July 15, 2012: Volume LXXX, No 14

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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

chi ldr en’s & te e n

M.L. Stedman presents a polished, clever debut novel with a cliffhanger ending p. 1442

A posthumous collection from Harvey Pekar reflects the seminal graphic memoirist at his edgy best p. 1478

Leda Schubert and Gérard DuBois paint a scintillating picture-book portrait of the world’s foremost mime p. 1519

in this issue: continuing series kirkus q&a

featured indie

Mark Haddon discusses narrative voice, attention to detail and other elements of his best novel yet, Red House p. 1432

In his multimedia e-book The Metropolis Organism, filmmaker Frank Vitale presents startling visual evidence for the city as a living entity p. 1544

w w w. k i r k u s r e v i e w s . c o m

Anniversaries: Remembering William Faulkner 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 Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com

A c o u n t e r f a c t ua l : S u p p o s e t h a t Wi l l i a m Fau l k n e r had never set pen to paper. What might the world of modern literature have looked like then? We would not, of course, have such strange and somber classics as Go Down, Moses and As I Lay Dying. We would also likely not have other books, foremost among them One Hundred Years of Solitude and The War of the End of the World, for Faulkner’s influence extended farther south than even he might have dared imagine, igniting the whole boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s thanks, at least in some measure, to a translation of the Wild Palms published, in 1940, by no less a luminary than Jorge Luis Borges.

But Faulkner, of course, did write. When he died half a century ago, on July 6, 1962, he had put a small but potent collection of novels and short stories into print. They were odd, but not, on the surface, revolutionary. Because Faulkner was a quiet type, content to stay put in the woody, hilly, stream-laced confines of northwestern Mississippi, that haunted place (not for nothing does Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” unveiled five years after Faulkner’s death, share a setting with his oeuvre), it took us some years after his death to realize what he was really up to, which was to overturn most of the conventions of his day.

Not least of them was race. Faulkner was a Southerner through and through, descended of the Confederate minor aristocracy. His second great theme, borrowed from the then-fashionable work of Oswald Spengler, was devolutionary: that aristocracy had become decadent and slipped away, its mansions given way to double-wide trailers, its people manifesting “some inner corruption of the spirit itself ”; after the noble Sartoris clan come the ignoble Snopes. But his first was that the great tragedy of the South, decadent or not, was its refusal to come to terms with its legacy of racism, which long preceded and long followed that brief period of nationhood.

Almost every page of Faulkner’s writing touches on that question, subtly; we have only to reread his elegantly humid tale “A Rose for Emily” and the slowly unfolding train wreck that is Light in August to see that at work. The best of his characters are quiet in their resistance to the backward-looking status quo, as with the Rev. Hightower in Light, given to softly correcting the crackerly “nigger” to “negro.” But all are caught up in ancient categories that impel stock behavior, most of it bad, from burning barns to burning people.

No other Southern writer has grappled with the question of racism quite so closely. Some have gone into corners far away from what the postmoderns call The Other. Others have chosen to sentimentalize a decidedly unsentimental matter; think Driving Miss Daisy and The Help. It is a curiosity that in the half-century since Faulkner’s death, no one else has come along to take up the question, Eddy Harris’ South of Haunted Dreams excepted.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers,” Faulkner gnomically wrote. The hidden wound that is racism still pains the nation, and not just its southern districts. In that regard, sadly, William Faulkner’s work has lost none of its immediacy.

for more re vi e ws and f eatures, vi si t u s on li n e at k irkusreviews.com.

Editor E L A I N E S Z E WC Z Y K eszewczyk@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Features Editor M O L LY B RO W N mbrown@kirkus.com Children’s & Teen Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E Senior Indie Editor KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com Indie Editor RYA N L E A H E Y rleahey@kirkus.com Assistant Indie Editor M AT T D O M I N O mdomino@kirkus.com Editorial Coordinator CHELSEA LANGFORD clangford@kirkus.com Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS Director of Kirkus Editorial P E R RY C RO W E pcrowe@kirkus.com Director of Technology E R I K S M A RT T esmartt@kirkus.com Developer B R A N T O N D AV I S bdavis@kirkus.com Director of Marketing CASEY GANNON cgannon@kirkus.com Marketing Associate DUSTIN LIEN dlien@kirkus.com Advertising Sales Associate A M Y G AY H A RT agayhart@kirkus.com #

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This Issue’s Contributors

Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Caroline Bartunek • Amy Boaz • Lee E. Cart • Marnie Colton • Lisa Costantino • Dave DeChristopher • Gregory F. DeLaurier • David Delman • Kathleen Devereaux • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Peter Franck • Bob Garber • Sean Gibson • Alan Goldsher • Michael Griffith • BJ Hollars • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Raina Lipsitz • Joe Maniscalco • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Brett Milano • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Chris Morris • Liza Nelson • John Noffsinger • Jennifer Ochs • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • Gary Presley • David Rapp • Kristen Bonardi Rapp • Megan Roth • Lloyd Sachs • Michael Sandlin • Barry Silverstein • Rosanne Simeone • Elaine Sioufi • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Matthew Tiffany • Steve Weinberg • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Joan Wilentz • Alex Zimmerman

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contents fiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS.................................................. p. 1423 REVIEWS....................................................................................... p. 1423 MYSTERY......................................................................................p. 1447

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

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY..................................................p. 1456 Q&A WITH MARK HADDON....................................................... p. 1432

nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS..................................................p. 1459 REVIEWS.......................................................................................p. 1459 Q&A WITH FRANK PARTNOY....................................................p. 1474

children’s & teen INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS................................................. p. 1489 REVIEWS...................................................................................... p. 1489 Q&A WITH CHRISTINE DAVENIER........................................... p. 1506 INTERACTIVE E-BOOKS.............................................................p. 1526 CONTINUING SERIES ROUND-UP............................................ p. 1533

indie INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS................................................... p. 1535 REVIEWS........................................................................................ p. 1535 Q&A WITH FRANK VITALE......................................................... p. 1544

Timothy Egan returns with the story of the astonishing life of Edward Curtis. See our starred review on p. 1468. |

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on the web w w w. k i r k u s r e v i e w s . c o m / b l o g s Here’s what’s exclusively online at kirkusreviews.com in mid-July…

In mid-July, Comic-Con International will take place in San Diego. The taste-making

event has become the largest convention in America and the shot heard round the world where pop culture is concerned. For geeks, comics fans, sci-fi buffs and pop culture media, Comic-Con International is heaven, nirvana and The Avengers movie combined.

But how did an event first organized in 1970 for less than 200 people become a worldwide behemoth that draws more than 125,000 guests? More importantly, what lessons can be drawn from this nontraditional topic and translated for business people facing similar challenges in other markets?

To solve this riddle, futurist Rob Salkowitz combined his love for five days of madness at the Con with his acumen for business strategy to see where worlds collide. Read our interview with Salkowitz online about how the business of comics, graphic novels and more became big money in his new book, Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, truly one of the most

intriguing and iconic actresses of the 20th century. In a new biography, Marilyn: The Passion and Paradox of Marilyn Monroe, Lois Banner offers a fresh perspective and updated facts on Monroe’s life and career, delving into such matters as the tragic star’s childhood and sexual abuse; building her career and public image; and her undeniable charisma. She even goes into the rumors surrounding her death. We said the book was “surely not the last word, but a complete and honest effort and a good starting place” on the life of Monroe. Read our interview with Banner online.

Cheryl Strayed is most recently known for her widely acclaimed book, Wild, about her

trek on the Pacific Crest Trail, which also happens to be Oprah’s first pick for her relaunched book club. Strayed, however, is also known in other circles as Dear Sugar, online magazine the Rumpus’ advice columnist. Strayed wrote anonymously until just this past February, when her identity was finally revealed. And

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now for the first time, selected columns of her advice are available in a new collection, Tiny Beautiful Things, out this month. Go online to read an excerpt of the new book and enjoy Strayed’s common-sense Sugar approach, and revisit our interview with Strayed on her acclaimed memoir Wild.

Death may seem an unlikely topic of interest

for midsummer, but Martha Brockenbrough’s new YA book, Devine Intervention, isn’t rooted so much in controversy as it is in the comedy-laden mishaps of two troubled teens. Heidi is an Amazonian outsider who would rather retreat into her self-conscious shell than be social. Jerome is a wisecracking troublemaker who, thanks to an afterlife rehabilitation program meant to realign his soul, just happens to be Heidi’s guardian angel. Jerome means well, but by not reading his celestial handbook, he royally wrecks Heidi’s life, thereby threatening both of their fates. In our exclusive online interview, Brockenbrough reveals the hiccups in choosing a narrator, the brilliance of G-rated cursing and a few of her favorite pop-culture influences from yesteryear.

S u m m e r i s n ’ t o v e r y e t. Let our book bloggers entertain you with their recommendations for easing out the longer days with the best in science fiction and fantasy (SF Signal, Book Smugglers); mysteries and thrillers (The Rap Sheet); literary picks (Bookslut); romance (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books); pop culture (Popdose); and teen (Bookshelves of Doom) and kids books (Seven Impossible Things). Stop by kirkusreviews.com/blog for all our bloggers’ picks.

w w w. k i r k u s r e v i e w s . c o m / i s s u e Don’t wait on the mail for reviews! You can read pre-publication reviews as they are released on KirkusReviews.com—even before they are published in the magazine. You can also access the current issue and back issues of Kirkus Reviews on our website by logging in as a subscriber. If you do not have a username or password, please contact customer care to set up your account by calling 1.800.316.9361 or e-mailing customers@kirkusreviews.com.

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fiction TRUE BELIEVERS

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Andersen, Kurt Random House (480 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-4000-6720-6

POTBOILER by Jesse Kellerman................................................... p. 1431 THE PROPHET by Michael Koryta............................................. p. 1434 THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS by M.L. Stedman................. p. 1442 THE BOOK OF MISCHIEF by Steve Stern.................................. p. 1442

POTBOILER

Kellerman, Jesse Putnam (336 pp.) $25.95 Jun. 28, 2012 978-0-399-15903-9

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A deliberately paced look back at the tumultuous 1960s, that era of free love, beads and bombs.

Karen Hollander, 64 years old and counting, has been working very hard for the last four decades, immersed in social issues and legal battles. Now, having withdrawn her candidacy for the U.S. Supreme Court, she’s embarked upon writing a memoir that’s bound to upset more than one apple cart. Step one, the reader being tougher at vetting than any Senate committee, she needs to establish her credentials: “I am a reliable narrator.

Unusually reliable. Trust me.” Any survivor of the ’60s will tell you that anyone who begs to be trusted is probably a narc, but not Karen, who is “old enough to forgo the self-protective fibs and lies but still young enough to get the memoir nailed down before the memories begin disintegrating.” It would spoil Studio 360 host Andersen’s (Turn of the Century, 1999, etc.) fun to give too much away, but suffice it to say that Karen is about to tell some tales out of school that involve intelligence agencies, plots to kill prominent politicians and other hijinks that definitively do not befit peace-and-love types. Naturally, there are people from the time who do not wish her to reveal such things, and so the plot thickens—as indeed it must, given Karen’s lifelong love of James Bond. (“The world must be crawling with makebelieve secret agents,” she thinks.) Andersen’s tone is smart and sometimes rueful: “During high school,” he has Karen recall, “we never discussed and weren’t even quite aware of the straddle we were attempting, studying hard and participating in extracurriculars even while we reimagined ourselves as existential renegades driven by contempt for conventional ambition and hypocrisy.”

The grown-up attitude suits the novel, which lacks the exuberance of Andersen’s Heyday (2007), a tale of the revolutionary year of 1848. Neither is it reserved, though. About its only flaw is its title, which, absent the plural marker, already belongs to a 1989 film about, yes, a ’60s survivor and lawyer battling for truth and justice, all a little too close for comfort.

Those who remember the ’60s, at least from one side of the culture wars, will like this yarn. (Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Omaha, San Francisco and Los Angeles)

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THE RUINS OF LACE

Anthony, Iris Sourcebooks Landmark (352 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4022-6803-8 In 17th-century France, Flemish lace is desired but illegal, so the smuggling business is alive and well.

This debut historical novel from Anthony (the pen name of a Christian book author) tells the story of lace from multiple perspectives, including an abused dog trained to smuggle lace across the border. Treated little better than the dog is Katharina, a nun who has become bent and blind from her incessant lace-making. Her sister, Heilwich, hopes to buy her back from the abbey before Katharina’s blindness is discovered and she is cast out onto the streets, very likely to earn a living by prostitution. Meanwhile, border guards are trained to hunt smugglers, and confiscated lace ends up gracing the sleeves of the aristocracy. One young girl, Lisette, becomes entranced by the lace cuffs of a visiting Count. Her curiosity, however, ruins not only the Count’s lace cuffs, but also her family’s fortunes, as he resorts to blackmail to gain vengeance. He wants, of course, not only more lace, but also a means to save his own fortune, since his father has threatened to disinherit him. Why disinherit him? Well, the Marquis has a newly pregnant wife, his first wife ruined the young Count by raising him initially as a girl, and the Count shows no inclination to produce an heir himself.

Lisette’s cousin Alexandre has also endured hard times. He and his leprous father were cast out by the village priest long ago, yet Lisette’s father rescued him. He owes his life to Lisette’s father, and he has given his heart to Lisette. So when she impulsively begs the Count to take her in place of the lace, and the Count spirits her away, Alexandre vows vengeance himself. Lurking behind is the master smuggler himself, De Grote. The many facets of the story of lace are intriguing, yet Anthony does not fully weave them together. There are simply too many threads.

Sweeping, yes. Cohesive, no. (Agent: Natasha Kern)

THE PEOPLE OF FOREVER ARE NOT AFRAID

Boianjiu, Shani Hogarth/Crown (288 pp.) $24.00 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-307-95595-1

A debut novel about coming-of-age in the Israeli army.

Drawing on her two years of experience in the army, Boianjiu tells a story that centers on the lives of several small-town friends who are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces, in which women are required by law to serve. The girls, Yael, Avishag and Lea, are alike and different at the same time. Although they share a common background as schoolgirls living in a country where 1424

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violence is an everyday component of life, they are also young women, exploring their sexuality while sorting through feelings about their world. Yael becomes a weapons instructor, shooting grenades at wrecked cars in order to pass the time and teaching an errant solider how to hit a target. Lea enters the service of the military police, dons the hated blue beret and feels miserable as a checkpoint crossing guard. The third of the friends, Avishag, marks her entry into the service by excelling at the gas mask test that recruits are required to pass, while slowly allowing the troubled history of the family’s women to overtake her present and affect both her mind and relationships. Other characters pass through the book, touching the girls’ lives and challenging their thinking, but war and violence, death and killing, define both their time in service and their civilian lives. Boianjiu’s prose is coarse, raw and altogether befitting her subject. Hard to read in places, the novel veers back and forth between the present and the past, describing ugly lives filled with emotional detachment from violence, casual sex that seems almost conquering in nature, and complicated, disturbing relationships with families, other soldiers and the people these women protect and serve.

Not for the squeamish. Readers will either embrace the complexity of the writing or become maddeningly lost as the author meanders through a hot, dry country devoid of tenderness. (Agent: Jin Auh)

THE RED CHAMBER

Chen, Pauline A. Knopf (400 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 13, 2012 978-0-307-70157-2

A leisurely saga exploring the closed society of privileged women in 18th-century Beijing, their loves, losses, friendships and character-forming private torments, based on a Chinese classic.

It’s all about marriage in Chen’s adult debut, an epic set within the bubble of the women’s community at Rongguo Mansion, lavish home to the Jia family, where barren wives, unpleasant wives and wrongly betrothed daughters mingle with servants and slaves. The fates of three women dominate: Daiyu, whose mother turned her back on her Jia family heritage; reserved Baochai, who has long hoped to wed sensitive Baoyu; and Xifeng, whose marriage to Lian founders on her inability to conceive. Lady Jia rules the household ruthlessly, fostering the marriage between Baochai and Baoyu even though the latter is in love with Daiyu. Xifeng, meanwhile, is supplanted when her servant becomes Lian’s second wife and is soon pregnant. Although external events rarely impinge, sudden catastrophe strikes—a palace coup strips the family of its wealth and deposits the menfolk in prison. Now the women struggle to survive, and some don’t. A pardon eventually restores order but not necessarily happiness.

Little new ground is broken here, but the writing is supple and Chen often touches notes of emotional depth.

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“Duncan leaves no doubt about his commitment to the intellectual and the bestial traditions of werewolves and vampires.” from talulla rising

TALULLA RISING

Duncan, Glen Knopf (352 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-307-59509-6

Werewolves and vampires are again at each other’s throats.

This sequel to Duncan’s The Last Werewolf (2011) follows the life of Tallula Demetriou, one of Jake’s lovers. Her mother had always told her she’d been a “Very (pause) Bad (pause) Girl,” and in this story she continues to follow her wicked ways, for after all, she’s a self-acknowledged “agent for the forces of darkness.” Early in the novel she discloses that she’s pregnant and being cared for by her friend Cloquet. For convenience, they’re keeping Kaitlyn, a young woman, in the basement for when “the Hunger” strikes, but on the night of a vampire attack, Kaitlyn finds herself freed in the confusion and Tallula gives birth to a son, quickly stolen and whisked away by the vampires. But wait...Tallula unexpectedly has a second child, a fraternal twin she names Zoë. In a bow to the plot of his previous novel, Duncan again resurrects the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena, a group that is once more realizing that they’ll be putting themselves out of business if they do in fact track down and kill all the werewolves. Walker and Mikhail, a couple of rogue agents formerly with WOCOP, introduce Tallula and Cloquet to a mythic book of vampire lore that predicts the return of Remshi, a kind of vampire deity who’s expected to return and inaugurate an age of vampire ascendancy. The Age of Remshi seems prophetic indeed when rumors spread that vampires are now beginning to walk in daylight. Through Tallula and her ilk, Duncan reacquaints us with the extreme notion of the Hunger, which is inextricably linked to both sex and violence, libido and id.

Duncan leaves no doubt about his commitment to the intellectual and the bestial traditions of werewolves and vampires, for he sustains a tone both brainy and vicious.

(Author tour to New York, San Francisco and Seattle)

so, naturally enough, he says things like, “If men like me dinna screw in the bolts and tighten the nuts, the ship would come apart and sink to the bottom of the sea.” Well, give her all she’s got or no, and the fact remains that Scotty is just one of many people—everyone on the planet, really—who are entangled with some very weird events that, as the pope tells an assembly of stereotype-perfect world religious leaders, “taken together indicate the possibility of malevolent forces at work.” Enter ace scientist Jason Chang, who tells the president of the United States (POTUS, throughout most of the yarn, presumably to save on typing wear and tear) that “what we at NASA have been calling Dark Matter has appeared from nowhere—or, more correctly from a point near galaxy cluster Abell 2744.” Astronomy buffs may know that Abell 2744 is called Pandora’s Cluster because of its curious properties, among them heretofore not having been the ability to conjure up forces of evil so bad that even the aforementioned Hitler (or, as POTUS endearingly calls him, “perverted piece of shit”) hasn’t sided with them. Can the world be saved from Dark Matter and the Dark Overlords? By a few pages in, only John Travolta, jetting his way over a ravaged land, might

FALLEN MASTERS

Edward, John Tor (464 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 19, 2012 978-0-7653-3271-4

There’s no psychic powerful enough to ferret out where celebrity medium Edward mislaid his writing talent, but it certainly isn’t in this flaccid suspense novel.

One wants to like, even praise, a novel in which both Adolf Hitler and John Travolta figure. Alas, the mere names are the best part of the ploy.

Here’s the opening line, at which the heart sinks: “Ten-year-old Charlene St. John glanced at the clock.” As well she might, since dad’s not home yet, and it’s near six. Dad’s from Scotland, and |

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“There’s good fun to be had here, even for those who might wish for a moratorium on books about vampires, zombies, witches and other things that go bump in the night.” from shadow of night

THE AFTER WIFE

be moved to care, while those who prize good writing will pray for the end days—or at least the end of this grinding tale.

Edward makes Dan Brown look like Shakespeare. And that’s a powerful bit of conjuring indeed.

RIPPER

Golemon, David Dunne/St. Martin’s (368 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-312-58080-3 While conducting a raid on a murderous Mexican drug gang hiding across the border in underground caves, an ultrasecret U.S. government agency out to rescue one of its own encounters blind killer beasts that point back to the laboratory origins of Jack the Ripper.

In his seventh Event Group thriller, Golemon reconvenes many of the principals of previous installments (Legacy, 2011, etc.), including headstrong go-to guy Col. Jack Collins; his love, feisty geologist Sarah McIntire; Department 5656 director Niles Compton; boyish security man Jason Ryan; and French black-op veteran Col. Henri Farbeaux, an antiquities addict who holds the Event Group responsible for the death of his wife. The action shifts from Mexico, where the ruthless drug lord Anaconda has abducted McIntire, to the Event Group complex in Nevada to CIA headquarters in Virginia. The president of the United States issues urgent directives, the rogue government group Men in Black insinuates itself in the plot, and weird stuff happens. If only the contemporary events were as tense and atmospheric as the opening scenes in Victorian England involving a timid Robert Louis Stevenson, the murderous American science professor he implicates and a queenly cover-up of the government’s involvement with the professor. In a subsequent historical chapter, young George S. Patton is forever changed by a grisly encounter. But once the novel leaps ahead to the modern day, its fear factor fades and its characters become less interesting—though Sarah’s attraction to Farbeaux, likely to continue playing out in subsequent novels, has its moments.

The perennially popular Jack-the-Ripper story is a handy selling point, but Golemon’s efforts to explode the Ripper legend are not inspired.

Grazer, Gigi Levangie Ballantine (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-0-345-52399-0

After being widowed, a woman begins to see ghosts everywhere in Grazer’s breezy postscript to The Starter Wife (2005).

When her husband, John, a personal chef and cookbook author, is the victim of a hit-and-run while biking to the market, 40ish Hannah Bernal’s life is upended. A stay-at-home dad to the Bernals’ toddler daughter Ellie, John also ran their household (in Santa Monica’s fashionable NoMo district) and made meals that went beyond mere nourishment. Hannah’s colleague and best friend Jay, a trash-talking gay man, forms a “Grief Team” with two of Hannah’s eccentric girlfriends, to help her get on her feet. But John’s death has imbued Hannah with a sixth sense. Under her backyard avocado tree, Hannah sees her first ghost, Trish, the former owner of Hannah’s historic house. Hannah’s side-chatter with ghostly interlopers at a business meeting gets her and Jay fired from their jobs in reality TV. The first time John appears, the parted spouses argue about topics serious (he let his life insurance policy lapse) and absurd (are Crocs shoes or sandals?). When John reveals that his hit-and-run killer was a Range Rover driven by a texting Momzilla, not a truck driven by the illegal immigrant who was arrested for the crime, Hannah goes to the aid of the immigrant, convincing the police to refocus their investigation. Unable to refinance her home and threatened with foreclosure (a Realtor frenemy is hounding her to sell to a tear-down entrepreneur), Hannah is a bit slow (especially for an ex-reality TV producer) to see the monetary potential in ghost whispering. A New Year’s trip to Palm Desert for high colonics, Team in tow, occasions arch commentary on what L.A. sybarites consider entertainment. Her friends have their own troubles, involving coyotes, Pomeranians, feckless married men and failed auditions. Hannah’s banter with interlocutors, corporeal or not, is the chief pleasure here, more so than the leggy and disjointed plot.

Darkly humorous look at grief, L.A.-style.

SHADOW OF NIGHT

Harkness, Deborah Viking (592 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-0-670-02348-6

William Shakespeare, vampire hunter.

Well, not exactly. But, thanks to the magic of time travel, Harkness’ (A Discovery of Witches, 2011) latest finds witch and Oxford professor Diana Bishop and her lover, scientist and vampire Matthew Clairmont, at the tail end of Elizabethan England, when Shakespeare’s career is about to take off. There, by happenstance, they meet Christopher Marlowe, who commands an uncommonly rich amount of data about the ways of the otherworld. Asked 1426

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why the odd couple should attract attention, he remarks matterof-factly, “Because witches and wearhs are forbidden to marry,” an exchange that affords Diana, and the reader, the chance to learn a new word. Diana and Matthew talk a lot. They argue a lot, too, quibbling about the strangest things: “ ‘You are a vampire. You’re possessive. It’s who you are,’ I said flatly, approaching him in spite of his anger. ‘And I am a witch. You promised to accept me as I am—light and dark, woman and witch, my own person as well as your wife.’ ” But then they get to have extremely hot—indeed, unnaturally hot, given the cold blood of the undead—makeup sex, involving armoires and oak paneling and lifted petticoats and gripped buttocks. Meanwhile, Kit Marlowe gets to do some petticoat lifting of his own, even if his adventures lead him to a Bedlam populated by all kinds of unfortunate souls, from a few ordinary wackaloons of yore to a small army of daemons, witches, vampires and other exemplars of the damned and doomed. Will Shakespeare comes onto the scene late, but there’s good reason for that—and maybe a little fodder for the Edward de Vere conspiratorial crowd, too. Clearly Harkness has great fun with all this, and her background as a literature professor gives her plenty of room to work with, and without, an ounce of pedantry.

Sure, the premise is altogether improbable. But, that said, there’s good fun to be had here, even for those who might wish for a moratorium on books about vampires, zombies, witches and other things that go bump in the night. (Agent: Sam Stoloff)

THE LANGUAGE OF SISTERS

Hatvany, Amy Washington Square/Pocket (400 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Jul. 31, 2012 978-1-4516-8813-9 When her severely disabled sister becomes pregnant, Nicole Hunter must confront the family issues she fled 10 years earlier.

Hatvany’s latest (Outside the Lines, 2012, etc.) afflicts her heroine with multiple traumas. First, there’s the unnamed condition that since infancy has rendered Nicole’s younger sister Jenny physically helpless and mute—except for the terrible screaming fits that provoked their father to hit her. His violence was Trauma Number Two; Number Three was the post-violence trips to Jenny’s bedroom at night, which led Nicole to believe their father sexually abused her.

Trauma Number Four was the decision to institutionalize Jenny, which prompted Nicole to leave home 10 years earlier; she blames her mother for giving in to her father’s pressure, especially since the marriage ultimately failed anyway. Now, as the novel opens, comes Trauma Number Five: Jenny has been raped by a Wellman Institute employee, and her mother (Jenny’s legal guardian) refuses to consider terminating the pregnancy. Mom is racked with guilt about an abortion she had years earlier, but Nicole’s poorly motivated willingness to go along with this is one of the many moments when plot gears can be heard clanking loudly. We know from the get-go that Nicole has never really settled into |

life in San Francisco and that the gorgeous workaholic lawyer she lives with doesn’t want to have kids. So when she starts thinking about adopting Jenny’s baby and her hometown best friend introduces her to an exemplary single dad whose young daughter makes an instinctive connection with Jenny, a degree in rocket science isn’t required to see where all this is heading. Hatvany has an easy, readable prose style, and her tender portrait of Nicole’s nonverbal bond with Jenny (the eponymous language of sisters) is touching. But her characters are painted in broad strokes, and even the most wrenching questions get feel-good answers.

Readers who prefer fiction that provides much simpler resolutions than life ever does will like Hatvany’s onceover-lightly approach just fine. (Author appearances in Seattle.

Agent: Victoria Sanders)

LONG TIME, NO SEE

Healy, Dermot Viking (448 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 2, 2012 978-0-670-02360-8

A young man holds his grief over the death of a friend in check by watching over his granduncle; a quietly impressive (if overlong) fourth novel from the Irish Healy (Sudden Times, 2000, etc.).

Philip Feeney, also known as Mister Psyche, lives in the village of Ballintra on the Atlantic with his Da, a handyman, and his Ma, a hospital nurse. While waiting for his junior college exam results and doing odd jobs, he looks after his granduncle, Joejoe, who lives alone. He makes his tea and reads to him from the Bible and even scratches his back (the old man has psoriasis). Joejoe’s other visitor is known as the Blackbird, a loner slipping into his dotage like Joejoe. Then a shocking event occurs. A bullet is fired through Joejoe’s window.

The old man suspects another neighbor, the General, nursing a 50-year-old grudge over a woman, but that’s ridiculous. Philip’s Da believes the Blackbird is the shooter, but has no proof. It will only be much later that the surprising truth emerges. The old men represent an ancient culture that in 2006 eurozone Ireland is vanishing; Poles and Lithuanians have arrived, looking for work. Much of the novel is beautifully captured dialogue, though Philip seldom says more than two words at a time. He professes not to have an interior life. Part of him has closed down, and only scattered hints tell us why. A year before, his close friend Mickey Brady, driving drunk, died in an accident. Frustratingly for the reader, and surely too for Philip’s loyal girlfriend, Anna, the catharsis never comes; the balance is off. When he’s not looking after Joejoe, Philip devotes his energy to building a wall for his mother’s future vegetable garden; it’s a symbol of regeneration.

The novel’s second half is increasingly elegiac as the two mutually dependent old-timers totter toward the grave.

An affecting account of the love that leaps across a generation.

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“Casual readers and fanboys alike may be caught off guard by this divergent adventure.” from wayne of gotham

WAYNE OF GOTHAM

Hickman, Tracy It Books/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $26.99 | Jun. 26, 2012 978-0-06-207420-1 Bruce Wayne, Gotham City’s dark knight, discovers that the primeval event of his life—the murder of his parents, Thomas and Martha—may hold clues to the nature of his worst enemies.

Industrious fantasy novelist Hickman (Embers of Atlantis, 2011, etc.) turns his attention to the weird world of Batman in this noir-tinged thriller. To assemble his plot, the author has gone back to Batman’s well-known origin, doing his fair share of retconning along the way. For the casual fan, the superhero will be just as familiar, armed with Teflon-coated Batarangs and rumbling around Gotham in the pimped-up Batmobile. But the book spends equal time with Bruce’s father, Thomas, a doctor who is enraptured with his future wife, Martha Kane. But the good doctor is also using the Wayne fortune to finance research into eugenics, the science of manipulating human populations. Back in the present, Bruce/Batman keeps running into lunatics like Harley Quinn, who seem to believe that they are long-dead contemporaries of Thomas, and that Bruce is in fact Thomas. As Batman, Wayne uncovers his father’s part in the creation of the ’50s-era gang of vigilantes called The Apocalypse. The conspiracy bits of the book struggle a bit with explication, but Hickman does a nice job of measuring the bleakness of the late-’50s set story with a blend of action, technology and the high-pitched madness that Batman inspires.

Neither as grim as its cinematic counterpart nor as byzantine as the current comics, but casual readers and fanboys alike may be caught off guard by this divergent adventure.

EAST OF DENVER

Hill, Gregory Dutton (240 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 5, 2012 978-0-525-95279-4

You can go home again, but Lord knows why you’d ever want to. Such is the lesson learned by rural drifter Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams in this agreeable, offbeat debut novel.

A deceased cat leads Shakespeare from Denver to his father’s farm, where he hopes to find a suitable burial space. Instead, he finds his father deep into senility, not aware that his longtime caretaker recently dropped dead in his bathroom. He’s also been swindled by the owner of the local bank, who’s already stolen Pa’s beloved airplane and is about to foreclose on the farm. Shakespeare settles in for the long haul, and the people he reconnects with—town bully/drug dealer D.J. Beckman and oversexed bank teller Clarissa McPhail—remind him of why he left. But he spends most of the narrative with his father, once a gifted carpenter/inventor and now in the grip of 1428

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something that looks like Alzheimer’s. Hill doesn’t soft-pedal the sadness of the situation, even while playing up the father’s constant forgetfulness and quick flashes of coherence for their dry and dark humor. Likewise, a subplot about an old classmate who’s now paraplegic is neither sentimentalized nor played for cheap laughs. The only hole is that we learn almost nothing of Shakespeare’s back story: We find that he is genetically unable to smell, an odd detail that doesn’t bear on the plot, but never find out what he did for a living. Shakespeare eventually decides that his best option is an unrealistic plan to rob the bank; whether he’ll go through with it is a running question throughout the book.

A story about a father and son who bond against the odds, with an ending as quirkily satisfying as the rest of the book.

HAVEN

Hooper, Kay Berkley (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 31, 2012 978-0-425-25874-3 Hooper’s latest in her Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series (Blood Ties, 2010, etc.) takes readers to a small North Carolina mountain town with the operatives of Haven.

Haven, the privately held pet project of a billionaire interested in psychic phenomena and crime fighting, sends its operative Jessie home to Baron Hollow, the town she fled 15 years earlier. When Jessie ran, she left behind her younger sister, Emma, and cold, reserved father. Since then, their father has died and Emma now runs the ancestral family home as an inn.

But Jessie needs to return home in order to resolve exactly what sent her fleeing Baron Hollow in the first place. When she arrives, she and operative Nathan Navarro, a fellow psychic sent to back her up without her knowledge, each sense a dark presence in the town. Soon, Navarro turns up the body of a young woman in the wild mountains and hiking trails near the town, and there’s little doubt in Navarro’s mind that a serial killer is working in the area. Jessie has come to the same conclusion after seeing several ghosts bearing warnings. And even Emma, who has never openly admitted to a penchant for psychic ability, is uneasy and suffering from bad dreams in which she keeps seeing young women brutalized and murdered. Before long, Jessie starts digging up painful past personal history and making waves in a town where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone else’s business. And, while Jessie puzzles through to find an answer to all that’s tormenting her, the killer continues to target helpless young women who stumble into the Hollow. Hooper weaves an intricate and complicated story into a coherent plot with plenty of twists and turns, but the tale she tells is dark and sometimes difficult to read. There’s also an element of recklessness about Jessie’s personality and reactions to obvious danger that’s both discomfiting and unconvincing. However, Hooper is a good storyteller and manages to make it all seem believable.

A paranormal thriller that’s sure to please both Hooper’s fans and those who like the genre.

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THIS DARK EARTH

Hornor Jacobs, John Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-6666-3 A doctor, her adolescent son and a trucker shelter and defend fellow survivors in the wake of a post-nuclear zombie apocalypse.

This second novel by Jacobs (Southern Gods, 2011) has all of the right elements of the bookshelf ’s worth of zombie novels swarming the market in the wake of AMC’s The Walking Dead: zombies, blood, gore, terror and the gruesome mechanics of survival—but this bloody entry also offers something more in style, substance and readability. Lucy Ingersol is a doctor in a southern hospital when the world goes pear-shaped— walking, flesh-eating corpses accompanied by critical nuclear strikes in major American cities. Lucy and her son Gus survive

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with the help of Jim “Knock-Out” Nickerson, a burly, rough-looking truck driver with a surprisingly gentle nature. Over time, the trio and their followers build an armed fortress off of the Arkansas River, naming their home “Bridge City.” It’s rough business for the adolescent boy being groomed to lead them. “The murderhole is a twenty-by-twenty space between the inner and outer gates, ringed by a walkway about six feet above the ground and connected to the rampart. The zombie’s heads are right at our feet level,” explains Gus. “This was all my idea. Some days I’m not too happy about it.” The novel’s tenderness in places is balanced by a ferocity that pulls no punches. In one story, a woman named Tessa details her misuse at the hands of mercenaries, and her revenge. In another sequence, Gus is captured by a vicious slaver named Konstantin, tortured nearly to death and crucified.

Yet there’s heart, too, like the funny sequence, “The Bureaucracy of the Dead,” where a member of the group takes minutes chronicling the terrible decisions that have to be made, often by fiat.

Don’t miss the interactive map of Bridge City on Jacobs’ website.

For readers who get off on what-would-I-do? questions, this book offers satisfaction.

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“Huston provides readers with more than a mere snapshot; her raw and sensual writing delivers the complete picture.” from infrared

INFRARED

Huston, Nancy Black Cat/Grove (272 pp.) $14.00 paperback | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-8021-2027-4 A woman explores complex family relationships and discovers truths about herself in this sensual, intricately woven offering from award-winning Huston (Fault Lines, 2008, etc.).

As freelance photographer Rena Greenblatt joins her aging father and abrasive stepmother in Italy for a dreaded week of vacation, the experience evolves into a period of self-reflection about her childhood, relationships, sensuality and self. Rena, a sexually uninhibited free spirit in her mid-40s, has had numerous lovers and husbands. Her chosen profession involves the use of infrared photography that allows her to “see” into the souls of her subjects during their most intimate moments. She is oddly reluctant to use her camera to document her trip and perhaps expose too many truths, but as she spends more time with her father and stepmother, slowly she peels away the complicated layers that encompass the intricate familial relationships that exist. Rena’s imaginary sister and voice in her head, Subra—the backward spelling of deceased photographer Diane Arbus—poses probing questions that prompt revelations about Rena’s background and her family: a once jealous and abusive older brother whom Rena loves, a mother who loved her but was always busy with her disadvantaged clients, and a philandering father, a doctoral candidate who once patterned himself after activist Timothy Leary and dropped acid with his daughter. As the week advances, Rena receives increasingly frantic phone calls from her French-born Algerian lover, who implores her to return to their home in France to document the race riots that are consuming the suburbs of Paris. But Rena, unwilling to affect an early departure, ignores his pleas as she faces the pivotal events of her past and reconciles these with the emotional reality of the present.

Huston provides readers with more than a mere snapshot; her raw and sensual writing delivers the complete picture.

THIEFTAKER

Jackson, D.B. Tor (336 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-7653-2761-1 Part historical novel, part supernatural thriller and part murder mystery, this inventive book by D.B. Jackson (alias David B. Coe, of the Blood of the Southlands series) has a lot of obstacles to dodge; but not as many as its hero, Ethan Kaille.

Ethan is a “thieftaker”—a bounty hunter who recovers stolen goods—in pre-Revolutionary War Boston. He’s also a conjurer of magic, a skill that’s run him into trouble in the past. When 1430

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he’s hired to find a brooch taken from a young woman who’s been murdered, he suspects that something bigger may be afoot. Unfortunately for him, he’s correct. Ethan deduces that the murder is somehow connected to the anti-British riots that have begun to spring up in the colonies. And since the body has no scars, he guesses she’s been killed by magic—and as he soon learns, by a conjurer far more powerful than he. The conjurer’s identity is the book’s running mystery—and to solve it, Ethan has to face statesmen on both sides of the impending Revolution who want him dead or tried as a witch. Not to mention rival thieftaker Sephira Pryce, whose murderous henchmen tend to show up at the least opportune times. Blending genres is seldom easy, but the historical and supernatural elements work together seamlessly. The plot is lively with period color (Thomas Hutchinson and John Adams both make appearances) and vivid support characters, notably the seductive Pryce and the ghost girl Anna.

It’s essentially a well-turned mystery whose supernatural elements add to the intrigue. Jackson only errs by stacking the cards too heavily against his hero: As Ethan closes in on the killer, he undergoes so many magic-induced tortures and old-fashioned beatings that his eventual triumph seems less credible; and these scenes make Thieftaker just a share darker than necessary.

Entertaining. (Agent: Lucienne Diver)

CLOSE YOUR EYES

Johansen, Iris; Johansen, Roy St. Martin’s (416 pp.) $27.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-312-61161-3 Johansen and her son, Roy, team up for their fourth collaborative effort (Shadow Zone, 2010, etc.).

Dr. Kendra Michaels, a music therapist, doesn’t seem like your average crime fighter, but Kendra’s track record is impressive. She’s helped police crack plenty of tough cases.

Although she has no crime-fighting background, the first 20 years of her life have heightened her senses, and she can see, hear, smell and feel things no one else can. Born blind, Kendra had sight-restoring surgery, but regaining her ability to see hasn’t changed her gift for zeroing in on details that often get by others. So, when someone starts killing random people, former FBI agent Adam Lynch, who is now investigative freelancing, ropes her into helping the feds find the killer. Kendra hadn’t planned to get involved in another case, but an FBI agent named Jeff, who is also an old boyfriend of hers, has gone missing, and the bureau believes he was snatched while trying to find the serial killer. Kendra fights the idea of joining the investigation and gives everyone from Adam to the FBI’s special agent in charge a hard time.

Then things get weird, and suddenly Kendra finds herself on the receiving end of the violence. After narrowly escaping an attack, Kendra plunges into the case but soon finds it’s forcing her to reexamine both her old relationship with Jeff and her new one with Adam. The law enforcement agents are all either corrupt or inept, and the supposed heat that builds between Kendra and

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“Seldom, if ever, have the cloak-and-dagger folk... appeared so omniscient, so omnipotent and so perfectly awful as they do in Kellerman’s mordantly funny latest.” from potboiler

Adam is tepid and uninteresting. While the foray into music therapy is compelling, the writers strain credulity with the premise that any federal agency would put up with someone as unpleasant and rude as Kendra, much less let her call the shots.

A not-so-thrilling thriller that leaves readers wishing that the bad guys were better shots.

SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE

Joyce, Graham Doubleday (352 pp.) $24.95 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-0-385-53578-6

Do we share the planet with other life forms such as fairies? Veteran British fantasist Joyce (The Silent Land, 2011, etc.) lets the possibility dangle in this absorbing work.

She’s come home. Tara Martin disappeared when she was not quite 16. Police combed her neighborhood in the English Midlands; her parents and protective older brother Peter were frantic. Her boyfriend Richie was the prime suspect. They had broken up over Tara’s pregnancy. She didn’t want to keep the baby; he did. No evidence, though, so no charges. Now, 20 years later, Tara shows up on her parents’ doorstep. She’s grubby and disheveled but scarcely older than the day she left. Peter now has his own family. Richie has been in a deep funk, his music his only refuge (he’s a superb guitarist). Very reluctantly, Tara tells Peter her story. On that shimmering May day, in a primeval forest carpeted in bluebells, Tara had been approached by a handsome man riding a white horse. He was relaxed and nonthreatening. He described his idyllic world and Tara willingly agreed to enter it; they made the crossing at twilight. Once there, she wanted to return, but that would take six months (or 20 human years). As Tara feared, Peter is incredulous; he arranges a shrink, who finds her sane but delusional. All this is excellently done; expertly grounded, suspensefully told. Joyce only stumbles in describing Hiero the horseman’s world. His people come across as promiscuous hippies, but they also have a bloodlust for gladiatorial combat and can ride bumblebees. If they’re not “little people with lacy wings,” then what exactly are they, other than dangerous? Hiero’s later transition from tenderhearted altruist to hostile stalker is especially jarring. However, the case for a hidden world is bolstered when the shrink, more clever than wise, gets his comeuppance, and an ancient neighbor confides to Tara that she too had once visited that world.

Keep an open mind, suggests Joyce with considerable charm. (Agent: Doug Stewart)

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POTBOILER

Kellerman, Jesse Putnam (336 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 28, 2012 978-0-399-15903-9 Seldom, if ever, have the cloak-anddagger folk—of any stripe, ours or theirs— appeared so omniscient, so omnipotent and so perfectly awful as they do in Kellerman’s mordantly funny latest.

If you put the question to him—and he was of a mind to answer it—Arthur Pfefferkorn would probably acknowledge that, yes, he’d led one of those gray lives up to now, a life without much in the way of accomplishment. He was what he was—a middle-aged English professor at an undistinguished university, whose courses were neither flocked to nor fled from. True, there was that long-ago novel: respectful reviews, bleak sales figures. This, of course, is in marked contrast to the performance of internationally famous William de Vallée, who pumps out bestsellers as if they were pellets from a shotgun and who happens to be Arthur’s oldest and best friend. But then suddenly, Bill is lost at sea, occasioning in Arthur’s life what amounts to a sea change. Deeply involved in this are the luscious Carlotta, Bill’s not-so-grieving widow, and a certain unfinished thriller, the completion of which implies Arthur’s acceptance of that old fictional standby: the Faustian bargain. Turns out that Bill wasn’t just an internationally famous, bestselling author. He was also a highly effective American spy, whose loss has created an intolerable vacuum. He has to be replaced. “Tag,” says the satanic superagent who explains all this to Arthur. “You’re it.” And just like that, Arthur Pfefferkorn’s life goes from gray to incandescent.

Another brilliant performance from Kellerman (The Executor, 2010, etc.). Potboiler? Hardly. Kellerman has fun here, and so will his readers.

THE NIGHTMARE

Kepler, Lars Translated by Wideburg, Laura A. Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (512 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-374-11533-3 Aren’t Swedes supposed to be nice socialists? Not if they’re arms dealers, the milieu of this latest whodunit by the Stockholm couple who writes as Lars Kepler (The Hypnotist, 2011).

Scene one: The sister of a Central American peace activist, her skin “the soft golden color of virgin olive oil or honey,” is brutally murdered. The activist’s boyfriend, it seems, may know why. But then comes scene two: The director of the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products—for which read weaponry—turns up dead, too, dispatched most brutally. Mulls the investigating officer, “Joona. I have to talk to Joona Linna immediately.” Et voilà: As world-weary as, if

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h m a r k h a d d on THE RED HOUSE

Mark Haddon Knopf (272 pp.)

Jun. 12, 2012 | $25.95 978-0-385-53577-9

Our review lauded The Red House from Britain’s Mark Haddon as “a novel to savor,” saying that “the plot feels organic rather than contrived, the characters convincing throughout, the tone compassionate and the writing wise.”

The third novel is the best from an author who initially wrote children’s books, enjoyed a critical and commercial breakthrough with 2003’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and experienced something of a sophomore slump with its follow-up, A Spot of Bother. Narrative voice remains a key to Haddon’s fiction, as he juggles the novel’s point of view among eight different characters (with multiple perspectives per page), as an extended family finds its relationships shifting on a rare vacation together.

Q: The setup here is as familiar as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which your novel specifically invokes toward the end), along with plenty of novels where characters experience discovery and revelation while on holiday away from the constraints of society, (with “the normal rules…temporarily suspended”). How did you meet the challenge of making the familiar seem so fresh?

A: Isn’t that always the aim, whatever the setup?

Freshness comes, I think, with attention to detail, both physical and psychological. We make characters interesting in the way that we make any strangers interesting, by moving closer, by looking harder, by listening, by putting ourselves in their shoes. Something similar goes for houses, for landscapes, for language itself….

Q: Where many novelists shift perspectives by devoting separate chapters to different, individual characters, your narrative shifts perspective as often as every paragraph, multiple times per page. Was this the plan for the novel from the start?

A: I’ve always thought it would be a very good idea to try and emulate the Virginia Woolf of Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. You can’t do it, of course.

No one can. Those novels are sublime. But aiming in their general directions should help.

Q: Among the eight members of this blended family, are some relationships more central to the novel than others? Is there any character you would consider a protagonist?

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Q: Would you consider this novel your most conventional in terms of framing, your most radical in terms of shifting narrative perspectives, or both? Or neither?

A: A Spot of Bother was a very traditional novel in which I learned, among other things, how to organize an ensemble. Curious Incident, despite its accessibility was, I think, rather radical, and not just because of the reliably unreliable narrator, the pictures-which-aren’tquite-illustrations or the interwoven mini-essays. It was, among other things, a book about books, a book about how we read. I hope The Red House pushes the envelope in some small way. If it does so, I think you’re right, it is in the speed with which it shifts perspectives and how this articulates the experience of being in a family that novels often miss.

Q: You have one character reflect, “What strangers we are to ourselves, changed in the twinkling of an eye.” Do your characters get to know themselves and each other better over the course of the novel? Or do they remain strangers—to the others and to themselves? Is what they learn how little they can know?

A: This is one of those questions I think readers should answer. You create characters so that they become real to readers. If you are successful then it’s up to the readers to make judgments about.

–By Don McLeese

P H OTO © RO RY C A RN E G IE

A: Historically the novel began with Angela and her relationship to Karen, her stillborn daughter.

In all the other respects I tried very hard to make the novel rigorously democratic. I wanted to give each character equal space irrespective of their age, gender or social status. As I write that sentence, I realize that, despite the novel being both middle class and largely apolitical, this structure grows out of deeply and passionately held political beliefs.

Interestingly, however, most readers of the novel disagree as to which characters are at the center of the novel, which I’m taking as a compliment.

slightly less morose than, Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, Joona Linna, detective extraordinaire, is on the scene. Did we say extraordinaire? Yah, sure: As one cop recalls, “I’d say I’m fairly well versed in forensics...but Joona walked in, took a look at the blood spatters...He knew right away when each murder had occurred.” Things don’t go quite so smoothly for Joona this time around, though, as the novel’s 500-plus pages might suggest. For one thing, those arms dealers are an oily, nasty, evil, sneering and altogether sinister bunch, even if they have nice haircuts and well-manicured nails. For another, there are countless red herrings in herring-rich Sweden. Suffice it to say that Kepler has a most pronounced penchant, à la Larsson, for describing exceptionally nasty criminal behavior (“Answer me! You want me to shoot your wife again or rape your sister?”). And suffice it to say that when the bad guys are finally revealed, it’s not a minute too soon—and not just because those 500-plus pages are 100-odd pages more than the story really calls for.

Overall, less expertly told and deeply layered than a Henning Mankell yarn, less politically charged than a Stieg Larsson caper, and less well-written than any of Janwillem van de Wetering’s procedurals down Holland way— but still a satisfying thriller.

has to be solved, not by the bumbling office-bound authorities, who perceive the world through a scrim of racism and civilization that blinds them, but by an informal community of street folk led by a Punjabi woman, Qui Hy. Khair’s style is nimble, and his investigations into the nature of identity are compelling. But the mystery loses momentum and sputters out—finally, Khair isn’t as interested in it as he is in his (convincing, but not subtle or surprising) allegory about the racism and atrocity of colonialism.

Smart, entertaining—but not quite satisfying.

A ONCE CROWDED SKY

King, Tom Illus. by Fowler, Tom Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-4516-5200-0 King’s debut novel is mostly textual narrative highlighted by random, comicbook–style illustrations.

THE THING ABOUT THUGS

Khair, Tabish Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (256 pp.) $24.00 | Jul. 24, 2012 978-0-547-73160-5 Khair’s American debut—published in his native India in 2009 and shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize—is an intricate, mostly winning parody/tribute to the Victorian novel.

Set largely in 1830s London—a locale Khair reassembles using a witty pastiche of details from Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others—the novel centers on Amir Ali. Ali has come to England as a combination of refugee, research subject and mascot. He serves his condescending sponsor, Capt. William Meadows, by pretending to be a reformed member of the infamous Thugees. Meadows, a smug advocate of the powers of phrenology to reveal character traits, is writing a book about Amir called Notes on a Thug. The novel offers a wide variety of sourcetexts: snippets from Meadows’ preposterous work of literary ventriloquism, in which Amir sings flowery praises to the Englishman’s superior intellect, superior customs, superior God; Amir’s secret notes in Farsi script to his illiterate beloved, Jenny; scandal-sheet newspaper stories; meditations by a present-day narrator who purports to have found Amir’s papers in his grandfather’s library and to be embroidering them into this novel. A mystery emerges, a twist on the actual case of William Burke, the “resurrection man” who, along with an accomplice, smothered street people in order to deliver their bodies to a surgeon who needed cadavers to study.

In Khair’s reimagining, someone is decapitating—and stealing the heads of—victims, many of them immigrants. Suspicion falls on Amir, who feels complicit, as if his made-up stories about foreign evil at large have conjured a real-world form. Eventually, the case |

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“By the end we get to know the city almost as intimately as we know the characters.” from say nice things about detroit

The Liberty Legion are superheroes, gods generated from the friction between good and evil, each with sublime powers. The Legion’s leader is a robot. Ultimate, The Man with the Metal Face, was born at his human creator’s death. Cognizant but confused, asking an existentialist “Why?,” Ultimate soon stumbled upon a superhero comic as his awareness expanded.

Ultimate decides “This was why I was built....The mission to save the world.” And decades later, it was Ultimate alone and without explanation who chose to face The Blue, transcendental evil.

With Ultimate gone, the Legion flounders. Left behind are The Soldier of Freedom, the cryogenically preserved bastard grandson of George Washington; Star-Knight; Distant Sun; Mashallah; Sicko; Runt; Freedom Fighter; Strength; Doctor Speed; Devil Girl; Prophetier; and PenUltimate, adopted as a boy by Ultimate and trained for succession. Each has a superpower; each deals with a tension-charged back story. With Ultimate gone, the superheroes are left powerless, and their home, Arcadia City, is in peril. The story is composed of alternating sequences of surreal narratives and crash-bang-boom action scenes, with the saga of brutality and betrayal climaxing at the Villains’ Graveyard. Literary exposition—“The glimmering particle in the glimmering fountain becomes a glimmering picture, becomes the sketch of a man frozen against the sky”—alternates with streetwise dialogue—“What job, yo?...It’d help, help jack this thing, beat it?”

King’s work is beyond postmodern, complex in conception, perhaps too esoteric for mainstream fiction fans, but relevant to the graphic-novel, video-gaming generation.

(Agent: John Silbersack)

THE PROPHET

Koryta, Michael Little, Brown (432 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 25, 2012 978-0-316-12261-0 Friday Night Lights meets In Cold Blood in this powerful tale of distant brothers whose torment over the murder of their sister when they were teens is compounded by the murder of another targeted teenage girl—a killing one of the brothers is determined to avenge even if that means committing murder himself.

Adam Austin, a physically imposing bail bondsman and sometime private investigator in the small town of Chambers, Ohio, has never gotten past the guilt of letting his little sister Marie walk home from a football game alone. He drove off with his new girlfriend, Chelsea, and never saw his sister again. He still talks to Marie in her spotlessly maintained old room, but is barely on speaking terms with his religiously rehabilitated younger brother Kent, the venerated coach of the football team they once played on together, who forgave the man who killed Marie. After Adam unknowingly sends a 17-year-old client to her death by telling her where she can find a letter-writing ex-con she thinks is her father, the past eerily collides with the present.

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his chances of happiness with Chelsea, who is back in his life with her no-good husband serving a long prison sentence. Kent, who seemed headed to his first state championship before the murder of the teen, his star receiver’s girlfriend, turns to his brother when his family is threatened. The question is whether Adam is beyond turning to anyone for help. Koryta, who drew acclaim with his 2011 supernatural thrillers, The Ridge and The Cypress House, returns to crime fiction with a gripping work.

This book succeeds on any number of levels. It’s a brilliantly paced thriller that keeps its villains at a tantalizing distance, a compelling family portrait, a study in morality that goes beyond the usual black-and-white judgments, and an entertaining spin on classic football fiction. A flawless performance.

A compulsively readable novel about brothers on opposite sides of life.

SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT DETROIT

Lasser, Scott Norton (288 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 2, 2012 978-0-393-08299-9

David Halpert returns to his native city and finds a new life and a modicum of happiness, but along the way he also confronts heartbreak and loss.

Owing to the insistence of his father, Halpert moves from Denver back to Detroit. At first he comes to help his father take care of his increasingly dementia-tormented mother, but he’s also dealing with the loss of his son Cory four years before and the subsequent breakup of his marriage. Even though in the back of his mind Halpert feels that “only the demented move to Detroit,” he finds that Motor City is in his blood, for it’s always been the locus of his childhood, friends and family. Although Halpert finds work as a lawyer, dealing primarily in wills and trusts, Lasser is far more interested in Halpert’s personal life. Halpert discovers that Natalie, a girl he had dated in high school, and her half-brother Dirk had both been murdered just a few days before he arrived home. Lasser presents extended flashbacks in which we get to know Natalie and Dirk, and because they have the same mother but fathers of different races, Lasser also uses the two siblings to confront racial issues. Dirk’s a straight arrow, an FBI agent involved in undercover drug work, and he serves as a surrogate father to Marlon, son of Dirk’s best friend Everett, who’s dying of cancer. At 13, Marlon smokes weed and definitely could use a moral compass. He’s also mixing with unsavory types who might be involved in the killing of Natalie and Dirk. Halpert hooks up with Carolyn, a sister of the murder victims, who becomes pregnant and decides to leave her husband for Halpert.

Lasser’s setting ranges from the dingy ’hood to the ritzy ’burbs, so by the end we get to know the city almost as intimately as we know the characters.

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THE DEVIL IN SILVER

LaValle, Victor Spiegel & Grau (464 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-1-4000-6986-6

A diffuse novel reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—but then, what novel set in a mental ward does not remind one of Randle McMurphy and Company?

Pepper is a huge man who gets put in New Hyde Hospital in Queens for assaulting three undercover police officers he’s dubbed Huey, Dewey and Louie. Although he was originally supposed to stay no more than 72 hours, Pepper winds up getting put on a potent collection of psycho-sedative drugs and “wakes up” almost a month later, wondering what he’s doing there. The ward has the usual collection of oddities, misfits and eccentrics, and Pepper fairly quickly adapts to his new situation, perhaps a sign that life outside the walls is close to indistinguishable from life within.

One new wrinkle in this relatively predictable scheme of things is that the devil—yes, Satan himself—seems to occasionally run loose at night, wreaking havoc on some of the inmates. Meanwhile, Pepper starts to adjust to life on the inside, attending book-group sessions, where he becomes enamored with the letters of Vincent van Gogh, and experiencing the irrational vagaries of his fellow inmates. He also begins a sexual relationship with Sue (or Xiu), who’s scheduled to be deported to China in a week, so Pepper takes upon himself the task of rescuing her from this fate. Seeing himself as a savior allows Dr. Anand, the head psychiatrist, the luxury of diagnosing Pepper as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder—and you know things have gotten out of hand when a psychiatrist tells a group of inmates, “You are terrible people...Sometimes I want to kill you.”

A story whose idea is much more engaging than the reading experience itself. (Author events in New York)

DISCRETION

Leotta, Allison Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-4484-5 Former federal prosecutor Leotta covers some familiar ground in her second legal thriller.

Anna Curtis, the plucky blonde lawyer in the government’s D.C. Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence Unit, surfaces for a second go-round with the capital city’s seamier side following the murder of a high-price escort, which implicates a congressman. This time, Anna teams up with her boyfriend, head of the homicide division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Jack Bailey, who is a widower with an adorable 6-year-old named Olivia. Jack and Anna have been seeing one another on the sly for about six months and living together in his suburban home. When escort |

Caroline McBride takes the plunge off D.C. Congressman Lionel’s balcony at the Capitol, both Jack and Anna are called in.

Jack requests Anna’s assistance and soon she, along with feisty and somewhat combative FBI agent Samantha Randazzo, is hot on the trail of the city’s top madam, who operates a high-priced and very hush-hush escort agency called Discretion. The agency caters to the city’s powerful and wealthy, and soon, both Anna and Sam discover that some members of the agency’s clientele might do anything to keep certain information about their activities from getting to the press. In addition to trying to solve Caroline’s murder, Anna and Jack have reached a crisis point in their relationship, and the two try to work through their issues without letting them affect the case or their professional relationship.

Leotta’s writing has bumped up a notch since her first novel; this story’s well-plotted, and although the outcome isn’t nearly as surprising as it should be, it’s much more believable. One drawback: The author describes in excruciating detail even the most minor characters, their wardrobes and the décor of the rooms they are in, which proves a major distraction from the action.

Better editing could have made this memorable, but even with Leotta’s tendency to provide character fashion reports on every page, this is worth the read.

MOTHER AND CHILD

Maso, Carole Counterpoint (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-58243-818-4

More gorgeously written, dramatically inert fiction from Maso (Defiance, 1998, etc.), this time set in a vaguely apocalyptic landscape.

It’s the Age of Funnels (tornadoes to you), and the Vortex Man rules. Frequent elliptical references to falling towers and a burning city suggest that the Valley where Maso’s mother and child live is a place to which people fled after some catastrophic event that both is and is not the World Trade Center attack. The author’s intent is clearly non-naturalistic: The novel opens with a tree splitting in half, emitting a torrent of bats and a stream of light, and over the course of the narrative, parent and child burst into flames, descend into the center of the earth and commune with Egyptian gods. Yet Maso sends mixed messages. Allusions to evangelical Christians, the Catholic Church pedophile scandals and artists from Ingmar Bergman to Damien Hirst situate the book in something like a recognizable universe. So why is San Francisco called the City of Saint Francis, and China is GinGin, but India is India, and the North Pole still has its own name? It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle than a novel, though the World Trade Center allusions build toward a passage that attempts to make this event the linchpin of her protagonists’ lives as well as the catalyst for a world in which low-level war seems to be perpetual. Instead of creating a consistent alternative universe, Maso simply tosses together a hodgepodge of material designed to evoke both fairy tales and recent history without meaningfully engaging either.

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“FDR recruits a young Jack Kennedy to do some sleuthing in Europe on the eve of World War II.” from jack 1939

Characters have names like the Girl with the Matted Hair and the Grandmother from the North Pole, but they don’t have personalities or purpose. Lacking plot or psychology to anchor their attention, readers are likely to drift from one beautiful but baffling passage to another, wondering What It All Means.

Only for the most determined aficionados of the avant-garde.

JACK 1939

Mathews, Francine Riverhead (368 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 12, 2012 978-1-59448-719-4

FDR recruits a young Jack Kennedy to do some sleuthing in Europe on the eve of World War II. It’s early 1939. Jack is 21, overshadowed by older brother Joe and racked by an undiagnosed disease, but Roosevelt sees past all that because he intuits that Jack is a nonconformist and risk-taker. The president has decided to run for a third term.

What concerns him is a German network steering money to Democratic clubhouses in hopes of electing an isolationist. Jack must find out how it operates; as son of the ambassador to London, he will have all the access he needs. The premise is different enough from Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America to be workable, and Mathews has carefully researched the period, but her portrait of Jack comes up short. She captures the charming ladies’ man, the romantic hero indifferent to death, but there’s little sign of his questing intelligence; Jack’s initial reason for traveling is to research his Harvard senior thesis (eventually his first book, Why England Slept). His fellow travelers on the trans-Atlantic crossing include Diana Playfair, an English femme fatale and Fascist sympathizer, and the White Spider, a psychopathic killer working for Gestapo chief Heydrich. We’ve already seen the Spider knife to death his first two victims, a sign that melodramatic cheap thrills will trump geopolitical intrigue. Jack will fall big time for Diana as they crisscross Europe. They will make furious love, but can she be trusted, especially after Heydrich snaps her up? Jack sends Morse code messages to FDR. He’ll be in plenty of tight spots, though there’s usually backup, and he gets to use his Luger. What hurts Jack most is his discovery that his dad is one of the network’s secret donors; their confrontation gets physical.

A bold concept, poorly executed by this veteran thriller writer (Blown, 2005, etc.).

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INTO THE DREAMING

Moning, Karen Marie Delacorte (128 pp.) $20.00 | Apr. 24, 2012 978-0-345-53522-1

A long-out-of-print novella by Moning (The Immortal Highlander, 2004, etc.) that’s padded with previously unpublished bits and pieces of her writing.

Aedan MacKinnon is, literally, the man of writer Jane Sillee’s dreams, and she’s determined to save him from an evil Unseelie king who’s tricked him into five hundred years of servitude. The grandson of a great Scottish ruler, Aedan has been trapped in an icy kingdom and has no memory of his past. Now called Vengeance, the king has transformed him into an agent of death and destruction. A Faery queen, determined to thwart the evil king, sends Jane a tapestry with Aedan’s name and likeness on it and uses her magic to transport the sleeping author to 15thcentury Scotland. When Jane awakens, as naked as the day she was born, she immediately recognizes Aedan, who, according to his agreement with the evil king, gets to spend a month visiting his old stomping grounds, the family castle, before returning to Unseelie. It’s up to Jane to seduce a reluctant Aedan, help him regain his memory and thus save him before he ends up on ice forever. And what better way to attract her man than to leave racy manuscripts strewn around the castle, to take sensuous baths by the fire, and to enlist the villagers to teach her how to cook?

This is a short fantasy, laced with lots of steamy sex and a dash of humor. The additional material (more than 100 pages), which includes a proposal for a romance that was never published and a deleted segment from another book, seems rather self-serving and unnecessary, of interest to only the most die-hard fans.

SHINE SHINE SHINE

Netzer, Lydia St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-250-00707-0

Netzer’s debut, about a heavily pregnant woman left to care for her dying mother and autistic son while her Nobelwinning husband travels to the moon, takes the literary concept of charmingly quirky characters to a new level.

Sunny is born in Burma in 1981 to missionary parents.

After her father’s death at the hands of the Communists, Sunny’s mother, Emma, settles with Sunny in rural western Pennsylvania, where she mistakenly hopes Sunny will be accepted despite her glaring abnormality—she is hairless and permanently bald, and Emma will not allow her to wear a wig. Sunny finds her soul mate in Maxon, the youngest son of cartoonishly

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abusive white-trash parents. If Sunny is brilliant and a little odd, Maxon is a genius far along the autism continuum. For Maxon, whose work with artificial intelligence has made him rich and won him a Nobel by age 30, the boundary between human and robot is erasable. He plots interpersonal interactions in terms of mathematical formulas. Nevertheless, he and Sunny’s love is shown as Shakespearian in its passion and depth. But when Sunny becomes pregnant with their son Bubber, maternal instincts push her toward conformity: wig wearing and suburbia. She wants to cure Bubber of the autism he has evidently inherited and becomes less patient with Maxon’s exceptionality. Sunny is far along in her second pregnancy and coping with Emma’s approaching death from cancer when Maxon leaves for his mission to colonize the moon with robots. While he faces a crisis in space that shows him how much his relationships on earth matter, Sunny stops wearing her wig, medicating Bubber to control him and maintaining Emma endlessly on life support. She drops her pretense of normality, only to realize that there may be no such thing as normal; everyone wears a metaphorical wig.

Talky uplift and a self-congratulatory tone bog down the novel, but through compelling characters, Netzer raises a provocative question: Is autism a disability, a gift or the norm of the future? (Agent: Caryn Karmatz Rudy)

OLD AND COLD

Nisbet, Jim Overlook (160 pp.) $13.95 paperback | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-59020-915-8 An aging, homeless Man with No Name takes an assignment for a contract hit in order to keep himself in icy martinis.

Noir-master Nisbet (The Damned Don’t Die, 1986, etc.) slaps readers right in the face with this stream-of-consciousness rant by an alcoholic narrator who makes Clint Eastwood sound downright squeaky by comparison. Nisbet’s protagonist lives

An action-packed thriller helmed by a mysterious and complicated anti-hero... in ruing the loss of the husband and father he might have been and evoking a deep and heart-rending loneliness, the narrator transforms into a character most readers will relate to, regardless of how much of an enigma he otherwise remains.—Kirkus Reviews contact: silverdave@me.com

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“This is Southern literature as expected, with a touch of noir and with a touch of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River.” from oregon hill

under a bridge abutment in San Francisco, where he does the math calculating how time is running out for him, pining for the daughter he thinks he has somewhere and betting whether the “smart money” will keep him in the two-to-ten martinis a day he needs to get by. “The one thing about binge drinking is that the one thing you know for sure is that sooner or later, while you know you’re going to wake up under that bridge abutment again, the question is whether you’re going to wake up there in one piece,” mulls our nominative hero. This is experimental stuff in a somewhat traditional genre, with chapters composed of unbroken paragraphs filled with the bleak but verbose monologue by a dying man. There are lots of ruminations here, marinated in Andrei Rublev vodka (an in-joke by Nisbet, naming his fictional cocktail after a medieval painter of Orthodox icons), ranging from notes on the economy to mathematical expressions of alcoholism to clinical observations on the little humiliations of one’s lifestyle, like spitting out teeth from time to time. Through the fog and psychic whiplash of this guy’s brain, we somehow learn that he’s taken one more hit, a $5,000 gig that will keep him on another bad bender for a while. There’s a couple of cops nosing around and a bartender who riles things up by raising the price of martinis to $6.50, which changes the math for our geezer killer.

But plot is secondary to voice in this fractured fairy tale, where the lessons aren’t cautionary—they’re fatal.

A grim, fiercely written entry whose best feature is one baleful voice, one step from the grave.

BREED

Novak, Chase Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (288 pp.) $25.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-316-19856-1 A cautionary tale about the perils of fertility treatments turns into a gore fest for the strong of stomach.

Now that Stephen King has earned acceptance as a literary novelist, what has been published as the debut novel by Novak represents a turnabout—a literary novelist of some renown and commercial success tries his hand at becoming Stephen King. The publisher doesn’t conceal that the novel was written under a pseudonym by Scott Spencer (whose A Ship Made of Paper, 2003, was a National Book Award nominee), but fans who appreciate his typical balance of thematic depth and storytelling will recognize the marketing wisdom of publishing this under a different name. While he remains a fine writer, this descent “into the medical hell of infertility” is most noteworthy for its shock value and for a few truly spectacular deaths (which should challenge the special effects within the movie to which this plainly aspires). Alex and Leslie have everything—luxurious Manhattan domicile, fine jobs, each other—except a baby. Leslie seems more willing to adopt, but Alex is desperate to try anything. If he weren’t, he might have had second thoughts after they traveled to see the mysterious doctor in Slovenia and were greeted 1438

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by a dog whose “eyes are imbecilic with avidity, and a smell of meat rises from his flanks and loins.... But they have come too far, and gone to too much trouble to turn back now.” Bad choice.

The doctor’s assistant proceeds to inform them that he has had “great, great success—using tissue from some of the most vigorous and fertile beings on earth.” Another red flag, but they proceed at Alex’s insistence, subsequently indulge in some spectacularly animalistic sex, have twins (or more?) and develop a taste for rodents, household pets, fellow human beings and perhaps even their offspring. The twins are a little weird (and they discover a tribe of similar mutants), but it’s the parents who become monsters.

There may well be a massive popular readership for this gruesome tale (but not Scott Spencer’s readers).

OREGON HILL

Owen, Howard Permanent Press (240 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-1-57962-208-4 Owen’s (The Reckoning, 2010, etc.) 10th novel, part mystery, part character study.

Willie Black is a reporter in Richmond, Va. Pugnacious and defiant, Black was once a star covering politics, and then he was captured by the bottle, messed up one too many times and found himself demoted to the nighttime police beat. He has three ex-wives, a daughter who tolerates him and bean-counter bosses cutting costs by laying off reporters. Then Willie happens to catch a late-night report about a body in a river, which is determined to be the decapitated corpse of a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, Isabel Ducharme. Diabolically, Isabel’s head has been shipped to her home in Boston. A suspect is quickly corralled, a sometime-student, sometime-deadbeat named Martin Fell who has a fondness for college girls. There’s a rapid confession. Willie thinks the story’s over, but then he gets a call from his latest ex-wife, now a lawyer, who wants him to meet with Fell’s mother and hear an alibi the police refuse to consider.

Nearly all that happens is centered around Oregon Hill, a Richmond neighborhood, “a tight little inbred box” full of factory workers and laborers, fighters and drinkers. Owen’s characters are superbly realistic: Willie himself, sired by a light-skinned African-American musician; his white mother, rejected by family, who turned to serial boyfriends and marijuana; David Junior Shiflett, a police lieutenant whose father was killed in a barroom brawl; Valentine Chadwick IV, the elder Shiflett’s murderer; and Awesome Dude, once a student, now a brain-addled possible witness to Isabelle’s murder. Owen knows his setting, his dialogue is spot-on, and his grasp of the down-and-dirty work of the police and news reporters lends authenticity to the narrative. This is Southern literature as expected, with a touch of noir and with a touch of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River.

Willie Black deserves a sequel.

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YOU & ME

Powell, Padgett Ecco/HarperCollins (208 pp.) $23.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jul. 31, 2012 978-0-06-212613-9 978-0-06-212615-3 e-book

Two Southern men riff, rant and trade non sequiturs in the latest literary stunt from Powell (Creative Writing/U. of Florida).

Following 2009’s The Interrogative Mood, a novel in which every sentence was a question, this slim novel is built out of brief chapters written exclusively in dialogue between two men sitting and biding their time “[s]omewhere between Bakersfield, California, and Jacksonville, Florida.” Similarly, their conversation topics can and do go anywhere: Jayne Mansfield’s cleavage, barber poles, war, sanity, Southern lore, existential notions of identity and more. The banter recalls Waiting for Godot, though the chatter here is more pun-driven than absurdist. When Powell gets deep into wordplay, the book can be great fun, as chapters that begin as sober discussions of, say, Johnny Weissmuller collapse into ridiculous lines of dialogue like, “We could go down to Blockbuster in the vinegar and get Tarzan.” For all the verbal mugging, though, Powell does raise some provocative questions: “What is the big picture?” “Why do we talk?” “Are we free?” What does it mean to live today like it’s the last day of your life? Clear answers to such heady questions aren’t forthcoming, of course, and the novel is bound to frustrate anybody looking for a conventional narrative arc. What this chicken-fried Phaedo does have going for it is its verve and enthusiasm for language—every page reflects Powell’s restless urge to make up words, to drill into them, to apply new meanings to them and sometimes just to revel in the sound of language. For instance: “Be neat, be brave, be Buster-Brown bustamente.” “What does that mean?” “I do not know. But does it not sound right?” If you’re willing to at least consider that question, spending time with Powell’s rambles can be great fun.

An irreverent, goofball, witty and surprisingly compelling experiment. (Author tour to Atlanta, Jackson (Miss.), New York, Oxford (Miss.) and Raleigh/Durham)

THE YELLOW BIRDS

Powers, Kevin Little, Brown (224 pp.) $24.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-316-21936-5

A novel about the poetry and the pity of war.

The title comes from an Army marching chant that expresses a violence that is as surprising as it is casual. Pvt. John Bartle’s life becomes linked to that of Pvt. Daniel Murphy when they’re both assigned to Fort Dix before a deployment to Iraq. Murph has just turned 18, but at 21, Bartle is infinitely |

more aged. In a rash statement, one that foreshadows ominous things to come, Bartle promises Murph’s mother that he’ll look out for him and “bring him home to you.” The irascible Sgt. Sterling overhears this promise and cautions Bartle he shouldn’t have said anything so impulsive and ill-advised. In Iraq nine months later, the two friends go on missions that seem pointless in theory but that are dangerous in fact. They quickly develop an apparent indifference and callousness to the death and destruction around them, but this indifference exemplifies an emotional distance necessary for their psychological survival. As the war intensifies in Nineveh province, they witness and participate in the usual horrors that many soldiers in war are exposed to. As a result of his experiences, Murph starts to act strangely, becoming more isolated and withdrawn until he finally snaps. Eventually he, too, becomes a victim of the war, and Bartle goes home to face the consequences of a coverup in which he’d participated.

Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader.

THE CHOCOLATE MONEY

Prentice Norton, Ashley Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (288 pp.) $15.95 paperback | Sep. 25, 2012 978-0-547-84004-8

A descendent of John D. Rockefeller, Norton debuts with a coming-of-age novel about another poor little rich girl who suffers neglect and abuse at the hands of her villainous mother.

In 1978 Chicago, 10-year-old Bettina lives in fear and fascination of her mother: Babs Ballentyne, heiress to the Ballentyne chocolate fortune, is an unfortunate cross between Auntie Mame and Mommy Dearest, spoiled, egotistical and despotic.

Although Bettina describes her as a blonde beauty in the Grace Kelly mold, Babs is unrelentingly crass and hates anything that smacks of intellect or emotion. Whether she loves her daughter is unclear, but bookish, sensitive Bettina irritates the controlling Babs to no end. When Babs discovers a forbidden can of ginger ale in Bettina’s room, she goes berserk and destroys Bettina’s most prized possession. What Babs loves, besides profanity and cigarettes, is sex; and she describes to Bettina in prurient detail the sex she’s enjoying with her married boyfriend, Mack.

Over the next couple of years as the relationship waxes and wanes, Mack becomes the one semidependable adult in Bettina’s life, not counting a stereotypical black cook. But shortly after returning to his wife, Mack dies in a drunken car accident.

Cut to 1983. Bettina arrives at prep school in New Hampshire alone with one suitcase and a lot of travelers’ checks. She’s not very interested in her genuinely nice roommate (Bettina’s condescending attitudes toward anyone middle class, not to mention her tone of low-key anti-Semitism, may be inherited but limit a reader’s sympathy). Meredith, the preppy mean girl down the hall, becomes Bettina’s obsession, whom she wants to impress and defeat, especially when she realizes Meredith’s

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“Ruiz Zafón’s story soon takes twists into the fantastic and metaphorical, heading underground literally and figuratively, to places such as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” from the prisoner of heaven

on-again-off-again boyfriend is Mack’s son. Soon Bettina is navigating her sexual awakening with side roads into sadomasochism. Babs disappears from the story for a while but shows up in time to ruin a little more of Bettina’s life before her final exit.

Bettina ends her flat-footed narration not on a note of growth or self-awareness, but one of enduring blame.

Not enjoyable, even a little distasteful.

WHEN MORNING COMES

Ray, Francis Griffin (352 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Jun. 5, 2012 978-0-312-68162-3

Do bloodlines or love lines create the strongest, truest families?­ The latest from prolific, multicultural romance writer Ray (With Just One Kiss, 2012, etc.) offers an intricately twisted family tree, lots of plot maneuverings, but few surprises. The book opens with young, unmarried Christine James giving birth. The father of her child is a no-good, married scoundrel, and her parents immediately give the boy up for adoption into a loving family. Fast forward 38 years. Dr. Cade Mathis is a tough, gruff, brilliant neurosurgeon. He is also gorgeous, as family advocate Dr. Sabrina Thomas quickly notices. Cade and Sabrina, of course, lock horns over Cade’s brusque treatment of a patient. Despite their antagonism, neither Cade nor Sabrina can stop thinking about the other. Adopted and raised by an emotionally abusive father, Cade has spent his whole life proving his worth to others and avoiding relationships. For the first time in his life, Cade begins to feel that he could love a woman.

Sabrina herself survived a meth-addicted biological mother, who burned her so badly that Sabrina remains scarred with skin grafts.

Adopted and raised by a loving, nurturing family, Sabrina has nevertheless shied away from men. Yet she cannot stop herself from pursuing Cade with picnic lunches in the cafeteria, bouquets of flowers, assurances of his worth, until he cannot resist her advances. Meanwhile, Sabrina’s best friend Kara is trying to escape her own disparaging mother, who demands all of her attention, all of her financial support, while offering only criticism in return. Could Tristan truly be interested in buying her paintings, or is her mother right that he is only interested in one thing? The romances proceed quickly until Kara’s mother goes one step too far and Sabrina’s mother makes a startling revelation.

Despite its unconventional tinkering with family trees, this romance remains lackluster and predictable.

THE PRISONER OF HEAVEN

Ruiz Zafón, Carlos Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-0-06-220628-2

The Count of Monte Cristo finds justice—after a fashion, anyway, and by the most roundabout of routes.

Daniel Sempere leads a life of bookish desperation in a Barcelona still reeling from the years of the Franco dictatorship. His father is even more desperate; no one is buying his wares, and there are always bills to pay. It’s with considerable if very temporary relief that, while his father is away from their bookshop, Daniel sells a rare copy of The Count of Monte Cristo to a shadowy stranger who uses it to send a message to a helper in the store: “For Fermín Romero de Torres, who came back from among the dead and holds the key to the future.” Who is the stranger, and what does his dark message mean? Will Daniel’s long-suffering wife run off, leaving the book retailer for a book publisher? Will anyone in our time read Dumas père’s book without having to be assigned to do so? For that matter, why did Franco ban Dumas, and what kind of trouble is Daniel in for because he has a copy for sale? From those promising if murky beginnings, Ruiz Zafón’s story takes off, resembling a Poe story here, a dark Lovecraft fantasy there, a sunny Christopher Morley yarn over there. The influences of those authors, to say nothing of Dumas and Balzac, are everywhere, though it’s a little disconcerting to find a street girl talking like Oliver Twist: “It’s me tits....A joy to look at, aren’t they, even though I shouldn’t say so.” But Ruiz Zafón’s story soon takes twists into the fantastic and metaphorical, heading underground literally and figuratively, to places such as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a place that only good and diligent readers ever get to visit, and in which the solution to the mystery is lain.

Ruiz Zafón narrowly avoids preciousness, and the ghosts of Spain that turn up around every corner are real enough.

Readers are likely to get a kick out of this improbable, oddly entertaining allegory. (Author tour to Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle)

NO ANIMALS WE COULD NAME

Sanders, Ted Graywolf (272 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-55597-616-3 It’s not the animals, but the clueless humans who dominate this amorphous story collection, the author’s debut.

Of the ten stories (and two short flights of fancy), the longest, “Airbag,” has been split into three nonconsecutive segments. It’s about a midget, Dorlene, who claims to be the seventh shortest person

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in the country. She’s described almost exclusively in terms of her size; that’s reductive, offensively so. She’s been brought to a party at a farm outside Seattle; she’s a former student of Tom, the host.

Dorlene’s no higher than crotch level (cue the oral-sex joke). Tom has a truly enormous dog, which he’s forgotten to shut away; it looms over Dorlene, who’s so panicked she wets herself. The ending will not be pleasant. There is more foolishness in the next longest story: “Putting the Lizard to Sleep.” A 5-year-old’s pet lizard loses part of its tail and has to be euthanized by the vet. John, the father, had been hoping to retrieve the dead lizard: “I wanted him to see what dead is.” But the lizard’s already been cremated, so John and his live-in girlfriend pretend they have the dead lizard in a box (it’s actually a sausage link). The ponderously delivered moral is that lying to kids doesn’t work. The other stories are even less developed. “Opinion of Person” is a study of anomie. Two housemates are united by their loathing of a cat, whose owner is away at work. James, in “Momentary,” has lost his hand in an act of self-mutilation. He’s under observation in a mental hospital, yet there are no insights into his condition. “The Lion” is just as wispy.

A wheelchair-bound woman has made a lion out of fabric. Will it

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be a Frankenstein’s monster? Who knows? And who knows what’s going on in “Jane,” between the ghost and her sleeping ex-lover?

As Sanders writes elsewhere, “Confusion burbles thickly.”

An awkward start.

TEN GIRLS TO WATCH

Shumway, Charity Washington Square/Pocket (320 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Jul. 31, 2012 978-1-4516-7341-8 A young woman gets the break of a lifetime at a popular magazine—now if only everything else (money, apartment, love life, entire professional future) would fall into place.

A sort of modern-day Mary Tyler Moore, Dawn West is trying to make it as a writer. Though countless novels have offered the same conceit—lives in New York, works in media, searches for Mr.

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“Moral dilemmas don’t come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut.” from the light between oceans

Right—Shumway’s Dawn is a young woman of substance, and her trials are of more consequence than the search for the perfect Little Black Dress. After Harvard, Dawn moves to New York, but along the way loses her college boyfriend Robert and finds herself barely solvent. Robert, they’re “still friends,” invites Dawn to his family’s annual summer fete in the Hamptons, but joining them will be his new girlfriend Lily. At once, Dawn sees Lily is everything she isn’t: rich and cultured in an effortless way and most importantly, unfazed by Robert and his privileged imperiousness.

At the party, Dawn meets Regina, the editor of Charm magazine, and this meeting lands her a job putting together a spread for Charm’s 50th anniversary of their “Ten Girls to Watch” contest (Charm is an indistinguishable stand-in for Glamour, where Shumway worked on their corresponding 50th anniversary piece for the “Top Ten College Women” contest). While in her new office (the storage closet) at the archives, Dawn meets Elliot, secret author of the magazine’s bachelor column. Sparks fly and they begin to form the kind of relationship that seems too good to be true. And then he doesn’t call and sends a fruit basket for Christmas. Meanwhile, Dawn is tracking down 50 years’ worth of remarkable women, some quite famous, whose stories fill the novel and offer inspiration when things get tough—her roommate disappears, her building burns down, Elliot is not what he seems, and Robert has ended their friendship. Never fear, our Dawn finds help in unsuspecting places.

A winning debut featuring the kind of witty, appealing good girl that captures readers’ hearts. (17 black-and-white images throughout)

SUZY’S CASE

Siegel, Andy Scribner (352 pp.) $26.00 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-4516-5878-1 The plot twists keep coming in this legal thriller by Siegel, a first-time author who calls on his own experience as a personal injury and malpractice lawyer.

Hero and narrator Tug Wyler is a hardboiled Manhattan lawyer who specializes in personal injury but usually winds up with robbers and murderers as clients. As a favor to an associate, he takes on the not-verypromising case of Suzy, a young sickle cell patient who suffered a brain-damaging stroke during hospitalization. Nothing initially points to malpractice, but Wyler’s instincts tell him that a key witness is lying. His search for the truth is accompanied by a few false leads, three separate attempts on his life and a potential love affair with Suzy’s mother. Instead of a climactic courtroom scene, Siegel delivers a final set of revelations after the case has been settled. Only in the final pages does Wyler discover all the key characters’ backgrounds and piece together what really happened in the hospital and why he survived those three murder attempts. The book’s fast-moving plot makes it a quick, enjoyable read, with some colorful characters, including a mysterious neighborhood avenger. The author’s background gives a ring of 1442

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truth to the plot twists and litigation scenes, and he avoids going off on legal tangents unless the plot requires them. He only trips up by trying too hard to establish Wyler as a rogue and a ladies’ man: Some of his office behavior seems to verge on sexual harassment, and he’s prone to dropping the phrase, “At least I admit it” every few dozen pages. (On the other hand, a more subtle running joke—Wyler keeps meeting people who share their names with famous television characters—works fine.)

If Siegel can only make his hero a tad less obnoxious, he will have a good potential series on his hands. (Agent: Sterling Lord)

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS

Stedman, M.L. Scribner (384 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4516-8173-4

The miraculous arrival of a child in the life of a barren couple delivers profound love but also the seeds of destruction.

Moral dilemmas don’t come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut. Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia emotionally scarred after distinguished service in World War I, so the solitary work of a lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock is attractive. Unexpectedly, Tom finds a partner on the mainland, Isabel; they marry and hope to start a family. But Isabel suffers miscarriages then loses a premature baby. Two weeks after that last catastrophe, a dinghy washes ashore containing a man’s body and a crying infant. Isabel wants to keep the child, which she sees as a gift from God; Tom wants to act correctly and tell the authorities. But Isabel’s joy in the baby is so immense and the prospect of giving her up so destructive, that Tom gives way. Years later, on a rare visit to the mainland, the couple learns about Hannah Roennfeldt, who lost her husband and baby at sea. Now guilt eats away at Tom, and when the truth does emerge, he takes the blame, leading to more moral self-examination and a cliffhanging conclusion.

A polished, cleverly constructed and very precisely calculated first novel.

THE BOOK OF MISCHIEF New And Selected Stories

Stern, Steve Graywolf (352 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-55597-621-7

“Mischief ” is indeed the operative term here, for Stern’s characters are subtle, slyly humorous and at times poignant.

Stern’s geographical range is impressive, with most of the stories unfolding in The Pinch, the Jewish

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“A decidely Dickensian flavor infuses the novel.” from the painted bridge

section in—of all incongruous places—Memphis, Tenn. In “The Tale of a Kite,” the opening story, Rabbi Shmelke is alleged to be able to fly. While this fascinates the narrator’s son Ziggy, the narrator himself is less naïve and more skeptical, especially since the rabbi has a reputation for being on the “lunatic fringe” of Judaism. In “Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven,” the narrator’s father-in-law untowardly refuses to die and thus causes untold embarrassment to his family. In fact, even when an angel appears to take him up to paradise, Malkin refuses to believe that the angel is real and snorts that “there ain’t no such place.” The angel becomes understandably offended but counters: “We’re even. In paradise they’ll never believe you’re for real.” “Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams” features the title character who, testing his mother’s lack of attention, announces that he robbed a bank and killed a teller. “Just so you’re careful,” she distractedly replies. After the first eight stories, Stern moves us out of Memphis and transports us to the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. There, prophet Elijah the Tishbite finds that after millennia of commuting between heaven and earth, and after being “translated to Paradise in a chariot of flame while yet alive,” he’s become a voyeur. After Manhattan, Stern shifts his narratives to Europe before returning to America for the final story, set in the Catskills.

Stern weaves an intricate and clever web of stories steeped in both sacred and mundane Jewish culture.

KILL DECISION

Suarez, Daniel Dutton (400 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 19, 2012 978-0-525-95261-9 In this Crichton-esque thriller, a female scientist specializing in ant intelligence is drawn into a nightmarish plot involving swarming drones launching terrorist strikes on U.S. soil—on their own, not as programmed by humans.

To myrmecologist Linda McKinney’s dismay, her findings on the social behavior of the murderously territorial weaver ant—Oecophylla longinoda—have become the basis for the technology behind the drones. She is doing field research in Tanzania when her living quarters are bombed and she is abducted—not by the enemy, but by a secret force headed by a rogue special operations soldier called Odin. Her death is faked to protect her from the faceless terrorists and to use her as bait to draw them out. McKinney enters into a frightening limbo existence in which she doesn’t know what is happening, where she is or whom to trust. After escaping Odin’s group, or thinking she has, she witnesses horrors that convince her he’s on the side of good, and she works with him to expose the threat the drones represent. At a time when the military relies increasingly on drone intelligence and firepower in the war on terrorism, this thriller is eerily unsettling, if not quite plausible. Suarez, who established himself as a cyberthriller go-to author with Daemon (2009) and Freedom (2010), feeds his story with just the right amount of techno know-how, taking care not to overwhelm the |

human dimensions of the story (even if two cyberravens who fly around spying on people are the book’s most interesting characters). Those with uneasy feelings about their trackable cellphones will be even more fearful after reading about the uses to which their easily accessible IMEI numbers can be put.

A confident thriller that leaves us wondering not whether its fictional premise will one day become reality, but when.

(Agent: Rafe Sagalyn)

THE PAINTED BRIDGE

Wallace, Wendy Scribner (304 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-4516-6082-1

British journalist Wallace’s first novel concerns a young Victorian-era woman placed in a private mental asylum by her husband for questionable reasons.

Twenty-four year old Anna and priggish Reverend Vincent Palmer have been entered in a mutual marriage of convenience for only seven months when he forcibly installs her at Lake House, a run-down private mental hospital outside London. Anna has provoked her husband by leaving him for five days to tend shipwrecked sailors without telling him beforehand. Does he genuinely think she suffers from hysteria as the asylum’s grossly inattentive doctor agrees, or is he simply punishing her for a lack of submission?

In either case, while Anna’s journey was impulsive and tied to haunting visions she can’t escape, she clearly does not deserve to be at Lake House, which offers little in the way of real help for its inmates. Owned by Querios Abse, who lives on-site with his unhappy but oddly sympathetic family, Lake House warehouses women whose families don’t know what else to do with them; Anna soon befriends erudite Talitha Batt, whose “insanity” had to do with falling in love with a non-Christian. Anna also befriends Abse’s teenage daughter Catherine, who has passions and secrets of her own, and she poses for Dr. Lukas St. Clair, a visiting idealistic who believes photographing patients may lead to a breakthrough in treating mental illness by seeing into their minds. With Catherine’s help, Anna escapes Lake House long enough to learn a shocking secret about Vincent, but her sense of responsibility for the adolescent sends her back to Lake House where Abse, in a fit of paternal vengeance—he mistakenly believes Anna has led Catherine astray—comes close to breaking her spirit for good. A decidedly Dickensian flavor infuses the novel, both in style and in emphasis on Victorian social issues, and its lively cast of supporting characters includes caricatures of evil as well as painfully nuanced portrayals of moral complexity.

Melodrama that borders on over-ripeness but that can be quite delicious. (Agent: Ivan Mulcahy)

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JULIET IN AUGUST

Warren, Dianne Amy Einhorn/Putnam (336 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 5, 2012 978-0-399-15799-8 Winner of the 2010 Governor General’s Award, Warren’s U.S. debut limns two nights and a single summer day in a tiny Canadian town.

In spare, quietly lyrical prose, Warren tracks the inhabitants of several households in Juliet (population 1,011). Lee Torgeson, 26, isn’t sure he’s capable of managing the farm left to him by his adoptive parents.

Willard Shoenfeld and his brother’s widow, Marian, share a home and continue to run the Desert Drive-In movie theater, but Willard is afraid Marian is planning to leave; he can’t admit to himself how much he loves her, and he’s unaware she shares those feelings. Blaine Dolson has lost most of his family’s farmland and faces bankruptcy; he’s maddened by the distracted, easygoing ways of wife Vicki, who seems to let their six children mostly run wild. Blaine is only one of the borrowers whose on-the-brink finances worry tenderhearted banker Norval Birch, who is also troubled by wife Lila’s plans for an elaborate wedding for their pregnant daughter Rachelle. Add to this mix an out-of-towner who has lost the Arabian horse she impulsively bought en route to see her formerly estranged daughter and the grandchildren she’s never met; good-natured trucker Hank Trass, who takes her cell number and promises to keep an eye out; his jealous wife, Lynn, who finds the number and is sure Hank is cheating; plus the local hairdresser, whose cousin stabbed his own mother and whose father is a drunk—it adds up to the traditional cast of quirky characters that frequently animate tales of small-town life. Warren gives it her own twist with humor as dry as the sand dunes of the Little Snake Hills that border Juliet and with gentle compassion for her characters, who have their share of troubles but are all essentially decent, caring folks.

The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely rhythms, most will find this an engaging snapshot of rural life. (Agent: Dean Cooke)

THE NEXT BEST THING

Weiner, Jennifer Atria (416 pp.) $26.99 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-4516-1775-7

A sitcom showrunner finds the road to her first series launch much rockier than expected.

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concept about a young woman, Daphne, and her grandmother, Nanna Trudy, who move to Miami to seek their fortunes. Ruth moved to Hollywood with her grandmother, Rae, and they’ve both enjoyed success, Ruth as a comedy writer and Rae as an extra. Rae raised Ruth from toddlerhood after a car crash killed her parents and disfigured Ruth. (Even after multiple surgeries, one side of Ruth’s face is badly scarred.) After Ruth is hired as an assistant to two writer-producers, Big Dave and Little Dave, they help her develop and pitch her own show. The process of bringing the series to air is sardonically chronicled by Weiner, herself a TV veteran. Ruth’s hopes for Next are systematically dashed. The network suits insist on a terrible rewrite of a critical scene, and now Nanna has morphed from Golden Girls ditzy sophisticate to randy, superannuated cougar. (So shocked is Rae by her raunchy doppelganger, that her relationship with her granddaughter is sorely tested for the first time.)

The zaftig leading lady (Daphne is insecure about her weight) shrinks down to a wraith of bulimic proportions, while shilling for a new diet. The seasoned character actress playing Nanna is replaced because the suits want a name, and the bimbo who caused Ruth’s departure from her last writing gig is hired as Daphne’s sidekick. Worse, Ruth has, for once, gotten what she wished for in the romance department—her first requited love, yet she pushes Little Dave away. The plot, exposition and flashback, heavy at first, pick up speed as complications multiply.

Spares no bon mot in exposing Hollywood’s sexism, ageism and incurable penchant for extravagant silliness.

SKAGBOYS

Welsh, Irvine Norton (560 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 17, 2012 978-0-393-08873-1 Once more into the ditch: Welsh revisits the economically depressed, heroin-sick slums of Edinburgh in this hefty prequel to Trainspotting (1993).

Much like that book, this one is a collection of episodic stories that roughly cohere as a novel, written mostly in Scottish dialect and illuminating the despair of its characters as Thatcher-era Great Britain disassembles the nation’s safety net. Again, the lead character is Mark Renton, a philosophical young man who seems poised to rise above his lower-middle-class station until heroin (i.e., skag) implodes him. Not long after he starts using, he’s dropped out of university and wants to quit drugs but not very badly—in one heartbreaking scene he admits to his girlfriend that he’s more interested in his relationship with heroin than with her. Shifting among various characters’ perspectives, Welsh shows how rapidly addiction sank Mark and his friends, but Welsh is no moralist, and he’s just as likely to mine their lives for humor as pathos. Desperate for consistent fixes, they pursue one harebrained scheme or other—a stint working as mules on a ferryboat goes particularly poorly—and their freewheeling banter shows that if nothing else, the drugs

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haven’t erased their personalities. Welsh’s themes are repetitive, and there is no reason why this book couldn’t be half as long.

But it’s marked by some virtuosic set pieces. In one scene, an addict watches a group of boys drop a puppy down a garbage chute, and his distressing (and heavily metaphorical) trip into the dumpster encapsulates the junkie’s journey with equal parts horror and comedy. And a lengthy rehab journal by Mark is a witty, fiery, joyously vulgar vision of life in detox, showing how his better self slowly emerges. But as we know from Trainspotting, such moments of redemption rarely last.

Red meat for Welsh cultists, but a heavy load for anybody else.

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THE SUMMER HOUSE

Willett, Marcia Dunne/St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | Jun. 19, 2012 978-1-250-00369-0 Among his mother’s effects, Matt has found a packet of photographs of a boy who looks like him but almost certainly can’t be him. Who is it?

Willett’s (The Christmas Angel, 2011, etc.) latest is filled with slightly eccentric relationships. Milo, the patriarch of a rather patched-together family, lives in the High House at Exmoor with his devoted sister-in-law, Lottie. Their relationship is chaste, yet they understand and support each other as the best of all married couples.

Venetia, Milo’s former mistress, has recently been widowed.

Estranged from her own family, she is frustrated that Milo has also distanced himself from her, perhaps out of guilt that her husband was Milo’s army buddy. Milo’s difficult ex-wife, Sara,

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“Modern hacker culture and ancient Muslim mysticism collide in the debut work of fiction from Wilson.” from alif the unseen

continues to meddle in his affairs, primarily to protect the interests of their son, Nick. In Sara’s eyes, Milo’s fortune could be lost to Matt and Imogen, two children Lottie brought into the family after their father’s death and whose mother has recently died. Yet each of the children suddenly faces crisis. Matt can’t write. Nick has gotten himself into some financial troubles that have strained his marriage to Alice to the breaking point. Arguments about where to move have unmoored Imogen’s marriage to Jules, and Nick’s reappearance has reawakened dangerous feelings. Weighing their dreams against cold reality, everyone converges upon the High House, where the sale of Milo’s Summer House offers salvation. Could its sale pull Nick out of his financial difficulties? Could Imogen and Jules buy it, even though only Imogen wants it? Could it be the place to relieve Matt’s writer’s block? In the midst of all of these personal difficulties, the mystery of the cache of strange photographs gets lost. Consequently, the ominous shadow Lottie’s second sight reveals to her, the shadow standing at Matt’s shoulder, evokes more curiosity than suspense.

The potential for an intriguing mystery is thwarted by sprawling character studies.

ALIF THE UNSEEN

Wilson, G. Willow Grove (440 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-8021-2020-5

Modern hacker culture and ancient Muslim mysticism collide in the debut work of fiction from Wilson, better known as a graphic novelist.

Alif, the pseudonym of the ArabIndian hero of this novel, is a young hacker living in an unnamed city in the Persian Gulf, providing support to various groups who want to avoid government censors. Heartbroken when he discovers his love has been betrothed to another man, Alif writes a program that can help him secretly detect her online activity, but the program catches the attention of the government, setting in motion a convoluted series of adventures involving an ancient Arabian Nightsesque tome called the Alf Yeom, religious leaders, otherworldly creatures and, quite literally, the girl next door. The most engaging members of this menagerie arrive early, including Vikram the Vampire, an imposing guide to the world of the jinn, and a female American Muslim-convert who sheds light on the mysterious text. Both give Wilson an opportunity to explore the more mystical elements of the Koran in particular and Islam in general, and she also clears plenty of room to discuss repressive regimes and East-West understandings. The novel is timely, especially as it surges toward an Arab Spring-themed conclusion. But though Wilson, a Muslim convert (documented in her 2010 memoir, The Butterfly Mosque), displays a savvy knowledge of Muslim arcana, the story is overstuffed with left turns and a host of characters and bogs down in jargon about hacker tools and techniques. Given relatively short shrift are samples from 1446

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the Alf Yeom itself, which, when they do appear, offer some wry fables that are engaging in their simplicity. Larger doses of those stories’ pithiness and charm would give this thriller more spirit.

Wilson displays an admirable Neil Gaiman-esque ambition that isn’t quite matched by this oft-plodding tale. (Agent: Warren Frazier)

THE RENEGADES

Young, Tom Putnam (336 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 19, 2012 978-0-399-15846-9

New hell has been visited upon wartorn Afghanistan in Young’s (Silent Enemy, 2011, etc.) latest action adventure tale.

A devastating earthquake has struck.

Villages are left in rubble. Thousands are homeless, exposed and in need of rescue or relief. Into the breach goes U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Parson, a decorated combat veteran now working as a liaison with the Afghan Air Force. Parson is an experienced navigator and airlift pilot, but even though he isn’t a “rotorhead,” Parson is working with Capt. Rashid and his crew flying a Soviet-built Mi-17 helicopter. In assisting in organizing and administrating effective Afghan flying units, Parson has requested the help of a colleague from another combat service, Army Sgt. Maj. Sophia Gold, a skilled translator of the Pashto language. The two are soon tossed into a chaotic situation. A Taliban splinter group, the Black Crescent led by Bakht Sahar, known as Chaaku (knife in Pashto), is killing aid workers, disrupting delivery of supplies and, worst of all, taking children hostage to be used as suicide bombers. Young writes solidly about the complex dynamics of Afghan-American interaction. He also explores social differences by having Gold become a vital link in the attempt to wheedle information from one of the wives of Mullah Durrani, veteran of the mujahedin and the Taliban, grown too old to fight.

In fact, Gold arranges a clandestine meeting and goes on a rogue mission to see Durrani. From there, she develops information that leads to the discovery of Chaaku’s fortress redoubt. Young is an Iraqi-Afghan war veteran, and he treats Afghan allies with due respect, acknowledges difficulties in bridging the gap between cultures and crafts a bad guy worth shooting. His grasp of military terminology, esoteric paraphernalia and ethos are spot-on, but don’t expect a ratcheted-up, loss-of-city narrative standard in a Tom Clancy or Dan Brown thriller. The slam-bang, good-guys-win conclusion comes with a well-described battle at Kuh-e Qara Batar, Chaaku’s mountain lair.

Real-life experience translated into page-turning fiction. (Agent: Michael Carlisle)

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m ys t e r y STICK A FORK IN IT

Allen, Robin Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (288 pp.) $14.95 paperback | Jul. 8, 2012 978-0-7387-2795-0 Series: Poppy Markham: Culinary Cop, 2 A health inspector finds murder in an over-the-top concept restaurant.

Who says vegetarians don’t really like food? Texas vegan Poppy Markham has built her life around edibles. As the daughter of Mitch Markham, owner of Markham’s Grille & Cocktails, she earned her chops as head chef. But after a fellow employee set her bedroom on fire (If You Can’t Stand the Heat, 2011), Poppy traded her toque for a job with the food police, issuing permits for the myriad eateries dotting Austin’s culinary scene. The very latest food venture, she discovers, is being built by two of Poppy’s high school classmates, ex-football stars Troy and Todd Sharpe.

The jocks have a bizarre twist: offer guests a choice of the last meals enjoyed by a variety of criminals shortly before their executions. But their grisly plan takes an even more grisly turn when Poppy checks out their three-part sink and finds Troy dangling from the second-floor catwalk. Investigating Troy’s death is just the break Poppy needs from trying to patch things up with food critic Jamie Sherwood, who sent their relationship into a nose dive by sleeping with another woman. She also has to mull the return of her ex-fiance, Drew Cooper, who abruptly disappeared into the blue yonder years back, obliging her to fall in love with perfidious Jamie. Now that Mitch has hired Drew as general manager at Markham’s, where Poppy’s temperamental stepsister Ursula has her eyes all over him, the need to keep a delicate balance between two gorgeous but unreliable guys makes solving a murder look as easy to Poppy as inspecting a hot dog stand.

Murder is definitely at the back of the house in Poppy’s second case, with jousting between exes firmly planted in the front.

SOME LIKE IT HAWK

Andrews, Donna Minotaur (320 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-250-00750-6

Ornamental blacksmith Meg Langslow seeks a killer who committed his dastardly deed in the basement of her hometown’s courthouse, while the building’s ownership is very much up for grabs.

Nothing, it seems, can throw Caerphilly, Va., off its reliably eccentric rhythm. Ex-mayor George |

Pruitt may have mortgaged the town’s public buildings to First Progressive Financial, LLC (aka Evil Lender) and embezzled the cash he raised; FPF may be threatening to foreclose on the collateral if its demands for the town to annex some choice private property through eminent domain and turn it over to FPF aren’t met; town clerk Phineas K. Throckmorton may have barricaded himself in the courthouse basement in protest over a year ago. The locals simply close ranks behind Phinny, refusing to tell FPF’s private eye Stanley Denton about the tunnel through which they’re taking food to the embattled clerk and doing their best to protect his 11 remaining pigeons from the hawk FPF has set on them. All would be perfectly normal, or at least what passes for normal in Caerphilly, if someone didn’t shoot FPF vice president Colleen Brown dead only a few yards from Phinny’s barricade. It’s an obvious attempt to frame the clerk and flush him out of the courthouse, but which of FPF’s many minions is responsible? Before Meg can celebrate the Fourth of July by answering that question, she’ll have to deal with a litigious ecdysiast mime, a uniformed security force everyone calls the Flying Monkey, and a crime scene inspector whose preferred apparel is a gorilla suit.

Not even Andrews (The Real Macaw, 2011, etc.) can sustain the comic inspiration of her wacky opening premise for an entire volume, but it sure is fun to watch her try.

THE LOST ONES

Atkins, Ace Putnam (352 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 1, 2012 978-0-399-15876-6

Atkins’ sequel to The Ranger (2011) finds Quinn Colson counting the ways in which his Afghanistan tours resemble life in the nice little Mississippi town that’s just elected him sheriff.

Begin with the complicated matter of identifying “friendlies.” What with turf wars and hidden agendas, not all law enforcement people march in lock step, Quinn discovers. Long legs, pretty red hair and an FBI power suit, for instance, do not, for sure, an ally make. They can signal one thing, then its opposite, and sometimes both simultaneously— mixed signals with the potential for dangerous, even deadly confusion. Along those same lines, an old pal with whom Quinn once happily tormented the juvenile authorities of Tibbehah County, Miss., now travels a crooked path to nowhere and can no longer be trusted. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that even Afghanistan might never be able to duplicate the homegrown nastiness of Johnny Stagg, the bottom feeder Quinn replaced as sheriff, and about whom the usually even-tempered, essenceof-cool Quinn is heard to say, “I’d like to punch Johnny Stagg in the throat.” Whether the business is dismal enough—and profitable enough—depends on ex-sheriff Stagg being somehow near the core of it. And suddenly Tibbehah County is rife with dismal profitable opportunities. There’s gunrunning activity involving bloodthirsty Mexican cartels, a thriving cottage

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“Castro’s first mystery is fierce and intense, with both harrowing depictions of New Orleans after Katrina and psychological mayhem for its troubled heroine.” from hell or high water

industry in baby-selling, and more, all of which keeps Sheriff Quinn stepping briskly to keep up. Add to this a full familial plate: His wayward kid sister has unexpectedly returned. To reclaim the little boy she left in Quinn’s charge? Good, hard-toanswer question. So, with his own agenda piled high and spilling over every which way, it’s entirely possible that from time to time Quinn might ask himself if Afghanistan was…well…quite as singular as he’d thought.

A valiant hero to root for, a vividly rendered small-town setting, lots of expertly managed violence: another crowdpleaser from a thriller-meister at the top of his game.

HELL OR HIGH WATER

Castro, Joy Dunne/St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-250-00457-4

Salvaging lives in post-Katrina New Orleans is no picnic.

Nola Céspedes is fed up with the puff pieces she’s assigned at the Times-Picayune.

So when she’s given a shot at a major feature story—how well do rehabilitated sex offenders do when released back into the community?—she goes all-out, even nudging her friend Calinda over in the district attorney’s office for unpublicized details concerning the recent rape and mutilation of a young tourist. Her choice of which serial rapists to interview is as dangerous as her choice of one-night stands.

Nola is so driven, argumentative and protectively secretive about her upbringing in the tawdry Desire Projects that her gay housemate Uri suggests therapy. But she’s too busy preparing for a wedding and meeting her mother’s female lover for the first time.

Her stress escalates when another young girl goes missing, and she becomes even more promiscuous, more argumentative, more out of control and more worried about one of her interviewees, a former vice principal who seems overly interested in the young girl she’s mentoring and the female students playing in the school courtyard across from his apartment. Nola’s final attempt to deal with the sordidness surrounding her brings death and a start at reclaiming her own past.

Castro’s first mystery is fierce and intense, with both harrowing depictions of New Orleans after Katrina and psychological mayhem for its troubled heroine, who crawls under your skin and lingers there long after you’ve finished reading. A sequel is in the works.

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DYING ECHO

Clemens, Judy Poisoned Pen (310 pp.) $24.95 | paper $14.95 | Lg. Prt. $22.95 Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4642-0021-2 978-1-4642-0023-6 paperback 978-1-4642-0022-9 Lg. Prt. A woman with a dark past must confront her demons to save her brother from a murder charge.

Ever since a fiery car crash claimed her husband and son, Death has been Casey Maldonado’s constant companion. Now she returns to her Colorado hometown in the hope of clearing the name of her brother Ricky, who stands accused of brutally murdering his girlfriend, Alicia McManus. Alicia, a greasyspoon waitress with no verifiable background, was obviously hiding from something in her past. The cops have no interest in looking further, especially since someone has obligingly framed Ricky by hiding a bloody shirt and incriminating documents in his apartment. Death gives Casey a tip that helps her and her friend Eric, who’s come after her despite her efforts to put him off, track Alicia to a small Texas town. There, they discover that 14-year-old Elizabeth Mann, aka Alicia, had vanished on the very day her father was murdered. Though she was never a serious suspect, she’d apparently been on the run for years until whatever she was running from finally caught up with her. Elizabeth’s family, including her look-alike cousin, remain in town, but although Elizabeth and her father had been living in his car ever since he lost his job, none of them has any idea who wanted him dead. Casey and Eric, accompanied by the ever-present Death, ask many questions and go through the detritus of the past until they find a motive that can lead them to the killers.

Having Death as her tipster makes sleuthing easier for Casey (Flowers for Her Grave, 2011, etc.), whose latest adventure provides mystery, romance and the hope that she’ll get her life back together.

THE WURST IS YET TO COME

Daheim, Mary Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $23.99 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-06-208983-0

Welcome to Little Bavaria, a town devoted to tourists, beer, oompah bands and murder.

Leaving her husband home at Hillside Manor, innkeeper Judith Flynn drags her cousin Renie along on a 4-hour train ride to Little Bavaria, where Oktoberfest is in full swing and the state B&B association, egged on by Ingrid Heffelman, hopes that a hospitality booth manned by its members will fill up rooms left vacant in the economic downturn. It’s a good idea that quickly turns nasty. A 91-year-old town patron keels over at

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the welcoming event. The autopsy reveals aconite poisoning. The police chief, an incompetent buffoon dubbed Fat Matt, is thoroughly baffled. He calls on amateur sleuth Judith to help him out, not only with this murder, but with that of the owner of the Pancake Schloss two months back. A couple of locals make false confessions. New evidence suggests that a past suicide may actually have been murder. There’s another attempt at poisoning and a lot of gossip about the many, many illegitimate children of that town patron, plus a few rumors about the failed marriages of some of his progeny and the whereabouts of some of their children. Clues pile up, ditto red herrings. And the oompah bands play on until Judith sorts through old legal cases, divorce papers and documents concerning German immigrant resettlement after World War II and saints of the Catholic Church.

Breezy and sardonic, with Judith and Renie (All the Pretty Hearses, 2011, etc.) in top form for their 26th adventure.

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THE 13TH TARGET

de Castrique, Mark Poisoned Pen (306 pp.) $24.95 | paper $14.95 | Lg. Prt. $22.95 Jul. 3, 2012 978-1-59058-615-0 978-1-59058-617-4 paperback 978-1-59058-616-7 Lg. Prt. A bodyguard turns shamus when his charge is the victim of a suspicious shooting.

An oblique prologue involving an anonymous superrich cabal hints at a grand plot involving the Federal Reserve and the upcoming national election. Cut to Russell Mullins, working as a bodyguard for besieged Reserve executive Paul Luguire after many years protecting presidents as a member of the Secret Service. Mullins feels a strong affinity for the slightly older Luguire, who is clearly showing the stress of his position. When Mullins gets a late-night call that Luguire has been shot and killed,

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“India’s Most Private Investigator faces threats from near and far as he grapples with the death of a Pakistani cricket-ace’s father.” from the case of the deadly butter chicken

the news hits him hard. He’s loath to cooperate with Arlington Police Detective Robert Sullivan, especially when the investigator won’t tell him any details about the shooting. Meanwhile, the enigmatic Fares Khoury decides to “wait for the man named Russell Mullins to come to him.” Mullins vents to his boss, Ted Lewison, then consults his colleague Amanda Church, also exSecret Service, and finally decides to investigate with her assistance. Already on this course is dogged investigative reporter Sidney Levine of The Washington Times, who smells a huge story.

A key piece in the complex puzzle is banker Craig Archer, who has noticed irregularities in recent transactions and becomes very stressed indeed when an anonymous caller begins making demands. As he twists in the wind, Levine and Mullins begin to share some of the discoveries that will lead to the truth.

Though its prose is merely serviceable and its characters stereotypical, this intricate thriller from de Castrique (The Sandburg Connection, 2011, etc.) offers a good deal of interesting and timely information on the Federal Reserve.

CAT IN A WHITE TIE AND TAILS

Douglas, Carole Nelson Forge (368 pp.) $24.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-7653-2747-5

Midnight Louie, Las Vegas’ toughest, shortest, darkest detective, is kidnapped, or catnapped, during a trip to Chicago.

Louie, who shares an apartment with PR person Temple Barr, accompanies her and her fiance, radio advice star Matt Devine, on a trip to meet his dysfunctional family. How dysfunctional? Well, Matt’s trying to promote his mother’s marriage to the brother of his real father, another scion of a wealthy Chicago family. Abducted by thugs trying to get something Matt’s creepy deceased stepfather may have left with his mother, the resourceful feline escapes with the help of some local talent. Back in Vegas, Temple’s former squeeze, ex-magician Max Kinsella, whom she thought had died in a magic trick gone wrong, has been hired by tough homicide lieutenant C.R. Molina to investigate a string of unsolved murders. Max, who’s lost his memory and his father figure in a series of wild escapades in Europe involving the Irish Republican Army, is getting help from Rafi Nadir, Molina’s former boyfriend and the father of her child, as he infiltrates what’s left of the mysterious group of magicians known as the Synth. Even the stone-cold killer Kitty the Cutter may have returned from the dead to involve herself in their affairs. Louie and his partner in crime Midnight Louise must enlist many of their feline pals to keep track of all the possible killers if he’s to protect Temple, Matt and Max. Louie’s 23rd (Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta, 2011, etc.) brings together many of the characters beloved by loyal fans, along with enough loose threads to knit a sizable blanket. Will they all be tied up when Douglas reaches the end of the series?

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DEATH TRAP

Hall, Patricia Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-1-78029-022-5 Life in ’60s London continues to challenge a young photographer from Liverpool.

Nothing the police did in handling the murder of her gay brother’s flatmate (Dead Beat, 2011) did much to inspire Kate O’Donnell’s confidence. So she’s reluctant to call them when she sees two thugs with a dog harassing the middle-aged couple downstairs. She knows that the landlord wants to clear the Argyll Gardens building so that he can chop up the three flats into tiny apartments to rent to Notting Hill’s growing West Indian community. When a West Indian neighbor is arrested on scant evidence in the killing of a young prostitute, however, Kate has no choice but to call DS Harry Barnard of the Soho vice squad. Barnard’s soft spot for Kate has been clear ever since he ran interference for her in her brother’s case. Despite some misgivings about her involvement with Nelson Mackintosh, who’s already annoyed the local bobbies by speaking up for West Indian rights, he puts her in touch with Eddie Lamb, his counterpart in the Notting Hill CID. DS Lamb insists that Mackintosh is their man. But a death in Kate’s building makes him think twice, especially when she hears that shady real estate developer Lazlo Roman is interested in the Argyll Gardens property. And when more shady characters threaten Kate for taking pictures around Portobello Road, it looks as if Harry’s worries may be all too justified.

Hall’s second begins where her first leaves off, mixing straight-up procedural with a dose of local color.

THE CASE OF THE DEADLY BUTTER CHICKEN

Hall, Tarquin Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $24.00 | Jul. 10, 2012 978-1-4516-1315-5

India’s Most Private Investigator faces threats from near and far as he grapples with the death of a Pakistani cricketace’s father.

The butter chicken served at the VVIP table of the Delhi Durbar Hotel promises to be most delicious. It also proves fatal. One bite and Faheem Khan keels over dead. Fortunately, one of the VVIPs is Vish Puri (The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, 2010, etc.), invited with his wife and Mummy-ji by his nephew Rohan of the Delhi Cowboys to a post-match feast. His presence on the scene prompts Sir James Scott, working for the Indian Cricket Board, to hire him to investigate. Unfortunately, Faheem’s son Kamran, bowler for the Kolkata Colts, has gone back to Rawalpindi to mourn. So Puri, who had never met a Pakistani in person before the Khans,

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“A dead man who crumples into his lap pulls travel writer Poke Rafferty once more down into Bangkok’s dank underbelly.” from the fear artist

must travel across a most-feared border in pursuit of justice.

His dread of being in Pakistan is soon replaced by the terror of learning that Mummy, who pretends to be on a mission to bury the ashes of Ritu Auntie’s late husband in the Ganges at the holy city of Haridwar, is actually investigating Khan’s death too. While Vish focuses on a point-shaving scheme as an obvious motive, Mummy zeroes in on her fellow VVIPs. But what could the elderly mother of Satish Bhatia, the Call Center King, or Mrs. Megha Dogra, wife of Ram Dogra, the Prince of Polyester, know about the murder of an elderly Pakistani?

Vish Puri’s third outing continues the tradition of Hall’s lively franchise. (Agent: Christy Fletcher)

THE FEAR ARTIST

Hallinan, Timothy Soho Crime (352 pp.) $25.00 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-61695-112-2

A dead man who crumples onto his lap pulls travel writer Poke Rafferty once more down into Bangkok’s dank underbelly.

In an uncharacteristic burst of domestic energy, Rafferty is just emerging from a store, lugging cans of paint destined for the walls of the apartment he shares with his wife, Rose, and their adopted daughter, Miaow, when he collides first with a crowd of pedestrians streaming down the road, then with an American gent who collapses on top of him, recovers just enough to say, “Helen Eckersley. Cheyenne,” and dies. Police deny that the American was shot, ascribe the copious blood on the scene to a nosebleed, and take Rafferty in. Questioned by the distinctly hostile Maj. Shen, Rafferty inconveniently forgets the name the dying American was at such pains to get out. It’s a costly gap in his story, one that brings down the wrath of Shen and sends police to ransack his place and frame him for the murder of a stranger whose name he still doesn’t know. Forced to send Rose and Miaow into hiding and to go on the run himself in the city he’s made his home, Rafferty gets help from his friends Arthit, a recently widowed police officer, and Dr. Ratt, who hides him from official scrutiny in a truly ingenious way. But in order to get the goods on Haskell Murphy, the ex-soldier he’s convinced is behind the murder, Rafferty will have to deal with the world’s most untrustworthy trio of spies, delve into a particularly ugly chapter in the Vietnam War and take some hellacious chances with his personal safety.

As usual (The Queen of Patpong, 2010, etc.), the real star of the show is the hero’s hometown. As Rafferty observes, “Bangkok may not be glamorous…but it’s got lurid down cold.”

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CHAMPAGNE: THE FAREWELL

Hubbard, Janet Poisoned Pen (294 pp.) $24.95 | paper $14.95 | Lg. Prt. $22.95 Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4642-0077-9 978-1-4642-0079-3 paperback 978-1-4642-0078-6 Lg. Prt.

An NYPD detective, in France to attend a wedding, finds herself investigating a murder as well.

Max Maguire, the daughter of a legendary NYPD detective, has spent her life trying to replace the brother who was killed in an accident. The reluctant sleuth is half French, but her mother’s aristocratic family disowned her when she married an Irish cop. Even during her school years in France, Max avoided them.

Now she’s visiting the gorgeous Marne Valley, an area known for producing champagne, for her school friend Chloé Marceau’s wedding at the family’s estate. Ever since the death of her much older spouse, Chloé’s beautiful aunt, Léa de Saint-Pern, has run the family vineyards and champagne company. But that ends when she’s found dead late on the night of the wedding.

Marceau family friend Olivier Chaumont, a sophisticated examining magistrate, becomes Max’s lover and even more unwilling partner in solving the murder. Max soon learns that several people had been interested in buying Léa out, among them a German whose French father was a collaborator during the war.

Marc, Chloé’s new husband, is an ambitious young man with plenty of ideas of his own who’s worked for Léa. His mother is a woman of mystery; his father is unknown. Chloé’s alcoholic uncle, the first police suspect, is the second victim. Max and Olivier combine their many talents to root among long-buried family secrets to catch a killer.

First in a planned series inspired by the author’s many trips to France. The mystery is less complex than the heroine, who’s nearly as appealing as the descriptions of the wine district.

LETHAL OUTLOOK

Laurie, Victoria Obsidian (368 pp.) $23.95 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-451-23695-1

Further adventures of a psychic private investigator as she pursues her life’s goals of solving mysteries and keeping her money out of the swear jar.

Abby Cooper is the most successful psychic private investigator in town, although technically she’s the only one in town. She and her closest friend and business partner Candice Fusco imagine they’ve built a reputation for themselves over the years.

Although local law enforcement is more than a little dubious of Abby’s job description, they’re willing to cooperate with

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Candice because of her more feminine charms. The pair need help from the local law when a mysterious Ms. Smith contacts Abby in order to secure her help with a client who’s retained her law services. Abby’s more than game to help, but the elusive Ms. Smith refuses to disclose her client’s name or even describe the case. Abby and Candice figure the client must be the husband of Kendra Moreno. The high-profile case of the woman who mysteriously disappeared and left her young son alone in the house has been splashed all over the news. Unfortunately, when Abby starts to investigate, it seems as though she’s not the only one with an eye on the case. Lucky for Abby, her fiancé, Dutch Rivers, makes it his mission to protect her. But can he save her from what may be the biggest threat of all: the wedding-planning attentions of her sister, Cat? Laurie’s latest in the series (Vision Impossible, 2011, etc.) brings Abby back to her circle of friends. Fans will cheer her fast-talking return. (Agent: Jim McCarthy)

FIRE SEASON

Loomis, Jon Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-312-66813-6 A prolific firebug shatters the peace of Provincetown’s normally calm offseason.

Seals are a quirky tourist attraction for customers of Yaya’s Greek Restaurant. So why is someone massacring them? When detective Frank Coffin and uniformed deputy Lola Winters investigate, Yaya’s owner, Stecopoulos, blames some annoyed drag queens for the seal killings, but after questioning them, Coffin finds that an unlikely theory. Though tourist season’s just ended and Provincetown should be quiet, Coffin, who’s doubling as police chief until a replacement can be found, has his hands full, as he regularly reminds his levelheaded ladylove, Jamie, who keeps him on an even keel. A mysterious arsonist is setting mostly innocuous fires, most recently in a dumpster behind Rossi’s Package Store. Starting with a vague description of a white male fleeing the dumpster and some research, Coffin begins to assemble a profile. The case takes a more serious turn with the burning of a two-story building in a prominent part of town. Experts don’t buy Coffin’s theory that there’s a copycat at work. A suspect emerges, but without probable cause, Coffin can’t get into his home to search for evidence. The rash of arson starts to seem like a petty nuisance when someone from The Fish Palace calls Coffin to report a head floating in the lobster tank. The victim is Dr. Branstool, the unpopular head of Valley View Nursing Home. Coffin can only hope the arsonist will take a break so he can solve the homicide.

Coffin’s third (Mating Season, 2009, etc.) has a smart, easy feel, a large cast of likable characters and snappy dialogue.

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TWISTED VINES

Price, Carole Five Star (330 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 15, 2012 978-1-4328-2602-4

An unexpected inheritance gives recently widowed Ohio crime analyst Caitlyn Tilson Pepper loads of chances to exercise her investigative talents.

When Cait receives a phone call from a California lawyer telling her that she’s inherited a vineyard and two Shakespearean theaters, she thinks it’s an April Fools’ joke.

Finally convinced, Cait makes the trip and discovers that Tasha Tilson Bening was her aunt, her father’s unknown-to-her twin.

Since her parents are both dead, it’s up to Cait to make sense of the family secrets on her own. She meets Navy SEAL Royal Tanner, who’s been watching the place on Tasha’s behalf ever since a series of unsettling incidents occurred, and Tasha’s secretary, Marcus Singer, whose criminal record and unforthcoming demeanor make for an uneasy relationship with his new boss.

After learning that her aunt’s death may have been murder rather than the heart attack attorney Stanton Lane had mentioned, Cait must decide whether she wants to remain on the valuable and fascinating property or return to Ohio. As Cait digs deeper into her family’s past, she uncovers some shocking news that will change her life. But the troubling past may not be the only factor to place her in mortal danger if she continues with her plans to take over the reins of her aunt’s enterprises.

Suspense and romance, though not much mystery, meet in Price’s debut, first in a planned series.

SCONE ISLAND

Ramsay, Frederick Poisoned Pen (264 pp.) $24.95 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4642-0053-3 An eagerly awaited vacation on a quiet Maine island becomes a nightmare for a former CIA agent and his significant other.

Ike Schwartz is currently the sheriff of Picketsville, Va., where his longtime love, university president Ruth Dennis, is recovering from a nasty incident that put her in a coma. Both of them manifestly need some peace. So when Ruth inherits her aunt’s house on Scone Island, they sneak off for some R&R. Four miles off the Maine coast, Scone has no electricity, phone service or even reliable water. But it does have a recent death, the suspicious fall from a cliff of mystery man Harmon Staley. While Ike is looking into the death of Staley, who was once his colleague, another of his old pals from the CIA is desperately seeking him.

Charlie Garland, cut out of a secret operation by his boss, has learned that someone is killing CIA agents who once had worked on several cases with Ike, and he’s convinced that Ike is next on the list. After snooping around on Scone and a nearby uninhabited

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“Street girls walk, street gangs war—it’s all business as usual, thinks DI Georgia Johnston, except for an unsettling surge in South London’s murder rate.” from street girls

island once used by the Coast Guard, Ike thinks he’s found the motive for Staley’s murder. Now he and Ruth may have to fight a pitched battle against unknown enemies from his past to survive.

The latest mystery-thriller for Ike (Rogue, 2011, etc.) provides all the fast-paced action and danger readers have come to expect.

STREET GIRLS

Regan, Linda Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jun. 1, 2012 978-1-78029-021-8 Street girls walk, street gangs war— it’s all business as usual, thinks DI Georgia Johnston, except for an unsettling surge in South London’s murder rate.

Three underage hookers are slaughtered within hours of each other. Has

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someone’s pathology gotten out of hand? Or is this the grisly aftermath of a major shift in gangland’s power structure? Is Yo-Yo Reilly, feared chieftain of the vicious Brotherhood gang (“And we all know sadism is his favorite pastime”) not quite as feared as he once was? These are gnarly questions with answers that branch out in multiple directions. So it makes sense for Georgia’s boss to call in an expert in gang warfare like DI David Dawes for aid and advice. But Georgia just plain doesn’t like or trust Dawes, a lack of sympathy noticeably mutual. Is it possible that her boss, whom she does like, and who begins the street-girl case by naming her senior officer in charge, is now having second thoughts? Georgia seems to find secrets, lies and hidden agendas wherever she turns. Nor does it help the least little bit when Lucy, the brave and brainy teenage daughter of a close friend and colleague, decides impetuously to consider police work as a career opportunity. She’s both dead right to do so and very nearly dead (literally) as a consequence.

Regan (Brotherhood of Blades, 2011, etc.) continues her sure-footed walk on the noir side. Entertaining stuff, but not for the fainthearted.

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LEADER OF THE PACK

Rosenfelt, David Minotaur (384 pp.) $24.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-0-312-64804-6

Dog-loving Andy Carpenter, Paterson, New Jersey’s gift to the criminal bar, gets another chance at a murder case he lost six years earlier.

Not even Joey Desimone disputes that his father, Carmine, runs one of central New Jersey’s dominant crime families, or that Joey carried on an adulterous affair with Karen Solarno, or that he was angry and hurt when she broke it off to give her marriage another shot. But Joey vigorously disputed prosecutor Dylan Campbell’s accusation that he rang the Solarnos’ doorbell and gunned down Karen and her husband, Richard. Despite Andy’s best efforts, Joey’s story didn’t sway a jury of his peers, and he’s already done six years of his life sentence when Andy, following an unwitting tip he’s gotten from Carmine’s aging brother and enforcer Nicky Fats, realizes that Richard Solarno was up to his gizzard in gunrunning and that a group of his clients, paramilitary survivalists who deemed a shipment he supplied short on firepower, had threatened his life—facts that Lt. Kyle Wagner of the Montana State Police not only knew, but duly reported to Dylan Campbell six years ago. Even Henry “Hatchet” Henderson, the irascible judge who seems to preside over all Andy’s trials (Dog Tags, 2010, etc.), acknowledges that the prosecution’s concealment of such exculpatory evidence constitutes grounds for a new trial. If only the trail weren’t so cold—and cooling further every day, thanks to the executions of Nicky Fats, Carmine and associates as far away as Peru at the hands of Simon Ryerson, a Harvard MBA who thinks the time is ripe for a hostile takeover of the Desimone empire and doesn’t mind stepping on Joey’s toes in order to close the deal.

The mob intrigue, as is customary with Rosenfelt (On Borrowed Time, 2011, etc.), is unconvincing, and, despite the title, there’s not much for dog fanciers this time around.

But Andy is as effervescent as ever, and the courtroom byplay is consistently entertaining.

THE STRANGE FATE OF KITTY EASTON

Speller, Elizabeth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (416 pp.) $25.00 | Jun. 26, 2012 978-0-547-54752-7 Grief, not love, yokes people together in the aftermath of the Great War. Thirteen years ago, little Kitty, just 5 years old, disappeared from her bedroom in Easton Hall, never to be seen again. Her widowed mother, Lydia, wasting away into madness, still thinks she’s alive. Nobody else does, especially not her brother-in-law Patrick, who on that long-ago night thought 1454

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he saw Lydia and Julian, her other brother-in-law, disposing of bloodstained linens. Also on hand and mired in despondency are Lydia’s half sister Frances and William Bolitho, an architect mutilated in the war come to oversee Lydia’s pet project, the installation of a stained-glass window in the family church and a maze meant to commemorate both the wartime loss of her husband, Digby, and the disappearance of their child. Rounding out the circle are Bolitho’s wife and caregiver Eleanor, their son Nicholas and Laurence Bartram (The Return of Captain John Emmett, 2011), who’s been asked by Bolitho to assist him. Bartram, still grieving over his lost love, Mary, and the deaths of his wife and unborn child, is appalled to witness a liaison between Eleanor and Patrick and to find a dead body in a vault under the chapel floor. Are the remains those of a serving girl gone missing at the Wembley exhibition? The unacknowledged wife of jackof-all-trades David, a wartime companion of Julian? Or Kitty?

As secret liaisons unfold and fired help are relocated, Bartram and Patrick almost perish in the estate’s original underground maze, and a final twist discloses the truth about Kitty, which becomes yet another secret that will be kept from most of the Hall residents and villagers in Easton Deadall.

A grim manor-house mystery with English upper-class decor and a present-day noir sensibility. (Agent: Georgina Capel)

THE PIGEON PIE MYSTERY

Stuart, Julia Doubleday (304 pp.) $24.95 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-385-53556-4

Her Highness Princess Alexandrina is forced by circumstances to make a new life for herself, and deal with new death, after the passing of her father, His Highness the Maharaja of Prindur.

His kingdom stolen by the British, the Maharaja is taken to England where, as a favorite of Queen Victoria, he marries an Englishwoman and spends his life brooding on the loss of the family jewels. His scandalous death in the arms of another young woman makes life difficult for his daughter Alexandrina, known as Mink, who is lucky to be awarded a grace-and-favor apartment at Hampton Court Palace, which is reputed to be haunted by ghosts. Once Mink and her Indian servant Pooki move into the moldering apartment, they meet a diverse and zany group: the obnoxious Maj. Gen. Bagshot and his wife, several military relics, the Keeper of the Maze, the Keeper of the Great Vine and Dr. Henderson, who falls for Mink. When a picnic is proposed, Pooki is asked to make a pigeon pie, a favorite of Bagshot’s. Soon after enjoying the treat, Bagshot dies—apparently from cholera, until an anonymous letter suggesting otherwise provokes a postmortem that turns up arsenic. Mink must unmask the real killer if she is to clear Pooki. As she questions her new acquaintances, Mink discovers many secrets. But are any of them a motive for murder?

Stuart’s third (The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, 2010, etc.) continues her exploration of famous English historic sites.

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Quirky characters, a feisty protagonist, a clever mystery and the requisite historical tidbits combine for an amusing read.

THE LAST REFUGE

Talley, Marcia Severn House (208 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-0-7278-8153-3

Hannah Ives (A Quiet Death, 2011, etc.) agrees to wear a wig and a farthingale for three months.

LynxE TV is in a bind. Patriot House, 1774, a reality show they’re about to start filming, has lost its leading lady to illness. Would Hannah, who lives just two blocks away from the William Paca colonial mansion, where the show is shot, agree to act as the other lead’s sister-in-law for the three months of shooting? The perks include no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no contact with anyone but cast members and 24/7 cameras following every move. The sweetener would be a $15,000 stipend and a $75,000 donation to the Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Leaving her husband Paul to his own devices, Hannah moves into the Paca house, where she cavorts with people playing a wealthy merchant, his children, a tutor, a dance master, indentured servants, and her lady’s maid. That would be Amy, the young widow of a Navy SEAL who died in a governmentsanctioned raid. Or did he? Now romancing the dancing master, Amy is none too pleased when her husband returns from the dead and wants her to collect his life insurance, then run off to Argentina with him using disguises and aliases. The problem of how to deal with the dancing master is settled when Hannah finds him dead in the springhouse where the family provisions are stored. Hannah sneaks messages past the production crew to Paul asking for help, which arrives punctually just as she’s being throttled at the show’s big finale at the State House ball.

The crimes are definitely secondary to the tidbits about colonial Annapolis. Most readers will feel Hannah’s pain at the era’s lack of shampoo and toothpaste.

DARK HEART

Tonkin, Peter Severn House (208 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-0-7278-8165-6 Richard and Robin Mariner are drawn into the deadly civil war of a turbulent West African nation.

The small country of Benin la Bas is notable mostly for its dense forests and the ultrarare orchid known as the Ghost.

Tyrannical President Liye Banda has seized this tropical paradise, but the freedom-fighting army of Gen. Dr. Julius Chaka has constantly challenged his rule. Part of Chaka’s |

campaign several years ago (Benin Light, 2008) involved the kidnappings of Robin Mariner and Anastasia Asov, the best friend of Chaka’s daughter, Celine, as bargaining chips. Politics makes strange bedfellows, however, and now, four years into the new administration, Robin and her husband, Richard, an international industrialist and avid seaman, are attending a celebration for Chaka in Benin la Bas and even considering financial support for the struggling country. While the Mariners rub elbows with other wealthy guests at the Presidential Palace in Granville Harbour, Celine and Anastasia, who are working at a jungle hospital and school in the far north of the nation, come under siege from a terrorist group called the Army of Christ the Infant. Its child soldiers, led by the terrifying Gen. Nlong, have already killed the hospital and school’s leader, the Rev. Antoine.

Fortified by their experience in the previous coup, Anastasia and Celine try to organize the workers, nuns and students to fight back, but they need reinforcements. Will the Mariners arrive in time?

Although Tonkin forgoes his usual maritime action, he energetically describes the wielding of weapons and fists in another solid adventure with a dash of current world events.

THE ALTERED CASE

Turnbull, Peter Severn House (192 pp.) $28.95 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-0-7278-8154-0

Two old friends stir up a hornet’s nest when they report a murder they witnessed as schoolboys.

DC Reginald Webster can hardly believe that two middle-aged businessmen would make up such a tale. So when Cyrus Middleton and Tony Allerton come in to report discovering a newly dug grave in a field close to the village of Catton Hill, Webster’s boss, DCI George Hennessey (Aftermath, 2011, etc.), has no choice but to investigate.

Problem is, Middleton and Allerton found the grave back when they were 15. Sure enough, in a field owned by irascible landlord Thomas Farrent, Hennessey’s men dig up five skeletons. Four are alike enough to be a family, similarly short in stature. The fifth is taller and perhaps unrelated. Slogging through 30-yearold missing-persons cold cases, DC Carmen Pharoah reads about the Parrs: father, mother and two adult daughters who disappeared from the posh King Henry Hotel at about the right time. But why did the Parrs leave their bohemian home in Camden Town for the Vale of York? Who was the taller girl traveling with them? And most important: Who wanted these gentle, harmless people dead? While Hennessey’s team struggles for answers, Farrant’s wife goes missing, adding a new urgency to the decades-old puzzle.

Brisk and businesslike, Turnbull’s latest in the series proves a worthy addition to his reliable franchise.

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“Imagine a Philip Marlowe-style gumshoe in a familiar-sounding and well-constructed medieval fantasy world, where your clients could be gangsters or pirates.” from wake of the bloody angel

THE TRUST

Vonnegut, Norb Minotaur (320 pp.) $25.99 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-250-01477-1 Mommas, don’t let your sons grow up to be Manhattan brokers or board members of charitable foundations. They’d never survive the combination of criminal plots and personal threats.

When Grove O’Rourke takes a call from Palmer Kincaid, his old mentor and his biggest client, he can tell that the old man is more than worried. But he doesn’t catch the next plane to Kincaid’s home in Charleston, S.C. As a result, he has to make the trip anyway for Palmer’s funeral after he’s killed in a convenient one-person boating accident. Smarting with guilt, Grove agrees to join Palmer’s daughter Claire, 33, and his second wife JoJo, 39, on the board of the Palmetto Foundation, which Palmer launched and headed. Another mistake. Katy Anders, Grove’s boss at Sachs, Kidder and Carnegie, is anything but supportive. And the very first item of business before the Foundation, a transfer of $65 million donated by the Catholic Fund to the Foundation for relief work in the Philippines, raises Grove’s hackles. He’s taken aback by dogged Fayetteville lawyer Biscuit Hughes’ revelation that the Catholic Fund owns Highly Intimate Pleasures, an adult novelty superstore, and he doesn’t trust Father Frederick Ricardo, the fasttalking Maryknoll priest who’s pressing for the transfer. Just to keep the pressure up, Grove learns that Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is poised to purchase his division at SKC and that Isabelle Torres of the FBI is dogging his every move and demanding he spill everything he knows about the Foundation. And that’s all before JoJo is kidnapped by someone demanding $200 million— virtually all the Foundation’s assets—for her safe return.

A fast and furious novel from Vonnegut (The Gods of Greenwich, 2011, etc.) and a guaranteed good time. (Agent: Scott Hoffman)

THE CROWDED GRAVE

Walker, Martin Knopf (336 pp.) $24.95 | Jul. 6, 2012 978-0-307-70019-3

A terrorist is introduced to Dordogne foie gras.

St. Denis Chef de Police Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges (Black Diamond, 2011, etc.) has his hands full. An unidentified corpse shot some 20 years ago has been found at the site of an archaeological dig. Two of the foreign students there, Teddy and Kajte, may be involved in a case of animal-rights vandalism. And a secret summit meeting of Spanish and French ministers may be targeted by Basque terrorists. While Bruno’s English girlfriend Pamela flies home to deal with her mother’s stroke and her ex-husband, Bruno’s 1456

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former Paris-based girlfriend Isabelle, recovering from a wound inflicted on the job, returns to St. Denis with other governmental bigwigs to supervise the summit. PETA leaflets appear.

Dynamite caches are rifled. A Spanish minister’s car blows up.

The German archaeology professor responsible for the dig disappears. Teddy and Kajte scamper off. Worse, the farmers raising ducks for foie gras loathe the new magistrate, who thinks eating the stuff is barbaric. Then clues to that old cadaver crop up, indicating ties to the SS, the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Army Faktion. Cover stories are uncovered. Good guys turn out to be bad. Bruno’s longtime companion, a basset hound, dies a heroic death. And Bruno manages to deal with everything and still have time to make a mouthwatering lamb stew, savor a Perigord foie gras snack and enjoy a really nice glass or two of wine.

Another delicious romp through a French menu garnished with politics.

science fiction and fantasy WAKE OF THE BLOODY ANGEL

Bledsoe, Alex Tor (352 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-7653-2745-1

Another independently intelligible outing for freelance sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse, from the author of, most recently, the splendid The Hum and the Shiver (2011).

Imagine a Philip Marlowe-style gumshoe in a familiar-sounding and well-constructed medieval fantasy world, where your clients could be gangsters or pirates threatened by dragons, sea monsters or magic. Eddie’s latest client is Angelina Dirnay, tavern owner—and his landlady, so he feels in no position to refuse her. Twenty years ago, so Angelina relates, she was a barmaid in a harbor town and fell in love with a handsome young sailor whose career choice was piracy. On his first voyage, so rumor has it, he captured a vast treasure but then was wrecked, and no trace of either Black Edward Tew or the treasure was ever found. Angelina, tearfully waiting all these years, now asks Eddie to discover the pirate’s fate. This coldest of cold cases seems hopeless, and Angelina’s clearly not telling all she knows—least of all that she and Edward had a son, as Eddie will soon learn. The one solid clue is that there was a survivor from the wreck, who’s now a feared pirate in his own right. The investigation proceeds in fits and starts, and the

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“It doesn’t skimp on the action scenes, which crackle as always, including a climactic confrontation between airships and magic.” from wards of faerie

THE STRANGER’S MAGIC

plot doesn’t really add up. Still, Bledsoe brings his own brand of tough charm to the proceedings, assisted by a stalwart supporting cast, vivid scenery and rugged bursts of action.

Series fans certainly won’t be disappointed.

Frei, Max Translated by Gannon, Polly; Moore, Ast A. Overlook (320 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-1-59020-479-5 Series: Labyrinths of Echo, 3

WARDS OF FAERIE The Dark Legacy Of Shannara

Cigarette-huffing magician bad boy Max Frei, the fictional character, returns in this latest by Max Frei (The Stranger, 2009, etc.), the author.

There are reasons to worry that Frei’s (the author’s) schtick is getting a little thin: Frei (the character) spends most of his time mugging and smirking, though he’s come into some good luck by having been placed in a position of power in the Unified Kingdom, chasing around the ever-weird city of Echo “to investigate cases of illegal magic and battle trespassing monsters from other worlds.” This being a work out of Russia, let’s not forget the job of picking on travelers, too: “I still can’t explain why a bunch of

Brooks, Terry Del Rey/Ballantine (384 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-345-52347-1

Prolific epic-fantasy novelist Brooks (The Measure of the Magic, 2011, etc.) unveils the first in his latest Shannara trilogy.

The story takes place 100 years after the events of Brooks’ 2005 Shannara novel, Straken, and follows an Elven Druid, Aphenglow Elessedil, on her quest to recover the remaining legendary Elfstones. After discovering a reference to the magical stones in an ancient diary, she becomes determined to find them, in large part so that they don’t fall into the wrong hands. She travels to the Druid fortress Paranor, where she enlists the help of her Elven relation, the powerful Ard Rhys Khyber Elessedil. The Ard Rhys consults the shade of the Druid Allanon, who advises her to gather a group to aid in the quest, including twins Railing and Redden Ohmsford, who wield the magic of the wishsong. Meanwhile, Drust Chazhul, the treacherous new prime minister of the technology-favoring Federation, uses a fleet of airships in a plan to destroy the magic-using Druids once and for all. After having spent the past several years publishing prequels to the original Shannara trilogy, Brooks here tackles a continuation of the vast series chronology. Fans will not be disappointed, for while this first installment primarily serves to introduce the main plot and players, it doesn’t skimp on the action scenes, which crackle as always, including a climactic confrontation between airships and magic. And although Brooks has written some 20 books in the Shannara saga to date—the first, The Sword of Shannara, was published 35 years ago—he shows little sign of slowing his pace; the second book in this trilogy is planned for publication in 2013.

An auspicious beginning to Brooks’ latest Shannara tale. (Promotion at San Diego Comic-Con (7/12), Dragon Con (9/12) and New York Comic Con (10/12). Agent: Anne Sibbald)

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“A high-concept but uneven genre combo.” from tin swift

grungy gypsy women made me so furious.” But “picking on” isn’t quite right, not when “annihilating” is the better word: “Moments later, everything was over: an unattractive heap of assorted colorful rags lay on the sand, and I moved onward.” But never mind the discomfiting politics; Frei (the character) eventually finds his stride and investigates some proper capers, including the possibility of a palace coup, an attempted murder and a bungled burglary. Frei (the author) works under some long shadows; there are moments that might have come from the pages of Douglas Adams, others that wouldn’t be out of place in Alice in Wonderland.

Frei (the author) relies on his by-now-trademark goofiness and a lot of witty back-and-forth to move his story along, but in the end, the plot is messy and not well-resolved—leaving room, of course, for yet another volume in the Labyrinths of Echo series.

Literate, silly fun, though the reader might wish for a little more energetic storytelling and a little less japery.

THE UNINCORPORATED FUTURE

Kollin, Dani; Kollin, Eytan Tor (352 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-7653-2881-6

Space battles, politics, religion and revolution: final entry in the series following The Unincorporated Woman (2011, etc.).

The premise: On a future Earth and a terraformed Mars—the United Human Federation—people are incorporated, that is, their personal worth is determined by stocks that can be bought and sold by others. They also, secretly, practice mind control. Justin Cord, having put himself into cryogenic suspension to avoid a mortal disease, was thawed out and cured, only to discover he alone was unincorporated. Regarding the whole incorporation system as slavery, and desiring personal freedom, he founded the Outer Alliance, comprising most of the colonies from the asteroid belt outwards. Inevitably, the two sides declared war. Cord was assassinated, but now the freedom fighters continue their struggle under President Sandra O’Toole and their brilliant general, J.D. Black, who continues to win victories and avoid defeat despite the massive odds against her. However, the UHF president, Hektor Sambianco, would rather wipe out the entire Alliance than allow them to secede, and with their huge advantage in manpower and ships commanded by Adm. Samuel Trang (he’s almost as good as J.D. Black), he seems capable of doing so.

Problem is, if the Alliance turns as ruthless as their opponents, the human race itself might not survive. And there are complications caused by artificial intelligence avatars who inhabit cyberspace and have an agenda of their own. The Kollin brothers add little that’s innovative to this hoary scenario. Some readers might find an annoying emphasis on religion. And they have little idea of how their science fiction-y toys actually work. Still, the politics and battles are well-handled, with notable emphasis on strongly developed female characters.

A satisfying wrap-up for series fans.

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TIN SWIFT The Age of Steam

Monk, Devon ROC/Penguin (384 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-451-46453-8

Monk (Magic Without Mercy, 2012, etc.) delivers the second installment in her genre-blending Age of Steam series.

Following 2011’s Dead Iron, Monk here delivers an amalgamation of science fiction and fantasy genre elements, told in an alternately hardboiled and folksy tone. Lycanthrope Cedar Hunt travels on the Old West frontier with, among others, a witch, Hunt’s werewolf brother and engineers specializing in steampunk-style tech, on a quest to find the Holder, a mysterious and powerful weapon.

Soon after finding a town inundated by the supernatural creatures known as the Strange, Hunt and company are rescued by the airship Swift. Capt. Hink, who leads the Swift’s crew, wants the Holder as well, and another airship is hot on their trail. The novel is almost a sci-fi/fantasy Mad Lib—a Western-fantasysteampunk-horror mashup attempting to draw together disparate elements of very different genres. Of all the elements on display, Monk leans most heavily on the supernatural and magical aspects. (She is also the author of the magic-oriented Allie Beckstrom urban-fantasy series.) At times, however, it feels as if the author is throwing together too many things at once; the mere fact that she combines so many different genres means that some are bound to get short shrift. Though there’s plenty of airship action, the steampunk-ish components can feel a bit tacked on and may not satisfy some hard-core steampunk aficionados. Also, for a novel that genre-crunches with such abandon, the story is a grim and serious affair, with relatively little humor. That said, readers of magic-based fantasy and fans of offbeat Westerns may find things to like.

A high-concept but uneven genre combo.

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nonfiction AMERICA’S UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION The Precedents and Principles We Live By

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: A REAL EMOTIONAL GIRL by Tanya Chernov .........................p. 1464

Amar, Akhil Reed Basic (668 pp.) $29.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-465-02957-0

LIFE AFTER DEATH by Damien Echols ......................................p. 1468 SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER by Timothy Egan ..............................p. 1468 NOT THE ISRAEL MY PARENTS PROMISED ME by Harvey Pekar ............................. p. 1478 THE GREAT PARTNERSHIP by Jonathan Sacks ........................ p. 1481

LIFE AFTER DEATH

Echols, Damien Blue Rider Press (384 pp.) $26.95 Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-399-16020-2

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A carefully reasoned defense of the United States Constitution as the foundation—but only the foundation—of

our legal system.

At a mere 8,000 words, the Constitution can only sketch basic rules for governing America. This hasn’t prevented a large group—which includes a few Supreme Court judges—from insisting that it contains within itself a perfect and unchanging legal system. Amar (Law and Political Science/Yale Univ.; America’s Constitution: A Biography, 2005) disagrees, laying out his argument in case-by-case details that are scholarly and legalistic but always readable. He emphasizes that much of our unwritten Constitution is written—Supreme Court opinions, presidential proclamations, congressional acts—but that it also encompasses common sense and legal scholarship that aims to decipher a document that contains no instructions on how to interpret its many general statements. Thus, almost everyone believes that the Constitution prohibits anyone in government from limiting freedom of speech, religion and assembly. In fact, the first amendment only prohibits Congress. From the beginning, it was implicit (a terrible word to strict constructionists) that the president, courts and state governments do not get a free pass, but the written Constitution is silent. The Constitution designates the vice-president as president of the Senate: its presiding officer. If impeached, the vice-president could preside over the Senate as it tries his case, acting as both judge and defendant. This is not only absurd, but legal tradition forbids it.

If it happened, the Senate would change the arrangements, but the Constitution is no help.

A dense but ingenious mixture of history, legal anecdotes and hypothetical cases. (14 b/w illustrations)

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FALLING IN LOVE WITH JOSEPH SMITH My Search for the Real Prophet

Barnes, Jane Tarcher/Penguin (288 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 16, 2012 978-1-58542-925-7

A thought-provoking, sometimes surprising account of a female intellectual’s passion for Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and her near-conversion to the faith.

Since her childhood, author and documentarian Barnes (Double Lives, 1981, etc.) has nursed “a persistent religious drive.” Born into a family where religion was more ritual than the expression of true faith, she eventually began a “slow mosey” through Unitarianism, ecstatic Protestantism, Zen Buddhism and spiritual practices that verged on worship of the supernatural. By 2003, Barnes had developed an especially profound fascination with Smith. Her interest manifested first as a treatment for a PBS documentary about Smith’s life, then evolved into a full-blown love for the man and his work. “His exuberant arc from boy conjurer into frontier prophet with gold plates gave me the most intense delight of which I was capable,” she writes.

Smith’s many contradictions showed Barnes that God and irony could coexist, but more importantly, that God had “a touchingly, meltingly, divinely irreverent sense of humor.” As she continued to explore the Mormon faith, she discovered that she was not the first in her family to have been touched by Smith’s teachings. Both maternal and paternal relatives had converted to Mormonism, and one had even become one of Brigham Young’s many wives. Ultimately, though, Barnes could not make the commitment to becoming a Mormon. While the author clearly idolizes Smith, she is not an apologist for him.

A searching, intelligent spiritual memoir.

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE U.S. MILITARY Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan

Bellesiles, Michael A. New Press (432 pp.) $29.95 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-1-59558-628-5 978-1-59558-713-8 e-book

Plenty of books record soldiers’ writings and interviews, but this one stands out modestly by sticking mostly to enlisted men.

Throughout history, writes Bellesiles (History/Central Connecticut State Univ.; 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently, 2010), working-class young men have enlisted in search of adventure or a paying job. Those in the United States have been no different except in one respect. From 1775 until the 20th century, 1460

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Americans tended to consider themselves citizen-soldiers giving up their freedom to fight for liberty. As the author demonstrates, this patriotism was severely tested by the miseries of service; readers will squirm at accounts of ineptitude, racism, intolerance and atrocities. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, soldiers were simply not fed or paid. In the Civil War and World War I, they were ordered forward in suicidal charges, and they knew it. WWII was not quite the “good war” of popular memory, but it enjoyed national support. This absence in Korea and Vietnam devastated morale. The elimination of the draft in 1973 eliminated the citizen-soldier, and civilians now view this all-volunteer force with worshipful admiration. Although now professionals, soldiers remain supersensitive to incompetent leadership and impossible missions. Ironically, civilians glorified fighting men but ignored veterans until they formed their own pressure group. Lobbying by the Grand Army of the Republic produced pensions for Union Civil War veterans, the largest federal budget expense for decades after the 1890s. The GI Bill of Rights remains the sole government entitlement program that no Republican would dare denounce.

Surrounded by Bellesiles’ acerbic commentary, this is a useful, unsettling bottom-up history of America’s wars that emphasizes the soldiers’ mistreatment, suffering and injustice.

SCIENCE LEFT BEHIND Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left

Berezow, Alex B.; Campbell, Hank PublicAffairs (336 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 12, 2012 978-1-61039-164-1

RealClearScience editor Berezow and Science 2.0 founder and editor Campbell take potshots at the modern-day progressive movement, which they claim has been given a free pass to attack science and technology.

The authors believe that “highly influential progressive activists…misinterpret, misrepresent and abuse science to advance their ideological and political agendas.” They address a number of controversial issues—e.g., the merits of organic foods, genetically engineered seeds, animal rights and vaccinations—attacking beliefs that they imply are held by the majority of progressives who vote Democratic. Along the way, Berezow and Campbell conflate seminal environmentalists such as Rachel Carson with extremists who reject childhood vaccination, and they hold President Obama responsible for pandering to them because of the 2009 shortages of anti-virus shots to prevent a feared H1N1 epidemic. They also attack “proponents of caveman-style running,” who prefer running barefoot, and progressives who “desire to return us to a Stone Age culture just because it is more ‘natural.’ ” The authors move on to question critics of genetically engineered seeds and those who are alarmed at the practice of injecting growth hormones in milk cows (although it is banned by the European Union). Perhaps to show that they genuinely are

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“A focused history of films that occasionally flirts with—but does not wed—portentousness.” from gods like us

GODS LIKE US On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame

nonpartisan, they take up the cudgels for Democratic economic advisor Larry Summers, who was forced to resign as Harvard president after he proposed a genetic explanation for the fact that fewer women become scientists than men.

A sophisticatedly vitriolic, somewhat tongue-in-cheek addition to the current election debate—unfortunate since many of the issues they address merit serious scientific discussion rather than political invective.

CRONKITE

Brinkley, Douglas Harper/HarperCollins (832 pp.) $34.99 | May 29, 2012 978-0-06-137426-5 Oversized biography of the largerthan-life newscaster, still a byword for a TV anchor, at least among viewers of a certain age.

As Vanity Fair contributor Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 2009, etc.) writes, Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) was an indifferent student but a constant reader, attuned in childhood to what we would call the news, if at a different pace and intensity. It wasn’t an easy childhood: Cronkite’s father was an alcoholic, his parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up in the alien confines of coastal Texas, far from his prized Missouri. Nonetheless, he more than rose to the occasion, learning how to speak in a “radio voice” while still a teenager: “In true Lowell Thomas fashion, he interviewed anyone who would stand still and speak into whatever faux microphone prop he held.” He also apprenticed at the Houston Post, learning how to write a lean news story, and he had a forward-looking habit, sensing that wire stories were going to be replaced by man-on-the-ground coverage and that television, when it arrived, would surpass radio and other media. Brinkley is very good on Cronkite’s early distinction as a war correspondent in World War II under the influence of Edward R. Murrow. The author also gives Cronkite credit for being out ahead on certain stories, such as gay rights, the collapse of the Vietnam War and Watergate. He hints that Cronkite could be a touch prickly and sensitive—for one thing, about his lack of a college degree—but the author doesn’t press that far enough; one wants to know more about the enmity between Cronkite and Dan Rather, for example. For all the book’s weight, Brinkley, a dutiful and plodding writer, skimps here and there where he should not. The great correspondent and Cronkite-colleague Richard Threlkeld, for instance, gets but a single passing mention.

Still, the best portrait of Cronkite—that legendary journalist, certainly worthy of a big biography—that we have.

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Burr, Ty Pantheon (400 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-307-37766-1 978-0-307-90742-4 e-book The film critic of the Boston Globe explores film celebrity and waxes philosophical about what it means to and for the rest of us.

Burr (The Best Old Movies for Families, 2007, etc.) has both a fan’s and scholar’s grasp of the history of film, and he travels along a celluloid highway that extends from the early days of Thomas Edison to Zac Efron. Of greatest interest to the author is our evolving notion of celebrity—of what celebrities mean.

He cites few authorities to support his view of our psychology, however, and he freely employs locutions like we want and we expect throughout. Burr notes that the earliest performers were anonymous, until actress Florence Lawrence (1886–1938). After that, the author ably shows, the names became virtually all. At near fast-forward speed, he takes us through the careers and contributions of the pioneer generation (Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix et al.), with some stops for closer looks at the rise and precipitous fall of Fatty Arbuckle, the arrival of the talkies and the emergence of the great screen presences of the 1930s and ’40s—Gable, Harlow, Cagney, Bogart and others.

Burr examines how studios sought to homogenize and manage their performers’ images (we knew what we were getting in a John Wayne film), and he offers a lengthy analysis of, and tribute to, Brando. He then deviates a bit from his subtitle by looking at the varying natures of celebrity in TV and popular music. He also mentions the meltdowns of Cruise and Gibson and the difficulties for female actors (they must not age).

A focused history of films that occasionally flirts with— but does not wed—portentousness. (8 pages of b/w photographs)

LOVING THIS PLANET Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World Caldicott, Helen--Ed. New Press (384 pp.) $17.95 paperback | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-59558-806-7 978-1-59558-808-1 e-book

Activist and environmentalist Caldicott (Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, 2006, etc.) publishes 25 transcripts of the interviews she conducts on her regular radio show.

Those selected include celebrities (Lily Tomlin and Martin Sheen), academic researchers (Michael Klare and Vini Gautam Khurana) and activists and think-tankers (Lester Brown and Bill McKibben). Some of the selections analyze different aspects of

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the nuclear issue, whether military or industrial; environmental lawyer Diane Curran characterizes the industry as the “prodigal son of the weapons industry…totally paid for, a socialized industry.” Toxicologist Janette Sherman-Nevinger provides a major service tracking down, translating for publication and editing non-English language source material on the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Equally well done is photographer Carole Gallagher’s contribution on nuclear testing in Nevada and the effects of fallout and radiation on the population “down-wind.” Like other contributors—e.g., Curran and film director Michael Madsen—Gallagher draws attention to the long-term consequences of nuclear byproducts. It is thus disappointing to find continuing alarmist attention to evacuation planning related to New Hampshire’s Seabrook reactor and no discussion of the matter of decommissioning such aging facilities. Khurana’s research on electromagnetic radiation and cellphones is both interesting and frightening, and Chris Hedges, fired from the New York Times because of his opposition to the second Iraq War, talks about his views on war and the principles on which he tries to base his life. There are also contributions on deforestation, land use and alternate energy policy.

A nice—but not necessary—collector’s item and reference work for readers of a specific bent.

CONCUSSIONS AND OUR KIDS America’s Leading Expert on How to Protect Young Athletes and Keep Sports Safe

Cantu, Robert; Hyman, Mark Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (208 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-547-77394-0

With the assistance of sports journalist Hyman (Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids, 2009, etc.), neurosurgeon Cantu offers parents, coaches and athletes an authoritative look at concussions.

Beginning with an analysis of what constitutes a concussion—“a shaking of the brain inside the skull that changes the alertness of the injured person”—the author, co-director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, pinpoints symptoms specific to this type of injury and offers readers therapeutic remedies for the situation. Collision sports such as football, hockey and boxing are known for causing concussions among players, but Cantu points out that many other types of sports and activities also cause this health issue. Synchronized swimming, wrestling, soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball and softball, cheerleading, martial arts, skateboarding and tennis are all culprits. Since “children are among the most vulnerable to injury because they have weak necks and immature musculature, and their brains are still developing,” Cantu feels it is imperative that athletes, parents and coaches are trained to identify the symptoms of a concussion and know the best methods of treatment. He recommends 1462

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baseline testing of cognitive skills before a child even begins to play a sport; in the event an injury occurs, there is a reference point to use in analyzing the extent of the injury. Cantu offers comprehensive research on post-concussion syndrome, second impact syndrome and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brain injuries that are more extensive and longer lasting and require far more rehabilitation than a single concussive incident. Not playing sports is not the answer, however; Cantu stresses the importance of education.

A sober look at a substantial health risk for young and mature athletes. (12-14 images)

ISLAND OF BONES Essays

Castro, Joy Bison/Univ. of Nebraska (144 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-8032-7142-5 Castro (English and Ethnic Studies/ Univ. of Nebraska; Hell or High Water, 2012, etc.) ponders her troubled adolescence and who she is today.

Adopted and raised by a Cuban American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the author reflects on her search for her true identity. As a child, she was required to proselytize for the church and was subjected to starvation and sexual abuse by her stepfather, conditions she knew were wrong. However, she was “raised to be seen and not heard,” and so Castro learned to put her head down and endure. “Forbidden to go to college,” she ran away at the age of 14 to live with her adoptive father. Despite becoming a single mother at 20, she continued her education, earned a doctorate, and later, tenure at Wabash College. Regardless of her achievements, Castro continued to search for understanding and identity through her teaching, her writing, her reading of Latino literature, and the raising of her son. As an adoptee, she had always believed her biological mother was a Latina and assumed the role of a Latina herself, only to have this myth crushed at 26 when she met her mother and found out her true ethnic background. “In one sudden yank of the rug,” she writes, “I felt my family and identity severed from me. I didn’t know where to stand.” Throughout her life, Castro has had to redefine her identity, both to herself and to others. These powerful transformations form the backbone of this slim volume of visceral pieces.

Potent, emotional essays that speak to the relatable experience of rising above a harrowing childhood.

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“A timely, convincing portrait of an occupation in crisis, with much to teach anyone involved in diplomacy or international aid.” from little america

LITTLE AMERICA The War Within the War for Afghanistan

FIRST CAMERAMAN The Improbable Story of How a Disheveled Film Professor Became the First Official White House Videographer

Chandrasekaran, Rajiv Knopf (320 pp.) $27.95 | Jul. 4, 2012 978-0-307-95714-6

As Afghanistan prepares for the withdrawal of American troops, Washington Post senior correspondent and associate editor Chandrasekaran (Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 2006) delivers a clearheaded assessment of events since the war began, showing that precious little progress has been made.

America has been engaging in utopian schemes to remake Afghanistan for far longer than most people realize—e.g., in the 1940s and ’50s, American engineers planted model villages in the Helmand River Valley in the vain hope that modernity would spread infectiously across Central Asia. Now, Marines battle insurgents for control of these remote outposts, as the local population continues to live much as they did centuries ago. Chandrasekaran captures the absurdity of a bumbling bureaucracy attempting to reengineer in its own image a society that is half a world away. Though the prose is workmanlike, the author’s account of infighting and ineptitude in Afghanistan is well-researched and compelling. Development consultants further their own careers by accepting brief postings in the country where they spend their time counting the hours until their departure and socializing at embassy parties while rarely leaving their fortified bases or interacting with ordinary Afghans.

Different factions within the State Department, the military, NATO and the development community pursue conflicting and mutually exclusive priorities, largely by funneling massive amounts of cash through the patronage networks of various corrupt local leaders. The complete lack of effective oversight ensures that most of the money has little lasting impact and some ends up in the hands of the Taliban. Based on extensive interviews with participants in the reconstruction effort and his own observations from some of the most volatile districts, Chandrasekaran systematically condemns the missed opportunities and the wasted resources of the campaign. “For years, we dwelled on the limitations of the Afghans,” he writes. “We should have focused on ours.”

A timely, convincing portrait of an occupation in crisis, with much to teach anyone involved in diplomacy or international aid. (First printing of 100,000. Author tour of Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C.)

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Chaudhary, Arun Times/Henry Holt (320 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-8050-9572-2

Charming memoir by the first official White House videographer.

Chaudhary, a punk rocker turned film professor, joined the Obama campaign in 2007, thanks to the aid of a friend on the New Media team, not even expecting the candidate would win the primaries. With a mission to gain the junior senator from Illinois as much YouTube exposure as possible, Chaudhary and associates developed a rapid-fire method of documentary filmmaking, capturing Obama in as many lights as possible: making

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campaign stops, chatting with volunteers and potential voters, taking the stage before a speech, making major addresses, etc. In the process, Obama’s team developed a new style of campaigning suited to the Internet age, a style that future campaigns will surely try to replicate. The point was not to make viral videos, but rather a large and diverse array of little films that could appeal to the broadest cross section of the electorate and show off the candidate’s “authenticity” to best effect. Chaudhary became one of Obama’s constant companions; fortunately for him, Obama enjoyed his slightly warped sense of humor and offbeat style, so much so that, after the election, he was invited to join the transition team and then forge a place for himself in the White House.

Half joking, the author refers to the position, which he left in 2011, as being like the president’s wedding videographer, “if every day is a wedding.” Chaudhary was also responsible for creating and maintaining the popular West Wing Week, a weekly video roundup of White House events on whitehouse.gov. While he is amusing on the subjects of his modest “rise to power” and what he saw at the White House, the author writes with some passion about the history, uses and craft of political image-making, and he seems more comfortable offering pithy critiques of campaign aids than political gossip.

Lovers of political memoirs may be dissatisfied, but readers interested in media and politics will learn a lot from the lessons Chaudhary took away from his experiences. (25-30 b/w photographs)

A REAL EMOTIONAL GIRL A Memoir about Cancer, Death, Grief, and Moving Forward

Chernov, Tanya Skyhorse Publishing (336 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-1-61608-869-9

In her debut, Los Angeles Review poetry and translations editor Chernov probes her grief over losing a much-loved father and the inability of contemporary society to accept profound emotion.

Returning to college after her father’s death, the difficulty the author discovered navigating college life was magnified by the response of those around her. Once a sought-after, popular girl, Chernov’s friends dropped away. She describes how this rejection deepened her sense of isolation from the college community. “My emotional baggage and I were not welcome in the college environment,” she writes, “but what I feared, and would soon learn, was that in our culture, emotional baggage of any kind threatens to slow us down to the point of being left behind.” The author’s family’s life centered around a summer camp for girls in Wisconsin, which they owned and operated, created by her father’s vision of a place where people could feel “loved and safe and free.” Growing up in this environment, Chernov felt cherished even though she was resentful of the campers who shared her family’s life each summer. When her 1464

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father was first diagnosed with cancer, the family was optimistic about a cure, but even as his health deteriorated, his love and determination to enjoy life to the end strengthened them.

Chernov writes of her own painful coming-of-age, made more difficult by the stress of anticipating her father’s death as his health declined, and how ultimately, she was able to embrace her father’s decision not to waste the time he had left.

A contemplative, profoundly moving meditation on life, love and death.

GOLDEN How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself Out of the Governor’s Office and Into Prison Coen, Jeff; Chase, John Chicago Review (432 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 1, 2012 978-1-56976-339-1

In-depth investigative report on the rise and fall of the embattled former gov-

ernor of Illinois.

Chicago Tribune staff writers Coen (Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob, 2010) and Chase team up in this account of Rod Blagojevich’s attempt to sell the Senate seat once belonging to Barack Obama. Ultimately, this heavily detailed narrative serves as “a morality tale for the nation.” Blagojevich’s road to corruption began long before the 2008 election, and the authors meticulously track the future politician from his Chicago boyhood days all the way to the governor’s mansion.

Blagojevich hardly had time to settle into the mansion before the media began typecasting him as an inept, hair-obsessed, comic figure—though as time soon revealed, Blagojevich’s lack of integrity was hardly the result of his hair, but rather, the big head beneath it. A man drunk on money and power—Coen and Chase report that “during his six years as governor, [he] and his wife spent $400,000 on clothes—more than they spent on their nanny,” and “$4,000 for a single custom-fitted suit, of which he bought more than a dozen a year”—Blagojevich is depicted as an affable con artist who could hardly manage his own finances, let alone those of the state. More jester than tragic hero, Blagojevich’s fall from grace confirmed what many constituents were beginning to see: He was a man so caught up in his act that he fooled even himself.

An exhaustively detailed, definitive account of one of America’s most morally reprehensible political-corruption sagas. (28 color photos)

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“A briskly charted tale of the neglected denouement of the defining event of JFK’s presidency.” from the fourteenth day

THE FOURTEENTH DAY JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Secret White House Tapes Coleman, David G. Norton (224 pp.) $25.95 | Oct. 8, 2012 978-0-393-08441-2

A historian looks at the crisis-related problems remaining on President John F. Kennedy’s desk in the immediate wake of the Cold War’s most dangerous moment.

Coleman (History/Univ. of Virginia; co-author, Real-World Nuclear Deterrence: The Making of International Strategy, 2006) reminds us that for Kennedy and his advisors, the crisis played out for months afterward, really until February 1963. Drawing heavily from the secret White House tapes, the author reconstructs the debates within the administration on at least three issues of greatest concern. First, notwithstanding Krushchev’s agreement to withdraw “the weapons you call offensive” from Cuba, serious questions remained as to what exactly he meant.

Long-range nuclear weapons, of course, but did the Soviet premier intend to include bombers, Russian combat troops and short-range missiles? Moreover, with Cuba vetoing any ground inspections, how would the United States verify that the missiles were gone? Second, satisfying the American public on this score was part of what drove JFK’s determination to channel and control the story, and to counter the inevitable Republican charges of mismanagement of and responsibility for the possible intelligence failure the nuclear showdown exposed. Third, this effort exacerbated an ongoing battle with the press about the administration’s tight hold over information, needless restrictions, critics charged, that enabled the government to “manage the news” for its own political ends. Coleman treats Kennedy well, calling his authorization of warrantless wiretaps on journalists merely “dubious,” skipping lightly over the administration’s willingness to appease public concern by exposing intelligence collection capabilities, and generally approving of the president’s unwillingness to press Krushchev too far on Russian concessions.

A briskly charted tale of the neglected denouement of the defining event of JFK’s presidency. (20 photographs)

THE LAST HEADBANGERS NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s: The Era that Created Modern Sports

Cook, Kevin Norton (304 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 3, 2012 978-0-393-08016-2

Sports journalist Cook (Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything, 2010, etc.) recalls “pro football’s raging, reckless, |

hormonal, hairy, druggy, drunken, immortal adolescence” of the 1970s and that era’s role in making the NFL the predominant American sport.

The nicknames of three Oakland Raiders defensive players give a quick idea of the nature of football in the ’70s: Dr. Death, the Assassin and the Hit Man. Pro football was brutal and violent and played (by and large) by men who made little money, lived life precipitously on the edge, played the game for keeps and partied afterward. There was no such thing as being concussed, and the use of performance-enhancing (as well as recreational) drugs, from steroids to horse testosterone, was pretty much the norm. Later, many players would pay a high physical or mental price for their football lives, yet few seem to express regrets. Cook brings to life both the outsized personalities of the era—party animal Ken “the Snake” Stabler, chain smoking Fred Biletnikoff, the troubled Terry Bradshaw, Broadway Joe Namath, Mean Joe Greene and so many others—and also the great rivalries and games of the era, particularly among the Steelers, Raiders and Cowboys. Out of this era, Cook demonstrates, came the modern game. Rule changes had made the forward pass, rather than the plodding running game, dominant.

Players were becoming bigger and faster. Add a little sexiness to the carnage via the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and the game was perfect for TV. A major contributor to this televisionization of football was the advent of Monday Night Football with the irascible Howard Cosell and sidekicks Frank Gifford and Don Meredith. Cook narrates the hilarious uncensored on- and offair adventures of MNF. There may be a bit too much football lingo here—“flex defense,” “stunt 4-3,” “three-deep zone”—for the casual fan, but Cook does not go overboard.

An enjoyable and insightful look at a wild and wooly era in American sports. (8 pages of photographs)

WE HAVE THE WAR UPON US The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 Cooper, William J. Knopf (352 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 12, 2012 978-1-4000-4200-5

Cooper (History/Louisiana State Univ.; Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era, 2008, etc.) shares his encyclopedic knowledge of the American South and the Civil War as he exposes the players who drew the country into war.

President James Buchanan’s attempts to diffuse the tensions only postponed a crisis. After South Carolina’s secession, he concluded a gentlemen’s agreement with Gov. Francis Pickens not to reinforce Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor as long as there was no interference. Though historians often claim that slavery was not the true cause of the war, the Southern states demanded their right to reclaim escaped slaves and the rights of the new territories to establish themselves as slave or free. Abraham Lincoln was adamantly against extending the right of slavery in

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the territories, a true deal breaker for the South. The Republican Party, rejoicing upon gaining the White House in November 1860, was determined to control the South, and they were unwilling to compromise, thwarting every attempt in Congress and using debate and delay methods that are all too familiar today.

The Democratic Congress stalwartly attempted to find resolution, with committees in both houses, but again the Republicans used all the instruments of democracy to frustrate success. There were countless attempts to save the Union, including the Crittenden Compromise, the tireless work of William Seward, and the proposal of an amendment to guarantee slavery as it existed.

Each had a possibility of success but suffered reverses, delays and impenetrable opposition. Drawing on his wide knowledge of the time period, Cooper clearly enumerates the many ways the Civil War could have been avoided and how many people were clueless as to the real threat, especially Lincoln.

Illuminating Civil War history from an expert in the field.

THE GREAT WORK OF YOUR LIFE A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling Cope, Stephen Bantam (320 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 1, 2012 978-0-553-80751-6 978-0-345-53568-9 e-book

The director of the Institute for Extraordinary Living at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health inquires into the dharma—vocation or calling—of a selection of both illustrious and ordinary individuals.

“Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation,” writes Cope. Turning to the Bhagavad Gita for guidance, the author realized the difficulty in penetrating even the first piece of advice: “Discern, name, and then embrace your own dharma.” For some, their dharma is a ready and apparent gift, but others struggle long and hard to hear that piece of inner music, that passion. So Cope illustrates this fact of life through example, drawing smooth portraits of important historical characters and twining them with glimpses into the lives of everyday people he knows. For example, he weds Henry David Thoreau’s courage to follow his muse in front of an entire town’s disapprobation with the story of a psychiatric nurse with a magical caregiving hand who needed help in recognizing and using her talent. Cope also tells the stories of Robert Frost finding a voice word by word, Walt Whitman’s wartime nursing, “a calling for which he didn’t even know he was searching,” and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s breaking the rules to understand the connection between seeing and painting. With ringing clarity, Cope gets his main point across: that seeking is all and that dharma will allow you to bear life’s suffering. “You only get yourself when you lose yourself to some great work,” he writes.

An engaging exploration into living fully.

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THE ART OF INTELLIGENCE Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service

Crumpton, Henry A. Penguin Press (352 pp.) $27.95 | May 14, 2012 978-1-59420-334-3

Indifferently written but nonetheless fascinating glimpse into the CIA’s most secret—and secretive—department.

Crumpton’s quarter-century career with Clandestine Services, he writes, began as a childhood reverie: “As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a spy.” It took some doing to get recruited, he recounts (“I had no military service, no foreign language, no graduate degree, no technical skill, and no professional pedigree”), but once in, he excelled at the tough physical work required of a CIA agent in the field, adopting the enthusiasm for the mission that long periods spent under difficult circumstances requires. Some of what Crumpton describes is mundane— e.g., the daily administrative affairs that surround spy work, particularly the politics of intelligence. Only when the agency is threatened does he become piqued enough to go beyond colorless descriptions, as when he writes indignantly of the outing of Valerie Plame (a “horrible breach of trust” on the part of the Bush administration). In fairness, the author is also hard on the current administration (“When President Obama assumed office in January 2009, his Justice Department threatened CIA officers with jail—because they had carried out lawful orders under the previous administration”).

His narrative is more vivid, if full of expected turns, when he discusses his time in the field as a commander of operations in Afghanistan, battling Taliban and al-Qaida fighters while trying to smoke Osama Bin Laden out of hiding. Of particular interest is his account of the prison uprising that led to the killing of CIA operative Mike Spann in 2001.

Even though heavily vetted, if without the black blocks of many other CIA-related texts, a useful inside look at what goes on behind closed doors—and iron curtains.

A CONSERVATIVE WALKS INTO A BAR The Politics of Political Humor

Dagnes, Alison Palgrave Macmillan (224 pp.) $28.00 paperback | Sep. 18, 2012 978-1-137-26284-4

Dagnes (Political Science/Shippensburg Univ.; Politics On Demand: The Effects of 24-Hour News on American Politics, 2010, etc.) investigates the relation among politics, bias and satire.

In this well-documented study, the author seeks to defend contemporary liberal satirists and promoters of satire in the

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“A must for movie lovers and more proof that Denby’s gifts are better displayed in a full-length text than in a short review.” from do the movies have a future?

entertainment business from conservative charges of bias.

Dagnes examines such programs as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Saturday Night Live, which contain jokes and sketches that have often been featured in the national political discussion. Perfect examples include SNL’s treatment of Sarah Palin and Stephen Colbert’s recent presidential campaign. Dagnes also discusses particular comedians, their writers and raw material, and she provides a wealth of helpful references, including personal interviews, literary sources, and TV performances.

The author employs the evenhandedness of an academic sociological analysis, and she focuses mainly on the well-accepted, and –studied, divisions between liberals and conservatives. She considers the difficulties that conservatives have faced in the world of comedy and satire, citing as one piece of evidence the failure of Fox News’ The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Rather that outright bias, the author finds differences that can be attributed to outlook, culture, education and audience. She doesn’t examine the comedy of specific politicians—e.g., Ronald Reagan, whose jokes were funny and sharp—and she considers the history of satire but not the social safety-valve function of the genre.

The author achieves her objective, but the price of her success is a book that will have greater appeal to specialists than to general readers.

DO THE MOVIES HAVE A FUTURE?

Denby, David Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 2, 2012 978-1-4165-9947-0 From the New Yorker film critic, a collection of critical essays that’s more than a miscellaneous roundup.

Denby (Snark, 2009, etc.) has selected only pieces from the magazine that flesh out his premise that mainstream American films today consist for the most part of obscenely expensive franchises, usually centered on comic-book figures, that have abandoned any attempt to interest adults with the visual grammar with which movies have told stories and developed characters for more than a century.

“Conglomerate Aesthetics,” a 2001 essay published for the first time here, dissects the results: movies in which “content becomes incidental, even disposable,” that have more in common with TV commercials and music videos than the classic Hollywood cinema Denby lovingly (but not blindly) celebrates in comparison.

He’s not incapable of enjoying contemporary films, however.

“Romantic Comedy Gets Knocked Up” is a smart and generally positive appraisal of the Judd Apatow school of moviemaking, and the previously unpublished “Chick Flicks” gives a critically dissed genre its due (in both cases, with some feminist caveats).

In this context, the individual reviews, ranging from Avatar to Winter’s Bone, and think pieces such as “Pirates on the iPod” (a glum look at the diminution of film-watching), have additional bite and significance. Among Denby’s particular strengths are an impressive ability to understand and convey the way directors |

employ spatial relations to make artistic points and a concern for the moral and social implications of film—the belief that “the nation’s soul was on trial in its movies” that he ascribes to the two predecessors who most influenced him: James Agee and Pauline Kael. Each gets an acute, appreciative assessment; Kael, a mentor who later told Denby “you’re too restless to be a writer,” receives a particularly shrewd and surprisingly balanced profile.

A must for movie lovers and more proof that Denby’s gifts are better displayed in a full-length text than in a short review.

THE GREAT AMERICAN RAILROAD WAR How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad

Drabelle, Dennis St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-312-66759-7 978-1-250-01505-1 e-book

A story of rapacious railroads and angry pens in the Gilded Age. On May 10, 1869, the rails of the Union and Central Pacific Railroads joined at Promontory Summit, in Utah Territory, creating the first transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific Railroad soon became the object of public ire. Not only did it fail to bring longed-for prosperity, but the railroad charged unfair rates and suborned lawmakers and regulators; its major backers lacked the common touch and built offensively lavish mansions with their newfound wealth. Washington Post Book World contributing editor Drabelle (Mile-High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode, 2009) offers a bright, anecdote-filled account of the rise of the railroad corporations, their corrupt business practices and how through journalism and fiction, two leading authors— Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris—made the Central Pacific “a symbol of everything that ailed Gilded Age America.” The complex business story involved surveying, overcoming obstacles (weather and cholera), finding laborers, and cajoling investors, including the federal government, which provided massive aid for construction.

Rail barons “achieved a near-miracle by building a railroad through some of the roughest terrain in the country,” but they “couldn’t overcome the widespread perception of their company as a monster that threatened the American republic form of government itself.” In more than 60 articles written in the 1890s for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, Bierce reamed the railroad and its owners. Based on Bierce’s writing and other sources, Norris then wrote The Octopus (1901), a novel about a railroad whose tentacles wrapped around California. Drabelle’s claims for both authors’ works seem excessive—he ranks Bierce’s articles with Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate coverage, and places The Octopus in the company of Moby-Dick—but his chapters on Bierce and Norris make fine introductions to these important but lesserknown American writers.

A nicely crafted portrait of monopolists and muckrakers.

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“Essential reading for anyone interested in justice or memoir.” from life after death

SOLDIERS FIRST Duty, Honor, Country, and Football at West Point

Drape, Joe Times/Henry Holt (288 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-8050-9490-9

A New York Times sportswriter chronicles the 2011 edition of the Black Knights football team.

During the 1940s and ’50s, Coach Red Blaik’s undefeated, powerhouse teams thundered up and down Michie Stadium’s field, and Army featured players—Doc Blanchard, Glenn Davis, Pete Dawkins—talented enough to win the Heisman Trophy. At the outset of Drape’s (Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen, 2009, etc.) account of last year’s young, not-very-talented team, he concedes that the glory days of Army football are over. He’s in search, however, of something else: Where, in the moral sewer of today’s big-time college athletics, does honor still reside?

His book contains a game-by-game replay of the disappointing three-win season, but the author is mainly concerned with explaining what it’s like to play a Division I sport at a place where the idea of a student-athlete is real. He focuses on the coach, Rich Ellerson, the team’s three captains, the quarterback and a few others to tell about a culture where being a player “is a picnic compared to being a West Point Plebe,” where football training camp is far easier than the field training to which all cadets are subjected, and where gridiron disappointments must be set aside quickly, because “[t]here is always something more important coming at you.” At the United States Military Academy, no Hollywood celebrities or NFL stars show up at practice (although a Medal of Honor winner might), no player receives special treatment to ensure his eligibility, nor are any concessions made to cadets who are soldiers first, players second. In reporting this story, Drape had “unfettered access to the Academy.” He’s returned from the banks of the Hudson with a sports book that has far more to do with character, intellect and sacrifice than it has to do with football.

Inspired by his 5-year-old son’s fascination with the pageantry of a televised Army game, Drape went to West Point looking for college football’s “good guys.” He most certainly found them. (8-page photo insert)

LIFE AFTER DEATH

Echols, Damien Blue Rider Press (384 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-399-16020-2 Exceptional memoir by the most famous of the West Memphis Three.

In 1993, Echols (Almost Home, 2005) was convicted, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., in the case of 1468

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the sadistic sex murders and mutilations of three young boys in the woods around their hometown of West Memphis, Ark. The state’s case was based almost entirely on the confession wrung out of Misskelley, who, writes the author, had the “intellect of a child,” and who recanted soon afterward. Witnesses’ testimonies to Echols’ “demonic” character sealed the defendants’ fates. Baldwin and Misskelley each received life sentences; Echols, perceived to be the ringleader of an alleged “satanic cult,” was sentenced to death. Over the next decade, an HBO trilogy of documentaries on the case, collectively titled Paradise Lost, helped spark an international campaign to free the West Memphis Three. Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins and Peter Jackson were among the celebrities who became personally involved in the case; thanks to their efforts, and especially those of Echols’ wife, Lorri, whom he met during his prison term, the three were released in August 2011. Those bare facts alone would make for an interesting story.

However, Echols is at heart a poet and mystic, and he has written not just a quickie one-off book to capitalize on a lurid news story, but rather a work of art that occasionally bears a resemblance to the work of Jean Genet. A voracious reader all his life, Echols vividly tells his story, from his impoverished childhood in a series of shacks and mobile homes to his emergence after half a lifetime behind bars as a psychically scarred man rediscovering freedom in New York City. The author also effectively displays his intelligence and sensitivity, qualities the Arkansas criminal justice system had no interest in recognizing during Echols’ ordeal.

Essential reading for anyone interested in justice or memoir. (Two 8-page full-color photo inserts. Cross-promotion with Peter Jackson’s documentary, West of Memphis)

SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

Egan, Timothy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (412 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 9, 2012 978-0-618-96902-9

New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Egan (The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, 2009, etc.) returns with the story of the astonishing life of Edward Curtis (1868–1952), whose photographs of American Indians now command impressive prices at auction.

This is an era of excessive subtitles—but not this one: “Epic” and “immortal” are words most fitting for Curtis, whose 20-volume The North American Indian, a project that consumed most of his productive adult life, is a work of astonishing beauty and almost incomprehensible devotion. Egan begins with the story of Angelina, Chief Seattle’s daughter, who in 1896 was living in abject poverty in the city named for her father. Curtis—who’d begun a Seattle photography shop—photographed her, became intrigued with the vanishing lives of America’s Indians and devoted the ensuing decades both to the photography of indigenous people all over North America and to the writing of texts

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that described their culture, languages, songs and religion. Curtis scrambled all his life for funding—J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt were both supporters, though the former eventually took over the copyrights and sold everything to a collector during the Depression for $1,000—and spent most of his time away from home, a decision that cost him his marriage.

His children, however, remained loyal, some later helping him with his project. As Egan shows, Curtis traveled nearly everywhere, living with the people he was studying, taking thousands of photographs. He nearly died on several occasions. Egan is careful to credit Curtis’ team, several of whom endured all that he did, though, gradually, he became the last man standing, and he reproduces a number of the gorgeous photographs.

Lucent prose illuminates a man obscured for years in history’s shadows. (20 b/w photos. Author tour to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Denver, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Portland, Seattle)

ESSAYS IN BIOGRAPHY

Epstein, Joseph Axios Press (564 pp.) $24.00 | Oct. 1, 2012 978-1-60419-068-7

Articulate, funny, informed and bitchy—guaranteed to both delight and disconcert.

THE BOOKS THAT MATTERED A Reader’s Memoir Gaillard, Frye NewSouth (210 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-1-58838-287-0

A Southern writer reflects on the lessons learned from a lifetime dedicated to literature.

In his latest work, Gaillard (English/ Univ. of South Alabama; With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions, 2008, etc.) pays homage to the many writers who came before him. Though subtitled “A Reader’s Memoir,” it’s more than that. A mix of biography, autobiography and literary criticism, the result is a heartfelt love letter to

The acclaimed essayist and former editor of the American Scholar presents a provocative collection of essays that illustrate the ways a writer can employ biographical detail.

Epstein (English/Northwestern Univ.; Gossip, 2011, etc.) has assembled a motley crew of characters—from Henry Adams to Xenophon, Michael Jordan to Gore Vidal. The author has a capacious mind, a wide range of interests, political biases (he labels himself a conservative) and a vast storehouse of knowledge about literary history—all of which animate and inform his pieces. (A complaint: There is neither preface nor foreword— no evidence, other than internal, of the date and audience for the pieces.) Epstein begins with a tribute to George Washington, concluding that it was his “moral character” that set him apart—a trait apparently unsullied by his slave-holding? There is little doubt about the author’s conservative preferences; when he writes about literature, he can become downright nasty and laugh-out-loud entertaining. He bites Saul Bellow (“a literary Bluebeard”) substantially in a full essay then returns in other pieces for additional nips. He blasts Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison, admires Bernard Malamud, eviscerates Dwight Macdonald and sucker punches both Mailer (calling “The White Negro” a “wretched essay”) and Vidal, whose essays he calls “dull hamburger.” His assessments of critics Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Irving Kristol range from measured to admiring. Epstein reserves some of his most potent firepower for Susan Sontag (her films, he writes, are surely playing in hell) but loves the work of Max Beerbohm and George Eliot. Writing of the latter, he notes how she had a sympathy for Jews that is lacking in many other major writers. He ends with a moving account of his friendship with a man in a nursing home. |

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literature. Wavering precariously on the border between critic and bibliophile, Gaillard bucks both roles by combining them, bringing with him a lifetime spent buried in books. While each chapter explores a particular theme—race, region, reportage, etc.—his conclusions come not from his own experiences, but the experience of reading others’ work through a historical lens.

As such, when tackling Southern race relations (a subject in which Gaillard is well-versed), he pairs Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird alongside the tragic real-life story of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers sentenced to death based on little more than scurrilous testimony. The author repeats this juxtaposition of life and literature throughout, providing an evaporative effect between fact and fiction. Gaillard’s revelations are mostly modest, and though he sets forth the occasional semicontroversial claim—in one instance he argues that the 1960s work of Nikki Giovanni and Eldridge Cleaver was “more catharsis than literature”—it is his ability to rise above this fray that makes for a pleasurable reading experience.

An exuberantly written account of one writer’s leap toward understanding life’s intersection with literature.

GHOST DANCES Proving Up on the Great Plains

Garrett-Davis, Josh Little, Brown (256 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-316-19984-1 A young man charts the geography of his tumultuous childhood against the expansive backdrop of the Great Plains.

After his parents divorced, GarrettDavis’ life was suddenly split between Pierre, S.D., and Portland, Ore. He spent much of his early years not only trying to process the abrupt dissolution of his family, but also keeping the secret of his mother’s lesbianism from the inherent backlash of South Dakota’s conservative culture. For years, the state’s right-wing governor, Bill Janklow, loomed like a flesh-and-bone boogeyman in the author’s mind. Despite the old hostilities, GarrettDavis finds significant meaning in his home state’s “landscape of motion” and its long history of transient personalities. Deep sojourns into the weight and significance of nascent punk-rock record collections happily exist alongside intense observations about the demise of the great bison herds and even efforts to restart the Pleistocene epoch. Such meditations reach back further still, to the 65-million-year-old fossilized bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Sue unearthed on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in 1990. Hiding a mother’s true identity, enduring a father’s simmering hostility and resisting South Dakota’s often oppressive culture undoubtedly made life hard for the author in his intensely introspective youth. After becoming firmly established in his new life in the East, Garrett-Davis nevertheless finds himself gazing at the Bronx Zoo’s captive bison, struggling to grasp the narrative of his own life on the Great Plains. He largely succeeds, recognizing that seemingly opposite concepts 1470

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of leaving and returning, embracing and rejecting, building and destroying may not be as mutually exclusive as they seem.

Occasionally uneven in the narrative flow, but mostly profound and enjoyable reading. (5 b/w photographs; 1 map)

LOSING MY SISTER A Memoir

Goldman, Judy John F. Blair (228 pp.) $21.95 | Oct. 2, 2012 978-0-89587-583-9 978-0-89587-586-0 e-book

A chronicle of the relationship between two sisters struggling to “solve the mystery of individuality and connection.”

Goldman (Early Leaving, 2008, etc.) begins in 1992, with the discovery of a “mass” in her breast. When she called her sister, Brenda, the next day, Brenda told her that she felt “calcifications” in her breast. Their biopsies occurred one day apart; the author’s diagnosis was benign, but her sister’s was malignant. For Goldman, the cancer encapsulated their respective images: she sweet and prim (like her mother), her sister tougher (like their father.) She explains that as the younger sibling, she followed her sister’s lead; in turn, her sister was protective. Goldman then skips back to 1974, when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Two years later, her father suffered a recurrence of colon cancer. The stress of the situation contributed to a serious rift between the sisters, a breach of intimacy that they struggled to repair during the ensuing years. Goldman’s parents had played an important part in helping them maintain their close bond as sisters. With them gone, writes the author, she experienced a belated rebellion against her sister. In an unsuccessful attempt to repair their apparently broken relationship, the sisters even tried couples’ therapy. After their mother’s death, they reconciled for a while, but the cycle repeated itself.

Although her sister’s fatal illness brought them close again, Goldman was left bereft but determined to claim her independence.

An occasionally poignant but mostly dismal memoir of loss and its many manifestations.

WALLACE The Pit Bull Who Conquered a Sport, Saved a Marriage, and Championed His Breed— One Flying Disc at a Time Gorant, Jim Gotham Books (256 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-1-592-40731-6

Sports Illustrated senior editor Gorant (Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption, 2010, etc.) recounts the tale of a rescue dog who became a world champion Frisbee dog and a mascot for pit bulls.

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“An accessible, indispensable nonfiction guidebook from an authority who knows his subject from cover to cover.” from you can’t make this stuff up

Apparently slated for an illegal dogfighting operation, Wallace was discovered by a policeman and eventually left with an animal shelter. His next owners, Andrew (Roo) Yori and his wife, Clara, had already adopted four dogs from the shelter, where she worked and he volunteered. At first, they hoped to find the puppy—whom they later named after NBA star Rasheed Wallace—a new adoptive home, but it became a problem. Not only do pit bulls have a bad reputation, but Wallace was a difficult dog. He was obstreperous with an unfortunate tendency to nip at other dogs, but he was playful and fundamentally friendly. Although the shelter turned to euthanasia only as a last resort, as time passed this seemed to be the future awaiting Wallace. Roo and Clara decided to take him in despite the problems. Roo used his own athletic prowess to train Wallace in disc-catching, and the sport provided an extreme athletic challenge for both man and dog. Gorant describes how they rose to the top in this highly competitive sport, and he also looks at the strains and rewards experienced by the newly married couple.

Dog lovers will certainly enjoy the story of Wallace’s journey, but the author’s digressions interrupt the narrative flow.

Too many detours confuse this account of an inspiring achievement.

CALL OF THE AMERICAN WILD A Tenderfoot’s Escape to Alaska

Grieve, Guy Skyhorse Publishing (400 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 7, 2012 978-1-61608-820-0 The spirited account of how a Scottish newspaper sales executive built and lived in a log cabin in the middle of the

Alaskan wilderness.

After being demoted from a prestigious marketing job, writer and outdoorsman Grieve suddenly realized that he had to end what had become an “increasingly mournful journey through the corridors of cubicle hell.” He concluded that the antidote to his woes was to head to the wilds of Alaska, where he could rediscover his masculinity and find a path to freedom for himself and his family. A year later, a series of lucky breaks landed Grieve in a remote forest miles from the nearest human settlement. A hard-bitten Yukon transplant named Don and the members of his extended family educated the ardent Scotsman in the ways of survival and helped him build the log cabin that would become his home. A “neurotic and needy” dog named Fuzzy became Grieve’s only companion. At first, the author reveled in the hunting, fishing and trapping that defined his daily routine. But as the harsh Alaskan winter settled on the land, Grieve began to see the extent of the risks he had taken with his life and the future of his family back in Scotland. Yet the headiness of living among bears, moose and wolves, learning how to become a dog-sled driver and surviving against the odds drove him onward and gave him insight into “how utterly small and insignificant” he really was. Grieve’s Jack London-esque |

narrative is engaging, but it is undercut by what comes across as the author’s irritatingly impotent feelings of guilt for seeking self-actualization away from his family.

Uneven testosterone-fueled entertainment.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction—from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between Gutkind, Lee Da Capo Lifelong/Perseus (288 pp.) $16.00 paperback | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7382-1554-9

A practical primer on writing “true stories, well told.”

Prolific writer, magazine editor and academic Gutkind (Almost Human: Making Robots Think, 2007, etc.) examines a fast-moving literary genre that promotes credible nonfiction material that’s both edifying and entertaining. The first section of his two-part writing guide defines and then describes the conception of authoring creative nonfiction. The second section serves as a motivational guide for writers. Much inspiration can be found in Gutkind’s authoritative, slickly written amalgam combining the “basic, anchoring elements” of nonfiction with industry wisdom on fact-checking and boundaries and a short history on authors who questionably padded their subject matter. The author highlights “immersion” research (experiencing subject matter personally) and the importance of rewriting, structure and focus, and he includes valuable writing (and reading) exercises that deconstruct the finer details of the process. Gutkind’s generous use of apposite excerpts from such authors as Rebecca Skloot and Lauren Slate further engages readers, encouraging them to practice and apply his writing techniques.

Reminiscent of Stephen King’s fiction handbook On Writing, the book will be useful to both new writers and seasoned chroniclers seeking a professional refresher course on the basics of content and continuity and on how to expand audience attention for typically esoteric material. Gutkind also provides a helpful appendix called, “Then and Now: Great (and Not So Great) Moments in Creative Nonfiction, 1993-2010,” which includes such significant events as the creation of Oprah’s Book Club and the James Frey scandal.

An accessible, indispensable nonfiction guidebook from an authority who knows his subject from cover to cover.

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THE SPINE OF THE CONTINENT The Most Ambitious Wildlife Conservation Project Ever Undertaken Hannibal, Mary Ellen Lyons Press (288 pp.) $24.95 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-7627-7214-8

Hannibal (Good Parenting Through Your Divorce, 2006, etc.) explores the ambitious Spine of the Continent Initiative, a massive project to protect wildlife and land by connecting expanses of acreage across North America.

The concept, pioneered by conservation biologist Michael Soulé, has been picked up by many others over the years, as a long-term way to help preserve wildlife and plant life in the West. Its ultimate goal was to unite discrete areas of publicly and privately owned wilderness to create one huge nature preserve stretching from Alaska to Mexico. In the first third of the book, Hannibal focuses on the history of conservation biology. The last two-thirds spotlight some of the many small organizations and researchers that are contributing to the larger vision, including projects focusing specifically on beavers, jaguars and wolves, among others. Throughout, Hannibal repeats the idea that everything in an ecosystem is connected.

It’s a seemingly simple concept, well-backed by research, and the author discusses how, in the long run, working for the preservation of even a single species links directly to larger issues such as climate change. Because Hannibal writes in a casual first-person voice, the narrative is occasionally haphazard, as she delves into the history of the beaver-pelt trade in America in one section and explores Soulé’s life-changing experience with Zen Buddhism in another. It has its share of odd moments, as when Hannibal compares beaver ponds to the concept of romanticism, or when she asks a scientist who experimented on temperature-intolerant pikas in the 1970s, “How could you fry those bunnies?” The author doesn’t fully explore the opinions of anyone who might oppose the Spine plan, but the book works well as an introduction to modern conservationist figures and concepts for casual readers.

A fine overview of wide-angle environmentalism.

I WANT YOU TO SHUT THE F#CK UP How the Audacity of Dopes Is Ruining America

Hughley, D.L. Crown Archetype (288 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-307-98623-8

Comedian and TV veteran Hughley drops an in-your-face mega-rant on the downward spiral of American culture.

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The author’s debut is both serious and funny, without being seriously funny. But while the book may be short on belly laughs, Hughley has a strikingly original take on just about everything.

Whether discussing fatherhood, the Democrats in Congress and their kid-gloved relationship with Obama, black stereotypes, growing up in South-Central Los Angeles or the negative influence of the NAACP, the author’s views are rarely predictable. Hughley’s own Horatio Alger success story is compelling enough: rising from the violent streets of LA to successful sales rep at the Los Angeles Times, all while holding together a family and making a name for himself as a standup comedian. Unlike many contemporary entertainers, Hughley prides himself on being unafraid of controversy. He recounts how his championing of free speech over political correctness led him to support Don Imus’ racial slur toward the Rutgers women’s basketball team—or at least his right to make those slurs. The author looks at the undeniable truths in racial stereotyping and the importance of acknowledging these truths. In fact, he uses this topic as a jumping-off point to lambast the NAACP for helping ruin mainstream black TV. Although he almost always finds a nuanced angle in presenting his outspoken opinions, it’s sometimes difficult to know where comedic provocation ends and deadly earnestness begins. Yet his views on marriage, women and kids seem strangely unhinged and harsh compared to the cool approach that makes the book so appealing throughout— e.g., “If they [women] want to make a man like them, then they should try shutting the fuck up once in a while.” But to his credit, Hughley’s a hard-line pragmatist whose brash opinions almost always transcend polarized black/white and liberal/conservative comfort zones.

A solid combination of a street-tough attitude and a keen grasp of social and political hot-button issues.

THE HEALING POWER OF REIKI A Modern Master’s Approach to Emotional, Spiritual & Physical Wellness Keyes, Raven Llewellyn (288 pp.) $16.99 paperback | Oct. 8, 2012 978-0-7387-3351-7

Personal accounts of reiki, a type of therapeutic healing.

Reiki, writes Keyes, is “a form of gentle energy transmission administered through the hands of a practitioner…the energy of pure, unconditional love.” The author, a reiki master, shares a variety of personal, emotionally moving experiences from her practice in this restorative medicine. She brings to light an ancient technique that is rapidly gaining acceptance in the modern, scientific world—Keyes details accounts of working with heart and transplant surgeons to aid the recovery of patients. She has performed reiki on skeptical professional athletes to help them overcome chronic pain, and she has helped cancer patients conquer the nausea and fears surrounding their

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“A well-argued call for more sanity in American politics.” from the party is over

illnesses and even seen the cancer go into remission. Keyes also spent nearly a year at ground zero, aiding the firefighters and policemen involved in the search for victims of 9/11. Through reiki, she was able to help numerous workers return to their grisly work each day. Soldiers and victims of abuse suffering from PTSD have also found relief through this method. Keyes honestly explains her experiences with her personal spirit guides, who aid her in this healing technique, as well as her exposure to spirits who have passed on who wish to convey messages to those still living. The author combines these accounts with meditations readers can perform to summon their own spirit guides and feel the benefits of reiki. She provides a nononsense approach to this restorative and soothing process, but the writing is workmanlike and occasionally overwrought.

Many readers will find the New Age platitudes tiring, but these intimate stories will draw the attention of New Age seekers and those interested in alternative medicine.

COUNT ON ME Tales of Sisterhoods and Fierce Friendships

Las Comadres Para Las Americas Atria (336 pp.) $16.00 paperback | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4516-4201-8 An anthology celebrating sisterhood and the special bonds that connect Latinas from diverse backgrounds.

Edited by López (Fifteen Candles: 15 Tales of Taffeta, Hairspray, Drunk Uncles, and other Quinceañera Stories, 2007, etc.), this wide-ranging collection mostly represents the work of prominent Latina authors and is published as a work of joint authorship by Las Comadres Para Las Americas, an organization with a membership of nearly 15,000 Latina professionals. In an introduction, CEO and president Nora de Hoyas explains that the “term [comadres] encompasses some of the most complex and important relationships that exist between women,” from best friends to midwives. In 2000, she attended an informal gathering of Latina professionals and was inspired to build “a multigenerational, multiracial sisterhood where Latinas can learn about and celebrate their culture.” In 2008, they organized a book club to explore American Latina literature. The stories in this collection all deal with the topic of female friendship, except for the contribution of Luis Albert Urrea, who writes about his close relationship with a woman he met as a child in a Tijuana garbage dump. Several of the pieces deal with the relationship between a Latina author and a cherished teacher who became a lifelong comadre. One of the highlights is “Every Day of Her Life” by Carolina De Robertis, who formed a deep relationship with a Lebanese writer while both were in graduate school. Her comadre died at age 47, leaving an unfinished novel for De Robertis to complete. In “Casa Amiga,” Teresa Rodriguez commemorates the life of a Mexican human rights activist who made a particularly strong impression on her.

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THE PARTY IS OVER How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

Lofgren, Mike Viking (208 pp.) $24.95 | Aug. 6, 2012 978-0-670-02626-5

Lofgren draws on 28 years as a professional staff member in Congress to expose deep, disturbing trends in Washington.

“Creative and constructive work is always harder than demagoguery or fear-mongering,” writes the author. “We have had too little of the former and too much of the latter during recent decades.” Lofgren tears into Congress’ “high measure of low cunning,” especially among Republicans, whose use of “political terrorism” illustrates the party’s principal objectives: delay and gridlock, obstruction and disruption. They consistently play to their base but with no positive workable agenda, and the cries for a reduction of the debt are often followed by the desperate need to increase defense spending. Lofgren astutely points out that defense spending is the personification of inefficient spending, and it creates no jobs. As “chicken hawks” play to the crowd and their fears of illegal aliens, drug wars and terrorists, talk-show personalities stir up the more radical elements until rational thought can no longer be found. The author distinctly lays the blame for the current situation at the feet of the Bush/Cheney administration, which nearly perfected the propaganda with the War on Terror, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. Lofgren certainly doesn’t excuse Democrats, who often fail to offer a good alternative; plus, they lack the fanatics that drive the far right. President Obama must also assume responsibility for continuing some of the more heinous practices of the Bush administration, though the author neglects to mention the fact that the obstructionist Congress has thwarted him at every turn.

A well-argued call for more sanity in American politics.

EMBERS OF WAR The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam Logevall, Fredrik Random House (880 pp.) $40.00 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-375-50442-6 978-0-679-64519-1 e-book

Comprehensive history of the early years of what in Vietnam is called “the American War”—the time in which one Western power took the place of another, only for both to be defeated.

Logevall (International Studies and History/Cornell Univ.; Terrorism and 9/11: A Reader, 2002, etc.) opens his long, deeply complex narrative with a little-known event: namely, a fact-finding

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h f r a n k pa r t n oy

WAIT:

The Art and Science of Delay Frank Partnoy PublicAffairs (304 pp.)

Jun. 26, 2012 | $26.99 978-1-61039-004-0

A: Watch Derek Jeter. His swing is short and compact, he completes it faster than most players.

Because he can move his bat so quickly, he frees up a few extra milliseconds to observe the speed and trajectory of the ball before he must swing or not.

This extraordinary skill is what top hitting coaches call “letting the ball travel.” Jeter’s delay is entirely unconscious; it takes a baseball just half a second to arrive at the plate and human beings cannot consciously process information that quickly. Yet studies confirm based on high-speed photography that the best hitters wait a tiny bit longer before they start a swing. If a player is 50 milliseconds slower than Jeter, just a fraction of the time it takes an eye to blink, he has no chance.

Is there anyone in the world who isn’t in a terrible rush to get somewhere, do something or see someone? We pay a price for the mad hurry that is life today, from mild jitters to debilitating stress to the inability to remember or focus on much of anything.

Frank Partnoy, a close student of things financial (Infectious Greed, 2003), turns his attention to the pace of life and its psychological and social implications in his new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay.

Q: Dogs that don’t eat the biscuits that are placed on their noses, kids who delay gratification, adults who tame their reactions to stress and worry—your book covers a lot of ground. Please tell us a bit about it and about how Wait came about.

Q: Your note that because novices are often likely to make the wrong move, “the right move is often no move at all,” sounds as if it could be a recipe for inaction. As you describe it, though, nonaction is a decided virtue beyond the Buddhist sense of the phrase. Are there a couple of instances in history where not acting would have improved things?

A: I had just finished The Match King during fall 2008, and I was considering writing a book about the ongoing financial crisis when I heard that Lehman Brothers had designed a decision-making course for their top managers back in 2005. I interviewed a few former Lehman executives and discovered that the speakers for the course had included not only preeminent Harvard psychologists but also Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink. Lehman’s president, Joe Gregory, apparently was a huge fan of snap intuition and gut instinct.

Right after this supposedly cutting-edge course, Lehman’s executives had rushed back to their corporate headquarters in Times Square and made some of the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets, ultimately bankrupting the firm.

So I thought: that’s pretty interesting.

I had worked on Morgan Stanley’s trading desk during the 1990s and saw how gut reactions were often disastrous. Since then, I’d worked on various financial reform issues and saw regulators also make terrible quick decisions, especially during crises. I’d taught decision-making in my courses for more than a decade and knew there weren’t books that explored the role of delay in decisions across the disciplines of psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience. I’d also been a huge procrastinator since childhood. So I decided to explore recent research on delay. A year later, I had a 5,000-word book proposal and, most important, a deadline.

A: It started with Adam and Eve going for the apple.

We all know from responding too quickly to email or provocations from colleagues or family that we often are better off not making any move. In historical terms, military inaction has been similarly beneficial, and military historians often cite delay or inaction as central to a winning strategy. What if Napoleon hadn’t invaded Russia? Or if Confederate forces hadn’t attacked Fort Sumter? Or if any recent terrorist had decided not to act? Inaction arguably would have made the world a better and safer place in each case, as it did when the U.S. government chose not to attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Sometimes we are forced to act, and then we must.

But if we have a choice and we aren’t experts, not deciding can be the best decision.

–By Gregory McNamee

9 For the full interview, please visit kirkusreviews.com

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P H OTO © F E RG US GR E ER

Q: “Top batsmen excel not because their reaction times are fast, but because their fast physical reaction times enable them to go slow.” This seems a little counterintuitive. Please tell us a little about the “wait” dimension in sports? Are there any current MLB players, say, who exemplify the point?

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mission to Vietnam on the part of then-Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1951, reporting on his return home that France was foolishly trying to cling to an empire even as the people of Vietnam rejected the French-installed Vietnamese puppet government.

But much as President Obama inherited George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, by the time Kennedy became president, he was saddled with Truman’s and then Eisenhower’s Vietnam. Logevall is careful to point to roads-not-taken without belaboring the point, to which readers will respond all the same by wishing, for one thing, that Franklin Roosevelt had lived beyond 1945—for it was he who was urging a postwar world without overseas empires, who “had reached the conclusion that, for good or ill, complete independence was foreordained for all or almost all the European colonies.” In the real development of early events, there was nothing foreordained, however; much of what shaped up in Vietnam was the result of historical accidents, such as the fact that, as Logevall notes, the Potsdam Agreement favored Ho Chi Minh by placing northern Vietnam under Chinese control, which allowed his Viet Minh to build up its armaments and political power. The opposition mounted by Ngo Dinh Diem, though, was ineffectual; he had enough on his hands trying to deal with the organized crime gangs that really ran South Vietnam. By the end of 1963, things really were locked into inevitability, especially after Ho decided to escalate the war precisely in order to make the Americans go home.

It didn’t work that way, of course. Logevall’s exhaustive study shows chapter and verse why not—and why the ensuing American war was doomed to fail. (43 photographs; 13 maps)

LOST ANTARCTICA Adventures in a Disappearing Land

McClintock, James B. Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-230-11245-2

A richly informative memoir from a veteran scientist who has devoted his career to Antarctica.

McClintock (Polar and Marine Biology/Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham) has undertaken 13 research expeditions to the far south, perhaps a record, and he writes an entertaining account, mixing anecdotes of these complex, often dangerous operations with their discoveries of the abundant life that thrives around a barren, frozen continent. Long periods of sunlight and circulation patterns that bring nutrients up from the bottom make icy southern seas far more productive than the tropics. At the bottom of the food chain are microscopic plants (phytoplankton) whose photosynthesis converts the sun’s energy to food for microscopic animals (zooplankton) and vast numbers of small shrimplike organisms (krill), which support innumerable invertebrates, dozens of species of birds, fish, whales, seals and penguins. Inevitably, global warming is exerting its baleful effect.

Glaciers are melting. Sea ice is receding. The same increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide that heats the earth is dissolving |

into the ocean, making it more acidic, damaging the carbonate shells of sea creatures and disordering their metabolism. Simultaneously, organisms from the north are migrating into slightly warmer Antarctic waters whose species, too finely tuned to their surrounding to adapt quickly, are dwindling.

Entertaining natural history.

WAR ON THE WATERS The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 McPherson, James M. Univ. of North Carolina (304 pp.) $35.00 | Sep. 17, 2012 978-0-8078-3588-3

Pulitzer and Lincoln Prize winner McPherson (Abraham Lincoln, 2009, etc.) displays his massive knowledge of the Civil War, this time specifically concern-

ing the naval battles.

The Union Navy far outnumbered the Confederate, but it was still much too small to effectively blockade the coastline from Chesapeake Bay to Texas. In addition, the forces were required to patrol in the rivers, which were so vital to transportation. Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was lucky in that Congress quickly eliminated the requirement to promote according to seniority of service before older leaders did too much damage. Cooperation with the Army was another hurdle, as traditional rivalry between forces made teamwork difficult.

Samuel Francis Du Pont managed to take Port Royal in South Carolina without help from the Army, and other actions at Hatteras Inlet, New Orleans and Memphis proved the Navy’s value.

Actions in North Carolina in 1862 and on the Southern coast, especially Mobile Bay, were examples of the most successful combined operations. David Farragut’s success in taking New Orleans enabled his push up the Mississippi in order to connect with Andrew Foote’s Western Flotilla. These two navies opened the Mississippi and aided Grant’s attack on Vicksburg.

The use of ironclads, timberclads and even tinclads proved to be of more use in defending the Union ships and ramming the Confederates. However, when they met up with each other, it was usually a draw.

While the navies may not be on the top of the list for most Civil War enthusiasts, this is a solid contribution to Civil War scholarship. (23 illustrations; 19 maps)

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FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 Millett, Allan R.; Maslowski, Peter; Feis, William B. Free Press (736 pp.) $28.00 paperback | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4516-2353-6

The third edition of this solid, comprehensive military history of the United States, first published in 1984, reworks the era from the Korean War onward and includes the requisite additions wrought by the “global war on terrorism.”

In this clearly structured, concisely written work, Millett (History/Univ. of New Orleans; The War for Korea, 1950-1951, 2010), Maslowski (History/Univ. of Nebraska; Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II, 1993, etc.) and Feis (History/Buena Vista Univ.; Grant’s Secret Service, 2002, etc.) proceed chronologically, as the nation’s commitment to civilian control of military policy became more nationalized and competitive with internal growth. The authors move across a wide terrain, including coverage of the colonial militiamen, the forging of the “common defense” by the two branches of the government, legislative and executive, as specified under the Constitution, the country’s national expansion through the Civil War, birth of the American “empire” through the two world wars, and Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Maslowski has masterly reorganized coverage of the Korean War, which allowed the Truman administration to substitute victory for rearmament in a major way. The war also provided the “political context” for development of NATO and a more active military role in Asia. The authors are stern with President Reagan’s wild-spending “Star Wars” initiative and the “waste, fraud, and abuse in the procurement process”; with Clinton’s “avoiding war and inviting future conflicts”; and with George W. Bush’s inexperience and alarming staff of hawkish neoconservatives. The authors discuss technological innovations, policy and operations in depth, and they urge the Obama administration to manage a policy less dependent on the whims of “domestic politics” and more reliant on “expert advice from their civilian and military professionals.”

A work of fine research, peer review and precise, evenhanded writing that is standing the test of time.

A NATION OF DEADBEATS An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters Nelson, Scott Reynolds Knopf (336 pp.) $27.95 | Sep. 5, 2012 978-0-307-27269-0

A revisionist history of financial collapses in the United States radiating to other parts of the globe, with implications for what really caused the ongoing economic meltdown.

Nelson (Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry: the Untold Story of an American Legend, 2006, etc.) is a professional historian with a nonestablishment focus. The major problem with traditional historic accounts is that they diminish the role of ordinary citizens—i.e., debtors—while overplaying the roles of gigantic banking institutions. Though the economic declines documented here occurred long before the current mess, the author makes the case that each of those declines (in 1792, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929) share common factors and can teach important lessons for contemporary policymakers. Systemic declines would probably never occur if not for the huge numbers of individual consumers wanting material goods, spending beyond the realm of common sense and then defaulting on promised payments. What happens next rarely stops at national borders, with panics crossing oceans and continents throughout the international economy. Additional fallout includes the formation of new political parties or the rejuvenation of existing but moribund parties. One compelling example, ably delineated by Nelson, is the rise of Andrew Jackson to the presidency due to fallout from a financial disaster. This revisionist account is eminently readable, in large part because Nelson offers flesh-and-blood examples rather than relying on abstractions. He opens the book with the story of his father’s career as a repo man. In that job, he dealt with deadbeat consumers every working day, gaining an acute understanding of how widespread financial collapses begin at the community level.

A fascinating historical narrative, even if Nelson occasionally confuses cause and effect with correlation or even coincidence in some of his case studies. (8 pages of photos.

Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C.)

A DISABILITY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Nielsen, Kim E. Beacon (272 pp.) $25.95 | $25.95 e-book | Oct. 2, 2012 978-0-8070-2202-3 978-0-8070-2203-0 e-book American history examined sensitively and skillfully from the bottom up, grounded in the often shabby and sometimes exemplary treatment of disabled individuals.

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“Tolkien’s roads, it seems, go ever, ever on, but with as amiable and knowledgeable a guide as Olsen, the weather remains fine and the journey sweet.” from exploring j.r.r. tolkien’s the hobbit

Nielsen’s (History and Women’s Studies/Univ. of Wisconsin, Green Bay; The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, 2004, etc.) interest in the treatment of the disabled began with research into the political activism of Helen Keller, perhaps the most famous of severely disabled Americans. The author organizes the book chronologically, beginning with the handling of disabled women and men

by Native Americans. The disability spectrum within indigenous North American cultures expanded in unwelcome ways as European settlers spread disease among the Indians. Nielsen then moves on to the stories of newly arrived immigrants from Europe and Africa who were not fully functional physically or mentally.

“Disability” has always been an elastic term; Nielsen explains how the definitions solidified in the legal and social sense in the 19th and 20th centuries. The definitions would deprive many individuals of full citizenship rights as institutionalization became a trend. That institutionalization fell disproportionately on the enslaved (usually but not always because of skin color), women and those individuals sometimes inaccurately characterized as lunatics or idiots. In a slightly more upbeat chapter, Nielsen explains how those marked as disabled slowly banded together to fight for their civil rights. Slowly, individuals with potential, despite being branded, began to receive educational and vocational opportunities. The final chapter marks the year 1968 as the beginning of improved understanding and enlightened policies.

Individuals previously kept out of sight and mind began to enter the mainstream culture.

A lively historical record that fills a gap in the literature.

THORNTON WILDER A Life

Niven, Penelope Harper/HarperCollins (848 pp.) $39.99 | Nov. 1, 2012 978-0-06-083136-3

A satisfying and insightful, if overlong, picture of a solitary writer who never stopped being a family man.

There are times reading this new biography by Niven (Swimming Lessons: Life Lessons from the Pool, from Diving in to Treading Water, 2004, etc.) when readers may wonder why a book about Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) is so inordinately concerned with the lives of his siblings. Biographical overkill, or is there some kind of a point? Both. For Niven, understanding Wilder’s family is simply vital to understanding Wilder, whose books and plays dig away at how people become who they are. His loving but repressive father, Amos, raised five children all over the world (while serving as President Taft’s consul to China) and micromanaged their lives every step of the way; they in turn bore the burden of his influence. At one extreme is Thornton; the son from whom Amos expected the least became a threetime Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and playwright whose major dramas, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, are anchored by families as hopeful and anxiety-ridden as his own. At the other is sister Charlotte, an esteemed poet whose artistic life was cut short by tormented lesbian desires and schizophrenia. Wilder’s own sex |

life is a mystery; like Henry James, he left only scant evidence that he ever had one. He had other things on his mind, as Niven ably sums up: “How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual life? And where does the family fit in the cosmic scheme of things?” For Wilder, the old questions were the only ones worth considering.

Although at times overwhelmed by her own research, Niven creates a perceptive, indispensable portrait of a productive and restlessly intellectual life. (16-page b/w insert)

EXPLORING J.R.R. TOLKIEN’S THE HOBBIT

Olsen, Corey Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (320 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-547-73946-5 A journey across Middle-earth with an English teacher.

Olsen, (English/Washington Coll.) who both teaches Tolkien courses and hosts a popular website (The Tolkien Professor), reveals his affection for—obsession with?—Tolkien’s texts in numerous ways. He directly praises passages as “brilliantly executed” and “masterful,” but merely by giving this young people’s book the full attention of his scholarly skills, he imparts to it an elevated status. Olsen declares he is more interested in explanation than in literary theory, so he offers a chapter-by-chapter explication of the characters, events, landscapes, traditions, conflicts and songs that fill Tolkien’s enormously popular 1937 novel. (The Peter Jackson two-part film opens in December.) The author also refers continually to the original edition, which Tolkien later revised when he decided to integrate The Hobbit with The Lord of the Rings.

Olsen rarely finds anything negative to say (he does observe that one moment is not “completely successful”) and sometimes even twists himself a bit to defend Tolkien. The author traces the conflict between the Baggins and Took sides of Bilbo, emphasizes the lust for treasure that nearly results in all-out war at the end, and observes the changes in Bilbo’s character as he moves from his safe hearth to the fiery furnace of the dragon’s lair. He spends lots of time with the songs, revealing meanings in them that would generally escape most readers, young and old.

Tolkien’s roads, it seems, go ever, ever on, but with as amiable and knowledgeable a guide as Olsen, the weather remains fine and the journey sweet. (Author tour to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Nashville)

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“Even if other posthumous work follows, it likely won’t be any richer than this.” from not the israel my parents promised me

LARCENY IN MY BLOOD A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education

Parker, Matthew Illus. by Parker, Matthew Gotham Books (256 pp.) $20.00 paperback | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-592-40662-3

There’s an inspirational life story within this graphic memoir of a frequently incarcerated junkie who belatedly earned an MFA from Columbia University’s prestigious creative writing program, but the framing and pacing of the narrative fall short of the material’s potential.

A lifelong addict and petty criminal, Parker had been arrested more than 30 times before he started college in his mid-40s.

He had some artistic ability—shown more here in his portraits of rock stars than his rough-hewn comics—and a lifelong love of reading and writing, despite a dysfunctional family in which he followed his mother down the path toward drugs and crime and most of his siblings ended up in jail or on the streets. His matter-of-fact tone has an honesty and dark humor to it, but the storytelling is so offhanded and chronologically disjointed that readers will sense that Parker is both smarter and a better writer than what he shows here. Particularly compelling are the parallels he draws between the penal system and academe and the addictions that extend beyond drugs to porn and credit cards (and some very unusual relations with women that result). There is no typically redemptive arc to the story, as the author keeps circling back to addiction and prison. Even after he went straight and found praise for his writing at Columbia, he admits that his financial problems (exacerbated by his criminal record) left him with little remorse about cheating the system. “I still have larceny in my blood and am not afraid to use it should the need arise,” he writes, telling a fellow student, “I came here to write, not to teach or work like a dog in some damn restaurant for minimum wage.”

Parker follows a professor’s advice to “write it the same way you would tell it”—but his approach to the narrative, hopscotching from here to there and back again, isn’t nearly as powerful as the story he has to tell.

NOT THE ISRAEL MY PARENTS PROMISED ME

Pekar, Harvey Illus. by Waldman, JT Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (176 pp.) $24.95 | Jul. 3, 2012 978-0-8090-9482-0 This posthumous publication reflects the seminal graphic memoirist at his edgy best.

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fights. But the handsome hardback publication and the masterful illustration by Waldman (Megillat Esther, 2006) confer a respectful legitimacy that shows how far the genre Pekar helped spawn has advanced since his early comic-book narratives. The tone is quintessential Pekar, pulling no punches, while the focus extends beyond the purely personal to the history of the Jewish people and the formation and essence of Israel. Both of his parents were ardent Zionists, but the author was not. The story begins with a visit by the narrator and the artist to a huge used bookstore in his native Cleveland and ends with them doing more library research. In between, it encompasses centuries and continents against a backdrop of Jewish history (with appropriate flourishes and framing from the artist as the tale moves through Roman and Muslim periods), interspersed with the tale of Pekar’s experiences in Hebrew school, his initiation into the leftist politics of the 1960s, his disillusionment with Israel as an oppressor, and his empathy with Arabs who were seen as the enemy. “Israelis mark this as a war of independence,” he says of the triumph he initially celebrated. “Palestinians call it the great catastrophe.”

Pekar deepens the discussion through conversations with the illustrator, who lived for a couple of years in Israel (where Pekar had once attempted to move, but he received no encouragement from the Israeli consulate). Proudly Jewish but increasingly skeptical of Israel’s moral authority, Pekar makes no claim to expertise on Middle Eastern relations: “What do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz,” he admits. “I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.”

Even if other posthumous work follows, it likely won’t be any richer than this.

THE WIVES The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants Popoff, Alexandra Pegasus (400 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 10, 2012 978-1-60598-366-0

Intriguing collection of biographies of six extraordinary women who devoted their lives to their husbands’ art.

As Popoff (Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, 2010) demonstrates, the extreme difficulty of surviving as a writer in repressive Russia reflected the formidable characters of each of these women. They fiercely adhered to the Russian philosophy that their husbands’ careers took precedence over all—even, to a point, their children. Their husbands ignored everything: government, money, survival and even family, although perhaps not Mother Russia itself. Taking in turn the wives of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, Nabokov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, Popoff shows the nunlike devotion of these women. They took dictation, transcribed, suggested changes and even memorized their husbands’ works, and they sacrificed promising careers, gentle upbringings and even comfortable marriages to dedicate their entire being to the artists. Throughout their lives, they all suffered dictatorial suppression from the

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days of the revolution. Stories of papers hidden, lost and smuggled abroad indicate the massive difficulties of life in 20th-century Russia. Tolstoy decided to renounce his copyrights, forego all his properties and give everything to charity—except Yasnaya Polyana, the estate where he retired to write. At this point, his wife, Sophia, actually stood up to him. After 19 pregnancies, 3 miscarriages and 5 infant deaths, she still had children to feed and educate. While all the other wives silently suffered abject poverty, hunger and homelessness, Sophia would have none of it. For that, Tolstoy left rights to his work to another and to her only the estate. Even so, she worked the rest of her life to chronicle his works and organize his archive, devoting even her widowhood to promoting and preserving her husband’s legacy.

Fascinating proof that being a writer’s wife is a profession in itself. (8 pages of b/w photographs)

LIKE A VIRGIN Exploring the Frontiers of Conception

Prasad, Aarathi Oneworld Publications (288 pp.) $19.95 paperback | Sep. 16, 2012 978-1-85168-911-8 An intriguing look at our reproductive future.

Previously a researcher in cancer genetics at Imperial College London, Prasad switched careers to become a science writer and is frequently seen on British TV. The author suggests that with the rise of male and female infertility, the use of artificial methods to promote human reproduction will not only be possible, but necessary if the world population declines precipitously. Today, many women postpone childbirth until their mid-30s, when they are less fertile. Prasad also explains that the number of genes in the male Y chromosome has markedly decreased over the span of the human species (from 1,400 to 45 genes). While the female X chromosome is one of a pair (allowing an exchange of genetic material), the Y chromosome is a stand-alone without that possibility. As a consequence—and because sperm are created in abundance— they are more vulnerable to mutation. This may have negative consequences, but in the author’s view, sperm mutations have also furthered evolution through natural selection. In the future, she writes, genetic engineering may allow both men and women to produce viable embryos from their own genome. Fetuses might then be provided with an artificial placenta and placed in an artificial womb. While these new advances are still not fully viable and, as the author notes, may raise ethical questions and promote moral dilemmas, there can be immediate benefits from this research— e.g., providing a more nurturing environment for premature babies than the incubators currently in use and allowing women with a damaged uterus or nonfunctional ovaries to give birth.

A fascinating examination of a future that may not be too distant, as well as an account of historical misconceptions about conception.

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ALMOST SOMEWHERE Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail

Roberts, Suzanne Bison/Univ. of Nebraska (280 pp.) $19.95 paperback | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-8032-4012-4

A travelogue chronicling a journey through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and along the path to self-discovery.

When Roberts (English and Creative Writing/Lake Tahoe Community Coll.; Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel, 2011, etc.) graduated from college with no plans for the future, she decided to take a monthlong vacation from worrying and embark on a serious hike with two girlfriends. Battling injuries, eating disorders, insecurities and each other, the three women hiked the John Muir Trail in the opposite direction of most hikers, attacking the hardest part of the hike first and ending on an easy note. Though Roberts dealt with many questions about her obsessive journaling, her attention to the exercise pays off in this memoir written almost 20 years after the trip.

The writing is mostly engaging and keeps the long days of hiking and fighting interesting to the last page. Even when the constant competition between the girls—over men, how many miles to hike, how much food to eat, who makes the decisions and more— becomes grating, most readers will continue to turn the pages.

Though Roberts waxes poetic about feminism and finding happiness outside of a relationship, it is obvious these lessons did not sink in until after the trip ended. Occasionally, these girl-power sidebars feel heavy-handed for a travel memoir, but in general, they flow naturally and honestly from the narrative.

Will appeal to readers of travel and nature books, as well as those who enjoy reading about social interactions and group dynamics. (1 map)

TALK TO ME FIRST Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go to” Person About Sex Roffman, Deborah Da Capo Lifelong/Perseus (256 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-7382-1508-2

An informative, helpful guide for parents contemplating how to talk to their children about the birds and the bees.

Parents are often plagued by the prospect of appearing indecisive and tongue-tied to their kids in those moments of truth, writes Roffman (But How’d I Get in There in the First Place? Talking to Your Young Child About Sex, 2002, etc.), a scholastic sex educator and mother of two who began brainstorming for this book after Janet Jackson’s overhyped Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.” She offers relief by counseling parents on sensitive matters of timing and the dissemination of facts. Unfortunately, she

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writes, American schools are typically years late in providing even basic sexual knowledge to age-appropriate children. Roffman discusses a laundry list of commonly used statements about sex and doesn’t shy away from more sensitive material such as abstinence, gay and transgendered kids, sexually transmitted infections and rape. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of positive, direct interaction with children. Her “five piece suit” approach stresses the significance of nurturing and parental roles in recognizing core needs like values, boundaries and guidance. Stories, analogies, scenarios and case studies bolster Roffman’s case, as does some good-natured humor. While it may be uncomfortable for parents to consider their children as “sexual people,” a chapter near the book’s midpoint serves as a primer course on human biology, development, reasoning, acceptance and the importance of honest communication at every stage of a child’s life. In utilizing this important guide, parents can reclaim the sexual education of their children instead of surrendering it to the influence of misguided media advertisers.

Roffman’s cleareyed text and non-clinical delivery makes the slippery slope of sex education less daunting.

THE CAT WHO CAME BACK FOR CHRISTMAS How a Cat Brought a Family the Gift of Love

Romp, Julia Plume (288 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Oct. 1, 2012 978-0-452-29878-1

The heartwarming story of a working-class single mother, her autistic son and the stray cat who brought them

together as a family.

Pet rescuer Romp was 22 and unmarried when she gave birth to her son, George. She knew he was different from the outset— restless and always screaming, he “seemed almost tormented by life.” Feeling bewildered by her son’s bizarre anti-social behaviors and guilty that she couldn’t give him a two-parent home, Romp became even more exasperated by the assurances others gave her that George would eventually adjust. It wasn’t until her son was 10, however, that the school psychologists confirmed that George was not only autistic, but also had “ADHD and paranoid tendencies.” The diagnosis allowed him to get the help he needed, but doctors warned Romp that George would never be a “cuddly boy.” Salvation for both mother and son came shortly thereafter in the form of a “thin and sickly” stray cat named Ben. Although George had never been able to bond with other animals, he formed an intense relationship with Ben. Almost immediately, George began speaking to it in a gentle voice, which gave Romp a glimpse of her son’s unseen emotional depths. The cat became Romp’s key to accessing the closeness she desired with her son, which she achieved by joining him in the narrative world he built around Ben. But when their beloved pet suddenly went missing, her relationship with George was tested. Fortunately, she found the cat a few days before Christmas. More importantly, though, 1480

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she discovered that while her family of three wasn’t the most conventional, it “didn’t make it any less of one.”

Sensitive without being overly sentimental.

THE SCIENTISTS A Family Romance

Roth, Marco Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $23.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-374-21028-1

The debut memoir about the formative years of a New York intellectual who tells his story out of “a more-than-ordinary fear of reliving [his] past elsewhere.”

The only son of a medical scientist and a concert pianist, literary critic and n+1 founder Roth grew up in an Upper-West-Side atmosphere where reciting the classics and learning about biology with his father were the norm. Just as he was about to enter high school, he discovered that his father, who claimed to have contracted HIV through laboratory exposure many years before, was dying of AIDS. The family home soon became a suffocating space of denial where “the important thing was to behave as though nothing were wrong.” At the same time, Roth’s father developed a morbid interest both in the scientific literature about HIV-AIDS and in sharing the information dispassionately with his son. The author made halfhearted attempts to escape by attending Oberlin College, but he returned to New York on pain of being cut from his father’s will. After his father’s death, Roth traveled to Paris, ostensibly to study with Jacques Derrida, but more to find release from the ghost of his father. Upon his return, his father’s sister presented him with a manuscript in which she alluded to her brother’s homosexuality.

Her claims caused Roth to begin an investigation of his father’s life through the novels that the elder Roth had given him. Eventually, he uncovered the truths his father could not articulate.

As a study of the relationship between literature and life, the book is intriguing, but the critical literary perspective Roth brings to the subject at times translates as a lack of emotional engagement.

MY HEART IS AN IDIOT Essays

Rothbart, Davy Farrar, Straus and Giroux (320 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-374-28084-0 A collection of personal essays by a man with a knack for stumbling into alcohol- and lust-fueled predicaments.

Rothbart (The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, 2005) is the creator of the fanzine Found Magazine, which features the provocative and poignant notes people leave in coffee shops and on sidewalks. On the

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“A leading Jewish theologian argues that both religious fundamentalists and neo-Darwinian atheists such as Richard Dawkins have it wrong when they contend that science and religious faith are incompatible.” from the great partnership

evidence of these pieces, his life is similarly haphazard. In “Shade,” his pining for a woman who resembles a beloved movie character leads him to a long-distance relationship and a disastrous road trip. In “Tarantula,” a one-night stand ends with him in a swimming pool with a dead body. And in “What Are You Wearing?” a random caller becomes a regular phone-sex partner. In small doses, Rothbart’s say-yes-to-anything attitude and self-deprecating tone is entertaining and engaging. The best piece, “99 Bottles of Pee on the Wall,” tracks his obsession with a scam artist who runs a series of fraudulent literary contests; the slow burn of his outrage—and growing crush on a female author who got taken—is smartly paced, and he’s candid about his quixotic pursuit. But taken together, there’s an overall pattern to his responses that gives these essays an off-putting, manipulative aspect. Rothbart’s proclaimed modesty actually comes packaged in loads of hyperbole—every girl he falls for is the most beautiful girl in the room, every night was the most amazing night ever, every dumb drunken thing was the dumbest, most drunken thing he could have done. Such posturing makes the poignant tone of “New York, New York,” about a bus trip he took right after 9/11, feel engineered for emotional effect. And it

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makes a more serious work of reportage about a man he claims was wrongly convicted for murder less convincing than it should be.

Rothbart has admirable wit, but his sensitive-wiseacre persona gets repetitive.

THE GREAT PARTNERSHIP Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Sacks, Jonathan Schocken (384 pp.) $28.95 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-8052-4301-7 978-0-8052-4302-4 e-book

A leading Jewish theologian argues that both religious fundamentalists and neoDarwinian atheists such as Richard Dawkins have it wrong when they contend that science and religious faith are incompatible.

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Instead, Sacks (Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible Exodus, 2010, etc.), chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, believes that both are necessary, complementary ways of looking at the world. “Science takes things apart to see how they work,” he writes. “Religion puts things together to see what they mean…neither is dispensable.” As a metaphor for this duality, the author uses the distinction between right-brain intuitive processing and left-brain analytic functioning. Religious faith is interpretative (“the search for meaning constitutes our humanity”), while scientific knowledge increases our well-being. Sacks dismisses rage-filled, self-righteous biblical fundamentalism but also deplores the equally intolerant stance of scientists like Dawkins, who has compared religious belief to a virus. Sacks refers to traditional Jewish interpretations of the Bible to explain his own search for God in the bonds of family, the small compassionate acts of people toward strangers and the necessity of challenging injustice. He views the Creation as a work in progress begun billions of years ago by a God who “delights in diversity,” and he interprets Darwin’s “wondrous discovery” as showing that “the Creator made creation creative.” The author compares his own Jewish view of God—consistent with the notion of emergence and evolution—to a literal interpretation of Genesis and suggests that God has called upon us “to become his partners in the work of redemption.” To accomplish this, he writes, we require “people capable of understanding cognitive pluralism.”

A brilliant exposition of the possibility of science and religion, each in its own way, contributing to a better world.

CONFRONT AND CONCEAL Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

Sanger, David E. Crown (498 pp.) $28.00 | Jun. 5, 2012 978-0-307-71802-0

A bracing rejoinder to those who think Barack Obama is a wimp, to say nothing of anti-American.

Readers who worry about the proper limits of executive power, on the other hand, will keep on worrying after reading New York Times correspondent Sanger’s (The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, 2009) account of just how far-reaching President Obama’s search for America’s enemies has been. That account begins not with grisly wetwork, though there’s plenty of that, but instead with a worm, developed by “a small team of computer warriors at Fort Meade and their counterparts, half a world away, inside a military intelligence agency that Israel barely acknowledges exists.” The worm’s targets were the computer-controlled centrifuges enriching uranium for Iran’s nuclear program. That sort of use of power arguably befits the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, but what of the heavier ordinance required to, say, “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda,” as the military mantra has it? As Sanger carefully relates, that’s a difficult dance: 1482

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President Obama may profess, for instance, confidence that Pakistan can keep its nuclear arsenal out of the hands of militants, but he has to verify more than trust, no easy matter when relations between the United States and Pakistan are perhaps at their lowest point in history. The author provides plenty of intriguing news, from the conduct of secret operations within Afghanistan to the dispatch of Osama bin Laden. On the latter matter, he hazards that there was never any question but that bin Laden would be killed and his body secretly disposed of. No one in the administration wanted a grave that would become a site of pilgrimage, nor an endless trial, either. President Obama’s foreign policy, it becomes clear here, is tougher than his mild-mannered, even professorial mien might let on—and particularly in the case not just of obvious enemies such as the Taliban, but also of less obvious ones such as China’s People’s Liberation Army.

A must-read for policy wonks and a good primer on how American power works beyond our borders.

SAPP ATTACK

Sapp, Warren with Fisher, David Dunne/St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-1-250-00438-3 978-1-250-02200-4 e-book 978-1-4272-2597-9 CD A former All-Pro defensive lineman with a mouth as big as his massive frame dishes on life in the NFL trenches and various controversies that dogged his career.

One of the greatest defensive players of his era, Sapp helped transform the perpetually pathetic Tampa Bay Buccaneers into Super Bowl champions. He was also one of the game’s harder hitters, biggest talkers and more controversial figures. With assistance from Fisher, Sapp chronicles his poor upbringing in Apopka, Fla.; his starring role on a University of Miami team that included future NFL legend Ray Lewis and wrestling icon Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; and his 13 seasons in the NFL. Unfortunately, his inimitable style can best be characterized as self-aggrandizing and far less hilarious than the author thinks it is. While he manages to share a few interesting insider stories—among them insight into the fines that teams hand out to offensive linemen caught loafing after an interception—there’s little doubt that the spotlight will focus on Sapp’s contention that Miami alumni, including Michael Irvin and Jim Kelly, contributed to a pool of money that was doled out to college players for making big plays. He downplays the incident, but his intimation that Irvin and others contributed up to $5,000 to the pot is sure to generate headlines. Elsewhere, Sapp attempts to explain the circumstances around failed drug tests and his arrest on domestic abuse charges—incidents, he contends, greatly exaggerated by a misinformed media—while failing to address—as a member of the media—his own apparently erroneous labeling of Jeremy Shockey as the “snitch” who blew the whistle on the New Orleans Saints’ bounty program.

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“An invaluable contribution to the contemporary debate over Muslim immigration and integration into Western communities.” from the myth of the muslim tide

THE MYTH OF THE MUSLIM TIDE Do Immigrants Threaten the West?

The literary equivalent of an NFL pregame show: obnoxious, frequently incoherent and only engaging when it actually focuses on the game. (8-page color photo insert)

Saunders, Doug Vintage (224 pp.) $15.00 paperback | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-307-95117-5

THE CRISES OF CAPITALISM A Different Study of Political Economy Sarkar, Saral Translated by Calderón, Graciela Counterpoint (384 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-1-61902-006-1

A prominent eco-socialist explains why capitalism is doomed.

Sarkar (Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?, 1999, etc.) casts himself as not merely a reformer of capitalism, but rather a radical who believes no amount of tinkering will prop up a capitalist system that’s come up against the twin killers of global warming and the imminent depletion of vital, nonrenewable natural resources. Neither of these developments, he insists, could have been foreseen either by the defenders of capitalism or its fiercest critics. Focusing primarily on the 20th century, the author engages in a critique of the theories of prominent economic commentators, carefully distinguishing the historical crises in capitalism—the Great Depression, the mid-’70s stagflation, the disruptions caused by globalization, the Great Recession of 2008—from the crisis of capitalism, the system’s inevitable collision with the newly appreciated fact of finite resources. He intends this manifesto for general readers interested in political-economic issues, economists open to a new critique of political economy and, primarily, for well-meaning activists who require theoretical clarity and objective knowledge to abandon the illusions and false theories that have heretofore hobbled them. Sarkar refers to fellow activists as comrades, but there’s nothing friendly about the turgid, relentlessly donnish prose (to be fair, the text is translated from the German) that carries his argument. It’s difficult to imagine those already converted to Sarkar’s worldview casually picking up this tome for guidance. Still, for those who passionately believe that innovation can no longer prolong capitalism, that the end of the Oil Age is near, that dwindling resources and today’s dangerously unstable economic moment point to “ecological socialism as the only convincing alternative,” Sarkar’s text supplies the requisite theoretical scaffolding so dear to the academy.

Strictly for graduate school seminars.

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Globe and Mail European bureau chief Saunders (Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, 2011) examines the fearful reaction of today’s native-born Western Europeans and North Americans to Muslim immigration.

The author takes a nuanced, informative look at the alarm that has greeted the latest wave of Muslim immigrants to Western countries and explains, with admirable precision, why this response is unjustified. In a methodical, point-by-point approach, Saunders analyzes the myths from which Western fears of a “Muslim takeover” have sprung, as well as the actual facts surrounding Muslim immigration patterns and population trends—e.g., birth rates are actually falling in many Muslim immigrant communities. The author argues that early-21st-century Muslim sentiment in the West is nearly identical in origin to the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish fervor that swept the same region when immigration from those communities increased in the early-20th century.

Few Americans today recall Paul Blanshard’s 1949 book American Freedom and Catholic Power, but it was a massively popular bestseller in which the author warned—in terms strikingly similar to those employed by the authors of contemporary books about the threat of Muslim immigration—that fast-breeding Catholics, left unchecked, would eventually seek to gain control of the American presidency and implement a “Catholic plan for America.” In the last section, Saunders provides a sober reflection on “the genuine problems and challenges of immigration” (as opposed to the trumped-up, hysterical anti-Muslim myths the author so effectively eviscerates in earlier sections). Saunders’ approach is refreshingly levelheaded and fact-based; he reproaches those who have allowed fear and anger to overwhelm reason, while acknowledging that terrorism and religious extremism pose real dangers to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

An invaluable contribution to the contemporary debate over Muslim immigration and integration into Western communities.

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ALL IN THE FAMILY The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s Self, Robert O. Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (528 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-8090-9502-5

Jampacked survey of the social movements since the 1960s that compelled America to become a more inclusive society—and created a potent conservative backlash.

Self (History/Brown Univ.; American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, 2003) dives into the maelstrom of social revolution in the mid-1960s, which exploded assumptions about manhood, womanhood, sex, race and family. Those leading the revolution had to grapple with high unemployment and disenfranchisement of black males in the poor urban communities, and the bemoaning of the “psychological castration” of the black male and “victimization” of the working-class white male was promoted by voices as different as Malcolm X, Sen. Patrick Moynihan, Stokely Carmichael and Pete Hamill. Norms of manhood such as soldiering and patriotism were shaken by antiwar activists and draft resisters, while homosexuals demanded equal rights and an end to forced secrecy. The ideal of female domesticity fractured as women pressed for economic equality, child care, access to reproductive services and safe abortion.

Yet as the counterculture, feminist and gay movements began to find their political footing, the conservative right wing galvanized its forces in the form of Nixon’s “silent majority,” middle Americans, anti-feminists, right-to-life advocates and evangelicals who all decried the breakdown of the nuclear family, boosting the Republican Party and giving rise to the Reagan Revolution of 1980. Conservatives successfully recast counterculture liberalism as damaging to the nation and the welfare-entitlement state as anathema to natural laissez-faire market principles. In a too-brief epilogue to his exhaustive study, Self sums up how this state of affairs prevailed at least through the “culture wars” of the 1990s.

A sweeping, busy examination of the necessary, however fraught rewriting of America’s social contract. (8 pages of b/w illustrations)

SCIENCE SET FREE 10 Paths to New Discovery

Sheldrake, Rupert Deepak Chopra Books/Crown (400 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-7704-3670-4

A proponent of New Age science offers a broad-ranging critique of modern science and presents an alternative approach.

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An opponent of what he deems to be the mechanistic materialism of current science, Institute of Noetic Sciences fellow Sheldrake (The Sense of Being Stared At, 2003, etc.) urges a return to vitalism, “the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.” He claims that his discovery of what he calls the “morphic resonance,” activity patterns that “resonate across time and space with subsequent patterns,” offers “a range of new possibilities for research.”

Further, this morphic field holds the key to cures for migraine headaches, the prediction of earthquakes and tsunamis and the solution to many still-open questions in science—e.g., the existence of dark matter. According to his theory, morphic fields operate over time and space so that past events shape the present and resonate simultaneously throughout the universe. They embrace chemical events such as the crystallization of sugars and are responsible for telepathic abilities in animals and humans, as well as other paranormal events such as premonitions. Sheldrake suggests that living organisms inherit a “collective memory of the species, on which each individual draws,” and he speculates about the possibility that organisms experience feelings and that animals are not only conscious, but are, to some degree, capable of free will. While there are many open questions remaining in science—from the existence of the Higgs boson to the existence of free will—these continue to fuel debate within the mainstream of science as well as on its fringes.

Will appeal to like-minded readers but may be unconvincing to others.

THE WILD DUCK CHASE Inside the Strange and Wonderful World of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest

Smith, Martin J. Walker (272 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-8027-7952-6

As Orange Coast editor in chief Smith (Straw Men, 2001, etc.) reports, the Federal Duck Stamp Program is one of the most successful government programs ever.

In his side job as chief of what became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, cartoonist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling made bird hunters the stewards of their wetlands by selling them annual duck stamps for the license to hunt. Darling drew the first in 1934. Since then, those prized little stickers have generated more than $750 million. Of each of those dollars, just 2 cents went for overhead; the rest was for wetland management. Eventually, duck-stamp painting became the sole juried art competition run by the American government, and it has been copied by many states and foreign jurisdictions. Smith covered the 2010 contest and its strict rules and earnest artists.

The winning hand-painted entry is reduced to stamp size and must depict one of five selected birds. The waterfowl portraitist must understand avian anatomy and know every feather—some birds flap more than others to keep aloft, some are better just

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“The beatification of President Dwight Eisenhower continues in this keen character study.” from ike’s bluff

ISLAND CUP Two Teams, Twelve Miles of Ocean, and Fifty Years of Football Rivalry

paddling around—and it takes three rounds to judge the winner.

The stakes are high. Collectors seek to buy a duck print signed by the winner, and other fees add to the purse, which in the past was said to approach $1 million (less now). Despite the stakes, however, the media is apathetic about this successful federal program, and the pro-am contest isn’t well known outside of the hunting and collecting world. Smith aims to fix that.

An interesting bit of Americana well reported.

A ROOM WITH A PEW Sleeping Our Way Through Spain’s Ancient Monasteries

Starks, Richard; Murcutt, Miriam Lyons Press (256 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-7627-8145-4

In their latest dispatches from abroad, Starks and Murcutt (Along the River that Flows Uphill: From the Orinoco to the Amazon, 2009, etc.) take readers on a pilgrimage to seven monasteries across Spain.

The authors’ use of immersion journalism provides unique insight into the inner sanctum of the monasteries, as they describe glimpses of a variety of treasures, including relics, artifacts and art. Better still is their shared insight into the psychology behind a life dedicated to God. Upon entering one monastery’s refectory, the writers wondered, “Could I eat here?

Three times a day in silence? With the same group of people?

For fifty years or more?” These questions, while rhetorical for the authors, undoubtedly had real-world ramifications for those who decided to engage in the monastic life. Yet when one monk notes the dearth of new recruits, readers may wonder if the answers to the aforementioned questions have often been a negative, if the monastic life is an endangered species soon to be another casualty of the modern world. While the book begins as a grand parade across Spain, it soon takes on characteristics of a forced march in which the primary difference among the monasteries are the people within their walls. Early on, Starks and Murcutt describe one monastery as “quiet and peaceful with an unhurried pace”—a good description for this book. There is little agency here, and while the authors faithfully report their trip, faith itself plays a minor role.

Lighthearted and occasionally humorous, but not fully engaging. (Pen-and-ink illustrations; map)

Sullivan, James Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $24.00 | Jul. 17, 2012 978-1-60819-527-5

Friday Night Lights, Northeast division.

Casual sports fans know that in the South, high school football is a religion.

However, few may know about a small pocket in the Northeast where the level of teenage football fanaticism is just as high.

Even fewer would guess that pocket is centered on two of the most seemingly civilized areas in all of New England, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. For almost 50 years, the Martha’s Vineyard High School Vineyarders and the Nantucket High School Whalers have done battle for the Island Cup, the prize given to the winner of their annual gridiron clash. Sullivan (Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin, 2010) discovered that the passion of the players, fans and local media are about this rivalry, and he does an adequate job bringing that story to the page. As in his previous outings, the author is an engaging, detailed storyteller, giving us intimate glimpses into the lives of the players, coaches and locals, and making the intensity of the Whaler-Vineyarder rivalry palpable. He moves back and forth in time, without ever losing control of the material. However, due to the nature of the story, the narrative is a patchwork quilt, and the lack of a singular arc makes it come across as a series of interconnected essays. While this is a more-than-competent, readable book, it’s not quite sporty enough for serious football fans and not quite rich enough for hardcore history buffs.

With its soap-operatic storyline, Friday Night Lights transcended geography, but this less linear, more episodic book likely won’t resonate far beyond New England.

IKE’S BLUFF President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World

Thomas, Evan Little, Brown (432 pp.) $29.99 | Sep. 25, 2012 978-0-316-09104-6

The beatification of President Dwight Eisenhower continues in this keen character study.

Often viewed as trustworthy but bland, Eisenhower didn’t let on what was really roiling behind the comforting exterior, as Thomas (Writing/Princeton Univ.; The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898, 2010, etc.) effectively argues in this chronological look at his presidency. In fact, atomic war loomed: The hydrogen bomb was being routinely tested to the obliteration of Pacific atolls, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff |

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were itching to provoke the Soviet Union and hot spots in Korea, China, Suez and Berlin were offering an opportunity. If anyone knew the devastation of war, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower certainly did. While he avoided initial calls to jump into the presidential fray, he was convinced that only he could keep the country secure and at peace; he assumed the duty personally, and the physical burden ruined his health. Thomas emphasizes Ike’s mastery at bridge, not because he had consistently good hands but because he could bluff. As he had learned through his World War II strategic command, he promoted an all-or-nothing approach to crises, standing cautious yet willing to throw everything in if required for victory. Tellingly, he moved the stockpiling of atomic weapons from the civilian Atomic Energy Commission to the military, and he did not concern himself with alleviating public hysteria over the threat of atomic warfare. Yet from crisis to crisis, he maintained a “healthy skepticism about the grandiose schemes of the military,” leading him to close his presidency with his haunting warning about the “military industrial complex.” Thomas ably demonstrates how operating through indirection became Ike’s effective peacekeeping strategy.

An astute, thoroughly engaging portrayal.

LIGHT & SHADE Conversations with Jimmy Page Tolinski, Brad Crown (272 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 23, 2012 978-0-307-98571-2

The wizardly, tight-lipped guitaristproducer-songwriter of Led Zeppelin opens up…a little.

Guitar World editor in chief Tolinski notes that Page has long been “the paradigm for rock-star inscrutability,” a Sphinx-like figure with little affection for the music press. Thus a collection of extended interviews with Page would appear a vital bibliographic entry. However, this unnecessarily repetitive and idolatrous volume only fitfully sheds light on its subject’s craft. After a slavering introduction, the author, plainly dredging material from occasional interviews for his magazine, dutifully runs down Page’s prodigious career as a top 1960s studio musician in London and his climb to fame in the Yardbirds. The book hits what passes for its stride with the genesis of Led Zeppelin, whose debut 1969 album Page financed and produced himself. Then Tolinski focuses on the quartet’s meteoric climb to the top of the ’70s rock heap and its sudden caesura with the alcohol-related death of drummer John Bonham in 1980. In his chats with the author, most of them clearly pegged to latter-day album and DVD releases, Page emerges as a smart, dry and unsurprisingly blunt and arrogant character. The best material here illuminates the innovative studio techniques that animated Zeppelin’s metal assaults and folk-inflected sorties; Page is less generous with details about his improvisational approach.

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with the Firm, David Coverdale, Zep vocalist Robert Plant and the reunited Zeppelin itself. Tolinski bulks up the book with mostly superfluous interviews with old mates (guitar peer Jeff Beck), collaborators (Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, the Firm’s Paul Rodgers, the Yardbirds’ Chris Dreja) and uber-fans (Jack White), and thuds to an end with useless offerings from fashion designer John Varvatos and an astrologer.

For die-hard Zep fans and guitar geeks only.

FORTRESS ISRAEL The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can’t Make Peace

Tyler, Patrick Farrar, Straus and Giroux (576 pp.) $30.00 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-374-28104-5

A scathing look at the belligerent mindset of Israel’s elite, from David Ben-Gurion to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since its founding in opposition to Arab hostility, Israel remains “in thrall of an original martial impulse,” writes former Washington Post and New York Times journalist Tyler (A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East—from the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2008, etc.). The native-born Israelis, sabras (“the new Jews, no longer a caricature of passivism, dependence, and weakness, but a people determined to take its fate into its own hands”), represented best in such figures as defense minister Moshe Dayan, grew up on cooperative farms, sparring with local Arabs over turf, reading the Bible not for religious instruction but as a “manual for war,” and becoming radicalized while serving in the army. The new militarism superseded the romantic notions of Zionism’s founding. By the mid-1950s, Ben-Gurion began urging for immediate escalation of Israel’s military might in response to Egyptian leader Nasser’s arms spree from Russia. Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Abba Eban, Menachim Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir and others were enlisted in Ben-Gurion’s new offensive-thinking policy, a call for an expansion of the Jewish state through preemptive strikes. Tyler attributes much of Ben-Gurion’s new “activist strategy” to his impending retirement, deep-seated anxiety about his “weaksister” successor and need to galvanize the support of the Israeli people. There has been a high price for this militarism—e.g., the Six-Day War, War of Attrition, border reprisals, Yom Kippur War and the current subverting of Iran’s nuclear program by secret assassinations and bombings. The tragic result of this military folly, writes the author, is Israel’s inability to generate effective diplomatic channels and alternatives for peace.

Tyler ably demonstrates how a culture of preemptive warfare and covert subversion is isolating Israel and alienating it from its founding as a progressive and humanistic state.

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“Valenti doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but she provides the right analytical tools for mothers seeking answers that are right for them.” from why have kids?

WHY HAVE KIDS? A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness

Valenti, Jessica Amazon/New Harvest (256 pp.) $23.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-547-89261-0

A leading feminist digs into questions about parenting—why we have children, what we’re told about the parenting experience, and what happens when the reality doesn’t mesh with the fairy tale.

With a rise in the number of women choosing to remain childless (married or not), Valenti’s (The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women, 2009, etc.) book is certainly timely, and she addresses her topic from cultural, personal and historical perspectives. The author, a new mom herself, wades deeply into the moral and logistical problems facing mothers, with interviews, research and her own anecdotal experiences. As mommy blogs and websites have become havens for those seeking support and answers, they have simultaneously given rise to information overload, and parents can often feel as inadequate as they do vindicated. The impression people have of motherhood often doesn’t match up with the realities that face new parents. Ideals and stereotypes leave new mothers feeling badly if they don’t feel love and warmth all the time. However, the inverse is also true. Oprah Winfrey famously stated that “moms have the toughest job in the world if you’re doing it right,” and that attitude too often translates to mothers pushing their children too hard to be successful. Valenti’s writing occasionally falls prey to bluster and hyperbole—if you question the exactitude of others’ pronouncements on pregnancy, it weakens the argument when your own pronouncements suffer the same shortcoming—but she states early on that her book is meant to anger people and incite discussions.

Valenti doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but she provides the right analytical tools for mothers seeking answers that are right for them.

AN EPIDEMIC OF ABSENCE A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases

Velasquez-Manoff, Moises Scribner (352 pp.) $26.00 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4391-9938-1

More on the hygiene hypothesis by a science writer who has searched the literature, traveled the world and interviewed scores of scientists who attribute a rise in allergies, autoimmune disease, asthma and many other disorders in our sanitized societies to an imbalance in our immune systems. |

Velasquez-Manoff writes that, until the Industrial Revolution, the human body was host to a rich microbiota of bacteria, viruses, parasites and pests. From birth, the immune system learned to respond to these fellow travelers by attacking deadly pathogens, collaborating with useful flora (such as bacteria that help digest food) and tolerating parasites like intestinal worms. With the rise of modernity came the movement from farms to cities, where smaller families are served by clean water and sewer systems. Then came antibiotics, deworming medicine, processed foods, etc.—the whole panoply of life in the developed world. Left without our “old friends,” the parasites in our guts, we now have an immune system that has turned against the body’s own cells, causing an increase in irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, eczema and a slew of other diseases that are on the rise, such as autism, diabetes, some cancers, heart disease and dementia. The problem is that the evidence to confirm the immune connection is largely based on observational studies, epidemiological associations or animal experiments, to which must be added the role of diet, genetic factors and other variables. Nonetheless, desperate patients have chosen to selfmedicate with intestinal worms, including the author. To his credit, he carefully reviews this undisciplined field and reveals his own experience. The massive data he presents, the insights into the role of the gut as orchestrator of immune responses, and the revelations coming from the completion of the Human Microbiome Project should spur much-needed research in the field. VelasquezManoff concludes with a discussion of the clinical trials in the works to test worms in treating multiple sclerosis, autism, peanut allergies and other maladies.

A solid, up-to-date report on a growing area of scientific research.

MY BERLIN KITCHEN A Love Story (with Recipes)

Weiss, Luisa Viking (320 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 17, 2012 978-0-670-02538-1

In her debut, The Wednesday Chef blogger recounts her life in and out of the kitchen.

Weiss grew up shuttling between Berlin, where her Italian mother lived, and Brookline, Mass., home of her American father. As an adult, she moved from Paris to New York, where she began a food blog, until finally returning to Berlin to marry. Unfortunately, this coming-of-age memoir (with recipes) is fretful and flabby, and much of the prose violates the show-don’t-tell rule of writing. In one section, she describes how a pigeon almost collides with her head, interpreting the event as a sign from the universe that she should break up with her fiancé. In the hands of a more experienced writer, this could have been a gripping, even moving, discovery, but Weiss’ retelling of the event is unfocused and rambling—more fit for a stream-of-consciousness blog than a full-length book. Each overinflated chapter closes with a recipe from the author’s blog or from her personal life. A few of the

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recipes (e.g., spaghetti with breadcrumbs, capers and parsley) are so rudimentary, anyone who knows their way around a kitchen may wonder why they were included at all. But many more are ludicrously complicated, such as poppy-seed breakfast rolls that take more than three hours to make and “don’t keep well, so make sure to eat them warm the morning they’re made.” Still others require ingredients most Americans will be unable to find—e.g., one recipe calls for “20 to 25 elderflower sprays.” Weiss’ suggestion is to “look for them in the wild.” Much of the often-clunky writing leads to queasy descriptions of food, like a white asparagus salad “slurped up…lustily” and an “unctuous, quivering ragù.”

Half-baked and unappetizing.

VAGINA A New Biography

Wolf, Naomi Ecco/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-06-198916-2 978-0-06-209696-8 e-book Cultural commentator Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, 2008, etc.) explores the effect of new neurobiological discoveries on our understanding of female sexuality.

When the author began noticing her own distressingly diminished sexual response at age 46, she visited a gynecologist, who diagnosed her with an impacted pelvic nerve. Since this nerve connects women’s genitalia to their brains, any damage to it can lead to sexual dysfunction or pain. After recovering from surgery and regaining sexual pleasure, Wolf set out to document the mind-body link with the goal of informing women of the crucial role that neurology plays not only in their sex lives, but also in fostering their creativity and sense of well-being. The author undoubtedly has good intentions, but her propensity to seek out research that mirrors her own beliefs too often reduces the wide scope of female sexuality to a one-size-fits-all approach. Wolf also frequently uses New Age terms like “Goddess Array” to describe the sexual techniques she claims all women crave, and she falls victim to tantric sexual healers whom skeptical readers will regard as mere charlatans. Wolf ’s tendency to ascribe independent consciousness to the vagina as an alternately traumatized, depressed and sacred site further stretches her credibility. However, the author takes a more measured approach in the second section, a fascinating history of the way that various cultures have viewed the vagina throughout history. Even here, though, she emphasizes the belief that many ancient societies worshiped the vagina, despite the fact that anthropologists have largely debunked this theory. The author also cites informal polls and questionnaires on her Facebook page as evidence for her hypotheses.

An unwieldy attempt to graft science onto a personal memoir/sexual-advice manual. (8-page color photo insert. Author tour to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and upon request)

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YOU’RE MARRIED TO HER?

Wood, Ira Leapfrog (170 pp.) $15.95 paperback | Aug. 14, 2012 978-1-935248-25-5

A slim yet raucous romp through a novelist’s life.

Spanning several decades, with sex as the undercurrent that ties these essays together, Wood (Going Public, 1991, etc.) amusingly exposes his adolescent, marital and extramarital exploits. “I laughed at guys who drove hundredfifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes,” he writes. “I viewed fitness fetishists as lumpy bags of rock. Mansions, advanced degrees, academic prizes, were as foolish a way to prove oneself as a trophy room full of rhinoceros heads…It was obvious to me that the one who dies with the most sex wins.” Determined to prove this point to readers, Wood wittily interweaves his sex life with his work as a writer, art teacher, book publisher, small-town government official and husband to writer Marge Piercy, with whom he has authored two books (So You Want to Write, 2001, etc.). Wood also self-deprecatingly divulges his youthful indiscretions, including the blatant lie to his first lover that his parents were dead, his dalliances with cocaine and his contraction of chlamydia. He reveals his testy confrontations with his parents and the ill feelings caused by his representation of his mother in a novel, which remained a sore spot for years. Fortunately, maturity and a longterm relationship stabilized his life. Although Wood writes that “sex is more interesting than writing,” he has successfully combined both in this bawdy bit of self-scrutiny.

Saucy, sexy stories of a young writer’s life.

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children’s & teen GROWING UP MUSLIM Understanding Islamic Beliefs and Practices

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

BETWEEN YOU & ME by Marisa Calin ..................................... p. 1493

Ali-Karamali, Sumbul Delacorte (224 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $19.99 Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-385-74095-1 978-0-375-98340-5 e-book 978-0-375-98977-3 PLB

OLLIE’S SCHOOL DAY by Stephanie Calmenson; illus. by Abby Carter..................................................................... p. 1493 VESSEL by Sarah Beth Durst ...................................................... p. 1497 SHIVER ME TIMBERS! by Douglas Florian; illus. by Robert Neubecker ............................................................p. 1498 AWESOME AUTUMN by Bruce Goldstone .................................p. 1499 THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND by Margo Lanagan ...... p. 1508 STEPHEN AND THE BEETLE by Jorge Luján; illus. by Chiara Carrer ..................................................................p. 1510 APPLE by Nikki McClure ............................................................p. 1511 KATERINA’S WISH by Jeannie Mobley .......................................p. 1513 TWO OR THREE THINGS I FORGOT TO TELL YOU by Joyce Carol Oates .......................... p. 1514 AFTER ELI by Rebecca Rupp ........................................................p. 1518 MONSIEUR MARCEAU by Leda Schubert; illus. by Gérard DuBois ............................................................... p. 1519 UP ABOVE AND DOWN BELOW by Paloma Valdivia ............. p. 1522 APPLESAUCE by Klaas Verplancke; trans. by Helen Mixter.................................................................. p. 1522

Ali-Karamali offers plenty of anecdotes about growing up Muslim in America in a conversational tone that is undermined by poor organization.

The work explores a range of questions that non-Muslims might have about followers of Islam. Ranging from a discussion of Muslim holidays or the kinds of clothes worn by Muslims to the development of Islam, the author explains these topics in a friendly, engaging manner. She provides several examples of Muslim practices around the world, going beyond her American experiences to reflect Islam’s diversity. Chapters are organized into three fact-filled sections on beliefs and practices, the development of Islam and current Muslim demographics.

Unfortunately, beginning with the practical questions about food, fasting and fashion delays important concepts such as how jihad is not equivalent to terrorism and whether Islam mandates women wear face veils (in a word, no). Compounding this basic conceptual flaw, this organizational choice necessitates clunky references to later chapters. Moreover, it is not until Chapter 4 that cited figures or quotes are provided references, an example of sloppy scholarship.

Readers will find answers to basic questions about Muslims, yet they might not understand the bigger picture if they don’t hang in until the end. (notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

THE INSOMNIACS by Karina Wolf; illus. by the Brothers Hilts ........................................................... p. 1524

TOUCHED

Balog, Cyn Delacorte (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-385-74032-6 978-0-375-89906-5 e-book 978-0-385-90834-4 PLB

B.B. WOLF by Debbie Fong ......................................................... p. 1529 DRAGON BRUSH by Andy Hullinger & John Solimine; illus. by John Solimine; dev. by Small Planet Digital ................ p. 1529 LITTLE FOX MUSIC BOX by Heidi Wittlinger ............................p. 1533

Every thought, every action has a consequence, and one unscripted moment can change everything. |

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For a record three months, 17-year-old Nick Cross has carefully listened to the unrelenting voices in his head as they lead him toward a future he desperately wants. But when Nick ultimately chooses to ignore the “You Wills” that tell him to save the life of a beautiful stranger, the result is devastating. Nick’s ability to see the future is “a living nightmare,” and Balog brings his torment to life for readers by allowing the voices in Nick’s head to constantly interrupt his narration with flashes from the future. Unfortunately, this clever technique largely falls by the wayside in the second half of the novel, and what is left is disappointingly ordinary. In addition, while the action is high in the beginning and readers will likely find Nick and his struggles compelling, the latter part of the story packs less of a punch.

Perhaps most importantly, the romance between Nick and Taryn, a girl with more than a few of her own secrets, never quite seems to ignite, making what could have been a riveting race to change the future considerably less compelling.

In the end, it is a frustratingly ho-hum read that could have been much, much more. (Fiction. 14 & up)

NOTHING EVER HAPPENS AT THE SOUTH POLE

Berenstain, Stan Illus. by Berenstain, Jan Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $10.99 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-06-207532-1

Children’s-literature buffs and staunch fans of the Berenstains (The Big Honey Hunt, 1962, etc.) will be thrilled that the second manuscript ever produced by the famed pair—shelved due to the enormous success of the Berenstain Bears characters introduced in their first book—is finally seeing the light of day.

When an eager penguin unexpectedly receives a blank journal in the mail, he begins to wish for adventures to record in it, only to be disappointed when (he thinks) they don’t pan out.

Readers glean from the illustrations that the penguin’s wishes are, in fact, coming true even though he remains oblivious, demonstrating a tunnel vision worthy of Mr. Magoo. He imagines, for instance, that he spies a giant eye staring at him and quickly concludes that it is not an eye at all, but a piece of rock or a snail. The pictures reveal that the eye really does belong to a whale that swallows the penguin and sends him barreling out of his spout, all with the penguin none the wiser. After a series of such misadventures, the penguin makes his first journal entry: “NOTHING HAPPENED HERE TODAY.” The counterpoint between text and illustrated subtext is amusing, but the rhymed verse demonstrates a tin ear: “Not bad! Not bad! / It is the best yet. / How much more dangerous / can you get?”

Sadly, while the concept is clever, the unwieldy, often awkward verse ensures that this effort will place a distant second to the many tales featuring those Bears. (Picture book. 4-8)

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THE TREE THAT BEAR CLIMBED

Berkes, Marianne Illus. by Rietz, Kathleen Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | paper $9.95 | Aug. 10, 2012 978-1-607185-284 978-1-607185-376 paperback A salute to trees, their needs and the interactions between plants and animals.

Beginning with the roots, Berkes introduces one part of the tree or its environment at a time: soil, rain, trunk, branches, leaves, sun, blossoms and pollen. Each new addition to the cumulative “House That Jack Built” rhyme provides a little information: “This is the rain / that waters the soil / that feeds the roots / that anchor the tree / that bear climbed.” This last line (and the book’s title) may seem odd to children who are reading all about the tree’s needs, but once the bees and their hive and their honey enter the poem, it is not hard to guess how the bear gets involved, nor what will happen to him when he does. Two spreads of backmatter extend the learning, with a huge treasure trove of additional educational materials posted on the publisher’s website.

Two pages teach readers about the basic needs of plants and the interaction between plants and animals. Two pages of activities challenge children to match a tree’s parts to their descriptions and conduct some experiments with plants. Rietz’s detailed artwork uses natural colors to great effect—readers will almost smell the blossoms on the tree and hear the buzzing of the bees with their furry bodies and transparent wings.

The repetitive text, surprise ending and effortless learning make this a sure winner for the classroom. (Informational picture book. 3-8)

OTHERKIN

Berry, Nina Kensington (320 pp.) $9.95 paperback | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-7582-7691-9 Series: Otherkin, 1 Berry’s debut offers just the right combination of high-stakes exploits and steamy love scenes to keep readers up until the wee hours.

Sixteen-year-old Desdemona Grey has always felt a little “other.” Adopted when she was a baby, Dez doesn’t have a clue who or where her birth parents are or if they are even alive. To make matters worse, a crooked spine has kept her in a back brace for the last two years and ruined any hope she might have for a love life. But Dez didn’t have any idea just how “other” she was until a sudden rage transforms her into a tiger. Before she can even process the golden eyes staring back at her in the mirror, she is locked up in a cage next to a hot “shadow caller,” who identifies her as a “shifter” and takes her to a school for others like her.

He not only knows the secrets of her past but also holds the key to

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“…the Changed eat their prey, devouring them in sensuously described murder and torture scenes packed with fountaining blood and festooned guts.” from shadows

her future—and quite possibly to her heart. While Dez is certainly not your typical teen, the book is ripe with issues that will resonate with readers. From body image to friendship, first love and betrayal, the novel explores the truth that no matter who or what you are, there’s no escaping the politics of high school.

A page-turner. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

SHADOWS

Bick, Ilsa J. Egmont USA (528 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Sep. 11, 2012 978-1-60684-176-1 978-1-60684-378-9 e-book Series: Ashes, 2 Earth’s few remaining normal teenagers struggle to survive in this gruesome, bloody post-apocalyptic sequel.

The world’s gone completely to hell: All nonelderly adults are dead, and most teenagers are Changed into zombielike feral children who eat humans alive. Survivors huddle into protective enclaves and protect themselves with deadly force. The cliffhanger ending of Ashes (2011)—Alex flees from the strangely religious community of Rule only to stumble into the bone-strewn larder of a pack of Changed—takes 100 pages to resolve, mostly due to the shifts in perspective to other un-Changed teenagers driving these action-packed short chapters. Alex is a prisoner of the Changed, and as they drive her through the snowy wilderness, she sees that their behavior is, disturbingly, growing less feral: They use guns, make uniforms and practice profitless cruelties. The remaining adults seem nearly as cruel, practicing Josef Mengele–style experiments and killing children to cover ancient political feuds. Sometimes it seems like the only difference is that the Changed eat their prey, devouring them in sensuously described murder and torture scenes packed with fountaining blood and festooned guts. Nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, keeping the horror appropriately unending: “And then Spider squeezed the trigger.” “The knife hacked down with a whir.” “And then, it moved.”

Plenty of mysteries and betrayals set up the trilogy’s forthcoming conclusion, which fans will eagerly await.

(Horror. 14-17)

A MARY BLAIR TREASURY OF GOLDEN BOOKS

Blair, Mary Golden Books/Random (160 pp.) $19.99 | PLB $22.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-375-87044-6 978-0-375-97044-3 PLB Despite the art’s distinctly retro look and coloring, the five Golden Books in this gathering—four complete, one excerpted—only rarely come off as period pieces. |

Lap-sitters and lap-providers alike will enjoy following a delighted-looking preschooler who is credibly ambiguous of gender, though to judge from the visible toys and furniture, probably originally intended to be a girl. She takes them on a tour of Baby’s House (1950, written by Gelolo McHugh) before moving on to Ruth Krauss’s hymn to empowerment I Can Fly (1950), the concept-driven Up and Down Book (1964), the contemporary nursery rhymes of Miriam Clark Potter in The Golden Book of Little Verses (1953) and the 21 standard folk songs and singing games selected from The New Golden Song Book (1955). All but the last two titles are published here for the first time in a large format. Though Blair’s modernist illustrations display stylistic changes over the years, they make the transition in size without losing their bright colors and sharply defined figures. Furthermore, her fondness for floating children, familiar pets or farm animals and isolated details in open-bordered compositions adds timeless, energetic visual rhythms, even to bedtime scenes.

For Boomers, a nostalgic trip back to their diaper-clad days, and if not exactly multicultural (despite some song lyrics in German and French), still enjoyable for today’s young children. (introduction) (Picture book collection. 3-5, adult)

SEND

Blount, Patty Sourcebooks Fire (304 pp.) $8.99 paperback | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-4022-7337-7 Incarcerated five years ago for sending a photo of a classmate in character underwear to all of his friends—resulting in the boy’s suicide—18-year-old Kenny has since been on the move with his family, seeking anonymity.

Starting his senior year at a new school with an assumed name, Dan, he immediately gets himself in trouble when he stops a bully from beating up perennial victim Brandon. He is horrified to realize that pretty senior Julie was watching but didn’t help. Dan is attracted to Julie but angered by her unwillingness to come to Brandon’s aid as the bullying continues unabated. Their bumpy relationship is plagued by their inability to resolve that basic issue. Good Samaritanism comes up repeatedly in a public-speaking class they share, always causing more strife. Coincidences—or hints—abound: Julie’s bullied half brother committed suicide five years ago, and her last name is the same as Dan/Kenny’s victim. Dan also struggles with guilt, as evidenced by a sarcastic alter-ego voice in his head, “Kenny,” with whom he shares sometimes-confusing conversations, in which Kenny speaks in italics: “Oh, man, this is hilarious, Kenny said. I shot him a glare.” Dan’s likable first-person voice rings with authenticity, but the improbably contrived, slow-moving plot undermines this debut.

Though predictable, this offering may be relevant for those looking for more books on the ever-important topic of bullying. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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“Hanawalt floats the simply drawn children and their blubbery buddy slightly above leafy, grassy meadows that are thickly strewn with both low wildflowers and an astonishing menagerie of onlooking birds, insects, lizards and other wildlife.….” from benny ’s brigade

HENRY GOES SKATING

leafy, grassy meadows that are thickly strewn with both low wildflowers and an astonishing menagerie of onlooking birds, insects, lizards and other wildlife. A huge foldout poster featuring crowds of picnicking walruses, slugs and fantasy animals in a “peaceable kingdom”–style scene serves as dust jacket and also echoes the culminating spread within.

A perfunctory plotline, buried among visual wonders that more than compensate. (Picture book. 6-8)

Bourne, B.B. Illus. by Abbott, Simon Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | paper $3.99 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-06-195821-2 978-0-06-195821-2 paperback Series: Everything Goes Almost everything goes in this latest installment of the Everything Goes early-reader series based on the picturebook series of the same name by Brian Biggs.

It’s snowing, so when a bus gets stuck on an icy road, it is going to have to wait for the tow truck to come. Otherwise, everything does tootle along in this typically mild and kindly outing, an earliest of early readers for those just starting to get their teeth into reading. There is plenty of necessary repetition in the simple text: “ ‘Look, Henry. Horses!’ says Henry’s mom.

‘Police horses,’ says Henry. ‘One is brown and one is white. And one is brown and white.’ ” It combines with enough unusual words (taxis, Zamboni) and constructions (such as the alternating use of “Henry says” and “says Henry”) to make readers work for the prize of the last page. But as is also typical of these books, the illustrations are in the driver’s seat, literally and figuratively. The book is chockablock with vehicles, as Henry and his parents take a little road trip to the city from the suburbs to go to a skating rink (“Zamboni!”). The illustrations have an ease that keeps eyes flickering between word and image.

Amiable and encouraging, and too innocent to give even a thought to snow stopping something in its tracks: school. (Early reader. 4-8)

BENNY’S BRIGADE

Bradford, Arthur Illus. by Hanawalt, Lisa McSweeney’s McMullens (48 pp.) $19.95 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-1-936365-61-6 In this bland but surreal tale two children find a tiny walrus in a nut.

Prying open a coconut-sized walnut, sisters Elsie and Theo free little Benny—who thanks them profusely, accompanies them to school, where he sings a sad song about missing the sea, and then sets out for home aboard a milk-carton boat. Three adventuresome slugs (looking much like Benny, aside from lacking tusks) come along for the ride but, being salt-averse, debark before reaching the sea. The language is downright fustian (the children “were sorry to see Benny and the slugs go, but now it was time for school, and they had adventures of their own to which they must attend”) and printed in blocks of small type that look lost on the large pages. Moreover, Bradford’s narrative has none of the illustrations’ luxuriant strangeness. Frequently zooming in for extreme close-ups, Hanawalt floats the simply drawn children and their blubbery buddy slightly above 1492

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SCARLETT DEDD

Brett, Cathy Illus. by Brett, Cathy Delacorte (288 pp.) $12.99 | PLB $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-385-74175-0 978-0-375-99022-9 PLB Quirky illustrations and mildly dark humor isn’t enough to overcome the pedestrian nature of this British horror novel.

Even before her death, Scarlett Dedd seemed to have one foot in the grave, with her pale coloring and love of grisly horror movies. She accidentally kills herself and her family with poisonous mushrooms, leaving her a lonely ghost. She wants to reach out to her friends—the interchangeable Psycho, JP, Rip and Taz— yet every time she tries, she suffers from “ghost puke.” After a suggestion from a new friend at a website called Ghoulkool (because even dead people need social media sites?), Scarlett tries to kill her friends so they can join her in the afterlife. But when those friends are threatened by actual bad guys, Scarlett and her family help save the gang, and Scarlett finally works toward an accommodation with her new, dead status. Brett is a talented illustrator with a hip and humorous take. Her illustrations give the characters most of their depth; there isn’t much in the text to distinguish them otherwise. Scarlett’s voice is occasionally funny, yet it’s much like other British imports. Scarlett’s blog posts and chat transcripts help pull the narrative weight as well.

Readers willing to stay with this slow-moving story won’t find much new here other than good pictures. (Horror. 14 & up)

THE UNIVERSE OF FAIR

Bulion, Leslie Illus. by Dormer, Frank W. Peachtree (264 pp.) $15.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-56145-634-5

In 11 1/2-year-old Miller’s town, the fair is the central event of the kid year.

He’s been saving and planning for months, and finally, it’s fair time. He and best pal Lewis plan a day of rides, games and fair food and work hard to make his parents believe that he is responsible enough to go without them. But then best-made plans go sadly awry. He

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accidentally feeds most of his father’s pie entry to his 6-yearold sister and her friends. Then his parents suddenly can’t take him and won’t let him go alone. Miller, despairing, rounds up his sister and her two friends and brings them to the fair, believing he can still manage some time for fun. Miller can fret with the best of worriers. As the day slips away, with no rides, no fabulous fair food and most of his money going to care for the little ones, concern for their safety washes over him as he begins to fully understand the true meaning of responsibility. Accompanied by Dormer’s slightly surreal black-and-white illustrations, this winsome effort not only lovingly celebrates the color and magic of the fair, but endearingly depicts the inner landscape of a maturing child encountering his first taste of the adult world.

A cheerful and totally entertaining look at fairs, friendship and the value of family. (Fiction. 8-12)

BETWEEN YOU & ME

Calin, Marisa Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-59990-758-1

A girl in love with the theater tells the story of her first great love in the form of a script.

The entire tale unfolds as a presenttense confessional addressed to the titular (and never-named) “you” by her best friend, the dramatic Phyre. Phyre sets her scenes by describing what “you” is doing or telling “you” about what has happened in her absence, folding in snippets of dialogue. The action takes place over the course of the fall semester, as Phyre falls head over heels for Mia, their charismatic new theater instructor. It’s a textbook crush: Phyre seeks out opportunities to catch Mia alone and then muffs them (her running criticism of her social gambits is hysterical), and she interprets the slightest gesture as freighted with meaning. Her fascination is so intense she barely pauses to wonder that the object of her desire is a woman, instead throwing herself wholeheartedly into her exhilaration.

The direct-address/script format works beautifully for her story; her self-absorption is so extreme that she can’t see what’s going on with “you,” but readers do, in those bits of dialogue Phyre records but does not reflect on. The play within a play that Phyre stars in (under Mia’s direction) is a tad metafictively obvious, but the device does introduce action and an intriguing and revelatory subplot.

Though hamstrung by a depressingly chick-lit-y cover, this total-immersion emotional experience is one readers will both recognize and thoroughly enjoy. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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OLLIE’S SCHOOL DAY A Yes-and-No Book Calmenson, Stephanie Illus. by Carter, Abby Holiday House (24 pp.) $15.95 | Aug. 15, 2012 978-0-8234-2377-4

An interactive look at a young boy’s school day teaches those new to school about routines and manners.

Calmenson, a former kindergarten teacher, savvily encourages the youngest listeners to chime in and be part of the reading process, inviting them in from the very first page: “Would you like to read an Ollie story?” From there, the text takes on a question-and-answer format, with three outlandish questions followed by one realistic one. For school today, will Ollie put on “A bathing suit?...A space suit?...A police officer’s uniform?”

Each of these questions is punctuated by a “NO” in large and colorful type. A page turn asks, “Will Ollie put on pants and a shirt, socks and shoes? YES!” Readers are sure to catch the pattern and relish shouting out the answers…after they finish giggling at the silly scenarios, which Carter plays up in her watercolor vignettes and one-page spreads. Ollie is an adorable, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed blond who ping-pongs between the mischievous imp who practices playing the kazoo during storytime and the perfectly mannered little boy who teaches readers how to behave when meeting friends, answering a teacher’s questions, and getting ready to go home. And when he does get home, he finds not a whale, a juggler or a robot waiting, but someone who loves him.

Will this be a popular and raucous first-day-of-school favorite? YES! (Picture book. 3-6)

3 BELOW

Carman, Patrick Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-545-25520-2 978-0-545-46971-5 e-book Series: Floors, 2 Leo Fillmore, 11 years old and proprietor of New York City’s most engagingly eccentric hotel (Floors, 2011), returns with a juicy, potentially calamitous dilemma.

When Leo learns that Merganzer D. Whippet, ex-owner of the Whippet Hotel (now in Leo’s capable if fumbly hands) and maker of wacky inventions, had neglected to pay the hotel’s taxes to the tune of $700,000, he has to unravel Merganzer’s strange instructions in order to save the joint from sale to an avaricious developer. (Actually, it is $7 million, but Merganzer is challenged in the 0’s department.) But it is as though Merganzer is speaking in tongues: “Remember!...Four Floogers, a zip rope, and the iron box!...An isle of Penguins, a boy named Twist, Robinson Crusoe!” Carman, however, is an intricate yet bell-clear storyteller,

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DID IT ALL START WITH A SNOWBALL FIGHT? And Other Questions About the American Revolution

all the many wheels freely spinning but meshed, and soon a Flooger is as obvious and necessary as the pink rhinoceros in the diamond mine. The characters are slap-happy and tomfool without overdoing their weird behavior, though Carman may be at his best in creating the very strange world of the hotel, from its magical, duck-infested rooftop to the Realm of Gears in the super-sub-basement. Then, when all seems lost, in rides the cavalry, as is only right.

An adventurous romp, as atmospheric as incense and as smooth as lemonade on a summer day. (Magical adventure. 9-12)

A PRESIDENT FROM HAWAI’I

Carolan, Terry; Carolan, Joanna Illus. by Zunon, Elizabeth Candlewick (24 pp.) $15.99 | paper $7.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-7636-5230-2 978-0-7636-6282-0 paperback

Originally published exclusively in Hawaii in 2009, this reissued title is now widely available, just in time for the upcoming electoral race.

In what is more a tribute to the 50th state than to President Obama, the Carolans explore Hawaiian traditions and link them to snippets from the president’s speeches, writings and interviews. Familiar words such as “aloha” and “lei” give room to lesser-known Hawaiian terms like “pono” (fair or just), “ho‘oponopono” (resolving conflict) and “kokua” (help). Written in rhyming couplets, the text attempts to capture the rhythmic rocking of a Hawaiian wave, yet more often than not, it is stilted and awkward. Some couplets appear to be thrown together almost as an afterthought or filler: “Here is where our president went to school. / Studying hard and getting good grades is very cool.” Zunon’s illustrations, saturated with lush greens and deep orange sunsets, lend a comforting warmth to the Hawaiian way of life. Photographs, signposts, newspaper headlines and more give a homey, scrapbook feel.

Hawaiians do—and should—take great pride in their heritage. This attempt to share it with the world, however, seems like it is piggybacking on celebrity and falls flat. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Carson, Mary Kay Illus. by Hunt, Robert Sterling (32 pp.) $12.95 | paper $5.95 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4027-9626-5 978-1-4027-8734-8 paperback Series: Good Question

Much of the essential history of the American Revolution is conveyed briefly through 18 questions and answers.

“Did it all start with a snowball fight?” “Were Yankee Doodles really dandy?” “How did the underdog Patriots come out on top?” “Who joined the Continental army and why did they look so scruffy?” The same enticing question-and-answer format employed in Carson’s previous series entry, What Sank the World’s Biggest Ship? (2012), is used here. Each question is followed by a page or so of information answering the question, though some answers are more thorough than others, and the writing is often choppy. Backmatter includes a timeline, but readers will have to search online for the bibliography and suggestions for further reading. This volume doesn’t quite live up to the promising start to the series, as copy-editing oversights mar the text, leaving in distracting errors of spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Still, the format works well to impart lots of information to young readers, and Hunt’s paintings add drama. The final question—“Were the shots fired at Lexington and Concord ‘heard round the world’?”—offers a hint at the significance of the American Revolution by linking it to later events, such as the French Revolution and the women’s rights and civil rights movements.

An entertaining though superficial introduction to the American Revolution. (Nonfiction. 8-12)

WOODEN BONES

Carter, Scott William Simon & Schuster (160 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4424-2751-8 What happens after Pinocchio becomes a real boy?

In Carter’s fanciful sequel, though people think the gift of life is Geppetto’s doing, it actually belongs to the boy. But Pino’s talent for carving and animating lifelike images brings him and his father nothing but trouble. Followed by the wife-and-mother puppet Pino creates, whom even fire cannot destroy, they run away from desperate and threatening neighbors and embark on a series of adventures and escapes.

Everywhere, they are besieged by people who want what Geppetto has, the dead apparently brought to life. And throughout, Pino is gradually turning back into wood, perhaps because of his

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“Hysterical.” from the bully goat grim

use of his gift. As in Collodi’s original story, the moral is explicit.

For the 19th-century author, happiness came from being wellbehaved. For today’s readers, it becomes acceptance of one’s difference, being “true to yourself.” The moral seems to be tacked on to an otherwise entertaining series of discrete adventures that are good for reading aloud. Each chapter ends on a suspenseful note, leading readers on, but the resolution disappoints.

Those who only remember Pinocchio as the untruthful boy in the Disney film may be surprised by this different character. But for readers already familiar with the original, this is an interesting exercise. (Fantasy. 9-12)

THE FLY FLEW IN

Catrow, David Illus. by Catrow, David Holiday House (32 pp.) $14.95 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-8234-2418-4 Series: I Like to Read

him!”—personally, but neither daddy troll nor mommy troll can decide on a way of dealing with the interloper. Luckily, baby troll knows her grammar and comes up with a clever plan that thwarts the goat’s meanness and uses his Random Hostility Syndrome as a source of entertainment. The moral? Learn your grammar and “demember— / nobody likes a dubnoxious beasty.”

Claflin peppers his tale with such moose-isms as distremely and angrify, and his Northern Piney Woods amunals include busterflies. There is also some impressive vocabulary on display—trajectory, apogee, process, soporific, synergistic—and, of course, the whole concept of the double negative is at the heart of baby troll’s solution. Stimson’s illustrations are as droll as ever, his characters full of personality, and spreads that are packed with details will require repeat readings to uncover them all.

Between the moose dialect and the story’s twist, this may not be one of your grandmother’s tales, but even she won’t be able to resist a few chuckles. Hysterical. (audio CD) (Fractured fairy tale. 7-12)

A frolicsome fly disrupts a fancy concert.

Catrow is in fine form as his fly flits from the nose of a fancifully costumed usher to formally dressed members of the audience and from the orchestra pit to the stage. He—the fly, that is—flies on and off noses. Humans flick him off, and he flips.

He flies by cymbals, violins and Wagnerian singers and finally flies out of the theater to thunderous applause, but only after creating much mayhem. The text is short, repetitive, filled with sound effects, and good fun to read aloud. It will certainly appeal to emerging readers and adults fond of the letter F. The publisher has designated the book as part of its I Like to Read series, reading level C. Catrow’s familiar watercolor-andink full-page paintings are screamingly funny. Intense hues of greens and blues and wildly exaggerated comical faces add fuel to the fracas. “Get that fly! Boom!”

Have fun with this fly. (Early reader. 2-6)

The Gaia Wars

The

GaiaWars

by Kenneth G. Bennett

DEADLY SECRETS have been buried in the Cascade mountain wilderness for centuries. Hidden.

Out of sight and out of mind.

Until today…

Kenneth G. Bennett ISBN: 978-1466211971

THE BULLY GOAT GRIM

Claflin, Willy Illus. by Stimson, James August House (32 pp.) $18.95 | Aug. 16, 2012 978-0-87483-952-4 Series: Maynard Moose

“A solid first entry of a promising, imaginative new young adult fantasy series featuring a well-crafted character.”

— Kirkus Reviews

Storytellers and Maynard Moose– lovers celebrate! There’s a wonderfully wacky new folksy tale for you.

Maynard (Rapunzel and the Seven Dwarfs, 2011, etc.) tells of Bully Goat Grim, a goat who is suffering from “Random Hostility Syndrome,” which causes him to lower his horns and headbutt cute, fluffy forest creatures. The kindly, though strange, troll family that lives under the bridge takes his challenge—“Beware, beware, the Bully Goat Grim! / Nobody better not mess with |

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For information about publication rights email: Ken@kennethgbennett.com

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“Not so hot.” from handbook for hot witches

ENSHADOWED

Creagh, Kelly Atheneum (448 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-0204-1 Series: Nevermore, 2 Her goth boyfriend, Varen Nethers, disappeared into the sinister, Poe-inflected dream world in Nevermore (2010), and now it’s up to cheerleader Isobel Lanley to find him again.

The key to rescuing Varen revolves around the mysterious “Poe Toaster,” a figure who visits Poe’s Baltimore gravesite each year on the author’s birthday. Isobel contrives to get to Baltimore on the fateful date but doesn’t make much of a plan; most of the action leading up to Isobel’s rendezvous with the Toaster involves her encountering frightening fragments of the dream world and hiding those encounters from family, teachers and even her sarcastic sidekick, Gwen. Readers who have forgotten the events of Nevermore are caught up slowly as the plot of this sequel unfolds; readers are reminded of Varen immediately, but the intricacies of the demonlike Nocs and the mechanics of dreams and waking are left somewhat unspecified. The prose is long-winded, moody and filled with awkward figures of speech (“Like flint striking in the dark, Gwen’s words snatched Isobel’s attention”). Dreams, chase scenes and confrontations blur into one another and become repetitive. Several dream scenes rely on characters falling asleep at unlikely moments (in a cold catacomb, waiting for the story’s climax, for example), and the ending brings little in the way of resolution.

Tedious; only for readers who can’t get enough of Varen, Isobel and Poe. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)

HANDBOOK FOR HOT WITCHES Dame Darcy’s Illustrated Guide to Magic, Love, and Creativity

Dame Darcy Henry Holt (208 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-8050-9379-7

An exploration of “witchcraft” shown through the mind-numbing pink fog of a

teen-magazine lens.

Are you like totally a hot witch? “Dame Darcy” has rendered this term down to five main types: enchantress, bard, pagan priestess, mystic and seer. For each type, she lists various activities and/or advice that may hold appeal; for example, the enchantress (“loves romance and glamour!”) can learn such necessities as love spells and is offered comforting platitudes like “no one is going to lead you to true happiness except yourself,” a sentiment sure to result in an angst-y eye-roll. The pagan priestess (“loves handcrafting and nature!”) is given just the quickest 1496

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overview of how to knit, something that Dame Darcy feels can be confidently explained in a mere four pages of illustration.

Sprinkled throughout are Darcy’s minicomics of her own feminist imaginings of fairy tales; one finds Sleeping Beauty roused by her long-lost twin—and when the Prince offers them a gift, they counter, “Boy, you are going to have to do more than that to get with this!” Though the female empowerment that the author attempts to promulgate is admirable, the rah-rah tone and lack of depth quickly negate any credibility. Replete with perky quizzes, tips on hair and makeup and simplistic handicrafts, this ends up feeling like a very long Seventeen article.

Not so hot. (additional readings) (Nonfiction. 12 & up)

A MUTINY IN TIME

Dashner, James Scholastic (192 pp.) $12.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-545-38696-8 Series: Infinity Ring, 1

Kicking off a multiauthor, multimedia thriller series modeled on The 39 Clues, this paint-by-numbers opener endows three teenagers with a footballsized time device and sends them back to 1492 to keep Columbus from being killed in a mutiny.

Strewing early scenes with clever “what’s wrong with this picture?” references like a flag with 48 stars and the national capital as Philadelphia, Dashner hooks up self-described “Time Nerds” Dak (mad about history), Sera (ditto science) and Riq (ditto languages), with the Hystorians. Set up by Aristotle after the premature assassination of Alexander, this secret organization is meant to identify other history-derailing Great Breaks (through intuition, apparently) and to assist travelers from the future in fixing them. The Hystorians are opposed by a powerful group called SQ for no clear reason except that, you know, there have to be Bad Guys. Logic not being the strong suit here, the Time Nerds’ first mission with the newly invented Infinity Ring takes them not to ancient Macedon but to 15th-century Spain. This and subsequent print volumes end on cliffhangers that segue into gamelike, online-only sequels (not seen) set in other eras and accessible with pass codes provided on foldout clue sheets.

Off-the-shelf adventure modules, stocked with familiar character types and set into a scenario that is nonsensical even by the usual low standards of formula time-travel adventure. (Science fiction. 10-12)

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A FRACTURED LIGHT

Davies, Jocelyn HarperTeen (320 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 25, 2012 978-0-06-199067-0 978-0-06-211966-7 e-book Series: Beautiful Dark, 2 This first sequel to A Beautiful Dark (2011) works mostly as romance and exposition, setting up the final book in the planned trilogy.

The opening scene resolves the ending of the first book, but this volume focuses mainly on Skye’s emerging supernatural powers and her continual indecision between the two warring angel factions—and between her two rival angel boyfriends. As she struggles to learn how to control her new abilities, even as she discovers what specific abilities she has, she continues her effort to decide which side of the angel war to take, no matter that she has already decided firmly for the rebels. So attracted to Asher, the rebel angel, that fires break out when they touch, she still can’t get over her feelings for Devin, the “Guardian” angel, despite his hostile acts toward her in the previous book. Plus, she has Guardian abilities, so shouldn’t she be on that side? Skye also delves into her family history, learning secrets that help to explain her situation. This book features little action beyond ski races, cryptic visions, dangerous weather and looming threats from the two factions, maintaining suspense mostly through Skye’s continual indecision.

Although mostly exposition, this installment appears to point to plenty of action in the final book.

Readers will have to wait and see. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)

STARRING ARABELLE

De Baun, Hillary Hall Eerdmans (236 pp.) $9.00 paperback | Aug. 30, 2012 978-0-8028-5398-1 Arabelle’s vision of a headlining freshman year of high school soon fades under the harsh glare of reality.

With a keen desire to transform herself into somebody spectacular, Arabelle yearns to be a dashing actress like her favorite romance-book heroine. A part in her school’s production of You Can’t Take It with You seems to be her opportunity to shine. Yet Arabelle soon realizes that life does not always follow a neat script. Instead of being center stage, Arabelle is on the sidelines working as a prompter for the actors. Even this meager role is in jeopardy due to the hostilities of the contemptuous Bonnie, lead actress and reigning diva. In the tradition of good theater, there is plenty of intrigue, comedy and romance as Arabelle endeavors to discover what makes her unique. De Baun contemplates the meaning of friendship in its many guises. A poignant parallel plot involving Arabelle’s volunteer work at a |

local nursing home elevates this story beyond the traditional quirky-girl-conquers-high-school scenario. Arabelle’s blossoming friendships with several memorable residents ultimately transform her perspective on life and herself.

Effervescent and optimistic, Arabelle demonstrates that on stage or off, everyone should take a starring role in her life. (Fiction. 12-14)

RETURN OF THE LIBRARY DRAGON

Deedy, Carmen Agra Illus. by White, Michael P. Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-1-56145-621-5

What could cause the Library Dragon to return (The Library Dragon, 1994)?

Miss Lotty, librarian at Sunrise Elementary School, was once a scaly, book-protecting, fire-breathing dragon, but years ago student Molly Brickmeyer helped melt the scales away by proving children can be trusted with books. Now, Miss Lotty is ready to retire. Though the kids will miss her, she’s sure her successor will carry on her library traditions. Unfortunately, when she arrives for her last day before retirement…Mr. Mike Krochip has replaced all her books with computers and e-readers. The kids profess their love of traditional books until they see the bells and whistles on the e-readers, triggering the return of the Library Dragon, who chomps through every piece of technology she sees until a young redhead saves the day (and the library) again. Deedy and White re-team to bring the Library Dragon into the 21st century. As an entertaining read that broaches the subject of technology’s place in the school media center, this deserves a place alongside its predecessor despite the fact that the resolution of the central conflict is about as realistic as a dragon in the library. White’s brightly colored, squashed and squiggly fullbleed illustrations match the tale for good goofiness.

Pro-book and -library quotes on the endpapers and multiple punny book titles in the illustrations add an extra touch of fun. (Picture book. 4-8)

VESSEL

Durst, Sarah Beth McElderry (432 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-1-4424-2376-3 When a summoning goes awry, Liyana must try to save her people and learn how to live for herself, in this sweeping adventure.

Chosen as a “vessel” to host the Goat Clan’s goddess, Bayla, and abandoned when Bayla doesn’t come, Liyana finds herself alone in the desert. Korbyn, god of the Raven Clan, rescues Liyana and

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provides her with a purpose: find the four other vessels who are also missing deities. Soon, Liyana and Korbyn pick up stalwart Fennik (horse god Sendar), princess-y Pia (silk goddess Oyri) and angry Raan (scorpion goddess Maara). Besides the desert’s many dangers, the ragtag group faces the massed army of the Crescent Empire, led by a young Emperor and his malicious magician, Mulaf. The tribes need their gods to save them from illness, starvation and drought, but the gods need to possess vessels to work magic—an arrangement whose logic several characters begin to question. Liyana is self-sacrificing but not a saint; stubborn, loyal, and curious, she finds new reasons to live even as she faces death. Durst offers a meditation on leadership and power and a vivid story set outside the typical Western European fantasy milieu.

From the gripping first line, a fast-paced, thought-provoking and stirring story of sacrifice. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

MR. ZINGER’S HAT

Fagan, Cary Illus. by Petricic, Dusan Tundra (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-1-77049-253-0

Here’s one answer, at least, to the archetypal question about where stories come from: Their authors pull them out of hats!

When old Mr. Zinger’s windblown hat lands atop young Leo, the elder’s suggestion that there must be a story inside it trying to get out leads the pair to make up a tale about a rich but bored lad who offers half his possessions to anyone who can cheer him up. The elder gently prods Leo to come up with all the major details—including the solution, which isn’t a flat-screen television, a live monkey or other high-profile item but a simple ball and a boy to share. Zinger then departs, leaving Leo to continue playing alone with his ball as he was before...until a new friend named Sophie shows up to share both the ball and the creation of a brand new story from Leo’s own cap. Petricic alternates loosely brushed, sketchily detailed watercolors to illustrate the frame story with even more simply drawn cartoons for the newly invented tales. In doing so, he expertly evokes the episode’s understated warmth while cranking up the visual appeal with a set of distinctly delineated central characters interacting comfortably with one another.

A thoroughly engaging addition to the shelf of stories about storymaking. (Picture book. 6-9)

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THE LOST TREASURE OF TUCKERNUCK

Fairlie, Emily Katherine Tegen/ HarperCollins (304 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 25, 2012 978-0-06-211890-5 978-0-06-211892-9 e-book Laurie does not want to be a Tuckernuck Clucker. Her plan: Stay long enough to solve the puzzle posed by the school’s founder, reap the promised treasure, then transfer to Hamilton Junior High.

Laurie is embarrassed by the Clucker regalia (chicken hats!).

Worse, she is paired as Gerbil Monitor with Bud, the outcast who had sugary treats banned from school. It is while chasing an escaped gerbil that Laurie and Bud discover the first clue in the 80-year-old challenge. While the premise is familiar, children will delight in the over-the-top treatment and fresh delivery. The third-person narration indulges the comical, selfinvolved dramas of preteens. Nor are Laurie and Bud especially interested in the clues’ highbrow references. After asking a teacher about Keats, Laurie assures him: “No, it’s fine, I don’t need to study him.” Readers also find tips from Laurie on “How to Elude a Persistent and Overeager English Teacher,” which include “Make excuses and back away slowly.” Other lists, notes and emails are interspersed throughout, providing more insight into the characters and background for the story. Most poignant is the relationship revealed between Bud and his father. That Laurie and Bud will solve the puzzle is a given. The real thrill is how the characters begin to discover and determine their own futures as they go through the process.

A sure hit. (Mystery. 8-12)

SHIVER ME TIMBERS! Pirate Poems and Paintings

Florian, Douglas Illus. by Neubecker, Robert Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Aug. 28, 2102 978-1-4424-1321-4 978-1-4424-5712-6 e-book Arr! ‘Tis a bonny day indeed when piratical inclinations are recorded with such florid nastiness as that found in this stellar collection of seagoing poems for salty dogs.

“A pirate’s life is topsy-turvy, / Full of strife, and rife with scurvy.”

Don’t believe a word of it. With Florian presenting the true life of pirates, from endless days of seafood (“If we have fish for one more day / Methinks that I will puke”) to general information (“We’re rude, crude dudes with attitudes”), it’s hard to imagine a pirate poetry book half as much fun as the one conjured up here. It helps that along with being amusing, the poems are actually informative as well. Kids learn a variety of terms in “Pirate Patter,” run through

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“Goldstone departs from his usual math picture books to deliver one of the most comprehensive books about autumn available for kids.” from awesome autumn

a virtual pirate thesaurus (from “buccaneers” to “salt sea-robbers”) in “Names for Pirates,” decipher what symbols mean in “Pirate Flags,” and are instructed in the difference between a privateer and a buccaneer in “Rule of the Pirate.” Bouncy verse is ably complemented by Neubecker’s pitch-perfect art. His nasty (yet nicely multicultural and including both genders) rovers are always dirty, always wild and clearly having fun on every page.

It’s not a stretch to say that if Shel Silverstein himself were to have dabbled in the piratical he could not have come up with a better selection of scurvy doggerel than the delicious verses found here. (Picture book/poetry. 4-8)

ALDO’S FANTASTICAL MOVIE PALACE

Friesen, Jonathan Zondervan (304 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-310-72110-9

a fierce-looking but friendly cockatrice, a computer gamer that looks like a bat crossed with a human and, just off a nearby beach, a menacing giant white crab. These creatures are only representative, though, of the many exotic and fantasy animals that Furie strews about each grainy-surfaced scene as he leads his two explorers past open woods, into twisting tunnels underground and through a deserted town decorated with gargoyles on the way to the sea. Surfing back to shore atop a pair of dolphins, the frog and mouse conclude their journey by climbing to a headland to watch a bright sunrise. A foldout poster of the cast (and cockatrice) serves as dust jacket.

Presented in a mix of sequential panels and full-spread views, this easy-to-follow debut tale is rich in both drama and sights that are less dangerous-looking than delightfully strange. (Picture book. 5-7)

AWESOME AUTUMN

A teenage girl with permanent facial scars and a blind boy enter an imaginary world through a combination of their own scriptwriting and a portal in an inherited old movie theater.

Fourteen-year-old Chloe Lundeen has additional, social scars from endless schoolyard taunts of “Scarface.” She’s living evidence of one of her inventor-father’s projects gone terribly wrong. Chloe finds solace in the family’s old-fashioned movie house and develops a love/hate relationship with a fellow sufferer named Nick Harris. The two eventually enter a magical world together, where their pain can be forgotten, but not without a price. Told in close thirdperson narration from Chloe’s point of view, this good-vs.-evil story moves from being fluent to disjointed and back again, several times. Accomplished author Friesen (The Last Martin, 2011, etc.) clearly has something to say to kids who have been emotionally or physically hurt by someone close to them. Yet he waxes didactic so often on the subjects of psychic pain, forgiveness and the inherent beauty that comes from overcoming adversity that readers may feel hit over the head with compassionate zeal. To make matters worse, the rules and characters of the fantasy world unfold in a sporadic way that feels more disorienting than helpful.

This poignant and well-meaning premise ends up a disappointing read. (Fantasy. 10-14)

THE NIGHT RIDERS

Furie, Matt Illus. by Furie, Matt McSweeney’s McMullens (48 pp.) $15.95 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-1-936365-56-2

Goldstone, Bruce Henry Holt (48 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-8050-9210-3

Goldstone departs from his usual math picture books to deliver one of the most comprehensive books about autumn available for kids.

Revolving around the idea that “Autumn is a season of awesome changes,” the text takes readers through some of them: Days get colder and shorter; frost forms; farmers harvest their crops; some animals migrate, hibernate, change color or get ready for the cold in other ways; people play soccer and football, rake leaves and celebrate Halloween and Thanksgiving. Sometimeslengthy paragraphs with vocabulary defined in the text inform readers; the best ones introduce the process of leaves changing color and separating from the tree. Goldstone seamlessly intersperses pages into this discussion that talk about the tastes, sounds, sights, textures and shapes of fall, making this a solid choice for audiences of mixed ages. One- and two-page spreads, as well as collages and vignettes of beautiful photos, evoke fall.

Many of the photos are cropped in the shape of leaves or words, as on the sound-sense page—“Hooray” is cut from a photo of fans in a stadium. The final few spreads give photographs of and directions for some fall crafts, including gourd geese, leaf rubbings, roasted pumpkin seeds and a fall mobile.

Wonderfully apropos pictures, solid information and sheer breadth are sure to make this an elementary-classroom staple. The cover blurb says it all: “All kinds of fall facts and fun.” (Nonfiction. 5-10)

In this wordless odyssey, a postprandial nighttime outing turns particularly adventurous for two animal buddies.

With his mouse friend in the front basket, a frog’s bike ride down a moonlit country road leads to startling encounters with |

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“Livelier than the typical history textbook but sillier than the many outstanding works on the Civil War available for young readers, this will appeal to both history buffs and graphic-novel enthusiasts.” from big bad ironclad!

THE KEY

Grant, Michael Katherine Tegen/ HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-06-183370-0 978-0-06-219021-5 e-book Series: The Magnificent 12, 3 As in the previous titles (The Call, 2010, and The Trap, 2011), this third installment in the Magnificent 12 series speeds forward with the help of over-the-top action sequences and rapid, clever dialogue.

This episode opens with Mack about to be catapulted and most likely smashed into a wall near Loch Ness, when at the last minute he is saved by French goth-girl Sylvie, who is the half sibling of evil Valin, an ally to the dark forces supporting the rise of the Pale Queen—and both Mack and Sylvie happen to be members of the Magnificent 12, on a quest to obtain the second part of the vital key. And this is how the story progresses, like an urgent, never-ending run-on sentence. With many plot twists, comic diversions involving the Golem standing in for Mack back at home, timely introductions of new characters, explanations of Vargan spells, and just-in-time fantastical feats that save lives and ultimately move the Eiffel Tower from one side of the Seine to the other, readers are in for a most entertaining if often hard-to-fathom tale. Grant’s series flows like a muchhyped Hollywood summer blockbuster: The special effects are impressive, but readers must instantly agree to suspend disbelief. A website encourages fans to create their own avatars, review characters and settings and keep updated on the latest news about the series.

Action, adventure, fantasy, humor and a glimpse of a potential budding romance are all here, making this a great end-of-summer read. (Fantasy. 10-14)

EMILY FOR REAL

Gunnery, Sylvia Pajama Press (208 pp.) $14.95 paperback | Aug. 15, 2012 978-0-9869495-8-6 After being dumped by her boyfriend, an emotionally shaken 17-year-old high school senior makes friends with an angry young man and discovers that the secure family she always considered rock-solid is riddled with lies and secrets.

This is a story about familial ties—ties of blood, ties of love, ties that bind. It’s also about family lies and the way these lies affect core connections. Although protagonist Emily Sinclair’s family is small, it’s complex and is comprised of a variety of household situations: intact, divorced, step, gay, straight, illegitimate and adoptive. The story, which rolls unevenly, is set in motion when Emily’s grandfather dies, and the family learns 1500

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that he had both a longtime mistress and an illegitimate daughter. And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Sinclair family’s surprising but believable secrets, and their eventual revelation shocks Emily to the quick. The other story thread concerns Emily’s realistically depicted budding friendship with Leo Mac, a new classmate with a plateful of family problems of his own, and their testy but ultimately supportive relationship. The characters are somewhat opaque for a story about relationships—this is particularly true of Emily’s mother—and the mood of the story is gray.

Nevertheless, it is genuinely touching at its tear-inducing, hopeful end. (Fiction. 12 & up)

BIG BAD IRONCLAD!

Hale, Nathan Illus. by Hale, Nathan Amulet/Abrams (128 pp.) $12.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-4197-0395-9 Series: Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales Travel with Nathan Hale back to 1861 for the famous Civil War battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, the war’s first ironclad ships.

Unless readers have read Hale’s One Dead Spy (2012) first, they may well wonder why the famous spy Nathan Hale, hanged for espionage in 1776, is telling this future story of naval warfare during the Civil War. It turns out that Nathan Hale—the spy, not the author—was standing at the gallows when he was swallowed by a giant book of American history. He lives to tell about it and, presumably, other tales of America for future volumes of Hazardous Tales. This volume, completed prior to One Dead Spy, is a wild ride of a graphic novel, featuring not only Nathan Hale, but his hangman, a fox representing Gustavus Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and the various participants in the battle.

Sketched, inked and colored in Photoshop, the two-color, frenetic volume succeeds in presenting the chaos of war. The backmatter is notable for its informative biographies of key players, a timeline, and a small but well-selected bibliography.

Livelier than the typical history textbook but sillier than the many outstanding works on the Civil War available for young readers, this will appeal to both history buffs and graphic-novel enthusiasts. (Graphic historical fiction. 8-12)

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BURN FOR BURN

Han, Jenny; Vivian, Siobhan Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-1-4424-4075-3 Revenge fantasies run riot (and disappointingly off the rails) in a new series from usually reliable experts Han and Vivian.

It’s the end of summer before senior year of high school in Jar Island’s resort towns, and change is in the air. After being victimized by people they thought they could trust, popular Lillia, outcast Kat and apparent new girl Mary make a revenge pact. Lillia, consumed with guilt and shame after being date raped, is hellbent on protecting her sheltered younger sister Nadia from the advances of fellow-senior Alex. Kat can’t wait to put the screws to Rennie, who shut her out of their friendship with Lillia freshman year and has been spreading nasty rumors about Kat ever since. Newly svelte Mary grew up on Jar Island but has been living off-island for the last four years, recovering from the crushing bullying visited upon her by star quarterback Reeve. Each humiliating act of vengeance goes exactly as planned, but the consequences are far more devastating than the girls imagined, culminating in a near-tragedy that leaves them deeply shaken. Unfortunately, all this delicious bitchiness devolves into nihilistic nonsense by the last chapter, hampered by a late-developing supernatural twist and a final sentence that wouldn’t be out of place in the film Chinatown.

Readers will feel narratively whiplashed. (Fiction. 15-18)

SPEECHLESS

Harrington, Hannah Harlequin Teen (272 pp.) $9.99 paperback | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-373-21052-7 An absorbing drama about what happens when one of the popular girls becomes the target of her former friends’ bullying.

Sixteen-year-old Chelsea is second in command to her school’s queen bee, Kristen, following her smug best friend in all things. Chelsea lies to her parents to attend Kristen’s secret New Year’s party. There, Chelsea gets drunk and walks in on two gay boys, then stumbles downstairs and outs them.

Kristen’s boyfriend and another boy brag that they’ll beat them up; later, they do, landing one in the hospital. Ashamed, Chelsea turns them in, but her former friends shun and attack her. In response, she vows not to speak at all. Thereafter she makes some unexpected friends and changes her entire outlook. Harrington draws a convincing portrait of the nastiness involved in the personal attacks against Chelsea, especially as the girl realizes how cruel she has been to others in the past.

Although Chelsea’s nearly complete change of character might seem too sudden, the author makes it look plausible by writing |

from Chelsea’s point of view and underscoring her reactions to her changed circumstances. Characters stand out quite well as individuals, especially confident Asha, the freshman girl who befriends Chelsea. The story works well as an argument against bullying that reaches young readers in their own world.

Timely and affecting. (Fiction. 12 & up)

BUDDY

Herlong, M.H. Viking (256 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 13, 2012 978-0-670-01403-3 Twelve-year-old Li’l T offers an absorbing first-person account of a poor, tightly knit, multigenerational family’s experience in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, focused through the lens of Li’l T’s relationship with a special dog named Buddy.

Unlike other titles that deal with Katrina, this one eases up to the big event, enabling readers to establish a strong connection with the characters by slowly revealing how Li’l T and Buddy met and how Li’l T helped Buddy recover from the amputation of one of his legs. When the epic storm comes into the picture, readers find themselves as heartbroken as Li’l T when the family must leave Buddy behind in the evacuation. Li’l T struggles mightily during the family’s temporary stay in Mississippi, suffering the loss of his dog, the family home and, finally, his beloved and now disconsolate grandfather. When the family moves back to New Orleans, Li’l T learns that he just might be able to get Buddy back from the family in California who has adopted him. The scenes involving the neighborhood criminal element and some final plot twists seem a little contrived, but Li’l T’s voice and love for Buddy feel authentic, and those elements are enough to carry the story.

A touching tale of hope, of holding on when you can, and of letting go when it’s the right thing to do. (Fiction. 9-12)

ERASING TIME

Hill, C.J. Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-06-212392-3 978-0-06-212394-7 e-book A dash of time travel gives a fresh flavor to the quickly staling dystopia genre.

Just as apprentice wordsmith Echo, a historian who’s studied the progression of the English language, prepares to flee his totalitarian city in the year 2447, a mad scientist unleashes the Time Strainer. Programmed to retrieve Tyler Sherwood, who revolutionized theories about matter in the 21st century, the time machine mistakenly delivers identical twin females, Taylor and Sheridan. Because of his abilities, Echo is assigned to monitor

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and translate for the teenage sisters. The initially slow thirdperson narration picks up pace as it alternates between Echo’s and Sheridan’s points of view. After learning about a Mafia-like organization that controls society and the mad scientist’s real plans for the Time Strainer, the twins decide to escape. Although kissing hasn’t changed in four centuries, Sheridan’s not sure she can completely trust Echo to help them. What the story lacks in detail of the futuristic time period, it makes up in its attention to the evolution of language and religion. Taylor and Sheridan’s quick-thinking idioms allow them to make plans right under the guards’ noses and strike while the iron is hot. For once, literature buff Sheridan outshines her physicist-prodigy sister.

Dramatic twists and turns to the very end ensure readers’ attention and the possibility of an equally thrilling sequel. (Science fiction. 13 & up)

THE RISING

Hill, Will Razorbill/Penguin (608 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 16, 2012 978-1-59514-407-2 Series: Department 19, 2 There’s gore aplenty in the second volume of Hill’s Department 19 series.

For Jamie Carpenter and his fellow monster-hunting team, the ominous graffito “HE RISES” hints at the return of the world’s oldest vampire, Dracula, and the violence he will bring. Jamie is worried for his mother, a recently created vampire, for his relationship with the unpredictable vampire Larissa and for his missing colleague and friend, Frankenstein.

When Valentin Rusmanov, one of Dracula’s first turnings, teams up with Department 19 to fight against Dracula, it appears as though the top-secret team may have a chance, until a lastminute kidnapping changes the balance of power. A full cast of characters leaping in and out of life-and-death scenarios coupled with just the right balance of vampiric flashbacks make for an enthralling sophomore outing. Jamie balances romance with duty without becoming sappy, and teens Kate and Larissa make quite good kick-ass vampire hunters. The many characters and plots are evenly handled, keeping the pace up, the pages turning and the gore splattering. From UV grenades to exploding stake bombs to a giant anti-vampire superweapon, the gadgets add a neat modern twist to the traditional stakings.

Fans will devour the pages and thirst for the next volume. (Horror. 14 & up)

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I LIKE OLD CLOTHES

Hoberman, Mary Ann Illus. by Barton, Patrice Knopf (32 pp.) $16.99 | PLB $19.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-375-86951-8 978-0-375-96951-5 PLB Hand-me-downs gain new poetic life in this charming picture-book remake.

Originally published with illustrations by Jacqueline Chwast, here Hoberman’s 1976 poem gets a makeover courtesy of illustrator Barton. Kirkus panned the original for attempting too much with too little, finding Hoberman’s “silly rhyme” as threadbare as its theme of recycled clothing and Chwast’s “overpopulated pictures” teeming with a “freakish cast.” Thankfully, the Barton edition coheres much better. While Hoberman’s thematic insistence on the delight to be found in imagining the prior ownership of secondhand clothes is a little heavy-handed, her verse comes across as playful and light: “I like old clothes. / I really do. / Clothes with a history, / Clothes with a mystery, // Sweaters and shirts / That are brother-and-sistery….” Barton’s digitally rendered mixed-media illustrations capture well the warmth of Hoberman’s message, using wispy lines and softly accented shading to imbue these garments with such life that they actually seem capable of some determinism in their handme-down trajectory. Particularly effective is the final spread, in which a clothesline strung between windows displays many of the “Now-for-play clothes” featured earlier, giving the poet’s concept of a garment’s past and future a smartly literal linearity.

With Barton’s nuanced illustrations, Hoberman’s 36-yearold hand-me-down poem defines sustainability for the next generation. (Picture book. 3-7)

GOLDILOCKS AND JUST ONE BEAR

Hodgkinson, Leigh Illus. by Hodgkinson, Leigh Nosy Crow/Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-6172-4

A sequel to the traditional fairy tale finds a bear lost in a big city.

Overwhelmed by the noise and lights, the bear ducks into Snooty Towers apartments to escape and get some much-needed rest. Some porridge would hit the spot. But one bowl is too soggy (fishbowl water—with fish!), one too crunchy (cat food) and the last is dry but doable (buttered toast). The mishaps continue in his search for a chair and a bed (a cactus and bath tub are involved, and the cat continues to be abused). The return of the penthouse-dwelling family wakes him, and he listens to their complaints as they follow his trail through the apartment to the little person’s bed where he is resting. The mommy person and the bear recognize each other and catch up over porridge before the now-grown Baby Bear finds his way back to the

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“Hollihan covers the eight decades of struggle for women’s suffrage with plentiful illustrations, numerous sidebars and a straightforward ability to explain words and ideas in context.” from rightfully ours

woods. Hodgkinson’s mixed-media artwork is the real star. The retro illustrations are done in bold blues, lime greens and pinks and are full of patterns and wonderfully scratchy and marbled textures. The blond family’s clothing, hairdos and attitudes neatly match their penthouse home, and the text plays into the artwork; “bright lights” is surrounded by lines depicting shine, while “wobbly” is written in a suitably shaky style.

Cute, but readers may wonder how a bear who grew up in the cottage that Goldilocks visited could have not a “crumb-of-a-clue” about porridge, chairs and beds. (Fractured fairy tale. 3-8)

RIGHTFULLY OURS How Women Won the Vote

Hollihan, Kerrie Logan Chicago Review (144 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-883052-89-8

A timeline that starts in January 1777, when Mary Katherine Goddard printed the first full copy of the Declaration of Independence, and ends with the women’s suffrage amendment passed in 1920 opens this fine history of how women got the vote in the United States.

Hollihan covers the eight decades of struggle for women’s suffrage with plentiful illustrations, numerous sidebars and a straightforward ability to explain words and ideas in context.

The stories, struggles and great work of Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul are laid out, as well as Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams and many other women famed and lesserknown. Hollihan is particularly good at tracing, in language middle-graders can understand, how little control women had over their lives and persons. She also does not gloss over the deep divisions between white women and African-American women, and between the conservative and radical movements within women’s suffrage associations. The only downside is the activities, which range from slightly silly (dress up like an ancient Greek for suffrage!) to simply wrong (cake mix does not taste as good as a cake made from scratch).

For young readers not quite ready for Ann Bausum’s masterly With Courage and Cloth (2004), the survey offers a powerful lesson in the vindication of the rights of women. (resources, index [not seen]) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

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EIGHTH GRADE IS MAKING ME SICK Ginny Davis’s Year in Stuff

Holm, Jennifer L. Illus. by Castaldi, Elicia Random House (128 pp.) $15.99PLB $18.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-375-86851-1 978-0-375-96851-8 PLB

It’s common knowledge that eighth grade is one of life’s low points.

Here, it literally makes Ginny Davis sick. Photo-collages of poems, notes, text and chat messages, comics, realia of all sorts and, especially, food document the descent of Ginny’s school year. This convincing sequel to Middle School is Worse than Meatloaf (2007) starts on a high as the Davis-Wrights move to a large new house, and Ginny makes the cheerleading squad. Her best (boy) friend is her biology lab partner, and her English teacher likes her poems. But along with romance over the dissection table and gossip on the Vampire Vixen web forum comes a real, painful family story. Her new stepfather loses his job, forcing the sale of both his car and the new house. Her mother has a baby, premature and sickly. Her brother gets into legal trouble, committing computer fraud. And Ginny’s constant tummy trouble turns out to be a serious, chronic illness. Still, the tone is positive, and the ending hopeful. This is aimed straight at those whose reading, like Ginny’s, may range from the Babymouse graphic novels of her younger days to teen vampire titles.

Holm slyly includes some good suggestions among the covers and book lists, featuring both classics and modern masterworks.

Ginny’s story in pictures is both inviting and satisfying; readers will surely want more. (Graphic fiction. 10-14)

ANNIE AND HELEN

Hopkinson, Deborah Illus. by Colón, Raúl Schwartz & Wade/Random (48 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-375-85706-5 A clear, simple narrative retells a powerful story of determination and triumph for a team of two: Anne Sullivan and her famous student, Helen Keller.

The story is nearly the stuff of legend: how the young teacher, herself partially blinded, finds a way out of the darkness for a willful blind and deaf girl whose early childhood was spent mostly without access to language. Hopkinson’s likable account for young listeners and primary-grade readers is drawn from Keller’s The Story of My Life. Appealing and dramatic anecdotes convey the breathtaking success that Anne and Helen achieved in a few short months, from Helen’s first word in the spring to her first letter later that summer. Hopkinson neatly explains the difference between sign language and the fingerspelling that Anne used to talk with Helen, describing Anne’s determination

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“Sophie’s blunt, perceptive present-tense narration takes readers effectively into her personal emotional maelstrom.” from if i lie

THE SANTA FE JAIL

to immerse Helen in language “the way people talk into a baby’s ears.” Colón’s gentle, light-hued watercolors create a feeling of quietness, their textured lines suggesting the tactile world of touch, motion and vibration that spoke most immediately to Helen. A dozen excellent photographs of Helen Keller as a child and young adult, four of them with Anne, grace the endpapers.

The story of this remarkable pair does not grow old, and here is a charming way to learn it for the first time. (author’s note; list of acknowledgments, print and online sources) (Picture book biography. 5-10)

IF I LIE

Jackson, Corrine Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-5413-2 Six years after Sophie’s mother cheats on her father, a Marine, Sophie does the very same thing and becomes a pariah.

Sweethaven, N.C., is just west of Camp Lejeune, and it is a Marine Corps town through and through. An injury to one is an injury to all, so when a half-naked Sophie is photographed wrapped around a boy who is not her boyfriend just days before he is deployed to Afghanistan, she becomes “slut” to everyone, including her father. As Sophie reflects of her boyfriend, “He might as well have a PROPERTY OF SWEETHAVEN label stamped on his ass.” Her only solace is the time she spends at the VA hospital with George, a crusty soldier-turned–war photographer whom she is helping with an oral-history project. What she won’t— can’t—say is that not only was she not cheating on Carey, she is suffering all this to protect him. Sophie’s blunt, perceptive present-tense narration takes readers effectively into her personal emotional maelstrom. Relationships and their dynamics play themselves out naturally and with satisfying complexity; readers see all too clearly the damage done in the name of love.

If Sophie’s friendship with George feels familiar, readers won’t begrudge her the only human who shows her warmth.

Set in the waning days of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” this portrait of a military town rings true. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Jakobsen, Lars Translated by Jakobsen, Lars; Chapman, Robyn Illus. by Jakobsen, Lars Graphic Universe (48 pp.) $6.95 paperback | $20.95 e-book PLB $27.93 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-8225-9421-5 978-1-4677-0045-0 e-book 978-0-7613-7886-0 PLB Series: Mortensen’s Escapades, 2 A disappointing second outing finds the titular time-traveling secret agent darting his way through a tangle of nefarious schemes so messy and incoherent that readers have no chance of following him.

A researcher (seemingly) kidnapped in 1973 for nebulous reasons…a mysterious meteoric metal mined in Tanzania in the 1920s and stolen by Nazis for never-explained purposes in 1942…a short hitchhike with the historical French “Black Cruise” through the Iringa rain forest in 1925…a discovery in conveniently untouched former Nazi offices in 1950 Denmark…a car chase and a double ambush in New Mexico….Switching decade and locale with a page turn or, sometimes, just between one panel and the next, Jakobsen pitches his ever-natty hero into and, with equal ease, out of one heavily contrived, tenuously related situation after another. Muddying the waters further, he also folds in supporting characters who either look too much alike to keep straight or are unrecognizable (with the exception of Einstein) caricatures of a suddenly-revealed “League of Extraordinary Scientists.”

Dedicated spy-thriller and sci-fi fans would probably be able to fill in the blanks, but it’s not worth the effort. (historical notes on rain forests, Nazi plunder and other related topics, with period images, appended) (Graphic science fiction. 10-12)

LAUGH-OUT-LOUD BABY

Johnston, Tony Illus. by Gammell, Stephen Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4424-1380-1 978-1-4424-3351-9 e-book Johnston captures the beauty of a baby’s first laugh and a family’s subsequent joy in this sweet celebration of one of life’s loveliest milestones.

On a crisp, winter’s day, a baby laughs. “That small spill of happiness / went rippling through the house— / a dazzle, a jazzle, a shine.” To share in this wondrous event, relatives and neighbors gather, but no amount of prompting can get this babe to giggle again. Later, with bellies full of food and conversation, “into a slot of silence… / ...rang a little mirthful sound,” causing

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more hilarity to ensue until the guests finally depart into the soft, falling snow. Tender and exuberant, playful and poignant, the text perfectly honors this merry occasion. Unfortunately, Gammell’s uniformly chaotic artwork is a poor match. Almost the full color spectrum is represented in each spread, with black used mainly to delineate shapes rather than shadows, thus hindering readers’ ability to perceive depth and focus. A few artistic choices also detract from the text, such as the baby’s derriere-exposing pants (cute the first time, but distracting the fourth); the needless sloppiness of the guests (spilled dishes and drinks); and a reappearing “LOL” sign (when other indicators point to an era gone by). Moreover, despite the author’s note on the Navajo First Laugh Ceremony, there are no appropriate ethnic elements in the illustrations.

Enjoy it for the delicious, read-aloud text, but hide the illustrations. (Picture book. 3-8)

HIDDEN

Jordan, Sophie Harper/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-06-193512-1 978-0-06-219016-1 e-book Series: Firelight, 3 This conclusion to the Firelight trilogy continues the conflict between a dragon-girl and those who hunt her kind.

Jacinda is a draki, a being that can morph from human form into a fire-breathing, flying dragonlike creature. She has her own society but wants to escape it with her human boyfriend, Will, who comes from a family that hunts the draki. This installment begins with Jacinda intentionally caught and imprisoned in an underground facility in which rather nasty scientists do research on draki. She plots with Will and her enforced mate, Cassian, to escape. Once the attack commences, exciting scenes ensue as the group fights their way out with a new, dangerous draki in tow. Jordan keeps the focus mostly on action even as she weaves in the forbidden-romance elements required by this genre, although the romantic conflict was mostly resolved in the previous installment. Plenty of rivalries among Jacinda and other draki spice things up. Two new characters, Deghan, the long-imprisoned draki, and little Lia appeal, although the story allows Lia’s fate to dangle unresolved. Chase scenes, near-captures and a late-game betrayal or two keep the narrative moving. Except for the subplot regarding Lia, everything comes to an ending that will satisfy readers.

New readers would best start with the beginning of the trilogy.

Entertaining enough. (Paranormal suspense. 12 & up)

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LENORE FINDS A FRIEND A True Story from Bedlam Farm Katz, Jon Photos by Katz, Jon Henry Holt (32 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-8050-9220-2

Lenore the black Lab befriends a cranky ram named Brutus in another entry in the popular streak of recent stories focusing on unlikely animal pals.

Katz continues to chronicle life on his farm in upstate New York with his second book for children, following Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm (2011). When Lenore arrives at the farm as a boisterous puppy, she tries to engage Rose, the border collie who herds the sheep of Bedlam Farm. Rose ignores Lenore, so the puppy buddies up to Brutus the ram, giving him “kisses” on his nose and following him around the farm. At first, Rose tries to intervene, but eventually she accepts Lenore as part of the farm family.

Though the story anthropomorphizes the dogs and ram a bit too much, the appealing photographs clearly convey Lenore’s winning personality with some touching shots of sad puppy eyes and sweet interactions between the Lab and the ram. The intriguing subject matter, large type size and short sentence length make this suitable for beginning readers as well as younger children.

Bedlam Farm seems an idyllic spot with a natural appeal to children, who are likely to ask for more about Lenore. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

DARKBEAST

Keyes, Morgan McElderry (288 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-4205-4 Life in Keara’s world is determined by adherence to strictures unchanged through generations.

Yearly tithes must be paid and marked by indelible wrist tattoos. The gods must be honored, and the Primate must be obeyed, all under the eyes of powerful Inquisitors. But most fearsome of all for Keara is the unbreakable rule demanding that children reaching the age of 12 must kill their darkbeasts in order to prepare for adulthood. The raven Caw has been Keara’s darkbeast, her constant companion and dearest friend, whose function has been to take upon himself all her faults and negative emotions.

Keara rebels, takes Caw and joins the Travelers, a group of actors who put on proscribed, unchanging plays about the gods and allowable new plays about ordinary folk. Challenges and adventures abound, but Keara is strong-willed and feisty and always has Caw’s support, conveyed in intense telepathic dialogue. Keyes employs vaguely antique language to describe a richly imagined universe that has elements of the biblical and the medieval mixed with Greco-Roman–influenced mythology. Keara narrates her own

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kirkus q & a with christine davenier

IT’S RAINING, IT’S POURING

Peter, Paul and Mary; illustrated by Christine Davenier Imagine (26 pp.)

Jul. 1, 2012 | $17.95 9781936140770

Paris-born artist Christine Davenier has illustrated many well-loved children’s books, including the bestselling Very Fairy Princess books, written by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, and a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of 2001, The First Thing My Mama Told Me, written by Susan Marie Swanson.

Here, Davenier discusses how her illustrations for It’s Raining, It’s Pouring, based on the beloved Peter, Paul and Mary song, invited her to recall rainy days from her own cozy past with family.

Q: Tell me the story behind the pictures you’ve conjured up here. Gray and stormy outside contrasted with cozy and warm inside—you’ve made a rainy day seem happy.

What inspired the art for this book?

A: I love watching and hearing the rain and not being wet...just like I love the sun when I am sitting in the shade and not getting burned...I am a contemplative person. I grew up in the countryside and have memories of sudden showers or storms that made me feel caught between fright and delight.

What a good feeling to be in your cozy bed with the noise of the rain on the roof of the house.

Q: These illustrations seem somehow personal. Did your own childhood come back to you when creating it?

A: When I worked on this book and created this bunch of cousins, I drew from my joyful childhood. My grandparents loved to gather all the family together, and my two sisters and I were very close to my cousins. We spent a lot of weekends and holidays all together at my grandmother’s.

Every Sunday we had a family lunch and a long afternoon full of laughter, tears, games.

Q: How did you approach illustrating the book, given that the text was actually a children’s song?

A: More than any other book of mine, this one was a collaboration with my agent Judy Sue and her wonderful creative team. We worked together to imagine the narrative and combine the game of hide-and-seek with the fanciful nursery rhymes.

Judy Sue would make a proposal, and then I would translate it in my own way so that we all brought something to it. It made for a rich story. Then, of course, we had good input from Peter Yarrow, who is an artist himself, and from Imagine Publishing, who worked incredibly hard to get the color right.

So, as in every book, it was a “group effort.”

Q: If you had to choose, which illustration is your personal favorite in this book?

A: My favorite illustration is the one in the kitchen. The grandmother has a supporting role in the story, but all through the narrative she follows her purpose—making an apple pie using the apples from her tree. I love supporting players who become part of “the spinal column” of the story.

Q: What projects are you working on now?

A: I am working on a wonderful story written by Tony Johnston, The Cat with Seven Names, (Charlesbridge), and I continue to work on The Very Fairy Princess series written by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton for Little, Brown. Here in France I am working on different projects. One of my favorite involves a little girl named “P’tite chérie,” for whom I imagined several adventures for a magazine. Every night after her mother’s goodnight kiss she has a ritual that makes her as small as her soft toys—stuffed animals—and she has a great adventure with them all night long!

–By Jessie Grearson

P HOTO CO U RT ESY O F T HE AU T H OR

A: Honestly, I didn’t know Peter, Paul and Mary, who are not as well-known here in France as in the United States, and I didn’t know anything about the rhyme “Jack and Jill”…It was also the first time I had worked on a song, but I didn’t put any pressure on myself and didn’t consider it as something different than the books I had done before. I didn’t listen to the song so much as read the words as a new manuscript with the characters to create, the set to imagine...I had to project myself into this “new world” as a child who used to play hide-and-seek with my family, and images came to me quite clearly.

Q: You’ve illustrated many works for children. Did your creative process depart this time at all from what you usually do?

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story, allowing supporting characters to become more complex as her understanding expands with maturity. She is not alone in her rebellion. There are lots of loose ends and unresolved relationships and a rather obvious hint at a possible sequel.

Tightly woven and carefully constructed fantasy. (Fantasy. 10-14)

THE CHANDELIERS

Kirsch, Vincent X. Illus. by Kirsch, Vincent X. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (40 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-374-39898-9 Kirsch applies his ornate flourishes to a troupe of giraffes in this tale of theatrical entrances and exits.

Each member of the world-renowned Chandelier family is featured in a pre– title-page cameo during which their extensive experience is highlighted—except for young Rufus. Not yet old enough to perform, he nevertheless proves his worth as the show unfolds. Ever the resourceful stagehand, he swings in on a trapeze to cue his father, camouflages himself with topiary to walk a parasol out to his mother, and brings up the rear in his brother’s horse costume.

There are humorous visual details in the bustling watercolor-andline compositions, and children will enjoy searching for the tiny mouse wearing a giraffe costume in every scene. Ultimately, however, the narrative loses steam. By the time Rufus is making thunder and lifting the moon, he and readers are just going through the motions to get to the end. The climax perpetuates the pattern: The busy hero casts a shadow monster and turns on the lights when they mysteriously dim, but the lack of actual drama, the static pace and the uneven writing yield waning interest.

Fans of the illustrator’s previous works (and theater) will forgive the flaws in favor of the electrifying compositions; those seeking true conflict or emotional connections should look elsewhere. (Picture book. 4-7)

ATLANTIS The Search for the Lost City Knight, Mary-Jane Illus. by Chidlow, Philip Kingfisher (48 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-7534-6680-3

BIG MEAN MIKE

Knudsen, Michelle Illus. by Magoon, Scott Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-4990-6 A warning: This book may make you like cute bunnies.

Big Mean Mike likes monster-truck shows. This is puzzling, because he’s bigger than some of the trucks. Big Mean Mike wears combat boots he bought at a store called Big Boots. Mike, it’s worth noting, is a dog, with a spiked collar. Mike should never own a bunny, but small, cute bunnies keep appearing in his sports car. One shows up in his trunk. Another shows up in his glove compartment. To Knudsen’s credit, this is never explained. Magoon has made the bunnies exactly as adorable as they need to be. They’re never cloying, but they’re fuzzy and round, and readers will feel embarrassed for Mike when he has to carry them past his friends, who are wearing muscle shirts and the occasional eye patch. The small details may be the real reason to buy the book. The grille of Mike’s car looks like the teeth of a shark. One of the toughest dogs has a cat’s skull and crossbones on his shirt, along with the words “HERE, KITTY, KITTY.” And every young reader will spot the Batmobile at the edge of a parking lot. When Mike finally learns to love his bunnies, the illustrations have set up the moment perfectly. They look like they belong together.

Even the toughest readers will crumble under the appeal of these bunnies. (Picture book. 4-8)

NICK AND THE NASTY KNIGHT

With help from a CD-sized cardboard decoder disk, young archaeologists can discover for themselves that the ancient Atlantean language was actually English.

Threaded together along a thin and thoroughly predictable plotline involving a fictional 19th-century submarine expedition to the Mediterranean, this low-budget item assembles a hodgepodge of facts about Minoans and mazes, underwater archaeology, mapmaking history and theories about Atlantis. It lays these out along with easily spotted “clues” to the legendary |

island’s location on old documents and artifacts. Many of said clues are short messages slightly hidden behind a substitution code that uses modified Roman capitals. Exceptionally lazy readers can skip to the end to find the translations, along with solutions to other conundrums posed during the expedition’s contrived misadventures. Printed on heavy stock with an occasional side flap, the spreads all offer a visual jumble of narrative blocks, small historical images, photos of live models in period dress and new art to fill in the gaps.

Undisguised ephemera. (Novelty. 10-12)

Krause, Ute Translated by Krause, Ute Illus. by Krause, Ute NorthSouth (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-7358-4091-1 Young Nick outfoxes a greedy knight as well as a company of thieves to rescue his oppressed medieval village.

The setting here is an age-worn town, sometime in the Middle Ages, with a Central European feel, venerable but struggling

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“Earthy, vigorous characters and prose ground the narrative in the world we know, yet its themes are deep as the sea.” from the brides of rollrock island

under the boot of a bloated, cruel tyrant. Nick has been forced into servitude at Sir Nestor the Nasty’s castle because his mother is in debt to the knight. Nestor has more than he will ever have need, but that’s the point: Greed breeds greed. All day long, it’s chop wood, fetch water, do the dishes, and then do it again. Nick connives to make his escape and stumbles into the knight’s treasury in the process. He grabs one glowing coin and swings to freedom, only to land in the hands of a band of robbers who are only too happy to have someone to chop their wood, fetch water, and do the dishes. But Nick plays on their greed and soon enough has them swimming in the moat with Nestor’s alligators, right along with Nestor, as he puts the golden coin to good work. On one level, the story is simple fun, as are the illustrations, but scratch it just a little and it has much to say about the universality of greed and how wealth finds meaning when it is put to use for the common good.

A nicely etched story of doing the right thing in a trying world. (Picture book. 4-8)

THE BETRAYAL OF THE LIVING

Lake, Nick Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-4424-2679-5 Series: Blood Ninja, 3 Meditating after destroying Lord Oda, vampire ninja Taro embarks on a quest to slay a dragon that has been troubling the city of Edo, home of the shogun.

Dragons are not the only troubles ravaging Japan; droughts and rice shortages have killed many peasants, and the dead have been returning in greater numbers and hungrier than ever before. As Taro searches for the legendary sword Kusanagi, he must also confront his father, Lord Tokugawa—and he must make sacrifices of his closest friends. Riddled with flashbacks, side narratives and more lore than ever before, Lake’s third entry in the Blood Ninja series surpasses the bloated Revenge of Lord Oda (2010) in slow pacing and needless exposition. Previously significant characters are reduced to cameo appearances in order to make space for complicated mythology lectures, recounts of past battles and those characters’ own backstories. Brief moments of tension build around Taro and Hana’s complex relationship, but there’s little drama anywhere else.

Attempting to wrap up all possible plots instead results in an unwieldy soap opera with none of the ninja action and excitement the first volume promised.

For the trilogy’s fans only. (Horror. 12 & up)

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THE BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND

Lanagan, Margo Knopf (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-375-86919-8 978-0-375-98930-8 e-book 978-0-375-96919-5 PLB In this spellbinding, intricately layered novel, the Printz Honor winner (Tender Morsels, 2008) puts her unique spin on selkies—haunting, mysterious, seal-human shape-shifters in a world of hardscrabble fishing villages, lonely islands and cold, restless seas.

At the story’s heart is unattractive, abused Misskaella, whose harsh life on Rollrock Island changes when, at age 9, she awakens to powers that include an exhilarating, terrifying connection to the island’s seals. Left largely unguided to develop her gifts, Misskaella grows up unloved, unmarried and feared.

A secret joy makes life bearable, but loss soon follows. When she learns to draw forth a beautiful woman from a seal, life changes again. Island men set aside their human wives—girls and matrons who once ridiculed Misskaella—and pay whatever she asks for seal wives. Beautiful, strange, sad, they’re truly loved by the husbands and sons who refuse to see their unhappiness. Earthy, vigorous characters and prose ground the narrative in the world we know, yet its themes are deep as the sea.

Daniel, son of a human father and his seal wife, wonders why “whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.” Intentions and actions, cause and effect are untidy and complicated, raising questions that will require generations to answer.

Bracing, powerful, resonant. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

ANDY SQUARED

Lavoie, Jennifer Bold Strokes Books (243 pp.) $11.95 paperback | Sep. 18, 2012 978-1-60282-743-1 Seventeen-year-old twins Andrew and Andrea Morris share everything until Ryder Coltrane arrives on the scene.

In their small New York town, Andrew and Andrea are stars of their respective soccer teams at school and are hoping for scholarships to the same college. Both are popular. Andrew dates a new girl every couple months, but he never feels comfortable in the relationships. Ryder has moved to town to stay with his aunt and uncle while his parents are deployed to Germany, and he joins the twins’ small group of close friends. Andrew notices stirrings of strange feelings when Ryder is near. When Ryder offers a kiss, Andrew takes him up on it, and the two begin a secret relationship. However, secrets are hard to keep in small towns, especially from someone as close as a twin sister. Lavoie’s

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debut may be well-intentioned, but the tale is buried in pedestrian prose and larded through with details and scenes that do little to nothing to advance the plot or develop the characters.

The situations may be realistic, but the characters don’t speak, and often don’t act, like real people.

Only for the largest and most well-used LGBT collections. (Fiction. 14-17)

TREVOR

Lecesne, James Seven Stories (96 pp.) $14.95 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-1-60980-420-6 978-1-60980-421-3 e-book Trevor, after which LGBT helpline the Trevor Project is named, began its life as a theater piece, was sold as a short film in 1997, and here is adapted to a contemporary setting in novella form.

Thirteen-year-old Trevor narrates in a voice that is initially exuberant. He wants more attention from his parents and seeks it by theatrically pretending to be dead. He loves Lady Gaga and is surprised when his best friend Zac derisively suggests he shelve his Gaga Halloween costume in favor of something “less gay.” Zac ultimately shuns Trevor and so does the new friend Trevor finds after Zac. Finally, after a bullying incident at school, Trevor attempts suicide (leaving a suicide note that requests that “Born This Way” be played at his funeral). Trevor’s voice is engaging, but the novella is short enough that both the change in his character and the resolution happen jarringly quickly. The slightness of the novella is reinforced by pencil drawings that add warmth but give the impression of having been quickly sketched. Teen fiction about gay boys in middle-class, suburban homes struggling with their sexuality is common enough now that this volume is no longer groundbreaking.

Instead, it is simply a compassionate but slight portrait of a likable young person whose unique, impassioned spirit is dampened by bullying and homophobia. (Fiction. 12 & up)

THE SINISTER SWEETNESS OF SPLENDID ACADEMY

Loftin, Nikki Razorbill/Penguin (288 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-1-59514-508-6

A pinch of Grimm, a dash of Greek mythology and a heaping helping of fresh chills make for an irresistible contemporary fairy tale centering around a food enchantment.

A sparkling new school pops up in Lorelei’s neighborhood, and events conspire to make her and her brother enroll. Not that they resist—Splendid Academy has the most phenomenal |

playground they’ve ever seen, and Principal Trapp lets the kids run in the halls. As icing on the cake, food’s provided constantly, especially desserts. Everyone’s desk contains a magically refilling candy bowl, and the lunches and (oddly non-optional) breakfasts are succulent feasts. Rules barely exist; teachers balk only when a student doesn’t eat enough. Even at home, Lorelei awakens with “a sick, twisting hunger that felt like teeth chewing at my insides.” Readers familiar with “Hansel and Gretel” will smell the reason why these teachers push food. Lorelei is smart, but two obstacles block her: knowledge that “there [i]sn’t an adult in the world who would believe” the preposterous truth at the school’s core, and emotional baggage from her mother’s death a year ago. In clear, accessible prose with a sense of immediacy, Loftin smoothly melds Lorelei’s conviction that she’s “done something unforgivably evil” with the deadly danger hovering at school. Refreshingly, Lorelei’s learning disability (dysgraphia) is simply a fact of life, not a literary symbol.

Deliciously scary and satisfying. (Fantasy. 8-12)

SMASHED

Luedeke, Lisa McElderry (336 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 978-1-4424-2779-2 “If you drink some wine and there’s no one around to see it, does it still count against you?”

Katie’s counting that it won’t. A promising field-hockey player entering her senior year, an athletic scholarship is her ticket out of crummy little Deerfield, Maine. But she also loves the feeling she gets after three beers—and margaritas.

That summer, handsome Alec romances her with deep conversation, sweet gestures and tequila. When he’s drunk, though, his sweetness disappears, and in trying to get away, Katie, also drunk, jeopardizes both her athletic career and their lives. She also gives him a very dangerous hold over her, one that sends her into an alcohol-fueled despair. There’s little subtlety to this book, from the title and cover to the “scared straight” descriptions of Katie’s vomiting jags. Debut author Luedeke gives the likable Katie sound psychological underpinnings to her alcoholism—her beer-swilling father abandoned them, her winedrinking mother is hardly ever at home—and a truly hellish bind with Alec. She also gives her staunch friends, a supportive field-hockey coach, an awesome little brother and, eventually, a caring therapist. Add up the pieces, and the result is an aboveaverage problem novel that will have readers flipping the pages in a literary version of rubbernecking.

Katie’s tale is so clearly a cautionary one, though, it may not reach the audience that most needs it. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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STEPHEN AND THE BEETLE

Luján, Jorge Illus. by Carrer, Chiara Groundwood (36 pp.) $18.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-55498-192-2 A small boy’s response to a beetle in the garden triggers profound moral questions in this arresting visual tour de force.

When Stephen spies a wee beetle in his garden, he instinctively removes his shoe and raises his arm to crush it. Oblivious to its impending demise, the beetle goes “on about its business.”

Then Stephen pauses and wonders where the beetle is going and what it is doing. He muses, “If I drop my shoe…the day will go on just the same, except for one small thing.” Instead of killing the beetle, Stephen lays his head on the ground and observes it. Up close, the beetle resembles a “terrible triceratops” poised for attack. Then the beetle seems to remember something and walks off. This simple yet powerful life-or-death drama between the boy and the beetle is vividly captured in Carrer’s striking, highly original acrylic, ink pencil, oil pastel and collage illustrations. Using naive outlines, Expressionistic color washes, open spaces and constantly changing perspectives, she creates tension between the aggressive boy and the passive beetle. Initially Stephen dominates the page, but following the existential moment of choice when he realizes the consequences of his intended action, the beetle becomes the visual focus, eventually assuming gargantuan proportions during their eye-to-eye standoff.

A memorable lesson in mindfulness. (Picture book. 2-5)

FIRE IN THE STREETS

Magoon, Kekla Aladdin (336 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-2230-8

The Black Panthers seem to have the answers for Maxie and her friends, so when a traitor to the group is suspected, she is determined to find who is leaking information to the Chicago police.

Maxie and her brother Raheem are deeply involved with the Black Panther Party. The shooting of a close friend and ongoing conflicts with the Chicago police make the radical group seem like the only protection they can count on. Problems at home—their mother’s unemployment, drinking and various boyfriends—make the Panther office a refuge for Maxie, and she presses to become a real member: armed, trained and patrolling the streets like her brother. She is deemed too young, so when Maxie hears there may be a traitor in the Panthers, she decides to discover who it is and prove she is ready to take a real place in the organization. The discovery changes everything and forces Maxie to face almost 1510

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unbearable truths. In this companion to award-winning A Rock and the River (2009), Magoon explores the role the Black Panthers played in urban communities during the tumultuous times of the late ’60s. Maxie is a believable and feisty character. Her interactions with her brother and his efforts to be the parent their mother seems incapable of being both ring true, as does her relationship with Sam, still grieving the death of his brother.

Historical moments such as the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention strengthen the sense of time and place, but this is primarily an authentic story of a young person attempting to grasp where she will stand in the struggle.

A well-written, compelling trip to a past not often portrayed in children’s literature. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

MILLIE FIERCE

Manning, Jane Illus. by Manning, Jane Philomel (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 16, 2012 978-0-399-25642-4 Alluring, edgy watercolors with sharp angles show a tyke’s transformation from mild to monstrous and back again.

“Millie was too short to be tall, too quiet to be loud, and too plain to be fancy.” Pink-cheeked and limp-haired, Millie feels like nothing special. She’s ignored and harassed. Schoolmates tromp on her chalk sidewalk picture, walking “all over her flower, and over it, and over it, until it [i]s nothing more than a big, multicolored smudge.” Such bullying is beyond tolerance, and Millie Fierce emerges. From downcast and slouchy, “feeling like a smudge” herself, Millie becomes upright, hands on hips, eyebrows aggressively slanted. She “frizze[s] out her hair and ma[kes] the crazy eye.” She demands that grandpa “Look at me and my ferocity!” But Millie’s assertiveness ratchets too high. She flicks food, paints the dog blue, howls at a nonplussed moon and becomes a bully herself. Coming unsurprisingly full circle, Millie concludes that “she likes being good better than being fierce.” Manning’s intense colors feature fine and pointy details, and her paintings warrant more than a quick glance. It’s too bad that Millie’s symbolically fierce hairdo is a common style for curly-haired kids.

The spiky, colorful art is more interesting than the plot, but Millie’s fierceness in the middle will speak both to tots who’ve tried it and those who haven’t. (Picture book. 4-7)

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“A charming, affecting picture-book life of France’s most celebrated naive painter—Henri Rousseau.” from the fantastic jungles of henri rousseau

THE FANTASTIC JUNGLES OF HENRI ROUSSEAU

Markel, Michelle Illus. by Hall, Amanda Eerdmans (34 pp.) $17.00 | Aug. 30, 2012 978-0-8028-5364-6

A charming, affecting picture-book life of France’s most celebrated naive painter—Henri Rousseau.

Around 1884, when he was in his 40s, Rousseau determined that he needed to transcend his life as a customs officer and began to recreate himself as an artist. Though he had no formal training and few financial resources, he persevered and created countless canvases that showcased his unique, almost magical personal visions, visions that continue to resonate with young and old alike. Rousseau was ridiculed repeatedly by both critics and artists, yet he continued to create his exotic, seemingly unsophisticated paintings. His lush tropical scenes were fueled by visits to the botanic gardens; his exotic animals were inspired by visits to the zoo. Though he remained a perpetual outsider, the Parisian avant-garde eventually embraced the visionary Rousseau, honoring him at a 1908 banquet (organized by Picasso himself). Markel’s simple, poetic text (“tropical plants fruit and flower into garlands, rockets, and rosettes of color”) is matched with Hall’s vivid, venturesome illustrations.

The bright watercolor-and-acrylic paintings have an impressive vitality and wonderfully channel Rosseau’s fantastic motifs and his characteristic use of flattened shapes and perspectives.

This lovely, child-friendly biography evokes and celebrates this fabulous naif. (author and illustrator notes) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)

APPLE

McClure, Nikki Illus. by McClure, Nikki abramsappleseed (40 pp.) $12.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-4197-0378-2 Primitive-looking cut-paper illustrations depict an apple’s travels from tree to kitchen to backpack to picnic and eventually into soil, where it takes root as a new seedling.

Run your fingers across this satisfyingly square book’s cover and feel the subtle, smooth outlines of a ripe apple and simple letters. You’ll immediately sense the solid, soothing storytelling at work inside, achieved through astute manipulations of paper.

McClure’s masterful cut-paper pictures appear more chunky and primitive here than in other works (To Market, to Market, 2011, etc.), appropriate in a book about plant processes as old as the Earth. Solitary verbs centered on white left-hand pages definitively describe the apple’s journey. Their red, all-uppercase, hand-drawn block lettering compliments rustic black-andwhite pictures that look a lot like whittled woodblock prints.

Beginning readers can latch onto these firm words, point at their hefty letters and discern sounds and meanings. Older |

readers will appreciate McClure’s use of a velvety, Valentine red to highlight the apple; these isolated instances of color pull children into each leg of a small odyssey, making a little apple’s peregrinations seem deserving of acute attention. Backmatter includes “The Life Cycle of an Apple Tree” and “Composting,” described in simple language that manages to be both sophisticated and conversational. Four panels capturing the four seasons sit on the opposite page: a summation of an apple’s year in pictures and an assured ending.

This deconstructed lesson in plant regeneration, composting and life cycles will reach apple-eating readers of many ages. (Picture book. 3-8)

JUDY MOODY AND THE BAD LUCK CHARM McDonald, Megan Illus. by Reynolds, Peter Candlewick (176 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-3451-3

Judy Moody has an amazing run of good luck, perhaps due to the wonderful lucky coin she’s started carrying.

Imagine winning prize after prize from The Claw—a fishingfor-stuffed-animals arcade game. That’s what happens to Judy with her new lucky penny. The good fortune doesn’t stop there, however. She bowls a prizewinning game at a birthday party, and the tough word she’s asked to spell in front of her third-grade class just happens to be posted on the bulletin board. Good luck can’t last forever though; she drops her lucky penny in the toilet and then misspells the very first word during the class spelling bee. She’s then asked to accompany classmate and bee winner Jessica to Washington, D.C., to babysit a pet piglet—that she accidentally almost loses. Character development is minimal but, Holy Baloney! McDonald’s lively style still has lots of youngreader appeal, even after all these years and outings. Quirky black-and-white illustrations on almost every page accompany the large-font and good-humored text. Nothing truly compelling happens, but all of Judy’s adventures are amusing and in sync with a third-grader’s experience. The brisk pace and familiar situations are likely to keep young readers and listeners engaged.

Another enjoyable outing with predictable Judy, just like a pleasant visit with an old friend. (Fiction. 6-9)

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“…quiet illustrations embellish the spare text by casting glowing moonlight on a bevy of eerie, silly, fantastical extraterrestrials in nocturnal purples, blues and greens.” from even aliens need snacks

EVEN ALIENS NEED SNACKS

McElligott, Matthew Illus. by McElligott, Matthew Walker (40 pp.) $14.99 | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-8027-2398-7

When his summer snack stand fails to attract family and neighbors, an enterprising young chef with a flair for the unusual draws some very weird customers from way out of town.

This creative young boy likes to help his mom cook and make up his own recipes. His sister finds his eggplant, mustard, and lemonade smoothie disgusting and warns him that no one in the world or the universe would eat what he cooks.

Undaunted, he builds a snack stand, but no one comes for his waffles, smoothies and sandwiches. Just as the boy gives up, a flying saucer lands near the shack one night, and his first alien customer samples the mushroom iced tea. Word spreads through the galaxy, and creatures line up nightly for their favorite dishes: Swiss-cheese doughnut holes, turnip-side-down cake, sponge cake with leeks, and bean puffs. But when the boy mixes all his favorite ingredients into Galactic Pudding, he may have gone too far for even his far-out clientele. Rendered in ink, pencil and digital techniques, quiet illustrations embellish the spare text by casting glowing moonlight on a bevy of eerie, silly, fantastical extraterrestrials in nocturnal purples, blues and greens.

Whimsical pairing of creatures and snacks—an enormous critter with a giant mouthful of teeth loves the toothpaste soup, for instance—proves especially rib­-tickling.

Tasty fare for alien fans. (Picture book. 4-8)

THE GHOST ROADS

McNamee, Eoin Wendy Lamb/Random (336 pp.) $16.99paper $19.99 | $10.99 e-book Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-385-73821-7 978-0-385-90714-9 paperback 978-0-375-98592-8 e-book Series: Ring of Five, 3

in both places. Double-crosses and betrayals abound, keeping readers’ attention and building anticipation of a rip-roaring ending—which does not disappoint. Fans of the first two books in this suspenseful and engrossing series will be totally satisfied, while skillful integration of previous events will enable newcomers to follow the story.

Surprises, plot twists and shocking revelations characterize this book and deliver the proper ending for a splendid trilogy. (Fantasy. 11-15)

PLUTO VISITS EARTH

Metzger, Steve Illus. by Lee, Jared Orchard (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-545-24934-8

Angry at learning he’s been demoted to a dwarf planet, Pluto pays a visit to Earth, where a boy’s reassurance satisfies

his need to be special.

After Speedy the space rock tells him about his new status, Pluto seeks help from other planets on his journey to demand reclassification. Unfortunately, they’re too busy, too scared, too vain, too bossy and too distracted. Metzger’s personified planets appear as large, round, expressive faces in Lee’s whimsical pen-and-ink illustrations. Some speak in speech bubbles.

Varying in size and spread, these images also show a variety of surprising travelers whizzing about. (Don’t miss the snowman astronaut.) The near-black of space is effectively rendered with hundreds of scribbled lines; pastel daubs show the blue of Earth and Pluto’s purple rage. The author includes some actual facts, supplemented by an afterword describing Pluto’s discovery, composition and moons, as well as the International Astronomical Union’s current definition of a planet, which the one-time ninth planet doesn’t meet. This laudable attempt to present the most recent understanding of the solar system to very young readers and listeners also demonstrates science’s rapidly changing state: Pluto’s most recently discovered fourth moon, still unnamed, is not included.

Playful science for preschool and the early elementary years. (Picture book. 4-7)

This finale to the Ring of Five trilogy demonstrates the skills that make its author so successful in creating fantasy and thriller stories. It is a (very suspenseful) delight to read.

Danny Caulfield is on the run. His archenemy, Ambrose Longford, head of the Ring of Five, has infiltrated the Upper World, convincing the authorities that Danny is a dangerous threat to both worlds. In his journey back to Wilsons Academy of the Devious Arts, Danny travels the ghost roads, finds a resistance group founded by his parents and sails on a mysterious river that passes through both worlds. Known characters reappear, and new ones join the roster. Danny’s odyssey through the Upper and Lower Worlds takes readers to unexpected locales 1512

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KISSING SHAKESPEARE

Mingle, Pamela Delacorte (352 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $20.99 Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-385-74196-5 978-0-375-98881-3 e-book 978-0-375-99034-2 PLB The only thing that’s not predictable about this time-travel romance is its exceptionally silly premise. |

Stephen Langford, a 16th-century time traveler, has a vision that the 17-year-old William Shakespeare may opt to join the priesthood instead of going on to write his plays and sonnets. So he travels to 21st-century Boston, where he plucks Miranda Graham, scion of a Shakespearean acting family, to go back to 1581 Lancashire with him to seduce Shakespeare. Mm-hmmm. Posing as Stephen’s sister Olivia, Miranda infiltrates the household of Stephen’s uncle, a closet Catholic who is housing both fledgling schoolmaster Shakespeare and enemy of the state Edmund Campion, leader of a Jesuit mission to convert England’s Protestants.

Miranda/Olivia adjusts to 16th-century life with ludicrous ease, despite its hygienic idiosyncrasies (public use of toothpicks) and her frequent lapses into 21st-century diction. Though she finds the idea of losing her virginity to Shakespeare titillating (and enjoys helping him write The Taming of the Shrew), it will surprise no one that she falls in love with the hunky Stephen instead. The tepid mystery revolving around the Privy Court investigation of Campion’s whereabouts is likewise underwhelming in its suspense. Vague waves of the authorial hand attempt to “explain” Stephen’s visions and time-traveling ability, but only the astonishingly incurious Miranda will accept them.

Despite the author’s obvious love of Shakespeare, this offering achieves only inanity. (Fantasy romance. 12 & up)

KATERINA’S WISH

Mobley, Jeannie McElderry (256 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-3343-4

Thirteen-year-old Katerina and her little sisters want to believe in their dreams, but life in a Colorado coal camp threatens to turn them into pipe dreams.

Take one maybe-magical carp and three sisters who believe in wishes, stir them together with an evil shopkeeper and add a dash of romance, and you have one dandy first novel. Katerina’s sisters wish for little hair ribbons and plum dumplings when they find a special fish, but big sister has appropriately bigger plans. She wishes that her family could leave the coal town and have the farm they hoped to own when they left Bohemia for America in the late 1800s. But dreams are tricky things, easily dashed when real life interferes.

This is a world where the coal company owns everything, pays hardworking immigrants in scrip that can only be used at the company store, separates the workers by nationality so they cannot organize and, worst of all, ignores safety regulations. Weaving rich details of life in a mining town at the turn of the 20th century with the pacing of a good old-fashioned historical romance and conveying it all in Katerina’s heartfelt voice, Mobley has constructed a world where one determined teenager with brains for business, the bravery to stand up for herself and the ability to find love help make dreams come true.

Top-notch. (Historical fiction. 9-14)

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TOPPLING

Murphy, Sally Illus. by James, Rhian Nest Candlewick (128 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-5921-9 An Australian boy obsessed with “toppling” dominoes finds his world wobbling when his best friend develops cancer.

John collects domino tiles, which he arranges in long, complex patterns that he then knocks over.

He’d like nothing better than “to play dominoes / all day, every day,” causing his sister Tess to call him “nerd boy.” John’s best friend, Dominic, is “fun / and funny / and honest / and pretty cool.” Other pals include smart Joseph, jokester Christian and Tran from Vietnam. John admits he’s “not smart / or funny / or from far away. / I’m just me.” When their fifth-grade teacher assigns individual research projects, John naturally picks dominoes as his topic, but he’s soon distracted and worried when he learns Dominic has a tumor on his kidney requiring surgery and chemotherapy. Afraid his best friend may die and unsure of how to act, John tries to think of what he can do to help. In the end, he and his pals find the perfect way to give Dominic the support he needs. John gives his story immediacy and authenticity by speaking in colloquial first-person, present-tense free verse. Black-and-white illustrations capture the ups and downs of friends trying to keep their buddy from toppling.

Engaging and poignant. (Verse novel. 8-12)

WHAT WILL YOU BE, GRANDMA?

Newman, Nanette Illus. by Chichester Clark, Emma Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-7636-6099-4 Little Lily asks her beloved grandma, “What do you think you’ll be when you grow up?”

The conversation that results from this turnabout question is full of wonderful imaginings and earnest wishes that will enchant many young readers. As Lily dreams up possible vocations, Grandma always replies with a gentle response that is ever respectful of her granddaughter’s suggestions. Perhaps Grandma could “grow wings and fly around the world…[o]r become an artist and paint rainbows on children’s faces…[or] a gardener and grow flowers that never die,” or even “a fairy with a magic wand who stops rooms from getting messy.” While Newman paces the text with a steady flow of quiet yet enthusiastic dialogue, it is Chichester Clark’s detailed illustrations in watercolor and pencil that truly shine. This grandma is not a stout gray-haired lady but a spunky, lithe, bespectacled brunette who happily takes part in every flight of fancy—sometimes decked out in feathers or looking quite fetching in everything from butterfly wings to a wizard hat—until it is time for bed. Young

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readers will take the cue from this slightly silly tale and enjoy coming up with their own ideas for what their grandparents or other family members might grow up to become.

Ideal as a beginning exploration of fantasy or as a discussion starter about future careers. (Picture book. 3-5)

TWO OR THREE THINGS I FORGOT TO TELL YOU

Oates, Joyce Carol HarperTeen (288 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Aug. 21, 2012 978-0-06-211047-3 978-0-06-211049-7 e-book At the heart of Oates’ riveting and poignant story of three teenage girls in crisis is the notion that a “secret can be too toxic to expose to a friend.”

In part one, it’s mid-December of their senior year at Quaker Heights Day School, a prep school in an affluent New Jersey suburb. Merissa, “The Perfect One,” has just been accepted early admission at Brown, with more good news to come. When she desperately needs a release—from the pressures to succeed, hypocrisy and her parents’ disintegrating marriage—she secretly embraces cutting. Part two flashes back to 15 months earlier, when smart, funny, edgy, unpredictable Tink, a former child star, transfers into their junior class and changes everything. Part three picks back up in the winter of their senior year and focuses on Nadia, who falls prey to sexts and cyberbullying. Tink’s suicide is revealed early on, and yet she remains a believable and critical touchstone for Merissa and Nadia, part of the girls of Tink Inc. The author is a master at portraying the complex, emotional inner lives of these teens, and their contemporary adolescent voices and perceptions (and misperceptions) ring true. The psychological dramas, though numerous, are deftly handled. What appears at first to be a bleak worldview does in fact make room for healing, change and standing up for what’s right.

Intense, keenly insightful, nuanced and affecting. (Fiction. 14 & up)

DINOSAUR COUNTDOWN

Oldland, Nicholas Illus. by Oldland, Nicholas Kids Can (24 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-55453-834-8

rearing. The eight “munching herbivores” have plants in their mouths, but the four “roaring carnivores” just have open mouths full of teeth. Sadly, a glossary is lacking. The featured species include Deinosuchus, pterodactyls, Deinonychus, Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus. The black-outlined Photoshopped dinosaurs will be the draw for kids. Patterned in earth tones of greens, browns and tans, they feature dots, stripes and splotches, along with somewhat goofy (and toothy) grins. They are easy to count against the stark white background, although some pages have more than the stated number: “ten / striding velociraptors / (and one looming predator)” and “seven / sauntering parasaurolophus / (and what’s that flying overhead?).” The creatures fill each spread, with the numeral in the top left-hand corner, the text on the right. A pronunciation guide is given, but parents just joining the dino bandwagon will have to flip back and forth, as it is on the last page, and, unfortunately, there is no further information about the dinosaurs.

Large collections with popular dinosaur sections may want to add this, but otherwise, it is one to miss. (Picture book. 2-5)

BEARS IN BEDS

Parenteau, Shirley Illus. by Walker, David Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-5338-5 Bouncy rhyming couplets tell the story of five bears and their bedtime routine.

Big Brown Bear is the first to climb into bed, but he is soon joined by four little bears: Yellow, Fuzzy, Calico and Floppy.

“Out goes the light! / It’s cozy in there. / Five warm beds / hold five tired bears.” But the peace is soon shattered by the sounds of a storm that scares the little ones out of their beds and into the safe, snuggly bed of Big Brown Bear. He knows just what to do: read a story “about three bears / and a pesky girl / with golden hair.” Soft acrylics in gentle colors complement this bedtime story that ends just where any good bedtime story should—with everyone snoring. Though the rhymes rely on the “there-bear” combination too often, this will be a great story for new readers who want to practice their skills by reading aloud to their younger siblings. Easy to read and a breeze to memorize, these little bears will soon be part of many a bedtime routine.

Little bears who are afraid of storms or who have trouble sleeping will want to cuddle up with these five friends.

(Picture book. 2-5)

Oldland provides dinosaur lovers who are learning to count down from 10 with some fodder, but there is no story here, nor a capital letter to speak of.

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“Sweethearts of any age will celebrate the joy of love and shared simple pleasures.” from apple cake

TURKEYS WE HAVE LOVED AND EATEN (AND OTHER THANKFUL STUFF)

Park, Barbara Illus. by Brunkus, Denise Random House (144 pp.) $11.99 | $9.99 e-book | PLB $14.99 Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-375-87063-7 978-0-307-97435-8 e-book 978-0-375-97063-4 PLB Series: Junie B., First Grader It’s bound to be a special Thanksgiving feast when Junie B. and her classmates are celebrating.

The school is holding a Thankful Contest, and the very patient Mr. Scary thinks his class is the one to win it. He calls them, “definitely the most creative first graders I’ve ever had.”

When the class puts together a list on the board, he has second thoughts. Canned cranberry jelly, exploding biscuits, “Nipsy Doodles,” rainbow sprinkles and especially item number five (toilet paper) have Mr. Scary frowning his eyebrows. While the class discussion of freedom (and why none of the first graders has it) is worth the price of admission, the rest of the story bounces from one out-of-control episode to another. While Junie B. still has her own irrepressible voice and worldview, it’s hard to believe that she is still using baby talk (bestest, hottish, sweatish) after 1 1/2 years in school and even harder to believe that nemesis May would engage in rough pretend play (with a stuffed elephant, no less) in November of first grade. It would have been fun to see Junie B. debunk some of the traditional Thanksgiving rituals: the questionable friendship feast, the silly Pilgrim costumes and the use of the word “Indian” (by the teacher).

Junie B. still brings a smile, but sometimes it’s an uncomfortable one. (Fiction. 5-8)

APPLE CAKE A Recipe for Love Paschkis, Julie Illus. by Paschkis, Julie Harcourt (32 pp.) $16.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-0-547-80745-4

Alphonse lures Ida away from her book by making a cake for her.

“Beautiful, kind, brilliant Ida… / always had her nose in a book.” So begins this lighthearted and airy tribute to the powers of love and persistence. Alphonse tries to be interesting, but he is unable to get Ida’s attention. He presents her with bouquets and butterflies and serenades her with guitar music, but still her eyes never leave the pages. He makes a cake, which turns into quite a production indeed. Paschkis takes a marvelous detour from her familiar style here. The pages are open, filled with white space and almost translucent gouache colors. Readers see Alphonse going to the ends of the earth for |

the ingredients: riding a horse up a mountain for apples, harvesting butter from the sun and sugar from clouds, climbing a tree to grab an egg from a nest, spooning salt from the sea and catching flour and baking powder from the sky. If all this weren’t enough to prove his love, Alphonse dives into the bowl himself to stir the cake! The smell of the cake baking eventually gets Ida’s attention, releasing a flood of butterflies and sunshine onto the final pages.

Sweethearts of any age will celebrate the joy of love and shared simple pleasures. (Picture book. 4 & up)

DESERT BATHS

Pattison, Darcy Illus. by Rietz, Kathleen Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | paper $9.95 | Aug. 10, 2012 978-1-607185-253 978-1-607185-345 paperback Throughout a day and night, a dozen U.S. desert animals demonstrate that not all animals use water to bathe.

This intriguing combination of biology and earth science follows the model of Prairie Storms (2011), by the same pair. Here, while a short text describes an animal’s behavior, the illustrations also reveal the time of day. From the turkey vulture’s early-morning sun bath to the bobcat kitten’s tongue-wash late at night, each creature is shown in its natural habitat in Rietz’s realistic paintings, done with a mix of watercolor and digital effects. As in the previous title, these double-page spreads are framed with unlabeled but relevant border designs. Six pages of backmatter include “fun facts,” an adaptations matching game, a U.S. map, further information about animal cleaning methods and telling time by the sun’s position, and instructions for making a sundial, but no index. The creatures described are fascinating, but the text lacks an explanatory, unifying introduction or conclusion. It is only through careful reading of the backmatter that readers will discover the point of the text—the variety of ways animals get rid of dirt, germs, bugs and parasites—or the orientation of the illustrations (looking north) that demonstrates the time of day.

A useful classroom teaching tool; it is also available in Spanish. (Informational picture book. 5-9)

A WARM WINTER TAIL

Pearson, Carrie A. Illus. by Wald, Christina Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | paper $9.95 | Aug. 10, 2012 978-1-607185-291 978-1-607185-383 paperback A cozy “tail” compares the adaptations animals and humans have for sur-

viving winter’s chill.

Baby animals ask grown-ups how humans keep warm in the winter. A fox kit asks, “How do humans keep warm in the winter,

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“A friendly little whodunit results in an unexpected romance between a bear and a bunny.” from bear in love

Mama? / Do they wrap their tails tight / ’round their bodies just right / as heaters to chase out the chill?” Mama answers, “No fur tail for draping, / for covering and caping; / their blankets are cotton and wool.” Each baby in turn asks if humans adapt as they do. The wide variety of animals portrayed ensures that most winter adaptations are covered, though camouflage is lacking. The responses vary in their success (or failure) at conveying humans’ comparable ways of combatting the cold, and the rhythm sometimes stumbles. The “For Creative Minds” section includes a spread of extensive further information and two pages of activities—matching animal to adaptation (the only place where the animals are identified by captioned thumbnails) and then sorting the animals into their four classes.

More activities and learning materials are on the publisher’s website. Wald’s lifelike illustrations incorporate speech bubbles for the babies’ questions and include humorous imaginings of how humans would look with animals’ adaptations, e.g., a child with butterfly wings.

A good first look at adaptations that stands above others despite its sometimes imperfect comparisons to humans. (Informational picture book. 3-7)

CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS AND THE TERRIFYING RETURN OF TIPPY TINKLETROUSERS

Pilkey, Dav Illus. by Pilkey, Dav Scholastic (304 pp.) $9.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-545-17534-0 Series: Captain Underpants, 9

Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.

Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series.

George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…

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Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)

BEAR IN LOVE

Pinkwater, Daniel Illus. by Hillenbrand, Will Candlewick (40 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-4569-4 A friendly little whodunit results in an unexpected romance between a bear and a bunny.

Bear lives in “a little cave, just big enough for him,” but it turns out that he has room for companionship. One morning he comes across a carrot lying on a flat rock, and not sure what it is, the bear decides to take a nibble. Delighted, he walks through the woods singing a song evocative of Winnie-the-Pooh’s hums.

Two carrots appear the next day, and Bear begins to wonder who has left them. “Crunchy things! Three of them!” he exclaims on day three, and then he finds a whole pile of carrots on the fourth day. “Someone must like me to leave these good things,” he muses, and then he stumbles across a honey tree and decides to bring a piece of honeycomb for his secret admirer. This act of reciprocity instigates an ongoing gift exchange, culminating when the bear finds a bunny hiding in a bush. Mutual admiration overflows as the no-longer-secret admirers offer appreciation for the gifts they exchanged and then join in song at book’s end. While the story is awfully sweet, Hillenbrand’s mixedmedia illustrations are what distinguish this picture book.

Faintly rendered backgrounds offset characters and foreground settings, lending a truly fresh look to the compositions.

There’s lots to love here. (Picture book. 3-5)

THAT MAD GAME Growing Up in a Warzone: An Anthology of Essays from Around the Globe Powers, J.L.--Ed. Cinco Puntos (230 pp.) $16.95 paperback | Aug. 7, 2012 978-1-935955-22-1

Seventeen wrenching accounts, most previously unpublished and either personal or based on interviews, from witnesses who as children or teenagers were caught up in wars or internecine violence.

From Marnie Mueller, born of non-Japanese parents in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II, to three pseudonymous young refugees belonging to the savagely persecuted Chin minority who fled Burma in the mid-2000s, the subjects of these essays range widely in age and background.

They have in common inner wounds that persist long after outer ones have healed or, at least, scarred over. Except for Fito Avitia, a resident of Juárez, Mexico, determined to stay put despite his

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city’s wild tides of crime and violence, displacement runs as a common thread through these narratives. It takes the form of either physical exile or, in the case of Phillip Cole Manor, who writes of his tour in Vietnam and Jerry Mathes’ portrait of his father, who came back from that war with PTSD, profound damage to senses of place and self. Explicit descriptions of atrocities make disturbing reading in some entries, though all are, in the end, uplifting tales of survival that offer a mix of (as the editor puts it) “loss, anger, fear, heartbreak and forgiveness.”

A romantic encounter between a Serb and a Croat, and a Kabul youth’s memories of repeated encounters with a smitten “Talib in Love” even add lighter notes.

War’s most vulnerable victims, stepping up to have their say. (introductory and biographical notes) (Nonfiction. 16 & up)

BUS DRIVER

Poydar, Nancy Illus. by Poydar, Nancy Holiday House (32 pp.) $15.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-8234-2411-5 Written for a slightly younger audience, this lacks the sparkle and story that mark Poydar’s other books.

When young Max finds a toy bus driver on the sidewalk, it immediately becomes his most beloved toy (there is no mention made of trying to track down the former owner). The two go everywhere together, which is a problem since Max can’t seem to keep track of the tiny toy. The preschooler and his mommy seem to be searching for Bus Driver on almost every spread (finding him at the last minute each time), but readers don’t get to do the same. Poydar’s acrylic illustrations rob children of the chance to search for him, although he may be so small so as to preclude that—as it is, he is a speck in most spreads. Readers who pay attention to the copyright page may spot the bus driver bouncing out of a toy bus, grabbed by a young girl after the pair were left by the garbage with a “free” sign attached. In the end, Bus Driver is reunited with his bus, once again “free” and next to the trash can, waiting for the next lucky taker—Max. The thin story, lackluster text and the missed opportunity in the illustrations add up to make this one to skip— for tales of lost toys, stick with Karen Beaumont and David Catrow’s Where’s My T-R-U-C-K? (2011) or Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny books. (Picture book. 3-5)

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SKY COLOR

Reynolds, Peter H. Illus. by Reynolds, Peter H. Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.00 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-7636-2345-6 Reynolds returns to a favorite topic— creative self-expression—with characteristic skill in a companion title to The Dot (2003) and Ish (2004).

Marisol is “an artist through and through. So when her teacher told her class they were going to paint a mural…, Marisol couldn’t wait to begin.” As each classmate claims a part of the picture to paint, Marisol declares she will “paint the sky.”

But she soon discovers there is no blue paint and wonders what she will do without the vital color. Up to this point, the author uses color sparingly—to accent a poster or painting of Marisol’s or to highlight the paint jars on a desk. During her bus ride home, Marisol wonders what to do and stares out the window.

The next spread reveals a vibrant departure from the gray tones of the previous pages. Reds, oranges, lemon yellows and golds streak across the sunset sky. Marisol notices the sky continuing to change in a rainbow of colors…except blue. After awakening from a colorful dream to a gray rainy day, Marisol smiles. With a fervent mixing of paints, she creates a beautiful swirling sky that she describes as “sky color.” Fans of Reynolds will enjoy the succinct language enhanced by illustrations in pen, ink, watercolor, gouache and tea.

Share this feel-good title with those who love art and those who can appreciate the confidence-building triumph of solving a problem on one’s own—creatively. (Picture book. 4-6)

ME AND MOMMA AND BIG JOHN

Rockliff, Mara Illus. by Low, William Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-7636-4359-1

A son tells of his mother’s new job cutting stone for “Big John,” New York City’s yet-unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

He focuses his mother’s experiences at the cathedral through his own lens: She comes home covered in gray dust after daily labor on a single stone. Is his mother’s work like an artist’s, whose pictures hang in the museum? When the family visits Big John’s stone yard and soaring interiors, he understands that her contribution—painstakingly crafted, yet so small—will take its place “high above the people, Momma’s stone touching the sky.” Drawing from historical details about a 25-year apprenticeship program begun in 1982, Rockliff ’s lyrical text celebrates collaboration and communion, whether as voices rising in a cathedral hymn or among the skilled workers who labored over more than a century. Low (Old Penn Station, 2007) renders many gorgeous digital spreads, articulating the extraordinary light

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and deep shadows within and outside the architecturally splendid cathedral. Combining the look of thick, fuzzy-edged pastel on paper with gouache on textured board, the illustrations are less successful in the figurative depictions. Awkwardly drawn shoes, feet and legs, along with some variation in the appearance of the daughter, are minor distractions from the overall strong visual appeal.

An intriguing examination of the inside story of one of New York City’s most important and beloved monuments. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

THE GINGERBREAD MAN

Rodriguez, Béatrice NorthSouth (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-7358-4086-7

right gift for her leafy friend, Joni concludes that a new tree planted close by and a promise to continue to nurture her arboreal companions is the best way to observe the holiday. “I promise to protect you and water you and love you.…I’ll be good to the trees of the world.” Demure characters colored in the hues of pale spring create a peaceful atmosphere for this environmentally conscious holiday, which encourages a respect for the Earth’s natural offerings. Joni’s “thinking out loud” conversational dialogue is balanced against an omniscient narrator, providing an easy-to-interpret text. And while directed at a Jewish audience, the overall ecological message can be applied in just about any cultural milieu.

Ingenuous and sweet. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-8)

AFTER ELI

It’s all a lark in this quick and simple version of the tale—at least until someone gets eaten.

Rodriguez retains the fugitive cookie’s traditional refrain but casts the rest of the narrative in simple, noncumulative prose: “The horse joined in the chase. The gingerbread man laughed and laughed, until he came to a river.” In the cartoon illustrations, everyone involved in the chase dashes along smiling—the gingerbread man even delivers Bronx cheers to his pursuers—until, at the end, the fox climbs out of the river and flips the horrified homunculus into his maw. The repetition in more extended renditions of the story make for stronger, more rhythmic read-alouds, but newly independent readers should trot through this one with nary a stumble…and find for reward a mouthwatering recipe at the end. As in her wordless confections (The Chicken Thief, 2010, etc.), Rodriguez’ illustrations yield amusing, attention-rewarding details: the sunbathing cow with shades and sunscreen, the oven-mitted old woman, the horse reading quietly at the bottom of the hill—and the heap that results when cow, pig and humans fall on top of it.

Not the most flavorsome retelling, but worth a nibble.

(Picture book folk tale. 4-6)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TREE! A Tu B’Shevat Story

Rosenberg, Madelyn Illus. by Christy, Jana Whitman (24 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-8075-3151-8

Rupp, Rebecca Candlewick (256 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 978-0-7636-5810-6 Daniel (E.) Anderson looks back on the summer he fell in love and finally came to terms with his soldier brother’s death.

After Eli died in Iraq, Daniel added his initial to his own name and began compiling a Book of the Dead, a binder filled with his research on famous deaths. Three years later, still angry at his brother for joining the Army, the 14-year-old still keeps his book. Relevant entries, ranging from the princes in the Tower to Isadora Duncan and the 9/11 victims, begin each chapter of this poignant novel. Danny’s father is detached and displeased by everything; his mother, silent and withdrawn. But in the course of an idyllic summer spent with the beautiful Isabelle and her younger twin siblings, visiting from New York, Danny comes to terms with his brother’s death, finds a new, true friend in his dorky, formerly despised classmate Walter, and discovers that working on an organic farm is something he’s good at and cares about.

Danny’s nostalgic first-person narration includes interestingly quirky information as well as sweet moments. Middle school readers will see the inevitable end of this first love long before Danny faces it, grieving his new loss but grateful for his healing.

Far more than a summer romance, this is a tribute to those left behind. (Fiction. 11-15)

On the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the birthday of the trees, Joni strives to create a celebration befitting her old majestic tree.

She brings water; with friend Nate, she blows and blows the clouds away until the sun peeks out; she even places a large mud cupcake at the base of the tree’s trunk. Although the tree doesn’t eat the cupcake, it may look a little happier. Really, it’s a frustratingly unresponsive honoree. Determined to find the 1518

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“Don’t turn the pages too quickly; rather stop and feel the joie de vivre with which the master filled people of all ages all over the world.” from monsieur marceau

MONSIEUR MARCEAU Actor Without Words Schubert, Leda Illus. by DuBois, Gérard Neal Porter/Flash Point/ Roaring Brook (40 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-59643-529-2

Audiences thrilled to his mesmerizing performances, in which he spoke through his expressive body without uttering a single word.

Marceau was the world’s most popular and beloved mime. Born in France, he grew up watching and imitating Charlie Chaplin, star of silent films. World War II intruded and turned the Jewish teen into a war hero. At war’s end, he created Bip, his alter ego, who with makeup and costume “walks against the wind, but there is no wind.” Schubert’s spare text is both poetic and dramatic. DuBois’s oil paintings are brilliantly executed and saturated, with textured nuances. Images of Marceau fly across the page, delighting the eye, while close-ups highlight his extraordinary facial expressions.

Ordinary paper morphs into stage settings as Marceau dances against white or black backgrounds. One double-page spread depicts a costumed fish with sinuously expressive hands and feet.

Another presents seven views of Marceau in movement, updating a series of views of Marceau as a child. The pages set during World War II, in contrast, are a somber palette. Don’t turn the pages too quickly; rather stop and feel the joie de vivre with which the master filled people of all ages all over the world.

An exceptional life; a stunning achievement. (afterword, source notes, further reading) (Picture book biography. 4-10)

THE SPORTS PAGES

Scieszka, Jon--Ed. Walden Pond Press/ HarperCollins (272 pp.) $16.99 | paper $6.99 | $5.99 e-book Sep. 8, 2012 978-0-06-196378-0 978-0-06-196377-3 paperback 978-0-06-219014-7 e-book Series: Guys Read, 3 Ten writers and athletes contribute sports stories written exclusively for this volume.

The third installment in Scieszka’s Guys Read Library of Great Reading again seeks to lure young male readers into the world of books. Following Funny Business (2010) and Thriller (2011), The Sports Pages offers a smorgasbord of sportswriting—fiction and nonfiction—to appeal to every sports enthusiast. From baseball to football, ice hockey to track and mixed martial arts, there is plenty here for sports-minded readers to like, with lively action, humor and even a dose of mysticism in the form of magical grapefruit and a witch doctor. James Brown’s “The Choice” and Dustin Brown’s “Against All Odds” are fine nonfiction entries, akin to the motivational talks athletes often present at sports banquets. Tim |

Green’s “Find Your Fire” has the liveliest sports action, featuring a young offensive lineman learning to deal with changes in his life.

Maximilian Funk, in Anne Ursu’s “Max Swings for the Fences,” tries to fit into the social scene of his new school and chooses the wrong way, with disastrous consequences. (Chris Crutcher’s “The Meat Grinder” is slated for inclusion but was not seen.)

The stories here offer action, humor and lessons about life and may well do the trick of connecting boys and books.

(Short stories. 9-13)

DOUBLE TROUBLE

Seegert, Scott Illus. by Martin, John Egmont USA (192 pp.) $13.99 | $10.49 e-book | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-60684-372-7 978-1-60684-373-4 e-book Series: Vordak the Incomprehensible, 3 At last, the supervillain tells his side of the story.

Vordak wants you to buy this book. He’s so eager for you to read it that he’s made you a character in the story. Yes, you.

He demands: “Don’t you have studying or chores or your grandmother’s toenails to trim or something to occupy your time?”

And you answer: “Actually, I AM studying. I’m using this book to help me with my science class.” Once in a while, Vordak asks for advice on taking over the world. He has an evil plan, but his army of scientists keeps having accidents in the Cloning Chamber. By the end of the book, there are at least nine scientists, all named Fred. Every few pages, another clone appears. These sequences are the funniest in the book. In fact, the Freds are more entertaining than Vordak, who tends to say things like: “I’m brilliant enough to know if I wasn’t as brilliant as I thought I was!” Vordak is best taken in small doses, and by the end of the story, you may wish that you were the main character.

There’s a theory among comic-book readers that the supervillain is always more entertaining than the hero.

This book puts that theory to the test. (Humor. 9-12)

THE STONE GIRL

Sheinmel, Alyssa B. Knopf (224 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | PLB $19.99 Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-375-87080-4 978-0-307-97462-4 e-book 978-0-375-97080-1 PLB Sethie, seriously conflicted by the challenge of navigating the uncertainties of a not-quite-relationship with Shaw,

develops anorexia.

Previously an excellent, responsible student, Sethie, a senior, tries to live up to indifferent Shaw’s expectations for a good-time

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“Sheth’s first novel for younger readers...features a likable, determined protagonist, gentle humor and a familiar family situation.” from the no -dogs -allowed rule

girl, always available for quick sex and willing to share his abundant pot stash and booze. Never completely addressing these soul-subverting issues—all seemingly in sharp contrast to her previous behavior—Sethie instead begins to associate her selfworth and value to Shaw with her weight. New best friend Janey helpfully offers her bulimia tips but is less than honest about Shaw and his ultimate lack of interest in and respect for Sethie.

Third-person, present-tense narration adds an additional level of edginess to this already disturbing tale of self-loathing—and eventually even self-mutilation, as Sethie, spiraling ever downward, dabbles in cutting as well. Adults around her, including her mother, seem nearly unaware of her drinking/drug use/anorexia until a too-easy conclusion brings a hopeful resolution—undermining the potential impact. While Sethie’s negative behavior and disturbing mental landscape are vividly depicted, it’s less obvious how she became so deeply afflicted, information that might provide readers with a helpful warning.

Never an easy read with its unrelenting depiction of Sethie’s pain and adult inattentiveness, this effort provides some insight but little assistance with an important and challenging topic. (Fiction. 14 & up)

THE NO-DOGSALLOWED RULE

Sheth, Kashmira Illus. by Pearce, Carl Whitman (128 pp.) $14.99 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-8075-5694-8

Third-grader Ishan Mehra wages a successful campaign to repeal his mother’s no-dogs-allowed rule by gently introducing her to a neighbor’s dog.

Ishan’s original plan is to win his mother over by being especially nice and helpful. But things go wrong. His cooking makes a mess, his hall-painting makes a bigger one, and the sculpture he and his friends make with the desserts at a large community party is a big mistake. But when an elderly neighbor faints, Ishan has the presence of mind to call 9-1-1 and is allowed to keep the man’s dog for a few days—time enough to help his mother get over her childhood fears. Sheth’s first novel for younger readers (Boys Without Names, 2010, etc.) features a likable, determined protagonist, gentle humor and a familiar family situation. Hindi words and details of Indian-American culture—especially the food—are woven into the story, always with an explanation.

The first-person, present-tense narration includes short paragraphs, ample dialogue and illustrations every few pages (final art not seen). While the multicultural aspect of this title is important, its real strength is the familiarity of Ishan’s situation.

Elementary school readers will find it easy to identify with both his younger-brother troubles and his desperate desire for a dog.

Just right for aspiring pet owners. (Fiction. 6-9)

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UNWHOLLY

Shusterman, Neal Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-4424-2366-4 Series: Unwind, 2 After surviving the attack on the Happy Jack Harvest Camp, the heroes from Unwind (2007) lead the revolt against the Unwind Accord.

Connor, aka the Akron AWOL, now heads up the resistance at the Graveyard, an abandoned airfield where 700-plus unwind escapees live in hiding. His wheelchairbound girlfriend, Risa, who also survived the attack, serves as the Graveyard’s nurse. Lev, a former tithe, now leads missions to rescue other tithes from unwinding and sends them to a camp where they can cope. Enter Cam, a schizophrenic, teenage Frankenstein built from the body parts of 99 different unwound teens. Shusterman mercifully supplies a Q&A at the front of this sequel to help readers fill in details from Book 1 in the trilogy. He also does an expert job of plunging them headfirst into his disturbing, dystopic and dangerous future world where teenagers are either handed over by their parents or kidnapped for “unwinding,” or organ harvesting. While the plot moves quickly, the work definitely reads like a sequel—a good one. Shusterman is obviously setting the scene for a big climax in Book 3, and his only fault is excess. There are so many new characters and plot twists and segues that readers may feel overwhelmed or confused, but that won’t stop them from turning the pages.

A breathless, unsettling read. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

NO BOYZ ALLOWED

Simone, Ni-Ni Dafina/Kensington (240 pp.) $9.95 paperback | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-7582-4193-1 Street-smart, heartwarming and hopeful without being preachy, the latest from Simone (Upgrade U, 2011, etc.) opens with 16-year-old Gem and her little brother Malik arriving at another in a series of foster homes.

Readers of the author’s previous books will recognize Gem’s new foster family: Cousin Shake, Ms. Minnie, Ms. Grier and Ms. Grier’s daughter, Toi, and son, Man-Man. Although Malik is immediately won over by Cousin Shake’s warmhearted but goofy antics, Gem has grown distrustful and used to disappointment. In what feels almost like a fairy tale, however, Gem is taken under Man-Man’s wing and fortuitously reunited with Pop, the best friend she hasn’t seen or heard from since sixthgrade. Support system in place, Gem slowly builds a new life for herself. She meets a boy and starts a romance, develops a rivalry with one of Pop’s friends, and even makes moves toward playing basketball, a sport she loves but had given up. The dialogue and

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narrative voice are fresh, smart and cutting, full of clever comebacks and Internet-generation slang (S.M.H., “I am pissed.org”).

Unfortunately, a relationship conflict at the end is resolved in a way that seems to suggest boys should be trusted above girls.

Otherwise, warm, uplifting and entertaining. (Fiction.

12 & up)

POTTERWOOKIEE

Skye, Obert Illus. by Skye, Obert Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (256 pp.) $12.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-8050-9451-0 Series: Creature from My Closet, 2 The second doll-sized literary mashup to come out of a wimpy kid’s magic closet (see Wonkenstein, 2011) adds wizardly spells and, far more frequently, noxious smells to a standard catalog of preteen misadventures.

Having reintroduced his family (“I mean my mom calls me Ribert, and if she’s not humiliating me, she’s sleeping”), Robert explains the origins of the pocket companion he dubs “Hairy.”

He chattily goes on to record efforts to save his little buddy from rough friends, his little brother, a garbage truck and an aggressive owl, along with his repeated transformation into a dork whenever he runs into dreamboat neighbor Janae. Amid references to monkey waste, a modified version of Old Maid called “Yo Mama” and other strained laffs, he recruits said friends to reform a bully by tying the punk to a graveyard tree one night. He also creates what turns out to be a revolting concoction for a cooking contest in hopes of appearing on Average Chef, “TV’s third most watched reality cooking show.” Still sailing along in Jeff Kinney’s wake format-wise, Skye presents Rob’s tally of haps and mishaps in a mix of block print and frequent, wobbly line drawings with punch lines and side remarks in dialogue balloons. In the end, Hairy leaves his tiny wand as a keepsake and returns to the closet, setting the stage for Rob’s next visitor: Pinocula.

Maybe the next episode will be less derivative. There’s always hope. (Comic fantasy. 9-11)

HOME COURT

Stoudemire, Amar’e Illus. by Jessell, Tim Scholastic (144 pp.) $17.99 | paper $5.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-0-545-43169-9 978-0-545-38759-0 paperback Series: STAT: Standing Tall and Talented, 1 NBA star Stoudemire draws on his own childhood and nickname, STAT (Standing Tall and Talented), to pen the first in a series of chapter books that celebrate sports, smarts and friendship. |

Amar’e is a bright 11-year-old who loves many different things.

He is as at home on his skateboard, working on his jumps, as he is on a basketball court, working on his moves. He is a good student, and he enjoys warm relationships with his older brother and father. Friends want him to participate in their upcoming tournament, but Amar’e is reluctant to commit to one sport, something his father understands. “Son, we both know you’ve got a gift for basketball,” he says. “But your greatest gift is just being you.”

When a group of older boys make it impossible to play basketball on a neighborhood court, Amar’e devises a strategy to return the court to open play for the entire community. Working to resolve the conflict helps him understand the lessons of Dr. King. This first in a series of chapter books geared to young males hits all the major points in encouraging boys to read: sports, peer relationships, the value of hard work and family support. The basketball scenes are, not surprisingly, the strength of this serviceable narrative, and Amar’e is a likable protagonist.

Though heavy on message, this will help address the dearth of chapter books featuring children of color positively engaged in the normal adventures of life. (Fiction. 8-12)

THE BIRTHDAY CAKE MYSTERY

Tjong-Khing, Thé Illus. by Tjong-Khing, Thé Gecko Press (32 pp.) $17.95 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-1-8775-7910-3 A scene of pastoral calm and beauty spins out into chaos.

The story is told entirely in pictures, 12 busy two-page spreads. Many things are happening on a wide stretch of bright green grass, with the edge of a forest in the background. A mother squirrel and her young son walk down a grassless path, two rats sunbathe side by side, a mother rabbit lays out a picnic for a variety of small animals. (All the animal characters wear clothing and walk on two feet.) In the background are four small houses. The third shows a mishap, with a dog in a striped shirt outside working hard at making a cake. His efforts are continually disrupted, first by an errant soccer ball and then by another dog, clad in dress and apron, chasing a fly. As the pages turn, the activity continues and accelerates. The pigs who live in the second house do some painting on a ladder; three monkeys perch on the roof of the first house; a fox and rabbit dig a deep hole near the path. Activity turns to bedlam, with a raccoon tracking paint into the fourth house and the ladder toppling over and almost everyone rushing into the woods. What exactly is happening? Much is left for the reader’s imagination to fill in.

This offbeat pictorial adventure won’t be to all tastes, but it should prompt storytelling fun for both adults and children. (Picture book. 4-7)

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AT THE PALACE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

tones, employing well-placed spots of blues and greens to highlight various details. The concluding line, “They can all look at the world the other way around,” gently underscores the book’s central message about the importance of considering other perspectives and seeing the common ground we share.

A visually stunning, gently restrained picture book that should be high up on readers’ lists. (Picture book. 4-8)

Turetsky, Bianca Illus. by Suy, Sandra Poppy/Little, Brown (272 pp.) $17.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-0-316-10538-5 Series: Time-Traveling Fashionista, 2 Middle school girls obsessed with fashion will find an entertaining, painless history lesson in this light romp.

Louise, 12, envies her best friend, who is becoming an actual teenager. Worse, her dad has suddenly lost his job, so Louise won’t be going on her much-anticipated trip to France with her classmates. She consoles herself by indulging in her obsession, vintage fashion, at the exclusive traveling vintage-clothing store that has sent her another exclusive invitation. The last time she visited the peripatetic store, she wound up traveling back in time to the Titanic, and she wonders if she can take another trip. Of course she can, winding up in the court of 14-year-old Princess Marie Antoinette just after her marriage to Prince Louis. Louise finds herself in the persona of a Duchess called Gabrielle. The amazing excesses of the court astonish her, as, of course, does the fashion. However, she also learns about the appalling conditions of the people of France and tries to awaken Marie Antoinette to their misery. She remembers the lecture her history teacher gave her class about the French Revolution, but can’t recall just when it happened. Is Louise herself in personal danger? Turetsky delivers her enjoyable history lesson through the eyes of a girl who knows every major and minor fashion designer, a character sure to appeal to her target audience, as will the time-traveling theme.

Appealing illustrations aid readers’ imaginations.

Good fun. (Fantasy. 8-12)

UP ABOVE AND DOWN BELOW

Valdivia, Paloma Illus. by Valdivia, Paloma Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 15, 2012 978-1-926973-39-5

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van Genechten, Guido Illus. by van Genechten, Guido Clavis (30 pp.) $17.95 | Jul. 1, 2012 978-1-60537-113-9

In the dark of night, each bird plays its unique tune, and then they collaborate.

Stars twinkle above the forest green treetops, and there’s a crescent moon. “All is still and quiet. Until...” The “tawny owl’s hoot echoes through the trees.” Next comes the thrush, with its cheerful song: “TUT-TUT, OH-LAY-LEEE.” The woodpecker plays a peck-and-tap rhythm, while the wood pigeon practices “its sweet coo-coo.” The sleek crow clears its throat roughly, and the red-breasted (European) robin warms up its vocal cords (sadly, misspelled “chords”) with a sweeter sound. The beautiful cuckoo, flying in a straight line, flaps its large wings and calls out its own name. The backgrounds of the illustrations get lighter and lighter, going from the pitch-black of night to a pale purple as sunrise nears. Far from The Big Woods, a rooster crows, and for a second the bird calls cease, and the Woods go silent. Then suddenly, the orchestra begins; that is, the birds all do their calls in unison. Was the rooster the conductor? It’s lovely music to greet the spring day, and all the forest animals do, in a bright three-page spread that concludes the book and should get listeners hooting, chirping and tweeting along with them. The story is slight but beautifully illustrated and informative as well, with realistic bird portraits and apt description of their cries.

Simple and sweet. (Picture book. 3-6)

APPLESAUCE

A small book about a big idea.

Chilean author/illustrator Valdivia highlights the notion that although different kinds of people live in different places around the world, we share many things in common. The title subtly references the Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres, launching readers into a picture book with spreads characterized by a line bisecting each page into upper and lower halves. This graceful attention to design contributes to the great success of this title, in which stylized characters populate both realms. Straightforward, lyrical text describes opposing seasons and other ways in which life in both places differs and coincides.

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Verplancke, Klaas Translated by Mixter, Helen Illus. by Verplancke, Klaas Groundwood (40 pp.) $18.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-55498-186-1 “My daddy has warm hands. His fingers taste like applesauce. I wish he had a thousand hands.”

Spare of words but rich in feeling, this love note tracks some ups and downs but circles back to an attachment so warm and close that only the stoniest of hearts will remain unaffected. Tagging along as his father washes up in the morning, sacks out in front of the television after some

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“Youngsters will quickly understand the word ‘outfoxed’ after reading these tales of flattery, greed and cheese, told as three connected short stories.” from fox and crow are not friends

vigorous outdoor play, and then goes on into the kitchen to peel apples, the young narrator makes contented comments about dad’s hands, muscles and stomach (“soft as a pillow”). When an unspecified offense brings on “thunder daddy,” though, the miffed lad heads for “the forest of Other-and-Better”—a staircase, in the pictures, that transforms into a dense, dark forest of trees with shouting mouths—in search of a nicer parent.

The scary experience drives him back into the kitchen where dad, who had himself transformed into a hairy, scowling gorilla, offers a bowl of applesauce and reverts bit by bit over a wordless spread as amity is restored. Aside from an early remark that papa “sounds like a mom when he sings in the bath,” there’s no sign of a second adult.

Reminiscent of Where the Wild Things Are in its visual transformations and emotional intensity, but with a more present and openly loving parent. (Picture book. 4-6)

LULU WALKS THE DOGS

Viorst, Judith Illus. by Smith, Lane Atheneum (160 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 4, 2012 978-1-4424-3579-7

The second hilarious episode to feature feisty Lulu (Lulu and the Brontosaurus, 2010), who almost always gets what she wants.

This time, what Lulu wants is so outrageous that her mother and father tell her she is going to have to earn the money for it herself, so Lulu hatches a business plan to earn the money by walking dogs. It turns out, however, that Lulu is a dismal failure at dog walking. Enter Fleischman, Lulu’s goody-goody, smartypants, neat-as-a-button, uber-helpful and incredibly annoying neighbor. He can certainly help Lulu with her dog-walking scheme.

The question is whether spoiled, prideful Lulu can stand him long enough to let him. Smith’s droll illustrations interspersed throughout the text add to the humor and developing conflict by playfully emphasizing the differences between Lulu and Fleischman and creatively dramatizing their most interesting moments. Unfortunately, Viorst’s numerous authorial asides—in which the narrator insists on control of the storyline and stops for brief question-andanswer sessions with readers—come across as more confusing than clever because the voice and personality of the narrator are almost indistinguishable from Lulu’s.

Nonetheless, the short, funny chapters, over-the-top characters and engaging artwork will give this one plenty of appeal, especially to kids just venturing into chapterbook territory. (Fiction. 6-10)

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FOX AND CROW ARE NOT FRIENDS

Wiley, Melissa Illus. by Braun, Sebastien Random House (48 pp.) $3.99 paperback | $12.99 PLB Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-375-96982-9 PLB The familiar fable about Fox and Crow, retold for new readers.

Youngsters will quickly understand the word “outfoxed” after reading these tales of flattery, greed and cheese, told as three connected short stories. Fox and Crow are enemies, fighting over one hunk of cheese as if it were the last morsel of food on the planet. It won’t take long for readers to giggle at just how far these two will go for the cheese. Fox gets the best of Crow in the first story, in which Fox flatters Crow into dropping the cheese directly into Fox’s mouth. Next, Crow dreams of ways to get the cheese back and spends every waking moment constructing a cunning trap, with stew-covered Crow as the lure. Success! Fox retaliates in the final chapter, but both critters are outsmarted by the watchful Mama Bear. Humorous watercolor illustrations are punctuated by thought bubbles showing the animals’ plans; other playful details include the owl’s eyes watching the shenanigans from a safe distance and the eventual sheepish looks when the enemies are trapped in the same net, with Mama Bear chastising them from the side.

Funny chapter titles will amuse adults, and subtle visual details make this a fable book that new readers will return to.

(Early reader. 3-7)

MAIA AND THE MONSTER BABY

Winthrop, Elizabeth Illus. by Haley, Amanda Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 15, 2012 978-0-8234-2518-1 Maia and her lovable monster delight each night in spirited play until they lose their status as their parents’ only offspring.

Monster’s bluntly phrased observation, “Your mother has a potbelly,” triggers a distressing realization: Maia’s mother is pregnant. So, it seems, is Monster’s. Both struggle to adjust to the inevitable sacrifices (from Monster’s babysitting to Maia’s dismay at having to share a room). Maia’s homemade sign, scrawled in red crayon, reads, “Monster Baby, STOP Screaming!” Maia demonstrates tried-and-true techniques (tickling fuzzy feet and rocking the cradle) to soothe Monster’s little sibling; Monster’s humorous cross-eyed expressions keep the human sister gurgling. Parental optimism expresses more idealism than reality: Maia grumbles, “My mother says my baby sister is my new best friend,” and Monster responds knowingly, “WE are the friends. They are the babies.” Saturated in purple-hued haziness, acrylic paints and shadowy colored-pencil scenes

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“Composition varies entrancingly, including full spreads, sequential boxes and dotted lines pointing to enlarged details.” from the insomniacs

locate the action in the cozy confines of Maia’s room. Monster’s childlike wardrobe and exuberant demeanor accommodate fur and fangs without any hint of fright.

No monstrous creativity here, but fanciful fun as friends adapt to their new family roles. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE INSOMNIACS

Wolf, Karina Illus. by the Brothers Hilts Putnam (32 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 16, 2012 978-0-399-25665-3

A quietly magnificent paean to the wonder of nighttime and the solidity of a family unit.

Unlike picture books that use evening settings to address fears or coax kids into bed, this creative debut makes night-living a valid choice. The city-dwelling Insomniacs aren’t originally “a night family. / But when Mrs. Insomniac found a new job, Mother, Father, and little Mika traveled twelve time zones to their new home,” northern and remote. Hot baths and mugs of milk don’t adjust their internal clocks. Perky all night and dozing all day, they seek counsel from their new neighbors: lynx, bears and bats. “And then the Insomniacs noticed: the darkness was full of life.” Why force it? They decide to “give night a try.” Mika keeps pets—a bandicoot and a fennec fox, among others—and attends night school online; Mother continues her (undefined) science career by studying night stars; Father develops photos in his darkroom. The family catches the bakery opening at dawn and then “bundle[s] into bed.” Prussian blue dominates the offbeat penciland-charcoal illustrations, with whites and yellows glowing as moon, snow and lamplight. Figures are thin-armed and deliberate. Composition varies entrancingly, including full spreads, sequential boxes and dotted lines pointing to enlarged details.

What first seems an eerie, baby-goth vibe is held steady by the stable, close-knit family and lack of crisis in this atmospheric, calmly splendid piece. (Picture book. 4-7)

BLOOD FEVER

Wolff, Veronica New American Library (304 pp.) $9.99 paperback | Aug. 7, 2012 978-0-451-23703-3 Series: The Watchers, 3

has recently, illicitly bonded with centuries-old Scottish vampire Carden McCloud by drinking his blood. Although there is plenty of the chaste-but-erotic tension for which teen-vampire romances are infamous, the more central plot is a mystery: Around the Isle, girls are turning up drained of blood, and Carden is a suspect. Drew’s clandestine investigation is actionpacked and fraught with peril, and a subplot involving her new roommate develops engagingly. Drew is a capable heroine, resourceful and willing to fight to the death when necessary, though at one key moment, she does require Carden’s rescue.

Most jarring is the volume’s generally upbeat tone, surprising given both the frequency with which students die, in class or at each other’s hands, and a series of sexualized threats against Drew, including an unwanted kiss from a vampire teacher.

A high-octane vampire thriller without too much emotional weight. (Paranormal suspense. 14 & up)

MAGGIE’S CHOPSTICKS

Woo, Alan Illus. by Malenfant, Isabelle Kids Can (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-55453-619-1

Learning to use something new is never easy.

Young Maggie has a new set of chopsticks, but everyone says she is using them incorrectly. Evocative and appealing digitally enhanced watercolors show how Grandmother, Mother, Brother and Sister eat with their chopsticks (shoveling, popping, plucking and dancing, respectively), but Maggie can’t seem to follow any of their examples. The Kitchen God has nothing helpful to say, and Maggie’s private practicing doesn’t help her either; it’s not until Father offers praise and comforting words about individuality that Maggie finds her own style, “like a butterfly emerging / from a long winter’s sleep.” Though something seems lost here— it is difficult to see whether the setting is China or elsewhere, whether using chopsticks with style is a cultural phenomenon or based on Maggie’s own observations, and whether Maggie improves through practice, simply accepts herself or both—the story is well-intentioned, the character plucky and hardworking, and the illustrations warm and striking.

Youngsters learning to cope with eating utensils of any sort will appreciate Maggie’s efforts and urge her on to success. (Picture book.3-5)

This third installment in Wolff ’s Watchers series maintains snappy dialogue and a zippy pace despite a seemingly grim set of circumstances.

Readers new to the series are caught up almost comprehensively and without distracting infodumps.

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IF I TOLD YOU SO

Woodward, Timothy Kensington (256 pp.) $15.00 | Sep. 1, 2012 978-0-7582-7488-5

Summer lovin’ happened so fa-aast…

New Hampshire 16-year-old Sean Jackson has just said goodbye to his girlfriend Lisa, who’ll be a counselor at a Christian children’s summer camp across the lake from their small hometown, when he learns his parents have decided he should spend the summer in Georgia with his father working as a landscaper.

In order to stay at home, Sean gets a job at the Pink Cone, a local ice-cream shop owned by the Fabulous (lesbian) Renée.

There he meets outspoken, Jewish New Yorker Becky and 18-year-old Jay, who is smokin’ hot. Becky offers Sean pointers on the coming-out process (her family lives near Chelsea) and life in general; when she warns him about Jay’s motives, however, Sean turns a (love-struck) deaf ear. Woodward’s debut is a soapy, feel-good read that is low on conflict as well as surprises.

Teens coming out today have it easier than in the past, but few will have it as easy as Sean, with his guidance counselor mother, his shockingly forgiving girlfriend, a boyfriend in the wings (for help recovering from first-love heartbreak) and sensei-yenta Becky, who dispenses wisdom faster than a hyper-caffeinated homo-Yoda. Myriad chest-and ab-ogling scenes and a graphicfor-the-age-range sex scene add verisimilitude.

Helpful and hopeful, if slightly unrealistic. (discussion guide) (Fiction. 15-19)

SNOW CHILDREN

Yamashita, Masako Illus. by Yamashita, Masako Groundwood (32 pp.) $17.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-55498-144-1 Two snow children, concerned about the effects of global warming, attend an international meeting where, after some dissension, all agree it is time to work together to do something about it.

On their journey, Yuta and Yuma encounter rabbits buried in a surprising avalanche, polar bears unable to hunt on the broken-up ice and caribou whose food is hidden in the deeper snow—all actual effects of recent climate changes. The tale becomes more fantastic as northern lights carry the pair off to their meeting, which begins with food: crispy and sweet snowballs. It is the beauty of new, falling snow that convinces the assembled snow people to cooperate. This simple, childfriendly story is framed by an opening spread (in a different typeface) defining global warming and the usual suggestions on the concluding endpapers for what children can do. Yamashita illustrates with pastel watercolors and Japanese paper collage, distinguishing the two snowball children by hat and muffler. |

The star-spangled Arctic sky and northern lights are particularly effective. Later, as people disagree, the sky becomes an angry red or green, and, curiously, pale red remains the color of the snowflakes even at the end.

A gentle, well-meant introduction to climate change (a phrase the author doesn’t use) that’s suitable for preschoolers, if there seems to be need. (Picture book. 3-5)

QUENTIN BLAKE’S AMAZING ANIMAL STORIES

Yeoman, John Illus. by Blake, Quentin Pavilion/Trafalgar (124 pp.) $19.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 978-1-84365-195-6

Fourteen animal tales are presented in the same format as Quentin Blake’s Magical Tales (2012), with many of the same strengths and weaknesses.

These very brief tales do not all have happy or resolved endings, and no sources are given. Some clues to context and locale come in the stories, but readers may need to search elsewhere for the origins of others. “The Singing Tortoise” is a West African tale and “The Turkey Girl,” a Zuni Cinderella with an unhappy ending. (Some of these tales were previously collected in The Singing Tortoise, 1993.) Blake’s squiggly and expressive pictures are the selling point, describing with ragged brio the hippos and the coyotes, the cobras and the ravens, the princesses and shepherds. The coyote who cannot remember the song the locust has taught him is a jagged mass of frustrated lines and angles. “The Impudent Bird” of that title, with his borrowed colors and feathers, contrasts nicely with the befuddled king and hardworking tailor, both of whom the bird hoodwinks. One of the few stories that is both satisfying and happy is the Italian “Monkey Palace,” wherein twin princes both end up with a kingdom to rule as a consequence of acts of kindness and honor.

Remarkable illustrations, brief retellings and clear morals do not quite make a satisfying collection. (Folk tales. 7-10)

BUTTON DOWN

Ylvisaker, Anne Candlewick (192 pp.) $15.99 | Sep. 11, 2012 978-0-7636-5396-5 Ylvisaker (The Luck of the Buttons, 2011) returns to the lovably unlucky Button family, this time with a gentle story about 11-year-old Ned and his love of football.

When local legend-in-the-making Lester Ward goes off to play football for the University of Iowa, he tosses his old football into an eager pack of boys, and surprise of surprises, it is caught by scrawny Ned Button. But when Lester’s younger brother Burton steals

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the ball away, Ned and his friends are ostracized and reduced to playing with a newspaper-and-twine football on the sidelines.

That is, until Granddaddy Ike gets involved. He convinces the group of ragtag youth that football is more about strategy than size, teaching them plays to run against the bigger, tougher boys.

And despite a failing heart, Granddaddy arranges to make one of Ned’s dreams—attending a game at the University of Iowa— come true. The precise historical setting—tiny Goodhue, Iowa, in 1929—is not central to this story, though it’s carefully drawn.

It could happen anyplace where bullies do nothing worse than steal footballs and a grandfather’s advice and love are enough to make a kid feel like he can take on the world.

Short chapters, simple yet meticulous language, a wholesome feel and the universal story of a boy with a dream combine to give this one widespread appeal. (Historical fiction. 8-11)

SINCE YOU LEFT ME

Zadoff, Allen Egmont USA (320 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Aug. 28, 2012 978-1-60684-296-6 978-1-60684-297-3 e-book Funny and glum, neglected yet selfserving, Sanskrit Aaron Zuckerman (“that’s my name, in all its confusing glory”) trudges through junior year with a large, stupid lie on his shoulders.

Sanskrit’s accustomed to his mother’s emotional absence; she’s preoccupied with yoga and named him after the ancient Indian language, revealing hippie leanings that match neither his lethargic atheism nor his school’s Modern Orthodox Judaism.

When Mom garners schoolwide attention by missing a parentteacher conference, Sanskrit announces she’s been in a near-fatal accident. The outpouring of sympathy, especially from a girl he’s adored since age 7, is like manna. Judi spurned him in second grade, and he’s still obsessed with that rejection. His parents are divorced, inattentive and flaky; old friend Herschel is more religious and moral than Sanskrit can bear; and Sanskrit’s late, Holocaust-survivor grandfather left him funding for Jewish education only (otherwise the money goes to Tay-Sachs research), forcing Sanskrit into Jewish school. His loneliness and his anxiety about the pressures attendant on being the descendent of a survivor are understandable, and sometimes he’s hilarious (“Can breasts look disappointed?”), but his self-centeredness is repugnant (in addition to the lie, he bets on teachers’ heart attacks). India is used for “exotic” textual flavor with a reductionist American slant: Chai, for instance, is “the taste of India.”

Two reveals plus the lie’s exposure surprisingly lead to relief for Sanskrit’s soul; hopefully moral growth follows.

(Fiction. 12-16)

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THE HELPFUL PUPPY

Zarins, Kim Illus. by McCully, Emily Arnold Holiday House (32 pp.) $16.95 | Aug. 15, 2012 978-0-8234-2318-7 A simple, old-fashioned story about a puppy adjusting to life on a family farm is complemented by sweetly nostalgic watercolor illustrations from Caldecott Medalist McCully.

The unnamed male beagle puppy wants a job on the farm like the other, more mature animals. He tries to crow like the rooster, push the farm wagon like the ox and chase mice like the barn cat. He realizes that he can’t lay eggs like the hens or carry people like the horse. A female farmhand (who looks rather like a clown in costume, minus white greasepaint) tells the puppy he can’t make milk because he is a male. At last, the puppy hears a familiar whistle as his young owner arrives home from school. For the rest of the day, the boy and the puppy play together, until the boy’s mother tucks her son and his dog into bed together; then, she describes the puppy’s contribution as love for the family. The short text, simple plot and amusing illustrations make this a fine choice for preschoolers who are just transitioning into real stories.

The earnest puppy doesn’t chart any new territory, but cute little ones who want to be helpful like the big guys have a natural and enduring appeal to the preschool set.

(Picture book. 3-7)

interactive e-books CABBY CAT & THE MISSING CELLO

Brewer, Timothy; Harsch, Douglas Illus. by Brewer, Timothy 2Dads in Brooklyn $2.99 | May 28, 2012 1.0; May 28, 2012 After leaving his cello in the trunk of a cab, a world-renowned musician enlists help to recover his prized instrument.

This scattered storybook app has plenty of character and a few nice technological twists, but it’s so weighed down with peripheral stimuli and superfluous content that getting through it is downright laborious. Mo-Mo Ya, a pig, leaves his cello in the trunk of Cabby Cat’s taxi. A band of street musicians, the Hound Dogs, covets the million-dollar instrument and steals it out of the cab. Ya and his entourage track the thieves down, forgive everything and then immediately form a band and play a

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“…it’s all paced...so...deliberately that many readers will inadvertently swipe ahead and so miss some delayed pans and passages of text.” from the aristocats

two-hour concert. The story is allegedly based on true events, but the narrative has so many gaps, it’s not easily swallowed. On the plus side, the 3-D rotation and zooming add a unique flair, and the rendition of Elgar’s Cello Concerto is fabulous. Several New York landmarks are highlighted with brief, pop-up history lessons, and the personality of the Big Apple shines throughout. Certain tasks, several of which are inane (a color-identification game at Ya’s hotel check-in desk, for instance), must be performed before an arrow appears to advance to the next page. At times the dreadful, rhymed text doesn’t match narration, and sentences that are split over page turns often require backtracking to determine context. The app does not work on first-generation iPads.

Cabby could use a little less catnip and lot more refining. (iPad storybook app. 6-10)

GRANDMAMA’S WORLD

Bullock, Gwen Illus. by Nevins, Janelle NeeNee Holdings $4.99 | May 17, 2012 1.0; May 17, 2012

An unfortunate mix of jarringly jumbled artwork, tepid text and general overstimulation, this visit to “Grandmama” feels at times like it will never end.

Attempts at whimsy in this celebration of the best place in the world—Grandmama’s home—are forced to the point of causing eyestrain. Each page is a cluttered collection of photocollaged images creating tableaux that are at times as nightmarish as they are imaginative. On one page, colorful birds fly around a rock sculpture in a Technicolor desert where Grandmama lives, while a kangaroo pushes a stroller and a child appears to be fleeing in terror. The most interesting visual effect is that the surface of the busy collages can be moved with the finger to create a tilting 3-D effect, making all the people, animals and objects on the screen appear to exist on multiple planes. But the “wow” factor of that admittedly neat feature subsides as it’s paired with such lackluster couplets as, “We paint pictures and then later / Hang them on her fridgerator.” The text is tiny (even when set at the largest font size available) and appears in a giant, ugly white strip along the bottom of every page. Though one little boy narrates the story throughout, the photos of people appear to be of different families and different Grandmamas, adding to the garish chaos.

Some kids may enjoy the mishmash of loud photos and unremarkable storytelling, but parents will want to sidestep this unpleasant app. (iPad storybook app. 3-7)

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THE ADVENTURES OF MR. MOUSE Cooper, Edward Edward Cooper $0.99 | May 1, 2012 1.0.1; May 21, 2012

A selfish hamster learns about the benefits of sharing from two generous mice.

Mr. Mouse isn’t a mouse at all; he’s a hamster that has everything a rodent could want: adoring owners, a multilevel house, a deluxe hamster wheel and an endless supply of nuts. One evening, two mice stop by to ask him if they can play on the wheel, and the hamster brusquely refuses to let them in. In a predictable twist of fate, Mr. Mouse falls out of his cage the next night and quickly becomes frightened and lonely. The mice find him, invite him to their humble abode and show him lavish hospitality. Lesson learned. The rhyming text is sloppy and forced, and at times it is even confusing. For example, when the mice find Mr. Mouse they approach him “to make amends.” Wait…isn’t it the ill-tempered, stingy hamster who should be apologizing? Many of the graphics are static, but the app also has considerable bobble and tilt action (though such features often distract rather than enhance). Icons make navigation easy, but to trigger narration, the play button must be tapped on each page.

Apart from decent navigation and a few touch features that are only briefly entertaining, nothing in this app rises above mediocrity. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)

THE ARISTOCATS

Disney Publishing Worldwide Disney Publishing Worldwide Applications $3.99 | May 31, 2012 1.1; Jun. 12, 2012 The handful of coloring pages and puzzles supplementing the stills that serve for illustrations and minor interactive features serve as poor substitutes for the original film’s swinging (if period, now) songs and lively voice-over performances.

Read optionally in cultured British accents by a single narrator over a background of generic light jazz, the tale does retrace the movie’s overall course—though so sketchily that none of the cats, from Duchess and her three kittens to their rescuer O’Malley and his raffish buddies, have a chance to establish much individuality. Furthermore, it’s all paced...so...deliberately that many readers will inadvertently swipe ahead and so miss some delayed pans and passages of text. Along with an abbreviated piano keyboard featuring a preprogrammed tune, three (savable) coloring pages and five multileveled jigsaw puzzles provide additional story-derailing distractions. For children with a yen to personalize, the app includes a self-record option and a “bookplate” with spaces for a name and a photo.

Pure commercialized product, offering barely a hint of

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any literary, dramatic, musical or emotional experience and stocked with a scanty assortment of off-the-shelf interactive elements. (iPad movie storybook app. 5-7)

THE ISTANBUL ADVENTURE WITH BRUCE THE GOOSE

Emory, Leyla; Kiral, Gulsevin Illus. by Gencer, Buket Manolin $3.99 | May 24, 2012 1.0; May 24, 2012

Now a tour, now a chase and much in need of copy editing, this helter-skelter introduction to Istanbul presents the city’s highlights with more enthusiasm than grace.

A stray goose alternately pursued and squired by two street cats named Fatty and Misty hits all the major sights in turn, from Topkapi Palace and the Bosphorus to Hagia Sophia and funky Istiklal Street. Each loosely drawn cartoon scene features atmospheric music or street noise and tap-activated meows or other sound effects. Most also include flashing links that open large inset photos (also available in a separate gallery, but labeled only with numbers on the index map) with explanatory commentary (that often features variant spellings). The main text, which is printed in different sizes and jammed higgledypiggledy into any space available, comes in rhymed English or Turkish (a dead link to a German text implies a third language to come). It is read by an animated narrator and offers (in English, anyway) lines like “ ‘Look,’ cried Fatty, ‘there he goes.’ / ‘Into the Grand Bazaar’s wild throes,’ [sic] ” plus an unhappily phrased reference to “thousands of different fish floating in the water” of the Basilica Cistern. Furthermore, the app tends to crash if the pages are swiped too fast.

The photographs are enticingly grand and bright, but the covering story and the software still have far to go. (iPad informational app. 7-9)

SNOW WHITE

Fairytale Studios Fairytale Studios $1.99 | May 31, 2012 1.0; May 31, 2012 A generic, uninspired take on “Snow White” brings rudimentary interactivity to the story without adding anything magical or even above average to make readers forget better versions.

There are no narrative surprises, as the plot follows the familiar path, and there’s nothing in its delivery to distinguish it. The story gallops at a pace that doesn’t give any characters, even Snow White herself, any time to come across as more than names and drawings. The dwarves, for instance, are given a single page of introduction in which they also agree to let Snow White be their 1528

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housekeeper. When the text isn’t bland, it’s clunky: “Fearing for her life, she ran through the afternoon, growing weary, hungry and losing hope that she would find shelter.” If there’s a saving grace here, it’s that a surprising number of objects, characters and backgrounds respond to touch with small snatches of animation or sound effects. But they’re part of a design that clumsily mixes realistic-looking backgrounds with painted foregrounds and crudely cartoonish animals and characters. The app has no navigation beyond page arrows and no extras or options beyond narration or narration-free. It doesn’t even include a page index or menu to jump to a specific page in the app.

Snow White is given short shrift in this amateurish adaptation. Everything down to the tiny, barely there poisoned apple is unconvincing and an opportunity missed. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)

A LION AND WHALE CAN DANCE

Fizzy Illus. by McIntire, Benjamin Arcade Sunshine Media $3.99 | Apr. 28, 2012 1.0; Apr. 28, 2012

A scraggly-looking bird brings two lonely creatures together on a moonlit beach in this offbeat tale.

The bird narrates in an affected mix of prose and verse—“It was then that I heard the brush shuffle and saw the dust fumble.

I smelled large teeth and felt a slight rumble! Was it a lion? Oh yes! Oh yes! Now I see.” With an optional audio, the tatteredlooking avian describes persuading Mowly the lion and Khody the whale to meet after listening separately to their rhymed whining. In gloomy, distorted illustrations that resemble Mervyn Peake’s art (Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, 2001, the Gormenghast trilogy, etc.), both animals, rendered with wildly exaggerated proportions, radiate misery even during the climactic wordless pirouette that demonstrates the titular proposition. Their arranged tryst is likely to be less interesting to younger audiences than a resettable side game in which the author places 30 smaller animals in various scenes to be tapped and “collected” to open a hidden coloring page. Most scenes also feature minor animations and sound effects.

The strangeness of the art and writing may draw a few readers. (iPad storybook app. 5-7, adult)

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“…the app’s greatest strength is the way it allows children to ‘fill in’ Bing-Wen’s paintings, then watch them come to life.” from dragon brush

B.B. WOLF

Despite some room for improvement, this rendition lends itself equally to shared or independent reading, and is likely to become as well-thumbed as it already looks. (iPad storybook app. 9-11)

Fong, Debbie Illus. by Fong, Debbie Debbie Fong $0.99 | May 15, 2012 1.0; May 15, 2012 A revised “Little Red Riding Hood,” with unusually simple and effective illustrations and interactive features.

Fong suspends small figures drawn in thin, scribbly lines against speckled sepia backgrounds free of extraneous detail, creating narrative movement for her retelling with one or two discreet spiral buttons in each scene. These activate a gesture, cause a line of text to appear or some similarly simple change when tapped. She also transforms the original tale’s cautionary message. She follows the traditional plotline until Red Riding Hood enters Grandma’s house, but then she puts the wolf in front of the stove in the kitchen, where he indignantly denies any wrongdoing and hands Red the basket of goodies she had left in the woods. In comes Grandma to make the lesson explicit (“What did I tell you about judging people by their appearances?”) and to join child and wolf at the table for “a nice dinner of porkchops.” Consonant with the overall sparseness of art and prose, page advances are manual only, and there are neither looped animations nor audio tracks.

A low-key, appealingly unpretentious twist on a familiar folk tale. (iPad storybook app. 5-7)

THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

Grahame, Kenneth Bibliodome $6.99 | May 28, 2012 1.0.1; May 28, 2012

Though this adaptation of the classic cuts down on the original’s more lyrical flights of fancy in favor of a closer focus on plot, the richly sentimental tone remains in full force.

Coming in at just under 200 golden-toned “pages” with chipped and discolored borders, North’s abridgment drops some chapters (notably “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”), combines some others and simplifies Grahame’s language without robbing it of its pastoral flavor. Nearly every other screen features a color or outline sketch illustration done in a distinctly Ernest Shepard– ish style—with, in most cases, the addition of touch- or tilt-sensitive animations. Enhanced by low-volume sound effects and snatches of music, these range from quick changes of expression and ripples in water to a wild, multiscreen motorcar joy ride and an image of Toad that can be clad in a variety of fetching dresses to expedite his escape from prison. The strip-index thumbnails are too small to be easily identifiable, but they do expedite quick skipping back and forth; less conveniently, there is no bookmarking. Furthermore, there is no audio narration, though links at the end do lead to complete print and sound versions of the classic. |

DRAGON BRUSH

Hullinger, Andy; Solimine, John Illus. by Solimine, John Small Planet Digital $2.99 | May 23, 2012 1.0; May 23, 2012 The story of a magical dragon brush that can bring painted objects to life casts its own spell.

Bing-Wen, a slender rabbit from a poor family, loves to paint.

His luck turns when he helps an old woman with an overturned cart and is awarded a paintbrush made from the whiskers of a dragon. Bing-Wen finds that everything he paints comes to life, even if the transformations don’t always turn out the way he plans. When he tries to help his village by painting sources of food, the emperor is not pleased and arrests the boy. What follows is a clever reversal, in which Bing-Wen gives the emperor what he wants, but in a way that saves Bing-Wen and his village.

Characters are rendered in subtle, evocative colors and with appropriate, often funny detail. Artwork throughout is subtle and elegant, with Chinese-inspired touches like menu buttons in the shape of paper lanterns. But the app’s greatest strength is the way it allows children to “fill in” Bing-Wen’s paintings, then watch them come to life. The text throughout is as clear and plainspoken as the narration, with good, punchy vocabulary. A separate painting feature is equally well-produced.

With its distinctive look, a great drawing element that’s actually appropriate to the story and a moral that values cleverness over power, Bing-Wen’s app is as rare and magical as the dragons he loves to paint. (iPad storybook app. 3-8)

DRAGONSTER The Meeting

Hullinger, Andy Illus. by Solimine, John eMotion Tales $2.99 | Apr. 14, 2012 1.1; Apr. 30, 2012

Things that go bump in the night are tediously explained. Again.

“No one knows where dragonsters come from or when they first appeared,” the story begins. It features a wealth of colorful animation, spot-on sound effects and a high level of interactivity that kids will enjoy. Unfortunately, the story itself meanders through pages, disjointed, clunky and seemingly pointless. It goes something like this: When young Cody sets out to investigate the disappearing blueberry jam and the tube of blue paint that’s often missing from his dad’s easel, he unknowingly says

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“Loading the cargo plane, learning about airport fire rescue, and repairing planes in the hangar will keep little hands and minds busy well beyond takeoff.” from all about airports

a magic word and poof! a blue dragonster appears. From there, Cody and readers engage in interactive discovery games, guessing the dragonster’s name, finding nonblue food options and completing puzzles to enter the dragonster’s lair. Cody awakens to find a note from his new friend, and he feels good knowing it wasn’t just a dream. The only comic relief is Mocha, an orange tabby that does what mischievous cats do, a bit part that gives the tiresome story a boost.

Colorful, yes. Interactive, absolutely. Captivating or original, not so much. (iPad storybook app. 4-9)

ALL ABOUT AIRPORTS

Interact Books Interact Books $3.99 | May 15, 2012 1.0; May 15, 2012

When a book that helps prepare children for first experiences is exciting as well as instructive, it’s a keeper; this educational passport of fun for preschoolers interested in travel or for those about to board is just that.

Packing a wealth of interactive options in its 12 digital pages, the app gives pre- and new readers a sneak peak at what goes on near the entrance of the airport, at the ticket counter and down on the tarmac, where food and fuel trucks are readying the plane for takeoff. There is no narrative per se, but tap-activated words identify the Lego-like machines and smiling people throughout, and a cheery female narrator introduces each screen. A demonstration of a plane flying in all kinds of weather should allay children’s fear of flying. Baggage claim is good fun, as readers make a game out of moving the red bag along the belt without bumping into other items. Loading the cargo plane, learning about airport fire rescue, and repairing planes in the hangar will keep little hands and minds busy well beyond takeoff.

Every aspect of air travel flies high on interactive display in this new app for the preschool set. (iPad storybook app. 2-6)

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Interact Books Interact Books $1.99 | May 11, 2012 1.0; May 11, 2012

An interactive history lesson about ancient musical instruments.

This cookie-cutter offering is broken into four sections. The brief introduction—painfully slow when the app’s narrator reads it—offers a few foundational facts about music in the ancient world. Next comes “Learn & Listen,” a collection of 11 instruments (two of them human voices) accompanied by text that gives a brief description and a few facts about the instrument. Tapping the active instrument triggers a short demonstration, though the animated movements 1530

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aren’t synced with the audio. Disappointingly, the harp demo consists of two notes played repeatedly at the same rhythmic interval; little ears and fingers will be begging for a glissando.

Furthermore, the little man who demonstrates one of the lyres is plucking it with his finger, but the sound is distinctly bowlike.

Once all the instruments have been demonstrated, readers can move to “The Orchestra,” where one or all instruments can be tapped to create unique combinations of sound (playing them all at once creates quite the cacophony). Finally, there’s the “Music Room,” where readers are instructed to “pick an instrument” they can haltingly play while reading facts about related objects displayed on a pedestal.

The concept is strong, but the delivery has more than a few glitches. Slow response coupled with incongruous and primitive features leave this app somewhere in the Middle Ages. (iPad informational app. 4-8)

GRIMM’S FROG KING

JustKidsApps JustKidsApps $1.99 | May 31, 2012 1.0; May 31, 2012

This version of the traditional Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale of a frog under a curse and the self-absorbed princess he needs to save him offers an alternative reading and lots of extras.

Read the familiar story through, then start over with the “Version with a Funny Twist,” which provides a running commentary and an alternative ending. This format explores the morals of the story while questioning the archaic “princess marries the handsome prince and lives happily ever after” theme. Amid the sounds of chirping frogs, the optional British-accented narration (also available in German) transports readers to the royal gardens. Filled with humans and amphibians that vocalize when touched, the detailed and brightly colored illustrations can be enlarged for closer viewing—and readers are advised to look closely, as some of those details appear in a quiz at the end.

Fairy-dust clues are easily spotted by little ones and indicate the simple touch and tilt animations. The games and jokes in the extras section are more fun than the story itself and include a fact page about frogs and toads and a prize to be won if the quiz is completed correctly.

Although the alternative narrative tries a little too hard to explain the morals of the story, this is a clever update of a classic that allows young readers to question old stereotypes. (iPad storybook app. 4-8)

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IT IS ALMOST TIME

LaCroix, Debbie Bernstein Illus. by Chalek, Sarah Kane/Miller $4.99 | May 17, 2012 1.0; May 17, 2012

With the onset of the digital age, with even wristwatches making a surreptitious exit from daily life, this app celebrates the many types of clocks that have marked time over the years.

Unfortunately, while one would expect some reference to telling time in a children’s book app about clocks—or at the very least some accurate correspondence between the time on the clocks and the text—this story focuses solely on the sounds that the clocks make. Throughout the story, a whimsical duo of horse and blue jay pass the time together swinging on pendulums, waking to annoying alarm clocks and generally introducing the reader to the various types and uses of clocks.

The particular sounds of each of the clocks are cleverly rendered in onomatopoeic words, from the “Tickety-tockety” of small clocks to the “Bonggg! Bonggg!” of the grandfather clock.

What is left to the imagination in the traditional book format (It’s Almost Time, 2011) is enhanced by the actual sounds embedded in the interactive features of the app. A simple touch plays the sounds of the clocks and initiates the antics of the horse and blue jay. But in addition to the lack of instructional content, the paper publication’s other flaws remain, most significantly the disconnect between the text’s “one minute till cuckoo” and the illustration’s 10 minutes before 12.

Although the boisterous illustrations do make it look like a lot of fun, there may not be enough here to bring back anyone but the youngest readers and true clock enthusiasts. (iPad storybook app. 2-6)

BUD THE BUNNY

Lloyd-Quinn, Kirean Bengal Studio $1.99 | May 9, 2012 1.0; May 9, 2012

A mediocre concept book featuring Bud the Brown Bunny and the letter B. The text “This is a bunny” and a plain, black bunny silhouette introduce this book. A descriptor such as “black-tailed” and “bent eared” or an activity such as “bee watching” and “blossom eating” is added on each page, building to a long mouthful of a sentence at the end: “This is Bud, the blue-eyed, black-tailed, bent eared, ball balancing, bee watching, boulder sitting, blossom eating, bandana wearing, bubble blowing, beach dreaming, brown birthday bunny with the beige belly.” The concept has potential, but unfortunately, the execution is undistinguished. The sound effects are unimaginative, and the cartoon-style illustrations are flat and mundane, with little charm or energy. Bud himself is actually a little creepy, as the illustrator chose to draw him with |

blue eyes and no whites or pupils. Each page features a standard animation, such as a bouncing ball, a color-changing bandana or a bubble wand that blows bubbles. Clare Kramer’s (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) narration is actually the best part of the app, injecting some vitality that partially compensates for the lackluster illustrations. There is a navigation grid on each page that allows quick access to any page. Bud has his own website, and a portion of the proceeds goes to Kids Need to Read, a nonprofit dedicated to improving children’s literacy.

“B” forewarned—there’s nothing special enough to warrant buying this app, even at the modest price of $1.99. (iPad storybook app. 2-5)

THE TREE I SEE

Mascarelli, Robert Aridan Books $3.99 | May 11, 2012 1.0; May 11, 2012 A happy boy joins chirping birds and other cute little animals around a smiling tree to celebrate the pleasure of sharing.

Boy, skunk, birds, a squirrel and a bee pop up in successive sunny cartoon scenes in the patterned tale, each getting a handshake or some other favor from the tree and uttering a line (“I love nuts!”) both then and in following scenes when tapped. Nightfall brings brief anxiety as the tree loses sight of its snoozing companions until moonlight in the next scene illuminates them. The rhymed text, read woodenly in a child’s voice, runs to lines like, “The skunk walks by and is quite shy / so the tree invites him to climb up high,” and “Sharing with friends is the lesson, you see, / even for a tree or a small child like me.” The software design is better than the art or writing—offering multiple buttons and sliders to configure the background music and other sounds, retractable text boxes on each screen, a large contents strip, manual and autoplay options and a variety of touch-activated animations and effects.

A saccharine variant on The Giving Tree, but conceived and designed particularly for children with special needs.

A portion of the proceeds will go to Autism Speaks. (iPad storybook app. 5-8)

HELLO TO THE MOON!

Matchbook Digital Matchbook Digital LLC $1.99 | May 25, 2012 1.0; May 25, 2012

A lunar lesson about global community.

Everyone on the planet sees the same moon. So, in theory, the moon is a cosmic intermediary that can help readers feel connected to others—whether it’s a parent we’re missing, or a kid we’ve never even met. The app’s illustrations appear to be photographs that have been enhanced by digital software. Each

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page contains one tap-activated “animation”—photographs that appear or rudimentary graphics that haltingly come and go (though none can be triggered until the narration is complete).

The story itself is told in rhyme, and as is the case with many rhyming storybook apps, the verse is often tedious and uninspiring. The idea that the author is apparently trying to convey is creative and communicates a message that could be helpful to some. But the content shifts focus enough that it weakens the thesis. For example, after a quick side note about how grandmas don’t like to be called old, the text reads, “Back to the moon and it’s amazing effects…” After one observation about kids in Pakistan seeing the same moon Americans do, attention turns to stars, the sun and the ocean. Advancing pages sometimes takes multiple taps, as does prompting other features.

The global-village theme has a lot of potential, but this rendering doesn’t do it justice. A little more effort would go a long way. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE

Mildren, R.A. RAMDreams $0.99 | May 19, 2012 1.0; May 19, 2012

In this challenging set of visual puzzles, a dozen user-activated “bombs” blow a hapless robot from Hydropolope to Planet Kakalooki, leaving behind scrambled scenes to reassemble.

Conducted by a helium-voiced narrator, Tiki-Zin3 is propelled into space, past Saturn and the “ancient spacecraft Voyager I,” through a wormhole and on to an eventual planetfall. At each of his 12 stops, a bomb floats into view, explodes with a different combination of taps and leaves a jumbled pile of rocket parts or other space junk to drag back into their original positions. Other than going back to the opening screen to touch an index icon, there is no way to advance except by completing each reassembly in turn. Help in this task is provided through buttons that toggle back to the previous screens, as well as correctly positioned outlines that appear after several failed attempts to place pieces. In spite of this, most of the puzzles— particularly the blobby Kakalookian landscape and Tiki-Zin3’s garden, which has to be reconstructed in near-total darkness— are real tests of visual memory.

Not much for storyline, but engagingly silly and tricky.

Not to mention: bombs! (iPad game app. 5-8)

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POOKIE’S SNOW DAY

Nawrocki, Kati Illus. by Nawrocki, Kati Gutpela $3.99 | Apr. 11, 2012 1.0; May 3, 2012

A hedgehog heads home when he realizes that winter is imminent.

Pookie makes his way across the changing landscape in the hope that he can get home before cold weather sets in. The plot, it seems, lies in helping the wee hedgehog get home safely and without too much discomfort.

Readers are asked to help him find food, chart his course across a flowing river and dress him in warm clothes. There are a few other tasks most preschoolers will delight in, including making snowflakes appear, popping them and helping a tree shed its leaves. Take away the Tamagotchi-like busywork, however, and eight pages could easily be reduced to two. In addition to the story itself, though, there’s a bonus that at first glance looks like a run-of-the-mill paint feature. But upon further examination, readers will find a unique storyboard interface. Backgrounds can be changed, and objects from the story can be imported and scaled. Additionally, if kids want to add their own artistic flair to the composition, they can paint directly on a superimposed layer that can be discarded without trashing anything else. Second- and third-generation iPad users have another nifty option: taking a photo and using it as a (nonscalable) backdrop. Completed creations can be saved, exported to Facebook or emailed.

Short, simple, sweet and stimulating. (iPad storybook app.

18 mos.-5)

THE HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY PIGEON

Winn, Don M. Illus. by Alfred, Dave Interact Books $3.99 | May 23, 2012 1.0; May 23, 2012

A pigeon with no sense of direction fails a flight school exam, but with additional study and a teacher’s encouragement, triumphs the second time around.

Confident student pilot Hank is plunged into despair after he loses track of where to go, and to the derision of his classmates, he returns from his demonstration flight two hours late. Second time’s the charm, though, after his teacher puts a proper spin on the experience—“With hard work on your side / And a compass to guide, / To the head of the class you can soar!”—and leaves him to practice his map-reading skills. Each scene features tap-activated blinks, squawks or other small-scale effects, a text box that evaporates with a touch, and an inconspicuous menu icon. Eight easy, multiple-choice comprehension and discussion questions (“Does having a personal hardship or learning challenge mean that you can’t succeed?”) cap a thoroughly lesson-driven episode.

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“There is so much creativity here that it can’t even fit onto the screen…” from little fox music box

It is illustrated with bland cartoons and written in verse so contrived that even the supplied narration sounds labored.

Well-meant but unlikely to get children, learning-challenged or otherwise, off the ground. (iPad storybook app. 6-9)

LITTLE FOX MUSIC BOX

Wittlinger, Heidi Shape Minds and Moving Images GmbH $2.99 | Mar. 15, 2012 2.0; May 2, 2012

A melodious music app combines artistic creativity with top-notch execution.

This superb app offers three songs plus a musical “play space” that all feature gorgeous, detailed illustrations, high-quality music and sound effects, and firstclass animations. “London Bridge” and “Old MacDonald” are voiced in unaffected, sweet kids’ voices, while “Evening Song” is sung mellifluously by an adult. The creators clearly paid attention to detail in all of the elements, with stupendous results. In “Old MacDonald,” the scenery and animations change to reflect the season, which is controlled by viewers by turning a wheel.

The “London Bridge” scene is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg contraption, with wacky details abounding. “Evening Song” has a quieter feel, but there is plenty to discover and animate. The Studio play space (a hollow tree) is populated with an array of sounds, like frogs singing, knitting needles clacking and spiders scuttling, all of which can be set to three background rhythms, while Fox dances center stage. There is so much creativity here that it can’t even fit onto the screen—when viewers scroll from side to side, they discover even more treasures. The only minor quibble is that the sound effects sometimes compete slightly with the music, particularly in the quieter “Evening Song.”

This spectacular synthesis of elements creates magic on the iPad. Parents and kids won’t want to tear themselves away. (iPad music app. 3-10)

continuing series END ZONE Tiki & Ronde Barber Sports Stories

RIVALS AND RETRIBUTIONS 13 to Life, #5

Barber, Tiki; Barber, Ronde Simon & Schuster (176 pp.) $15.99 | Aug. 28, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-4169-9097-0 (Sports. 8-12)

Delaney, Shannon St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) paper $9.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-312-62518-4 (Paranormal romance. 13-15)

GO FOR THE GOAL A Fred Bowen Sports Story

MY HEALTHY BODY Body Works

Fromer, Liza; Gerstein, Francine Illustrator: Weissmann, Joe Tundra (24 pp.) $12.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-77049-312-4 (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Bowen, Fred Peachtree (152 pp.) paper $5.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-56145-632-1 (Sports. 7-12)

INVASION OF THE APPLEHEADS Deadtime Stories

MY ITCHY BODY Body Works

Fromer, Liza; Gerstein, Francine Illustrator: Weissmann, Joe Tundra (24 pp.) $12.95 | Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-77049-311-7 (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Cascone, Annette; Cascone, Gina Starscape (192 pp.) $14.99 | July 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-7653-3068-0 (Horror. 8-12)

HOW TO STEAL A DRAGON’S SWORD How to Train Your Dragon, #9

SUPER SURPRISE Zigzag Kids, #6

Giff, Patricia Reilly Illustrator: Bright, Alasdair Wendy Lamb/Random (80 pp.) $12.99 | PLB $15.99 Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-385-73890-3 PLB: 978-0-385-90757-6 (Fiction. 6-9)

Cowell, Cressida Little, Brown (304 pp.) $12.99 | July 3, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-316-20571-9 (Fantasy. 8-12)

LIBERATOR Dragons of Starlight, #4

PRINCESS POSEY AND THE MONSTER STEW Princess Posey, #4

Davis, Bryan Zondervan (432 pp.) paper $9.99 | July 24, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-310-71839-0 (Fantasy. 12 & up)

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Greene, Stephanie Illustrator: Sisson, Stephanie Roth Putnam (96 pp.) $12.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-399-25464-2 (Fiction. 6-8)

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CAUGHT Missing, #5

Haddix, Margaret Peterson Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $16.99 | Aug. 21, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-4169-8982-0 (Science fiction. 8-12)

13 SECRETS 13 Treasures Trilogy, #3

THE MELTING SEA Seekers: Return to the Wild, #2

Hunter, Erin HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | PLB $17.89 June 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-06-199637-5 PLB: 978-0-06-199638-2 (Animal fantasy. 8-14)

RAPTURE Fallen, #4

Kate, Lauren Delacorte (464 pp.) $17.99 | PLB $20.99 June, 19 2012 ISBN: 978-0-385-73918-4 PLB: 978-0-385-90775-0 (Paranormal romance.

12 & up)

King, Dedie Illustrator: Inglese, Judith Satya House (40 pp.) paper $12.95 | June 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-9358741-4-0 (Picture book. 4-7)

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Masiello, Ralph Illustrator: Masiello, Ralph Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | paper $7.95 July 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-57091-541-3 paper: 978-1-57091-542-0 (Nonfiction. 5-10)

THE FAKE FRIEND! Daphne’s Diary of Daily Disasters, #3

Moss, Marissa Illustrator: Moss, Marissa Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (96 pp.) paper $5.99 | July 10, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-4424-016-6 (Graphic fiction. 7-10)

FREDA STOPS A BULLY I See I Learn

I SEE THE SUN IN MEXICO / VEO EL SOL EN MÉXICO I See the Sun in…, #5

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Larkin, Jillian Delacorte (320 pp.) $17.99 | PLB $20.99 July 10, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-385-74041-8 PLB: 978-0-385-90837-5 (Historical fiction. 12 & up)

RALPH MASIELLO’S HALLOWEEN DRAWING BOOK Ralph Masiello’s Drawing Books

Harrison, Michelle Little, Brown (496 pp.) $16.99 | June 12, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-316-18563-9 (Fantasy. 8-12)

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DIVA Flappers, #3

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Murphy, Stuart J. Illustrator: Jones, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $14.95 | paper $6.95 July 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-58089-466-1 paper: 978-1-58089-467-8 (Picture book. 2-5)

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HAPPY, HEALTHY AJAY! I See I Learn

BROWNIE & PEARL MAKE GOOD Brownie & Pearl

Murphy, Stuart J. Illustrator: Jones, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $14.95 | paper $6.95 July 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-58089-470-8 paper: 978-1-58089-471-5 (Picture book. 2-5)

Rylant, Cynthia Illustrator: Biggs, Brian Beach Lane (24 pp.) $13.99 | Aug. 14, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-4424-3913-9 (Picture book/early reader. 3-5)

THE INTRIGUES OF HARUHI SUZUMIYA Haruhi Suzumiya, #7

DARK DESTINY Dark Mirror, #3

Tanigawa, Nagaru Little, Brown (280 pp.) paper $8.99 | June 19, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-316-03896-6 (Science fiction. 14-16)

Putney, M.J. St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) paper $9.99 | July 3, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-312-62286-2 (Historical fantasy. 12 & up)

THE SECOND SPY The Books of Elsewhere, #3

A MIDSUMMER TIGHTS DREAM Misadventures of Tallulah Casey, #2

West, Jacqueline Illustrator: Bernatene, Poly Dial (256 pp.) $16.99 | July 5, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-8037-3689-4 (Fantasy. 9-13)

Rennison, Louise HarperTeen (256 pp.) $17.99 | Aug. 1, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-06-179936-5 (Fiction. 13 & up)

TALES FROM A NOT-SO-GRACEFUL ICE PRINCESS Dork Diaries, #4

Russell, Rachel Illustrator: Russell, Rachel Aladdin (368 pp.) $13.99 | June 5, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-4424-1193-7 (Fiction. 9-13)

This Issue’s Contributors # Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Sophie Brookover • Timothy Capehart • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Elise DeGuiseppi • Robin L. Elliott • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga • Barbara A. Genco • Judith Gire • Megan Honig • Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • Megan Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Ellen Loughran • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • Jeanne McDermott • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • Lisa Moore • R. Moore • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Melissa Riddle Chalos • Erika Rohrbach • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Mindy Schanback • Dean Schneider • Chris Shoemaker • Paula Singer • Meg Smith • Robin Smith • Rita Soltan • Shelley Sutherland • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko

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indie Self-publishing has opened an incredible number of doors—not just for authors but for readers, too. With well over 1 million books self-published a year, those doors won’t be closing anytime soon. Of course the sheer quantity of self-published books is astounding—after all, everyone has a story to tell, and sharing that story with thousands, or even millions, of people has never been easier or less expensive—but what may be more surprising is the quality of selfpublished books ready to be discovered. At Kirkus Indie, we’ve offered professional, unbiased reviews of self-published books since 2005, so we’re intimately aware of how great these books can be. Some have even earned Kirkus stars. So read on and visit kirkusreviews.com/indie for an exciting look at books made possible by self-publishing.

9 These titles earned the Kirkus Star: LAY SAINTS by Adam Connell ....................................................p. 1536 PARALLEL LIVES by Michael Martins; Dennis A. Binette ........p. 1538 BEAR STORY by Liz Scott ........................................................... p. 1540 THE TAJ MAHAL OF TRUNDLE by Margaret Sutherland ........ p. 1541 HEART’S BLOOD by Elizabeth Zinn .......................................... p. 1545

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CATASTROPHICALLY CONSEQUENTIAL

Bird, Stephen C. Hysterical Dementia (152 pp.) $9.00 paperback | $1.00 e-book Feb. 16, 2012 978-0615566634 Lurid satirical riffs hold up a funhouse mirror to the world in this fantasia.

New York underground littérateur Bird (Hideous Exuberance, 2009) creates an alternative universe peopled by cartoonish characters who intermingle across dreamlike episodes that shatter the conventions of time, space and spelling. On high is the deity Lord Szczmawg, who benevolently smothers our Blue Green Planet with intestinal greenhouse gasses; on Earth is the antagonism between cretinous Evilangelists and burqa-ed Muslim comedians. Barely repressed perversion stalks the rural hinterland of Amurycka Profunda. There roam the likes of high school prostitute Mannequin Streetwalker and her half-sister, Incestuous Ingrydd, while blaringly unrepressed perversion saturates a nightmare Manhattan where self-loathing trust-funders wallow in sadomasochistic scenes that spill over into ritual slaughter. There’s a parade of vaudeville set pieces: Princess Orca Media, a “spoiled, demanding, pre-Freudian and power-drunk bitch” lords over sullen serfs; her time-travelling future incarnation, a ditzy Jersey Goth-ette discourses on Star Trek; a sketch set on the Planet Vomitoria serves “sewage sludge mousse garnished with chicken claws.”

Bird’s prose is a stew of surrealism—“She was blissfully unaware as she performed scathing, balletic, synchronized swimmingstyle moves…while giant carnivorous frogs salivated by the aqua colored kidney shaped swimming pool”—mixed with insult comedy and scabrous sexual provocations. He festoons it with Central European linguistic flourishes: German exclamations, Polish phonics, a weirdly Teutonic hillbilly patois—“Jes cuz we worships Jah-Hee-Zeus dunt mean usns alwaysiez gots tuh be all saintlie like Himmerz!”—that evokes a redneck Weimar cabaret. Threading through the chaos are a wicked caricature of New York scenesters, rage against environmental destruction, religious bigotry and striking photographs of dark roads, lit but not illuminated by garish streetlights that form a sinister, hallucinatory visual counterpoint to the text. Bird’s caustic levity, exuberant wordplay and arresting imagery make for a bracing read—though it’s not for the faint of heart.

This raucous avant-garde comedy will sweep you along with its vigor and originality.

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“The engrossing result feels like an ESP-themed mashup of The Sopranos and The Wire as scripted by Quentin Tarantino.” from lay saints

LAY SAINTS

Connell, Adam Self (434 pp.) $4.99 e-book | Apr. 23, 2012 Influence peddling—the telepathic kind—fuels the big city in this hardboiled but soulful fantasy thriller.

After years spent conveying the thoughts of small-town coma patients to their relatives, 20-something psychic Calder heads for Manhattan, where he’s snapped up by a man named Sotto and his crew of psychics-for-hire. Like everything else in New York, ESP is a racket: By telepathically sussing out potential blackmail fodder or implanting irresistible commands in a target’s mind, Sotto’s contractors will, for a reasonable fee, convince a client’s troublesome tenant to move, a boss to confer a promotion or a business competitor to close up shop. Unfortunately, Calder’s first assignment—swaying a city councilman’s vote on a real estate development—bogs down when the pol proves to be a rare “stone”—someone impervious to psychic manipulation. Mentored by a psychic amateur boxer who doesn’t mind dishing out the occasional old-school beating-aspersuasion, Calder resorts to ever more frantic mental string-pulling as he fends off a rival crew trying to lobby the council in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, he drinks in an atmospheric demimonde— New York City is in many ways the novel’s beguiling antagonist— that includes a stripper with a heart of gold, a priest with a taste for demented violence and thuggish psychic twins who try to run him out of town with an excruciating headache. Connell (Counterfeit Kings, 2004) pulls the psychic scenario out of the usual mystical dungeon and gives it a bracing, noir-edged urban naturalism. For all their supernatural powers, his characters are prosaic working stiffs: hardened, on the make and embroiled in murderous criminal turf battles, yet reigned in—sometimes—by a modicum of professional ethics or Catholic guilt. Despite their direct links to other minds, they reveal themselves mainly in long, discursive conversations that meander through offbeat observations, half-remembered anecdotes and curlicued philosophical ruminations, all phrased in a fluid, punchy, endlessly entertaining vernacular. The engrossing result feels like an ESP-themed mashup of The Sopranos and The Wire as scripted

by Quentin Tarantino.

A stylish reimagining of the psychic mystery genre.

THE THIEVES OF SHINY THINGS

Dickinson, Charlie Cetus (183 pp.) $2.99 e-book | Aug. 4, 2011 The rare murder among neighboring tribes forces a young Native American man to quickly grow up as he hunts his father’s killer in Dickinson’s novel.

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the indigenous peoples who populate the caves and riverbanks of this unnamed era. The setting’s important because everything needed for survival comes from the land: Acorns and the occasional mule deer provide sustenance, and the earth offers up raw nuggets of gold that may ultimately prove to be one tribe’s undoing. Jupa of the Miwokitul learns this last part the hard way when, one morning, he discovers his father’s dead body. With the help of Keleli the Elder, the young “hunter in the making” sets out to find who killed Naketi and, just as important, why.

A gold stone in Naketi’s pouch provides the first clue. Eventually, they suspect someone in the band of Nokotul people to the south of the Miwok caves. Keleli’s methodical investigation echoes other impressive detective stories, but it’s what happens in the background that really draws the reader into Jupa’s world.

Dickinson marvelously conveys his research of the day-to-day lives of these Northern California peoples, and the details captivate. The constant pounding of acorns for porridge and tea, the revered arrow-making tradition, training a wolf pup to hunt, the integral myth of Cougar Man, Jupa’s first mule deer hunt— all capture the sometimes harsh reality for those dependent on nature. Dickinson weaves the details together with strong, evocative language that expresses the bitter cold of spring water and the sound of ravens constantly spying from overhead. The pacing slips a bit toward the end, but a lovely final scene rescues a somewhat predictable resolution.

Rich visuals and an unusual mystery make this short novel an intriguing read.

SCORPIO RISING

Domovitch, Monique Lansen Publishing (398 pp.) $14.99 paperback | $4.99 e-book Sep. 15, 2011 978-1463790738 In Domovitch’s debut novel, the fates of an ambitious young American architect and a beautiful Parisian painter intertwine.

The novel tells the parallel stories of Alex Ivanov, who’s at the onset of a promising career in architecture, and Brigitte Dartois, who escapes a string of dishonorable men to make a career as a painter. Spanning from the late-1940s to the 1960s, the novel follows Alex and Brigitte as they come of age, take control of their destinies and begin to see their respective stars rise. Born in poverty to a single, Russian-immigrant mother, Alex single-mindedly pursues his ambition, working night and day to learn his trade and establish himself. With no time for love or marriage, he uses his powerful good looks to seduce and leave a string of women; an entanglement with sexy Anne Turner, a secretary at his firm with an agenda of her own, threatens to cost him his hard-won position. Brigitte, who left home as a teenager, finds a job in a glamorous department store and becomes the target of her married boss’ extravagant attentions; he buys her a new wardrobe and sets her up in a lavish apartment. Upon realizing his motives, |

she flees to start a new life in Montmartre, selling her paintings in the market. Against the odds, Alex and Brigitte meet in Paris.

They’re both uncertain about the future, but they find themselves drawn to each other despite their great differences. The novel has its flaws: The plot and characters are a bit generic, and many of Alex and Brigitte’s troubles result from the machinations of stock villains. The historical period is perfunctorily set, but Domovitch commendably handles the story, weaving together multiple subplots while creating passionate, ambitious characters who fight for what they want. She allows Alex and Brigitte enough complexity to prevent their eventual romance from seeming saccharine, although it’s not clear whether things will turn out well for them. The ambiguity and ominous developments that conclude the novel serve to dramatically set the stage for the novel’s sequel, The Sting of the Scorpio (2011), which follows the lovers to America.

Good old-fashioned melodrama, with plenty of sex and scheming.

MERELY A MISTER An Avalon Historical Romance Ferguson, Sherry Lynn Avalon Books (186 pp.) $23.95 | Feb. 7, 2012 978-0803474611

In Ferguson’s (Major Lord David, 2010, etc.) latest historical romance, an ailing lord falls in love with the woman who restores him to health.

After the loss at Waterloo, Myles Trent—Lord Hayden— takes refuge at Lake Como, his European tour cut short by the fevers that periodically rack his body. His constitution depleted, Myles is determined to return home as soon as possible. En route, he takes ill and recuperates in the village of Wiswood at the countryside home of Anne Whyte, master herbalist and healer. Although Anne’s patient has the appearance of a gentleman, Anne knows him only as “Mister Myles.”

During Myles’ convalescence, the two flirt and come to know one another; Lord Hayden’s identity remains unknown to both Anne and her father. A local, Perry Wenfield, hopes to wed Anne, but she rebuffs his advances. Myles, growing ever more enamored, resents Wenfield’s presence in her life. Soon, Myles is well enough to return to his obligations in Braughton, which may include seeking a proper wife from the Birdwistle clan. But will Lord Hayden honor his heart or familial duty? This is an enchanting story, set shortly after Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena. True to Avalon form, heroine Anne is independent; she is accomplished in her use of remedies, with a library of texts and a garden full of herbs for her concoctions. She masterfully prescribes horehound drops for the throat, rosewater compresses for a feverish brow and valerian for sleep. Best friend Vera serves as a touchstone, helping a subdued Anne give voice to her growing feelings for Myles and her doubts that she is his equal in station. Although proud, Myles is at Anne’s mercy in |

more ways than one, and his extended convalescence provides ample time for mutual affection, respect and admiration to flourish at a steady pace. The narrative has an authentic period feel, with a well-developed subtext about discontent among farmers after the Napoleonic Wars; this undercurrent is artfully used to advance relations between Anne and Myles. The verbal exchanges between these two gentlefolk are a mix of subtlety and spark, and a pleasure to read.

Enticing plot, winning dialogue and genuine historical backdrop, as befits a Regency romance.

THE LAST TAG

Goldfarb, Ann I. CreateSpace (338 pp.) $10.95 paperback | $0.99 e-book Feb. 3, 2012 978-1469908151 After being transported to ancient Roman times, a young man must solve a young girl’s murder.

Life in Arizona isn’t so great for EB— his Dad is overworked, his mom lives in another state and doesn’t want to see him—so he spends his time tagging around the neighborhood. However, trouble starts when he encounters the ghost of a young girl in an abandoned house, and she begs him to solve the mystery of her murder.

Unfortunately for EB, Aurelia’s murder took place in A.D. 78 in a Roman city near Pompeii called Herculaneum. Once he realizes he can’t ignore her request, he’s magically transported there. EB knows a little Latin from school, but he also knows that there’s only a limited amount of time before Mount Vesuvius erupts. As he meets various members of Aurelia’s family and their well-off Roman acquaintances, his graffiti skills come in handy: Leaving a message on a street wall helps him track down the culprit.

The stakes get higher on a personal level when EB catches the eye of a young Roman girl from a prominent family that’s tied to Aurelia’s death; in turn, he makes an enemy of her brother.

As EB begins putting the clues together, he has the genius idea to expose the murder in a very public fashion so that Aurelia’s family might be avenged and her ghost can find closure. The climax of the novel occurs during a remarkably tense scene at the Roman theater. Though readers must suspend disbelief that EB would fit into ancient Roman society so seamlessly, the novel moves along at a solid pace and the motivations for the murder are well-plotted. EB’s voice is charmingly youthful and acerbic, while also recalling the sharp observations of old film detectives.

A smart, entertaining time-travel mystery.

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“A powerful story that approaches a happy ending—or at least a hopeful one.” from the next to last drink

HARVESTING GOLD Thomas Edison’s Experiment to Re-Invent American Money Hammes, David L. Richard Mahler (166 pp.) $8.99 paperback | $3.99 e-book Mar. 12, 2012 978-0985066703

Hammes’ (Economics/Univ. of HawaiiHilo; Shaping Our Nation, 1988) nonfiction title sheds light on the great inventor’s eccentric, intriguing foray into economic theory.

With the nation suffering from a sharp depression in the early 1920s after the inflationary boom of World War I, Thomas Edison figured he could solve the economic malaise with a plan to back the value of money with farming commodities as an alternative to the gold standard. Under his scheme, farmers would deposit their harvest in government warehouses and receive half of its 25-year average price as a loan in dollars printed by the Federal Reserve, an amount that would be repaid over the course of a year as the crops were sold off. Edison hoped to provide farmers a more stable income and the country a more stable currency founded on real value; his proposal drew much acclaim from the public and press—and scorn from economists.

(One professor suggested that Edison was senile.) Economist Hammes gives a detailed, highly readable exposition of Edison’s complex scheme and its surprising resemblance to modern-day policy innovations. The Federal Reserve, he notes, now seems to be running a similar program—only instead of giving farmers money in exchange for their wheat, it gives bankers money in exchange for their toxic mortgage-backed securities. He sets Edison’s ideas against a lucid explanation of money, inflation and the gold standard, as well as a nuanced analysis of America’s 19th-century monetary controversies. At the time, currency was a stormy political issue pitting debtors, farmers and exporters against bankers and creditors. In Hammes’ vivid portrait, Edison embodies these contradictions: He’s a captain of industry who had a profound suspicion of both the Wall Street financiers who backed him and the boom-and-bust cycles that almost bankrupted him. He also emerges as a great American amateur: half-genius, half-crank, convinced that a little common-sense tinkering could improve the economy where the experts had failed. Hammes illuminates the crucial role money plays not just in the economy, but also in the national character.

A smart, lively account of a revealing episode in economic history.

PARALLEL LIVES A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River

Martins, Michael; Binette, Dennis A. Fall River Historical Society (1138 pp.) $75.00 | Nov. 22, 2011 978-0964124813

The authors (The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Vs. Lizzie A. Borden, 1994) return with a riveting history of the flourishing small town of Fall River, Mass., and its most infamous resident, Lizzie Borden.

It’s been more than eight decades since the death of Lizzie Borden, but interest in the gruesome ax murders that made her famous lives on. This book isn’t intended as a commentary on those murders of August 4, 1892, or speculation about her guilt or innocence; instead, it provides insight into Lizzie Borden, the woman, the city in which she spent most of her life and the society that would later judge her. According to documents, young Lizzie’s implication in her parents’ murders wasn’t based on evidence but merely suggestion and “village gossip.” Varying points of view on the family’s relations—especially between Lizzie and her stepmother—were recorded, but most townspeople distorted the Borden’s evidently normal familial disagreements into a sinister light, spurred on by the macabre events that transpired. The book, culled from exhaustive research by the curators of the Fall River Historical Society, offers an alternate perspective to the previously known particulars. The authors share unprecedented access to never-before-seen documents, memorabilia and other information. The result is an ambitious tome featuring a plethora of information, replete with beautiful photographs. Though the narrative and history are nonlinear, the telling flows seamlessly. The fateful events of August 4, 1892, are discussed early on, but references are peppered throughout, with additional perspective and data. Fall River itself is a compelling character: Its main claim to fame may be Lizzie Borden, but the town—one of the first to open a free library in the United States, in 1860—also persevered through two devastating fires, the Civil War, Lincoln’s assassination and multiple instances of embezzlement.

Every page may not be dedicated to the Borden family, but the lush history of the town and its many residents somehow connect to the family and its notorious daughter.

A must-have for history buffs.

THE NEXT TO LAST DRINK Mathieu, Lois CreateSpace (246 pp.) $15.95 paperback | $7.95 e-book Mar. 7, 2012 978-1468093254

A novel about one man’s struggle with alcoholism and anxiety after hitting rock bottom.

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Will Valentine repeats to himself because the idea of his very last drink—the one that will probably kill him—is too disheartening to bear. The story follows Will through individual therapy and group sessions as he attempts to rebuild his life and control his alcoholism, which seems to have been both the cause and the result of his deep-seated anxiety. It takes courage to write a book with an unlikable main character and even more to write one with a plot that’s less of an adventure than an internal journey. But Mathieu has a grasp on both the despair and the attendant ennui that accompany the fight for sobriety, and she’s able to effectively express the struggle. Depression is, of course, a complicated subject to write about because of the difficulty in conveying those attendant emotions to someone who is not or has not been in the throes of the disease. Yet Will’s internal debate about visiting his old bar and his belief that he could have just a little bit of wine are heartrending, and his relapse is especially poignant, perhaps because it’s such a believable story.

There are a few structural problems, though, particularly with the imprecise amount of time that passes between events. Also, Will’s lack of compassion for his fellow addicts and his impatience with the process of recovery make him somewhat unsympathetic, even as the reader hopes for his sober success.

A powerful story that approaches a happy ending—or at least a hopeful one.

PHYSICIAN EVIL

McCabe, Robert CreateSpace (152 pp.) $9.99 paperback | $2.99 e-book May 10, 2012 978-1475154375 Information technology consultant Robert McCabe continues his freelance evil-smiting against a bizarre trio of siblings.

In this distinct novel that defies easy categorization—part supernatural thriller, part (presumably fictionalized) memoir— McCabe’s brother-in-law, Tim, contacts him concerning a rash of heart-attack deaths in Portland, Ore. Computer hacking discovers a striking coincidence: Not only did the deceased share a cardiac surgeon, Dr. George Condon, but they all used the same financial planning firm, Condon and Chrome. Intrigued, McCabe secures a temporary job with Freightliner, providing legitimacy for his presence in the rainy city. Then, under the pretense of having chest pains, McCabe sees George Condon and immediately senses his evil. The doctor’s handshake produces an electrical jolt, and McCabe swears Condon’s eyes turned red and his skin green. Following the doctor’s recommendation to use his brother and sister’s financial planning firm, McCabe meets Lewis Condon, whose handshake produces a similar response. Because McCabe acquires the powers of the evil ones he encounters, he soon shares the Condons’ ability to read and alter a person’s heart rhythm. Combined with the metal-controlling powers he had previously acquired, McCabe’s new skill makes him a formidable adversary—much to the detriment of |

the Condon siblings. Although author McCabe’s engaging narrative voice carries readers effortlessly and enjoyably through this short suspense novel, the dialogue is often oddly stilted, a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent book. Superhero abilities aside, McCabe is an enviable protagonist; he’s easygoing and talented, with a remarkable nose for wine. Comparatively, secondary characters are one-dimensional, good or evil, although even the poorly developed characters don’t detract from the otherwise enthralling story. Enlisting his wife Shelley’s assistance to make the crusading a team effort, McCabe promises future installments in his evil-conquering series.

A unique tale well worth the suspension of disbelief.

COLLEGIUM SORCERORUM Thaddeus and the Master Sauvain, Louis Illus. by Bodley, Sean Louis Sauvain (493 pp.) $18.95 paperback | $1.99 e-book Apr. 19, 2012 978-0615584515

Sauvain’s (Collegium Sorcerorum: Thaddeus of Beewicke, 2011) second fantasy installment features a foursome of heralded, first-year Collegium students who discover their abilities through a series of unexpected adventures.

Talking statues, Lilyput the goblin and eerie laughter from the mysterious Minaret of Power welcome first-year students— Thaddeus of Beewicke, Anders of Brightfield and Rolland of Fountaindale—to the Collegium. While the first volume of Sauvain’s epic fantasy detailed the journey to the Collegium, the second depicts the young sorcerers as they learn hand-to-hand combat and grapple with hostile upperclassmen. Rolland, nicknamed “Prince of Thieves,” finds trouble from the start: He’s pinned to the wall by upperclassmen and later accosted by a demon for using sorcery on campus. Each time, ever-loyal Thaddeus comes to his brethren’s aid. Rolland’s knack for acquiring trouble adds flavor to the storyline, but the thief ’s pronounced ability to stir trouble is also a catalyst that helps readers understand the depth of the main characters’ friendship. Dismayed by the popularity of their first-year peers, upperclassmen challenge Thaddeus and company to a game of “Pila Ludere”—a form of soccer using a dragon’s bladder—on Halloween night.

Sauvain uses this match as an opportunity to introduce fairies and elves, who help even the odds against the older sorcerers.

As the contest nears an end, Thaddeus blacks out and finds himself in a faraway land called “Locus Lapidum Pendentium,” or the place of hanging stones. The baffling history of this desolate region inevitably links the Minaret of Power, the Cin empire, Master Silvestrus and the Collegium. Perhaps the most intriguing deviation from Sauvain’s debut novel is the integration of Zoarr, Prince of Mauretesia, and his unique love–hate relationship with Rolland. Throughout the book, Zoarr, a member of the senior class, strives to prove his loyalty to Thaddeus, Anders and especially Rolland. While Sauvain’s strength is his ability kirkusreviews.com

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“A fast-paced adventure with a deep backdrop of religious scholarship.” from the breath of god

to create dynamic characters, including animals such as talking bird Pscittica and golden dog Bellis, he leaves readers desiring more scenes that shed light on the mystery behind the Minaret of Power. Sauvain dedicates the last 50 pages to explaining the role of each character and clarifying the terminology.

A strong cast of characters and an intriguing storyline overshadow the sometimes abundant use of foreign terms known as “Lingua Imperatoria.”

BEAR STORY Just a Silly Man Who Wears a Fur Coat and Needs a Shave

Scott, Liz Illus. by Rose, Marju AuthorHouse (40 pp.) $18.49 paperback | Jan. 19, 2012 978-1467887144

In Scott’s debut picture book, a young bear experiences the passage of time as he learns to do what comes naturally.

Scott introduces early readers to a brown bear living in the far north, with river and forest always within easy reach. He’s coaxed into a lovely existence by Rose’s free, elegant linework and kaleidoscopic palette of watercolors. Scott describes the bear’s world with soft, incantatory prose: “You must remember this, when the autumn leaves fall, coloured red, yellow and brown, and the geese are flying south, it is time for all good little bears to be in their beds.” The autumn leaves beckon, a luxurious pile in his den. “The ice and snow came and covered everything and the earth slept too.” When the bear wakes from his hibernation, the world is a very different place. There is a factory in the valley, and the bear is mistaken for a wayward laborer. “You’re just a silly man who wears a fur coat and needs a shave and you can get back to work,” says the foreman. “I am a bear, I am,” protests the bear. The drollery amid the general madness evokes Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale, though Scott is her own pilot. To prove to the bear that he’s mistaken about his identity, the president of the factory takes him to the zoo and the circus; captive bears attest he can’t be a bear if he isn’t in their shoes. Thus, the bear caves in to expectations, ending up as a working stiff at the factory. But then the skies lower, the leaves change, and the bear gets back into the ursine swing.

Though the story’s message is far from ambiguous, Scott ably and shrewdly tenders a mysterious ending. Ultimately, the book’s lofty sentiment—being true to yourself—is softly peddled yet deeply affecting.

A story worthy of young readers’ attention.

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THE BREATH OF GOD A Novel of Suspense

Small, Jeffrey West Hills Press (414 pp.) $15.95 paperback | $15.95 e-book Mar. 1, 2011 978-1933512860 In Small’s (God as the Ground of Being, 2009) theological thriller, an American grad student traveling through Bhutan uncovers a secret, ancient connection between the world’s major religions.

In a remote monastery, Grant Matthews befriends Kinley Goenpo, a wise older monk who shares his spirit of curiosity.

Deep within the monastery’s library is exactly what Grant has been searching for: ancient texts purporting to show a direct link between the teachings of Hinduism and early Christianity.

The two join forces with Kristin Misaki, a free-spirited traveling journalist with whom Grant quickly becomes infatuated, to try to bring the evidence to light. They’re thwarted by conservative religious leaders, both in Kinley’s Buddhist order and within the evangelical Christian community in the United States. Most threatening of all is Tim Huntley—a Christian extremist, exsoldier and ruthless killer—who makes it his mission to ensure that the texts are destroyed along with whomever stands in his way. Soon, the enigmatic Kinley disappears with the texts in order to protect them, leaving Grant and Kristin to follow his trail across India and Bhutan, with Huntley close behind them.

The novel’s themes give Small, who studied religion at Oxford, ample opportunity to explore the history and common traits of different faiths. He handles subjects like the development of the Gospels and the nature of Hindu deities without slowing down the action. The storyline offers brief lessons on various locations—the Taj Mahal, the Hindu pilgrimage city of Varanasi and the mountaintop Taktsang monastery in the Himalayas—as they become focal points in the plot. A few moments feel a bit contrived, though, and the villains sometimes veer toward being melodramatically evil. Overall, however, the religious themes don’t come across as gimmicky, and Small seems sincerely interested in exploring the relationship between faith and fact.

A fast-paced adventure with a deep backdrop of religious scholarship.

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BEYOND MONTSERRAT A Medieval Novel Stanton, Jay Nanci Dickinson (455 pp.)

May 1, 2012 978-0557303908

Stanton’s debut novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Pedro López de Ayala, a 14th-century Spanish poet and historian who served under a series of kings.

Ayala, who lived well before Spain was united under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, authored some of the most famous works of his era, including Crónicas de Los Reyes de Castilla and the Libro Rimado del Palacio. These texts, plus a healthy dose of imagination, form the basis of Stanton’s well-crafted piece of historical fiction, which brings medieval Spain to life. Stanton writes in the first person, as if Ayala were penning his own memoir, starting with Ayala’s noble upbringing and his move at age 7 to the French papal city of Avignon, where he learned the secrets of both falconry and women before a brush with the plague sent him back to Castilla and León. He then spends the rest of his life serving as a scribe and advisor to four kings: brutish, inept Vicente; just but credulous Enrique II; frail, stubborn Juan; and young, inexperienced Enrique III. Ayala meets a number of other famous historical figures along the way, such as English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and French military commander Bertrand du Guesclin. In Ayala’s eyes, the Jews are basically dishonest schemers and the Moors are infidels, and Stanton only briefly mentions their suffering under Catholic rule. Instead, the novel focuses on the endless wars— and royal weddings—that took place among the kingdoms of Castilla, León and various other European nobilities. At times, the book gets bogged down in esoteric details, but for the most part, Stanton delivers a fast-moving narrative that deftly explores the power, violence, love, lust and piety of the period, via an intriguing character perfectly positioned to witness it all.

A compelling read for those interested in medieval Spanish history and literature.

THE TAJ MAHAL OF TRUNDLE

Sutherland, Margaret Trafford (288 pp.) $23.00 paperback | Oct. 19, 2009 978-1426904394 Sutherland’s (Windsong, 2008) contemporary novel takes readers to the small, fictional Australian town of Trundle, offering a peek at the lives of its residents over the course of a year.

Grown sisters Ronnie and Marie have returned to their family home in Trundle, each of them recovering from a personal heartbreak. They’re not sure what to make of their troublesome neighbors, the Lals, who have built a large, modern house next |

door. The sisters and the Lals are at the core of the story, but Sutherland expertly weaves the lives of various residents into a rich tapestry. Trundle possesses many elements found in any small town: mom-and-pop shops, a struggling economy and a colorful cast of characters. What sets it apart from other towns is a place called Pelican, a commune founded in the 1980s on the outskirts of town. Marie, a former resident who left Pelican under a cloud of disgrace, returns to find she is welcome in the community; burned out from work, Ronnie finds herself restored by her stay there. Meanwhile, the grieving Mr. Lal sees Pelican as the perfect spot to build his own version of the Taj Mahal in tribute to his deceased wife, and his son, Vijay, struggles to find himself and the meaning of life. The story shifts perspective, often jumping between the central protagonists and various Trundle figures, giving readers an intimate view of the town. But well-defined, realistically drawn characters enable readers to easily follow these shifts in perspective. In spite of occasional scandals and disturbing events, Sutherland’s novel is, at heart, a quiet story of ordinary people dealing with everyday problems. Her graceful descriptions—“Through the open window flowed a deep and restful stillness punctuated by the chime of birds and the tolling of frogs”—bring to life both the landscape and the people who inhabit it.

An enjoyable, eloquently told tale.

HOW TO PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK YOUR RISK MANAGEMENT A Practical Guide to Help You Tell if Your Risk Management Is Effective Talbot, Julian; Jakeman, Miles Resilient Risk, Ltd $15.00 paperback | $9.99 e-book Feb. 6, 2012 978-1466377578

Consulting financiers offer an abbreviated, practical guide to risk management via performance benchmarking.

This overview proves, at the very least, that an abundance of words is not always necessary to explain a high-level business concept. In a scant 50 pages, Talbot and Jakeman describe and dissect performance benchmarking, here defined broadly as “comparing your organization’s processes and risk management performance against internal measures, industry standards, and best practices from other industries.” The authors focus primarily on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) because using them is “a key strategy for shaping and defining desired behaviors and outcomes—and, indeed, of managing operational risks.” In addition, Talbot and Jakeman cover performance standards, define performance and establish a reporting framework.

A particularly helpful chapter discusses how to present KPIs to various audiences. While the authors emphasize the importance of a visual presentation, the visual aids needn’t be complicated. Talbot and Jakeman refer to the fact that they built a security-risk-performance scorecard for a multibillion-dollar kirkusreviews.com

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organization using nothing more than Microsoft Excel. Despite the book’s brevity, it is enhanced with numerous figures illustrating causal links for KPIs, lag vs. lead indicators, KPI performance standards and more. Additionally, Talbot and Jakeman reference real-world examples throughout the text. The authors are careful to point out that, despite their value, KPIs require considerable thought in the development stage. One issue, for example, is to be certain KPIs are measuring the right things and addressing the underlying causes: “When things go wrong, it is tempting to allocate blame, ‘kick to contractor,’ or try to dodge responsibility. Unless the KPIs are truly meaningful and can specifically identify poor performance, this strategy is likely to be counterproductive.”

Given the authors’ considerable experience in this targeted area, business managers interested in managing risk will find this well-written guide of special value.

has its faults—substandard punctuation and grammar, spelling by ear (“Old Lang Zain,” “By Mir Mister Shane”), haphazardly shifting points of view, far too much unnecessary detail, and wandering timelines—but it is undeniably engaging, much like coming across an old diary. Seeing Rose walk step by step into the life of a kept woman is fascinating, and it’s impressive how well debut author Tarcici depicts the temptations of glamor. Rose’s choices are not unlike those made today by young men who want—for various reasons—to be players in the drug trade. Though her family may disapprove, Rose becomes their main breadwinner; they have to eat somehow. Mercenary and vulgar as Rose is, she has the pluck and the luck to get what she wants.

Vivid period details and a forthright heroine help smooth the rough edges of this rags-to-riches story.

REEL LIFE

EAST SIDE STORY

Tarcici, Martha (192 pp.) $17.16 paperback | Sep. 30, 2010 978-1434983213 Rosa Rizzio and her friends take different paths to escape the poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side during the 1940s.

In 1942, Rosa Rizzio was a junior high dropout eager to start making money. Growing up during the Great Depression in a crowded, dirty cold-water tenement, she and her Italian-immigrant family lived through grinding poverty. In the time before President Roosevelt’s New Deal and free school lunches, her mother sometimes stole food just to give them one meal a day. Now, with a war raging and jobs plentiful, Rosa charts a path toward financial security that begins with a summer job waitressing, then develops into work as a rumba instructor (she changes her name to Rose Rice). Eventually, by the age of 15, she finds herself becoming the pampered mistress of Sam Cohen, a married garment-industry millionaire. She’d prefer someone young, handsome and single—and also rich— but you can’t have everything. Over the years, one childhood friend marries and moves to Long Island; another goes to college; and still another, Ruthie, on the brink of respectable marriage, throws over her potential husband in order to pursue a richer man, with disastrous results. Rose’s hardheaded gold-digging isn’t that different from her mother’s attitude toward theft: “Her family had to eat somehow. They had to dress somehow. And they had to keep warm somehow. It is a question of survival.” No amount of low-wage work could ever earn her the gowns, jewels and high life she craves, Rose reasons. Her sugar daddy wants to pay, so why not let him?

By her own lights, she’s a good friend: “When youse go out with Sam’s friends, don’t be ashamed to axk them for money.

If youse don’t, they won’t give youse anything and you’ll wind up with nothen but jelly beans,” she advises Ruthie. The novel 1542

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Townsend, Jackie Ripetta Press (376 pp.) $9.02 paperback | Feb. 22, 2012 978-0983791508 Two sisters travel a rocky path to selffulfillment—watching some movies along the way—in this reflective debut novel.

Betty and Jamie, red-haired siblings just a year apart in age, don’t exactly share a sisterly bond. In an early scene, 9-year-old Betty wishes her younger sister “would pirouette right through the pane glass window.” Seconds later, Jamie injures herself in a fall, and Betty lets her writhe in pain for several minutes before calling for help. It’s an event that sets the tone for the sisters’ future relationship—there’s love between them, but it’s tempered by misunderstandings, jealousy and failures to connect. A difficult home life doesn’t make things easier: Their father is a frustrated actor turned therapist, their mother an ambitious career woman who leaves her husband for another man as her daughters enter adolescence. These formative experiences leave a deep impression, which is apparent as the sisters grow older and make decisions about motherhood, careers and romance. A complex relationship with their moody, troubled mom haunts them, and neither sibling can forgive her failings. Betty copes by overcompensating, embracing her maternal instinct (she has three children) and designing a line of baby clothes. Jamie’s relationship to motherhood is more complicated. Cancer treatments appear to have left her infertile, and her husband is adamant he doesn’t want children. The novel is episodic and shifts between the recent and more distant past. A different film provides the structure for each chapter to indicate both the era and the circumstances of the sisters’ lives—Little Darlings during their teen years in the early 1980s, Breaking the Waves in the mid-’90s when Betty sacrifices her dreams to support her husband’s career. Some of these references work better than others; readers may be more familiar with The Wizard of Oz or Hitchcock’s Vertigo than the less-memorable 1998 film Primary Colors, and the summary of movie plots occasionally distracts from the larger story. From Betty’s infidelity to a shocking revelation from Jamie’s |

husband, the sisters have plenty of their own drama without heading to the movies. But they grow wiser as they age, a trajectory that expands the novel’s emotional scope.

A realistic, moving chronicle of the evolving relationship between sisters.

FOOD HELL 30 Day Plan to Lose Weight, Feel Better, and End Dieting Forever

Vargas, Vianesa Capital Food Coaching, LLC (69 pp.) $1.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2012 Vargas’ debut self-help guide offers a diagnosis of modern-day food problems, along with easy-to-follow solutions and expertly articulated advice on habits, choices and healthy daily practices.

Neither a fad diet nor a groundbreaking theory on eating right, this practical guide is filled with strategies to reverse the common misconceptions and habits people have adopted as part of a consumer-driven society. To start, Vargas debunks myths about supplements, gluten-free products and sugar-free foods. She offers a plan that steers clear of new products, fancy kitchen equipment and hours on the treadmill. Instead, the author focuses on the idea of eating “real” food, as opposed to supplements and liquid calories. She examines ingredients lists and shows readers how to decipher what is “real” and what is artificial. She recommends, for example, that a product like key lime pie should list key limes as one of the first ingredients; if key limes are not found at the top of the list, that’s a good indication that the product is packed with preservatives and processed ingredients. The book’s organizational structure is very effective, allowing readers to work their way out of “Food Hell” from page one. Rather than completing the book before embarking on a new lifestyle plan, readers can incorporate small changes into their diet and lifestyle as they move along.

The book concludes with sample meal plans, possible exercise schedules and a fair number of simple recipes incorporating the knowledge and principles of the book. Though the grammar is, at times, somewhat casual and the prose is peppered with punctuation errors, readers should find the tone of this title accessible and conversational. Vargas doesn’t chastise her readers, and she avoids preaching and enforcing unrealistic rules. The material here may not be new, but the way in which it is presented could be helpful to readers on the lookout for a new approach.

A practical, helpful guide to fit any budget and help readers make their own dietary decisions.

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Vineyard, Jeremy Coin Bump $2.99 e-book | Nov. 10, 2010 This intense young-adult epic pits a group of teens against demons, deities and the forces of nature.

Vineyard’s (Setting Up Your Shots, 2008) first novel brims with mythic power without forgetting the contemporary world.

After their new friend, Nayana, disappears into a strange portal with a dark abductor, lifelong friends Masha and Thomas stumble upon a mysterious land where great heroes and deities are preparing for a world-shaking battle. Behind them follows Vanya, Masha’s uncle, an expert lock picker (locks recur as a leitmotif in the novel). A host of friends and enemies awaits the transplants, from wanted-thief Samuel Windspring to Irkalla, queen of storms. The friends quickly find Nayana, but the way home remains unclear, their destinies now bound to the gathering war with the Asuras—the demonic forces of Yama, lord of death. The group searches for a living weapon known as a Deva, which can perhaps defeat the Asura threat, as they traverse exotic locales on their journey, including Baudas, city of knowledge, and the Meadow Infinite. Many of the beings they encounter emerge directly from Vedic mythology and the Mahabharata, the Hindu lore that serves as excellent source material for a story about epic clashes. For a relatively short novel, the plot’s velocity is dizzying at times, but Vineyard packs in an abundance of characters and background. With so much happening, he rarely has time to slow down and describe the magical world’s landscape. Occasional flashbacks to the ancient past dot the narrative, but their abruptness and lack of clarification sometimes confuse rather than illuminate the story, even though Vineyard’s lyrical style will keep readers consistently engaged. Further chapters could allow this world to more fully unfold; in the meantime, however, this superb read provides a powerful adventure.

Deep myths and thrilling magic that will excite young readers.

THE METROPOLIS ORGANISM

Vitale, Frank Longtail Distribution Network $8.95 enhanced e-book November 4, 2011 A great city is a tiny organism writ large, according to Vitale’s debut multimedia e-book.

Vitale is taken with the idea that the form and function of a metropolis look uncannily similar, from a distance, to those of biological entities. He elaborates the analogy in a series of remarkable photos and embedded video sequences that compare aerial and satellite views of cities with studies of microscopic life-forms. The juxtapositions are striking: a Slovakian town sprawling over the landscape is pictorially paired with an kirkusreviews.com

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h f r a n k v i ta l e

THE METROPOLIS ORGANISM

Vitale, Frank Longtail Distribution Network $8.95 enhanced e-book November 4, 2011

K I R K US M E DI A L L C # K I R K US M E DI A L L C President M A RC W I# NKELMA N President SVP, Finance M A RC WEISNH KU EL LL MAN JA M SVP,Marketing Finance SVP, J AIM LY L M KE E SHH EU JN SVP, Marketing SVP, Online M ILK H EO HFEFJM NA YN PAU

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Q: You call the city “a living, breathing biological organism.” How so?

A: I look at cities from the perspective of a hypothetical scientific observer: If an observer with just two traits—he thinks like a scientist and doesn’t know what a human is—looked down at a city, could he tell whether it was an artifact that humans operate, or an organism? Scientists look at an organism as something with parts that work together to form a whole; in that sense a city is an organism. A scientist looking at a cell in a petri dish doesn’t say, “The endoplasmic reticulum is the brains and the rest is just an artifact.”

Q: Your book is full of arresting images that juxtapose cities with living beings: old city walls with cell membranes, factories with organelles. You even compare the Norwegian town of Baerum to a “slime net.”

A: A slime net is a green mass you might see in a swamp, but it’s kind of lacy and beautiful. It builds this net, and then the cells of the organism move through the net from one place to another, like a city with highway transportation. When I look at cities, I see the same kinds of systems that sustain organisms—supplying energy, eliminating waste products, communicating. To a scientific observer, an urban factory has stuff going in and cars coming out, just as we see nutrition going into bone marrow and red blood cells coming out.

Q: You did your own observation of Dayton, N.J. What did you see?

A: From on high, using Google Earth satellite photos, I saw circulation, structures and street patterns that looked biological. Suburban streets look like mitochondria, energy-generating organelles in a cell that have their own DNA. They evolved from bacteria that joined together to form the eukaryotic cell.

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Q: Just as a city is built up from smaller dwellings, businesses and people who come together to form something bigger?

A: Exactly. I also noticed that Google Earth images can’t resolve a human being; a scientific observer looking at them would never know humans exist.

When I drove around Dayton, I still couldn’t see many humans because the streets are mostly deserted. By volume and weight, the human presence in a city is extremely small and hard to see.

Q: That leads you to argue that humans are not the creators of the urban superorganism, but just cogs within it.

That’s quite a blow to the human ego.

A: A huge blow. The same thing happened when Darwin figured out that we weren’t a superior being separate from animals—that we were just one of them. All animals think they are the center of the world; I’m sure my dog thinks that my purpose in life is to feed him. But we’re not that important.

Take cloud computing: Nobody controls the cloud.

There are a lot of things where humans are an integral part, but there’s nobody in charge.

Q: You’re a film director, and you’ve embedded lots of video clips in the text. How do you market a multimedia e-book?

A: Early on I went to libraries and said, “I’d like to give a talk that’s half about e-books in general, and half about my e-book.” That didn’t turn out successfully; people were interested in the e-book part, but they didn’t come to hear about cities as organisms. Then I found out that Kirkus does reviews for independent authors—real reviews—so I sent it in. I’m now in touch with Wisconsin Public Radio, and they’re doing a series on cities for a show called Science and the Search for Meaning. I included the review as part of my pitch, and they’re considering it.

–By Jim Franklin

9 For the full interview, please visit kirkusreviews.com P HOTO C OU RT E SY OF TA N YA W RI GH T

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Imagine an urban area growing through the years like a blossoming culture in a petri dish. Filmmaker Frank Vitale extends the metaphor to reality: In his theory, the city is “a living, breathing biological organism.” The idea may seem far-fetched, but Vitale supports his hypothesis with an array of wondrous images and video embedded in his new e-book, The Metropolis Organism. The result is “a triumph chock-full of stunning images, on scales both intimate and grand,” according to its Kirkus Indie review. We recently spoke to Vitale about marketing his idea as an e-book and how he sees hints of the future in the present.

“The author’s love for Arizona is immersed in her lyrical writing, as the impact of environment on family is threaded wonderfully into various plotlines.” from heart’s blood

amoeba; twisty, suburban cul-de-sacs are set against a cellular endoplasmic reticulum; the flow of street traffic becomes a “corpuscular circulation system” for the automobiles (blood cells) coursing through it; a video montage of satellite pictures shows Las Vegas swelling through the decades like a burgeoning culture in a desert petri dish. The text also insists that the notion of a city as an organism is literal truth rather than metaphor.

Humans, Vitale contends, should give up their anthropocentric belief that they are creators of the urban realm. Instead, humans should adopt the objective viewpoint of a “Scientific Observer” looking down from on high, for whom people would appear as just one of many “unremarkable organelle[s]” servicing the urban superorganism. Visually, Vitale’s CD-ROM e-book is a triumph chock-full of stunning images, on scales both intimate and grand: pretty suburban streetscapes; the awesome high-rise fortress of Kowloon, China’s Walled City; and the wispy Norwegian town of Baerum Akershus, “lacy and fragile, cling[ing] to the earth like a delicate slime net.” Raptly evocative prose crackling with ideas makes a stimulating accompaniment to the visual content. Philosophically, his treatise can be a bit muddled and overstated: Readers know for a scientific certainty that cities are intentionally planned and built by humans; cities aren’t autonomous life-forms that have simply “germinated,” as Vitale would have it. Still, his conceit is a fruitful, fascinating one that yields rich insights into the urban ecology.

A superb pictorial and video meditation on the life of cities.

landscape. Among several entwined themes, family and its different permutations are at the heart of the novel: The rejection of Ty’s biological son contrasts Ty’s relationship with his adopted daughter. The author’s love for Arizona is immersed in her lyrical writing, as the impact of environment on family is threaded wonderfully into various plotlines.

An eloquent, refreshing perspective on the struggles faced by those living along the Mexican border.

HEART’S BLOOD

Zinn, Elizabeth CreateSpace (272 pp.) $13.95 paperback | $9.99 e-book Mar. 20, 2012 978-1468140385 Zinn (The Happiness Lottery, 2011, etc.) returns with a novel that chronicles the trials of a wandering cowboy who learns to take life by the horns.

Tyler “Ty” McNeil makes his living running rodeo shows, just like his father, now deceased, did.

Ty spends several years traveling far from home to do so, which strains his marriage. He eventually chooses the rodeo over his wife, finding himself alone and unfulfilled. As a result, Ty makes a radical decision to take control of his life and live it on his own terms. Rather than blindly following the direction of others, Ty now desires to direct his own path, regardless of his obligations.

The peace he makes and his thoughts on life as he grows older are magnificently captured through intermittent reflections. Ty abandons the rodeo and sets his sights on a ranch back home in southwestern Arizona. Zinn’s characterization is purposeful, deep and rich; each character is well-developed and instrumental to the story. An intriguing mix of cultures populates the novel: Anglos, Mexicans, Native Americans and mixed-blood families. Although the story chronicles the changes in Ty’s life over the course of two generations, the setting takes almost equal precedence, brought to life by vivid descriptions of the |

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“A compelling combination of reality and fantasy...�

For information about publication rights, email Shannonmbrewer@yahoo.com or call 512.921.1420.