January 15, 2014: Volume LXXXII, No 2

Featuring 319 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXII, NO.

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REVIEWS

CHILDREN'S & TEEN

Aviary Wonders Inc.

by Kate Samworth In a future without birds, consumers can order parts to make their own from this comprehensive catalog. p. 117

NONFICTION

The End of Eve

by Ariel Gore Wickedly sharp reading filled to bursting with compassion, rage, pain and wit p. 59

on the cover Can a genteel, white Southern woman of the 21st century truly comprehend the life of a young, black slave in the 19th century? Sue Monk Kidd reveals what it was like writing The Invention of Wings. p. 14

FICTION

Shotgun Lovesongs

by Nickolas Butler A charming look at small-town life in America p. 6

INDIE Revered writer Lawrence Block discovers he's also a merchant. p. 134

a note from the editor

Adam Sternbergh’s Mission to Entertain B Y C la i b orne

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Smi t h

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

Photo courtesy Thad Carter

Shovel Ready, the first novel by journalist Adam Sternbergh, is the kind of thriller that makes you want to grab on to someone’s hand.

Anyone’s hand, really. The novel doesn’t traffic in the kind of tingly spookiness alleviated by the protective presence of someone you love. It’s more of an existentially unsettling book. Set in a near-future Manhattan, with a bombed-out, radioactive Times Square at its core, Shovel Ready seethes with characters out to maim or off one another. Maybe it’s due to the fact that they’re hit men (the ones who aren’t assassins are pretty good at killing too), but Shovel Ready, despite an undercurrent of tenderness and gallows humor, is a grim read. It makes you search for a smile from a stranger Claiborne Smith because you want to feel comforted, after finishing the book, that smiles can exist between people who don’t know one another.

Shovel Ready is also unrelentingly entertaining (which may be one reason Warner Bros. bought the film rights very soon after Crown decided to publish the book; Denzel Washington is attached to star). Spademan, the narrator, was a garbage collector before the bombs. Now, he’s a hired gun asked to kill the daughter of America’s most famous evangelist. When he meets her, he has to decide whether to send her to her grave or protect her from the vicious person who hired Spademan to do her in.

There is plenty of life left in the post-apocalyptic novel, Sternbergh says, despite what has by now been a long train of dystopias coming down the track. (He’s right: We put Chang-rae Lee on the cover of the Jan. 1 Adam Sternbergh issue for his dystopian novel On Such a Full Sea, and the New York Times Book Review put its review of that book on the front page of its Jan. 5 issue.)

Sternbergh is the culture editor at the New York Times Magazine, having edited and written at New York before joining the Times. When I met with him recently, we talked about blurring the lines between “literary” novels and “genre” books. He remembered reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 thriller No Country for Old Men, which the Coen brothers adapted.

The critical reception of the book was “as if a virtuoso violinist had taken a day off to go play fiddle at the square dance,” he recalled, as if a revered writer had taken a “time out” to play in the genre sandbox.

Sternbergh’s reaction was different. For him, it was “kind of like a bonus” to have McCarthy writing a thriller. “I’m a guy who really likes to square dance.” Sternbergh wrote a previous novel that was a satire of New York in the boom days of the 2000s, but his writing didn’t interest him, so he shelved it. With Shovel Ready, he was “shamelessly committed” to entertaining himself and his reader. The distinction between what is literary and what’s not interests him and book critics, he said, but readers care less about those demarcations. “As someone working in the cultural-analytical industrial complex, I think it was easy for me to lose touch with that reader myself,” he said. Writing Shovel Ready, “I wanted to get back in touch with that.”

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This Issue’s Contributors

Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Gerald Bartell • Amy Boaz • Claire Bushey Hamilton Cain • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Julie Foster • Peter Franck • Amy Goldschlager • April Holder • Robert M. Knight • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Angela Leroux-Lindsey Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Joe Maniscalco Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Mike Oppenheim Derek Parsons • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • William E. Pike • Gary Presley Karen Rigby • Evan Rodriguez • Lloyd Sachs Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Michael Sandlin William P. Shumaker • Rosanne Simeone • Linda Simon Elaine Sioufi • Arthur Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Suzy Spencer Matthew Tiffany • Claire Trazenfeld • Amanda Eyre Ward • Steve Weinberg • Carol White Chris White • Alex Zimmerman

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contents fiction

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

Index to Starred Reviews............................................................5 REVIEWS.................................................................................................5 Sue Monk Kidd confronts the American holocaust....14 Mystery..............................................................................................25 Science Fiction & Fantasy..........................................................36 Romance............................................................................................38

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews..........................................................41 REVIEWS...............................................................................................41 Ahdaf Soueif’s memoir of a city in the grip of revolution and hope...................................................................56

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews......................................................... 83 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 83 Ransom Riggs adapts to Peculiar best-sellerdom..... 100 interactive e-books...................................................................123 Continuing series.......................................................................125

indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................127

Hannah E. Harrison gives a really good dog her time in the spotlight in this winning debut. Read the review on p. 104.

REVIEWS..............................................................................................127 Legendary mystery writer Lawrence Block goes indie ....................................................................................... 134

Appreciations: Remembering Bruce Chatwin................ 143

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on the web w w w. k i r k u s . c o m

Photo courtesy Berta Crayton

In Tim Tingle’s haunting novel, The House of Purple Cedars, the Trail of Tears is a memory, but the Choctaw people of Oklahoma still confront prejudice and contempt. We called it “a lyrical, touching tale of love and family, compassion and forgiveness.” It’s 1896. At Skullyville settlement, New Hope Academy for Girls has been destroyed by fire. Twenty Choctaw girls die.

Tingle’s story spans the months following the fire as experienced by Rose Goode, a student. Despite assimilating elements of white culture, including Christianity, Tingle’s Choctaws maintain mystical connections to the land and its creatures. The tale is ripe with symbolism and peopled by riveting characters. Look for our conversation with Tim Tingle this month.

Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9 Photo courtesy Gasper Tringale

In E.L. Doctorow’s latest, Andrew’s Brain, Andrew is brainier than most since he’s a cognitive scientist preoccupied with the biopsychological question of how brain becomes mind—and over the course of the novel, readers discover that the workings of his mind have become increasingly problematic. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. As he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Kirkus writer Megan Labrise talks with Doctorow about Andrew’s Brain later this month.

9 And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors. Each week, we feature authors’ exclusive personal essays and reported articles on how they achieved their success in publishing. It’s a must-read resource for any aspiring author interested in getting readers to notice their new books.

Espionage, counterespionage, a scandalous trial, a coverup and a man who tries to do right make Robert Harris’ new novel, An Officer and a Spy, a complex and alluring thriller. The book is set in Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of 20,000. Among the witnesses to his humiliation is Georges Picquart, Harris’ ambitious protagonist. The intellectual Picquart has recently been promoted to the head of the counterespionage agency that “proved” Dreyfus had passed secrets to the Germans. At first, Picquart firmly believes in Dreyfus’ guilt, but it is not long after Dreyfus is delivered to his desolate prison that Picquart stumbles on information that leads him to suspect that there is still a spy at large in the French military.

An Officer and a Spy has labyrinthine machinations having to do with the Dreyfus Affair, the late 19th-century spy case that disclosed a latent antiSemitism in French culture. Catch our interview with Robert Harris in the coming weeks.

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fiction ROOSEVELT’S BEAST

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Bayard, Louis Henry Holt (320 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-8050-9070-3

SHOTGUN LOVESONGS by Nickolas Butler....................................... 6 FEAR NOTHING by Lisa Gardner....................................................... 13

Bayard (The School of Night, 2011, etc.) draws dark fiction from the real-life Roosevelt-Rondon 1914 exploration of Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida.

Bayard exactingly chronicles the hardships of charting the river, right down to the damp, dangers and drudgery of the Amazonian jungle, but it’s the physical and emotional trials of Kermit, Teddy Roosevelt’s son, that drive the story. The 20-something Kermit has been sent along to protect his boisterous father from his own recklessness. Kermit worships his father, but he also feels a strange kinship to his wastrel uncle, Elliott, the family’s black sheep. Famous names and true-life exploration aside, Bayard’s novel captures a great adventure, with the expedition navigating in cumbersome dugout canoes, running short of food and fighting off malaria. Danger enough, but then Teddy wanders from camp while hunting for food. Kermit follows protectively, and the pair are captured by Cinta Larga, a tribe of cannibals. The tribe is being plagued by the “Beast,” a thing that kills “beyond malevolence.” If the Roosevelts kill the Beast, the tribe will set them free. Bayard describes tribal life realistically, employing a young female character, the bilingual Luz, a missionary group’s only survivor, to bridge cultural barriers. Teddy and Kermit kill the Beast, which seems to be a large howler monkey, but then Kermit glimpses “the look of boundless sorrow in the howler’s eyes and realizes an evil entity has leapt from the howler into a nearby human. Bayard’s heart-of-darkness saga is impressive— blood and sacrifice, primitive peoples and Roosevelt courage.

Kermit’s powerfully drawn in the expedition, in his inextricable link to the Roosevelt name and in his sad decline in 1943 Alaska.

Luz and the Cinta Larga are believable, as are Rondon and the exploration party. Teddy, however, seems one-dimensional, all Bull Moose–San Juan Hill, no matter how dire the circumstances, leavened only by his love for his son.

A suspense-filled re-imagining of history deepened by a confrontation with evil’s supernatural presence.

PRAYING DRUNK by Kyle Minor.......................................................18 BOY, SNOW, BIRD by Helen Oyeyemi............................................... 20 LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932

by Francine Prose...................................................................................21 THE GHOST APPLE by Aaron Thier.................................................. 24 ROMANCING THE DUKE by Tessa Dare.............................................38

ROMANCING THE DUKE

Dare, Tessa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-06-224019-4

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“Intelligent escapism that should please Brothers Grimm lovers more than Disney fans.” from while beauty slept

WHILE BEAUTY SLEPT

title, Head Witch of the Lazarus Coven, to Lilith herself. While shielding her fragile brother and grieving mother, and placating her fiance, Viscount Louis Harcourt, also a witch, she must now prepare for her inauguration as Morningstar, leader of the coven sworn to protect the Great Secret and the Elixir from the clutches of malign necromancers like the Sentinels, who could use these materials for terrible ends. And then Lilith goes and falls in love with a nonwitch, handsome artist Bram Cardale, leaving both herself and Bram vulnerable when wicked forces attack. This third combination of romance and sorcery from Brackston is longer, slower and more slackly plotted than her previous books, neither chilling in its horrors nor compelling in its drama. Skipping forward from 1913 to a conclusion six years later, it runs a repetitive and illogical course, no more infernal in its necromancy, finally, than Ghostbusters.

Previously a sprightly tale-spinner, Brackston has mislaid her magic touch this time round.

Blackwell, Elizabeth Amy Einhorn/Putnam (416 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-0-399-16623-5 In her first novel, Blackwell keeps her retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” in the once-upon-a-time past but makes the standard version’s reliance on magic subservient to a more psychological/sociological interpretation.

When aged Elise overhears her granddaughter telling the popular legend about a sleeping princess brought back to life by a kiss, she feels compelled to tell the real events she witnessed 50 years earlier while a beloved servant of King Ranolf and Queen Lenore: Aware she was the bastard offspring of an unnamed father connected to the castle where her mother once worked as a seamstress, Elise arrived at court as a teenager. Although her quick rise to becoming personal attendant to Queen Lenore made her unpopular with other servants, Elise adored her work and the gentle queen. But all was not as copacetic as it at first seemed. Lenore’s inability to bear an heir was creating a political as well as a marital crisis. Ranolf was about to buckle to pressure to name his brutal brother Bowen as successor, when Lenore returned from a journey with Ranolf’s great-aunt Millicent and announced her pregnancy. Soon, Millicent and Ranolf were locked in a power struggle over influencing Lenore, and Elise found her own allegiance to the queen compromised. And after Princess Rose was born, stubborn Ranolf banished Millicent, who vowed to destroy Ranolf’s kingdom. Whether she possessed any special power was less important than the “distrust and fear” that gradually overtook Ranolf’s rule as Rose grew up. Equally devoted to Rose as to her mother, Elise also lived her own life, complete with an early love and a complicated marriage. By the time Rose was 17, Ranolf had won a pyrrhic victory in his war against his enemies, including his brother, and Lenore had drifted under the spell of a religious fanatic. Then the kingdom faced an even greater crisis and Elise was assigned to protect Rose at all costs, including complete isolation.

Intelligent escapism that should please Brothers Grimm lovers more than Disney fans.

SHOTGUN LOVESONGS

Butler, Nickolas Dunne/St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-250-03981-1

A debut novel that delves so deeply into the small-town heartland that readers will accept its flaws as part of its charm.

“Write what you know” is the first dictum directed toward aspiring fiction writers, and there’s no doubt that Butler knows his fictional Little Wing inside out. It’s a Wisconsin farm town not far from Eau Claire, where the author was raised, and it holds a central place in the hearts of those who came of age there—particularly the four men who were boyhood friends and who narrate the novel’s alternating chapters, along with the fifth, a woman who was the childhood sweetheart of at least two of them. Beth and Henry are the married couple who remained to farm in Little Wing and, despite their financial struggles, are in some ways the envy of the others. Lee, who is Henry’s best friend, has become “America’s most famous flannel-wearing indie troubadour,” an artist so successful he hobnobs with those that others know mainly from celebrity magazines.

But he only feels at home in Little Wing, where he found his voice and wrote the songs on the album that catapulted him to fame (and gives the novel its title). Kip made millions for others and did well for himself as a broker in Chicago but has returned to Little Wing to restore its mill as a commercial center and to show off the beautiful woman who will be his wife. Ronny left town as a rodeo rider and an alcoholic and has returned to recover after a brain-damaging mishap.

There are four weddings in the novel, a few separations, a bunch of drunken adventures and confessions, and a fairly preposterous ending. But there is also a profound empathy for the characters and the small-town dynamic that the reader will likely share, an appreciation for what “America was, or could be.”

Despite some soap-opera machinations and occasional literary overreach, the novel will strike a responsive chord in any reader who has found his life reflected in a Bob Seger song.

THE MIDNIGHT WITCH

Brackston, Paula St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-250-00608-0 978-1-250-02296-7 e-book Downton Abbey meets the dark arts in Brackston’s (The Winter Witch, 2013, etc.) latest, which sees an aristocratic young English witch leading a fight against an evil magic order while world war looms.

Twenty-one-year-old Lady Lilith Montgomery has her hands full. Her father, the sixth Duke of Radnor, has just died, handing on his title to Lilith’s opium-addicted brother, Freddie, and his other 6

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BLACK MOON

Over time, Biggs has watched her gradual deterioration, and part of the novel involves Biggs’ quest to find her after she goes missing and to share with her an elaborate dream he’s had, one Carolyn eventually tries to re-create and film. Another symptom of cultural and personal breakdown can be seen in college students Chase and Jordan. Since prescription sleep aids become extraordinarily valuable in a world populated by insomniacs, Chase and Jordan develop a scheme to rip off the pharmaceutical industry by stealing pills from the containers in which sleep medicines are kept. Chase’s ex-girlfriend Felicia works as a lab assistant at a Sleep Research Center, where doctors are desperately trying to find a cure—and where their research sometimes has lethal consequences. Another narrative thread involves high school student Lila, who, like Biggs, has retained her ability to sleep, but she finds she must leave her parents, whose insomnia is leading them toward madness.

Calhoun writes beautifully, though the novel is occasionally slow-moving—and thus, ironically, becomes a cure for insomnia.

Calhoun, Kenneth Hogarth/Crown (288 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-8041-3714-0 A novel about insomnia and dreams, and thus, almost by definition, it’s surreal.

Calhoun’s premise is brilliant, and he follows it to its logical (and psychological) conclusion. What if, gradually, everyone lost the ability to sleep? What would the world look like? How would contemporary culture shift on its axis? In this narrative, we follow a series of characters drastically affected by this shift, most of them pathological insomniacs, though a few retain their ability to sleep and thus become pariahs to the multitudes of the sleepless. At the center of the novel are Biggs (a “sleeper”) and his wife, Carolyn, who’s given over to the telltale signs of insomnia, including physical symptoms like redrimmed eyes and psychological symptoms resembling dementia.

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THE DELIVERANCE OF EVIL

away Lesley’s hard-won independence again and again. Her case worker, Francesca, tirelessly works to place Lesley in safe homes, although the best she can offer is a hostel populated by skeevy men. Essentially rejected by her mother for bringing shame upon the family, Lesley finds the courage to work at a diner and attend a posh school, where she is reminded daily of her status as a scholarship student. Her English teacher, Mrs. Kremsky, or Miss, becomes Lesley’s guardian angel. Driving her to and from school, offering morning lattes, Miss gradually gains Lesley’s trust. Lesley, though, has farther to fall, as she begins cutting herself to release her emotional pain. The day after her father’s trial, she accidentally cuts too deeply and winds up in a rehab center, arranged by Miss with the assistance of Francesca. Undergoing therapy, Lesley meets her first love, Clare, yet their sweet romance is doomed by Clare’s religiously fanatic parents and the center’s rules. Soon, Lesley is tossed out. With the help of Miss and her family, Lesley slowly claws her way out of the hellhole of PTSD. When Lesley finds herself pregnant, she naively reveals her past troubles to her midwife, unwittingly unleashing her own hell.

With its deft plotting, rich characterization and often hilariously poignant dialogue, Crowell’s (Letting the Body Lead, 2002, etc.) latest is a gem.

Costantini, Roberto Translated by Thompson, N.S. Quercus (576 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-62365-002-5

A long, complex crime novel that moves from savage murder to the political and social realities of contemporary Italy.

Debut novelist Costantini’s book appeared in his home country of Italy in 2011 under the title Tu sei il male (“You Are the Evil”), a somewhat more pointed statement than the “deliverance” of the English version. The evil is broadly distributed. Police captain Michele Balistreri is a young man who has no trouble betraying the neofascists whose cell he has infiltrated, even if he harbors a few neofascist sympathies himself. He’s more interested in drinking, smoking and cutting a bella figura on the streets of Rome, and when, just after Italy wins the World Cup in 1982, a young woman turns up brutally murdered, he seems to regard it as an inconvenience. He takes his job infinitely more seriously when, a quarter-century later, Italy again returns to the championship and the bodies start popping up once more. Here, the story, already absorbing (though too long by 100 pages), picks up speed, even though Balistreri doesn’t; he’s world-weary to the point of exhaustion, cynical and dependent on antidepressants to get him through the day, but he’s been suffering from guilt over his earlier callousness and is determined to get the investigation right this time. His inquiry takes him into some unlikely corners, from the Vatican to gypsy encampments, though he keeps circling back to suspicions he has been nursing for years. It helps to have a little knowledge of Italian politics to appreciate some of the subtleties of Costantini’s story, as well as a nodding familiarity with the geography of Rome (and the fact, for instance, that the Hotel Hassler is the city’s most elite).

None of those things are necessary in order to understand the essential nastiness of the bad guy and the moral ambiguities of the supposedly good ones. A promising debut.

THE BOOTLEGGER

Cussler, Clive; Scott, Justin Putnam (416 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-399-16729-4 The seventh page-turner in the Cussler series featuring indomitable detective Isaac Bell.

World War I’s over. Prohibition’s law.

The Van Dorn Detective Agency is helping the Coast Guard chase rumrunners and bootleggers, but it’s rough sailing. Boatloads of money are being used to corrupt police, Coasties and even weaklings in Van Dorn’s agency. Things turn critical quickly when Joseph Van Dorn himself is gravely wounded in a shootout at sea. He charges his No. 1 man, Isaac, with keeping the agency running, but Isaac’s more interested in finding Joseph’s assailant. Cussler/ Scott do a bang-up job with characterizations in this historical action tale, beginning with Isaac, the Jazz Age James Bond; Isaac’s protégé, beautiful former librarian Fräulein Privatdetektive Pauline Grandzau; and Marat Zolner, a Comintern operative who believes rumrunning can aid in overthrowing the international bourgeoisie. The plot’s believable, and there are fistfights, knifings or a Lewis gun spitting bullets page after page. The action shifts from New York City’s docks to luxury hotels where Isaac entertains his movie-star wife to Long Island estates. Cussler and company love historical factoids—across the Long Island landscape, bootleggers and others prowl in Pierce-Arrows, Packards and Rolls Royces. Marat’s a worthy adversary, one so amoral as to murder fellow apparatchiks sent to keep him from going rogue. There are gangs—White Hands,

ETCHED ON ME

Crowell, Jenn Washington Square/Pocket (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-3906-9 A courageous survivor of sexual abuse, Lesley Holloway has always cooperated with social services. That is, until they take her newborn daughter away from her and she has to battle to win her back.

After years of being dragged into the hall closet to be raped by her own father, Lesley runs away.

From that moment, she is thrust into the world of child protective services, a world filled with tremendously helpful individuals but also riddled with the very bureaucracy that will rip 8

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THE OBEDIENT ASSASSIN

Black Hands and Purple Gang—flinging lead as Isaac chases Marat from NYC to Detroit (where liquor arrives from Canada via an under-river tunnel) to Miami to the Bahamas and beyond.

Great fun from one of the better Cussler series.

Davidson, John P. Delphinium (320 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-883285-58-6

THE CONVERSATION The Night Napoleon Changed the World

Uneven thriller about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico prior to World War II. For this debut, journalist Davidson mines a real-life adventure that offers everything for an engaging thriller (mother-son tensions, world politics, exotic locales, a rhapsodic affair) but that emerges as uninvolving, however carefully executed. On a grim, fetid battlefield in Spain during the Civil War of 1936, Loyalist Lt. Ramón Mercader watches “a black sedan moving through the landscape of white limestone hills.” In the car comes his mother, Caridad, who wants to pull her son from the war against Franco to pursue a mission of far greater scope and consequence. The lieutenant resists, partly since his hard

d’Ormesson, Jean Translated by Bent, Timothy Arcade (128 pp.) $19.95 | Nov. 1, 2013 978-1-61145-905-0

A lauded titan of French letters plumbs the intersection between character and despotism in a slender, tendentious imagining of a conversation between Napoleon and a trusted political ally.

On a winter evening in 1804, Napoleon seeks the advice of Second Consul Jean-Jacques Cambacérès at the general’s Tuileries residence in Paris. The two men ponder the fate of the fledgling French republic, sapped by years of bloody revolution and foreign wars. D’Ormesson formats his story as a one-act play, with both men ruminating on the merits and flaws of democratic government as well as history’s cruel, unexpected turns. “I don’t repent the Revolution,” Napoleon confesses, “but I always detested its crimes.” He carefully builds a case to the wary Cambacérès: What conflict-weary France needs is a modern Caesar, bursting with ambition, burning to rule his country by any means necessary. Although a political parable, the book espouses elitist notions that would fit beautifully among today’s continental intellectuals. “The future belongs to no man,” Napoleon says, “Still, I am trying to bend it to my will...I am called to change the face of the world.” Once Cambacérès capitulates to the general’s bulldozing arguments, Napoleon feels liberated to crown himself emperor in the Roman fashion, revealing a profound narcissism that will both elevate and undermine his pivotal role in shaping Europe. While Bent’s translation is fluent, there’s a larger problem: d’Ormesson resists other options to Napoleon’s Great Man of History theory. “Successful men of letters think themselves the center of the world,” Napoleon audaciously claims; and it’s easy to believe that d’Ormesson, too, espouses this view.

A snobbish, claustrophobic work.

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THE ENCHANTED

and expedient mother stood by while members of her Soviet party, working for Stalin, executed her other son because, she says, “[h]e put himself above the cause.” Now Stalin, fearful Trotsky will undermine the Russian leftist cause, as he did by splitting the leftists in Spain, wants Trotsky, residing in Mexico, taken out. Caridad entreats Ramón to undertake the assignment. Reluctantly, but obediently, he becomes the assassin. The mission requires Ramón to take on the identity of a Belgian aristocrat, then head to Trotsky’s headquarters. To infiltrate the Soviet’s compound, Ramón must pose as a suitor to Sylvia Ageloff, one of Trotsky’s followers, a rich, cultured Jew from New York. Predictably, Ramón and Sylvia fall in love, with Ageloff ’s passivity and trust straining both credibility and the reader’s patience. Davidson describes his locales vividly and paces the story briskly, eventually building to a poignant, tragic and ironic denouement. But his characters, particularly Ramón and Caridad, whose back stories might rival The Manchurian Candidate’s Oedipal nightmare, lack the detail to develop them beyond their immediate objectives in the plot.

A well-crafted story hampered by insufficient character growth.

Denfeld, Rene Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-06-228550-8 The lost souls are on both sides of the bars in this death-row melodrama, the first novel from the author of works on societal issues (All God’s Children, 2007, etc.).

The prison is old. The row itself is below ground. The nameless narrator calls the place enchanted, for the inmates are under the spell of death. Executions in the lethal injection chamber are frequent. Mute since the age of 6, this narrator left a mental hospital at 18 and did something “too terrible to name” to a little boy. He found sanctuary in the prison library until, intolerably provoked, he beat another inmate to death and was transferred to solitary. There are too many gaps in the mute’s story to make him compelling. We know much more about his neighbor York, convicted of crimes against girls, again unspecified. His beautiful, mentally challenged mother had slept with half their small town; her visitors took advantage of York, too. He was born with syphilis. This detail is uncovered by the lady, as the death penalty investigator is known. (The author has worked in this field.) Acting for the defense to commute York’s sentence to life, she is up against a tight deadline and against York himself, who wants to die. Her sleuthing could have made a powerful novella, but there are too many distractions. We delve into the lady’s background, a mirror image of York’s. She’s painfully alone but looking for a mate, and she finds one in another death-row visitor, the fallen priest, a loner burdened by guilt. But Denfeld’s not done; she explores the prison culture, in which corruption is rampant and rape condoned. She is on much surer ground here than with her magic realist touches, such as the golden horses that live beneath the row and start running as an execution nears. Their role? “[B]eauty in the pain,” says the priest.

An over-the-top work with a number of preordained victims but no individuals. (Author appearances in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle)

KICKING THE SKY

De Sa, Anthony Algonquin (336 pp.) $14.95 paper | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-56512-927-6 A scrappy immigrant community in Toronto in 1977 sinks deeper into superstition and violence after a child’s murder; a pubescent boy struggles to comprehend the events in this gritty second book from Canadian De Sa (Barnacle Love, 2008) based on real events.

Confused by his own impulses and the behavior of those around him, 12-year-old Antonio Rebelo is coming of age amid contradictions and perhaps danger. The discovery of local shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques’ body has resulted in demonstrations against the gay community. Nearer to home, James, an attractive, mysterious stranger, possibly a male prostitute, has set up house in a neighbor’s garage. When a local underage girl falls pregnant after sex with her stepfather, James takes her in. Antonio and his friends, one of them serially abused by his father, hang out with James, sometimes stealing bicycles. Then Antonio sees the face of Jesus in a limpet shell and suddenly becomes the local miracle child, a healer and a source of income for his father. De Sa’s novel, a feverish portrait of the impoverished but colorful Portuguese community, is sporadically sympathetic but more often spiky, laden with abusive childhoods, unreliable adults and dangerous sexuality. As the lies, disasters, disappointments and disillusionments accumulate, Antonio’s group of friends and family fractures, and his childhood comes to an end.

A largely bleak vision, top-heavy with angst and tragedy.

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BEAUTY

Dillen, Frederick Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4767-1692-3 After a career closing factories, a woman reclaims her blue-collar roots, revives a plant and saves a community.

Oh yes, she also gets a shot at true love in this third novel from Dillen (Fool, 1999, etc.). Bony and flat-chested, Carol MacLean would never be considered attractive. Yet she is a commanding presence and not just because of her 6-foot-1-inch |

height; Carol, a single workaholic, is a natural leader. The irony is that instead of leading her own company, she has been a socalled undertaker, burying failing plants after buyouts by her private equity employers. Though it hurts this daughter of a Detroit machinist to bring bad news to working people, she’s very good at what she does, and her boss, Baxter, has promised her her own company after one more burial. About time; Carol is 56. But as she’s burying a fish processor on the Massachusetts shore, she learns that the promised company has gone to a rival. Carol, sobbing, collapses in the parking lot, where she’s found by Ezekiel “Easy” Parsons, a lifelong fisherman, captain of a stern dragger. Easy surely has to be Mr. Right, but business comes first. There are two plants. The new plant is heavily indebted; that’s Baxter’s problem. Carol sees her opening in the still-functional old plant. She will buy it from Baxter and transfer the all-female workforce once she has persuaded a Town Hall meeting of her sincerity. There are strong echoes of Jimmy Stewart rallying the townspeople in It’s A Wonderful Life. Carol has Anna Rose, redoubtable organizer of the Wives of the Sea, on her side; the town is thrilled; Carol is a hero. All this happens

at improbable breakneck speed, but Dillen presents the business choices so clearly that we cut him some slack. While the way forward will not be problem-free, the story’s sentimental populism has its own momentum.

Kudos to Dillen for his unusual premise. The workplace drama that follows is rousing, if predictable.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE

D’Aguiar, Fred Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-227732-9

A mother and daughter seek to escape a commune headed by an autocratic preacher in D’Aguiar’s (The Longest Memory, 1995, etc.) evocative novel, based on tragic events that occurred in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana.

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They’ve surrendered their birth certificates, their worldly possessions and their free wills to follow a charismatic leader to an exotic location in the midst of a jungle. But their 3,000 acre commune is far from the utopia some devotees envisioned.

Instead, members endure beatings and theatrical tests of faith, including ones that involve absolute trust while scorpions or tarantulas skitter up and down their arms. The preacher often uses fear and deceptive, “miraculous” resurrections to maintain a firm grip on a community that includes Joyce, her 10-yearold daughter, Trina, and a caged gorilla named Adam, whose thoughts and actions provide a unique perspective to D’Aguiar’s narrative. Much as the preacher’s praise and special attention ensure cooperation and adoration from his adherents, fruit and back scratches guarantee the gorilla’s loyalty, at least for a time.

But not all who live within the commune remain complacent.

Some are labeled dissidents, and others, like Trina’s friend Ryan, try to run away or go into hiding. Joyce holds a trusted position keeping the commune’s books in order and makes occasional boat trips to the mainland office, where money often changes hands with local officials. She and the boat’s captain develop an attraction, and he entertains Trina with stories about a spirited spider named Anansi while he verbally spars with Joyce when she defends the commune and invites him to join. When the preacher increasingly begins to single out Trina, Joyce and her daughter plan their escape from a community so enthralled with his promises they dutifully practice when he instructs them to rehearse the ultimate act. Joyce insists that they limit their plan of escape to themselves, but Trina has a change of heart. D’Aguiar’s narrative adequately describes the brutality and manipulative efforts of a self-absorbed leader, and his depiction of Adam and the infusion of magical realism add an unusual and sympathetic aspect to the story.

The author provides insight into the psyche of cult members, but it’s still puzzling why any person would blindly follow such destructive directives.

Texas in “Of All Places” or the predictable rise and fall of the novelist in “The Fecalist,” who enlivens a party hosted by a friend who’s just trashed his latest book in a review by relieving himself on the offending copy of the New Yorker. And once in a while, the premise itself is crazy, as in “Lazarus Dying,” which shows the tribulations of Lazarus after his recalling to life. Egerton, bless him, is equally at home writing about Jesus camps (“The Martyrs of Mountain Peak” and “Heart Thong”) and penises that are more than just phallic appendages (“Pierced” and “Lord Baxter Ballsington”).

The stories that begin with the most surreal premises— the melding of man and squirrel in “The Beginning of All Things,” the hero’s irrational fears in “The Adventures of Stimp”—are more piquant than gripping, but the sudden descents from domesticity into madness in “Christmas” and “Tonight at Noon” manage to be at once creepy and disturbingly funny.

DAKOTA

Florio, Gwen Permanent Press (264 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 21, 2014 978-1-57962-362-3 Florio’s second novel mines familiar ground with another look at American Indian culture along the frozen U.S.-Canadian border territory, with a compelling mystery folded in to add spice to the mix.

Lola Wicks, a veteran big-city reporter who came to Montana to see an old friend, ended up staying and solving her friend’s murder. Now, she’s involved with the sheriff, who is part American Indian, and working for the local paper, something Lola’s not sure she wants or likes. For someone used to covering the war in Afghanistan, Magpie, Mont., is a bit claustrophobic. But then a beautiful member of the Blackfeet Nation, a young girl named Judith, turns up frozen to death in a snowbank, and Lola’s reporting instincts start pinging. When she discovers that a number of young Native American girls from the area have disappeared, she talks her boss at the paper into letting her follow a story that will take her to the Patch, a thrown-together shanty town in North Dakota. Men from all over the country have traveled to find jobs working in the oil fields that surround the makeshift settlement. And that’s where Lola and her three-legged border collie, Bub, discover a web of crime, including prostitution, and a town where anything, including murder, goes. Again, Florio chooses interesting settings for her action and infuses her story with plenty of atmosphere and character. A longtime reporter, she has a good eye for weaving Native American culture into her tales, and this one is no exception. She also imbues Lola with believability, although the character often fails to display the common sense that purportedly kept her alive when she was stationed in Kabul. Despite Lola’s rash tendency to engage in risky behavior when acting as an amateur sleuth, the writing is topnotch, and the action builds at just the right pace.

In Florio’s capable hands, Lola Wicks is going to be around for a long, long time.

HOW TO BEST AVOID DYING Stories

Egerton, Owen Soft Skull Press (176 pp.) $15.95 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-59376-522-4

Spoiler alert: Although plenty of characters survive these 21 stories, there’s no obvious prescription that fulfills the promise of the collection’s title.

Some storytellers are realists, some fantasists. Egerton (Everyone Says That at the End of the World, 2013, etc.) starts most of these tales in the guise of an earnest regionalist before swerving into unknown, comically unsettling depths. Sometimes the movement from realism to fantasy is as sudden as the springing of the trapdoor that awaits the losers of the spelling bee in “Spelling” or the rage that overtakes a father trying to assemble his daughter’s Christmas presents in “Arnie’s Gift.” Sometimes the journey is more gradual, as in the narrator’s increasingly dissociated odyssey from California to 12

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“If you think Gardner pulled out all the stops in D.D.’s previous cases, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Better fasten your seat belt for this roller-coaster ride through family hell.” from fear nothing

DEEP WINTER

Naturally, Adeline went to medical school and became a psychiatrist specializing in pain management, and it’s in that capacity that D.D. consults her after an accident at a blood-soaked crime scene leaves her with an impressive set of injuries. Christine Ryan, the victim who’s been smothered and flayed by someone who left behind a bottle of champagne, a pair of fur-lined handcuffs and a long-stemmed rose, is followed distressingly quickly by a second victim, occupational therapist Regina Barnes. Even worse, the handiwork of the Rose Killer is gruesomely linked to the criminal careers of Harry Day, dead these 40 years, and his daughter Shana, who’s been in the Massachusetts Correctional Institute for over 25 years. Alternating as usual between third-person chapters following D.D.’s investigation and first-person chapters dramatizing Adeline’s point of view, Gardner (Touch & Go, 2013, etc.) paints an indelible portrait of two troubled sisters so closely bound together by blood that they agree: “Blood is love.”

If you think Gardner pulled out all the stops in D.D.’s previous cases (Catch Me, 2012, etc.), you ain’t seen nothing yet. Better fasten your seat belt for this roller-coaster ride through family hell.

Gailey, Samuel W. Blue Rider Press (304 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-0-399-16596-2 Screenwriter Gailey’s first novel owes a tip of the hat to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Danny, a gentle giant with a tragic past that’s responsible for his mental challenges, lives in a tiny, bare room over a laundromat in Wyalusing, Pa. The business’s owner allows Danny to live there and pays him a small stipend for keeping the premises clean and handling day-to-day issues. It’s not a plush life, but Danny, whose parents died when he was a little boy, leaving him to the mercy of his vicious uncle, doesn’t ask for or expect much.

And that’s a good thing, since Wyalusing holds some of the nastiest people ever to congregate in one place. The worst of the worst is a deputy named Mike Sokowski who, in terms of sheer evil, makes Charles Manson seem like a choirboy. Mike’s former girlfriend Mindy, waitress and all-around nice person, is friends with Danny; in fact, Mindy is about the only friend Danny has.

Although Danny’s situation in life is through no fault of his own, adults in Wyalusing teach their children to ignore and even abuse the big man. Sokowski is at the front of that line, and one night, following a fight at a party that gets out of hand, he and a friend pay a visit to Mindy that results in her death, for which he frames Danny. What follows is a race to pin the crime on the innocent man by some of the most odious characters this side of the Evil Empire, including an extraneous drunken state police officer.

Gailey writes visually, rendering the characters and action both vivid and alive. But his townsfolk behave so shamefully toward Danny, and the villain is so despicable, that the book often reads more like a fairy tale than a novel.

Gailey’s writing is the saving grace in this tale of good versus evil.

FEAR NOTHING

Gardner, Lisa Dutton (400 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-525-95308-1

Recovering from a nasty fall down a flight of stairs, Detective D.D. Warren, of Boston Homicide, tangles with a pair of sisters who put her pain in a whole new perspective.

Forty years ago, Harry Day, about to be arrested for killing eight prostitutes, got his wife to slit his wrists before the police closed in. He left behind two young daughters: Shana, a sociopath who followed so closely in her father’s footsteps that she was jailed for life when she killed a neighborhood boy at age 14, and Adeline, not quite a year old when her father died, who’s grown up cursed by an inability to feel physical pain. |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Sue Monk Kidd

Can a genteel, white Southern woman of the 21st century truly comprehend the life of a young, black slave in the 19th century?

By Suzy Spencer with her sister Angelina, became the inspiration for Kidd’s bold new novel, The Invention of Wings.

Though Angelina was the younger, prettier and fierier of the two, it was single Sarah who pulled at Kidd.

“I revere her as a real figure, and I revered her history.”

But Kidd found herself weighed down and confined by Sarah’s formidable history; she knew she had to find the woman beyond the facts. “And that was the moment the character came alive for me,” Kidd says, “because there are two Sarahs. There’s the Sarah of history, and then there’s my character.”

In a way, there are two Sue Monk Kidds, too: the New York Times best-selling novelist of The Secret Life of Bees but also the nonfiction author of The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. With The Invention of Wings, which has been named an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection, Kidd beautifully weaves her two selves as she creates a novel based on fact that is riveting, compelling and disturbing.

“If this novel isn’t disturbing to people, I probably have failed somewhat,” Kidd says. After all, it is about slavery, and Kidd considers America’s 246 years of slavery to be its original sin—“an American holocaust,” as she calls it.

To even think about writing about American slavery was daunting to Kidd. “I had to take a deep breath to do that. But once I did, I knew that it could not be a sentimental rendering,” she says. “I had to try—the best I could—to represent how harrowing and horrendous it really was in an individual life.”

And just as Toni Morrison did with Beloved, an author whom Kidd quotes, she wanted to make history personal so that the reader knows what it feels like to be afraid.

To that end, The Invention of Wings tells the entwined stories of Sarah and Hetty “Handful” Grimke,

Photo courtesy Roland Scarpa

Sue Monk Kidd, the genteel Southern novelist, stood in a Massachusetts cemetery, staring at a headstone—worn, pitted and discolored from nearly 140 winters. Its engraved words, “Sarah Moore Grimke,” were barely legible. But Kidd’s own words, the ones she whispered in her mind, were clear: If you can hear this, Sarah, I want to do you justice. I want to do your life justice. I would love for people to know about you and your role and what you did.

Sarah Grimke was the 19th-century daughter of Charleston, S.C., slave owners who died in New Hope, Mass., after disgracing her family and Southern city by fighting against slavery, racism, and sexism and battling for abolition and suffrage. She, along 14

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the 10-year-old slave Sarah’s parents gave their daughter for her 11th birthday. Though Handful was created from Kidd’s imagination, she is based on the fact that Sarah’s parents gifted their daughter a slave. Sarah tried to return the “present,” i.e. Handful, but her parents ignored the attempt. So, in an act that defied her mother, father, the law and her rector, in the novel, Sarah teaches Handful how to read. Sarah’s father is indignant: “There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control,” he tells Sarah. “Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there’s a great good here that must be protected.”

“But Father, it’s wrong!” Sarah cries.

Over the next 35 years of Sarah’s and Handful’s lives, Kidd details the violence and evil that human beings perpetrate on other human beings, all in the name of God. “It’s important for Americans…to finally come to terms with this dark part of our past,” Kidd says.

“I don’t feel like we truly have done that, or we would be able to look at it a little more cleareyed” and not feel the need to say “I can’t see that. I can’t look at that. That has nothing to do with me,” she adds. “That was my ancestors. That was the norm— ‘My ancestors are from the North. Therefore it has nothing to do with me.’ There are all these ways that I think we distance ourselves from this.”

But can a genteel, private university–educated, white Southern woman of the 21st century truly comprehend the life of a young, black slave in the 19th century, as Kidd attempts with Handful?

“What an important thing that really is to do, I think: to put ourselves into the lives and minds and hearts of the other and to see what that was like,” Kidd says. “And at first I think there was a bit of cowardice in me about it, because I tried to write [Handful] in third person. It didn’t last very long, because the voice kept reverting back to first person.

And I finally just let Handful be who she needed and wanted to be and wrote it.”

In fact, as a child of the 1960s who came of age during the civil rights movement, Kidd feels a sense of social responsibility to write about slavery, though she laughs briefly at the mention of The Invention of Wings being a political book. She wants her novel to be thought of as a story about a 35-year sweep of history that was formative and volatile as seen through

the lives of two women—a slave owner and a slave— whose destinies are bound together.

Then she notes, “But maybe it has some political aspects in the sense that whenever we write about the past, we’re really writing about the present, I suppose.”

Indeed, that’s the boldness of The Invention of Wings. In so many ways, it’s about America today.

And that’s how Sue Monk Kidd can stand at the foot of a nearly 140-year-old gravestone and speak to a woman who fought for abolition and suffrage.

Suzy Spencer is the author of the memoir Secret Sex Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality.

The Invention of Wings received a starred review in the Oct. 15, 2013, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

The Invention of Wings Kidd, Sue Monk Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-670-02478-0

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THE SENTINELS OF ANDERSONVILLE

BROTHERHOOD OF FEAR

Grossman, Paul St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-250-01159-6

Groot, Tracy Tyndale House (368 pp.) $24.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-4143-5948-9

Another richly painted Willi Kraus thriller, in which a mundane assignment goes horribly wrong.

The year is 1933, and Willi’s reputation as one of Berlin’s finest detectives counts for nothing in the new Hitler regime. As a Jew, Will has just recently escaped his native country for the relative safety of Paris. His status in France is tenuous, though.

Never mind that he was a German hero in the Great War; simply having a German accent sits poorly with many in France. Now, the widower must obtain a work permit to support himself and his two sons. If he’s caught working without a permit, he can be shipped back to Germany—his worst fear. Unable to get one, he still accepts an assignment to follow a young student, not knowing he will witness a murder. Then, Willi enmeshes himself in a labyrinth of intrigue that reaches into the highest echelons of power in France. Along the way, he meets the beautiful and seductive Vivi, with whom he carries on a passionate affair. Willi is an honorable man readers will root for as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, avoid deportation and learn who Vivi really is. But a great deal of space goes to describing Willi’s angst. By nature, he is much more a thinker than a blood-and-guts guy, which is wise given his touchy status in France. Occasionally, the narrative seems to be worry, worry, have sex, worry, worry, have sex, but overall, the tension builds quite well, and Willi’s hand-wringing is amply justified. Although it lacks the power of Grossman’s Children of Wrath (2012), this is a fine novel showing pre-WWII France as it fantasizes about security behind the Maginot Line.

Read it, then hope Grossman writes more about Willi in Paris. He has plenty of time before the Nazis arrive.

In 1864, Americus, Ga., was short on buttons and bandages but long on community and family values. Just 10 miles away, however, sat the notorious Andersonville Prison.

All delicate bones and huge blue eyes, Violet Stiles is the lodestar for Dance Pickett, a gimlet-eyed young man stationed as an Andersonville sentry. Armed with little more than whiskey and determination, Dr. Stiles, Violet’s father, daily tries to cure the incurable. He and Dance strive to keep the womenfolk—indeed, the entire community of Americus—blissfully ignorant of the unspeakable conditions at the prison. Yet Violet’s desire to do good sets her on a collision course with the truth. Looking for a package of seashells, Violet impetuously sets off to find her father at the prison hospital. Dance sees her in the distance and tries to stop her before she can witness any of the horrors. He’s too late. Violet has seen the broken Union soldiers. Perhaps worse, she’s overheard a conversation between Emery Jones and Lewis Gann. While escorting Lewis (the lone survivor of the 12th Pennsylvania militia) to the prison, Emery (a witty Confederate from Alabama) unexpectedly finds a friend. As they frankly discuss the war, Violet realizes that the Union soldiers are not the vermin she’s been led to believe they are.

Distraught over the conditions at Andersonville, as well as the complacency in Americus, Violet, Dance, Emery and Dr. Stiles found the Friends of Andersonville. Intended to open the eyes of Southern citizens to the truth and to improve conditions for the soldiers held at Andersonville, the group instead challenges everyone’s moral fortitude. When mercy is seen as treason, even the heroes are endangered.

Christy–award winning novelist Groot (Flame of Resistance, 2012, etc.) unflinchingly examines the consequences of becoming a good Samaritan in this richly detailed, engrossing historical fiction.

A MAN CAME OUT OF A DOOR IN THE MOUNTAIN

Harun, Adrianne Penguin (272 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-670-78610-7

The devil is alive and well and living in British Columbia.

In a remote section of western Canada, girls have started disappearing, and it’s unclear why or who’s responsible.

Admittedly, there are some egregiously nasty types around, most notably the Nagle brothers, Markus and GF, who tool around in their orange Matador intimidating the local population. And intimidating they are—while they’re involved in unseemly activities, they mainly just like being badasses. As Uncle Jud tells it, “[e]verybody’s got a mean bone. Some have a full set.” Jud is uncle to Leo, one of the narrators of the novel, who likes to 16

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“A highly literate thriller from medievalist Holsinger.” from a burnable book

hang out with his friends Jackie, Bryan, Ursula (“Ursie”) and Tessa, but they’re all getting more and more disturbed by the way girls are vanishing near what has become known as the Highway of Tears. All of the friends are in late adolescence and trying to make sense of life in their remote logging town. And then a number of strangers appear, bringing mystery and allure to their lives: Kevin Seven does dazzling card tricks and starts to mentor Ursie, who’d never before even shuffled a deck, while fragile and self-possessed Hana Swann, with preternaturally white skin, calmly tries to convince Bryan of the rationality of getting revenge on Gerald Flacker, a local drug dealer seemingly in league with the devil.

Through a complex narrative structure, Harun manages to invest all of her action—slow as it sometimes is— with an aura of myth and folk legend that raises it above the lurid and sensational.

dauntingly complex, the determined reader will be rewarded with a fascinating overview of pre-Renaissance London at its best and worst.

A highly literate thriller from medievalist Holsinger.

A CIRCLE OF WIVES

LaPlante, Alice Atlantic Monthly (272 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-2234-6

LaPlante (Turn of Mind, 2011, etc.) returns with a character study as murder mystery.

Dr. John Taylor’s a respected Palo Alto plastic surgeon. While his Taylor Institute partners prefer the “revenue stream” of vanity surgery, Taylor’s passion is reconstructing the faces of damaged children. Taylor was “a man you could trust...a man

A BURNABLE BOOK

Holsinger, Bruce Morrow/HarperCollins (560 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-06-224032-3 978-0-06-224034-7 e-book In 1385 London, the race is on to recover a missing book.

Outside the walls of London, Agnes, a “maudlyn,” or prostitute, observes the murder, by a cloaked, Italian-speaking thug, of a young woman, whose dress and accent bespeak noble birth. Agnes leaves the scene with a hidden prize: a book wrapped in a delicate tapestry. Meanwhile, John Gower, the 14th-century equivalent of a grizzled detective, has gotten wind of a conspiracy against the reigning king, Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince and nephew of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The plot may have been fomented by the followers of the recently executed heretic Wycliffe, who are using the prophecies of one Lollius, an ancient Roman, as a blueprint.

Lollius, it seems, predicted the manner of death of each English sovereign since William the Conqueror, and there is one prediction yet to be fulfilled: that on St. Dunstan’s Day, near a bishop’s palace, butchers—abetted by a Long Castle (Lancaster)—will lie in wait to slay the current monarch. As it happens, these prophecies are contained in Agnes’ contraband volume, which has fallen into the hands of her sister Millicent, who hopes to sell it to restore herself to the middle-class existence she once attained as a knight’s mistress. Trouble is, possession of a “burnable book,” one that embodies heresy and/or threats to the king’s person, is high treason. Gower and his friend Geoffrey Chaucer are hot on the tome’s trail when Gower’s sinister son, Simon, returns inopportunely from exile abroad. Enter Agnes’ best friend Eleanor/Edgar, a transvestite, whose main goal is to free his brother Gerald, a butcher’s apprentice, from the clutches of his cruel master, Grimes. Gerald has overheard Grimes planning just the sort of butchery envisioned by the book. Although the burgeoning web of plots and plotlines is |

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who had your interests at heart...competent, straight-talking, yet compassionate,” and so there’s widespread shock when Taylor’s found dead at a local hotel. The confusion’s compounded when it’s discovered that Taylor was a bigamist. Deborah, his wife of decades, presides over local society. MJ Taylor, an accountant to whom he’s been married for six years, lives in a modest ranch with a lush garden. His bride of six months, Dr. Helen Richter, is a respected Los Angeles children’s cancer specialist. A media storm erupts, growing to the intensity of a hurricane after it’s discovered Taylor was murdered. The case is assigned to law school dropout–turned–police officer Samantha Adams, a young woman who finds her own long-term relationship perplexing. In this literary character study built on a mystery’s framework, LaPlante ingeniously constructs characters that are distinct and original.

Deborah withdrew from her marriage to Taylor, but, unwilling to divorce, she acquiesced to his search for intimacy elsewhere, even managing logistics for all three marriages. MJ’s a tortured, needy soul, ripe for seduction. Helen, a singularly focused physician, finds herself “surprised by joy” and “not in control of my destiny or my body.” Taylor became what each needed. Against this backdrop, Samantha’s relationship with her lover, a lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, unravels as she comes face to face with “[t]he shell of an amicable but less-than-nourishing relationship...as good as I can expect to get.” And then into the narrative come MJ’s drug-damaged brother, Thomas, and exotically beautiful Dr. Claire Fanning, Taylor Institute’s newest surgeon and Taylor’s prospective wife, for whom he’s promised to forsake all others.

Love, passion and marriage reflected in a mystery’s funhouse mirror. (Agent: Victoria Skurnick)

benevolence on her part.) And so on, and so on: The chief flaw of the book is that’s it’s stuffed full of characters who are hard to differentiate, consistently possessed as they are of Livers’ eloquent if down-home voice. The episodic, character-sketch arrangement undercuts the central drama of the novel, involving the murder of the Vietnamese wife of another war vet. Livers means to explore the ways that perception and reality often fail to overlap in smalltown life, and there are moments where the novel sings in that regard, particularly in one section where the supposed bad girl of the Ferguson clan finds a refuge in the home of an elderly resident.

But the overall tone is curiously muted.

An earnest and sober portrait of the homefront, filled a bit past capacity.

PRAYING DRUNK Stories

Minor, Kyle Sarabande (192 pp.) $15.95 paper | Feb. 15, 2014 978-1-936747-63-4 An award-winning short fiction author offers 12 stories so ripe with realism as to suggest a roman à clef.

“In a Distant Country” is the most affecting, ringing with the haunted truths of Shakespearean tragedy—a missionary in Haiti, his teenage bride, the Duvaliers overthrown, his death, her disappearance—a tale unfolding in six letters from witnesses. It’s the 10th tale, but don’t read it first. In sequence, the stories present a powerful reflective narrative, offering perspectives on friends, family and faith. Stories cut to the heart—a teen helps his father chop a pink piano into kindling before he “walked toward this woodpile with a loaded shotgun and blew off his head”; then the boy’s funeral is rendered through multiple stories. Then come stories of the narrator’s brother, a Nashville musician, cheated and misused, who quits, finds a good job and then quits again, “under the shadow of death, that end of all ends, and life is too short...when you could be standing under stage lights making somebody you never met before feel something.” Pain and loss range from Ohio to Tennessee to Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, with prose ringing with the hard-edged, mordant clarity of Southern writing. A preacher turns the making of biscuits into a funeral parable, and there’s more sardonic play with faith, as when a character sniffs up methadone powder: “There’s the line, gone up like the rapture.” That surrealistic piece follows a bereaved father who recreates a dead son as a bionic robot to win back his wife.

This brilliant collection unfolds around a fractured narrative of faith and friends and family, loved and lost, an arc of stories in which characters find reason to carry on even after contemplating a “God with agency enough to create everything...and apathy enough to let it proceed as an atrocity parade.”

There’s cynicism and despair and nihilism in the collection, certainly, but there’s courage too and a measure of blood-tinged beauty.

CEMENTVILLE

Livers, Paulette Counterpoint (304 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-61902-243-0 The arrival of dead soldiers from Vietnam in 1969 upturns and rewires the lives in a small Kentucky town.

As Livers’ debut novel opens, the reputation of Cementville (pop. 1,003) has shifted from its namesake cement factory to something much more visceral: The arrival of the bodies of seven National Guardsmen who were killed in a firefight. The tragedy has sent the town into public displays of mourning, though as Livers shifts the story’s perspective among a host of residents, more complicated emotions emerge. For Maria Louise, a young journalist who skipped town for the city years before, it means a return home and sudden romance with a member of the low-class Ferguson clan. For 13-year-old Maureen, it’s a revelation about her family’s capacity for secrets. For Harlan, a POW who lost a leg overseas, it means a hero’s welcome that’s been overshadowed by a week’s worth of funerals. For Evelyn, the elderly head of the town’s wealthiest clan, it’s an opportunity to sourly recall years of Cementville shortcomings. (Though the novel turns on an act of 18

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THE FALL OF SAINTS

Mosse, Kate Morrow/HarperCollins (704 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-06-228125-8

Ngūgī, Wanjikū wa Atria (288 pp.) $24.00 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-4767-1491-2

Raiders of the Lost Ark meets The Da Vinci Code, with lashings of Nazis and belles mademoiselles.

Yes, it’s improbable in the extreme that a medieval codex should figure high on the list of priorities of both the Gestapo and the French Resistance, but, well, the Nazis were an improbable bunch, and they actually had a noted medievalist on their payroll against the odds of turning up the Holy Grail or other mysteries of the ages. Improbability doesn’t get in the way of Mosse’s (Sepulchre, 2008, etc.) yarn, which, though very long, is full of rousing action and intelligent character development alike. Closing her Languedoc Trilogy, she turns in a tale that begins, gruesomely, with a retaliatory hanging and moves swiftly to a firefight and a grimly delivered piece of partisan justice—and that’s within the space of just a few pages. Interwoven in the tale of the doings of a girl gang of Resistance fighters in Vichy, France, code-named Citadel, are spectral events from another time, about which a curious fellow named Audric Baillard seems to know altogether too much. Tough-as-nails Marianne Vidal is one of the fiercest of the fighters; her sister Sandrine joins her as soon as she’s old enough to get a driver’s license. The sisters are of an ancient clan (“ ‘Names are important,’ Baillard said brightly”), and both are attuned to the things that go bump in the night. But can both outlast the SS thugs who are tearing around Carcassonne? Mosse slips a millennium and a half and more into the past to introduce an ancient heretical document, the Languedoc being a place notably receptive to heretical ideas, the discovery and mastery of which will allow its holder to conjure up an ancient ghost army (“You want them safely in the earth, don’t you, Audric?”)—not at all a bad thing to have if you’re out for world conquest, that.

The bad guys are bad, a local collaborationist particularly so; the ghouls are ghastly; the Nazis, determinedly Teutonic; and the filles de France, fetching.

Suspend disbelief and enjoy the time travel and genre-blending.

A Kenyan expatriate, now a pampered New York soccer mom, becomes a super sleuth and sharpshooter in a matter of days as she investigates an international human trafficking operation that branches out into even more sinister enterprises.

This debut is original, if confusing. The narrative teems with menacing characters, global conspiracies and gun battles that rock protagonist Mugure Sivonen’s world. Mugure is married to wealthy attorney Zack, and they live comfortably with their adopted 5-year-old son, Kobi. When Mugure discovers a scrap of paper with a phone number and Kobi’s name written on it, she’s propelled into a dark world of criminal activity that appears to center around the adoption agency that delivered

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Kobi to their door. The Kasla Agency was recommended by Zack’s friend Mark, a millionaire landscaper who reputedly employs illegals. Mark also is married to Mugure’s friend, Melinda, a singer, but she divorces him before she leaves New York to perform in other countries, including at Kenya’s Festival of Rags. Soon, Mugure lives in a constant state of paranoia, and almost everyone she comes into contact with is suspect— a mysterious caller, a frightening gunman, an ominous curio shop owner, a crazed 75-year-old carjacker—not to mention some members of her social circle who also seem rather shady.

Mugure’s unsure whom to trust, so she grabs Kobi and ends up in Ohio at an old friend’s home, where, in a flash, she becomes a crack shot with every gun she handles. She also decides her son will be safe if she leaves him there while she heads to Kenya to find the answers to all of her questions. And she has a bunch.

There, two more old friends come to her aid and help her meet more shady characters, visit witnesses, break into buildings, and engage in chases and gunfights with the bad guys. At one point, Mugure displays her superhuman powers by shooting with both hands—remember, she’s only recently learned to shoot—and disarms an adversary with a defensive kick to his hand. Before all issues are wrapped up, Mugure addresses a few subplots involving relatives and sorts through what seems like a cast of thousands to figure out who the bad guys really are.

By the end, readers will be too befuddled to care.

Quixote,” is also the longest, so Novak has more space in which to develop his comic ideas. A translator becomes famous translating not only Miguel de Cervantes, but also Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust—and his final work is a new translation of The Great Gatsby into “modern” English.

Novak creates a spectrum of work from the mediocre to the deliciously tongue-in-cheek. If you don’t like something, just wait—a new piece is usually only a page or two away.

BOY, SNOW, BIRD

Oyeyemi, Helen Riverhead (320 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 6, 2014 978-1-59463-139-9

Readers who found British author Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox (2011) an intellectual tour de force, but emotionally chilly, will be won over by this riveting, brilliant and emotionally rich retelling of “Snow White” set in 1950s New England.

Despite her name, Boy Novak is a 20-year-old young woman when she arrives in Flax Hill, Mass., in 1953 She has run away from New York’s Lower East Side because her abusive father, Frank, a rat catcher by trade who has refused to tell her anything about her never-present mother, has threatened to treat her like one of his rats. In Flax Hill, Boy makes actual friends, like beautiful, career-driven Mia, and begins a relationship with Arturo Whitman, a former history professor and widowed father. Now a jewelry maker, Arturo lives with his little daughter, Snow, in close proximity to his mother, intimidating social matriarch Olivia. Not sure she loves him, Boy marries Arturo (whose quiet goodness is increasingly endearing to the reader and Boy) largely because she loves Snow, a fairhaired beauty who charms everyone she meets. But when Boy gives birth to her own daughter, Bird, the Whitmans’ deepest secret is revealed—Arturo’s parents are actually light-skinned African-Americans passing as white. Faced with how others view the difference between the sisters and influenced by some combination of overpowering maternal protectiveness and bad postpartum depression, Boy sends 7-year-old Snow to live with Arturo’s dark-skinned sister, Clara, whom Olivia banished years ago. Growing up apart, Bird and Snow tell their versions of how Boy’s decision impacts their lives. Then a startling revelation about Boy’s own identity makes all three confront who they are individually and together.

Dense with fully realized characters, startling images, original observations and revelatory truths, this masterpiece engages the reader’s heart and mind as it captures both the complexities of racial and gender identity in the 20th century and the more intimate complexities of love in all its guises.

ONE MORE THING Stories and Other Stories

Novak, B.J. Knopf (256 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-385-35183-6

A debut collection of stories, ranging from two or three sentences to 18 or so pages, from Novak, best known for his work on The Office.

Given the sheer number of entries in this collection, it’s not surprising that Novak has both hits and misses. Among the latter are a few sketches that read like standup material, occasionally witty but also occasionally falling flat.

Some ideas work better in conception than in execution— “Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins),” for example, in which the narrator is blunt about wanting to have sex with the eponymous motivational speaker, or “The Ghost of Mark Twain,” in which a teacher objects to the language in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and hopes to see a new edition increasing the number of times Huck uses the “N-word.” At other times, however, Novak is spot-on and frequently hilarious.

In “The World’s Biggest Ripoff,” the narrator and his family visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, Niagara Falls and the Guinness World Records Museum and find all of them wanting. The narrator then visits an “incredibly well-executed interactive holographic exhibit on the Bernie Madoff hedge fund scam of 2009” and finds the $100 entrance fee (per person) well spent.

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“Brilliant and dazzling...” from lovers at the chameleon club, paris 1932

LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932

scheming ways to grow rich and spying on a wealthy man and his family. When Evan manages to persuade his employers to invest in a nascent company that might have stumbled upon the cure for a terrible disease, he thinks he’s found his ticket to the top. But that comes to a halt when everything tilts and he’s wiped out, along with his company. After his firing, Evan is hired by a firm that profited from his mistakes, and soon, he’s come up with a new plan involving short sales of stock to enrich both the company and himself.

But the price Evan must pay in order to make his plan work is high and requires a great sacrifice. The question, Scofield poses, is how far will Evan go to succeed and get revenge on the people who have wronged him? Scofield, an attorney, writes knowledgeably about high finance, but unless readers are familiar with the terminology, they’ll find much of the book incomprehensible. This is a tale spun in staccato and somewhat lifeless prose. Scofield buries the plot under a mountain of name-dropping minutiae, to the point of regaling readers with the brand of shorts worn by a store clerk.

An intriguing idea that could have been better executed but instead ends up top-heavy with dull technical detail, static writing and a hard-to-swallow conclusion.

Prose, Francine Harper/HarperCollins (448 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-0-06-171378-1 A tour de force of character, point of view and especially atmosphere, Prose’s latest takes place in Paris from the late 1920s till the end of World War II. The primary locus of action is the Chameleon Club, a cabaret where entertainment edges toward the kinky. Presiding most nights is Eva “Yvonne” Nagy, a Hungarian chanteuse and mistress of the revels. The name of the club is not strictly metaphorical, for Yvonne has a pet lizard, but the cabaret is also famous as a place where Le Tout-Paris can gather and cross-dress, and homosexual lovers can be entertained there with some degree of privacy. One of the most fascinating denizens of the club is Lou Villars, in her youth an astounding athlete and in her adulthood a dancer (with her lover Arlette) at the club and even later a race car driver and eventually a German spy in Paris during the Occupation. Villars and Arlette are the subjects of what becomes the era’s iconic photograph, one that gives the novel its title. This image is taken by Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, eventual lover (and later husband) of sexual athlete Suzanne Dunois. Tsenyi is also a protégé of Baroness Lily de Rossignol, former Hollywood actress, now married to the gay Baron de Rossignol, the fabulously wealthy owner of a French car manufacturing company. Within this multilayered web of characters, Prose manages to give almost every character a voice, ranging from Tsenyi’s eager letters home to his parents, excerpts from a putative biography of Lou Villars (supposedly written by Suzanne’s great-niece) entitled The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars, Lily de Rossignol’s memoirs and further reminiscences by Lionel Maine, Suzanne’s lover before she was “stolen away” by the photographer.

Brilliant and dazzling Prose.

EAT WHAT YOU KILL

Scofield, Ted St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-250-02182-3

Scofield’s debut novel, a financial thriller, introduces readers to a main character so difficult and full of malice that he makes Hannibal Lector seem like a kindly old uncle with quirky dietary habits.

Evan Stoess, the byproduct of a ritzy prep school education but born out of wedlock to a trailer park– trash mom who raised him in a home dominated by an abusive stepfather, envies the rich and successful to the point of obsessiveness. Evan, who works in finance, spends much of his free time |

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THE DEALER AND THE DEAD

underwater for three minutes, leading to severe brain damage that lasts throughout his life. This accident changes the entire dynamic for the Mishra family. First, they have to determine how to take care of Birju, and they eventually decide to buy a new home and have live-in help, a situation made more feasible when the family gets a $1 million insurance settlement. But the father becomes an alcoholic, in part owing to the new stresses brought about by Birju’s medical needs, and the mother winds up taking a job in the garment industry for minor wages. Meanwhile, Ajay begins to feel some pressure to be the academic star, something he succeeds in by graduating first in his high school class—he eventually attends Princeton, studies economics and becomes an investment banker. Along the way, he becomes enamored with Ernest Hemingway and begins to write short stories about his family life in the reportorial and flat style of the author he so admires—a style Sharma also adheres to in the writing of his novel.

A moving story of displacement and of the inevitable adjustments one must make when life circumstances change. (Author tour to New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.)

Seymour, Gerald Dunne/St. Martin’s (464 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-250-01878-6

In 1991, Croatian villagers pooled together their worldly goods to buy weapons to use against advancing Serb forces, only to be left defenseless by a shadowy arms dealer who took the money and ran. Nearly 20 years later, survivors of the brutal attack discover his identity and pay to have him killed to avenge the deaths.

Harvey Gillot, the still-active, internationally successful arms dealer, regards this betrayal as the only blot on his record.

But it increasingly haunts him. When he learns his life is at risk, he goes underground, moving his family to a remote, southern part of England. In spite of his efforts to disappear, he is pursued not only by a young London hit man struggling to live up to crime family standards, but also a police detective, a customs agent, an NGO arms monitor and a retired intelligence officer.

Arms dealing, we learn, is not illegal under British law if certain conditions are met. The morality of moving weapons to various parts of the world is not so easily resolved. Seymour’s 25th novel, published in England in 2010, has its share of nail-biting moments, gaining intensity down the stretch. But it largely eschews action scenes in favor of a simmering, multilayered account of the past catching up to the present. Gillot is in a classic melancholic mode; readers who like more adrenalized thrillers might do better to look elsewhere. Those who are drawn to densely woven, slowly unfolding plots and thoughtful writing will rate this book a winner.

Decades after establishing himself as a master of British spy fiction with Harry’s Game, Seymour shows no signs of slowing down or losing relevance.

THE RICH AND THE DEAD

Spector, Liv Morrow/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $13.99 paper | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-06-225839-7

Given the chance to go back in time to catch a murderer, would you risk it? Even knowing that you couldn’t save the victims?

Three years ago on New Year’s Eve, 12 fabulously wealthy members of the Miami Beach jet set were assassinated. The crime scene: a glamorous mansion on Star Island. Mode of death: single bullet wound to the forehead. Suspects: plenty of shifty characters. The lead detective: Lila Day. The killer: still at large. Coincidentally, Dec. 31, 2014, also marked the disappearance of the Janus Society. Devoted to supporting charitable organizations, the Society had always announced the recipient of its annual grant each New Year’s Day. But three years have passed without a word. Before the Star Island Massacre, Lila was the golden child on Miami’s police force, famous for her preternatural ability to sniff out a criminal. The unsolved case, however, has disgraced Lila, who soon finds herself dismissed not only from the police force, but also from her latest job as a security officer for a seamy hotel. Down and out, she has little to lose when Teddy Hawkins, tech mogul and billionaire, hires her to solve the mystery. First, she has to overcome her doubts about time travel. Teddy sets her up with a meticulously crafted alias as newly divorced socialite Camilla Dayton. He also provides a thoroughly researched dossier on every victim and suspect. Quickly absorbed into the Miami Beach party scene, populated with shady art dealers, former reality show starlets and pushy real estate agents, Lila also finds what she never expected: love with the mysterious Dylan Rhodes. The first in a series professionally packaged by the branding experts

FAMILY LIFE

Sharma, Akhil Norton (192 pp.) $23.95 | Apr. 7, 2014 978-0-393-06005-8 In Sharma’s world, as in Leo Tolstoy’s, unhappy families continue to be unhappy in different ways.

In 1978, narrator Ajay’s father emigrates from Delhi to New York to take a job as a clerk in a government agency, and a year later, his family joins him. Ajay’s mother had been an economics teacher in India and must now adjust to lower career aspirations, while Ajay’s older brother Birju experiences some academic success in middle school and qualifies to attend the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Tragically, just before Birju is about to begin at his new high school, he has an accident—he hits his head in a pool and stays unconscious 22

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behind Gossip Girls, Pretty Little Liars, etc., Spector’s debut establishes an engaging, time-traveling heroine.

With more drama than ratiocination, this is a breezy, light detective novel.

also written three novels (by George, 2007, etc.) that attracted a readership beyond his music fans. He now seems to be bringing those two identities together, recording most recently under his own name and turning his novelistic attention to his experiences in the music industry. Not that this is thinly disguised memoir, for it details a parallel history of rock through the career arc of the fictitious Wonderkids, formed by two brothers (think Kinks, Oasis, Everlys) who discover that they fill a previously unknown niche: “Rock Music for Kids.” Or, with their hint of misbehavior, “Punk for kids. Punk for kids whose parents like punk. Music for kids with cool parents.” The band experiences its own version of pivotal moments in rock—Beatlemania, Altamont, an extended feud with the censoring Parents Music Resource Center (who term their seemingly playful music “one of the greatest evils facing America today”), a drug bust, a Jim Morrison–style indecent exposure incident, and the inevitable personnel changes, disbanding and reunion. The narrator, for reasons initially inexplicable, is a Dickensian urchin named Sweet who is adopted by the band (specifically frontman Blake Lear) to escape the tedium of his British boyhood. Sweet

WONDERKID

Stace, Wesley Overlook (352 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 27, 2014 978-1-4683-0801-3 A whimsical novel of the rock industry that frequently delights with its wry humor and insider’s knowledge but ultimately falls short of its promise.

Few would seem as qualified to write an incisive novel about the life of a touring musician as Stace. He initially attracted a cult following as a British singer-songwriter billed as John Wesley Harding and has

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“An improbable laugh riot.” from the ghost apple

THE GHOST APPLE

eventually figures more critically in the plot, but he seems like a contrivance, the coincidence of his meeting the band straining credulity, and his perspective is an odd one for telling this story.

Yet the bigger problem with the novel, as with the touring rock life it depicts, is the tedium of repetition, the day-to-day-ness in which not much happens beyond stereotypes (manager, record execs, etc.) behaving like stereotypes while the author has some fun with obscure references (fans of Spirit, for example, will delight in the command to the bus driver: “Randy? California!”).

The novel makes the point that all rock is kid’s music (“Aren’t we all just big kids?”) and makes it again and again.

Thier, Aaron Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-62040-527-7

Academic satire meets anti-globalization polemic in Thier’s debut.

The tale of Tripoli College is told piecemeal, in an accretion of memos, newspaper excerpts, diary entries, historical accounts, emails—and slave narratives, old and new. The college, an institution of higher learning that hardly dares call itself elite or Ivy League, manages, in spite of a recession-gutted endowment, to subsist thanks to its robust athletic department and innovative proxy college on St. Renard in the Caribbean. St. Renard, island habitat of the medicinal (or poisonous?) “Ghost Apple” originally cultivated by its first indigenous population, the long extinct Carawak Indians, is still largely dependent on its sugar industry. In short, Tripoli, with its failing finances—the football team is losing steadily thanks to woefully inept kickers—is ripe for corporate takeover by the global snack food/pharma conglomerate Big Anna®. To gain more insight into Tripoli student life, William Brees, Tripoli’s 70-year-old dean of students, goes undercover to live in a dorm and party with a crew of slacker freshmen. He quickly develops a crush on Maggie Bell, an African-American student from a privileged background, whose emails to her twin brother, Chris, reveal that she has a crush on charismatic history professor John Kabaka. Disgusted with Tripoli’s craven acceptance of corporate governance—Big Anna®’s minions muzzle the student newspaper, squelch academic freedom and, in acts of political correctness carried to unimaginable extremes, perpetrate atrocities against a college benefactor descended from slaveholders—Kabaka flees to St. Renard to foment revolt. As Megan and professor Brees soon learn, while they spend an illadvised semester on the pestilential isle, Big Anna® has, in the name of reducing its carbon footprint, abandoned mechanized forms of sugar production. This forces it to resort to the only other large-scale sugar growing and refining mechanism possible: slave labor. In arch language mirroring everything from annual report puffery to 17th-century castaway journals, Thier manages to lampoon corporate evil without ever underestimating or dismissing it.

An improbable laugh riot.

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER Three Novellas Steiner, Robert Counterpoint (272 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-61902-231-7

A trio of stubbornly relentless fictions on sex and death and infidelity and sex and death and infidelity. Also: sex, death and infidelity.

Experimentalist Steiner (Negative Space, 2010, etc.) clearly intends this book to function as a triptych on romantic abandonment. The opener, Into the Green Ocean Deep, tracks a woman at death’s door who’s pursuing one last gasp of sexual abandon with her lover. The prose is marked by its gynecological and scatological candor and a repetitive style that might tire Gertrude Stein. (“[S]he isn’t only dying, she’s at the end of dying, and then she’s dead and there isn’t any more dying to do…”—and so on.) Inviolate follows the musings of a woman whose husband lies comatose after a fall from a balcony; what she mainly ponders is the nature of consciousness and her affairs but more repetitively than with depth. The closing Negative Space is a man’s account of his wife’s confession of an affair after 20 years of marriage. This last story benefits from the intimacy of a first-person narrator and a sense of detail (a beloved coat, cigarettes, Parisian streets) that makes its pseudophilosophical intonations feel less wooly. Steiner knows what he’s doing, and he’s in firm command of his style, but his assurance doesn’t make these stories any less tedious and distancing; the namelessness of the couples don’t signify universality so much as a faraway ghostliness. The book is orthographically punishing as well: Paragraph breaks are rare, making every page feel like a gray-prose tombstone. If Steiner means to explore the fragile nature of our lives, let alone the flickers of love we get to enjoy within them, he’s done it with a dispiriting lack of humor and empathy.

Pretentious, cold and exhausting.

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at Underhill College, has been poisoned in his office. Grace Montoya, the student (and lover) who found his body, withdraws from campus life, emerging only long enough to seduce her adoring roommate, Imogen, before she dies by violence herself. The sibling rivalry between Michael O’Conlan, the neighborhood teen to whom Davenport had been giving chess lessons, and his identical twin, Simon, intensifies. Kate Steelford’s late-night post-mortem exam of Davenport’s stomach contents discloses a gigantic praying mantis and several eggs the size of jelly beans.

There’s no momentum, no sustained investigation, no characters worthy of the name since few of the contributors are interested in following up any of the clues, or even any of the developments, laid down by their predecessors; it’s not until Chapter 23 that Detective Harsley, of the Hurst Green Police, realizes “he hadn’t spoken to Davenport’s goddamn wife.” If the continuity is weak, however, several individual episodes—Harsley’s modishly bitter reflections on his own ex-wife, a disastrous debut for a campus tour guide, a series of academic explanations of the crime that obscure a lot more than they explain—are likely to provoke guffaws, or at least smirks.

NAKED CAME THE POSTPOSTMODERNIST

Sarah Lawrence Class WRIT - 3303 - R; Bukiet, Melvin Jules Arcade (240 pp.) $22.95 | Nov. 6, 2013 978-1-61145-909-8 Thirteen members of a Sarah Lawrence writing workshop directed by Bukiet (Undertown, 2013, etc.) team up for this serial whodunit, with predictably episodic results.

Much as President Mara Yaftali and corporate donor Eva Louisa Valdez might prefer to sweep it under the rug, there’s no denying that professor Eric Davenport, chair of the math department

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“...Alber skillfully uses many shades of gray...” from kilmoon

Precious little post-postmodernism, or even pre-postpostmodernism, is on display; Naked Came the Outraged Feminist would have been a more accurate title. But here’s proof that a bunch of college students can handle the roundrobin format about as well as their professional models.

witness SADOS jealousies and backbiting in the rehearsal for George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. She becomes more than an onlooker, however, in her attempts to help prompter Hester Winstone, who makes a suicidal gesture because of a one-night stand with lead actor Neville Prideaux. After a feud with guest actor Ritchie Goode, Elizaveta Dalrymple, the august widow of SADOS’ founder, walks out on the production, and Jude finds herself back on stage in the grand dame’s role.

Jude persuades her neighbor and fellow amateur sleuth Carole Seddon, lately of the Home Office, to take over Hester’s role as prompter. When Goode is found hanged on the prop gallows, Jude and Carole discreetly investigate the other members of the cast—the beleaguered director, the set carpenter who built the gallows, the supremely self-idolizing Elizaveta—to find out whether the hanging was accidental. Or did the pompous and womanizing Goode have more enemies than anyone realized?

Although Brett (A Decent Interval, 2013, etc.) effectively skewers small-town theatrics, occasional glints of pathos and an unexpectedly tragic outcome darken the tone. The abrupt return to the comfort of levity is as unconvincing as the murder motive itself.

KILMOON

Alber, Lisa Muskrat Press (358 pp.) $14.95 paper | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-9895446-0-3 A woman hoping to meet her biological father is embroiled in village scandal and murder.

Merrit McCallum grew up in the shadow of a photograph of the old Irish church in the village where her parents met. She’s already lost her mother; after her stepfather’s death in California, Merrit travels to County Clare and the home of Liam Donellan, the matchmaker of Lisfenora. Liam, who has a rare gift for bringing couples together, is presiding over his annual matchmaking festival, though he’s never found lasting love himself. He fathered two daughters by different women yet is still unmarried and lives only with his adopted son, Kevin.

After Liam’s birthday party, Lonnie O’Brien, heir to a prominent local family, is found dead in his Internet Café, and Merrit is one of the suspects. The O’Brien family, however, wants DS Danny Ahern to focus only on Kevin, who had a grudge against Lonnie. It’s a hard assignment for Danny. Kevin, one of his closest friends, fears being displaced by both Merrit and her half sister, who, like Merrit, has come to Lisfenora to find the answers about her mother and about Liam. Blackmail schemes, a second murder, and odd clues like a cake and a bloody afghan point to heartbreak, revenge, and past and present betrayal near the ruins of Our Lady of the Kilmoon.

In her moody debut, Alber skillfully uses many shades of gray to draw complex characters who discover how cruel love can be.

A TRAITOR’S TEARS

Buckley, Fiona Severn House (240 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-78029-057-7

Queen Elizabeth’s half sister tries to prove a loyal servant innocent of murder.

Ursula Blanchard is doing her best to live quietly in Surrey with her young son Harry, the offspring of a liaison with the first husband she had thought dead but met on her last perilous mission on the Continent. Since Ursula’s second husband passed away too early to have been Harry’s father, she must live with nasty gossip, especially from her neighbor Jane Cobbold, whom she is nonetheless visiting when Jane is found stabbed to death in her garden. The unimaginative sheriff seizes on Ursula’s trusted manservant Brockley for the murder. Even Jane’s husband does not believe Brockley guilty, but Roland Wyse, the one man who may have seen something, is no longer in the area. Since Wyse works for Lord Burghley, Ursula heads for London, where she learns that Wyse is already off on another errand.

In the meantime, a man who lived on the Cobbold estate is also found murdered while carrying a letter in cipher. Putting up one of her estates as bail for Brockley, Ursula, along with Brockley and his wife, Dale, heads off hoping to find Wyse at the home of his man-eating mother. They discover that Wyse was half brother to the recently beheaded Duke of Norfolk. When they finally catch up to Wyse, who is busy on Burghley’s behalf looking for Catholic priests who are spreading sedition, he claims to have seen nothing that would help Brockley. Desperate to save her servant, Ursula realizes that the mysterious cipher may hold the answer.

Not the best of Ursula’s 12 mysteries (A Rescue for a Queen, 2013, etc.) but still as historically rich as ever.

THE STRANGLING ON THE STAGE

Brett, Simon Creme de la Crime (192 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-78029-056-0

An amateur dramatic production turns deadly in the latest Fethering cozy.

Jude Nichol, a former model and actor, has settled comfortably into her life as a healer in the English village of Fethering. When Storm Lavelle, one of her clients, asks Jude to bring a favorite prop for a production of the Smalting Amateur Drama and Operatic Society, Jude has her first chance to 26

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EGGS IN A CASKET

that the affection between the two was mutual, the truth is that Lester’s behavior toward Missy was borderline stalking. To clear Missy’s good name, Suzanne and Toni ask around town to find who had the most to gain by the tidy disposal of Lester’s body.

Once the two start their snooping, they find that Missy isn’t the only one in town who’s been on Lester’s bad side; a few of the other potential killers had a lot more to lose. Sheriff Doogie, longtime ally of the triad, must have made progress in the case, since he’s soon enough rendered incapacitated and uncommunicative in the hospital, presumably since he’s gotten too close to the killer. Now the Cackleberry Club has to discover what he knew.

The 40-plus female formula might work for longtime readers of Childs (Postcards From the Dead, 2012, etc.), but a lack of all but the most superficial character details will leave new readers wanting more.

Childs, Laura Berkley Prime Crime (336 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-425-25558-2 The murder of a man who was nobody’s friend brings the Cackleberry Club’s middle-aged amateur investigators back into investigation mode.

Though he was not particularly interesting during his life, prison warden Lester Drummond’s death is a subject of fascination for the small town of Kindred. Not least of the interested parties is the Cackleberry Club, the three 40-something owners of the best breakfast place in town. It’s not as if Suzanne, Toni or Petra know much about the man, though Suzanne and Toni are the ones to stumble on his body. The issue is really the evidence that their friend Missy is somehow wrapped up in Lester’s murder, down to the Taser gun found in her bedroom. Though some thought

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AN AIR OF TREASON

tidy Laing, and is occasionally highhanded with the local force, including Detective Jimmy Perez. Still battling depression after the murder of his fiancee, Perez resents taking orders from a stranger, especially one he’s attracted to in spite of himself. Interviews with Markham’s family, his best friend, the young woman Markham got pregnant and abandoned, and the widower she’s about to marry point to a green-energy movement as a common denominator among the involved parties. When a supposed straw effigy turns out to be a human—and a dead one at that— Perez and Reeves further question the real motive behind the murders and demand to know what Laing is hiding.

Cleeves (Silent Voices, 2013, etc.) returns to a sea-bound land of crofters’ cottages, barren rocks and fog, especially the fog surrounding the murders. Although some of the characters are sketchier than the setting itself, the wellconstructed procedural gains another dimension from Jimmy’s re-engagement with his work and his life.

Chisholm, P.F. Poisoned Pen (320 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4642-0220-9 978-1-4642-0222-3 paper 978-1-4642-0221-6 Lg. Prt. A most difficult and dangerous murder inquiry is forced upon a flamboyant nobleman.

Sir Robert Carey, the son of Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon, illegitimate half brother of Elizabeth I, is seeking out the queen to obtain his warrant and fee for serving as deputy warden of the West March. Elizabeth’s royal progress has taken her to Oxford, and when Carey arrives there, the queen orders him to investigate the death of Amy Robsart Dudley, wife of the love of Elizabeth’s life, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—a scandalous murder that put paid to her hopes of marrying Dudley. Unfortunately for the clever but wild Carey, Amy died 30 years ago, in 1560. Although he has little idea where to begin, his initial inquiries evidently touch a nerve, since someone shoots a crossbow bolt at him and then poisons him with belladonna. The belladonna leaves him nearly blind, making his task even more difficult. Carey’s longtime helper Sgt. Dodd is in trouble of his own after making off with an enemy’s possessions and a horse bearing the royal mark. When he’s attacked and left naked and badly hurt, his first thought is revenge. Little does he know that his search will involve him in Carey’s quest. Meanwhile, Carey fears he’ll perish on the scaffold since the queen herself is a prime suspect in the murder of her rival.

Carey’s sixth adventure (A Murder of Crows, 2010, etc.) is packed with historical detail, dangerous exploits and humor. The fact-based mystery moves along at a fairly quick pace to a complicated denouement.

CHAIN REACTION

Fanning, Diane Severn House (240 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8341-4

A bomb blast shatters the tranquility of a Sunday morning.

When the bomb explodes, killing a caretaker and an unidentified person, Lt. Lucinda Pierce rushes to the local high school. Although Lucinda lives with FBI agent Jake Lovett, she’s not happy to think that the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and Homeland Security will take over her case, especially once she meets ATF Agent Connelly, who is quick to disparage the local police, is extremely rude to everyone and is fixated on Muslim terrorists.

Lucinda refuses to be pushed out, especially when the body is identified as that of a high school student whose friend is soon found dead by suicide. She focuses her attention on the red pickup truck that was seen leaving the scene. Several students drive red pickups. So do three teachers. Lucinda investigates them all while Connelly continues to alienate both local law enforcement and Jake, who finds him impossible to work with.

Lucinda is also trying to help young Charley Spencer (Wrong Turn, 2013, etc.), whose friend Amber, molested by her mother’s boyfriend, finds that her mother refuses to believe her. When the powers that be realize that Connelly, who’s kidnapped some innocent Sikhs, is suffering from dementia, they take him off the case. But the pressures of the bombing and her fears for Amber still prey on Lucinda, who must put all the evidence together if she’s to uncover a sly killer.

Lucinda isn’t the only one who’ll find herself distracted by all the subplots. But the tale moves along at a brisk pace, and Fanning provides several welcome twists even though she hints at the guilty party early on.

DEAD WATER

Cleeves, Ann Minotaur (400 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-250-03660-5 978-1-250-03661-2 e-book A grieving detective clashes with an incoming supervisor to solve a pair of murders on the main island of Shetland.

Not long after photojournalist Jerry Markham has returned to Shetland after years in the south, someone runs his car off the foggy road from the oil terminal in Sullom Voe. Rhona Laing, the Procurator Fiscal of the district, finds his body in the boat in which she regularly rows with other women of Aith. When DI Willow Reeves arrives from the West Hebrides to supervise the subsequent investigation, she might as well be from another world. Willow grew up on a commune, wears baggy clothes that offend the obsessively 28

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THE DROWNING SPOOL

but claimed to have seen no sign of the victim entering the facility. And no wonder, since the autopsy results show that pregnant Teddi Whalberger was drowned in a bathtub and moved to the pool. Teddi and her two roommates were free-spirited party types, and Teddi had quite a few boyfriends, including a married man, who might find it inconvenient to be named her baby’s father. During a sleuthing visit to Watered Silk, Wilma shows Betsy an outside door that appeared to be closed off but was obviously the point of entry for Teddi’s body. For her pains, Wilma is murdered in a clever way that makes Betsy’s hunt for the killer even more complicated.

A pleasant addition to Ferris’ long string of needlework whodunits (And Then You Die, 2012, etc.) featuring the ebullient Betsy, her gay assistant and her live-in boyfriend. This one is full of needlework lore but doesn’t feature much of a mystery.

Ferris, Monica Berkley Prime Crime (304 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-425-27008-0

Who knew that retirement homes could be such dangerous places?

Betsy Devonshire, the amateur sleuth who owns the Crewel World needlework shop, is happy to teach a punch needle class at Watered Silk, a senior retirement home, since she’s going there anyhow for water aerobics classes while her usual pool is being repaired. Both classes go well except for the disturbances caused by Wilma Carter, who’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. When the instructor finds the naked body of a lovely young woman in the pool, Betsy is drawn into the investigation by one of her customers, who asks her to prove her nephew innocent. College student Ethan Smart, who had a night job at Watered Silk, monitored all the doors

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“Mario’s seventh is a solid procedural with a huge cast of economically drawn characters, sharp dialogue, a vigorous pace, and a welcome twist or two.” from the ways of evil men

THE WAYS OF EVIL MEN

sperm donor Ziad Zacour, turns up in Baltimore, and he and his pregnant fiancee seem like the ideal family for Matt.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s killer, troubled Nadal Brown, watches Matt obsessively and schemes to snatch the boy he’s convinced is his son away from Jan and Arthur. By the time Nadal finally makes his move, George (Simple, 2012, etc.) will have used the conventions of the police procedural to explore an unusually far-flung web, not of suspects, but of ordinary people whose lives the murder and kidnapping have touched, from Christie’s distraught wife, Marina Benedict, to detectives Colleen Greer and John Potocki, who pick this swell time to fall in love.

Nobody in the cast gets much sleep, and neither will the reader, till it all concludes with a happy ending stippled with the kind of sadness that rarely comes out in genre fiction.

Gage, Leighton Soho Crime (304 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-61695-272-3

Sensitive cultural issues are engaged when dozens of members of an Amazon tribe are apparently poisoned.

In the Brazilian rain forests of Para, Raoni, a child warrior from the Awana tribe, rages at the inexplicable deaths of countless fellow tribesmen, including his grandfather and his best friend, Tinga. Jade Calmon, who works for FUNAI, the federal government’s National Indian Foundation, discovers the boy and other survivors, including Father Carlo Castori, a former missionary now serving as a parish priest in Azevedo, the closest town. This duo, along with Amati, a surviving Indian, runs through the list of possible causes and culprits and concludes that the tribe was poisoned. They bring their suspicions to Azevedo, where a septet of local honchos confers, fueled by alcohol. The next morning, the corpse of local womanizer Omar Torres is discovered as Amati stands nearby, machete in hand. Jade heatedly argues for Amati’s innocence. Thus does the matter (and the murder) arrive on the desk of Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police (Perfect Hatred, 2013, etc.). The disreputable Torres, it happens, had countless enemies; except for Father Castori, every bigwig in Azevedo had a motive for killing Torres. With the prickly Jade breathing down his neck, Mario and his quirky team work to unravel the poisoning and solve the murder.

Mario’s seventh is a solid procedural with a huge cast of economically drawn characters, sharp dialogue, a vigorous pace, and a welcome twist or two.

MURDER IN THE BALL PARK

Goldsborough, Robert MysteriousPress.com (193 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-1-4804-4565-9

Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin return, after a fashion, to identify the person who shot an embattled New York state senator at the Polo Grounds.

Since Archie—like his creator, Rex Stout—is a longtime Giants fan, he’s on hand with freelance private eye Saul Panzer, who’s rooting for the Dodgers, when a fourth-inning home run brings the crowd to its feet and a .30-caliber bullet to the temple of Orson Milbank on Flag Day, 1950 (or so). The suspects are clustered around Milbank’s carefully calibrated position on the proposed Northern Parkway. Northern Realtors Association chairman Jordan Keller, backing the project, is unhappy that Milbank’s asked that it be rerouted to avoid mobster Franco Bacelli’s estate and several other towns in the process.

So is Ray Corcoran, who heads the Westchester-PutnamDutchess County businessmen’s group. On the other side is opposition leader Howell Baxter, head of Citizens Looking to Enjoy Arboreal Nature, which some acronym-challenged genius has dubbed CLEAR. Ex-actress Elise DuVal, the second Mrs. Milbank, is so dissatisfied with Inspector Cramer’s investigation that she asks Wolfe to take the case, and the rest is strictly routine. In Goldsborough’s eighth pastiche, Wolfe sounds like Wolfe, but the other regulars favor P.G. Wodehouse and Damon Runyon. “Flushing is hardly a place I am accustomed to visiting,” Archie sniffs to a suspicious Cramer. He calls Saul’s plan to split a dinner check at Rusterman’s Restaurant “a capital idea indeed” and asks Lily Rowan: “Ah, perchance have you lured me out here to neck?” Pity.

Strictly for fans who miss Wolfe and his crowd so much they don’t care how the characters sound.

A MEASURE OF BLOOD

George, Kathleen MysteriousPress.com (400 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-4804-4560-4 The routine murder of a single mom is far from routine for Cmdr. Richard Christie and the members of Pittsburgh PD’s homicide squad.

The leads are slender in art teacher Maggie Brown’s fatal stabbing. The cops have a witness who heard her quarreling shortly before her death with a man who insisted against all the evidence that he was the father of her son, Matthew. They even have a physical description of the suspect and the suspect’s car.

But the witness is Matthew Brown, who’s not even 8 years old. Since the murder has orphaned Matt, Christie scrambles to find a new foster home for him, then squirms when, just as Matt’s settling in comfortably with professors Janet Gabriel and Arthur Morris, his biological father, long-ago 30

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THE OUTCAST DEAD

Kate, is investigating the deaths of a couple’s three young children. The first two incidents were written off as crib deaths, but the third looks like murder, and Nelson suspects the parents. As Ruth continues her work on the program, Nelson gets another child-related case. A young girl has been stolen from the house of her wealthy parents, whose nanny spends more time with the children than they do. After a frantic search, the child is found along with a cryptic note from “The Childminder.” No sooner is that case resolved than the son of Ruth’s friend Judy, a member of Nelson’s team, is taken from his sitter, and another note from the Childminder turns up. Judy is married to her high school sweetheart, but her son is the product of her affair with Cathbad, a druid friend of Ruth’s who had helped her in past cases (A Dying Fall, 2013, etc.). Could all these cases be related?

Griffiths lovingly develops the complicated, often testy relationships between the continuing characters in the course of a mystery perhaps a shade less exciting than her usual fare.

Griffiths, Elly Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (384 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-547-79277-4 What connection could the discovery of a notorious child killer’s corpse have to a new series of unnerving crimes?

Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway thinks that the body she’s unearthed near the walls of Norwich Castle may be that of Mother Hook, a woman who took in unwanted children, possibly sold their bodies and was hanged for murder in 1867.

Ruth’s publicity-seeking department head is thrilled when the producer of the TV series Women Who Kill decides to add Mother Hook to the lineup. Ruth herself is less pleased even though the job brings her together with Frank Barker, an attractive professor of American history who thinks Mother Hook was innocent. At the same time, DCI Harry Nelson, the father of Ruth’s daughter,

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HARD GOING

research becomes personal, Monmouth is more determined than ever to learn about Vane’s history as well as his own. With the help and support of his new friend Lady Quincebridge, Monmouth traces his origins to the mysterious and remote Kittiscar Hall. Although Lady Quincebridge insists that Monmouth give up when the madness of researching Vane begins to infect him as an illness, Monmouth cannot rest until he understands how their lives are intertwined. His journey to Kittiscar Hall holds secrets that Monmouth had never guessed and yet always instinctively knew—and not only secrets, but danger too.

The eponymous mist seems to cloud the writing, and the meandering tale ends quickly with a conclusion that still seems obscure. Even if Monmouth doesn’t deserve the truth, doesn’t the loyal reader?

Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia Severn House (240 pp.) $28.95 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8331-5 London detectives search for the murderer of a neighborhood philanthropist.

Retired solicitor Lionel Bygod had just begun to write out a check in the elegant reception room of his Shepherd’s Bush flat when someone bashed in the back of his head with a bronze statuette. DI Bill Slider and his subordinates interview Bygod’s acquaintances, who assure them that the victim was a quiet, well-mannered man who loved the theater, was active in volunteer work and helped people in the area, especially those down on their luck. Bygod was a moderately wealthy man with no known next of kin and no will. What could have driven someone to kill him? Maybe the unpopular defense case that brought him nothing but harassment and drove him into retirement. Besides searching for the most vocal of Bygod’s persecutors as a possible suspect, Slider also grills Angela Kroll, Bygod’s housekeeper, who has a key to the flat and a husband deeply in debt. A mystery woman from Bygod’s Oxford days and a missing photograph make Slider question whether the victim was really the honest and generous man he seemed. And who was the intended payee of the check that Bygod never finished writing?

Levelheaded DI Slider (Blood Never Dies, 2012, etc.) returns in a satisfying balance of bullpen banter, lively characterization and thorough detection. Although Harrod-Eagles (Kate’s Progress, 2013, etc.) tips her hand earlier than she might have, a poignant ending more than makes up for this minor lapse.

MOVING TARGET

Jance, J.A. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-4500-8 An ex-reporter, a high-tech specialist and a nun help right wrongs of the near and distant past as they circle the globe.

Even though Ali Reynolds (Deadly Stakes, 2013, etc.) is a grandmother, she intends to get married in style. She doesn’t come to England with her major-domo Leland Brooks just to shop for a wedding gown, however: She hopes to see Leland reunited with his estranged family while she tries to find out if Leland’s late father had a little help in dying. Ali’s fiance, B. Simpson, head of a computer security company, is following the case of Lance Tucker. A former honors student and computer whiz at a Texas high school, Lance was recently released from juvenile detention after an accident that broke both his legs and gave him second-degree burns. Simpson, who was partly responsible for sending Lance to juvie when the boy was caught hacking into his school’s computer system, feels guilty and wants to lend a hand. For starters, he has Sister Anselm appointed as Lance’s patient advocate. The murder of another advocate for the teenager unites Ali, Simpson and Sister Anselm in trying to protect Lance, who’s developed a computer application that may be worth more than his life.

Dizzying changes of locale and point of view, along with large helpings of sentimentality, weaken Ali’s latest. If only Jance had focused on one plot instead of sending her characters all over creation in pursuit of two separate mysteries.

THE MIST IN THE MIRROR

Hill, Susan Vintage (288 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-345-80667-3

The moody countryside wanderings of an adventurer Hill (A Question of Identity, 2013, etc.) sends on a glacially paced adventure in search of the truth about his hero.

After an unconventional childhood during which he was raised in Africa by a distant guardian, Sir James Monmouth has made his life traveling the world questing for adventure. He seeks in part to travel in the footsteps of his hero, the famous (or infamous) Conrad Vane. On his arrival in England, Monmouth plans to learn the history surrounding Vane, from his early life onward. Though all those he meets try to dissuade him from this quest, citing feelings of wariness and concern for Monmouth, he soldiers on, tracking down a surprising connection between Vane’s life and his own. Once his 32

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“...densely plotted but sprawling...” from bad wolf

BAD WOLF

disgraced colleague who’s now working for Internal Affairs and bent on revenge. Across town, TV personality Hanna Herzmann gets a line on a shadowy story involving convicted child molester Kilian Rothemund and veteran thug Berndt Prinzler, a story so big and explosive that she’s convinced it will send her career into hyperdrive, even though her producer, Wolfgang Matern, godfather of her unlovable daughter, Meike, urges her to drop it like a hot potato. She refuses, and soon, both she and Leonie Verges, the psychotherapist who brought the case to her attention, will pay a high price for their interest. The highest price, though, will be exacted from a long line of innocent children terrified of the Big Bad Wolf, from Lilly Sander, the granddaughter of Pia’s live-in boyfriend, Christoph, to Emma’s daughter Louisa, whose visit to the emergency room reveals injuries inconsistent with her fall from a horse.

A densely plotted but sprawling exercise in unbridled evil. Spoiler alert: Most of the bad guys turn out to be good, and most of the good guys turn out to be bad.

Neuhaus, Nele Translated by Murray, Steven T. Minotaur (432 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-250-04399-3 Another encounter with monstrous iniquity for Pia Kirchhoff, Oliver von Bodenstein and the other stalwarts of Hofheim’s Criminal Police (Snow White Must Die, 2013).

Even before she drowned, the nameless girl fished out of the river near the Eddersheim locks had suffered terrible damage. Her skin showed bruises and burns that were years old, and her malnourishment and pallor suggested that she’d been fed little and kept imprisoned away from the sunlight. Pulled away from a class reunion where she connected once more with her old friend Emma Finkbeiner, Pia, frustrated by the lack of leads, must also dodge the unwelcome attention of Frank Behnke, a

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JUDGEMENT CALL

to wonder if their deaths were intended to move the land deal along. But they’re confounded by the murder of a woman who’d planned to sell her place. The murdered couple’s children start a war of their own when the son, who’s deeply in debt, learns that his sister is getting three-fourths of the assets. After Rachel’s friend Joanna McKendrick, a vocal opponent of the scheme, loses her barn to arson, Tom learns that many people on both sides of the issue have been getting threatening letters and suffering petty vandalism. Three sisters who haven’t made up their minds are in constant fear. Tom warns them and all the antiresort forces to be extra careful, since he and his deputies have their hands full with violent demonstrations. Though she worries about threats from Tom’s job, Rachel can’t sit on the sidelines, especially once their nephew is threatened. But it won’t be easy to find out if the murders stem from the fight over the resort or from a much more personal motive.

Parshall (Bleeding Through, 2012, etc.) expertly maintains the tension between warring factions until the surprising conclusion.

Oldham, Nick Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8333-9

A young police constable learns what kind of cop, and man, he wants to be.

Four years into the police service that began in 1978, Henry Christie longs for something that will help him become a detective. After a promising assignment that ends in disaster, he’s back in uniform for his solitary patrols of Lancashire’s sleepy Rossendale Valley. At 23, Christie is full of grand ideas and gallant impulses, like arresting Vladimir Kaminski, who routinely rapes and beats his girlfriend. After DI Robert Fanshaw-Bayley releases Kaminski, Christie tries to advance himself again. He disobeys orders during a robbery, follows a hunch and a car, and is shot at for his trouble. To teach him his place, Fanshaw-Bayley sends him to Dover with an attractive female police constable to collect a prisoner. After several pints too many, Christie lets his hormones do his thinking and loses the prisoner in the bargain. He has a steady, beautiful, loving girlfriend back home, but he can’t stay away from either the pubs or any woman who gives him a wink. Then, a colleague’s murder puts everything in a new light, and Christie is appointed to a special squad to solve the case. More violence and a potentially deadly encounter with Kaminski bring Christie face to face with a line he will not cross, whatever the cost to his future.

Although fans may welcome the coming-of-age chapter in Christie’s life, newcomers may wince as he repeatedly trips over his own feet. Like a stern but loving father, however, Oldham (Bad Tidings, 2013, etc.) finally forces the boy-man protagonist of this prequel to get over himself and grow up.

SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE

Rankin, Ian Little, Brown (400 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-316-22455-0 978-0-316-22456-7 e-book Rebus is working the streets as a detective again—and his loyalty is on the line.

When John Rebus left retirement to rejoin the Edinburgh police force, he had to take the reduced rank of detective sergeant. Siobhan Clarke, his former junior partner, is now a detective inspector and theoretically his boss in the investigation of the road accident of Jessica Traynor, a young art student. The two coppers suspect that Jessica’s boyfriend, son of Justice Minister Patrick McCuskey, was driving the car and fled the scene. While Rebus is on the Traynor case and the subsequent murder of McCuskey, Malcolm Fox of Complaints is investigating Rebus and the surviving members of the Saints of the Shadow Bible, a police division that disbanded years ago. Rebus, who was only a detective constable back then, had little to do with Billy Saunders, the snitch who killed a man and walked, most likely thank to his usefulness to the Saints. Thirty years later, the snitch disappears, and Rebus must choose whether to back up his former mates while he pursues the crisscrossing mysteries.

Although Rebus (Standing in Another Man’s Grave, 2013, etc.) is the protagonist of this gritty procedural, you see the action through so many other eyes that the hard-living detective is less vivid a presence than in his earlier outings. But the most persistent cop in the shop will still do whatever it takes to crack a case. (Author tour to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Kansas City, St. Louis, Austin and Minneapolis)

POISONED GROUND

Parshall, Sandra Poisoned Pen (250 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4642-0224-7 978-1-4642-0226-1 paper 978-1-4642-0225-4 Lg. Prt. Plans to build a resort in rural Virginia start an uncivil war.

Many of the locals see the new resort as Mason County’s chance for much needed jobs, even if they’re minimum wage with no benefits. Since some of the people whose land is required dream happily of a big payoff while others adamantly refuse to sell, it’s neighbor against neighbor.

Veterinarian Rachel Goddard tries to walk a fine line, since her husband, Sheriff Tom Bridger, must remain impartial, but the developers’ smug arrogance drives her to speak her mind. When a couple who refuse to sell are found shot, Tom and Rachel have 34

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MORIARTY RETURNS A LETTER

Paul Barnes, another candidate for Thorpe’s job who hints that he’d like to work with Dulcie. When a paper that Stella Roebuck had planned to read vanishes from her computer, professor Roebuck, blaming her former lover Barnes, demands that Dulcie’s boyfriend, Chris, a computer expert, find it. Then Marco Telsa, Roebuck’s newest lover, falls off a balcony at an evening party, and the police suspect murder. Dulcie, who often seeks advice from the ghost of her deceased cat Mr. Grey and her new cat, Esmé, is worried about Thorpe, who appeared to be drunk at the party, and Chris, who’s acting strangely. Although she’s survived several murder investigations (Grey Dawn, 2013, etc.), her immersion in all things gothic gives her a distinctive slant on sleuthing that puts her in peril.

Though Dulcie’s rather scatterbrained approach to sleuthing may put readers off, her seventh provides a plethora of suspects that keeps them guessing.

Robertson, Michael Minotaur (272 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-1-250-01646-1

More trouble for the Sherlock Holmes letters and the curators who love them not wisely but too well.

A century and more ago, a brave undercover Pinkerton operative pretended to be professor Moriarty in a last-ditch attempt to prevent crime lord extraordinaire Redgil from executing him. Fifty years later, the operative’s son, Capt. James Moriarty of the U.S. Army, lost his life when a London pub was bombed. Now, in 1998, the nuptials of actress Laura Rankin and Reggie Heath, Q.C., whose sideline is answering the letters still addressed to Sherlock Holmes, are complicated—well, virtually trashed— by the miraculous escape from death of schizophrenic savant Darla Rennie from the mangled car in which she’d kidnapped Laura and by a new exhibit of Holmes letters quickly installed and then even more quickly pulled from Dorset House—but not in time to prevent a new malefactor from noticing evidence of a sinister secret that must be protected at all costs from Reggie and his brother Nigel, a blandly inoffensive solicitor who was once in group therapy with Darla. The two brothers, surely the most reluctant detective duo in fiction, wend their way through a thicket of false identities, hairsbreadth escapes, Sherlock-ian references and Wodehouse-ian dialogue to end with the tableau of two mortal enemies locked in hand-to-hand combat hurtling over a cliff. Hmm. Robertson (The Baker Street Translation, 2013, etc.) extracts another ebullient puzzle from the most improbable yet thoroughly logical sources imaginable.

LION PLAYS ROUGH

Smith, Lachlan Mysterious Press (256 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-2216-2

Now that he’s solved the shooting that left his brother Teddy seriously disabled (Bear Is Broken, 2013), Oakland attorney Leo Maxwell is ready to juggle a trio of cases that put him on the hot seat.

Beware of women who knock you off your bicycle with their convertibles and then press you to take an iffy case. The woman in question is Lavinia Martin, who, instead of sending Leo a $200 check for his broken wheel, offers him $10,000 to protect her brother, who already violated his probation when Detective Eric Campbell found a gun in his car, from the charges that are sure to follow when the cops link that gun to a recent murder. The only trouble is that when Leo, who’s already skirted the law by photographing a meeting between Campbell and suspicious-looking private security agent Damon Watson, maneuvers his way into a meeting with the imprisoned Jamil Robinson, his supposed client insists he never hired Leo—in fact, his only sister is dead. Clearly, Leo’s been set up to take the heat off the police corruption case he thought he’d cracked, but by whom: Jamil’s heavy-duty attorney, Nikki Matson? The vanished Lavinia Martin? Campbell himself? Before he can answer this question, Leo will have to defend Marty Scarsdale, a client accused of molesting a 13-year-old friend of his daughter’s, and reopen the murder case of Jeremy Walker, who was shot to death last summer and whose mother now wants Teddy to marry her even more impaired daughter Tamara, who doesn’t even remember that she was in a therapy group with Teddy.

“We’re lawyers, not private detectives,” Leo’s boss, Jeanie, Teddy’s ex-wife, tells him. In his sophomore outing, though, Leo shines a lot more brightly as a private detective than as a lawyer.

GREY HOWL

Simon, Clea Severn House (208 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8346-9 More adventures in the dangerous groves of academe.

Doctoral candidate Dulcie Schwartz is thrilled that she is getting the chance to read a paper she wrote on aspects of a gothic novel by a so-far-unidentified woman author who’s the subject of her thesis. The literature conference is being held for the first time at a prestigious university in Cambridge, Mass. Dulcie has been pressed into service as a liaison and fixer of problems by her nervous department head, Martin Thorpe, who’s fighting to keep his job. Dulcie would prefer Renée Showalter, a Canadian professor who’s made available to her some highly interesting documents that will help in her research—at least, until she meets charismatic |

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“Fun, with phasers on lethal.” from honor’s knight

WORKING GOD’S MISCHIEF

science fiction and fantasy

Cook, Glen Tor (432 pp.) $27.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-7653-3420-6 Series: Instrumentalities of the Night, 4 Fourth in the series (Surrender to the Will of the Night, 2010, etc.) featuring an alternate-world 13th century, the era of the crusades—along with gods, demons, monsters and wizards.

That being said, Cook disdains any explanations or even hints that might help ease newcomers into the flow. The Aelen Kofer, or dwarf wizards, trapped the Old Gods in a space-time bubble. Fresh from his success in killing the worst of these, Piper Hecht, along with his allies (including his sister Heris, ancestor Cloven Februaren, and Ferris Renfrow, all wizards), intends to release them in controlled fashion—and either kill them or force them to bargain for their lives. The gods that survive this process, perhaps daunted to discover how little magic power survives outside their ancient prison, seem biddable, cooperative and trustworthy—but they rapidly grow bored and start getting into mischief. Elsewhere, an enigmatic four-armed woman with supernatural powers visits Brother Candle, Countess Socia and Bernardin Amberchelle and, even more mysteriously, bestows astonishing gifts on them. Despite the presence of real, tangible gods, belief in the One God is strong, and the armies of the Grail Empire are preparing for another crusade against Hecht’s former coreligionists, the Praman. Winters grow longer, the ice builds and expands. And, seemingly out of nowhere, Hecht conceives an urgent need to recover Grinling, a lost magic ring wrought by the Aelen Kofer. All this, in Cook’s capable hands, comes across as less derivative than it might appear in summary; his characters have substance, their conversations sparkle. What he doesn’t convey are any senses of urgency, what it all means, why it matters or how it fits into the context of the series.

Presumably, you have to start at the beginning, and readers looking for a lengthy, well-narrated, but rather shapeless immersion should do just that.

HONOR’S KNIGHT

Bach, Rachel Orbit/Little, Brown (384 pp.) $15.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-316-22108-5 978-0-316-22107-8 e-book Series: Paradox, 2 Independently intelligible second entry (Fortune’s Pawn, 2013) in a space opera starring a tough, sexy, armor-clad mercenary chick.

Fresh from burying her colleague, Devi Morris boards the battered old freighter known as the Fool. The ship’s enigmatic captain, Brian Caldswell, is one of the leaders of an organization, the Eyes, whose mission is to track down and destroy phantoms, huge, planet-busting aliens which few can perceive.

Not that Devi’s aware of this, since, at the end of the previous book, she had her memories wiped. By Caldswell. Well, it was either that or kill her, since she found out too much about what was really going on. All Devi knows is that the ship seems to be infested with strange glowing bugs that only she can see— is she going crazy?—and that she finds the ship’s cook, Rupert Charkov, powerfully attractive—yet when she looks directly at him, she feels a visceral repulsion. There are Caldswell’s “daughters,” who all look like identical, blank-eyed, emaciated kids but have the ability to manipulate plasmex, a sort of cosmic energy field. Devi doesn’t trust Caldswell and prepares to throw in her lot with John Brenton, Caldswell’s former ally-turnedrival, until she discovers that Brenton’s cooperating with alien enemies, the xith’cal. And then there’s the creepy black stain that sometimes seems about to cover Devi’s entire body. Will Devi recover her memories and figure out how all these peculiar matters relate? Rest assured, Devi will be firing up her trusty thermite blade, working her armor until the rivets pop, and charming or intimidating anybody, human, alien or indeterminate, that gets in her way. And when the smoke clears—well, it pretty much never does: The action’s tough, gory and incessant, with revelation piled upon revelation.

Fun, with phasers on lethal.

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FALLOUT

Decker, James K. ROC/Penguin (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-451-41341-3 Sequel to The Burn Zone (2013), Decker’s medium-future, aliens-among-us yarn.

When a scientific experiment conducted in another universe went wrong, a vast alien installation appeared in the middle of China, transforming the world and the universe in ways few humans have grasped. Fifty years later, relations between humans and the haan are turbulent but mostly peaceful, with the haan |

slowly releasing advanced technology such as portable wormhole gates, antigravity and force fields. Starving and desperate, young Sam Shao joins a program in which humans foster haan infants and, as a result, develop powerful empathic bonds with them. She’s also made friends with an outcast haan, Nix. Still, she wonders why the haan project a field that forces humans to see only what the haan want them to see. The haan are building new colonies, while humans are disappearing, and there’s a thriving market in human flesh. Factional struggles within the haan lead to the release of a virus that transforms humans into seemingly powerful and unkillable monsters, yet the victims are convinced they haven’t changed at all; sometimes they don’t even notice. Sam’s attempt to broadcast the truth fails; as a fugitive, she hatches another plot to bring down the force field that envelops the entire haan installation. With fast and furious action, hairsbreadth escapes and surprises on every page, it’s eye-popping stuff, set against a gritty, grainy, visceral depiction of a city scarred by overpopulation, malnourishment and fear of the unknown. Yet it’s impossible to ignore the gaping holes in the logical fabric. Earth, for instance, is now too radioactive to sustain human life in the long term; even the stars are different—and apparently nobody noticed.

Readers who thrive on tension and excitement will feel themselves amply rewarded; those who tend to question underlying assumptions, not so much.

DARK DUETS All-New Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy Golden, Christopher–Ed. Harper Voyager (432 pp.) $25.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-06-224027-9 978-0-06-224029-3 e-book

Acclaimed authors collaborate on a collection of stories of the macabre.

This gathering of supernatural tales has a unique hook: The stories are collaborations between established writers working together for the first time. The results are a mixed bag, both in terms of quality and tone; moody, atmospheric meditations on loss follow old-school gothic bodicerippers, with some contemporary brutal torture porn thrown in for good measure. Charlaine Harris, of True Blood fame, is one of the bigger names here. Her story with Rachel Caine is a middling, generic yarn with nods to female empowerment. Kevin J. Anderson and Sherrilyn Kenyon contribute a somewhat maudlin account of a homeless man/magical troll. In general, the stories that hew closest to genre tropes like haunted castles and deals with the devil come off as forgettable and inessential, but there are a few gems, including Stuart MacBride and Allan Guthrie’s lurid account of a most unusual cat-breeding operation; Gregory Frost and Jonathan Maberry’s chilling, revisionist take on fairies; and, best of all, Rhodi Hawk and F. Paul Wilson’s delightful, inventive odd-couple adventure featuring a beautiful 19th-century sociopathic mortician and an irascible Irish |

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zombie. This story, titled “Renascence,” brilliantly justifies the book’s strategy of blending disparate talents to see what happens. The result is unpredictable, funny, gripping and weirdly endearing. One might initially shudder at the notion of a steampunk/zombie/will-they-won’t-they/buddy comedy/adventure, but a “Renascence” franchise would be most welcome.

Some of the spooky stories hit bum notes, but when on its game, this collection really sings.

THE CRIMSON CAMPAIGN

McClellan, Brian Orbit/Little, Brown (608 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-316-21908-2 978-0-316-21909-9 e-book Series: Powder Mage, 2 Second entry in the Powder Mage trilogy (Promise of Blood, 2013), something like a fantasy French Revolution with seriously weird wizards.

The narrative follows the fortunes of three key figures. Field Marshal Tamas, a powder mage, one who eats or snorts gunpowder in order to gain magic powers, overthrew the monarchy and slaughtered the aristocracy and the Cabal of evil wizards that sustained them. Adamat, a retired police inspector with a perfect memory, investigates conspirators and traitors. Tamas’ disaffected son, Taniel, a powder mage and master marksman, helped Tamas defend Adro against the invading Kez and killed the god Kresimir. Taniel’s companion is Ka-poel, a young, mute barbarian female whose powerful magics are unlike those of other mages. Now the Kez attack again, this time with a vast army and impossibly fast, strong Wardens created by the magic of Kresimir, who’s evidently not as dead as Taniel hoped.

Tamas schemes to stem the invasion by leading his best troops in an unexpected flank attack, but he soon finds himself cut off behind enemy lines, without supplies or reinforcements, and facing a long, dangerous road home. In Adro, Inspector Adamat’s wife and children are being held hostage by the psychopathic Lord Vetas. With Tamas and his powder mages missing and presumed dead, Taniel angrily leads the defense against the Kez hordes. Tamas’ generals, however, inexplicably fall back instead of holding the line and haughtily dismiss Taniel’s insubordinate complaints. Kresimir, meanwhile, seeks the man who shot him in the eye. This book is less relentlessly inventive than the inaugural volume but still impressively distinctive and pungent, with solid plotting and exceptional action sequences.

A reliably rewarding installment that will keep appetites whetted for the conclusion.

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THE ECHO

general outline of the story may seem familiar to experienced epic fantasy readers, the worldbuilding is solid, appealing and fairly assured for a debut. The rituals of the Kettral (the fantasy equivalent of Navy SEALs), who use giant predatory birds to travel to their missions, worship at an oak tree covered in bloodsucking bats and whose graduation exam involves seeking the eggs of vicious, sightless lizards within their underground lair, are particularly well-imagined. And if the momentum is a bit slow to build, it seems likely that Staveley is merely putting his pieces in place for what will no doubt be an intriguingly complex and bloody game.

Worth sticking around to see what comes next.

Smythe, James Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-06-228728-1 Dysfunctional…People…in…Spaaaace!

For the second time in a projected fourbook series, Smythe demonstrates why it’s a bad idea to shut up virtual strangers in a tin can with an unclear directive.

The Ishiguro vanished on its journey to examine an anomalous area of space. Readers of The Explorer (2013) know that everyone died except for journalist Cormac Easton, trapped within the anomaly and looped in time, observing the tragedy over and over. Twenty-three years later, scientist twins Tomas and Mira Hyvönen head a new mission to explore the anomaly. Tomas remains on Earth at ground control while Mira, the narrator, travels aboard the spaceship Lära. Mira is physically, socially and emotionally clumsy, ill-suited to heading an expedition into unknown territory. The brothers believe they have considered every contingency, that their mission will succeed where the previous one did not. Of course, things go terribly wrong—again and again—as the crew becomes ensnared in their own series of devastating time loops. Both novels in the series resemble a bleak cross between Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and the film Groundhog Day. These works share a common theme—that the protagonists’ psychological problems and moral failings led to their predicament; the only way to escape is to confront those problems and strive for redemption. Sadly, Mira is no Bill Murray.

Nicely written and thoughtful, but two more of these literary variations on a morbid theme may be far too much of the same for readers.

r om a n c e ROMANCING THE DUKE

Dare, Tessa Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-06-224019-4

Izzy Goodnight has long given up on fairy tales, so she is shocked to learn that she has inherited a castle and must figure out what to do with the wounded duke who lives there.

As the daughter of a scholar famous for penning a series of tales about knights and maidens, Izzy knows a thing or two about fairy tales. However, she also knows hunger and financial desperation thanks to the same father, who never took the time to ensure she was cared for after his death. In fact, Izzy has spent her life looking after her father and supporting his career, so his betrayal in this manner is even more crushing. Learning she has inherited a castle from one of her father’s advisers sends her fleeing to the property, only to find a dilapidated building and the wounded duke who used to own it—and who is quite surprised and angry to learn he no longer does. Since Izzy has no money and the duke needs help, they agree she will stay on and help him get his affairs in order, and he will pay her for her services. Getting to the bottom of the mystery forces them to work closely together, and both are stunned when a strong attraction flares between them. But Izzy is the beloved daughter of a famous author, and her father’s adoring public comes calling, causing tension in the household. Add in Izzy’s self-consciousness regarding her plain appearance, the continued dispute over the castle and various quirky secondary characters, not to mention a few secrets and dangers along the bumpy path to the couple’s happily-ever-after, and you have the recipe for an effervescent, heart-tugging romance.

Dare starts her new series with a unique storyline, a sweet, fun nod to literary fandom, and two main characters who are perfect for each other yet never would have met if they weren’t each at a nadir in life’s journey.

THE EMPEROR’S BLADES

Staveley, Brian Tor (481 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-7653-3640-8 Series: Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, 1 A political coup and an ancient menace threaten the stability of a vast empire in the first volume of a new series.

The emperor of Annur has been assassinated, and his children may be next. The eldest, Adare, chief finance minister, can’t rule, since women don’t sit on the Unhewn Throne. However, as the only sibling in the Dawn Palace, she takes it upon herself to seek justice for her father, if only she can discover a way to prove his alleged murderer’s guilt. Her brother Kaden does not yet know that he is emperor, as he has spent the last several years at an isolated monastery, learning mental disciplines whose utility will soon become apparent. The youngest, Valyn, is eager to rush to his brother’s aid, but he must complete his training in an elite military corps first—and root out the threat against his own life. Although the 38

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FALLING LIGHT

and moves herself and 5-year-old Wyatt to her family’s cabin on Minnesota’s Butternut Lake. Though slightly derelict, the cabin will be their new home, a new start. There, she reconnects with childhood friend Jax (pregnant with girl No. 4) and Caroline, owner of the local diner. Things seem pleasingly unchanged in Butternut, except for the large lake house that has recently appeared across from Allie’s more modest cabin. The modernist affair belongs to the town’s most eligible bachelor, Walker Ford, owner of a string of successful boatyards. It seems inevitable that Allie and Walker will make their ways to each other, but there is a novel’s worth of obstacles in their path: Allie’s fear of betraying the memory of her husband, Walker’s fear of commitment, and their mutual, initial dislike for each other. While their romance works itself out, there is other trouble in Butternut: Jax’s old boyfriend (and secretly the father of her first child) is out of prison and is blackmailing her to keep quiet.

Caroline, bereft that her only child has just moved away to college, brushes off the advances of a friendly retired pilot. And then, despite a passionate weekend together, Allie misinterprets a visit from Walker’s ex-wife and calls off the blossoming romance. Jax’s husband finds out about the blackmail, and the two separate. Caroline eases her loneliness by babysitting Wyatt.

Will the three women remain alone by novel’s end? Unlikely.

Plot really isn’t the point of books like these; it’s about the characters, and McNear has admirably crafted people worth following.

Harrison, Thea Berkley Sensation (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-425-25510-0 Part of an ancient contingent sent to Earth to destroy the Deceiver, Mary and Michael have lost nearly all of their friends over the thousands of years they’ve existed here, but now, despite exhaustion and grief, victory may be in sight for the soul mates.

Thousands of years ago, a criminal from another planet escaped his confines and fled to Earth, wreaking havoc through the ages. Focused on world domination, aided by physical and psychic advantages, and unburdened by any moral compass, this monster can only be stopped by his own kind.

Hunted by a group of his species through the ages, he has destroyed all but three of them. Michael and Mary have left their home planet behind to seek the Deceiver, unable to ever return. Mated for eternity, the two made the mutual decision to follow the villain across time and space in hopes of curtailing his murderous, powerhungry rampage, but 900 years ago, Mary was so badly injured that she was unable to regenerate into human form until the end of the 20th century. Michael has been searching for her for centuries, and now that he’s found her, they must destroy the Deceiver to ever have a chance at a peaceful, secure life. Mary is only beginning to remember her gifts and the fact that she isn’t truly human. Furthermore, she doesn’t have the benefit of centuries of training and preparation for a showdown. Still, she is a quick study, and some of her more empathetic qualities may be just what the two need to balance the power scale in ways Michael could never have imagined. Harrison builds a creative, fascinating urban fantasy world that looks a lot like ours but with one troubling supervillain who has slashed and burned his way through human history. In this second of two installments, Michael and Mary just might be able to stop the demonic Deceiver once and for all, with help from the enigmatic Astra, some Native American wisdom and heroes, and some ancient and powerful allies.

Beautifully written, boldly imaginative, action-packed and captivating.

R IS FOR REBEL ...and Royalty, Relatives, Reality, and Running From Love...

Mulry, Megan Sourcebooks Landmark (400 pp.) $14.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-7003-1

Aristocrat Abigail Heyworth has never fit comfortably in her skin, but she’s decided it’s well past time to create a life; self-made American millionaire Eliot Cranbrook wants everything from Abby, which is hard since she’s not sure what that is.

The youngest daughter of a duke, Abby has never felt like she truly belonged anywhere. Just coming off a 10-year relationship that has run its course, Abby is ready to settle in and figure out exactly what she wants to do with her life. However, she is not ready for another serious relationship, or at least she doesn’t think she is. She’s been getting close to Eliot Cransbrook, an American luxury brands magnate, and while she thinks she wants to take things beyond the friendship stage, she is disconcerted by the intensity of their connection and the look in his eyes that seems to want far more than she is able to give. As the two circle each other, sexual awareness blazing between them, Abby begins to feel that her feelings for Eliot are all or nothing, and she’s not sure which is more frightening. Mulry is a sizzling writer, and her way with words and sigh-worthy romantic highs, not to mention scorching sexual tension, is dynamic and elegant.

UP AT BUTTERNUT LAKE

McNear, Mary Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | Apr. 15, 2014 978-0-06-228314-6 The first in a homey, feel-good series, McNear’s small-town tale offers lakeside views and likable characters.

Since her husband’s death in Afghanistan, Allie can no longer bear the intrusiveness of suburbia: the pitiful stares at the grocery, the useless advice, the weight of all those happy memories. So she sells the house, puts her furniture in storage, |

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“Standard, appealing fare from Steel.” from power play

A clever, intense read marred by a few mechanics issues, including some distracting head-hopping. However, these flaws are minor compared to the quality of the story and storytelling. (Agent: Allison Hunter)

POWER PLAY

Steel, Danielle Delacorte (352 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-345-53091-2 Steel’s (Winners, 2013, etc.) latest contemporary romance targets the integrity of corporate executives.

Connecting two powerful CEOs through their children’s romantic involvement, the author uses her signature lowkey, easy-to-read style to examine personal and professional morality. Fiona Carson and Marshall Weston have made it to the tops of their games with a lot of sweat equity, and both are respected leaders, but that’s where the similarities end. Fiona is an accomplished divorcée and the mother of two well-balanced college students. She makes accessibility to her son and daughter a priority and rationalizes that she doesn’t have room in her life for a man since her work and her children keep her busy and happy. When Pulitzer Prize winner Logan Smith, an investigative reporter, contacts Fiona for a story he’s working on, she sees him as a good match for her older sister, Jillian. After all, Jillian’s a psychiatrist who’s working on a book about women in power, and both Jillian and Logan believe successful women in the business world conduct themselves very differently from their male counterparts. Marshall seems to exemplify that difference.

While Fiona’s a concerned parent and a by-the-book executive who would never compromise her principles, Marshall’s actions reflect his questionable ethics. Married for 27 years to the same woman, he’s been a decent provider to his wife and three children, and on the surface, he appears to achieve a perfect balance between family life and corporate duties. But looks can be deceiving. His eldest son despises him; his daughter’s on a dubious path; and Marshall’s hiding a secret life that threatens to harm the reputation of his company, destroy his marriage and damage others who depend on him. When he’s forced to make an important decision, Marshall’s loyalty to his company and loved ones is tested.

Standard, appealing fare from Steel.

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nonfiction MAKE ME A MOTHER A Memoir

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Antonetta, Susanne Norton (256 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 17, 2014 978-0-393-06817-7

ENCOUNTERS AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD

by Elizabeth A. Fenn............................................................................. 53 FARADAY, MAXWELL, AND THE ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD

by Nancy Forbes; Basil Mahon.............................................................54 TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN by Amanda Gefter.............58 THE END OF EVE by Ariel Gore..........................................................59 MINDLESS by Simon Head................................................................. 60 THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD

by Justin Hocking..................................................................................61 A GARDEN OF MARVELS by Ruth Kassinger................................... 64 THE MEAT RACKET by Christopher Leonard.....................................65 GAME-CHANGER by David McAdams.............................................67 DEGREES OF INEQUALITY by Suzanne Mettler.............................. 69 THE RACE UNDERGROUND by Doug Most......................................70 THE BROKEN AND THE WHOLE by Charles S. Sherman................. 75 ASTORIA by Peter Stark....................................................................... 77 FIELD NOTES FROM A HIDDEN CITY by Esther Woolfson.............. 82 TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything

Gefter, Amanda Bantam (496 pp.) $28.00 Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-345-53143-8

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An award-winning memoirist’s moving account of how adopting a South Korean baby taught her about motherhood and love.

Adoption had been an attractive option to Antonetta (A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, 2005, etc.) and her husband even before they had begun trying to conceive. “Put together,” she writes, “we had a genetic picture that looked like a Munch painting: bipolar disorder and alcoholism going back many generations.” One painful miscarriage and several years later, the pair decided to adopt internationally and settled on Jin, an Asian boy with “dark hair and large liquid eyes.” Although not born of her body, the baby nevertheless had a profound impact on Antonetta even before she held him in her arms. Maternal hormones surged through her body, and in the months before Jin arrived, her home began to look like a cross between “late Victorian [and] early FisherPrice.” Memories of her troubled past, which included drug abuse, a difficult relationship with her parents, and recurring battles with mental illness, also began to resurface. With both anxiety and joy, Antonetta plunged into motherhood knowing that it would remake her as a woman, wife and daughter.

Though fear of rejection by Jin dogged her, she overcame it and learned to navigate the murky waters of transracial parent-child relationships in the process. As she felt him “grow into [her], ounce by ounce,” Antonetta’s notion of family also evolved.

Adoption did not simply occur between adults and children. It could also happen between adults and their parents, as when the author “adopted” her aging mother and father by becoming their caregiver.

In the end, Jin’s otherness became the unlooked-for gift that taught Antonetta how love was as much about risk as it was acceptance.

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THE OGALLALA ROAD A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

Bair, Julene Viking (288 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 10, 2014 978-0-670-78604-6

A gifted writer describes the ebbs and flows of the arc of a romantic relationship while exploring her own bond to the American heartland.

Bair (One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, 2000) explores her inner emotional life in this spare memoir that eventually becomes equal parts Robert James Waller romance novel, William Least Heat-Moon road show and agricultural exposé memorializing the painful legacy of the independent American farmer. The author begins with her memories of a childhood on the farm in remote Kansas. Returning home after years in metropolitan San Francisco, Bair felt like a stranger in a strange land until she met Ward, a laconic, closeted intellectual rancher who ignited a fire in this single mother. In subsequent sections, we experience Bair’s combative relationship with her son, Jake, to whom Ward represented a potential last chance at a father figure. Coming home, Bair worked with her family to preserve the large industrial farm that had become their family legacy but was faced with the harsh reality that their livelihood contributes to the rapid depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies over a quarter of America’s irrigated land with water—not to mention the fact that the farm’s fate was being decided on the eve of the ethanol boom. Bair offers an unblinking look at a woman’s place in a patriarchal culture. “A father for Jake, a farmer for Dad,” the author laments. “That’s why the time I’d spend helping Dad during Jake’s toddlerhood had seemed so healing. I had proven I could be that farmer if I wanted to, and Dad had accepted that I could. I rejected all those sexist implications, asserted my own truths, became equal in my own right, but look at me now.”

A lyrical but somewhat distracted narrative that can’t decide whether it’s a love story, a meditation on our lives on this planet or an attempt to follow Upton Sinclair into the depths.

FALLING IN HONEY Life and Love on a Greek Island

Barclay, Jennifer Sourcebooks (304 pp.) $14.99 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-8510-3

A peripatetic 30-something Englishwoman’s account of how a Greek island “got under [her] skin” and showed her the way to contented self-direction.

When Barclay (The Traveller’s Friend: A Miscellany of Wit and Wisdom, 2011, etc.) was studying ancient Greek at Hulme 42

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Grammar School for Girls, she never imagined that Greece would eventually become her personal North Star. All through her adolescence, she returned to it during her holidays, and after she graduated from college unclear about what to do next, she went to Greece to teach English and “have the adventures that life should be about.” Work eventually took her to Canada, where she married, divorced, and spent more than five years living and traveling around the world with a man she believed was “the one.” The relationship ended with her realizing that she wanted a child and that time was running out for her to have one. Barclay once again turned her attention to Greece, hoping that this time it could be “a good cure for love.” So she went to the tiny island of Tilos, where she became the unwitting romantic interest of another suitor. Barclay returned home to England and began dating once more, only to be disappointed yet again. She found solace in the arms of a friend, Matt, who unexpectedly became her lover and, later, fiance. Together, the two planned to return to Tilos to live and eventually raise a family, but the fairy tale came to an abrupt end when Barclay discovered that Matt had lied about almost everything, from his job to his ability to have children. Yet Barclay remained unfazed by romantic disappointment. In the end, she realized that “it was always meant to be all about [her] and Tilos,” not about the fragile romantic relationships that too often undermined her hopes and dreams.

Light and lively reading with an understated edge.

A SLIVER OF LIGHT Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran Bauer, Shane; Fattal, Josh; Shourd, Sarah Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (336 pp.) $27.00 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-547-98553-4

The three American hikers imprisoned in Iran in 2009 alternate relaying their versions of their scary, uncertain ordeal.

Trekking up a mountain in northern Iraqi Kurdistanm, the three 20-something Americans working in the Middle East as journalists and teachers wandered across the Iranian border and were thrown into prison, suspected of espionage. The two young men, friends Bauer and Fattal, were held for two years. Shourd, Bauer’s fiancee, was released after a year, and she employed her notoriety to get the others out. Indeed, they became convenient pawns in the ongoing political enmity between the United States and Iran, used to apply pressure where needed in discussing sanctions and nuclear arsenals. In their well-developed and detailed accounts, told in alternate first-person voices, the three remind the world how human, vulnerable and terribly isolated they were during their months of incarceration, when they knew little of what was going on in the outside world and existed day by day in an entrenched survival mode. Shuttled around blindfolded, with Shourd wearing hijab, they started several hunger strikes at first when the guards |

“With a novelist’s care for detail and storytelling, Beckman offers a remarkably expansive, if flawed, cultural history.” from american fun

separated them and soon were transported to the dreaded Evin Prison in Tehran. Managing the guards was key, as was learning to stand up for themselves in terms of the small liberties they were allowed, such as spending a precious few hours together daily in the courtyard. Shourd endured solitary since she wasn’t allowed to mix with Iranians, while the two men roomed with each other and devised all kinds of mental-exercise games— e.g., studying Morse code and memorizing poetry. As a Jew, Fattal became more religiously observant in jail, and all three studied the Quran. All were critical of American government policy before their incarceration and emerged from their ordeal unbowed and outspoken.

An unsugared account that demonstrates the admirable, unbreakable bond of friends, parents and countrymen. (Author tour including New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle)

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AMERICAN FUN Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt

Beckman, John Pantheon (432 pp.) $28.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-307-90817-9 978-0-307-90818-6 e-book

A lively, entertaining history of American fun.

Notwithstanding its obvious subjectivity, the definition of “fun” has changed significantly since early American colonization. Yet Beckman (English/U.S. Naval Academy; The Winter Zoo, 2002) is undeterred by the challenge of drawing out what he believes to be a uniquely American idea of fun as an act of rebellion. Using a cast of familiar characters—Samuel Adams, Ken Kesey, Mark Twain—as well as lesser-known Americans—Thomas Morton, King Charles and Buddy Bolden, to name a few—Beckman argues that it is

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quintessentially American to participate in pranks and tricks.

(The Boston Tea Party is a prime example.) For Beckman, it is this “boldness in the face of adversity and restraint” that characterized early American fun. It was social, political and, above all, daring, and it represented an appeal to the democratic principles that would come to define the still-maturing republic. But, as “fun” became more popular, Americans were quick to exploit the economics of leisure. Fun was now a matter of entertainment—“Barnumization,” as Beckman puts it—a big business that no longer relied on prankster risk. “These pleasures were fleeting and superficial—by design,” he writes. “Nothing was at stake, except the ticket price.” These two strands of fun continued to develop in parallel, defining their respective ages, from Jazz Age exuberance and the subversive counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s hypercommercialization and today’s digital zombie-ism. While there is no shortage of irreverent and diverse examples that key in on various stages of fun’s development in America, Beckman is often so diffuse in his breadth that his argument seems to be lost. His conclusions, moreover, slide dangerously close to exceptionalist rhetoric. Are Americans the only people that partake in such revelry? Nevertheless, he does identify uniquely American experiences that define a collective understanding of fun as a protest against the established order, even if one is a part of that order.

With a novelist’s care for detail and storytelling, Beckman offers a remarkably expansive, if flawed, cultural history. (b/w illustrations throughout)

WHAT IS RELATIVITY? An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein’s Ideas, and Why They Matter Bennett, Jeffrey Columbia Univ. (224 pp.) $25.95 | $24.99 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-231-16726-0 978-0-231-53703-2 e-book

Understanding the universe requires understanding relativity, and this slim volume does an admirable job without resorting to the gimmicks or magic show common in the Einstein-for-laymen genre.

“Much of the difficulty that most people have with relativity,” writes astrophysicist Bennett (Math for Life: Crucial Ideas You Didn’t Learn in School, 2012, etc.), “comes about only because it seems to run counter to ideas of space and time that have become deeply ingrained in our minds.” What’s relative in relativity, he writes, is motion. Its foundation rests on two absolutes: 1) The laws of physics are the same for everyone and, 2) the speed of light is the same for everyone. Readers will share Bennett’s amazement at the weird consequences of the latter. The faster an object moves, the more its length contracts, its mass increases, and time slows. If it reaches the speed of light, which is impossible, time would stop. These are facts, and experiments verify them. Modern technology, such as GPS measurements, must take relativity into account. Bennett begins with 44

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special relativity, which explains constant motion. It’s so simple that the required math does not go beyond high school algebra. Far more complex, general relativity explains accelerated motion, which is (another Einstein discovery) identical to gravity. Laymen describe gravity as an attraction between objects.

Scientists since Isaac Newton agreed, but all hated the idea of an invisible force acting across empty space. Einstein solved this problem by revealing that gravity is the natural consequence of curved space. The greater the mass of a body, the more it warps nearby space into a fourth dimension: time. We can’t see this dimension, so it appears that heavenly bodies are moving in odd directions when they’re simply following the straightest path through spacetime.

A sober, comprehensible account of what every intelligent layman should know about space and time.

KICKING THE KREMLIN Russia’s New Dissidents and the Battle to Topple Putin

Bennetts, Marc Oneworld Publications (288 pp.) $16.99 paper | Feb. 20, 2014 978-1-78074-348-6 978-1-78074-349-3 e-book

Engagingly grim, frequently absurdist portrait of Vladimir Putin and the popular protests against him, which are gaining steam.

Moscow-based British journalist Bennetts (Football Dynamo: Modern Russia and the People’s Game, 2009, etc.) maintains a cool, even tone throughout these portraits of the Putin oligarchs, who are determined to keep power, and the leaders of the dissident movements aiming to oust them. Putin, the former security services chief anointed by outgoing Boris Yeltsin to succeed him as president in 2000, was received as a breath of fresh air by his Russian constituents when the country was reeling from the “shock therapy” of capitalism suddenly imposed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poverty and lawlessness plagued the nation, and Putin set about restoring order with strong-arm tactics like quelling the independent media, sabotaging the courts, siphoning oil dollars, appointing regional governors rather than holding elections and stifling breakaway republics. Gradually, Russians began to grow weary of his “sausages in exchange for freedom” approach to ruling the country.

Heartened by the so-called Colour Revolutions that had prevailed in ex-Soviet republics from 2003 to 2005, the “Orange threat” challenged the pro-Putin right-wing youth movement, while Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov galvanized punks and skinheads into the street-wise NatsBol. However, with the election of heir apparent Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, the “scent of change” encouraged wider protest against authority—e.g., a local mother-turned-activist who saved the Khimki forest from highway construction and lawyer Alexei Navalny’s grass-roots anti-corruption campaign. The clincher was Putin’s naked comeback to the presidency, a wicked “trick” engineered with |

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“Memorable and moving, Bowen’s story is a gift straight from the heart. A great complement to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky.” from wish you happy forever

LIFE INTERRUPTED Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States

Medvedev and played on the Russian people, whose mood had darkened with the rigged 2012 presidential elections, making way for huge street demonstrations in a rare show of unity, from the New Left to more vociferous groups like Pussy Riot.

Bennetts insightfully portrays a Russia on the cusp of popular revolt.

WISH YOU HAPPY FOREVER What China’s Orphans Taught Me About Moving Mountains Bowen, Jenny HarperOne (288 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-06-219200-4

A social entrepreneur and former filmmaker’s account of how adopting two Chinese daughters inspired her to help China reform its child welfare system from within.

Bowen and her husband were two empty nesters with respectable but unfulfilling careers in the Hollywood movie industry. That all changed in early 1996 when they saw a photo of a malnourished Chinese child in the New York Times and learned that China allowed thousands of orphans, most of them female, to die every year. After adopting a little girl and watching the sick, dispirited waif grow into a healthy, happy child, Bowen realized that she also wanted to help her daughter’s “orphaned sisters.” So in 1998, she created a nonprofit organization that advocated a child-centered approach to caring for abandoned or parentless children. She named it Half the Sky in honor of a Chinese saying that “[w]omen hold up half the sky.” At the time, the Chinese government actively discouraged foreigners from setting up aid programs in China. Yet Bowen persevered, often going against a board of directors that disagreed with her decisions and tactics. She faced other major challenges as well, such as fallout from 9/11, the SARS epidemic, earthquakes and other natural disasters. These found embodiment in her second adopted daughter, a wary, physically traumatized child who came to trust her only very gradually. But Half the Sky succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Bowen was able to establish more than 50 sites around China dedicated to helping all abandoned children, including those with special needs. In 2008, government officials allowed Half the Sky to become just the third registered NGO in China. Two years later, Bowen’s most ambitious vision—to help Chinese child welfare social workers create loving environments for orphans—also became a reality.

Memorable and moving, Bowen’s story is a gift straight from the heart. A great complement to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky (2009).

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Brennan, Denise Duke Univ. (296 pp.) $23.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8223-5633-2

Brennan (Anthropology/Georgetown Univ.; What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic, 2004) examines the everyday lives of people who have formerly been trafficked into forced labor.

Through her interviews and casual conversations with dozens of individuals, the author makes painfully clear that exploitation of migrant labor is a fact of life in the United States. Whereas the term “trafficking” is often assumed to mean sex trafficking, Brennan is concerned with the larger picture of trafficking into forced labor of all kinds—e.g., domestic, construction, agriculture or other low-wage jobs. She writes not of headline-making dramatic rescues but of the day-to-day lives of the formerly trafficked, those trying to rebuild their lives in the U.S. and make it their home. Through the voices of women such as Elsa, a domestic servant held in forced labor by a Saudi family in Washington, D.C., and many others in similar situations, she paints a grim picture of their lives under exploitation: long hours, withheld pay, isolation, fear of deportation, and physical and verbal abuse.

For those who escape forced labor, life remains hard; they usually still live on the edge of poverty, separated from family members in another country who count on their financial support. A few are able to qualify for a T visa, or trafficking visa, a first step toward obtaining a green card; most, however, do not, remaining undocumented workers, subject to unsafe working conditions, insecurity, criminalization and deportation. Brennan winds up her discussion with a set of measures that concerned citizens can take to ameliorate the situation and a list of organizations providing legal and social services.

A tough-to-read exposé of trafficking and its effects and an urgent call for changes in federal immigration policy and ineffectual labor laws. (18 photos)

PROMISES KEPT Raising Black Boys to Succeed in School and in Life

Brewster, Joe; Stephenson, Michele with Beard, Hilary Spiegel & Grau (384 pp.) $18.00 paper | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-8129-8489-7

With the assistance of Beard (Health First!: The Black Woman’s Wellness Guide, 2012, etc.), independent filmmakers Brewster and Stephenson examine concrete ways black parents can enhance their sons’ potential for success in a world prejudiced against black males. |

Seeking to give their son, Idris, the education that would help the youngster “bypass racism and achieve his human potential,” Brewster and his wife, Stephenson, enrolled him at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. It quickly became evident that however progressive Dalton proclaimed to be, the school was as elitist as it was racially biased. Written as a response to the “struggles, tears and frustration” their son faced, this book is also a companion to American Promise, an acclaimed 2013 documentary Brewster and his wife made about Idris’ Dalton experiences, as well as those of his fellow students of color. The authors offer a plethora of information and advice geared toward the specific developmental needs of black boys.

For Brewster and Stephenson, preparation begins before birth and includes everything from taking parenting classes to eating only the most nutritious foods. Once the child is born, the parents must work to establish secure emotional attachments with their son and develop his higher brain functions through consistent and conscientious verbal engagement. Once the child is older, they must not only protect him from the traps of excessive media consumption and drugs; they must also warn him about “overreactive teachers, principals and police officers” by having honest conversations about race and racial injustice.

Their involvement should also extend into schools and classrooms, where low expectations for black males breed failure.

Thorough and detailed, this guidebook is also a call to action.

As Brewster sees it, when people of color remain complacent, they not only break a tacit promise to future generations to achieve social equity, they also imperil the futures of both the nation and the planet.

A practical and impassioned parenting guide.

WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT? The Hidden Threats Nobody Is Talking About (and False Fears Everyone Is Distracted By) Brockman, John–Ed. Perennial/HarperCollins (528 pp.) $15.99 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-229623-8

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, an acclaimed website gleans sophisticated anxieties for our consideration from a cohort of well-educated, highly influential people.

Each year, literary agent and Edge.org founder Brockman (Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, 2013, etc.) asks dozens of scientists, academics, authors and artists (in roughly declining order of representation) a thought-provoking question to which he invites a brief response. This year, the author asked what people should worry about that is “under the radar,” or what is on the radar that isn’t worth worrying about? In this collection, climate change and the impending collapse of the world financial system are relegated to supporting roles, giving way to a more eclectic |

hodgepodge of concerns, many reflecting their authors’ professional backgrounds. The physicists tend to worry about the disastrous effect that the lack of public support for big science projects, like the Large Hadron Collider, is already having on future discoveries and theories. A number of neuroscientists are anxious about the effect of information technologies on the minds and language of young people. Few worry about overpopulation; in fact, several participants propose a projected collapse of the global population curve toward the end of the century as cause for worry about how the youthful minority will cope with a superabundance of seniors. A little of these worries goes a very long way, and reading this collection can soon oppress readers: Imagine 150 very smart people taking turns trying to outdo each other with bad scenarios no one else has thought of.

Instead of reading straight through, dip in and sample the ideas of the likes of Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Mary Catherine Bateson, Evgeny Morozov, J. Craig Venter, Brian Eno and many more obscure but no less erudite thinkers.

You will be surprised, you will learn a lot, and indeed, you will have a higher quality of things to worry about.

HOW TO WRITE ANYTHING A Complete Guide Brown, Laura Norton (560 pp.) $35.00 | Apr. 4, 2014 978-0-393-24014-6

An enthusiastic writing coach offers practical support.

In this upbeat self-help book, Brown gives advice for putting words together effectively and efficiently. She covers hundreds of different tasks, from resignation letters to classified ads, obituaries to wedding vows, Twitter posts to press releases. Her “proven process” takes the form of a spinner whose arrow points to one of six words indicating stages in the writing process: purpose, reader, brainstorm, organize, draft, revise. Writing rarely proceeds in a linear fashion, she writes, and she encourages writers to start anywhere: “You can start by brainstorming. You can start by writing an outline. You can start by drafting….The real key to success is not going through these six steps in any particular order but simply in ensuring that you’ve touched all these bases at least once.” For most of the writing tasks she considers, Brown shows both successful and unsuccessful samples. Weak pieces fail to consider the writer’s goals, have little sense of a reader’s needs, unintentionally convey a negative or hostile attitude, or use vague generalizations rather than concrete details.

Although she doesn’t cover grammar, Brown insists that every piece of writing needs to be proofread—even emails. Up-tothe-minute sections cover personal blog entries, online reviews and Facebook status updates. The section on writing at school seems more appropriate to high school assignments than the analytical and critical essays required in college classes. More helpful is advice on how to write a high school work resume and an internship application letter, tasks that students often kirkus.com

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“A noted visual literacy expert reveals how doodling can transform the thinking process in both individual and group contexts.” from the doodle revolution

SEVEN ELEMENTS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD An Adventure of Ingenuity and Discovery

find daunting. The author brings considerable experience as a business-writing consultant to a section on writing at work, including Power Point presentations, minutes, job descriptions, cover letters and candidate rejection letters. Besides hints for language, content and organization, she reminds readers of the legal consequences of what they put in writing.

Brown’s concrete, common-sense approach makes this book a useful reference.

THE DOODLE REVOLUTION Unlock the Power to Think Differently

Brown, Sunni Portfolio (256 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 9, 2014 978-1-59184-588-1

A noted visual literacy expert reveals how doodling can transform the thinking process in both individual and group contexts.

Doodling is a universal human practice that can manifest through kinesthetic or mental activities like drawing, walking and daydreaming. Yet it is considered inappropriate in all but the most personal contexts. In this fun, lavishly illustrated book, Brown (co-author: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, 2010), one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, explodes the myth that doodling is a “mindless” waste of time. Celebrated thinkers and creative people—including Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Steve Jobs—actively used it to promote concentration, stimulate the imagination and facilitate problem solving. Doodling also accommodates all major learning modalities and offers what the author calls the “Three Ps: [cognitive] Power, Performance, and Pleasure.” Brown advises readers on how to move past their biases against this activity and instructs them on how to produce the basic shapes she associates with the “visual alphabet” of doodles. She also introduces the concept of “infodoodling,” which transforms “data, information, and conversation into a more rich, immersive representative of itself.” With its ability to boil large quantities of information down to simple, easily accessible formulations, infodoodling can empower all knowledge-based businesses, education, and media communities and increase output and overall efficiency. As methods to help readers better understand the infodoodling process, Brown provides stimulating games and sequentially ordered exercises designed to engage the power of “the collective brain” for maximum meaningful creative output. Both practical and inspiring, Brown’s book reminds readers of the revolutionary power of simplicity in an information-overloaded world.

A gold mine for readers interested in learning more about the benefits of increased visual literacy.

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Browne, John Pegasus (288 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-540-4

Personal observations on how the use of seven elements has shaped human civilizations.

“Over the course of my forty-five years in business, including twelve as the leader of BP, I saw the very best and the very worst that the elements can do for humanity,” observes former British Petroleum CEO Browne (Beyond Business: An Inspirational Memoir from a Visionary Leader, 2011) at the outset of this idiosyncratic survey. The author has selected seven elements he believes have been prime contributors to the building of the modern world: iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium and silicon. Regarding each element, he reaches back to its use in the ancient world or more recent discovery and then examines the changes each has wrought throughout history. Any such selection will be arbitrary; for example, some may puzzle over his choice of titanium as one of the seven instead of copper, which gave us developments from the Bronze Age to telegraphy and telephony, passed over since “electrical engineering will have its fair share with silicon.” Browne makes cameo appearances throughout the book, generally in the course of rubbing elbows with the powerful, and the exposition is clearly shaped by his interests and experiences. Having spent a lifetime in the oil business, he has much to say about carbon as a fuel but never mentions plastics, and his collection of more than 100 glass (that is, silicon) elephants appears alongside the development of semiconductors. Such quirks aside, the topics the author chooses to cover, ranging from the use of coal in ancient China to the Bessemer converter and silver photography, unfold in thoughtful detail, and the ample footnotes accompanying the text are as diverting as they are helpful.

Somewhat entertaining but lightweight stroll through some of the chemical underpinnings of the modern world.

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“Crisp portrait of the life and social environment of a principled, self-destructive, singular cultural figure.” from dashiell hammett

ON THE SAME TRACK How Schools Can Join the Twenty-FirstCentury Struggle Against Resegregation

DASHIELL HAMMETT Man of Mystery

Cline, Sally Arcade (220 pp.) $19.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-61145-784-1

Burris, Carol Corbett Beacon (192 pp.) $25.95 | $25.95 e-book | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-8070-3297-8 978-0-8070-3298-5 e-book An educator offers a bold prescription to promote equality in America’s public schools.

High school principal and educational researcher Burris (co-author: Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness, 2012) delivers a strong critique of tracking, the practice of sorting students within schools or districts that gives them different access to learning. Drawing on numerous studies and her own experiences and interviews, Burris concludes that tracking causes segregation of those black, Latino and poor students who are identified as low achievers with limited intellectual prospects. Begun early in the 20th century as part of progressive education reform, tracking was seen as “an efficient and scientific way to school students according to their academic capacity, social class, and future life stations.” Based largely on IQ scores, high-achieving students went into enriched or advanced college-preparatory classes, where their progress would not be impeded by those identified as less able. The author surveys 40 years of research to show that the assumptions that led to tracking were incorrect: “[M]ost studies showed that low-track classes depress student achievement and that the achievement gap between low- and high-achieving students widens over time due to tracking.” Moreover, high-achieving students do not lose their advantages when taught in heterogeneous groups; standardized and teacher-created tests show that all students improve.

Despite overwhelming evidence from research, many parents and teachers vehemently oppose detracking, with reasons that reveal underlying racism. Some fear that a heterogeneous classroom will lead to a watered-down curriculum “and that students with weaker skills will be frustrated and act out with bad behavior.” Parents see advanced classes as prestigious, giving their child an edge for getting into top colleges. Well-educated and economically advantaged parents feel that they deserve educational privileges for their children. Burris offers concrete advice for school leaders trying to counter such assumptions, and she argues persuasively that tracking undermines real educational achievement for all students.

An important book that should be required reading for educators, parents and school boards.

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Concise biography of Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), literary pioneer and luckless radical.

Royal Society of Arts fellow Cline (Zelda Fitzgerald, 2012, etc.) argues that despite his limited output, Hammett “transformed and subverted the detective novel form by his moral vision, propelling the mystery genre into literature.” Certainly, Hammett’s raucous life—bridging the hardscrabble, proletarian 19th century and the slick, unforgiving postwar era—taught him hard moral lessons that informed his fiction. His story is well-known, although Cline provides new insights via her interviews with Hammett’s daughter Jo. Following an apathetic youth, Hammett was thrust into manhood by service in World War I and early employment with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. These transformative experiences gave Hammett discipline and a fondness for masculine environments while sparking his complex relationship with money and the working class. Once he began placing stories in magazines like Black Mask, he became prolific, producing his five novels in a six-year period. Lean, intense books like The Maltese Falcon (1930) proved popular enough to fundamentally alter the American pop-culture vocabulary, just before the Depression. Hammett then veered away from his literary ambitions: He drank excessively for the next two decades, harming his already fragile health, tried his fortunes in Hollywood with diminishing returns and famously embarked upon a contentious yet mutually nurturing relationship with Lillian Hellman. Hammett volunteered for service in World War II yet was pursued by the FBI during the Red Scare of the 1950s, serving time in federal prison rather than testifying about his leftist connections. Although Cline discusses the plots and literary qualities of Hammett’s novels, she generally connects such elements back to the author’s increasingly complicated personal life and the tenor of his times, an approach which makes this brief biography seem efficiently rendered.

Crisp portrait of the life and social environment of a principled, self-destructive, singular cultural figure. (12 b/w photos)

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EATING FIRE My Life as a Lesbian Avenger

Cogswell, Kelly Univ. of Minnesota (256 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8166-9116-6

A wistful and feverishly told tale of the founding and implosion of the notorious lesbian rights collective.

Cogswell chronicles the beginnings, glory days and bitter end of the short-lived activist group Lesbian Avengers. The author developed from a young woman in 1992, sitting on the perimeter of the group’s first meetings at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Manhattan (and cringing at the word lesbian, “a label of no return”), to being the organizer of the direct actions that shaped the group’s renegade identity. She explains it as “a direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility” and says that eating fire was more than an attention-getting circus trick; it was a daring and empowering act, a ritual “changing hate and fear into a kind of resolve.” Some stories in the early chapters are presented in a nonlinear manner, but they vividly describe Cogswell’s budding political awareness against the backdrop of gentrification in the East Village, the election of law-and-order Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the passage of anti-gay legislation across the country; her excitement about moving to the forefront of the group as a fire-eating activist is palpable. But when the group implodes— done in by internal squabbling, backbiting, racial rifts and personal grudges—about two-thirds of the way through the book, the accounts of her long-term relationship and subsequent work as a citizen-journalist moving among France, Cuba and New York City are not nearly as vibrant. Although the Lesbian Avengers have been defunct since 1995, Cogswell’s idealistic objective in the fight for civil rights is still relevant: to make lesbians visible, change society, and most importantly, change lesbians, who will come to see the public space as theirs.

The fiery edge that burns through the first two-thirds of the book dissipates in the end.

ETHEL MERMAN, MOTHER TERESA...AND ME My Improbable Journey from Châteaux in France to the Slums of Calcutta

Cointreau, Tony Prospecta Press (312 pp.) $24.95 | $12.99 e-book | Feb. 15, 2014 978-1-935212-34-8 978-1-935212-33-1 e-book

From poor little rich boy to cafesociety darling, popular singer and AIDS volunteer: French liqueur heir Cointreau’s eventful, confusing life.

The author’s childhood seems pulled from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, with parents who shunted him off to a 50

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comfortless nurse, a cruel bully of a granny and a beastly brother.

At age 8, the author also suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher. For 40 years, Cointreau suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia and attempted suicide at least once. The author barely mentions his father, who founded the Cointreau branch in New Jersey, except that they spent summers at his grandmother’s apartment in Paris and at her château near Angers. The title of the book is not exactly appropriate, as the author had many saviors through his life, most importantly Jim Russo, his life partner. As a member of the upper crust, Cointreau met all the right people; Robert and Lee Lehman (Robert was the chairman of Lehman Brothers Banking Investment Corporation) were the first to take him under their wings. The author and their daughter, Pam, dated for over five years, during which time the author finally admitted to himself that he preferred men. While a student at the prestigious Browning School, he met Arthur, son of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a friend who understood him and whom he tried to help. Then he met his idol, actress Ethel Merman, and her daughter, and once again forged a permanent relation. Cointreau doesn’t explore the motivations that drew him to the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s work, but he volunteered at Gift of Love in Manhattan for years and, through it all, learned how to deal with what life had thrown at him.

A lightweight memoir, but the common thread of these deep friendships is the fact that they all trusted the author and he returned it in full. It’s a difficult but important lesson. (50+ photos)

THE DARK BOX A Secret History of Confession Cornwell, John Basic (314 pp.) $27.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-465-03995-1

A haunting study, both scholarly and personal, that situates the practice of confession as the source of the Catholic Church’s clerical abuse.

In this deep-reaching history that also encompasses the voices of the deeply scarred, provocative English historian, memoirist and novelist Cornwell (Fellow/Jesus Coll., Cambridge; Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint, 2010, etc.) focuses on Pius X’s lowering of the age of first confession from 13 to age 7 from 1910 onward as the spur to the church’s worst sexual abuses. The discrepancy between Catholic teaching and practice has dogged the church for centuries, and confession evolved from a way to reconcile penitent sinners back into the fold into an outlet for the severe repression of priests. A form of “repetitive, private contrition” had been practiced in early monastic communities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Making “auricular” confession once a year was set forth by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. A whole clerical class of “specialist confessors” sprang up, obsessed with the examination of conscience, ripe for inquisitional manipulation. Sexual abuses around confession |

“A powerful book that displays both the malice and the nobility of our species.” from hold tight gently

helped galvanize the Protestant Reformation; in response, the “little black box” became a familiar item of church furniture in Milan’s Duomo in 1576, prompting a dangerous shift from the “public or social nature of sin to the scrupulous examination of recollected motivation.” Sexual solicitation, of both men and women, during confession was not uncommon, especially as clergymen were trained to be isolated, regimented and repressed (Cornwell enlists as evidence his own seminarian training in England in the 1960s). Yet it wasn’t until children were included as penitents, as part of Pius X’s staving off the ills of secular modernism, that the most egregious abuses were indulged and tolerated.

Enlisting a legion of voices attesting to their “soul murder” by confessional priests, Cornwell offers another strong indictment of the church.

NATURAL PROPHETS From Health Foods to Whole Foods—How the Pioneers of the Industry Changed the Way We Eat and Reshaped American Business Dobrow, Joe Rodale (288 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-62336-179-2 978-1-62336-180-8 e-book

Marketer, management scholar and journalist Dobrow chronicles how natural and organic foods were transformed from the pursuit of a few idealists to a thriving, multibillion-dollar industry.

The author examines the whole food movement from the postwar period, when alarm bells began ringing about the proliferation of chemicals and nuclear waste. He traces its “philosophical but impractical development by idealistic children of the sixties” to the 1980s and ’90s, when an ambitious group of opportunists laid the foundation for “its current state as a bubbling crucible of mission-driven entrepreneurial activity.”

Calling it “one of the great ironic twists in modern history,” Dobrow chronicles how the vision of the early counterculture, which embraced environmentalism but rejected the capitalist get-rich-quick ethos, was transformed into the successful business plan of “some of the most successful capitalists of our time.” In the process, the author introduces a fascinating cast of characters less well known than the heroes of Silicon Valley but arguably equally influential in transforming the way we live and work. Including the CEOs who put Whole Foods, Stonyfield Farm and Trader Joe’s on the map, they have made a “larger contribution to the health and sustainability of the planet and the humans who ride on it than just about anyone else in the modern era.” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, one of the key players, typifies this group of mission-oriented business leaders. He has fostered a highly competitive leadership group with an eye to the bottom line while maintaining the quality of the produce on the shelves of an expanding empire of stores. Mergers, acquisitions, vertical organization with private labels and branding |

were all important. These days, conventional food manufacturers such as Quaker and Kraft are also marketing health foods, yet with “natural foods only represent[ing] 5 percent of total food sales,” there remains much to be done.

A lively, informative look at the transformative potential of a mission-driven niche industry.

HOLD TIGHT GENTLY Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS

Duberman, Martin New Press (352 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-59558-945-3 978-1-59558-965-1 e-book

An acclaimed historian and biographer returns with an intimate history of the AIDS crisis and its devastations.

Bancroft Prize winner Duberman (Emeritus, History/CUNY Graduate Center; Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, 2012, etc.) employs an effective structure, focusing on two young men (both died of AIDS at age 38), one white (Michael Callen), the other black (Essex Hemphill), and alternating the narratives of their lives, pausing occasionally to sketch the experiences of other young men and to inject accounts of his own memories as a gay man. As the author notes, the amount of material on Callen is more plentiful, but he has unearthed some affecting information about Hemphill as well. Callen was much more aggressive about pursuing sexual experiences (more than 1,000 different partners), and he soon became involved in various musical groups and even managed to produce recordings near the end of his life. He also became an outspoken, sometimesfiery, advocate for gay rights and for AIDS research. Duberman highlights the disgracefully slow responses of the government and the medical community to the spreading crisis. (The Reagan administration, in particular, comes under heavy attack.)

Hemphill was a poet and essayist and wrote a draft of a novel that Duberman examines and analyzes. The author shows the reactions to AIDS in the black community, noting the slow acceptance of gay blacks in black churches, and he charts the various medical responses to the crisis—the fear, the uncertainty and the desperation to try just about anything. The politics, no surprise, are both complicated and unpleasant. Duberman also discusses the effect of AIDS announcements from Magic Johnson, Arthur Ashe and other notables. The final sections are hard to read as we witness the declines of two young men we’ve come to know and admire.

A powerful book that displays both the malice and the nobility of our species.

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THE TYRANNY OF EXPERTS Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

Easterly, William Basic (368 pp.) $29.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-465-03125-2

Easterly (Economics/New York Univ.; The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, 2006, etc.) delivers a scathing assault on the anti-poverty programs associated with both the United Nations and its political and private sector supporters.

No stranger to controversy, the author takes off the gloves again in a no-holds-barred account of the history and hypocrisy of the ideas associated with development economics. He charges that to the extent anti-poverty programs intended for the developing sector rely on outside economic and technical expertise and top-down government action, they become authoritarian, antidemocratic and unlikely to succeed. Easterly derides the recent acclaimed success of the Millennium Development campaign in Ethiopia in reducing infant mortality, which has been praised by many. The author shows that the results are difficult to substantiate given the lack of coherent data, and they are undermined by the government’s use of aid funds for its own political purposes.

He contends that the Ethiopian case reflects a longer history in which the World Bank acts in a political manner, despite the prohibition in its charter, and he explores how the World Bank programs ignored the brutality in Colombia during la violencia of the 1950s. For Easterly, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 marked the beginning of modern development economics, and he shows how “development ideas took shape…at a time when…attitudes…were still racist.” He provides a broader historical perspective on especially African countries, demonstrating how the history of slavery still influences current politics. The author offers the alternative of fostering greater human rights and increasing political freedom.

A sharply written polemic intended to stir up debate about the aims of global anti-poverty campaigns. (charts, graphs and photos throughout)

ICE CREAM SOCIAL The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s Edmondson, Brad Berrett-Koehler (288 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-60994-813-9

A journalist and business consultant’s story of how a small Vermont-based company showed a money-hungry corporate world what could happen when employees “brought their consciences to work with them.”

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When Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started Ben & Jerry’s in 1978, their goals were simply to “make enough money to live on while they enjoyed themselves.” Their hard work and deliciously innovative ideas brought them national notice just a few years later. Despite their ambition to create “the best ice cream in the world,” they were reluctant to grow Ben & Jerry’s beyond Vermont since both realized that big businesses were “harmful to the environment [and] to…employees.” So they worked on ways that would allow their company to pursue expansion alongside objectives that benefited workers, communities and the planet. The end result was the development of a radical business vision called “linked prosperity.” As Ben & Jerry’s prospered, so would everyone and everything that had contributed to its success. The company worked with product suppliers dedicated to helping marginalized groups or the manufacture of eco-friendly products. And it aligned itself with progressive social movements like the anti-nuclear campaign and with nonprofit human welfare organizations like the Children’s Defense.

However, the larger Ben & Jerry’s became, the harder it struggled against internal and external pressures to focus exclusively on profit. Multinational giant Unilever eventually bought the company out in 2000. Nevertheless, the deal it struck with Unilever gave it enough control over its mission that it was able to keep up the fight to remain socially responsible. Rich in details about the colorful yet committed individuals who built Ben & Jerry’s, Edmondson’s book shows what is possible when people dream together with integrity and purpose.

Uplifting reading about the little company that could.

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything

Ehrenreich, Barbara Twelve (256 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | $40.00 CD Apr. 8, 2014 978-1-4555-0176-2 978-1-4555-0175-5 e-book 978-1-4789-0027-6 CD In 1959, the 16-year-old author had an ineffable vision, which she here contextualizes and attempts to understand.

Ehrenreich (Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, 2009, etc.) returns with a personal chronicle, a coming-of-age story with an edge and a focus: Who am I? What does any of this mean? In 2005, a Florida hurricane destroyed most of the author’s papers in her Florida Keys home, but one surviving document was her girlhood diary (kept somewhat regularly from 1956 to 1966). She transcribed that diary and alludes to and quotes from it throughout this account of a dawning consciousness. Ehrenreich came from a line of atheists—and remains one herself (at least in any conventional sense). Throughout, she dismisses monotheism and conventional religions, though, by the end, she’s professing a sort of polytheism that acknowledges experiences that so far |

escape scientific detection and definition. She writes about her troubled family (her father died of Alzheimer’s, her mother of an overdose), her childhood loneliness (the fate of many a bright youngster), her girlhood decision to pursue the why of life, and her journey from solipsism to social activism in the 1960s and beyond. She discusses only briefly her two broken marriages and children. Of most interest, of course, is that 1959 experience in Lone Pine, Calif., where, after spending the night in a car, she went for a walk at dawn and saw “the world [had] flamed into life.” A talented student (co-valedictorian in high school), especially in the sciences, Ehrenreich studied chemistry and physics in college and graduate school, a career path she abandoned during the era of Vietnam and civil rights. But ever resting like a splinter in her mind: that Lone Pine experience.

A powerful, honest account of a lifelong attempt to understand that will please neither theists nor atheists.

(Author tour to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle)

ENCOUNTERS AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD A History of the Mandan People

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (480 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-8090-4239-5

A nonpolemical, engaging study of a once-thriving Indian nation of the American heartland whose origins and demise tell us much about ourselves.

Along the Missouri River in North Dakota, the Mandan people flourished in the warming period between ice ages, circa A.D. 1000, drawn to the alluvial richness of the river as well as the bison hunting ranges of the Western grasslands. In her thorough mosaic of Mandan history and culture, Fenn (Western American History/Univ. of Colorado; Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82, 2001, etc.) writes that these were an immensely adaptable people, migrating upstream when weather patterns changed, mastering the cultivation of corn and other edibles and the art of trade, often in competition with other horticulturalist tribes nearby, like the Arikara and Lakota. Elaborate Mandan defense fortifications indicated a vulnerability to attack, perhaps by the fierce, nomadic Sioux.

Mandan homes were sturdy and numerous, solid earthen lodges built by the women, who also cultivated the fields, dried the meat and tanned the hides, revealing a strong maternal society where the husbands and the children were shared by sisters in one house due to the scarcity of men, perhaps due to mortality from war and hunting. At the time of the Spanish conquistadors, Fenn estimates there were 12,000 Mandans in the upper Missouri River; it was “teeming with people.” Gradually, contact with outsiders beginning in the 17th century and continuing with the famous interaction with Louis and Clark’s expedition |

up the Missouri in 1804 led to Mandan decimation by disease as well as by the Norwegian rat, which devoured their corn stored in cache pits. In addition to her comprehensive narrative, Fenn intersperses throughout the narrative many helpful maps and poignant drawings by George Catlin and others.

An excellent contribution to the truth telling of the American Indian story. (73 b/w illustrations; 15 maps)

INFERNO An Anatomy of American Punishment Ferguson, Robert A. Harvard Univ. (340 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-674-72868-4

An eye-opening report about how the United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, holds 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population.

Ferguson (Law, Literature and Criticism/Columbia University; Alone in America: The Stories that Really Matter, 2013, etc.) charges that American prisons have “become an evil for all concerned.” Federal, state and local governments spend $80 billion per year on a system that provides jobs for one out of nine state employees. In order to promote the system’s growth, private prison companies, as well as the unions representing guards, have become a self-serving lobby wielding their clout over political decision-makers. As one example, Louisiana’s privatized, for-profit system holds one out of every 86 of the state’s citizens: three times more than in Iran, seven times more than in China and 10 times more than in Germany. The numbers jailed and the severity of the sentences— including life without parole for nonviolent crimes—are no longer comparable to any of the countries that are peers and allies of the U.S. Overcrowding risks unrest, and financial costs have outgrown available revenue. Ultimately, writes Ferguson, U.S. prison policy has reached a breaking point. The author puts much of the blame on the politicians whose legislation brought about this state of affairs, and he calls their political desires “the punitive impulse in American society.” He wants to know whether it is reversible, noting that it’s “simply a fact that voters promote to high office those politicians who want tougher penalties.” Ferguson dates the origins of this current, nearly intractable situation to a knee-jerk response to widespread urban riots 50 years ago.

An important wake-up call about an emerging crisis that threatens to become a human rights scandal of global proportions.

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“A lively account of the men and their times and a brilliant exposition of the scientific circumstances and significance of their work.” from faraday, maxwell, and the electromagnetic field

THE BROKEN ROAD From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos Fermor, Patrick Leigh Cooper, Artemis; Thubron, Colin–Eds. New York Review Books (384 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-59017-754-9

A posthumous completion of an adventure British author and adventurer Fermor (1915–2011) began more than 70 years ago: a walk from Holland to Istanbul.

In 1933, then 18, “Paddy” Fermor—the subject of co-editor Artemis Cooper’s biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2013)—set out on that long trek. As he recounted in A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), both written half a century later, he encountered all sorts of people, not least of them the Nazis and nationalists who would soon set Europe aflame, whereupon Fermor began a guerrilla life that James Bond would have envied. When he died, he left behind bits and pieces of this closing volume. Why he never completed it is a mystery; as Cooper and co-editor Colin Thubron observe, “The problem remained obscure even to him, and The Broken Road is only its partial resolution.” On reading it, one wishes that Fermor, a fluent and supremely literate writer, had spent more time in closure; the book seems a touch unfinished and not quite up to its predecessors. Even so, he is in fine form as he travels from the Iron Gates of Bulgaria toward his destination, meeting a succession of beguiling women and, as ever, being in the right place at the right time. As readers will learn, the title of the book is just right; and if Fermor encountered endless obstacles as well, his enthusiasm for description and discovery remain undiminished, as he recounts the ethnographic and historical details of life in the Balkans: “When their crust of frowning aloofness is broken, and their guard down and the maddening banter lulled, they are often spontaneous, enthusiastic and—despite the opposite intention—extremely naïve and transparently innocent”; “Brandy in large quantities pumped in a fresh impetus, which was hardly needed by this time, and we danced and sang.”

Incomplete but lovely nonetheless. Admirers of Fermor’s writing will not be disappointed.

AN EXPLORER’S NOTEBOOK Essays on Life, History, and Climate

Flannery, Tim Grove (288 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-2231-5 978-0-8021-9279-0 e-book

An eminent Australian scientist and environmentalist’s collection of 33 highly readable essays and book reviews published between 1985 and 2012.

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Flannery (Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific, 2012, etc.) began his career as a student field biologist in the 1970s.

By the 1980s, he was studying fossils as well as the evolution of kangaroos. Realizing that “rainforests were the habitat of much of Australia’s flora and fauna,” the author began studying living rain forests. This led to an interest in how climate influenced life on the planet both in the past and present. In this book, Flannery offers readers insight into his extraordinary career through selected essays he wrote about his own work as well as about the books that have shaped his thinking. The first section focuses on articles Flannery produced during almost 20 years in the field. It includes fascinating accounts of journeys he made to New Guinea to rediscover the elusive Bulmer’s fruit bat and to study rare species of tree kangaroos. In the second section, Flannery gathers together the reviews he wrote for the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. His reading tastes run the gamut from ecological investigations

by Sir David Attenborough to natural histories of man-eating predators and scorpions to biographies about John James Audubon and Rachel Carson; the reviews are both eloquent and trenchant. In the third section of the book, Flannery shares his articles on climate change. Written in the first decade of the 21st century, most of these essays critique the Australian government’s “disparagement” of renewable energy in favor of “dirty” and/or dangerous sources like coal and nuclear power. This last section is the weakest of the book, largely due to the fact that the essays (which were published between 2006 and 2007) are somewhat dated.

Accessible, provocative and well worth investigating.

FARADAY, MAXWELL, AND THE ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

Forbes, Nancy; Mahon, Basil Prometheus Books (300 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-61614-942-0

Forbes (Imitation of Life: How Biology Is Inspiring Computing, 2004, etc.) and Mahon (Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity, 2009, etc.) offer a compelling new interpretation of the seminal importance of the discoveries of Michael Faraday (1791–1861) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879).

The authors explain “the way that Faraday and Maxwell’s concept of the electromagnetic field transformed scientists’ view of the physical world,” beginning with Faraday’s anticipation of a unified field theory that would include the force of gravity as well as electromagnetism and the propagation of light. His ideas were so advanced that not only did he reject the Newtonian concept of action-at-distance, then prevalent among scientists, but also the existence of an ether. “From today’s perspective…Faraday, the bold theorist, was making an |

advance announcement of a scientific transformation that has given us not only electromagnetic theory but special relativity,” write the authors. Faraday is credited as the brilliant experimentalist who “discovered the principle of the electric motor,” while Maxwell, with his groundbreaking Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, laid the groundwork for modern field theory. Forbes and Mahon show that Maxwell adhered to Faraday’s hypothesis that the propagation of electricity and magnetism in space occurred through the vibration of lines of force. He developed his famous equations by first adapting the mathematical treatment of fluid flow and a mechanical model of spinning cells with minute ball bearings as heuristic models. Only then did he dispense with these models and directly employ the “mathematical laws of dynamics” to electromagnetism, thus laying the basis for modern field theory. The authors emphasize that, for Maxwell, his use of models “didn’t purport to represent nature’s actual mechanism, it was merely a temporary aid to thought.”

A lively account of the men and their times and a brilliant exposition of the scientific circumstances and significance of their work.

JOY, GUILT, ANGER, LOVE What Neuroscience Can— and Can’t—Tell Us About How We Feel Frazzetto, Giovanni Penguin (336 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-14-312309-5

A molecular biologist offers a meditation on the different ways in which we can know ourselves.

“There is endless wonder in the images of neuroscience. Yet they do not cover the entire breadth of an emotion,” writes Frazzetto, a founding member of the European Neuroscience and Society Network. He probes how we can combine the “incredible amount of information about the brain at our disposal” with our own intimate knowledge of our feelings. The author cites Darwin’s seminal research on emotions expressed by animals and the cross-cultural universality of the human expression of emotions. “Feeling is emotion which has been rendered conscious,” he writes. “Although emotions develop as biological processes, they culminate as personal mental experiences.” Frazzetto finds fault with the current overemphasis on genetic determinism at the expense of ameliorative social and environmental determinants. Similarly, he suggests that emotional responses tested in a laboratory miss the essential social cues that determine our real-life responses to specific situations.

“When your emotions are being measured inside a scanner you are often asked to perform distinct tasks [that are]…convenient substitutes for authentic fragments of life,” he writes. The author offers a stringent criticism of the marketing of pharmaceuticals to treat depression as “an economic success [that] is not matched by improvements in the population’s overall mental health,” and he relates his own experiences of grief as a way |

to keep the deceased alive in memory. In the last sections of this intriguing book, Frazzetto references measurable vocalizations of pleasure heard when adolescent rats play and his own euphoric experiences of falling in love and composing a sonnet.

As might be expected, he is critical of online dating, which “substitutes calculation for intuition.”

An enjoyable illumination of “that most private and shadowy territory, our emotions.”

JO FROST’S TODDLER RULES Your 5-Step Guide to Shaping Proper Behavior Frost, Jo Ballantine (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-345-54238-0 978-0-345-51239-7 e-book

The Supernanny delivers a guidebook to aid parents with rambunctious toddlers.

With more than two decades of experience as a London nanny, Frost (Jo Frost’s Confident Baby Care, 2008, etc.) has seen just about every kind of behavioral issue a young child can produce and has developed certain strategies that effectively nip bad behavior in the bud. She offers parents of preschoolers and older children five basic guidelines to follow to ensure a child grows “into a happy, healthy, productive adult with good morals, healthy boundaries, and the ability to function well in the world.” By meeting the physical, nutritional and sleep needs of a child, as well as providing an environment that encourages brain development and setting clear rules for family behavior, parents can eliminate most, if not all, potential problems. Using a method called SOS, Frost recommends a parent Step back from the situation at hand, Observe what is happening, and then Step in and administer the appropriate resolution. Using clear-cut examples that are common issues with young children, the author provides parents with ready-made solutions that have proven effective, eliminating the need to second-guess a decision. She covers sleeping problems (getting a child to sleep in his own bed or what to do when he cries in the night), food and eating issues (refusing to eat certain foods, establishing good table manners, going out in public with toddlers), the need for safety and interacting with other children.

She also suggests activities to stimulate gross and fine motor skills and recommends basic good behavior rules that are the accepted norms for human interaction. A full chapter devoted to handling temper tantrums is an added bonus for parents in crisis mode.

Common-sense and practical advice on raising young children by an expert in the field.

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Ahdaf Souief

The Egyptian novelist’s heartbreaking report from a city in the grip of revolution and hope

By Amanda Eyre Ward

Photo courtesy Eamonn McCabe

In late January 2011, the world watched as a revolution erupted in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Thousands of Egyptians flooded the streets, demanding the overthrow of the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. Novelist and journalist Ahdaf Soueif and her nieces were in a motorboat on the Nile when they heard “a great shout” from the Qasr el-Nil Bridge. “I look at Salma and Mariam,” Soueif explains in her new book Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. “ ‘Yes, let’s,’ they say. I tell the boatman we’ve changed our minds.” Soueif and her companions head away from their homes and toward Tahrir Square, disembarking and finding themselves “within, inside, and part of the masses.” They stand on the island in the middle 56

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of a road “and that was the moment I became part of the revolution,” Soueif writes.

Soueif ’s complete immersion in the protests—as well as her lifelong love of Cairo and her novelist’s sensibility—enabled her to create Cairo, a rare work.

The book is a report from the front lines of the revolution, a bittersweet love letter to Egypt and a memoir of Soueif ’s life, written in the precise, lyrical prose that illuminates her novels. (A Map of Love was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became a worldwide best-seller, but my favorite is Soueif ’s sprawling debut, In the Eye of the Sun.) Soueif actually signed a contract to write a book about her birthplace 20 years ago, but she found herself unable to type. “When I tried,” she writes, “it read like an elegy, and I would not write an elegy for my city.” I ask Soueif how the revolution (also now known as the “Lotus Revolution”) inspired her to finally write Cairo. “With the revolution there came hope and a tremendous burst of energy,” she explains by email. “Writing Cairo became an act—not of commemorating a past and railing against the present, but of fashioning a narrative of the city in the grip of revolution and hope; on the threshold of a future we were—we still are—trying to imagine.”

Soueif ’s portrait of Cairo is nuanced, detailed and heartbreaking. So many parts of the city have changed since her happy childhood. Soueif remembers the Lazoghli neighborhood, for example, as the place her Aunt Toufi set up house as a young bride.

Toufi had a balcony where, as a girl, Soueif “had a full view of the screen of the open-air Cinema Lazoghli.” In her memory, “Lazoghli was freedom with a prime seat at a summer cinema every night.” Under the Mubarak regime, however, Lazoghli housed the State Security Intelligence Bureau and Coroner’s Of|

fice. Instead of a sweet place to watch movies, Soueif writes, “Lazoghli was disappearances…torture.” In 2011, when young revolutionaries attacked Lazoghli, Soueif writes about the grim fate of her idyllic childhood haunt: “five snipers are on the roof, snipers whose existence the ministry will deny despite their images captured on film.”

Soueif introduces readers to “magical architectural features” of downtown Cairo: pedestrian passages that run at street level between and in the middles of buildings. Soueif ’s own grandfather’s house had such a passage. But just as readers begin to imagine the delight a child would feel in a secret tunnel (some with hidden shops!), Soueif describes going into one passage (which leads to Tahrir Square, also known as “the Midan”) during the revolution. She sees a makeshift mosque with rows of prayer mats.

On these mats, she explains, “lie young men covered in blood, and other young men are running through the Midan entrance carrying yet more young men covered in blood and lowering them carefully onto the mats, and by the walls, figures are stretched out, shrouded in dark blankets.”

Soueif, unlike a visiting war reporter, makes the horror of the revolution personal. Not only does she evoke joyous times in similar passageways, she knows many of the young men who are fighting— her own two sons take part in the revolution, as do her nieces, nephews and the friends of children. The doctor tending the bloody men in the passageway is Mona Mina, a friend of Soueif ’s sister. Alongside her scribbled journalist’s notes, Soueif also lists things the makeshift hospital needs: “Betadine, dressings, spray anaesthetic…surgical gloves, painkillers.”

But even as the revolution rages, Soueif thinks of her beloved city’s wonders: “For a moment, as I was running down the slip road with my eyes closed, holding onto my nieces, I had the—typical—thought that we might nip into the Ramses Hilton and wash our faces, maybe even get some tea.” Instead, Soueif, passing “charred cars,” finds that the hotel is “dark and shuttered,” surrounded by soldiers. “It is clear that a five-star interlude is out of the question,” she remarks wryly.

One evening, Soueif walks past tanks and soldiers in camouflage. Behind one of the soldiers, she notices the sign of a restaurant, Paprika, and writes, “as I look at the restaurant’s darkened window I see—so clearly that my breath catches—I see my younger self, ablaze |

with love and poetry...sitting, leaning, across the table from the man I love.” Such vivid memories enjoin Soueif ’s political dreams and her personal ones, creating a vibrant combination of memory and reportage.

The situation in Egypt remains complicated and unstable, and Soueif ’s memoir is not an easy book to read. But it is powerful, informative and suffused with the beauty of a city (and nation) in transition.

Soueif invites readers into Egyptian homes and histories, daring us to understand that behind the scenes of bloodshed are individuals who yearn for freedom—living rooms filled with mothers and fathers, grandparents and squabbling children.

I ask Soueif to describe a perfect night in Cairo.

“Well,” she writes, “the TV would be on, with a talk show, or the news or an old movie. Fruit, nuts, cheeses and sweet pastries on a big central coffee table. Endless tea. The talk all of family affairs, a bit of gossip, but mainly and predominantly and always politics and public affairs, Egyptian, regional and international. And a balcony nearby where you can retreat for a private conversation or a cigarette (which one shouldn’t have).”

Amanda Eyre Ward’s fifth novel, Homecoming, will be published in 2015.

Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed was reviewed in the Nov. 15, 2013, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed Soueif, Ahdaf Pantheon (256 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-307-90810-0

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“Beautifully written and hugely entertaining, this book is a heartfelt introduction to the many mind-bending theories in contemporary physics.” from trespassing on einstein’s lawn

TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything Gefter, Amanda Bantam (496 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-345-53143-8 978-0-345-53963-2 e-book

Part science writing and part memoir, this adventurous fact-finding romp takes readers across the landscape of ideas about the universe, calling on the expertise of the biggest names in science—and also the author’s lifelong partner in her pursuit of the meaning of everything: her father.

Gefter, an MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow and founding editor of CultureLab at New Scientist, is a crafty storyteller and journalist; she describes how she jump-started her career by crashing physics conferences and faking her way into interviews with world-famous physicists. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity about how the universe could be at once governed by the laws of cosmology (which define large-scale properties of the universe) and also by the laws of quantum mechanics (which define the behavior of microscopic particles), the author embarked on a scientific scavenger hunt while chasing leads across time and space. Gefter makes even the most esoteric concepts—and there are a lot of them in this book—lucid and approachable.

From string theory to the multiverse to the holographic principle, the author’s exuberance for physics and the possibility that cutting-edge theories may lead to a new understanding of “reality” is evident in her passionate prose. Underlying the joys of scientific pursuit is the author’s formative relationship with her father, who first asked the big question—“How would you define nothing?”—that inspired her yearslong quest to define how “nothing” and “everything” can be explained by the forces that govern the universe. What she discovered about the new frontier of quantum cosmology and the importance of the role of the individual observer is astonishing and awesome, and Gefter’s book is a useful presentation of this thrilling ontological shift for a general audience.

Beautifully written and hugely entertaining, this book is a heartfelt introduction to the many mind-bending theories in contemporary physics. (29 photos)

WORDS WILL BREAK CEMENT The Passion of Pussy Riot Gessen, Masha Riverhead (320 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-59463-219-8

A Russian-American journalist faces considerable challenges in telling the story of a punk band that most know only by its notorious name.

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While considering flight rather than facing trial for a performance within Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the members of Pussy Riot decided not to flee their homeland, since that option “was for serious people in real trouble, not for intellectual pranksters who presented themselves as silly young girls.” Ultimately, they found themselves in serious trouble, bordering almost on torture: an extended pretrial imprisonment, a trial that left no doubt from the outset as to the verdict, and the two-year sentences that two of the defendants have been serving (a third challenged the verdict after switching lawyers and had her sentence suspended). Ultimately, in impact and consequences, Pussy Riot makes the Sex Pistols look as harmless as the Monkees by comparison. The problem with this illuminating book is that Gessen (The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, 2012) is both too close and not close enough. While she lacked access to the incarcerated members once worldwide attention justified a book such as this (likely to capitalize on the profile it helps raise, just as it analyzes how some involved have hopes of capitalizing), she does not provide the detail required by those readers who may not understand the intricacies and absurdities of the Russian legal system. The reporting of the trial is the most vivid, as the three articulate, intelligent defendants face diversionary charges of blasphemy in the church instead of the anti-Putin protest they were plainly making. “How did our performance, a small and somewhat absurd act to begin with, balloon into a full-fledged catastrophe?” asked one in a closing statement. “Obviously, this could not have happened in a healthy society.” Losing in court, they emerged victorious in the eyes of the world, which awaits the next chapter in what could become a significant career.

An uneven but revelatory introduction to the story, though certainly not the last word.

MACHINE MADE Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics Golway, Terry Liveright/Norton (400 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 10, 2014 978-0-87140-375-9

How the Irish mobilized America.

The story of Tammany Hall, a fraternal organization founded in the late 1700s as a “voice of the common man,” mirrors the story of the Irish Catholics in New York City, who had to crack the AngloProtestant political order in order to make their way. So argues journalist Golway (Director, Kean Univ. Center for History, Politics, and Policy; Words that Ring Through Time: The Fifty Most Important Speeches in History and How They Changed Our World, 2009, etc.) in this politics-laden, competent ramble through the dawning of the empowerment of minorities in American politics. Taking their cues from the popular electoral organization of Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell and his Catholic Association, Irish Catholic leaders in New York challenged the “hostile civic |

culture” of the Protestant elite by pushing back against nativist animosity. As the Irish population of the city swelled from the Great Famine—from 371,000 in 1845 to 630,000 by the mid1850s—Tammany embraced and enfranchised these unfortunate masses so that the collective memory of the famine helped spur the social legislation of the Progressive Era: securing jobs, pushing for universal suffrage, lobbying for anti-monopoly legislation, labor unions and land reform for Ireland, and opening orphanages, asylums and homes for unwed mothers run by Irish Catholic nuns. The election of William R. Grace, the first Irish Catholic immigrant, as mayor of New York City in 1880 was a watershed, erasing some of the corruption taint created

by Boss Tweed. The establishment of a vast “clubhouse system” ensured that favors and social services were well-distributed and won the loyalty of those who needed them, leading to rampant abuses, as exemplified by Richard Croker’s scandal-ridden Tammany era. The Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire of 1911 galvanized Tammany’s more promising reform-minded leaders like Robert Wagner and Al Smith to urge for regulatory legislation that inspired Francis Perkins and, later, Franklin Roosevelt.

A work that knowledgeably readjusts Tammany’s reputation from a nest of corruption to an important crusader for the poor and downtrodden.

THE END OF EVE A Memoir

Gore, Ariel Hawthorne Books (234 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-9860007-9-9

A journalist and award-winning author’s mordantly humorous memoir about caring for, and surviving, her terminally ill mother.

Hip Mama publisher Gore (All the Pretty People: Tales of Carob, Shame, and Barbie-Envy, 2011, etc.) was living in Portland, Ore., and raising a small son with her lesbian partner, Sol, when she discovered that her charming but violent and capricious mother, Eve, was dying of cancer. Convinced that she needed to do as the Tibetan yogis she admired did and “go to the places that scared [her],” she became Eve’s caregiver. Sol, in turn, demanded that they all move to the colorfully quirky city of Santa Fe, a place she had long romanticized—and where a female mime she had once loved still lived. But before Gore could even get resettled, her mother took over the house her daughter had bought and began renovating it. While the author and her family scrambled to make a life “out of stardust and panic,” Eve flirted outrageously with an Anaïs Nin scholar– turned-contractor, watched Hollywood noir movies and reminded everyone that she was dying. Spurred by this comically inappropriate behavior and memories of Eve re-enacting the wire hanger scene from Mommie Dearest for fun, Gore stood up to her mother—and got thrown out. In the meantime, Sol stalked her old girlfriend, and the life Gore had “always imagined she [wanted]” soon fell apart. Desperate to understand her |

own role in making “all this violence seem necessary and inevitable,” Gore fled to a house outside of Santa Fe where she began redefining the meaning of love. By turns tender and heartbreaking, Gore’s book is a brave, thoroughly authentic journey to the center of the human heart.

Wickedly sharp reading filled to bursting with compassion, rage, pain and wit.

WHAT MAKES OLGA RUN? The Mystery of the 90-Something Track Star and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives Grierson, Bruce Henry Holt (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-8050-9720-7

A Canadian freelance journalist probes the fascinating mystery behind a nonagenarian female’s stunning success as a competitive athlete.

When Olga Kotelko first took up track at age 77, it was simply for fun. But by the time she reached her 90s, the former schoolteacher had become the holder of more than 20 world records, and she was the fastest nonagenarian female in the world. In a book that is part biography and part exploration of the latest research in exercise physiology, gerontology and neuropsychology, Grierson (U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?, 2007) grapples with the question of why a little old lady barely 5 feet tall breaks records rather than bones. Science offers answers that are as tantalizing as they are incomplete. For most people, healthy aging boils down to three-quarters good lifestyle and one-quarter good genes. Grierson suggests that Olga’s habits— which include an “an abiding faith in water, reflexology,” intense workouts that target every moving part in her body and personal traits such as extroversion, friendliness and resilience— no doubt help to account for her impressive good health. Her family history, however, does not reveal exceptional longevity nor does it explain where Olga derived her almost freakish physical capabilities. Grierson proposes that the mystery surrounding Olga’s achievements has less to do with her lifestyle and genetic inheritance and more to do with how her particular body has somehow managed to develop mechanisms, which scientists have yet to understand, that have slowed the aging process. Olga’s body may be unique in its age-defying abilities, but her determination to push the limits of her own physicality is what is most inspiring of all, especially to baby boomers like the author. For Grierson, Olga is living proof that “[n]ot only is midlife not too late [to start exercising]…in some ways, it’s the best time to go for it.”

Eye-opening and insightful.

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INDIE SPIRITUALIST A No Bullshit Exploration of Spirituality Grosso, Chris Beyond Words/Atria (272 pp.) $15.00 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-58270-462-3

In a mixed bag of introspective insights and navel-gazing, Grosso tells the story of how he finally entered recovery after years of drug and alcohol abuse, which set him on the path of investigating his spiritual side far outside of organized religion.

It’s a bit like mid-1990s MTV meets New-Age mysticism, and they have a tattooed hipster baby. To give the author credit, it sounds like he was truly messed up before he got his act together, and his explorations may appeal to Daily Show viewers who feel like they need a shot of new-time religion. The book is composed of short, easily consumed chapters kicked off with quotes from usual suspects like Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley and Charles Bukowski and carrying titles like “The Tao of Checking Yourself ” and “Jesus, Hitler, Bieber, Slayer & God.” It’s a collection that’s likely to cause mixed reactions, much like the work of journalist Neal Pollack, who retired from his own celebrated superstardom to study yoga—at which Grosso makes a few good-natured swipes (the yoga, not Pollack). There are good moments, like the way Grosso describes reaching a state of meditative bliss during an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo.

How you feel about the pseudo-advice in lines like, “You were born to be real, not to be perfect,” will probably depend on your own spiritual sense of well-being at the time, though more cynical readers are likely to raise an eyebrow or two here and there.

That’s even truer of Grosso’s postmodern experiences, littered with self-promotional links, like discovering the meaning of life while scrolling Facebook. For the record, the meaning of life is “Be cool” and “Don’t be an asshole.”

It’s an artifice, sure, but compared to nonsense like The Secret, indie spiritualism has a lot going for it—maybe even some actual sincerity.

MINDLESS Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans Head, Simon Basic (240 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-465-01844-4

A dark, revealing view of computerized control and monitoring of the workplace.

Head (Senior Fellow/Institute for Public Knowledge, New York Univ.; The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, 2003) argues that Computer Business Systems—computerized management programs that 60

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Amazon and other large organizations use to measure everything that happens in factories, warehouses and depots—are turning workers into “digital chain gang” members who work harder and earn less. Once limited to tracking blue-collar productivity, CBSs now engulf much of the white-collar world, where they control the complex work of physicians, teachers and others in the professional and administrative middle class.

By combining scientific management with IT systems, writes Head, they are recreating the “harsh, driven capitalism of the pre-New Deal era.” The author describes the hidden world of CBSs in several outstanding case studies. Walmart, for instance, achieves spectacular results with a targeting and monitoring system that tells employees what to do, how long they have to do it and whether they have met target times. Similarly, Amazon drives employee productivity while keeping a lid on low wages. At Goldman Sachs, such systems were a critical factor in manipulating subprime mortgages, a major component of the 2008 economic crisis. Other organizations using networked computers with monitoring software attached include Toyota, FedEx, UPS and Dell, as well as the military and academia, where scholars’ research outputs are measured and targeted. To a degree undreamed of in the past, the computerized systems are now monitoring nuanced human interactions in health care, financial services, human resources and customer relations.

While this simplifies and accelerates processes like tracking loans and managing hospitals, it also has the effect of deskilling labor, diminishing its role and weakening its earning power.

A sobering, important book.

GHOSTBELLY

Heineman, Elizabeth Feminist (320 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-55861-844-2 A wrenching account of how the author gave birth to a stillborn baby and coped with the loss of her child.

Heineman (History and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies/Univ. of Iowa; Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse, 2011, etc.) was approaching her mid-40s when she and her partner decided to try for a baby. Conception happened relatively quickly, though, and the pregnancy was easy. Against medical advice to the contrary, she decided to have her baby at home with only a midwife in attendance. Heineman knew an out-of-hospital delivery was risky and that her advanced maternal age made her vulnerable to problems during pregnancy as well as childbirth. But she was also unwilling to have her baby in an impersonal hospital setting. Heineman remained optimistic even after her pregnancy stretched beyond 40 weeks: Her health was excellent, her baby was in good condition, and Deirdre, her midwife, had been practicing midwifery more than 20 years “with no bad outcomes.” Just as she was about to give birth, an unexpected placental abruption occurred, and the child, a boy she had nicknamed Thor, was born dead. Heineman |

“Through stylistic understatement and perfect tonal pitch, this memoir somehow achieves its outlandish ambitions.” from the great floodgates of the wonderworld

found that little support existed to help grieving parents of stillborn children make sense of their losses. She also discovered the grim truth that, in a society afraid to acknowledge the reality of death, the proper place of corpses was not among loved ones but “away from the living.” With tenderness and lucidity, Heineman writes about the bonding rituals she and her partner developed around Thor’s body, which a sympathetic funeral director allowed them to keep before interment. These descriptions are disturbing yet refreshing for their honesty. However, some readers may find the author’s protracted post-mortem of both her decision to give birth at home and its consequences overdone and obsessive.

At times self-indulgent but provocative.

THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD A Memoir

Hocking, Justin Graywolf (256 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-55597-669-9

Through stylistic understatement and perfect tonal pitch, this memoir somehow achieves its outlandish ambitions.

In lesser hands, a narrative steeped in obsessions with Moby-Dick and surfing and skateboarding would strain to make connections, especially when it’s also a coming-of-age, rite-ofpassage memoir by a 30-something author who has trouble letting go of or committing to anything while recognizing that he should have grown up long ago. An avid skateboarder in Colorado with a graduate degree that lets him teach creative writing at the university level, Hocking (co-editor: Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the Deep End, 2004) gave it all up, along with a fulfilling romantic relationship, to move to New York for…what? He took a job delivering food and another reading manuscripts for rejection. He worked on a novel that was “basically going nowhere.” Incongruously enough, he discovered surfing, which offered a natural progression from his passion for skateboarding: “Like the majority of actual New York residents, I had no idea surfing was even possible here. Could you really ride the subway to the beach? If so, could you surf in the morning and hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art that same afternoon?” Thus New York allowed Hocking to develop a passion for surfing, which shared an ocean with his longtime obsession with Melville (whose paths through the city he retraced) and what appears to be an obsession with himself and with romance, coupled with an ambivalence toward commitment— to anything. “You know, you talk about loving everyone all the time like you’re some sort of enlightened being,” said the girlfriend over whom his obsession deepened after they split. “But the only reason you love anyone is to make yourself feel better.” Therapy, 12-step programs, a nervous breakdown, spiritual crisis and renewal, friends, career and geographical change, and |

some life-threatening experiences helped transform the author and deepen his appreciation of Moby-Dick.

In a book that’s likely far richer than the novel he shelved, Hocking ultimately transcends “the dark Ahab force.”

CURED How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science

Holt, Nathalia Dutton (336 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 27, 2014 978-0-525-95392-0

A fascinating discourse on how medical science is zeroing in on an HIV vaccine after several anomalous triumphs.

With the AIDS epidemic now in its fourth decade, awardwinning HIV research scientist Holt believes “we are only just beginning to understand our shared evolution with viruses.”

Still, she offers increasing hope for a cure by spotlighting the two male “Berlin Patients” and several others, including a child, who chemically bombarded and expunged the HIV virus from their bodies. The author tracks the enduring histories of these men—German-born Christian Hahn and Timothy Brown, an American—from the detection of their initial viral prodromes to the astonishing depletion of HIV-infected cells from their bodies, prompting clinical trials and controversial research.

Holt also profiles HIV specialists Heiko Jessen, Bruce Walker and David Ho as part of a frustrated yet galvanized group of professionals working toward developing new therapies to either counterbalance HIV’s onslaught on a vulnerable immune system or, ideally, discover a way to have the virus coexist with its human host. The author includes research that field experts consider “pertinent and exciting,” and the result makes for educative, thought-provoking and frequently alarming reading.

Textbook descriptions on the intricacies of HIV’s tactical viral transmission commingle with a timeline spanning from an era when a seropositive test result equaled a sure death sentence.

The author also examines controversial trials of AZT drug therapies, stem cell transplants, and the genetic suppression and inexplicable eradication of the virus from a fortunate few. Holt further supports her subject with graphic illustrations and a well-balanced assortment of interviews and opinions from doctors, genetic scientists and informed researchers, all unified in the global battle to find a cure.

An astute AIDS retrospective blended with contemporary updates on aggressive medical strategies.

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TURNING THE BLACK SOX WHITE The Misunderstood Legacy of Charles A. Comiskey Hornbaker, Tim Sports Publishing/Skyhorse (400 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-61321-638-5

An attempt to restore the reputation of one of professional baseball’s seminal figures.

Charles A. Comiskey (1859–1931) was a giant in the early days of baseball. A fine player in the last third of the 19th century, Comiskey’s career segued from the playing field to management to ownership when he established the Chicago White Sox as a founding franchise in the American League. In Comiskey’s day as a slick fielder and savvy, innovative manager, leagues and teams would form and disperse, oftentimes in the middle of a season. With the establishment of the American League, the basic, stable structure of major league baseball as we know it today emerged. Hornbaker’s (Legends of Pro Wrestling: 150 Years of Headlocks, Body Slams, and Piledrivers, 2012, etc.) book serves two purposes. The first is to restore Comiskey to his rightful place as one of the vital figures in the history of the sport. Although the author is not a particularly elegant stylist, his depth of knowledge of this era of baseball history shines through. His second main purpose is to redeem Comiskey, who has long taken a disproportionate share of the blame for the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which eight White Sox players threw the World Series, allegedly as a result of Comiskey’s tightfisted ways. Hornbaker makes a sound case for why Comiskey has long been an inappropriate fall guy for the scandal. But this story only takes up a small part of Comiskey’s life and this book. Why, then, give the book, which is not in fact about the Black Sox scandal on the whole, such a peculiar title, and why make it the foundation of the book’s marketing campaign? In so doing, the author and the publisher do the larger story he tells a disservice.

The history of baseball might be far different without Comiskey’s role in it. This serviceable biography ensures that his role will not be forgotten. (30 b/w photos)

COUNTRY MUSIC BROKE MY BRAIN A Behind-the-Microphone Peek at Nashville’s Famous and Fabulous Stars House, Gerry BenBella (240 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-939529-90-9

A veteran country broadcaster mixes memoir with anecdotes and corny jokes.

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jokes and scripts for numerous country awards shows. In the incestuous world of country music, he’s a well-connected member of the family, and he shares some tales here that he never could on air (including one about Waylon Jennings driving with two kinds of blow). The author also tells some apocryphal tall tales—one about a roadie and another about a conniving couple named Buddy and Julie, apparently no relation to the Millers, recording artists who are married. “Nearly everyone I know in the music business is nice,” he writes, and he’s nice in turn to almost everyone, including Garth Brooks (“a genius at marketing [who] has figured out how to sell the same twenty songs over and over in different packages”), Kenny Rogers (“the Kenmeister”), Pam Tillis (“supernaturally talented”), Ray Stevens (another “genius”) and the Oak Ridge Boys (“unique and wonderful people—gentle, caring and fascinating. And they are stunning showmen”). House also discusses Taylor Swift, who was initially so appreciative but then once gave him the brush off. He also doesn’t much care for Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks—though few country insiders do. A typical passage: “Tanya Tucker has no editing button. If it occurs in her head, it’s gonna come spilling out her piehole. I think she’s hilarious because of that one fact. She’s also hell on wheels.” A typical joke: “I always think of Dolly [Parton] whenever I visit the Great Pyramids. I don’t know why, I just do.

They’re enormous. The pyramids, that is.”

House doesn’t take himself, country music or his book too seriously. Pass.

CODE NAME: JOHNNY WALKER The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs

“Johnny Walker” with DeFelice, Jim Morrow/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-226755-9

Fiery, insightful memoir from the former Iraqi translator who fought alongside U.S. Special Forces during the recent war in Iraq.

With the assistance of DeFelice (co-author: American Sniper, 2012, etc.) and writing as a first-time author under a protective pseudonym, “Johnny Walker,” this Mosul-born, pro-American Muslim Iraqi relates a sometimes-biased but invaluable insider’s perspective of Iraq after Saddam Hussein. After an undistinguished stint in the badly trained Iraqi army, the author made a decision early on in the 2003 conflict that to provide for his family, he would have to collaborate with the American occupying force. Although his initial attempts at obtaining work as a translator and adviser for the Americans were frustrated, he eventually caught on with the Navy SEALs. Quickly, he began to learn that being a translator also meant being a combat-ready soldier and risking his life. Things began to get seriously dangerous for “Johnny,” however, when his relationship with the American forces became well-known around Mosul, which made him |

a potential target for assassins. This pressure to both serve his American employers and still retain close ties to his own Iraqi community is what eventually drove him to pursue his dream of immigrating to America. Throughout the book, the author gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to be stuck geopolitically between a rock and a hard place: Iraqis like him rejected the tyrannical rule of Hussein but then had to endure the chaos of the destabilizing influence that the U.S.-led invasion wrought on the country.

Although he defends the motives behind the American invasion, the question of whether this pre-emptive military action was an effective operation in the long run is a point he mostly evades until the end of the book. Ultimately, any national allegiances take a back seat to “Johnny’s” survival instincts. Eventually, the once-impossible dream of becoming an American citizen and bringing his family to the U.S. became a hard-won reality.

A harrowing personal journey of courageous selfempowerment during wartime.

STALIN The Kremlin Mountaineer

Johnson, Paul Amazon Publishing (160 pp.) $5.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014

Slender character study of “one of the outstanding monsters civilization has yet produced.”

Noted historian and biographer Johnson (Mozart: A Life, 2013, etc.) should not be expected to write anything but a condemnation of the Soviet dictator, and so he has—not that Stalin has many defenders these days and certainly not among the intelligentsia. However, the author finds a few kind things to say: Stalin was an accomplished letter writer and voracious reader whose personal library encompassed 20,000 volumes, and he could be charming when he wished. Even so, Stalin was, of course, not a good man: His wife killed herself, a son drank himself to death, a daughter defected to the West, and countless millions of Soviet citizens and their neighbors died. Stalin would doubtless call those people “problems,” for which, Johnson writes, he had a formula: “These were problem men, and death solves the problem.

No men, no problem.” Like all tyrants, Stalin was afraid of his own shadow: Even as fully half a million Soviets were devoted to serving as his guard, toward the end of his life, despising the “Jewish doctors” who surrounded him, he ate little but hard-boiled eggs with the thought that they were one of the few foods that could not be poisoned. He also succeeded in creating “a society in which everyone was afraid,” from the lowliest street-sweeper to his closest lieutenant. A monster indeed and one with whom history has yet to fully reckon, a task that this too-brief book can only begin to address. Johnson writes that his impetus for writing this short study of Stalin is that “among the young, he is insufficiently known.”

Whether the book can remedy that situation is unknown, as well, but as informed opinion, it’s very satisfying.

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LOVE ILLUMINATED Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (with the Help of 50,000 Strangers)

Jones, Daniel Morrow/HarperCollins (224 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-06-221116-3 978-0-06-221118-7 e-book

A lively, anecdotal examination of the mystifying and treacherous landscape of

dating and love.

New York Times “Modern Love” columnist Jones states that he doesn’t consider himself an expert in the dating and marriage game, and the book will disappoint those seeking definitive advice for dating, finding true love or making relationships work. Instead, the author breaks down the wisdom he has garnered from reviewing and editing 50,000 (and counting) readers’ love stories and laments. Although he offers no hard and fast rules or absolutes, Jones makes several observations about the state of modern romantic relationships and what he sees as permanent changes to the dating landscape, filed under irreverent chapter subheadings like “Destiny: So What’s Wrong With You?” and “Trust: Avoid Everybody.” The author demonstrates how the metrics of one particular dating website focused his attention on several appropriate candidates, but not with his wife, to whom he has been married for more than 10 years. He explains this is due to the fact that when users intensify their focus—as online dating sites encourage their members to do—they tend to lose their peripheral vision, which involves serendipity, the possibility of compromise and, if you believe in it, destiny. Another enlightening section reveals how modern social mores and technology have created new ways of connecting without genuine communication—e.g., booty-texting and hooking up; emailing, e-chatting, blogging, Tweeting and Skyping. Jones pointedly labels this new frontier of the search for love the “Soul Mate In A Box.” The author does not provide reassurance to the baffled, frustrated and lovelorn; he notes that “the case with almost anyone who’s feeling unwanted and hopeless is they simply haven’t met the right person.” Unfortunately, “some people never do.”

Amusing and heartening.

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“A delightful book, fun to read and share— green thumb not required.” from a garden of marvels

A GARDEN OF MARVELS The Discovery that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants Kassinger, Ruth Morrow/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-06-204899-8 978-0-06-204903-2 e-book

From award-winning history and science writer Kassinger (Paradise Under Glass: An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden, 2010, etc.), an informal, entertaining account of how early researchers discovered how plants work and what scientists are still learning about plants today.

The author combines her lively botanical history with personal anecdotes about her own plant adventures and misadventures, and she also chronicles her visits to universities and nurseries, where accommodating, knowledgeable people shared their expertise with her. It is clear that Kassinger has done considerable research as well, for her account is rich with portraits of men from the 17th century struggling to understand the anatomy and physiology of plants. She writes of the techniques they used, the observations they made, what they misunderstood and what they got right. Other chapters reveal what is known now about the functions of leaves, stems, roots and flowers. She even explores the world of competitive giant pumpkin growing. Along with some tips on how to grow a oneton pumpkin, Kassinger takes readers to an annual fall festival in Maine, where pumpkin lovers turn them into competitive racing boats. The author also introduces readers to green slugs that can photosynthesize; a “cocktail” citrus tree that bears limes, lemons and oranges; and a fern that can remove arsenic from polluted soil. Kassinger briefly considers the promise of the perennial grass miscanthus as a biofuel and the possible benefits of genetic engineering of food plants. A bonus of the book are the simple line drawings by Eva-Maria Ruhl, which illustrate Kassinger’s lucid prose, making some botanical details even clearer. Especially charming is her drawing of a borametz, a plant that even educated Europeans in the early 17th century believed grew a tiny, living baby sheep on its stalk.

A delightful book, fun to read and share—green thumb not required.

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BLOOD WILL OUT The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade Kirn, Walter Liveright/Norton (352 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 3, 2014 978-0-87140-451-0

The complicated, credulity-straining relationship between the author and his subject leaves the reader wondering about both of them.

This is a book about two very strange characters. One is best known as Clark Rockefeller, “the most prodigious serial imposter in recent history,” a convicted murderer, a kidnapper and a psychopath. The other is Kirn (My Mother’s Bible: A Son Discovers Clues to God, 2013, etc.), a respected journalist and novelist who admits that he initially intended to exploit his relationship with his subject for a book but belatedly discovered that his subject had been exploiting him. “What a perfect mark I’d been,” writes the author. “Rationalizing, justifying, imagining. I’d worked as hard at being conned by him as he had at conning me.” The story begins, oddly enough, with the author agreeing to deliver a crippled dog from his home in Montana to the stranger with the famous surname in Manhattan. Why? He was having some financial troubles, and this unlikely scenario might result in a book. One would think that a writer with this much journalistic experience and accomplishment might do some basic background checking, yet he not only fell for the increasingly outlandish stories his source spun, he also decided to protect the relationship by refusing to write about it, even though, on first meeting, he found the purported Rockefeller “instantly annoying.” The author also describes using Ritalin to meet deadlines and Ambien to catch a few hours of sleep, carrying a gun while on assignment, marrying a girl little more than half his age after a whirlwind courtship and basically establishing himself as an unreliable narrator of a nonfiction book.

After initially defending his friend’s identity against mounting evidence to the contrary, he decided to cash in: “He was conning me, but I was also conning him. The liar and murderer and heaven knows what else was correct about the writer: I betrayed him.”

A book that casts long-form narrative journalism in general, and Kirn’s in particular, in an unflattering light.

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THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror

THE MEAT RACKET The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business

Kundnani, Arun Verso (256 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 14, 2014 978-1-78168-159-6

Leonard, Christopher Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-4516-4581-1

A widely researched argument about why the war on terror will have no success unless the West stops blaming Islam and starts locating the roots of political dissent.

In fighting the war on terror, Kundnani (Terrorism Studies/ John Jay Coll.; The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, 2007) sees the governments of the U.S. and Britain as employing the same wrongheaded surveillance tactics that were created by the Russians and sharpened by the CIA, then the FBI, in cracking down on dissidents during the Cold War and the civil rights era. The problem, writes the author, is that Muslims have become an “ideal enemy,” perceived by mainstream American and British societies as unable to assimilate properly due to the essential flaw in their religion: the inability to separate church and state. Policymakers view extremism as a “perversion of Islam’s message,” the twisting of what is essentially a benign religion into “an antimodern, totalitarian, political ideology.” The truth is that most people are peace-loving and assimilationist, and Muslim communities have become a kind of “Asian model minority.” Yet some of the youth, thwarted in their political expression, lash out in extremism—e.g., in the reaction to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the plight of the Palestinians against Israeli aggression. In the crackdown on anti-extremism, scholars of “radicalization”—i.e., the process by which Muslims move toward terrorism—zero in on a spurious “cultural-psychological predisposition” toward violence and disaffection that offers intelligence and law enforcement agencies a framework to work with but does not address what Kundnani believes is at the root of the unrest: poverty and oppression. His examples of the pernicious reach of many policing tools are useful, such as the Prevent model launched in Britain in 2004, provoking questions about privacy and discrimination.

Kundnani frankly and refreshingly moves away from ideological symptoms and toward political causes in tackling extremism.

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An engrossing report on the industrialized American meat business.

Leonard, a fellow at the New America Foundation and former national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press, debuts with a richly detailed examination of factory farming, which has reshaped small-town life for the worse in Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma and elsewhere, leaving a handful of huge companies with “unprecedented control” over the U.S. meat supply—most notably Tyson Foods, the biggest, which has $28 billion in annual sales with $780 million in profits. Using Tyson as a window on modern meat production, Leonard shows how the company has eliminated free market competition through vertical integration, buying up independent suppliers (feed mills, slaughterhouses and hatcheries) and controlling farmers through restrictive contracts.

The strategy, soon a blueprint for other firms, worked first in the chicken business, then in the hog industry (some 90 percent of all hog farms disappeared), and now threatens the cattle business, where a minority of ranchers refuse to abandon their independence. As the author observes, all of this occurred out of sight of most Americans, who from the 1960s to ’90s knew only that meat was cheap and plentiful in fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. Now, cost savings from factory farming are slowing down. In the meantime, rural communities have been “chickenized,” with farmers dependent on the company in a bizarre, near-feudal system that forces many into bankruptcy. Sometimes, hopeful immigrants take over abandoned farms, only to face the vicissitudes of the least-profitable corner of the corporate meat business. Tyson’s “cost-cutting ethos and the lack of competition restrains income growth in rural America,” writes the author, and strong lobbying defeated the Obama administration’s recent attempts at reform. Leonard’s book traces the rise of Tyson, from its creation by former fruit farmer John Tyson in the Depression to the chicken evangelism of his son, Don, who spent 14 years convincing McDonald’s to add chicken to its menu and helped make chicken the nation’s most-consumed meat.

An authoritative look at a ruthlessly efficient system.

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“Creativity, like genius, is inexplicable, but Lewis’ synthesis of history, biography and psychological research offers a thoughtful response to the question of how new ideas happen.” from the rise

THE RISE Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

FUKUSHIMA The Story of a Nuclear Disaster

Lewis, Sarah Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4516-2923-1

In her nonfiction debut, curator and arts consultant Lewis (Painting and Printmaking/Yale Univ.) takes on the broad topic of creativity.

Ranging across an expansive historical landscape, the author considers artists, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs and even an intrepid explorer, investigating the sources of their creativity. Serendipity, failure, daring and grit, she discovers, can all lead to innovation. Often, silence and space offer essential “safe havens” where a person can be alone to ruminate. Although failure can be terminally discouraging, for some, it is liberating. After a spectacular critical failure in 1957, choreographer Paul Taylor ignored negative reviews and, he said, committed himself to “keep heading in my own direction.” He triumphed and eventually won a MacArthur Genius award. “We make discoveries, breakthroughs, and inventions in part because we are free enough to take risks,” Lewis writes.

Freedom to take risks, however, also requires persistence to achieve one’s goals. Samuel Morse abandoned his grandiose dream of being an artist and turned to electrical telegraphy.

He kept at his experiments for nearly two decades until he finally succeeded in transmitting a message. Lewis identifies Morse’s persistence as “grit.” However, as a psychological researcher told the author, grit requires avoiding just spinning one’s wheels: “Whatever you’re doing, you have to figure out when to give out effort and when to withdraw it.” Related to grit is the quality of surrender: “We surrender not when we give up,” she explains, “but when we give over.” The power that comes from surrender is “a supportive, benevolent current.” Lewis praises the discoveries made by amateurs, those who defy the judgment of peers, and those who set out on untrammeled paths, “seeking out roads that, though hidden, are found on open ground.”

Creativity, like genius, is inexplicable, but Lewis’ synthesis of history, biography and psychological research offers a thoughtful response to the question of how new ideas happen.

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Lochbaum, David; Lyman, Edwin; Stranahan, Susan Q.; The Union of Concerned Scientist New Press (256 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-59558-908-8 978-1-59558-927-9 e-book

Technical reports written by committee are almost always dull affairs; this is an exception.

The book is a gripping, suspenseful page-turner finely crafted to appeal both to people familiar with the science and those with only the barest inkling of how nuclear power works.

Even with the broad outlines of the story in the public record, the authors have uncovered many important details that never came to light during the saturation-level media coverage. The Union of Concerned Scientists has long cast a critical eye on the nuclear industry, and the tone should surprise no one, but its criticisms are balanced, insightful and impossible to dismiss. Reactors are protected by multiple fail-safes, but “[a]ll of Fukushima’s defensive barriers failed for the same reason. Each had a limit that provided too little safety margin to prevent error.” Essentially, a single unforeseen event, if it exceeds the components’ design specifications, will simultaneously disable multiple layers of protection. Furthermore, the safety guidelines proved biased toward “internal events,” utterly failing to account for “a sustained total loss of electrical power and the inability to obtain needed supplies because of damaged roads” that resulted from a broader natural disaster. Incredibly, the threat posed by tsunamis on the northeast coast of Japan was never taken seriously; in 2009, Tokyo Electric Power Company management nixed a seawall at Fukushima, concluding, “a tall barricade in front of a nuclear plant would send the wrong message to the public.” Ultimately, the authors warn that failure on a similar scale is eminently possible at many American facilities.

The fact that worst-case scenarios were finally averted in this instance may be a mixed blessing, as already, new protective measures are being abandoned or watered down, and even in Japan, new nuclear plants are under construction.

The events at Fukushima provided a graphic warning of the dangers posed by nuclear power; the most important question asked by this book is, what will be done about them? (39 images)

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SAMURAI A History

Man, John Morrow/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $14.99 paper | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-06-220267-3 978-0-06-220268-0 e-book Man, a crack biographer of Asian historical figures (Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warriors, 2012, etc.), tenders a survey of the samurai, the equivalent of

Japan’s feudal knights.

This is a well-written piece of history with an easy storyteller’s rhythm and plenty of intrigue. Readers will quickly realize that the author, who previously worked for Reuters and Time-Life Books, is well-versed in Far Eastern history, but he also accommodates new discoveries and insights. To understand the samurai, it is critical to understand the nature of the Japanese political landscape, “a patchwork of sixty provinces and six hundred estates, all scrapping with one another.” The lords found protection in landowning warriors—samurai—who were gifted land by the lord and gathered wartime booty. There also arose a strict code of conduct within the samurais’ elite community. They were generous, stoic, intelligent, and masters at swordplay and spiritual matters; they also realized that there was often no way out but death, which tended to make them rather fearless. But times change, and Mann intricately describes the shift in the orientation of the Japanese government after the post-1600 revolution: the rise of the shogun and the banning of warfare. In these peaceful years, the samurai could have disappeared, but they survived. “The key to their survival,” writes the author, “was the way they renewed their sense of identity, not by abandoning the past but by cherrypicking aspects of it to suit new circumstances.” The samurai became enforcers of the peace; they could kill at the drop of an insult, an act of adultery or out of revenge. But they were also schooled in the art of speaking and “of attitude, of clothing, of intellectual vigor”—a ready-made diplomatic corps.

Smooth, sophisticated history writing.

THE HOTEL ON PLACE VENDÔME Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

Mazzeo, Tilar J. Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-06-179108-6

Another breathless exposé of French horizontal collaboration from cultural historian Mazzeo (English/Colby Coll.; The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume, 2010, etc.).

The author was warned by an aged Resistance widow not to take up this story of the Hotel Ritz as a happy collaborationist |

playground since everyone involved lied. The “collective French national fantasy” is that everyone helped the Resistance, yet in reality, very few actually did. Mazzeo struggles structurally with how to tell this story, first introducing the cast of characters and habitués of the Ritz, opened in 1898 in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair by Swiss founders Marie-Louise and César Ritz. Marcel Proust epitomized the group of modern artists and intellectuals and rich American transplants who frequented the hotel. The author then moves through the surrealist mood at the hotel in 1917, during World War I, before touching on the arrival of the Germans in 1940, when the wealthy regular occupants were forced to give up their quarters to German officer Herman Goring and others. Mazzeo then leaps to 1944 just before the liberation of Paris by French and American troops, which sent certain French notables into a panic as their wartime love affairs were public knowledge—e.g., Marcel Carné’s favored actress Arletty, who enjoyed her Nazi lieutenant Hans-Jürgen Soehring, and, of course, Coco Chanel and her own German lover Hans von Dincklage. Mazzeo delights in the story of Ernest Hemingway’s competitive swagger to secure the Ritz first and enjoy its wine cellar before his buddies Robert Capa and others could get there and the numerous “dame reporters” like Martha Gellhorn and Lee Miller, who made it all interesting. Stolen art, double agents, a legendary bartender passing notes to the Resistance: This is a rich, messy history.

A gossipy, occasionally entertaining who’s who that eventually grows tiresome and repetitive. (19 b/w photos)

GAME-CHANGER Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations McAdams, David Norton (256 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 27, 2014 978-0-393-23967-6

McAdams (Duke Univ. Fuqua School of Business) transforms the concept of game theory, used in business, statistics and elsewhere, to introduce what he calls the “game-theory approach to life.”

Over the past 40 years, the author writes, game theory has become “a mainstay” in economics, political science, business strategy and the military, among other areas. Developing what he calls “game awareness,” he generalizes a method of plotting tactics and provides actionable insights in order to improve the understanding and predictive capabilities that can enrich the lives of families and individuals. Out of many possible games, McAdams returns most frequently to the classic “Prisoners’ Dilemma.” Two partners in crime separately face the choice whether to confess or not. Confession, however, apparently the best choice for each, will be the worst for both. McAdams shows how to recognize life situations based on this dilemma to illustrate his principle that ruthless competition is not always the best strategy. He provides six methods to accomplish this kirkus.com

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and supplements them with another three ways to change the game completely. Each is intended to build an ethic of cooperation and trust. The author employs examples along the “gaming tree” and the “payoff matrix.” The gaming tree represents players’ decisions as branching points and summarizes the sequence of options as choices play out. The matrix is an arrangement of rows and columns that organizes an overview of players and their possible moves; it permits ranking of outcomes and comparison of different games to identify their common features. McAdams also provides his “Game-Changer Files,” in which he discusses current real-life problems—e.g., online price competition and real estate agency—to highlight the way “game awareness” can be generalized to the benefit of individual freedom of choice.

Real-life lessons presented in a readily accessible way for the benefit of nonbusiness readers. (30 illustrations)

THE UP SIDE OF DOWN Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

McArdle, Megan Viking (304 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-670-02614-2

An illuminating look at the psychology behind rebounding from defeat.

“Failure can be the best thing that ever happened to you (though it may sometimes feel like the worst),” writes Bloomberg View columnist and blogger McArdle, who has found a humble, intelligent way of infusing positivity and opportunity into personal losses. The author, a self-admitted “Mozart of misfortune, the Paganini of poor luck,” adroitly examines the many facets of the spirit-crushing failure and rebound synthesis—from welfare reform to the blame game and debt forgiveness. McArdle states her points in prose saturated with a self-effacing lightheartedness, lending levity to the crestfallen reality of loss. A detour into her mother’s disastrous treatment for a ruptured appendix, however, feels odd when buttressed against chapters on the government bailout of General Motors and the art of self-identifying a recurring problem. Especially noteworthy is the fact that McArdle’s observations are not the thoughts of a detached outsider. The author has indeed been in the trenches of disappointment and disillusionment and gets personal in later chapters describing her hard-knocks ordeal fighting the depressive effects of being ill-qualified for a corporate job and then spending months on unemployment (“It is difficult to communicate the progressive corrosion of long-term unemployment to someone who has not endured it”).

McArdle’s message is a significant one with both personal and economic impact: There can be no vast success without initial failures, and it’s important to foster a culture of risk-takers who embrace experimentation in working outside of their comfort zones. Mistakes are learning tools for the greater good of society, she advises, and they should not inherently be classified as failures.

Sage counsel on how to learn from failure with humor and grace.

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ATHENS

McGregor, James H.S. Belknap/Harvard Univ. (250 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 24, 2014 978-0-674-04772-3 McGregor (Emeritus, Comparative Literature/Univ. of Georgia; Paris from the Ground Up, 2009, etc.) describes the great city of Athens in solid detail as it spirals out from its core on the Acropolis.

As the author demonstrates, the Parthenon wasn’t the only building, nor was it the first temple. The Erechtheum, named for the founder and first king of Athens, honors the dual guardianship of Poseidon and Athena. The Propylaia, more than a temple, was a gateway for the Panathenaic procession and a boundary between the city and the sacred place.

With buildings atop ruins, walls, additions and conversions, the Acropolis has been a confused space since its very beginning.

Democracy is surely the most important bequest of ancient Athens, but her architecture and the classical light and movement captured in the art of drapery influenced cultures well into the 19th century. The author not only starts at the top of the Acropolis; he also dives into the geology of the place itself, noting how the limestone base ends in a solid surface, which produces the many water sources for the city. Then it’s on to the agora, which was much more than a crossword answer and a market; it was the seat of the council of Areopagus and home of the Theatre of Dionysus. Throughout Greece’s history, invasion and occupation scattered the Greek people from the time of Philip of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s father) and the Roman Empire, up through the Ottoman Empire and World War II. The Allies’ great carve-up after the war set the physical boundaries of the country, but Greece will always be the larger part of our world that is philosophy, rhetoric, music, literature and art.

A concise, useful history of “the hometown of Western thought, the birthplace of democracy, and the starting block for the modern Olympics.” (49 halftones; 4 maps)

WHITEY ON TRIAL Secrets, Corruption, and the Search for Truth

McLean, Margaret; Leiberman, Jon Forge (400 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-7653-3776-4

Alternately vivid and limping yarn about the recent Whitey Bulger trial, which ended in the murderous Boston mobster’s imprisonment in August 2013, and the events that set it in motion.

Criminal prosecutor and legal analyst McLean (Under Fire, 2012, etc.) and Howard Stern Show investigative reporter Leiberman have been following the Bulger case for years. While they leave no doubt that Bulger and his associates were the |

“A thorough and deeply troubling analysis of a quiet but ominous threat to democracy.” from degrees of inequality

instigators of much recent mayhem, their account indicts a broader pattern of the use of high-end informants to snitch on other high-end informants, which flies in the face of received police wisdom. Says one Massachusetts State Police commander of that tactic, employed by the FBI, “[i]t’s like making a deal with Hitler, and him giving you his field marshals and commanders below”—when, of course, it’s Hitler who’s giving the orders. The strained comparison aside, part of the deal, more than one source suggests, includes someone high up in the FBI leaking information to the perpetrators of some very heinous crimes. In the best case, the authors assert, “the FBI should have been doing more to protect top secret files, especially when informants and cooperating witnesses were getting killed” as a result of that loose information. The blow-by-blow approach lends the book a curious gait: Sometimes the narrative flows swiftly, but when it doesn’t, it grinds down in legal minutiae. Perhaps only John Grisham or Jeffrey Toobin could have done the events literary justice, but sensitive readers will wince at lines such as, “The slender forty-six-year-old woman in the black robe and shoulder length hair adjusted her glasses and shuffled papers” or, “Debbi was a beautiful young blond, full of life. Why did they pull all her teeth and bury her in the basement?”

Indifferent writing aside, the authors deliver some newsworthy revelations that, if proven, would make it difficult to distinguish the good guys from the bad.

DEGREES OF INEQUALITY How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream

Mettler, Suzanne Basic (272 pp.) $29.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-465-04496-2

Mettler (Government/Cornell Univ.; The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, 2011, etc.) delivers a broadside to for-profit universities and the politics that enrich them.

The author spent eight years researching and writing her withering attack, and her data is devastating. The for-profits have poor graduation rates, poor records of employment for those who do graduate, and vast numbers of people who find themselves greatly in debt (student loans) and, due to their inadequate education and training, unable to find jobs that will enable them to repay their loans. “The reality of these schools,” she writes, “has not matched the rhetoric.” Mettler’s text is also a social and political history of American higher education, and she notes that despite the pervasiveness of anti-elitist rhetoric, polls show that Americans still believe in the importance of higher education. There is a vast difference between the lifetime incomes of those who did and those who did not graduate from college. The author also traces the history of |

public funding for higher education—all the way back to precolonial America—with special emphasis on major projects like the GI Bill and Pell Grants. She notes that increasing tuition is linked closely to the recent cutbacks in state and federal taxes that support higher education, and she uses Colorado as an example. Among her most damning discoveries: The majority of the for-profits receive more than 80 percent of their revenue from the federal government, and their administrators earn far more than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar universities.

She notes that for-profits focus on recruitment, not on education. The GOP receives most of her fire, but the Democrats do not escape unscathed. Basically, she writes, the rich go to “real” schools, the poor to the for-profits, exacerbating inequality.

A thorough and deeply troubling analysis of a quiet but ominous threat to democracy. (10 charts and graphs)

AMERICAN CORNBALL A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny Miller, Christopher Harper/HarperCollins (544 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-06-222517-7

An alphabetical history of “things that used to make Americans laugh.”

If you yuck and guffaw at the likes of old maids, absent-minded professors and red-nosed topers, then this is just the book for you. As novelist Miller (The Cardboard Universe, 2009, etc.) notes, these were the things that were widely considered to be funny—and perhaps nothing so much as the specter of the henpecked husband. Other things have come along since in a humor culture that may have become less kind and gentle (courtesy of, say, Sam Kinison and his like), leaving these old-fashioned sources of japery in the realm of “cornball.”

Miller describes the comedic grammar: Lucille Ball resists the intoxicating powers of Vitameatavegamin, since, by Miller’s light, she was “a fully realized character with twenty-nine episodes of backstory behind her” when that one aired, whereas Red Skelton, as a one-off kabibbler, was free to yield to the sauce. Or, on another matter, since most absent-minded professors teach science, it’s not always easy to distinguish them from their madscientist peers—just ask Buddy Love. Miller’s encyclopedia of comic types is wide-ranging, complete and lively; you have to appreciate a sentence such as this: “A fat work-shy self-righteous long-winded blustering grandiose feckless confabulating braggart, Hoople is forever boasting of shooting elephants, overpowering octopi, advising heads of state, and so on.” The only shortcoming is the too-easy glossing on the psychology of humor: There’s more to making fun of so-called easy girls than the mere fact that for men, “it’s something they like to think about. A lot.”

Freud would tell you otherwise—but then he was one of those pointy-headed absent-minded prof types, wasn’t he?

A good-natured, entertaining read. It doesn’t make Family Circus any funnier, but it explains good bits of Blondie and Snuffy Smith. kirkus.com

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“An almost flawlessly conducted tour back to a time when major American cities dreamed big.” from the race underground

POWER How J.D. Power III Became the Auto Industry’s Adviser, Confessor, and Eyewitness to History

THE RACE UNDERGROUND Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry that Built America’s First Subway

Morgans, Sarah; Thorness, Bill Fenwick Publishing (400 pp.) $19.95 paper | Sep. 10, 2013 978-0-9818336-7-5

An authorized biography of J.D. Power, who built an eponymous business that revolutionized the relationship between automobile manufacturers and consumers.

Morgans, who specializes in authorized histories of corporations and biographies of their colorful founders, and Thorness (Biking Puget Sound: 50 Rides from Olympia to the San Juans, 2007, etc.), a freelance writer with a background in the business press, provide a clearly written account of how Power quit a stable job to invent a new kind of market research company in 1968. Power was a partner in the composition of the book, referred to by his nickname “Dave” throughout the text. The narrative often reads like a valentine, and thus it is difficult to discern whether the co-authors found any negative information on their subject. However, the evidence is convincing that Power is both a visionary and a moral, nice human being. The fast-talking reference in car advertisements about the imprimatur of J.D. Power and Associates has probably left viewers and listeners wondering who or what that entity really is, and the authors write that many consumers never realized that “J.D. Power” is an actual individual. Morgans and Thorness lift the curtain, showing Power’s individuality as a slowly developing business tycoon who eventually sold his creation to a much larger corporation yet remained active in management. Since General Motors, Ford, Toyota and other companies realized they needed reliable information from consumers, information that helped them design more desirable vehicles, repair flaws and appear sympathetic to purchasers, most of the auto manufacturers figure into the saga. The authors make the case that Power has made a significant impact on the quality of automobiles and how they are sold at the retail level. When manufacturers tried to misrepresent results of J.D. Power surveys to their advantage, Power has often quietly intervened on the side of honesty.

An occasionally hagiographic but surprisingly captivating biography.

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Most, Doug St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $27.99 | $11.99 e-book | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-312-59132-8 978-1-4668-4200-7 e-book

A deputy editor at the Boston Globe recalls the visionaries, moneymen, engineering wizards, and the economic and political struggles behind the creation of the subway in America.

In 1888, horses operated 90 percent of the 6,000 miles of America’s street railway, with all but a fraction of the rest run by cable-pulled streetcars or small steam locomotives. The urban transportation system—filthy, slow, dangerous and unreliable, straining at the explosion of immigrant populations, at the mercy of snow and ice—needed rethinking. As far back as 1849—34 years before the Brooklyn Bridge opened—Alfred Beach, publisher of Scientific American, had proposed the idea of a “railway underneath” New York. However, the psychological barriers to subway travel (“like living in a tomb,” critics said) and the formidable engineering challenges would take decades to overcome. By the time Boston and New York opened their subways—in 1897 and 1904, respectively—a remarkable story had unfolded, one Most (Always in Our Hearts: The Story of Amy Grossberg, Brian Peterson, the Pregnancy They Hid, and the Baby They Killed, 2005) chronicles with grand style and enthusiasm.

Famous names flit in and out of his narrative—Boss Tweed, Thomas Edison, Edwin Arlington Robinson, piano manufacturer William Steinway and Andrew Carnegie—but he focuses on two lesser-knowns, brothers, both transportation magnates: Boston’s Henry Whitney and New York’s William Whitney, who tie together this subterranean transportation tale of two cities.

It’s a story of blizzards and fires, accidental gas explosions and dynamite blasts, of trenches tortuously dug, of sewer and water pipes rerouted and cemeteries excavated, of political infighting, of turnstiles and ticket-taking, of ingenious solutions to staggering problems. Inventor Frank Sprague, who perfected the electric motor, financier August Belmont, crusading New York Mayor Abram Hewitt and engineer William Barclay Parsons also play prominent roles in this colorful Gilded Age saga.

An almost flawlessly conducted tour back to a time when major American cities dreamed big. (First printing of 100,000)

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THE EXTREME LIFE OF THE SEA

Palumbi, Stephen R.; Palumbi, Anthony R. Princeton Univ. (256 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-691-14956-1 An exploration of the sea, “our most fertile stage, populated by wonderfully colorful characters acting out their lives in a daily drama.”

Stephen R. Palumbi (Marine Biology/Stanford Univ.; The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change, 2001, etc.) and his son, science writer Anthony R. Palumbi, explain that they have chosen to write about how life flourishes under the most extreme conditions in order to demonstrate “what life is fully capable of.” They begin in 1909 with the discovery of the Burgess Shale, a quarry in British Columbia where the fossilized remains of more than 65,000 marine creatures were discovered. The odd assortment of creatures that lived around 505 million years ago proved to be truly eye-opening for the scientists who discovered them—“hard to fit into the normal taxonomy of living invertebrates [with bodies] like unique jalopies assembled from random spare parts.” Out of this assembly of creatures, through the process of natural selection, life as we know it today evolved. The authors profile today’s inhabitants of the planet’s oceans, beginning with “single-celled organisms too small to see with the naked eye,” which nonetheless play an important ecological role in the chemistry of oceans and the food chain. The Palumbis probe life in the depths of the oceans and in tidewaters in successive chapters spotlighting the long-lived Bowhead whale; sea species that adapt to extremely high temperatures and others to cold; clownfish, which change gender, becoming male or female as circumstances dictate; and much more. The authors end with a warning that the oceans contain a complex ecology in which each species “thrives in its easily disrupted specialized niche.” Global warming and pollution threaten the destruction of marine life as we know it.

A sparkling appreciation of the wonderful variety of marine life that also communicates an important message.

NOW I KNOW WHO MY COMRADES ARE Voices from the Internet Underground

Parker, Emily Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-374-17695-2 An American journalist delves into the fringes of Internet activism in three countries forged from communist oppression.

New America Foundation senior fellow and former Wall Street Journal writer Parker draws on her rich education in |

international relations and a wide range of fellowships to examine how the Internet is changing—or not changing—cultures in China, Russia and Cuba. As most readers know, the suppression of activism in these countries has a long, shameful history, so Parker uses her contacts and experience to quiz the new types of citizens emerging due to the Web. The book’s fundamental flaw, however, is in couching itself as a perceptive analysis of how Web-based activists inspired change in recent revolutionary hotbeds like Egypt and Tunisia. However, Parker presents an interesting but scattered collection of profiles of postmodern activists, none of whom seem to be as effective as they would like. The usual suspects include Jing Zhao, the political blogger who aggravates the Chinese government as “Michael Anti”; Russian nationalist Alexei Navalny, who found out the hard way how serious Vladimir Putin is about uprisings; and Reinaldo Escobar and Yoani Sanchez, the married couple from Cuba who use their international connections to speak truth to power under the Castro regime. There are nuances to the situations in each country, and Parker finds China the most changed by its experience with the world online, while Cuba remains isolated. But they all seem to share the fear, apathy and isolation that Parker identifies as the tenets of suppression. “A long tradition of citizen informers has broken down the social fabric,” Parker writes of Cuba. “This decentralized paranoia is what makes coordinated rebellion so difficult, and the government knows it. You never know whom to fear, so you fear everyone.”

A narrowly focused portrait of idealism in the face of oppression that is very nearly past its sell-by date.

HANDBOOK FOR AN UNPREDICTABLE LIFE How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling (with Great Hair)

Perez, Rosie Crown Archetype (336 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-307-95239-4

A celebrated Puerto Rican actress’s memoir about how she found success despite growing up in unstable and often abusive environments.

Brooklyn native Perez spent the first three years of her life with her father’s sister, a woman she called “Mommie.” When her beautiful but schizophrenic birth mother, Lydia, unexpectedly re-entered her life, it was to take her to a Catholic home for children 50 miles outside of New York City. Shocked and confused, Perez knew almost nothing but injustice from that moment forward. The nuns often lacked compassion, and her mother was as neglectful as she was cruel. The only person who genuinely cared for her was her aunt, who struggled for years against both Lydia and the New York court system to get custody of her niece. Perez’s ebullience and scrappiness put her at odds with all of her guardians, but they also allowed her to survive her ever-changing cast of sometimes-abusive caretakers. kirkus.com

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Despite these challenges, the author still managed to reconnect with her father, Ismael, who helped her learn to appreciate her Puerto Rican identity at a crucial time in an otherwise fraught adolescence. Along the way, she discovered a gift for dancing that would eventually get her noticed in a Los Angeles nightclub by Soul Train creator Don Cornelius. She became a respected hip-hop choreographer and then caught the eye of film director Spike Lee, who cast her in his 1989 film Do the Right Thing. Perez ultimately went on to become the poor Brooklyn girl who made good; but in her personal life, she continued to struggle with the searing aftereffects of her difficult life, including PTSD and depression. With refreshing candor and sass, Perez transforms the painful details of her life into an inspiring reminder that even the most unforgiving of personal circumstances can be overcome.

A spunky and heartfelt memoir.

JUST FREEDOM A Moral Compass for a Complex World Pettit, Philip Norton (160 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 10, 2014 978-0-393-06397-4

Pettit (Politics and Human Values/ Princeton Univ.; On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, 2013, etc.) offers some clear definitions of justice and freedom and suggests what those definitions have meant in history—and could mean in the contemporary world.

The author writes extensively here about republicanism (lowercase r), but most of his arguments will do little to delight today’s GOP. He devotes an early chapter to the evolving notion of freedom, beginning in ancient Rome and moving through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He arrives at a list of eight freedoms, some of which appear in our Bill of Rights but others of which derive from his definitions: “the freedom to change occupation and employment” and “the freedom to spend your leisure time in one or another activity.” Pettit emphasizes throughout that citizens must be equals, and he continually employs the example of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to show how Nora’s liberty is not genuine since her “freedom” is always conditional upon Torvald’s largesse. In later chapters, Pettit discusses features of states based on freedom and justice, features that include civic protections, infrastructure and insurance (all, he writes, should receive a “basic level of social security, medical security, and judicial security”). He proceeds to a discussion about the relationship between freedom and democracy and argues that a constitution should remain in a perpetual state of revision. Near the end, he looks beyond the United States, considers how his ideas might play out on a world stage and urges the employment of “soft” rather than “hard” power in international relations. He ends by noting that “democracy is hard work” and by blasting unnamed news organizations that are the “enemies of democracy.”

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Pettit’s logical and humane yet ultimately utopian approach to human organizations will leave many muttering, “If only!”

SEVEN FLOWERS And How They Shaped Our World Potter, Jennifer Overlook (304 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 6, 2014 978-1-4683-0817-4

Botanical writer Potter (The Rose, 2011) examines the rich history of “the flowers of healing; of delirium and death; of purity and passion; of greed, envy and virtue; of hope and consolation; of the beauty that drives men wild.”

Going back to evidence of roses more than 35 million years ago, the author traces the beginnings and great influences of that iconic flower, as well as the lotus, lily, opium poppy, sunflower, tulip and orchid. While English gardeners will benefit more from the author’s deep discussion of various species, most other readers will enjoy the luscious botanical descriptions. The earliest descriptions of plants predate Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’ 18th-century binomial nomenclature and were often misnamed. For example, the fleur-de-lis is not a lily but rather a flag iris, and water lilies aren’t really lotuses. In addition to the power of flowers to speak metaphorically, Potter explores their influence on art, literature and especially the medicinal arts. The opium poppy has 40 alkaloids, including codeine and morphine, while the lovely tulip has no use as either nourishment or medicine. Even so, tulip fever led to the financial ruin of thousands in 17th-century Holland. Globalization of different species of flowers began with Alexander the Great, whose army carried plants to their new conquests, and the Romans continued the spread. The trade routes, especially the Silk Road, transferred even more specimens, as did the plant hunters of the British Empire. The spread of the opium poppy can be laid at the feet of the British, as they fought the opium wars to be allowed to export the opium they grew in India to China.

Though Potter is occasionally too thorough in her information, anyone who has ever planted a seed or loved a flower can appreciate the author’s knowledge and devotion.

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“All the President’s Men it’s not, but Ruderman and Laker provide a welcome addition to the shelves of books about the mechanics and logistics of journalistic exposés.” from busted

MOTHER NATURE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World

BUSTED A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love Ruderman, Wendy; Laker, Barbara Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-06-208544-3

Riskin, Dan Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4767-0754-9

The host of Animal Planet’s Monsters Inside Me explores the world of parasites and their human hosts.

Evolutionary biologist Riskin paints a disgusting yet highly entertaining and informative canvas illustrating how living things use behaviors that are often gross and frightening to survive and thrive. The author is a passionate observer of bats, and his career studying them in their various habitats around the world has given him distinct impressions of Mother Nature. Rather than the gentle, incomplete and utopian vision presented by marketers and the media, the author argues for a different perspective. While not dismissing the gifts provided by the natural world, humans should also understand the other side of our natural environment. “I think the disgusting, immoral, and violent side of nature, the side that the grocery stores and shampoo commercials leave out, contains its most awe-inspiring and beautiful parts,” writes the author. Devoting a chapter to each of the seven deadly sins— greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, envy, wrath and pride—Riskin takes readers through remarkable scientific territory. Discussing sloth, the author tears down preconceptions surrounding the idea of nature being a “perfect model of hard work,” sharing stories of parasites who mooch off their hosts, including vampire bats that eat nothing but blood; worms that can grow to four inches long in the human body and cause elephantiasis. In the chapter on wrath, Riskin explodes the myth of nature as a peaceable kingdom. The author’s narrative examining killer whales’ instincts, especially those in captivity, jolts the senses. He explains the difference between venom and poison while discussing poisonous snakes, and woven throughout the narrative are queries surrounding the “roots of fatherly love,” arising from the birth of his son and the role of nature in this relationship.

A fact-filled and amusing trek through nature’s dark side that adroitly combines learning and the yuck factor.

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Two newspaper reporters explain how they broke open police corruption in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia Daily News reporters Ruderman and Laker deliver an All the President’s Men–type book, examining their investigation of police corruption, which began in late 2008 when a law enforcement source suggested that a career criminal named Benny Martinez contact the reporters about illegal activity he had conducted with narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik. Martinez would identify alleged drug dealers and users to Cujdik, whose narcotics squad would raid their homes, keeping some of the proceeds for themselves. In addition, one of Cujdik’s colleagues would sometimes assault women at the site of the raids. Eventually, the reporters learned of a related thread of misconduct in which his narcotics squad would burst in on retail storeowners, disabling security cameras while stealing cash and merchandise under the guise of the merchants selling drug-related supplies. Since the stories fearlessly named names, some Philadelphia cops were demoted amid citizen outrage. Ruderman and Laker disclose, however, that none of the police officers ever lost their jobs or faced criminal charges. The newspaper’s investigations eventually garnered the authors the Pulitzer Prize for reporting. All the while, the newspaper was so strapped for cash that it was in and out of bankruptcy proceedings, with its very existence in doubt. In addition to chronicling their journalistic investigations, Ruderman and Laker tell their personal stories, disclosing their workaholic habits, quirky personalities and deep friendship in a breezy writing style that occasionally borders on maudlin. Despite the stylistic distractions, however, the narrative offers an insightful view of highrisk, high-reward investigative journalism, made more poignant by recent severe cutbacks in newsrooms around the country.

All the President’s Men it’s not, but Ruderman and Laker provide a welcome addition to the shelves of books about the mechanics and logistics of journalistic exposés.

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ADHD DOES NOT EXIST

THERMONUCLEAR MONARCHY Choosing Between Democracy and Doom

Saul, Richard Harper Wave/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $23.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-06-226673-6 Respected American Academy of Pediatrics and American Academy of Neurology fellow Saul makes the controversial claim that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is routinely misdiagnosed.

The author challenges the definition of ADHD as a fundamentally flawed catchall based solely on “symptoms of distractibility and impulsivity [that] are all too real” but may be attributable to “more than twenty medical diagnoses.” Using the analogy of common ailments—e.g., abdominal pain, which may be the result of a variety of problems ranging from indigestion to appendicitis or cancer—Saul makes the point that many different factors can explain a child’s disruptive behavior. He makes a convincing case that a diagnosis of ADHD followed by a prescription for a stimulant, such as Ritalin, has become a routine option for pediatricians at the urging of school authorities and parents. Too often, an overlooked, underlying condition is left untreated while the hapless patient suffers from side effects such as insomnia, weight loss and anxiety. The author illustrates his contention with anecdotal material, using case histories accumulated from his more than 50 years of medical practice. He explains that he routinely administers a series of tests before making any recommendations, beginning with a blood work-up in order to eliminate problems such as hyperthyroidism, iron deficiency or hormone imbalance. He describes instances in which a routine eye examination revealed that a child was unable to see the chalkboard and a similar instance of how a hearing problem was the root of a student’s inability to follow instructions properly. If none of these are at issue, Saul looks for stressrelated psychological problems. Other possibilities range from dyslexia, substance abuse, 20-second epileptic seizures and major psychiatric disorders such as depression. None of these benefit from amphetamine-based medications such as Ritalin.

A provocative, valuable guide for parents, school personnel and medical practitioners who deal with individuals showing symptoms routinely attributed to ADHD.

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Scarry, Elaine Norton (640 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 24, 2014 978-0-393-08008-7

Nuclear weaponry has stealthily altered the substance of our form of government, contends Scarry (Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value/Harvard Univ.; Thinking in an Emergency, 2011, etc.).

Americans generally give little thought to the policy under which the president can order a first strike using nuclear weapons, and yet the president’s power to order, at his sole discretion, the destruction of millions of people is a power far greater than anything imagined by earlier absolute rulers. Scarry presents a frightening argument that the president has assumed extraconstitutional control of weapons of mass destruction and that the doctrine of presidential first use of nuclear weapons has effectively eviscerated our democracy and rendered us a monarchy. She goes on to show how the possession of nuclear weapons is contrary to the social contract as described by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Scarry’s argument is intriguing, but its presentation is flawed. Her philosophical analyses of social contract, consent and emergencies are learned and thorough but far more extensive than necessary to support her thesis. The author’s arguments about American constitutional law, though creative, suffer from superficial analysis and factual misperceptions. For example, she never articulates how the congressional authorizations of hostile action employed since 1941 differ significantly from a resolution formally styled as a declaration of war. Throughout, Scarry fails to differentiate between circumstances arising specifically from the existence of nuclear weapons and those equally attributable to other technologies or political theories. While she regards certain American constitutional provisions as tools through which the people could regain their control over war-making powers, which would likely require renouncing nuclear weapons, she gives no hint of how this might be done and suggests no means for persuading nations that care nothing for our constitution or Hobbesian analysis to abandon their nuclear weapons.

An important discussion that deserves a more disciplined presentation. (5 illustrations)

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“Deeply moving, extraordinarily thought-provoking and entirely humane.” from the broken and the whole

ALL JOY AND NO FUN The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

THE BROKEN AND THE WHOLE Discovering Joy After Heartbreak

Senior, Jennifer Ecco/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-06-207222-1

What can we learn from studying the effects of children on parents?

The past 10 or 15 years will likely be looked back on as a period when parents sank into a morass of identity crisis, with “helicopter parents,” “tiger moms,” and legions of hand-wringing moms and dads trying to figure out where the line is for good intentions based on sound science. It naturally follows that researchers would turn their gazes away from the effects of parents on their children— enough has been written about that to fill a library—and toward the effects of children on their parents. From the starting point of parenting being a “high cost/high reward activity,” New York contributor Senior delves into a broad survey of the topic, parsing out the different arenas in which children are molding the lives of their parents. Employment, marriage, hobbies, habits, relationships with friends and other family, even a parent’s sense of his- or herself: Senior takes an analytical approach to each of these areas, looking at them through a variety of lenses— historical, economic, philosophical, anthropological. She finds that French mothers simultaneously enjoyed caring more for their children and spent less time actually doing it than American women. She examines the phenomenon of “concerted cultivation,” with kids being overscheduled to boost their performances in years to come, and how both narcissism and concern about future opportunities go hand in hand with this level of control. Teenagers, with a heady combination of being both “wild horses and penned veal,” have a great deal of influence over their parents, and the author does an admirable job of reviewing the current state of affairs with technology—specifically, the reversal of roles, with parents asking their kids to friend them on Facebook.

Senior could have made this book twice as long given the minefield parents and their kids face, but what she did produce is well-considered and valuable information.

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Sherman, Charles S. Scribner (224 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4516-5616-9

A meaningful portrayal of how tragedy affected and transformed one family and especially one religious leader.

Sherman, a rabbi in upstate New York, points to a single day in March 1986 as the point at which his family’s life was forever altered. His son, Eyal, was found to have a lesion in the brainstem. Given no hope for recovery without aggressive treatment, doctors attempted an ambitious surgery, which kept Eyal alive but left him a quadriplegic. It was the beginning of three decades of traumatic health issues, lengthy hospital stays, and daily, mundane care needs stretching around the clock. Sherman does not set out merely to tell his son’s story, or even that of him and his family. Instead, he emphasizes how this experience has transformed them, how it has shaped him as a man of faith and how it has thoroughly changed how he understands other people. Though Sherman describes many situations filled with heartbreaking pain, fear and even monotony, his true focus is on community. He examines the relationships within his family and how his son’s very life is a precious gift.

He also explores his congregation, looking at how they have helped each other (and at times stumbled) and how his ministry to others has grown deeper through difficult experiences. Lastly, Sherman focuses on the larger community—e.g., total strangers who treated them with extraordinary kindness or those of other religions and walks of life with whom he has been able to bond.

Throughout, Sherman ties his narrative to his faith, exploring how everything he has experienced, from anger to joy, is mirrored in Scripture. “When I heard Eyal’s terrible prognosis, my life was shattered,” he writes. “But eventually, as Moses did, I got up and climbed the mountain again.”

Deeply moving, extraordinarily thought-provoking and entirely humane. (Events in Baltimore, Charleston, S.C., Greenwich, Conn., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Toronto, Washington, D.C.)

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A BREAST CANCER ALPHABET

Sikka, Madhulika Crown (208 pp.) $19.00 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-385-34851-5

A compilation of thoughts by a woman with breast cancer.

When she received her diagnosis (“the most devastating news I had ever had in my life”), NPR News executive Sikka had just finished an interview with President Barack Obama, and his statements swirled with the myriad of thoughts suddenly rushing through the author’s mind. “What my doctor was saying competed with words from the president’s interview in this cloud in my head,” she writes. Fortunately, she had numerous friends and family to help her through the monthslong process of mastectomy, chemotherapy and recovery. Sikka has gathered together her reflections and discoveries of being in “Cancerland” in an A-to-Z guidebook to the entire process of cancer diagnosis, treatment and life afterward. The author examines the process of coping with the waves of feelings one will experience (anxiety, guilt, indignity and others), the need for pampering and the odds of a diagnosis—one in eight women in the United States will get breast cancer. Sikka frankly explores the nature of breasts and how these intimate parts of the body suddenly become everyone’s business, from doctors and nurses to brothers and male co-workers. She discusses the lack of sexual desire caused by the chemotherapy and pain and the need to use any and all available drugs.

“Drugs are your friends,” she writes. “Let me repeat, drugs, pharmaceuticals of all kinds for all things, are your friends.

Pill-popping, vein-coursing drugs are your friends.” Whether you want to Quit, need Kindness from a friend, or long for a Vacation, Sikka gives counsel. Sometimes humorous, always honest and straightforward, this little book offers the perfect combination of practical advice and personal musings to help any woman, her family and her friends handle the complicated road through Cancerland.

Insightful, helpful comments on living with breast cancer.

LADY IN THE DARK Iris Barry and the Art of Film

Sitton, Robert Columbia Univ. (512 pp.) $40.00 | $39.99 e-book | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-231-16578-5 978-0-231-53714-8 e-book

Iris Barry (1895–1969) is one of the main reasons we can still see silent movies of Hollywood, Europe and Russia. Media and culture professor Sitton exhaustively traces Barry’s career from aspiring poet to playwright, biographer and film critic.

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In 1916, Ezra Pound encouraged Barry to join his Bloomsbury coterie, where she met the love of her life, Wyndham Lewis. Their two children were generally ignored, and neither knew of the other’s existence; parenthood was certainly not Barry’s strong point. In 1923, Barry landed a job as film critic for the London Spectator, and her career blossomed from there. As she grew and learned, she managed to connect with all the right people—e.g., T.S. Eliot and Sidney Bernstein, with whom she founded the Film Society in London in 1925. This was the beginning of her quest to raise cinema from a lower-class beer-hall diversion to a legitimate art form, and she convinced European film societies to contribute copies of their films for preservation. Though her work raised film to a high art, however, she never defined the criteria for a good film. Her introduction to art historian Alfred Barr proved to be the key to her involvement in the film library at the Museum of Modern Art. While her husband, John Abbott, got most of the credit, it was Iris who collected and cataloged the international library of films that would have been destroyed in World War II. Life at MOMA, the involvement in wartime propaganda, the gossipy tale of Barr’s replacement by Abbott and the easing out of Iris from her life’s work all help reduce the ennui of Sitton’s namedropping, long quotes and abundance of information in general.

Film students will enjoy this book; however, to learn criticism, they should read Barry’s Let’s Go to the Pictures (1926).

REVERTIGO An Off-Kilter Memoir

Skloot, Floyd Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin Press (220 pp.) $26.95 | $16.95 e-book | Mar. 17, 2014 978-0-299-29950-7 978-0-299-29953-8 e-book

A wide-ranging collection of literary essays in the guise of a memoir.

“At the center of [this book],” writes prolific poet, novelist and essayist Skloot (The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life, 2008), “is an attack of unrelenting vertigo that began—out of nowhere—on the morning of March 27, 2009, and ended on the evening of August 12, 2009, as suddenly as it had begun. Those 138 days seemed so anomalous, such a weird and isolated period in my life.” Well, yes and no. As it turns out, a viral attack in the brain some two decades earlier might well have presaged the vertigo, and some hip problems the author later suffered initially seemed equally out of the blue.

Yet less than half of these essays (most previously published though often revised here) deal specifically with issues of health and disorientation, and some of the best—“Senior Speech,” about the stigma of speaking Brooklynese, and “The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read” (by Styron, Bellow, Mann et al.)—work better as stand-alone pieces than in contributing to a larger thematic whole. Perhaps best of all is “Anniversary Fever,” which combines Skloot’s deep appreciation |

“A fast-paced, riveting account of exploration and settlement, suffering and survival, treachery and death.” from astoria

for poetry (and T.S. Eliot in particular) with a sense of how “the marking of anniversaries…helps me find order in a world that can be snarled and chaotic for anyone, not just for the brain damaged, or to find harmony in the jangle and dissonance of experience.” More than once, he shows a father’s pride in the success of daughter Rebecca’s best-selling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: “I’ll admit to having twenty-seven foreign and five American editions.”

At the age of 66, the author finds connections among these pieces that are stronger than those readers might discover.

ASTORIA Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival Stark, Peter Ecco/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-06-221829-2

A correspondent for Outside recovers a remarkable piece of history: the story of America’s first colony on the continent’s West coast.

Beginning in 1810, John Jacob Astor (1763–1848) set in motion an audacious plan to create “the largest commercial enterprise the world has ever known.” He planned to control North America’s entire fur trade by establishing a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River, the lynchpin of a network extending west to the Pacific Rim and east to Europe. President Thomas Jefferson encouraged the venture, envisioning Astor’s proposed settlement as the beginning of a “sister democracy” to the United States. From his base in Manhattan, Astor launched a two-pronged expedition: an Overland Party that carved a path later known as the Oregon Trail and a Sea-Going Party that sailed around Cape Horn to the coastal region west of the Rockies. Stark (The Last Empty Places: A Past and Present Journey through the Blank Spots on the American Map, 2010, etc.) spins the tale of these arduous journeys, the founding of Astoria and the outpost’s abandonment during the War of 1812. He focuses on the tyrannical sea captain, the beleaguered, consensus-seeking businessman, and the shady, self-important fur trader who headed the parties and the French voyageurs, Yankee seamen, and Scottish woodsmen they commanded, as well as the Native American tribes they encountered. If the character of Astor remains indistinct, not so the horrors faced by the Astorians.

Their various ordeals give Stark the chance to comment on cold water immersion and hypothermia, the efficacy of pounded, dried wild cherries in combating scurvy, and the intriguing role of what we would today call PTSD in the early exploration of North America. Near the end of his life, Astor employed Washington Irving to tell the astonishing story of Astoria. With Stark, this almost unbelievable tale remains in expert hands.

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WHISTLER A Life for Art’s Sake

Sutherland, Daniel E. Yale Univ. (432 pp.) $40.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-300-20346-2

An unfussy, thoroughgoing look at a multifaceted, restless genius.

Civil War historian Sutherland (History/Univ. of Arkansas; A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, 2009, etc.) does not pass judgment too harshly on the brilliant, controversial and litigious American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), who fought to refashion art criticism from the artist’s point of view. The author clearly brings out Whistler’s uniqueness in terms of his technique; he was both a kind of naturalist and a trailblazing user of etching and pastels. The eldest of a large family, born in Lowell, Mass., Whistler spent a formative six years in St. Petersburg, Russia, when his engineer father was hired by the czar to help build the railroad; learning French turned out to be an important asset for Whistler when he began to pursue his career as an artist in Paris. Intractable and headstrong, winning and personable, he was bounced out of his father’s alma mater, West Point, and was finally able to play at being the young bohemian in Paris.

With his practiced drawing talent and curiosity, he absorbed the styles of the masters around him, from classicism to realism to naturalism to photography. He began to hone his own style— e.g., in At the Piano and The White Girl, which was his “first tentative step away from narrative painting…one of the great artistic controversies of the century.” Indeed, in London, Whistler took his “art for art’s sake” credo to combative new heights by taking critic John Ruskin to task for disparaging his delicate, quick brush technique. While Whistler’s notoriety grew, the prices of his paintings did not, and he was often insolvent, selfpromoting yet fiercely devoted to his craft. In this immensely readable work, Sutherland brings out how enormously influential Whistler became to younger artists, especially in Scotland.

A lively addition to the understanding of this difficult and important American artist.

MONEY MANIA Booms, Panics, and Busts from Ancient Rome to the Great Meltdown

Swarup, Bob Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-60819-841-2

Cosmologist-turned–investment manager and journalist Swarup trades investigations of the heavens to pursue something much more down to earth, mining 25 centuries of financial crises and bubbles. The results are unimpressive. kirkus.com

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The author sets out “to understand why crises occur with such regularity and why we never seem to learn.” He concedes that the view that all crises are bad is “too simplistic” and that they “evolve down different routes.” For historical continuity, he tracks the relation between money, which represents “a leveraging of human emotions,” and psychology. Swarup focuses on excesses and shortages of money as causes. During the early years of the Roman Empire, Emperor Augustus governed his empire with loose money policies, and his successor, Tiberius, caused a depression when he tightened the reins on the monetary system. The author then examines a series of such expansions and contractions throughout history—e.g., the Lehman bankruptcy crisis of 2008, the Japanese deflation of the 1990s, Dutch tulip-mania of the 17th century and several others. Swarup’s evaluative efforts rely heavily on his discussion of money. He is a monetarist who believes that “money is a commodity” and has an intrinsic value of its own, which can be traded. Like the followers of Friedrich Hayek, his reference points are provided by unqualified freedom for markets combined with a minimalist consideration of the lawful functions of government. In real life, neither extreme is ever encountered in its pure form.

Thus he supports virtual monies like Bitcoin or the Linden of Second Life. The author doesn’t accept that the differences also undermine his own attempt to unify the disparate cases and that pop psychology and trendy behavioral economics don’t fill the void.

There are many good books on this subject; this is not one of them.

THE BOHEMIANS Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Tarnoff, Ben Penguin Press (336 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 24, 2014 978-1-59420-473-9

Four ambitious writers star in this literary history.

Journalist Tarnoff (A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers, 2011) tells a lively story of mid-19th-century San Francisco, focused on champagne-swilling Mark Twain, foppish Bret Harte, poet and essayist Charles Warren Stoddard, and little-remembered poet Ina Coolbrith. Despite the book’s hyperbolic subtitle, Tarnoff does not make a case for these writers’ revolutionary impact on American literature; nor, in fact, that Stoddard and Coolbrith had any impact at all. In the 1860s, Harte was well-known for humorous short stories about California life, but by 1871, when he came East for a speaking tour, his career was over. “It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent,” Mark Twain announced. Although Twain had by then reconciled with his 78

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one-time rival, he did not mourn Harte’s literary downfall.

His star was rising, partly due to his recognition by William Dean Howells, the influential editor of the Atlantic Monthly; partly due to his status as a brilliant performer who attracted huge audiences to his one-man shows; partly due to the fact that readers east of the Mississippi were enthralled by fiction set on the raunchy frontier. Exuberant stories gave the young nation new myths, establishing the West as “a place of paradox and incongruity, where conventional rules of sentiment and syntax broke down, and humor overlaid everything.” Twain proved to be a master of this new genre. In such works as Innocents Abroad, a best-seller in 1869, Twain’s characters were ordinary middle Americans, honest, open and free of an old-world veneer of sophistication: “They belonged to a country of the future: an innovative, economically ascendant nation with a style all its own.”

It may be, as Tarnoff asserts, that these writers spent the best years of their lives in California, but only Twain, living in New York and Connecticut, left a lasting literary legacy.

TEACHING THE CAT TO SIT A Memoir Theall, Michelle Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $24.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-4516-9729-2

A travel and fitness journalist’s account of her struggles to reconcile strong Catholic beliefs with both homosexuality and motherhood.

In a narrative that deftly moves between past and present, Theall tells the moving story of how she found self-acceptance as a lesbian mother of faith. The black sheep in a strict Roman Catholic household, she knew that “God had made [her] a girl,” but that didn’t stop her from arm-wrestling the boys in school and wishing that she could be like her Happy Days hero, the Fonz. Living in small-town Texas didn’t help matters. Neither did living near her best friend’s father, a man who raped her when she was 11. So when the family moved to Dallas, she was thrilled. But she was still an outsider, even in the big city. To escape the pain of being different, Theall joined the track team and bonded with a coach she later discovered was lesbian. She knew that Catholicism condemned all forms of homosexual love, but she also realized that the coach and her partner were “a refuge.” Despite the experience of a lesbian relationship in college, Theall remained conflicted about her sexual identity until she was nearly 30. Acceptance from her family, especially her mother, remained incomplete and came with great difficulty. But the greatest challenge would come later, after she had settled down with her partner to raise an adopted son. The same church that had caused her to feel so much shame tried to force her child out of the Catholicrun school due to her lesbianism. In the journey away from Catholicism and the need for maternal approval that followed, |

“The world’s culture dissected, one cunning, bemused essay at a time.” from what would lynne tillman do?

DEFIANT The POWs Who Endured Vietnam’s Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned

Theall eventually found peace. She also came to understand that the “raging love” between her and her mother was part of what made them “something more.”

A searingly honest memoir of faith, sexuality and motherhood.

Townley, Alvin Dunne/St. Martin’s (432 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-250-00653-0 978-1-250-03761-9 e-book

WHAT WOULD LYNNE TILLMAN DO?

Tillman, Lynne Red Lemonade/Cursor (380 pp.) $16.95 paper | Apr. 10, 2014 978-1-935869-21-4 A miscellany of essays, critiques, narrative explorations and diversions from a literary iconoclast.

These are shorter works by Tillman (Someday This Will Be Funny, 2011, etc.), but it’s a generous set, allowing one essay for each letter of the alphabet. The collection starts with a return to previous targets, as “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol” examines the little-known 1968 book a: A Novel using a shopping list as context for delving into Tillman’s beloved Warhol. “Nothing is Lost or Found: Desperately Seeking Paul and Jane Bowles” is a fond remembrance of the famously besotted writers. A little later, “White Cool” gives a heartbreaking flash of famed jazz musician Chet Baker. Tillman is a fantastic writer in long-form or short, and the exercise of turning that famous intellect on herself seems to make her more abrupt yet more focused. In “Try Again,” she discusses the creative process: “No one strong-arms you into becoming an artist or writer—most often you’re dissuaded—and volunteers who bemoan their chosen gig seem disingenuous. Visual artists are often called to account for their choices and asked to defend their positions. Few occupations other than finance, politics and crime entail this reckoning. Writers and artists may ask themselves why they make art or write, and many feel the pointlessness of their self-chosen jobs, but all rebuttals and answers to their existential questions rest on faith in Art or Literature. Faith itself will be tested.” The collection doesn’t even really serve as an introduction to Tillman’s work, although it certainly represents her wit. The most weighty piece here is “A Mole in the House of the Modern,” a piercing deconstruction of Edith Wharton. In short, it’s a nonessential pastiche of book reviews and other miscellaneous writings that reads less as a collage and more like someone handed you one drawer of a great writer’s file cabinet.

The world’s culture dissected, one cunning, bemused essay at a time.

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Grim account of the torture and isolation suffered by U.S. airmen taken prisoner in North Vietnam.

Townley (Spirit of Adventure: Eagle Scouts and the Making of America’s Future, 2009, etc.) composes a complex historical narrative covering roughly 1965 to 1973, following two parallel elements: the experiences of POWs in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” contrasted with their families’ anguish and, more broadly, the American military’s declining fortunes in the conflict (and those of presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon). Operation Rolling Thunder, the Johnson administration’s initial air campaign against North Vietnam, resulted in a spike in downed aircraft and, ultimately, hundreds of prisoners; the North Vietnamese were determined to treat captured airmen as “war criminals” not deserving of Geneva Convention protections and to extract confessions from them for propaganda purposes. Townley focuses on “the Alcatraz Gang,” POWs who most resisted their captors, communicating covertly and documenting their torture in ingenious ways. “Their actions and unity not only ruined the Camp Authority’s plans,” writes the author, “but also enabled these men to keep their wits and selfconfidence.” Meanwhile, at home, their wives at first kept silent about their husbands’ plight; the U.S. government “discouraged releasing any facts that might offend North Vietnam and disrupt the peace talks.” As they connected with each other, they became impatient with governmental inaction. By 1970, they had taken a more public profile, forming the National League of Families, demanding action from the Nixon administration and even facing North Vietnamese diplomats at the long-running Paris peace talks. Eventually, the POW cause “[bound] citizens of all politics to the servicemen fighting the war, even as more Americans turned against the conflict.” But most of the narrative focuses on the POWs’ hellish daily experiences.

An inspirational yet grueling read that demonstrates the price some paid for patriotism in a different era and another unpopular war. (22 b/w photos)

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MISSION AT NUREMBERG An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis Townsend, Tim Morrow/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-06-199719-8 978-0-06-230019-5 e-book 978-0-06-229861-4 Lg. Prt.

In his first book, Townsend, a writer and editor with the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project, examines World War II’s most unusual ministry: the pastoring of the architects of the Third Reich.

On Nov. 20, 1945, the Allies commenced the Nuremberg Trials, an unprecedented proceeding that charged Hitler’s top lieutenants—Goering, Kesselring et al.—with conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity. Due to the strict security surrounding the prisoners, the Chaplain Corps was called upon for the first time in its 230-year history to supply religious counseling to America’s enemies. Assigned to this controversial task since he was Lutheran (like so many of the German prisoners), spoke the language and had experience with prison ministries, Chaplain Henry Gerecke (1893–1961) worked for nearly a year to rescue the souls of some of history’s most notorious defendants. Gerecke’s prewar life story, a quick review of the Chaplain Corps’ evolution, scene-setting to explain the Nuremberg tribunal’s composition and mission, thumbnail sketches of the Nazi henchmen and a recitation of the atrocities they engineered, and prison life for the war criminals are all part of Townsend’s story. However, he focuses most on Gerecke’s delicate interactions with his highly unusual flock. Passages recalling the middle-aged St. Louis preacher’s counseling of Goering (and the decision to deny the Luftwaffe commander Holy Communion) and Gerecke’s first meeting with Rudolf Hess are especially well-done. Townsend authoritatively addresses the excruciating moral and religious issues confronting wartime chaplains and deftly explains the role of a spiritual adviser in bringing the wrongdoer, even one seemingly beyond redemption, back to “a place of restoration.”

Gerecke’s story is only a footnote to “the trial of the century,” but Townsend thoroughly understands and skillfully handles the rich, potentially explosive material it contains. (b/w photo insert)

HOTEL FLORIDA Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

Vaill, Amanda Farrar, Straus and Giroux (464 pp.) $28.00 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-374-17299-2

Vaill (Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, 2006, etc.) follows a handful of characters (some are celebrities, some not) through the Spanish Civil War. Subdividing her chapters by months, the author sets herself a difficult task: chasing Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Arturo Barea, Ilsa Kulcsar, Endre Friedmann (aka Robert Capa) and Gerta Pohorylle through the political and military chaos in Spain and elsewhere. Among the many popping up for cameos are Stephen Spender, Eric Blair (George Orwell) and John Dos Passos. Although it will be difficult for readers to turn their eyes away from the power couple (Hemingway and Gellhorn), Vaill does a good job of getting us deeply interested in the lives, experiences and, sadly, the deaths of some of the others. It helps her cause, too, that she elected to portray Hemingway in the most unflattering (and deserved?) light. We see his pettiness and his professional jealousy; we watch him swinging away at people in bars. Early in the conflict, we also see Capa and other photographers staging acting scenes (including, in a way, his famous image of a wounded warrior in midfall on a Spanish hillside) and Gellhorn fabricating a story about a lynching in the American South. It was certainly a different time in journalism.

Vaill shows us images of incredible courage—especially Capa’s— and political intrigue (the Russians were especially perfidious— and Stalin’s reeking presence) and the absolute confusion that reigned. (The truth concealed itself quite well.) She also points us toward Hitler, and we witness his invasion of Austria and his designs on Czechoslovakia. A touching epilogue records the deaths of all her principals.

War, sex, friendship, betrayal, celebrity, rivalry, jealousy, idealism, foolishness and foppery—all this and more gather in the lobby of Madrid’s Hotel Florida.

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age

Wagner, Robert J. with Eyman, Scott Viking (272 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-670-02609-8

The star of such films and TV shows as A Kiss Before Dying and It Takes a Thief revisits the architecture, fashion, restaurants and pastimes of Hollywood’s golden age through anecdotes and personal memories.

With veteran biographer and film historian Eyman (Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, 2010, etc.), with 80

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“Digressive, amusing, anecdotal, legend-shattering, self-deprecating and passionate—just what you want in a friend sitting beside you at the ballpark.” from a nice little place on the north side

whom he collaborated on his previous memoir (Pieces of My Heart, 2008), Wagner presents a brisk account of early Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, their surrounding neighborhoods and the silver screen notables who frequented them, including James Cagney, Gloria Swanson, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart and many others. Topical chapters provide generous vistas on a world marked by exclusivity. The author dedicates a substantial, meticulous chapter to houses and hotels, with emphasis on the home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Pickfair; Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon Lair; the Beverly Hills Hotel; and similarly iconic structures. Tracking the shift from a pre-1929 “architecture as entertainment” perspective to a less opulent style, Wagner enlivens many sites and landscapes that have largely disappeared. For dedicated movie buffs, a handful of choice remarks on the personal habits of stars provides respite from tedious details. Other chapters consider facets of privilege, from a preference among certain male stars for Englishinspired wardrobes to the nightlife of the times. A few mild, curmudgeonly laments on current realities—such as paparazzi swarms, the bottom-line nature of moviemaking and an increasing informality that sharply contrasts with bygone glamour— underscore the actor’s nostalgia for the studio days, yet they stop short of idealizing; he briefly acknowledges the industry’s later midcentury problems. Ultimately, the book is a charmed and mostly charming tribute to off-screen lives during a period many may regard as Hollywood’s finest.

A diverting ancillary note to heavier biographies.

THE SUGAR SEASON A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family’s Quest for the Sweetest Harvest

Whynott, Douglas Da Capo Lifelong/Perseus (256 pp.) $24.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-306-82204-9

An inside look at the maple syrup industry.

From small, family-operated sugarhouses that use metal buckets to collect sap to mega-million–dollar outfits that run thousands of miles of plastic tubing over hundreds of acres of maple trees, Whynott (Writing/Emerson Coll.; A Country Practice: Scenes from the Veterinary Life, 2004, etc.) takes readers behind the often closed doors of the syrup industry in both the United States and Canada. Closely following one man’s year of operation, the author examines the proper weather conditions required for the sap to run, explains in detail the process of reverse osmosis, which reduces the amount of water in the sap and thereby concentrates the sugar content, and chronicles the sometimesrisky business of buying and selling sap and syrup based on projections and borrowed money. Whynott provides details on the shapes, styles and designs of sugarhouses and explains how syrup is graded. Through extensive meteorological data and numerous statistics—e.g., one man’s 63,865 taps produced 1,373 gallons of |

syrup during a seven-hour boil, the 2010 U.S. production was 20 million pounds, while the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, with more than 7,000 members, made five times that amount in 2012—Whynott shows the intimate, almost reverent relationship the maple producers have with their trees. They have been handed down from generation to generation like prized family heirlooms, valued not only for their moneymaking abilities, but for their majesty and beauty. Also evident is the deep concern syrup producers have regarding climate change, as the entire industry is dependent on certain weather conditions.

These conditions are in constant flux, placing a multimilliondollar industry in possible jeopardy.

Thorough research provides fascinating insight into the sweet business of maple syrup. (8 pages of b/w photos)

A NICE LITTLE PLACE ON THE NORTH SIDE Wrigley Field at One Hundred

Will, George F. Crown Archetype (160 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-385-34931-4

Veteran conservative political pundit Will (One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation, 2009, etc.) writes an affectionate birthday card to the home of his beloved Chicago Cubs.

The author, who has written often about baseball (Bunts: Pete Rose, Curt Flood, Camden Yards and Other Reflections on Baseball, 1997, etc.) as well as issuing his periodic poundings of liberals and celebrations of conservatives, traces his Cub fandom back to 1948, when he was 7. He notes that since his birth, the Cubs are nearly 700 games below .500, a sad record that in a perverse way unites their fans. (Will compares the Cubs to Miss Havisham, the jilted bride in Great Expectations.) This is not a traditional, chronological history but an emotional one; in fact, greedy readers will find little about the construction of the place—though there is a nice little section about the decision to plant ivy to crawl along the outfield wall. Along the way, readers will learn about a baseball-related shooting that inspired Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), some history of the odd Wrigley family, the relationship between beer and attendance at baseball games, some discoveries by baseball statistician Bill James, the surprising news that Jack Ruby (yes, he who shot Lee Harvey Oswald) once was a vendor at Wrigley and that the Cubs used to train on Santa Catalina Island. Of course, it wouldn’t be George-Will-on-baseball without allusions to Dickens, Aristotle and some other luminaries. He dispels a few myths along the way. For example, the famed double-play combo (Tinker to Evers to Chance) actually turned two very rarely, and he waxes philosophical a bit, ruminating about how fandom is like tribalism.

Digressive, amusing, anecdotal, legend-shattering, self-deprecating and passionate—just what you want in a friend sitting beside you at the ballpark. kirkus.com

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“Woolfson is an elegant, precise writer, and this transcendent memoir conveys exquisitely the vibrant world she inhabits.” from field notes from a hidden city

FIELD NOTES FROM A HIDDEN CITY An Urban Nature Diary

SMART PEOPLE SHOULD BUILD THINGS How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America

Woolfson, Esther Counterpoint (368 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 7, 2014 978-1-61902-240-9

Chilly Aberdeen, Scotland, may seem an unlikely place to investigate the natural world, but Woolfson (Corvus: A Life with Birds, 2009) offers a vivid portrait of birds, animals, insects and plants—and her place among them—in the city where she has lived for decades.

Located at 57 degrees north latitude, Aberdeen is cold, damp and stark, with changeable weather that “flits and blows, defies forecast and forecasters” to emerge as “several seasons in a day, only some of them recognizable….” Weather is a frequent topic of conversation, and adverse weather, many believe, is a punishment for hubris or, perhaps, too much joy. “Our climate is sombre,” Woolfson writes, “our mood, our stone, our mode of building against the weather.” In a gesture of hopefulness, she planted roses in her garden, but along with her clematis, it died during a cold spell. But other species flourished: rooks and jackdaws, gray squirrels and butterflies, oystercatchers and bluebells. Some were labeled pests: Woolfson called an exterminator to get rid of rats living under her house, and the city took measures to circumscribe starlings. The author cautions against intervening: “[W]ithin the limited framework of the artificial spaces of nature we have created, learning to stand back is all we can do.” Taking us through a year in Aberdeen, Woolfson closely observed changes in bird life and animal visitors, soil and sky: “different kinds of wind, different kinds of snow, different kinds of twilight.” Interwoven with diarylike entries are longer meditations on spiders, pigeons, jackdaws, sparrows and the complexities of the slug, who shoots a “love dart” as part of its mating behavior—a phenomenon, Woolfson speculates, that’s possibly the origin of Cupid’s arrow.

Woolfson is an elegant, precise writer, and this transcendent memoir conveys exquisitely the vibrant world she inhabits.

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Yang, Andrew Harper Business (272 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 24, 2014 978-0-06-229204-9

A small-business guidebook promoting entrepreneurialism over a corporate career.

Yang, the founder of Venture for America, a program steering new college graduates toward startup businesses, believes in the power of innovation and venture development. In his first book, which could be perceived as a thinly veiled promotional vehicle for his nonprofit organization, the author clearly advances the idea of new business-building rather than universities’ robotically funneling top grads toward traditional high-profile arenas like financial institutions, law firms or management consultancies. “I meet seniors in college all the time,” writes Yang, “and they have a very vague idea of what roles are available to them beyond the obvious ones and little sense of how the economy functions.” On the other hand, he writes, there are unlimited possibilities in startup businesses once candidates gain training and on-site experience. Yang generously shares his own personal journey: being raised “conscious of money,” spending uninspiring years in law school, then creating a succession of influential companies that made him a millionaire at age 34. His success story of finding fulfillment in the nonprofit sector after overcoming the harsh realities of student loan debt and fleeting job satisfaction forms the foundation of the book’s principles of entrepreneurial team building, dedication and earnest product development. Yang firmly believes initiatives like Venture for America stimulate new graduates to build startup businesses rather than becoming individual contributors in what is often a creativity-stifling corporate world environment. This enterprising outlook expands employment options and opportunities in nontraditional job sectors, as well. The author’s use of business statistics and bullet-pointed lists of his own lessons learned are enlightening and frequently surprising and moves much of his pro-entrepreneurship slant from conventional wisdom into fact-based guidance for the “young, hungry talent” he hopes will help rebuild the American economy.

A galvanizing amalgam of personal history, acquired business wisdom and mentorship.

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children’s & teen

I LIVED ON BUTTERFLY HILL

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Agosín, Marjorie Illus. by White, Lee Translated by O’Connor, E.M. Atheneum (464 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4169-5344-9 978-1-4424-9476-3 e-book

A LION IN PARIS by Beatrice Alemagna............................................85 THE CROSSOVER by Kwame Alexander............................................85 NEVER ENDING by Martyn Bedford..................................................87 A WOMAN IN THE HOUSE (AND SENATE) by Ilene Cooper; illus. by Elizabeth Baddley...................................................................91 SEVEN WILD SISTERS by Charles de Lint; illus. by Charles Vess...110 GRANDFATHER GANDHI by Arun Gandhi; Bethany Hegedus; illus. by Evan Turk............................................................................... 99 MATILDA’S CAT by Emily Gravett....................................................102 NEW KID by Tim Green..................................................................... 103 CINDERELLA by Steven Guarnaccia................................................ 103 EXTRAORDINARY JANE by Hannah E. Harrison......................... 104 THE CHILDREN OF THE KING by Sonya Hartnett......................... 104 THE MARK OF THE DRAGONFLY by Jaleigh Johnson..................... 107 THE STORY OF OWEN by E.K. Johnston......................................... 107 P.K. PINKERTON AND THE PISTOL-PACKING WIDOWS

by Caroline Lawrence.........................................................................109 THE CRACKS IN THE KINGDOM by Jaclyn Moriarty.................... 112 HI, KOO! by Jon J. Muth.................................................................... 112 SPARKY! by Jenny Offill; illus. by Chris Appelhans.......................... 113

With a loving and financially secure family and a close group of friends, 11-year-old Celeste’s life in Valparaíso, Chile, is relatively carefree—until the coup that unseats the president and establishes a dictatorship.

People begin to be disappeared. Her parents, both doctors running a clinic for the poor, are now subversives who must go into hiding in order to keep themselves and Celeste safe. As the situation worsens, Celeste herself must leave her homeland to stay with her aunt in faraway Maine. She spends three years in this cold and solitary land. As she finally begins to fit in, the time comes to return home. She finds her country different, filled with the fog of sadness. But she also finds opportunities: to reconnect, rebuild and forgive. Though the size and scope of this novel may appear daunting, the beautiful language, compelling characters and short chapters make it a captivating read. For some, the extensive denouement may go on a touch too long, but most will be pleased to have a little extra time with Celeste as she and her community rebuild their lives in a new Chile.

Award-winning Chilean author and poet Agosín’s debut for young people is a lyrically ambitious tale of exile and reunification. (Historical fiction. 10-14)

PANIC by Lauren Oliver.................................................................... 113

MUSIC EVERYWHERE!

HIDDEN LIKE ANNE FRANK by Marcel Prins; Peter Henk Steenhuis; trans. by Laura Watkinson.............................114

Ajmera, Maya; Derstine, Elise Hofer; Pon, Cynthia Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-57091-936-7 978-1-57091-937-4 paper 978-1-60734-670-8 e-book

GANDHI by Jason Quinn; illus. by Sachin Nagar.............................114 AVIARY WONDERS INC. by Kate Samworth.................................. 117 ONE BUSY DAY by Lola M. Schaefer; illus. by Jessica Meserve...... 117 THREATENED by Eliot Schrefer........................................................ 118 PEEK-A-BOO BUNNY by Holly Surplice..........................................120 SUGAR HILL by Carole Boston Weatherford; illus. by R. Gregory Christie............................................................... 121 DISNEY ANIMATED by Disney Publishing Worldwide; TouchPress........................................................................................... 123 |

“We love music!”

In the tradition of previous photo essays such as Faith (2009), Our Grandparents (2010) and What We Wear (2012), Ajmera and her co-authors have here assembled a collection of charming photographs showing children enjoying music in 35 countries around the world. Some play instruments, like the

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Venezuelan girl practicing her violin on the title page. Others clap, dance, sing along and listen. On the Cook Islands, a girl with a flower crown blows a conch shell for a festival. In Scotland, a very young bagpiper marches at the Highland Games.

Novice Buddhists blow long horns in a temple in Bhutan, and young Indonesians play together in a gamelan orchestra. Some are proud performers, others rapt in concentration; their enjoyment is evident. The selection of images is wide-ranging, and the underlying message, inclusive. On each spread, well-chosen and crisply reproduced photographs that vary in size are set against solid, colored backgrounds with a single sentence of text and identifying captions. The variety of musical instruments, traditional and improvised, will gladden the hearts of teachers and those who want to encourage their children’s appreciation for music. The backmatter includes a map, glossary and suggestions for readers’ own music-making.

A medley perfectly tuned. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

BUGGED How Insects Changed History

Albee, Sarah Illus. by Leighton, Robert Walker (176 pp.) $16.99 paper | $23.89 PLB | Apr. 15, 2014 978-0-8027-3422-8 978-0-8027-3423-5 PLB From the creators of Poop Happened!

(2010), a swarm of bug-driven disasters suffered through the centuries.

Though Albee at least makes mention of honeybees, silkworms, the parasitic wasps used for biological control, and even, provocatively if a tad off topic, a study that suggests intestinal worms make some people healthier, the focus here is on the dark side. Setting readers up for major “ick” moments, the introduction includes a disingenuous warning that squeamish readers should skip the explicit “TMI” side boxes (as if!). The chronicle proper opens with a lurid picture of our historically unhygienic ways and introductions to the four “Bad-News Bugs” most responsible for spreading microbial maladies. Successive chapters (with jocular headers: “Of Lice and Men”; “Twentieth Century Pox”) detail the damage wrought by crop-devouring insects as well as the symptoms and effects of insect-borne epidemics, pandemics and tropical diseases. Along with the aforementioned TMI features, the pages are liberally endowed with side profiles of “Bug Thugs” and human notables, quick quotes and other tidbits, as well as maps, photos, period images and Leighton’s lighthearted cartoon vignettes. Ominous observations toward the end that pesticide-resistant bugs and microbes are on the rise don’t entirely spoil the fun.

Tailor-made for epidemiologists-in-the-making and connoisseurs of the gross. (glossary, multimedia information sources, index) (Nonfiction. 11-14)

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BILLY THE GOAT’S BIG BREAKFAST

Alborough, Jez Illus. by Alborough, Jez Kane/Miller (32 pp.) $12.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-61067-190-3

Billy Goat bites off more than he should.

“Nat the Cat made a breakfast to share / with her friends Billy Goat and Hugo Hare. / She was going to make a breakfast treat, / with some lovely homemade bread to eat.” Nat has set the dough out to rise when Billy arrives early. Billy doesn’t want to wait for Hugo, so to distract him, Nat suggests Billy set the table. While Nat is out gathering flowers for the centerpiece, Billy sets the table…but he just can’t resist the jug of juice. Then he sees the bread and takes a bite before he realizes it isn’t cooked. Hugo and Nat arrive, and Billy has to swallow—and then his tummy starts to bloat. Hugo and Billy try to hide the belly from Nat, but Billy confesses. After a breakfast of store-bought juice and what’s left of the dough (now cooked), Nat writes a song about Billy’s impatience, and the friends sing along. Alborough’s first of two companion books to Nat the Cat’s Sunny Smile (2013) is less charming than its predecessor. The song that appears as sheet music in the story and is available online is a bit flat and didactic, much like the story itself, and Alborough’s cheery illustrations are chopped up by the talky text.

Here’s hoping Hugo’s forthcoming tale will have more bounce. (Picture book. 4-7)

ACROBAT

Alborozo Illus. by Alborozo Child’s Play (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 31, 2014 978-1-84643-634-5 In Alborozo’s curious—bordering on surreal—tale, a clown finds that attention is hard to grab these days.

A circus clown is doing his thing for the audience, teetering on three tippy chairs while balancing a vase of flowers and a ball on long poles. It’s good stuff, classic, but the clown finds that the circus-goers would rather watch Adele (she plays the accordion and a bass drum—simultaneously), Hercule the strongman, and Marguerite, who pulls lots and lots of hankies out of her top hat. Rejected and dejected, the acrobat leaves the circus and decides to set up shop in the local park. He juggles, does pratfalls and performs amazing feats of balance, but the kids pay him no attention. “The acrobat decided to feed the birds instead.” (Anything for an audience.) And lo, if you feed them, they will come, just like the baseball fans in Iowa. Soon the clown is covered head to toe with a swarm of multicolored little birds, and the kids find this pretty cool indeed. When he is just about to collapse under the birds’ weight, the clown does

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“This novel in verse is rich in character and relationships. Most interesting is the family dynamic that informs so much of the narrative, which always reveals, never tells.” from the crossover

a great jumping jack, and the birds explode away in a dazzle of color and movement. Beat that, Marguerite and Hercule. The simple text, with its soupçon of existentialism, and the kooky artwork make this a flash of pleasure.

Success comes in the unlikeliest places, so keep on keeping on. (Picture book. 4-8)

A LION IN PARIS

Alemagna, Beatrice Illus. by Alemagna, Beatrice Tate/Abrams (32 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-84976-171-0 This oversized book about a bored young lion who visits Paris to find “a job, love and a future” is worth every bit of paper and ink.

The book opens vertically, with sparse, large-type text on each top page and complex artwork below. The sturdiness of the paper allows young hands to turn pages repeatedly and to pore over each carefully rendered illustration, a lion’s share of mixed media that includes architectural renderings of Parisian hot spots, tiny photographs of people and, on every page, the large protagonist, sporting a huge bushlike mane and a great variety of engagingly human expressions. As the lion roams Paris, he is unhappy about the lack of attention he draws, even when he roars. He hits rock bottom when a rainstorm turns him “grey and shiny like the roofs around him.” But urban apathy eventually subsides, and love comes in the form of a young girl’s adoring eyes, which follow him. (Only the youngest of viewers will lose the joke: That lover is the Mona Lisa.) The lion soon finds his job and his future, with vocabulary that refuses to condescend: A plinth in the middle of a square offers him his perfect vocation. Children will feel more sophisticated than the lion, who makes such mistakes as confusing baguettes with swords.

The lion atop the Eiffel Tower, mane blowing in the wind, captures the essence of this artful, whimsical delight.

(Picture book. 3-8)

THE CROSSOVER

Alexander, Kwame HMH Books (240 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-544-10771-7

Basketball-playing twins find challenges to their relationship on and off the court as they cope with changes in their lives.

Josh Bell and his twin, Jordan, aka JB, are stars of their school basketball team.

They are also successful students, since their educator mother will stand for nothing else. As the two middle schoolers move to a successful season, readers can see their differences despite the sibling connection. After all, Josh has dreadlocks and is quiet on |

court, and JB is bald and a trash talker. Their love of the sport comes from their father, who had also excelled in the game, though his championship was achieved overseas. Now, however, he does not have a job and seems to have health problems the parents do not fully divulge to the boys. The twins experience their first major rift when JB is attracted to a new girl in their school, and Josh finds himself without his brother. This novel in verse is rich in character and relationships. Most interesting is the family dynamic that informs so much of the narrative, which always reveals, never tells. While Josh relates the story, readers get a full picture of major and minor players. The basketball action provides energy and rhythm for a moving story.

Poet Alexander deftly reveals the power of the format to pack an emotional punch. (Verse fiction. 9-12)

OCEAN OF FIRE The Burning of Columbia, 1865

Anderson, T. Neill Charlesbridge (176 pp.) $16.95 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-58089-516-3 978-1-60734-541-1 e-book Series: Horrors of History Only readers with a strong knowledge of and interest in the Civil War will persist in reading this grim, stilted novel about the burning of Columbia, S.C. When Union soldiers marched into Columbia in 1865, the city was a potential tinderbox of strong winds and loose bales of cotton. After drunken Yankee soldiers started fires both accidentally and intentionally, the wind kept them going. This fictionalized third-person narrative tells of Emma LeConte, a real young woman who left a diary. She watches from her family’s home as other houses burn up and the local hospital, full of injured Union and Confederate soldiers, is evacuated. The story shifts at times to Emma’s father, a chemist who flees with Confederate medicines and chemicals to keep them safe, only to find danger on the road. The third main character, Rev. Anthony T. Porter, who also left an account, is shown trying to keep his family safe. Unfortunately, neither characters nor relationships are developed; readers are simply told what characters feel, especially how much Emma despises Yankees. The focus is on events, but Anderson provides too little context to explain the level of hatred between Southerners and Union soldiers after so many years of war and loss.

The awkward combination of facts and fiction fails to adequately inform or engage readers, despite the dramatic topic. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-16)

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“An inept commander and his clueless robot—there are lots of satisfying possibilities there, and Arnold taps into them.” from fix this mess!

FIX THIS MESS!

Arnold, Tedd Illus. by Arnold, Tedd Holiday House (32 pp.) $14.95 | Mar. 15, 2014 978-0-8234-2942-4 Series: I Like to Read A “remote operating basic utility gizmo”—call him Robug for short—comes to clean Jake the dog’s mess, turning the house into hash in the process.

Arnold is always a bit of a wild man, and he brings that vibrancy here in both a narrative straining at its compression— “I will fix this mess!” is Robug’s refrain—and an artwork of inviting tactility. Readers would gladly dive into one of those plush chairs, even if they are covered with junk. Robug is a close kin to one of those swimming-pool cleaners that crawls contentedly about on the bottom. Robug, though, is a catastrophic dust storm, moving the mess from room to room to roof without ever getting anything put away. Finally, with a look in its eye like a teacher who isn’t going to take any more guff, Robug gets Jake cracking. This is a good, simple and funny tale, a pleasing eyeful working on a familiar motif: the sweep-it-under-the-rug style of cleaning, the cram-it-in-the-closet or shove-it-underthe-bed approach to household management, even the old shove-it-around-on-the-plate trick to pretend you at least tried the cold rutabaga salad. It hits the spot for beginning readers, and read-alongs are welcome, perhaps inevitable.

An inept commander and his clueless robot—there are lots of satisfying possibilities there, and Arnold taps into them. (Early reader. 4-8)

SUITCASE OF STARS

Baccalario, P.D. Illus. by Bruno, Iacopo Capstone Young Readers (240 pp.) $12.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-62370-039-3 Series: Enchanted Emporium, 1 Teeming fantasy trappings largely substitute for internal logic in this meandering tale of a pop-up shop extraordinaire.

Finley McPhee narrates his temporary transformation from a lazy lad in the sleepy Scottish village of Applecross to a modern incarnation of the Irish hero Cuchalainn. Finley’s world begins morphing with the arrival of lovely Aiby Lily and her father.

Finley, atoning for truancy by delivering mail for Applecross’ injured postman, discovers the Lilys while carrying a mysterious letter to their not-there-before red house. It’s the magical father and daughter’s turn to open the Enchanted Emporium, which trades in magical objects, powders, potions and spells.

(Finley’s witnessing plenty of examples: Aiby uses a Fix-It Spider to repair his broken bike; Aiby’s father travels through the village via Self-Propelling Pants.) Old rivalries unleash evildoers bent on destroying the Emporium, including a mysteriously 86

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macabre “Dutchman” and a giant literally unearthed from the ruins of the Lilys’ ancestral castle. Besides Finley, the mythic battle’s unlikely heroes include his annoying brother, Doug, and Meb the dressmaker. A triumphant grand opening draws a thousand international visitors. When the festivities, fireworks and commerce conclude, Meb and Finley each receive a key to the Emporium, their roles in future adventures all but ensured.

Bruno’s elegant, steampunk-ish illustrations elevate the story, but its slow start and overreliance on dei ex machina flaw it. (Fantasy. 9-12)

ZOOBOTS Wild Robots Inspired by Real Animals Becker, Helaine Illus. by Ries, Alex Kids Can (32 pp.) $17.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-1-55453-971-0

Becker introduces a handful of “zoobots,” mechanical contrivances inspired by creatures from the animal kingdom.

This is a not-altogether-surprising collection of robotic tools serving a variety of tasks that humans may not be able to do or would rather not do even if they were able. The machines are touted as the “creepiest, crawliest” creatures, but in fact, it is the natural animals that the robots evolved from that rate the “downright weirdest” label: the black ghost knifefish, the Etruscan pygmy shrew and, of course, the snake. Becker provides specifications, applications, inspirations from the animal kingdom and “special operations”: how they actually might work. The Octobot, for instance, is a silicone-covered cabled “tentacle” that can flex and tighten. While Ries’ artwork is suitably futuristic—and the design features lots of black, signaling an intergalactic milieu—only a few of the robots really pack much wow; the fact that none has moved past prototype stage is a bit deflating. The bots can be used for military applications, crawling through fire, reaching nooks inaccessible to humans, fixing deep-sea oil spills, monitoring pollution and, of course, surveillance.

Though the premise is cool, what’s delivered is too short on the shock, mind-boggling and bizarre-originality factors. (Picture book. 7-10)

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TWO TOUGH CROCS

Bedford, David Illus. by Jellett, Tom Holiday House (24 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-8234-3048-2

Two tough crocs learn that there is always a bigger, tougher croc in the swamp.

Jellett’s two saurian bullies, Sylvester and Arnold, live in a big swamp. They have never even met. They both wear toughcroc shorts, so what else is there to say? One day, they accidentally meet. There is a showdown: They glare at each other before clinching in a fearsome two-clawed grip. (This is all tamely farcical as drawn in fruity colors by Bedford, though with just enough menace in the crocs’ eyes to keep things from unadulterated silliness.) Then they hear a hiss. It’s Betty the Bad, the biggest, toughest croc in the swamp, who wouldn’t think twice about “messing up their toys.” Sylvester and Arnold soon find themselves shivering in the slimy bog, waiting for nightfall and a dash to happier swamp grounds. When they try to make their escape, Betty spots them. The two little bullies clutch each other, and what does Betty see? A four-eyed, eight-clawed, teeth-rattling, knobby twotailed something...something scary. A friendship is born. Despite its modest charms, there is not much of a story here, nor is the twist memorable enough to withstand many exposures.

Good for one time around the block, though probably not for two. (Picture book. 4-8)

NEVER ENDING

Bedford, Martyn Wendy Lamb/Random (304 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $18.99 PLB Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-385-73991-7 978-0-375-89856-3 e-book 978-0-385-90809-2 PLB An English teen can’t stop blaming herself for her brother’s death.

Thanks to the headlines, all of Europe knows what happened to 15-year-old Shiv’s brother one fateful night in Kyritos, Greece. Since then, she’s been experiencing PTSD-like symptoms that put her into rages she can’t remember and send illusions of her brother creeping across her vision. The two-pronged narrative shifts between the fateful family vacation in Greece and Shiv’s inpatient therapy at the Korsakoff Clinic. What matters most is not so much whether or not Shiv had a hand in her brother’s death, as she so accuses herself, but the relationships she builds with the other teen residents of the clinic and the arc of her treatment. Each session of therapy opens another window to Shiv’s time in Greece before her brother’s death—her crush on a handsome, 19-yearold Greek boy, days spent relaxing by the pool with her parents at the villa and the terrifying night her brother lost his life. The characters and the scenery are rendered with such photographic |

precision that readers will feel as though they’re watching a film.

They’ll also find Bedford’s compellingly blunt, sharply drawn narrative (laced with Salinger references) sometimes too painful to read as they experience the harsh treatments right alongside Shiv. The results, however, are absolutely worth it.

Beautiful and illuminating but as hard as therapy. (Fiction. 14-18)

SAY IT AIN’T SO

Berk, Josh Knopf (288 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-375-87009-5 978-0-375-98737-3 e-book 978-0-375-97009-2 PLB Series: Lenny & the Mikes, 2 The second installment in the Lenny & the Mikes mysteries finds Lenny Norbeck and his friends Mike and Other Mike in seventh grade with a new case to solve.

Though starting catcher Davis Gannett has been kicked off the team for stealing a cellphone, and Mike has taken his place, Davis keeps showing up at games. As the season goes on, Lenny discovers that another team, Griffith Middle School, is stealing the catcher’s signs, allowing their hitters to know what pitches to expect. So when pitching star Hunter Ashwell starts losing games, panic is in the air, and Lenny has a new mystery to solve.

It’s not as dramatic as the murder mystery of the series opener, Strike Three, You’re Dead (2013), but Berk delivers important life lessons wrapped up in a satisfying story of baseball and friendship. What are the costs of solving crimes? Would he rather be “the Sherlock Holmes of suburbia” or just a friend? What if doing right turns out to help the boy nobody likes? These common middle school moral dilemmas are treated realistically in the believable context of baseball as a metaphor for life.

Lenny is thrown several curves as he solves the mystery and finds a deeper appreciation of what it means to be a friend in this satisfying caper. (Mystery. 8-12)

RESISTANCE

Black, Jenna Tor (368 pp.) $9.99 paper | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-7653-3372-8 Histrionic characters overpower the action in this dystopian-political-thriller sequel to Replica (2013).

Nate and his fiancee, Nadia, believe that they have successfully disabled Nate’s father’s plan to indefinitely extend his role as Chairman of the corporate government. As this sequel begins, they naively believe they will have the opportunity to

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implement reform when Nate inherits the Chairmanship. However, Nate’s father secretly retained the tools he needs to rule forever once he’s neutralized Nate and Nadia. Nadia is sent to a prisonlike mental institution, where she develops a predictably clichéd romance with Dante, a spy for the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Chairman limits Nate’s power by forcing him to accept a fiancee who will be less likely to tolerate Nate’s political ideas— or his secret boyfriend, Bishop, who also happens to be a rebellion spy. Soon, Nate and Nadia find themselves involved, however ill-prepared, in the rebellion. Dante’s and Bishop’s practical skills are not enough to save the plot from an overreliance on convenience—Nadia’s escape from confinement, in particular, stretches the limits of believability. Also unconvincing are the characters’ continual emotional vacillations, which make them simply unpredictable rather than complex, particularly in the novel’s final moments.

Only for fans of the first book. (Dystopian adventure. 14-18)

TEEN SPIRIT

Block, Francesca Lia HarperTeen (240 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-06-200809-1 978-0-06-223916-7 e-book One haunted girl chooses between twin brothers—who inhabit the same body.

Julie’s best friend is her beloved grandmother, Miriam. But when she dies, everything falls apart. Julie’s mom falls into a depression and loses her job and their home. Friendless and lonely, Julie must start her senior year in a new school while living in a terrible Beverly Hills apartment. Everything looks up when she meets Clark, a happy eccentric. Clark, with his wacky hats and his healthy suppers, sustains Julie even as her mother shows the clearest signs of mental breakdown: dressing attractively and dating. Still, what about the devilishly attractive boy who looks just like Clark and kisses like a dream? Could he truly be Clark’s dead twin, Grant? She all too accurately compares her dilemma to preteens at a Twilight premiere; some of her thoughts “were on team Grant and some were on team Clark.”

Julie’s quest to solve her boy troubles is tied inextricably to her grief over her grandmother; she must use her latent psychic powers to resolve both. Her quest takes her over a New-Age map of Los Angeles, where a multicultural mishmash of every ethnicity with a spirituality to appropriate teaches her that “maybe a shaman is just someone who understands that life is filled with loss and pain.”

Try Rosemary Clement-Moore’s Spirit and Dust (2013) instead for a more substantial psychic teen. (Paranormal romance. 14-18)

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TAP TAP BOOM BOOM

Bluemle, Elizabeth Illus. by Karas, G. Brian Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-5696-6

A sudden thunderstorm inspires an impromptu gathering of congenial strangers.

It all begins with darkening skies and a few drops of rain. Out come the umbrellas as the thunder roars, the wind swirls, and the rain comes pouring down. People make a run for it to the shelter of the subway. There are lots of smiles and laughter and sharing—a brief communal moment—and then it’s over, and everyone disperses to see a rainbow: “[s]urprise in sky.” Bluemle employs bouncy, fast-paced rhymes and rhythms with words that emphasize sound and movement. The title phrase repeats throughout, augmented by “slam bang” and with an additional “crackle” to indicate lightning as the storm intensifies. The text, appropriately varied in size and boldness to match the storm’s activity, moves across mostly double-paged spreads and intermingles with the illustrations. Karas, perhaps influenced by Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny, sets gouache and pencil drawings within collages of photographs of New York City. Backgrounds appear subtly rain-washed or as faded sepia photos of buildings. Blacks, grays and earth tones are highlighted with taxi-yellow and occasional pops of orange, red and green. The ethnically diverse characters are animated as they head for the subway stairs, and there are delightful details to elicit giggles from young readers.

Cuddle up for a rainy-day adventure. (Picture book. 3-7)

ROSIE & REX A Nose for Fun!

Boyle, Bob Illus. by Boyle, Bob Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-221131-6

Two very different friends have a bit of trouble deciding what to do together in this simple story about finding common ground.

Rex wants to play with robots. Rosie wants to play “princess ballerina tea party,” repeatedly declaring that “robots are not fun” as Rex entreats her to join in all things robotic. When they find a mysterious discarded object and try to figure out what it is, Rex offers many robot-related possibilities. Rosie becomes disconsolate upon discovering that it is the nose of a giant, jovial, animate robot. Then, much to her delight, the robot suggests that the trio have a “PRINCESS BALLERINA ROBOT TEA PARTY!” This punch line comes a few pages before the conclusion, leading to something of an anticlimax that may leave readers wishing it had ended with the threesome at tea. Minimal background detail and tidy speech balloons present an uncluttered design, and Boyle’s background in television animation

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“Murphy clearly revels in the Borrowers-style perspective of the beetles’ miniature world: In their under-sink home, Marvin’s drawing table is a die, and a propped-up birthday-cake candle dwarfs the family.” from the miniature world of marvin & james

THE MINIATURE WORLD OF MARVIN & JAMES

is apparent throughout the colorful, digitally illustrated story.

Rosie, Rex and the robot even bear stylistic resemblances to the characters populating his Emmy-winning television series, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! But despite this common ground, the final product doesn’t have much of a wow factor.

In the end, this is a simple friendship story with pictures that will likely grab attention but won’t stand up well to multiple readings. (Picture book. 3-5)

STAY WHERE YOU ARE AND THEN LEAVE

Boyne, John Illus. by Jeffers, Oliver Henry Holt (256 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-62779-031-4

Another child’s-eye view of war from the author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006); here the child is working-class, the conflict, World War I. The fighting starts July 28, 1914, the day Alfie Summerfield turns 5. Eager to defend king and country, young men—including Alfie’s dad, Georgie—enlist in droves, leaving wives to manage households and families. Everyone says it will be over

by Christmas, but four years later, the war grinds on, having transformed Alfie’s stable, working-class neighborhood beyond recognition. Czech-immigrant neighbors have been taken away, their candy shop boarded up. Released from jail, a conscientious objector and old family friend is reviled and beaten when he returns home. Georgie’s letters stop coming. Alfie’s mother, now a nurse, insists he’s on a secret government mission, but Alfie fears he’s dead. Hard times get harder. Skipping school to shine shoes at King’s Cross railway station, Alfie learns Georgie’s hospitalized with shell shock and vows to bring him home.

Alfie’s the novel’s strong suit: self-centered, altruistic, schooled by years of war, yet clinging to the belief that he can control the uncontrollable. His authenticity lends credibility to the sometimes–far-fetched, coincidence-heavy plot. (Conversely, a didactic tone creeps in when the viewpoint shifts from Alfie.)

A vivid, accessible tale of the staggering price war exacts from those who had no voice in waging it. (Historical fiction. 9-14)

Broach, Elise Illus. by Murphy, Kelly Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (112 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-8050-9190-8 Series: Masterpiece Adventures, 1 The boy-and-beetle friendship first introduced in Broach’s charming novel Masterpiece (2010) is now the cornerstone of an illustrated chapter-book series.

James is a boy, and Marvin is a beetle, but with the help of Marvin’s drawing skills, they find a way to communicate. James’ mom worries that her son’s best friend is an insect, but tiny Marvin has the opposite worry—that James will find human friends who supplant him. When James takes off on a beach vacation, Marvin frets even more, but he manages to have a few adventures of his own, like getting trapped inside Mr. Pompaday’s electric pencil sharpener with his beetle cousin Elaine. At first it’s entertaining to frolic among the shavings, but when an unanticipated pencil clogs the exit hole, there’s big trouble.

Murphy clearly revels in the Borrowers-style perspective of the beetles’ miniature world: In their under-sink home, Marvin’s drawing table is a die, and a propped-up birthday-cake candle dwarfs the family. The dramatic, blow-by-blow pencilsharpener incident dominates the story, but it circles back to friendship. James really did miss Marvin after all, and a souvenir seashell (the perfect beetle hideout!) seals the deal.

This winsome series debut is both a sweet story of cross-species friendship and a sobering new way to look at pencil sharpeners. (Fantasy. 6-8)

COLD, CRUNCHY, COLORFUL Using Our Senses

Brocket, Jane Photos by Brocket, Jane Millbrook/Lerner (32 pp.) $19.95 e-book | $26.60 PLB Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-2538-5 e-book 978-1-4677-0233-1 PLB

Brocket’s latest in the Clever Concepts series uses photographs to explore the five senses.

The text explains the five senses in a way even the youngest of readers can understand, and it’s paired with simple photos that highlight just what the text is mentioning but that are also full of patterns, shapes, colors and textures. They highlight everyday sights and objects with new angles and perspectives that will have kids looking around on walks in the neighborhood—plants, architectural details, rocks and flowers are prominently featured. We use our eyes to see colors, read books, discern patterns; our ears to hear; we feel with our hands, our feet, our skin; our noses smell things that are nice but also things that are not so nice—garbage, |

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“…a moving introduction to a subject seldom covered in fiction for youth.” from caminar

for instance. “We use our tongues to taste…. // We can taste many flavors. Juicy cherries, spicy chilies, and jammy cookies. / Oily, salty fish. Fluffy vanilla frosting. Cool, minty toothpaste.”

Brocket concludes by pointing out that we often use more than one sense at a time—eating a crunchy pretzel twist uses all five senses at once—and two pages of photo collages challenge readers to name which senses are in use in each.

Teachers and parents eager for their children to experience the world in a different way will be thrilled. (Informational picture book. 3-7)

CAMINAR

Brown, Skila Candlewick (208 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-6516-6 The horrors of the Guatemalan civil war are filtered through the eyes of a boy coming of age.

Set in Chopán in 1981, this verse novel follows the life of Carlos, old enough to feed the chickens but not old enough to wring their necks as the story opens. Carlos’ family and other villagers are introduced in early poems, including Santiago Luc who remembers “a time when there were no soldiers / driving up in jeeps, holding / meetings, making / laws, scattering / bullets into the trees, / hunting guerillas.” On an errand for his mother when soldiers attack, Carlos makes a series of decisions that ultimately save his life but leave him doubting his manliness and bravery. An epilogue of sorts helps tie the main narrative to the present, and the book ends on a hopeful note. In her debut, Brown has chosen an excellent form for exploring the violence and loss of war, but at times, stylistic decisions (most notably attempts at concrete poetry) appear to trump content. While some of the individual poems may be difficult for readers to follow and the frequent references to traditional masculinity may strike some as patriarchal, the use of Spanish is thoughtful, as are references to local flora and fauna. The overall effect is a moving introduction to a subject seldom covered in fiction for youth.

A promising debut. (glossary, author Q&A) (Verse/historical fiction. 10-14)

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CHEERS FOR A DOZEN EARS A Summer Crop of Counting

Chernesky, Felicia Sanzari Illus. by Swan, Susan Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-1130-5

Chernesky and Swan (Pick a Circle, Gather Squares: A Fall Harvest of Shapes, 2013) reunite, again pairing a season with an early learning concept.

This time, a mom and two siblings visit a farm stand on a hot summer day. The boy and girl count their way through Mom’s list, from 1 watermelon to 12 ears of corn. Chernesky’s rhymed couplets are uneven, with spry ones undercut by others that employ tired rhymes or sacrifice kid appeal for rhythm.

One sturdy couplet (“1 watermelon so smooth and round. / 2 purple eggplants that weigh two pounds”) is followed by doggerel: “3 bell peppers: orange, green, and yellow / 4 cucumbers.

What bumpy fellows!” The lines “9 fine tomatoes are firm and red. / 10 plump plums will keep us well-fed” convey an intrusively persnickety, adult tone, out of step in a child’s narrative.

Swan’s digital-and–cut-paper collages elevate the piece, presenting a riotous harvest of brilliant produce against an azure sky and green fields. The light-brown–skinned children (perhaps Latino) exude good spirits, but Swan—an extraordinary colorist, highly skilled at capturing texture by combining painted, cut paper and digital elements—is not at her best depicting humans.

The cheerful but banal faces of people are static and cartoonish throughout. But those onions and peaches? Gorgeous.

Nails its seasonal and counting concepts, with both flair and flaws. (Picture book. 4-7)

THOMAS JEFFERSON A Day at Monticello

Chew, Elizabeth V. Illus. by Elliott, Mark Abrams (56 pp.) $18.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4197-0541-0

Stepping carefully around the controversies, a former curator at Monticello reconstructs the septuagenarian Jefferson’s active daily round.

Jefferson’s fixed routine begins with a faithful recording of temperature and weather at first rising and ends with a final period of solitary reading by candlelight in his unusual alcove bed. In between, the author describes in often fussy detail the range of his interests and enterprises. There’s not only his “polygraph” and other beloved gadgets, but also meals, family members, visitors, and excursions to Monticello’s diverse gardens, workshops and outbuildings. Like the dialogue, which mixes inventions with historical utterances, the generous suite of visuals includes photos of furnishings and artifacts as well as stodgy full-page tableaux and vignettes painted by Elliott. The “slaves”

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or “enslaved” workers (the author uses the terms interchangeably) that Jefferson encounters through the day are all historical and named—but Sally Hemings and her Jeffersonian offspring are conspicuously absent (aside from a brief name check buried in the closing timeline). Jefferson adroitly sidesteps a pointed question from his grandson, who accompanies him on his rounds, by pleading his age: “The work of ending slavery is for the young.”

Well-informed and much-idealized if not entirely simplistic pictures of both the great man and his bustling estate. (sidebars, endnotes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)

ED AND KIP

Chorao, Kay Illus. by Chorao, Kay Holiday House (32 pp.) $14.95 | Mar. 15, 2014 978-0-8234-2903-5 Series: I Like to Read There’s always fun to be had if you know where to look.

It’s a bright, sunlit morning, and two sweet elephant babies, Ed and Kip, are ready to play. Chorao’s charming watercolor illustrations depict the appealing pachyderm pair as they frolic and stroll through a colorful rain forest, while simple text, closely tied to the pictures, gives just the right amount of repetition for young readers and succinctly describes the elephants’ adventures. It all starts when Monkey drops a rock, which naturally leads to a game of catch. But the rock seems to have a mind of its own, and its continued rolling leads to an unexpected alliance with a big bug as well as an altercation with a toothy crocodile. Clearly, this day is far from uneventful.

The format works well as an early reader or a picture book for the very young, and the comic-book–type panels and dialogue bubbles will attract fans of that genre as well. When the rock is lost, it looks like the excitement has come to an end—until the cheeky monkey drops a log from a tree. “MORE FUN!” rejoice the elephants, who continue to play—until bedtime.

An engaging tale of friendship, play and cooperation, replete with mild suspense and gentle humor. (Early reader. 2-6)

PROVIDENCE

Cocca, Lisa Colozza Merit Press (256 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-4405-6927-2 Southern manners abound in this predictable debut, in which a girl on the run takes on an abandoned baby and is helped in turn by an elderly woman who owns a secondhand shop.

Sixteen-year-old Becky is a good girl who helps take care of a slew of younger siblings. But when a boy stopping by to see her inadvertently burns down her family’s barn, the anticipated wrath of her father causes her to light out—taking with her some meager savings and hopping aboard a freight train, where she discovers the baby. Overcome with tender feelings for the infant, she stumbles into the role of adoptive mom, despite having nowhere to live. While there is plenty of tension to sustain readers, including Becky’s worry that others may discover the baby is not her daughter and an eventual bid for the little girl’s custody by a local woman who has experienced a terrible tragedy, it feels melodramatic due to the overabundance of coincidences and characters that play to type. Yet, to its credit, Becky’s sweet-as-honey first-person narrative voice suits the dialogue-driven story well—she is an uncomplicated heroine, resourceful and completely without self-pity.

Teens who take a special interest in realistic fiction may want to check this one out, but its appeal otherwise will likely be limited. (Fiction. 12-16)

A WOMAN IN THE HOUSE (AND SENATE) How Women Came to the United States Congress, Broke Down Barriers, and Changed the Country

Cooper, Ilene Illus. by Baddeley, Elizabeth Abrams (144 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4197-1036-0

It is no small task to create a book that summarizes over a century of U.S. history, gives a crash course in civics, and provides succinct, pithy biographies of numerous women who have served in the legislative and judicial branches of government.

Cooper pulls it off.

She sets her tone with the introduction: “Guess how many women served in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives from the first Congress in 1789 until the 65th Congress began in 1917. / 200? 100? 50? / Zero. Nada. None…. / What’s up with that?” Vigorous prose and well-chosen anecdotes, enhanced by elegant design, make for a continually engaging read. A double-page spread featuring a 1914 photograph of |

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suffragists superimposed with a feisty Susan B. Anthony quotation precedes some general history of the suffrage movement, followed by short biographies of key women. Each subsequent chronological section similarly captures an era, with appropriate artwork. (Doves and flowers adorn the introduction to the 1960s). Throughout the cataloging of legislative triumphs—in a spectrum of issues far beyond women’s rights—there are documented anecdotes of struggles against racism and sexism, such as the day in the 1970s when a committee chairman insisted that the sole female representative and the sole African-American representative share a chair, as their votes “were worth only half of one regular Member.”

Accessible, erudite, aesthetically appealing: a must-have. (foreword, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, acknowledgments, index) (Nonfiction. 10-14)

FIGHTING FIRE! Ten of the Deadliest Fires in American History and How We Fought Them Cooper, Michael L. Henry Holt (208 pp.) $19.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-8050-9714-6

The history of firefighting in the United States is explored through the stories of 10 important fires.

Some are familiar stories, others less well-known. It begins with the largest in Colonial history, the Boston fire of 1760 that some saw as judgment from God even as they sought to make improvements in the city’s ability to respond to future blazes.

The change in city skylines that occurred after the Chicago fire is discussed, and fires in Baltimore, New York and San Francisco in the early 20th century, deemed the “great urban fires,” led to important changes in regulations, building codes and firefighting techniques. Workplace tragedies such as the one that occurred at the Triangle Waist Company led to changes in laws protecting workers. The devastating loss of life in the attacks on the World Trade Center demonstrated the vulnerability of modern buildings. The volume concludes with a look at one of California’s worst wildfires. Each of the 10 incidents seems carefully chosen to provide a different angle to the history of American firefighting. Readers can chart progress and setbacks as firefighters worked to improve their techniques and communities attempted to make their buildings and environments safer.

A dramatic narrative, richly illustrated and solidly supported. (museums to visit, recommended reading, websites, source notes, glossary, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction.

10-14)

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NEARLY GONE

Cosimano, Elle Kathy Dawson/Penguin (388 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-8037-3926-0 In a suspenseful high school whodunit, AP chemistry student Nearly “Leigh” Boswell investigates a series of murders for which someone is trying to frame her.

Every week, Leigh (which she really prefers to her given name, Nearly) combs the missed-connections ads in her local paper, hoping for word from the father who disappeared years ago. On the day her chemistry teacher lectures the class about Schrödinger’s cat, Leigh spots an eerie outlier among the messages: “Newton was wrong....Find me tonight under the bleachers.” After a math tutee’s brutal attack, a scrawled warning in Leigh’s desk, and a dead cat delivered to Leigh’s doorstep, complete with Schrödinger reference, a second science-themed personal ad convinces Leigh that something nefarious is afoot. With regard to believability, the science-class conceits are as tricky to swallow as the idea that a teenager in 2014 browses print personals. But the point here isn’t realism—it’s puzzles. Cryptic missed-connections clues, a sequence of numbers left on the victims’ bodies, and of course, the identity and motive of the murderer leave plenty for readers to contemplate as Leigh rushes to crime scenes and runs from the police. The story’s single supernatural element— when Leigh touches people, she experiences their emotions—is woven deftly into the story, and the romance plot is compelling.

Tense and engaging—well worth the effort of suspending one’s disbelief. (Mystery. 12-18)

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG OVER THE MOON

Cottrell Boyce, Frank Illus. by Berger, Joe Candlewick (304 pp.) $15.99 | Apr. 8, 2014 978-0-7636-5983-7 Series: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 3

The third and (probably) final “official” sequel to Ian Fleming’s classic sends the redoubtable roadster careening off the planet as well as through time.

Following much travel through various eras in previous episodes, the story opens with the dramatic conversion of Big Ben and its tower to a rocket ship. Cottrell Boyce assembles his expanded cast of passengers—the Pott family from the original novel, the latter-day Tootings, and archvillains Tiny Jack and the Nanny—aboard Tiny Jack’s orbiting estate, the Château Bateau, for a climactic faceoff. There, the terrible tyke has gathered all sorts of earthly landmarks from Stonehenge to the pyramids.

Now he needs only Apollo 15’s lunar rover to complete his

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“[The] father-daughter bond feels both earned and earnest.” from returning to shore

collection of the world’s most expensive stolen cars. Can even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the original “smart car,” get everything and everyone back to their proper times and places? Wellstocked with thrills, from a high-speed ride with the queen of England (“and Lots of Other Places”) to a game of Snakes and Ladders played with real snakes, the daffy series zooms to its finish line in suitable high-octane style. Berger’s droll character and spot vignettes add plenty of carbonation.

One last exhilarating ride: “Ga gooo ga!!!!” (Fantasy. 10-12)

THE INVENTOR’S SECRET

Cremer, Andrea Philomel (384 pp.) $18.99 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-0-399-15962-6

Paranormal-romance queen Cremer (the Nightshade series) tries her hand at writing steampunk with an alternativehistory twist.

The year is 1816. The British have won the Revolutionary War, enslaved the Americans, and turned Boston into a prison and New York City into a socially stratified power center. Giant, robotic Imperial Labor Gatherers and man-eating rats terrorize the population. A colony of teenage resistance fighters are hiding in a remote maze of caves in the New York Wilderness. Tomboy heroine Charlotte rescues a mysteriously invincible but amnesiac boy, nicknamed Grave, and brings him back to the Catacombs. The plot thickens when fellow rebel, tough guy Jack, turns out to be the disgraced son of an elite admiral who holds a powerful position in Empire society.

Piloting the made-for-movies Dragonfly, a fanciful insectlike aircraft tricked out in brass and leather, Jack flies Charlotte and her companions to the multilayered Floating City. There, disguised as aristocrats and servants from the islands, the rebels attempt to infiltrate the establishment and solve the mystery of Grave. Charlotte’s steamy romantic intrigues with Jack and his Machiavellian brother dominate much of the action, leaving some plot details frustratingly opaque, including the titular secret itself. The cliffhanger at the conclusion of the novel clearly anticipates a sequel.

On balance, it’s an entertaining romp in a richly imaginative setting. (Steampunk. 12 & up)

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SEVEN WILD SISTERS A Modern Fairy Tale de Lint, Charles Illus. by Vess, Charles Little, Brown (272 pp.) $18.00 | Feb. 14, 2014 978-0-316-05356-3

Beautiful bookmaking, lovely storytelling and wondrous illustrations make for a splendid sequel-of-sorts to The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (2013).

The little girl of the earlier tale is now “Aunt” Lillian, a woman in her 80s who lives alone and who fascinates young Sarah Jane Dillard, the middle of seven red-haired sisters. Sarah Jane tells parts of the story in the first person, while her sisters (two sets of twins and two singletons) figure in third-person sections woven in and around Sarah Jane’s account. Harvesting ginseng, or ’sang, for Aunt Lillian by herself for the first time, Sarah Jane finds an injured ’sangman. By helping him, she angers the bee fairies who had attacked him. Aunt Lillian enlists the aid of the Apple Tree Man to negotiate in the Otherworld but not before all of the sisters become entangled in the fight on one side or another. The skills of the sisters—Adie at action; Laurel and Bess at music; Elsie at observation; and Ruth and Grace at raising hell—all play into the resolution, although not without a bit of eldritch assistance. The language is as pretty on the page as it is in the speaking, with rich echoes of fantasy tropes. The story and the art are reworked from a limited edition of some time ago, described by Vess in an artist’s note.

There is a promise of more stories at the ever-so-satisfying end, which comes with the tiniest hint of romance past and future—readers will be enchanted. (Fantasy. 8-12)

RETURNING TO SHORE

Demas, Corinne Carolrhoda Lab (208 pp.) $17.95 | $12.95 e-book | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-1328-3 978-1-4677-2403-6 e-book A thoughtful teen reconnects with her nature-loving father on Cape Cod. Fourteen year-old Clare is less than thrilled with her mother’s plan to have her spend three weeks on a remote island with her father, Richard: She hasn’t seen him in twelve years, and they only speak on Christmas. Vera and her third husband are jetting off to honeymoon in France, though, so Blackfish Island, ho! Richard isn’t much of a conversationalist, but his diffident silence lets Clare come to appreciate, in her own time, her father and his work preserving the nests and habitat of the endangered Northern diamondback terrapin. Gradually, through walks on the beach, kayaking around the bay and board games, the two find their way toward an honest and loving relationship. Some obnoxious neighbors, walking clichés whose

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every move embodies thoughtless entitlement and ignorance of the island’s natural rhythms, are the one weak spot here. Demas’ careful seeding of details about Richard’s life in the years between his divorce from Vera and his re-emergence in Clare’s life is subtle enough that the revelation of what held him back from maintaining any substantive relationship with her will be surprising and ring true to most readers. Their father-daughter bond feels both earned and earnest.

A quiet, lovely story with a satisfyingly sentimental ending. (Fiction. 13-16)

TWO LITTLE BIRDS

DePalma, Mary Newell Illus. by DePalma, Mary Newell Eerdmans (34 pp.) $16.00 | Feb. 14, 2014 978-0-8028-5421-6 This charming if superficial story follows two little birds from the moment they burst from their shells.

They feed, frolic and grow. One night, they look up to see a great flock of migrating birds, and anxious not to be left behind, they decide to join them. They encounter thunderstorms, power lines and other perils along the way, but after a grueling flight over the ocean, they land, exhausted, in a new country and find themselves in the warm sunlight, surrounded by tropical vegetation. All around them are other little birds, feasting on the strange plants and insects, flitting about and enjoying the company of the other migrants.

Soon, however, their instincts tell them it is time to leave and make the perilous journey back home, where the process starts all over again, with mating, nest building and laying eggs.

DePalma’s gentle illustrations make use of a skillful blend of acrylics and torn–tissue-paper collage, overlaid on canvas so the visibility of the painted fabric adds interest and variety to the illustrations. While attractively produced, the text is somewhat perfunctory and lacks informative detail. Questions curious children might wish to ask about the science of migration and birds’ life cycles remain unanswered, though an afterword discloses that DePalma bases her tale on orchard orioles and their annual migration to and from the Yucatán.

Visually distinctive, but a little disingenuous in its approach to the science that underlies it. (Picture book. 4-6)

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THE SHADOW PRINCE

Despain, Bree Egmont USA (512 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-60684-247-8 Series: Into the Dark, 1

A singer and a soldier boy re-enact and rework classic Greek myths in this lengthy series opener.

Daphne Raines loves her down-toearth mother, Demi, and their safe haven in Ellis Fields, Utah. Nevertheless, she moves to Olympus Hills, Calif., with her estranged rock-star father, Joe Vince, in hopes of herself becoming a star. Likewise, Haden Lord wants to please his regal father, overcome his (slowly revealed) childhood trauma and regain his position in the Underrealm court, even if he has to go topside and persuade a girl to return with him to the land of the dead. Mirroring their alternating (and sometimes overlapping) narratives and music lessons, they first clash and then begin to harmonize in their shared adventure.

While their fish-out-of water experiences would have been sufficient material for a first installment, Despain attempts to layer apocalyptic deadlines and a convoluted tale of the prophecied Cypher who can find the lost Key of Hades atop reinterpretations of the tales of Orpheus and Persephone. Daphne and Haden occasionally surprise, but they are ultimately a standard heroine and hero. Naturally and supernaturally attuned to the music of the world, Daphne is inexplicably and irritatingly special, while her counterpart, Haden, is darkly handsome as well as sensitive but scarred.

An overcrowded modern romance equally inspired by ancient Greece and Glee. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)

NEVER TOO LATE

Destiny, A.; Helms, Rhonda Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (224 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-8404-7 978-1-4424-8403-0 paper Series: Flirt In this second, stand-alone book in the Flirt series, a teenager is thrilled when she gets the lead in a school play— until she realizes who her co-star is.

The big event in the sophomore class is the Renaissance faire, in which everyone participates in a wide variety of roles.

Abbey discovers she’s won the coveted lead in the big production, playing opposite the handsome, popular Jason, whom, alas, she sees as arrogant and shallow. But worse, some transgression he committed at the school dance seriously haunts Abbey, and the textual implication is that the act was truly egregious.

Then readers find out: She overheard him telling a buddy that he thought Abbey was boring. Really? But the second and third rubs are worthy of worry: As Abbey gets to know Jason, she

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“The mixed-media illustrations play with form and white space, while the artistic-license black-and-white eyes of all the bugs cleverly draw readers’ gazes toward them, encouraging close examination.” from some bugs

realizes she’s smitten—and her best friend, Olivia, has a serious crush on him. Though many teenage characters are drama queens, Abbey’s eternal disquietude grows wearisome, and readers may find themselves wishing she would just chill. Balancing this is her sensitivity toward Olivia. Though the writing offers nothing truly original—readers must put up with many a cliché—the narrative flies, Abbey’s navigation of her burgeoning relationship is compelling, and the triangular love plot will be appealing, as well as achingly familiar to many.

Some may give it a standing ovation, though others will remain seated. (Fiction. 12-16)

SOME BUGS

DiTerlizzi, Angela Illus. by Wenzel, Brendan Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-5880-2 978-1-4424-5881-9 e-book A picture book that capers with joy in the buggy natural world.

With minimal words cajoled into loose rhyme—they have just enough structure to hold their own within the sprawling illustrations—each page of this ebullient book introduces a different bug’s proclivity (“Some bugs STING. Some bugs BITE”) while a small ladybug saunters past, serving as a cohesive visual element. (“Bug” is loosely construed to include many insects and arachnids.) The mixed-media illustrations play with form and white space, while the artisticlicense black-and-white eyes of all the bugs cleverly draw readers’ gazes toward them, encouraging close examination. The second-to-final spread—a long shot—reveals to readers that the earlier illustrations in the book are actually close-ups of a single backyard. This visual surprise encourages the friendly accessibility of readers’ own backyards as habitats to explore. Only one jarring note disturbs the joyful tone of this book, and that is the indirect permission it gives to readers to capture these critters.

As there is no textual exhortation to take care and let the creatures go after examining them, adults will need to underscore this independently.

Deceptively simple, with innovative illustrations and a catchy narrative, this book adeptly supplies information, a sense of accessibility, close looking and joie de vivre. (Picture book. 2-5)

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WHERE’S MOMMY?

Donofrio, Beverly Illus. by McClintock, Barbara Schwartz & Wade/Random (32 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-375-84423-2 978-0-375-94456-7 PLB The parallel adventures of a little girl, Maria, and her friend, Mouse Mouse, who realize at the very same time that their mothers have not come in to kiss them goodnight and go off to find them.

The idea of a small, usually unseen world next to ours always enchants, all the more so when a denizen of each world befriends the other. The pivotal point here: These two have kept their friendship secret. Maria is afraid her parents will get a cat; Mouse Mouse is sure her parents will move away from the humans. This is perhaps the only misstep, as readers will wonder why the friends make these assumptions (that and the fact that a baby mouse is not a “meese”), but why quibble?

Simple text deftly delineates the similarities between each girl’s mommy-hunt while gloriously detailed illustrations capturing the action appear side by side or in top-and-bottom panels. Tension builds—just enough so that tots’ anxiety quickly turns to delicious anticipation as they begin to guess that maybe the mommies are going to be found…together! The moment of joint discovery is a delightful full-bleed, double-page spread of the two generations together. For those who have read Mary and the Mouse, the Mouse and Mary (2007), this is an especially satisfying culmination of the larger story.

Irresistible. (Picture book. 3-6)

OKAY, ANDY

Eaton III, Maxwell Illus. by Eaton III, Maxwell Blue Apple (88 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-60905-350-5 A silly buddy story about Andy the alligator and his mammalian friend Preston plods somewhat aimlessly along through three chapters of gentle, simple adventures.

Andy and Preston are friends; Andy, the lime-green alligator, is the straight man, sober and easily annoyed, while Preston, a beige animal (whose species is never quite defined), is buoyantly enthusiastic and energetic. Their friendship plays off the combination of these archetypal traits as the duo meander about in their forest home looking for a rogue rabbit, learning about patience and identifying other animals’ sounds. Simple heavy lines, oversized panels and word balloons make this easy for young readers to follow. The slow-moving pace, though dotted with some bursts of humor, doesn’t quite do enough to propel the action, though. With most pages containing a single panel with fewer than a half-dozen words, this offering may help burgeoning readers gain confidence in finishing a book quickly;

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however with many other, similar series—such as the excellent Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems—this may be passed over for more recognizable and lively selections.

Eaton’s book covers well-trod ground and unfortunately pales in the shadows of more-established series.

(Graphic early reader. 4-8)

TWELVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

Edge, Christopher Whitman (256 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-8133-9

As 1899 draws to a close, a savvy young writer of gothic tales becomes embroiled in a perplexing mystery in this first volume of a proposed trilogy.

Since inheriting the Penny Dreadful, 13-year-old orphan Penelope Tredwell has “single-handedly acted as the magazine’s editor, lead author, and publisher,” though she hides her true identity behind the pseudonym Montgomery Flinch. Now the “most celebrated author in Britain,” Penelope hires an actor to impersonate Flinch to promote sales. Receiving an urgent plea from the superintendent of Bedlam, the lunatic asylum, for Flinch’s assistance, Penelope sees the potential for her next horror story. Masquerading as Flinch’s niece, Penelope investigates, intrigued by accounts of patients arising in a trance at 12 minutes to midnight each night to compulsively write delirious, prophetic ramblings. Penelope’s investigation leads her to reclusive Lady Cambridge, aka the Spider Lady of South Kensington, whose diabolical plot to control the future threatens to plunge London into madness. Bold and intelligent beyond her years, Penelope pursues Lady Cambridge into London’s darkest places, facing gothic horrors greater than any she has written. Edge successfully delivers his own penny dreadful in the riveting style of a Victorian mystery.

Original, chilling, atmospheric mystery with a heroine of remarkable mettle. (Historical mystery. 8-12)

THE SCRAPS BOOK Notes from a Colorful Life

Ehlert, Lois Illus. by Ehlert, Lois Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (72 pp.) $17.99 | $11.76 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-3571-1 978-1-4424-3572-8 e-book Scraps—of art supplies, of finished illustrations, of techniques and of memory—overlap in this blend of memoir and artistic how-to.

Right from the start, Ehlert decorates each page with collages of more than one material. Photos of gleaming scissors sit near a baby photo of herself with her mother, the text listing the 96

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“fabric scraps, buttons, lace, ribbons, and many scissors” that her mother shared with her. Photos of paint brushes, every bristle temptingly visible, overlap a childhood photo with her father, who shared wood scraps and taught her about painting, sawing and pounding nails. A photo of her parents “after hunting for wild asparagus” pairs with painted, collaged asparagus from Eating the Alphabet (1989). Tackling common questions, she frames art as eminently doable. (Where does she get her ideas?

Mostly from the natural world: “On a trip to the aquarium, while I watched colorful fish swim by, a book idea swam into my brain.”) Some technical terms become clear by visual example; others require outside explanation (dummy book; “[m]echanical sketch showing die cut overlays”). Highlights include a line sketch of the iconic Chicka Chicka Boom Boom next to color swatches and final shapes and all the thumbnails—plus two text versions—of Feathers for Lunch (1990).

Readers will scurry to collage household and backyard tidbits; pair this with Ehlert’s other work for maximum satisfaction. (Picture book/memoir. 5-9)

FIRE

Elfgren, Sara B.; Strandberg, Mats Translated by Paterson, Anna Overlook (704 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-4683-0672-9 Series: Engelsfors Trilogy, 2 The intricate relationship chess that sets the opener of this teens-vs.-demons import apart really takes over in the projected trilogy’s middle volume.

The five young Swedes previously given paranormal powers and designated by enigmatic “guardians” as Chosen Ones (The Circle, 2013) are thoroughly enmeshed in emotional turmoil fostered by the sprawling cast of questionable boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, vicious bullies, troubled parents and hostile townsfolk. This so preoccupies them that both the arrival of an investigator bent on punishing any unauthorized magic working and the imminent prospect of the world’s destruction by otherworld demons seem mere distractions. Still struggling with personality conflicts as well as grief months after the murders of two confederates, the five survivors are slow to notice that a “Positive Engelsfors” movement is turning nearly everyone in the town into zombielike conformists—blind to, and even participating in, a rising tide of sudden deaths and vandalism.

Eventually, following an eye-opening round of bespelled mutual body switching, the teenage world savers narrowly avert a mass killing that would have touched off the apocalypse and in the process, form bonds that leave them at least somewhat readier to face the final reckoning to come.

The fantasy elements remain as murky as they are inessential to a story that is really more about high schoolers poised to emerge from tough adolescences than magic.

(Fantasy/horror. 13-18)

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“Primary source materials, especially the movingly matter-of-fact recollections of several of the nurses and personal snapshots, bring the story to life.” from pure grit

PETRA K. AND THE BLACKHEARTS

Ellis, M. Henderson Young Europe Books (208 pp.) $11.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-9850623-8-5 A breathless—for the most part page-turning—adventure pits a poor, fatherless girl against all sides in a battle for a dragon’s heart and a city’s freedom.

Petra is clearly the odd girl out when her class goes on a field trip to Ludmilla’s Cosmetics Emporium, and she’s the only one to receive a vial of perfume distilled from the mystical song of a dragonka (a descendent of ancient dragons)—launching events that culminate in revolution. An apparent epidemic of “dragonka fever” allows the monarchy’s police force, the Boot, to impose martial law on behalf of the child emperor, Archibald the Precious. As the city falls under oppression, Petra is occupied with the young dragonka she saves from a deliberate drowning. A permeable divide between living and dead is revealed to be evil at work, and Petra and a ragtag gang of orphans, the Blackhearts, must free the city from an ancient curse revived. Meticulously imagined, Petra’s city is built on ancient layers of cultures and traditions, with magic woven into its fabric. Marvelous descriptions of the city in decline, its vast mysterious underground, and the dragonka and their magical variety provide a foundation almost too rich for the intriguing but thinly supported plot. The character of first-person narrator Petra is nuanced, but she has her moments of blankness, as if the author abandoned her to dash to the next scene.

Nevertheless, a remarkable and distinctive offering for devoted fantasy fans. (Fantasy. 10-14)

SILVER PEOPLE Voices from the Panama Canal

Engle, Margarita HMH Books (272 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-544-10941-4

A poetic exploration of the construction of the Panama Canal.

From the animal inhabitants of the Panamanian jungle, disturbed and displaced by the construction, and the trees felled to the human workers, Engle unites disparate voices into a cohesive narrative in poems chronicling the creation of the Panama Canal.

Mateo, a 14-year-old Cuban lured by promises of wealth, journeys to Panama only to discover the recruiters’ lies and a life of harsh labor. However, through his relationships with Anita, an “herb girl,” Henry, a black Jamaican worker, and Augusto, a Puerto Rican geologist, Mateo is able to find a place in his new land. The Newbery Honoree and Pura Belpré winner’s verse |

is characteristically elegant, and her inclusion of nonhuman voices brings home the environmental impact of the monumental project. Given this breadth, Engle’s choice to center her story on a nonblack protagonist is saddening, as the majority of the workers on the Panama Canal were black islanders. Furthermore, while Mateo and Anita—and even many of the flora and fauna characters—are represented on the cover, Henry, a prominent character and the only black given a voice, does not make an appearance—a regrettable decision.

Engle’s new offering contains moments of true poetic beauty, but these choices detract from an otherwise lovely, enlightening book. (author’s note, selected bibliography) (Historical fiction/verse. 10-14)

PURE GRIT How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific

Farrell, Mary Cronk Abrams (160 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-4197-1028-5

As World War II began, nearly 100 Navy and Army nurses were stationed in the Philippines, once a lush, desirable duty station and then abruptly one of the more dangerous places these young noncombatants could be.

Farrell shines a light on their devastating experiences. Japanese bombing of the Philippines followed almost immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. With their position becoming untenable, U.S. forces withdrew to Bataan and the island fortress of Corregidor. Nurses, deeply engaged in caring for desperately wounded soldiers, were sent to Bataan. After living on near-starvation rations, the nurses on Bataan were evacuated to Corregidor just hours before the surrender that led to the Bataan Death March. A few were rescued from Corregidor before it too fell to enemy forces, on May 6. The remaining nurses were then imprisoned in harsh, soon horrific, conditions and not released until late winter of 1945. Primary source materials, especially the movingly matter-of-fact recollections of several of the nurses and personal snapshots, bring the story to life. Of particular interest is the almost cavalier disregard for their suffering that the nurses, their health ruined, faced upon release, since they were still not regarded as combatants.

A fine purchase for young-adult—and adult—World War II collections that illuminates a previously unexplored aspect of the war. (list of nurses, timeline and extensive endnotes) (Nonfiction. 12 & up)

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THE SLANTED WORLDS

Fisher, Catherine Dial (368 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-8037-3970-3 Series: Obsidian Mirror, 2

This second in a projected trilogy provides a sumptuous genre-blend of time travel, dark fantasy and post-apocalyptic thriller, along with more complications than answers.

It starts with a literal explosion, as most of the cast of teenagers, adventurers, schoolmasters, changelings, ghosts and duplicated cats hunker down at the crumbling Wintercombe Abbey, desperately trying to master the Chronoptika—excepting Sarah, sent from a ravaged future to destroy the enigmatic device, and Jake, trapped in the London Blitz. While none of them (with good reason) trusts the others, they agree to work together to save Jake, then to rescue his father. Meanwhile, the vicious queen of the Shee seduces and rages, the Victorian spiritualist Alicia meddles and schemes, and the future tyrant Janus sends back his “replicants” to threaten and mock. The fiendishly labyrinthine plot twists back and forth through perspectives and centuries, from England to medieval Florence to the dreamlike illusions of the Summerland, but elegant prose, deft characterization and an acute eye for telling details keep readers anchored. Although none of the characters, all imprisoned in the grips of their selfish obsessions, is particularly likable, the narrative hurtles at a breathless pace, compelling readers to follow to the final cliffhanger.

Gorgeous, atmospheric, and addictive but ultimately frustrating; absolutely necessary wherever the first has fans. (Science fiction/fantasy. 12 & up)

SHAPING UP SUMMER

Flatt, Lizann Illus. by Barron, Ashley Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $14.95 | Mar. 15, 2014 978-1-926973-87-6

Flatt and Barron’s fourth and final entry in the Math in Nature series rounds out the seasons with a look at shapes in the summer.

From 2-D to 3-D, Flatt explores all sorts of shapes, though only rarely do either the text or the gorgeous cut-paper collages reflect shapes actually found in nature. Moles dig out tunnels in the shapes of rectangles, triangles and squares, while ghost crabs use the sand excavated from their holes to build spheres, prisms and cylinders. A spread depicting a beaver’s dam asks readers to find 3-D shapes with various numbers of faces. From shapes, Flatt moves on to explore such relational concepts as above, below, under, over, beside, etc. A pond scene challenges readers’ knowledge of symmetry; dolphins turn, flip and slide; and two final scenes ask readers to look at placement. Barron’s 98

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artwork continues to be the major draw, as this latest shares the flaws of the other books in the series. The rhythm and rhyme are inconsistent, sometimes dropping altogether, and the book lacks an answer key. The audience isn’t clear—those who are drawn to picture books may find themselves in over their heads, as the concepts and vocabulary are not explained. This entry also mixes math with a bit of science, with murky results.

Backmatter gives a brief paragraph of information about each featured animal.

If reading with a caring adult, children can show off what they know and extend their learning, though there’s not much realistic about the nature. (Math picture book. 5-7)

GABE & IZZY Speaking Up for America’s Bullied

Ford, Gabrielle; Thomson, Sarah Puffin (192 pp.) $16.99 | $8.99 paper | Mar. 13, 2014 978-0-8037-4062-4 978-0-14-750994-9 paper

Ford’s motivational story of overcoming bullying and disability will appeal to dog lovers as well as kids coping with bullying.

Some pets really do take after their owners. When the author contracted Friedreich’s ataxia, a disease that erodes her speech and coordination, as a young teen, she endured bullying as well. She found a friend in Izzy, a coonhound that helped her to finally face her disability. When Izzy displayed eerily similar symptoms, they both discovered a great capacity for kindness in the people around them and became famous in the process, educating kids nationwide about bullying. Their intriguing story is more told than shown; many major events read like summaries. The author’s conversational tone softens the issues of disability and bullying for young readers, but it also glosses over incidents that invite deeper reflection. She writes that she viewed a wheelchair as “giving in” for so long that a fall broke her bones—how does she discuss that with wheelchair-bound kids without making them feel that they’re “giving in”? Ultimately, though, the empathetic student feedback punctuating her story supports her opinion that “[s]imply to hear someone talking openly about bullying makes them feel they’ve already been rescued.” Brief individual appendices for kids, parents and educators offer advice for dealing with bullying.

This canine tale is a fine beginning resource for bullied kids and the adults who care about them. (Memoir. 10 & up)

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“This series debut features a smart, surprising teaser of a plot that keeps readers off balance—in a good way—to the last page.” from elusion

MY HUMONGOUS HAMSTER

Freytag, Lorna Photos by Freytag, Lorna Henry Holt (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-8050-9918-8

What happens when a hamster eats his whole bowl of food in one gulp?

“If he does that,” muses the narrator, “he will get BIGGER and BIGGER. / Then he will be… / … HUMONGOUS!” Through the magic of photo collage, the narrator’s cute, tiny hamster is now as tall as the ceiling. He moves outdoors, where he grows more. Readers see the Godzilla-sized hamster “eat trees like broccoli” and rest his furry paws atop a skyscraper. With a ladder leaning on his hindquarters, a group of children have scrambled up for a ride.

“He could give me and my friends a ride to the park.” Or, the narrator continues, the hamster might become a superhero—and the hamster grabs a robber by the leg with a police car waiting nearby. With accompanying illustrations, the narrator realizes that a creature so big would be scary to the family’s cat. Next, in a close-up, the hamster is looking straight out with dark, menacing eyes: “In fact, I think I’d find him scary myself, especially if he got ANGRY.” Unfortunately, the story provides no comforting resolution, going on sans segue to show where the hamster might sleep outdoors.

One little flaw in a story with a big, irresistible pet. (Picture book. 3-5)

ELUSION

Gabel, Claudia; Klam, Cheryl Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-06-212241-4 978-0-06-212243-8 e-book This series debut features a smart, surprising teaser of a plot that keeps readers off balance—in a good way—to the last page.

Regan missed her dad even before his tragic death. Elusion, the form of virtual reality he developed with her best friend, Patrick, took most of his time. Now, Elusion’s launch is a bittersweet triumph. For an hour, users are immersed in a beautiful Escape, forgetting life in a polluted Detroit subject to damaging acid rains, where oxygen masks are essential gear when outdoors. Not everyone is thrilled with Elusion. Regan’s classmate Avery is making damaging claims that though regulators have approved it as safe, Elusion’s highly addictive, putting users who’ve figured out how to stay longer at serious risk.

While Regan rejects this, her attractive new friend, Josh, takes it seriously, and Patrick’s evasions don’t help. There’s something wrong with Elusion, and it’s been carefully covered up. The more Regan and Josh investigate, the worse it looks, causing |

Regan to question her dad’s role as well as Patrick’s. Exactly what’s behind the euphoria Elusion generates is unknown, but as her father tells her when he turns up in an Escape, it’s dangerous. Regan’s appealing though—minor quibble—perhaps a tad too rational when responding to the reality-twisting scenarios that are thrown at her.

An ingenious, compulsively readable cure for the blahs.

(Science fiction. 14 & up)

GRANDFATHER GANDHI

Gandhi, Arun; Hegedus, Bethany Illus. by Turk, Evan Atheneum (48 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-2365-7 978-1-4424-5082-0 e-book This first-person account presents Mohandas Gandhi through the eyes of his then–12-year-old grandson.

Arriving at Sevagram, the ashram Gandhi lived in as an old man, young Arun and his family greet their famous relative and start participating in the simple lifestyle of morning prayers, chores and pumpkin mush. It is challenging for the boy, who misses electricity and movies and dreads language lessons. The crux of the story hinges on the moment Arun is tripped and injured during a soccer game. He picks up a rock and feels the weight of familial expectations. Running to his grandfather, he learns the surprising fact that Gandhi gets angry too. Grandfather lovingly explains that anger is like electricity: it “can strike, like lightning, and split a living tree in two….Or it can be channeled, transformed….Then anger can illuminate. It can turn the darkness into light.” Turk’s complex collages, rich in symbolic meaning and bold, expressive imagery, contribute greatly to the emotional worldbuilding. Watercolor, gouache and cut paper set the scenes, while fabric clothes the primary players. Gandhi’s spinning wheel is a repeated motif; tangled yarn surrounding Arun signals frustration.

Never burdened by its message, this exceptional title works on multiple levels; it is both a striking introduction to a singular icon and a compelling story about the universal experience of a child seeking approval from a revered adult. (authors’ note) (Picture book/memoir. 4-8)

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Ransom Riggs

The author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children adapts to his own peculiar reality as best-seller

By Jessie Grearson

Photo courtesy Tahereh Mafi

Ransom Riggs, author of the surprise hit Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, says his own peculiar reality as best-selling author now feels a little more normal to him. (In order to make the book’s success less abstract, his publisher, Quirk, has made a nifty infographic revealing that, when stacked, sold copies of his book surpass the height of Mount Everest.) “It’s taken a while, because I really was not expecting such a hearty and enthusiastic reaction to the book,” Riggs says. “I thought it would be like a lot of books that come and go quietly. With any luck, you’re afforded a chance to write another. But it’s not demanded of you—no one’s pounding on your door asking, where’s the sequel?”

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Fans of that first book (a deeply original fantasyadventure story from 2011 illustrated with vintage photographs) have in fact been clamoring for its sequel, Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children. The sequel reintroduces readers to teenager Jacob Portman, who can see hollows, shadowy monsters with an appetite for peculiars. With his band of peculiar friends (each gifted with an unusual power such as invisibility, the ability to create fire, the ability to levitate), Jacob must make his way to wartorn 1940s London, dodging shadowy monsters and ducking in and out of time, in order to help the peculiars’ beloved mentor, Miss Peregrine, return from her bird form to her human shape.

Though Riggs says Hollow City “had momentum going for it,” he still didn’t really know what direction it would take, and figuring that out took a lot of drafts. “The end of the first book is so open. They’re sailing off into the sunrise—they can go anywhere.”

Riggs says he had set up a whole world in that first book but didn’t really get to explore in it. “I was itching to get out into this land of loops and time travel and monsters and meet other peculiars who do all sorts of neat things and see what’s there.”

That exploration took time. Riggs says he tried “every different avenue,” meaning he wrote “about three different books” before arriving at what would become Hollow City. “With the first draft of the book, I had them going all over the place. Global travel. Then I realized that this was a book about time travel to some degree, so they didn’t have to go a long distance geographically to find interesting things. They just had to go to a place with a rich history. That was London.” That both his first and seckirkus.com

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ond books have a British setting is, Riggs believes, a result of some “half-conscious bias…that Britain simply seems a more magical place than America. It was harder for me to imagine Miss Peregrine and her peculiar wards living in, say, a loop outside of Tampa, Fla., than it was some foggy island where Celts and Arthurian knights have probably been tromping around for millennia.”

Riggs, who has an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California and who has been “making short films ever since he got his hands on a friend’s video camera at age 12,” says it’s hard to know how much that background has influenced him, though he does say he finds it exciting and quite freeing to “break out of screenplays and write a novel.…

I don’t need to know how long it is, and I can write what the character’s thinking—amazing! All these very ironclad rules to do with screenwriting suddenly disappeared.” Still, he says, he can’t really write a scene until he’s imagined it visually, which may partly explain his attraction to the vintage photos that are such a distinctive part of these stories.

Many readers are curious about those photos, but Riggs says the collection that plays such an important role in the book (initially he used photos “sort of like headshots when casting a movie”) is a fluke.

“It all started at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena…this giant swap meet that stretches for five football fields,” he recalls. “I was just looking for old furniture.” He’d known such photographs existed from long-ago visits to antiques stores with his grandmother, but not until he met a dealer named Leonard Lightfoot did he perceive them as “found art.”

Despite his own enthusiasm for the photos, Riggs never really expected his collection to interest young readers. “But I think it proves that teenagers will always surprise you,” he says. “That you cannot predict what they’re going to like or respond to.”

Riggs has been thinking about this, and he believes that teens are drawn to old pictures for the same reason that he was. “It’s like you’re solving the mystery of the people around you, of your parents and grandparents—who they used to be when they were younger. There’s something interesting about the archaeology of recent history that comes with exploring an old building or trying to solve the puzzle of old photographs that are just from a couple of generations back.” |

The author says he loves the recently published graphic novel version of his first book and is delighted that Tim Burton (who’s been one of his “most favorite directors since forever”) will be directing the film version of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, due out in 2015.

But even with all the excitement surrounding the publication of Hollow City, Riggs plans to start working on a third book. “I haven’t written it yet, so I don’t want to say too much, but the first two stories are part of an arc that hasn’t quite finished yet, and it will finish with the third book. There won’t be any lingering questions or hanging threads. But I don’t think I am going to close the door on the world. I know that this story is going to be over with the third book, but their world won’t be over.”

Jessie Grearson is a freelance writer and writing teacher living in Falmouth, Maine.

Hollow City is reviewed on page 115 in this issue of Kirkus Reviews.

Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children Riggs, Ransom Quirk Books (400 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-59474-612-3

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ROTTEN RALPH’S ROTTEN FAMILY

time thinking due to the low nutritional value of their eucalyptus diet. Tomfoolery abounds, from vomiting tourists to a close call with the Toilet of Doom. Teddy delivers a knockout conclusion, coming to the understanding that the nature of the beast is not always what it appears.

This thrill-ride of a mystery is chock-full of hijinks for middle-grade sleuths and budding zoologists alike. (Mystery.

8-12)

Gantos, Jack Illus. by Rubel, Nicole Farrar, Straus and Giroux (48 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-374-36353-6 Series: Rotten Ralph Rotten Readers Just how did Rotten Ralph get so rotten?

Poor, beleaguered Sarah is at her wits’ end with her beloved Rotten Ralph when she cannot find a catsitter willing to care for him. Ralph, chagrined and not a little defensive, takes a trip down Memory Lane via a photo album documenting his time as a kitten with his feline family. Convinced that he sees no evidence of rottenness there (though readers may think otherwise if they examine Rubel’s illustrations), he heads back to the family farm to discover how he ended up so rotten. Once there, hilarity ensues as his family (with the exception of his mother) reveals that they weren’t hapless victims in his photographed hijinks. “Did you find out why you are so rotten?” Ralph’s mother asks him before he gratefully heads home to Sarah. “Yes,” he responds. “Because everyone was so rotten to me.” Poor Ralph returns to Sarah a reformed cat and proceeds to clean his room, tidy the house and prepare her a fancy breakfast in bed. However, fans of Ralph’s rotten ways needn’t be concerned about this apparent transformation, as a closing line asserts that he’s grateful not for some internal change, but for the knowledge that Sarah loves him enough that he can do whatever he wants.

Rot on, Ralph! (Early reader. 6-8)

POACHED

Gibbs, Stuart Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-6777-4 In this sequel to Belly Up (2010), 12-year-old trouble-magnet Teddy is still living at FunJungle, a massive zoo and amusement park, with his primatologist mother and wildlife photographer father.

The shenanigans resume when the school bully, Vance, forces Teddy to throw a fake arm into the shark tank at FunJungle. This has a large-scale snowball effect that positions Teddy as the key suspect in the theft of Kazoo, a koala on loan from Australia. With some behind-the-scenes help from friend (and crush) Summer, Teddy sets out to prove his innocence and find the real thief. Amid red herrings galore, Teddy follows leads that reveal the turbulent underbelly of greed and grudge within the park’s personnel. Teddy’s struggle against the mounting evidence becomes a race to prevent Kazoo’s imminent starvation. The ebullient romp is salted with animal facts, including the tidbit that koalas spend almost no 102

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ALASKA’S DOG HEROES True Stories of Remarkable Canines Gill, Shelley Illus. by James, Robin Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch (32 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-57061-947-2 978-1-57061-909-0 paper

Nineteen famous dogs from Alaska are introduced through short profiles in this illustrated look at some courageous canines.

The most well-known dogs profiled are Balto and Togo, both leaders of dog-sled teams. The two dogs participated in the famous rescue operation in 1925 that brought serum from Anchorage to Nome to treat a diphtheria outbreak. Tramp and Red were a pair of sled dogs in the 1950s who protected their owners from an attacking bear. Other profiled dogs of the past include a bull terrier that was a pet of the entire town of Juneau and a dog that traveled with the naturalist John Muir in 1880.

Modern canine profiles include several exemplary sled dogs and two heroic German shepherds. The book’s organization is confusing as it is not chronological, and the profiles jump among historical dogs and modern ones. Terms are not always clearly defined within context or are explained several pages after the first use. A map of Alaska with the locations of towns and dog races would have been helpful, along with a diagram of a dogsled team and a glossary of key terms. Attractive, full-page illustrations of the dogs are the book’s best feature, with several of the canines running or leaping through the air in rescue mode.

Of primary interest to Alaskan readers. (Nonfiction. 6-10)

VICTORIA

Goldemberg, Silvana Translated by Smith, Emilie Tradewind Books (136 pp.) $12.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-896580-95-1 Brutality and poverty threaten the life of a young girl in Paraná, Argentina.

At 14, Victoria Díaz has already lost both parents: one to domestic violence and the other to apathy. She and her younger, twin brothers live with an aunt and her boyfriend in Doña Norma’s house until the boyfriend’s sexual advances cause kirkus.com

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“A master of animal countenance, Gravett pairs an expressive cat with a busy kid and winks at the difference between textual and visual message.” from matilda’s cat

Victoria to run away. While she meets some well-meaning strangers, the streets of the city are rough, teeming with gang members, drug dealers and other unsavory characters. Victoria must navigate this chaotic world while trying to get back into school and reunite with her brothers. Native Argentine Goldemberg has an unending supply of obstacles to put in Victoria’s path. The author dedicates the novel to “the children who suffer from violence and poverty,” but she almost makes a mockery of their suffering through a combination of two-dimensional characters, hackneyed dialogue, unbelievable coincidences, poor transitions and a very tidy ending. Spanish and Italian words and South American slang provide some initial interest in the otherwise lackluster conversations, but they soon wear, especially when combined with the snippets of song lyrics scattered throughout the novel.

Teen readers need realistic novels set in contemporary Latin America that capture culture while avoiding stereotypes, but Goldemberg’s effort fails to engage. (glossary, song list) (Fiction. 12-16)

THE FLY

Gravel, Elise Illus. by Gravel, Elise Tundra (32 pp.) $10.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-77049-636-1 Series: Disgusting Critters, 1 The author of the rousingly revolting Day in the Office of Doctor Bugspit (2011) dishes out more dirt with this appetitespoiling introduction to the ubiquitous fly clan.

Focusing particularly on houseflies (Muscidae), Gravel ties snippets of natural science—the fly “spits or vomits a bit of digestive fluid on his meal to soften it”—to humorous scenarios (“Jonathan! Did you spit on your food?” / “Yeeeesss, Mom.” / “There’s a good boy”). The black, blue, puce and red illustrations feature bulbous, anthropomorphic figures with limp wings and tubular noses, along with the occasional accessory (the “Teenager Muscidae” sports a slouch and a sideways baseball cap; the baby has a binky). Young readers will at least come away with a thorough understanding of how unsanitary these insects are and also, perhaps, clearer pictures of their physical makeup, life cycle and even some of the differences among fly species.

Published simultaneously in the Disgusting Critters series, The Worm (978-1-77049-633-0) is equally edutaining.

Gross-out potential, for sure—but also likely to give larval entomologists a mild buzz. (Picture book. 5-7)

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MATILDA’S CAT

Gravett, Emily Illus. by Gravett, Emily Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-4424-7527-4 978-1-4424-7528-1 e-book A master of animal countenance, Gravett pairs an expressive cat with a busy kid and winks at the difference between textual and visual message.

Matilda likes many things, including riding bikes, climbing trees, funky hats and fighting foes. Each spread shows Matilda playing at one thing while the text claims that her orange tabby enjoys it. “Matilda’s cat likes playing with wool,” it begins, as rosy-cheeked Matilda romps inside a huge, multicolored wool tangle and launches a ball of yarn toward the cat. He looks up with wide-eyed trepidation. On the next page, the words “playing with wool” are neatly crossed out and replaced by the word “boxes”: The narration now admits that tabby doesn’t like playing with wool but instead claims he likes Matilda’s box-stacking-and-hiding game (actually he looks alarmed). This pattern continues, the text asserting and then retracting (with crossouts) what the cat likes. A tea party dismays him, as Matilda serves him an unpeeled banana. A bedtime story causes stifftailed, whiskers-on-end terror—though is it due to Matilda’s storybook, Gravett’s own Dogs (2010), or the large dog/wolf shadow puppet casually cast by her chubby fingers? Matilda sports a head-to-toe tabby suit, linking cat and girl all along; the shrewd and skillful art implies sly underlying affection even when the cat’s nonplussed, worried or asleep.

Even Matilda’s cat would like this. (Picture book. 3-6)

NEW KID

Green, Tim Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-06-220872-9 A teenage baseball star struggles not only with game-day stress, but also with the ever-present fear that his world is about to end.

Brock Nickerson, whose name was Tommy last week, has more than his fair share of problems. Just like plenty of other kids, he worries about finals, baseball and bullies, but he also has to think about which microwave meal he’ll heat up for himself for dinner and when his dad will announce it’s time for them to leave again. For good. His dad’s job is mysterious and dangerous, and it requires them to stay on the run. Moving abruptly has only gotten harder as Brock gets older, and when he finds a great baseball coach and a good friend— and a potential girlfriend—the thought of leaving it all behind terrifies him even more. Best-selling author and former NFL defensive end Green delivers a riveting book about the complexities of being a teenager caught in unusual circumstances beyond his control. His |

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“Done in an Art Deco style with pencil, pen and watercolor, the artwork is reminiscent of fashion illustrations, with its exaggerated proportions and use of color and pattern.” froms cinderella

writing is both compelling and intelligent, and even the implausible scenes—like a visit from a baseball great—still maintain a feel of authenticity. Even readers who aren’t sports fans will find plenty of familiar drama and entertainment in this book.

Exciting, romantic and thought-provoking, this book scores a home run. (Fiction. 10-14)

CINDERELLA A Fashionable Tale

matters, with an eventual emphasis on finding ways to forgive. Each character has distinct flaws, including Morgan and both her parents, giving the book a psychologically realistic flavor. Chatty Amy comes across as the most interesting character as she propels Morgan to look beneath the surfaces of her friendships. As Morgan becomes more involved with Adam and Amy, she begins to realize the depth of her relationships in an emotionally satisfying climax.

Well done, sensitive and real. (Fiction. 12-17)

LETTER LUNCH

Guarnaccia, Steven Illus. by Guarnaccia, Steven Abrams (32 pp.) $18.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4197-0986-9

A crisp, modern take on the ofttold tale: deliciously subversive and visually captivating.

Electrolux vacuum in hand, this Twiggy-esque Cinderella is fresh, bright and absolutely unexpected in her patchwork shift (of designer patterns). Here, the confines of fairy-tale dress are shed, and the Perrault story becomes the perfect vehicle to celebrate fashion—and the real-life mavericks who redefined beauty in the 20th and 21st centuries. Done in an Art Deco style with pencil, pen and watercolor, the artwork is reminiscent of fashion illustrations, with its exaggerated proportions and use of color and pattern. And Guarnaccia’s simple, sophisticated drawings imply a luxuriousness brought to life. Young fashionistas will delight in the fabulous, ponytailed fairy godfather who offers up haute couture designs, as well as the gorgeous endpapers that denote the famous designs found within: Yves St. Laurent, Bally, Christian Dior and more.

Chic and sophisticated, a delectable homage to fashion.

(Picture book/fairy tale. 4-8)

16 THINGS I THOUGHT WERE TRUE

Gurtler, Janet Sourcebooks Fire (304 pp.) $9.99 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-7797-9

A Twitter-obsessed teen gets some real friends in this appealing story about family and friendship.

Eighteen-year-old Morgan knows nothing about her dad, not even his name. Her mom simply won’t talk about him. But when her mom winds up in the hospital, she finally lets the information slip. Estranged from schoolmates after an embarrassing video goes viral, Morgan meets talkative Amy at work and reluctantly becomes friends with Adam, her supervisor. When Morgan learns her dad’s address in British Columbia, Amy talks Morgan and Adam into a road trip to find him, leading to a classic journey to understanding. In a narrative punctuated by Tweets, hashtags and text-message transcripts, Gurtler keeps the focus as much on Morgan’s friendships as on her evolving family 104

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Gutiérrez, Eliza Illus. by Gutiérrez, Eliza Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 15, 2014 978-1-77147-000-1 Hold onto your vowels and get ready for an alphabetic romp—graphic style.

In this wordless pursuit, a hungry boy and girl check the cupboard for food but find only a letter “C.” So they take a basket outside to gather consonants from bushes and trees to make lunch. Then they’re off to the market to add more to their basket. Missing a “Z,” they climb up a hill, where a twisted black bush holds the letter. They return home and scramble up a dish in the kitchen, but it tastes bad, until they realize that DLCS needs VOWELS to become delicious. Cut-paper collage and mixed media carry out this visual venture with basic shapes and dots and lines for eyes and mouths. Some background scenes and people are drawn with just white outlines, and each letter is blocked in different colors. Sharp eyes will notice a clue to the story in the list of letter ingredients the boy and girl make as they leave the kitchen: It contains no vowels. Other graphic alphabets exist (Paul Thurlby’s Alphabet, 2011, is a good recent one), but Gutiérrez’s comic-strip story feels pleasingly fresh. Obviously, this wordless, multipaneled narrative is not for beginners learning the alphabet, but it is an inventive boon for language teachers and others.

This recipe spells out delicious wordplay and appreciation. (Alphabet picture book. 6-8)

EXTRAORDINARY JANE

Harrison, Hannah E. Illus. by Harrison, Hannah E. Dial (40 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-8037-3914-7

Jane may not be the strongest or most fearless performer in the Barnaby Beluchi Circus, but she’s a really good dog.

In this sparely written read-aloud, the pictures tell the story. Jane cowers in a corner, paws over eyes, while her six brothers are shot out of cannons. She scratches a possible flea while her ballerina mother dances atop a galloping horse. Not daring, not graceful, “Jane was just Jane.” Youngsters kirkus.com

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will relate to the fear of not living up to the expectations of others…but they will also recognize how treasured the loving puppy is: Adoration shines from the eyes of her dear friend the ringmaster. Harrison’s expressive, beautifully rendered acrylicon-board paintings effectively capture Jane’s quiet role in the exciting, extravagant world of the big top. The colorful compositions are all the more striking due to the crisp white backgrounds and dramatically varied perspectives, from the dizzying high wire to circus ring–level, where Jane accidentally plows down her fellow performers with a giant red balancing ball.

Small moments steal the show here, both heartrendingly cute ones, like the ringmaster toweling Jane off after her bath, and funny ones, such as the contrast of Jane’s blob painting of the ringmaster with the artistic elephant’s more refined portrait.

A touching, delectably illustrated circus story that applauds the underdog. (Picture book. 3-5)

THE CHILDREN OF THE KING

Hartnett, Sonya Candlewick (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-6735-1

No matter how far north of London the Lockwoods travel, they can’t escape the ravages of World War II. Twelve-year-old Cecily Lockwood isn’t happy to leave her revered father behind in London, but she’s secretly thrilled she and her older brother, Jeremy, are bound for Heron Hall, her uncle Peregrine’s lovely country manor. At the train station, they convince their mother to take in a 10-year-old London evacuee named May Bright, who, to Cecily’s delight, becomes a sort of sister to her, though (less delightful for bossy Cecily) she’s “prone to bouts of independence.” Through her likable, vividly wrought characters, Hartnett respectfully captures the depth and ferocity of childhood. The poetic descriptions of the girls’ rural wanderings are to be savored like the best tea and biscuits, but the masterful lyricism never slows the suspenseful story of Cecily and May’s discovery of two “horrid boys” in velvet jackets, hiding among nearby castle ruins…or the rising tension between Jeremy and his mother as he battles his sense of helplessness as others fight the war. Uncle Peregrine tells a 450-year-old story whose themes are curiously relevant to World War II England…perhaps even to the be-velveted boys-in-hiding.

Mystery and history dance a mesmerizing waltz in this poignant, thoroughly entertaining novel that shows how “[t]he past lives everywhere.” (Historical fiction. 11-14)

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THE DEAD LANDS

Hautala, Rick JournalStone (232 pp.) $15.95 paper | Feb. 7, 2014 978-1-940161-30-3 When modern 16-year-old Megan McGowan falls to her death from the cliffs at Fort Williams, the spirit of Abby Cummings, who died in a shipwreck off the Maine coast in 1883, awakens to help her.

Abby has risen several times over the years to help the spirits of the conflicted departed move on by resolving the issues they left unfinished in life. Now the girls must discover what is holding Megan back, and that means finding out if her fall was an accident, suicide or murder. Abby herself must avoid the vengeful spirit of her uncle, the Rev. Wheeler, who serves a darker master than he did in life, and discover why she is drawn to teenager Jim Burke. Can the girls avoid Wheeler, his Hell Hounds and the Reapers and solve the mystery in time? Hautala died in early 2013, and this, his last novel, shows signs of premature separation. Obviously planned as the start of a series, this stiff, melodramatic offering would have improved over subsequent drafts had its author lived. Clichéd characters, an obvious mystery, a fuzziness to the supernatural logic, and a rushed, unsatisfying climax belie Hautala’s Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. An unease in balancing child and (frequently foulmouthed) adult characters further marks the story as still in development. Nevertheless, kids who find their curiosity piqued by unresolved questions about Abby’s world may hope for the stories to continue, as a tantalizing ending suggests.

Not, alas, quite ready for prime time. (Supernatural mystery. 12-14)

KISSING IN ITALIAN

Henderson, Lauren Delacorte (272 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-385-74137-8 978-0-375-98453-2 e-book 978-0-375-99000-7 PLB The story continues in slow, meandering fashion for Violet, the heroine of Flirting in Italian (2012).

Determined to forget Luca, the Italian boy who might be her half brother, Violet resolves to discover if she is adopted.

While waiting weeks for that answer, there’s a surfeit of issues to keep Violet occupied. Among her fellow students on a summer study course in Italy, Kelly struggles with her perceived outsider status, Kendra starts a romance with their art teacher, and Paige flirts and shops. But when Kelly tells Catia, their guide, about Kendra’s romance with Luigi, it damages the relationships among the four girls. This development is nothing more than |

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filler—the real heart of the novel is Violet’s forbidden romance with the remote, one-dimensional Luca. Violet seeks solace in her artwork and waits for her mother to tell her the truth. But when Violet’s parents tell her what she has long suspected, it turns out that’s not the end of the secrets, as Violet and readers learn in a credulity-straining twist. Violet’s character is fairly well-drawn, and the other girls are relatively interesting, although Kelly’s sad-sack persona quickly grates on the reader.

Unfortunately the plot moves as slowly as an Italian summer afternoon, leaving one to wonder at the lack of urgency in a novel billed as suspenseful. (Mystery/romance. 14 & up)

JACOB’S NEW DRESS

Hoffman, Ian; Hoffman, Sarah Illus. by Case, Chris Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-6373-1 In a warmly illustrated picture book meant to comfort both boys who are gender-nonconforming and their parents, young Jacob asks his mom for a dress to wear to school.

At first, Jacob’s interest in wearing dresses is limited to playing dress-up. When his classmate Christopher tells him he ought to wear boys’ clothes instead, Jacob’s friend Emily answers with age-appropriate defenses (“Christopher, stop telling us what to do”). Jacob’s mom hesitates when Jacob expresses interest in wearing a dress as school clothes, but eventually, both she and Jacob’s dad agree to it. The segments with Jacob’s mom and dad seem aimed at parents as much as at children. Jacob’s mom’s look of concern when he first asks about the dress is poignant, and his dad’s words of acceptance (“Well, it’s not what I would wear, but you look great”) could easily serve as a model for fathers in similar positions. What rings less true is the story’s rosy end. Faced with Christopher’s bullying comments and other kids’ laughter, Jacob is so buoyed by his new dress that he stands up to Christopher himself, then sprints triumphantly across the playground, “his dress spreading out like wings.”

Hopeful and affirming, but children familiar with bullying may find the conclusion too simple. (afterword, authors’ note) (Picture book. 4-8)

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A TRIP INTO SPACE An Adventure to the International Space Station

Houran, Lori Haskins Illus. by Marquez, Francisca Whitman (24 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-8091-2

The youngest space enthusiasts get a look at life aboard the International Space Station in Houran’s latest.

From the rocket’s launch, which propels the astronauts to “work,” to their bedding down at night, this book looks at a few of the more well-known activities that astronauts on the International Space Station are engaged in: eating, space walking, making repairs to the ISS and zipping into sleeping bags.

Neither the narrative nor the digital-looking illustrations go into much depth; the latter provide the barest minimum of detail (and some at NASA may cringe to see laptops floating in the space station, tethered only by their power cords). Still, the short text will certainly keep readers’ attention and even provides an opportunity for participation, as each section ends with “in space.” “Looking at Earth… // While Earth looks at you… / A blip out in space” and “Taking a walk / Without any ground! / Flipping in space.” The final spread features a paragraph of further information about each of the activities. These use more specific vocabulary and explain things in greater depth than the simple text while keeping them accessible for adults working with children.

A good introduction to the International Space Station for very young children just beginning to look beyond the stratosphere. (Informational picture book. 2-5)

FOUR SEASONS OF PATRICK

Hughes, Susan Red Deer Press (96 pp.) $9.95 paper | Mar. 15, 2014 978-0-88995-505-9

Over the course of four evocatively described seasons, Patrick must come to grips with his father’s intention to remarry, to a woman with a 7-year-old daughter, Claire, he views as a pest-y interloper.

Patrick’s mother has been dead for a while; he, his older brother and his dad have nearly adjusted to her absence. Patrick and his best friend, Harry, share lots of traditions that help fill any emotional void in the boy’s life. But after his dad announces his coming marriage, nothing feels right anymore.

Patrick decides to build a treehouse that will give him room to stretch out—without Claire’s annoying presence. As he finishes up construction, he also begins to recognize that Claire is just as disturbed by their newly blended family as he is; only then can he reach out to her. Patrick’s first-person voice often sounds more authorial than childlike. He and Harry pretend to kirkus.com

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“Humor, pathos and wry social commentary unite in a cleverly drawn, marvelously diverse world.” from the story of owen

THE MARK OF THE DRAGONFLY

be abominable snowmen, “our arms stiffly at our sides, our faces menacing. We gnashed our teeth”; during a walk in the woods, “tree branches stretched like bony skeletons above our heads.”

This disconnect diminishes an otherwise attractive exploration of a common problem.

In spite of flaws in the presentation, Patrick’s gradual adjustment to his new family may offer a satisfying road map for chapter-book readers dealing with similar situations. (Fiction. 7-9)

PICTURE THIS! ANIMALS

Hynes, Margaret Illus. by Crisp, Andy Kingfisher (64 pp.) $12.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-7534-6887-6

Chock-full of ingeniously designed infographics, this quick but memorable comparative survey of the animal kingdom offers fresh insights on nearly every page.

The 26 single-topic spreads range from looks at major classes and phyla to animal senses, records and conservation.

Each features a cleanly laid-out mix of graphic-style animal shapes and explanatory captions or introductory hooks (“There are more animals in your bed than in any zoo in the world”).

Though some of the images are straight-up illustrations, far more often they are sized, ordered or arranged to reflect adjacent statistics or other measures—as percentages of endangered species, the frog silhouette representing amphibians (41 percent) is nearly twice the size of the mammalian elephant (25 percent), for instance. Some graphics, such as a chart comparing daily food intake and waste production in terms of body weight, are as droll as they are informative (picture, if you can, a blue whale and an elephant sitting on toilets). Others convey multilayered messages, such as the six animals (none, pointedly, human) perching atop bars that resemble pedestals in a chart of average time males devote to child care.

A dandy demonstration of how vividly information can be presented when numbers and pictures are linked in inventive ways. (index, further reading) (Nonfiction. 8-11)

Johnson, Jaleigh Delacorte (400 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB| Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-385-37615-0 978-0-385-376460-4 e-book 978-0-385-37645-7 PLB Heart, brains and courage find a home in a steampunk fantasy worthy of a nod

from Baum.

Thirteen-year-old Piper is a forthright machinist in dismal Scrap Town Number Sixteen (as charming as it sounds). Her skill at machine repair is unsurpassed, but the recent loss of her father has left her orphaned, with a need to trade destitution for something greener. While scavenging debris left by a violent meteor storm, Piper finds an unconscious girl, Anna, who wakes with severe amnesia and a propensity for analytical chatter and who bears the dragonfly tattoo given to those in the king’s inner circle. When a menacing man comes looking for Anna, the girls board the 401 (an antique locomotive run by a motley crew), radically accelerating Piper’s plans for a new life.

Though Piper is initially driven by the prospect of a reward for returning Anna to what she assumes is a wealthy home, the staggeringly different girls eventually form a bond far stronger than just strategic alliance. Though there are initial echoes of Hunger Games–ian dystopian despair, these are quickly absolved as the book becomes something all its own. Consistent and precise attention to detail, from the functioning of a security system to the communicative abilities of a telepathic species, thrills. This is foremost a rugged adventure story, but there is a splash of romance (and a fabulous makeover scene).

A well-imagined world of veritable adventure. (Steampunk. 11-15)

THE STORY OF OWEN Dragon Slayer of Trondheim

Johnston, E.K. Carolrhoda Lab (312 pp.) $17.95 | $12.95 e-book | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-1066-4 978-1-4677-2406-7 e-book

In an alternate world where humans and dragons battle over fossil fuels, the tale of one slayer and his bard becomes a celebration of friendship, family, community and calling.

Once, every village had its own dragon slayer, but those days are long gone; now, slayers are drafted by governments or sponsored by corporations. Sixteen-year-old Owen Thorskard, scion of a renowned line, wants to help reverse that—starting with the rural Canadian town of Trondheim. While Owen is brave, dedicated and likable, this story really belongs to Siobhan McQuaid, |

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“Warm, sun-baked hues and widemouthed gulping scenes amp up the lunacy.” from there once was a cowpoke who swallowed an ant

dauntless bard-in-training. In her witty account, Siobhan learns alongside Owen from his heroic aunt and her blacksmith wife, schemes with classmates to create local Dragon Guards and enlists the entire county in a daring scheme to attack the dragons’ own turf. Humor, pathos and wry social commentary unite in a cleverly drawn, marvelously diverse world. Refreshingly, the focus is on the pair as friends and partners, not on potential romance; Siobhan places as much emphasis on supporting her allies as extolling Owen’s deeds. Smart enough to both avoid unnecessary danger and be scared when appropriate, they prove all the more valiant when tragic sacrifices have to be made.

It may “[take] a village to train a dragon slayer,” but it takes an exceptional dragon slayer to deserve a village— and a storyteller—like this one. (Fantasy. 12-18)

SECRET

Kemmerer, Brigid Kensington (336 pp.) $9.95 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-7582-9437-1 Series: Elemental, 4 In this fourth full-length title in the Elementals series, multiple secrets come to a boil.

Nick Merrick is trying to keep secret the fact that he is gay, despite falling hard for Adam. His fake girlfriend, Quinn, doesn’t want anyone to know how terrible her home life has become, while Tyler, the archenemy of the Merricks and all the Elementals, has a secret of his own. All these secrets spawn numerous disasters. Newcomers to the series will find that none of it tracks very well, but readers looking for a gay romance may enjoy the play-by-play of each touch between Nick and Adam, sometimes tender, sometimes not. Frightened to go home, Quinn becomes attached to Tyler, providing an avenue for readers to understand his background and place in the intricate web that covers this town that’s extraordinarily full of Elementals. The Guides, sworn to kill all Elementals, appear early on, and their ominous threat lurking in the background heightens suspense. On the last page, Kemmerer makes clear that more titles are forthcoming; as the protagonists age out of the high school setting, the near-total absence of most of the characters’ parents will become less of a narrative quibble.

As with previous titles, the heart of the story is the human condition, and the paranormal aspect is the side note—a pleasing balance. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)

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THERE ONCE WAS A COWPOKE WHO SWALLOWED AN ANT

Ketteman, Helen Illus. by Terry, Will Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-7850-6

“There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” gets a downhome Texan transformation.

An exaggerated blockhead of a cowboy accidentally swallows a fire ant. His eyes bulge and cheeks puff wide—“The cowpoke panted, and his voice got higher. / ‘Yippie-ti-yay! My stomach’s on fire!’ ” He needs to fix this situation right quick. So what does he do? Why, swallow a spider, of course. But that spider (complete with eight eyes) wiggles and waggles inside him. And so he downs a string of Southwestern creatures—a snake, a roadrunner, an armadillo (shortened to “ ’dillo” for the rhythm’s sake), a boar and more.

The poor cowpoke looks more bedraggled and desperate with each passing animal. But before the expected tragic end of the cumulative song can befall him, determination kicks in. He sets his 10-gallon hat firmly on his head and declares, “If I want it done right, I’ll do it myself.” In a twist sure to stop young readers in their tracks, the cowboy swallows his rope, his horse and…himself. Those animals stampede right out of his mouth. Warm, sun-baked hues and widemouthed gulping scenes amp up the lunacy. Alas, the rhythm takes some bumpy turns, so singing out loud requires practice.

It doesn’t outshine the original, but it’s a romping, regional retelling that introduces new animals to boot.

(Picture book. 4-7)

SAM AND CHARLIE (AND SAM TOO) RETURN!

Kimmelman, Leslie Illus. by Owl, William Whitman (48 pp.) $13.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-7215-3

This is a collection of Jewish stories that leaves out the stories.

Reading this book feels a lot like listening to a vinyl LP with multiple skips that send listeners abruptly from the middle of one song to the next. Here’s the plot of the first story in the collection: Sam and Charlie shovel their neighbor’s walk. Then they drink hot cocoa. Along the way, they complain about hat hair and accidentally dump snow on each other, but none of these incidents advances the story. In fact, there is no story, just a series of isolated events, like random notes in a recording.

Sometimes this leads to a pretty good joke. In one scene, Charlie is following Passover tradition and hunting for a matzo cracker that’s been hidden somewhere in the house. She sits in an armchair to think, and—CRUNCH!—the matzo turns up under the cushion.

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in any order and made just as much sense. The illustrations are unfailingly gorgeous. Charlie’s hair has more personality than the main characters in other books.

If only the stories were as involving as the pictures around them. (Early reader. 5-8)

SCARLATTI’S CAT

Lachenmeyer, Nathaniel Illus. by Beccia, Carlyn Carolrhoda (32 pp.) $16.95 | $12.95 e-book | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-7613-5472-7 978-1-4677-2401-2 e-book Despite an intriguing premise, Lachenmeyer and Beccia’s collaboration doesn’t quite manage to produce a pleasing composition.

Legend has it that Scarlatti’s “Sonata in G Minor” was inspired by his pet cat, Pulcinella. Lachenmeyer uses this as a jumping-off point and imagines that the fancy feline has a particular interest in (and talent for) composition. Though initially stymied by Scarlatti’s dictum that no one may touch his harpsichord, Pulcinella gets her chance one day when a bold mouse in a bright blue vest pops up and leads both cat and master on a merry chase. When her paws hit the keys, Pulcinella begins to play. Initially captivated, Scarlatti later worries about the impact of her talent on his livelihood and decides that passing his pet on to a friend is the best way to protect himself and other composers. Beccia’s illustrations feature subdued colors, elaborate details and faux crackling to enhance the historical feel. Unfortunately, the stiffness of the figures, though artistically appropriate, creates a sense of distance. Unlikely events, uneven pacing, and the unsettling, if ultimately amusing, finale further reduce the already limited appeal.

Music lovers might appreciate this slight story that ties the creation of a popular classical sonata to a pampered pet, but most young listeners will simply be left wondering what poor Pulcinella did to be abandoned by her owner. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-8)

NO SLURPING, NO BURPING! A Tale of Table Manners LaReau, Kara Illus. by Bove, Lorelay Disney Hyperion (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-5733-5

for playing,” the kids lay out the rules. Unsurprisingly, Father has lost his taste for eating by the time Friday rolls around. Fortunately, a surprise guest (his own mama) shows everyone how far he has really come. Still, not even Grandma is immune from the occasional slip-up. A list of suggested table manners graces the end of the book. Parents hoping to instill good behavior in their own offspring will clamor for this title, and LaReau’s light touch makes it pleasant to read. The art is appealing, although clearly in the style of an animated film; the book is one of a series that showcases Disney’s animation artists. In spite of Father’s comical oafishness, it’s clear that children’s best bet for learning table manners is their own parents.

The ill-mannered apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. Parents, take note. (Picture book. 4-8)

LUCKY DOG Twelve Tales of Rescued Dogs Larson, Kirby; Sutherland, Tui T.; Miles, Ellen, et al.

Scholastic (192 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-545-55451-0

Thirteen dog-loving authors contribute 12 short stories about dogs at the Pawley Rescue Center and the humans who love them.

An 11-year-old sick of his fighting parents and their “bird’snest” custody arrangement (he stays in the family house while they move in and out) finds comfort in the floppy-eared rescue he names Bird Dog. Friendship between their dogs leads to peace between a bully and his target. An opinionated Pomeranian befriends an Old English sheepdog and pitches a fit when an adoptive family takes her home without her One and Only Truest Best Friend in the World. Some stories are told from a kid’s perspective and others from a dog’s, but every one tugs at readers’ heartstrings as dogs and humans are brought lovingly together. The bleaker side of animal shelters is left unaddressed; readers are led to understand that dogs who don’t get adopted might be lonely, but no reference is made to what happens when Pawley’s kennels are full. (There is, however, a graphic anecdote about the demise of two Siamese fighting fish unwisely put into the same tank.) There’s nothing wrong, however, with letting dog stories stay uplifting, and these will easily bring tears to dog lovers’ eyes.

A varied and heartwarming set of doggy tales...or is that tails? (Short stories. 9-12)

Two impossibly neat and polite youngsters attempt to rein in their father’s madcap (but undeniably cheery) mealtime missteps.

In a twist on common expectations, two kids must teach their parent how to adopt an appropriate tableside manner.

Their father’s a sweet fellow, but each day at dinner, Evie and Simon must work to correct his less-than-sterling conduct.

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P.K. PINKERTON AND THE PISTOL-PACKING WIDOWS

What hazardous mysteries await? What strange creatures will Angus see? And how can his problem ever be solved? A welcome addition to any collection, this enjoyable selection will have young readers laughing out loud and maybe even straightening up their rooms in seconds flat (or at least seriously considering the possibility of doing so). A glossary of Scottish terms is included.

A lighthearted paean to the importance of cleanliness.

(Picture book. 3-6)

Lawrence, Caroline Putnam (304 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 6, 2014 978-0-399-25635-6 Series: P.K. Pinkerton, 3

Twelve-year-old half-Lakota “doubleorphan” detective P.K. Pinkerton heads to Carson City in the third of the disarming Western Mysteries series.

The year is 1862, and news of P.K.’s private-eye prowess has spread through the Nevada Territory. A high-class Virginia City courtesan hires the detective to spy on her possibly unfaithful fiance, the very same Poker Face Jace who is P.K.’s beloved mentor. P.K. has what he calls a “Thorn,” difficulty showing or reading emotion; Jace has taught his protégé to read people’s “tells,” and not just around the poker table. As P.K. shadows Jace in Carson City, he thinks “Blind Widow Woman” will be his best disguise ever—until his “sock bosom” migrates north. (P.K.’s true gender is deliberately left iffy until the end.) Carson City is alive with gamblers and guns, drinkers and desperados…even a young Sam Clemens. The silver mines are humming, the railroad’s coming, and the colorful legislature wrangles the law. P.K.—the best kind of hero—navigates it all with unblinking acceptance of the salty characters he meets, straight-shooting honesty and impressive investigative work. The young detective’s dryly hilarious firstperson accounts keep the story at a gallop.

No disguise can mask P.K. Pinkerton’s stout heart and steely resolve in Lawrence’s third (and mighty fine) Wild West adventure. (maps) (Historical fiction. 10-14)

THE LOCH MESS MONSTER

Lester, Helen Illus. by Munsinger, Lynn HMH Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-544-09990-6

Beware the Loch Mess monster!

The legend of the Loch Ness monster is not exactly true. There is no single monster—there are three! Nessie, Fergus, and their wee laddie, Angus, live peacefully together beneath the surface of the lake, obeying proper monster etiquette by following five basic monster rules. All is well until Angus’ untidy ways result in a grottie mess and break rule No. 2 (“Always pick up after yourself”), which leads to an extended stay in his room that’s designed to keep his mess from spreading. Believable, appealing characters and pitch-perfect pacing combine nicely with Lester’s alwayshumorous text and Munsinger’s hilariously detailed illustrations in this cheerful cautionary tale, as the entertaining Angus, unbothered, simply lets his mess pile up—and up. Before long, he is breaking rule No. 1 (“NevereverEVER go up to the surface of the loch”).

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MONSTER TRUCK MANIA!

Lord, Cynthia Illus. by Anderson, Derek Scholastic (40 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-545-46261-7 Series: Hod Rod Hamster

Hot Rod Hamster takes the fair by storm!

Hot Rod and his big bulldog buddy are headed to the fair to see Fearless Franco’s Monster Truck Mania. “Truck day, treat day, cotton-candy sweet day. / Fun day, fair day, music in the air day.” But the show is not until 3:00. What can they do in the meantime? Hamster knows: search for the perfect ride! He knows the attributes of the perfect ride. The first criterion is fun. “Sailboat, rowboat, pirates long ago boat. / Sub boat, tugboat, chugga-chugga-chug boat. / Which would you choose?”

The boat ride is fun, but the perfect ride will also be fast. The teacups ride fits that bill, but the perfect ride will also let them drive. The bumper cars are pretty good, but the perfect ride will go up in the air. Bulldog goes to save their seats for the monster-truck show while Hot Rod gets some cotton candy… where he hears that Fearless Franco can’t drive since he broke his glasses. Now who do you think would like to drive a monster truck? Lord and Anderson reteam for a third fun-filled, rhythmic jaunt with Hot Rod and his friends (Happy Birthday, Hamster, 2011, etc.). Returning to what he loves best—things that GO!—Anderson’s bright-eyed, expressive acrylics extend Lord’s enthusiastic rhyming tale to perfection.

A treat for Hot Rod fans as well as lovers of trucks and carnival rides. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE HIGHEST NUMBER IN THE WORLD

MacGregor, Roy Illus. by Després, Geneviève Tundra (32 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-77049-575-3

You play a sport. You have a hero. You want that number on your jersey. Period.

Gabe—short for Gabriella, but don’t even think about it— is a 9-year-old squirt smitten with hockey. When she makes the team for 10-year-olds, she’s justly proud, as proud as if she were Hayley Wickenheiser, her idol and Canadian hockey Olympian. kirkus.com

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“The Arcadia trilogy concludes with magic, shootouts, family betrayals and a cruise ship full of monsters: everything that’s necessary for a romance about Cosa Nostra shape shifters.” from arcadia falls

Hayley wore No. 22, and Gabe has always worn No. 22. But when jerseys are handed out, she gets No. 9. “Gabe’s heart felt as if a skate had just run across it.” (MacGregor doesn’t pull his punches in the imagery department, though Després brings as much honey as ice to the proceedings.) She goes home in tears. Forget it; she doesn’t want to play, certainly not as No. 9.

Grandma Gabriella visits her later that night, when Gabe is in bed and in misery. She has an old picture album with her from the days when she played hockey (hair tucked under her beanie), until someone ratted on her for being a girl: Girls couldn’t play on the team. Grandma doesn’t belabor the point, but she does offer a short history of No. 9, replete with names like Rocket Richard, Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, the “Great One”—Wayne Gretzky, No. 99—and Grandma herself. OK, maybe No. 9’s got some mojo after all.

As pleasing as a warm memory. (Picture book. 6-9)

IGNITE ME

Mafi, Tahereh Harper/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-06-208557-3 Series: Shatter Me, 3 Fighting an oppressive regime is an afterthought in this conclusion to Mafi’s romantic trilogy.

Unravel Me (2013) left the resistance thoroughly trounced. Juliette’s barely escaped death at the hands of Warner’s father, and she’s rescued and hidden by Warner on the base. In a refrain familiar to the series’ readers, Juliette again vows to fight back, for real this time, and to destroy the Reestablishment. But first, she must romance Warner and find out what’s become of her Omega Point friends. Romancing Warner is easy: Warner’s early, frequent, lengthy monologues explain how Juliette misinterpreted nearly every villainous thing Warner has ever done. It’s even easier after Juliette reunites with the Omega Point survivors, finds Adam and gets a taste of his new, jerk personality. Broad strokes—Warner: good, Adam: bad—destroy any complexity, mystery or tension in the love triangle. Many of the most interesting and difficult moments, such as a conversation between Adam and Warner about their parentage, are glossed over in favor of the repetitive sharing of emotions. A high page count gives the novel physical if not psychological weight and includes such padding as Juliette’s lengthy musings on a bar of soap. After all this, the end is all too easy, for characters anyway.

Well, most people are probably reading these books for Warner anyway. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

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LEO LOVES BABY TIME

McQuinn, Anna Illus. by Hearson, Ruth Charlesbridge (24 pp.) $9.95 | $6.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-58089-665-8 978-1-60734-730-9 e-book Leo, who first appeared in Lola Reads to Leo (2012), attends a baby program with his mother.

He and his fellow sitting-up babes enjoy singing and playing on their grown-ups’ laps, as well as exploring books and toys. The single- and double-page spreads include one or two sentences describing the action written in a bold, black type: “First they sing the happy song. / Then they play peekaboo with scarves!” Hearson effectively channels the style of Rosalind Beardshaw, who illustrated the previous Lola titles, and creates cozy cartoon scenes in warm jewel tones. The setting of this program is left unclear, but it could easily be a public library or a community center in a very diverse neighborhood (the skin tones range from chocolate to peach). Organizations offering such events will want to stock up on this title, since it offers a perfect introduction for babies and their caregivers alike. While the ending feels a bit abrupt, little ones will find much to recognize here, and their grown-ups will appreciate the baby-friendly book design with its thicker-than-normal pages, jacketless cover and rounded corners.

Like Leo and his friends, this book is a buoyant and bouncy delight. (Picture book. 6-18 mos.)

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ARCADIA FALLS

Meyer, Kai Translated by Bell, Anthea Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-200610-3 978-0-06-209298-4 e-book Series: Arcadia Trilogy, 3 The Arcadia trilogy concludes with magic, shootouts, family betrayals and a cruise ship full of monsters: everything that’s necessary for a romance about Cosa Nostra shape shifters.

After the death of her aunt and sister, Rosa has become head of the Alcantara dynasty of Sicilian mobsters. She’s made nothing but enemies among her own family—because of her romance with Alessandro, head of the rival Carnevare family, because she’s cleaning up the least savory of her family’s criminal enterprises or simply because she’s an outsider—and soon, she and Alessandro are on the run, framed for a murder they didn’t commit. Since the discovery that she can turn into a 9-foot-long snake (while Alessandro can become an enormous panther), Rosa has learned not to be surprised by anything.

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“This is madcap, whimsical, smart and even heartbreaking, but Moriarty never drops the dozens of balls in the air.” from the cracks in the kingdom

in the rape and abortion that originally sent Rosa to Sicily, is connected to dark mob business and mad science. As they seek answers, revenge or at least a quiet moment, Alessandro and Rosa face certain doom with believably affectionate bickering.

Refreshingly for a paranormal romance, the two protect and fight for each other with equal strength and zeal. Rosa and her enemies leave a trail of corpses, some explicitly gruesome, all the way to the cinematic conclusion at a long-drowned village.

Snappy dialogue and well-paced excitement bring this adventure to its ambiguous but nevertheless satisfying conclusion. (Paranormal romance. 15 & up)

THE CRACKS IN THE KINGDOM

Moriarty, Jaclyn Levine/Scholastic (480 pp.) $18.99 | $18.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-545-39738-4 978-0-545-63369-7 e-book Series: Colors of Madeleine, 2 Moriarty’s latest draws this world and Cello ever closer.

Picking up just after the revelations that ended A Corner of White (2013) and ratcheting the stakes up even higher, this middle volume moves from a balance between Madeleine, in our world, and Elliot, in Cello (which is kind of fairyland, but stranger and more modern), to a tighter focus on Elliot and Cello’s political situation. Elliot has teamed up with the seemingly airheaded but actually ruthless Princess Ko and the Royal Youth Alliance in search of the abducted royal family, who have all been spirited away to this world. Meanwhile, the search for Elliot’s missing father has been taken over by a pair of agents, now that it appears Abel really was a Loyalist abducted

by Hostiles; in this world, Madeleine continues learning strange facts that seem to have bearing on Cello. This is madcap, whimsical, smart and even heartbreaking, but Moriarty never drops the dozens of balls in the air. By turns coming-of-age and wild adventure (the Lake of Spells and the Turquoise Rain in Jagged Edge stand out), this volume complicates the characters, expands the worldbuilding and sets things up for a grand finish in the trilogy closer.

Not for the impatient or new reader, but otherwise even better than the first. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

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MISS EMILY

Mutén, Burleigh Illus. by Phelan, Matt Candlewick (144 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-5734-5 The Belle of Amherst leads some young friends on a grand adventure.

Drawing on Dickinson’s playfulness and delight in children, Mutén fashions this light verse story told from the perspective of young MacGregor “Mac” Jenkins, the pastor’s son who lived across the street from the Dickinson residence (in real life) and was a playmate of the poet’s niece and nephew. With the help of Phelan’s wispy, textured drawings, Mutén imagines the famously reclusive poet playfully disguised as “Proserpina—Queen of the Night,” leading her tiny band of “Amherst gypsies” on a midnight quest to spy the arrival of the Great Golden Menagerie and Circus at the Amherst train station. Both poet and children thrill at the opportunity to meet a fortuneteller and witness the unloading of exotic circus animals, but as they speed home to avoid being recognized, Mac falls and injures himself. Mac’s resulting convalescence, landing him “housebound / like a winter bee in the hive,” draws not only an unprecedented visit from “Miss Emily,” but the chance for her to treat Mac and friends to another tale. It also gives Mutén an apt occasion to weave in a bit of actual correspondence from the poet to the children outlining her wish: “Please never improve—you are perfect now.”

Uplifting and clever, Mutén’s tale also includes a layer of biographical detail sure to tantalize Dickinson lovers everywhere. (biographical notes, bibliography) (Verse novel.

8-12)

HI, KOO! A Year of Seasons Muth, Jon J Illus. by Muth, Jon J Scholastic (32 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-16668-3

Long before photography, poets took to haiku, the poetic equivalent of a snapshot, and painters, to the suggestive medium of watercolor to capture the essence of moments in nature.

Caldecott Honoree Muth (Zen Shorts, 2005) employs both, with the help of his playful panda Koo, to present 26 moments through the seasons. Though light in tone and geared toward pre-reader eyes and interests, the mostly outdoor scenes Muth depicts command serious attention from all. The first page simultaneously demonstrates both Muth’s adherence to haiku’s three-line form rather than its traditional five-seven-five syllabic sequence and his exquisite use of white space. “Autumn, / are you dreaming / of new clothes?” reads the text as Koo reaches up to try to catch a handful of falling leaves. One of the few scenes referencing indoor living hilariously comes in early kirkus.com

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spring: “too much TV this winter / my eyes are square / let’s go Out and play.” Two children and Koo stand in front of a large television, the whites of the children’s eyes boxed and zombielike and Koo’s, two solid black squares. A more reflective, deeply moving spring moment finds the children alone with a book in the woods, Muth’s delicate watercolor and subtle inking deftly suggesting the forest’s shifting scope.

Throughout, condensed poetic image coupled with spare illustration yields huge effect; in a word, magical.

(Picture book/poetry. 3 & up)

FLIP FLAP FARM

Nosy Crow Illus. by Scheffler, Axel Nosy Crow/Candlewick (26 pp.) $11.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-7067-2 “What crazy creatures will you meet today?”

Scheffler illustrates a series of bouncy two-verse poems about animals, with verses on the left-hand page and pictures on the right. And there’s a “flip-flap” twist: Each right-hand page is split in half; turning a flap to the left changes each pictured animal considerably. (The spiral binding and sturdy stock make this task easy for young readers.) Starting with the cow—“I’m beautiful! My nose is pink, / I have lovely big brown eyes. / I swish my tail from side to side / to keep away the flies”— pulling the top half yields the upper half of a pink pig with a mottled bovine bottom half, udder and all! Turning still more flaps brings up a rooster, lamb, horse or squirrel for the top half.

There are 11 individual animals in all, bringing the number of possible combinations to well over 100. And each crazy creature has a different name. That oinker with udders is called a pow. There’s also a cabbit (cow/rabbit), a moat (mouse/goat) and a hirrel (horse/squirrel). And on and on and on.

Bold colors, phonetically zippy rhymes, sturdy book construction and countless creature combinations are a winning formula for beginning readers and storytimers.

(Picture book. 3-5)

SPARKY!

Offill, Jenny Illus. by Appelhans, Chris Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $16.99 | $19.99 PLB | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-375-87023-1 978-0-375-97023-8 PLB

bathed or fed.” After some library research, “[m]y sloth arrived

by Express Mail.” Here it gets really funny. The girl waits two days, standing in moonlight and rain next to Sparky’s backyard tree, before he even awakens. She teaches him games: “We played King of the Mountain / and I won. // We played Hideand-Seek / and I won.” Sparky never moves a muscle. Sitting on the grass, he’s stock-still; on his tree branch, he lies motionless (atop the branch, inexplicably but adorably, not hanging down in sloth fashion). Even his expression’s comically immobile. Training sessions and a performance proceed—um—at Sparky’s pace, but a beautiful closing illustration of girl and sloth together on his branch shows how close they’ve grown. Appelhans uses blue and pinky-brown watercolors and pencil on creamy background to create understated humor and affection with a light touch.

A serene, funny addition to the new-pet genre. (Picture book. 3-6)

PANIC

Oliver, Lauren Harper/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $17.99 | $11.99 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-06-201455-9 978-0-06-228559-1 e-book Oliver makes a white-knuckle return to realism that will have readers up until the wee hours.

They’ll be desperate to learn who will win—and even more importantly, who will survive—Panic, a secret game that pits player against player in mental and physical challenges designed to push them to the breaking point. Heather Nill never planned to play, but with a broken heart and nothing to lose, once she’s in, nothing is going to keep her from walking away with the $67,000 prize. Desperate to get out of Carp, N.Y., and determined to protect her sister Lily, Heather puts her life on the line time and again for a shot at a brighter future. Dodge Mason is playing for revenge, and he knows exactly how he is going to get it. After years of planning, nothing, not even the promise of new love, is going to stand in his way. Dodge is going to use the game to right an unforgiveable wrong, even if it kills him. Set in a town so run-down the grit is practically palpable, the book makes suspension of disbelief easy. Readers will understand how the deliberately built characters would and could do just about anything for a shot at getting out.

The only thing more terrifying than the game itself is not getting the chance to play it. (Thriller. 14 & up)

Quietly dry humor marks this story about a most unusual pet.

An unassuming girl looks straight out at readers and explains her desire for a pet. She’s not fussy, but she can’t make it happen: “My mother said no to the bird. / No to the bunny. / No, no, no to the trained seal.” Finally her mother consents—sort of: She agrees to any pet “as long as it doesn’t need to be walked or |

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THE SUMMER I FOUND YOU

Perry, Jolene Whitman (256 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-8369-2

Aidan and Kate meet soon after each has experienced a devastating change in health and are surprised to fall in love.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that high school senior Kate must deal with diabetes and its attendant shots, carb-counting and parental worrying, her boyfriend has just dumped her.

Soon after, she meets Aidan, who has his own struggles, having recently returned from Afghanistan, where his arm was blown off. Kate’s startling honesty (“How do you open jars?”) is refreshing to Aidan, who tells her, “It’s like they all try to pretend my arm’s still there and it isn’t.” Chapters alternate between Kate’s and Aidan’s first-person narrations, and each perspective rings true as their romance progresses from awkward-but-direct conversations to kissing and eventually sleeping together. The novel’s thoroughly chick-lit cover (complete with a heart of flowers) will prevent most guys from picking it up, and that’s a shame, as Perry conveys Aidan’s physical and emotional journey evocatively and with authenticity: “A lump stretches at my throat, and I nod. Unable to do more.” The romance is sweet and believable, but the only real momentum driving the plot is readers’ knowledge that Kate’s disability is an invisible one that she hasn’t yet revealed to Aidan, which may not be enough for many.

Likable main characters, lively dialogue and a timely topic of returning soldiers fill out this low-key romance.

(Romance. 13-18)

LIGHT IS ALL AROUND US

Pfeffer, Wendy Illus. by Meisel, Paul Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | $5.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-029121-1 978-0-06-440924-7 paper Series: World Around Us Inquiring minds in primary grades can gain understanding about a seemingly ever-present subject in this title about light in the Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science series.

Pfeffer begins her straightforward text by discussing sources of light from the sun and stars, as well as those powered by electricity. Soon readers are discovering how light travels to Earth from the sun 93 million miles away. The challenging concept of how fast light travels is made clear by Meisel’s appealing spreads comparing the speeds of various vehicles (car, plane, etc.) to light. The notion of measuring a particular light’s brightness in lumens unfolds alongside a series of spot illustrations showing how length, time, temperature and weight are measured. Bioluminescent creatures, such as common fireflies and the more exotic glowing octopus, get a quick mention 114

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before an accessible and informative explanation of how the eye works is impressively executed by both author and illustrator. Simple experiments proving how necessary light is to living things and suggested activities about shadows are provided at the title’s conclusion. A note states that this book “meets the Common Core State Standards for Science and Technical Subjects.” Newly independent readers will appreciate how closely the pictures reflect and extend the text, while younger students will gain much from listening to the book read aloud and poring over the details on each page.

An illuminating choice for the science shelf. (notes on experiments) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

HIDDEN LIKE ANNE FRANK 14 True Stories of Survival

Prins, Marcel; Steenhuis, Peter Henk Translated by Watkinson, Laura Levine/Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-545-54362-0 978-0-545-54363-7 e-book Dutch survivors of the Holocaust remember their years as hidden children.

During Hitler’s reign of terror, paths to survival for Jews were few and involved secrecy, danger, vigilance, and the kindness and bravery of strangers. Fourteen men and women recall their experiences with amazing clarity, detail and honesty. There are several commonalities in the accounts. Most began their ordeal at very young ages and had to take on heavy responsibilities and new identities, enduring frequent moves, incidents of near discovery, and unending fear and uncertainty. Some found compassion and love among their rescuers, and others were treated callously by sponsors who accepted them only for the stipend that the resistance organizations paid. After the war, most of them found that nearly all their family members had been killed, relationships with surviving parents were awkward, their homes had been given to other people, and postwar authorities were slow to help them resettle. The accounts are told in a matter-of-fact tone, with no attempt at sentimentality or self-pity. Photos of the survivors before the war and of some of their temporary homes and families accompany the text, and photos as they are now are shown at the end. Each memoir is poignant and heartrending on its own, and the compilation gives the reader a stunning sense of the horror of the Holocaust.

Terrifying, haunting and powerful. (foreword, glossary) (Collective memoir. 12 & up)

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“Though less of a novelty here than in the opener, [the photographs] still add distinctly creepy notes…to a tale already well-stocked with soul eaters and tentacled monsters.” from hollow city

GANDHI My Life is My Message

Quinn, Jason Illus. by Nagar, Sachin Campfire (212 pp.) $16.99 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-93-80741-22-2 Series: Campfire Graphic Novels Heroes A fictionalized graphic “memoir” conveys bright pictures of the Great Soul’s character and achievements without falling into blind hero worship.

Quinn’s account is written in the first person and includes invented thoughts and dialogue that sometimes have an anachronistic ring. These literary gestures notwithstanding, the author retraces Gandhi’s career accurately and in relatively fine detail from childhood to assassination. More importantly, he also depicts the origins, logic and applications of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent disobedience (satyagraha) in deft, compelling strokes. There is a slight drift toward hagiography in later pages, capped by a reference to Gandhi’s “martyrdom,” but this is balanced by a cleareyed view of his actions as a younger man. He justifies his frequent abandonment of his family with a glib, less-than-saintly “Why should I rob my children of their right to self reliance?” His intelligent wife, Kasturba, will elicit particular sympathy, though she does get in her digs: “Oh yes, go, go, leave us again. We’re used to it.” Along with placing the large blocks of dialogue and narrative so that they’re seldom in the way, Nagar expertly positions panels and figures to create a visual sweep even in relatively static compositions. Action in the art is easy to follow, and scenes of violence are explicit but not disturbingly so.

Inspiring, of course…but also a well-told tale, rich alike in intimate moments and momentous historical events. (quotes, chronology, lists of books, films, websites) (Graphic novel. 11-15)

HOLLOW CITY The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children Riggs, Ransom Quirk Books (400 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-59474-612-3 Series: Peculiar Children, 2

Along with picking up the action where it left off in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Riggs fills in background detail while adding both talking animals and more children with magical powers to the cast.

With evil wights and murderous hollowgasts in hot pursuit— and only days to save their beloved Miss Peregrine from permanently becoming a bird—Jacob and his nine young (in body, if not age) companions fling themselves through time loops to |

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Blitz-torn London. The growing attachment between Jacob and kindhearted fire-conjurer Emma turns out to play a crucial role in the plot. After a brisk round of chases, captures, escapes and bombings—capped by a devastating reversal—the two end up separated from most of their allies but with a new talent that just might save “peculiardom” from its seemingly all-powerful enemies. As before, the author spins his tale in part around a crop of enigmatic vintage trick or portrait photographs, including two men (corpses?) sharing a bed with skeletons, a pipesmoking dog and a staring girl with a huge hole through her midsection. Though less of a novelty here than in the opener, these still add distinctly creepy notes (even when the subject is supposedly comical) to a tale already well-stocked with soul eaters and tentacled monsters.

Less a straightforward horrorfest than a tasty adventure for any reader with an appetite for the…peculiar. (Fantasy. 11 & up)

A WORLD OF HER OWN 24 Amazing Women Explorers and Adventurers

Ross, Michael Elsohn Chicago Review (272 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-61374-438-3

If only the writing lived up to the subject matter….

Twenty-four vignettes of intrepid true-life women—exploring, adventuring and risking their lives to live fully—are recounted in passive, confusing narratives. Disjointed thoughts plague many of the accounts: “At one point Sophia thought that she couldn’t walk another step, but she only grew stronger.” Troublesome undercurrents riffle others: “…and Eleanor’s intelligence, courage, and grace set an example of what a woman could accomplish at sea.” (Switch the gender and see how patronizing it sounds.)

For a book about women, the influence of men infiltrates irritatingly. Most role models depicted, whether in the forms of parents, spouses or professors, are men. Professors, especially, proliferate since doctorates are earned by many of the women.

And often earned, it seems, without much juggling of responsibilities or financial hardship. While many of the women profiled knew struggle in both childhood and adulthood, the flat tone of the writing keeps readers from engaging emotionally.

All these women could be—are—wonderful role models, and their stories could inspire, if only they were told with more passion. The most inspiration is found in the resources, notes and bibliography sections of the backmatter.

The book’s overall tone—that of a laundry list of accomplishments—does a disservice to readers who deserve to relate to and be inspired by these remarkable women. (Collective biography. 10-17)

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“Simple, flat, pastel-hued gouache illustrations exude an innocent cheer as they progress from Olive and Sophie’s apparently exclusive friendship to Olive’s more expansive perspective….” from sophie sleeps over

THE BLOOD GUARD

Roy, Carter Two Lions (288 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4778-4725-1 Series: Blood Guard, 1

Roy’s first novel is the humorous and exciting start of a new trilogy.

Ordinary 13-year-old Evelyn Ronan Truelove’s life is turned on its ear when he finds himself a participant in a mad car chase, his mother at the wheel, pursued by unknown assailants his mother identifies as “bad guys.” When Ronan’s mother reveals she’s a member of a group known as the Blood Guard, he realizes his life isn’t as normal as he thought, for he’s unknowingly been a Blood Guard–in-training his entire life. The mission of the Guard: to protect three dozen people known as the Pure, whose goodness balances out the sins of Earth’s 6 billion other inhabitants. If the Pure die, the world ends. The bad guys are Bend Sinister agents, members of a group who’ve created a way to steal the souls of the Pure—and bring about the world’s destruction. The stakes are raised with a startling revelation that will have readers eager for the next book. The pacing is quick, with important details revealed evenly throughout. It can be sentimental in places but never sappy, and Ronan (please don’t call him Evelyn) is a believable protagonist, gradually moving from ordinary boy to hero.

Though it’s a little on the derivative side, this iteration of the hero’s journey will have readers chuckling all the way to the satisfying cliffhanger. (Adventure. 10-14)

EVERYONE PAINTS! The Lives and Art of the Wyeth Family Rubin, Susan Goldman Chronicle (112 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8118-6984-3

A perceptive, if undersized and overdesigned, introduction to a dynasty of American painters.

Playing to her well-established strengths, Rubin (Delicious!

The Life & Art of Wayne Thiebaud, 2007, etc.) does a fine job of setting selected works of N.C. Wyeth, his son Andrew and his grandson Jamie into biographical context and explicating emotional substrates in their art. This is particularly important with Andrew, whose pictures are often oblique expressions of private feelings or incidents. The analysis is, however, embedded in references to other family members (several of whom were also artists, though none of their work is illustrated or discussed here), along with moves to various residences, gallery shows, awards, honors and other details that will be less than compelling to young readers. Moreover, the type and background color scheme does nothing but call attention to itself by changing 116

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with every page turn (the purple type on gray background is a particularly unfortunate choice). Though nearly every spread offers a sharply reproduced image of a painting or drawing (or an occasional photo), the volume’s modest trim size cramps the often large originals.

Still, Rubin’s portrait of this creative clan merits at least a look by students of both book illustration and American fine art in general. (index, bibliography) (Biography. 11-14)

LOST FOR WORDS

Russell, Natalie Illus. by Russell, Natalie Peachtree (32 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-56145-739-7

An animal struggles toward selfexpression, taking inspiration from his friends’ creations and realizing he can choose his own art form.

Tapir, a gray animal with a long snout and a gently curved body, has pencils and a blank notebook. When he tries to write, his head feels “empty, just like his page.” His friends write easily: Giraffe scribes a poem, Hippo crafts a story, and Flamingo composes a song. Giraffe has “a way with words,” Hippo’s story is “exciting,” and Flamingo’s song brings a tear to Tapir’s eye—all of which Tapir finds impressive but daunting. Feeling insecure and wordless, Tapir wanders up a hill and gazes at the landscape. When he unpacks his pencils, he knows what to do: He draws a sun for Flamingo, a muddy pool for Hippo and a tall tree for Giraffe, and then he draws his friends into the scene.

Russell’s screen-print illustrations use simple, tidy shapes and flat, medium-intensity colors. Tapir’s drawings, like his friends’ work, are childlike; unlike similar books that show dramatic distinction between the primary visual narrative and the characters’ in-book work, Russell provides little contrast.

While blander than many available options about writer’s block, mustering voice or choosing an art form, this may also be more directly encouraging for readers who need the message, as the results seem so achievable. (Picture book. 4-7)

SOPHIE SLEEPS OVER

Russo, Marisabina Illus. by Russo, Marisabina Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-59643-933-7 A little bunny attends a sleepover birthday party at her best friend’s house and discovers she may not be Olive’s only “best friend.” “[B]est bunny friends” Sophie and Olive enjoy snacking on carrots, cabbage and kale. They like wearing bracelets, bows and tiaras. They play jump-rope, hopscotch, tag and pingpong. So when Olive invites Sophie to her birthday sleepover, kirkus.com

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Sophie’s “happy from the tops of her ears to the tips of her toes” but surprised when another bunny named Penelope answers Olive’s door and announces she’s Olive’s best friend. Since Sophie thought she was Olive’s best friend, she’s confused and feels slighted. Eventually, Sophie and Penelope confront Olive about which is her best friend, and Olive tells them you can have more than one best friend. Skeptical, Penelope and Sophie can’t fall asleep until they confess to each other this is their first sleepover and they miss their favorite dolls. After this confidential exchange, Sophie decides Olive may be right. Simple, flat, pastel-hued gouache illustrations exude an innocent cheer as they progress from Olive and Sophie’s apparently exclusive friendship to Olive’s more expansive perspective with her two best friends, Sophie and Penelope.

A charming, emotionally resonant exploration of the oh-so-important concept of “best friend.” (Picture book. 3-7)

AVIARY WONDERS INC. Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual

Samworth, Kate Illus. by Samworth, Kate Clarion (32 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-547-97899-4

A catalog of bird parts and instructions for making your own in a sadly possible future in which living birds have nearly disappeared.

Feathers, beaks, legs and feet, bodies, tails and even flight styles can be ordered from this enterprising company, whose motto is “Renewing the World’s Bird Supply Since 2031.” Written and illustrated (in oil, ink, graphite and colored pencil) in the style of traditional mail-order inventories, this weaves in a surprising amount of genuine bird information while displaying the variety of interchangeable parts. Body and wing shapes fit different purposes. Legs and feet are adjusted for habitat, and beaks must match potential food. There are decorative streamers, collars and crests. The illustrations reflect actual birds; in spite of decorative coloration, beaks and wings are recognizable as identified. If a model is based on a bird now critically endangered or extinct (such as the slender-billed curlew, great auk and passenger pigeon), the label points it out. The author also enumerates actual bird threats: insecticides, habitat loss, the exotic pet trade and cats. Finally, careful instructions for assembly and training are included. Don’t teach your bird a song you don’t want to hear over and over!

For children and their bird-watching parents, who will appreciate the clever premise and the message of admiration. (Picture book. 10 & up)

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THE GOOD-PIE PARTY

Scanlon, Liz Garton Illus. by Denton, Kady MacDonald Levine/Scholastic (32 pp.) $17.99 | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-545-44870-3 Posy Peyton does not want to move away from her secret clubhouse, her books, her bird feeder or her friends.

Instead of a goodbye party, she and her friends have a good-pie party. Since everything is packed up except the kitchen, the three girls make a pie. They then invite neighbors and friends to a party to say so long (not goodbye). When everyone arrives with pies in hand, Posy and her friends replace their sadness with the joy of pie, whipped cream and lemonade. Building a giant pyramid of smiling children helps too. The party might not make the sadness disappear, but it does allow the friends some time to adjust to the new reality. Scanlon’s gentle, child’s-eye view of a common challenge hits the right notes—the move will happen, but memories link people forever. Denton’s gentle, muted watercolors get at the girls’ emotions with angry scowls and somber faces and extend the spare text. The furnished house transforms into empty rooms with tan boxes and bare walls, letting readers know the inevitability of the move. The final spreads, showing the pie-shaped moon, is a reminder that these friends will always share these special memories.

A must for every child who has to move away and for teachers and parents who want to help children through these times. (Picture book. 4-8)

MONKEY AND ELEPHANT GO GADDING

Schaefer, Carola Lexa Illus. by Bernstein, Galia Candlewick (48 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-6128-1 Series: Monkey and Elephant

All cleaned up but with nowhere to go, Monkey and Elephant go gadding about in this latest installment of their

early-reader series.

In the first of three brief chapters, Monkey cleans her small pink ears, Elephant cleans his big, blue ears, and they admire how nice they look. In fact, Bernstein’s distinctive, digitally rendered characters find themselves so fetching that Monkey declares that they look too nice to stay home. She suggests that they go gadding, which she helpfully defines as “walking along, looking around, finding something fun, stopping awhile, then moving on.” In the second chapter, the pair happens upon Elephant’s uncle Phump, who has taken up millinery and gives them the delightful opportunity to select hats from his collection. Newly hatted, the friends go gadding again, only to run |

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into Monkey’s cousin MeeMee, who surprises them not with a new hobby, but a new family when she introduces them to her three babies. Monkey’s hat comes in handy as a cradle of sorts for the little ones when they nap, and then she and Elephant get to have a visit and a snack together with MeeMee before they resume their gadding.

A fine addition to a well-established series for new readers. (Early reader. 6-8)

ONE BUSY DAY A Story for Big Brothers and Sisters Schaefer, Lola M. Illus. by Meserve, Jessica Disney Hyperion (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-7112-6

In this sequel to their excellent new-baby story, One Special Day (2012), Schaefer and Meserve depict a growing sibling bond between big brother Spencer and little sister Mia. No longer a baby, Mia longs to play with Spencer. “But he was always too busy.” Mia gets busy all by herself and engages in solitary imaginative play. Taking a page from Ian Falconer’s Olivia (2000), whose heroine imagines herself as Maria Callas (among other luminaries), Meserve’s art cleverly extends the text to expound upon plucky Mia’s imaginative flights of fancy.

For example, she goes exploring under a fort of chairs and blankets, but a page turn reveals her to be not in a dining room but in “a deep, dark cave” complete with drawings reminiscent of those discovered in Lascaux. All the while, Spencer observes his little sister’s play and is soon enticed to join in on the fun, much to her delight. The pleasing text culminates in a circular ending that showcases the pair as “busy. Very, very busy—together.”

Throughout, Meserve’s digitally rendered illustrations employ soft visual texture and bold colors to create a cheery, charming world for the two children to enjoy.

Hooray for sibling revelry! (Picture book. 3-6)

THREATENED

Schrefer, Eliot Scholastic (288 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-55143-4 978-0-545-55144-1 e-book The author of Endangered (2012) introduces another primate species, offering a poignant demonstration of connection between chimpanzees and humans.

When AIDs orphan Luc goes into the Gabon jungle with professor Abdul Mohammed, a scientist who frees him from his bondholder and plans to study chimpanzees in the wild, the resourceful boy finds a surprising new family and makes a real home. Luc’s story is riveting and seldom 118

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comfortable, for him or for his readers. The chimpanzees are aggressive, but they are not as lethal as the leopard or as personally dangerous as the bushmeat hunter the professor frightens away or Monsieur Tatagani, determined to return Luc to his stable of street boys. Drummer, the young male chimp Luc rescues from a trap, and Mango, his toddler sister, have personalities as real and appealing as the boy himself. Luc’s first-person narration is so lively and detailed readers won’t notice that he seems remarkably acute for a 12- or 13-year-old, even one who has watched his mother and baby sister die and lived, afterward, by his own wits. The particulars of his daily life Inside—where Gabonese believe humans shouldn’t go—will enthrall those who enjoy adventure, and the intimate glimpse of chimpanzee daily life is a treat for nature lovers.

Engrossing action and characters readers will keep thinking about in a splendid survival story. (Adventure. 12-16)

FIRE & FLOOD

Scott, Victoria Scholastic (320 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-53746-9 978-0-545-53747-6 e-book The Hunger Games meets The Amazing Race.

When a mysterious blue box arrives for Tella, a small audio device invites her to compete in the Brimstone Bleed. She has less than 48 hours to report to the competition, select a Pandora companion and enter in a three-month race across four separate ecosystems—first to the finish line gets a cure for any illness.

Tella seizes the chance to save her deathly ill brother’s life and is tossed into a ruthless survivalist competition. While the overall worldbuilding is light, the more immediate competition settings are ably exploited for dangers. The Pandoras are eggs that hatch genetically engineered, superpowered animals—not terribly realistic but so much fun that nobody will care. Everyone has a loved one to save so stakes are high, but survival necessitates teaming up, yielding hilarious dialogue. Of course, one of Tella’s teammates is a handsome, broody, uber-competent love interest.

The female supporting characters are less stock. Tella herself is awkward, doofy and self-consciously superficial—the combination makes her easy to root for. It’s hard to believe how trusting and accepting Tella is regarding the lack of information about the race—aside from the occasional small hints, most background comes in a large expository passage late in the novel that will leave readers excited for the next installment.

Great for readers needing a fix in between Hunger Games movie releases. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

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“A communal effort reunites a lost child with her mother in this invitingly told and illustrated import.” from the wednesday bazaar

THREE

Simmons, Kristen Tor (384 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-7653-2960-8 Series: Article 5, 3 The third and final installment of the series that began with Article 5 (2012) ramps up the action as the extremist government cracks down on Ember Miller and her fellow resistance members.

When the book opens, Ember is sleeping in what remains of a destroyed resistance safe house along with the boy she loves, Chase, and a handful of others. As they continue to travel underground, they encounter the legendary resistance group, Three. This is a war story: Ember and her friends continually flee, camp out, strategize and fight, often at a moment’s notice.

Where earlier volumes’ action sequences felt repetitive, these are suspenseful and immediate. Whom to trust and how far are rarely clear. Some interesting moral questions about pragmatism and violence arise, and no easy answers are given. Ember and Chase’s relationship, including a gentle and warmly presented sex scene, gives the story both hope and warmth. Given the series’ emphasis on the dangers of social conservativism, however—Ember’s mother’s initial crime was having conceived Ember out of wedlock—it seems odd that Ember dreams of marrying Chase without considering that act’s relationship to the Articles or to her mother’s arrest.

The strongest of the series’ three volumes, with a tense and harrowing climax. (Dystopian romance. 14 & up)

THE WEDNESDAY BAZAAR

Singh, Neha Illus. by Gupta, Sonal Karadi Tales (36 pp.) $11.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-81-8190-295-5

A communal effort reunites a lost child with her mother in this invitingly told and illustrated import.

On their weekly outing to buy vegetables, young Bela suddenly loses sight of her quick-moving mother. Her cries attract a boy with a goat (the goat also bleats “Ma!”), a tightrope walker and others who link hands to form a chain of helpers: “ ‘I see her Ma, she is walking near the peepal tree!’ ‘He sees her Ma near the peepal tree!’ ‘Her Ma! Peepal tree!’ ” With each Ma spotting, she runs from one landmark to another until at last she hears her name called. Bela’s “I found her!” and “Thank you!” pass back down the line as she rejoins her mother at the iced-lolly cart, and the two stroll home together. Using warm reds and golds as predominant colors, Gupta depicts uncrowded market scenes from, often, elevated angles so that Bela and her mother are both visible to viewers.

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“saree”; other figures display a similar mix of modern and traditional garb. Bela’s plight is taken seriously, but the overall tone is relaxed. It’s lightened further by visual parallels between the delicate curlicues in the roofs and walls of the long rows of market stalls and the extravagantly curled mustaches sported by most of the men.

A few moments of distress capped by a happy ending and an iced lolly—all stories should end so well. (Picture book.

5-7)

29 MYTHS ON THE SWINSTER PHARMACY

Snicket, Lemony Illus. by Brown, Lisa McSweeney’s McMullens (32 pp.) $14.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-938073-78-6

Young investigators, a girl and boy old enough to ride the city bus alone, offer 29 observations associated with a building in another town.

The Swinster Pharmacy seems to be one of those strangely inaccessible businesses engaged in unknown and possibly mysterious activities. A cat closely resembling the cat on the “Lost” flyer posted near the Swinster Pharmacy slips among the scenes.

There’s an implication of nonspecific sinister happenings: Much is unexplained and slightly surreal (and the richer for it).

From the title (“29 Myths on…”), Snicket channels the slightly awkward, odd syntax of children. Some of the sleuths’ 29 numbered statements are a little spooky—“Dogs bark at it all the time”—while some are slyly funny: “I was going to write a poem about the Swinster Pharmacy.” A sign in the window declares “Included.” Brown’s simple, cartoon-style artwork against a dark background is just right: It’s direct and not overly edgy; her characters are distinctive and expressive. A simple map offers a geographic context for the travels of the sleuthing duo; a glimpse of the basement appears on the cover. The compelling, unexplained goings-on at the Swinster Pharmacy could turn out to be evil or benign or something completely other—readers are never told.

For all its enigmatic nature, the tale provides a clear reason for drawing one’s own conclusions: Observing and recording the results through a personal filter makes a good story. (Picture book. 5-8)

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“Vibrant illustrations in mixed media and collage use stylized shapes for the animals against juicy lime and lavender backgrounds that burst with flowers, leaves and trees.” from peek-a-boo bunny

SWITCHED AT BIRTHDAY

Standiford, Natalie Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-34650-4 978-0-545-63377-2 e-book A wish, a shared birthday and some “theater magic” transform the lives of two young teens.

Although Lavender’s and Scarlet’s birthdays are on the same day, their lives are polar opposites. Scarlet reigns as a popular girl at their middle school, while Lavender’s status falls much lower on the social scale. Yet both are determined to audition for the lead, Marian, in their school production of The Music Man. The mysterious intervention of their music teacher—who harbors a magical secret—leads to the pair waking up the day after their 13th birthdays in each other’s bodies. Suddenly, Lavender experiences the popular life as Scarlet, and Scarlet endures the many taunts that punctuate Lavender’s school days. As they scramble to resolve their dilemma, the girls form a reluctant collaboration. Standiford’s adept portrayal of the evolution of the girls’ self-awareness conveys a meaningful message about empathy and forgiveness. While the switch enables the girls to learn about each other, it also gives them greater insight into their own lives, allowing them each to discover their strengths and to recognize their foibles. The girls emerge from their experiences with an appreciation of their genuine friendship and the courage to make positive changes in their lives.

A characteristically insightful tale that affirms the importance of true friendship and self-acceptance. (Fantasy.

9-13)

FEATHERS Not Just for Flying

Stewart, Melissa; Brannen, Sarah S. Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-58089-430-2 978-1-57091-431-9 paper 978-1-60734-627-2 e-book

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THE FOX AND THE CROW

Subramaniam, Manasi Illus. by Fox, Culpeo S. Karadi Tales (28 pp.) $17.95 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-81-8190-303-7

A melodramatic take on the Aesop fable with dark, strongly brushed artwork and equally expressive language.

“When the moon slithers into the open skies, surely some trickery is afoot.” The charged exchange between the crow with the stolen bread in his beak and the trickster fox below is entirely nonverbal: “Their eyes meet. A challenge is spoken.” Fox howls (“Oh, she’s a temptress, that one,” comments the narrative). As “[a] song is an invitation[,] Crow must sing back.” In consequence, even as “Crow’s pride sets his hunger ablaze,” Fox snatches the fallen bread with a smirk, and her “tail teases as she swishes away.” The big, spread-spanning nighttime scenes are mostly close-ups, often just headshots of the sly rivals (and an owl, looking on inscrutably) limned in thick swirls of light and shadow. Floating musical notes to symbolize the “song” add an incongruous (and superfluous) element, but they don’t detract significantly from the brief encounter’s intensity. The moral goes unstated, and in contrast to more-conventional versions, the interpretation suggests higher stakes than just a lost meal. Discuss.

Aesop noir—gorgeous. (Picture book/folk tale. 6-10)

PEEK-A-BOO BUNNY

An album of images and a simple text reveal that birds’ feathers are far more versatile than one might expect.

Comparing feathers to familiar objects, Stewart reveals that birds use them in surprising ways. Her two-level text is headlined with a comparison and includes a short paragraph of explanation. Laid out like a scrapbook, her words share a page or spread with accurate and appealing watercolor images of a bird (identified by species and location), the everyday object in question and the feather. From backyard blue jays and cardinals to exotic manakins and peacocks, the 16 birds used as examples come from all over. The rosy-faced lovebird in Namibia carries nesting material in its tail feathers, like a forklift. For the 120

Alaskan winter, a willow ptarmigan grows feathers on its feet that serve as snowshoes. In Mongolia, a Pallas’ sandgrouse uses his spongelike belly feathers to soak up water to bring to his nestlings. On a concluding spread, text and illustrations together provide an example of one possible system of feather classification. Sepia-toned endpapers show some of the feathers described. Other than a note about Birdwatching magazine, the author doesn’t indicate her sources, but considerable research by both author and illustrator is evident.

The combination of thoughtful approach and careful crafting makes this an excellent resource for early nature study. (Informational picture book. 5-9)

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Surplice, Holly Illus. by Surplice, Holly Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $9.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-0-06-224265-5 A gray rabbit plays hide-and-seek with his forest friends in this delightfully illustrated, simple story with a bouncy, rhyming text.

Surrounded by delicate flowers, Bunny stares out from the cover illustration with a transfixed expression, foreshadowing his difficulty in playing the game effectively. As his friends hide, Bunny counts to 10, slyly peeking out from behind his paws. A little mole pops up to help Bunny, trying to point out the hiding kirkus.com

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characters during the ensuing search, but Bunny is so excited to be playing the game that he bounds right past the hiding places.

Finally, Bunny slumps down under a tree, dejected—but on the final, joyous spread, the animal friends all jump out shouting, “PEEK-A-BOO!” Vibrant illustrations in mixed media and collage use stylized shapes for the animals against juicy lime and lavender backgrounds that burst with flowers, leaves and trees. The wildflowers and grasses often stretch across the foreground of a full spread in an impressionistic blur, complemented by delicate leaves that hang from the overarching boughs, together framing the animal action in a distinctive, theatrical way.

Preschoolers who are just beginning to understand the game of hide-and-seek will find this irresistible. (Picture book. 2-6)

S IS FOR SALMON A Pacific Northwest Alphabet

Viano, Hannah; Viano, Hannah Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1570618734

Anemone, blackberry, crab, Douglas fir, eagle…this elegant alphabet book mirrors the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest.

Except for the double-page spreads “A for anemone” and “Z for zephyr,” each Northwest entity is allotted one giftcard–perfect page, showing the capital and lowercase versions of each letter. The artwork resembles woodcuts, but Viano carves away black paper to shape her images. A soothing palette—creams, robin’s-egg blue, pale greens, warm rose—sets a reflective mood in keeping with the quiet, still illustrations of close-up objects and landscapes alike. The text—sometimes factual, sometimes more whimsical—is best for reading aloud to wee ones, as the sentence structure can be somewhat convoluted: “Tucked away when exposed at low tide, the tentacles of a sea ANEMONE reach out when the water returns.” Much of the pictured flora and fauna, such as gull, lichen, nettle, pine cone, queen bee, etc. can be found elsewhere around the world. The author embraces her Northwest-resident status, using inclusive language like “[o]ur beloved ISLANDS” and extending her conversational tone with friendly admonitions such as “Blame the squirrel for the falling PINECONE that hits you on the head while you rest against a tree.”

Urchins and volcanoes and whales, oh my! This eyecatching alphabet book affectionately showcases the Northwest’s bountiful beauty. (Picture book. 4-8)

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MAMA BUILT A LITTLE NEST

Ward, Jennifer Illus. by Jenkins, Steve Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-4424-2116-5 978-1-4424-4945-9 e-book Echoing the meter of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” Ward uses catchy original rhymes to describe the variety of nests

birds create.

Each sweet stanza is complemented by a factual, engaging description of the nesting habits of each bird. Some of the notes are intriguing, such as the fact that the hummingbird uses flexible spider web to construct its cup-shaped nest so the nest will stretch as the chicks grow. An especially endearing nesting behavior is that of the emperor penguin, who, with unbelievable patience, incubates the egg between his tummy and his feet for up to 60 days. The author clearly feels a mission to impart her extensive knowledge of birds and bird behavior to the very young, and she’s found an appealing and attractive way to accomplish this. The simple rhymes on the left page of each spread, written from the young bird’s perspective, will appeal to younger children, and the notes on the right-hand page of each spread provide more complex factual information that will help parents answer further questions and satisfy the curiosity of older children. Jenkins’ accomplished collage illustrations of common bird species—woodpecker, hummingbird, cowbird, emperor penguin, eagle, owl, wren—as well as exotics, such as flamingoes and hornbills, are characteristically naturalistic and accurate in detail.

A good bet for the youngest bird-watchers. (author’s note, further resources) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

SUGAR HILL Harlem’s Historic Neighborhood

Weatherford, Carole Boston Illus. by Christie, R. Gregory Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-7650-2 Weatherford’s poetic, swinging textual rhythms meet Christie’s artistic razzmatazz to create one hot picture book.

A historic and cultural tour of Harlem’s famous neighborhood, the book drops names aplenty. Miles Davis, Lena Horne, Zora Neale Hurston, Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. Du Bois, among others, all lived and thrived in this center of AfricanAmerican life and art—a place that has also always nurtured black children into productive lives through the arts, literature, and the love and attention of caring adults. Sparsely detailed but action-packed, Christie’s illustrations echo the lives of the starstudded cast of characters. Faith Ringgold’s page, for instance, |

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features the Brooklyn Bridge and a young girl who could just as easily be Cassie from Ringgold’s Tar Beach (1991) as the young Ringgold herself. The backmatter offers biographical blurbs that emphasize the longitudinal impact this neighborhood has had on Harlem and on the nation; birthdates begin in 1868 (Du Bois) and end in the present with those who are still producing art today (Sonny Rollins, the “Saxophone Colossus,” and Ringgold, both 82 years old at the time of this review).

A fine tribute to the local color of Sugar Hill, who have made America a better and more interesting country for almost a century. (Informational picture book. 7-9)

THE SAVAGES

Whyman, Matt Overlook (288 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 6, 2014 978-1-4683-0856-3 Dinner with the Savages can be murder.

Sixteen-year-old Sasha Savage has a new boyfriend. Jack is a year ahead of her in school, but that’s not what causes a family controversy: He’s a vegetarian, and the Savages are…well, they’re cannibals. Ever since Grandpa was in the siege of Leningrad, the family has ritualistically, on occasion, feasted on human flesh, but they are always respectful to the source and waste as little as possible. Sasha’s father, Titus, was born and raised in England.

He’s a predatory businessman; he orchestrates hostile takeovers of companies. It’s this practice that has private detective Vernon English tailing Titus. Then a model fatally falls prey to a prank directed at Sasha by her younger brother, Ivan. Vernon doesn’t know the specifics behind her disappearance, but he’s sure something more than illegal business deals is going on. Can Sasha introduce her controversial boyfriend to the family, and can they all keep Vernon from finding out the family’s culinary peculiarity? Making fun of foodies and vegetarians alike, this is neither a laugh riot nor a page-turning thriller, but readers seeking a little grisly diversion may be entertained.

Whyman’s British Addams Family of man-eaters certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for those who like their humor very, very dry, it may just hit the spot. (Fiction.

13 & up)

DRAMA QUEENS IN THE HOUSE

Williams, Julie Roaring Brook (432 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-59643-735-7

Jessie’s world revolves around the Minnesota theater company her parents co-founded, so she’s considerably shaken up when she surprises her dad, Mark, in a passionate embrace with Brad, the company’s costumer.

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Mark, who’s black, moves out, the theater goes on, and Jessie adapts to her reconfigured family. Less resilient, her mother, Una, who’s white, dives into an affair with the company’s other cofounder. Her dad’s family excepted, Jessie’s world is white. (Jessie, 15 and a high school graduate, belongs to the burgeoning biracialgenius category.) Sensing her gifts lie in writing and directing, Jessie breaks with tradition and enrolls in a writing workshop instead of helping with theater summer school. Sexual orientation, coming out and celebrating progress toward marriage equality are central to plot and theme; characters are explicitly gay, straight or, like Jessie herself, undecided Then in a puzzling development that feels borrowed from another narrative, race, until now carrying little emotional or thematic weight, replaces sexual orientation as the catalyst for her development. Sexual orientation gets savvy, sensitive treatment, but the presentation of race is clumsy and simplistic. Previously effervescent and selfconfident, Jessie now struggles with a self-limiting belief, racially nuanced, that she can’t dance. Since readers know Jessie has no ambitions to act or dance, why does it matter?

An initially fresh, original narrative swamped by tired tropes and conventional resolution. Pity. (Fiction. 12-16)

MIDDLE-SCHOOL COOL

Williams, Maiya Illus. by Williams, Karl Delacorte (240 pp.) $12.99 | $9.99 e-book | $15.99 PLB Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-385-74349-5 978-0-449-81614-1 e-book 978-0-375-99115-8 PLB Graduates of Wayside School will fit right in at the decidedly unconventional

Kaboom Academy.

The Academy is located in a former mental situation, staffed in part by former patients and dedicated to making students fall “madly in love with learning!” It offers literary classics in easyto-swallow pill form, games of dodgeball in which the balls vigorously throw themselves, loud gongs and cannon fire instead of bells, and character-building lunches sprinkled with “curiosity,” “honesty” and other “spices of life.” The school also has a journalism class of nine young investigative reporters—including legally blind photographer Leo and telepathic former conjoined twins Aliya and Taliya—determined to winkle out all of the Academy’s secrets. Williams weighs her episodic tale down with detailed expositions of the central cast’s unhappy pasts and troubled domestic situations, as well as heavy-handed axe grinding in repeated rants against the boring, pointless, timewasting experience of going to normal school. Nevertheless, the mix of out-and-out magic with far-fetched but logical twists creates an enjoyably surreal romp. Also, the author shows a knack for wacky inventions, from those book pills to the climactic arrival of an Invisiblimp.

Middle schoolers will clamor for a transfer. (Fantasy.

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“A frankly stunning look at the creation of animated film over the past century from the daddy of them all, Disney.” from disney animated

interactive e-books

the bold, bright colors of the app’s illustrations. While the plot is recounted in bland, by-the-numbers passages (“Kristoff took Anna to the trolls. The trolls said that Elsa had put ice in Anna’s heart”), the app’s background music, visuals and narration are well-produced. And the app’s best feature (or gimmick if you’re cynical) is that some story pages can be swapped out by rotating the iPad 180 degrees, shifting Anna’s story to Elsa’s. The app designers wisely give plenty of attention to Olaf, the clueless, scene-stealing snowman. Extras include an ice-themed freedrawing tool, a snow globe and a set of frustrating puzzles in which shards of ice must be matched up.

A pale shadow of the movie experience. (iPad storybook app. 3-10)

AUGUI AND THE RAIN POTION

Caessa, Sofia Illus. by Fernandes, Pedro Lêleh Land $3.99 | Nov. 29, 2013 1.0.2; Dec. 19, 2013

An inviting new series about a grandmother witch is hobbled by clunky app design and a slow-moving story.

Augui doesn’t know what to do when her granddaughter Feelu begins crying one morning and can’t stop. She tries potions and spells, but ultimately, it’s a forest adventure that helps cure Feelu. The app opens on a confusing page of menu options inside Augui’s home. There’s an original song that can be played and information for parents, but finding the actual story is not easy. Once begun, it becomes an exercise in frustration. On some pages, it’s unclear what needs to be done to unlock the next bit of the story, and animations and interactions that must be completed to continue are often balky. Clues are nominally available, but this menu is as difficult to manage as another containing an incomplete list of story pages (most of them inaccessible until they’ve already been read). How sluggish is the pace of the story itself? The key action sequence of the story involves following a snail through a forest. At one point in the story, four options are offered as possible solutions to Feelu’s dilemma. But three of them lead to short dead ends, making them feel like an extraneous attempt at interactivity.

Everyone would love to have a spell-casting granny like Augui, but she’s ill-served by this app. (Requires iOS 7 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 5-9)

DISNEY ANIMATED

Disney Publishing Worldwide; TouchPress Disney Publishing Worldwide Applications $9.99 | Aug. 8, 2013 1.0.4; Dec. 12, 2013 A frankly stunning look at the creation of animated film over the past century from the daddy of them all, Disney.

This leisurely, thorough survey of animated cartoons from Disney Studios is a well-tempered creation, advancing step by step through the process of telling a story through pictures.

There is plenty of nuts-and-bolts information, from ink and paint and storybooks to the latest in computer-animated production systems. The app shows how an artist works to get at the heart of a story—the role of fairy tales, myths, legends and folk stories are brought forward—underscoring the importance of details. It also explains techniques such as the use of a multiplane camera, which keeps the moon the same size as, in the film, you walk toward it at night. More revealing, however, is the exploration of how artists evoke mood and the feel of color, how they connect and communicate with the viewer. The interaction with the app is vast and varied, with numerous clips from the oldest to the latest productions, including excellent samples from two Academy Award–winning shorts, The Old Mill, from 1937, and Paperman, from 2012.

A fruitful and highly pleasurable way to spend an afternoon. (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad informational app. 6 & up)

FROZEN Storybook Deluxe

Disney Publishing Worldwide Disney Publishing Worldwide Applications $6.99 | Nov. 14, 2013 1.3; Nov. 20, 2013 Disney’s latest spinoff app gets the story beats right but misses some magic in a problematic adaptation from film.

As in the titular film, itself an almost unrecognizable adaptation of “The Snow Queen,” princesses Elsa and Anna are separated when Elsa accidentally injures her sister with her ice magic. Years later, a stressful public event causes Elsa to reveal her powers and to inadvertently freeze the kingdom.

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“Inspired by the calm and peaceful vibe of Fred Rogers,...[it] most certainly moves at a snail’s pace and offers very limited animation and interaction, which seems to be the point here.” from bluebear book

FUSSY EATER STORY

otherwise enjoyable musical accompaniments. Tap the “fun” button for a step-by-step tutorial on baking bread (which is enticing, but seems a little ambitious for a preschooler app activity).

A plain-vanilla alternative to the frenetic hordes. (iPad storybook app. 1-4)

Dziubak, Emilia Illus. by Dziubak, Emilia Translated by Gorska, Bozena THE STORY $1.99 | Nov. 8, 2013 1.1; Nov. 20, 2013

Mixing together satire, visual recipes and quirky illustrations, this app takes a fresh approach; unfortunately, the results seem a bit half-baked.

A saucy interview with The Carrot starts off this unconventional app. “My ideal role is in Carrot Soup but I am open to suggestions. Vegetable Soup was as a result of solid cooperation with Potato, Parsley, Celery and Brussels Sprout.” A short chapter on vitamins follows, but the interactive features fail to add to readers’ knowledge; readers simply touch the apple, then an apple core and finally a smiling girl to show that eating fruit makes for happy, healthy kids, for instance. The illustrations complement the satirical tone with offbeat animated characters. A bag of flour waves—“Hey, hey”—and an egg gallantly tips its hat. But the stylish illustrations don’t make up for the overall lack of substance.

Recipes are not spelled out clearly for young readers to follow.

Nutritional facts are obscured by the focus on humorous caricatures. Interactive features are uneven and do not further real understanding of the content. Awkward sentences, possibly due to poor translation, contribute further problems.

While the clever illustrations might draw children to the app, the overall package does not deliver a wholesome offering. (iPad informational app. 5-10)

BLUEBEAR BOOK

Lewis, Robert Illus. by Lewis, Robert Leola Book LLC $2.99 | Oct. 6, 2013 1.0; Oct. 6, 2013

This tale about a laid-back cobalt teddy bear demonstrates the value of a leisurely and unhurried lifestyle.

Bluebear leads a pretty charmed life. He lives in an adorable yellow-and-red cottage by the sea. In the spring, he plants tomatoes and then spends his summer tending the soil and drinking lemonade while gazing at the ocean. Once the tomatoes are ripe, he picks them, bakes bread and has a jazzy picnic with the flowers, butterflies and bees. Inspired by the calm and peaceful vibe of Fred Rogers, Lewis wrote and illustrated the story for his young son in the early 1990s (according to an author’s note). This adaptation most certainly moves at a snail’s pace and offers very limited animation and interaction, which seems to be the point here. Butterflies flutter by; potted tomato plants play the notes of a scale when individually tapped; flour puffs across the screen while Bluebear is baking bread. But for the most part, each page offers minimal movement. The optional narration is likewise deliberate, and unfortunately, it is drowned out at times by the 124

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CHRIS P. BACON My Life So Far...

Oceanhouse Media Oceanhouse Media $2.99 | Dec. 3, 2013 2.5; Dec. 3, 2013

Paired with a mix of snapshots and cartoon art, a (real) piglet born without functional hind legs offers a sugary memoir retracing his climb to YouTube and TV celebrity.

He’s kitted out by veterinarian Dr. Len—“Dad, as I call him now”—with his rather ominous name and a small wheeled cart (“How awesome, I thought. ‘Oink-Oink,’ I said”). Chatty Chris recalls watching himself on the Web scooting about and then going on tour to demonstrate how, with “a little help—and a lot of grunting” and an upbeat attitude, anything is possible: “If you think positive, who knows what you can do?! Or in other words, Oinkity-Oink-Oink-Oink!” Minor animations aside, most of the movement in the illustrations is provided by automatic or swipe-activated pans. Along with a silent mode, auto-play and a self-record option for the narrative, every word in the text, oinks and all, can be revoiced with a tap. Likewise, touching any figure or detail in the illustrations, even the “wall” and “floor,” calls forth an aural label, as per Oceanhouse’s standard.

Smooth of presentation, if simple of message; the very small, very pink, very photogenic piggy in the lead role helps to compensate for his saccharine delivery. (photo album appended) (iPad storybook app. 5-8)

This Issue’s Contributors # Alison Anholt-White • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Sophie Brookover • Timothy Capehart Ann Childs • Julie Cummins • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Elise DeGuiseppi Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Carol Edwards • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Megan Honig • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • K. Lesley Knieriem • Robin Fogle Kurz • Megan Dowd Lambert • Susan Dove Lempke Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Meredith Madyda • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin Michelle H. Martin PhD • Jeanne McDermott • Shelly McNerney • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • Lisa Moore • R. Moore • Kathleen Odean • Deb Paulson • Rachel G. Payne • John Edward Peters • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Amy Robinson • Erika Rohrbach • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Katie Scherrer • Mary Ann Scheuer • Dean Schneider • Hillary Foote Schwartz • Stephanie Seales • Karyn N. Silverman • Robin Smith • Karin Snelson • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Bette Wendell-Branco • Gordon West Monica Wyatt • Melissa Yurechko

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continuing series SECRETS ACCORDING TO HUMPHREY

Birney, Betty G. Putnam (144 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-399-25796-4 Humphrey, 10 (Fantasy. 7-11)

CHEESIE MACK IS NOT EXACTLY FAMOUS

Cotler, Steve Illus. by Holgate, Douglas Random House (256 pp.) $15.99 | $18.99 PLB | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-385-36984-8 978-0-385-36985-5 PLB Cheesie Mack, 4 (Fiction. 8-12)

HEIDI HECKELBECK AND THE TIE-DYED BUNNY

REAL MERMAIDS DON’T SELL SEASHELLS

Boudreau, Hélène Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (224 pp.) $6.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-8498-4 Real Mermaids…, 4 (Fantasy. 10-14)

Coven, Wanda Illus. by Burris, Priscilla Little Simon (128 pp.) $15.99 | $4.99 paper | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-4424-8938-7 978-1-4424-8937-0 paper Heidi Heckelbeck, 10 (Fantasy. 5-7)

THE IRON EMPIRE

THIRD STRIKE

Dashner, James Scholastic (192 pp.) $12.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-545-38702-6 Infinity Ring, 7 (Adventure. 8-12)

Brewer, Heather Dial (240 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-0-8037-3785-3 Slayer Chronicles, 3 (Paranormal. 12-16)

PEPPA PIG AND THE VEGETABLE GARDEN

Candlewick Candlewick (32 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-6987-4 Peppa Pig (Picture book. 2-5)

BISCUIT LOVES THE LIBRARY

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL

Dean, James; Dean, Kimberly Illus. by Dean, James Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-211076-3 978-0-06-211075-6 paper Pete the Cat (Early reader. 4-8)

THE WITCH IS BACK

Capucilli, Alyssa Satin Illus. by Schories, Pat Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-06-193507-7 978-0-06-193506-0 paper Biscuit (Early reader. 4-8)

Geragotelis, Brittany Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-4424-6688-3 Lifea Witch, 3 (Paranormal chick lit. 12 & up)

FOREST OF WOLVES

Hunter, Erin Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-06-199643-6 Seekers: Return to the Wild, 4 (Fantasy. 8-12) |

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NOTHING LEFT TO OOZE

THE WINDY CITY

Kloepfer, John Illus. by DeGrand, David Harper/HarperCollins (224 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-0-06-223098-0 Zombie Chasers, 5 (Funny horror. 8-12)

Smith, Roland; Spradlin, Michael P. Sleeping Bear (256 pp.) $15.99 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-58536-824-2 I, Q, 5 (Adventure. 10-14)

JACKPOT

Stilton, Geronimo Scholastic (128 pp.) $6.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-55630-9 Geronimo Stilton, 56 (Adventure. 7-10)

TEDDY BEAR ADDITION

Stoudemire, Amar’e Scholastic (144 pp.) $5.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-60613-4 STAT, 5 (Fiction. 8-12)

FLIGHT OF THE RED BANDIT

Korman, Gordon Scholastic (208 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-56146-4 Swindle, 6 (Fiction. 8-12)

MOST VALUABLE

McGrath, Barbara Barbieri Illus. by Nihoff, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | $7.95 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-58089-424-1 978-1-58089-425-8 paper Teddy Bear Math (Picture book. 4-8)

I SURVIVED THE NAZI INVASION, 1944

Tarshis, Lauren Scholastic (112 pp.) $4.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-45938-9 I Survived, 9 (Historical fiction. 7-10)

HIGH TIME FOR HEROES

Osborne, Mary Pope Illus. by Murdocca, Sal Random House (128 pp.) $12.99 | $15.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-307-98049-6 978-0-307-98050-2 PLB Magic Tree House, 51 (Fantasy. 6-9)

LOVE REBORN

Woon, Yvonne Hyperion (368 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4231-7120-1 Dead Beautiful, 3 (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)

THE RAIN DRAGON RESCUE

Selfors, Suzanne Illus. by Santat, Dan Little, Brown (160 pp.) $16 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-316-22557-1 Imaginary Veterinary, 3 (Fantasy. 7-12)

ZOM-B GLADIATOR

Shan, Darren Little, Brown (160 pp.) $15 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-316-21407-0 Zom-B, 6 (Horror. 12 & up) 126

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indie PLAYING UNTIL DARK Selected Poems 1995–2013

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: PLAYING UNTIL DARK by John R. Alberts...................................... 127

Alberts, John R. AuthorHouse (100 pp.) $13.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Aug. 27, 2013 978-1-4918-1155-9

The New Killer Apps by Chunka Mui; Paul B. Carroll............. 138 GRE/GMAT MATH by Sid Thatte.......................................................141

Free-wheeling yet carefully wrought, this free verse collection is a joyful reminder that, at its best, poetry is music.

Alberts’ jazz-soaked debut jukes and jives in unfettered celebration of the musicality of poetry.

When his scat-singing, finger-snapping narrators exclaim, “Rhythm just naturally beats / All the hell right out of me,” it is no lamentation but a sly proclamation of the heavenliness of a strong, interesting beat. Good poetry, he suggests, is at least as much for the body as the mind and more for the ear than the eye. Thus, deathbed reflection is punctuated by onomatopoeia—“When the film of your life runs out / When the screen glares white / When the film strip’s tail end / slaps, slaps, slaps”—and melody itself becomes a body to be exploited for musical effect: “Inside her rib-joints start a rattle, / like a snare, stick-stuck-staccato.” Not surprisingly, then, Alberts’ poems take a fully embodied, forward-moving perspective. In Adam and Eve, he sees not regret and original sin but other, more exciting firsts: “So ribs were the rub ’til one night in the tub / while scrubbing each other, errr, randomly, / they both started acting, umm, randily. // Now bed springs never rest.” This playful, life-affirming sensuality reappears in poems like “You Will Need a Pencil Today” and “Bacon ’n Eggs.” Sex, though, is only one type of play, a subject this appropriately titled collection takes seriously. Play, for Alberts, is a mindset and a way of interacting with the world. His narrators play with form, with sounds and with the boundaries of time and space. When, in play, a ball is hit, “the ball will arc / out of the field of play / lost to the game, to the players. / Just gone,” just as happened to Roethke that fateful day when he “Dove into a swimming pool in 1963 / And came right back up. / Left only his body behind.” Play can even become the organizing principle in making sense of tragedy, as Alberts demonstrates in the poignant “War Games.” The sheer fun of Alberts’ poetry, coupled with its virtuosity, may occasionally distract readers from the poetry’s deeper currents, but they’ll have no problem catching the rhythm.

Remarkable poetry, good for the body and mind.

The New Killer Apps How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups

Mui, Chunka; Carroll, Paul B. Cornerloft Press (189 pp.) $19.53 paper Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-9892420-1-1

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UNTO THE DAUGHTERS OF MEN A Ross Duncan Novel

and crisp sounds to draw readers in. Beginning the collection with a graphic narrative of a bicycle accident, Beck-Clark introduces the theme of death and the temporary nature of all life, a thread that runs throughout the book. Whether speaking about health, friends’ unwise marriages, dreams or childhood memories, the author addresses aging and the grace of wisdom that can act on anyone who grows older with an open mind and open eyes. In “I remember Maxwell’s Plum” and elsewhere, Beck-Clark’s use of imagery delivers poignant verses with sharp alliteration and soundplay to awaken readers’ senses: “Then, the sprawling streetlight and / Traffic light colors zigging and zagging….We sipped the liquid candy, laughing, / Humming, slipping quarters into the juke box.” Beck-Clark punctuates her poems with striking pen drawings that feel partially mosaic and geometric while also celebrating flows, cycles and shapes. The color drawings are similar in theme and motif but markedly different, serving as breaks between the often poignant poems. The author concludes the collection with a poem about her son and the lifelong struggle between nature and nurture, between protection and empowerment. This last poem, “Special Needs Mom,” succinctly ties together the collection, ending on a universal and positive theme of love. Overall, with its conversational tone, stimulating images and sounds, the collection succeeds in depicting universal themes within particular, personal moments.

A short, confessional collection of imagery-driven poems.

Bartley, Christopher Peach Publishing (294 pp.) $5.99 e-book | May 29, 2013

In Bartley’s (To Catch is Not to Hold, 2013, etc.) latest hard-boiled thriller, former bank robber Ross Duncan, commissioned to locate a wayward granddaughter, exposes blackmail and prostitution in 1934 New York.

Coming highly recommended by Chicago gangsters, Duncan is hired by Col. Bennett, an aging war veteran, after someone asking for a payoff sends the colonel a compromising photo of his granddaughter, Veronica. Her blackmailing of married men is just the start of Duncan’s investigation, which is hindered by an open contract on him. But who wants him dead? The fifth book in Bartley’s ongoing series boasts a film-noir feel, more so than the previous novels: Every female character, particularly Veronica, is an untrustworthy femme fatale; Duncan gets roughed up by heavies, and though he’s never slipped a Mickey, he’s otherwise rendered unconscious. Despite saying he’s “something else altogether” when asked if he’s a detective, Duncan does, in fact, play the part of the gumshoe. Bartley relies on previous books in the series to define Duncan; readers familiar with the series will understand Duncan’s personal desire to help the redemption-seeking Bennett. For new readers, amid the mostly superficial references to earlier stories, Duncan will come across as a stoic, hardened man. Most of the supporting characters making a first appearance in the series have plenty of personality, too, including Remo Marsden, a two-bit hoodlum who seems to have genuine affection for Veronica; and Nancy Presser, a woman who remains hopeful even in the clutches of drug addiction and prostitution. Welcome trademarks of the series pop up throughout: a good amount of action (gangsters are trying to kill Duncan, after all); Duncan’s Bible at his side; and keen dialogue, as when Duncan, reminded that he’ll die someday, says matter-of-factly, “I have things to do first.” But the story, despite being refreshingly complex with an endless stream of suspects and red herrings, seems like it could have been told with anyone in the lead, not necessarily Duncan.

Adds little to the Ross Duncan series, but as a self-contained mystery, it’s a knockout.

I Want Much More Than A Dinosaur Berliner, Charles CREATE-A-WORLD PUBLICATIONS (50 pp.) $14.95 paper | $4.25 e-book Sep. 25, 2013 978-0-615-84942-3

In Berliner’s debut children’s book, a little imagination goes a long way when a boy envisions combinations of different animals.

Dinosaurs may be crazy creatures for kids to imagine, but what happens when they let their imaginations run wild and create new animals of their own? This book, which includes a brief introduction by actress Florence Henderson, shows a boy envisioning a combination of an octopus and a monkey: “an eight-legged beastie in a tree by the sea.” He then pictures a rabbit and an owl merging into a creature with “[b]ig ears, big eyes, fluffy tail in the sky.”

The colorful book continues through other unusual pairings, until the boy finally imagines a combination that produces a real-life platypus. Berliner, who designs scenery and costumes for plays, musicals, and film, television and dance productions, knows the importance of visuals, and here, the illustrations are just as important as the text. Each animal gets a page of its own; the true-life animal portraits are realistic, and the fictional, combined animals are fanciful and fun. The rhyming text has a singsong quality that fits with the lighthearted premise. The book creates a game that’s easy to replicate, which may make it suitable for an elementary school classroom. Of course, creativity and imagination are more than just good fun, as Berliner writes in the conclusion: “The boy’s name is Art….Art is named after a subject that was once always taught to

THE ZEN OF FORGETTING Poems Beck-Clark, Denise CreateSpace (66 pp.) $14.99 paper | Oct. 24, 2013 978-1-4849-6184-1

In this collection of narrative poems, Beck-Clark produces a visual array of life moments, turning points and wisdom.

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“Diamond and McGann compile a rousing, spicy brew of sex, love and intrigue with a cliffhanger ending foretelling more Sapphire adventures to come.” from stilettos in vegas

THE GOMORRAH PRINCIPLE A Vietnam Sniper’s Story

students in the public school system along with ‘reading, writing and arithmetic.’ ” It’s a clear reminder that imagination is just as necessary to kids’ development as reading and math.

A well-illustrated story that encourages kids to use their imaginations.

DeStefanis, Rick CreateSpace (432 pp.) $17.95 paper | $4.99 e-book | Jun. 7, 2013 978-1-4818-9680-1

MY CIA Memories of a Secret Career

In DeStefanis’ (The Philosophy of Big Buck Hunting, 2011) first novel, a young man in the Vietnam War confronts the differences between good and evil.

Brady Nash leads a bucolic life in 1967 America, and as this novel opens, he sits at the base of an oak tree in Tennessee cradling a hunting rifle and admiring the crisp, fresh landscape spread out before him. Brady is about to trade cornfields for jungles, as he’s enlisted in the Vietnam War as a sniper. He’s no stranger to the perils of combat; his best friend, Duff Cowan, went away months ago and was tragically killed in action. Despite this, Brady can’t help feeling excited—but when he arrives on the other side of the world, things begin to look a bit skewed, and suddenly Duff ’s death doesn’t seem so honorable.

In fact, Brady suspects that his friend might have been a victim of foul play. In true thriller mode, Brady infiltrates the secretive world of black ops to find answers about his dead friend, and he learns that in a deadly war, things aren’t always as clear as they are back home and that good and evil are not as black and white on the battlefield. Brady’s loyalties become fragmented; he has love for his country, commitment to his duty, grief for his best friend, and a desire to understand and potentially avenge his death. This novel’s prose evokes a simplicity and clarity evident in certain classics of American literature, raising it slightly above most conventional wartime psychological thrillers (“Brady held the barrel up to the bedside lamp….The spiral of lands and grooves gleamed like a mirror under the light”). The opening section, for example, feels somewhat reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s work. The conflicts that play out in Brady’s psyche work well in the Vietnam War setting, which is always ripe for exploration of moral dilemmas. Fans of historical fiction will also find plenty to enjoy here.

A rare Vietnam story that manages to draw power from its protagonist rather than from the bewildering tragedies of war.

Costanzo, Christopher David CreateSpace (430 pp.) $23.50 paper | $9.99 e-book Nov. 12, 2013 978-1-4904-9843-0

In his debut, a CIA veteran recounts his challenges and frustrations working for the intelligence agency from 1966 to 1991.

Following college and a stint in the Marines, Costanzo, son of an American Foreign Service worker, signed on to work for the CIA in the 1960s. So began his tale of dealing with a rather Kafkaesque bureaucracy for the next 25 years. Costanzo enjoyed his espionage training and has respect for nonnalluring procedures—e.g., ensuring consistent language in surveillance summaries—but the pettiness of senior officers, many of them holdovers from World War II, almost made him quit several times. Instead, he persevered, often by circumventing the system, especially after he realized that the CIA rarely fires anyone since such departures could pose a security risk. He got deployed overseas and held jobs at cover organizations while also conducting clandestine operations, ultimately reaching the position of chief of station in an unnamed country. Costanzo provides some fascinating peeks into the mechanics of cultivating recruits and using disguises and safe houses, but alas, he must remain mum about the actual places where he served, as mandated by his CIA manuscript reviewers for reasons of national security. Still, Costanzo has some fun within this directive, christening countries with such Orwellian monikers as Latrinia, Effluvia and Rattalia. He also manages to sneak in some assessments of CIA leaders, including James Jesus Angleton (“a real operational genius, but later he grew irrational”), Dick Helms (“cronyism abounded”), James R. Schlesinger (“myopia and incomprehension of the service’s problems”), Bill Colby (“some good reforms”) and Bob Gates (“his policies fully embodied the prejudices toward the perceived elitism of the clandestine service”). Costanzo provides some pithy takes on political events as well, usually casting the blame squarely on outside parties—blaming émigrés for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for example—rather than on bad informants.

Elsewhere, he skims over his personal life—his wife and daughter are only briefly mentioned—and comes off a bit cranky with his relentless workplace complaints. Overall, however, Costanzo files a commendable report on agency life.

A fascinating though somewhat censored memoir that also serves as an organizational critique of the CIA.

STILETTOS IN VEGAS

Diamond, Valerie L.; McGann, Don Xlibris (212 pp.) $29.99 | $19.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Sep. 30, 2013 978-1-4931-0547-2 Dual-authored debut fiction about a young but seasoned stripper navigating the Las Vegas strip club circuit.

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(her stage name is “Sapphire”) recalls the day, having just turned 21, she left Buffalo, N.Y., for the “fantasy and lights of Las Vegas.”

Those days of innocence long gone, she now must contend with exhaustive hours spent lap-dancing rich, pushy, strange men while fending off the sexual advances of Stilettos’ sleazy, arrogant general manager, Scott. Her personal life is also messy thanks to Spider, a smooth operator on the Vegas scene; she falls for Spider, and he fathers their daughter, Christina. The authors amp up the melodrama after Christina is removed from Sapphire’s care, Sapphire doesn’t excommunicate Spider altogether, until she discovers that he’s already married with two teenage children. A hasty marriage to a wealthy, aging retiree named Tony temporarily satiates Sapphire, but soon, she longs for Spider’s bad-boy tough love and a chance to rat out Stilettos’ shady management to the FBI. Complementing the fast-moving storyline are pages of fascinating insider industry secrets, such as a dancer’s sartorial requirements, the prevalence of police trouble and dirty details of the strip club circuit, all culled from co-author Diamond’s seven years as a Vegas stripper. Toward the book’s conclusion, Diamond’s intentions to educate, not patronize, the women working within the lucrative strip club world and challenge the preconceived notions associated with it are discreetly communicated through Sapphire. Diamond and McGann compile a rousing, spicy brew of sex, love and intrigue with a cliffhanger ending foretelling more Sapphire adventures to come.

A readable, highly charged amalgam of erotic action and suspense headlined by a likable, compassionate exotic performer with a heart of gold.

community. So tight is that bond that after the Sounders once lost badly at home, the team offered ticket refunds to every fan who attended the game. Management also bowed to the fans’ wishes by agreeing not to have Budweiser sponsor the traditional pregame march to the stadium. “In almost every way they forged interactions with their fans that were different from anything that had been seen in American professional sports,” Gastineau says. The author effectively captures the key signings of veteran goalkeeper Kasey Keller and Colombian forward Fredy Montero, who was so young at the time that his first question to management was, “If I go to the U.S., can I get medicine for my acne?” He also details the out-ofthe-box contributions of comedian and co-owner Drew Carey, who, among other things, suggested fans vote on whether to keep the general manager in office. “It’s great because the fans are invested in the team no matter what happens good or bad,” Carey explains. The Sounders have yet to win an MLS Cup, but Gastineau has scored with this vivid history.

An entertaining, thoughtful examination that will appeal not only to soccer fans but to anyone interested in the business of sports.

The Martial Art of Strategy Russian Style: Nine Elegant Solutions

Grishin, Igor; Emelyanov, Mikhail Les Waller International, LLC (191 pp.) $12.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-9898094-0-5

Sounders FC: AUTHENTIC MASTERPIECE The Inside Story of the Best Franchise Launch in American Sports History

To better understand the art of strategy, consider studying the ancient Chinese game of go, write Grishin and Emelyanov in a new translation of their Russian work.

Unlike chess, the goal of go, the enigmatic game of black and white stones, isn’t to annihilate your opponent but to capture and develop territory by placing stones on a board. Victory lies in controlling space and the positioning of resources—ideas the authors contend are valuable in geopolitics, business and even one’s personal life. After all, “territory” is just another word for “market share,” as Japanese auto executives shrewdly demonstrated, the authors say, when they invaded the American car market in the 1970s. Using go as a visual model of strategy, Grishin and Emelyanov advance nine “elegant solutions” to problems common in competitive environments. Their solutions are based on strategic concepts long studied by Eastern leaders: clarification, alternatives, hidden resources, superfluity, exchanges, indirect fighting, superiority, forcing and surviving trouble. As in Sun Tzu’s Art of War and martial arts like judo, the authors advocate outthinking an adversary rather than outmuscling him. While not the first writers to expound the mysteries of go, Grishin and Emelyanov have a talent for expressing their insights with graceful maxims that are easy to grasp. Their use of real-world examples from history and business make the principles behind a 2,500-year-old game seem timeless. Whether it’s

Gastineau, Mike CreateSpace (270 pp.) $19.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Oct. 7, 2013 978-1-4910-6834-2

A behind-the-scenes look at the successful launch of a Major League Soccer franchise.

After being founded in 2007 and playing their first game in 2009, the Seattle Sounders have been a model franchise not only for MLS but for sports in general, setting league attendance records and building a uniquely devoted fan base while avoiding the growing pains faced by other expansion teams. As the author writes, before the team was put together, Seattle had just experienced the loss of the NBA’s Supersonics, and “the thought that Seattle, of all places, could be the home of the most successful sports franchise launch in American history was beyond rational belief.” But the Sounders blossomed through the visionary efforts of three men in particular—movie executive Joe Roth, CEO Tod Leiweke and general manager Adrian Hanauer—who recognized the importance of forging a unique relationship between the team and the 130

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legendary Chinese statesman Zhuge Liang in the third century or billionaire George Soros’ currency speculation in the 1990s, a crafty strategist possesses an almost magical ability to come out on top. As to be expected, the book contains numerous diagrams of games of go in progress. Those unfamiliar with the game will need extra perseverance, but the reward is a deeper understanding of efficiency, timing and influence. The authors concede that go cannot capture all the complexities of real situations; instead, they say the game and their nine solutions should be viewed as tools for attaining mastery over oneself and the environment—the highest aspiration of strategic art.

Wise reading for policymakers, executives, entrepreneurs—anyone who seeks to survive and thrive in the crucible that is competition.

and decisions within the zeitgeist of her relatively simple 1950s upbringing, though she vividly documents the jarring realizations, in later years, that life turned out to be far more complex.

A singular window into the spiritual journey of a progressive female minister, particularly relevant as Christianity wrestles with the roles of women in the church.

POWER SHIFT The New No-Stress, NoHassle Way to Get Your Best New-Car Deal—Every Time!

Kelton, Phil Requisite Press (200 pp.) $15.95 paper | $8.99 e-book | Nov. 1, 2013 978-1-939725-00-4

Mrs. Ogg Played the Harp Memories of Church and Love in the High Desert

A step-by-step approach to using Internet research and sealed email bids to get the lowest prices on new vehicles

Jordan, Elaine Greensmith Two Harbors Press (262 pp.) $15.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Nov. 15, 2012 978-1-938690-20-4

from auto dealers.

Debut author Kelton informs “battle-weary car buyers everywhere” that people typically pay $2,000 to $3,000 more than they need to when buying a new vehicle. He promises to remedy that with this book, a step-by-step approach to getting the best deal possible on a new car. Buyers have more leverage over car dealers than they realize, he argues, because it’s expensive to keep vehicles on lots and the smart dealers “understand the value of a quick Internet sale.” The basic idea is to find the bottom-line, “out-the-door” price for the car of one’s choice by researching credible sources, such as Consumer Reports and Edmunds.com, and then emailing seven to 10 dealers and asking each for a nonnegotiable, sealed bid. (Kelton excludes trade-ins, rebates and add-ons to make the bids comparable.) Later, he gives advice on how to sell one’s old car for the best price with the least hassle and how to get the best deals on add-ons by purchasing them from aftermarket suppliers rather than dealers. Using detailed instructions, including sample email templates, Kelton gives readers everything they need to know to try his method. He also offers solid tips on watching out for tricks of the trade, such as unnecessary rustproofing, and clearly explains the minutiae of the business, including dealer holdbacks and manufacturers’ cash incentives. Even so, he may be too optimistic when he writes that “most dealers run ethical and honest businesses”; more on target is his observation that “[l]ying is often expected by both the dealer and buyer.” Given the vagaries of human nature— and especially of car dealers’—will his system work? Readers may find that it’s worth a try, given the high cost and hassle of buying a new car the traditional way, although “no system is perfect,” as the author admits.

A clearly written guide, with many useful references, that could recoup its cost many times over.

In her debut, essayist, poet and former minister Jordan recounts a moving, humorous slice of her past spent pastoring a small congregation in Arizona.

Spanning five years in the 1990s when the author was in her 50s, Jordan’s memoir artfully interweaves strands of her interior life, memories of earlier times and accounts of events from her ministry. Readers witness the author’s fears and doubts unfold on a grand scale, even as she conscientiously conducts mundane ministerial duties. Jordan confronts tragedy in her parish and in her family, while comedy bubbles to the surface when conservative parishioners rub up against Jordan’s unorthodox theology. “They’d want to explore my thinking about…Jesus,” she says upon first visiting the church. “While I served in Jesus’ name and thought of him as a model of goodness, I rejected the idea that he was a risen son of God….Instead, Jesus was a wise counselor like Harvey, the six-foot rabbit—a comic character in a play—who looked on and commented on the action.

I’d have to make sure this little church was ready for me and Harvey.” Compassionate, robust descriptions of Jordan’s flock highlight both foibles and strengths, ensuring the reader’s emotional investment. Keenly aware of her own fragile humanity, the author self-identifies as a vulnerable seeker in a clerical collar looking for personal validation through life’s turmoil. She seeks emotional healing, marital restoration, knowledge of the transcendent and a way to shepherd her small flock—even the obnoxious ones. As she finally chooses to face the consequences of her persistent skepticism, Jordan’s articulate descriptions of wrestling with pivotal Christian doctrines evoke empathy, selfexamination and admiration for her personal integrity. Enriching the memoir is the author’s attention to a broader sense of time and place; she frames many of her youthful expectations |

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“[Laich] handles this complex subject with a firm hand, marshaling data effectively to prove his points and striving to maintain an objective approach throughout.” from skin in the game

OAXACA CHOCOLATE A Santo Gordo Mystery

SKIN IN THE GAME Poor Kids and Patriots

Kerns, Charles CreateSpace (250 pp.) $14.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Oct. 3, 2013 978-1-4922-6384-5

Laich, Dennis iUniverse (192 pp.) $28.95 | $17.95 paper | $7.99 e-book Aug. 30, 2013 978-1-4917-0383-0

When a suspicious gas leak blows up his favorite doughnut shop, a retired American expat bumbles into a mystery in Mexico.

Robert Evans doesn’t love the nickname he’s earned in his adopted hometown of Oaxaca, but he can’t shake Santo Gordo, the crime-fighting alter ego who inevitably finds himself entangled in suspicious events the corrupt authorities prefer to ignore. Also, his sizable girth nets him a special steel-reinforced chair at his favorite bakery. In this, Evans’ second outing, the pink pastelería explodes minutes after he leaves with his sugary breakfast. His friend Efraím, head of the powerful local cabbies union and driver himself of an ancient, immaculate taxi, asks Evans to investigate (the bakery belonged to Efraím’s uncle).

Evans also agrees to handle a sensitive inquiry for his estranged daughter, Randy, a commandingly efficient do-gooder who suspects that a nonprofit she represents is actually a front for a two-bit fraudster. The father and daughter begin to repair their relationship, even as Evans’ slow unraveling of his other case threatens to undermine it, revealing the bakery was targeted by an American company wanting to do for fair-trade chocolate what Starbucks did for coffee. Randy thinks the company will improve life in Mexico, while Evans worries its corporate version of “doing good” will flatten Oaxaca’s citizens, since its motivations and effects are likely apiece with the American-style malls on the city’s outskirts that “threatened to siphon off everyone local and turn the downtown zócalo into a tourist Disney-Mex attraction.” The conspiracy never stretches beyond the demolished bakery, making for a plot that, like Oaxaca’s cinnamonlaced, water-based hot chocolate, is spicy but thin. Still, Evans’ love for the city feels real, grounded in details like the taste of chicken mole, the opening hours of the English-language library and the rococo infant Jesus in his landlady’s Christmas Nativity.

Kerns (Santo Gordo: A Killing in Oaxaca, 2012) describes a slowmoving town where the walled compounds cannot forever shut out the winds of globalization.

The city of Oaxaca, lively, dark and under threat, plays a starring role in this satisfying mystery.

A retired general offers his opinions on the state of America’s volunteer army and some suggestions for its future.

In this short but substantial book, former U.S. Army Gen. Laich delivers a detailed assessment of America’s all-volunteer force, elaborating on what led to its creation in 1973 and evaluating its performance since then—particularly as it’s waged two wars at once in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His statistics are grim: Returning veterans are much more likely than civilians to commit suicide, abuse drugs and alcohol, and become homeless. He underscores the unfairness of the volunteer model, which fills the armed services with disproportionate numbers of lower-income people, leaving wealthier, better educated people underrepresented. He also decries the planning failures that led to the use of reservists and National Guard troops in combat despite their lack of readiness and to the redeployment of servicemen for combat tours after insufficient recovery time stateside. He clearly has no patience for the civilian and military leaders who’ve let these situations arise. However, Laich’s main point is that the AVF has failed because it was asked to conduct a protracted overseas war—something it was never intended to do. The author handles this complex subject with a firm hand, marshaling data effectively to prove his points and striving to maintain an objective approach throughout. He’s very direct about how the military, by its very structure, discourages the sort of creative thinking needed to push through necessary reforms.

He also resists the temptation to expound on policy—specifically, the wisdom of waging particular wars in the first place—which gives him added credibility. He accepts that America will inevitably become involved in military conflicts overseas; he just wants those deployments to be fair, efficient and sustainable.

An absolutely essential read for those concerned about the U.S. military, its purpose and its future.

THAT SHAKESPEARE KID LoMonico, Michael CreateSpace (160 pp.) $12.00 paper | $5.00 e-book Oct. 22, 2013 978-1-4895-9822-6

In this debut YA novel, the Bard of Avon’s words become commonplace when a 12-year-old boy can’t stop speaking them.

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a minor concussion along with other, much stranger symptoms. Once in the ambulance with Emma, he greets the EMTs with the comment, “For this relief, much thanks,” followed by, “Alack, what noise is this?” From then on, he responds to everything with relevant quotes from all of Shakespeare’s works. He doesn’t understand why this has happened to him; he doesn’t even know anything about Shakespeare. Only in his English class, where he and Emma are preparing to perform scenes from Romeo and Juliet, are his quotes appreciated. His English teacher has been encouraging the students to become more familiar with Shakespearean language, also known as Early Modern English, so that they can relate to the universal and very contemporary themes and plots. But most people, particularly his peers, are not impressed, and they now find Peter even odder than they already did. Fortunately, he’s able to text in conventional English, so Emma becomes his translator and constant companion. Conveniently, she’s to play Juliet to his Romeo in the class production. Concerned and frustrated by his inability to communicate, Peter and his parents schedule appointments with various specialists, but once the media gets wind of Peter’s affliction, he becomes newsworthy, culminating in an appearance with Matt Lauer and Al Roker on The Today Show. The story reaches a happy conclusion that features an unconvincing middle school romance. The book serves as an effective portal for early teens to become comfortable with the archaic, Shakespearean language, and the author pulls off a clever ploy by placing all quotes in context—“ ‘Are you ready for some English?’

Ms. Hastings sang (in the same way they used to start Monday Night Football).” As such, readers should have no problem understanding unfamiliar words and phrases. In the endnotes, all the quotes are identified and cited, making the entire book a useful teaching tool.

An engaging, fanciful tale of a boy who inadvertently brings the beauty and majesty of Shakespeare into everyone’s lives.

the air vents keep him cool and bring in “all sorts of new and wonderful smells.” Pip hears Micki Lu talk about looking for horned toads to photograph, and he pictures the “fat, squishy things” in his backyard back home, noting that “not one of them had ever had horns!” At night, he curls up to sleep inside the “House on Wheels.” Just before dawn, he awakens and peers through the window, thrilled to see a raccoon and a deer with two fawns and somewhat relieved that the rustling he’d heard wasn’t caused by a “very big toad” with horns. His excitement and sense of discovery warms each page of this gentle, genuine story, as does the author’s apparent deep love and care for the real-life Pip—who’s not only the author’s companion, but her medical-alert dog as well. The book’s soft, expressive colored-pencil drawings follow Pip through human and natural environments, reflecting the observant authenticity of Lu’s storytelling, right down to Pip’s satisfying encounter with an actual horned toad.

A thoroughly charming illustrated children’s book about a curious, adventure-loving dog that bodes well for the series to come.

Child Sex Slave: A Memoir Luecha, Monluedee CreateSpace (442 pp.) $19.95 paper | Jan. 17, 2013 978-1-4791-6842-2

Luecha’s memoir of astonishing brutality and miraculous salvation details her trials of being treated like chattel in 1960s Thailand.

The eldest child of a large, chaotic family, Luecha—Awe, as she’s known— “had been beaten since infancy.” Raped for the first time when she was 4 years old, she had “the mentality of a Roman soldier” by the time she was 5. The daughter of a one-time nightclub singer and a high-ranking government official, she was surrounded in her formative years by a beloved great-grandfather, the “wise Sinsae of Nakornpathom”; a grandmother, who was more like a mother; younger siblings, mostly sisters; and a predatory stepfather, “Paw.” In order to escape Paw’s constant abuse, she ran off to Bangkok with dreams of school and a respectable job. Instead, like the frequently mentioned scent of garlic cooking, “karma” followed her in the form of repeated gang rapes and forced sexual servitude to a family of pimps, from whom she sustained “an almost daily harvest of punishment.” Her life among the young girls, who served up to seventy “Doors” (i.e., johns) a day—earning their “whalish cartoon” Boss a pretty penny—resembled a modern-day, highly sexual Dickensian universe. By 1972, when she was 14 and relatively free, Luecha estimates she was raped more than 9,000 times. Through her strength of character, modeled on her movie hero, Steve McQueen, and her passion for books, Luecha escaped her captors, returned home and put her siblings through school. Luecha’s astonishing gift for conjuring the smells, sights and sounds of her rich, turbulent homeland often captivates, despite the sometimes-unbearable pain and suffering she and others endured. Assured writing dotted

Pip the Adventure Dog Goes to Caprock Canyons State Park Lu, Micki Illus. by Sesler, Chris CreateSpace (40 pp.) $9.99 paper | Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4910-3803-1

An appealing children’s tale of a lively, loyal canine named Pip and his camping adventure with his favorite “Persons”: the author, a wildlife photographer; and her husband, a naturalist.

Furry little Pip is a Schipperke, a Belgian breed of canine, but as far as he’s concerned, he’s “pure Adventure dog.” In this charming, resonant first book in a planned series, Pip joyfully accompanies his owners, Micki Lu and Brad, on a camping trip to Texas’ Caprock Canyons State Park. Getting there is half the fun: In the truck, Pip sits in a special, dog-safe seat between his Persons, giving him a clear view of the passing scenery. He’s in a perfect spot to receive lots of affectionate petting during the trip, and |

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Interviews & Profiles

Lawrence Block

A revered writer discovers he’s also a merchant

By Joe Maniscalco really glad to get away from the computer. I’ve never been so busy. There’s tons of stuff to do. Self-publishing is labor-intensive.”

The impetus behind Block’s decision to self-publish Rhodenbarr’s latest adventure actually stretches all the way back to 1985 when, with the help of a friend at Arbor House, he decided to run off 5,000 copies of a book he produced to coincide with a writing seminar he was conducting at the time. It turned out to be lots of fun, and the New York City–based author ended up selling every copy of the book.

Block’s decadeslong writing career continues to attract dedicated legions of fans who are drawn to his astonishing ability to create truly authentic and multifaceted characters across a broad literary spectrum.

There are vast differences between Bernie Rhodenbarr’s ever-ready wit and rapierlike rejoinders and Matthew Scudder’s two-fistedness and hard-as-nails demeanor. Both, however, command a loyalty that few others in the literary universe of crime and punishment can hope to match. One world is a timeless milieu that suggests the high-minded and purposeful exchanges found in the pages of classic Sherlock Holmes, while the other smacks of the all-too-mortal grit and flawed reality that exist in the heart of everyday life.

Each somehow manages to successfully build upon, and even deepen, succeeding entries while also maintaining the magical continuity of lives actually lived.

The author is recognized as a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and the recipient of a host of other literary awards. “[Self-publishing] has been in the heads of most of the writers that I’ve been around,” Block says. They “would sit drinking the evening away saying, ‘Why can’t we publish our own stuff? Aren’t we tired of watching publishers fuck everything up for us?’ ”

Photo courtesy Amy Reichel

Lawrence Block is sitting in the back of a cozy Greenwich Village bar sharing a plate of crunchy french fries and talking about how, at age 75, he is helping to expand the publishing industry and reinvigorate his own career with the latest entry in the ever-popular Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery series.

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons is Block’s 11th novel featuring the signature exploits of his urbane gentleman thief. However, unlike virtually every one of his prior literary efforts involving a cavalcade of indelible characters, including, of course, complicated private investigator Matthew Scudder, Block’s latest is completely self-published.

“It’s very exciting,” the award-winning crime writer says. “I welcomed the interview today because I’m 134

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The advent of e-books allowed Block to start uploading his work electronically. And a couple of years ago, he decided to put out a collection of Scudder short stories on his own in e-book and paperback form. Both continue to sell well.

Then, the Grand Master thought he might be through penning novels. Self-publishing helped bring him back.

“In addition to the urge a writer always has to do more, I wanted to see what it would be like to publish an A-list book of mine from start to finish that way,” Block says.

Last summer, Block booked himself on a fiveweek cruise in the North Atlantic and at the end of it, had an engrossing new Bernie Rhodenbarr story to sell. Nevertheless, disembarking with a fresh novel on deck, Block wasn’t totally sure what he was going to do with it.

“There was enormous pressure—not in terms of anybody leaning on me—but just the thought that here I had this book that I knew Mulholland would be happy to publish, that HarperCollins would be happy to publish. I knew that there were publishers out there, and they would even hand me a substantial advance,” Block says. “I could just hand it over and be done with it. And that was tempting.”

To ultimately decide whether to self-publish Bernie Rhodenbarr’s latest travails, Block relied on a savvy mechanism he’s employed many times in the past when faced with tough decisions.

“You just presuppose that whatever you do, you’re going to regret it and try to pick which you’d rather regret,” Block says. “And I figured if I published it myself and didn’t do that well with it, I’d regret that a little. But if I didn’t publish it myself, I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it because it was the impulse to self-publish that got the book written in the first place.”

Now, with his zest for publishing replenished, and The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons being hailed as one of the strongest entries in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, Block thinks that it may even be time once again to visit his favorite private investigator Matthew Scudder.

“I was on Craig Ferguson,” Block says. “And he always tries to get me to agree to write another book.

He likes Scudder. I found myself increasingly receptive to the notion. I also had this conscious thought

that, ‘Gee, I’m having so much fun right now, I really better write another book because I don’t know if I’ll get to do this again.’ ” Had Block gone the route of traditional book publishing, The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons might be out in the late fall of 2014—but more likely in 2015. Too long to wait for Block. This way, the book completed in mid-August was available to readers by Christmas Day, 2013.

“I’ve reached the age where I am no longer advised to buy green bananas,” Block says. “I don’t want to sit around waiting a year and a half for something to come out. For years I thought I was an artist—now I find out I’m a merchant. Who knew?”

Indeed, in “the old days,” Block and his comrades needed only concern themselves with things like plot, theme and character development. Now, the self-professed “contrary son of a bitch” finds himself responsible for everything right down to the color of the next book’s jacket.

“You wouldn’t believe how many dark greens there are,” he laughs.

Joe Maniscalco is a writer living in Brooklyn.

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons Block, Lawrence Lawrence Block (250 pp.) $12.97 paper | Dec. 25, 2013 978-0-99106-842-5 |

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“Lundy is a talented writer who crafts vivid characters, keeps the overcomplicated story moving at a brisk pace and serves up vigorous prose with punchy dialogue.” from happy utopia day, joe mccarthy

THE SAVVY INSOMNIAC A Personal Journey Through Science to Better Sleep

with delightful similes and Thai expressions carries the reader through multiple detailed horrors with unexpected bursts of beauty and joy. Most surprisingly, Luecha retained her childlike sense of humor through the darkness. After a beating, Luecha writes, “My left eyeball disappeared for awhile [sic] behind a red curtain.” Her best friend and “model of cool,” Ying, simply told her she looked “like an angry squirrel.”

The lurid title belies the elegant poetry, honest humanity and complex culture exposed within.

Maharg, Lois Fine Fettle Books (320 pp.) $12.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Sep. 27, 2013 978-0-9894837-1-1

A thorough guide to the physical and psychological aspects of insomnia.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that 10 percent of the population suffers from chronic insomnia, and yet at least two-thirds of those afflicted do not seek medical help. Instead, the condition wreaks havoc on their physical and emotional states, often beginning in childhood and continuing through adulthood. An insomniac herself, Maharg ably combines memoir with reportage, talking with other sufferers and parsing through a barrage of medical advice on the subject. She’s particularly adept at relaying scientific information clearly, as when she explains the negative effects that a lack of sleep can have, not only on the ability to curb fears, but for finding pleasure in positive events. She quotes one expert as saying, “Sleep resets the magnetic north of your emotional compass. With sleep deprivation, you’re all gas pedal and no brake.” A large portion of the book is devoted to combing through the historical and contemporary solutions to the problem. While those afflicted were long told it was simply something in their heads, current practice treats insomnia much more methodically. Maharg excels when she reports on specific treatments that are popular today. For instance, readers will appreciate the detailed way she discusses the many sleeping pills on the market, summarizing their pros and cons. While she may not have very much new to say on the subject—there are, after all, numerous books on the topic—her book is accessible and the information wisely chosen. She doesn’t merely tell readers to exercise, but gives them suggestions for specific exercises.

Maharg is also judicious in that she offers her opinion yet recognizes that the proper solution varies from person to person.

She does not, for example, live and die by the 8-hour rule or think that one approach—e.g., pills, yoga, sleep restriction—is the end all, be all. And finally, her message is one of optimism and hope combined with a dose of perspective. While her sleep is still only “on the fragile side of normal,” she says, “I’m light years beyond where I was before.”

A friendly, informative guide for those seeking a good night’s sleep.

Happy Utopia Day, Joe McCarthy

Lundy, J.T Emerald Book Company (328 pp.) $13.95 paper | $4.99 e-book | Oct. 1, 2013 978-1-937110-53-6 A mild-mannered federal functionary battles a fascist takeover in this boisterous satirical thriller.

Chris Thompson, a low-level U.S. Customs official, is shocked when he’s summoned out of the blue to the White House, where the president, a nitwit who plays arcade games in the Oval Office, and the Cheney-esque chief of staff tell him the country is facing a stealth invasion of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Canada. Free-associative plot twists soon shove Chris out of a crashing airplane and into Emergence, a strange bunker compound located beneath a Nevada strip joint. There, he discovers a cult of young men who worship the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy as a prophet and believe they will enter a deathless utopia after completing their service in a torture- and murderfor-hire scheme. Chris escapes Emergence but finds that its xenophobic, anti-communist dogmas have taken over America and resulted in a dictatorship complete with loyalty oaths to the McCarthyite Big Mac Party. Lundy’s frenetic picaresque bundles Chris and his pickup team of oddball sidekicks—lady ninja, Cherokee warrior, horny computer geek—from sorority party to detention camp to helicopter gunship without worrying too much about plausibility or consistency of tone. Chris imagines himself a James Bond–ian action hero, but he’s more a Candide-like sad sack whose initiatives usually fizzle; he needs one deus ex machina after another to pluck him out of scrapes.

Revolving around a cautionary tale about a luridly caricatured right-wing agenda and a creeping national-security state, the novel’s politics are a bit cartoonish, as the republic meekly submits to authoritarian rule just because a politician dictates it on TV. Still, Lundy is a talented writer who crafts vivid characters, keeps the overcomplicated story moving at a brisk pace and serves up vigorous prose with punchy dialogue. Fortunately, he supplies enough tongue-in-cheek farce to balance the ideological dudgeon.

An entertaining if over-the-top saga of demagoguery run amok.

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MYTH A Wall Street Novel

Sam’s birthday stinks like “the smelliest garbage in the whole world.” His birthday is Dec. 27, so close to Christmas that he gets combination birthday/Christmas gifts and other people’s reject gifts as his birthday presents. He doesn’t get to celebrate with his friends because they’re busy spending the holiday with their families. His siblings have enviable May and October birthdays—perfect times for celebrating, thanks to the uncrowded calendar and beautiful weather. Sam has tried celebrating his half birthday, but it’s just not the same. So, in a funk, Sam finally admits to his teacher, Mrs. Charles, that his upcoming birthday stinks. By this time, readers will really feel for him—and really like him, too. Marinelli’s (Falling from the Moon, 2009) concise, snappy storytelling and Hagen’s photostyle color illustrations create a strong, realistic character in under 30 pages. Marinelli also nails the voice and mindset of an 8-year-old boy and manages to build a story around his complaint without making him seem like a whiny brat. Mrs. Charles certainly understands Sam’s frustration: Her birthday is Dec. 25; she’s never had a party on her birthday, and she knows all about “combo” presents and birthday gifts wrapped in red-and-green paper. But she finds joy in her birthday and helps Sam find joy in his, too. He admits he enjoys the snowball fights with cousins and cocoa with tons of marshmallows. Still, he’d rather have a different sort of birthday, and Mrs. Charles helps make it happen: “His mother made a special cake with a football on it and all his presents were wrapped in birthday paper. And, he didn’t get one waffle maker or boring sweater. For two hours that night, no one said ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Merry Christmas.’ ” In the end, Sam expresses his appreciation to Mrs. Charles with a touching—and particularly 8-year-old–like—phone call to say “Merry birthday.”

A charming holiday read that gifts a feel-good smile.

Mallach, David Austin Penhurst Books (260 pp.) $21.95 | Jul. 2, 2013 978-0-578-12295-3

A courtroom drama that indicts the dominant strategies of the financial planning industry, telling an enjoyable story at the same time.

In his latest novel drawing on his years of financial industry experience, Mallach (Walking with the Analysts, 2008) turns a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority hearing into a tension-filled analysis of the shortcomings of fixed-income investment strategies. Blue-collar workers Henry and Norma Thompson file a complaint against their financial adviser, Valerie Brown, after her investments on their behalf lead to the loss of a significant portion of their retirement savings. Feisty but schlubby lawyer Lucien Marat represents the Thompsons at the FINRA hearing, but his real mission is to bring about systemic change in the financial industry, one lawsuit at a time. Mallach keeps the intricacies of investment strategy at a level the average reader can understand, using his characters, rather than infodumps, to explain concepts through fast-paced dialogue. What at first seems to be a clear-cut case of professional negligence turns out to be more complicated as the opposing lawyers reveal one twist after another, and Mallach keeps readers guessing until the hearing’s conclusion. The book ends by following up on several of the characters two years after the hearing, particularly the ever-more-litigious Marat and the chastened Brown; the Thompsons, however, do not appear again—an odd choice given their importance to the book’s central conflict. Mallach succeeds in keeping the story moving, despite the relatively dry subject matter, thanks to multidimensional characters who can’t make it to the end of the page without arguing with each other. The highly descriptive style of writing, though occasionally overstuffed with colorful turns of phrase—“irritating enough to make the Dalai Lama curse like a character in Goodfellas”; “people like you can sell birthday cakes and party hats to a Jehovah’s Witness”—continues to keep the pages turning and the conflict crackling.

Proof that even the mechanics of low-risk investment strategies can be the basis of a thoughtful, dynamic novel.

GLORIOUS INCORPORATED The Joshua Chronicles

Moore, Steven Neil Xlibris (410 pp.) $26.99 | $23.99 paper | May 31, 2013 978-1-4836-4754-8 A religious allegorical novel in which two corporations compete to control the future of mankind.

Two big companies are vying for young straight-out-of-grad-school Joshua Arden at the beginning of Moore’s engaging debut novel: There’s Jonah International, a philanthropic Manhattan firm led by CEO Malcolm Holden, and Alastar-McGlocklin, ruled by ill-tempered Morgan Blalock. In some ways, Josh is an unlikely candidate for corporate recruitment (“Corporations need to see what they do to people,” he tells his interviewers at Jonah International, “They need to understand that other things are more important than their market presence and money”); he’s a fiercely idealistic dreamer, which seems to make him a perfect fit with Jonah’s mysterious trinity of directors, although they want him to join them of his own free will. Alastar-McGlocklin prefers more

MERRY BIRTHDAY

Marinelli, Lise Skyscraper Press (28 pp.) $9.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Sep. 25, 2013 978-1-935766-41-4 Can any birthday be a bad birthday?

Late December birthday girls and boys will empathize with Sam in this smart, modern picture book. |

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“Norris’ legacy is an engrossing tale of love and heartbreak, wealth and greed.” from black diamond destiny

coercive methods, planting surveillance devices to watch Josh’s every move. “You never know what the future will hold,” Josh says as he leaves his Jonah interview, and this proves true as Moore’s novel dramatically picks up its pace and thrusts Josh into a world of corporate espionage and covert operations in which he plays a key role that even he doesn’t fully understand (“I feel like everyone is looking at me like Harry Potter, the savior of everything magical”). With a remarkably assured sense of pacing, Moore rolls out all the usual props of a standard airport thriller—powerful artifacts, high-tech hardware, sexual tension, sorcerous cults, ancient mysteries of the Catholic Church—and handles them convincingly. The novel’s style is polished business-ese; there are far too many passages that read like corporate finance training manuals: “For monetary amounts that large, the transactions had to be monitored and filed with the Federal Trade Commission to ensure that all competitive practices with the liquidation were completed legally.” But Moore invests his characters—especially Josh, whose doubts never feel contrived—with an appealing humanity, and he slips in shards of humor when they’re least expected; the results are very satisfying.

Pilgrim’s Progress meets Tom Clancy in this confident, effective thriller.

case studies. Additionally, many readers will find the afterword— “Moving from Innovation to Invention”—well worth their time, especially if they wish to create their own technological earthquakes instead of merely using disruptive technologies to their advantage. The partisan pro–big-business stance shouldn’t prevent the other side—e.g., startups, entrepreneurs, small-business owners—from taking advantage of these insights to see what their savvy, outsize competitors will soon be up to. The sagacious, well-rounded guide will also appeal to investors, teachers, students, journalists and historians, all of whom might have a vested interest in the future of the tech industry and the next big thing.

An erudite anthem for large companies reshaping themselves to innovate and compete with agile startups.

BLACK DIAMOND DESTINY

Norris, Helen M. AuthorHouse (260 pp.) $28.99 | $19.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Aug. 30, 2013 978-1-4817-7269-3 This posthumous release by first-time novelist Norris largely succeeds in ensnaring fans of multigenerational melodramas.

Norris tells the saga, based on a true story, of the Mattisons, a family of hardscrabble, mountain farmers in West Virginia who, out of desperation, develop a small outcrop of coal on their property and become miners. The novel follows the secretive, nefarious way the mining venture got its startup capital—which causes the family’s daughter, Gem, to strike out on her own, becoming the madam of the lone bawdy house in the nearby town of Fairmont, while her brothers join her father in what grows into the world’s largest coal corporation. As the Mattisons flourish and become a mining dynasty, Norris does a marvelous job getting readers emotionally invested in the ever-expanding family, especially those members working to better the hazardous conditions for the miners, despite the deplorable indifference of the coal barons. Like such generational-saga veterans as James Michener and John Jakes, Norris admirably weaves fascinating historical details into her narrative, with her exhaustive research giving context to events within her novel. Following the Mattisons takes readers on a journey through the development of West Virginia’s coal mining industry, which comes to rule the state. Norris, a former West Virginia schoolteacher, started the novel at the age of 72, but failing health caused her to set it aside in the midst of revisions. Her son Randolph rediscovered the work, which had been tucked in a closet for 23 years, and shepherded it through to publication. Norris’ legacy is an engrossing tale of love and heartbreak, wealth and greed. The book would have benefited from more thorough editing, though, to remove repetitiveness and fix typos, but the story’s overall strength overcomes these shortcomings.

An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.

The New Killer Apps How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups Mui, Chunka; Carroll, Paul B. Cornerloft Press (189 pp.) $19.53 paper | Oct. 15, 2013 978-0-9892420-1-1

Couched as an us-vs.-them guide for corporations in the realm of technology innovation, this perceptive book shows how big companies can defeat the nimble upstarts through the strategic use of resources, the implementation of three principles and the following of eight rules.

Mui (co-author Unleashing the Killer App, 2000) and former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor Carroll’s (co-author Billion Dollar Lessons, 2008) latest joint work builds on the idea that, to beat startups, large companies must leverage their greater assets (e.g., people, resources, branding, supply chains, distribution networks, customer relations, and market and customer data) in the context of six key technological innovations: mobile devices, cameras, sensors, social media, the cloud and “emergent knowledge.” Three principles guide the approach: first, “Think Big,” the initial phase in redesigning a business, which calls for starting fresh, embracing the context of the business environment and considering potential worst-case scenarios; second, “Start Small,” as in make sure everyone in the company is on the same page, and don’t rush to let financial projections limit or run the company, since those numbers can be inaccurate; and third, “Learn Fast” regarding rules about the value of showing versus telling and welcoming a devil’s advocate into strategy planning. The clear, engaging prose is highlighted by plenty of anecdotes and four 138

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OTHER PEOPLE’S PHOBIAS

a stately aplomb befitting his advanced age and arthritic hips.

Brutus so identifies with his masters that he considers himself a fellow Jew; in his own mind, he’s adopted the name Baruch and presides benignly over Morty’s frequent observances of Jewish memorial rituals. There’s a lot for Morty to mourn, as his daughter, Sara, and wife, Lenore, died years ago—a tragedy that overshadows his strained relationship with Abbie. Another girl named Sarah, a motor-mouthed 10-year-old with Down syndrome, bounces into Abbie’s dog-walking routine along with her mother, Rivka, a half-Jewish, half-Chinese professional stand-up comic. Over the course of the story, Abbie gets embroiled in a friend’s half-baked drug-dealing scheme, Morty comes down with lung cancer, and both become infatuated with Rivka, who prods Morty through her stand-up comedy class.

Perlstein’s novel has some twee conceits that might have overwhelmed it, particularly the plummy, stentorian narrative voice of Brutus, who sounds like Henry James scoping out a nightclub (“Understanding my role as Abbie’s wingman—and aware of the attraction that an English Bulldog of my stature maintains for women of all ages—I gazed instead into the young Latina’s eyes as might Rudolph Valentino in the era of silent films”).

Fortunately, the author’s gift for sharp, empathetic human characterizations rescues the proceedings. He steeps the story in well-observed renditions of West Coast Jewish culture, from homey dinner routines to the theory and practice of stand-up comedy, in which kvetching is the wellspring of artistic revelation. Perlstein offsets the shtick with psychological depth and nuance, keeping it charming throughout.

A funny, affecting novel about fragmented lives that slip the leash.

Ocampo, Flaminia CreateSpace (96 pp.) $6.00 paper | $1.99 e-book Oct. 16, 2013 978-1-4903-6709-5

Death in all its creeping incarnations is the greatest phobia in Ocampo’s (Siete Vidas, 1989) 11 strangely poetic vignettes involving homicidal spouses, malevolent doctors, hellbent rodents and other

everyday terrors.

Largely devoid of supernatural or fantastical elements, these quick detours into nagging fears and pedestrian dreads are nevertheless strangely possessed of fablelike qualities that make the mundane insane. The tales tend to confront the implied safety of domesticity and a secure abode. Take, for instance, Sherry’s bedtime routine: “At night, before going to bed, she knelt down in front of her rosemary bush and prayed, and when she smelled the basil leaves, she made sounds as if overwhelmed by pleasure.” Each entry builds upon the blooming terror-scape, while highlights like “Umbrifer Maritus,” “The Power of Buttons” and “Bald Man’s Charm” create an uneasy vertigo that feeds directly into the unsettling collection’s knockout finale. “Love in a Tub,” meanwhile, further demonstrates the provocative author’s facility with light and dark, hope and horror. In it, the dubious benefits of at-home water immersion therapy give way to a wholly surprising, mesmerizing outcome. In other tales, the horror of a winning raffle ticket and yoga are on par with monstrous rats and dull-eyed psychopaths. “Death In The Landscape” takes what most would consider a tropical paradise and effortlessly renders it a claustrophobic hive of impending doom, where even the evasion of catastrophe offers little in the way of relief.

In Ocampo’s world, there is no safety, least of all at home or in a loved one’s arms. When the scariest place in the world is inside the therapist’s head, things are not going to be OK. Magnificently malignant horror shot through with lyrical beauty and profound terror.

CREATURE AND CREATOR Intersections Between Science and Religion Picton, Terence Self (515 pp.) $28.00 paper | Dec. 15, 2013 978-0-9920814-0-9

A dispassionate, exhaustive examination of God, mankind and seemingly everything else under the sun.

The author, in his debut, may hold dear his own understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, but it doesn’t prevent him from giving diverse viewpoints their due. On the contrary, this intelligent, consistently provocative discourse on who we are, where we come from and where we might be headed appears to revel in possibilities. Many examples of perceived truths that humankind has attained through revelation or experimentation are put center stage for close scrutiny. One moment, the book provides a careful overview of Galileo Galilei’s run-in with the Inquisition; the next, it offers an in-depth analysis of color and its fundamental properties. Quantum physics gets equal time with ontological uncertainty, epistemic anxiety, free will and the philosophy of David Hume. The book also treats readers to generous helpings of

THE BOY WALKER Perlstein, David Manuscript Feb. 15, 2014

In Perlstein’s (Slick!, 2011) winsome fable, a protective dog and the therapeutic effects of stand-up comedy help heal a wounded family.

Abbie Greenbaum is a 25-year-old slacker in San Francisco who coasts through a life centered on desultory dogwalking gigs and a garage band. He still lives with his dad, Morty, an American studies professor who specializes in deep ruminations on TV comedy. Morty’s English bulldog, Brutus, who’s chief among Abbie’s canine charges, narrates their story with |

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hermeneutics, causality, determinism, evolution, cosmology and more. History’s greatest philosophers are balanced against the world’s great religions: “Science is based on a belief in a real world whose governing principles can be determined by observation, experimentation and reason….Religion is based on a belief that the universe has a purpose, and that human beings should seek to discover this purpose.” Curiously, the author notes, it’s at the intersection of science and religion that things get most unpredictable; stout men of science are revealed to be fundamentally faithful, while some of the most outwardly devout historical figures are found to harbor the most acute pessimism. After he painstakingly peels all the layers away, the author intriguingly finds lots of faith in science and plenty of cleareyed reasoning in religion.

A refreshing intellectual discussion of religious and scientific themes.

it is still applauded, but not in the United States”; “We forget that Americans, by nature, are the most competitive people on this planet”—Sharma does point out that he reached this conclusion after years of international experience.

A unique recommendation for the economic future of the United States, offering well-thought-out proposals sure to spark discussion.

Blanche: World Class Musician, World Class Mother Noteworthy Lessons for Living in Harmony with Self, Others, & the Universe Steinberg, Dominique Moyse CreateSpace (144 pp.) $20.00 paper | Jul. 14, 2013 978-1-4904-2566-5

THE 3RD AMERICAN DREAM ... that is global in reach

Using music as metaphor, this loving biographical tribute offers advice on artistry and life.

Steinberg (The Social Work Student’s Research Handbook, 2004, etc.) had quite a mother: Blanche Moyse survived the Nazi occupation of France, poverty in Argentina and a legally treacherous journey to Vermont, where she led a chorale for years. Always close to Blanche, Steinberg cared for her mother in her twilight years, absorbing the wisdom and chutzpah of a woman who lived to be 100 years old but was adventurous enough to ride in a hot air balloon at 95. Steinberg applies her mother’s commentary on music and performance to everyday life, since “the wisdom shared with her artistic colleagues were the very same pearls she had shared with those who interacted with her intimately in everyday life. The metaphors were all musical,” Steinberg says, “but the sentiments were exactly the same.” Thus, each chapter’s theme is drawn from one of Blanche’s pearls of wisdom, such as: “I’m deaf, and you are (still) too loud.” Along with anecdotes from Blanche’s life, Steinberg describes ways we can all apply the musical lesson to everyday life, shortening the explanation to a single sentence or two, which she calls a “life lesson take-away.” Interspersed throughout are “intermezzos” (short lists of quotes from Blanche), “variations” (comments from Blanche to her chorale during her 40-year reign), photographs and captions. Though it’s immediately evident that Blanche was a remarkable woman with insightful commentary, this volume tends to be a bit scattered. At times, it resembles a family scrapbook instead of a narrative. The jumps back and forth between story and advice can be a bit jarring, which could be alleviated by separating the text into lengthier chunks and giving each tale a longer arc. Despite these organizational issues, Blanche shines through as a worthy central figure, and a second, more anecdotal biography about her long, rich life and career might also be a page-turner.

Though this book doesn’t quite live up to the genius of Blanche’s beloved Bach, it certainly strikes some lovely chords.

Sharma, Suresh CreateSpace (262 pp.) $18.45 paper | $9.45 e-book Sep. 24, 2013 978-1-4848-7332-8

An entrepreneur offers a vision for a new wave of American economic success.

Drawing on history, economic theory and his own experience as an immigrant, an employee and an entrepreneur, Sharma (Global Outsourcing, 2005) lays out a road map for American prosperity based on innovation and a high-tech infrastructure that allows the best and brightest to both collaborate and compete. The book begins with an overview of what the author defines as the two previous American dreams: one in an agricultural economy based on family farms in the 19th century, and the other in a broad base of homeowners subsidized by government policy in the 20th century.

Sharma’s vision for the 21st century and beyond relies on a governmental policy that provides a structure for federally backed startup funding—a structure, he says, more effective than venture capitalists focused on quick profits and one that will become self-sustaining as successful businesses share equity rather than repay interest. That startup funding would be supported by a network of national and regional hubs for education and innovation, guided by the understanding that manufacturing as well as the service industry are necessary for a stable economy. The book goes into detail as to how the education, health and energy sectors would develop under this plan. It is clear that Sharma has thought through the details of his fundamental reorganization of the economy, as the book offers not only big-picture theoretical explanations for his advice, but also itemized discussions of how his proposed structures, such as a Cabinet-level innovation department and an integrated system of in-person and remote education, should be set up, funded and operated. Although the book is at times overly enthusiastic about American exceptionalism—“In any other country, if one played well and lost the game 140

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“Tritto helps Anthony evolve from a self-absorbed yuppie to a man more empathetic to those around him, a man readers can root for even if he still doesn’t truly know himself.” from taking flight

GRE/GMAT MATH A Systematic Approach

suburbs, as are the couples with whom they socialize. By most standards, Anthony should be content, but he still feels unfulfilled—a good thing, narratively speaking, since these characters are fairly unappealing early in the novel. Then life throws some changes at the Bartolos and their friends. Anthony is blindsided when he loses his job, which leaves him casting about for what he wants to do with his life. Such ruminations could come off as whiny, but in Tritto’s capable hands, Anthony blossoms. A member of their group dies while doing charitable work in El Salvador, and Anthony, the only one with time on his hands, volunteers to retrieve his remains. In fact, he selfishly does so without consulting Bernadette, further threatening their crumbling relationship. Anthony’s worldview changes once he lands in the Central American country, which is populated by believable characters, including his guide, Col. Juan Hernandez, a former rebel leader who serves as security for Anthony during his trip.

While Anthony jumps through bureaucratic hoops in order to take his friend home, he learns to appreciate the ways of El Salvador while navigating its dangers and tragedies. Anthony arrives in El Salvador as a well-meaning but sometimes-ugly American, yet he comes back a changed man, bearing precious cargo: not only his friend’s body, but also a secret from his friend’s other life. Anthony doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows he doesn’t want his old life. Tritto helps Anthony evolve from a self-absorbed yuppie to a man more empathetic to those around him, a man readers can root for even if he still doesn’t truly know himself.

A novel that artfully spans two cultures, from a talented new author ready to take wing.

Thatte, Sid CreateSpace (326 pp.) $25.00 paper | Jun. 24, 2010 978-1-4536-3398-4 Thatte’s first study guide provides not just a systematic approach to solving math problems on the Graduate Record Examinations and Graduate Management Admission Test, but also the strategies to help readers do so as quickly and easily as possible.

Thatte’s greatest accomplishment here may be breaking down word problems—often a bane for math test takers—and clearly explaining the intuitive, comprehension-heavy process that goes into solving them. But before he teaches readers how to translate words into mathematical equations and vice versa, Thatte lays a solid groundwork of mathematical concepts. Starting from scratch and working his way up to geometry, he provides a fast, thorough review of the types of math found on the GRE and GMAT. His experience in prepping students for competitive exams shines through with spare, to-the-point explanations and collected tips and tricks for streamlining calculations, spotting trends, and tackling problems to reach the answers efficiently and accurately. He even breezes painlessly through an explanation of absolute value equations, a topic that often flummoxes algebra learners. Thatte creates a handful of practice problems to help reinforce each new concept and problem-solving strategy. “The more you practice, the faster you will get. On the GRE/GMAT speed is as important as accuracy,” he writes, warning that test takers have two minutes or less to solve each problem. The number of practice problems and space given for computations might be a bit skimpy, particularly for readers new to the mathematical concepts, but for a streamlined, skill- and strategy-intensive review, it’s still workable. The inconsistently formatted fractions can look a bit odd, but that’s only briefly distracting and barely reduces the quality and ease of Thatte’s teaching style.

Perhaps too fast-moving for beginners but an astute, well-paced review for anyone looking to conquer the logistical and mathematical challenges of the GRE and GMAT.

K i r k us M e di a LL C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny

TAKING FLIGHT

Tritto, Stephen CreateSpace (464 pp.) $13.50 paper | $4.95 e-book | Apr. 3, 2013 978-1-4826-6246-7

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Tritto’s sparkling debut novel succeeds as a gripping tale of one man’s self-discovery.

Tritto, a veteran short story author, tells the story of Anthony Bartolo, a product manager for a high-tech firm.

He and his wife, Bernadette, a buyer for an upscale department store, are DINKs—dual incomes, no kids—living well in the

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HOW WE BECAME A FAMILY Egg Donor, Twins Version

Cancer: How to Make Survival Worth Living Coping With Long Term Effects of Cancer Treatment

Villegas, Bernard; Villegas, Teresa Heart and Mind Press (32 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-9884501-0-3

Wheeler, Patricia R. CreateSpace (152 pp.) $14.99 paper | Oct. 30, 2013 978-1-4849-0770-2

A book for children and their parents that confronts the fact that sometimes the answer to the question “Where did I come from?” isn’t that simple.

Many parents tell their children, “You grew in Mommy’s tummy,” while others tell about their adoptions. However, wellmeaning parents of children who were conceived through in vitro fertilization, or with an egg or sperm donor, may stumble over technical terms as they search for words that are honest, clear and simple enough for children. This book, part of a series from Bernard Villegas and Teresa Villegas (Golemito, 2013, with Ilan Stavans, etc.), offers a helping hand. It explains assisted reproduction in spare, restrained language that allows plenty of leeway for parents to deliver their own messages, and it also preserves the beauty and magic of a child’s birth. The story, told in the second person, as if a parent is speaking directly to a child, begins with two people who love each other so much they want to form a family: “They trusted each other, and they helped each other become the best person they could be.” But, when they try to make a baby, they can’t, so they see a doctor.

The doctor explains that the couple has most of what they need to make a baby—particularly love and mutual respect—but they also need seeds, eggs and a nest: “Your father had the seeds and your mother had the nest, but she didn’t have any eggs.”

It’s an elegant explanation that most children will grasp easily, and of course, they already know the book’s happy ending.

The story features muted, folk art–inspired illustrations, and although most are abstract (the parents have birdlike heads and humanlike bodies), one page has tastefully explicit anatomical drawings of a man and a woman, with the vulva, vagina, penis and scrotum labeled. As with everything else in this book, the drawings and the words are graceful and matter-of-fact. (This version of the book is written for egg-donor twins, and versions for single egg-donor babies and children conceived using donor sperm are also available.)

An engaging book that will likely fulfill a need for some parents.

A heartfelt, well-crafted handbook about the effects of cancer treatments.

Numerous books address the subject of living with cancer, and some discuss the side effects of cancer treatments.

Few, however, tackle the challenge of living with the long-term effects of cancer treatments. Wheeler, a philosophy teacher who survived both breast and ovarian cancers, has undergone surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. She was led to believe that the symptoms she sustained years after her treatment were possibly age-related, but her research suggested otherwise. Wheeler’s book is the result of her personal quest to learn about life after cancer treatment; it demonstrates both her determination to discover the truth and her desire to help other cancer survivors. Describing her writing effort as “this ‘Alphabet Soup’ of my own experience,” Wheeler wants readers to take that line literally: She organizes the bulk of the book into 26 chapters, each related to a letter of the alphabet and each covering a specific area she wants to discuss. For example, in “A is for Anxiety,” Wheeler writes that “[a]nxiety may well be the most overwhelming problem post treatment cancer patients endure.” In “K is for Kin,” she observes that “many of us may never be the same as we were before cancer….We are left to find our own way, each of us, as best we can.” Wheeler pinpoints a particular challenge, symptom or issue in each short chapter and writes about it with insight and compassion. Her revealing perspective as someone who has lived through many cancer treatments combines with her research-based advice and her philosophical bent to create a personal, moving and instructive book. On occasion, the author uses storytelling, references to mythological characters and excerpts from poems to add a literary flavor to her writing, lifting this manual above the ordinary. Readers who have gone through cancer treatments are sure to find solace in Wheeler’s words.

Neither sugarcoated nor overly raw, a cathartic, spiritually uplifting book to help cancer survivors overcome the lasting effects of treatment and get on with their lives.

This Issue’s Contributors # Kent Armstrong • Amy Cavanaugh • Rosie Colosi • Tricia Cornell • Steve Donoghue • Mary Elizabeth Tom Eubanks • Sean Hammer • Lynne Heffley • Matthew Heller • Isaac Larson • Daniel Lindley Lisa Maloney • Joe Maniscalco • Dale McGarrigle • Ashley Nelson • Timothy Niedermann Jim Piechota • Jon C. Pope • Judy Quinn • Sarah Rettger • Megan Roth • Nomi Schwartz Barry Silverstein • Carrie Allen Tipton

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Appreciations: Bruce Chatwin, 1940–1989 B Y G RE G OR Y M C NAMEE

It seems very strange that Bruce Chatwin left us fully 25 years ago, on Jan. 18, 1989.

Like everything else, it seems only yesterday that Chatwin was making an exemplary name for himself as a latter-day incarnation of the old “British Orientalists,” backpack slung onto his well-muscled shoulders for a mad journey deep into some desert or mountain fastness where—always on the track of his grand, lifelong subject—some nomadic people or another was waiting to be described.

He got closest to that goal with The Songlines, which, published in 1986, had slowly built a reputation as a brilliant blend of anthropology and travel in the Australian Outback. And then, after following up with a brilliant novel, Utz, set in the rarified world of Meissen porcelain and exploring the power of things to possess their possessor, he died, having let it be known that a mysterious bacillus from a cave in remotest China had resisted treatment.

It was AIDS that killed him, and the fact that he had chosen to invent a story infuriated some of his readers— and some of his fellow writers, who took the opportunity to call the truthfulness of every story he had ever told into question. It was an easy exercise, for if Chatwin was a demon of research, he was also quite content to remove inconvenient facts from consideration if they got in the way of a good story. Indeed, The Songlines had come under attack for being laced with fictional elements, and even though Chatwin had never presented it as anything other than an imaginary exploration of its subject—the geography of a nomadic people who prefer the old ways to maps and (now) GPS devices—it became a kind of parlor game to find embellishments and outright impossibilities in The Songlines. Even his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, wrote despairingly of the book that “one cannot help feeling a little duped.”

Chatwin is less widely read a quarter-century after his passing but for no good reason. He was a superb storyteller, even if storytelling meant departing from the literal truth—a standard to which we do not hold many other literary travelers, it should be said, from Herodotus to Mark Twain. And, that said, most of his books, which were too few to begin with, remain in print. In Patagonia (1978), which offended a few readers back in the day for certain imprecisions that served his novelistic bent, is now published as a Penguin Classic. And deservedly so, for few tales apart from Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight and some of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories (themselves inventions, of course) capture the essential loneliness and arid isolation of the place.

Bruce Chatwin had a habit, on finishing a book, of ridding himself of the objects, books, maps and letters he had accumulated in his research; it would be a service for someone one day to reconstruct the prodigious library he devoured to do his work. Meanwhile, we have his books, some of them (The Viceroy of Ouidah, Utz, and, yes, The Songlines) among the very best of his time. All merit rereading—and all occasion a tip of the slouch hat and walking stick to their author.

—Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews. |

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Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler • 978-0-316-12726-4 I The Diviners by Libba Bray • 978-0-316-12610-6 Altered by Jennifer Rush • 978-0-316-19709-0