May 15, 2011: Volume LXXIX, No 10

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REVIEWS

t h e nat i o n ’s p r e m i e r b o o k r e v i e w j o u r na l f o r mo r e t h a n 7 5 y e a rs

fiction

nonfiction

children & teens

★ Amit Majmudar pens a magnificent first novel that follows the lives of four refugees p. 814

★ Mary Jane Nealon poetically writes about her Irish-American family in a fine memoir p. 847

★ Rosemary Clement-Moore gives readers a blessedly independent paranormal heroine p. 861

★ A lovelorn gardener named Mattias is at the center of Johan Harstad’s splendid novel p. 813

★ Storied defense attorney Clarence Darrow is profiled

by John A. Farrell in a fresh bio p. 835

★ A cheer goes up for fresh veggies of all kinds in April Pulley Sayre’s infectious chant p. 879

★ Elizabeth Berg delivers the goods in a masterful novel about a reunited divorced couple p. 807

★ Manning Marable offers a candid, corrective look at Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X p. 843

★ Diane Stanley combines fairy-tale motifs with nuanced characters for a standout fantasy p. 881

Laura Harrington finds bliss; Donald Ray Pollock entertains the devil; J.M. Hayes shares a lesson; Darien Gee bakes bread; Caprice Crane gets lucky; DBC Pierre searches for wonderland; Carol Higgins Clark has murder on her mind; and much, much more v i s i t k i rku sre vi e ws. com f or f ull versions of f eatures, q & as and thou sa n ds of archived reviews

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

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f r om

interactive e-books p. 861 fiction p. 867 mystery p. 819

t h e

science fiction & fantasy p. 826 nonfiction p. 827

children & teens p. 857 kirkus indie p. 886

# President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Vice President & Publisher B O B C A R LT O N bcarlton@kirkusreviews.com Editor E L A I N E S Z E WC Z Y K eszewczyk@kirkusreviews.com

p u b l i s h e r

Dear Readers, It seems that every media outlet is reporting on the changes in the book business, predicting where our industry may be going. One of the most informed prognosticators is the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). The BISG is a national, not-for-profit U.S. book trade association with the mission of creating a more informed, empowered and efficient book industry. The Executive Director for BISG Scott Lubeck recently spoke about where the industry is headed.

Areas on the Horizon of the Book Business • Taxonomy and semantics development and maintenance: to guide online navigation and discovery, with employees to specifically manage product information. “General trade publishing has consigned that role way downstream to a coordinator-level person, but it really requires someone with data modeling expertise to think about all the dimensions of product information you need to manage and maintain over time,” Lubeck says.

• Process management: The ability to analyze a business at a detailed level so it can be reengineered quickly. Publishers need to be “agile” because the business is changing so fast, almost like the software business.

• Technology-based product development: creating many types of non-printed book products in multiple formats. Included in this category is user experience architecture, which focuses on building products that consumers can actually use and enjoy. (Apple, of course, has great user experience architects.)

• Information architecture: An information architect designs for simplicity and results; this skill is “highly coveted,” Lubeck says. Websites designed for commerce have to be easy to navigate: “If you have to go through 12 steps to check out, you probably lose the buyer.”

• Statistical, predictive analysis: Empirical research, development, and decision making. “It’s no longer good enough to go on your gut,” Lubeck says. “When you think about the fire hose of data produced by websites, apps, and social media, the ability to make it useful is a key competency.”

• Master data management: Managing metadata/product info and customer data for purposes including product identification, online discovery, and understanding and rewarding customer loyalty.

• Metadata management: Managing all the information about the content from all sources, both publisher- and user-generated.

• Community management: Driving engagement/ enchantment, including managing social networking, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing.

—Bob Carlton

Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N

Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkusreviews.com Features Editor M O L LY B RO W N molly.brown@kirkusreviews.com Children’s & YA Books VICKY SMITH vicky.smith@kirkusreviews.com Kirkus Indie Editor P E R RY C RO W E perry.crowe@kirkusreviews.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Editorial Coordinator REBECCA CRAMER rebecca.cramer@kirkusreviews.com Contributing Editor G REG ORY Mc NAME E # for customer service or subscription questions, please call 877-441-3010 Kirkus Reviews Online www.kirkusreviews.com Print indexes: www.kirkusreviews.com/ book-reviews/print-indexes Kirkus Blog: www.kirkusreviews.com/blog Advertising Opportunities: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/ advertising-opportunities Submission Guidelines: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/ submission-guidlines Subscriptions: www.kirkusreviews.com/ subscription Newsletters: www.kirkusreviews.com/ subscription/newsletter/add This Issue’s Contributors Maude Adjarian • Bruce Allen • Joseph Barbato • Amy Boaz • Julie Buffaloe-Yoder • Gary Buiso • Derek Charles Catsam • Kelli Daley • Dave DeChristopher • Gregory F. DeLaurier • David Delman • Kathleen Devereaux • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Julie Foster • Peter Franck • Faith Giordano • Alan Goldsher • Christine Goodman • Peter Heck • BJ Hollars • Robert M. Knight • Paul Lamey • Rebecca Schumejda • Judith Leitch • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Carey London • Swapna Lovin • Joe Maniscalco • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Clayton Moore • Chris Morris • Liza Nelson • John Noffsinger • WM O’Neill • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Gary Presley • Erika Rohrbach • Lloyd Sachs • Bob Sanchez • Susan Sebanc • William P. Shumaker • Kester Smith • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Claire Trazenfeld • Steve Weinberg • Carol White • Chris White • Joan Wilentz • Alex Zimmerman

interactive e-books WILD FABLES

interactive e-books for children AESOP IN RHYME: Hare and Tortoise

Adapter: Park, Marmaduke Illustrator: Shukla, Umesh Developer: Auryn Inc. Version: 1.0 | April 9, 2011 An arch 19th-century version of the fable, sans explicit moral, is paired to illustrations of silhouette figures flexed in lively ways by barred “Scanimation”type screens.

Viewers can opt to take an active or a (semi-) passive role. With the Read-to-Me option, a plummy-voiced narrator reads aloud as the pages and the superimposed screen advance automatically. Children reading the text silently can manually swipe to the next page and drag the screen over the black silhouettes at any chosen rate to control the speed with which the contenders nod, gesticulate and dash along. Park’s formal but not stuffy language echoes that of the poet’s contemporary Edward Lear and matches like qualities in the art nicely. “So at last this slow walker came up with the hare, / And there fast asleep did he spy her. / And he cunningly crept with such caution and care, / That she woke not, although he pass’d by her.” Just for fun and a bit of added animation, the text appears on sign boards that swing down from the top and can be cut loose to fall and shatter violently into individual words. The free version of the app is subsidized by ads that run across the top of each frame; readers who prefer a commercial-free experience can upgrade within the app for a fee.

Too quickly over, but an altogether engaging version of a classic bit of common literary currency. (iPad storybook app. 5-8)

Aesop Developer: Razeware LLC Version: 1.1 | March 31, 2011 A small but growing set of Aesop’s fables are collected in this app and given a too-literal, but serviceable reworking.

There’s a glut of what might be called Aesop’s apps for the iPad; developer Razeware LLC’s take is that it’ll provide a story or two for free and allow readers to pay for more tales within the app. Currently there are four tales; “The Crow and the Pitcher” and “The Tortoise and the Hare” are the freebies. “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Fox and the Grapes” are not. The adaptations are spare and short, with morals clearly spelled out on the last page (“It’s easy to scorn what we cannot have,” reads the one for “Grapes”). The app’s mix of sprightly woodwinds and New Age–y orchestral synth, a lack of spoken narration and minimal sound effects gives it a more austere feel than is perhaps necessary. The illustrated objects—mostly animals—are large, clearly defined and lovely, but as in too many iPad story apps, most of the interaction consists of tossing animated objects (grapes, pebbles, woodland creatures) across the screen as they float about in zerogravity–like conditions. For “The Crow and the Pitcher,” readers can fill the pitcher up with these drifty pebbles; in “Tortoise,” the Hare zips across the screen in a puff of smoke when touched, but other animals move like they’re swimming in an aquarium filled with gravy.

It’s an admirable effort with more tales promised for future release; the whole thing could stand to be a little wilder, though. (iPad storybook app. 2-7)

ALICE & ANDY IN THE UNIVERSE OF WONDERS The Planet Earth

Barrosa, Mariana; Pullen, Lee Illustrator: Roquette, Andre Illustrator: Martins, Mafalda Developer: The Science Office $3.99 | Version: 1.0.1 March 23, 2011

Amateur production design and underwhelming interactive features only underscore the unusual superficiality of this planetary once-over. |

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“...the real meat of the app is the zippy way that the characters and their horses, teacups and coaster cars bound across the page (and over it, under it, around it).” from my dad drives a roller coaster car

The text and narration can be set at any time to any of five languages plus British or American English, but the good news ends there. Read at a deliberate pace by a narrator who cannot be switched off, the wordy tale endows two 7-year-old twins with a magic globe. It takes them down to the Earth’s core (which Andy somehow spots through solid rock even before they arrive) and up into orbit, where Alice points out features that are not visible on the planet below. In response to a wish to see “different animals,” it deposits them near a camel in an unspecified desert and then in the ocean, where an anglerfish somehow shares its deep-sea habitat with coral, algae and a whale (all of which are also unseen in the illustration). They then travel to a snowy scene into which a polar bear and an Inuit lad slide slowly and rigidly after a few moments. A final wish gathers three children “from all around the world” in casual western dress, plus the Inuit in furs, to share a birthday cake. Consonant with the monotonous background music, wooden writing, scientific misinformation and disconnects between text and pictures, finger taps will make labels appear, and some figures can be induced to move a few inches or blink almost invisibly.

Apprentice work at best; definitely not ready for prime time. (iPad informational app. 6-8)

THE DEEP BLUE KINGDOM

Cherian, Marcus Developer: Imaginatronics LLC $4.99 | Version: 1.0 March 21, 2011 Amateur writing and lowrent design sink this quick video visit to the ocean’s upper reaches.

To a continual background burbling that sounds like a recording of a tabletop aquarium, sharks, humpback whales, sea turtles, clownfish, shrimp and other marine creatures glide or saunter past in the half-minute or so loops featured on each of the 21 screens. Meanwhile, a lushly expressive narrator reads text that runs to lines like “The lionfish is a strange looking creature that has very interesting features,” “Seahorses are gentle, playful, and amazing” (jellyfish, manta rays and schooling fish are also “amazing”) and “Did you know that the sea dragon can only be found in the waters of Australia?” Aside from swiping to turn the page, a zoom gesture to bring the video images to fulltablet width (but not height) and a tap to repeat the narration, there are no touch features—nor any further interactive elements, leads to more information or other extras. Next to the more feature-rich Ocean Blue for iPad (2010) or even a printed photo album like Epic Ocean HD (2010), this isn’t likely to give children more than an ankle-deep experience.

Decent-quality video embedded in an anemic app. (iPad nonfiction app. 6-8)

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NURSERY RHYMES WITH STORYTIME

Illustrator: Denslow, W.W. Developers: ustwo; Atomic Antelope $3.99 | Version: 1.1 April 5, 2011 Another classic of childhood, Mother Goose, comes alive on the iPad, thanks to developer ustwo in conjunction with Atomic Antelope, who produced the impressive Alice for the iPad. Readers have to shake awake the sun to begin, and each screen continues the physical fun, mimicking old-time novelty books with plenty of swiping and swinging action.

Drag Jack and Jill’s bucket up the well shaft and watch it descend again with a splash; propel the little piggy that goes “Weee Weee Weee” all the way home along a spiral path. The vintage illustrations are by W.W. Denslow (famous for his Wizard of Oz work), and the supersized text is integral to the experience, dominating each page and sometimes even becoming one of the interactive elements. Other rhymes include “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “This Little Piggy,” “Three Blind Mice,” “Hey Diddle Diddle,” “Humpty Dumpty” and “Twinkle Twinkle,” with more promised, according to iTunes, along with “narration for all.” There is currently no read-tome option, though it does include a StoryTime™ connection feature allowing parents on business trips to perform remote bedtime reading via the Apple GameCenter app and a wifi connection; both see the same page (with the parent controlling page-turning) and can hear each other, though any page-swiping action is viewed independently.

This interactive nursery-rhyme app has great appeal, even without long-distance read-alouds. (iPad storybook app. 1-4)

MY DAD DRIVES A ROLLER COASTER CAR

Doyle, Bill Illustrator: Guidera, Daniel Developer: Crab Hill Press, LLC $1.99 | Version: 1.0 March 31, 2011 Dynamic, motion-filled pages and a hip, retro visual style make for a fabulous ride.

Hank’s a lucky kid by most any definition; his family gets around on carnival rides like carousel horses, rocket ships, a log-flume vessel and the titular roller coaster car his dad drives. But his constant pleas to take the wheel (or reins) are met with equally constant rejections... until Hank gets a welcome surprise that allows him to make his own amusement-park path. The pages of the story are buoyed by distinctive illustrations that wouldn’t be out of place in an entertainment magazine and typography that spins, pops out and bumps up against characters in clever ways. But the

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NICKELBY SWIFT, KITTEN CATASTROPHE

real meat of the app is the zippy way that the characters and their horses, teacups and coaster cars bound across the page (and over it, under it, around it). Simple screen taps activate nearly all the motions, making it accessible to young readers, while its sophisticated look and clever writing (“Someday isn’t even a real day!”) make it appealing for older kids.

Hank’s family is a blast, and so is this extremely welldesigned app. (iPad storybook app. 3-10)

NASH SMASHER

Doyle, Bill Illustrator: Cummings, Troy Developer: Crab Hill Press, LLC $1.99 | Version: 1.0 December 15, 2010 A destructive lad gets a proper outlet for his energies in a story app positively festooned with funny special effects and side business.

In an extreme case of adrenalin rush, barely is birthdayparty invitee Nash through the door than he’s out of control.

He begins wildly smashing toys, gifts, favors and even the cake—potentially over and over, thanks to touch-activated animations and slidable tabs and wheels on every screen.

Clued in at last by the tears raining from fellow partygoers (plus a water level that rises or falls with a slider), he “feels like a twit” and tries unsuccessfully to match the pieces of various damaged toys (with more sliders, “[h]e gives the cake a hat while the doll gets a bat. The train wears a gown and the fish sports a crown”). He is about to depart in disgrace when birthday girl Sue forgivingly hands him a pole and points him toward the piñata. POW! Along with the main actions, tapping or swiping many of the figures and background details in each retro-style cartoon scene activates an animation or sound effect, occasionally a different one each time. On the final page there’s even a digital paintbrush that smears a new layer of “frosting” on the cake. The voiced narration is as smooth as the animations, but it can also be switched off.

Despite some clumsy versifying, as fine and fun a way as ever was to re-channel (temporarily, at least) the beast within. (iPad storybook app. 6-9)

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Hecht, Ben Illustrator: Vimislik, Matthew Developer: Mythos Machine Publisher: VivaBook $2.99 | Version: 1.1 April 14, 2011 A riff on the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” offers readers an eccentric inventor, a kitten and a handful of pallid interactive features.

Not only does “helpful” Nickelby make a nuisance of himself in Dr. Kafruganegel’s lab, he wrecks the whole house by losing control of the multi-armed “Clean-O-Matic” robot when the doctor steps out to run errands. Behind a Home screen button confusingly labeled “My Library,” children can opt for either a pleasant British-accented narration or any of several self-recorded ones. Even when the audio is turned off, however, the text scrolls slowly in and out of view on successive pages, blending into the bright cartoon backgrounds except for one or two highlighted lines at a time.

Likewise taking far too long to load after each page turn, the scanty assortment of touch-activated effects range from muttered comments and subdued sounds to isolated items and figures that glow or can be coaxed to move. The animation is stiff, and Vimislik’s figures—particularly the Doctor, whose expression seldom varies from wide-eyed and openmouthed dismay—are equally wooden. The narration is too often out of sync with the highlighted text, and the app’s audio track continues to run even after the tablet is locked.

“Awww”s for the cute kitten; “ugh”s for the slow and frustrating app. (iPad storybook app. 6-8)

WILL & KATE

Illustrator: Larkum, Adam Developer: Ink Robin $3.99 | Version: 1.0 April 8, 2011 Oozing charm, a sweet bonbon to celebrate the royal wedding of (probably) the decade.

“Once upon a time in a delightful country called England, there lived a young prince….” Illustrated with cartoons done in spot-on Quentin Blake style and (optionally) narrated in a cheery British lilt, this brief tale brings young William, who “knew that one day he would grow up to be king” but “wondered whether he might be lonely in the palace,” and Catherine, who “[l]ike many little girls, … dreamt of meeting a prince” together. They meet at an old library table and proceed to go on a balloon ride that stands in for “all kinds of adventures.” Then it’s on to the wedding, mutual “I do”s, the dancing, the honeymoon and, at last, an

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optimistic (considering recent family history) “happily ever after.” (This, in a large castle described as a “pretty little cottage in the middle of the Welsh countryside.”) Sounds, animations and other special effects there are aplenty.

Sheep open their mouths to bleat or snatch a bouquet, and a glittering royal engagement ring pops out of a padded box with a hearty “ka-ching!”; There are touch-activated fireworks and approving murmurs from formal portraits of Queen Victoria and Henry VIII. Truly a fairy tale to warm cockles on both sides of the pond, with a few dashes of sauce to f lavor the sugar. (iPad storybook app. 6-9, adult)

LAZY LARRY LIZARD

Nunn, Graham Illustrator: Neale, Kim Developer: Wasabi Productions $3.99 | Version: 1.3 March 30, 2011 Series: Larry Lizard From Down Under, a delight for the diaper-clad.

All Larry the lizard wants to do is snooze—so when, at the repeated urgings of the Aussieaccented narrator, young viewers/listeners give him a poke, he stirs, grumbles, makes eye contact and then slips off behind a rock, under a gum tree or up in its branches. When he finally starts to cry, the narrator changes her tune and suggests that “instead of giving Larry a poke / Give Larry a very soft…very gentle…very special…stroke!” Simple, smoothly animated cartoons illustrate this subtly presented lesson in toddler socialization. For added value, the app comes bundled with an elementary game in which players try to get Larry to jump over, rather than bump into, a passing set of rocks and thorny shrubs. Except for the game’s irritatingly jaunty and short-looped music, this is a sure pleaser, interactive on an unusually elemental level and so well pitched in pictures and premise to its intended audience that requests for repeat encounters are near certain.

A limited set of animations and interactive effects expertly leveraged into an engaging experience for the very youngest app-heads. (iPad storybook app. 1-3)

HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, AND TOES

Illustrator: Wells, Rosemary Developer: Auryn Inc. $3.99 | Version: 1.0 | April 8, 2011 Series: Bunny Fun This toddler app revolves around the children’s song by the same name, the first in a planned suite by the illustrator of the now-classic My Very First Mother Goose.

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Once the app is launched, one of Wells’ trademark sturdy bunnies appears wearing Western clothes, while an orchestral version of “Chicken Reel” loops in the background. Tap the animal, and the violins give way to a small group of children singing the nursery song, while the bunny points to his corresponding body parts. (Fair warning: You may never be able to get the tune out of your head.) Readers are given two other options: Tap the body parts for individual display and enunciation of the words, or record your own version for playback. A menu at the top of the screen shows four different snapshots, each of the same bunny dressed in other attire (which represents the other languages the song is available in—French, Spanish and Japanese).

Select a different snapshot and the bunny turns and skips merrily to another screen where he finds a new location, a new set of threads and language/music that reflects that particular ethnicity. Auryn, Inc., hit grand slams with previous releases Teddy’s Day (2010) and The Little Mermaid (2011). This is a perfectly adorable app that makes good use of iPad technology, but it is a much more basic offering than its predecessors.

Appropriately for the audience, there’s no story line or dazzling special effects—just a creatively imagined encounter with a song that has universal toddler appeal.

More, please! (iPad storybook app. 1-3)

interactive e-books f o r a d u lt s HERE ON EARTH: A Natural History of the Planet

Tim Flannery Arcade Sunshine Media $11.99 | April 14, 2011 Version 1.0

Of melting ice caps, famines and inadvertent terraforming: Australian scientist Flannery charts the effects of the “human superorganism” on Earth at a critical juncture.

There have been other critical junctures, of course; Flannery (Environmental Sustainability/Macquarie Univ.; Here on Earth, 2011, etc.) delivers tales of human-caused woe, for instance, at the end of the Ice Age, in which the mammoth steppe, “the largest single land-based habitat on the planet,” was remade by human overuse—which, in turn, may have “altered Earth’s carbon balance,” the very thing we’re worrying about today. Packed into this app, apart from the complete text of the 2011 book, are video commentaries

by Flannery, an engaging speaker, and supplemental videos and still photographs. In the latter category, to name those

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for just one chapter, there are images of traditional human communities on the steppe, as well as of the unfortunate large herbivores that fell to their spearheads—notably the “giant unicorn,” an unusually capable rhinoceros that once wandered throughout central Eurasia. The app has a reasonably intuitive bookmarking feature, and, most forwardlooking, a section at the end of each chapter for the reader’s own notes alongside Twitter posts from the publisher and other readers. It’s a fat app, at half a gigabyte, but without any waste. However, it seems easy to crash—in our tests, we had to reinstall it twice before it settled down, and scrolling sometimes finds one stuck between pages.

However, once it’s up and running, it’s an engaging, irresistible work of multimedia pop science.

CHAOS: Making New Science: Enhanced Edition

James Gleick OpenRoad Integrated Media (360 pp.) $12.99 | March 22, 2011 Twenty-five years ago, a young Harvard liberal-arts graduate named James Gleick, then working for the New York Times, became fascinated by an emerging body of science that examined the world not as an orderly chain of being but as a complex, scarcely predictable, sometimes scarcely comprehensible mess of events.

A quarter-century—and a few stock-market crashes, the fall of empires and the decline of civilizations—later, the idea of a chaotic world is commonplace. That is in large part due to the success of Gleick’s book, which made the so-called Butterfly Effect a household term. But 25 years is a couple of lifetimes in science, and there this lively enhanced e-book comes in. In video clips throughout, Gleick—who introduces himself as a journalist, not a scientist—offers brief updates on developments since the original publication. Otherwise, the enhanced version contains the canonical text of the book, with its thorough index and hot-linked words in text that lead, without difficulty, to the extensive back-of-book notes, from which it is easy to navigate back to the main text. Tap on the illustrations, and they fill the screen; readers may wish only that there were more of them.

The team at OpenRoad obviously devoted good effort to making this a stable, nearly un-crashable e-book.

Compared to the current paperback edition of the book, the enhanced e-book edition is a bargain, and a very well-made and well-organized artifact indeed.

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A MODERN FAIRY TALE William, Kate, and Three Generations of Royal Love

Green, Jane Hyperion (120 pp.) $7.99 | April 11, 2011 978-1-6143-007-6

Newish technology meets what Barbara Walters calls, in her video introduction, “a new chapter in the life

of the monarchy.”

That new chapter is, of course, the marriage of William, the Prince of Wales, to Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, the “so-called commoner” (Walters again) whom he met a decade ago. The antecedent chapters are less fresh in memory, at least on this side of the Atlantic, among them the unhappy marriage of William’s father and mother, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and her untimely death—though the recent success of The King’s Speech has revived an interest in all things related to the star-crossed Windsor clan. Enter royal-watcher and pop novelist Green (Promises to Keep, 2010, etc.), a Briton resident in Connecticut who retains the requisite (unless you’re Christopher Hitchens) breathlessness around her royal subjects while never forgetting her genre roots: “ ‘Wow,’ he whispered. ‘Kate’s hot!’ So hot, he tried to kiss her that night…In a winning move, Kate played hard to get, but it was clearly only a matter of time before chemistry between them burst into a full-fledged romance.” The prose is merely serviceable, and there’s not much more than compounded cliché in the writing itself (“the royal family is as much a part of the fabric of our lives as cups of tea and crumpets”). The value added is the video and photographic add-ons, that film of Barbara Walters included. Indeed, this slick package is a nearly perfectly synergistic, corporate product: ABC owns Hyperion, the publisher, and the pages are stuffed with ABC footage, most of it very high quality, covering the last three monarchies. Further, Disney owns ABC, and it knows a thing or two about magical castles, which brings it all full circle.

It all makes a user-friendly, if fawning, keepsake of a particularly fortunate English couple’s happy day.

THE BEST OF VANITY FAIR: ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Vanity Fair (176 pp.) $4.99 | April 1, 2011

A collection of Vanity Fair’s best pieces on Hollywood’s violet-eyed starlet.

In this inaugural e-book launch of the magazine’s “Best of” series, a variety of respected journalists and authors share personal memories, dogged research, intensive sit-down interviews and book excerpts reflecting

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on the passion and the histrionics that made Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) an indelible celebrity. Editor-in-chief Graydon Carter’s introduction recalls the one and only time he’d met the “fun and bawdy” Taylor, seated at Elton John’s birthday dinner with a pet Maltese perched in her lap. A longtime friend of the star, Dominick Dunne dusts off his previously unpublished introspective introduction to Taylor’s coffee-table book My Love Affair with Jewelry. Dunne’s writing appears later in the volume with a worshipful 1985 article profiling the omnipresent star as “trained like royalty to understand and undertake the obligations of her calling.”

Taylor’s sensationalized relationship with Richard Burton is given a curtsy both in contributing editor Sam Kashner’s exploratory chronicling of the glamorous couple through their film roles and a generous 16-page excerpt from his dual biography of the stars, Furious Love. An affectionately conceived excerpt from “tanning virtuoso” George Hamilton’s 2008 memoir Don’t Mind if I Do finds Taylor coyly flirtatious, and prolific novelist and Hollywood insider Gwen Davis offers a glimpse into her own Hollywood-styled friendship with the “hedgehopping” beauty. Perhaps most moving is contributing editor Nancy Collins’ expansive piece on Taylor’s tireless, humanitarian AIDS activism, leavened with scenes of fostering her middle-class former hubby Larry Fortensky’s acceptance of homosexuals (“now, some of his best friends are”). A commemorative timeline, Taylor’s screen and stage credits and resonant photographs punctuate this noteworthy memorial to a commanding icon who sparkled with grace and substance.

An enchanting and respectful homage to an unforgettable legend.

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fiction UNTOLD STORY

JOY FOR BEGINNERS

Ali, Monica Scribner (272 pp.) $25.00 | June 1, 2011 978-1-4516-3548-5

Bauermeister, Erica Putnam (288 pp.) $24.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-399-15712-7

Princess Di is alive and well and living incognito in an ordinary American town in this buzzy fourth novel from the British Ali (In the Kitchen, 2009, etc.).

How did she do it? And why? Those are the biggest questions looming over this speculative fiction. Her movement from one life into another was orchestrated by her top aide and only true confidant, Lawrence Standing. He set up a safe house for her in Brazil, where she was spirited after a nocturnal swim from her yacht. Lawrence oversaw her plastic surgery in Rio and the paperwork for her new identity: Lydia Snaresbrook. As for her reasons, she feared “they” wanted her dead; the press was driving her crazy; most of all, her lifestyle was hurting her boys.

This portrait of the princess jibes with the common perception.

She was a bundle of contradictions: tough yet fragile; naïve yet suspicious; narcissistic yet empathetic. To these Lawrence adds one more—leaving her boys was both selfish and “her greatest act of selflessness.” Certainly she has been racked by guilt and longing for them in the 10 years since she left. For it’s now 2007, and Lydia has found a comfortable niche in neighborly Kensington. She has her own modest home; a congenial job at a canine shelter; a rock-steady boyfriend, Carson; and three super girlfriends. They don’t pry; she has a good cover story. Lydia is a tamer, emasculated version of the tempestuous Di. The novel has an awkward structure, but its real failing is that Ali has not drilled down into Lydia’s essence. Is she capable of commitment? Unanswered question. By chance, or rather contrivance, there’s a newcomer in town, Grabowski, a paparazzo, one of the Brits who chased Diana. Her extraordinary eyes give her away.

Instead of a novel of character, we get the cheap thrill of a catand-mouse game, as Grabowski senses the scoop of a lifetime.

Despite the bold premise, this gifted writer has, uncharacteristically, settled for less.

A soft-centered celebration of female friendship and endurance follows a group of women facing challenges set by a cancer-survivor.

It’s the back stories to the six caring women who supported breast-cancer sufferer Kate through her illness and treatment which form the core of Bauermeister’s novel (The School of Essential Ingredients, 2009). After Kate accepts her daughter’s challenge to go rafting down the Grand Canyon to celebrate being alive, each of the six agrees to do something scary or difficult, with Kate setting the tasks. Divorced bookstore worker Caroline must finally throw out her ex-husband’s books, thereby reclaiming her life as well as her shelf space. Potter Daria must bake a loaf of bread, thereby embarking on a love affair. Sara, who has never spent a night apart from her children, must travel, while young widow Hadley, who has retreated to a tiny new home hidden in a green jungle, is tasked with taking care of her garden. Bauermeister’s sensuous writing lends her slender, rather sugary (even when sad) material a graceful charm, but the material is never substantial enough, with the character vignettes too short and the liberating outcomes too heartwarmingly predictable.

Toothless. A neatly crafted reworking of a cozy, sentimental formula. (Reading group guide online)

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS YOU

Berg, Elizabeth Random (304 pp.) $25.00 | e-book $25.00 CD: $35.00 | April 5, 2011 978-1-4000-6865-4 e-book 978-1-58826-893-5 CD 978-0-307-71378-0

The prolific Berg delivers the goods in this perceptive novel about a divorced couple reunited when their daughter goes missing.

Eighteen-year-old Sadie spends most of the year in San Francisco with her mother Irene (neurotic, funny, lonely) and a few weeks a year with her architect father John in their native St. Paul. When Sadie returns home from one of these visits, |

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she convinces Irene to let her go rock climbing with a group of friends—at John’s urging, Irene agrees. However, neither of them know that Sadie is in love and is instead meeting Ron for a romantic weekend. Ron’s late, Sadie’s furious, she gets a lift with a stranger and the worst happens—the stranger kidnaps her, threatens her life and locks her in a windowless shed.

When Sadie doesn’t return home, Irene panics and calls John, who hops on the next flight to San Francisco. As soon as they are together, it is clear why they divorced—they infuriate and mistrust one another, they share no common language. By this time, Berg has built their respective back stories: their equally tragic childhoods, their mutual terror of marriage, their miserable attempts at relationships in the 10 years since their divorce.

After days of contemplating her impending death, Sadie is rescued by the police (thanks to Ron), and when she finally calls home, she has some news for her parents—she and Ron have eloped. Though grateful Sadie is alive, relief quickly turns to anger and disbelief that their level-headed girl could do something as foolish as get married. All of John and Irene’s dysfunction comes to bear on the issue, and Berg fashions an affecting portrait of divorce, of a couple for whom love was not enough.

The seemingly romantic title refers to John and Irene and their too-late realization that they didn’t know how to make love grow, though now there may be a chance for John back in St. Paul with a pretty widow, and a younger man for Irene.

Berg’s masterful portraits and keen insight makes for a memorable read. (Author tour to Boston, Miami, Chicago/Milwaukee, Omaha, St. Louis, Wichita, Denver. Agent: Suzanne Gluck/ William Morris Endeavor)

YOU

Briscoe, Joanna Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | August 1, 2011 978-1-60819-483-4 Infatuation and secrecy maintained over decades drive—very slowly—an intense three-generational saga of women’s longings.

Briscoe’s (Sleep with Me, 2005, etc.) novel traces the exquisite torture of twin impossible love-addictions suffered by Dora Bannan and her daughter Cecilia for a pair of teachers at a progressive English school in the 1970s. Dora lives a life of hippie squalor at Wind Tor, a rambling old house on Dartmoor, with her potter husband and four children. Her job teaching music introduces her to a shocking addiction: sex with impeccably dressed, emotionally remote art teacher Elisabeth Dahl. Elisabeth’s husband James, who teaches English to clever 17-year-old Cecilia, eventually, guiltily, succumbs to the teenager’s overpowering crush.

But Cecilia doesn’t tell James when she falls pregnant, and Dora never tells Cecilia what happened to the baby taken from her hours after the birth. Twenty years later, Cecilia has returned to Wind Tor with her own three children, partly to finish a book, partly to care for cancer-stricken Dora. Briscoe’s talent for 808

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dissecting miniscule shifts of emotion is mined to the limit in a story more devoted to mood and texture than pace. Haunted by the child she never knew, Cecilia reconnects with James, jeopardizing her relationship with the children around her and her partner, too. Snail’s pace switches to headlong dash as the tale enters its final, inconclusive pages.

Although implausible and suffocating, this rapture of obsession and lyrical landscape is not unimpressive. (Reading group guide online)

A SMALL HOTEL

Butler, Robert Olen Grove (256 pp.) $24.00 | July 1, 2011 978-0-8021-1987-2

A painful marital breakup stimulates a flow of harsh memories leading toward a decisive climactic choice, in NBA-winner Butler’s emotionally charged, uneven novel (Hell, 2009, etc.).

Though its title alludes to a Broadway show tune about the joys of honeymooning, the subject is the impending divorce of Kelly and Michael Hays, left unaccomplished when she fails to show up in a Louisiana courthouse to sign final papers. Thereafter, we observe the pair in present circumstances and both shared and separate memories, as Michael second-guesses his own rapidly escalating affair with a beautiful younger woman (Laurie) and Kelly reconsiders experiences that have eroded her enchantment with Michael’s confident masculinity and gracefully borne sense of honor and responsibility (as it happens, he’s an attorney). The book waxes and wanes frustratingly, whether in the memory of a drunken Mardi Gras episode (from which he rescued her); Michael’s “clever” marriage proposal (a ludicrously mishandled scene); Michael’s borderline-bathetic recall of having disappointed his tyrannical, macho dad; and Kelly’s far more plaintive memories of inevitable alienation from her withdrawn, unresponsive father. Fleeting echoes of William Styron’s famous first novel Lie Down in Darkness appear, notably in later scenes that document Kelly’s virtually passive swoon into despairing guilt (over a foolish, pointless misadventure with a married man). On balance, this is a fairly short book that feels like a rather longer one, perhaps because we learn much less than we feel we need to know about its principal characters’ inner lives (despite considerable soul-searching). And minor characters like Michael’s new lover Laurie (basically a charmless fantasy figure) and the Hays’ adult daughter Sam barely register on the page.

As the eponymous show tune (from: “Pal Joey”) coyly asks, “Not a sign of people. Who wants people?” One answer: Novels do. (Agent: Warren Fraizer/John Hawkins & Associates)

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THE ASTRAL

Christensen, Kate Doubleday (320 pp.) $24.95 | June 14, 2011 978-0-385-53091-0 Christensen (Trouble, 2009, etc.) knows her way around aging characters. Having won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her lively septuagenarians in The Great Man (2007), she now creates a charmingly ribald bohemian poet flailing about in late middle age.

The title refers to the apartment building where Harry Quirk and his wife Luz, a devoutly Catholic Mexican nurse, have lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for all of their 30-year marriage. Now Luz has kicked Harry out and burnt his latest manuscript of poetry—eschewing popular trends, he writes in rhyme and meter—because she thinks his love poems are proof that he’s been carrying on an affair with his friend Marion.

Righteously claiming the poems are written to an imaginary woman, he fights hard to convince Luz of his fidelity and win her back. Meanwhile, he hangs out in his Greenpoint neighborhood, finds work at a Hasidic lumberyard where he’s the only non-Jew, drinks at his local bars, visits Marion and discusses why they have never been and never will be lovers and moves from living space to living space until he ends up staying with his daughter Karina, a 25-year-old vegan dumpster-diving activist. He and Karina make visits to Karina’s older brother Hector, always Luz’s favorite, who has abandoned her Catholicism and joined a Christian cult led by a sexy charlatan who plans to marry Hector. While Harry wanders through his days, drinking, conversing, picking fights, trying to talk to Luz, who says she wants a divorce and won’t see him, his Brooklyn world of aging bohemians comes vividly to life. There’s not a lot of active plot here, but each minor character is a gem. As for Harry, by the time he faces the truth about his marriage and finds a measure of hard-earned happiness, or at least self-awareness, he has won the reader’s heart. He’s a larger-than-life, endearing fool.

A masterpiece of comedy and angst. Think Gulley Jimson of Joyce Cary’s The Horses Mouth transported from 1930s London to present-day Brooklyn.

WITH A LITTLE LUCK

Crane, Caprice Bantam (320 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | July 26, 2011 978-0-553-38624-0 Superstitious young woman has doubts about her latest boyfriend.

Cute Los Angeles DJ Berry Lambert has a lot going for her. There is the semi-cool job at a classic-rock station, her hip restaurateur best friend Nat and her sweet dog Moose. But she also lives by an ironclad set of rules based on her own notion of good and bad luck. Black cats, |

even numbers—you name it—all portend certain doom to her.

With a view of the world shaped by her professional gambler father, an affable degenerate with few misgivings about taking money from his “good luck charm” daughter, Berry sees traps everywhere. That is why, after quickly losing two different guys, she figures that her next man (rule of threes) will soon be history as well, leaving her ready to meet her soul mate. Enter Ryan Riley, who hosts a Loveline-style show at her sister station.

They go on a date as part of a radio stunt, and their bantering chemistry is enough for their bosses to offer them a morning talk-show gig. Berry takes it to please Ryan, in spite of her misgivings about their future together. Morning Mayhem with Riley and Lambert is a hit, and off duty they continue to grow close, with all the highs and lows associated with any new relationship.

But a thoughtless on-air comment by Ryan ribbing her about her idiosyncrasies gives Berry the perfect excuse to cut and run. It is a decision she quickly regrets until a new guy shows up who seems more her type, complicating everything. Crane (Family Affair, 2009, etc.) has once again built a story around an adorable/annoying girl with a self-conscious set of quirks. But she does not ignore the very real repercussions of Berry’s self defeating behavior, leaving room for real character growth.

Satisfying romantic comedy minus a too-sweet aftertaste. (Agent: Jenny Bent/Trident Media Group)

CALLING MR. KING

De Feo, Ronald Other Press (320 pp.) $15.95 paperback original | October 18, 2011 978-1-59051-475-7 A hit man discovers his inner aesthete. Uh-oh.

From childhood on, John Cole hated his old man with a passion. The permanently angry blue-collar worker would go into the woods outside their Hudson River town and shoot everything in sight. Cole inherited his father’s expert marksmanship; he left home before they shot each other. Unemployed, he was hired to put his skill to good use…on a human target. He had found his profession. Word of his expertise spread. He moved to London to work for a worldwide conglomerate known as the Firm; he never missed his targets. But when we first meet the 33-year-old Cole, he has the nagging feeling that he’s off his game. A quick job in Paris has taken a whole week, and he almost botches his next job, outside a Georgian house in the English countryside. He gets his man but is forced to shoot a bystander as well, breaking a cardinal rule. This is a terrific start. First-time novelist De Feo hooks us as he describes Cole tracking his quarry. These are clean kills; there is no splatter. The author also has a great premise: that a hired gun’s need for a career change might take him in a wholly unexpected direction. That beautiful Georgian house has sparked Cole’s imagination. Why couldn’t he be the owner?

He buys books on Georgian architecture. An escapist fantasy becomes a scholarly pursuit. The Firm sends him to New York

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to lie low after that countryside mess. Here the novel stalls; De Feo doesn’t know what to do with Cole except have him buy more books and visit museums. He becomes a bore, moaning about his miserable childhood on a pointless visit to his hometown. By the final segment in Barcelona, Spain, scene of Cole’s new assignment, his transformation is complete. The hit man, in denial, has become a student of Spanish architecture.

Though character development is a real problem, De Feo is definitely a newcomer to watch.

VERY BAD MEN

Dolan, Harry Amy Einhorn/Putnam (432 pp.) $25.95 | July 1, 2011 978-0-399-15749-3 A second mind-bending case for Ann Arbor editor David Loogan that begins just as simply and ominously and takes the reader on just as wild a journey.

Anthony Lark’s mission is simple: to kill three of the men involved in a fatally botched bank robbery 17 years ago. He’s already dispatched two of his targets—an impressive feat, considering that one of them, Terry Dawtrey, is serving 30 years in Kinross Prison—when he identifies them both and announces his third, nurse practitioner Sutton Bell, in an anonymous letter to Loogan (Bad Things Happen, 2009), who promptly shares it with his ladylove, police detective Elizabeth Waishkey. The timely intervention of aspiring tabloid reporter Lucy Navarro saves Bell from Lark’s initial attempt and gives Dolan a chance to fill in some back story.

Lark’s motives are obscure, but they have something to do with U.S. Senate candidate Callie Spencer, whose father Harlan was the Chippewa County Sheriff shot and paralyzed in the bank robbery and whose father-in-law, John Casterbridge, is the senator she hopes to succeed. Lark keeps coming nerve-wrackingly close to killing Bell; Loogan and Elizabeth keep coming heartbreakingly close to catching Lark; and yet the tale still goes on.

To divulge any more about the plot would spoil some of the dozens of surprises Dolan springs. But it’s not too much to say that nearly every cast member, however minor, is complicit in some crime; that nearly every one, even though they’re all rooted in excruciatingly familiar generic types, gets a chance to reveal unexpected depths; and that Dolan mixes his pitches with an ace’s judgment, steadily complicating Lark’s quest while keeping the psychology of his characters considerably more plausible than in Loogan’s equally baroque debut.

The rare crime novel with something for everyone who reads crime fiction. (Agent: Victoria Skurnick)

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A CUPBOARD FULL OF COATS

Edwards, Yvette Oneworld Publications (272 pp.) $14.95 paperback original | June 1, 2011 978-1851687978 First novel explores the trans-generational fallout from an abusive relationship.

Edwards vividly re-creates the lifestyles, cuisine and dialect of Caribbean immigrants living in London’s East End. Her narrator is Jinx, whose present life has been tainted by her mother’s violent death 14 years earlier, for which she blames herself. When an old family friend, Lemon, appears out of nowhere, Jinx is forced to relive the events leading up to the tragedy. Her mother’s lover, Berris, the man who stabbed her, grew up with Lemon as a street urchin on the tiny West Indies island of Montserrat. The two men are lifelong friends, but also rivals. Berris spoiled Lemon’s marriage by impugning his wife’s chastity and the paternity of his son. Meanwhile, Jinx reflects on how her own marriage suffered from her traumatic adolescence. Having relinquished custody of her son to her ex-husband, she has no maternal feelings toward the child. Her alienation is such that she only feels comfortable around the dead people she makes up in her job as a freelance embalmer. Now, long estranged from his son, his wife dead of cancer, Lemon has come to confess something to Jinx. As Jinx and Lemon tiptoe around each other, various facts emerge. Jinx was 16 when Berris appeared. Her formerly tranquil life with her mother, a widow, is shattered by her mother’s total absorption in Berris. When he moves in, a pattern begins: He hits Jinx’s mother (we don’t learn her name until the end) then, to atone, buys her progressively more luxurious coats, until she has a closetful. Jinx loses her virginity to the much older Lemon, but is stung by his apparent crush on her mother. Her resentment explodes into rage after Berris beats her, and her mother ignores her screams.

As both Lemon and Jinx cautiously summon long suppressed memories of the night of the murder, the novel spirals to a satisfying if not entirely surprising climax.

An impressive debut, particularly notable for its pellucid prose.

AFTER LYLETOWN

Frederick, K.C. Permanent Press (244 pp.) $28.00 | July 1, 2011 978-1-57962-2190 Radical activity from the 1960s comes back to haunt a former militant.

Alan Ripley is a respected attorney with a modest business in wills and real-estate transactions. He’s into his second marriage, has a young son and, at least on the surface, seems quite content. But when he gets a call from Rory Dekker, Alan |

is reminded of an ugly incident from 20 years earlier. In a spasm of radical enthusiasm, he and some acquaintances had been involved in a scheme to rob a gun store in Lyletown and distribute the weapons to blacks oppressed by The Man. While Alan’s role in the crime was supposed to be modest— he was scheduled to be a lookout while others took care of business—a case of appendicitis removed him from the scene, and Rory took his place. Planned to unfold like clockwork, the crime was unbelievably botched, and Rory was the only one who served time. Now that he’s out of prison, he contacts Alan, but Rory’s motives are murky—a shakedown? blackmail? a power play? Alan has kept his wife Julia in the dark about this sordid incident from his past, and he has to work hard to keep Rory’s presence out of their lives. While Rory’s activities remain shadowy, he continues to contact Alan every few years when he’s in a jam—getting involved with a mob boss in New Orleans, for example, and having to hightail it out of town when he disses the boss’s son. Rory’s creepiness understandably makes Alan uncomfortable, but eventually he’s able to confess his past to Julia and resume his “normal” life...more or less.

Although Rory’s character is occasionally ill-defined, his interactions with Alan remain menacing—and Frederick reminds us of the tenebrous atmosphere of the ’60s.

THE NIGHTMARE THIEF

Gardiner, Meg Dutton (368 pp.) $25.95 | July 21, 2011 978-0-525-95221-3

Bay Area forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett’s fourth case (The Liar’s Lullaby, 2010, etc.) finds her caught in the middle of a fantasy crime spree turned deadly.

Hedge-fund king Peter Reiniger is no ordinary father, and his 21st-birthday present to his thoroughly spoiled daughter Autumn is no ordinary gift. He’s hired Edge Adventures to orchestrate a weekend scenario in which Autumn becomes the Queen of Crime and five of her best buds get to play the roles of her lawyer, her accomplices and her nemesis. But not even Edge’s reputation for elaborate planning can prevent rogue financier Dane Haugen from stepping into the middle of this latter-day fairy tale and, motivated by some obscure harm he suffered at Reiniger’s hands, kidnapping Autumn for real for $20 million. Jo and her main man, Sgt. Gabe Quintana, are on their way back from attorney Phelps Wylie’s final resting place—an abandoned gold mine in which, Jo quickly rules, he certainly didn’t commit suicide—when they stop to play Good Samaritan and are rewarded by getting taken captive along with Autumn and her friends. Not enough complications for you? Another freelance kidnapper plans to grab Autumn and company from Haugen’s clutches, ransom Autumn and make short work of the supporting cast—one of whom has the bright idea of jumping the bad guys, turning a routine fake-kidnapping-turned-real into a fight |

for survival against armed criminals, rattlesnakes and every other wilderness peril you can imagine.

The mind-bogglingly improbable setup and the number of wild cards in the mix guarantee endless plot twists, most of them so diabolically engineered that you’ll forget how wafer-thin the characters are. (Agents: Sheila Crowley/A.P. Watt (UK) and Deborah Schneider/Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents)

FRIENDSHIP BREAD

Gee, Darien Ballantine (400 pp.) $25.00 | April 19, 2011 978-0-345-52534-5

Another addition in the recent trend in popular fiction: Small groups of women improve their lives by engaging in a domestic comfort. This time it’s bread making.

Julia and her small daughter Gracie find a gift on their doorstep—a plate of bread, a note and a bag of starter dough. Though Julia is not a baker, and has little interest in...life (more on that later), Gracie convinces her mother to follow the instructions and make Amish Friendship Bread. Part of the requirements are to split the bag of starter into three, bake one loaf for yourself and pass on the rest to someone else—a culinary chain letter. The novel traces the effect of the Friendship Bread on a small town, jumping from neighbor to neighbor, but focuses on a small group of women whose lives need mending. Julia’s son Josh died five years ago, and since then life is a daily struggle and her marriage is a mess; Hannah is soon to be divorced by her husband, a famous classical musician (as she once was before an injury); Madeline is struggling to run her tea shop and come to terms with the kind of stepmother she was; Edie is pregnant and is sure it will ruin her career as an investigative journalist; and, finally, Livvy is also expecting, but her husband has just lost his job, and her sister Julia won’t speak to her—she’s still blamed for Josh’s death. Gee admirably weaves the various lives together, linked more often than not by sadness and disappointment, and demonstrates that simple companionship is a powerful balm.

The novel’s title, and even its conceit, promises a kind of homespun sappiness that the narrative thankfully avoids, delivering instead thoughtful portraits of women on the brink of finding better versions of themselves.

A satisfying first novel by Gee; perfect for the bookclub circuit and beyond. (Author tour to northern California, Seattle, Chicago, Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, Dayton)

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“A heartening novel about art, war and the tug of family relationships.” from remember ben clayton

PARADISE RULES

Gleacher, Jimmy Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | July 12, 2011 978-1-4516-0845-8 An adolescent fantasy—perhaps wet dream—of a book.

Our narrator Gates—aka Caspae, Gator and Fun Buns—is a 17 year old with a messed-up life. When he was 15, his mom had a nervous breakdown (at least we’re led to believe this was true), and renowned psychologist Alicia stepped up as his godmother to help him through the trauma. She seduced him, however, and, unbeknownst to Gates’ mother, they began a torrid affair.

Meanwhile, his erstwhile girlfriend Mel is eager to lose her virginity to the somewhat willing Gates, but every time they try to get it on his guilt kicks in and he’s unable to perform. And although Gates never knew his father, Alicia and Gates’ mom have become a couple. (His mom also messes around with Stuart, a neighbor, but tries to keep this affair quiet.) Mel’s dad, a hotshot lawyer, likes to play golf at the local country club and also likes to fondle Gates (hence one of his nicknames, see above), and Mel’s mom is hot in her own right, especially after some surgery that has enhanced her bodily assets. Although only a high-school junior, Gates is a successful golf hustler, slyly messing up his game on the front nine so he can collect big time on the back. (Think Fast Eddie Felson with a golf club instead of a cue stick.) He doesn’t get to keep all the loot, however, because golf-club owner Lu—who has a propensity for fake sayings from Confucius, all with double-entendres—is able to extort money from him through various threats verging on blackmail. If anyone cares, Gates eventually finds out who his father is.

The demographic for this tiresomely humorous book is essentially those who identify with the narrator—horny adolescent boys. (Agent: Alex Glass/Trident Media Group)

ABYSS

Hagberg, David Forge (496 pp.) $24.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-7653-2410-8 Ex-CIA chief Kirk McGarvey fends off charlatans and terrorists in this exciting and largely plausible eco-thriller.

Powerful oil interests concoct a plot to make all other forms of energy repugnant to the public, and where better to begin than with destroying a nuclear power plant? That done and the public duly frightened, the conspirators turn on Dr. Evelyn Larsen, a scientist who has devised a plan to supply energy using non-polluting ocean power. The public face of the anti-everything-but-oil campaign is a cynical preacher with presidential ambitions, while behind the scenes a South African mercenary spills plenty of blood with exceeding skill. McGarvey is a smart, level-headed hero whose most effective weapon is his brain as he 812

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matches wits with some highly talented criminals. Quite a few characters are introduced before McGarvey finally walks onstage in Chapter Eight, and that seems to fit his relatively modest temperament. The pacing is good, though occasionally the momentum hiccups for an explanation of a new character’s background.

One man’s speech tic has him often saying, “honest injun, kemo sabe,” an expression that should have been retired with Tonto and the Lone Ranger. Also, an important female character likes to demean the Nobel Prize–winning Larsen as “the lady scientist,” which feels both irritating and implausible, though one of the two women may turn out to be McGarvey’s love interest. Other than those few quirks, the book moves along well and would make an entertaining movie with plenty of great visual effects.

Given the BP oil spill and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, this is a timely and frightening novel.

Readers will be left thinking, This could really happen.

REMEMBER BEN CLAYTON

Harrigan, Stephen Knopf (352 pp.) $26.95 | e-book: $26.95 | May 24, 2011 978-0-307-26581-4 e-book 978-0-307-59669-7 A Texas rancher wants to commemorate his son, killed in World War I, by commissioning a statue, but we discover this public act covers up a failed relationship.

Sculptor Francis “Gil” Gilheaney has had a checkered career. He moved to San Antonio shortly after completing a work honoring the heroes of the Alamo, but one of his recent works, The Pawnee Scout, has been destroyed by a drunken mob in Omaha. He’s intrigued by an offer that comes to him from Lamar Clayton, owner of a vast tract of Texas range.

While Lamar doesn’t readily reveal his feelings, it’s clear he’s grieving for Ben, his only child, who died as a young soldier at St. Etienne on the Western Front. Gil takes the commission because of the challenge—and perhaps because at the age of 60 he has only one more great work in him. Accompanying him is his daughter Maureen, also a sculptor, now 32, unmarried and living in the shadow of her genius father. As Gil and Lamar get to know each other, hidden parts of their past begin to emerge.

We learn, for example, that Lamar’s parents had been killed by Comanches on the frontier, and for two years Lamar had been raised by the tribe. He’s still suspicious of Jewell, his sister, whom the Comanches had sold to the Kiowa and who had tried to teach Ben “Indian ways,” especially before his sojourn to France. We further learn that when he was part of the tribe, Lamar participated in atrocities that Ben found out about. Gil feels that to make a masterpiece he has to come to “know” Ben, and he even goes to the cemetery in France where Ben is buried. Although tempted to give up the commission altogether, Gil finally decides to complete the work.

A heartening novel about art, war and the tug of family relationships.

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ALICE BLISS

Harrington, Laura Pamela Dorman/Viking (320 pp.) $25.95 | June 6, 2011 978-0-670-02278-6 Playwright Harrington’s first novel, based on her one-woman musical, focuses on the upstate New York family of a National Guard reservist called into service during the Iraq War. Salt-of-the-earth Matt Bliss considers it his moral obligation to serve his country, although he hates leaving behind his beloved, distraught wife Angie and his daughters: 8-year-old Ellie and 15-year-old Alice. Once he’s left for duty, Angie throws herself into her insurance career but can barely function domestically. Precocious Ellie starts wetting the bed and reading Matt’s dictionary aloud. Stalwart Alice, with whom Matt has always shared a special bond, tries to pick up the slack at home with only minimal success. For support she turns to her longtime best friend Henry, the unbelievably caring boy every mother hopes her teenage daughter will luck into as her first love. At the cusp of adolescence, Alice finds their relationship changing in confusing ways, especially when an older, popular but equally sensitive boy named John shows an interest in her. Teenage romance takes the passenger seat when word comes that Matt has been declared MIA. Fortunately, the Blisses receive succor from Angie’s mother and brother, as well as many friends in their idyllic small town. Angie rises to the challenge, helping her daughters function day by day. By the time they learn Matt’s fate, Angie and Alice have struggled past minor mother-daughter tensions to offer each other consolation. Alice is in many ways a different girl by story’s end. The novel closes with a lovely image that theatrically arcs back to the opening scene.

It feels curmudgeonly to fault Harrington’s earnest, uplifting (and apolitical) approach to this topical subject, but the surfeit of sensitivity weakens its impact and the reader’s interest.

BUZZ ALDRIN, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU IN ALL THE CONFUSION?

Harstad, Johan Translator: Dawkin, Deborah Seven Stories (480 pp.) $30.00 | June 7, 2011 978-1-60980-135-9

Or, the long-awaited Great Faroese Novel: a splendid confusion about life, love and intrigues in the land of the midnight sun.

Thirty-something Norwegian writer/musician/all-around pop icon Harstad has been making quite a splash—or, perhaps, splashdown—with his debut novel of 2005, which was published in 11 countries before making its way to these shores and |

is now a feature film in the making. The story is perhaps uneasily fitted to the silver screen, for it’s big and sprawling, and most of what happens does so in the interiors of its characters. The protagonist is a lovelorn gardener named Mattias, a young man of simple pleasures and absolutely no ambition: “Here in the garden, and I wanted to be nowhere else in the world” apart— perhaps, from hanging out with his friend Jørn. Mattias finds backing for his contentment in his station in the fate of Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, who, though in command of the Apollo mission, had all his thunder stolen by Neil Armstrong, whom history remembers as the first man on the Moon, even though Aldrin was “a more experienced pilot in just about every way.”

Given the choice, Jørn, naturally enough, would want to be Armstrong, and so the twain diverges—and presto, Mattias, coming into adulthood at just about the time Olof Palme is shot dead in Sweden and the age of Scandinavian innocence dissolves, finds himself in the remote Faeroe Islands. For a man who wants nothing more than for nothing to change, the new venue would seem to be ideal. But, of course, the world intrudes even on the Far North, and Mattias finds himself caught up in weird cabals and improbable plots about which he keeps suitably mum (“Didn’t mention any catastrophes, bloodied hands or envelopes that appeared from nowhere filled with large amounts of money”). The austere landscape and people of the Faeroes become players in Harstad’s poetic narrative, half-dramatic and half-comic, which takes on memorable turns with every page as Mattias realizes just how not in control of his destiny he really is.

A modern saga of rocketships, ice floes and dreams of the Caribbean, and great fun to read.

MIDNIGHT MOVIE

Hooper, Tobe Three Rivers/Crown (320 pp.) $14.00 paperback original | July 1, 2011 978-0-307-71701-6 The creator of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre takes to print with a co-authored foray into zombie comic novel territory.

Tobe Hooper, real-life auteur of on-screen mayhem and gore, is the protagonist in his own novel, chronicling a plague of “suicide bombers, burning cities, an inordinate number of missing persons, and a new strain of STD.” The all-in-good-horror parody begins with Hooper invited to screen his never-seen teenage-filmed first effort, Destiny Express, at the famous South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. Austin happens to be Hooper’s home town, he’s been offered a generous fee and he’s sure to see old friends. Enter a bonanza of bizarre characters. Dude McGee, the corpulent slacker organizing the screening, resides in his mother’s basement, has body odor redolent of lunch meat, and purposely mangles Hooper’s name. Erick Laughlin is a local film reviewer and sometime musician. Janine Daltrey needs the bucks she’ll earn taking tickets at the door, but she refuses to enter the screening venue, a raunchy bar called The Cove. Then there’s kirkusreviews.com

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Janine’s sister, Andi, plus assorted meth cooks and tweakers, and Tobe’s childhood best friend, Gary Church, who starred in Destiny and then moved to Hollywood for a career chewing scenery in horror flicks. The world begins to turn upside down at the screening when the film somehow releases a virus that infects those present.

Andi turns from virginal good girl to a mega-obsessed sexual glutton. Gary returns to “Hell Lay” and morphs into a zombie. Arsonists flame up everywhere. A Homeland Security agent becomes a terrorist. And it’s all because of the Game—the virus—transmitted by the never-before-screened film. This isn’t a straightforward narrative. The frenetic, quick-change-of-scene novel lands on the pages as handwritten notes, copies of e-mails, blog posts, Twitter tweets and first-person recitations from the various characters.

Horror as comedy, bawdy and blue, more yucks than frights. (Author events in Los Angeles, Austin and New York)

GROUNDSWELL

Lee, Katie Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $25.00 | June 21, 2011 978-1-4391-8359-5 Lee, the much younger ex-wife of Billy Joel, debuts with a novel whose self-important heroine is a famous actor’s much younger wife who leaves him (with prenup) when he cheats on her only to find true love weeks later with her surf instructor.

Screenwriter Emma is at a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala when she catches “blockbuster movie star” husband Garrett kissing her old friend Lily. Flash back seven years to the beginning of the romance between Emma and Garrett. While Lily, then her college roommate, is rich and spoiled, Emma is a scholarship student from Kentucky who also manages to be a killer dresser. She dreams of becoming a screenwriter (her telling all-time favorites: Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally and Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Working on a movie set, Lily quickly catches Garrett’s eye. Despite his reputation as a womanizer, he falls hard for Emma. Soon they are dining at fine restaurants (names provided) and hanging out in his suite at the Carlyle. She cuts short her family Christmas to vacation on his yacht near St. Bart’s and buy $12,000 of clothing on his credit card. At the wedding that soon follows, Emma slights Lily, sharing the ceremony’s big secret only with her childhood friend Grace. Grace becomes Emma’s personal assistant and finds an adorable West Village apartment. Garrett moves Emma into a fab Soho loft and finances her screenplay debut, the story of their romance— a huge hit. Emma’s struggling to conceive a second script when her marriage collapses. She kicks Garrett out and decamps, at Grace’s suggestion, to Mexico to recuperate. There she discovers the spiritual power of surfing, especially after she and her hunky surf instructor have “sex for hours.” Could a whole new life be on the horizon?

Beach readers may find sand gnats more entertaining.

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PARTITIONS

Majmudar, Amit Metropolitan/Henry Holt (224 pp.) $25.00 | June 21, 2011 978-0-8050-9395-7 In his magnificent first novel, poet Majmudar (O°, O°, 2009) embodies the terrible days following the partition of India and Pakistan in the stories of four refugees from sectarian violence.

Keshav and Shankar are 6-year-old twins, separated from their mother in a crush of Hindus trying to get on the last train for Delhi from what is now Pakistan. On the same day in India, Dr. Ibrahim Masud arrives at his looted clinic, where the terrified gatekeeper tells him, “The city isn’t safe for any Mussulman.” Simran and her family are Sikhs; she flees as her father prepares to kill his wife and daughters rather than have them soiled by their Muslim neighbors. Observing them all is the spirit of the twins’ dead father; his initially startling narration gives the novel the distance it needs to chronicle horrifyingly brutal events. Muslims stop a train full of Hindus and murder everyone on board. Men burning down a Muslim lawyer’s house turn to douse a boy with kerosene, not caring that the child they’re about to incinerate is also Hindu. The breakdown of civil order is epitomized by a young thug who snares the twins and sells them to a childless widow, then joins a roving gang looking for stranded girls to force into prostitution. They pick up Simran, but she escapes and finds refuge with Masud, as do Keshav and Shankar. The doctor stands at the story’s moral center, treating the sick and injured of all ethnicities in the vast caravans of refugees streaming toward the India/Pakistan border from both directions. He’s not the only one: A Sikh bus driver, a farmer and a prostitute all risk their lives to help others, “reminded…of a lost, golden past, before the invention of borders, when [kindness was] possible.” Each character must grapple with the choice between kindness and cruelty, and the otherworldly narrator understands that either choice is equally likely in a world gone mad.

Written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight—a rueful masterpiece.

THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC

Otsuka, Julie Knopf (144 pp.) $22.00 | e-book: $22.00 | August 1, 2011 978-0-307-70000-1 e-book 978-0-307-70046-9 Otsuka, whose first novel (When the Emperor Was Divine, 2003) focused on one specific Japanese-American family’s plight during and after internment, takes the broad view in this novella-length consideration of Japanese mail-order brides making a life for themselves in America in the decades before World War II. |

“Man Booker winner Pierre continues on his polarizing way with another extreme adventure.” from lights out in wonderland

There are no central characters. A first-person-plural chorus narrates the women’s experiences from their departure from Japan until they are removed from their homes and shipped to the camps, at which point the narration is taken over by clueless whites. Rather than following an individual story, Otsuka lists experience after experience, piling name upon name. Voyaging across the Pacific to California, the women’s emotions range from fear to excitement, but most, even those leaving behind secret lovers, are hopeful. Reality sets in when they meet their husbands, who are seldom the men they seemed from their letters and photographs. And the men’s reactions to their new wives vary as much as the women’s. Some are loving, some abusive. For all their differences, whether farm workers, laundrymen, gardeners or struggling entrepreneurs, they share a common outsider status. Soon the majority of women who stay married—some die or run off or are abandoned—are working alongside their husbands. They begin to have babies and find themselves raising children who speak English and consider themselves American. And the women have become entrenched; some even have relationships with the whites around them; many are financially comfortable. But with the arrival of the war against Japan come rumors. Japanese and white Americans look at each other differently. Loyalty is questioned. Anti-Japanese laws are passed. And the Japanese themselves no longer know whom to trust as more and more of them disappear each day. Once they are truly gone, off to the camps, the whites feel a mix of guilt and relief, then begin to forget the Japanese who had been their neighbors.

A lovely prose poem that gives a bitter history lesson.

(Author tour to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle)

LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND

Pierre, DBC Norton (336 pp.) $25.95 | August 1, 2011 978-0-393-08123-7 Man Booker winner Pierre (Ludmila’s Broken English, 2006, etc.) continues on his polarizing way with another extreme adventure, this one undertaken by a narrator who plans to kill himself.

Readers may not feel too terrible about that, since Gabriel, like Pierre’s protagonist in Vernon God Little (2002), is initially as obnoxious as he is motor-mouthed. Just checked into rehab by his father, Gabriel puffs defiantly on cigarettes while ranting about capitalism and messing with the staff. Soon he slips away for a final pre-suicide bacchanal with his best friend Smuts, who’s working at an ultra-exclusive Tokyo restaurant that serves poisonous (and illegal) fugu to those who can afford it. Unfortunately, once Gabriel gets done loading him up with coke and booze, Smuts recklessly takes the challenge of a customer who wants the fish’s extra-toxic liver. The customer winds up in the hospital, and Smuts in jail. The only way Gabriel can spring him is by getting Smuts’ shadowy “sponsor,” Didier Le Basque, to |

pull strings. And the only way to do that is to convince Didier, who makes a fortune creating one-of-a-kind banquets for rich thrill-seekers, that Gabriel can connect him to a unique venue.

So off Gabriel goes to Berlin, where his detested father had a club in the 1990s. Things get even crazier when Gabriel actually does discover the perfect spot for a decadent feast: miles of tunnels and bunkers built for the Third Reich underneath Tempelhof Airport. Even as he enthusiastically participates in the excesses of Didier’s right-hand man Thomas, who’s arranging the bash in the bunkers, Gabriel is developing a guilty conscience about the whole affair. Can it be that our hero is growing up? Well, yes: Gabriel eventually drops his intended suicide, along with several other affectations of youth, though Pierre does feel obliged to provide an over-the-top finale involving fireworks both gastronomic and incendiary.

Considerably more mature than its predecessors, and just as scathingly brilliant with words, but this author is definitely an acquired taste.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME

Pollock, Donald Ray Doubleday (304 pp.) $26.95 | July 12, 2011 978-0-385-53504-5

This debut novel occasionally flashes the promise that the author showed in his highly praised short-story collection, but falls short of fulfilling it.

The unflinching, often hilarious stories in Knockemstiff (2008) drew considerable attention to a writer whose own story was as fascinating as his fiction. A mill worker for three decades in blue-collar Ohio (where he sets his fiction), Pollock belatedly earned an MFA from Ohio State and published his collection of stories in which themes and characters were so interwoven that it might have passed as a novel. It was inevitable that his next book would be an actual novel, and billed as such, but this isn’t the total knockout that one might have expected. Instead, its various plot strands, which inevitably come together at the end, might have worked better as individual stories. Set again in rural, impoverished Knockemstiff and nearby Mead, the novel opens with the relationship of young Arvin Russell and his father, Willard, a haunted World War II vet who marries a beautiful woman and then watches her die from cancer. He alternates between praying and drinking, neither of which do much to alleviate his pain. In fact, his son “didn’t know which was worse, the drinking or the praying.” The tragic ways of the world (in a novel that sometimes aims at dark comedy) leave Arvin an orphan. As he’s maturing into young adulthood, raised by his grandmother, the plot shifts include a huckster pair of religious revivalists, a preacher who preys on young girls and a husband-and-wife pair of serial killers (she seduces their victims, whom they call “models,” and he photographs and kills them).

Though there’s a hard-bitten realism to the character of Arvin, most of the rest seem like gothic noir redneck caricature (some kirkusreviews.com

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with latent homosexual tendencies). A piece of cheap motel wall art could stand as the aesthetic credo: “It served no purpose that he could think of, other than to remind a person that the world was a sorry-ass place to be stuck living in.”

Pollock remains a singular stylist, but he has better books in him than this. (Author tour to New York, Dayton/Cincinnati, Iowa City, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco)

THE VIPS

Poulson-Bryant, Scott Broadway (384 pp.) $15.00 paperback original e-book: $15.00 | July 5, 2011 978-0-7679-2974-5 e-book 978-0-7679-3224-0 Four friends from the 1980s get jarringly reacquainted when rap artist TNT gathers them together in his penthouse apartment and demands to know which

one is his daddy.

The narrative moves back and forth between the summer of 1983 and the summer of 2007, the year TNT tries to discover the secret of his paternity, as well as to several years in between as the self-styled VIPs grow up and become wildly successful.

Duke, the only “white boy” in the group, is a football star at Syracuse and plays professional ball (and earns two Super Bowl rings) with the Washington Redskins. Foster child Joey makes it big in the fashion world by developing a hit line of clothing, while Leo, scion of a wealthy family that own CoCo skin-care products, struggles with his homosexuality, falling first for Joey and then for Pete, first his roomie at Yale and later a rock star. The fourth member of the pack is Barry, the hardscrabble son of a hateful man who manicures the estates of the wealthy black community in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Complicating the mixture is the ever-present Carla, whose sexy come-ons lure any number of willing adolescent boys. Throughout the novel, Poulson-Bryant teases us by withholding the identity of TNT’s father and by providing bewildering explanations of other paternities as well. It also turns out that someone with a secret is also stalking TNT. Ultimately, nothing is as it appears— though by this time we’re pretty much beyond caring.

Hip, flimsy fiction.

Northern Cheyenne, and his white wife, Sadie, as they follow a lonely trail through the bitter country of addiction and then back to each other. “The Great Divide” chronicles the life of Middie, a massive, protean figure, the product of a Depressionera abusive childhood on an isolated Montana ranch. From rodeo to railroad, Middie’s tale is reminiscent of the John Henry legend as he finishes college, labors on the railroad and fistfights his way across the great northwest because “he knows the taste of blood.” “Three from Montana” introduces Shale and Weston and their father Edwin, an itinerant steel-spined high-school basketball coach. Unfathomable loss crashes into a single mother in “Rodin’s The Hand of God” after her two young daughters drown. Shale appears again in “When We Rise,” a meditation on basketball, brotherhood and the precious magic of being alive in the moment. Tori falls for Shannon in “Mrs. Secrest,” but she doesn’t see him clearly, a theme threading through the book—women expecting something from men they will never receive. In “The Dark between Them,” Zeb, a white boy taking refuge on the reservation, meets Sara, a hard Northern Cheyenne girl, but both are caught up in meth, methadone and mushrooms. Almost every story is set under the great blue steel dome of the Montana sky. Almost every story follows a hard man who cannot understand where hardness should end.

Almost every story watches as a lonely woman attempts to love such a man without understanding the anger, the hurt and the loneliness beneath the iron.

Think Hemingway or Jim Harrison, and know that Ray’s collection is the deserving winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize.

AMERICAN MASCULINE

Ray, Shann Graywolf (192 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | June 21, 2011 978-1-55597-588-3 Ray’s stories resonate hard and clear, very much word images reflecting the Montana setting of the collection.

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BRIGHT’S PASSAGE

Ritter, Josh Dial Press (208 pp.) $22.00 | July 12, 2011 978-1-4000-6950-7

Returning from the traumas of the French battlefield, a young World War I veteran must face up to dark primal conflicts back home in West Virginia, where he is aided and instructed by an angel in the form of a horse.

Folk-rock singer-songwriter Ritter’s first novel is a sometimes fatalistic, sometimes fanciful allegory about Henry Bright, a taciturn Appalachian whose wife dies in childbirth, leaving him with a son whom the angel proclaims the future King of Heaven. After burning down his cabin at the behest of the talking horse, he heads into an uncertain future with the baby, making his way through mountains that seem less familiar than they once did. Moving back and forth in time, the novel details Henry’s off-kilter childhood, when he was paired off with his future wife, Rachel; his time in France, where one fellow soldier died in a trench in mid-sentence and another saved him from a massacre by falling dead on top of him; and his homecoming, when he is targeted by his wife’s evil father and brutal, unbalanced sons. Aiming for the austere existentialism of Cormac |

“A strange, formidable novel about crossed signals and damage done.” from wire to wire

McCarthy, the story unfolds with leisurely ease, told in lofty, even tones. Ritter has a knack for details, such as the difference between the German’s spacious, cement-fortified trenches and the cramped ones hurriedly dug by the Americans. He’s an assured stylist as well: “The fields in between the trenches were wind-whipped ponds of bodies, and even though the bodies were dead they could still pull you down with them; the dead were hungry that way.” It will be difficult for some readers to get past the talking horse (not to mention the cranky goat that plays a supporting role), but those who are able to will enjoy an original, freshly observed novel that lingers after the final pages have been turned.

A tender, touching novel about a survivor of both World War I and a nasty family conflict. (Author tour to Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Agent: Scott Moyers/The Wylie Agency)

DREAMS OF JOY

See, Lisa Random (368 pp.) $26.00 | May 31, 2011 978-1-4000-6712-1 In this sequel to See’s bestselling Shanghai Girls (2009, etc.), a daughter’s flight leads to further family upheavals against the backdrop of Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward.

Twenty years have passed since Pearl and May Chin left war-torn Shanghai for California, to fulfill the marriage contracts their bankrupt gambler father had arranged. Now, Pearl’s daughter Joy has impulsively immigrated to China to seek her birth father Z.G., who once painted the youthful Pearl and May for “Beautiful Girl” advertisements.

Z.G. is not hard to locate—he is now the New Society’s highestranking propaganda artist. But he has fallen into disfavor and is being sent to a peasant commune, Green Dragon Village, to reform his bourgeois aesthetic. Joy accompanies him to Green Dragon, excited at the prospect of living the communist ideals that so enthralled her as a University of Chicago student. For a while, the system works: Women are liberated from household drudgery, childcare and cooking (meals are provided by a canteen), crops are plentiful and people are being encouraged to have large families to augment the workforce. Z.G. returns to Shanghai, but Joy, who has married local peasant Tao, remains behind (she’ll regret her marriage immediately after a wedding night spent in a crowded, two-room shack). However, soon the Great Leap Forward, thanks to several wrongheaded strategies (among them, plowing broken glass into the fields, overplanting wheat and a war on sparrows which wreaks environmental havoc), leads to nationwide famine. The once tranquil commune is now riven by strife. Under the rule of a corrupt party official who keeps all the food for himself, starving villagers resort to mob violence and cannibalism. Meanwhile, Pearl has arrived in Shanghai and is living in uneasy community with her father’s former tenants and working as a street sweeper while |

she plots to rescue Joy and her new granddaughter.

Although the ending betrays See’s roots in genre fiction, this is a riveting, meticulously researched depiction of one of the world’s worst human-engineered catastrophes.

(Author tour to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles)

WIRE TO WIRE

Sparling, Scott Tin House (392 pp.) $15.95 paperback original | June 15, 2011 978-1-935639-05-3 A dizzying, speed-laced debut novel from Portland-based writer Sparling.

With Dexedrine-slamming rail riders, a glue-sniffing femme fatale and a lead protagonist whose point of view is skewed under the best of circumstances, the book is a worthy combination of Bob Seger nostalgia and dope-fueled noir, but it’s not always the easiest story to follow.

The framing device: video editor Michael Slater’s editing suite, where the pill-popping film slicer screens scenes from his own life. Michael has never been quite the same since a peculiar, life-altering incident. While riding on top of a hurtling freight train with his amigo Harp Maitland, a power line zaps the young adventurer with 33,000 volts to the forehead. Now Slater has a head full of holes, and he sometimes sees people who aren’t there. From there, it’s a hallucinatory road trip from Arizona to Michigan, which Slater describes in loving detail. It’s a blistered postcard of passing Americana, stitched together with diners, pool halls and pickup trucks, not to mention the freight trains that Sparling himself rode. Technically, it’s a crime novel— there’s violence and sex and things on fire. But it’s obvious that the author is more interested in what’s bouncing around in his hero’s fractured head and spilling it out onto the page than he is in tidy endings. Slater explains his peculiar interests to a fellow traveler as a train narrowly misses a cow on the tracks. “I was disappointed,” he says. “I wanted to see the cow explode.

Things start to go wrong and I like to watch.”

A strange, formidable novel about crossed signals and damage done, with plenty of peek-between-your-fingers moments for good measure. (Reading group guide online. Author tour to New York, Francisco, Seattle, Portland)

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KINDRED SPIRITS

Strohmeyer, Sarah Dutton (304 pp.) $25.95 | July 1, 2011 978-0-525-95222-0

Three women carry out the last wishes of their friend, discovering secrets, shedding inhibitions and inventing new martinis along the way.

To combat PTA pettiness, four friends, all residing in the idyllic lakeside town of Marshfield, Conn., are inspired by a musty cookbook, penned by a long-ago Marshfield clubwoman, to form the Ladies Society for the Conservation of Martinis. They bond over Cosmos, Blue Martinis and classic James Bond or Rat Pack concoctions while battling various crises in their lives. Now, though, the crises have the upper hand. Carol precipitously left her husband Jeff to resume her legal career in New York City, resulting in an ill-considered divorce. Now her ex-husband is insisting on selling their Marshfield house, and Carol’s daughter Amanda is not speaking to her. Mary Kay, who raised her orphaned niece Tiffany as her own, has been concealing her infertility from her live-in partner and soon-to-be fiancé, Drake.

Beth is juggling her ailing elderly father’s health issues with no assistance, only criticism, from a controlling out-of-town sister.

Worst of all, the society’s founder, Lynne, has run out of options in her battle against cancer. Employing a combination of Blue Martinis and morphine, she commits suicide, leaving a letter for her friends to find. That letter instructs them to look for the daughter that, as a teenager in Pennsylvania, Lynne had been forced to give up for adoption. The women track down Lynne’s mother and aunt, and thanks to Beth’s skills as a librarian, turn up a crucial clue that Lynne herself had withheld. As they zero in on their quarry, spreading unwelcome news all over Pennsylvania, the women have plenty of opportunity to indulge in all manner of martinis (recipes included). The lighthearted conventions of the midlife girl-power road trip (no driving while intoxicated depicted) often clash with the downright depressing subject matter, as the myriad ways in which parents, spouses and children can become estranged are picked apart.

A hackneyed concept which gains little in this tepid treatment. (Agent: Heather Schroder/ICM)

THE ORIENTAL WIFE

Toynton, Evelyn Other Press (304 pp.) $15.95 paperback original | July 19, 2011 978-1-59051-441-2 Painful echoes of the Holocaust resonate in Toynton’s literary effort.

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become devoted friends. In the midst of growing unrest and increasing anti-Semitism, Franz and his wife, a woman plagued by “nerves,” send Louisa to a Swiss boarding school, then to England. Rolf ’s family too realizes Hitler’s hell is descending on Jews. With family help, Rolf emigrates to America, finds employment and plunges into volunteer work helping other Jews escape. Otto follows. Louisa, however, is seduced by one Englishman, and then another, before the friends finally meet in New York City. Stolid, conservative Rolf and fun-loving, adventurous Louisa marry, each seeking what the other will never be able to give. Louisa becomes pregnant. Then she is almost immediately diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. Surgery leaves her partially paralyzed and baby Emma in the care of a duplicitous housekeeper, a hypocrite Rolf cannot recognize. That Louisa is no longer the person Rolf idealized leads to divorce, something they each regard as a confirmation of their destiny to be unhappy. Adult Emma sees the divorce as betrayal, a failure later mirrored when Emma is betrayed by her own lover, a mysterious Cambodian activist. While almost every other character is superbly realized, Otto’s story is the least explored, perhaps presenting him as a metaphor for those who escaped without crippling emotional damage. Toynton also delves into the melancholy fate of Louisa’s parents and their friends, a doctor and his wife, who fled the Nazis but languish in America, haunted by the “Old World...with all its weight of senseless suffering.”

Toynton’s work is deeply emotional, capturing the malaise shadowing those from whom everything familiar, everything loved, has been stolen, symbolized at the novel’s conclusion by an heirloom locket snatched away from Emma by a mugger.

A first-rate literary work and a character study of loss.

(Agent: Marly Rusoff/Marly Rusoff and Associates)

THE BOOK OF HAPPENSTANCE

Winterbach, Ingrid Translators: Winterbach, Dirk; Winterbach, Ingrid Open Letter (254 pp.) $14.95 paperback original | June 14, 2011 978-1-934824-33-7 A quirky South African lexicographer is forced to rethink her past and future after falling victim to a most unusual crime.

Three months into a year-long gig compiling a dictionary of archaic Afrikaans words for the elegant Theo Verwey, Helena Verbloem comes home to her garden flat to find that someone has taken her prized collection of sea shells and defecated on her carpet. With few friends in Durban, and no enemies to speak of, she is shaken by the violation but also curious. The shells, which meant so much to her, had little resale value, and her experience with the local police raises more questions than answers. And it gets even weirder after an unlikely suspect is found hanged.

That experience, along with a phone call from a man claiming to have known her when she was a sexually adventurous young writer, triggers dormant memories and a fair share of regret. |

Helena feels something in her life is brewing, and it causes some distance between her and her longtime lover Frans, who lives in another town. While nursing an attraction to the married Theo, she spends her days at the Natural History Museum, where they work, conversing with the other staffers. An interesting bunch, they range from Sailor, a strapping young man with admirers of both genders, to Hugo Hattingh, a brilliant paleontologist with Asperger’s tendencies. Helena becomes good friends with Sof, a translator who finds herself erotically fixated on her family’s wheelchair-bound physician. Sof accompanies Helena to the nearby town of Ladybrand, where they meet up with a young mixed-race man who seems to know something about the shells.

Or not. Eventually, even Helena realizes that the shells are probably the least-significant part of her puzzle, as she begins to chart a new personal course.

A stealth gem, Winterbach’s (To Hell with Cronjé, 2010) captivating book offers up a fascinating heroine, made all the more so for her lack of so-called endearing qualities. This is a challenging portrait of an artist that defies easy categorization.

m ys t e r y CHIHUAHUA OF THE BASKERVILLES

Allbritten, Esri Minotaur Books (288 pp.) $23.99 | July 5, 2011 978-0-312-56915-0

A magazine staff investigates a ghost dog’s appearance in a quirky Colorado town.

Beleaguered Scotsman Angus MacGregor is sent to resuscitate Tripping magazine (about ghosts, not drugs) with a fanciful story of a ghost dog. Charlotte Baskerville, the owner and operator of the niche shop Petey’s Closet, “Where the Well-Dressed Pooch Shops,” has seen the clothing catalog’s namesake wandering her home’s grounds at night, a year after Petey’s death. Charlotte’s sourpuss husband Thomas insists that her story is further grounds for having the poor old dear declared incompetent, though a skeptic might suspect he’s more concerned for her money than her mind. With bold photographer Suki Oota and cynical writer Michael Abernathy in tow, Angus visits the Baskerville home determined to write the story, whether or not the ghost is real. The Tripping team quickly becomes integrated into the quirky Baskerville household, from fame-hungry Russian dog trainer Ivan Blotski to Charlotte’s own granddaughter and recovering alcoholic Cheri to bizarrely optimistic neighbor Bob Hume, who’s obsessed with acai berries. Charlotte’s living Chihuahuas, Lila and Chum, play non-speaking, |

emotionally supportive roles for the old girl while Angus and his mates investigate in order to assuage her concerns over Petey’s message from the beyond. The mystery takes a backseat to tensions among the characters, all culminating at the town’s annual coffin race festival.

Allbritten (Bound to Love Her, 2008, etc., as Esri Rose) tells a light and engaging tale with charming characters that will appeal to those outside of both mystery and canine genres.

MOBBED

Clark, Carol Higgins Scribner (272 pp.) $25.00 | April 5, 2011 978-1-4391-7028-1 Private eye Regan Reilly, down at the Jersey shore to celebrate the birthday of her mother, that famous suspense writer, is on hand—you can’t really say she does much more than that—for a hastily organized garage sale whose satellites include

an aspiring killer.

Having just completed a bona fide piece of sleuthing—getting the goods on her old classmate Hayley Patton’s unfaithful boyfriend Scott Thompson—Regan (Fleeced, 2001, etc.) is ready for some R and R. But the garage sale suddenly declared

by Edna Frawley, the imperious mother of Karen Fulton, novelist Nora Regan Reilly’s old friend, promises to provide everything but. Edna’s eager to sell her house in Bay Head and all its contents, including, most memorably, the things left behind

by Cleo Paradise, the Oscar-nominated actress who rented the place for a month. Cleo wouldn’t have run off without her extra jeans and her trunk full of plastic skulls if she hadn’t been panicked by yet more sinister gifts of the dead roses she thought she’d left behind in Los Angeles. Now Cleo has vanished for parts unknown, leaving her stalker to smack his lips in a series of interpolated chapters in which he exults over her impending demise. Doubtless Regan, along with her husband Jack, head of NYPD’s Major Crimes Squad, will find her and rush to her defense just as soon as she’s waded through all the fans, bullies, rivals, wannabes and hangers-on who’ve turned out for Edna’s sale.

To find the unguessable culprit, you’ll have to look beneath a pile of suspects who seem less menacing than bothersome, like a cloud of Jersey mosquitoes.

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“The reason for a brutal present-day crime near Brighton, England, lies in the past.” from the last king of brighton

THE RICH AND THE DEAD

Editor: DeMille, Nelson Grand Central Publishing (384 pp.) $24.99 | May 2, 2011 978-0-445-55587-6 The 20 new stories in this year’s Mystery Writers of America’s annual anthology focus on financial vicissitudes.

Editor DeMille, a perennial resident on the bestseller lists, is less deft at finding surefire short-story winners, with only two standouts. One of them, seasoned pro Lee Child, turns the tables on a coke dealer with a defective Bic. The other, newcomer K. Catalona, drolly presents a literary agent and his spunky geriatric helper who co-opt a client’s manuscript. As for the rest: Angela Zeman takes a society journalist to task; Elaine Togneri establishes a photojournalist in his career; Ted Bell nails a tabloid reporter for stealing; and S.J. Rozan goes one better and offs a tabloid blackmailer between poker hands. A Ponzi scheme fails to enliven a surprisingly dull appearance by Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. Tim Chapman makes a mom resort to murder. Twist Phelan shows how a father and grandfather’s get-rich dreams go awry. DeMille plots insurance fraud in the Hamptons; Carolyn Mullen plots murder for revenge in a mill town. Daniel Hale places diamonds in a Texas cabin; David Morrell sets up a fake murder attempt at Lincoln Center; Joseph Goodrich assuages poverty and loneliness in a Paris cemetery; Roberta Islieb puckishly demeans the tourist potential of Key West. Peter Blauner topples a faded Hollywood star; David DeLee’s on-the-skids rap star gains street cred. Frank Cook’s scientific breakthrough leads to dementia, and Jonathan Santlofer’s deals with the Old Masters.

Not helped by DeMille’s lackluster introduction or the generally pedestrian handling of the volume’s uninspiring theme.

THE LAST KING OF BRIGHTON

Guttridge, Peter Severn House (256 pp.) $29.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-7278-8009-3 The reason for a brutal present-day crime near Brighton, England, lies in the past.

August 1963. The Great Train Robbery is headline news, but life is good for teen John Hathaway. While his parents are away on holiday, he’s having an affair with Barbara, an older woman who works for Dennis Hathaway, his father. He plays in a band with some friends and leads a fairly normal life until he begins to realize that Dennis is a major crime boss. Slowly John and his bandmate Charlie get drawn into Dennis’ enterprises. Forced to acknowledge his own propensity for violence, 820

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he tries to keep it buried until his father has Charlie kill Elaine, John’s latest girlfriend, who’s seen too much for her own good.

Fast-forward to the present day: John has moved the family money into mostly legitimate businesses, but he’s become the target of Balkan criminals who will stop at nothing to take over.

Ex–Chief Constable Bob Watts, his security expert friend Tingley and DS Sarah Gilchrist all become involved in a dangerous effort to stop the newcomers. The trio still hope to unravel the truth about the police raid gone bad that cost Watts his job and prevent the Balkan influx threatening Brighton.

Best appreciated by those who have read the first in this historical series (City of Dreadful Night, 2010, etc.). Intertwined crimes dating back to the 1930s and years of police corruption are explored in this darkly fascinating noir procedural, which once again leaves much to be revealed next time.

PACIFIC HEIGHTS

Harper, Paul Henry Holt (400 pp.) $25.00 | July 5, 2011 978-0-8050-9393-3

Thriller veteran David Lindsey (The Face of the Assassin, 2004, etc.) kicks off this pseudonymous new series with the surprisingly glossy account of a sexual predator with a talent for getting inside his partners’ fantasies.

Trophy wife Elise Currin can’t imagine how her lover Ray Kern can divine her darkest secrets. The sex is mind-blowing but scary. So is the idea that Ray knows everything she’s ever thought. Lore Cha feels the same way about Philip Krey, who takes her places she’s never gone and isn’t sure she’ll ever come back from. Most distressed of all, however, is Vera List, the widowed psychotherapist who treats both women, who don’t know each other, and who’s convinced that the two preternaturally sensitive lovers are one and the same, and that whoever he is, he’s getting the lowdown on them in a much more prosaic way: by breaking into Vera’s case files. Shaken, she consults Marten Fane, an ex–San Francisco cop who assures her that he’s not a private detective: “There’s no job description for what I do.” He in turn brings in his colleagues Roma Solís, formerly of Colombia’s Policía Nacional; counter-surveillance specialist Jon Bücher; and Bobby Noble, whose job at Virtual Marketing Research has nothing to do with marketing research. Together they plot to bring down the predator who’s actually Ryan Kroll, a former CIA interrogator now with Vector Strategies, and whose long-range plan is a good deal more sinister than seducing and tormenting the best-looking women in the Bay Area.

Has the bones of a good-enough story, but the battle between the franchise hero and the bogeyman, swathed in self-seriousness, suffers from a serious absence of real menace beneath the inflated descriptions.

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Hayes, J.M. Poisoned Pen (194 pp.) $24.95 | paper $14.95 Lg. Prt.: $22.95 | July 1, 2011 978-1-59058-915-1 paper 978-1-59058-917-5 Lg. Prt. 978-1-59058-916-8 Christmas brings a startling assortment of violent surprises to Officer Heather English of the Sewa Tribal Police, her Cheyenne

uncle and her father.

The first surprise comes when Heather, following an anonymous phone tip, finds Arizona governor-elect Joe Hyde’s corpse skinned and pinned to a wall far from anywhere. Her uncle Mad Dog awakens to discover a package on his doorstep containing a severed human hand, a grisly sign from someone who thinks Mad Dog, a wannabe shaman, is setting up as a rival drug lord.

Nor is Heather’s father, sheriff of far-off Benteen County, Kan., to be outdone. A pair of apparently innocuous misdemeanors— elderly Lottie Walker’s reckless driving and the defacing of Don Crabtree’s Yuletide crèche—swiftly escalate to a full-blown, and ultimately sanguinary, battle between Sheriff English and the townsfolk, who are convinced he wants to confiscate their guns. How closely will Mad Dog’s troubles with the killer hired to take him out be linked to Heather’s stalking by the professional assassin who’s still smarting because she survived their last encounter (Server Down, 2008, etc.)? And what do their travails have to do with those of her father and brother four states away? Hayes cuts back and forth from one story to the next, pumping up the body count—at least 12 dead among the three plotlines—and editing for maximum punch. The result, however cinematic, is oddly weightless, with a general effect of nonstop bustle rather than violent threat.

The best of the three stories is Sheriff English’s siege against his gun-toting neighbors; the other two are for fans of the first five installments only.

DEATH IN THE OPENING CHAPTER

Heald, Tim Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | July 1, 2011 978-1-78029-002-7 The Flanagan Fludd Literary Festival is put on hold when a collateral relative of its namesake is strung up in his own church.

The Rev. Sebastian Fludd, vicar of St. Teath’s Mallborne, was an inoffensive soul. The only scenario more unlikely than that he should have hanged himself is that he should have annoyed someone else enough to take the trouble to do so. Luckily, Sir Simon Bognor, head of the Board of Trade’s Special Investigations Department, is staying with the vicar’s cousin, Sir Branwell Fludd. So when |

Chief Constable Jones indicates that his one and only interest in the case is not stirring up any trouble, Bognor, variously assisted by his wife Monica and his right-hand man Harvey Contractor, is available to interrogate the suspects, beginning, of course, with his host and his wife Lady Camilla. Whether Bognor, who aptly “felt as if he had never really grown up,” is questioning grieving widow Dorcas Fludd, operatic soprano Vicenza Book (née Marigold Bean), or Festival Writer-in-Residence Martin Allgood, the dialogue is so relentlessly facetious and self-gratifying, in the Wodehouse manner, that even the most experienced armchair sleuths will have trouble grasping the truth beneath the industrial-strength persiflage. It doesn’t help that Heald (Stop Press, 1999, etc.), after signaling the potential importance early on of a key clue, never presents it directly to the gentle reader.

A feast of blather, more full of fun than genuine wit or humor, that’s bound to flatter like-minded fans into approval.

TWICE AS DEAD

Jaffarian, Sue Ann Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (312 pp.) $14.95 paperback original | June 1, 2011 978-0-7387-1352-6 The death of an event planner spells more than double trouble for a Southern California paralegal and her yuppie boss.

Finding Shirley Pearson’s corpse in a coatroom while guests dance the Electric Slide at Hannah Washington’s wedding poses a variety of problems for Odelia Grey (Corpse on the Cob, 2010, etc.). First, in a fit of mother-of-the-bride outrage, Zee Washington threatens to brain her best friend with a coat hanger if she dares disrupt Hannah’s nuptials with something as tacky as a dead body. Second, stylish Shirley turns out to be, at least technically, still a guy. Third, Doug Pearson, the guy Shirley is or used to be, reportedly died 14 years ago after sticking up a bank in Minnesota. But fourth and foremost, her coat room discovery confirms Odelia’s status as Corpse Magnet of the Century, an honor her husband Greg and brother Clark fear will make her a target in her own right. They won’t help her investigate, even when former classmate Clarice Hollowell presents her with a list of people who, like Doug, supposedly shuffled off this mortal coil years ago, but whose alter egos now seem to have bought it for real. And Detective Dev Frye certainly doesn’t want Odelia messing around in police business. That leaves Odelia’s boss, smart but arrogant Mike Steele, who’s surprisingly willing to be Odelia’s Watson, even if it means a night of Drag Queen Bingo at Billie’s Holliday, Newport Beach’s answer to Hamburger Mary’s.

Sleuthing spirals so quickly out of control in Odelia’s loopy sixth that you can’t tell the corpses without a scorecard.

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h m a r i s a d e l o s s a n t o s Marisa de los Santos’ critically acclaimed novels, Love Walked In and Belong to Me (which reached No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list) have become book-club favorites. Here, the author discusses her next novel, Falling Together, and what goes into creating the lovable, multidimensional characters she’s known for.

Falling Together

Marisa de los Santos Morrow / HarperCollins (352 pp.) $25.99 October 9780061670879

Q: Novels often begin as the result of an image, or a character, or a voice. What was the beginning of Falling Together for you?

A: The very first thing I knew about this book was that it would be about a friendship among three people—two women and a man. I could picture them…walking, a tall man, a tall woman and between them a much smaller woman. I carried this image around inside my head for quite some time before the character of Pen began to take shape.

Early on, I knew she was a mother. Also, I knew that she was sad and lonely in a way that Cornelia, the protagonist of my first two books, never was. The interesting thing to me is that I knew Pen was sad, but for a long time, I thought she was sad only about losing her friends. It kept nagging at me, though, this sense that her sadness was deeper and more complicated than that.

Then, one day, while I was on the elliptical trainer going full-tilt, I understood that her father had died and, right there in the middle of the YMCA, a wave of sadness that I recognized as Pen’s particular sadness hit me. Once I had that, I had Pen, and the story emerged more steadily after that.

Q: This story’s plot weaves back and forth in time. Did you have a very clear outline, or did the pieces “fall together” this way for you?

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A: My friendships in college and graduate school rank among the most intense of my life. I think this is because I’m a person who needs to have family around me all the time. If my actual blood relatives aren’t there, I need to grow a new family…There’s a point in the book in which Pen tells Will that she has given him and Cat everything, “My childhood, my parents, the things that scare me, the books I love, the sentences I love from the books I love.” And I think young adulthood is like that—you throw open your vault, you hand everything over. You want so much to be known and to know your friends in a real, lasting way. My best friend in college was a guy named Victor, and even though we don’t see each other all that often, I am always instantly at ease, instantly at home in his presence.

Q: You’ve said that you miss your characters when a book is done. Does it help to have a relationship with new characters on the horizon?

A: Yes, that does help. I’m early on in the process, but I know the fourth book will be the story of siblings, a set of twins in their early 30s, Estella and Marcus Cleary, and their 16-year-old half sister Willow from their father’s second marriage.

I think the story will be told from the perspectives of the two sisters, and maybe also Marcus, but right now, I’m focused on getting to know Willow.

Because her father believes that his first family was a failure, he and his much younger wife have raised Willow in an incredibly sheltered and rarefied world—homeschooling, no television, few friends, almost no contact with his previous family.

But when the story opens, the father is ill and Willow is in public high school for the first time.

I find her so interesting, this odd combination of self-assured—she’s always been taught that she is a superior person being raised in a superior way— and scared, knowing and deeply innocent. She’ll tell her story in the first-person, so I’m learning her voice, which is always a fascinating undertaking. I still miss Pen, Will and Cat, but it makes me happy to think that Willow and Estella and Marcus and I have a long, long road ahead of us.

– by Jessie Grearson t is s a d e l a-vo l p e

A: I have this fantasy wherein I am a writer who uses a very clear outline! But my process seems to be that I need to know the characters really, really well before I start writing—although I never know them nearly as well as I think I do; they surprise me constantly, and I need to know a few simple things about the plot.

After that it’s a matter of staying as absolutely tuned in to my characters as I can and taking my cues from them. In Falling Together, the chapters grew out of one another. I’d finish one, then start the next in a time and place that felt most necessary to the story, which sometimes meant sending my characters backward…I love being so completely immersed, and I love the surprises. So maybe I’m glad that I’m not an outliner after all!

Q: Pen’s intense friendship with Will and Cat is a revelation to her. Did you experience similarly intense friendships in college?

“A darkly powerful fictionalization of the last two hours in the life of Kitty Genovese.” from good neighbors

GOOD NEIGHBORS

Jahn, Ryan David Penguin (288 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | June 1, 2011 978-0-14-311896-1 A darkly powerful fictionalization of the last two hours in the life of Kitty Genovese, attacked and killed outside her New York apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, while her neighbors did nothing.

Only steps from her door in a typical Queens neighborhood, Katrina Marino, 28, returning from her job as night manager of a sports bar, is stabbed by an unknown man. Kat is a fighter, and she doesn’t take the assault lying down. She fights back; she screams; she begs her neighbors in the building for help.

Although four different people hear her and consider phoning the police, none of them does, simply because they’re all so involved with their own problems. Patrick Donaldson weighs how to tell his bedridden mother that he’s been drafted. Diane Myers waits to confront her husband Larry about his obvious adultery. Thomas Marlowe, Larry’s bowling teammate, contemplates suicide. Peter and Anne Adams indulge in their first taste of spouse-swapping with Ron and Bettie Paulson. Frank Riva, terrified that his wife Erin may have struck a child with her car, sets off to see what he can learn. Emergency Medical Technician David White catches up with the molester who abused him as a child. Officer Alan Kees takes steps to deal with an extortionist. Debut novelist Jahn inhabits these people and their problems so completely and convincingly that they don’t seem like monsters even as they ignore the woman who’s dying only a few yards away.

Since Kat Marino is, for better or worse, the least-interesting person here, it’s well worth watching to see what Jahn can do in a novel that isn’t based on a real-life person.

HELL IS EMPTY

Johnson, Craig Viking (320 pp.) $25.95 | June 6, 2011 978-0-670-02277-9 For Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire (Junkyard Dogs, 2010, etc.), the pursuit of a vicious murderer through a killer ice storm in the Bighorn Mountains adds up to a cold day in hell.

Sly, elusive Raynaud Shade is a homicidal maniac and a lawman’s nightmare. But at last he’s been caught. The confessed slayer of a 7-year-old boy is on his way to the slammer, almost certainly for the rest of his bloodthirsty life. And he knows it. So Absaroka County Sheriff Longmire, who has him in his custody, is quite reasonably uneasy. Not only is Shade a textbook psychopath, profoundly remorseless, he’s begun professing an affinity for Sheriff Walt, as if they were |

somehow partners in delusion, as if Walt, too, were “possessed by evil spirits” that forced him to kill on command. All of which is as unsettling to Walt as it is unavoidable, since the body of Owen White Buffalo, the dead boy in question, was discovered in Walt’s jurisdiction. The transport van advances circumspectly toward its destination until, in the mind-blowing ferocity of a sudden mountain storm, the slippery Shade manages to escape.

Now a complex game’s afoot as lawman chases madman. Before it’s played out, the Bighorns, icily nonjudgmental, will have had their way with Walt, narrowing the sanity gap.

Deft as always, but dearly missed from this stark, wintry tale is grizzled Walt’s much younger lover, his feisty, tormenting, adorable girl of summer.

FROZEN CHARLOTTE

Masters, Priscilla Severn House (208 pp.) $27.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-7278-8006-2

Who is the very quiet woman with the very quiet baby in the very noisy Accident and Emergency department of the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital?

It’s a January night, snowy and slippery, exactly the kind of night calculated to boost the accident rate and strain an Accident and Emergency department beyond its capacity. No wonder everyone’s ignoring the woman who sits so unobtrusively, looking so ordinary, seeming so attended to. On a night like this, that woman is guaranteed to be bypassed, as she is until finally frenzy settles into comparative calm, and staff Nurse Lucy Ramshaw has a chance to think seriously about her.

Her name is Alice Sedgewick, and she’s middle-aged, decently dressed and well-spoken. The baby she’s holding remains quiet as death because it is indeed dead and has been for at least five years. Does Mrs. Sedgewick know her baby is dead? For that matter, is the baby Mrs. Sedgewick’s? And since the baby is clearly male, why does she insist on referring to him as Poppy?

The obvious questions lead nowhere until Coroner Martha Gunn (Slip Knot, 2007, etc.) begins asking them. But even smart, sensitive, intuitive Martha won’t have an easy time with the sad, bad case of the baby so desperately wanted, except by those who didn’t want him at all.

The strong premise is weakened by pace-killing subplots imbued with the sensibility of a romance novel.

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THE COUNTERFEIT MADAM

McIntosh, Pat Soho Constable (304 pp.) $25.00 | June 1, 2011 978-1-56947-949-0

A case of counterfeiting in 15th-century Scotland involves Archbishop’s Quaestor (constable) Gil Cunningham and his wife Alys in a series of murders close to home.

John Sempill has openly acknowledged Alys’ foster brother John McIan as his bastard son. Now Sempill is married and his wife is pregnant.

So outspoken Dame Isabella Torrance, the godmother of Alys’ sister, visits Alys and purposes a transfer of property to John McIan in return for his relinquishing the right to claim more.

Sempill’s property in Glasgow will provide good rents, and Dame Isabella sweetens the pot by offering to give Sempill’s wife and Alys’ sister some income-producing property in the countryside. But there is some confusion about the legal ownership of one of the parcels. When Dame Isabella is murdered, Gil and Alys get involved in the investigation. Gil, inspecting a brothel that’s part of the property intended for McIan, is attacked on another property containing several workshops. Meantime, a flood of counterfeit coins makes Gil suspicious of some of the craftsman. He continues his investigations in town while Alys sneaks off to visit the property whose title is in doubt. Both of them find much more than they could have anticipated.

Gil’s adventures (A Pig of Cold Poison, 2008, etc.) continue to provide satisfying, albeit convoluted, mysteries larded with historical detail.

WANTED—DEB OR ALIVE

Moore, Laurie Five Star (310 pp.) $25.95 | July 20, 2011 978-1-4328-2540-9

Debutante Dainty Prescott (Deb on Arrival—Live at Five, 2010, etc.) goes south of the border.

Life is just about perfect for Dainty Prescott. She gets a glow from her new relationship with Detective Jim Bruckman and another from watching her little sister, Teensy, come out as a debutante at the annual Rubanbleu ball. But when Dainty gets a middle of the night call from her sister, who’s been kidnapped by Mexican police alongside her best friend and co-debutante, Tiffany, her perfect life is turned into a disaster. She’s certain she can solve the case if only she can get to Ciudad Juárez, but not even Bruckman supports this foray of what he calls the Debutante Detective Agency. Confronted by a country she hates and a language barrier her good looks can’t cross, Dainty is at a standstill. Enter Amanda Vásquez. She’s either a local police lieutenant or a pygmy prostitute and, either way, may be Dainty’s only hope. The two team up in the most 824

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unlikely of pairings, dodging bullets and bodies as they evade the mysterious and murderous presence of local legend El Mortero. Dainty is in for a bigger challenge than she ever imagined as she gets closer to the truth, but she still can’t escape her biggest enemy of all: Mexico.

Less a mystery than a buddy adventure, the second in this series will please those enamored of Dainty’s disasters, so long as they don’t mind the high body count.

THE INSPECTOR AND SILENCE

Nesser, Håkan Translator: Thompson, Laurie Pantheon (304 pp.) $24.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-375-42523-3 e-book 978-0-307-37982-5 Inspector Van Veeteren probes a religious camp after a series of anonymous calls reports a missing girl.

At the Pure Life Camp in the wilderness at Waldingham, a camper sneaks out of her cabin in the middle of the night, then realizes she’s being followed. A short time later, laid-back local police chief Kluuge receives a series of whispered calls about a girl missing from the camp. Meanwhile, in the city of Maardam, a sweltering summer is, depending on whom you ask, either raising or lowering the crime rate. Veteran Inspector Van Veeteren, who’s closing in on 60, is again contemplating retirement and a less stressful life. So getting sent to Pure Life seems like an ironic bit of karma. He finds Kluuge an amiable shirker, and the neighbors of the camp hard to communicate with. Van Veeteren checks in regularly with the squad room guys, who have everything under control in other cases. But the creepy leader of the camp proves to be a challenge. Slick, smug and shrewd, Oscar Yellinek parries all of Ven Veeteren’s probing questions about the camp, which caters exclusively to teenage girls. Employees and campers alike deny that a girl is missing, but Van Veeteren smells a lie and a cult when Yellinek is evasive regarding sexual activity at the camp. The discovery of a dead girl changes everything.

Van Veeteren’s fifth case to be translated into English (Woman with Birthmark, 2009, etc.) builds slowly, the grim haunting plot perfectly suited to the methodical, stoic hero.

THE BONES OF AVALON

Rickman, Phil Minotaur Books (384 pp.) $25.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-312-67238-6

Catholics, Protestants, faeries, torture and love during the reign of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth, superstitious and chary of a prediction promising disaster unless she can find and bring King Arthur’s |

“A midwife’s latest delivery involves her in murder.” from murder on sisters’ row

bones to a glorious resting place, sends Robert Dudley, Master of the Horse (and perhaps her lover), and Dr. John Dee, scholar and astronomer, off to Glastonbury, purportedly the site of Arthur’s burial place, although his bones disappeared when Cromwell had the abbey destroyed. Traveling incognito as the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities, Dudley is felled by fever, and Dr. Dee runs afoul of Sir Edmund Fyche, who through lies and treachery oversaw the execution of herbalist Cate Borrow, and now seems determined to have her daughter Eleanor hanged as a witch. The lives of both women were entwined with the work of mad geographer John Leland, whose lost writings about a terrestrial Zodiac may hold the key to Arthur’s burial place. But Dr. Dee’s obsession with saving Eleanor and the quest for those bones is stymied not only by the usual Francophiles seething with distaste for Elizabeth but also by Benlow the Bone-Man, who sells fake relics; Fyche’s cruel son Stephen, who thrills in maiming his adversaries; Joan Tyrre and the faerie folk gathering on the Tor; and anthrax, the fatal wool-sorter’s disease. While contending with demons both mystical and real, Dr. Dee uncovers a plot masterminded by the seer Nostradame to turn Elizabeth’s heritage and gullibility against her.

Rickman, who’s wending his way through Welsh history, myth and mores (the Merrily Watkins series), revisits many of the real-life characters he wrote of in The Chalice (1997, etc.) with admirable scholarship and verve, making a John Dee sequel something to look forward to.

MURDER ON SISTERS’ ROW

Thompson, Victoria Berkley Prime Crime (304 pp.) $24.95 | June 7, 2011 978-0-4252-4115-8

A midwife’s latest delivery involves her in murder.

Despite being the daughter of a wealthy and socially prominent New York family, widowed Sarah Brandt continues to work as a midwife. Called out to deliver a baby, she does not immediately realize that Amy, the lovely and spoiled young woman about to give birth, is a prostitute. When Sarah, who has finally realized where she is working, returns to check on the baby boy, Amy begs her to contact Mrs. Van Orner, a wealthy woman who devotes herself to rescuing prostitutes. Impressed by Mrs. Van Orner’s charitable work, Sarah helps Amy escape to a safe house.

Amy turns out to be a demanding and calculating young woman who hints that her son was fathered by Mrs. Van Orner’s husband. When Mrs. Van Orner is found dead in her carriage after leaving the safe house, Sarah’s friend, Detective Frank Malloy, gets the case. In turn-of-the-century New York, the police are so completely controlled by the powers that be that Malloy can investigate only if Van Orner asks for an investigation. Coaxed

by Mrs. Van Orner’s secretary, Miss Yingling, however, Van Orner agrees. The only suspects in his wife’s laudanum poisoning are members of his own household and the women who live |

or work at the safe house. Sarah has her work cut out for her in helping Malloy solve the disagreeable and dangerous case.

Thompson’s enjoyable historical series (Murder on Lexington Avenue, 2010, etc.) continues to highlighvt the social injustices of the time, some of which continue to this day.

PUMPED FOR MURDER

Viets, Elaine Obsidian (272 pp.) $23.95 | May 3, 2011 978-0-451-23320-2

A husband-and-wife detective team takes on its inaugural cases.

Now that her ex-husband’s body is tidily stashed under a church basement in St. Louis, Helen Hawthorne (Half-Price Homicide, 2010, etc.) is ready to start a new life. After years of earning sub-minimum wages to avoid paying alimony to her creepy ex, she and her new husband Phil hope that Coronado Investigations will produce at least a modest, steady income. But their first two cases don’t look too promising. Custom auto restorer Gus Behr wants the pair to look into the cause of his brother Mark’s death—25 years ago. Meanwhile, Shelby Minars hires Coronado for a more routine case: getting the goods on her cheating husband Bryan. Not only is the Minars case more routine, it drags Helen back onto more familiar turf. Since Bryan spends six hours a day working out, she gets herself hired as a receptionist at Fantastic Fitness, hoping to catch him in flagrante with whoever he’s flagranting. Unfortunately, undercover work in a dead-end job comes with all the responsibilities of a real dead-end job, and soon Helen is breaking up fights between clients arguing over whether CNN or Fox News should be airing above the treadmills. Her prime headache is Debbi Dhosset, a body builder with zero percent body fat and 90 percent attitude, whose trainers Kristi and Tansi pump her up with enough steroids to turn her into a murderer. But when Debbi herself turns up dead, Helen ends up with a third, non-paying client: gentle Evie Roddick, who’s accused of killing the girl with the killer bod.

Coronado’s off to a respectable start with a variety of offbeat cases that should bring Helen a decent payday at last.

THE ROCK HOLE

Wortham, Reavis Z. Poisoned Pen (292 pp.) $24.95 | paper $14.95 Lg. Prt.: $22.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-59058-884-0 paper 978-1-59058-886-4 Lg. Prt. 978-1-59058-885-7 An accomplished first novel about life and murder in a small Texas town.

Back in the summer of 1964, life is simpler, though probably no less fraught with evil. In Lamar

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County, Texas, Ned Parker’s the law. He’s a bit long in the tooth but still has that don’t-tread-on-me look that county reprobates have learned to take seriously. And then there’s Top, the constable’s adoring and well-loved 10-year-old grandson. Through them, in alternating chapters, Wortham tells a story of grace under pressure, of what happens when a deranged and vicious predator decides that they’re his promised prey. Local news sources tab him “The Skinner,” and the label is chillingly apt.

He starts with small animals, then proceeds to small human beings—mutilated, murdered, their corpses gruesomely displayed as trophies, an idiosyncratic array doubly intimidating in its lack of pattern. Lamar County cowers. Constable Ned is convinced that a vendetta is involved, and though the why of it remains murky, he can no longer doubt its intent. Something noxious is heading for the Parkers. It arrives with breathtaking suddenness, leading to a fast and furious climax, written to the hilt, harrowing in its unpredictability.

Not just scary but funny too, as Wortham nails time and place in a sure-handed, captivating way. There’s a lot of good stuff in this unpretentious gem. Don’t miss it.

science fiction and fantasy CITY OF RUIN

Newton, Mark Charan Spectra/Bantam (448 pp.) $16.00 paperback original | June 28, 2011 978-0-345-52088-3 e-book 978-0-345-52086-9 Second book of a series (following Nights of Villjamur, 2010), reaching U.S. shores after publication last year in the UK, where the author resides.

In the subgenre referred to by its practitioners as New Weird—bizarrely outlandish fantasy or far-future rational science fiction, take your choice—we’re offered a world lit by a red sun, littered with remnants of advanced technology, populated by humans, humanoids, human-alien hybrids and still weirder creatures. Driven forth by a usurper, Rika, heir to the Jamur Empire’s throne, her sister Eir, and formidable swordsman and con-man Randur, flee towards Villiren, a northern city already feeling the frigid early effects of a new ice age. Worse, the city faces invasion by the insensate lobster-like alien Okun, whose hordes pour through a portal from—somewhere. Homosexual albino Commander Brynd Lathraea of the Night Guard commands Jamur’s troops against the Okun while desperately trying to persuade the gangs who really run Villiren to help defend it. Unfortunately the most powerful gangster, the half-vampire Malum, 826

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loathes homosexuals. Meanwhile, bafflingly, hundreds of prosperous citizens and loyal soldiers have inexplicably vanished from the streets; Inspector Rumex Jeryd, a furry, tailed, humanoid rumel, searches for the culprit, unaware as yet that the responsible party is a huge spider ordered forth by the mysterious Doctor Voland.

Knowledge of the previous book is neither assumed nor required, although many characters are common to both. Newton’s battle sequences often startle and impress, and he’s not afraid to kill off major characters. Thankfully, he resists the temptation to overinflate the scope of the proceedings.

Less weird than some, with fairly orthodox plotting, characters and narrative that build to a satisfying conclusion while promising still more.

SHADOWBORN

Sinclair, Alison ROC/Penguin (352 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | June 7, 2011 978-0-451-46394-4 Final installment of Sinclair’s romantic daylight vs. darkness fantasy trilogy, following Lightborn (2010).

Hundreds of years ago a war between powerful mages resulted in the world being sundered in twain. The Lightborn require light to survive and are killed by darkness, while for the sightless Darkborn—they have a sort of blindsight called “sonn”—the reverse is true. Over time the two peoples made an uneasy accommodation, but now both face slavery or annihilation by the mysterious Shadowborn, whose magic is more powerful than either and whose motives, initially at least, remain unknown. Sociologically, society resembles the English Regency with its frilly entitlements and deference to the aristocracy, while technologically it’s more late Victorian, with railways, modern weaponry and scientific experimentation. Another complication is that the haughty Lightborn mages, for all their organization, can’t detect the Shadowborn or their magic, so when the Shadowborn assault the Darkborn stronghold of Stranhorne, the Lightborn Prince Fejelis immediately blames the Darkborn. Leading the Darkborn defenders is Ishmael, a mage no longer able to exercise his magic, and his physician friend Balthasar Hearne, who believes that his wife, the powerful but untrained mage Lady Telmaine, is dead, executed by the Lightborn. What nobody yet grasps is that the Shadowborn mages can not only ensorcel large groups of people, but they can take the semblance of others. However, the huge cast, each with his or her style, title and particular magic talent or lack thereof, and complex web of interactions, accusations and suspicions, makes this volume a tough place to start for newcomers.

Conceptually satisfying and thoroughly absorbing, if overpopulated and sometimes overwhelming.

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nonfiction GANDHI The True Man Behind Modern India

IDEA MAN A Memoir by the Co-Founder of Microsoft

Adams, Jad Pegasus (288 pp.) $26.95 | July 15, 2011 978-1-60598-171-0

Allen, Paul Portfolio (368 pp.) $27.95 | April 19, 2011 978-1-59184-382-5

A concise, critical look at the Indian leader, emphasizing his striving for spiritual perfection.

Unlike Joseph Lelyveld’s recent exhaustive study of Gandhi and the evolution of his ideas, Great Soul (2011), this work by British historian Adams (Hideous Absinthe, 2003, etc.) goes right to the essential thought of the Mahatma, despite his confounding, albeit engaging inconsistencies. The author sticks to primary sources, such as accounts by Gandhi’s secretaries, while remaining somewhat leery of Gandhi’s own autobiography, because of his elusive relationship to truth (“I have grown from truth to truth”). In discrete, tidy chapters, Adams embarks on the main tenets of Gandhi’s life: his pampered upbringing by a very devout Hindu mother; his marriage at age 13 to Kasturbai, also his age, which would arouse his later disgust for Hindu marriage rituals; his lifelong striving for chastity and the shaping of his brahmacharya vow; his obsession with his diet, a system of trial-and-error that would often leave him weak and ill; his early law education in England, a great sacrifice for his family, though later he would essentially sever ties to his relatives, refuse to educate his sons and support his family financially; his use of fasting as a political tool; and his gradual political engagement, from his time as a young barrister in South Africa to his return to India as a national leader for the rights of the indentured servants, miners, poor and untouchables. He sought emancipation by doing—living in self-sufficient simplicity within his ashrams, where he imposed the strictest discipline on himself and others, immersing himself in sacred texts of all religions. The concluding chapter on Gandhi’s “Legacy” considers his assassin’s criticism of Gandhi’s sense of his own infallibility, as well as the terrible repercussions from the partition of Pakistan and Gandhi’s invaluable catalyst to global movements of human rights.

A tight synthesis and good introduction to Gandhi’s life and work.

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The highly anticipated, eyebrowraising memoir of the other founding partner of the Microsoft Corporation.

Even at 58 and one of the wealthiest people in the world, Allen admits that writing his life story was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” The result is surprisingly profound and refreshingly frank. Inspired by an oral-history project he’d initiated in 2000 to commemorate his early years with Microsoft, the author begins and ends his chronicle with nods to his friendship with “partner in crime” Bill Gates— from their beginnings driven by an all-consuming enthusiasm for computers to Gates’ regular appearances at Allen’s bedside as he defeated aggressive cancer. Yet it’s the often-turbulent years sandwiched in between that form the indulgent crux of this heavily jargonized narrative. Allen amiably retraces his Seattle roots raised by staunch booklovers as he dabbled in circuitry and mechanics. He honed rudimentary computer-programming skills while enrolled at a private school where he met Gates, who, at 13, was already competitive and scheming of wild successes. Lofty ambitions cut Allen’s collegiate career short, and, following many years of hard work, Microsoft was born in 1975, helmed by himself and increasingly tyrannical “taskmaster” Gates. Allen writes extensively of locking horns with his partner soon after the company became profitable, and, with the same heft used to praise the successes of a company that made him rich, he skewers his co-founder for his “mercenary opportunism” when conspired to dilute Allen’s Microsoft equity after he developed cancer. His disillusionment with the company, he writes, was “like a failed romance.” Allen spends the closing chapters elucidating his critically scrutinized interests in commercial space travel, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, neuroscience and, more recently, artificial intelligence.

A diligently crafted scrapbook of gratitude, accusation and excess, guaranteed to entertain and even ruffle a few feathers.

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THE MORO WAR How America Battled a Muslim Insurgency in the Philippine Jungle, 1902-1913

Arnold, James R. Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $27.00 | August 2, 2011 978-1-60819-024-9

The United States’ war in the Philippines is largely forgotten; this account, drawing parallels with more recent conflicts, should help bring it back into focus.

Military historian Arnold (Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq, 2009, etc.), begins with the arrival in Manila of Gen. Leonard Wood, who had been appointed governor of Moro Province, the southernmost portion of the Philippines. The Spanish, who had governed the islands for nearly 500 years, had been able to do little with the province, where a predominantly Muslim population refused to be assimilated. Wood, like most of the Americans who would serve there, arrived with very little knowledge of his new post. The Moros, whose history was one of conflict between local leaders called datus, were wily close-range fighters whose chosen weapons were a variety of wicked blades, notably the kris, which every male carried in his sash. The American troops’ superior firepower made it an unequal fight, but the intractable jungles often nullified that advantage. Arnold recounts how for 10 years, Wood and his successors, John J. Pershing and Tasker Bliss, searched for ways to pacify the Moros. The author also gives detailed accounts of the many battles. American troops faced violent attacks by individual Moros who had decided to become martyrs, killing as many Americans as possible in the process. But the Americans gradually began to gain control of the province, partly by enlisting both Moros and northern Filipinos as auxiliary troops, or “scouts.” While the war as a whole was not a matter of set battles, the futility of the Moro resistance was most clearly shown in two actions—massacres, really—at Bud Dajo and Bud Bagsak. Ultimately, the Moro War became the main training ground for the officers who went to France in World War I, and Arnold concludes by tracing their subsequent careers.

A lively, well-told chronicle of a conflict that commanders in more recent conflicts could well have from studying.

(60 black-and-white illustrations. Appearances in Washington, D.C./ Virginia area)

THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ A True Story of World War II

Avey, Denis; Broomby, Rob Da Capo/Perseus (288 pp.) $25.00 | July 5, 2011 978-0-306-81965-0 e-book 978-0-306-81981-0

Submerged memories of a remarkable encounter in Auschwitz drove an aged British World War II veteran to reveal his plainspoken, moving story—assisted by BBC journalist Broomby.

Avey admits he did not join the army in 1939 “for King and Country,” but rather for adventure; as a strapping farm boy, he proved a crack rifleman and a natural-born leader. After ordeals fighting Mussolini’s forces in Libya and General Rommel’s forces in North Africa, he was taken prisoner in 1944 and transported to Auschwitz, where he was enlisted to help build a massive rubber factory by the IG Farben company. Though English prisoners were treated fairly well, they toiled alongside a separate group of miserable, starved wretches the English called “stripeys,” because of their tattered pajama-like outfits, hardly human “moving shadows” who were barely strong enough to lift anything—the Jews. Gradually, Avey befriended several of the crew, including a man named Ernst and learned that the Jews were simply worked to death (unlike the Englishmen), then vaporized “up the chimney,” sending out the sickly sweet odor Avey had noticed. “The scales were lifted from my eyes,” he writes, and he arranged with Ernst to switch clothing so that Avey could infiltrate the Jewish barracks for a night and Ernst could eat and rest in the British prisoners’ camp. It was a perilous ploy, but it worked, and Avey was duly horrified by the brutal conditions and life-saving mechanisms. He wrote to his mother in coded language about the camp details and to contact Ernst’s sister in England. Upon liberation, both Avey and Ernst were force-marched west, but neither knew what happened to the other. The author’s post-traumatic torment after the war—when no one wanted to listen to the truth so that the young soldier simply sealed up—underscores the importance of treatment for soldiers and prisoners.

A unique war story from a brave man. (8 pages of blackand-white photographs)

THE PIRATES OF SOMALIA Inside Their Hidden World

Bahadur, Jay Pantheon (288 pp.) $26.95 | July 19, 2011 978-0-307-37906-1

A Toronto-based journalist debuts with a rare inside look at the pirates preying on tourist and commercial ships off the coast of Somalia.

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“Especially timely given recent events throughout the Middle East, this book is recommended for anyone wishing to better understand the workings of a police state.” from then they came for me

Present-day piracy in the region began two decades ago, writes Bahadur, at the onset of a civil war in the impoverished, Muslim state of Somalia. At first, coast dwellers—rebel groups, militias and warlords—extorted “fines” from foreign fishing vessels that had devastated the lobster population. When such vessels armed themselves, the pirates began attacking commercial fishing fleets. By 2009, the buccaneers won world attention with hijackings of three vessels: a Ukrainian transport ship with a cargo of tanks; a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil; and the American cargo vessel Maersk Alabama, an incident that ended with action by Navy SEAL snipers. Winning entrance to pirate enclaves through the son of Abdirahman Farole, president of the autonomous region of Puntland, the author spent six weeks conducting interviews. Traveling with bodyguards and sharing a supply of khat, a popular drug, Bahadur talked with pirate leaders, officials and former hostages. “We’re not murderers,” said Abdullahi Abshir, who has hijacked more than 25 ships. “We’ve never killed anyone, we just attack ships.” Another pirate explained how he turned piracy into a business by introducing investors, guidance technology and motherships from which pirates operate deep into the Indian Ocean. Bahadur captures the private lives of the pirates as well as their increasingly organized and sophisticated ways. A 2010 hijacking garnered a $9.5 million ransom for an oil tanker.

Attacks now occur over such a huge ocean area that the multinational naval task forces patrolling off the 1,000-mile Somali coast remain “unable to stop a motley assortment of brigands armed with aging assault rifles.”

A nicely crafted, revealing report.

THEN THEY CAME FOR ME A Family’s Story for Love, Captivity, and Survival Bahari, Maziar with Aimee Molloy Random (384 pp.) $27.00 | June 7, 2011 978-1-4000-6946-0

This harrowing memoir provides an illuminating glimpse into the security apparatus of one of the world’s most repressive countries.

The elections of 2009 led to the largest street protests in Iran since the fall of the Shah, and the establishment responded by arresting and torturing thousands of the participants. With the assistance of Molloy (co-author: Jantsen’s Gift, 2009, etc.), Newsweek correspondent Bahari details his incarceration at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison. Because both his father and sister spent years in Iranian prisons for their political activism, Bahari was better prepared for his ordeal than most people, but the reality was shocking even to him. He learned from his interrogator, a man he knew only as “Rosewater” due to his overpowering perfume, that the Islamic Republic believed he was an American spy and one of the chief instigators of the protests. The key piece of evidence against him was an interview he once gave to a correspondent |

from the Daily Show with John Stewart, who was dressed as a spy and who introduced him by saying, “He goes by the code name Pistachio.” Rosewater also presented him with the damning evidence of his membership in a Pauly Shore fan club on Facebook, and that he had traveled to New Jersey. Much of the book concerns the psychological impact of imprisonment and separation from loved ones, and Bahari draws upon the strength of his relatives to survive. While contemplating suicide, he imagined his father telling him, “You shouldn’t do their jobs for them. If they want to kill you, they can easily do it themselves.”

Especially timely given recent events throughout the Middle East, this book is recommended for anyone wishing to better understand the workings of a police state.

(Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Agent: Amanda Urban)

MAKING SENSE OF PEOPLE Decoding the Mysteries of Personality

Barondes, Samuel FT Press/Pearson (256 pp.) $25.99 | August 11, 2011 9780132172608

A succinct look at personality psychology.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Barondes (Molecules and Mental Illness, 2007, etc.) has spent years studying human behavior, and this book reflects his systematic, scientific approach for personality assessment. The average person isn’t likely to have time to research a difficult boss or potential love interest, but the author supplements intuition with a useful cornerstone for gauging human behavior: a table of the “Big Five” personality traits, among them Extraversion vs. Introversion and Agreeableness vs. Antagonism. To learn how to apply the Big Five, Barondes supplies a link for a professional online personality test, in addition to a basic introduction of troubling personality patterns—e.g., narcissism and compulsiveness.

While genetics may play a heavy hand in influencing personality, Barondes writes, it’s awareness of a person’s background, character and life story that is paramount in unearthing reasons for adult behavior. Readers might like to see the author weave more everyday examples into the text—his exercise in fostering compassion by imagining an adult as a 10-year-old child is a gem—but there is plenty here to ponder.

Those looking for traditional “self-help” advice won’t find it here, but this book clearly lays the groundwork for deeper human interaction and better life relationships.

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“A gloomily convincing portrait of American misadventures in Afghanistan.” from afghanistan

POISONED The True Story of the Deadly E. coli Outbreak that Changed the Way Americans Eat Benedict, Jeff Inspire Books (314 pp.0 $24.95 | May 17, 2011 978-0-9833478-0-4

Just in time for BBQ season, an investigative journalist traces the path of a devastating outbreak of food-borne illness linked to hamburger meat.

In 1993, nobody, save for a lab technician or two, knew anything about a dangerous strain of bacteria called E. Coli, which has the potential to cause illness and death. With careful attention to detail, Benedict (Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage, 2009, etc.), illustrates the danger in this thorough exploration of the Jack in the Box E. Coli outbreak that killed four children and sickened 700 more in several states. The author, who holds a law degree, fashions the book like a police procedural, keeping the beat with quick cuts to the major players—parents waiting by their dying children’s bedsides, lawyers and corporate executives. With accounts of his firsthand interviews and observation, Benedict provides a powerful reminder that food safety is a matter of life and death, as in the case of Suzanne Kiner and her daughter Brianne: “Desperate, she turned to a few vials of holy water that had been given to her by women of faith-complete strangers. Suzanne often wondered whether the stuff had any real power...Looking around and seeing no nurses in sight, Suzanne removed the tops of the vials and poured the contents all over Brianne’s head. She even put a few drops in Brianne’s IV. This is it, she thought. I can’t beg any more time for her.”

Spartan prose delivers a chilling, page-turning lesson in food safety.

AFGHANISTAN How the West Lost Its Way

Bird, Tim; Marshall, Alex Yale Univ. (368 pp.) $30.00 | June 28, 2011 978-0-300-15457-3 e-book 978-0-300-15458-0

Books explaining America’s botched war in Afghanistan are catching up with those doing the same for Iraq; this lucid account by two British military historians will keep readers gnashing their teeth throughout.

Bird (Defense Studies/King’s College, London) and Marshall (History and War Studies/Univ. of Glasgow) stress that righteous anger drove the American invasion in October 2001, and the U.S. military followed a clear strategy—remove the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda and eliminate Afghanistan as a base for international terrorism. After an apparently easy victory, clarity 830

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vanished. By early 2002, troops were departing for Iraq, leaving free Afghans to build a modern society which was assumed to mean a strong central government and free elections. This was disastrously naive because traditional Afghan tribal networks treat government as a winner-take-all arena in which those in power enrich themselves and their tribe to the exclusion of others. Preoccupied in Iraq, five years passed before the U.S. administration noticed that a revived Taliban was thrashing the incompetent Afghan army, predatory police and kleptocratic local warlords. A corrupt, ineffectual central government relied on foreign assistance and the flourishing drug trade, which now supplies nearly 90 percent of the world’s heroin; taxes provide less than 10 percent of Afghanistan’s budget. Always conscious that its major ally, Pakistan, supported the Taliban, the American government grew uncomfortably aware that billions in aid had not bought its loyalty. Despite revived efforts, the authors conclude that competent central government and victory over the insurgents remains unattainable. Despite the Obama administration’s optimistic rhetoric, it is likely that most of its energy is aimed at a politically acceptable exit strategy.

A gloomily convincing portrait of American misadventures in Afghanistan. (10 black-and-white illustrations)

SEASON TO TASTE How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way

Birnbaum, Molly Ecco/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $24.99 | July 1, 2011 978-0-06-191531-4 A culinary-minded journalist reckons with the loss of her sense of smell.

After graduating from college, 22-year-old Birnbaum decided to change course and pursue her passion for cooking as a vocation. Little did she know that her life’s direction was to change yet again that summer. Just weeks before she was to start at the Culinary Institute of America, the author was hit by a car, an accident that broke her pelvis in two spots, snapped the tendons in her knee, fractured her skull and, most devastatingly for the author, obliterated her sense of smell.

After a month, when she was utterly unmoved in the face of a freshly baked apple crisp, Birnbaum realized the gravity of her situation. In her debut, the author attempts to come to terms with life after her trauma. She movingly depicts the nearly ineffable plight of the anosmic, both from her perspective— “without smell, the world around me seemed suddenly strange and stagnant. […] How do you describe the scent of nothing? I wondered. It was strong; it was blank. It was completely overwhelming”—and that of others she encountered in researching the condition’s various forms. Ever hopeful that her sense would return and eager to understand the roots of her malady—the impact’s force had severed the olfactory neurons connecting nose to brain—Birnbaum consulted with Oliver Sacks, numerous olfactory specialists and even a flavorist and perfumers. Her

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FIRE MONKS Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara

story includes probing introspection, especially as smell relates to emotion, alongside passages of sweeping journalistic discovery of all things olfactory.

A brave, unflagging memoir.

FIRE AND RAIN The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970 Browne, David Da Capo/Perseus (384 pp.) $26.00 | June 1, 2011 978-0-306-81850-9

Through the lens of four fabulously successful musical acts, a Rolling Stone contributing editor looks at the moment 1960s idealism “began surrendering to the buzzkill comedown of the decade ahead.”

By decade’s end, the ’60s counterculture ethos of peace, love and togetherness lay pretty much in ruins. Browne (Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth, 2008, etc.) alludes to many dismal headline events that dominated the news of 1970— the shootings at Kent and Jackson State, the Manson trial, the Weather Underground’s terror bombings, Apollo 13 limping home from space—but focuses here on the music makers, the most visible representatives of the youth subculture whose collaborations became every bit as dysfunctional as the Establishment they mocked. Released in 1970, the Beatles’ Let It Be, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu were their final albums together and signaled the end of an era. The early fame and the seemingly effortless camaraderie gave way to jealousy, greed, infighting and disarray. Artists turned their backs on group albums in favor of solo efforts; intimate concerts were replaced by stadium shows; outdoor festivals, attempting to duplicate Woodstock, were brushed by fans demanding free admission. Hard drugs hovered over the entire scene, crippling musicians—Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin overdosed—and addling fans. That same year, James Taylor, famously a former mental patient, himself strung out, issued Sweet Baby James, for better or worse, the herald of a softer, more relaxed vibe that would dominate the years ahead.

Browne skillfully interleaves the stories of these musicians during this tumultuous year, making room for substantial walk-ons by other significant industry figures like Bill Graham, Peter Yarrow, Phil Spector, Rita Coolidge, Carole King and Joni Mitchell.

Intimately familiar with the music, fully comprehending the cross-pollination among the artists, thoroughly awake to the dynamics of the decade’s last gasp, the author expertly captures a volatile and hugely interesting moment in rock history.

A vivid freeze-frame of Hall of Fame musicians, some of whom would go on to make fine records, none ever again as central to the culture. (25 black-and-white photographs)

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Busch, Colleen Morton Penguin Press (272 pp.) $25.95 | July 11, 2011 978-1-59420-291-9

A former Yoga Journal senior editor’s account of five Zen practitioners turned firefighters who saved a beloved California monastery.

Most readers, if they know it at all, will connect Tassajara to the bread-baking and vegetarian cookbooks inspired by its kitchen. For practitioners of American Zen, however, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur is an almost sacred place for meditation and work, famous for its monastic training and host to thousands of guests since its founding in the mid-1960s. In June 2008, lightning set the California chaparral ablaze. At the end of an unpaved road, in a canyon surrounded by mountains, Tassajara lay in the middle of what would eventually become the third-largest conflagration in state history, destroying more than 240,000 acres. For almost three weeks, the community watched the fire approach, reduced their numbers to essential personnel and took various steps—including an ingenious sprinkler system rigged to rooftops, dubbed “Dharma Rain”—to protect the monastery. Finally, down to a band of 14 and under orders from state and federal authorities who deemed the place indefensible, they evacuated. On the way out, five monks turned back, determined to protect the abbey. Their histories, the stories of other Tassajara disciples, an introduction to the tenets of Buddhism and a meticulous tracking of the devastating fire’s progress are all part of Busch’s story. Her main purpose, though, is to explore how the discipline of Zen uniquely prepared otherwise untrained monks to face the crisis. Herself a Zen student, the author explains how Zen practice teaches followers to live in flux, to recognize impermanence and to deal with uncertainty. Novice firefighters, the monks were veterans at practicing calm and taking care, of honoring simultaneously interdependence and individual authority. They smoothly turned toward the fire, not to confront or fight it, but rather to meet it, to “make friends with it” as the blaze lapped at their perimeter.

The awareness of the firefighter, the mindfulness of the monk, the principles of fire and the spirit of Zen come together in a well-told story about the effort required and the lessons learned from paying close attention. (West Coast author tour. Agent: Michael Katz)

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“Firsthand knowledge of what many have already suspected about the American intelligence community’s methods.” from the interrogator

THE INTERROGATOR An Education

Carle, Glenn L. Nation Books/Perseus (320 pp.) $26.99 | July 5, 2011 978-1-56858-673-1

From a 27-year CIA veteran, a thoroughly documented insider’s view of illegal activities undertaken on the “dark side” of the global war on terror.

As an experienced CIA spy, Carle came to the conclusion that there was a major disconnect between the White House’s Global war on terror and the reality he experienced. In the aftermath of 9/11, he was assigned to interrogate a suspected top al-Qaeda terrorist. He details the battles which followed, at least as much as possible under the conditions of CIA censorship—black boxes in the text indicate the work of Agency redactors. At the beginning, Carle was asked what he would do if he was required to violate not only the letter of the law, but also his own standards of honor and duty. Previously acquired interrogation skills led to him to the conclusion that his prisoner was not the man his captors believed him to be. He was neither a leader of al-Qaeda nor someone who possessed useful information about terrorism. Nonetheless, Carle’s conclusions were of no effect against the process that was underway. This was only one incident that the author considers indicative of a pattern of the CIA and the White House ignoring evidence that conflicted with the official policy narrative. By the end of the assignment, Carle was questioning how the United States had been reduced to such utter lawlessness. He believes there are still remedial steps that need to be taken to address what he calls a self-created problem of narrow perspective, hyped threats and deluded perceptions. Among them, he advocates the formation of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” similar to the one legislated into existence by the South African parliament after the end of apartheid.

Firsthand knowledge of what many have already suspected about the American intelligence community’s methods.

THE LEDGE An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier Davidson, Jim; Vaughan, Kevin Ballantine (288 pp.) $26.00 | August 1, 2011 978-0-345-52319-8 e-book 978-0-345-52321-1

The tragic saga of a mountain climb gone awry.

With the assistance of Denver Post reporter Vaughan, veteran mountain climber Davidson recounts how he and the late Mike Price attempted to summit Mount Rainier in the summer 832

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of 1992. As the pair of kindred spirits snapped a final photo from the peak, they took an 80-foot plunge into a crevasse.

While Davidson managed to climb his way to safety, Price did not, forcing the survivor to return home and fulfill his burdensome responsibility of explaining the death to Price’s family.

Ostensibly, this is a survival story, but it’s also a story of trust that explores a precarious situation in which men are literally bound to one another for survival. Though the narrative is highly personal, its implications reach much farther, offering a philosophical inquiry of how men react once the safety nets have been cut from beneath them. As the authors make clear, the life of a mountain climber depends on little more than footholds, carabineers and luck. As confirmed by Price’s death, skill is of little use when luck doesn’t fall one’s way.

A cautionary tale about the true danger of extreme mountaineering. (Agent: Dan Conoway)

THE MAN OF NUMBERS Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution

Devlin, Keith Walker (192 pp.) $25.00 | July 5, 2011 978-0-8027-7812-3

Three cheers for Leonardo Pisano, nicknamed Fibonacci, heralded by NPR’s “Math Guy” Devlin (Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for Learning, 2011, etc.) as the man who introduced Hindu-Arabic numbers (0 to 9) and rules of arithmetic to Europe in the 13th century.

The author writes that by far the most important contribution that Pisano native made to Western culture was not the Fibonacci numbers (the series in which each term is the sum of the two previous terms, e.g., 1,1,2,3,5,8,13—celebrated in The Da Vinci Code) but the replacement of Roman numerals with the familiar 10 digits and place notation. That was a boon to merchants and bankers, moneychangers and tax collectors, just when the world was poised for the science and technology discoveries of the Renaissance. It all came about because Pisano’s father, a customs official, took his teenage son with him to North Africa, where the boy learned about the numerical system that Arab traders had brought from India. Devlin makes clear that he was not a passive transmitter of new knowledge but a gifted thinker whose magisterial Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation), published in 1202, and later popularizations, as well as works in algebra and geometry, mark him as one of mathematics’ great minds. As for the series, Pisano wrote that it was known early on to Indian scholars, and he stated it as a problem to determine how many rabbits a fertile pair would produce in a year “when it is the nature of them in a single month to bear another pair. And in the second month those born to bear also.”

A wonderful book for history-of-science buffs that will also amuse math teachers, because the many problems and solutions included are simply medieval versions of the

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word problems that are the bane of many high-school students. (8-page color insert. Appearances at science museums. Agent: Ted Weinstein)

CRAZY Notes On and Off the Couch

Dobrenski, Rob Lyons Press (224 pp.) $24.95 | June 14, 2011 978-0-7627-6483-9 A licensed psychologist dishes about his patients, and himself.

The life, times and thoughts of a New York therapist are put on display in a candid account of what goes on behind the doctor’s door— and in his head—during a day filled with patients and selfdoubt. Tackling serious mental-health subjects without being overly reverent, shrinktalk.net blogger Dobrenski maintains a snappy pace. Patients are not spared his keen observations, which help to answer the vexing question: Am I paranoid, or does my shrink think I’m crazy—and sloppy? Take the author’s account of patient Scott, “six-foot-four, disheveled, overweight, and constantly perspiring. He began many of his sentences with an F-bomb and arrived for his sessions in T-shirts that were too tight for his abdomen, and white sneakers with black socks. His hands were always very clammy, but he insisted on a handshake every time he entered the therapy room. He was easily the brunt of many people’s jokes.” But Dobrenski also puts himself under the microscope, ultimately heeding the old chestnut: “No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand…Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.” The author also cautions those being shrinked: “The human condition is so complex and constantly evolving and no one person or institution has all the answers.

Therapy will never be an exact science, and therefore there will never be the perfect textbook or teacher or school that will create the Ultimate Therapist who puts his hand on your head and cures you of every and every ill.”

Clean, honest writing makes for an engaging read, particularly for “couch” potatoes.

MAN WITH A PAN Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families

Editor: Donohue, John Algonquin (320 pp.) $15.95 paperback original | May 17, 2011 978-1-56512-985-6 Inspirational, heartwarming tales of fathers in the kitchen.

Society may still dwell on gender and |

assign male or female roles to family tasks, but gender roles are changing, and this compilation of stories reflects that metamorphosis. Donohue, a cartoonist and editor at the New Yorker, asked 21 other fathers of varying backgrounds to share their cooking adventures, go-to cookbooks and favorite recipes, ranging from Grilled Burgers with Herb Butter to Afrikaner staple Vegetarian Bobotie. Like most collections, the quality of the writing varies.

Readers may tire of tale after tale of kitchen mishaps, but the best pieces are surprising and enlightening. Highlights include Jim Harrison’s “Chef English Major,” a fantastic riff on food and cooking in America, which takes chefs to task for overuse of rosemary, and Stephen King’s “On Cooking,” an essay on how he learned the ins and outs of the kitchen after his wife lost her sense of taste and smell. There’s romance here, too. Ghanaian writer and musician Mohammed Naseehu Ali tells of how cooking helped to heal his father’s heart in “The Way to a Man’s Heart.” Matt Greenberg’s “The Ribbing,” written in screenplay style, is a welcome piece in which a grill adopts anthropomorphic qualities. New Yorker–style cartoons garnish the pages, and the overall style of the book has that same urban feel.

Despite a few lulls, an engaging collection that should inspire comfort for the man who cooks while his baby bangs on the pots and pans.

OUR FATHERS, OURSELVES Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family Drexler, Peggy Rodale (272 pp.) $24.99 | May 10, 2011 978-1-60529-360-8

Drexler (Psychology/Cornell Univ.; Raising Boys Without Men, 2005) sheds new light on the relationship between fathers and daughters.

The word father means different things to different people, but for the author, who lost hers at an early age, it means mystery. She always wondered what she missed growing up without one. Through research, surveys and conversations with other women, the author weaves an intriguing analysis of the often complex father-daughter relationship. The author’s first-person style is accessible and friendly, and she refrains from insulting the intelligence of the reader. Broken into three parts, the book kicks off with an overview of the roles fathers play in parenting and problems that can arise, with examples of fathers who get too close and fathers who do not put effort into getting close enough. The second section presents case studies of six women who have had positive relationships with their fathers—e.g., one father taught his daughter everything he would have taught a son. Though not surprising, the conclusions in the final section are significant. Every woman in the study realized the importance of the father figure in her life, even if the relationship was not entirely positive. Drexler includes a questionnaire that gently guides readers through an assessment of how well

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“Comprehensive, educative and entertaining for eye, mind, imagination and libido.” from rebels in paradise

OSA AND MARTIN For the Love of Adventure

she knows her father, and provides tips for ways to improve father-daughter relations. Those tips, however, aren’t simple or trite; her questions are thoughtful prompts for deeper analysis.

A helpful guide to father-daughter relationships, in which the author indicates that a woman must come to terms with her father in order to empower herself.

REBELS IN PARADISE The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter John Macrae/Henry Holt (288 pp.) $27.00 | July 19, 2011 978-0-8050-8836-6

A freelance art critic and biographer (Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, 2004) surveys 1960s Los Angeles—its artists, art, museums, collectors, social movements, sexual mores, gender politics, drugs and dissipation.

Drohojowska-Philp has done massive research to compile this generous account of a movement and its movers—not just the artists (and their biographies) but many of the personalities and celebrities and hangers-on who enjoyed the decade-long whirlpool. She begins with two significant figures: Andy Warhol, who got his first breaks in L.A. before moving to New York (later, the author tells about his 1968 shooting), and actor/collector/artist Dennis Hopper, one of the earliest to interest himself in—and promote—the revolutionary art. The author quickly examines Ferus, the first L.A. gallery to feature the works of emerging experimental local artists, and establishes it as a powerful magnet—not just for the artists but also for her narrative, which continually returns to it. Founded by Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz in the late ’50s, Ferus quickly drew in Craig Kauffman, Al Bengston, Robert Irwin and others whose works were just too unusual for traditional galleries. Oddly, DrohojowskaPhilp shows very few images of individual works early in the narrative (more appear later), but does offer photographs of the principal players. The author demonstrates clearly how Ferus and the art and artists changed as the ’60s progressed through the early years, to the Watts Riots and to the Easy Rider era of the late ’60s. Sometimes, she offers more about the artists’ sex lives than their works, but readers may accept this as a thoughtful gift, not a distraction.

Comprehensive, educative and entertaining for eye, mind, imagination and libido. (20-25 black-and-white illustrations. Agents: Eric and Maureen Lasher/The LA Literary Agency)

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Enright, Kelly Lyons Press (220 pp.) $24.95 | August 16, 2011 978-0-7627-6360-3

Historian Enright (America’s Natural Places: Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, 2009, etc.) showcases the careers of Osa and Martin Johnson, explorers, wildlife-movie pioneers and inseparable adventure seekers.

At the age of 16, Osa walked out of the 1909 popular lecture and photo display put on by Martin Johnson in Chanute, Kan., after his return from the South Seas. She thought the show was ugly and repulsive, but the two hit it off and, within a month, they had married. On Osa’s initiative, they took the lecture on the vaudeville circuit to raise money for joint explorations in the South Seas. She never lost this ability to act decisively, which many times saved her husband’s life. Sharing their lives, they revisited the South Seas, and then followed up with three visits to Kenya before returning to the South Seas again. Except for an Explorers’ Club membership, which Osa, as a woman, could never attain, the two were inseparable until Martin’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1937.

During their adventures, Osa and Martin pioneered using movie to record wildlife in their natural habitat, and their films remain a source of documentation for studies of wildlife today. The couple traveled and filmed in a time of transition, while the British were establishing preserves like Serengeti and ruthlessly clearing wildlife from areas designated for settled agriculture. Osa continued after Martin’s death, writing books for adults and children, and her groundbreaking TV series Big Game Hunt.

The couple’s delight and happiness in living the life they made for each other shines through.

ELIXIR A History of Water and Humankind Fagan, Brian Bloomsbury (416 pp.) $28.00 | June 7, 2011 978-1-60819-003-4

Anthropologist Fagan (Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, 2010, etc.) spins a tale of water, water everywhere—water that is damn hard to get at, and getting harder to find every day.

Humans cannot live without the stuff, of course. Yet, writes the author, “[o]f all the resources that we rely on for survival in today’s world, water is the least appreciated and certainly the most misunderstood.” It has not always been so. Fagan serves up anecdotes and historical episodes showing how pre-industrial people, or at least people wiser than we, properly appreciated water, from the San hunters of the Kalahari, who see the whole world as a sometimes grudging source of the substance, to John Wesley Powell’s efforts

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to create political divisions in the American West not based on surveyors’ straight lines but on natural watersheds. Politics is important to Fagan’s story, for much of human history hinges on control of water. The author examines the famed Wittfogel hypothesis of anthropological renown, which keyed the development of political institutions to bureaucracies surrounding water in places such as Mesopotamia. However, the control of water is not necessarily coercive—and there the story turns to lessons for our own time, a scramble for control on the part of private concerns wishing to monetize what has long been held a public good, which will require of us “long-term thinking ... decisive political leadership and…a reordering of financial priorities.” If that seems improbable, so do some of the engineering feats that Fagan recounts—even if it seems that, over time, we’ve gotten worse at managing this essential resource.

Long and discursive, but a rewarding survey of water’s role in history and contemporary politics alike. (Black-andwhite illustrations throughout. Pre-pub author events in Los Angeles.

Author tour to Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, San Diego. Agent: Susan Rabiner/Susan Rabiner Literary Agency)

CLARENCE DARROW Attorney for the Damned Farrell, John A. Doubleday (400 pp.) $29.95 | June 14, 2011 978-0-385-52258-8

A comprehensive biography of the storied defense attorney.

At midlife, embarrassed by his comfortable railroad practice so at odds with his personal beliefs, Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) took on a series of high-profile cases whose underlying political, sociological and economic issues placed him at the white-hot center of the Progressive Era. His starring role in these courtroom dramas turned him into a legend. Making elaborate use of transcripts, observers’ accounts, correspondence and newspaper reports, Farrell (Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, 2002) chronicles Darrow’s most celebrated trials in detail: the defense of labor leaders Eugene Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood; the McNamara brothers, charged with firebombing the Los Angeles Times headquarters; homosexual thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb; Ossian Sweet, accused of murder for defending his home against a racist mob; John Scopes for teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law; and the friends and family of Thalia Massie, on trial in Hawaii for a so-called “honor killing.” These cases—including two in which Darrow, almost surely guilty, was himself tried for jury tampering—dominate the narrative, but Farrell neatly places them within the larger context of this complicated man’s crowded life and practice. He covers Darrow’s small-town upbringing, his brief country-lawyer career, his move to Chicago and his rise within the city’s political and legal establishment. A puzzling mix of towering ego and bottomless compassion, Darrow was also an author and an in-demand lecturer who more than dabbled in politics. Also at home within bohemian circles, |

Darrow preferred the company of artists, professors and poets.

(Edgar Lee Masters, who grew to despise him, was for a time his legal partner.) Twice-married, Darrow was also an inveterate womanizer, money grubber and shameless self-promoter who often bent the ethical code to combat what he saw as corrupt prosecutions. Farrell unflinchingly addresses these shortcomings, even as he underscores the genuine brilliance of a stillunmatched advocate for underdogs everywhere.

A warts-and-all portrait that leaves readers lamenting Darrow’s private failings, while still in awe of his immensely consequential career.

TALIBAN The Unknown Enemy Fergusson, James Da Capo/Perseus (320 pp.) $27.50 | June 1, 2011 978-0-306-82033-5

An intriguing argument for negotiations with the Taliban presented as the necessary precondition for a political settlement and withdrawal.

Journalist Fergusson (A Million Bullets—The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan, 2008, etc.), who has reported on Afghanistan for 14 years, draws on his wideranging experience and extensive personal network. The author is convinced that the Taliban is not just unknown, but misrepresented in Western thinking and coverage. He concedes that elements of the Taliban’s program and activities are abhorrent to Westerners, especially their treatment of women, but he insists that there is another side to the story. The misrepresentation leaves out what was going on in Afghanistan before the Taliban took power in 1996, and what they tried to put an end to, and ignores the fact that there are different views within the movement. Thus, when the Taliban said they were protecting women, it was partially true, at least relative to the murder, violence and rape that accompanied the rule of mujahideen commanders like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The Taliban, writes the author, are primarily Pashto, a tribal people with traditions of great antiquity, among other tribes, ethnicities and religions. Those who follow such ways, and their leaders, must be treated with respect while they work out their differences. Stopping night-time assassinations of civilians and ending the continued employment of Soviet-era prison facilities and political police would contribute as well. The misrepresentation is part of the persistent refusal of the United States and its allies in the International Security Assistance Force to open negotiations with those who might move things forward. “The Taliban has made some terrible mistakes,” writes the author, “and I do not condone them. But I am also certain that we need a better understanding of how and why they made those mistakes before we condemn them.”

If wars are ended through negotiation between enemies, then the Taliban will need to be among those at the table who will help bring this one to an end. (16 pages of blackand-white photographs)

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“Punctuated with the dark humor you’d expect from a graduate of the streets, a thoughtful treatise with implications far outside the boardroom.” from mob rules

MOB RULES What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman Ferrante, Louis Portfolio (272 pp.) $25.95 | June 2, 2011 978-1-59184-398-6

A veteran mobster who walked away from “The Life” with his head held high offers road-tested life lessons that served him well inside and outside La Cosa Nostra.

Some Mafia dons have their heads blown off. Others live long enough to expire peacefully in their own beds. In either event, Ferrante—who left prison behind eight years ago to become a well-respected author—insists that today’s CEOs, middle managers and employees would do well to learn a thing or two from their counterparts in the underworld. Building his case in concise, economical prose, Ferrante draws on an extensive knowledge of world events, mob lore and personal experience to deliver an engrossing sophomore effort that reads like a rousing memoir, meditation on world history and Mafia exposé all in one. Who would have thought that George Washington had so much in common with Lucky Luciano, the “Founding Father” of the American mob, or that there was something good to be said for “Scarface” Al Capone? In eschewing mob violence, Ferrante has nonetheless retained an appreciation for the way the mob operates as a successful business enterprise. When it works, Ferrante writes, it’s a blueprint for the way businesses in the “legit” world ought to operate. And when it doesn’t, it’s a sobering cautionary tale for every over-reaching CEO, powerhungry middle manager and clueless employee.

Punctuated with the dark humor you’d expect from a graduate of the streets, a thoughtful treatise with implications far outside the boardroom.

A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Fitzgerald, F. Scott Editor: West III, James L.W. Scribner (224 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | August 2, 2011 978-1-4391-9906-0 The title suggests something more significant than this collection of magazine essays delivers.

While the preface promises that this is “as close as we can now come to an autobiography” of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), most of these pieces for the likes of the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, College Humor et al. are breezy and slight, lacking the scope, depth and detail of autobiography—you’d never know from this volume that he’d wed a woman named Zelda or the nature of the troubles that ensued—let alone the richness of his fiction. Frequently strapped for cash, Fitzgerald had apparently proposed such a 836

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volume on at least a couple of occasions to his legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, who didn’t think it to be worthy of a book.

In fact, the title comes from one of the shorter pieces, a New Yorker casual from 1929 that traces a life through a progression of drink (“1923: Oceans of Canadian Ale with R. Lardner in Great Neck, Long Island”). Yet Fitzgerald fans will delight in the book’s engagingly playful tone (which has the author switching from first to third person in referring to himself), the struggles of the creative process (“It would be nice to be able to distinguish useful work from mere labor expended. Perhaps that is part of the work itself—to find the difference”) and the sense of literary mission in speaking to and for one’s own generation. In the cheeky “What I Think and Feel at 25,” Fitzgerald writes, “As old people run the world, an enormous camouflage has been built up to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important.” But, as the same essay acknowledges, “When I’m thirty I won’t be this me—I’ll be somebody else.”

This volume will mainly interest those who have already read everything else by and about the author of The Great Gatsby.

RESCUING REGINA The Battle to Save a Friend from Deportation and Death Flynn, Josephe Marie Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review (352 pp.) $26.95 | July 1, 2011 978-1-56976-624-8

A powerful account of the long and painful journey toward asylum for two

Congolese refugees.

Regina Bakala, a former political activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo who suffered terrible consequences for her activism, narrowly escaped almost certain death in 1995 and made it to the United States—but not to safety. After living in America for a decade—during which time she reunited with her husband and had two children—immigration officials took Bakala one evening in 2005. A victim of poor legal representation and a cruel immigration system, she faced an extraordinarily difficult and complex case with few avenues for legal action. Yet an entire congregation, led by Sister Flynn, came together and generated an overwhelming amount of financial, emotional, legal and logistical support for her and her family—the result is truly uplifting. The book makes intensely personal two problems that are, to most Americans, impossibly abstract: the political turmoil in the Congo and the U.S. immigration system. Flynn explains the situation in a way that makes the plight of all immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers clear and understandable. Though the torture both Bakala and her husband endured in the Congo is horrific, Flynn handles their stories in a sensitive, compassionate way. In addition to their stories, a cogent overview of immigration policy, a rough primer for activism and the details of their legal process toward asylum,

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Flynn explores her own personal history as a survivor of abuse.

As might be expected from a book written by a nun, the Catholic faith of both the author and the Bakala family are absolutely central to the story; however, this may be the rare book that the staunchest progressive and the most devout Catholic could read together.

Arresting and inspiring—a must-read for people of faith, immigration activists and anyone concerned with social justice.

A WORLD ON FIRE Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

Foreman, Amanda Random (1,008 pp.) $35.00 | CD: $45.00 | June 28, 2011 978-0-375-50494-5 CD 978-0-307-73896-7 Exhaustive record of Britain’s growing alarm at the escalating American Civil War and outright sympathy and shelter for the Confederacy.

The Civil War exacerbated old grievances still rankling between the United States and England, which held the moral high ground on slavery and disdained American “exceptionalism.”

Whitbread Prize–winning historian Foreman (Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, 1999) embraces a vast enterprise, from the buildup to war to the aftermath, and does not fail to amplify in a leisurely narrative fashion all facets of the complicated British and American relationship, including diplomatic, political and military.

The author also features accounts by countless other observers, pro-Confederate and pro-Union. English textile mills relied on Southern cotton, while the South leaned on British finance to manage its debt crisis; with the Union blockade of Confederate ports from April 1860 onward, the U.S. and England approached war with each other. Public opinion ran hot or cold, depending on dispatches by journalists such as William Howard Russell for The Times and artistic renderings by Frank Vizetelly (he was present during Jefferson Davis’ last days as a fugitive). After President Lincoln’s assassination, the British press underwent a thorough self-castigation for its pro-Southern coverage. With General Lee’s victory at Bull Run, and subsequent march north, the Confederacy anticipated the British gesture of Southern Recognition.

Despite avowed British neutrality, the North widely believed that Britain was supporting the Confederacy’s blockade-running efforts. Yet the Southern defeat at Antietam began to reveal great holes in Lee’s army, and the British could never entirely shake their abhorrence to slavery—leaving the South to its “utter isolation.” Foreman’s dense narrative ably—but lengthily—reveals the passions that this war aroused overseas.

A staggering work of research, occasionally toilsome to read. (Maps and illustrations; two 16-page black-and-white photo inserts. Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Gettysburg, Richmond, Atlanta, San Francisco. Agent: Andrew Wylie/The Wylie Agency) |

TRY THIS Traveling the Globe Without Leaving the Table

Freeman, Danyelle Ecco/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-0-06-188178-7

A culinary journey around the world in 288 pages.

With a keen sense of direction, food writer and blogger Freeman (restaurantgirl.com) guides readers on a comprehensive, contemporary, global culinary excursion.

But this isn’t merely an overview of 14 types of global cuisine, among them Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern. It’s a challenge to investigate the world in the things around you, beginning with food. Freeman encourages readers to take chances by being upfront: “Most people won’t admit it, but half the time we don’t know what we’re eating, what we ordered, or what we might be missing because we’re too embarrassed to ask our servers or look it up.” She entices not only readers’ palate but brain as well with “tasty morsels” of information—e.g., “In Egypt. McDonald’s features the ‘McFalafel,’ a falafel patty topped with lettuce, tomato, and ‘secret sauce’ on a hamburger bun. The secret sauce is actually just tahini.” Deftly blending anecdote with fact, she includes sections on table manners and how they vary culturally. She also discusses how to get the most out of the experience by making reservations, wearing proper attire and treating people with respect. In addition, Freeman explains some simple misconceptions—e.g., “Curry actually means nothing more than ‘cooked in liquid.’ ” An innovative guide that tickles the taste buds and proves that you don’t have to travel abroad to experience international gastronomy.

THE CHEAT SHEET A Clue-by-Clue Guide to Finding Out If He’s Unfaithful

Frey, Rea Alexander, Stephany Adams Media (256 pp.) $14.95 paperback original | June 18, 2011 978-1-4405-1198-1 A manual for catching unfaithful loves in their deceptions.

Frey and Alexander, founders of WomanSavers.com, explore the dark side of love, offering signs, tips and tools for dealing with love gone bad. Both women speak from experience—Alexander has cheated in the past, while Frey was once the “other woman.” The authors leave no stone unturned when it comes to outing a potential cheater, although their suggestions can border on unhealthy if not paranoid—e.g., “Take a photo of the bedroom or the room in question before you leave for the

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day” to see if anything is out of place upon your return. At times, their advice even walks a fine legal line. Tapping phone lines, for instance, is illegal in some states. Each chapter begins with a wonderful quotation and immediately launches into a “CheatSheet Tale,” a personal account by a cheater. There are quizzes on everything from alibis your partner might offer to what kind of cheater he could be—there are four types. The book takes a more positive turn toward the end as the authors present ways to pick up the pieces, such as when to stay in a relationship and how to make a marriage affair-proof.

No earth-shattering discoveries, but helpful for those who suspect their mates are being less than forthright.

DRIVING LESSONS A Father, a Son, and the Healing Power of Golf Friedman, Steve Rodale $15.00 | May 10, 2011 978-1-60529-125-3

Inspirational account of how a swing and a slice rekindled the relationship between a father and son.

Friedman (The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn’t Enough, 2007, etc.) ventures into new territory in his latest book, investigating his relationship with his father through a series of vignettes about their shared love of golf. The author, a journalist who has written for GQ and Men’s Health, recounts childhood days spent on the links with his father, desperate for his approval and attention. Nearly four decades later, not much has changed for the author; he may be pushing 50, but he is still searching for his father’s love and acceptance on the putting green. Golf is the unifying theme of the narrative, but the choppy flow and Friedman’s tendency to jump around chronologically may leave readers feeling as if they’re constantly searching for meaning in sand traps. It’s the author’s father who steers this book back on course, whether he’s advising his son on romantic matters—he suggests Friedman ask Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman on a date because “she’s single and she spends time in New York City,” where the author lives—or simply offering tips on his golf game. “Even if you have a bunch of bad shots,” he says, “you never know when you’re going to hit a good one.”

A slim volume of light, heartwarming reading that can be enjoyed by anyone, no matter their handicap.

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SHEEPISH Two Women, Fifty Sheep & Enough Wool to Save the Planet

Friend, Catherine Da Capo/Perseus (256 pp.) $15.95 paperback original | May 1, 2011 978-0-306-81844-8

What is the common thread between road rage, Elvis and socks?

The answer: wool, writes Friend (The Compassionate Carnivore, 2009, etc.) in this memoir about raising sheep with her partner. The story begins with an anecdote about a man who, during a visit to the author’s farm to purchase beef, became riveted by a sign that read, “Warning Electric Fence.” It’s the perfect extended metaphor for Friend’s adventures on the farm—that caution often gives way to curiosity, demonstrated soon after as the man reached out and was shocked. Like her customer, the author has been intrigued by adventures into unknown territory. In her latest installment of life on the farm, the author focuses on the middles, the times not often celebrated, ruminating on being both mid-career and middle-aged. The author’s humility is engaging, and she is well aware that sheep farming isn’t the broadest of interests: “If people are relying on me to show them the way, they’re in big trouble…basically because I’ve begun turning to memoirs myself in search of direction and encouragement.” But she’s quite wise, as well, offering several insights into what humans can learn from sheep. Friend ably weaves together comical stories, strands of self-help, historical and environmental facts.

Like sheep themselves, the author’s account often wanders outside the confines of the pasture and into the readers’ hearts.

HOW TO LOVE AN AMERICAN MAN A True Story

Gasbarre, Kristine Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $14.99 paperback original | August 16, 2011 978-0-06-199739-6

In this fun but also moving debut memoir, Gasbarre tells the story of how she “boomeranged” back home to help care for the newly widowed grandmother who unexpectedly became her “ideal relationship guru.”

The two women seemed polar opposites. “Grandma Glo” had married young and never finished college, while Gasbarre had graduated with a master’s degree, lived in Europe, and “spent all of [her] twenties questing and introspecting to understand where [she] fit in the world.” But for all the adventure she had experienced, the author, unlike her grandmother, had only known unfulfilling, short-lived romances with men. Yet the two women found common ground in one important way—they

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“An enthusiastic, entertaining libertarian critique of American politics, brimming with derision for the status quo and optimism for the future and confident of the right direction, but disappointingly silent about which roads to take.” from declaration of independents

both shared an “equally intense affinity for the first generation all-American alpha male.” Their bond deepened as Gasbarre shared the details of the two relationships that occupied her attention during her stay at her parents’ house: one with an immature collegiate six years her junior and the other with a shy, gentle cosmetic surgeon who showed her what it was like to be courted. Grandma Glo in turn provided glimpses into a bygone era when men cherished their women and women stood steadfastly by their men. Gasbarre uses each “lesson” she learned from her Grandmother—such as learning to listen, being prepared to forgive and loving by existing—as the title of each chapter, and each chapter as a kind of chronological “illustration” of how she came to terms with that lesson. Her depiction of how two “fiery, independent women” bonded across generations is heartwarming without being saccharine. The author’s treatment of the central conflict that drives the book—the quintessentially modern female quandary of finding lasting love while staying true to personal ambitions—comes across with an integrity and veracity women readers will undoubtedly appreciate.

Chick-lit-alicious. (Author appearances in New York)

acquires the right to control the lives and property of the minority.” However, the authors leave unstated exactly what this means and how this is to be accomplished, beyond exuding a sunny confidence in innovation and markets unconstrained by government controls. When they turn to specific institutions like public education and retirement entitlements, their prescriptions are discouragingly shopworn. Their conjecture that a “nongoverning minority of independents and disaffected party members who come together in swarms to push or block legislation … [is] the future of American public policy and elections” offers little hope or direction for responsible constitutional government.

An enthusiastic, entertaining libertarian critique of American politics, brimming with derision for the status quo and optimism for the future and confident of the right direction, but disappointingly silent about which roads to take.

GOOD ENOUGH IS THE NEW PERFECT Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENTS How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America

Gillespie, Becky Beaupre; Temple, Hollee Schwartz Harlequin (288 pp.) $16.95 paperback original | May 1, 2011 978-0-373-89237-2

Gillespie, Nick; Welch, Matt PublicAffairs (288 pp.) $25.99 | June 28, 2011 978-1-58648-938-0

A call to bring to government the same expansion of personal choice and freedom that has swept other areas of American life, through the application of libertarian principles.

The past four decades have seen an astonishing increase in personal choice and opportunity in commerce and culture.

The dominance of a few institutions offering limited options, from Kodak and AT&T to the communist bloc, has been swept away by market forces, withdrawal of government protections and the democratizing torrent of information from the Internet. Government alone has remained largely unaffected, which explains why it is so expensive and unresponsive. So contend former and current Reason editors Gillespie and Welch (McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, 2007). In this rambunctious and rambling indictment of contemporary American politics, the authors gleefully tear into the Republican and Democratic parties, arguing that the spectacle of our horse-race politics is meaningless because regardless of what they say about themselves, both parties’ actions expose them as spendthrifts in love with unwieldy centralized control. Gillespie and Welch believe this regime is tottering because voters—the “independents” celebrated in the title—increasingly reject party identification and because both parties have together spent the country into bankruptcy. The authors see salvation in a move to more libertarian principles, an independence from politics “in which a majority, however slim, |

Bloggers Gillespie and Temple give common-sense advice for women looking to balance career and family.

No parent is perfect, and no career is without sacrifices, write the authors. Mothers today are so exhausted from their successful careers, they have to let go of the myth of Supermom. In their debut, Gillespie and Temple attempt to reassure upper-income mothers who are stressed with career and family. Women, faced with so many choices, want everything, but because they have been raised to believe they can do it all, motherhood becomes a competitive sport. The authors surveyed 905 women born between 1965 and 1980 and asked them to speak about the difficulty of balancing their work and home lives. Each chapter offers bullet-point tips and examples from their subjects as well as the authors’ lives. Not surprisingly, mothers who realize that doing their best is good enough are happiest. Much of the authors’ advice is merely straightforward and conventional, but there are a few high points. Among them: a lengthy discussion of career advice that urges women to think long term before choosing a specialty.

Far-from-revelatory observations about adjusting career expectations to fit with motherhood.

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DOLPHIN DIARIES My Twenty-Five Years with Spotted Dolphins in the Bahamas

FAIR FOOD Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All

Herzing, Denise L. St. Martin’s (256 pp.) $25.99 | July 5, 2011 978-0-312-60896-5

A cetologist chronicles her 25 fieldseason summers studying generations of Atlantic spotted dolphins.

Beginning in 1985, Herzing, then in her early 30s, traveled to an area in the Bahamas, a known home to families of friendly dolphins, and began tracking them, analyzing behavioral traits and the courting and mating habits of what she believes to be “one of the most advanced nonhuman intelligence on the planet.” Initially taking an anthropological approach, she quickly realized that an interactive, participatory methodology would play a more critical role in her research. So she dove in, equipped with scuba gear, cameras and a “hydrophone” for video-recording the dolphins’ highly expressive underwater vocalizations and behavior. Herzing passionately writes of her first summer cautiously immersed in the marine mammal’s world of clicks and whistles, their playtime and foreplay and in naming the dolphins and ultimately reconstructing elaborate family trees. Though it would take her five years to establish some semblance of shared trust and solace with the apprehensive dolphin pods, the many summers that followed only served to reinforce the author’s enthusiasm and perseverance for the wide-eyed observation of mothers and calves, their babysitting mystique, intricate interspecies relations (humans included) and elaborate communication coding. The author’s liberal use of “anthropomorphizing” (ascribing emotions to the dolphins) only adds to the exploration’s allure, especially when threatening elements like storms, dangerous water currents and hungry sharks enter the picture. Herzing’s fervent work became disrupted, however, by three hurricanes the 2004-5 seasons, which displaced many of the dolphins she’d been meticulously documenting. Inspired by the pioneering work of Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Herzing’s focused, captivating account concludes with moving animal-rights arguments centered around the injustices foisted upon defenseless cetaceans and the many other species senselessly killed or held in cruel captivity.

Solid, fascinating spadework. (8-page color photo insert)

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Hesterman, Oran PublicAffairs (320 pp.) $24.99 | May 31, 2011 978-1-61039-006-4

A look at how food gets to the dinner table and suggestions for how it can be done better.

Many Americans take for granted their regular trips to the grocery store. Shoppers may not be aware that 80 percent of the country’s meat originates from four suppliers. In fact, they may not know that there are areas in the inner cities of America where grocery stores do not even exist. Hesterman, a longtime advocate of sustainable agriculture and the founder of Fair Food Network, writes that our food system is broken and will not be able to continue supporting the world population for much longer. The author’s deft explanation of our current cultivation and consumption of food should have families moving away from their supermarket aisles and into farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture programs. Hesterman urges much-needed change on the federal level, as well: “Moving from conscious consumers in our own homes to engaged citizens in our communities is the next step but…no matter how many of us decide to do this, the changes necessary to bring balance back into our food system will not happen without changes in public policy.” Guides and resources are included to help the average consumer source food locally, and the author also includes a breakdown of federal legislation and how it should be amended.

A thorough, inspiring guide on how to restructure the food system for a long and healthy future, for consumers and legislators alike.

A BOOK OF SECRETS Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers

Holroyd, Michael Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $26.00 | August 9, 2011 978-0-374-11558-6

An elegiac work of literary archaeology by the knighted British biographer of Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey.

As the third volume of his memoirs—after Basil Street Blues (2000) and Mosaic (2004)—which similarly offer an intriguing mix of biography and autobiography (“I seek invisibility behind the subjects I am trying to bring alive on the page”), Holroyd (A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, 2009, etc.) focuses here on the lives of two Bloomsbury-era women who were linked to the same man. Visits to the literary mecca Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, Italy, put the author on the track of a former owner of the

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“Touring America and beyond in a blindingly orange, fiberglass hot dog on wheels.” from dog days

house, an English dilettante, ex-banker, widower and Edwardian patron of the arts, Ernest Beckett turned Lord Grimthorpe, who commissioned a bust in 1901 from Rodin of Beckett’s fiancée, Eve Fairfax, only to jilt her soon after. Left with the bill, Eve nonetheless charmed the great, now-aged French sculptor, and over the next eight years their friendship flowered. The bust eventually sold (with his permission) in order to help support this intelligent, cultured woman who would remain unmarried and of scant independent means. Holroyd was able to locate Eve’s precious diary, which he calls her book of secrets, in which she accumulated autographs, photos of dear friends, scraps of poems and memories that record what she believed was a “useful” life. The other main protagonist is the legendary literary sprite, novelist and muse Violet Trefusis, also the lover of Ernest Beckett. Holroyd delved into the novels and life of Trefusis, delineating her torrid, life-transforming affair with Vita Sackville-West, and he quotes amply from their correspondence for a lively, satisfying adventure. Literary enthusiasts will delight in this lovely narrative for its own sake.

Purportedly Holroyd’s “last book,” this is an elegant literary study by a seasoned biographer and wonderfully engaging writer. (8 pages of black-and-white illustrations; family tree. Agent: Robert Lescher/Lescher & Lescher)

WHICH COMES FIRST, CARDIO OR WEIGHTS? Fitness Myths, Training Truths, and Other Surprising Discoveries from the Science of Exercise

Hutchinson, Alex Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $14.99 paperback original | May 24, 2011 978-0-06-200753-7

A comprehensive “evidence based” guide on exercise, health and performance for aspiring athletes and pros alike.

Hutchinson, a journalist and physicist, offers a refreshing perspective on fitness and well-being. Instead of adding to the list of manifestos on the perfect fitness regimen, the author sets aside conventional wisdom for scientific exploration and invites readers to form their own opinions. From the outset, Hutchinson clearly states his intentions: “This is an important point: there’s no single ‘best’ exercise program or technique that applies to everyone. You’ll have to take into account your background, current level of fitness and goals in designing an appropriate workout regimen—not to mention more subtle considerations like the types of activity you enjoy. After all, the most effective program is the one you can stick with!” With that in mind, the author leads readers on a path that methodically disentangles myth from fact regarding exercise, performance and healthy living. But Hutchinson isn’t only concerned with what works and what doesn’t; he’s interested in the why as well. The author’s scientific training serves him well in referencing hundreds of |

peer-reviewed journal articles and more than 100 interviews with researchers worldwide. However, he carefully balances the scientific data with a blend of tips and helpful diagrams.

For example, readers may enjoy learning the mind-body connection and how listening to music or watching TV can affect a workout. Each chapter closes with a “cheat sheet,” a clearly defined list of the key points.

Factual, informative and empowering.

DOG DAYS A Year in the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile

Ihlenfeld, Dave Union Square/Sterling (224 pp.) $14.95 paperback original | July 5, 2011 978-1-4027-7610-6

Touring America and beyond in a blindingly orange, fiberglass hot dog on wheels.

Ihlenfeld has come a long way since spending 1999 driving one of Oscar Mayer’s “wacky promotional vehicles,” the Weinermobile, for $21,000. With more recent TV writing credits on Malcolm in the Middle and Family Guy to his name, he’s free to recap the disenchantment of his college years fed up with journalism school and living the life of a pessimistic, directionless underachiever. Desperate for postgraduate employment, Ihlenfeld answered an Oscar Mayer open call for Weinermobile drivers eager to “travel the Hot Dog Highways.” He was hired after a succession of interviews at their Wisconsin headquarters which, he humorously offers, “smell[ed] like bacon.” Much to his surprise, he received spirited encouragement from his parents and a happily energetic crew of fellow Hotdoggers like driving partner Ali and “super-hot chick” Sofia. Ihlenfeld’s satirical travelogue brims with wit, humor, chapters of hotdog history and puns galore. He shuffles readers though adventures in processed meat at the “Hot Dog High” two-week boot-camp training and chronicles the challenges of navigating the sweltering, breakdown-prone vehicle through the hills and valleys of California and the Southwest. Random acts of carnality and conciliatory camaraderie soothe frustrating months on a job that soon lost its initial appeal, but Ihlenfeld kept his wild and crazy year on the road churning through hemorrhoids, a bailout at Mardi Gras and Europe with new partner Tammy. The inspiring conclusion finds the author gratefully equipped with mobilemarketing savvy and a newfound self-confidence, the marks of a well-traveled “Hotdogger.”

Lighthearted fare from a resilient road warrior.

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THE SPORTSMAN Unexpected Lessons from an Around-the-World Sports Odyssey

Jones, Dhani; Grotenstein, Jonathan Rodale (272 pp.) $25.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1-60961-111-8

Freethinking NFL linebacker opens up about his adventures tackling the globe for two seasons on the Travel Channel.

The gridiron just isn’t big enough to hold Jones, a decade-plus NFL veteran. Despite that remarkable feat, the debut author has had to continually fend off critics who say his varied outside interests distract from his game—among them, the design and manufacture of his signature bowties. The criticism reached its apex a couple of years ago when the author started secretly shooting episodes of Dhani Tackles the Globe during the off-season. His reality show took him around the world and placed him in sporting arenas and cultures totally alien to him. Far from hindering his day job, Jones writes, butting heads with opponents as daunting as Singaporean dragonboat racers, Senegalese strongmen and latter-day Vikings has made him a much better football player. Beyond that, he insists, it made him a better human being. With co-writer Grotenstein, Jones offers a thought-provoking adventure story that’s part travelogue, part sports journal and even part fitness manual. The pages turn quickly in anticipation of the next stop on Jones’ itinerary. Breaking down stereotypes is fun and fulfilling, but Jones spends an equal amount of time slaying his own demons, both physical and mental.

A cathartic, inspiring tale that promises much more to come.

LIP SERVICE Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics LaFrance, Marianne Norton (352 pp.) $26.95 | August 8, 2011 978-0-393-06004-1

A winning smile is widely recognized as social currency even by our primate cousins, but—as LaFrance (Psychology/ Yale Univ.) shows—its meaning is not always so obvious.

The author deconstructs the hidden content of smiles and their role in our lives, beginning with the startling information that babies have been observed to practice smiling while still in the womb. This is believed to be an unconscious survival mechanism that prepares them to elicit the care they need from adults in order to survive, rather than a spontaneous expression of pleasure. The author identifies this act as the baby’s social manipulation. By five or six weeks, the infant has learned to lock eyes with caretakers and smile responsively. “[E]volution has made that 842

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behavior adaptive,” she writes, providing “babies with the ability and inclination to flex their smile muscles but maturity and social context affect whether, when and how they will materialize.” Smiles are recognizably spontaneous or voluntary, engaging different neural pathways and involving different facial muscles; and they can represent a panoply mixed emotions, which are recognizable according to the facial muscles they engage, their size and duration. Humans are wired to respond empathetically to the smiles of others, and experimental evidence suggests that people who smile more tend to live longer because the act evokes a positive emotional state. Psychologists describe this as the “facial feedback hypothesis.” LaFrance presents an abundance of contemporary research to demonstrate how our smiles are conditioned socially. Women tend to smile more than men, people in power positions smile less than their subordinates and service-with-a-smile is expected. Americans smile at the children of strangers, while Europeans don’t, and there are subtle differences between the smile of an Englishman and an American, or a French woman and a French-speaking Canadian—as discernible as their different accents.

By unveiling the complexity of something as simple as a smile, the author provides surprising insights into culture and psychology. (38 illustrations. Agent: Katinka Matson)

THE CHITLIN’ CIRCUIT AND THE ROAD TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Lauterbach, Preston Norton (320 pp.) $26.95 | July 18, 2011 978-0-393-07652-3

The development of the Southern black club scene receives a sometimes cluttered history.

In his debut, music journalist Lauterbach plots the early years of the chitlin’ circuit, which takes its name from “chitterlings,” or hog intestines, an indigenous Southern cuisine. Born in the late swing era, the circuit owed its existence to canny entrepreneurs like Denver Ferguson, a numbers racketeer and club owner in Indianapolis’ “Bronzeville” district, and Walter Barnes, a self-promoting bandleader and Chicago Defender columnist who barnstormed black markets in the South. Their efforts opened the way for other regional bookers like Don Robey (Houston), Sunbeam Mitchell (Memphis) and Clint Branley (Macon). The chitlin’ circuit gained traction during the 1940s, as the big bands waned and small combos like Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five set the stage for popular R&B acts like Roy Brown, Johnny Ace, Little Richard and James Brown. Frequently citing the black press of the day, Lauterbach tells his story with big splashes of color. At times, the narrative slows as the author trots out endless band itineraries.

Possibly the biggest problem with the book is Lauterbach’s failure to make a completely compelling case for Ferguson’s enduring importance. He devotes most of his space to the Indiana promoter’s hometown business, and material about Ferguson’s later years, in which he grappled with tax troubles and a messy divorce, add

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“A bold, sure-footed, significant biography of enormous depth and feeling.” from malcolm x

little to the main narrative. Furthermore, Lauterbach ends the story with the arrival of the ’50s performers who gained fame in the rock ’n’ roll era (and a pointless coda about the destruction of Memphis’ Beale Street district). While he alludes to the colorful careers of modern chitlin’ circuit artists like Bobby Rush and the late Marvin Sease, whose popularity extended into the new millennium, he leaves that vital story untold.

A lack of organizational rigor derails an interesting tale.

(34 illustrations. Agent: Paul Bresnick/Paul Bresnick Agency)

THE NATURE PRINCIPLE Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder

Louv, Richard Algonquin (320 pp.) $24.95 | May 10, 2011 978-1-56512-581-0

A sound argument for the importance of the natural world.

Readers needn’t be poets to understand that nature inspires more than five senses, but many would probably benefit from this exploration of nature’s significance in our lives and what role it will play in the future.

Award-winning science journalist Louv (Last Child In the Woods, 2008, etc.) returns with a discussion of the seven precepts of natural power, introducing such concepts as the “purposeful place,” where natural history is as highly valued as human history. While the author comes across as a bit self-obsessed and the book is written to suburban and urban audiences, his writing style is clear and raises many valid points—most of which anyone with a small degree of common sense could figure out on their own. Don’t we already know that technology is not bad when used as a tool, or that exposure to nature helps well-being and may even cause physical healing? Louv heartily exhorts readers to become more engaged in the world around them, as citizen naturalists out to discover their own bioregions. Taking time to find and create an everyday Eden is not only beneficial to the individual, but to the community as a whole.

Louv’s latest isn’t much more than age-old wisdom, but it bears repeating in an asphalt-coated world.

MALCOLM X A Life of Reinvention

Marable, Manning Viking (594 pp.) $30.00 | CD: $39.95 | April 4, 2011 978-0-670-02220-5 CD 978-0-14-242844-3 A candid, corrective look at the Nation of Islam leader and renegade—and a deeply informed investigation of the evolution of his thinking on race and revolution. |

For decades, distinguished scholar Marable (African-American Affairs/Columbia Univ.; Living Black History: How Re-Imagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future, 2006, etc.) studied the life and work of Malcolm X (1925–1965), and this meticulous sifting of the fact from the fiction expertly places him within the civil-rights movement of the time and as catalyst for the emerging Black Power struggle. The author looks beyond the myth that “Malcolmites” have woven around their leader and returns to original sources, such as NOI members and former members; Malcolm’s widow and their children; African and Islamist chiefs Malcolm met on his extensive travels abroad; civil-rights activists, who were wary of his views on racial separatism; and files by the FBI and New York Police Department, who may have been complicit in his assassination

by NOI operatives on Feb. 21, 1965. First and foremost, Marable deconstructs Alex Haley’s masterly Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which he and Malcolm collaborated on for years before Malcolm’s death, but which exaggerates the exploits of Malcolm’s earlier manifestation as “Detroit Red,” probably in order to render more powerful the conversion to Islam of this hustler, pimp and thief incarcerated at the Norfolk Prison Colony.

For years, Malcolm was NOI’s exalted evangelical front man and first minister, broadcasting the organization’s anti-white, anti-political doctrine before Malcolm’s recognition of the crucial work of the civil-rights activists and the need for global black political engagement prompted his break with the NOI to embrace what Marable terms Pan-Africanism. Moreover, Malcolm could not sanction Elijah Muhammad’s extramarital affairs and out-of-wedlock children, setting in motion a perilous countdown to NOI retribution. The Malcolm X revealed here was troublingly misogynist and occasionally precipitous in action and speech, but possessed a dauntless sincerity and intelligence that was only beginning to shape and clarify his message for humanity.

A bold, sure-footed, significant biography of enormous depth and feeling.

AN ANATOMY OF ADDICTION Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine

Markel, Howard Pantheon (352 pp.) $27.95 | July 19, 2011 978-0-375-42330-7

Medical historian Markel (Medicine/ Univ. of Michigan; When Germs Travel, 2004, etc.) writes of a time when many Americans and Europeans enjoyed their daily rendezvous with cocaine.

Two of them were giants: Sigmund Freud and William Halsted, and no history of their fields—psychology and surgery—is complete without considering their contributions, for “each man changed the world.” They were also both cocaine addicts for part of their lives, and Markel investigates how that condition may have impinged on their work. The author is a convivial

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h m i c h a e l f ee n e y c a l l a n

Robert Redford

Michael Feeney Callan Knopf (496 pp.) $28.95 May 2011 9780679450559

Michael Feeney Callan devoted 14 years to writing Robert Redford: The Biography. Having written biographies of Anthony Hopkins, Julie Christie and Sean Connery, Callan persuaded the sometimes reticent actor-director to be interviewed for a “no holds barred” biography.

Redford spoke openly and at great length with Callan and, further, turned over voluminous files, journals and correspondence related to his films. The actor/director’s co-operation on the project apparently persuaded literally scores of A-list co-workers— Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Sydney Pollack and others—to be interviewed for the book. Feeney, who lives in Dublin, recently answered a few questions about Redford via e-mail.

Q: You quote actor John Saxon as saying of Redford, “There was a chasm, a distance he’d put between himself and the rest of the world.” Other interviewees you quote express similar sentiments. When you interviewed Redford, did you also sense that “chasm?”

Q: In your acknowledgements, you say that editor Susan Hill thought Redford to be “undervalued.” Did you share that assessment when you launched the project? How, if at all, did your work on the book alter that perception?

Q: Although you present some details of Redford’s personal life, this aspect is not as central to the book as his work as an actor, director and environmentalist. Was this focus your intention?

A: Susan Hill sadly and unexpectedly died long before the book was completed. The reason we started the book together is exactly that we shared a belief that Redford was undervalued, or rather that his iconic status detracted from an important, building body of work as producer/director. My perception changed in that I saw Redford increasingly as an overlooked visionary, especially in his eco-activism (launching the critical Greenhouse Glasnost five years before the United Nations Rio summit) and in the alternative art of Sundance, whose underlying principle of promoting diversity has a subtle but clearly rationalized educational objective.

A: I always intended to let Redford tell the story for himself, so the balance of the text accurately reflects who he is, what interests him and how he perceives himself. The book attempts to be evaluative by being accumulative. I wanted to be forensic in recording every significant incident of his life, and then turn it over to the reader to assess.

A: He’s first and foremost a poet. He’s at his most comfortable when talking about Eliot or Yeats. He knows their work, their ideals and chronically, almost obsessively, analyses them. He has his own viewpoint, but it is constantly evolving. So, truly engaging him means stepping away from the domestic or iconic issues and getting into that inner dialogue. In my experience, the door is open, though not many seem to go through it to really access him.

Q: Not all film stars also become icons. What forces came together to make Redford an icon? What does he symbolize as an icon?

A: I think he deployed the same skills Gary Cooper did—the Native American’s restraint and economy of words, combined with the projection of courage, resilience and compassion. The audience sees the beauty in the deed, not the look.

Q: You preface the biography with a quote from Owen Wister’s The Virginian. To what extent do Redford’s films and his life mirror Wister’s and his Virginian?

A: Redford is a frontiersman. In that I mean he is committed to the challenges within the culture, whether reflected in the exploratory themes of his directorial movies (like Quiz Show, Ordinary People, Lions for Lambs) or the boundary-pushing of Sundance.

Q: How do the story, style and ideas in Redford’s latest film, The Conspirator, fit in, or depart, from the other films he has directed?

A: I like to travel and read. My interest in the interchange of cultural values began with The Notebooks of Geoffrey Crayon and has never quit. American principles fascinate me, and the can-do spirit of the pioneers was resoundingly resonant for me as a child when I heard Kennedy’s speech committing America to go to the moon “not because it’s easy, but because it is hard.”

That American spirit, I find, is laudable. And important for humanity, if that doesn’t sound too grand.

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p h oto by Mi c ha e l L io n s ta r

A: I’ll quote Bob Woodward here, who says he cherishes Redford’s “observational skills.” In all his selfproduced or directorial films, he probes the roots of things—human behavior, institutional weakness, societal beliefs. The Conspirator is another probing part of that tendency, a piece in the mosaic. When his work is finally done, I think film historians will assemble all his self-produced/directed movies as a unified statement of the individual’s capacity to tackle, change and finally improve “the system.”

Q: Throughout the book, you demonstrate a thorough grasp of American culture and history. How was this background acquired?

writer, but careful with his data; he musters his facts, then deals them out with a pleasurable flourish. He situates both the rise and fall of cocaine in the medical world, and that world writ large during the late 19th century, as well as broadly exploring each man’s significance to medicine. Markel ably covers cocaine’s effects as it made its way into the surgery—it was the anesthesiologist’s godsend—as well as Freud and Halsted’s bloodstreams. Reports of its revivifying powers had been floating out of South America since the early 19th century, and the substance gradually came into everyday use. Markel is particularly good with the social history of the drug: how it was laced into wine and Coca-Cola (as a response to the outlawing of liquor in Georgia), and the same-as-it-ever-was shenanigans of Big Pharma. Freud and Halsted, however, are cautionary tales as self-experimenters: Cocaine’s progress played upon their insecurities and vanities, exacted physical and emotional tolls and disrupted their personal lives, not to mention that “their most fallow professional years coincided with their most prodigious substance abuse.”

From wonder drug to the monkey on their back, Markel testifies that cocaine did neither Freud nor Halsted any favors.

SOCIALIST DREAMS AND BEAUTY QUEENS A Couchsurfer’s Memoir of Venezuela

Maslin, Jamie Skyhorse Publishing (304 pp.) $24.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-61608-221-5

A raw, uncut journey into the wilds of Venezuela.

Travel writer Maslin (Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn: A Hitchhiker’s Adventures in the New Iran, 2009) offers a firsthand account of the many debacles endured throughout his Venezuelan trek. Yet what makes his story unique is the manner in which he chooses to experience the country—by couch surfing, a get-what-you-pay-for approach to traveling in which hosts open their homes to strangers. The result is a comic tale in which Maslin soon finds himself accosted by corrupt cops and abandoned by unruly cab drivers, as well as serving as pincushion to an overzealous nurse and her needle. While the author blends his problematic personal narrative alongside Venezuela’s historical backdrop, and current turbulent politics under the leadership of loose cannon Hugo Chávez the personal tale wins out. His experiences on the ground depict a poverty-stricken nation with a predatory populace looking to exploit naïve travelers. However, Maslin provides another view as well, in which the beauty-obsessed citizens somehow find the funds to frequent plastic surgeons with the regularity most people reserve for dentists. Venezuela’s bodycomplex epidemic comes into even sharper focus as the author draws connections between plastic surgery and the country’s love for beauty pageants—a cultural undercurrent that transforms young girls to grown women with the flick of a scalpel. Maslin soon moves beyond the Venezuelan people’s proclivities, devoting equal |

time to the country’s natural beauty, including a journey into the dense jungles to glimpse Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall.

This juxtaposition between people and place—as well as beauties both natural and otherwise—offers a rare commentary on a country most readers know little about.

A complex portrait of Venezuela’s people, poverty and promise.

WHAT LANGUAGE IS (And What It Isn’t And What It Could Be) McWhorter, John Gotham Books (272 pp.) $26.00 | August 4, 2011 978-1-592-40625-8

Linguist and New Republic contributing editor McWhorter (Linguistics and Western Civilization/Columbia Univ.; Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, 2008, etc.) returns with a discussion of what languages are, and some insightful thoughts about why we view some as “primitive” and others as “advanced.”

The author employs a jumping-bean style that briskly leaps from frisky allusions to popular culture—not always recent: Wilt Chamberlain and Warren Beatty appear in one sentence— to dense descriptions of the complexities of language. Throughout, the author uses what he calls the “underwater approach” to language analysis, noting how early scientific illustrations of marine life showed critters dried and displayed on a beach; not until we could stay underwater for extended periods could we describe these creatures in their own habitat. Linguists offer a similar view of language. Observing that any language is a “fecund, redolent buzzing mess of a thing,” McWhorter groups his observations under five headings—languages are ingrown, disheveled, intricate, oral and mixed. The author dispels many common misconceptions, among them the notion that languages spoken by isolated peoples are simple or primitive. On the contrary, the more isolated a language, the more complex it becomes, as native speakers add numerous layers of special-purpose features. It’s only when other, non-native adults arrive that the language begins to simplify. He notes, for instance, the enormous complexity of Navajo (and, yes, he deals with the code talkers). He also reminds us that spoken languages antedate by millennia any written language and quips that all languages are “sluts,” taking on the attributes of all comers. McWhorter also dismisses the notion that Black English is Africa-born but recognizes the dialect’s dignity, calling it “a different kind of English but not a lesser one.”

Turgid at times, but mostly eye-opening, even liberating. (Halftone maps throughout. Agent: Katinka Matson)

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“A Peabody and Emmy Award–winning correspondent reports on the indignities, difficulties, delights and occasional triumphs of small-town newspapering.” from emus loose in egnar

WANTON WEST Madams, Money, Murder, and the Wild Women of Montana’s Frontier

Morgan, Lael Chicago Review (320 pp.) $24.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-56976-338-4

There weren’t many career opportunities open to women in the Wild West: schoolmarm, farm wife, perhaps stenographer. However, writes journalist and popular historian Morgan (Media Writing/Univ. of Texas, Arlington; Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush, 1998, etc.) in this entertaining and instructive study, there was always a demand for prostitutes and brothel keepers, and many women naturally drifted into those ancient professions.

Profiling several of these women from the Gold Rush into the early years of the 20th century, the author makes it clear why this wasn’t necessarily a bad career move, especially on the management side. In Helena, Mont., the city’s 37 “independent, property-owning prostitutes” accounted for 44 percent of the real-estate transfers and sometimes acted as venture capitalists for local businesses; a dozen of them reported that they had bank accounts in excess of $2,500, while “even street whores without capital could expect to earn $223 a month”—this at a time when a skilled carpenter made half that. One hooker-turned-madam even opened a theater that became “a family favorite,” while others, mostly immigrants from Asia and Europe, provided financial anchors around which communities of their compatriots formed. Morgan’s subject, improperly treated, could easily devolve into a lascivious catalog, but she has an important larger point: The independence of these women inspired the independence of women who did not engage in the sex trade, and it’s no accident that women had the right to vote and served in political office in the West well before they did in other parts of the country. The author closes with Montana’s own Jeannette Rankin, elected to Congress in 1917, who got plenty done—even if, as Morgan writes, the press of the day “showed less interest in her legislative accomplishments than in whether she was having an affair with Fiorello LaGuardia.”

A useful addition to Western Americana and women’s studies. (8-page black-and-white photo insert)

YOGA BITCH One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment

Morrison, Suzanne Three Rivers/Crown (352 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | August 23, 2011 978-0-307-71744-3

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A smoker from Seattle heads to Bali to train as a yoga teacher, providing an entertaining voice to her doubts and inner rebellion.

Morrison followed Indra, her beautiful blond yoga teacher, and her mind-reading husband Lou, to a remote Indonesian village for a two-month training program. While there, the author struggled with the austere lifestyle and faced unresolved spiritual issues from her Catholic youth. Upon discovering her beloved guru’s flaws, Morrison became disillusioned with yogic teachings and began drinking milkshakes in an act of rebellion, leading to open resistance and rejection of the higher path, and returned to America disappointed to be the same woman. Ten years later, Morrison found herself in New York, still unforgiving of the yoga world. She humorously dismisses the urban yoga scene, calling the practice “yogaerobics,” the teachers “celebriyogis” and the boutiques “sacred schwag.” Optimistic despite her constant questioning, Morrison reflects on her time as “a real yogi in Bali,” and finally is able to forgive her teachers their humanity and move toward acceptance. Though her love life provides the framework for her story and decisions, the author candidly describes her thoughts in detail, whether selfish, cynical or mushy, without professing a message or conquering her own dualistic world view, allowing the reader to participate in her processes along the way.

Brings the higher path down to Earth with refreshing honesty.

EMUS LOOSE IN EGNAR Big Stories from Small Towns

Muller, Judy Univ. of Nebraska (264 pp.) $24.95 | July 1, 2011 978-0-8032-3016-3

A Peabody and Emmy Award–winning correspondent reports on the indignities, difficulties, delights and occasional triumphs of small-town newspapering.

Newspapers may be dying, but don’t tell that to Muller (Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Now This: Radio, Television… and the Real World, 2000)—or to the editors of the Guadalupe County Communicator, the Canadian Record, the Mountain Eagle, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, the Canyon Country Zephyr, the Dove Creek Press, the Big Horn County News or the Norwood Post papers, among the many the author visits along her diverting, informative trip. In tough economic times, these newspapers still get by on ads and subscriptions, providing local news for tiny communities who can’t get that information anywhere else. In small towns—there are over 8,000 weeklies in the United States—newspapers still matter. Sometimes the stories are serious: the school superintendent who unilaterally decides to censor books at the high school, the district-attorney candidate who hides a cocaine habit, the child beaten to death by a single mother’s live-in boyfriend, the beloved local doctor arrested for stealing Indian artifacts from public land, or the elected school board that insists on doing business behind closed doors. Sometimes they are complex: the controversy over

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“Simultaneously an elegiac memoir and a sparkling prose-poem.” from beautiful unbroken

a newly built, never-occupied, multimillion-dollar detention facility in Montana that pits one town’s paper against the nearby Crow Tribe’s house organ and stirs up longstanding grievances in the land of Custer. More often, the news hole is filled by club doings, guest column or the three staples of local reporting for which Muller offers a delightful lesson in decoding the small-town style: school sports, where mythmaking and hyperbole rule, the obituaries, where euphemism reigns, and the police blotter, where the decision to name names underscores the special burden of small-town editors everywhere—“they have to live there, too.” Very occasionally under threat of violence, more often facing social isolation or financial pressure, these rural journalists’ devotion to truth-telling keeps the First Amendment alive and communities connected in grassroots America.

Told with deep affection and respect, a thoroughly engaging “journey down journalism’s blue highways.” (8 photographs)

BEAUTIFUL UNBROKEN One Nurse’s Life

Nealon, Mary Jane Graywolf (224 pp.) $15.00 paperback original | August 1, 2011 978-1-55597-590-6 Poet and Bakeless Prize winner Nealon (Immaculate Fuel, 2004, etc.) poetically writes about her close-knit Irish-American family and her vocation for healing.

As a young girl, after enjoying a biography of Molly Pitcher, the author dreamed of accomplishing great deeds in the medical field. However, she writes, nursing school was actually a default option since her grades would not qualify her for a university scholarship. Tragically, her younger brother which whom she had an extremely close bond was diagnosed with a rare, difficult-to-treat cancer just after her graduation. Rather than seeking a job near her family home in New Jersey, she accepted a nursing job in Virginia because she couldn’t face the possibility of her brother’s death. Only a year later, when her brother was near death, did she return home. Oppressed by guilt at the carefree life she had been living, Nealon writes about her painful realization that she had failed her family and especially her brother: “I had been in the wrong hospital. I had been at the wrong bedside.” Consequently, she took a job nursing young patients who had terminal cancers in the same hospital where her brother lay dying, and this was a turning point in her life.

From then on, she was engaged in a search—for reconciliation with her parents and sister, who blamed her for leaving, for a lover who might take her brother’s place, and for the spiritual sustenance she derived from nurturing cancer patients, caring for wave of early AIDS patients and treating the homeless.

Simultaneously an elegiac memoir and a sparkling prose-poem. (Agent: Bill Contardi/Brandt and Hochman)

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ABSOLUTE MONARCHS A History of the Papacy Norwich, John Julius Random (528 pp.) $30.00 | July 12, 2011 978-1-4000-6715-2 e-book 978-0-679-60499-0

From the disciple Peter to the reigning Benedict, accomplished British historian Norwich (The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean, 2006, etc.) fashions a spirited, concise chronicle of the accomplishments of the most noteworthy popes.

The author is comfortable navigating this vast terrain, which is essentially the history of Christianity—and he even manages to make the numbing litany of events palatable. Moreover, Norwich is not above questioning historical interpretation, such as over the controversy over John Paul I’s death in 1978—was he murdered? With Jesus’ pronouncement to his disciple Simon, that “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,” the leaders of the fledgling Christian church began to organize themselves. Norwich doesn’t dwell on St. Paul, but subsequent church elders in the first two centuries CE were Levantines—centered in the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean—working to establish churches despite Roman persecution and mostly in Asia. The emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity in the fourth century, and construction of a basilica dedicated to St. Peter on the Vatican Hill, boosted Christianity’s profile enormously. However, marauding hordes laid waste to Rome over the centuries, and early popes had to solidify doctrine and orthodoxy, notably in the time of Gregory the Great and Leo II (who crowned Charlemagne).

Norwich lingers over the schism between the Western and Eastern churches, the leaders of the Crusades, the seven popes who resided in Avignon, the rebuilding of the Roman Church during the Renaissance beginning under Nicholas V, the “monsters” (Alexander, Julius), the patrons of the arts (Leo X) and the rulers during the Counter-Reformation, who checked the tide of Protestantism. The author gracefully navigates through the challenges of the Age of Reason, revolution, the Risorgimento and the World Wars, examining the papal responses—e.g., Pius XII’s silence in the face of the persecution of the Jews.

Norwich doesn’t skirt controversies, ancient and present, in this broad, clear-eyed assessment. (16-page color photo insert; 3 maps. Agent: Peter Greenberg/Curtis Brown)

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“Already known for providing readers a new angle on a familiar subject, Robbins now applies that same incisive inside scoop to the lives of high-schoolers who feel…different.” from the geeks shall inherit the earth

STEVEN PETROW’S COMPLETE GAY & LESBIAN MANNERS The Definitive Guide to LGBT Life

Petrow, Steven; Chew, Sally Workman (432 pp.) $17.95 paperback original June 1, 2011 978-0-7611-5670-3

Syndicated writer and New York Times same-sex wedding expert updates his volume on manners and navigating gay and lesbian life.

Petrow (The Essential Book of Gay Manners & Etiquette, 1995) concedes that manuals on propriety can seem passé by contemporary standards, but he believes that “treating everyone with respect and decency makes for a better and fairer world, and that manners are among the best ways to make sure we do.” The author sees little difference between good behavior in the gay world versus the heterosexual one, but most etiquette books, he writes, fail to address predicaments unique to the homosexual (LGBT) population. In the sensitive, smartly conceived opening section, Petrow establishes then acknowledges the pride and pitfalls of sexual orientation. Important chapters on supportive friendships follow, which include timely resources on bullying, gay suicide, and the Trevor Project’s prevention helpline. The author then cheerily delves into more naturally provocative material like romance and sexual etiquette, where the delicate dance of that first in-person date and the joys of a committed relationship meet the technologically savvy world of online profiles, social-media navigation and breaking up via text message. Petrow also gives equal space to more important issues, like ruminations on HIV status disclosure, infidelity, domestic violence, workplace discrimination and homophobic travel destinations. He also examines gay weddings, with appropriate rules for rings, invitations, attire and even honeymoons. Also effective is the author’s addition of a wide range of asides, like the gay-focused “queery” and heterosexualbased “straight talk” inserts. Most gay men and women will find something of interest here, whether they’re contemplating marriage, starting a family, coming out of the closet or simply setting the dinner table.

An indispensable refresher course, alternately edifying and campy, on what’s proper in modern gay life.

NORMANDY CRUCIBLE The Decisive Battle that Shaped World War II in Europe

Prados, John NAL Caliber/Berkley (336 pp.) $25.95 | July 5, 2011 978-0-451-23383-7

A fresh point of view on the 1944 battle that emphasizes intelligence, logistics and the battle’s unexpected strategic consequences.

While researching Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History 848

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of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II (1995), prolific military historian Prados (How the Cold War Ended, 2010, etc.) noticed that histories of the Normandy campaign paid scant attention to ULTRA code-breaking (declassified in the 1970s) and provided weak explanations of why the Wehrmacht, fleeing in disorder in August, recovered so quickly. The author concentrates on the month from mid-July to mid-August, six weeks after the landing. The British were battling for Caen, nine miles from the coast despite its scheduled capture on day one. Stalled American forces were about to launch Operation Cobra, another offensive aimed at breaking out. Allied frustrations paled next to those of the Germans, who were vastly outnumbered and harried by Allied air supremacy. By the end of August, the Allies were racing across France and predicting victory by Christmas. A month later, they suffered a bloody nose at Arnhem, and by November resistance brought the advance to a halt. This should have come as less of a surprise because ULTRA intercepts as early as June revealed Germany mobilizing another million men. In addition, despite Hitler’s penchant for stand-fast orders and suicidal offensives, he worked hard to strengthen defenses on Germany’s Western border.

Prados has done his homework, writes fine battle descriptions and makes a convincing case that events during the summer of 1944 predicted the subsequent course of the war.

THE GEEKS SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Robbins, Alexandra Hyperion (448 pp.) $25.99 | May 3, 2011 978-1-4013-0202-3

Already known for providing readers a new angle on a familiar subject—e.g., college sororities (Pledged, 2004), obsessive students (The Overachievers, 2006)—Robbins now applies that same incisive inside scoop to the lives of high-schoolers who feel…different.

In schools across the country, thousands of students often feel “trapped, despairing that in today’s educational landscape, they either have to conform to the popular crowd’s arbitrary standards—forcing them to hide their true selves—or face dismissive treatment that batters relentlessly at their soul.” The author introduces what she calls “quirk theory,” the idea that outsiders thrive after high school for many of the same reasons that they were misfits in high school. Fully immersing herself in the lives of a wide variety of “outsider” students—including the “band geek,” the “artsy indie,” the “loner” and the “gamer”— Robbins demonstrates the ways in which their “quirk” is a good thing. This likely won’t be news for many readers who have long survived high school, but it’s a useful reminder to all of us to discover and encourage the quirks that make certain students exceptional. Robbins offers real hope to adolescents who must realize that “it gets better” is far more than wishful thinking.

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SEVEN SEASONS IN SIENA My Quixotic Qvuest for Acceptance Among Tuscany’s Proudest People

The author has a gift for writing fact like fiction—she reminds us what it was like to be in high school and helps us relive all the anxiety and angst—and the students and their stories are thoroughly engaging. The author also includes a helpful appendix, “31 Tips for Students, Parents, Teachers, and Schools.”

These stories are not just entertaining but important, reminding us to celebrate our quirks and those which we see in others as well. (Agent: Paula Balzer/The Paula Balzer Agency)

FINDING EVERETT RUESS The Remarkable Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer Roberts, David Broadway (304 pp.) $25.00 | July 19, 2011 978-0-307-59176-0 e-book 978-0-307-59178-4

The absorbing story of wilderness explorer Everett Ruess, who has gained a cult-like following since his disappearance in 1934.

In adventure writer Roberts’ (The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America’s Boldest Mountaineer, 2010) latest, the author examines the life of Ruess, who was born in 1914 to caring, if over-involved parents. From a young age, he was fascinated with nature. At 16, he set off on the first of his expeditions, hitchhiking from Los Angeles to Carmel, then moving on to Big Sur. Roberts depicts Ruess as intelligent but somewhat naïve, and completely unable to support himself.

He became increasingly dependent on his cash-strapped parents to fund his wanderings, and his sense of entitlement deepened over the course of his short life. The author relies on Ruess’ surviving letters and journals to paint a portrait of the explorer, and they reveal a moody, pensive and often troubled young man who had a disdain for sedentary life: “I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.” The second half of the book delves into the possible fate of the explorer, presenting readers with four possible outcomes: suicide, murder, accidental death or withdrawal into hiding. Roberts explores each of these avenues thoroughly, providing both sides of each argument before laying out his own investigation. Though readers may be left with niggling doubts—Roberts chronicles many hoaxes with regards to Ruess’ disappearance—in the end, he makes a convincing case.

A well-researched, readable look at a complex personality in wilderness exploration. (16-page black-and-white photo insert. Author events with the Explorers Club. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky/Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency)

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Rodi, Robert Ballantine (288 pp.) $25.00 | June 21, 2011 978-0-345-52105-7 e-book 978-0-345-52107-1

An American writer from Chicago falls in love with what he sees as an ideal society in the Bruco contrada, an ancient subdivision of Siena, Italy, and strives mightily to become accepted into it.

To Rodi (Dogged Pursuit: My Year of Competing Dusty, the World’s Least Likely Agility Dog, 2009, etc.) the robust Italian appetite for life was a welcome contrast to the “dismaying anemia of modern American culture.” Driven by a deep desire to belong, he traveled to Siena seven times between 2003 and 2009. Several of his trips occurred during the Palio, the colorful civic competition among contrade held twice each summer and featuring a horse race around the Piazza del Campo in the city’s center. Rodi views this celebration and game as central to the life of Siena, renewing its people’s hope and making them the happiest and most self-reliant people he’s ever met. Usually, he was accompanied and guided by Dario, a genial entrepreneur who gave him entry into the society to which he longed to belong. Acceptance did not come easy for a gay, middle-aged American whose Italian was shaky, and Rodi worked hard to fit in. Good food and plenty of wine eased the way, however. In a generally self-deprecating manner, the author recounts his missteps, minor achievements (being recognized by a bartender, being greeted on the street) and embarrassing moments (wearing too-short yellow shorts in a footrace). In 2009, Rodi got his wish when he was honored by becoming an official member of the contrada, a ceremony during which he happily swore allegiance to its traditions.

A lighthearted account, a touch snobbish at times, but entertaining and funny. (Agent: Christopher Schellin)

PURPLE CITRUS & SWEET PERFUME Cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean

Rowe, Silvena Ecco/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $34.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-06-207159-0

Sensual recipes designed to inspire a passion for Eastern Mediterranean cuisine.

Rowe (Feasts, 2009) pays homage to the renowned chefs of the Ottoman Empire who prized food for its sensual attributes: taste, smell, color and texture. According to the author, the Sultans were one of the great foodie cultures, often employing

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kitchen staffs of 1,300 that adapted and integrated the intriguing flavors they found along the Spice Road. Rowe’s cookbook covers what was once the domain of the Ottomans—the regions of Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and even Bulgaria, where Rowe was born.

Each recipe is spiced up with a history lesson or a travel memory.

To make it easier to picture both the food and the locale, Rowe sprinkles the book with gorgeous photographs. Her recipes are as exotic as they are rich and complex in flavor, making use of such ingredients as rose petals, pomegranate molasses, Aleppo peppers, nigella seeds and spices like sumac and the incredibly aromatic Baharat. While it may be hard to find the ingredients for the Partridge Dolma or the kadaifi pastry for the Basil and Kadaifi-Wrapped Shrimp with Pine Nut Tarator, Rowe doesn’t make excuses or offer Americanized substitutions. She provides a glossary, but the rest is up to the curious, resourceful cook.

Discover a new culinary tradition that evokes a fascinating time and place.

SEX, MOM, AND GOD How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway Schaeffer, Frank Da Capo/Perseus (320 pp.) $26.00 | June 1, 2011 978-0-306-81928-5

In the third installment of the “God Trilogy,” prolific novelist and nonfiction author Schaeffer (Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), 2009, etc.) tells “the truth” about his mother’s curious impartation of religion and sex.

The author’s mother Edith played as much a spiritual role as his father, the late Evangelist Francis Schaeffer, and continues to do so at 96, though her memory loss and sight deterioration defy them both. The book shines in sections centered on Edith, a “life-embracing free spirit” whose sexual education of her son began with a show-and-tell of her diaphragm to him at age eight while on a family vacation.

This candid abandon extended to matters outside of sexuality as well. The author distinctly remembers Edith praising a God that foreknew and condoned the miscarriage of her first male child in favor of subsequently giving birth to Schaeffer. He attributes life growing up with three sisters as vital to his affinity for women in later years, though they usurped too much of his parents’ time and attention back then. As a woman who’d sacrificed a dancing career to become a religious juggernaut, Edith’s fiery personality and sexual extroversion were contradictory to the piousness that defined her, yet she managed to formulate extraordinary interpretations. From advising women to wear sheer, black lingerie to keep their husbands’ interest to confessing Francis’ sexual demands on her—all were justified with biblical significance. A consummate memoirist, Schaeffer fills the narrative 850

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with interesting anecdotes about his sex life, like a nervous first-time encounter with a French woman and the ice-girl he fashioned (and attempted to mate with) while growing up in the Swiss mission his parents founded. The author’s heated rejection of modern Evangelicalism and discussions of abortion, Reconstructionist movements and even Sarah Palin rob the memoir of the loving glow cast by Edith’s legacy, but the sage conversation on a New York–bound bus with a distraught Asian girl is warmly resonant and a befitting conclusion to an occasionally disjointed book of ruminations, memories and frustrated opinion.

Sweet and savory familial adoration. (Agent: Jennifer Lyons/Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency)

BEIJING WELCOMES YOU Unveiling the Capital City of the Future

Scocca, Tom Riverhead (384 pp.) $25.95 | August 4, 2011 978-1-59448-784-2

A curiously backward-moving but fun book chronicling the buildup to the Beijing Olympics.

A columnist at the time for the New York Observer, Slate blogger Scocca and his Chinese American wife moved to Beijing in 2004 (she worked in nonprofit, he commuted back and forth from New York). For the next four years, by the magic date of 8/8/08, they witnessed the extraordinary transformation of the city into a marvel for the world. A once closed-off, cluttered capital city plagued by the rambling hutongs (the old city’s lanes and alleys…right-angled jogs and branchings, blind turns and dead ends, parallel lines suddenly swinging perpendicularly away from each other”), traffic jams and smog, Beijing was gradually rearranged, gutted and renovated by enormous, all-devouring construction projects. The single-character chai (“tear down”) was painted everywhere. The Stalinist architecture and goofy traditionalist designs were scuttled in favor of the innovative and sculptural: “hatboxes, flashlights, sardine cans standing on end, a giant topiary garden in steel and glass.” China would spend $40 billion to prepare for the Games, aiming for a top gold-medal count (only 20 years before, China had won its first gold medal in Los Angeles), hiding its hordes of rustic migrant workers and selecting the Olympic motto “One world, one dream” (Scocca’s alternate translation: “Same world, same dream”). Life in Beijing for the foreigners was not always easy or comfortable (such as the manifestation of the security state via Internet censorship), but endlessly fascinating and unintentionally hilarious: the lively, everchanging taxi fleet, the everyday objects that fell apart effortlessly, the contradictions in the Chinese character, the government’s efforts to improve their citizens’ manners by prohibiting public spitting and rehearsing orderly lining-up prescribed “line-up day.” The last part of Scocca’s amusing

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“A richly nuanced, decidedly sympathetic portrait of President Obama’s remarkably accomplished, spirited mother.” from a singular woman

AMERICA WALKS INTO A BAR A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops

account marks the suspenseful countdown to the big day, a triumph for China, followed by an extensive assessment that China had indeed “joined the world.”

A witty, light-handed chronicle, though after three years, the Beijing Olympics has already lost its luster.

Sismondo, Christine Oxford Univ. (320 pp.) $24.95 | July 1, 2011 978-0-19-973495-5

A SINGULAR WOMAN The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother Scott, Janny Riverhead (384 pp.) $26.95 | May 3, 2011 978-1-59448-797-2

A richly nuanced, decidedly sympathetic portrait of President Obama’s remarkably accomplished, spirited mother.

Actually, the story of Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, who died of cancer in 1995, has been told at length, especially during the 2008 presidential campaign.

But former New York Times reporter Scott does not believe that the treatment Obama’s mother garnered in the press was fair or complete. The author conducted exhaustive interviews with family and friends to try to flesh out the biography, especially regarding her years working in Indonesia, trying to finish her doctorate degree and deciding to send back her young son, then 10, to Hawaii. There he attended a prep school in vthe care of her parents, a decision for which she was roundly criticized by the press. Kansas-born Stanley Ann—named after her father, though her mother was enamored by the Bette Davis character named Stanley in the 1942 film In This Our Life—early on set herself apart by her intellectual curiosity, wit and openness to new adventures. When her parents relocated to the new state of Hawaii upon her graduation in 1960, she became simply Ann, and immersed herself in the nascent East-West Center, where she would fall in love with the Kenyan student Barack Hussein Obama. He was 24 and married to a woman back in Kenya; she was 17 and soon pregnant; though they married quietly, they separated soon after. Ann’s resilience and dogged spirit emerge continuously throughout her story. She struggled to gain her degrees while raising first “Barry,” then her daughter, Maya, by her second husband, the Javanese surveyor Lolo Soetoro, all the while moving frequently to do fieldwork on Indonesian cottage industries. Her work in far-flung community outreach and microfinance gained her jobs at the Ford Foundation and the Women’s World Banking, in New York City, and greatly inspired her son in his own political activism.

A biography of considerable depth and understanding.

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Belly up to a scholarly treatise on the evolution of the barroom.

Sismondo’s sophisticated narrative on the cocktail (Mondo Cocktail, 2005) could be considered a primer course for this companion volume, her “pub crawl through American history.”

This three-part exploration of the bar—an institution where culture, politics, law enforcement, prejudice and gender bias all had a hand in its genesis—begins with the traditional taverns of the early colonial era. These establishments assisted travelers as a Puritanical way-station and concurrently formed vital social and political networks, yet were plagued by rampant drunkenness. Sismondo also plumbs George Washington’s Whiskey Rebellion resistance movement as it paved the way for the president’s political popularity. The author includes whimsical doggerel, diary entries and a wealth of significant historical milestones like Prohibition, the controversial presence of women in pubs and a particularly illuminating chapter devoted to bars like San Francisco’s Black Cat and the Stonewall Inn, where the gay community fought for, and eventually won, the freedom to associate. The author lucidly discusses more recent changes in bar culture as well. Cigarette legislation, for instance, caused a whole new set of complications by forcing smokers outside, often causing restaurant and bar patios and sidewalks to become noisy neighborhood nuisances, while the newly smoke-free air inside made it safe for children to accompany their parents. Sismondo’s passion for her subject matter is evident in both her comprehensive research and in short anecdotes on her own initiation to the bar culture as a child accompanying her parents to loungefriendly client meetings on business trips and, later, working in the local Toronto pub community. These personal sections and the author’s spirited prose add personality to text that, to casual readers, could seem dry.

A robust homage to the history and proliferation of bars and their vast and often overlooked cultural significance. (19 black-and-white illustrations. Agent: Ethan Bassoff)

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“A mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed trek through a littlevisited region of the world.” from on the road to babadag

DRIVING WITH PLATO The Meaning of Life’s Milestones Smith, Robert Rowland Free Press (256 pp.) $19.99 | May 3, 2011 978-1-4391-8687-9

A lighthearted examination of major life milestones through the lens of major philosophical thinkers.

Smith’s latest dips into the thought of Montesquieu, Arendt and Kant, among others, to lend a philosophical flair to essays on common life experiences. A former Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Smith (Breakfast with Socrates, 2010) writes with a conversational bent, moving quickly through his arguments and making deft leaps from the mundane to the abstract. His explanations of difficult concepts are clear without being condescending. Unfortunately, there are moments where the author’s intellectual authority is marred by his refusal to think beyond the trite, as in an exploration of young love and first kisses. Smith acknowledges that the idea that teenage boys want to quickly move beyond kissing into sex, as opposed to their female counterparts, is a stereotype, but doesn’t bother to explore other scenarios. This is especially disappointing given his brilliant analysis, in the same chapter, of one of the most famous first kisses in literature, between Romeo and Juliet. It’s a shame he didn’t delve deeper into the play and offer his thoughts on Juliet’s breathlessly erotic soliloquy (“Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds…”), surely a place to consider that teenage girls, too, might want more than a kiss. The stereotypes continue in “Getting a Job,” in which Smith writes that women have a different relationship to work than men because their ability to have children “might mean depending on a man at some point to bring home the bacon.”

Amusing and occasionally insightful, but too reliant on oversimplification.

ON THE ROAD TO BABADAG Travels in the Other Europe

Stasiuk, Andrzej Translator: Kandel, Michael Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (272 pp.) $23.00 | June 16, 2011 978-0-15-101271-8

A Nike Award–winning author travels through Eastern Europe, a place littered with the crumbling relics of communism, with inhabitants abandoned and seemingly frozen in time waiting for their future to begin.

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Albania. Translated from Polish, the spellbinding language captures the author’s piercing insights with painful clarity; Stasiuk refuses to soften what he sees, hears and smells, providing a dynamic postcard of his travels. Readers will be rapidly ensnared by his recounting of a curiously exotic and complex region of the world—villages where, “[i]f you took away the cars, everything would be as it was a hundred year ago,” where “monotony suggests eternity.” Peppered with haunting landscapes, the terrain contains a history of brutal wars and rapacious dictators. Driving through Slovenia, the author came across a dark valley, the largest unmarked cemetery in a country where “in the summer of 1945, Tito’s Communists murdered in this place, without a trial or witnesses, prisoners who had been handed over to them by armies of the Allies.” In Albania, the author encountered a nation lacking the resources to melt down the 600,000 bunkers built between 1944 and 1985, during the regime of Enver Hoxha. “When the highway turned toward Tirana, the bunkers began,” he writes. “Gray concrete skulls, jutting a meter above the ground, gazed with eyes that were black vertical slits. They looked like corpses buried standing.” Whether writing about gypsies, the ancient bond between beasts and humans or the threadbare currency of Moldova, Stasiuk’s language and sharp observations reveal a discerning intellect.

A mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed trek through a littlevisited region of the world.

IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING A Memoir Thomas, Susan Gregory Random (240 pp.) $26.00 | July 12, 2011 978-1-4000-6882-1

Former US News & World Report senior editor Thomas (Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, 2007) examines the zeitgeist of her generation in this compelling memoir.

“For most of my generation—Generation X—there is only one question,” she writes. “ ‘When did your parents get divorced?’ ” The author castigates the self-absorption of her own parents, who even before the dissolution of their marriage neglected her and her younger brother, virtually abandoning them to the care of live-in babysitters. “One of the things I have always despised so intensely about Boomers and their divorces was how breathtakingly egocentric they were,” she writes. “They were so eager to trade in their children’s very sense of safety in the world for access to an unfettered sex life and a sense of ‘personal fulfillment.’ ” The author blames her parents for her adolescent slide into a punk-rock subculture. At 19, she pulled herself together, enrolled in college and became a workaholic in pursuit of a career in journalism. She met Cal, her husband-to-be, at her first full-time job at a computer magazine. They lived together for six years, then married and had two children—divorcing in 2007 to her intense dismay. Until the birth of her children, she was bedeviled by an inner sense of worthlessness and depended upon her husband for emotional support. Their

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“Bowie nerds will love it, and music nerds will admire it; regular nerds and most others will think it’s about 150 pages too long.” from david bowie

married life was built upon their devotion to their children—she scaled down her career, and they both worked from home—but as a couple they drew further apart. Thomas chronicles how, despite her critical view of consumer culture, they became enmeshed in home ownership and what she describes as nest-building. Major events such as 9/11 are only touched on as they impinge on her family and providing a secure environment for children.

The author sheds light on an unresolved, multigenerational crisis in American family life, typified by the divorce rates.

THE WARS OF AFGHANISTAN Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers Tomsen, Peter PublicAffairs (896 pp.) $40.00 | July 12, 2011 978-1-58648-763-8

Former special presidential envoy to Afghanistan takes the long view of the political failures in that country and suggests a more hands-off U.S. approach, especially in checking neighboring bully, Pakistan.

After a distinguished career in foreign service, Tomsen served as President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, during a time of building an Afghan consensus following the Soviet withdrawal. Here, the author fashions an ambitious, wide-ranging, informed historical overview as well as a detailed record of his work, and the American failures since. Afghanistan has geographically operated as a “buffer” state between powerful, marauding empires, such as those by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, Mughals and Persians, creating what Tomsen calls a “shatter zone,” isolating the nomadic tribes from global currents. Later, the British empire used the country for criss-crossing rather than colonizing, and Afghanistan remained factiously independent and resistant to repeated imperialist onslaughts. The author examines the Afghan tribal and religious makeup, especially the friction between Pashtunwali (“the way of the Pashtun,” the dominant tribal group) and Sharia law, factors that have been misunderstood by foreign governments to their own peril. Tomsen jumps to the disastrous invasion by the Soviet Union in 1978, coinciding with the rise of a radical Wahhabi ideology in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan became the refuge of the Mujahidin, the “freedom fighters” largely supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia—and therein lay the problem, the author astutely asserts. The U.S. aid package to Pakistan’s General Zia starting with the “Reagan Doctrine” of 1980 essentially funded an “unholy alliance” of Islamist extremists such as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban--all who have come back to haunt America in the wake of 9/11. Tomsen warns of the current dangers in continuing to “outsource” American Afghan policy to Pakistan, and instead sets forth a detailed, cogent plan involving tougher conditions to bolster a more autonomous Afghanistan.

Wise words from trial-and-error experience in the trenches. (Black-and-white photo insert) |

DAVID BOWIE Starman

Trynka, Paul Little, Brown (544 pp.) $25.99 | July 18, 2011 978-0-316-03225-4 Everything you always wanted to know about the Thin White Duke. Everything.

Musically speaking, David Bowie never quite reached the critical or popular heights of fellow UK rockers the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin—granted, that was due in part to poor timing, as he came onto the scene at the tail end of the British Invasion. Yet despite his inconsistent catalog, he’s managed to remain in the public consciousness for more than 40 years, which explains why he’s proven to be a fascinating subject for long biographies. In 2009, Marc Spitz delivered the doorstopper Bowie: A Biography, and Nicholas Pegg is set to release The Complete David Bowie in late 2011.

So does Ziggy Stardust merit all this coverage? Former Mojo editor Trynka offers an emphatic yes. The author gave Bowie’s contemporary Iggy Pop the same treatment with Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (2008), an insanely in-depth, honest and readable biography. Here, Trynka once again covers it all—the music, the movies, the marriages, the shifting personae, the drugs, the drugs and the drugs—in a breezy, chatty style that often reads as a novel. The author remains objective about Bowie’s music, most notably during his lengthy discussion about how much of a hand his sidemen played in the development and recording of his records, and the fact that Trynka isn’t sycophantic about David’s undeniably hit-and-miss discography helps legitimize the project. But despite its numerous positive attributes, the book is exhaustive to a fault. By the time most readers are threequarters of the way through, they’ll probably want to listen to “Space Oddity” and “Heroes,” then call it a day.

Bowie nerds will love it, and music nerds will admire it; regular nerds and most others will think it’s about 150 pages too long. (8 pages of black-and-white photographs)

ADVENTURES IN THE ORGASMATRON How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

Turner, Christopher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (528 pp.) $35.00 | June 14, 2011 978-0-374-10094-0

Exhaustive biography of Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), the renegade Freudian who championed the therapeutic powers of the orgasm and, for better or worse, helped transform America’s views on sexuality.

At the age of 22, Reich became a member of Freud’s inner circle, and was clearly the leader of the second generation of

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psychoanalysts. Yet his insistence that sexual repression was the key to all neuroses soon alienated him from Freud and his more orthodox followers. This alienation accelerated when Reich joined the Communist Party and laid out the theory that sexual repression was at the root of social disorder as well. None of this sat well with either Marxists or Freudians, and with the intentions of the Nazis clear, Reich left Europe for the United States in 1939. In America, Reich found a more receptive audience for his unorthodox views, especially among the artistic and political avant-garde of the early post–World War II years, who were alienated from Marxism but hardly aligned with the status quo. Of particular interest was Reich’s invention, the orgone energy accumulator, basically a wooden box lined with steel wool. The box gathered and concentrated a mysterious and sexually charged life force, orgone, and by sitting in the box one could improve his or her orgasm, general health, even be cured of cancer. Notables such as Norman Mailer championed Reich, and among his followers were William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Sean Connery. However, Reich’s behavior became increasingly erratic. Turner writes that he was clearly schizophrenic, seeing enemies everywhere including aliens from outer space.

Imprisoned for violating an FDA injunction on building or using the orgone box, Reich died in 1957. Yet in death his influence grew, in ways he would have abhorred. He championed sexual liberation, not the promiscuous narcissism that flourished in the 1960s. As Reich had intimated and Marcuse and Foucault confirmed, sexual freedom can become a commodity and blunt radical impulses toward social change.

Fair, accessible story of a strange man and strange times. (8 pages of black-and-white illustrations)

THE TRIPLE AGENT The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA

Warrick, Joby Doubleday (304 pp.) $27.95 | July 19, 2011 978-0-385-53418-5

The story of how the Central Intelligence Agency continued its record of failure in the so-called war on terrorism, with fatal consequences.

In his debut, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post intelligence reporter Warrick focuses on Dec. 30, 2009, when CIA officials, U.S. military personnel and Pakistani and Afghani operatives gathered at a well-protected base in Khost, Afghanistan, to meet a Jordanian pediatrician who had seemingly become a valued spy for the Americans inside Muslim terrorist networks. But as the book’s title suggests, Humam Khalil alBalawi, despite supposedly careful vetting by CIA and Pakistani experts, was actually on the side of the anti-American warriors willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill Westerners. Once inside the base, Balawi ignited a bomb strapped to his chest, killing seven CIA personnel. Although the classified-information obstacles and polished lies of master spies make accurate 854

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reporting on such embarrassing fatalities extremely difficult, Warrick demonstrates the initiative that has marked his newspaper career to share details that are mostly attributed and seem credible. An able storyteller, Warrick provides enough background on each key character to make them come alive.

With so much focus on Osama bin Laden since 9/11—especially the failures of presidents Bush and Obama to fulfill their vows that he will be captured—it is easy for readers to forget that many other faith-based operatives from al-Qaeda and related organizations know how to lure American personnel into death traps. Warrick demonstrates the skills of those operatives while quietly exposing the lack of wisdom continually demonstrated

by American government and military officials.

An alarming narrative, especially so because of its understated, never-shrill tone. (Agent: Gail Ross)

WILDLY AFFORDABLE ORGANIC Eat Fabulous Food, Get Healthy, and Save the Planet All on $5 a Day or Less

Watson, Linda Da Capo Lifelong/Perseus (272 pp.) $17.00 paperback original | May 31, 2011 978-0-7382-1468-9 Organic chef Watson extols the virtues of living healthfully by combining natural ingredients and thrifty meal planning.

“Eating green doesn’t have to mean eating up all your money,” writes the author. Watson and husband Bruce (both “flexitarians” who eat meat socially) took part in a fascinating experiment during which spending $1 per meal for an entire summer forced them to radically rework weekly menus, intricately budget food purchases and cook from scratch. The first half of the book shares the fruits of that trial period: a “scrimp or splurge” chart listing moneysaving alternatives for common kitchen staples, indispensable tips on shopping smarter (watch for sales to get national brands at store-brand prices, scan the Hispanic aisle for equivalents), and the benefits of fresh-freezing, farmers’ markets buying in bulk and composting. Some suggestions are a stretch, like using food scales and buying smaller plates to reduce overeating. Watson’s 7-day, 20-minute cooking plans fall right in step with her smart planning, cooking and shopping strategies. The author organizes menus organized by season: Southern Summer Pesto on high-protein pasta and green beans with Blueberry Pie yields to Harvest Lasagna and Baked Pears with Cinnamon Yogurt Sauce in autumn. The second half of the book, which is disappointingly devoid of photographs, features breakfast offerings like low-salt Better Blueberry Pancakes, Magic Quiche with Asparagus and homemade “Whisk” breads and tortillas. Dinner recipes are curiously sparse, but those seeking a more healthful approach to cooking will appreciate Watson’s family, community and planet-friendly organic lifestyle.

A unique addition to the genre, this sustainable take on everyday meal planning is both practical and contemporary.

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AMERICAN TO THE BACKBONE The Life of W.C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists

Webber, Christopher L. Pegasus (480 pp.) $29.95 | July 12, 2011 978-1-60598-175-8

A richly detailed, wide-ranging biography of a modestly neglected black religious leader who was born a slave.

After discovering W.C. Pennington’s 1849 autobiography, minister and prolific author Webber (editor: An American Prayer Book, 2008, etc.) delved into the archives to learn about this pre–Civil War preacher, educator and abolitionist. Pennington fled north at the age of 19. Illiterate and so ignorant he had never heard of the Underground Railroad, he encountered it after reaching the North.

Sympathetic members provided shelter and introduced him to both education and Christianity, which he embraced enthusiastically. Within five years, he was teaching, preaching and participating in the earliest national black-activist organizations. Despite his energy, Pennington lacked the quirks and charisma of contemporaries such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

Fortunately, he lived in interesting times, so readers will encounter the familiar, turbulent, but ultimately successful fight for abolition along with the discouraging, far less successful struggle for black civil rights in the North. By 1860, only six northern states permitted blacks to vote; none could serve on juries. Pennington was regularly refused service in restaurants, forced to ride baggage cars on trains, refused admittance or thrown off trams and directed to the “colored section” when attending white churches—even those whose ministers supported abolition. His protests mostly involved speeches, sermons and essays, which readers may prefer to skim; efforts at legal or political action failed as often as they succeeded.

Webber’s decision to cast his net widely has produced an important biography as well as insight into the pre–Civil War free-black subculture. (8 pages of black-and-white photographs)

THE LONG NIGHT William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Wick, Steve Palgrave Macmillan (288 pp.) $27.00 | August 2, 2011 978-0-230-62318-7

In a trenchant discussion of journalism, biography and ethics, Newsday senior editor Wick (Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder, 1990, etc.) examines the life of William Shirer (1904–1993), American war correspondent and author of the landmark book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). |

The author is very much attuned to the conflicts and difficulties of a journalist like Shirer working in a police state. Wick asks what more he might have done, and discusses Shirer’s concerns about getting stories published in New York, where he thought “no one…paid much attention.” Shirer’s knowledge only part of the story. He endured both the German government’s lies and the corporate concerns of CBS, and he had to act on this partial and contradictory knowledge, not the fuller truth now available. He also had to protect his sources. His transmissions were monitored by Nazi spies in the United States who reported back with recommendations for action against him.

It was a major undertaking for him to get his diaries and personal papers out of Hitler’s Germany when he left in 1940. The papers eventually provided the necessary documentation for the influential books he later wrote about Hitler’s rise to power and the Third Reich. As one of the first broadcast journalists, Shirer was breaking new ground with his nightly transmissions.

Unfortunately, we will never know his full story because he protected his sources and burned sensitive papers before he left.

A gripping account of a courageous journalist’s efforts to alert the world to Hitler’s plan, and an engaging discussion of the relationship between journalism and personal integrity, which is as relevant today as it was then. (Agent: Michael Carlisle/Inkwell Management)

THE MIRAGE MAN Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America’s Rush to War

Willman, David Bantam (464 pp.) $27.00 | July 12, 2011 978-0-553-80775-2 e-book 978-0-345-53021-9

An investigative journalist provides an in-depth exploration of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, finding that quite a few people did not acquit themselves well.

In his first book, Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times reporter Willman painstakingly recounts the mysterious mailings of anthrax spores to various media and political figures in the weeks after 9/11. When news of the attacks came to light, they seemed to represent a piece of a larger plot by still-undefined enemies. Willman focuses on Bruce Ivins, an obscure scientist working on developing anthrax vaccines in a military lab in Maryland. On the surface, Ivins appeared to be quirky and socially awkward. But there were disturbing currents running beneath the surface—he suffered from mental-health issues and had longstanding obsessions with institutions such as a national college sorority, whose members he stalked and harassed. Much of the narrative reads like a brief for the prosecution, but in the process of trying to get to the bottom of the anthrax attacks, Willman makes clear that many involved in the investigation acted incompetently, maliciously or irresponsibly, including cocksure but ignorant members of the national

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“On his journey, the author ‘discovered far more’ about the Earth, not only from space, but also in the time and effort spent vindicating himself from what appears to have been an unfair scapegoating.” from falling to earth

media and FBI officials, who seem to have settled on the guilt of another obscure scientist, thus doing harm to the investigation by limiting its purview. Willman also examines another consequence of the anthrax attacks: They helped clear the way for the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Though less successful in this argument, the author offers finely drawn sketches of the individuals and forensics involved in a case that vexed investigators, politicians and the general public.

A well-told true-crime story with vast ramifications.

(Author tour to New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles. 8-page black-and-white photo insert. Agent: David Halpern)

FALLING TO EARTH An Apollo 15 Astronaut’s Journey to the Moon Worden, Al; French, Francis Smithsonian Books (304 pp.) $29.95 | July 12, 2011 978-1-58834-309-3

With the assistance of space historian French (co-author: In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969, 2007, etc.), astronaut Worden, commander of the Apollo 15 module, writes that “it is time to…set the record straight” about the scandal that ended his career in space flight.

The author flew under Capt. Dave Scott with Jim Irwin on the successful 1971 NASA trip to the Moon. When they returned to Earth, the crew found themselves in the midst of a scandal, accused of being paid to take souvenir items into space. Although they denied this, they were grounded from then on. By the summer of 1972, the U.S. Senate was involved, and Congresswoman Leonor Sullivan wanted to know “what’s going on at NASA.” They were never charged with violating law or NASA regulations, but it took years for the three flyers to get their good names back. Worden, now in his 80s, has a record that speaks for itself. He is one of “only 24 humans” who have left Earth’s orbit and gone to the Moon. The author describes how astronauts need courage and skill to fly on the Apollo missions and how they had to be prepared to deal with the unexpected: “We focused on the events that could kill us and prepared for them.” Apollo 15, with its on-board instruments and cameras, brought back a treasure trove of data, but they faced many potentially dangerous situations including fragments of broken glass in the weightless environment of the landing module. Worden now helps the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation fund the training of future flyers.

On his journey, the author “discovered far more” about the Earth, not only from space, but also in the time and effort spent vindicating himself from what appears to have been an unfair scapegoating. (31 black-and-white photos)

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WHO ARE WE And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?

Younge, Gary Nation Books/Perseus (256 pp.) $26.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-56858-660-1

Guardian columnist Younge (Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States, 2006, etc.) explores how “our various identities [can] be mobilized to accentuate our universal humanity as opposed to separating us off into various, antagonistic camps.

The author finds prejudice and oppression still alive and well throughout the world—and he should know. He has been there and lived through it in Britain, France, South Africa, Rwanda and elsewhere. Younge provides many examples of people dealing with the slippery nature of identity, including such well-known figures as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Tiger Woods. The author also looks at lesser-known examples, like Joseph Fackenheim, the son of a Holocaust survivor whose conversion to Judaism was annulled by the Israeli Rabbinate; Salma Yaqoob, a councilor in Birmingham, England, who has been threatened with death by her fellow Muslims; and former South African leader F.W. de Klerk, “who tried to make apartheid sound a bit like an abortive attempt to create an early version of the European Union in Africa.” There is a thread of hard work and courage in the pursuit of excellence that unites the many people the author profiles, and these praiseworthy qualities seem as deeply interwoven in the notion of identity as the limited horizons and prejudice they oppose.

As Younge discusses situations in which members of an elite group seek to maintain their privileged position, as well as the often sharp division between political masters and underdogs, his optimism shines through. With determination, he writes, people can mobilize and things can change. Hitler was defeated.

The Soviet system collapsed. Apartheid was overthrown. In the author’s view, identity politics are not written in stone.

Younge combines an engaging prose style with close reasoning and solid documentation. (Events in New York and Washington, D.C.)

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children & teens FROM BAD TO CURSED

Alender, Katie Hyperion (448 pp.) $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-1-4231-3471-8

A group of social-climbing highschool girls makes a deal with a demon in this sassy, easily digestible horror story.

After saving her little sister Kasey from demonic possession in Bad Girls Don’t Die (2009), pink-haired, confident Alexis hopes her time battling fiends is over. When Kasey starts high school, however, she falls in with the Sunshine Club, a group of girls who turn out to be involved with the demon Aralt, and Alexis, hoping to protect her sister, joins the club herself.

Although it takes some time for Alexis to realize she has become possessed, her condition is no secret from readers. The author effectively blends Alexis’ take-charge, nonconformist personality with Aralt’s aggressively sunny, obsessively image-conscious influence. Life becomes easier with Aralt’s help: Alexis heals quickly from injuries, manipulates her suspicious boyfriend and attracts the attention of well-placed adults, some of them also Aralt’s devotees. The tension comes from watching Alexis’ demon-fighting resolve weaken and uncovering clues about the true cost of Aralt’s seeming benevolence. A few nasty fat jokes undercut the novel’s ostensible stance against looks-related bullying, and using a girl who walks with a cane to represent the most desperate of losers is tasteless and unnecessary.

Otherwise, a smooth and not-too-scary page-turner, with room in its conclusion for a third installment. (Supernatural thriller. 12 & up)

THE BONES OF THE HOLY

Allison, Jennifer Dutton (304 pp.) $16.99 | June 9, 2011 978-0-525-42212-9 Series: Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator, 5 In this fifth Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator installment, amateur sleuth Gilda travels to historic St. Augustine to encounter a ghostly woman in white and ends up literally buried in another baffling mystery.

Horrified when her mother returns from a getaway weekend in St. Augustine engaged to an antiques dealer named Eugene Pook, whom she met on the Internet and plans to |

marry immediately, Gilda experiences her “psychic signal,” a tickling in her left ear, warning something unusual or dangerous is about to occur. Arriving in St. Augustine for the wedding, Gilda finds Eugene to be “older, plump, walruslike” and definitely weird. She loves the ghost tour of St. Augustine, “one of the most haunted cities in the entire United States,” but is surprised when Eugene’s 12-year-old neighbor confesses she’s seen a spectral woman in white in his house. Gilda discovers Eugene had been jilted years before by his fiancée, Charlotte, who looked just like Gilda’s mother and mysteriously vanished.

Now Eugene seems to be re-creating his aborted wedding.

Could the woman in white be Charlotte’s ghost? Local ghost tales, Gilda’s spy records, letters and travelogue flesh out the account of how this sassy wannabe investigator tries to save her mother from Charlotte’s fate.

Gilda fans will rally to her latest caper, while newcomers should revel in her ghostly escapades in old St. Augustine. (Mystery. 10-14)

FAIRY BAD DAY

Ashby, Amanda Speak/Penguin (352 pp.) $7.99 paperback original | June 9, 2011 978-0-14-241259-6 Teens with a taste for the paranormal school story and a tolerance for raucous humor will be involved with and amused by this romantic fantasy.

Set in the same world as Ashby’s first book, The Zombie Queen of Newbury High (2009), this companion deals with the students of Burtonwood, a school where the pupils aid the Department of Paranormal Affairs by killing demons, dragons and other monsters. Emma, a sophomore ready to receive her assignment, is stunned and furious when she is assigned to miniature, dress-mad, malicious fairies instead of the dragons she expected to slay. Emma sulks and fumes until affairs become too dangerous to credibly insist that she doesn’t need help. Then the story gains momentum, and the plot really clicks on. The exciting plot, humor throughout—often provided by the little fairies—and relatively innocent romance between characters will grab readers and keep them involved despite the initially weak worldbuilding. Kids who enjoyed Douglas Rees’ Vampire High books will find the same qualities in this punnily titled outing.

Give this lighthearted and lightly satirical book to younger teens and those preteens who won’t be put off by the length. (Paranormal adventure. 12 & up)

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“...humor, illustrations, wordplay and story are strong enough that casual readers will pick this up, chuckle and even (gasp!) learn.” from zoola palooza

STARSTRUCK

Barretta’s watercolors do a stellar job of incorporating all of the homographs presented on each spread (helpfully presented in all uppercase within the text), no matter how far-out and unrelated they may seem.

While teachers are sure to reach for this entertaining resource again and again, the humor, illustrations, wordplay and story are strong enough that casual readers will pick this up, chuckle and even (gasp!) learn. (Picture book. 5-10)

Balog, Cyn Delacorte (256 pp.) $15.99 | PLB: $18.99 e-book: $15.99 | July 12, 2011 978-0-385-73850-7 PLB 978-0-385-90734-7 e-book 978-0-375-89494-7 It takes dark magic to make attractive people love fat girls.

Gwendolyn (“Dough”) is fat —and lest readers think she might have other characteristics, Gwen speaks of nothing else. Her “cheeks look like two fat red balloons” or “two giant pimples on the verge of popping.” For four years, Gwen’s been carrying on an e-mail relationship with her childhood best friend, Wish, who moved to California at 12.

Now Wish—whose Facebook photos all depict a tanned surfer god— is returning home, horrifying Gwen. Yet inexplicably, the boy who’s been her BFF since first grade still likes her, despite being rich, popular and attractive! There must be something creepy afoot, and indeed there is. Through defeating the devastating magic that would destroy her home, Gwen learns to love her body (more or less), but not before regaling readers with overwhelming self-loathing: “I cringe as I force away the mental image of him ... Touching the folds of flesh that weren’t there all those years ago.” Final messages about inner beauty are drowned in waves of fat hate and eating-as-disorder.

Skip this one, and try Charles Butler’s The Fetch of Mardy Watt (2004) instead, a far superior fantasy about a self-loathing fat heroine and her male best friend. Readers who are looking for high-school pettiness should go for Nico Medina’s Fat Hoochie Prom Queen (2008). (Paranormal romance. 12-16)

ZOOLA PALOOZA A Book of Homographs

Barretta, Gene Illustrator: Barretta, Gene Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (40 pp.) $16.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-8050-9107-6

GHOST HANDS

Barron, T.A. Illustrator: Low, William Philomel (40 pp.) $18.99 | July 1, 2011 978-0-399-25083-5 The ubiquity of the handprint in cave art around the world, and Patagonia in particular, begs unresolved questions about the image’s meaning; Barron’s invented back story posits that healers, warriors and others who contributed to the common good may have been thus memorialized.

Adding to the intrigue in Argentina’s Cueva de las Manos is the appearance of a footprint. Combining suspense with coincidence to imagine what prompted this singularity, Barron offers this tale narrated by a son of the Tehuelche tribe.

When Auki begs to go hunting, his father admonishes him to wait: “To hunt you must be strong. And brave—brave enough to face the puma. For the puma, too, is a hunter….” The child sets out alone. Digitally rendered compositions teem with texture and depth. Light and shadow crisscross the cliffs, and loose strokes animate the players. In a dramatic doublepage spread, the beast appears, fangs bared, facing the reader and the boy. While fleeing, the protagonist wounds his foot, stumbling upon the secret cave “visited only by elders…and… ghosts.” A climactic scene pitting the savage animal against the aged cave painter portrays Auki’s foot as a weapon—one worthy of record.

As in Barron and Low’s previous collaboration, The Day the Stones Walked (2007), tightly connected visuals and text provoke curiosity and awe about a phenomenon at once mysterious and accessible. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)

A topic only rarely addressed gets whimsical treatment in this latest from wordplay master Barretta.

Homographs, a frequent source of confusion for readers, are words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently.

Barretta helps children sort them out in this trip to an animal rock concert. Billy the striped bass plays the bass fiddle, while Florence Welk plays a polka on a polka-dot accordion. Puns and wordplay abound, and there is something for young and old alike—from the potty humor of the Seagull Sisters’ “present” to the exhausted Catnip Clan drummer: “Usually that cat lives to REBEL. / But today he was just / a REBEL without his claws.”

From outstanding performances to lip-sync scandals, stage crew mishaps to faithful groupies, the fun doesn’t stop at the text.

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THE MISTAKEN MASTERPIECE

Beil, Michael D. Illustrator: Baxter, Daniel Knopf (320 pp.) $16.99 | PLB: $19.99 e-book: $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-375-86740-8 PLB 978-0-375-96740-5 e-book 978-0-375-89789-4 Series: The Red Blazer Girls

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Fresh from solving The Vanishing Violin (2010) mystery, seventh-grade amateur sleuths and best friends Sophie, Margaret, Rebecca and Leigh Ann of St. Veronica’s all-girl’s school in Manhattan tackle two new cases.

This third installment opens with Sophie receiving a broken nose after “accidentally” colliding with arch-rival Livvy at swim practice. When Sophie’s dad arranges for the Red Blazer girls to spend a day with teen idol Nate Etan on his movie set, Sophie agrees to be his dog sitter. The pace accelerates after Father Julian enlists the Red Blazer Girls Detective Agency to tackle two cases. The first involves determining which of two seemingly identical baseballs autographed by the New York Yankees 1928 starting line-up is real. Surprisingly, Nate’s dog helps unravel this one. The second case concerns a painting that could be valuable if the girls can prove it was painted before 1961. As Sophie balances dog-sitting, school, performing in The Blazers band, swim team, worrying about boyfriend Raf and troubling encounters with Livvy, she and her pals piece together the increasingly complex painting puzzle in a frenzied finale.

As usual, Sophie narrates with humor and self-effacing aplomb.

Visual evidence inserted in the text invites reader participation.

While this caper proves less brain-teasing and exciting than its predecessors, the four (soon to be five?) Red Blazer gals still rock. (Mystery. 10-14)

SIRENZ

Bennardo, Charlotte Zaman, Natalie Flux (264 pp.) $9.95 | June 8, 2011 978-0-7387-2319-8 If two mismatched roommates fighting over a pair of high-fashion pumps accidentally push a gorgeous guy to his dismembering death but aren’t anywhere near Mt. Olympus, do ye gods still see it?

Unfortunately for Meg and Shar, the goth girl and the perfect princess respectively, not only do the gods see them unintentionally cause the demise of a young man, the girls are coerced into acting as temporary Sirens for Hades in order to help him collect on the expired contract of an elusive celebrity and thus clear their own tarnished record. Though Hades, Demeter, Persephone and Hera all play a part in potentially conjuring a secondary interest in Greek mythology for readers, far more label than deity names are dropped as the girls traipse from Underworld to fashion world in their mission. Less of a redeeming tale of teamwork against all odds and more of a frothy comedy glazed with oversexed, overdressed gods and goddesses, there still lies the message that friendship can emerge under even the most unlikely circumstances—but only if the dowdy one realizes she can be pretty and the pretty one realizes she can be compassionate by making over said dowdy one.

A garish indulgence for young chick-lit devotees. (Paranormal chick lit. 12-15)

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MAX ARCHER KID DETECTIVE: THE CASE OF THE WET BED

Bennett, Howard J. Illustrator: Gerrell, Spike American Psychological Association/ Magination (48 pp.) $14.95 | May 15, 2011 978-1-4338-0953-8 Max is a detective who likes to “help kids with their problems”—this case takes on bedwetting.

Max relates to Billy’s issue of often waking up in a wet bed; he did not outgrow bedwetting until he “was eleven years old!”

The fictional story allows Max to carefully take Billy and readers through this easy-to-read informational book about how to stay dry at night. Bennett strikes the right balance between story and self-help to provide a title whose tone and careful explanations both parents and kids will appreciate. The book puts the problem in context: “five million kids in the United States…go to bed…not knowing if they will wake up wet or dry.”

What follows is a clear plan ably complemented by Gerrell’s superb cartoon illustrations of Max and Billy on the case as they investigate the digestive system, how a bladder works and ways to better signal the brain to get up and go. At the back of the book there is extra information about pooping and its impact on bedwetting, a word search about proper foods to eat and a “Q&A About Bedwetting (Just for Parents!)”

Even if there were not an alarming dearth of titles on this subject aimed at kids, this would stand out as a most thorough, highly readable resource. (Blended nonfiction. 6-10)

POSSUM SUMMER

Blom, Jen K. Illustrator: Rayyan, Omar Holiday House (160 pp.) $17.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-8234-2331-6 Eleven-year-old Princess desperately wants a pet, but her father says animals on a farm must earn their keep.

With her dad away in Iraq, her mother busy with work and her older half-sister Monica busy being 16, “P” (which she prefers over Princess) tries to make the cow-herding dog Blackie a pet, but he won’t listen to her. When Blackie kills a possum, P finds it was a mother and adopts the surviving baby despite her father’s rule. With the help of her best friend Mart, P keeps “Ike” a secret from teachers and family while trying to teach him to be a wild possum (since her wounded father will be home soon).

With rabies running rampant in the Oklahoma countryside and catastrophes coming fast and furious, can P do right by her charge and keep the farm ready for her father’s return? Blom’s debut is a run-of-the-mill wild-animal–as-pet tale, though the

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deployed-father element makes it plenty relevant today. There’s a slight disconnect between the vocabulary used to relate this folksy story and the first-person narrator’s difficulties in school and with letter writing, but P is a feisty, honest country gal.

Readers with a hankering for a modern, Midwest animal tale could do worse. (Fiction. 8-11)

BIG BROTHERS DON’T TAKE NAPS

Borden, Louise Illustrator: Dodd, Emma McElderry (32 pp.) $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-1-4169-5503-0

Little brother Nicholas adores big brother James, who serves as a great role model in this story about a loving, and expanding, family.

Nicholas anticipates the day when he won’t have to take naps, and he sees lots of other positive things about growing up as he witnesses James go to school, read, type on Dad’s computer, etc. James is an ideal older sibling: protective, supportive, patient and kind. Together, they look forward to a “special secret” in June, which readers may well figure out before book’s end. The biggest clue comes with James and Nicholas hunched over a sheet of paper covered in girls’ names scrawled in childish handwriting. Nicholas reports, “…my big brother lets me draw the circle around the one we like best.” Closing endpapers reveal that their chosen name is Grace, where their new baby sister’s name is circled and serves as a satisfying conclusion to this sweet family story. Throughout, Dodd’s digital art employs bold line and vibrant color, rendering playful illustrations that match the text’s tone and recall Lauren Child’s and Ken WilsonMax’s illustration styles.

A fine addition to the extended family of new-baby books, with a welcome nod to the middle child. (Picture book. 3-5)

MISSING ON SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN

Broach, Elise Illustrator: Caparo, Antonio Javier Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (272 pp.) $15.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-8050-9047-5 This engrossing mystery pits three brothers recently transplanted from Chicago against the rocky caverns of Arizona’s Superstition Mountain.

Simon, 11, feisty 6-year-old Jack and narrator Henry, 10, quickly grow curious about the menacing mountain that adults pointedly warn them against climbing. Their first clandestine trek ensues as they chase their roving cat, Josie. The boys feel the mountain’s oppressive eeriness and encounter three skulls on a precarious ledge. After some research with library books 860

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and a historical-society pamphlet, the three secretly return to the mountain with Delilah, a smart fifth grader who’s also new to Superstition. Broach brings her customary skill to this first of a projected series, articulating the boys’ personalities, sketching out adults (Mrs. Barker, a medical illustrator, is the most interesting) and adding the evenhanded Delilah. A fall injures Delilah and brings adults to the rescue, but it also permits Henry’s discovery of a hidden canyon, an old pair of saddlebags and a strange map. Broach sympathetically explores Henry’s voice, allowing the third-person narration to filter his perceptions as a lonely middle child. He loves reading, relishes the big words he learns and worries about not living up to his namesake, the late, roguish Great Uncle Hank.

Broach reserves plenty of suspicious characters, spooky landscapes and loose ends for the slated sequels, which both boys and girls will savor. (author’s note) (Mystery. 8-12)

THE MYSTIC PHYLES Beasts

Brockway, Stephanie; Masiello, Ralph Illustrator: Masiello, Ralph Charlesbridge (144 pp.) $15.95 | e-book: $9.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-57091-718-9 e-book 978-1-60734-310-3 Sketchy infodumps and plotting leave fancy packaging to carry the load in this elaborately decorated journal.

Impelled by a request delivered by a cat, 13-year-old orphan Abigail compiles information on 15 probably mythical beasts, from mermaids and sea monsters to bunyips, barguests and Bigfoot. Meanwhile she also records incidents in a largely unhappy life—cloistered at home by a tyrannical grandfather and afflicted at her small-town school by bullies and cliques alike. Framed as a diary that fills every square inch including the endpapers, her narrative is presented on swatches of paper interspersed with a mix of dramatic full-page creature portraits, smaller images of old prints and supplementary drawings. These last are in a more informal style, and all are neatly applied over backgrounds pre-brushed with rich colors. Her “reports” run to only a few short comments or quotes (capped at the end by a stale booklist and a more helpful set of websites). Her personal miseries are abruptly resolved by a miraculous pendant and the revelation—quickly laid out at the end and reading more like a draft scenario—that the mythical creatures are real and there’s a struggle going on between those who would hide them and others who want them exposed.

Thin soup next to Monsterology (2008) and like bestiaries, but a draw for fans of coated paper and stamped covers.

(Fantasy. 10-12)

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“This engaging mystery has plenty of both paranormal and romance, spiced with loving families and satisfyingly packed with self-sufficient, competent girls.” from texas gothic

THE HOLE IN THE MIDDLE

Budnitz, Paul Illustrator: Kakeda, Aya Disney Hyperion (40 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1-4231-3761-0

This charming story about friendship, a debut effort for both author and illustrator, succeeds with a chatty tone and appealing cartoon-style illustrations.

Morgan is a boy with a hole in his midsection; you can see right through it, and it causes an empty feeling no matter what he’s doing or how much he eats. His best friend, Yumi, tries to help by making strawberry cake, taking his mind off it with play and suggesting he just forget about it, but nothing works until, in a reversal of roles, Yumi gets sick and needs his help. Alert readers will notice even before Morgan does that the hole in his tummy gets smaller and smaller the more he focuses on Yumi rather than himself. Morgan and Yumi’s caring friendship is warmly portrayed, and the fact that they help each other solve problems (there are no adults here) encourages young readers’ budding initiative and self-sufficiency. The colorful, cheerful spreads depict all sorts of amusements and feature whimsical details that add to the brief text; it’s fun to try to spot the robot toy and the doll with a flower-shaped face that accompany Morgan and Yumi, respectively, through their adventures.

Focusing on the needs of others is a time-honored solution for those dissatisfied with their own lot in life; here is a motivating parable for contemporary kids. (Picture book. 3-6)

TEXAS GOTHIC

Clement-Moore, Rosemary Delacorte (416 pp.) $17.99 | PLB: $20.99 e-book: $17.99 | July 12, 2011 978-0-385-73693-0 PLB 978-0-385-90636-4 e-book 978-0-375-89810-5 A pragmatic heroine must confront her magical side to save the day, find the ghost, win the boy and corral the goats.

You can’t get much more Nancy Drew than intrepid Texan heroines uncovering a mystery involving ranchers, Spanish ghosts, vandalized archaeological digs and lumps of gold. The summer after high school, Amy Goodnight is taking care of Aunt Hyacinth’s herb farm. Unlike the rest of the Goodnights—witches or psychics all—Amy intends to succeed in the mundane world.

She protects her family of eccentrics, making sure that outsiders see Amy’s sister Phin as a whiz with physics and chemistry, rather than a genius with the potions and spells of preternatural science.

Meanwhile, Amy spars with cranky young rancher Ben, whose land entirely surrounds Aunt Hyacinth’s tiny farm. Amy first meets Ben while she’s chasing escaped goats and wearing nothing but cherry-spotted undies and rubber boots: an introduction |

worthy of the best contemporary adult romance. Before their heated arguments can turn to something more, Amy and Ben had better solve the mystery of The Mad Monk of McCulloch Ranch, who’s been conking people over the head. As if that weren’t complicated enough, Amy does see a ghost; is he the Mad Monk?

This engaging mystery has plenty of both paranormal and romance, spiced with loving families and satisfyingly packed with self-sufficient, competent girls. (Paranormal mystery. 12-15)

WHAT WE KEEP IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT WILL STAY

Cockrell, Amanda Flux (264 pp.) $9.95 | June 8, 2011 978-0-7387-2615-1

Tenth-grader Angie discovers that the world is a vastly complicated place.

First, the statue of St. Felix in the church basement she’s been in the habit of confiding in seems to come to life. Her parents are at odds over her scriptwriter father’s decision to use one of her mother’s painful memories in his current project. And an Afghan War vet returns to her high school to get his diploma at age 19, minus a foot—or, maybe, that’s plus a mechanical limb. Ex-soldier Jesse seems lost and friendless, which appeals to Angie and her best friend Lily’s impulse to do good. Not fully aware of the impact his wartime experiences might have on him, Angie gradually finds herself in an uncomfortable relationship with this older boy. While the adults in her life urge caution, Angie is certain that Jesse is suffering from a disease, albeit a psychological one.

She has to decide what she can and cannot do to help him. Also needing help is Felix, possibly a saint or maybe homeless. While the story is written with a light hand—particularly humorous scenes around a Las Posadas parade and a certain boy who is interested in what’s under her shirt—the plot takes an unexpectedly serious turn that readers may not be prepared for.

This entertaining, if slightly unfocused comic tragedy exploring moral obligation, innocence and guilt falls victim to a copout ending. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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SPOILED

Cocks, Heather; Morgan, Jessica Poppy/Little, Brown (368 pp.) $17.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-316-09825-0 Brooke Berlin—accomplished power shopper, prima-donna–in-training and daughter of film megastar Brick Berlin— thought she was an only child. Now she’s appalled to discover that she has a half sister, Molly. |

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“The jazzed-up animals are shaped with textured cut-out pieces that form the assemblage, which pops against the black-and-purple striped backgrounds.” from farmyard beat

Worse, her father’s not only invited Molly to move in, he intends to introduce her to the world at Brooke’s Sweet 16 party.

Arriving from Indiana, shell-shocked by her mother’s recent death, Molly makes an easy victim. Brooke, nursing her own mom issues, gets Molly drunk at the party and makes sure the tabloids notice. So does Brick, whose past films include Tequila Mockingbird and It Takes a Pillage (a Leif Ericson biopic)—he may be self-involved, but he’s still a parent. Brick decrees the girls share a room and attend school together. There Brooke sabotages Molly; Teddy and Max befriend her; and Shelby, Brooke’s nemesis, uses her. Finally, Molly fights back. Followers of the authors’ take-no-prisoners, celebrity-fashion blog will expect the satire. What surprises are moments of emotional depth— Brooke and Molly especially are rounded individuals—in this obsessively readable, smartly subversive take on lifestyles of the rich and narcissistic and their many enablers, from top stars to trashy-tabloid bottom feeders.

Names aren’t so much dropped as smashed; for maximum enjoyment, less-invested readers may require a “who’s who” of trashy celebrities. (Fiction. 13 & up)

LITTLE PIG JOINS THE BAND

Costello, David Hyde Illustrator: Costello, David Hyde Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $14.95 | e-book: $9.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-58089-264-3 e-book 978-1-60734-307-3

Costello’s winsome tale explores the travails of being the youngest and the littlest.

When Little Pig, a.k.a. Jacob, and his brothers and sisters visit their grandpa, they break out his old marching-band instruments. Little Pig, to his dismay, discovers he’s just too little to play the drum or trumpet, let alone the trombone or tuba. When his siblings can’t get their playing or marching act together—hey presto!—a drum major is born, small of stature but packing a big whistle. Much of the book’s amiability derives from the artwork, sure-handed watercolors that are active but not busy, with (most of) the pigs having a merry old time trooping about, tooting and pounding away, collapsing in a heap. Yet the words add a considerable measure to the pleasure. Costello has built a story under the arching narrative, a body of asides that add color commentary: “Do we have any piccolos?” asks Little Pig. “There’s a jar in the fridge, behind the olives,” replies his distracted sister.

“A kazoo?” “Gesundheit.” And when Little Pig does succeed— wielding his baton, he is now Jacob in his siblings’ eyes—he takes it with humility: “You can call me Little Pig.” Humor lifts the story from a simple tale of woe to transcendence. (Picture book. 4-7)

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FARMYARD BEAT

Craig, Lindsey Illustrator: Brown, Marc Knopf (32 pp) $15.99 | PLB: $16.89 | June 14, 2011 978-0-375-86455-1 PLB 978-0-375-96455-8 When the sun goes down, the farmyard animals are supposed to go to sleep. But wait: “Chicks can’t sleep. Chicks can’t sleep. / Chicks can’t sleep / ’cause they got the beat!”

The sheep, cat, cow and dog can’t sleep either because they’ve got the beat, too. Here comes Farmer Sue, and she can’t sleep either, so everyone dances to the beat, “T-I-L-L… / … they fall in a heap! / Asleep!” The collage art (hand-painted on corrugated-looking and other found papers) is similar to the duo’s Dancing Feet! (2010) and a total departure from Brown’s style in his Arthur books. The jazzed-up animals are shaped with textured cut-out pieces that form the assemblage, which pops against the black-and-purple striped backgrounds. Colors are largely those found in nature, though judicious use of pinks on noses, tongues and the insides of ears keep the figures from looking anything but dull; they definitely have child appeal. The story ends with the rooster (a spectacle in blue, lavender and crimson) crowing, “Cock-a-doodle-doo! / I’ve got the beat!”

It won’t take but one or two readings before kids join right in with the syncopated fun. (Picture book. 3-6)

WOLFSBANE

Cremer, Andrea Philomel (400 pp.) $17.99 | July 1, 2011 978-0-399-25483-3 Series: Nightshade, 2 This second installment in the wellreceived Nightshade series puts 17-yearold alpha girl-wolf Calla into an alignment with her erstwhile mortal enemies, the Seekers, in an effort to save her pack and

eventually the world.

This book picks up where the first ended, requiring familiarity with the earlier story and offering little explanation to new readers. Calla loves Shay, whom she rescued and transformed into a man-wolf in the first book. Yet she can’t abandon her fierce attraction to Ren, her intended mate, left behind in Vail, Colo., to suffer torture at the hands of the Keepers, the powerful beings who control the wolves. Worse, Calla realizes that the Keepers will destroy her wolf pack if she doesn’t save them with the Seekers’ help. With alliances decided and exposition of Calla’s new circumstances completed, Calla and the Seekers journey magically back to Vail to attempt a rescue of Ren and her pack. Cremer focuses this installment on plenty of action as the raid runs into trouble, referring only occasionally to her earlier theme of freedom. That battle does the job, however, along with the occasional hot-hot-hot sex scene, to

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keep readers hooked into the narrative. The series has plenty of oomph to continue beyond this story’s cliffhanger. Fans will be satisfied and eager for the next installment.

Creative and absorbing fantasy. (Paranormal adventure. 14 & up)

MINE!

Crum, Shutta Illustrator: Barton, Patrice Knopf (32 pp..) $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-375-86711-8 What toddler hasn’t experienced the frustration of trying to retrieve toys from a baby sibling or the family dog with a shouted “MINE!”?

Though the situation is quite familiar, it’s the whimsical illustrations that capture every comical nuance here. The text is virtually wordless—just one word, “Mine,” which is repeated in the first several spreads and is implied in following scenes.

Initially, this scene of play starts badly, with the toddler rounding up all the toys, uttering “mine” with each one. Baby flings toy bunny in the air, and it lands in the dog’s water dish. Dog shakes wet bunny, showering water everywhere. Toddler drops all the other toys in the dog’s water bowl, spraying water on the laughing kids and dog (who breaks the textual pattern with one “Woof?”). Body and facial expressions need no translating.

A string of blue dotted lines traces the movements of all the tossed and flying objects. The capricious artwork has touches of Helen Oxenbury and Marla Frazee’s babies, smudgy, digitized pencil sketches full of movement and joy. As a discussion piece to use with very young children, a basic lesson in emotional literacy or an exercise in reading the pictures, this not-as-simpleas-it-seems book excels.

This charming, animated episode will elicit giggles and demands of “read it again!” (Picture book. 2-5)

SAY WHAT?

DiTerlizzi, Angela Illustrator: Chou, Joey Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp) $15.99 | July 12, 2011 978-1-4169-8694-2

to his mother. Full-bleed, double-page, digitally rendered illustrations in slightly muted retro colors use a flattened perspective to show a variety of parent/child interactions. These offer some imaginative activities, such as identifying cloud shapes and making hay angels, and include a range of settings. Perceptive observers will notice humorous details: a baby lamb with a pacifier, a bird birthday party with a cat piñata, an old-fashioned stand telephone in a booth.

For preschoolers who enjoy language play, this opens up whole new opportunities for communication. (Picture book. 2-5)

SO, SO HOOD

Divine, L. Dafina/Kensington (224 pp.) $9.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-7582-3119-2 Series: Drama High, 14 In the 14th volume of Divine’s wildly popular Drama High series, newly initiated voodoo priestess Jayd Jackson begins her senior year.

Jayd is wearing white in honor of her marriage to her spiritual mother Oshune, but, as she observes in her introductory journal entry, her mind is as much on the mundane as on the divine. An incriminating cell phone picture suggests her boyfriend Jeremy is cheating, and Jayd avoids and fights with Jeremy and swaps choice words with “that broad.”

Her friends Mickey, Rah and Nigel, along with the two young children in their care, move in together (“I know it’s strange for some of my friends to be parents going into our senior year of high school,” Jayd opines in a refreshingly nonjudgmental aside, “but that’s how it is sometimes”), and Jayd is the first to hear when money troubles arise and treacherous exes show up. In the meantime, Jayd’s archnemesis Misty is becoming a vampire, a turn of events the author weaves comfortably into the book’s voodoo cosmology, and Jayd fights Misty and her kin both in dreams and in the physical world.

Though a few elements seem hastily put together (the same one-liner about the incriminating photo appears twice, for instance), this is a solid installment in Jayd’s saga. (discussion guide) (Fiction. 12-16)

THE LOST AND FOUND PONY

A small boy wonders and speculates what animals might mean by their tradi-

tional sounds.

The stylized animals shown using megaphones and paper-cup telephones on the cover reappear inside fully clothed, behaving in familiar human ways and using a wide variety of communications devices. A lion cub roars for more toys in the bathtub. A duckling quacks for a snack in front of an open refrigerator. A small snake hisses for a kiss from her mother. Simple rhyming couplets and a repeating chorus, “They say what they say / in their own silly way, / when they say what they say / with their sounds every day” carry the narrative, which concludes with the child’s “I do love you so!” |

Dockray, Tracy Illustrator: Dockray, Tracy Feiwel & Friends (48 pp.) $16.99 | July 19, 2011 978-0-312-59259-2

A small pony recounts his melodramatic life.

The nameless pony is first given to a little girl on her birthday. They compete over fences and win, until they try a jump that is “just too high.” The girl falls off, and her angry

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parents sell the pony to a circus, where for years he partners with a dwarf in a clown act. When the circus disbands, the pony, now old, thin and pathetic, is sold at auction. His original little girl, now grown, happens to be at the same auction.

She recognizes him, and, of course, they live happily ever after. At 48 text-heavy pages, it’s long for a picture book, and the pace suffers accordingly—several scenes, such as the opening with the pony and his dam in a field, take up a lot of pages but don’t move the story forward. The emotional tone often feels forced or misplaced, as when the circus fails because the audience “stayed home, playing video games,” and the perspective seems more adult than child-friendly.

Dockray’s watercolor illustrations are better than her text.

Animals and people are both lifelike and full of emotion, and she varies perspective and tone to convey changing moods.

Overall, it’s hard to see an appropriate audience for this one— small children won’t sit through it, older ones will be bored.

You can only say, “Oh, the poor pony!” so many times.

(Picture book. 5-8)

DREAM AWAY

Durango, Julia; Trupiano, Katie Belle Illustrator: Goldstrom, Robert Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | July 12, 2011 978-1-4169-8702-4 A dreamscape unfurls as a dad reads a bedtime story to his son.

The red-haired boy is in bed, still wearing his paper hat, while his red-haired dad reads to him (the illustration in the book dad holds is the same one readers see).

“In a dream we did float in an old paper boat,” and off they go to the heavens, deep blue with a yellow moon-balloon to pull them along. They float past constellations embodied, planets and UFOs, accompanied by winged pets, a Pegasus and cloud shapes that morph amazingly. When they return to the last couplet, just like the first—“Dream away, dream away, sleepyhead, love. / Set sail for the ocean of stars up above”—the boy’s bedroom vista expands so readers can see his cats, the dog, his fish, his mobile of the planets and the framed photograph of three red-haired guys of three generations that peopled his dreamtime, albeit in somewhat different shape and form. The pictures were made in oils on cotton, and one can see their rich texture, but the overall effect is smoothed over and out like computer art. The colors are strong, and in the final image the big full moon morphs back into the winsome face of the yellow balloon.

Odd but pleasant, and the pictures give readers lots to return to even if the verse wears a bit. (Picture book. 4-8)

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VICIOUS LITTLE DARLINGS

Easer, Katherine Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $16.99 | June 21, 2011 978-1-59990-628-7 “The brochure said nothing about angst-filled dorms or psychic roommates.”

Instead of going to local UCLA, 17-year-old Sarah is spending the next four years at Wetherly, a fictional all-women’s college in New England, all because her Nana caught her having sex with the most popular guy at her high school. Constantly substituting sex for love (so she doesn’t end up miserable, like her absent parents), without female friends, slightly depressed and definitely insecure, she’s the perfect victim. In this edgy debut thriller, the first-year student’s not sure why she’s drawn to her beautiful, narcissistic orphan roommate, Maddy, and Maddy’s wealthy, enabling best friend, Agnes, but suddenly she’s sharing an off-campus house and an injured deer (which readers won’t know whether to laugh or cringe at) with them. And she’s not sure why she stays even after she realizes that Maddy is a pathological liar, that equally manipulative Agnes is trying to pretend she’s not in love with Maddy and that she’s caught between the two housemates vying for each other’s attention. It’s a constant who’s manipulating whom, with secrets, sexual tension and a Gypsy’s deadly prediction always at the forefront, as the story’s slow burn finally explodes. It’s all given immediacy and subtle sarcasm through Sarah’s first-person narration, which will have readers second-guessing throughout.

It’s clear someone has to die, but just who it will be keeps readers wondering to the very end. (Thriller. 15 & up)

THE BLACK STALLION AND THE LOST CITY

Farley, Steven Random (256 pp.) $16.99 | PLB $19.99 e-book: $16.99 | June 28, 2011 978-0-375-86837-5 | PLB 978-0-375-96837-2 e-book 978-0-375-89887-7 Series: The Black Stallion, 25 The Black Stallion battles flesh-eating mares in this strange, off-putting addition to the late Walter Farley’s series, written by his son.

Alec Ramsey and his Black Stallion are playing the parts of Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalus in a movie filmed in the mountains of Greece near a mysterious, heavily guarded “resort.” When the Black pursues a strange albino mare across a stream, Alex and the 13-year-old daughter of one of the stunt riders (who seems to have no purpose in the story other than to keep it from being entirely populated by adults) follow.

They fall into a mysterious underground river and thence into a strange world where people stay young by drinking magical

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“Garland packs a lot of learning into her good-hearted tale of friendship and helping.” from eddie’s toolbox and how to make and mend things

water and offering human sacrifices to flesh-eating mares. It’s meant to parallel the legend of Diomedes; unfortunately, none of it makes any sense. A graphic scene of horses consuming an elderly couple will unsettle many readers. Farley’s writing, simultaneously flat and full of hyperbole, would be right at home in a B-movie Western, as would his characters, who come straight out of central casting, bad foreign dialects and all. Even the Black has become a stereotype.

Readers are better off sticking to the originals. (Fiction. 9-12)

ASTONISHING ANIMAL ABC

Fuge, Charles Illustrator: Fuge, Charles Sterling (32 pp.) $14.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-4027-8645-7 Alliteration and rhyme abound in Fuge’s latest, an abecedarian salute to anthropomorphized animals.

Fuge provides a nice mix of animals, including aardark, cobra, narwhal, sloth and vole, and readers will be pleasantly shocked to learn that Z is not for zebra. The author neatly sidesteps the difficulties of coming up with animals for all the letters (E is for egg). Large, red capital letters make it easy for learners to pick out the alphabet, while the text reinforces the sounds those letters make. Unfortunately, not every letter gets its own treatment: “G, girl gorilla, / H and I, hare on ice, / J, jolly jackal and his joyful, jumping mice.” While the rhyme sometimes stumbles (unicorn rhymed with Vaughn), the rollicking rhythm of the verses keeps the text moving, which is good, as page turns do not advance any sort of story—the stand-alone spreads rely on humor rather than narrative to engage audiences. The illustrations provide this whimsy, featuring realistically detailed animals partnered with amusing touches that bring the words to life—the pirate panther sports a gold hoop in his ear, while the dancing dodo is not complete without his straw hat and cane.

Cute enough, but not likely to inspire repeated readings. (Picture book. 3-6)

ESCAPE FROM ZOBADAK

Gallagher, Brad Charlesbridge (360 pp.) $16.95 | paper $8.95 e-book: $6.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-934133-32-3 | paper 978-1-934133-33-0 e-book 978-1-60734-435-3 Four children find their way into another world through a hidden doorway in a mysterious old piece of furniture.

Gallagher elaborates on this oddly familiar premise by (eventually) explaining that the right sort of wooden joinery |

will link furniture from any place or time. Billy, his little sister Sophie and their friends Chris and Maggie discover a seemingly endless maze of hallways lined with doors and drawers full of strange artifacts by crawling into a nightstand belonging to missing Uncle Gary. The labyrinth is actually a “cabinet of curiosities” that brilliant carpenters of many generations have been building to store treasures like Excalibur and the Thunderbird Photograph. Before this is explained, however, the four children have spent many chapters wandering the halls at random—and also being menaced in the outside world by animated wooden puppets from the fictional “Zobadak Wood Company,” who are after Uncle Gary and the nightstand at the command of a shadowy figure named Brope. Along with introducing scads of enigmatic elements from flocks of aggressive crows to a mischievous fairy, the author injects artificial melodrama into the tale by having Billy and Sophie rescue their pointlessly kidnapped parents. He clumsily tries for comic relief by casting the puppets as inept Abbott-and-Costello types and with no perceptible rationale closes by having all of the adults stonewall or downplay everything that has happened.

Inventive worldbuilding, but way too much is left unexplained and unresolved. (Fantasy. 11-13)

EDDIE’S TOOLBOX AND HOW TO MAKE AND MEND THINGS

Garland, Sarah Illustrator: Garland, Sarah Frances Lincoln (36 pp.) $17.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-84780-053-4

Eddie gets the opportunity to help new neighbors with their fixer-upper house and to make a haven for the birds.

A moving van next door means that there might be some new friends to play with. Mum and Eddie and his little sister Lily go outside to greet the newcomers, and, indeed, it’s a single dad with a daughter just about Lily’s age named Tilly. The dad, whose name is Tom, asks Eddie if he’d like to help make a few things that the house needs, and Eddie eagerly agrees. First they make a bed, and Tom shows Eddie how to make a tiny boat for Lily to play with in the bath. The next day, they put together shelves and wall hooks for the kitchen; Mum makes a big lunch for the five of them. While everyone is eating, Eddie notices that Pusskin the cat has killed a sparrow, and everyone reacts with sadness. Then Eddie gets an idea: With Tom’s help, he builds a tall platform on a pole where the birds can safely land and feed. It turns out to be a good day after all. A terrific appendix describes all of Eddie’s tools, safety tips for using them and instructions for making a “Bird Table.”

Garland packs a lot of learning into her good-hearted tale of friendship and helping. (Picture book. 4-7)

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“With very short sentences, ample white space and sight-word vocabulary, this will be accessible to the earliest readers.” from dixie

THE REVENANT

Gensler, Sonia Knopf (336 pp.) $16.99 | PLB: $19.99 e-book: $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-375-86701-9 | PLB 978-0-375-96701-6 e-book 978-0-375-89732-0 When her mother insists she leave boarding school and come home, Willie, 17—a teen rebel à la 1896—assumes the identity of another student who’s decided to decline a teaching position at the Cherokee Female Seminary.

Accepting the offer in her place, Willie heads to Tahlequah, Okla. Contrary to Willie’s expectations, the seminary is an elegant, distinguished academic institution, educating students far wealthier and more cultured than she. Class and cultural differences divide the student body: Urban sophisticates, often of mixed-race, disdain the less-privileged, rural Cherokee girls and Willie herself, a white, rural Tennessean. Lately, strange noises and violent happenings have been plaguing the school. Is the ghost of a dead student, a revenant, responsible? Dismissive at first, Willie is soon drawn into the mystery and to Eli Sevenstar, a handsome, charismatic student at the nearby Cherokee men’s seminary who may be involved. This debut presents an intriguing look at a little-known piece of American history: Opened in 1851, the Cherokee Nation’s seminaries provided superior education to youth across the socioeconomic spectrum, including girls, for half a century.

While Willie’s personal story and the school mystery don’t always mesh, the well-drawn characters and suspenseful plot should keep readers fully engaged. (author’s note) (Historical fantasy. 12 & up)

THE KIDS’ SUMMER FUN BOOK

Gillman, Claire ; Martin, Sam Illustrator: Eaton, David Barron’s (128 pp.) $12.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-7641-4581-0 For nervous parents facing endless summer days and kids who have the “I’m bored” bug, this is a mixed bag of activities, games, crafts and recipes that will help stave off the doldrums.

The five sections each address a different topic and include detailed directions for at least 14 activities, most of which focus on getting kids outdoors. The projects range from exploring tide pools and stargazing to making a soda geyser, playing croquet and learning how to make some summery treats to eat. While there are many standout projects, this book is not without its flaws. Most kids will have already tried at least a handful of the things in each section. Many of the entries are limiting in that they require specialized 866

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equipment or access to specific places. But the worst flaw is a lackadaisical attitude toward safety. Beyond the copyright page, little is mentioned about parental supervision. And the difficulty scale (one=low; three=high) is no help in this regard—exploring sea caves is given a one, while building a tree house is a two. Helpful illustrations and photographs are scattered throughout the book, supporting the directions in the text. But here, also, there is a lack of concern for safety—the “row a boat” activity pictures a child sans life jacket, and it is not on the list of items needed.

There are some worthwhile projects here, but many don’t come cheap and most require more skill and supervision than the text recommends. (Nonfiction. 6-12)

DIXIE

Gilman, Grace Illustrator: McConnell, Sarah Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | paper $3.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-06-171914-1 paper 978-0-06-171913-4 An easy-to-read story about a little girl’s dream of playing Dorothy with her own dog, Dixie, in the role of Toto.

Dixie is initially excited when Emma, her owner, is chosen to be the star of the school production of The Wizard of Oz. Anything that makes Emma happy makes Dixie happy. “All you have to do is follow me everywhere,” Emma reassures the pup. That sounds perfect to the dog. When Dixie realizes that the play preparations are cutting into her Emma time, though, she retaliates by hiding with one of the ruby slippers, leaving Dorothy with no Toto and only one shoe. With very short sentences, ample white space and sight-word vocabulary, this will be accessible to the earliest readers. A straightforward, comforting plot, coupled with rich, full-color illustrations, adds appeal.

Dixie’s antics are particularly energetic—she runs in circles around the pages while Emma holds her red pigtails in exasperation. When Emma thinks all is lost, the illustration droops in empathy: Her fuzzy-bear slippers’ faces frown; the picture on the wall shows Dixie walking away; and her stuffed animal dejectedly flops over the edge of the bed. The dog-and-girl friendship deepens as Emma realizes that her sweet Dixie is truly her best pal.

New readers looking for a good confidence builder should grab this one. (Early reader. 4-8)

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THE CHAMBER OF FIVE

Harmon, Michael Knopf (208 pp.) $16.99 | PLB $19.99 e-book: $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-375-86644-9 PLB 978-0-375-96644-6 e-book 978-0-375-89641-5

As the son of a U.S. Congressman, 17-year-old Jason Weatherby knows all about power and influence.

His father’s connections secured his admission into the prestigious Lambert School for the Gifted, while the geniuses for whom the school was founded have no such clout. As a sophomore, Jason joined the exclusive Youth Leadership Group, and his invitation to join the Chamber of Five in his junior year is the ultimate reward for his father’s generosity. Inclusion in this elite group of upperclassmen comes with a price: Jason must convince an undesirable freshman named Thomas Singletary to leave Lambert, by any means necessary. Until Jason agrees to become a Chamber member and gets rid of Thomas, the other Chamber members ridicule and physically threaten his friend Elvis, one of the novel’s few sympathetic characters. Jason’s own elitism comes across in his first-person narration and may leave some readers questioning both his decisions and Harmon’s choice of protagonist. Jason’s decision to stage a coup d’état during the student council elections sets off a chain of events leading to the novel’s dramatic conclusion, although perceptive teens may unearth the personal vendetta behind the Chamber’s Machiavellian actions before Jason puts all of the pieces together.

With a cast of mostly unlikable characters, this novel of privilege and corruption proves uninspiring. (Fiction. 14 & up)

13 CURSES

Harrison, Michelle Little, Brown (496 pp.) $15.99 | June 7, 2011 978-0-316-04150-8 In an absorbing sequel to The 13 Treasures (2010), Red pursues her stolen baby brother through the parallel world of fairies, negotiating a landscape of deliciously sinister and dreadful magical creatures, finally discovering her own heartrending secret.

Harrison’s satisfyingly hefty and page-turning adventure focuses on Rowan, the girl who willingly replaced Tanya as captive of the fairy realm. Rowan’s quest to find and return her brother James to real England is finally aided by the residents of Elvesden Manor through a series of problem-solving challenges and a search for the 13 magical charms from an old bracelet. The sure-handed storytelling creates a completely credible setting—by turns violent and tender, sinister and |

poignant—in which those who can see fairies are most at risk of harm from the magical beings. The permeable border between the magical and the ordinary is described with matter-of-fact authority; the convincing result is a fully realized world where humans and fairies occupy a similar landscape to very different ends. Contrasts between human emotion and commitment and the cold, often cruel magic and mischief of the fairy realm create terrific tension and afford opportunities for heroism for the young protagonists.

While the threads of Red’s story come neatly together at the end, there’s still plenty left for a sequel. (Fantasy. 10-14)

PHOTO BOOTH

Helfand, Lewis Illustrator: Nagar, Sachin Campfire (80 pp.) $9.99 | June 21, 2011 978-93-80028-65-1 An intriguing—though fussily intricate—premise is hampered by an unfortunately disjointed execution.

Against a grim, sketchy black-andwhite backdrop enters the brooding, chiseled Praveer Rajani. Rajani, an Interpol agent, has just made a huge drug bust at a carnival. While leaving the scene, he sees a photo booth that jars memories of his childhood 20 years ago and his parents’ untimely demise. Abruptly, the entire setting changes, jumping back two decades and exploding in bright, jarring colors within structured panels.

Nagar quickly abandons the dark, bleak setting and changes character perspective from Praveer to his older brother, Jayendra. After their parents’ death, Jayendra steps in as his family’s caretaker, though this ultimately costs him his relationship with Shalini, the love of his life. At a carnival, the Rajanis discover a mystical photo booth that can show the heart’s true desires. Impulsively, Jayendra uproots the family, taking them abroad to win back Shalini and discovering a startling coincidence about their parents. Just as suddenly, the setting changes back to the future and Praveer’s point of view, neatly tying the elements of his family’s past to the recent drug bust. Overall, this lacks cohesion and feels choppy, moving discordantly between the darkly noir and sweetly magical settings.

Ambitiously constructed but ultimately falling short.

(Graphic fiction. 14 & up)

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STUPID FAST

Herbach, Geoff Sourcebooks Fire (320 pp.) $9.99 | June 1, 2011 978-1-4022-5630-1 A rambling ode to male adolescent angst.

It is the summer before junior year, and oddball outsider Felton Reinstein has hit the puberty jackpot. Suddenly tall, muscular and “stupid fast,” he has been invited by the high-school football coach to work out with the team with the understanding that he may win a position come fall. His sudden popularity is marred by his mother’s equally abrupt bout of depression and his little brother Andrew’s intense anger about it. Felton thinks his mom’s bad mood may have something to do with his age and father’s suicide 10 years ago, but he is too distracted by his new posse and the cute pianist next door, Aleah, to find out. Soon the situation deteriorates to the point where Mom never leaves the house and Andrew burns all his clothes in the yard in order to get her attention. Now Felton is forced to face the longburied secret of his father’s death if he wants to heal his family.

Felton’s manic, repetitive voice and naive, trusting personality stand out in a field of dude lit populated with posturing tough guys and cynical know-it-alls. Add strong secondary characterizations and readers may be able to overcome the tangential storyline and rather perfunctory climax.

A little tightening of the plot screws could have led to this uneven novel being stupid good. (Fiction. 12 & up)

THE DEAD

Higson, Charlie Hyperion (480 pp.) $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-1-4231-3412-1 When all adults turn into zombies, kids must fend for themselves.

Before London was filled with shambling husks craving fresh meat, there was an Internet video of a scared boy ranting about adults killing children. Months later, both video and Internet have disappeared. After constant battles with ravening adults, 15-year-olds Jack and Ed rescue the trapped Frédérique and break out of their barricaded school to find food and stronger shelter. Despite a misadventure with a cannibalistic bus driver, the youths arrive at the Imperial War Museum only to discover others have claimed the space. When London starts to burn again, they all must work together to flee the coming firestorm. Higson delivers this prequel to The Enemy (2010) in similar style, with multiple narrators allowing for even more action than the first offering. While most of these threads lack strong emotional resonance, Frédérique’s narrative harrows, as she descends into madness when infection overtakes her. Jack and Ed have a good rapport, too, though there’s a bit too much 868

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sentimentality toward the end. Gun combat takes precedence over melee here, a choice that makes sense given the protagonists’ ages and the setting, though it tends to break the action more than the fisticuffs that dominated the first work.

With giant firestorms, rampaging hoards and continual life-and-death scenarios, though, Higson delivers an action-packed summer read. (Horror. 13-16)

I AM A TYRANNOSAURUS

Hines, Anna Grossnickle Illustrator: Hines, Anna Grossnickle Tricycle (40 pp.) $12.99 | PLB: $15.99 | July 12, 2011 978-1-58246-413-8 PLB 978-1-58246-414-5 Second time’s also a charm for this close cousin to I Am a Backhoe (2010).

In this iteration it’s a blond, rather than dark-haired, lad imagining himself—and posing expressively in the digitally drawn and painted pictures—as a sequence of dinosaurs. He pretends to be five named dinos and a hatchling in succession before his mother (rather than father, as previously) appears.

(The dinos represented are, in addition to the titular T. Rex, velociraptor, brachiosaurus, triceratops and pteranodon.) He dubs his mother “Maiasaurus” (“That means… / good mother lizard,” the child explains) before cuddling into her lap. Featuring realistic, sharply defined figures of boy and dinosaurs floating above rich washes of color, the art reflects both the imaginative play’s exuberance and the narrative’s patterned simplicity: “I’m not so big, with a stiff tail and little wings, but I run fast and leap, leap, leap. I am… / a velociraptor.”

Not exactly a creative leap, leap, leap for Hines, but a broadly popular topic enhanced with light brushes of fact, wrapped in family warmth and presented in a comfortably formulaic way. (Picture book. 2-6)

PAPER COVERS ROCK

Hubbard, Jenny Delacorte (192 pp.) $16.99 | PLB: $16.99 e-book: $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-385-74055-5 PLB 978-0-375-98954-4 e-book 978-0-375-89942-3 It may take a village to raise a child, but a boys’ boarding school is a poor substitute, with its 24/7 peer culture and absentee parents “who pay shitloads of money to send their sons away.”

And when 17-year-old Thomas Edward Broughton, Jr. dies after diving off a rock in a spot on the river off limits to students, his friend Alex Stromm is left trying to make sense of the tragedy. He writes in the journal his father had given him two years before, an ambitious attempt at “the Not-So Great American

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“Smoothly written—the spookily vivid afterlife is a strong point—this debut represents a modest addition to a fantasy genre featuring heroines with limited aspirations.” from hereafter

Novel,” where he hopes that “through careful arrangements of words, order could be made from chaos.” His journal contains observations, rough drafts of letters, poems and homework essays. Readers may well wonder at Alex’s capacity to write this level of introspective prose, but the journal is a good vehicle for slowly revealing the layers of guilt, truth and deception in this tightly knit community. Hubbard’s fine debut skillfully portrays boarding-school life and a young man’s will to use words to keep himself afloat in that world.

Readers will eagerly anticipate her next work, and in the meantime they may try such similar, classic fare as A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye. (Fiction. 14 & up)

HEREAFTER

Hudson, Tara HarperTeen (416 pp.) $17.99 | June 7, 2011 978-0-06-202677-4 Amelia knows she’s dead and that she drowned, but little more.

Then she encounters a drowning boy, Josh, and though he survives, his brief experience of death allows him to see her. Soon they’re an item—his presence and touch reawaken her senses. Josh takes her to school, and together they investigate her origins. In the less-benign afterlife when Josh is not around, Amelia meets mysterious Eli, once a handsome young man and now responsible for bringing the recently dead to his masters, terrifying beings that rule the afterlife’s nastier corners. While Eli plots to make Amelia his apprentice, Amelia and Josh pursue the genre’s traditional passionate-but-chaste relationship. Among the obstacles they face is Ruth, Josh’s grandmother, a “Seer” who can perceive Amelia but confuses her with Eli, whom she’s sworn to exorcize.

The breathless ending has “sequel to come” written all over it.

Smoothly written—the spookily vivid afterlife is a strong point— this debut represents a modest addition to a fantasy genre featuring heroines with limited aspirations.

Being dead, Amelia has a better excuse than most for lacking a career goal beyond finding bliss with the one living guy who can see her. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)

WHAT’S SO FUNNY? Making Sense of Humor

Jackson, Donna M. Illustrator: Stearn, Ted Viking (64 pp.) $16.99 | June 9, 2011 978-0-670-01244-2

A light introduction to the appealing, complicated subject of humor lacks the depth to do it justice.

Starting with an overview of how researchers look at humor, |

this uneven guide to a topic with potentially high kid-appeal meanders through loosely connected aspects of humor, offering anecdotes, quotes from experts and intriguing facts. Short chapters touch on the anatomy of laughter and the history of laugh tracks. A longer chapter discusses how humor differs between genders, among cultures and age groups and throughout history. Readers may be most interested in the final chapter on stand-up comedy and how to be funny. Jackson relies heavily on quotes from interviews with humor experts, working their names and titles awkwardly into the text. The academic nature of the quotes, suitable to a more substantial study of humor, jars with the author’s otherwise conversational, entry-level approach to the subject, raising questions about the intended audience. Generic cartoonish pictures and occasional jokes in boldface type illustrate points made in the text. Short sidebars explore topics such as the funny bone, tickling and texting abbreviations about humor.

Mildly entertaining and informative but neither laugha-minute nor substantial enough for reports. (further reading, source notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 11-13)

EVERY COWGIRL NEEDS DANCING BOOTS

Janni, Rebecca Illustrator: Avril, Lynne Dutton (32 pp.) $16.99 | June 9, 2011 978-0-525-42341-6

What better way to make friends than throwing a party?

Nellie Sue has a new pair of pink dancing boots, but she can’t go out dancing alone. Mama suggests befriending the new girls that she sees playing on the street. Nellie Sue saddles up her pink “two-wheeled horse” and invites the three girls to go for a ride; the youngest (about Nellie Sue’s age) seems interested, but her older sister says, “Not in ballet slippers.” Nellie Sue is discouraged, but only for a minute; her dog Ginger gives her a great idea! She makes some pretty invitations and gets back on her horse, galloping “like the Pony Express” to ask the neighbor girls to her “Barn Dance.” The whole neighborhood shows up, and Nellie Sue commences to dance. But the floor is slick and she takes a tumble, bringing the refreshments and most of the guests down with her. Ginger starts giving everybody on the floor sloppy dog kisses. It looks like Nellie Sue’s party will be a disaster until that youngest girl, whose name is Anna, laughs. Finally, the ice is broken. Nellie Sue drops g’s and uses cowgirl idiom with abandon; her adherence to the cowgirl “code of honor” is endearing. Avril’s lineand-watercolor cartoons keep the visual tone light.

A passel of fun activities—dancing, crafting, biking and dress up—are tucked into Janni’s tonic tale of imagination and optimism. (Picture book. 3-5)

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r Robert Neubecker is an artist and freelance editorial illustrator whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week, Time, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal. He moved to Utah in 1994, and, inspired by his young family, made his publishing debut in 2004 with the children’s picture book Wow! City!, which he followed with Wow! America! and Wow! School! Neubecker, who currently works for Slate.com, says that his daughters helped him write his children’s books: “All I did was observe and take notes.”

Wow! Ocean!

Robert Neubecker Disney Hyperion $17.99 May 2011 9781423131137

Q: Your Wow! books capture the excitement and enthusiasm of seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Can you talk a little about your decision to include the ocean in this series?

A: Well, the ocean is the most wondrous thing ever, no? When I lived in New York, I did a lot of surfing on Long Island. It was a life-transforming experience.

The ocean is a giant living organism, very powerful, very spiritual. Now that we’re in the Rocky Mountains, we travel to beaches along the Pacific from Costa Rica to Oregon. The girls love it, and [they] can wander the beaches and play in the surf for hours.

Wow! Ocean! is nonfiction, like all the Wow! books.

Q: I am guessing that these Wow! books are quite research intensive. If so, how do you go about doing that research?

Q: Can you tell me about something you discovered when researching Wow! Ocean! that you hadn’t known before?

A: Killer whales, or orcas, are part of the dolphin family. [My daughter] Izzy set me straight on that one.

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A: No, the labels are new to Wow! Ocean! There were just too many interesting fish not to label them, and kids love it. When I did Air Show! with Treat Williams (2010), we labeled all the fantastic airplanes because, well, wow!

Q: Can you talk about how your life as a children’s author meshes (or contrasts) with that of an editorial illustrator? Is it easy to move back and forth?

A: I don’t have any problem going from one to the other. It’s actually easier mentally to be an editorial illustrator, because at the end of the day your drawing goes to press or online and you’re done. A book is more like a show of paintings that takes months to complete and is always there in the back (or front) of your mind.

As far as adult/children sensibility goes, again, they’re just me in different contexts. I love doing both.

Q: I enjoy how you populate your books with your family.

A: When I was drawing Wow! City!, including Izzy was logical because she essentially wrote the book, at 18 months, by exclaiming, “wow!” at everything she saw. Then I looked at pictures of my friends for dad reference, but none of them had any hair. I wanted a young(ish) dad… so I used me. I figured no one would know. Then it got out of hand. The mountain in the Wow! books is literally out my window.

Q: What’s on your drawing table now?

A: Arrrr! Pirates! I’m illustrating a wonderful pirate poetry book called Shiver Me Timbers! by Douglas Florian for my mateys over at Beach Lane Books (Simon & Shuster, Aug. 2012).

–by Jessie Grearson

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p hoto CO URTESY OF THE AU THOR

A: Wow! City! was my love letter to New York.

I drew upon my experiences from over 20 years, but especially my student days, when we had no money and the city itself was our entertainment.

For Wow! America!, I had traveled widely as a child and drew on that experience. I got the Niagara Falls quote from the Internet, about the teacher who went over the falls in a barrel and said: “No one ought ever do that again!”

Wow! School! took quite a bit of research. My daughter Josephine was in a wonderful preschool at the time, and I spent hours in the classroom.

I consulted with her teachers, Elaine Burns and Kim Dankers. I also worked closely with my editor, Donna Bray, who had a little boy going through the same experience.

Wow! Ocean! was easy and wonderful. I emptied the library of all books fishy. I ran the sketches by Greg Welch, a marine biologist with the city of San Diego. And I spent a lot of time in the ocean.

Q: Wow! Ocean! has subtle labels on everything. Are these in all the Wow! books?

QUEEN OF THE DEAD

Kade, Stacey Hyperion (272 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1-4231-3467-1 Series: The Ghost and the Goth, 2 Former cheerleader, fashionista and “mean girl supreme” and current spirit guide Alona Dare and social recluse and ghost-talker Will Killian trade their flirtatious banter for a more serious dilemma in this sequel to The Ghost and the Goth (2010).

Alona’s only been dead two months, and already her recovering alcoholic mother is throwing out her prized mementos and her absent father and his ex-wife (aka StepMothra) are having a baby. Now could Will be interested in fellow ghost-talker Mina Blackwell and her Ghostbusterlike boxes meant to capture spirits? When Alona enters a comatose body, she only hopes to communicate with her selfish parents and teach Will a lesson, but she ends up getting stuck in the process. Once again the teens’ alternating voices give differing perspectives. Will learns about the Order of the Guardians, a secret society of ghost-talkers bent on ridding the world of unsafe spirits, as well as his dead father’s role in it, and selfish, immobile Alona contemplates her own karma and why she was left on Earth. The tension mounts when the Order comes to consider Alona dangerous. While this sequel lacks some of the amusement provided by the first book, plenty of back story keeps readers engaged in the continuing story line.

With room for a third book, who’s Alona gonna call?

Ghost and the Goth lovers. (Paranormal. 12 & up)

LOUIS THE TIGER WHO CAME FROM THE SEA

Kozlowski, Michal Illustrator: Walker, Sholto Annick Press (32 pp.) $19.95 | paper $8.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-55451-257-7 paper 978-1-55451-256-0

Big cat makes a surprise appearance, prompting a brother and sister to come out and play.

Early one morning, just as the birds are preparing to sing, Ollie and Ali are awakened by a beastly snore in their backyard. Ollie looks out the window and sees what looks like a giant carrot or pumpkin but, after rubbing his eyes, realizes that it’s a tiger. Ali names the tiger Louis and says he looks like he came from the sea, a suspicion that’s confirmed when the duo opens the window and smells seaweed and saltwater.

Though their parents are a bit reticent (and hide behind a tree), the children get into their bathing suits, prepare a big bucketful of food for Louis and hurry outside. A roar from Louis sends the whole family running back to the house. |

Louis calmly follows them in and settles on a big purple rug right in front of the fireplace. Mother runs a bath for the beast, which seems to enjoy it. But the problem remains; the family puts its heads together and comes up with a creative solution for luring Louis back into the sea. Kozlowski’s story is appealing, but readers will need to surrender to the goofy surrealism to enjoy it. Walker contrasts the tiger, majestic and realistic, with the more cartoonish family to nice effect.

An odd but not at all unlikable fable. (Picture book. 3-6)

SECRETS

Kunze, Lauren; Onur, Rina Greenwillow/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-06-196047-5 Series: The Ivy, 2 Callie and her friends are trying to survive their freshman year at Harvard while juggling studies with romance and, in Callie’s case, blackmail.

This second installment in a planned four-book series stands alone well, without a reiteration of the previous plot. Callie’s major dilemma involves a sex video starring herself and taped by an old boyfriend without her knowledge that has fallen into the hands of Alexis, her manipulative boss on the campus magazine Callie tries to join. Callie also has roommate problems. Vanessa, her former BFF, flies into destructive rages at imagined slights. Meanwhile, she’s attracted to two handsome boys: Gregory, with whom she had a one-night stand but who misinterprets her welcoming message to him, and Clint, Alexis’ old boyfriend.

Kunze and Onur spend some time on Callie’s studies as well as on her social difficulties, diving into literature, economics, justice theory and biochemistry. The authors leave no doubt that these students are at school to learn, a more important activity than even romance. The protagonists take their writing seriously and work overtime to win places as school journalists. Callie’s blackmail problem adds an element of suspense. The book’s hang-fire ending should prompt readers to buy the next sequel. Plenty of visits to businesses in the Harvard neighborhood add local color.

Chick lit for highly educated chicks. (Fiction. 16 & up)

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“A thinking, active alternative for readers who fall between adult nonfiction and all the rhyming dino fare meant for the younger set.” from dinosaur discovery

RALPH MASIELLO’S ROBOT DRAWING BOOK

Masiello, Ralph Illustrator: Masiello, Ralph Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | paper $7.95 e-book: $6.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-57091-535-2 paper 978-1-57091-536-9 e-book 978-1-60734-313-4

Masiello elegantly and joyfully taps into a thankfully enduring artistic tradition: the step-by-step technique that walks readers by hand through the creation of an image on paper.

Just as he has done previously for dinosaurs, dragons and bugs (Ralph Masiello’s Dragon Drawing Book, 2007, etc.), here he guides young artists in the creation of robots—“ ’bots,” in the vernacular, as in “Squarehead Thinbot,” “Sparky Springbot” and “Zoidbot.” The artist starts by introducing readers to lines and shapes—nothing is taken for granted—from which can be drawn an elemental robot. He then provides a serious handful of “spare parts,” which can be used to add detail to readers’ creations. The spare-part section is good for sparking the imagination, but the best sparks are thrown by the finished products, which are cool in their radical colors and otherworldliness but not daunting (even if readers are not likely to attain his level of gradients and shadings). Robots are by nature somewhat scary, with their dead, sharklike eyes and sharp edges, and Masiello keeps that spooky quality. But he also knows how to invest them with humor: witness the “Bakerbot,” with a muffin cooking in its belly.

Brainstorming—a book that ought to launch a thousand robots. (Nonfiction. 6-9)

DINOSAUR DISCOVERY: Everything You Need to Be a Paleontologist

McGowan, Christopher Illustrator: Schmidt, Erica Lyn Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $17.99 | June 28, 2011 978-1-4169-4764-6

In-depth facts about 13 dinosaurs are interspersed with activities that teach readers about anatomy and how paleontologists understand body structure.

Gearing his text to older dinosaur lovers, McGowan assumes prior knowledge and leaves out many explanatory details, such as a prehistoric timeline, map and definitions of the different types of dinosaurs. But for enthusiasts who can grasp the advanced vocabulary and concepts, this is a great resource for learning more about both dinosaurs and anatomy in general. The 27 activities and experiments illustrate the concepts presented and focus on the featured dinosaurs. By following the well-written directions as well as the 872

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picture steps, budding paleontologists will explore how a tail affects balance, discover binocular vision and learn how the two parts of a bone make them both stiff and elastic. While most use common household materials, there are some interesting ones that require supplies such as plaster of Paris and a long length of board. Schmidt’s detailed acrylic illustrations give life to the dinosaurs, and her scientific renderings of bones could have come straight out of an anatomy textbook.

The spreads are also interspersed with photos, showing readers real fossil remains.

A thinking, active alternative for readers who fall between adult nonfiction and all the rhyming dino fare meant for the younger set. (Nonfiction. 10-14)

THE DEATH OF YORIK MORTWELL

Messer, Stephen Illustrator: Grimly, Gris Random (192 pp.) $15.99 | PLB: $18.99 e-book: $15.99 | June 28, 2011 978-0-375-86858-0 PLB 978-0-375-96858-7 e-book 978-0-375-89928-7

A ghost story that attempts to combine the macabre with the heroic fails to find its footing.

Yorik was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Having been knocked to his death by his feudal landlord’s spoiled son, our hero leaves behind his destitute little sister, Susan. She finds employment with the manor’s servants, while Yorik likewise finds afterlife employment with the strange silver-haired Princess of the Aviary Glade. Given the task to haunt his former tormentor, Yorik instead discovers that all is not well at Ravenby Manor. Something evil has escaped, and it is slowly but surely taking over the inhabitants. It’s up to one seemingly helpless ghost to find a way to stop the threat before it harms his still-living sibling. To be an odd book is not a bad thing, but there is something so overwhelmingly peculiar about Messer’s mix of fantasy genres (pseudo-Gothic meets the standard saving-the-world format) that the entire kerfuffle comes off as hopelessly overblown. This is helped not at all by its deus ex machina ending.

With illustrations by the appropriately dour Grimley, this is a mix of two talents who together yield a less-thansuperior product. Some art not seen. (Fiction. 9-12)

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LUMINOUS

Best are all the dangling strings the story presents—ten o’clock scholar, baking blackbirds, a plum on a thumb, the knave of hearts—that interested readers can follow to the source. (Picture book. 4-8)

Metcalf, Dawn Dutton (384 pp.) $17.99 | June 30, 2011 978-0-525-42247-1 A confusing and at times just plain weird paranormal debut.

If finding a lump on her head isn’t enough to freak out 17-year-old Consuela Chavez, then peeling back her human skin to reveal her luminous skeleton should. Instead, she feels freedom as she defies gravity, donning a “skin” of air and talking a man out of suicide. Nicknamed Bones for her preferred look, Consuela learns that she is living in an alternate reality called the Flow, where spirit guides are assigned certain individuals to keep them from dying before their time. But as one of handsome V’s assignments gone wrong, she was never meant to cross over to the Flow. In this thirdperson narration, wrought with heavy-handed descriptions and similes gone wild, it’s often unclear what Consuela’s goal is. Is she trying to understand her belief system or return to her perhaps-dying body or stop the Flow’s pain eater, who’s mysteriously started killing off the Flow’s members in gruesome ways?

Most of the novel is comprised of repetitive, long-winded introspection and encounters with fellow Flow members. Representing diverse religions, these characters (the Native American, the orthodox Jew, etc.) only come across as stereotyped. And there’s little to Consuela’s would-be romance with V. Only extreme fans of Melissa Marr, Cassandra Clare and the like will find anything to enjoy here. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

DETECTIVE BLUE

Metzger, Steve Illustrator: Arnold, Tedd Orchard (32 pp.) $16.99 | July 1, 2011 978-0-545-17286-8

Nursery noir.

That great body of literature known as the nursery rhyme is used as a fine tease here by Metzger; their intimations carry this humorous, simple detective caper along. The glimpses are just provocative enough to have young readers ask what an allusion means, whereupon adults can introduce the real, often surreal, deal. The tale has more meat on its bones than insinuations of the nursery, as well as being aided and abetted by Arnold’s illustrations, with their bold, black outlines and translucent blocks of color. It’s the story of Detective Blue (the kid formerly known as Little Boy—“At one time I blew a horn and looked after cows and sheep. That’s in the past!”) and his search for a missing person: Miss Muffet. Detective Blue affects a tough-egg attitude—Sergeant Friday in fairyland—though he is friend to all: Jack Horner, Jack Sprat, Bo Peep, Humpty (who gets a comradely pat on the back from Blue and takes a fall). |

CLEOPATRA CONFESSES

Meyer, Carolyn Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1-4169-8727-7 Having made her way through the European princesses of note (Duchessina, 2007, etc.), Meyer dishes up historicalfiction-lite in this imagined account of Cleopatra’s coming of age.

Readers follow the mildly compelling first-person account in sections, from the 10-year-old touring the Nile with her father, through the teenage power struggles with her maniacal sisters, to the securing of her throne, which she pointedly ensures at the cost of her virginity: “As the night goes on, the magnetism between us grows as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides.

By the next morning I am Caesar’s mistress. I am not Caesar’s conquest. He is mine.” The occasionally vivid voice of an intelligent young woman lapses into uncharacteristic moments of denseness (as she fails to heed advice she’s just given herself) or starchy historical or cultural explanations for the readers’ benefit, often inserted into conversation (“But you are right—[Caesar] has a wife in Rome. Her name is Calpurnia. His first wife, Cornelia, bore him his only child, Julia, and both are dead. He divorced his second wife, Pompeia…”). For such an exciting history, the narrative arc lags under the inconsistent voice.

Readers who hungry purely for lots of effective detail of an ancient culture, time and place may find this a digestible-enough vehicle for it, with oodles of backmatter for support. (Historical fiction. 11-14)

FRACTIONS = TROUBLE!

Mills, Claudia Illustrator: Karas, G. Brian Farrar, Straus and Giroux (128 pp.) $15.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-374-36716-9 Third-grader Wilson Williams knows he’ll never learn fractions: “Multiplication was hard enough,” he tells his pet hamster, Pip. Worse, his parents have arranged for a math tutor. Just the idea of a tutor is embarrassing, but sympathetic Mrs. Tucker uses his love for hamsters to help him understand the math, and soon he’s quite clear about the difference between the Nice Numerator and the Dumb Denominator. At the same time, Pip becomes the

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basis for a successful science-fair project. Not only does Wilson have some academic success, he makes his little brother happy. Though only in kindergarten, Kipper has a science-fair project too. In the process of Kipper’s investigations, one of his favorite stuffed animals disappears. Big brother Wilson comes to the rescue. Most satisfying of all, he discovers that others—even his very best friend—are tutored, too. The short chapters have believable dialogue and plenty of reader appeal.

In one, Wilson tries to teach his hamster to shake hands; in another, his friend Josh experiments with blowing up a pickle.

Karas’ scratchy grayscale drawings, one to a chapter, support the story. This sequel to 7 x 9 = Trouble (2002) follows logically but also stands on its own.

Familiar school concerns, nicely resolved, make this another excellent selection for early chapter-book readers. (Fiction. 7-10)

INTO THE TRAP

Moodie, Craig Roaring Brook (208 pp.) $15.99 | July 19, 2011 978-1-59643-585-8 “What happens on the water stays on the water,” is the attitude in this fishing community on the fictional New England community of Fog Island.

Things are not going well for 12-year-old Eddie Atwell and his family.

Poachers have stolen roughly 1,000 pounds of lobsters from the Atwell’s “car” (the mostly submerged, enclosed pen used to hold lobsters in seawater), and Eddie’s dad is on the mainland having surgery. All the action takes place within 24 hours, with each chapter heading counting down the minutes. At 4:05 in the morning, Eddie sneaks away from his sister Laurie to go fishing on Greenhead Point. At 5:01, he stumbles upon the stolen lobsters and learns Laurie’s boyfriend, Jake, is one of the poachers. At 5:40, Eddie meets 13-year-old Briggs Fairfield, a geeky rich kid who escaped from the nearby sailing camp because he is being bullied by Marty, one of the counselors— who also happens to be the ringleader of the thieves. By 9:45 that evening, the chase is on. The story is relies a touch too heavily on character and regional stereotypes, while some of the situations seem far-fetched.

Nevertheless, an action-packed tale with guns and boat chases that will appeal to reluctant readers. (Adventure. 10-14)

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ME AND MY DAD

Morgan, Sally; Kwaymullina, Ezekiel Illustrator: Ottley, Matt Little Hare/Trafalgar (24 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 978-1-921541-81-0 In this average offering, a boy, his dad and their small dog spend a day at the beach.

Morgan and Kwaymullina’s spare text recounts the many things they contend with and encounter. Dad is fearlessly brave (but more often clueless to the danger) as he survives turning his back on a colossal ocean wave, swimming in a sea full of jellyfish and threatening a couple of menacing sharks. Sunny blues and yellows dominate the palette. Ottley’s illustrations provide the real story as he plays with perspective and exaggerates scale to accentuate the cartoonish tone. On one spread, dad’s comically oversized foot ably steps over super-sharp thornlike shells, and on another a villainous crab with an impossibly huge claw attempts to steal lunch. The unlikely creatures that dad seems to have a true fear of are the ones that the boy enthusiastically chases away. Preschool readers will identify with the fun of scaring off squawking seagulls and enjoy the boy’s role as hero. A troubling oddity, though—the father’s physical characteristics seem altered on the next-to-the-last spread. Through most of the book, he is decidedly dark-skinned and looks vaguely aboriginal (this is an Australian import); in that penultimate picture, his skin tone appears lighter, and the facial features are different.

Seek out more successful funny tales of fathers and sons, such as Ethan Long’s My Dad, My Hero (2010) and Liz Rosenberg’s Tyrannosaurus Dad, illustrated by Matthew Myers (2010). (Picture book. 3-5)

ESCAPE BY NIGHT A Civil War Adventure Myers, Laurie Illustrator: Bates, Amy June Henry Holt (128 pp.) $14.99 | June 7, 2011 978-0-8050-8825-0

In October 1863, a 10-year-old minister’s son in Augusta, Ga., finds himself at a moral crossroads after secretly befriending a wounded Union soldier.

When an injured, one-armed soldier arrives at the Confederate hospital, Tommy and his greyhound Samson see him drop a book. The soldier, whose name is Red, is grateful when Tommy returns the lost book. Red explains this “commonplace” book is where he records poems and stories, and he reads Tommy his poem about fighting to “make the nation whole,” a decidedly unConfederate view of the war. Red’s unusual accent and kind treatment of a slave working in the hospital convince Tommy “there’s something different” about this soldier. Tommy confronts Red, who admits he’s a Union soldier and believes “men should be free” and “slavery is wrong.” Red asks Tommy help him escape to his

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“Polhemus’ stark artwork builds the mood, with heavy lines and crosshatching complementing the campfire nature of the tales.” from return to daemon hall

family in Ohio. The direct third-person narration belies Tommy’s huge dilemma. Taught to distrust Yankees as enemies, Tommy will break the law if he fails to report Red, but Red’s his friend and he doesn’t want to send him to prison camp. Eventually Tommy finds his moral compass and helps Red for all the right reasons. Realistic pencil sketches highlight pivotal scenes.

A genuine young hero learns the meaning of friendship, loyalty and freedom in this suspenseful Civil War vignette. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)

RETURN TO DAEMON HALL Evil Roots

Nance, Andrew Illustrator: Polhemus, Coleman Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (256 pp.) $16.99 | July 19, 2011 978-0-8050-8748-2 Despite the terrible events at Daemon Hall last year, horror writer Ian Tremblin is repeating his contest to discover and publish a talented young writer (Daemon Hall, 2007).

Taking titles from a mysterious blank book that possibly belonged to Rudolph Daemon, Tremblin invites three contestants to join past winner and former mental patient Wade Reilly along with Daemon Hall survivor Demarius for an evening of storytelling. During the sharing of the first story, the six writers are suddenly transported to Daemon Hall, where horror still lives. Whether they tell tales of haunted Native American hunting grounds, construction deaths or possessed tattoos that stitch themselves onto a host, the authors must share their stories and survive the night. Nance again uses the frame to present an enjoyable compilation of fireside tales. While none of the individuals has a fleshed-out personality, the narrative format really doesn’t demand them. Daemon Hall is reminiscent of many a haunted house, and the Faustian bargain that underlies the story is comfortingly familiar. Polhemus’ stark artwork builds the mood, with heavy lines and crosshatching complementing the campfire nature of the tales.

For a small summer-reading spine tingle, this is an excellent option. (Horror. 12-14)

THE ULTIMATE TOP SECRET GUIDE TO TAKING OVER THE WORLD

Nesbitt, Kenn Illustrator: Long, Ethan Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (208 pp.) $7.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-4022-3834-5

Nesbitt offers rightly characterized “brief period[s] of simulated education” (“Your arch is the curve on the bottom of your foot, so an arch nemesis is an enemy that you want to step on”) punctuated by boob, doo-doo and butt jokes. The author lays out a ten–or-so–step program for would-be supervillains—from becoming a genius overnight by playing more video games to acquiring evil minions and robots along with the requisite lair, look, cackle, motto and booty (“Hey! Stop that! Are you laughing at the BIG, SHINY BOOTY? You are?”). He also wanders off on tangents that will likely lose even his intended audience, suggesting such family-friendly pranks as resetting all of the household clocks and watches or periodically announcing that he’s taking a break or that his brother has dropped a hamster down his pants. Long’s small spot cartoon drawings supply neither humor nor relief.

Not even in the same League as Scott Seegert’s funnier and far more useful Vordak the Incomprehensible: How to Grow Up and Rule the World (2010). (Humor. 10-12)

THE GREAT RACE

O’Malley, Kevin Illustrator: O’Malley, Kevin Walker (32 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-8027-2158-7 A slightly fractured fable works too hard to appeal to an adult audience and leaves children in the dust.

Nate Tortoise is tired of hearing about the celebrity hare Lever Lapin. He is the talk of the town, the chatter fueled by the hare himself. Even at the tortoise’s favorite restaurant, La Gaganspew, he is re-seated to make way for the hopping megastar. Reacting to the ubiquitous barrage, Nate challenges Lever to the inevitable race. The rest is history—repeated.

Although this story is always a favorite of young readers, the new twist found here is a bit odd. With obvious disdain for the celebrity phenomenon, O’Malley provides additional meat to the story: The swarm of fans pinning the hare to the wall is the reason Lever loses the race. The text is laced with biting, mature humor. “You’ve got the brains of a four-year-old and I’ll bet he’s glad to be rid of it.” Even the play on words at the book’s end (a headline reads, “BETTER NATE THAN LEVER”) is a stretch for young minds, albeit entertaining for adult readers. O’Malley’s ink-and-watercolor cartoons echo the adult tone, depicting sneers and jaded expressions on the faces of the principals.

An updated but optional version of this ubiquitous tale.

(Picture book. 4-8)

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“A harsh but ultimately heartwarming story about moving forward after trauma and loss...” from hooper finds a family

THE WIZARD OF DARK STREET

Odyssey, Shawn Thomas Egmont USA (352 pp.) $16.99 | e-book: $16.99 | July 26, 2011 978-1-60684-143-3 e-book 978-1-60684-277-5 Oona would rather solve cases than cast spells, but her decision not to apprentice to her uncle, The Wizard of Dark Street, has disastrous consequences.

In 1877, 12-year-old Oona is a rare natural magician, but she has reasons beyond an interest in detection to shun her magical heritage—personal reasons. Although she lives with her magician uncle on Dark Street, last of the 13 roads between the worlds of Man and Faerie, Oona wants to follow in her dead father’s gumshoe footsteps and solve crimes. When the ceremony to name a new apprentice to The Wizard ends abruptly with the disappearance of her uncle and prompts local crime boss Red Martin to attempt to take possession of Pendulum House, magical linchpin of Dark Street and traditional home of The Wizard, Oona and her talking raven Deacon are on the case. Odyssey’s debut is a sad thicket of extraneous detail and repetitive exposition with a regrettably unexplored historical setting. Oona is engaging enough, but those around her don’t rise to her level of characterization. The mystery offers some appeal, but the “magical” setting is a pale reflection of Diagon Alley.

The interesting and satisfying conclusion to the mystery just doesn’t make the long rambling journey worth the trip. (Fantasy/mystery. 9-12)

AFRICANS THOUGHT OF IT Amazing Innovations

Opini, Bathseba; Lee, Richard B. Annick Press (48 pp.) $21.95 | paper $11.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-55451-277-5 paper 978-1-55451-276-8 Series: We Thought of It

This entry in the We Thought of It series introduces African innovations in various fields including architecture, arts and crafts, communication, musical instruments and more.

The series features co-writing by an academic expert and a member of the country or culture represented, clear, colorful design that includes numerous full-color photos and a great deal of information. A fascinating blend of tradition and modernity is evident, especially in one photo of a Maasai man in traditional clothing using a digital camera to photograph animal tracks. The innovations range from the familiar (bow and arrow; pyramids) to some that will be new to most kids (a “rondavel,” or round house; “injera,” a spongy bread). Although the text focuses on history of 876

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these discoveries and inventions, briefly putting them into contemporary context, there is also a helpful “Africa Today” chapter. Unfortunately, the decision to treat Africa as a single entity—other series titles focus on an individual country or people, such as The Chinese Thought of It (2009) or The Inuit Thought of It (2007)—contributes to the lack of awareness about the many different countries, languages and cultures represented on this enormous continent. The text, as opposed to the title, does address Africa’s diversity, often noting that the same item or concept is known by different names throughout Africa, for example.

Interesting to browse and suitable for research. (Nonfiction. 8-11)

HOOPER FINDS A FAMILY A Hurricane Katrina Dog’s Survival Tale Paley, Jane Harper/HarperCollins (144 pp.) $15.99 | June 28, 2011 978-0-06-201103-9

Paley offers a first-person, presenttense account of a puppy’s journey through Hurricane Katrina, based on a true story.

Jimmy has quite the story to tell.

His happy life in Lake Charles, La., is suddenly disrupted by a violent storm, and he is left alone and homeless. The fierce storm and Jimmy’s struggles to stay alive are described in unsparing detail. Jimmy barely escapes drowning and being eaten by a bobcat. Starving, he spots a nest of baby birds: “I lean over and snatch one. While the raft is rocking, I gobble it up. It’s so good, I grab a second bird without hesitating.”

After being rescued from the flood waters, Jimmy describes the conditions he endures in an animal shelter before being adopted by a new family in New York. At first, Jimmy is not sure how he feels about his new life; his new “Dad” doesn’t seem to think much of him, and there are the small matters of a bully in the dog park and a new name, Hooper, to get used to. Adjustment brings contentment, and readers who have followed Jimmy/Hooper’s odyssey will be satisfied with the ending.

A harsh but ultimately heartwarming story about moving forward after trauma and loss by making space for new loved ones and new possibilities. (Fiction. 9-12)

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FORGOTTEN

Patrick, Cat Little, Brown (304 pp.) $17.99 | June 7, 2011 978-0-316-09461-0 Imagine forgetting yesterday but remembering tomorrow.

Patrick’s high-concept debut falls flat. Each morning at 4:33, London Lane’s mind resets, blanking out the past—but she “remembers” her future.

Doctors have been unable to solve her condition, so London stumbles through life faking normal, aided by notes and her mother and best friend (both of whom she “knows,” thanks to future memories). Every morning she must study her own life. Enter hot boy, but despite the growing relationship, London can’t remember him from her future. Luke’s inexplicable presence and a resurfaced actual memory set London on the trail of her own past, in which she discovers a tragic mystery. She conveniently remembers just enough to solve it, and it turns out there are happy endings all around, although only a weak “explanation” for London’s ability to effectively see the future. The flat main character and awkward necessities of writing to accommodate future memories hinder the promising premise. Present-tense narration in an adult voice (perhaps because London remembers forward?) and a personality is based only on who she will be make empathy difficult. This is compounded by the discomfiting circular logic throughout (she is friends with Jamie because she will be friends with Jamie; readers will still wonder why).

Ultimately, it’s a mess, but intense romance means some appeal. (Pseudo-paranormal romance/mystery. 12-16)

A FILTH OF STARLINGS

PatrickGeorge Illustrator: PatrickGeorge PatrickGeorge/Trafalgar (48 pp.) $12.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-9562558-1-5 Like its companion title, A Drove of Bullocks (2011), this compendium of collective nouns for 20 different animal groups is imaginatively illustrated with visual plays on the words and accompanied by short, relevant descriptions and realistic silhouettes.

Drove covers mostly mammals and insects; Filth includes birds and aquatic animals. The two titles work well as a pair.

These are all genuine words, ranging from the familiar “flock of geese” (though the flocked wallpaper background may be a puzzle) to the unusual “smack of jellyfish.” The spare images are set on double-page spreads. Author-designers Peter and Ann Scott, working as PatrickGeorge, make liberal use of silhouettes and only a few intense colors per image. Some are beautiful, like the “kaleidoscope of butterflies,” and many |

are gently humorous, like the “pod of dolphins” wearing iPods and earbuds. The “murder of crows” carries weapons from a Clue game. The short descriptive paragraphs explain the group name. In one unfortunate lapse, the authors refer to a stingray’s venomous tail; actually, it’s only a small barb on the tail. A few Briticisms in these titles, first published in England in 2009, may puzzle American readers, but they add to the language interest.

This striking book and its companion will be welcome in schools and homes where language is a focus. (Informational picture book. 8-14)

FLAT BROKE

Paulsen, Gary Wendy Lamb/Random (128 pp.) $12.99 | PLB: $15.99 e-book: $12.99 | July 12, 2011 978-0-385-74002-9 PLB 978-0-385-90818-4 e-book 978-0-375-89869-3 A 14-year-old greedily launches himself headlong into the entrepreneurial world, with amusing consequences.

In the sequel to Liar, Liar (2011), Kevin’s parents have taken away his allowance to punish him for his creative lying.

Never impeded by misfortune (or a guilty conscience or the advice of everyone wiser than he), he decides it’s a great time to make money. First he provides the perfect venue for poker games, even though some of his hapless player-victims begin to lose more money than they have. With the gambling business running admirably, he starts cleaning neighbors’ garages, not worrying that depositing the trash in store Dumpsters is illegal. Then he begins “borrowing” a golf cart to sell cookies and coffee to college students. But he steps on too many people on the way up, inevitably leading to his downfall. Kevin’s good-natured—if oversimplified—view of the world is pretty funny, and while readers will anticipate problems long before he does, it just adds to the fun. Chapter titles taken from a fictitious book on making money— “The Successful Person Has Vision That Others Lack,” for example—contrast nicely with the disastrous outcome of Kevin’s grandiose plans. That his droll first-person account only lightly sketches other characters hardly matters.

A jocular, fast-paced voyage into the sometimes simple but never quiet mind of an ambitious eighth grader.

(Fiction. 9-12)

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WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU O.J.

Perl, Erica S. Knopf (208 pp.) $15.99 | PLB: $18.99 e-book: $15.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-375-85924-3 PLB 978-0-375-95924-0 e-book 978-0-375-89783-2 Be careful what you wish for is the premise of this mildly amusing novel about a girl who aches for a dog.

Zelly Fried, Jewish and entering sixth grade, lives in Vermont, where she doesn’t feel she fits in. Understanding her yearnings, Grandpa (a.k.a. “Ace”) ropes Zelly into using an orange-juice jug as a “practice dog” to convince her parents she’s capable of caring for a real one. Because she loves Ace—and because he’s an unstoppable force of nature (whose booming voice is rendered in large uppercase letters)—Zelly gives in. Taking care of “O.J.” isn’t easy, particularly cleaning up “fake poop.” Schlepping a jug on a leash and including it in various activities is especially humiliating. Why Zelly embarks on this scheme, let alone keeps on, will strain readers’ credulity, as will the delayed entry into the novel of sensible ideas, courtesy of a new friend, for showing that Zelly’s ready for dog ownership. Zelly does rebel at one point but then returns to “O.J.” in a predictable, maudlin plot twist. Characterizations are superficial, though Zelly is likable, and kids will relate to her predicament. Too many subplots also make for uneven storytelling.

Yiddish words and phrases and various Jewish customs are sprinkled liberally throughout and defined in a glossary, which might help the novel reach more than a niche audience. (Fiction. 9-12)

THE WAKING: SPIRITS OF THE NOH

Randall, Thomas Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $8.99 | June 1, 2011 978-1-59990-251-7 Series: The Waking, 2

With all the twists, turns and scares of a blockbuster teen horror flick, Randall’s second offering in his Waking series rockets off at a breakneck pace through lingering curses, evil spirits and lush descriptions of Japanese culture.

Gaijin Kara Harper is assimilating nicely into her Japanese school and has closely bonded with the group of friends with whom she battled a horrible demon (The Waking: Dreams of the Dead, 2009). Kara and her friends belong to the school’s Noh club, and they are thrilled to be preparing the school’s first performance of a Noh play about the Hannya: a chilling tale of a snake demon that possesses a beautiful woman.

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However, when members of the club begin disappearing, Kara and her friends quickly realize that evil has again found its way into their school. Randall provides enough back story to give new readers an adequate jumping-in point, so familiarity with the first installment is not necessary. Fans teetering on the edge of the cliffhanger ending will delight in the knowledge (and short wait) that the final volume in the trilogy is slated for later this year. Using all the usual horror elements, Randall constructs a fine teen chiller complete with mean-girl drama, a dash of romance and the angst of teens who believe that adults do not understand them.

A darkly spooky whirlwind of a read. (Horror. 13 & up)

SECRET PONY SOCIETY

Rising, Janet Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (192 pp.) $6.99 | June 1, 2011 978-1-4022-3954-0 Series: The Pony Whisperer, 3 This time out with the Pony Whisperer, the talking horses don’t have all that much to say.

Rising continues the adventures of Pia, who, thanks to a statue of the Roman goddess Epona, can converse with horses. Travelers— British for gypsies—have encamped near the stables where Pia keeps her pony, Drummer. Their brutal treatment of young racehorses leads Pia to help one traveler girl, Jazz, and her horse run away. Oddly enough, as soon as she’s found Jazz a place to hide, Pia disappears from the action—she goes to visit her dad, and by the time she comes back, Jazz has reconciled with her family and claims all is well. Pia’s magical talent is not important to the plot, which flounders. Are the horses really being abused? Is Jazz? The ending offers no resolution: the travelers leave with these questions unanswered.

The first-person narrative is breezy and fast-paced, and Pia is an appealing character, but the rest of the boarders at the stable are settling into stereotypes—the catty girl, the airhead, the handsome, pony-loving boy. With series fiction one doesn’t hope for much, but the first books in this series promised more (The Word on the Yard, 2009, etc.).

Still, easy-enough fun for horse-crazy girls. (Animal fantasy. 9-13)

WHERE’S THE PARTY?

Robey, Katharine Crawford Illustrator: Endle, Kate Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $15.95 | $6.95 | e-book: $6.99 | July 1, 2011 978-1-58089-268-1 | 978-1-58089-269-8 e-book 978-1-60734-315-8 Neighborhood birds singing about a party wake Kate up and seem to invite her.

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“Briskly sending up fraying Southern social traditions, this hilarious debut celebrates one value that’s universal: true friendship.”

from never sit down in a hoopskirt and other things i learned in southern belle hell

Off she goes, down the path, past the garden to a field of wild strawberries. Basket in hand, she stops to pick, then hurries on toward the brook. There she finds baby mallards, just one week old. The wild berries are a perfect present for wild ducklings. Even better, there’s homemade strawberry jam waiting when she gets home. Overall-clad Kate has button eyes and a simple but surprisingly expressive face. This classic home-awayhome story is enhanced by accurate information about familiar birds with believably transliterated songs. The cardinal whistles, “Par-ty! Par-ty! Party!” The meadowlark encourages, “Party is ne-ar! Party is ne-ar!” and when Kate is ready to give up, the killdeer points the way, “Quick, here! Quick, here!” Endle uses a variety of painted and patterned papers for her mixed-media collage illustrations. Plentiful greens and tans are accented by the colorful birds and berries. Ten different kinds of birds are shown accurately enough for identification. An ending glossary tells more about each species in the order of appearance and gives their Latin names. In conclusion, a list of standard field guides and a reputable website offer further resources.

An irresistible invitation. (Picture book. 3-7)

NEVER SIT DOWN IN A HOOPSKIRT AND OTHER THINGS I LEARNED IN SOUTHERN BELLE HELL

Rumley, Crickett Egmont USA (304 pp.) $8.99 | June 14, 2011 978-1-60684-131-0

Fresh from a series of boarding-school expulsions, Jane, 17, returns to Bienville, Ala., to cap her high-school career.

Residing with Grandmama, who is intent on turning her into a Southern Belle, Jane enters a longstanding beauty—sorry, achievement—pageant, introducing the cream of wealthy, white Bienville maidenhood to society. She’s appalled to be selected as one of five Magnolia Maids; but times are changing.

Recovering from a massive oil spill and seeking to attract investment, town leaders hope to project a modern, diverse (postEmancipation) image. Along with traditional belles Ashley and Mallory, this year’s Maids include Zara, daughter of the AfricanAmerican communications tycoon who’s bringing needed jobs to his hometown; Brandi Lyn, representing Bienville’s disadvantaged residents; and Jane, straddling categories. (Her mom was a town blueblood; her Greek shipping-magnate dad anything but.) When not engaged in Maid duties, Jane obsesses over Luke Churchville, whom she was sent to boarding school to get away from but never stopped thinking about. While diversity is easier to say than practice, the girls discover sisterhood is powerful, and getting even with two-timing boyfriends while wearing hoopskirts is a great leveler. (For best results, avoid vodka.)

Briskly sending up fraying Southern social traditions, this hilarious debut celebrates one value that’s universal: true friendship. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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DEAD RULES

Russell, Randy HarperTeen (384 pp.) $16.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-06-198670-3 Not your usual paranormal romance.

Romeo and Juliet meets Daniel Waters in folklorist Russell’s wry teen debut. After a deadly freak bowling accident on a double date, high-school junior Jana Webster (of Webster and Haynes, regional champions in Duet Acting, as she’s quick to mention) finds herself in Dead School, right in her hometown of Asheville, N.C. As in real high school, rules and cliques govern Dead School.

Jana, a Riser (with a promising placement after graduation), is supposed to avoid Sliders (whose fates are on a downward spiral). Since Sliders still have an attachment to Earth, she asks Slider Mars to help her communicate with her boyfriend and love of her life, Michael Haynes. While Jana plots to kill Michael so they can be together forever, Mars believes Dead School is a chance to learn how to change their destinies. The pacing intensifies as Jana discovers the truth about her death, and the real star-crossed lovers emerge. Sarcastic quips and double entendres drive the story’s humor, but it’s the sensitivity of the supporting characters (like Beatrice, who after inviting her crush to her church picnic and sneaking off to the woods with him so he can feel her up, dies when a stray lawn dart strikes her head) that allows Jana (and readers) to see laughter within tragedy.

Wickedly clever. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

RAH, RAH, RADISHES! A Vegetable Chant

Sayre, April Pulley Photographer: Sayre, April Pulley Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $14.99 | June 14, 2011 978-1-4424-2141-7

Let’s hear it for the veggies! This cheerful chant pairs pithy couplets with the author’s photographs of farmer’s market beauties.

The staccato rhymes suggest themselves for all sorts of exuberant oration, from simple read-alouds to more orchestrated pageantry, perhaps involving kids as players. (Cauliflower pom-poms, anyone?) Page turns are cleverly used to add further punch to the rhymes: “Lettuce. Lima. Go, green bean! / Cucumber’s cool. Kohlrabi’s queen!” The photographs, as sturdy and delicious as their subjects, occasionally pull off a visual pun: The aforementioned queenly kohlrabies sport crowns of trimmed stalks that indeed lend a regal air. Photos, bordered with thin white lines in offset rectangles, appear against pages of green, gold, eggplant-purple or tomato-red. (Yup, it’s a fruit, but it makes several honorary appearances.) Crisp white type in the serif font “Calvert” adds the right rah-rah touch. The most pleasing aspect

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about this crunch-fest for parents and caregivers, arguably, is its happy presumption: What kid wouldn’t love to both celebrate and chow down on these fresh and fabulous foods?

Indeed, Sayre’s appended a page of facts and suggestions and notes that “No vegetables were harmed or mistreated in the making of this book. Most, however, were later eaten.”

A winning recipe blending crispy verse and fresh photography: Go team! (Picture book. 3-7)

HE’S SO NOT WORTH IT

Scott, Kieran Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1416999539 Ally wants her dad and her boyfriend, Jake, to come back; Jake wants Ally back, but he can’t figure out how to approach her. Failure for both leads to over 300 pages of tantrums, but the teens will learn in the end, as might some readers.

In chapters dominated by Ally but punctuated by passages about Jake, Scott spins her story of adolescent angst.

Ally wants to escape being one of the rich kids whose families vacation every summer in expensive beach homes. She doesn’t want to stay with her mom’s new boyfriend, but she makes an impulsive decision to go to the shore anyway and begins a relationship with a local boy who clearly stands on the wrong side of the law. Jake’s mom grounds him for the summer, forcing him to get a summer job with none other than Ally’s dad, now running a local coffee shop. Both teens react with frequent, instant and extreme anger when their fantasies fail to meet reality. The author plays fair by highlighting the stupidity and rudeness of many of their actions, allowing readers to assess the behavior realistically. As Ally makes ever-more-foolish decisions, Jake eventually moves in the opposite direction and helps to save the day.

It’s chick lit with redeeming features that may help it appeal to a wide audience. (Fiction. 14 & up)

BETTER TOGETHER

Shapiro, Sheryl; Shapiro, Simon Illustrator: Petricic, Dušan Annick Press (32 pp.) $19.95 | paper $8.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-55451-279-9 paper 978-1-55451-278-2

a sticky goo.” In “Bubbles,” a girl blocks her brother, who wants to give the dog a bath in the washing machine, advising instead that they “Rub and scrub with soapy water, watch the bubbles fly.” “Concrete” shows a workman putting sand, gravel, water and cement into the big mixer, as well as a trio of children putting their prints in the new sidewalk (one gets his shoes stuck): “Concrete starts all soft and slushy, / then gets hard—that’s clever.” Other topics include a makeshift Martian costume for Halloween, cinnamon toast, a ragtag soccer team, salad dressing, mud, music and bedtime; that is, the routine of checking under the bed, a bedtime story, hug and kiss, etc. “Just one more glass of water, / and one more time to pee, / and one more check beneath the bed / for monsters—wait for me.” A brief, helpful afterword suggests teaching possibilities provided by the text.

The poetry may be hit and miss, but the concept is terrific and the illustrations similarly sublime. (Picture book. 3-6)

WHAT IS YOUR DOG DOING?

Singer, Marilyn Illustrator: Habbley, Kathleen Atheneum (32 pp.) $12.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1-4169-7931-9

Snappy illustrations and a short, rhyming text depict a collection of canines in humorous activities from dreaming and scheming to shedding and sledding in this fetching story suitable as a read-aloud for young children or for newly independent readers.

The patterned text uses just a few words per page to describe each dog’s behavior or condition, with the appealing pups alternating between playful or mischievous activities and useful ones. Several specific canine breeds are shown engaging in their own specialty: a German shepherd as a police dog and a border collie herding sheep, for example. A few of the canine behaviors will need explanation by an adult, such as “dog wired” for an overactive pup or “dog in disgrace” for a dog who has tracked mud into the house. The collie in the “famous dog that gets chauffeured” illustration will be recognizable to those who grew up with black-and-white TV, but probably not to today’s children. Each of these illustrations provides an opportunity for discussion, however, introducing rich vocabulary into a supershort text. Computer-generated art from first-time illustrator Habbley uses a contemporary palette and crisp graphics to provide jazzy images of the adorable dogs. From a tiny Chihuahua “snug in a purse” to a huge St. Bernard, each dog has an engaging face and expression.

Amiable and entertaining, just like a well-behaved canine companion. (Picture book. 3-7)

A compendium of poems designed to teach the concept of mixing...and, of course, to entertain.

Each of the 13 verses is illustrated with a two-page spread, featuring mostly children doing the mixing. “Glue” shows them combining flour and water to make glue for a classroom art project—”Then mix them, squish them, squoosh them, / ‘til you get 880

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“Three of Earth’s last teenagers discover a long-hidden escape route for humanity in this suspenseful future tale, a solo debut for Smyth.” from the never weres

THE NEVER WERES

Smyth, Fiona Illustrator: Smyth, Fiona Annick Press (256 pp.) $21.95 | paper $12.95 | June 1, 2011 978-1-55451-285-0 paper 978-1-55451-284-3 Three of Earth’s last teenagers discover a long-hidden escape route for humanity in this suspenseful future tale, a solo debut for Smyth.

Fifteen years after a virus stopped all new human births, most of the aging population lives in overcrowded urban warrens while Mia, Xian and Jesse rattle around a steadily-emptying school with the rest of their thinning generation. Jesse’s controversial involvement in cloning studies, artistic Mia’s work in an old-age home and reckless Xian’s dangerous and illegal excursions into the miles of old tunnels and sewers beneath the city has turned their friendship contentious. Their bonds solidify again, though, when they discover clues that point to a successful but suppressed experiment in human cloning many years previous, thus drawing the ominous attention of a mysterious government agent. Smyth, a veteran illustrator, creates a credible futuristic world in which advanced technology and run-down infrastructure blend seamlessly in monochromatic ink-and-wash graphic panels done in an underground comics style. Showing particular chops with chases, escapes and even multiple actions like tantrums in single impressionistic mélanges of images, she creates back stories for each central character, cranks the tension up on the way to a climactic double surprise and closes with a tidy but upbeat resolution.

Despite earnest undertones a richly imagined and capably carried-out thriller. (Graphic science fiction. 11-13)

WILLIAM’S MIDSUMMER DREAMS

Snyder, Zilpha Keatley Atheneum (224 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-1442419971

Set in the quaint town of Gold Beach in the 1930s, this sequel picks up right where William S. and the Great Escape (2009) left off.

Eighth-grader William, his brother, Buddy, and his two sisters, Trixie and Jancy, have been living with their Aunt Fiona since they escaped the clutches of their cruel father and half-brothers. William thoroughly enjoys his new life, especially when the opportunity arises to try out for the role of Puck in a prestigious summer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After a spectacular audition, William clinches the role of Puck and makes himself an enemy in the process—a boy called Bernard, the son of the Dean of Performing Arts, who was sure he had the role locked up. A girl named Clarice, who is quite infatuated |

with William, insists on trying to solve his problem with Bernard and ends up only complicating things further. Finally, in an initially interesting but not entirely successful subplot, Jancy and William have to face the fact that Buddy is behaving like one of their half-brothers, starting fights and making quite the nuisance of himself. Nevertheless, the description of William’s severe case of stage nerves and his techniques for coping with this and other challenges will resonate with readers.

An adventure story with a lot to say about identity, ambition and character. (Historical fiction. 9-13)

SPINNING OUT

Stahler Jr., David Chronicle (288 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-8118-7780-0 Stocky stoner prankster Frenchy and his wealthy hippie friend Stewart usually prefer to bide their time smoking weed and plotting tricks to unleash on their unsuspecting school, but when Stewart hears that the drama department is putting on The Man of La Mancha, he eagerly convinces Frenchy to audition with him.

Stewart and Frenchy land the lead roles of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively, and all hell breaks loose as Frenchy and the cast watch Stewart’s mind disintegrate into dementia in rehearsals as opening night approaches. Stahler knows highschool boyspeak well, and both characters walk and talk like real teen boys who’ve known each other forever. He successfully renders other characters as well, including a stage-manager love interest for Frenchy. He stumbles with plot, however.

While the parallels between the boys’ lives and the musical are obvious, the allusions will feel bizarre and random to teen readers not familiar with either the play or the Cervantes original, especially when Stewart shows up to class in full costume and makeup with a saber.

The end may or may not be a surprise to readers, but ultimately this story of a high-school friend trying to save his buddy will be tough to find an audience for. (Fiction. 14 & up)

THE SILVER BOWL

Stanley, Diane Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $16.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-06-157543-3 Veteran Stanley concocts a delicious blend of familiar fairy-tale motifs and intriguing, well-rounded characters to create an engaging fantasy.

Young Molly’s mother is ill and her father uncaring, so she learns early how to take care of herself. Her resourcefulness pays off when she goes into service at the palace. Resilience

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and intelligence allow her to thrive, and they stand her in good stead when she gets swept up into a series of dangerous adventures. Molly encounters an enchanted artifact that reveals (only to her) the threat that hangs over the royal family. Aided by Tobias, a fellow servant who befriended her from the first, Molly rescues young Prince Alaric from certain death. The three then flee the castle and face a series of challenges both mundane and magical before Alaric can claim the throne. Stanley’s writing is smooth and compelling, making her characters come to life and ensuring that readers can easily follow the twists and turns of the inventive plot.

While there is indeed a villain as well as some not-so-nice characters, Stanley’s nuanced portraits encourage readers to consider motivation as well as actions. Touches of humor lighten the tone at times, while suspenseful sequences heighten the tension.

A most worthy and enjoyable entry in the “feisty female” fantasy genre. (Fantasy. 10-14)

COOKIEBOT! A Harry and Horsie Adventure

Van Camp, Katie Illustrator: Agnew, Lincoln Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 978-0-06-197445-8 Harry and Horsie return to battle a giant, cookie-eating robot in this winning tale that will satisfy sweet tooth and thrillseeker alike.

Somewhere in the universe, two tummies are growling.

Only cookies will satiate the ebullient Harry and his toy pal, Horsie. But in order to reach the cookie jar, the two must create the ultimate cookie-getter. A mechanical feat of colossal proportions, CookieBot marches through their metropolis, grabbing cookies from high-rises; but like Godzilla and King Kong, CookieBot goes mad. Down Fifth Avenue he stomps, gobbling confections and climbing skyscrapers until it looks like the city might face the ultimate catastrophe: no more cookies! An epic battle ensues—complete with one big sugar crash—as the heroes leave a happy (and full) public to return home and play another day. Agnew’s fantastical, retrofuturistic artwork propels this spirited adventure. Stylistically he’s true to the title’s predecessor, Harry and Horsie (2009), but compositionally he deftly changes genres, moving from a Flash Gordon–esque, sci-fi–serial approach that highlights sequential images to finding inspiration in classic, monster fantasy movies. Iconic splash pages capture the scope of Harry’s spirited imagination, while detailed illustrations offer clever, hidden humor. Once again, friendship rules for Harry and Horsie; and for Van Camp and Agnew, their seemingly seamless collaboration perfectly tells the story.

Inventive, animated and irresistible. (Picture book. 3-6)

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THE BOY AT THE END OF THE WORLD

van Eekhout, Greg Bloomsbury (224 pp.) $16.99 | June 21, 2011 978-1-59990-524-2

A boy, a robot and a mammoth struggle to survive after the apocalypse.

Fisher “becomes born,” as he thinks of it, out of a gel-filled pod in a destroyed Ark meant to preserve dozens of species along with human life after environmental cataclysm. He seems to have been endowed with a complete understanding of language and of his surroundings, and with, as he notes in awe, an awareness of hundreds of ways to catch fish: “I know all of them.” He is accompanied by the somewhat damaged guardian robot Fisher christens Click and by a juvenile mammoth Fisher calls Protein (after deciding not to kill and eat the gentle giant…just yet). This trio makes its way across the North American continent in search of a second and finally a third Ark in order to help Fisher fulfill his mission of continuing the human species.

Self-reinventing weaponry meant to defend each of the Arks leads to the destruction both of Fisher’s birthplace and the Southern Ark, where an encounter with nano-technology is by turns hilarious and creepy. Part speculative fiction, part cinematic survival adventure, the novel features a brisk pace and clever and snappy dialogue.

The real, scary possibility of human destruction of our own environment is tempered by this diverting tale of the possibilities of continued existence and the meaning of hope, friendship and community.

(Science fiction. 8-12)

HOPPER AND WILSON

van Lieshout, Maria Illustrator: van Lieshout, Maria Philomel (40 pp.) $16.99 | May 12, 2011 978-0-399-25184-9

Two lumpy stuffed animals pack up a red balloon, wave goodbye to their potted pet cactus and set sail in a paper hat to find the end of the world—a place they hope has enough lemons for an endless supply of lemonade and a staircase to the moon!

Quiet, concise language and poignant watercolor illustrations pull readers into this far-out fable about a friendship between a toy elephant (Hopper) and a yellow mouse (Wilson). Children will immediately like these two funny little guys, whose exposed stitching make them seem both Velveteen and vulnerable. They’ll also fall for the book’s soothing cadence and rolling rhythms. Simple sentences beat up against gestural artwork like small waves on a ship’s bow.

Sensitive line work and atmospheric washes of cool colors

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“When aggressive xenophobia closes in, it’s time to record memories in a mysterious whistle, pile into an invisible spaceship and optimistically fly to another planet. Isn’t that what everybody does?” from you ’ll like it here (everybody does)

communicate the depth of Hopper and Wilson’s friendship and their shared despair when a storm separates them at sea. A frightening spread of the two caught in mammoth, murky waves causes trembles; a chilling, misty sequence of lonely Wilson calling hoarsely for his buddy brings tears.

The reunion is inevitable and immensely moving. Hopper, a small, blurry smudge far, far away, shouts from an entire page of white space, “Wilson, is that you?”

Winsomely ambiguous and otherworldly, this sweet, quirky story offers fantastic footholds for dizzying discussion. (Picture book. 4-12)

A SWORD IN HER HAND

van Rijckeghem, Jean-Claude; van Beirs, Pat Translator: Nieuwenhuizen, John Annick Press (288 pp.) $21.95 | paper $12.95 | June 1, 2011 978-0-55451-291-1 paper 978-0-55451-290-4 Lady Marguerite, born in 1347 in Flanders, is determined to control her own destiny and not submit to the will of her domineering father, who wants to form an alliance by marrying her off to a repulsive English nobleman.

Vividly depicting wealthy life in the Middle Ages, this coauthored Dutch import follows the childhood of the spunky daughter of a brutal Flemish count. After a series of losses of newborn sons, Marguerite’s distraught mother is sent off to a monastery, leaving the count’s only child poorly supervised. With plenty of free time, she plays hard with young squires, learns to fight with a sword and ride astride a stallion, becoming too self-assured to accept the demands her father begins to place on her as she reaches a mature age of 13. Marguerite tells her own story in the present tense, a style that at first reads awkwardly as she describes her own birth yet later serves to enhance the edginess of her personality—but also makes it hard to fully develop any other character. Rejecting the advances of both English and French princes, determined instead to marry for love, Marguerite is an engaging if not always historically authentic character who encounters and overcomes numerous obstacles.

Marguerite’s fearless spirit, the fast pace and the setting’s gritty authenticity all elevate this noble historical novel above the rabble. (Historical fiction. 13 & up)

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MISTRESS OF THE STORM

Welsh, M. L. David Fickling/Random (320 pp.) $16.99 | PLB: $19.99 e-book: $16.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-385-75244-2 PLB 978-0-385-75245-9 e-book 978-0-375-89917-1 In Albion, there are places where stories become true. Unbeknownst to her, Verity Gallant is at the center of one such tale.

Verity is the unlikely heroine in a story that combines elements from Joan Aiken, Cornelia Funke and J.K. Rowling. Bullied at school, a misfit at home and ignorant of her family history, Verity is the only one suspicious of the “Grandmother” who invades her home to await the birth of Verity’s youngest sister. Welsh sets a brisk pace and delivers a nightmare-worthy villain as Verity, with help from her friends combined with some convenient revelations, discovers the horrifying truth. The intruder is the Mistress of the Storm, said to drink the blood of infants to survive. Verity’s grandfather, leader of the famed smugglers known as the Gentry, had been duped in the past by the murderous Mistress. In revenge, he created a tale in which Verity is fated to destroy her. The setting and cast of characters are so richly described readers will see the scenes, which cut from one to another, as if watching a movie. For those not content to stay on the surface, there are psychological depths to plumb, a point made in a regrettably didactic last chapter.

This is an exciting debut—with the promise of more to come—that will leave readers clinging to their seats, or masts, as the case may be. (Fantasy. 10 & up)

YOU’LL LIKE IT HERE (EVERYBODY DOES)

White, Ruth Delacorte (272 pp.) $16.99 | PLB: $19.99 | June 14, 2011 978-0-385-73998-6 PLB 978-0-385-90813-9 When aggressive xenophobia closes in, it’s time to record memories in a mysterious whistle, pile into an invisible spaceship and optimistically fly to another planet. Isn’t that what everybody does?

It is for Meggie Blue and her family when their tranquil life in North Carolina is interrupted by townspeople rightly suspecting them of being alien. Though their native tongue is unusual and they sporadically sprout glowing blue hair after a certain age, the Blues are far from threatening and adore the sanctuary Earth provided when pollution destroyed their home planet. However, with their lives threatened, Meggie and her family vacate unwittingly to

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a parallel world characterized by destitute outlooks, subliminal mind control and really boring clothes. Alternating narration between 12-year-old Meggie and her 14-year-old brother, David, White (best known for Southern comingof-age realism) paves the way for a relatively broad audience.

And though the dialogue has occasional unnatural tempos, these awkward bumps can be chalked up to otherworldly speech patterns. Hovering in the vicinity of ET, The Twilight Zone and 1984, the attractive science-fiction formula accommodates the familiar coming-of-age arc. More important is the underlying theme of originality. Meggie and her family repeatedly have to prove (even to themselves) that being different or just plain alien is more than okay—even if your hair turns blue.

A quirky commentary on age, environment, government and self-expression. (Science fiction. 11-14)

HOGWASH!

Wilson, Karma Illustrator: McMullan, Jim Little, Brown (40 pp.) $16.99 | June 7, 2011 978-0-316-98840-7 Farmer takes spring cleaning to the extreme in this barnyard romp.

In rollicking rhyming verse, Wilson describes how Farmer washes each horse, duck, cow, goat, cat and dog. All goes well. And then it is the hogs’ turn. Those sassy porkers board up their pen and write rude messages expressing their displeasure with having to get clean: “No hogwash / for us today. / Pigs love dirt— / so go away!”

The clever farmer tries to trick those pigs, but to no avail—a shower by hose instead of a bath just makes more mud for them to wallow in. Bribing them with food fails. His last attempt involves his crop duster and some shampoo, but unfortunately, he forgets the gas. When he crashes into the muddy pigsty, readers may think he’ll explode with anger, but they are in for a surprise. With their soft lines and muted colors, McMullan’s watercolors lend the book an old-fashioned feel that is echoed in the rather elongated faces of the horses and the overall-clad, fresh-faced farmer. The characters’ comical expressions and the pigs’ feisty messages to the farmer will leave readers in stitches.

Certain partners to Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin’s Duck, these hogs (and their mud-loving message) are sure to delight. (Picture book. 3-7)

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PUTTING MAKEUP ON THE FAT BOY

Wright, Bil Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) $16.99 | July 26, 2011 978-1-4169-3996-2 Carlos, 16 and fabulous, just knows he’s going to be famous.

Cocky but playful—“I had just the slightest touch of color in my cheeks.

I’d given myself a manicure. I looked beyond excellent!”—Carlos strides purposefully toward his goal: Makeup artist to the stars. Zipping around Manhattan, he obtains employment with a hip, prestigious cosmetics company in Macy’s and nabs a position working for the star of a Saturday Night Live equivalent. His campy voice (“seriously gorgeous bootay. Tight and round and perched, honey, perched!”) turns bitchy sometimes. He also needs to learn accountability for his actions: Macy’s makeup really can’t leave the store before being paid for, no matter how famous the star requesting it, and Stella McCartney boots begged from a friend must be returned pristine. Carlos loses that friend but narrowly saves his job; he also fights his sister’s abuser (who calls Carlos “maricón”) and strains for dignity when a kind but clueless straight boy tells Carlos to his face that he doesn’t return his crush. Wright’s occasionally flashy but mostly straightforward (often even clunky) prose should work equally well for bookish and non-bookish readers; the excellent treatment of a gay, Latino teen is marred only by ruthless slamming of fat friend Angie.

He may step on some toes along the way, but this fat boy’s going places. (Fiction. 11-15)

A NEED SO BEAUTIFUL

Young, Suzanne Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $16.99 | June 21, 2011 978-0-06-200824-4 Yet another angel in human form reluctantly faces her uncertain destiny in a gripping supernatural romance.

High schooler Charlotte’s life has been controlled by the Need: Periodically she experiences an irresistible compulsion to locate a particular person and provide some kind of emotional assistance, never understanding why. But now the episodes are happening every day, dominating her and impossible to explain away to her best friend, rich girl Sarah, and rock-steady boyfriend, Harlin. Onika, a sexy young woman who haunts her nightmares, may hold the key to what’s happening to Charlotte. What she discovers about her future is painful and disturbing. She’s a supernatural being, and when, way too soon, she’s forced back to the light—akin to dying—no one will remember her. Her

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first-person narration captures the terror of dying young, which is here intensified by the prospect of the erasure of her existence once she’s gone. Realistic dialogue and believable teen situations—opportunities to sneak out for sexual encounters, the ready availability of alcohol, the ugly outcome of Sarah’s rejection of a predatory classmate—all serve to make the fantasy elements more believable. While characters are predictable and superficial, the inventive plotdriven narrative fully conveys Charlotte’s desolation.

Charlotte’s bleak tale provides an imaginative twist on the timeless battle between dark and light and, of course, sets up a potential sequel. (Supernatural romance. 12 & up)

k i r k u s r o u n d-u p continuing series MISS SMITH UNDER THE OCEAN: Miss Smith, #4 Garland, Michael Illus. by the author Dutton (32 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-525-42342-3 (Picture book. 5-8)

A GOOD KNIGHT’S REST: Good Knight, #6

Thomas, Shelley Moore Illus. by Jennifer Plecas Dutton (32 pp.) $16.99 | June 1, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-525-42195-5 (Picture book. 3-5)

I LOVE TO DANCE: I Love…

Walker, Anna Illus. by the author Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $9.99 | June 7, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4169-8323-1 (Picture book. 2-6)

I LOVE TO SING: I Love…

Walker, Anna Illus. by the author Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $9.99 | June 7, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4169-8322-4 (Picture book. 2-6)

This Issue’s Contributors #

Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Timothy Capehart • Louise Capizzo • Julie Cummins • Katie Day • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Carol Edwards • Diane B. Foote • Omar Gallaga • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • Robin Fogle Kurz • Megan Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Nina Lindsay • Ellen Loughran • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Hillias J. Martin • Jeanne McDermott • Kathie Meizner • Kathleen Odean • John Edward Peters • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Leslie L. Rounds • Dean Schneider • Chris Shoemaker • Karyn N. Silverman • Robin Smith • Jennifer Sweeney • Gordon West • Monica D. Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko

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kirkus indie Kirkus has been keeping an eye on selfpublishing for years, and we’ve never seen anything like the current boom. With the number of self-published titles now pushing 1 million per year, and independent authors utilizing new technologies to sell tens of thousands of copies of their work, the age of indie has truly arrived. Kirkus Indie brings readers the best works by independent authors, and we bring independent authors the crucial tools to get the word out about their books like no one else. We’ll give your book an unbiased, professional review, and then we’ll push that review into the world via our social-media properties, newsletters, website and expanding content. To learn more about Kirkus Indie and start promoting your title, please visit us online at kirkusreviews.com/indie/about.

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DEVIL’S DEN

Ashby, Timothy CreateSpace (489 pp.) $17.95 paperback | March 21, 2011 ISBN: 978-1456545246 In a mystery by former U.S. Department of Commerce official Ashby, the 1923 murder of a Civil War veteran leaves a trail of conspiracy, cover-up and corruption stretching from the Battle of Gettysburg to the halls of the Harding-era Congress and the fledgling Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the FBI).

Someone is killing elderly Civil War veterans and BI agent Seth Armitage must discover what links the victims in order to find the killer, unaware that the investigation is being manipulated by the Bureau’s corrupt director Harry M. Daugherty (reallife Attorney General in the tainted Harding Administration) and a shadowy member of the Senate. Providing a Machiavellian counterweight to the plot is the BI’s ambitious assistant director J. Edgar Hoover. The case draws Virginia-born Armitage, haunted by his memories of World War I France, to the site of the bloody battlefield where his grandfather fought for the Confederacy. Ashby’s interweaving of the two events, and his portrayal of the Civil War as a lingering tragedy for both sides of the conflict, nicely ups the emotional stakes. The beautiful daughter of a deceased Union soldier plays a pivotal role; so do young Charles “Slim” Lindbergh, the resurging Ku Klux Klan and BI colleague Gaston Means (a convicted felon in real life). Ashby missteps in altering between his hero’s first and last names, at times in the same paragraph, and in his not entirely successful attempt to portray the complexities of post-Civil War black-and-white relationships through peripheral characters. It is no mean feat, however, that despite myriad plot devices and a prodigious volume of historical detail—military maneuvers, weaponry, early FBI forensics practices, books of the time—Ashby maintains the story’s forward momentum and clarity.

Real people, real events and the still-charged reverberations of the Civil War provide a provocative framework for a 1920s-era mystery neatly told with meticulous historical detail and enjoyable twists.

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“Military fiction buffs will find much to savor in this dark novel, rife with chilling authenticity.” from palestine

PALESTINE

Bloomfield, Jonathan Silver Lane (472 pp.) $17.97 paperback | $9.99 e-book June 30, 2011 ISBN: 978-0615418179 A veteran of the Israel Defense Forces incorporates his experiences into a brooding military battlefront saga set in wartime Israel.

Bloomfield’s dense, impressive debut opens with a rush of excitement as Bahaa, a soldier on Palestine’s Gaza Strip, flees from Zionist troops but is shot dead, leaving his secret love, an Islamic University history teacher, pregnant with his son. The brawny life of Bahaa’s offspring, christened Anid al-Husseini, forms the grainy crux of the novel, which revolves around an imagined nuclear war between Israel and Iran. As a teenager, joined by best friend Luty, Anid joins the Hamas Islamic resistance movement. Both receive commendations for their bravery and resolve in the face of mortal danger and these attributes carry the men through their college years until Anid is ordered into hiding, just as he becomes smitten with the beautiful Amjad. Meanwhile, young Maj. Gen. Yigal Navon, head of Israeli intelligence, braces for news that Iran has beefed up its nuclear arsenal of ballistic missiles aimed at Israel. A host of soldiers are called into active duty as civilians panic, and Anid’s resilience is tested while on the run through a succession of kidnappings, a ghost from his past and a reunion with Luty and Amjad. The Muslim army’s Operation Judgment Day is set in motion, ensuring the massacre of Jews throughout the region, but Luty seems conflicted about his intentions and puts Anid in danger as Navon, now prime minister, continues to navigate the strife with strategic projects.

The author handles the rush and urgency of his war-torn setting well as a dizzying surfeit of surface characters emerge, each ushering along the two-sided battle plan that, while relentlessly violent and stark, is also engagingly complex. His imaginings about an Israelite uprising resonate with harrowing realness and the novel’s unique coda, however heavy-handed, offers postscripts and expansions of his story through pointed conjecture.

Military fiction buffs will find much to savor in this dark novel, rife with chilling authenticity.

BREAKING GROUND: The Horeb Anomaly

Cornell, Robert J. Tate (356 pp.) $25.99 paperback | February 1, 2011 ISBN: 978-1617394317 In Cornell’s thriller, an unprecedented discovery could invalidate much of what historians believe about humankind’s ancient past.

While on an archeological venture in Jordan, members of a private military firm |

excavate ancient vessels similar to those housing the Dead Sea Scrolls. The company’s CEO, Victor Finn, enlists the services of expert paleolinguist Holly Webster and former Special Ops soldier Jack Butler to not only unravel the mystery surrounding the indecipherable text inside the vessels, but to travel back to the Middle East to search for more related relics. What the group doesn’t realize, however, is the existence of the Brotherhood, a radical Islamic organization whose mission is to ensure that the accepted historical paradigms of the day are protected and that anything or anyone that challenges those beliefs is promptly destroyed. The discoveries that Webster and Butler make in the field are jaw-dropping—a drastically different history of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, the translation of the original language of ancient man, the first Rosetta Stone, the unearthing of Moses’ tomb, etc. And even these revelations pale in comparison to what they ultimately uncover.

But with the Brotherhood bent on destroying them and everything that the remote site has sheltered for millennia, will humankind ever know the literally earth-shattering secrets of their forefathers?

The strength of this novel could also be its biggest weakness— although the Indiana Jones-like action and adventure is undeniably gets the adrenaline flowing, it’s also formulaic and, at times, predictable. But even the predictability can’t stifle the sheer audacity of this storyline; it’s apparent that Cornell had as much fun writing this novel as readers will have experiencing it. Powered by a highly intelligent, meticulously researched and provocative narrative that challenges numerous historical and religious convictions regarding humankind’s past, Cornell’s tale is a breakneck-paced, edge-ofyour-seat thriller in the vein of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

A page-turner of the highest order.

MY TWO WIVES AND THREE HUSBANDS

Gordon, S. Stanley Savant (287 pp.) $16.95 paperback | February 25, 2011 ISBN: 978-0982998786 An erudite charmer documents his ongoing adventures in love and culture through 80-plus years “in the life­”—from Rittenhouse Square to London’s West End. First-time author Gordon’s breezy autobiography begins with a caution to the reader: “If concepts like Hopeless Romantic, Love at First Sight or Head Over Heels make you nauseous, this book is definitely not for you.” Born to working-class Russian-Jewish immigrants in 1920s Philadelphia, Gordon, née Samuel Grodsky, knew early on that he was different; after unrequited crushes on neighbor boys and desperate trips to the library to read Havelock Ellis, the amiable young man ambles into what would eventually become a lucrative career in optometry and a truly amazing life story.

He marries, divorces, dabbles and dithers, marries again, has a son and eventually realizes he’s gay. Then the fun begins; cruising, swank Hollywood parties, lots of sex, the pursuit of love (a recurring theme), glamorous midcentury gay New York, Broadway semitriumphs and tragedies, lots more sex and love (with

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k i r ku s q & a w i t h l e i g h fa l l on Leigh Fallon is a social media success story.

She shopped her supernatural love story with little headway, only to upload the novel to the teen lit social network InkPop.com and have it garner serious media attention and acclaim. Fallon now has a deal with HarperTeen, and The Carrier of the Mark will be hitting the bookshelves in September. Fallon talks to us about going to a major, using social networking to gain a following and why the first set of publishers were right to reject her.

and edited accordingly, and they responded. The Carrier of the Mark was very well received and shot up to the top of the charts. There I got my review from a HarperCollins editor. It was very encouraging and filled with excellent editing advice. Shortly afterward, I was offered a deal from the very same editor. [Ed note: InkPop was actually launched by HarperCollins in 2009, so editors keep an eye on it.]

Q: I noticed you’re active on Twitter and Facebook, and regularly blog. How was Twitter, Facebook or blogging helpful before the book deal? And now?

Q: After your initial round of rejections, what did you think the chances were that your book would be released by a traditional publisher?

A: I’d always felt pretty confident that I would eventually get The Carrier of the Mark published. I knew that when I got my rejections it wasn’t all down to the manuscript; while it was in need of much editing, it was my lack of knowledge of how the publishing industry worked that was my greatest obstacle.

The Carrier of the Mark

Leigh Fallon Harper Teen $8.99 paperback October 2011 978-0062027870

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SVP, Finance J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny

Q: Do you believe the HarperCollins deal would have happened without social networking? Why or why not?

Q: What is the most common mistake that prevents indie authors from being successful?

SVP, Online Paul H offman #

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Kirkus Reviews, PO Box 3601, Northbrook, IL 60065-3601.

Periodicals Postage Paid at Austin, TX 78710 and at additional mailing offices.

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A: Rushing. From what I see, most authors write their manuscript and race headfirst into getting it published. This is a mistake. A manuscript needs time to breathe. And the author needs time to take stock. This is where an author should pause, observe the market and start following agents and trends.

A: The whole concept behind sites like InkPop is social networking. Without the social networking, we don’t have this hive of eager, well-educated minds, hungry for good writing and experimenting with their own. So no, without social networking The Carrier of the Mark would most likely have remained in the giant slush piles of great stories that would never be read.

Q: As an indie author, what advantages did InkPop give you?

Q: If the deal didn’t happen, what would you be doing now?

A: InkPop was hugely advantageous for me. Here I had a readymade, eager-to-read pool of teens who were gasping to get their hands on new material.

In general, InkPop members are intelligent and highly vocal. They aren’t afraid to voice opinions and preferences, so I could fine tune my work to deliver what the real reading teen wanted. I listened

A: It’s hard to say, I’d like to think I’d be plugging away. I’d certainly have maintained my online presence. Hopefully I’d have improved my truly heinous query letter and managed to snag a literary agent to pursue the traditional route to publishing.

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ph oto by je n n if e r co n roy

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A: Honestly, I had no concerns going to a big publisher…I’d heard the whisperings of the perils of publishing through a publishing giant. Stories of debut authors getting swallowed up in the machine, enduring a revolving door of editors and publicists and big-name authors demanding all the marketing and publicity funds, but for me this has not been the case. I think coming from InkPop I already had a huge following, and HarperCollins was very aware of this and are fostering that online connection with a campaign that has been tailor made to fit.

A: When I first started pursuing representation and that illusive “deal,” I was very naive. I hadn’t put enough time into studying and researching the publishing industry. I hadn’t prepared myself for the harsh realities of a very tough industry and an exceptionally overcrowded market.

While my manuscript was good in terms of story and potential, it was not polished enough to be considered in a market flooded with talented writers who have put time and effort into making their manuscript read beautifully.

President M A RC W I N K E L M A N

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Q: What was your biggest concern with going to a big publisher?

Q: You once said neither you nor your manuscript was ready when you first pursued a deal. What were you and your story missing, respectively?

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A: To be honest, I didn’t really use social networking before I got my deal. It was only when I discovered InkPop and the power of the online community that I began to tap into the opportunities that it presented. Many of the InkPop users crossed over onto Twitter and Facebook with me, and as my author presence grew so did my following.

the titular husbands) and a graceful slide into vigorous middle age and beyond. The book chronicles Gordon’s long and mostly absurdly happy life to date with stylish candor and humility. His engaging prose is chatty without being catty, and sexy without being sleazy; better still, he tells his tale of fabulousness without resorting to the bland narcissism that sully many memoirs— especially the happy ones. There’s no false modesty, but neither is there boasting or gratuitous name-dropping. Even when he dishes on celebs such as Tallulah Bankhead or Lawrence Harvey, it’s more wittily self-deprecating than vicious. Gordon’s is a fascinating life, and his boundless joy at his good fortune is genuine—and contagious. The only thing his book lacks is pictures.

An instant classic of its kind (i.e., Christopher’s kind) and required reading for inquisitive young queers, dyspeptic old conservatives and just about anyone who has a heart.

THE GUARDIANS OF TIME: Book 1 of the Guardians Series

Lawrence, Damian Pentelicus (489 pp.) $19.95 paperback | $9.99 e-book March 21, 2011 ISBN: 978-0983172123 Lawrence’s debut balances adventure, mystery, science, religion and morality.

Mark Lawson discovered time travel in order to save the human race, but he recognizes that his techniques could also be used to manipulate history. Nearly half a century later, that’s exactly what temporal terrorists are doing—and the Guardians exist to make sure they’re not successful. But it would help immensely if the Guardians knew exactly who they were fighting. Their story offers readers a complicated romp through time, with scenes spanning the centuries. For the most part, Lawrence handles the changing times with a deftness that is unexpected in a first-time novelist, though his short treatises on Greek history may make some readers feel like they’re sitting in an obscure history class.

However, it’s the characters and the choices they make that matter the most, and that’s what will draw in readers. While the story is what most would call science fiction, it may not be what fans of the genre would expect. Science exists and, indeed, remains central to the story, but doesn’t drive every aspect of the plot. Much of that depends on history, characters, religious faith and more. The characters are not only trying to understand and deal with technological advances, but are asking what it means to be human and how the new technology fits into their lives and culture. Lawrence’s story manages to be exciting enough to make those who crave adventure happy, while also examining the metaphysical and moral implications that time travel could have on individuals, groups and cultures. This is a compelling, detailed read, and one that offers its audience something solid to chew on.

Lawrence does a masterful job of drawing readers into his fully realized, morally complex vision of the future.

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SACRED CEREMONY: Create and Officiate Personalized Reid, Dayna Wedding Ceremonies CreateSpace (246 pp.) $17.95 paperback | March 19, 2011 ISBN: 978-1456491444

A how-to guide for choosing the words that mean the most to you for your wedding ceremony, as well as designing the event.

In a welcome respite from the marriage-industrial complex, minister and officiant Reid takes the immensely practical tack of helping you select the right words for your wedding, from pure suggestions to full sample ceremonies. That’s not to say that the book’s cup doesn’t runneth over with glad tidings and peals of joy at the event; just that the author would like to see you get it right for yourself. To start the process, Reid offers a step-by-step overview of the many possible elements that can be included in a ceremony, from approval and dedication blessings, to the declaration of intent and pronouncement (the only legal stipulations involved), to vows and the exchange of rings, to the kiss and the close. Since the whole point of this project is to provide the reader with word choices, Reid serves up abundant samples for each element in the service. They might be spiritual or nonspiritual, traditional or alternative; they might be brief or extended, soupy or flinty. Her sources are rangy and inclusive—biblical scripture, Native American blessings and prayers, Buddhist homilies, rabbinical teachings, Irish blessings and toasts; Armenian, Hawaiian, Inuit; Rumi, Oscar Levant, Kierkegaard; song lyrics, movies, children’s books, television.

Even if some of them make you recoil—perhaps Richard Bach isn’t your cup of tea—there is always a counterbalance somewhere in these pages. Reid encourages readers to use the words as a springboard to zero in on the day’s significance and intent, to embellish upon them, just as she recommends ways in which to broaden the ceremony with personal touches, such as the ringing of little brass bells instead of the shower of rice or birdseed. Lastly, she takes on the bureaucracy; obtaining license, filing paperwork, officiating.

This may be a nuts-and-bolts primer on fashioning the architecture and words for your marriage, but Reid keeps it sweet as the cake and smooth as the silk.

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