January 15, 2013: Volume LXXXI, No 2

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KIRKUS V O L . L X X X I , N O.

Photo by Kenny Braun

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J A N UA RY

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REVIEWS

CHILDREN’S & TEEN

Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass

by Meg Medina Heartfelt prose describes one Latina teen’s victimization at the hands of a bully, craft never taking a backseat to the issue explored. p. 97

NONFICTION

The Future

By Al Gore A tour de force of Big Picture thinking p. 48

FICTION

As Sweet as Honey

by Indira Ganesan Ganesan introduces a host of charming characters. p. 10

Lawrence Wright The Pulitzer Winner Investigates Scientology in Going Clear, p. 50

Also In This Issue

Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus Returns, p. 14 Vicky Smith Previews the Morris Shortlist, p. 92

Anniversaries: Down with Skool! and Other Tales of Public School B Y G RE G O RY MC NA M EE

Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N # President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com

“ Yo u s e e w h a t i m e a n i n t h e o l d d ays y o u k n e w w h e r e y o u w e r e but now they are trying to read your inmost thorts heaven help them.” A sign at a tea party rally? No: a sentence, better spelled than most, from a goofy book, Down with Skool!, that entered the world 60 years ago courtesy of an English journalist—and one-time schoolmaster—named Geoffrey Willans, who teamed with illustrator Ronald Searle to delight generations of oiks.

Now, an oik, if you’re a swot or a sport, is someone who didn’t go to your school, which of

Editor E L A I N E S Z E WC Z Y K eszewczyk@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Children’s & Teen Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Features Editor C laiborne S mith csmith@kirkus.com

course is superior to any other in the land. Nigel Molesworth, “goriller of 3b and curse of St Cus-

Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH

tard’s,” labors under no such illusions. St Custard’s is a second-tier place, if full of the usual terrors,

Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E

foremost among them “the enemy”—namely, the teachers, whether the English faculty, made up

Senior Indie Editor KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com

of men (and men only, in the British public schools of the time) who went mad over Wordsworth, or the math profs who professed to be your friends, or the science teachers, who can be fooled into letting you out of class if you pretend to swallow sulfuric acid. And the teachers, the masters, are nothing compared to the other boys, from the school bully to the drama-club enthusiast.

Molesworth, stuck in the bottom of what we would call ninth grade, cannot spell (“Once a boy hav been sent to a skool the die is cast”), but he is cunning. He knows what it takes to sur-

Indie Editor RYA N L E A H E Y rleahey@kirkus.com Indie Editor D avid R a p p drapp@kirkus.com Assistant Indie Editor M AT T D O M I N O mdomino@kirkus.com

vive, which is mostly not being seen. He is also, to his detriment, a very careful observer, and he

Editorial Coordinator CHELSEA LANGFORD clangford@kirkus.com

is always behaving less like a mole and more like a prairie dog, sticking his head out to see what’s

Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS

going on. As a result, he knows exactly who is who at St Custard’s, a Darwinian world in which the

Director of Kirkus Editorial P E R RY C RO W E pcrowe@kirkus.com

big ones destroy the little ones. In that microcosm of class-riddled Britain, Molesworth himself is a bully-in-training. “Charge at the tinies,” he says, “and mow them down.”

He knows, and he tells. He also tells what he knows, which might make one fear for the future save that he often gets it right, at least in his own way: “Aktually Drake was pritty tuough and did more or less as he liked espueshelly if there were spaniards about.”

You don’t have to be British to take delight in watching upper-crust twits being twitted, the spectacle that makes P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories a pleasure to read to this day. Nonetheless, life recapitulates high school no matter where you are, and Nigel Molesworth is an answer, of a kind, to Holden Caulfield on these shores, stuck in a place he doesn’t want to be and downright annoyed by it.

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It’s worth seeking out the Molesworth stories, gathered in a Penguin omnibus called Molesworth in 1999 and scarce on either side of the Atlantic today. A bonus if you do: You’ll get to see where much of Monty Python’s humor comes from and where J.K. Rowling got the name Hogwarts from—and that’s a place where the real oiks, Nigel Molesworth would tell us, can be found.

for more re vi e ws and f eatures, vi si t u s on l i n e at kirkus.com.

This Issue’s Contributors

Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Amy Boaz • Lee E. Cart • Derek Charles Catsam • Stephanie Cerra • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott • Gro Flatebo • Julie Foster • Peter Franck • Bob Garber • Faith Giordano • Michael Griffith • BJ Hollars • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Peter Lewis • Elsbeth Lindner • Joe Maniscalco • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Brett Milano • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Chris Morris • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • William E. Pike • Gary Presley • David Rapp • Kristen Bonardi Rapp • Erika Rohrbach • Lloyd Sachs • Sandra Sanchez • William P. Shumaker • Elaine Sioufi • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Sarah Suksiri • Matthew Tiffany • Claire Trazenfeld • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Joan Wilentz

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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..................................................... p. 5 REVIEWS.......................................................................................... p. 5 the return of inspector rebus by amy goldschlager.............................................................p. 14 Mystery.........................................................................................p. 24 Science Fiction & Fantasy..................................................... p. 32

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews.....................................................p. 35 REVIEWS..........................................................................................p. 35 getting the story with claiborne smith...................... p. 50

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews.................................................... p. 75 REVIEWS......................................................................................... p. 75 the morris shortlist by vicky smith...............................p. 92 interactive e-books...............................................................p. 108 continuing series................................................................... p. 111

indie Index to Starred Reviews..................................................... p. 113 REVIEWS.......................................................................................... p. 113 natural self-selection by joe maniscalco.................p. 120

Indira Ganesan introduces a host of charming characters. See the starred review on p. 10.

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on the web After his stellar novel Beautiful Ruins was published in 2012, readers who’d already read Jess Walter’s past books started wanting more from him. His publisher will release We Live in Water, a collection of his short fiction. Kirkus writer Bridgette Bates will interview Walter about the new collection, which is a diverse suite of stories marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of America’s most talkedabout writers. Stories in We Live in Water range from comic tales of love to social satire and suspenseful crime fiction. Traveling from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, to a condemned casino in Las Vegas and a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho, this is a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of personal struggles and diminished dreams.

w w w. k i r k u s . c o m Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9

Bookslut.com founder Jessa Crispin will interview legendary New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid about her new novel See Now Then—her first in 10 years—in which a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, among the present, the past and the future, for, as she writes, “the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid making clear what is unclear and making unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle and the end.

For the latest new releases every day, go online to Kirkus.com.

It’s where our editors and contributing blog partners bring you the best in science fiction, mysteries and thrillers, literary fiction and nonfiction, teen books and children’s books, Indie publishing and more.

And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors, including James Bannon and Adam Connell, as well as traditionally published writers like Sue Grafton and Justina Chen. Each week, we feature authors’ exclusive personal essays 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.

Kirkus contributor Kirk Reed Forrester gets to the bottom of Stephen Dobyns’ sardonic new literary thriller The Burn Palace. At 2:30 in the morning, at the local hospital in Brewster, R.I., Alice Alessio—also known as Nurse Spandex—is given the surprise of her life. Coming back from a secret tryst with a doctor, she peeks in to check on the newborn baby she was supposed to be watching and finds a huge, writhing red-and-yellow snake in the bassinet instead. So begins a series of strange and disturbing events that plague this sleepy little community and confound the police. Woody Potter, the detective on the case, simply can’t put it all together: What is the thread that connects a missing baby, a dead insurance investigator and a local Wiccan sect? Stephen King calls The Burn Palace “the best of the best,” raving that the novel is, “simply put, the embodiment of why we read stories.”

new website Kirkus recently launched our new website, with a vibrant new section of author interviews and profiles, articles about books that are trending now and insider news about hot books. Kirkus Media’s Author Services and Publisher Services are also highlighted on the site, making it simple for Indie writers to get their books reviewed by Kirkus critics and publishers to get acquainted with our full suite of professional services. The revamped kirkus.com makes it easier to discover the best new books. Logging in as a subscriber gives you access to reviews that have not yet been published in Kirkus Reviews; if you do not have a username or password, please contact customer care to set up your account by calling 1.800.316.9361 or emailing customers@kirkus.com.

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fiction A NEARLY PERFECT COPY

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Amend, Allison Talese/Doubleday (304 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-385-53669-1

THE HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE by John Boyne..................... p. 7 AS SWEET AS HONEY by Indira Ganesan..................................... p. 10

The third book by Amend (Stations West, 2010, etc.) is a fast-paced, lively novel of forgery.

Gabriel Connois is the Spanish-born relation of a prominent contemporary of Degas. A talented but rather cranky, mercurial personality, he occupies what is beginning to seem a permanent spot at the impoverished margins of the Paris art world—an outsiderdom that’s exacerbated by the limitations of his French and by his uncompromising attitude toward the bourgeois art world. Meanwhile, in New York, Elmira “Elm” Howells holds a prestigious place at her family’s art auction house. Elm’s marriage is a bit chilly, and her career is languishing, in part since the auction house is now headed by a rather imperious and skeptical cousin but mainly since she’s been absolutely unstrung by grief after the death (vacation, tsunami) of her young son Ronan. Early in the book, Gabriel—a gifted copyist and mimic who owes his start in the art world to his perfect replica of a painting by his famous forebear that hung in his childhood house—gets tempted, bit by bit, into a scheme that seems simultaneously to lay waste to and to fulfill his ambitions...and Elm, too, is swept into the conspiracy, at the other end, by her desperation to replace the son she lost. Amend provides a fizzy, entertaining insider’s look at the conjunction of visual art and commerce—especially the world of art auctions—and though the portrait of Elm’s family life and a subplot about cloning (human analog of forgery) are less convincing and strain credulity, they don’t detract too much from the charm and enjoyment provided by Amend’s exploration of the ethics and the mechanics of the art world.

A few preposterous plot points, but overall, this is a quick, provocative and likable read. (Author events in New York)

A DUKE NEVER YIELDS by Juliana Gray...................................... p. 11 THE BEST MAN by Kristan Higgins................................................ p. 12 THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner................................. p. 15 THE ACCURSED by Joyce Carol Oates............................................ p. 18

The accursed

Oates, Joyce Carol Ecco/ HarperCollins (688 pp.) $27.99 Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-06-223170-3

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JUGGERNAUT

short illness, Cecilia herself is now adrift. Penny, her next-door neighbor in Minneapolis, had tried to persuade Cecilia to take a vacation and go globe-trotting with her. But Cecilia procrastinated, and now it is too late. Consulting a variety of fortunetelling devices, she sells her home—she has never married—and moves in with three other women, who are also at loose ends.

The witty repartee among the four and their interactions with their pet, an aging yellow lab named Riley, are the most enjoyable aspects of this otherwise predictable pastiche of timeworn truisms on loss and aging. The four (and Riley) soon leave domestic routine to traverse the heartland in search of lost opportunities. Cecilia intends to reconnect with globe-trotting heartthrob Dennis, with whom she lost touch after college. Her traveling companions, advice columnist Renie, family physician Lise and chef Joni, are seeking, respectively, a lost daughter, an ex-husband and culinary inspiration. (Riley is just hoping for lots of road-food leftovers.) The bromidic plot leaves no doubt as to the outcome for all four. Berg marshals sentimental subplots in support of her inspirational thesis: The wry voice of the departed Penny reminds Cecilia that time’s winged chariot is hovering just overhead, the fiancee of a dying man in a hospice where Cecilia volunteers (that was Penny’s deathbed wish) offers him a last hope, and Cecilia’s dotty mother, an assisted living resident, is bent on getting married. However, the characterization, particularly of Cecilia, is too sketchy: A deeper, more fully articulated back story might have lent needed depth to our understanding of how Cecilia arrived at this juncture in her life.

Berg fails to play to her strengths here. (Agent: Suzanne Gluck)

Baker, Adam Dunne/St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-250-01767-3

A rogue band of mercenaries discover more resistance than they imagined during a coordinated assault on Saddam Hussein’s treasure trove.

Though technically a prequel to Baker’s U.K. debut, Outpost (2011), this gritty, highly stylized desert adventure stands on its own as a contest of horror survival. The novel opens in Iraq, circa 2005. In an interesting turn, the mercenaries that drive the story aren’t all testosterone-fueled behemoths in the vein of The Expendables.

In fact, this ragtag band of shooters is led by a woman, Lucy White, who commands a modernly diverse group of guns for hire who literally wear their trophies on their chests. Through Jabril Jamadi, an imprisoned member of Uday Hussein’s entourage, they hear rumors of a gold transport abandoned in the western desert—a target far too juicy to ignore. Seeking transport, they fall in with Jim Gaunt, a CIA contractor who’s eager to be welcomed into the fold of the Company. But Gaunt is serving two masters, taking his primary instructions from a field officer named Koell. The spooks have intel that indicates the site of the bullion, on the edge of the Syrian border, holds secrets that the Russians would kill to keep quiet. From these slender threads, Baker lights it up, pushing his prose and his characters to the limits of genre fiction. Adrenaline junkies will dig the crisply written combat sequences awash with bullet snaps and gunpowder fumes. Thriller enthusiasts will surely enjoy the mad scientist they find in the desert, safeguarding a deadly bioweapon with the potential for global disaster. Fans of The Walking Dead, which are approaching legion, can safely know that the Republican Guards waiting for them out in the desert are definitely of the undead variety. Is it all a bit lurid?

Sure, but Baker’s imaginative set pieces, breathless pace and rough-and-tumble heroes give it a prepackaged for-the-movies sheen that’s hard not to enjoy.

A high-velocity zombie-thriller that’s as smart, daring and propulsive as the disparate stories it’s mashing up.

TRAPS

Bezos, MacKenzie Knopf (224 pp.) $24.95 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-307-95973-7 The lives of four troubled women converge outside Las Vegas in this follow-up from Bezos (The Testing of Luther Albright, 2005).

This cleverly orchestrated, cooltoned novel opens with Dana, a topshelf bodyguard, fending off a dog attack without breaking a sweat. The scene serves as a kind of allegory for what Bezos is up to throughout the book: She wants to explore how women respond to threats, and do it free of emotional overreaction.

Dana is charged with monitoring Jessica, an Oscar-winning actress who’s compelled to visit her ailing estranged father and care for his dog. The dog brings them into the orbit of Lynn, a recovering alcoholic who runs an animal shelter, and she in turn has taken in Vivian, a 17-year-old prostitute who’s run off with her twin infants to escape her abusive pimp. The setup is pulpy and all the more preposterous for being set in just four days. Yet Bezos’ prose doesn’t dramatize—at times, it’s as removed as a dossier, and a spare image of a black widow spider resting on the car seat where Vivian’s babies sleep is enough to convey her brittle, dangerous milieu. The novel isn’t short on conflict—Dana is

TAPESTRY OF FORTUNES

Berg, Elizabeth Random House (240 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-8129-9314-1

A motivational speaker struggles to follow her own advice after a close friend dies.

Cecilia, successful self-help author and woman of a certain age—which she declines, on principle, to disclose—travels the nation inspiring others to be their best selves. However, since her best friend Penny died after a 6

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struggling to help her boyfriend, who has cancer, and Vivian’s pimp makes an ugly reappearance. But its drama is powered as much by conversation and the women’s interior thoughts. Each woman is impressively rendered for such a slim book, and each is at a different level of flinty no-nonsensehood that Bezos implies is essential to avoid the “traps” of the title—mostly men but also just life itself. Dana, with her low resting heart rate, is the platonic ideal, but Vivian’s complicated but determined escape is equally admirable.

This book’s emotional remove is something of an asset, emphasizing the seriousness of the characters’ predicaments without locking them into the stock, manipulative plots.

Boyne, John Other Press (480 pp.) $16.95 paper | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-59051-598-3 Narrator Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev reviews his long life, from being a servant in the household of Czar Nicholas II to his post-retirement years in London.

Georgy is the son of a common laborer in the small rural town of Kashin when a political accident radically changes his life. Georgy’s friend Kolek Boryavich decides to act on a revolutionary impulse and tries to assassinate Grand Duke Nicholas, cousin of the czar, but in the shock of seeing his friend engage in this violent act, Georgy steps in front of the duke and takes the bullet instead.

As a reward for his unintended heroism, Georgy is sent to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to work for Czar Nicholas.

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As an exuberant adolescent, Georgy becomes a caretaker to Alexei, the 11-year-old hemophiliac son of the czar and heir to the Romanov throne, but he almost loses his position when he takes his charge tree-climbing, for Alexei’s health must be preserved at all costs. Georgy’s stay at the Winter Palace puts him in contact with the young and winsome Anastasia, with whom he falls desperately in love, as well as with the unsavory Rasputin. Boyne moves us across decades of Georgy’s life through reminiscences ranging from the Bolshevik Revolution to his emigration to England (where he gets a job at the British Museum library) to translating messages during World War II (and meeting Churchill in the process) to the loss of his beloved only daughter, Arina, to his troubled but loving marriage to Zoya.

Boyne re-creates both Georgy’s personal life and the life of pre-Revolutionary Russia with astonishing density and power.

in which a host of coincidences explain the convoluted plot, each of the characters has realized what the car represents in his/her life.

Only race car aficionados may be willing to wade through the philosophic pretensions and flat prose.

OLEANDER GIRL

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Free Press (304 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-4516-9565-6 Although her heroine travels to the United States to unravel family secrets, the heart of Divakaruni’s cross-cultural novel (One Amazing Thing, 2010, etc.) lies in contemporary Kolkata, India.

Orphaned in infancy, 18-year-old Korobi (the name for Oleander) has been raised in a cocoon of privilege and protectiveness by her devoted maternal grandparents. They have told Korobi little about her parents, but she has found and cherishes a love letter she assumes was written by her mother to her dead father shortly after she was born. Korobi has recently become engaged to Rajat Bose, a far more sophisticated, modern young man whose family owns art galleries in Kolkata and New York City. Korobi’s life seems perfect. But then Korobi’s grandfather, a stern traditionalist, collapses at the formal engagement party. After his death, Korobi’s grandmother acknowledges some bitter truths: Not only is Korobi’s father alive, an African-American whom Korobi’s mother met while studying at Berkley, but he and Korobi’s mother were not yet married when Korobi’s mother died. Despite the potential scandal that she is illegitimate and half African-American, Rajat still wants to marry Korobi, but she becomes obsessed with finding her father before marrying. Although his patience is understandably strained, Rajat stands behind Korobi’s decision to travel alone to America for a month on her quest. In America, the innocent—to the point of being naïve—Korobi faces challenges she has never imagined and takes increasing control of her life as she searches for clues about her father with the help of a kindly Indian private detective. She and Rajat, who has shielded her from his own worries about his family’s increasing financial problems since 9/11, begin to drift apart. She is tempted by a new attraction; he is pursued by a former lover. Both must find a balance between old and new values. Surrounded by diverting secondary characters, Korobi herself is so self-absorbed that it is hard not to feel sorry for long-suffering Rajat.

Like an Indian Maeve Binchy, Divakaruni offers an entertaining if lightweight comfort read. (Author tour to Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra)

THE AFTERLIFE OF EMERSON TANG

Champa, Paula Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (336 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-547-79278-1

A journalist specializing in auto design, Champa debuts with a novel about a classic car and the symbolism it holds for a range of characters.

Thirty-something Beth Corvid was originally hired to be the archivist of a photography collection owned by Emerson Tang, a half-Chinese/half-WASP multimillionaire. Only a few years older than Beth, Emerson is now dying of a never named incurable disease, and while there is no romance between them, there is love and devotion, so Emerson has put her in charge of his health care and his life in general. When the aging French artist Hélène Moreau, famous for her futurist “Speed” paintings created by race car tires during the 1950s, approaches Emerson to buy his 1954 Beacon, Beth is surprised to find out he has purchased the car without her knowledge. Hélène wants the car, or specifically its engine, to jump-start her creativity, which has dissipated. Hélène befriends Beth, but Beth doesn’t trust her motives or her sincerity. When it becomes clear that the chassis to Emerson’s Beacon is missing its original engine, Emerson suspects Hélene.

He sends Beth to search for clues to its whereabouts in Germany, where the Beacon line is about to be relaunched. There, she meets Hélène’s former lover with whom she once raced in the Beacon. She also meets Miguel Beacon, whose grandfather founded the original Beacon manufacturing company. Miguel agrees to help her find the engine. Soon, the four characters’ lives are intersecting if not intertwining as the search for the engine moves to California. Meanwhile, Emerson’s health is breaking down rapidly, and Beth, whose own near-death experience as a small child has left her afraid to commit fully to life, is finding herself increasingly attracted to Miguel. By the ending, 8

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the less she trusts even people like Finn, a cute geek who had a crush on her in high school and now reserves donuts for her as proprietor of the still-running dime store. Evie has much invested in nostalgia. A fireman’s daughter who witnessed a tragic blaze at a young age, she is curating a show for a historical society about the day in 1945 a lost B-25 bomber slammed into the Empire State Building—a crash, as it happens, Mina survived. Told from both Evie’s and Mina’s perspectives, the book takes its time setting the scene and establishing the creepy vibe.

Ultimately, it doesn’t have a strong enough payoff as a suspense novel. But in portraying the inner life of an aged widow struggling heroically against her limitations, it’s very good.

Ephron, who wrote five novels with Donald Davidoff as G.H. Ephron, continues to assert her own thoughtful style with her third fictional effort under her own name.

Ephron, Hallie Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-06-211760-1

Ominous things are happening to elderly women living by themselves in the salt marsh of Higgs Point, across the East River from Manhattan.

Home to look after her suddenly hospitalized mother, Evie Ferrante is shocked to discover the bungalow Evie and her sister Ginger grew up in has become a trash heap overnight—mysterious new flat-screen TV and wads of loose cash notwithstanding.

Mina Yetner, their 90-year-old next-door neighbor, whose mind seems sharp to Evie, is being treated as senile and worse by her manipulative nephew, who has been pressuring her to sign certain papers. The more oddities Evie discovers, including a car leaking gasoline because it’s had acid poured in the tank,

NIKO PERREN THE

GLASS SKY In

2012

“An exciting, well-written and compassionate eco-thriller, with real heroes and a mission worth caring about.”

Hurricane Sandy slammed the East.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Weʼll call these the GOOD times.

Heat waves and drought charred the West.

A record melt changed the face of the Arctic.

In

2050

Publishing rights are available.

THE GLASS SKY ◊ ISBN 978-0987913609 NikoPerren@gmail.com

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“A fiercely intelligent, multilayered thriller....” from tuesday ’s gone

TUESDAY’S GONE

The novel opens with a wedding and a death almost in the same breath. After a brief but romantic courtship, 6-foot, 28-year-old Meterling (thoroughly East Asian despite her eccentric German name) receives permission from her Hindu family to marry Archer, a dapper 4-foot-7-inch Englishman in his 40s. During their first wedding dance, he suffers a fatal coronary. Meterling is naturally heartbroken; she is also pregnant. The narrator of the aftermath, Meterling’s much younger cousin Mina, lives with a passel of cousins, aunts and uncles in her grandmother’s household of joyous pandemonium, which is not unlike the genteel chaos of Woolf ’s Ramsays; coincidentally, Mina’s is a family of well-read Anglophiles, not unaware that Pi is a little like Prospero’s enchanted island. Looking back from her own adulthood, Mina describes growing up in an innocent but not unsophisticated world in which people really do take care of each other and where what is meant to be happens. So her family accepts the scandalous fact that Meterling had sex before marriage and adores the resulting baby, Oscar. But Western influence is unavoidable. Mina lives with her grandmother since her parents are getting Ph.D.s at Princeton, and eventually, she ends up in America. Yet Mina still manages to tell the story of Meterling’s unexpected second romance and marriage to Archer’s cousin Simon, with whom she moves to England. The novel is masterful at exploring the difficulty of cultural identity and integration. There’s also a bit of magical realism in the shape of a ghost. But ultimately, this is a novel about the many permutations of both love and family.

Despite some slightly strained plot twists, the characters’ genuine charm and the girlish, witty energy of the storytelling are irresistible.

French, Nicci Pamela Dorman/Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 8, 2013 978-0-670-02567-1 Still haunted by the bizarre events in Blue Monday (2012), London psychotherapist turned police consultant Frieda Klein investigates the murder of an enigmatic con man whose naked, decomposing body is found in the home of a mentally ill young woman.

The woman, Michelle, who speaks in code, collects things.

Frieda, who blames herself for the death of a female student in Blue Monday, the first installment in French’s excellent series, is determined to help her. She alone understands Michelle. But though her insight is invaluable to her good-guy supervisor, DCI Karlsson, her tendency to play by her own rules puts her at odds with other cops and makes her an easy media target. A fellow psychologist says Frieda is “losing sight of whether she’s a therapist or a detective.” While determining the identity of the con man and then piecing together the stories of his victims, including a widow with a leaky roof and a young woman who hires him as a personal trainer, the 30-something Frieda must solve problems that are closer to home. Among them: the neglect of her troubled niece by Frieda’s brother and his ex-wife. Writing under the Nicci French pseudonym, married couple Nicci Gerrard and Sean French specialize in examining the things that tear families apart. Reading Blue Monday first isn’t a prerequisite to enjoying this book, but it is strongly recommended. The new novel extends the plot of its predecessor, bringing back important characters—possibly including a major baddie Frieda is convinced is lurking in the shadows. And it’s always good with a character as fascinating and slow to reveal herself as Frieda— who is bright, caring and conversant but also moody, detached and happiest when walking by herself in unexplored London— to be with her from the start.

A fiercely intelligent, multilayered thriller, this book casts its narrative net wider than Blue Monday, making welcome demands on its readers.

THE SUNSHINE WHEN SHE’S GONE

Goodman, Thea Henry Holt (240 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-8050-9662-0

Six months after baby makes three for a comfortable Manhattan couple, mother has turned distant and despondent while father is acting borderline delinquent.

Readers may find themselves worrying about the baby, given the not-very-grown-up pair of parents in charge, in Goodman’s debut. The birth of little Clara, the hysterectomy that immediately followed and the endless broken nights have left Veronica moody and manic. Her partner, John, feeling shut out, responds by going AWOL. During one freezing New York weekend, good intentions turn into bad decisions as John disappears with Clara, leaving Veronica to catch up on her sleep and her friends but also to hook up with an old flame. Keen to debate the philosophical as well as psychological implications of increased responsibility and parenting, Goodman narrates her slight, possibly comic, picaresque story alternately from John’s and Veronica’s perspectives, both of them enjoying a sense of liberation in their sudden

AS SWEET AS HONEY

Ganesan, Indira Knopf (288 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 15, 2013 978-0-307-96044-3

The imaginary Indian coastal island of Pi, where Ganesan has set her previous fiction (Inheritance, 1998, etc.), works beautifully as the setting for this East Asian homage to To the Lighthouse, both the nostalgic recreation of a lost perfect moment and an exploration into Woolf ’s “thousand shapes” of love.

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ALL YOU COULD ASK FOR

separation but both transgressing. A little suspense is followed by reunification, an angry aftermath and an eventual decision to move forward, the adults now blessed with improved insight into the sharing of the parental load.

A chamber piece. Goodman can be perceptive, but her morality tale is trite.

Greenberg, Mike Morrow/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-06-222075-2

Sports pundit Greenberg tries his hand at chick lit, with somber overtones and mixed results.

Part One of this first novel is pretty formulaic: Three former debutantes face the usual prickly situations the wealthy and naïve are prone to, involving men, of course. Well, not men per se but their own vulnerabilities with respect to the opposite sex. Katherine, turning 40, doses herself with exercise and affirmations as she faces another day as a Wall Street banker in the employ of a man who jilted her almost 20 years before. Brooke, a Connecticut yummy mummy married to a Wall Street banker, is also turning 40: Her biggest challenge right now is compiling a portfolio of naked photos of herself to present to her husband.

Samantha, 28, has her own naked photo dilemma: The politician she has just married has a few (not of her) in his email inbox. She has fled her honeymoon in Kauai for a luxury hotel, where her plutocrat father will bail her out of her difficulties and get her marriage annulled while she trains for a triathlon. Part Two will bring these women together. The unifying element, intended to lend gravitas to the frivolity, involves cancer. Although the cancer section provides opportunities for the women to discover what is truly important in life, it also affords Greenberg too many pretexts for preachy clichés and oversimplification.

Any automatic sympathy conferred by illness will be mitigated, for most readers, by how little we’ve come to care for these superficial and uber-privileged characters.

A DUKE NEVER YIELDS

Gray, Juliana Berkley Sensation (320 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-425-25118-8

When Abigail Harewood—sexually innocent yet effervescently determined to live life to the fullest—decides to take a lover, she sets her sights on notorious rake the Duke of Wallingford, who has just resolved on a year of chastity and sober living.

Abigail flees London with her sister and cousin for a year in Italy and decides it’s a perfect opportunity to explore sensual pleasure. Since she has sworn to never marry yet wants to experience a full, vibrant life, she feels the need to check this goal off her Edwardian checklist. She meets the Duke of Wallingford in an inn and considers him a prime candidate, and when, through a contractual misunderstanding, it turns out that her party and his (consisting of his brother and their illegitimate uncle) are sharing the same Tuscan castle, she sets out to seduce him.

However, Wallingford has sworn off his rakish ways, and the road to Abigail’s happiness is further hindered by an irritating wager the two sets of relatives make that heightens the stakes if he fails. And then there are the mysterious servants that must be more than they seem, the enchanting setting of an Italian castle and Abigail’s eerie sense that there is more magic afoot than Wallingford’s spellbinding presence. The third of a debut trilogy loosely based on Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost with a distinct nod to the great operatic works of Giuseppe Verdi, this is a mesmerizing, enthralling romance that starts out with a sparkling, irrepressible heroine and a brooding, damaged hero and only gets better and better page by page.

Bright, witty dialogue and superb characterization are the backbones of a fun, intricate historical storyline, and you may at turns laugh out loud and wipe your eyes at this couple’s entertaining, tender path to their happily ever after.

THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN

Hart, Erin Scribner (352 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4516-3484-6

Two bodies killed hundreds of years apart bring pathologist Nora Gavin (False Mermaid, 2010, etc.) and archaeologist Cormac Maguire to Killowen, home to an ancient order of scribes.

Nearly 1,200 years ago, young Eóghan was brought to the monastery at Killowen by his mother, who was at wits’ end with his strange vocalizations and uncontrollable movements. There, his fascination with the monks’ Scriptorum grew until the brothers allowed the youth to copy their sacred texts. Was it one of those illuminated manuscripts that led to the death of philosopher Benedict Kavanagh, who skewered rivals on his weekly television show and who recently told his estranged wife, Mairéad Broome, of a find that would set the scholarly world on its ear? The discovery of Kavanagh’s body, along with the body of a man who perished |

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SISTER MINE

centuries earlier, in the trunk of a car submerged in Killowen Bog brings Nora and Cormac to this remote corner of Killarney, along with Cormac’s father, Joseph, still recovering from a stroke, and his caregiver, Eliana. The four stay at a local artists’ retreat, where Claire Finnerty and her band of painters, potters and calligraphers include the visitors in their communal meals but keep them at arm’s length from their personal lives. Local police detective Stella Cusack is more welcoming. But pressure to close the widely publicized case quickly and the demands of life with her teenage daughter Lia threaten Stella’s professional and personal well-being.

Hart’s foray into soggy Killowen has a rock-solid foundation of musical language and deft plotting.

Hopkinson, Nalo Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $23.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-446-57692-5 Canadian science fiction/fantasy author Hopkinson (The Chaos, 2012, etc.) goes about five steps too far in this wildly overstuffed tale blending made-up nature mythology with a coming-of-age odyssey.

Makeda and Abby are the daughters of a human woman and a demigod who rules all growing things, an illicit union that got Mom turned into a water monster dwelling in Lake Ontario and Dad temporarily exiled into human flesh. Moreover, the girls were born conjoined, and their surgical separation nearly led to Abby’s death until Mom persuaded her brother-in-law, guardian of life and death, to give the baby another chance. The rest of Dad’s family let that breach pass since Abby has mojo and could almost be a demigod, except she’s mortal, while Makeda is a mere “claypicken” with no supernatural powers whatever and hence disdained by her celestial kin. If that sounds murky, it only gets murkier as we learn that the “haint” (ghost) that periodically attacks Makeda is actually her mojo, which got loose at birth and is now trying to rejoin her—but in the meantime Dad loaned her his mojo and won’t get it back till she dies. Hopkinson has lost none of her gift for salty, Caribbean-Canadian talk—“those boho Obamanegroes with their braided hemp necklaces” being one of her funnier jabs—and the relationship between Makeda and Abby always rings true: resentment and anger enduringly intertwined with love and loyalty. But a fantasy setup that was overly elaborate to begin with gets increasingly absurd as one bizarre development follows another. It’s regrettable, since there are a few gorgeous passages—particularly the one where Makeda rediscovers her mojo while making a magic carpet that doubles as a contemporary art project—that remind us how good this talented author can be when she disciplines her imagination just a tad.

Excessive and overwrought, though Hopkinson’s fans may love it anyway.

THE BEST MAN

Higgins, Kristan Harlequin (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-373-77792-1 When Faith Holland was abandoned at the altar three years ago, she left her hometown for San Francisco to regroup; coming home to Manningsport, she’ll have to confront her past and Levi Cooper, the disturbingly handsome chief of police she blames for ruining her life.

On the day her fiance came out and left her at the altar, Faith escaped to the West Coast, where she’s had a thriving professional life and a comical romantic life. Summoned home for a few months to work the harvest at her family’s winery and help with some crisis management, Faith realizes that some things in her small town will never change—for the good or the bad—but she knows the time has come to establish a new reality with her ex, her family and maybe even Levi Cooper, the best man who forced Jeremy to be honest with her and himself on their wedding day. It’s so much easier to blame and despise him; if she lets down her guard, she might have to deal with their short but profound shared past and her own guilt and secrets from a longago tragedy that has haunted her for most of her life. Higgins’ newest heart-tugging romantic comedy juggles a spectrum of emotionally powerful elements, including the death of a mother, the abandonment of a father and a sigh-worthy high school romance gone awry. With her typical engaging voice, compelling storytelling and amusing dialogue, Higgins keeps the audience flipping through pages as quickly as possible, but it is her spot-on ability to make her characters at once funny, authentic and vulnerable—vulnerable to the point of breaking, so they can heal, stronger and better and more able to love—that is her true genius and guarantees most romance fans will both laugh out loud and get teary, sometimes at the same time.

Another sweet, touching must-read for Higgins fans and anyone who enjoys a perfect combination of humor and romance.

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THE DEATH OF FIDEL PÉREZ

Huergo, Elizabeth Unbridled Books (304 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-60953-095-2

The enduring impact of the Cuban revolution on the lives of ordinary citizens is the subject of Huergo’s disjointed debut novel.

On the 50th anniversary of the Moncada Barracks raid, Fidel Pérez, lovesick and inebriated, ventures onto his brother’s balcony after a night of drinking. Rafael hears his brother’s cries as the railing |

“Superbly imagined....” from double feature

gives way and rushes to save him, but both he and his brother plummet to their deaths. As their battered bodies lay on the ground below, the neighbors gather, and Fidel’s former lover’s cries are heard above the throng as she laments that Fidel and his brother have fallen. The shouts are taken up by the crowd, and as rolling blackouts hit Havana, its citizens misconstrue the meaning of the words and sweep toward the town’s center.

The author focuses on four individuals among the crowd that converges at La Plaza de la Revolución: Saturnina, an elderly woman who lives on the streets and still grieves the loss of her son, Tomás, a Fidelista who once provided food and shelter to anti-Batista dissenters and who she believes will live again; professor Pedro Valle, arrested and tortured by the Castro regime 10 years ago and now flooded with remorse as he “converses” with his friend and colleague, Mario, who “was disappeared” as a subversive; Justicio, who witnessed the Pérez brothers’ deaths and ekes out a living with his bicycle cab; and young Camilo, a university student who knows no other life than the one under Castro’s fist. His mother abandoned the family when she fled Cuba in 1980, and now he finds himself becoming a spokesperson for a new hope. Huergo’s writing is expressive, and her opening premise is creative, but what follows is often difficult to understand. Her frequent use of Spanish dialogue and her didactic approach to storytelling often interrupt the flow, and the reader must reread passages several times in an often fruitless attempt to grasp meaning and differentiate between past and present.

Huergo writes with heart even though her account lacks consistency.

Arthur and Derek meet other passengers on the voyage, most notably Bunny and Francis, the latter of who is pleased to see Elizabeth turning away from Derek. As Francis explains, “I do get tired of seeing fantastic women with appalling men. It’s like some form of blood sacrifice, self-harm”—not that Elizabeth needs too much nudging. Kennedy occasionally takes us away from the claustral atmosphere of the ship to fill in the gaps in Elizabeth’s previous life.

With a ferocious and probing style, Kennedy examines love and pain and the whole damn thing.

DOUBLE FEATURE

King, Owen Scribner (432 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-4516-7689-1

Gen-Y angst riffles the pages of King’s (We’re All in this Together, 2005) debut novel.

This is an often weirdly funny book, all the same. Samuel Dolan graduated from a liberal arts college in upstate New York. His girlfriend, Polly, left to live with her parents in Florida. Sam’s mother is dead, and Sam doesn’t much like his father, Booth. Booth Dolan has made a career out of scenerychewing in B-movies—and doing what he wants, including chasing skirts. Sam’s passionate ambition is his indie film, Who We Are, “about the costs of growing up—and the costs of not growing up. And that was heavy stuff.” Sam makes his film, but the film that finds its way into print isn’t the film he made, thanks to the crazed machinations of Brooks, an unstable assistant director Sam took on since he was a rich kid who chipped in big bucks. Years later, Sam ends up in Brooklyn doing “weddingography,” themed if you like—Grindhouse, Nouvelle Vague or Citizen Wedding. And Who We Are? It’s a cult film “playing to packed, goofy, inebriated houses,” complete with the Brooksinserted masturbating satyr and other aberrations. There are even residual checks, which Sam refuses to cash. King’s characters are both attractive and realistic, not only larger-than-life Booth and disaffected Sam, but also Allie, Sam’s mother, who was always cool and accepting, even of Booth’s “blithe selfishness.” There’s Mina, Sam’s wise and fragile half sister; Polly, who still beds Sam even after marrying a buffoonish retired Yankee baseball player; Rick Savini, an eccentric yet successful character actor who treats Sam as an equal; and television producer Tess, earnest and bossy, whom Sam meets as he films a wedding.

The narrative blossoms and unfolds and expands, Sam becoming wiser and more likable, even as he reconciles with his world at a happily-enough-ever-after homecoming. Unique in concept and execution, with much mention of Orson Welles and Dog Day Afternoon, King’s novel is winning.

Superbly imagined lit-fic about family, fathers and film.

THE BLUE BOOK

Kennedy, A.L. Amazon/New Harvest (368 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-544-02770-1 On an ocean liner during a transAtlantic voyage, emotions are intensified as love relationships get tossed about.

Elizabeth and Derek are a couple—sort of. At least they’re sharing a cabin onboard the ship. They’re almost engaged, but not quite, and Elizabeth is looking for reasons to escape from the relationship. Derek is a con artist, a profession that doesn’t carry well into romance. Onboard, they meet Arthur Lockwood, yet another con artist, and although Elizabeth pretends to be meeting Arthur for the first time, it turns out they’d been lovers years before, and she wants to hide this fact from Derek. This is easily done, for Derek becomes devastatingly seasick and for days is immobilized in their cabin.

Elizabeth gradually, and at first reluctantly, enters into the force field that is Arthur, a charming older man still very much taken with Elizabeth. Despite her initial reticence, she gradually begins to spend more time with Arthur, and eventually, they rekindle their affair. Kennedy becomes lyrically erotic when she gets these two back together. In the interstices, Elizabeth and |

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Re-entry Song: The Return of Inspector Rebus b y a m y

Standing in Another Man’s Grave

Rankin, Ian Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown (400 pp.) $25.99 Jan. 15th, 2013 978-0-316-22458-1

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With the publication of Exit Music four years ago, Edinburgh’s Inspector John Rebus went reluctantly, cantankerously into retirement.

At that time, his publishers proclaimed that we would see no more of Rebus. Best-selling series author Ian Rankin was certain that there would be no more Rebus novels. And yet, here is Standing in Another Man’s Grave, a brand-new Rebus novel. What happened?

Various things happened, says Rankin. The first is that 2012 marked 25 years since the publication of the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses. The second is that Rankin “got an idea for a story that seemed to be a cold case and I knew in my heart that that was what Rebus was doing.” And finally, a policeman told Rankin that Edinburgh was raising the retirement age for cops, which meant that Rebus would be able to apply for reinstatement in the force.

Rebus, whose career in the Criminal Investigation Department utterly dominated his life, would obviously not have spent the intervening years quietly beekeeping in the country; rather, he has joined Edinburgh’s cold case unit, which is staffed by retired cops turned uneasy civilians. And, naturally, when he decides to investigate Nina Hazlitt’s claim that her daughter’s disappearance several years ago is linked to the disappearances of several other young women, he immediately begins interfering in the most recent case.

Meanwhile, Rebus only seems to have deepened his bizarrely collegial, incredibly fraught relationship with his nemesis, the (supposedly) retired crime lord “Big Ger” Cafferty, even going for a fortnightly drink with him. What drives this odd pairing? Rankin says the men are “two sides of the same coin. Cain and Abel….[They’re both] dinosaurs, the last of their breed. Younger, more intelligent, hungrier people are coming up behind them.”

One of those younger, hungry types is Malcolm Fox of “The Complaints”—what Americans would call the internal affairs department. Protagonist of two non-Rebus novels, The Complaints and The Impossible Dead, Fox makes an appearance here since he’s convinced that Rebus’ contact with Cafferty means that Rebus must be dirty.

Of course, readers know that he isn’t, but Rebus’ tendency to buck the rules and seek answers from the criminal element certainly looks a bit shady to the spectator and causes fresh trouble for his former subordinate, DI Siobhan Clarke, who, before Rebus’ renewed intrusion into her work, was actually doing quite well. “He’s always trying to screw things up for her,” Rankin notes.

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have misgivings. He acts like her dad. They have lost touch, she has gone her own way, she’s doing well in her personal and professional life, and Rebus shows up. She knows he’s on the side of the angels, but if she helps him, it could stall her career. There’s an awkward dance those characters are doing.”

The background music for this particular dance is provided by the late Jackie Leven, a friend of Rankin’s to whom Rankin dedicated the book.

Leven’s lyrics serve as epigrams throughout the novel, and the title is a mondegreen, a mishearing of Leven’s song “Standing in Another Man’s Rain.”

Rankin confesses to mishearing lyrics since he was a child; this particular one caused him some trouble with his publishers, who felt that the title was too long. It was only when he pointed out that the similarly long title The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hadn’t proved to be a detriment in English-speaking countries that he got away with it.

At the conclusion of the book, Rebus’ days as a cold case researcher appear to be numbered.

But if Rebus can’t solve crimes, what else is there for him to do? Rebus “uses the job as a crutch, as a way of not having to think too hard about his own failings, his own problems,” Rankin says. “He’s a professional voyeur, peering into other’s lives, so he doesn’t have to look into the mirror.” If Rebus were American, he might consider becoming a private investigator—after all, he practically acts like one already. But alas, as Rankin points out, there is no PI tradition in the U.K. Is it possible that Rebus’ ability to close cases will outweigh the more checkered parts of his record, and he’ll be allowed to rejoin the CID? One gets the sense that Rankin never wanted to retire Rebus in the first place. One of his mistakes, he says, was making Rebus too old in his first appearance. But Rankin doesn’t yet know if his next novel will include either Rebus or Malcolm Fox. “All I know,” Rankin says, “is that I’ve got to start writing next month.”

Standing in Another Man’s Grave was reviewed on page 33 in the 1/1 issue of Kirkus Reviews.

9 Amy Goldschlager is an editor and book/audiobook reviewer who lives in New York City and exists virtually at www.amygoldschlager.com. She has worked for several major publishers and has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Locus, ComicMix and AudioFile magazine.

PROPHET OF BONES

concerned about their marriage’s monotony, and they try some marriage counseling, but it doesn’t take. Things take a turn for the better (from the narrator’s point of view) when he hires lubricious 21-year-old Holly as an intern, and it’s clear these two are eventually going to mate like otters. Holly has gotten her sex education from Internet porn, something our Average American Male knows quite well. She’s also well-versed in how the modern woman uses social media, so when she sends compromising photographs that the AAM receives on his cellphone, he’s both delighted and turned on...until Alyna discovers the photos and kicks him out. For a while, he lives in a hotel room and visits Holly in her dorm room, barely finding his way through the haze of marijuana smoke. Eventually (and predictably), she also begins to find the narrator tiresome, and he tries to reconcile with Alyna, who has hired a self-described “shark” as a divorce lawyer.

Even if Kultgen intends this as satire, it’s hard to believe anyone can develop an interest in such a narcissistic, unsympathetic and downright odious narrator—one who makes Shallow Hal look like Heathcliff.

Kosmatka, Ted Henry Holt (368 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-8050-9617-0

This archaeological thriller from Kosmatka (The Games, 2012) has a promising opening that winds up as a dead end.

In the first scene, a power-mad, messianic Prophet is murdered by his renegade followers. We then flash to the troubled childhood of Paul Carlsson, a sensitive soul with a violently abusive father and an ominous fascination for breeding rats. But no, Paul doesn’t grow up to be the Prophet—in fact, the latter is never heard from again, so the opening scene is simply left dangling. Nor does Paul’s tortured childhood play into the remainder of the book. Instead, the reader is dropped into an entirely different plot, in which the adult Paul—who has become a specialist in DNA research—is called to an Indonesian archaeological dig, where he discovers bones that seem to belong to a previously undiscovered, human-related species. He soon learns that he’s working for Martial Johansson, a mysterious billionaire who’ll do anything to keep this information from getting out. Johansson is doing his own sinister research, but it’s never clear why he’s so threatened by Paul’s discovery—or why he would sponsor the dig when he knows what will be found.

We don’t even learn when the action is happening: The setting is an era when evolution has apparently been disproved and certain key scientific texts are banned, but there’s no clue why or when. The book’s climax finds Paul reunited with Lillivati, his college mentor and girlfriend, whose sex drive is apparently unaffected by looming threats on her life.

Together, they face a series of deadly chases—first with Johansson’s henchmen, then with crossbred ape/human monsters. But these events do little to advance a plot whose coherence has long since vanished into the ether.

THE FLAMETHROWERS

Kushner, Rachel Scribner (400 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4391-4200-4

A novel of art and politics but also of bikes and speed—not Harleys and drugs, but fine (and fast) Italian motorbikes.

At 21, Reno (who goes by the name of the city she comes from) has graduated with a degree in art from the University of Nevada-Reno, and she does what any aspiring artist would like to—heads to New York City. She gets her kicks by riding a Moto Valera, a magnificent example of Italian engineering.

In fact, for one brief shining moment in 1976, she sets a speed record of 308.506 mph on her bike at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. This impressive achievement occurs the year after she’d headed to New York, where she’d taken up with—amazing coincidence—Sandro Valera, scion of the Italian manufacturer of the motorbikes she favors and, like Reno, an aspiring artist in New York. Other coincidences abound—for example, that Reno had had sex with a young man, and they’d agreed not to exchange names, but shortly afterward she finds out he’s a close friend of Sandro’s, and he goes on to play a major role in her life.

Kushner spends a considerable amount of time flashing us back to the Valera who founded the firm in the early 20th century, and she updates the fate of the company when Reno and Sandro visit his family home in Italy. There they experience both a huge demonstration and eventually the kidnapping of Sandro’s father, a victim of the political turbulence of the 1970s.

Kushner writes well and plunges us deeply into the disparate worlds of the New York City art scene, European political radicalism and the exhilarating rush of motorcycles.

THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MARRIAGE

Kultgen, Chad Perennial/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $14.99 paper | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-06-211955-1

The narrator from Kultgen’s earlier novel (The Average American Male, 2007) is back—if anyone is interested.

Kultgen’s title makes it clear that his narrator is now married. His wife is the long-suffering Alyna, and they also have the requisite two kids, Andy and Jane. But how anyone could marry this self-centered, sexually-obsessed and irresponsible slimeball strains our credulity. Our family man is working a dead-end job doing not much of anything. His marriage is dull, his children are boring, and his main concern is that he’s not getting any. Alyna is also |

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“...successful at every level.” from woke up lonely

WOKE UP LONELY

puts readers into the heads of everyone, from Chinese generals to hardened killers. The plot revolves around the kidnapping of the president, who is abducted from the White House in the middle of the night by what appears to be an alien craft that leaves behind distinctive crop circles. Meanwhile, dial back a few decades and the Chinese are busy manipulating some odd aircraft in order to get the jump on the West. Ledger, who is having an affair with a beautiful assassin named Violin, is called in to find out what is going on with the president. While he is out with his combat dog, Ghost, his apartment is invaded and torn to pieces by men sent to take him, and the DMS, down.

The confusing plot meanders around, jumping from villain to protagonist in rapid succession and even throwing in a group referred to as the “men in black,” along with an enigmatic woman with an eidetic memory and over-the-top bad guys by the score. Although Ledger is presented as a killing machine with a patriotic side, as a character, he is so soaked in blood and testosterone that he comes off as cartoonish.

What could have been a fun romp turns into a clichéridden tale so confusing that most readers will need a whiteboard to keep track of the characters and plot points.

Maazel, Fiona Graywolf (336 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-55597-638-5

In this rollicking ride of a novel, Maazel explores a world of family, fame and forgiveness.

One of the cures for “waking up lonely” is the Helix, sponsor of a number of services geared to help the legion of people experiencing loneliness in the 21st century. The founder of the Helix is Thurlow “Lo” Dan, whose mission has been to help those who feel companionless, though ironically, he’s been feeling forsaken and isolated himself since the breakup of his marriage to Esme and his separation from his daughter, Ida. In one hilarious scene we learn of the Helix’s strategy of “speed dating,” in which potential partners come together for a few minutes to share a brief piece of who they are (responding to contrived prompts such as “My worst high school moment”) in hopes of establishing a more lasting relationship. Despite such artificiality, the Helix has become something of a cult and is now drawing worldwide attention. Esme has been spying on Thurlow and comes up with a recon mission that, to say the least, devolves into a fiasco. In fact, he turns the tables on the motley group of operatives Esme has put together. In a number of touching flashbacks, we learn of the development of Lo and Esme’s relationship. The narrative moves readers seamlessly from such unlikely places as the Helix’s corporate headquarters in Cincinnati to the bleakness of North Korea.

Maazel manages to strike a number of tones here— from poignant (all Lo wants is to get back with wife and daughter) to paranoid—and she’s successful at every level.

(Author tour to New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Milkwaukee, Portland and Seattle)

SOMETHING ABOUT SOPHIE

McComas, Mary Kay Morrow/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | $12.99 e-book Mar. 26, 2013 978-0-06-208480-4 978-0-96-208481-1 e-book

A romance and a mystery told in tandem.

The story begins with a cryptic conversation between Arthur Cubeck, dying in the hospital, and a female visitor with whom he has long shared a guilty secret. He has contacted a young woman named Sophie with a request to come see him so he can tell her the secret the female visitor wishes him to keep. Clearly, his visitor wishes he would die before telling, and in fact, he does. Sophie, adopted as an infant by a woman who loved her and gave her a good life, is more concerned with mourning the death of her adoptive mother than in finding out about her birth mother. The invitation from Arthur to visit and find out about her origins is intriguing, but she is ambivalent, and when she finally makes up her mind to visit this stranger, she is too late. The trip is not wasted, however, as she finds herself attracted to the doctor who promises to look into whether Arthur left any written communication for her. He also returns her romantic interest. Arthur’s lawyer asks Sophie to attend the reading of the will, and the fact that Arthur leaves her some property, along with the explanation that he owes her much, causes her and his son to wonder if he was her father. This is a clue worth following. Another clue is the stranger found dead with photos of Sophie in his possession. Soon, the small town is abuzz with speculation about Sophie, and eventually, she discovers the trauma of her conception and the reason Arthur, not a perpetrator but a witness, felt so guilty.

EXTINCTION MACHINE

Maberry, Jonathan St. Martin’s Griffin (464 pp.) $15.99 paper | Mar. 26, 2013 978-0-312-55221-3

Maberry’s fifth entry in the Joe Ledger series combines conspiracy theories, aliens, corrupt government agencies and tons of action/adventure.

Capt. Joe Ledger, a former police detective who is now an operative for the highly secretive Department of Military Sciences, and his team once again face foes coming from every corner. Ledger’s problems start when he is targeted by a group of dangerous men who aim to put him, his team and his agency out of the picture for good. This convoluted tale, which switches back and forth from Ledger’s present to the past, from country to country and from Ledger’s first-person point of view to third-person omniscient, 16

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The novel is similar in plot and structure to episodes of the TV series Cold Case, whose fans will find its peregrinations most intriguing.

in New York. At a literary party, she meets her future husband, Sidney Klein, 20 years her senior and an intellectual professor. He’s smart and analytical, and it doesn’t take him long to learn of Constance’s scarred relationship with her father, Morgan Schuyler, a doctor who lives up the Hudson in a quirky and depressing home called Ravenswood. (Think Manderley.)

Although Constance seems to hate her father and tries to get away from him, her marriage to Sidney suggests she’s looking for a father replacement (repetition compulsion complex, she wonders?). Constance’s kid sister also comes to New York and gets involved with cocktail pianist Eddie Castrol. Iris is much more comfortable with her sexuality than Constance, but the older sister breaks up the relationship, leaving Iris to moon about and feel sorry for herself. Then, over one Christmas vacation, Morgan drops a bombshell—he’s not really Constance’s father. Her real father is the husband of the housekeeper, and he committed suicide—or perhaps was thrown under a train— shortly before Constance was born. In another strange psychological and erotic twist, Constance turns to Eddie for a brief but intense sexual relationship. Throughout the novel, McGrath moves us from Constance’s to Sidney’s point of view, sometimes lurching the novel forward by having them use the same words to characterize what’s happening in their lives.

A novel of fierce rages and great tenderness, exhausting in its emotional intensity.

RECONSTRUCTING AMELIA

McCreight, Kimberly Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-06-222543-6

Former attorney McCreight pens a multilayered legal thriller.

Single mom Kate Baron struggles with the unholy demands that come with being an associate at a high-powered New York City law firm while raising her 15-year-old daughter, Amelia. A child born out of wedlock, Amelia doesn’t know who her father is, and Kate, for some reason that never really becomes clear, fails to share this information with her. While curious about her dad’s identity, Amelia has other, more pressing issues about which to worry. For one thing, she has been tapped for membership in her ritzy private school’s illicit all-girls club, a fact she’s hiding from her best friend, Sylvia, as well as her mother. But when Kate receives a call from the school that she must leave a meeting and come pick up her daughter because good-girl Amelia has been suspended for cheating, Kate’s world completely crumbles. Running late to collect her daughter, Kate doesn’t arrive until pretty, smart, blonde Amelia has fallen from the school roof, a victim of her own failure. Or at least that’s what the police are telling Kate, but she doesn’t believe Amelia killed herself. When she receives an anonymous text message, it prompts her to prove that Amelia was murdered. The author tells the story in flashbacks, alternating between Kate’s and Amelia’s point of view, leading up to the day Amelia died. Although the expensive and exclusive school comes across as a cauldron out of hell and a bit over-the-top, the book never bogs down and comes to a seamless and unanticipated conclusion.

Readers will need to swallow the premise that a police homicide investigator would allow the mother of a victim to tag along on the investigation and question witnesses, but otherwise, this is a solid debut novel.

THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN

Nabokov, Vladimir Translated by Karshan, Thomas; Tolstoy, Anastasia Knopf (176 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-307-96081-8

An early, recently unearthed play by the 20th-century master, heavily critical of politics and hinting at the brilliance to come.

Nabokov (1899-1977) was living in Prague in 1923 when he wrote this play, rediscovered in 1997 and published in book form in Russia in 2008. But the communist revolution in his homeland is its key inspiration. Set in an unnamed country, the story tracks a tug of war for power: Tremens is the leader of a failed coup who wants the land reduced to ashes, and Mister Morn is the gentle but successful poet/leader who obscures his status as king. Shakespeare is Nabokov’s model in a variety of ways. Most obviously, the play was written in iambic pentameter (attentively but not rigorously preserved by the translators). And its references to Othello, along with its themes of madness, leadership, family lines and how women support powerful men, show Nabokov took plenty of cues from the Bard of Avon. Admirers of Lolita, Pale Fire and Pnin have to work hard to detect glimpses of Nabokov’s best-known work here, but it’s not impossible: In his introduction, co-translator and Nabokov scholar Karshan explores how the play’s references to masks and sex would re-emerge in Nabokov’s mature novels. The dynamism of the

CONSTANCE

McGrath, Patrick Bloomsbury (240 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-60819-943-3 Unhappy families being unhappy in their own way...again.

McGrath’s hyperanalytical approach to traumatic family relationships runs deep. Constance Schuyler, a cool, iconic blonde in a Hitchcock-ian mold, lives |

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THE ACCURSED

play’s romantic relationships makes it a firmly modernist work.

Through Midia, the wife of an imprisoned revolutionary who’s in love with Morn, he explores infidelity without high moral judgment. And in Ella, Tremens’ daughter, he’s imagined a vibrant, nervy woman quick to question her father’s “equivocating little words.” Morn’s vagueness dulls the play’s climax somewhat, but he’s also the story’s chief asset: “All my power lay in my mysteriousness,” he proclaims in a final soliloquy, an apt line for a tale about the mysteriousness of power.

A minor work in the overall Nabokov canon, but an intriguing riff on Elizabethan drama nonetheless.

Oates, Joyce Carol Ecco/HarperCollins (688 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-06-223170-3 978-0-06-223436-0 e-book Oates (Sourland, 2010, etc.) finishes up a big novel begun years before—and it’s a keeper.

If the devil were to come for a visit, à la The Master and Margarita, where would he turn up first? You might not guess Princeton, N.J., long Oates’ domicile, but there “the Curse” shows up, first in the spring of 1905, then in June, on “the disastrous morning of Annabel Slade’s wedding.” No slashing ensues, no pea-green vomiting; instead, the good citizens of Princeton steadily turn inward and against each other, the veneer of civilization swiftly flaking off on the edge of the wilderness within us and, for that matter, just outside Princeton. Woodrow Wilson might have said it differently when he reflected on his native Virginia: “The defeat of the Confederacy was the defeat of—a way of civilization that was superior to its conqueror’s.” It just could be that the devil’s civilization is superior to that of America in the days of the Great White Fleet and Jim Crow, for Wilson—a central figure in the novel and then-president of Princeton University— is no friend to the little people. But then, none of Oates’ male characters—some of them writers such as Mark Twain and Jack London, others politicos such as Grover Cleveland, still others academics plotting against the upstart Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its “devilish business”—are quite good guys: Representatives of the patriarchy, they bear its original sin. The Curse is the one of past crimes meeting the future, perhaps; it is as much psychological as real, though Oates takes pains to invest plenty of reality in it. Carefully and densely plotted, chockablock with twists and turns and fleeting characters, her novel offers a satisfying modern rejoinder to the best of M.R. James—and perhaps even Henry James.

Though it requires some work and has a wintry feel to it, it’s oddly entertaining, as a good supernatural yarn should be. (Author tour to Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle)

THIS MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION

O’Malley, Thomas Bloomsbury (416 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-60819-279-3

O’Malley (In the Province of Saints, 2005) crafts a sensitive portrait of lost souls who desperately try to reconcile their pasts with their current realities.

Duncan Bright is 10 years old in December 1980 and living in a northern Minnesota monastery with other orphans. He has no memory of the first years of his life, but kind Brother Canice, who constantly chews sunflower seeds, provides him with a story, which becomes Duncan’s mantra: Ten years earlier, the Festival of Lights Holiday Train became stranded in the midst of a terrible snowstorm. Many people in the area froze to death, including those on the snowbound train.

Early in the morning, Duncan’s mother appeared outside the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy and left him on the flagstone, then disappeared. She continues to inquire about him and loves him, but she feels he’s better off at the Home because she can’t take care of him. Duncan, who claims to remember his birth and the voice of God speaking to him, desperately dreams that one day his mother will come and reclaim him. He prizes an old transistor radio, given to him by Brother Canice, and he listens to recordings of the Apollo 11 astronauts at night—voices of men Duncan believes were doomed to never return to Earth. When his mother finally comes, she takes Duncan to San Francisco, where they live a bleak existence. Maggie Bright’s a former opera sensation who’s now a burned-out alcoholic who sings in a bar. Her boyfriend, Joshua, is a Vietnam vet, but the three scarred individuals draw comfort and a tenuous strength from one another. Haunting and dark, O’Malley’s narrative is profoundly moving. His characters bear the wounds of their imperfections, but no matter how hard they struggle to change direction, to reinterpret the past, the reality remains: They cannot heal themselves or each other.

O’Malley manages to take some of the ugliest aspects of human existence and, through the magic of his words, infuse them with beauty and light. (Agent: Richard Abate)

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NOWHERE BUT HOME

Palmer, Liza Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $14.99 paper | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-06-200747-6 A heart-wrenching tale told with true wisdom and a brilliant wit that morphs into a heartwarming and inspiring experience.

The book opens with Queenie Wake getting fired from her job as a chef at a Manhattan hotel restaurant. She has been through similar failures in cities across the country from |

Los Angeles to New York, always on the run, but this time she decides to head back home to North Star, Texas. Growing up in North Star, Queenie and her older, loving sister were doomed to inherit the disdain of the community due to a mother known as the town harlot and a completely absent father. Their mother was killed when Queenie was 16, and she still harbors mixed feelings about the neglectful mother’s untimely death.

She returns home to cheer when her sister’s son debuts as the star quarterback on the high school football team, but she is not really certain she will stay. Once there, she reconnects with the love of her life, whose marriage to a socially more suitable woman, selected for him by his upper-class parents, is the reason Queenie left North Star in the first place. On the career front, she gets a job cooking last meals for death row inmates at the local prison. This job will lead her into one of the most moving and inspiring scenes any writer could possibly imagine and thence to the happiness that she craves and deserves. Along the way, Queenie will witness, and sometimes influence, positive changes in the lives of other residents of North Star. Palmer (More Like Her, 2012, etc.) demonstrates a remarkable grasp of human psychology. Her running interior monologue is so funny and real that the reader quickly relates to Queenie. The dialogue is equally real, and each character comes alive with his or her own distinct voice. The excellent use of language and metaphor makes several long back stories feel short, and the author handles the complex connections with superb skill.

An uplifting reading experience.

Reiner distinguishes himself as a particularly brutal overseer of the women’s camp. Franz, meanwhile, keeps his hands relatively blood-free by supervising the camp’s accounting office. Minka’s story takes her from an idyllic childhood as a baker’s daughter to the misery of the Polish ghetto and imprisonment in Auschwitz. Readers will see the final twist coming far in advance due to unwieldy plot contrivances which only serve to emphasize what they are intended to conceal.

Still, a fictional testament as horrifying as it is suspenseful. (Author tour to: New York, Boston, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami, Boca Raton, Tuscon, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Austin, Houston and Washington, D.C.)

THE GOOD DAUGHTER

Porter, Jane Berkley (336 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-425-25342-7

The second in Porter’s Brennan Sisters trilogy focuses on Kit: single, almost 40 and wondering when it will be her turn to have it all.

In the large Brennan clan of San Francisco firefighters, police officers and nurses, Kit, an English teacher at a Catholic school, is the designated good girl. She is the peacemaker, the caretaker and the occasional doormat. Having just ended a long relationship that didn’t include marriage, children or passion, Kit is thinking about adopting a child. This news sits poorly with her conservative friends and family, who want her to do it the old-fashioned way. She would too, but the men out there! First, there is Michael Dempsey, handsome and clean-cut, but their first date is disastrous. He is controlling and crude and then lets drop he’s actually married. Then there is Jude Knight, a mystery man she met while at her family’s Capitola beach house. He has the look of a romance-novel hero (long hair, taut muscles, cheekbones that betray his Native American heritage) but the tattoos and motorcycle of a bad boy, and Kit could never bring him home to her family. A week after their date, Michael Dempsey appears in Kit’s class; he has reconciled with his wife, and his stepdaughter Delilah is now enrolled at the school. Although Kit imagines Delilah’s life is strained (on their date, Michael confessed to hating his mouthy stepdaughter), she has no idea the extent of the abuse; but Jude Knight does: He’s Delilah’s next-door neighbor, and he gets a nightly earful of the fights, screams and punches. When Delilah gets in trouble at school, she calls Jude, and he and Kit reconnect. Will Delilah get away from her abusive stepfather? Will Jude win Kit over? Is naming the romantic hero Knight going a bit too far?

Our heroine’s dangerous romance with the “wrong man” is engaging enough, though Porter’s examination of domestic abuse is too lightly handled.

THE STORYTELLER

Picoult, Jodi Emily Bestler/Atria (480 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-1-4391-0276-3 A baker enlists a Nazi hunter to entrap a nonagenarian who may have brutalized her grandmother in Picoult’s ambitious latest.

Sage, who works in a bakery attached to a New Hampshire retreat center, prefers the overnight hours bakers keep. Her face is scarred (from a trauma not immediately revealed), and she is mourning her mother’s recent death. Having abandoned her Jewish faith, Sage is estranged from her two sisters, but she is still close to her grandmother, Minka, a Holocaust survivor. Josef, a much respected 95-year-old retired German teacher, confesses to Sage that he is a former SS officer, real name Reiner, who once was an Auschwitz guard. Sage calls in Leo, a Washington, D.C.– based FBI agent who specializes in tracking down Nazi fugitives. Leo asks her to elicit Minka’s story, never before told, in hopes of finding an eyewitness to Josef ’s atrocities. Reiner’s and Minka’s wartime experiences form the bulk of the novel. Reiner, a bully recruited early by the Hitler Youth and later by the SS, is soon inured to slaughter by presiding over mass killings of Jews in Poland. Later assigned to Auschwitz along with his (comparatively speaking) gentler and more sensitive brother Franz, |

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“An oddly affectionate portrait of disaster relief....” from odds against tomorrow

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW

sparrow, a 20-year-old officer in the U.S. Navy, Philip Bowman.

It’s a stunning opening, displaying a mastery of scale that will not be repeated. Bowman is the protagonist: loyal, conscientious, a virgin (there’s no rush), from a modest home in New Jersey. He’s very close to his schoolteacher mother (father absconded in his infancy). After Harvard, Bowman is hired by the high-principled owner of a small literary publishing house.

He meets Vivian at a bar. She’s from Virginia, part of a rich, horsey set. As lovers, they transcend mortality, becoming gods and goddesses. Everyday life is more difficult. Bowman believes the unlettered Vivian, now his bride, is educable; she’s not. At a Christmas house party in Virginia, the young couple is obscured by hard-drinking minor characters with easy morals. The narrative is studded with these striking vignettes; in retrospect, they’re a swirling mass, losing their particularity. In London on a business trip, Bowman meets a married woman, just as rich, and scales new heights of passion with her; their affair will fizzle out, like his marriage to Vivian. Bowman’s work gets less attention.

Salter writes with cosmopolitan ease but avoids the nitty-gritty of the business; Bowman floats above all that, while somehow acquiring the respect of his peers. His third great passion is a disaster. An ill-defined American woman with a teenage daughter appears to be his soul mate; then she cheats on him. Four years later, Bowman uses the daughter in a shockingly cruel way; to make matters worse, this thoughtful man fails to examine his conduct. Without his self-knowledge, there is nothing to knit the novel together.

There are incidental pleasures here but, overall, a disappointing return.

Rich, Nathaniel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (304 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-374-22424-0

A mathematician with a combination of unusual gifts sees the worst coming in this strange rumination on catastrophe prediction.

Mitchell Zukor is the protagonist of this open-ended exercise in paranoia by Rich (The Mayor’s Tongue, 2008, etc.). The novel opens with a slight remembrance of the brilliant young analyst by a college classmate, both part of a generation permanently scarred by an earthquake that completely razes Seattle. Relatively unfazed but simmering at his core, Zukor does the responsible thing and takes a job as a financial analyst at a NYC firm. But soon after, he meets the mysterious Alec Charnoble of FutureWorld, a company that advises its clients against potential disasters that would inevitably affect their markets—a perfect platform for Zukor’s vigilant intellect. Mitchell also initiates a nonromantic, epistolary relationship with Elsa Bruner, a classmate who has as thoroughly rejected the urban spectrum as Zukor has immersed himself in it, fleeing to a remote retreat in Maine.

“It’s curiosity that’s my problem,” Zukor writes to her. “I wish I didn’t want to know the first thing about plate tectonics or nuclear war, but I do. So I learn more. And the more I learn, the more I find there is to fear.” His worst fears come to life when he successfully predicts that a massive hurricane will wipe out New York City, sending Zukor and his protégé into the chaos.

Zukor’s impossibly accurate prediction makes him a cult figure of sorts, the visionary held hostage by his own fear. In an already uneasy age, Rich zeroes in on our collective anxiety with a story of wild-eyed ingenuity that is both meditative and propulsive, often simultaneously. With its fits of paranoia and eerily prescient scenario, this book is not comfortable reading, but it’s also nearly impossible to put down.

An oddly affectionate portrait of disaster relief that deftly mocks the indemnity mindset of a culture under siege.

THE EDGE OF THE EARTH

Schwarz, Christina Atria (288 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4516-8367-7

On a lighthouse off the northern California coast, a young woman discovers her husband’s true nature—and her own—in Schwarz’s latest thoughtful exploration of family ties (So Long at the Fair, 2008, etc.).

Trudy is no longer sure she wants the conventional future her parents have mapped out for her in Milwaukee circa 1897.

What’s the point of the education she’s receiving at the Milwaukee College for Females if all she’s going to do with it is make a perfect bourgeois home for Ernst, the family friend earmarked as her husband since childhood? When his cousin Oskar comes to visit, Trudy finds that this intellectual, iconoclastic dropout expresses her own restlessness and impatience.

The next thing she knows, she’s married and en route with Oskar to a post as assistant lighthouse keeper that he expects will give him time for his electrical experiments. Their only company at the isolated lighthouse is the head keeper, Mr. Crawley, his wife and four children, and Mrs. Crawley’s brother Archie. These bluff, terse folks are not the sort Trudy

ALL THAT IS

Salter, James Knopf (304 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-400-04313-2 In his first fiction since the story collection Last Night (2005), the acclaimed veteran author chronicles the life and loves of a Manhattan book editor over a 40-year period.

Okinawa, 1945. The Americans and Japanese are preparing for the climactic battle of the Pacific.

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Nevertheless, the author possesses a gift for infusing a mundane situation (an abandoned housewife) with the implausible (a mermaid) and building a story that many readers will find intuitive, clever and, on many levels, perfectly believable.

is used to, though she does become fond of the children after she’s enlisted to give them lessons, especially youngest daughter Jane. But Trudy soon realizes that Oskar’s ambitions are unfocused and aimless, plus he proves to be arrogant and selfish as well. When his attention is drawn to a mysterious native woman the Crawleys call Helen, who lives in a nearby cave, Oskar sees her as his ticket to an academic career and ruthlessly plans to carry off Helen to a university. The fatal climax makes good use of the lighthouse’s rugged natural setting, which is well-described throughout, as is Trudy’s gradual maturation from a rebellious girl fooled by fancy words to a resourceful woman who thinks independently and can see value in people unlike herself.

Strong characters and plotting—including a nifty final twist involving Jane—maintain the interest in a rather slowly paced narrative. (Author appearances in Kansas City, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, San Diego and Seattle)

LOVE WATER MEMORY

Shortridge, Jennie Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4516-8483-4 Rescued from San Francisco Bay with no memory of her former life, Lucie Walker tries to reconnect with her fiance and unearth the dark secrets from her past.

Amnesia, that improbable staple of countless mysteries, here receives a 21st-century makeover as “dissociative fugue”—which means, explains the friendly doctor at San Francisco General, “it was brought on by some kind of emotional trauma.” That’s easy to believe when Lucie’s fiance, Grady Goodall, comes to take her home to Seattle, twitching with anxiety and racked with guilt about the big fight they had right before Lucie disappeared. It quickly becomes clear, as Lucie tries to jog her memories by talking with Grady and the neighbors she once shunned, that her pre-fugue self was an unpleasant control freak. Old Lucie, a high-tech headhunter, latched onto Grady while recruiting him for his product development job at Boeing and ran his life ever after: directing what he ate, how he dressed and how they lived—which meant talking as little as possible about Lucie’s dead parents, her hated Aunt Helen or the three scars on her thigh that look like cigarette burns. Insecure Grady, son of an impoverished Native American fisherman who died when he was 8, was fine with being bossed around, until Lucie got so obsessive about planning their wedding that he lost his temper and provoked a screaming attack that he fears (correctly) set off her dissociative fugue. The bulk of the novel shows New Lucie, way nicer than she was before, agonizing over whether Grady still loves her (which is blindingly obvious to everyone but her) and slowly reconstructing her past with the reluctant help of Aunt Helen.

Heavy hinting makes the final revelation unsurprising, though still shocking. Nor is there much unexpected about either Lucie or Grady, though both are agreeable enough to hold readers’ attention through Shortridge’s undemanding fifth novel.

Predictable, but sweet-natured and mildly absorbing.

THE MERMAID OF BROOKLYN

Shearn, Amy Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $14.99 paper | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4516-7828-4

A woman drowning in self-pity and depression takes a plunge but manages to stay afloat with the help of a mermaid in this second novel by aquatic-obsessed Shearn (How Far is the Ocean from Here, 2008).

Jenny Lipkin’s life consists of breast-feeding her infant daughter, idle chitchat with other mothers in the park, trips to the store, a home in disarray, walking the dog and lots of Cheerios. Husband Harry works at his family-owned candy company, which isn’t doing too well, given current health trends and, perhaps, his mismanagement. When he fails to return home one evening, and $1,000 is missing from the company’s account, Jenny, a frazzled mess to begin with, becomes even more unwound. She’s angry with her husband, who’s a compulsive gambler, but she’s not all that concerned for his well-being; being left to cope with finances, her daughters and her mother-in-law is enough to drive her over the edge. Sinking further into a long-occurring depression, she dons a great looking pair of shoes and decides to jump off a bridge. But at the last minute, she glances at the shoes and, loathing the thought of another woman wearing them, changes her mind. Too late, she loses her balance, and into the water she goes; but instead of drowning, she’s rescued by a mermaid, a rusalka of Slavic lore, who then inhabits Jenny’s body and helps her turn her life around. Jenny cleans house, both literally and figuratively. Shearn’s narrative is delightfully manic and extremely witty at times, but the very elements that make parts of this book so pleasurable also become slightly monotonous toward the end: Jenny is a bit too consumed with her colicky kids, lactating breasts and relationships with family, friends and Harry. |

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THE SILENCE AND THE ROAR

charm and on his best days, charisma. Since Hollywood is a happenin’ place in the early ’60s, Beau migrates there from New York, shortly after having gotten Rachel Roth pregnant, with twins no less. After a hasty marriage, Beau leaves Rachel and the kids in New York and heads back to LA, for after all, that’s where his future lies. He hooks up with the Talented Artists Group and becomes an agent for Bryce Beller, a hapless actor whom Beau hawks as the next person to kiss Natalie Wood on screen. Eventually, he gets Bryce a role in The Dog’s Tail, a “poetic” film Beau is trying to put together. The narrator of the novel, Beau’s son by an office fling, caustically summarizes the film: “[The] script was fathomless, yet apart from the shuddersome beginning and the end, not much happened.” Needless to say, in a city where you’re judged by your last critical success, Beau’s stock goes down. Interoffice politics soon cause Beau to break away from TAG and link up with another talent agency, the American Dream Machine, and at least for a while, things go well, for they seem to be signing legitimate talent, but ultimately, ADM becomes a mockery of its own self-naming. Beau’s life plays out against the issues of his family woes: the death of his daughter and the emotional wallop of two “friends” discovering they’re in fact stepbrothers.

A Hollywood version—literally—of how the American Dream continues to con people with its seductive illusion.

(Author tour to Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Seattle and Boston)

Sirees, Nihad Other Press (160 pp.) $13.95 paper | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-59051-645-4

In this short, satiric fable, a formerly famous writer silenced by an authoritarian regime finds himself in a predicament where Kafka meets Catch-22.

In self-imposed exile from his native Syria (where this book has been banned), the author never names his homeland in the novel, originally published in 2004 and subsequently translated for European publication but only now receiving its first English translation.

It details one tumultuous day in the life of Fathi Chin, once a well-known writer who has resisted the demand that the entirety of the culture be devoted to celebration of the ruler known only as the Leader. On this very day, there is a parade to pay 20th-anniversary tribute to the regime, and those who don’t participate must at least watch on television. Once “a well-known personality,” the writer has done his best to disappear from public life and stay below the government’s radar, not resisting, just abstaining. But the parade draws him outdoors, where he sees uniformed thugs beating a young man for no apparent reason. “I had spent twenty years trying not to get involved in affairs involving the Comrades, purposefully avoiding them, but the sight of that young man’s beseeching eyes pressed me to do something.” His intervention results in the confiscation of his ID card, which he is told he will need to go to the government to retrieve. His problem is that “in order to get inside the Party building you have to show your ID card. Several times I told the Comrades at the door that I had come there in order to reclaim my ID card.” Has he become enmeshed in the madness by coincidence or conspiracy? As the day progresses, a visit with his mother and a distracted sexual interlude with his girlfriend add comic intrigue to his dilemma.

Since language is important to both the writer and his culture, it’s hard to tell from the translation whether what is rendered as slangy cliché is meant to be, as the protagonist’s reflections don’t seem particularly well-written.

THE LAST TELEGRAM

Trenow, Liz Sourcebooks Landmark (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4022-7945-4 A routine World War II romance, Trenow’s debut, is distinguished by the author’s smooth-as-silk delivery.

Lily is in the twilight of life as she sorts through the remnants of her past at her rural British home, The Chestnuts.

When her granddaughter finds a locked briefcase in a closet, she’s flooded with memories of her youth, including a guilty secret she’s harbored for many years. Lily’s story, told in hindsight, is the tale of a young woman who discovers love and purpose while learning the intricacies of the family business under the tutelage of Gwen, the assistant factory manager. As her friendship with Gwen deepens and the inevitability of war edges closer, Lily excitedly accompanies her brother to a party where she meets pilot Robert Cameron. He visits the family at The Chestnuts and persuades her father and brother to invest in machinery that will enable the mill to manufacture silk for parachutes. A wise venture, their business deal keeps the factory operating and enables the Verner family to sponsor three German refugees and to provide them with jobs and a cottage. Much to her father’s dismay, Lily rebuffs Robert’s romantic advances and falls in love with Stefan, one of the refugees. She’s heartbroken when England enters the war, her brother enlists in the RAF, and Stefan and the two other

AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE

Specktor, Matthew Tin House (464 pp.) $25.95 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-935639-44-2

For Beau Rosenwald and his cronies in the talent agency business in the ’60s and ’70s, the American Dream Machine is alive but not always well.

Beau is the quintessential American Dreamer who feels nothing can hold him back from his own success. Despite his disjunctive name (he’s physically unprepossessing, in fact downright ugly), he has 22

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SOMETHING TO REMEMBER YOU BY

refugees are taken into custody and shipped to an internment camp in Australia. As the war rages, Lily becomes her father’s assistant and suddenly is thrust into the directorship, which she manages with Gwen’s assistance. She and Stefan have kept their love alive via post, and when he returns to England, now called Stephen Holmes, their romance strengthens. The story takes a predictable path and ends on a too-perfect note, but nevertheless, it’s worth reading.

Trenow, who serves as a perfect example of the old adage that you should write what you know—she’s the descendant of generations of weavers—has penned a mellifluous, impeccably researched narrative.

Wilder, Gene St. Martin’s (176 pp.) $19.99 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-312-59891-4

More sentimental fiction from actor/ author Wilder (What Is This Thing Called Love?, 2010, etc.).

Wounded in France on Christmas Day 1944, American medic Tom Cole is discharged from an English hospital for a one-week leave in London. A motherly nurse sets him up with a free room, plus directions on which play to see and which restaurant to eat in. She’s the second (after Tom’s commanding officer) in a series of subsidiary characters whose cozy benevolence is certainly striking in the midst of a world war. Indeed, an atmosphere of unadulterated sweetness enfolds this very slight tale of Tom’s romance with Danish refugee Anna Rosenkilde, whom he meets at the restaurant on his first night of leave. The only potential conflict—when Tom reports for an assignment in intelligence and discovers that Anna doesn’t work in Radar, as she told him—is quickly resolved when she suddenly disappears and Tom learns that Anna is an agent of the Special Operations Executive and has been arrested after parachuting into occupied Denmark. Naturally, Tom immediately gets permission to attempt to rescue his love from a Nazi camp outside Alsace; naturally, he speaks fluent French and German (Dad was Austrian, Mom French); and naturally, he springs Anna with just a few blasts of submachine guns—which come into play again when the nasty Nazis break into the home where they are celebrating Passover with the family hiding them. Tom is wounded as they are fleeing France, but that doesn’t stop him from insisting on returning when a British double agent reveals that the Frenchman who helped them has been captured.

Treacly and entirely predictable, though it will no doubt appeal to undemanding readers looking for a warm and fuzzy adventure.

THE PATRON SAINT OF LOST DOGS

Trout, Nick Hyperion (256 pp.) $14.99 paper | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-4013-1088-2

It’s tough to resist a good story that features four-legged creatures, which highlight this surprisingly upbeat tale about a son who returns home following the death of his long estranged father.

Cyrus Mills isn’t a warm, fuzzy kind of person, and choosing a career as a veterinary pathologist seems a logical choice: He’s following in his late mother’s footsteps, and he gets to work in solitude, which he prefers. When Robert Cobb, Cyrus’ father, dies and bequeaths Bedside Manor for Sick Animals to him, he returns to his former home in a small town in Vermont. Cyrus is eager to sell his inheritance and leave Eden Falls behind. He has few fond memories of his life there, except for the time he spent with his mother, and he needs the money from the sale to fund a legal battle to reinstate his license, which has been temporarily suspended following charges of wrongdoing filed by his former employer. But Cyrus quickly discovers that in addition to being a workaholic and an absentee dad, Dr. Cobb was mired in debt. Unless Cyrus can prove that his father’s heavily mortgaged veterinary clinic is worth a potential buyer’s investment—within the week—he’ll lose the sale, and it appears that a sinister banker and an anonymous blackmailer might be rooting against him. With a light touch and conversational tone, Trout (Ever by My Side, 2011, etc.) delivers a doggone charming tale.

Rather than dispensing an overload of schmaltz, which is difficult to avoid in a feel-good story that introduces a magnitude of furry friends and their often eccentric owners, the author manages to successfully pull off a straightforward, energizing story with a message that doesn’t choke on its own sweetness. Cyrus, of course, transforms during the week as he’s forced to interact with each character, revisit his past and contemplate his future.

He becomes an excellent healer, and with the help of a group of caring individuals, including a gentle mentor, an attractive waitress, a gruff receptionist and all of his four-legged friends, he also becomes one of the healed.

Two paws up.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Wilson, Robert Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (416 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 26, 2013 978-0-547-93519-5 In the first installment of a new series by Wilson (A Small Death in Lisbon, 2000, etc.), the estranged daughter of an Indian tycoon is abducted in London for reasons that don’t seem to involve ransom money—and then re-abducted.

Sussing out this odd turn of events, “kidnapping and recovery” expert Charles Boxer is drawn into an international plot that may involve terrorists. Part spy novel, part police procedural and part terrorist thriller, this book features a wide assortment of suspects and victims. The tycoon, Frank D’Cruz, is a |

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“Another solid outing....” from the sound of broken glass

Montalbano’s 15th case features more hilarious bark and some satisfying bite.

former Bollywood star whose coldblooded business methods have made countless enemies—but whose investments have made him a favored guest of the U.K. His 25-year-old daughter, Alyshia—whose mother, Isabel, is British—had mysterious dealings of her own during her times in Mumbai that may have contributed to her kidnapping. Boxer, a former military man and cop trying to live down his reputation for killing as well as thwarting kidnappers, complicates the investigation by having an affair with Isabel while collaborating with his West African ex-wife, Mercy, who’s with the Metropolitan Police.

The perpetually unraveling plot involves members of the Indian underworld looking for payback, London lowlifes looking for a fast score and Islamic extremists looking to blow up London.

And while all this is going on, the estranged daughter of Boxer and Mercy is demanding attention. As packed with characters and incidents as the book is, Wilson remains in elegant control of the narrative. Though there are times when the book bogs down a bit in the details, it never loses its grip.

One of the more sophisticated writers in his field, Wilson leaves us looking forward to Charles Boxer’s next assignment.

THE SOUND OF BROKEN GLASS

Crombie, Deborah Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 19, 2013 978-0-06-199063-2 Friendships go seriously awry.

When DS Melody Talbot spends the night with guitarist Andy Monahan, a witness and possibly even a suspect in a murder case, she can’t decide which is worse: having to confess her indiscretion to her boss, Acting DCI Gemma James, or to her good mate Doug Cullen, a copper laid up with a bad leg. Andy had argued with barrister Vincent Arnott, the victim, between sets at a pub in the Crystal Palace area. Could the musician have followed Arnott to the sleazy Belvedere Hotel, plied him with drugs, stripped him naked, trussed him up, then strangled him with a scarf that left threads embedded in his neck? With an assist from her husband, Duncan Kincaid, now on leave from his Scotland Yard purview to take care of little orphan Charlotte, whom they hope to adopt, Gemma interviews Andy’s manager, a record producer hoping to pair Andy with new sensation Poppy, band members and kin.

When another barrister, Shaun Francis, is murdered in identical fashion, the only link between the two dead men seems to be Andy. It is not until Duncan listens to a tale of a 13-year-old’s betrayal that tawdry gossip and legal shenanigans come to light, implicating a widowed French teacher and a much-bullied boy nursing grievances that cry out for revenge.

Another solid outing for the reliable Crombie (No Mark Upon Her, 2012, etc.), who turns a judicious eye on secrets that can overwhelm what they’re meant to protect despite the best intentions. (Author appearances in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix and Sacramento)

m ys t e r y THE DANCE OF THE SEAGULL

Camilleri, Andrea Penguin (288 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-14-312261-6

The disappearance of Inspector Silvio Montalbano’s sidekick hits the whole squad room hard.

Insomnia increasingly plagues the Sicilian detective as he slides into his late 50s. So he’s even crankier than usual when he picks up his ladylove Livia at the Palermo airport early in the morning for a brief getaway. Livia has never seen some of the more picaresque parts of the island, and Montalbano, as always, needs a break. But a brief stop at the office throws all his plans into disarray when he learns that his faithful second-in-command, Fazio, has gone missing. The vacation is off, and Montalbano begins to retrace Fazio’s recent movements, aided (or hindered) by Mimi, his high-maintenance third-incommand, who’s made even less attentive by an ongoing quarrel with his wife, Beba. An additional annoyance comes from the presence of a film crew making a TV series based loosely on Montalbano’s cases (The Age of Doubt, 2012, etc.). At length, Fazio is found in a hospital, severely banged up and with little memory of the events that landed him there. Investigation reveals that Fazio, who’d been working near the docks on a drug smuggling case, walked into an ambush. The loopy path to a solution, inspired by recent headlines, leads through a potential scandal involving a government official, a secret locale in a remote village and bickering pedicurists.

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THE STRAW MEN

Doherty, Paul Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-78029-037-9 A Dominican priest is tasked yet again with solving several locked-room murders.

In 1381, John of Gaunt is regent of England. He is a fierce and ambitious man whose authority is challenged by rebels who call themselves the Upright Men. Gaunt invites Brother Athelstan and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, to a mystery play performed by the Straw Men, Gaunt’s personal acting troupe. The performance at the Tower |

ROOM NO. 10

of London is interrupted by the deaths and wounding of guests, and two severed heads are left at the scene. So Gaunt orders Athelstan, who’s well-known for his knack for solving difficult problems (Bloodstone, 2012, etc.), to unmask the killer. When one of the troupe is found dead at the foot of the Tower, it looks as if he was escaping after the attack, but Athelstan is not convinced.

Athelstan is already walking a fine line between the regent and the Upright Men, who each have spies in his parish and even in the highest reaches of their enemies’ councils. Perhaps the deaths have something to do with the mysterious woman Gaunt has locked in the Tower. Rumors swirl amid street battles and revenge killings in the squalid, frozen streets of London. More murders follow before Athelstan can gather up the pieces of the cunning puzzle and put them together to solve the crimes.

Close attention will reward readers with wellresearched historical information, from the minutiae of everyday living to the public events in the lives of the rich and powerful. Mystery buffs, however, are likely to reach the answer before Athelstan.

Edwardson, Åke Simon & Schuster (464 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4516-0852-6 A disappearance and a murder nearly 20 years apart trouble the sleep of Gothenburg’s Chief Inspector Erik Winter and his much younger self.

There’s something familiar about the Hotel Revy and desk clerk Richard Salko and room number 10, where Paula Ney has been found hanged, one of her hands painted white. And no wonder, since one of Winter’s very first cases, back in 1987, began in the very same room, which Ellen Börge, after leaving her husband Christer’s home, checked into before she vanished. What connection could there be between the disappearance of one woman and the violent death of another nearly a generation later? With the help of his guilt-ridden memory and a long series of flashbacks, Winter painstakingly revisits the earlier case—not just the fruitless interviews and the leads that petered out into dead ends, but his agitation about working for the first time with prickly DI Fredrik Halders, who’s still on the homicide squad today. Pondering the Neys, Winter asks, “What is the secret, this family’s secret? If I knew that, I’d know everything.” Working patiently, he draws out the inevitable links between the two incidents, which are as shocking as they are intimate. Another murder helps narrow his focus to three persons of interest: Christer Börge, who never seemed quite right 18 years ago; Paula’s father, Mario, whose wife is a pivotal figure in the investigation; and Jonas Sandler, who was only a troubled boy when Ellen disappeared but is now a troubled man.

As majestically lumbering as Henning Mankell at his most grueling, with a finale out of Stieg Larsson.

THE RIPTIDE ULTRA-GLIDE

Dorsey, Tim Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-06-209278-6 978-0-06-209280-9 e-book Still thinking globally, but now acting locally, Serge Storms (Pineapple Grenade, 2012, etc.) turns his admittedly limited attention to the section of U.S. Highway 1 that goes from Fort Lauderdale to the Keys.

Often confused by ill-informed tourists with Highway A1A, which actually does run along the ocean, U.S. 1 is home to gas stations, strip malls and seedy hotels. Perfect spot, thinks Serge, to film a reality show. So he packs his wingman Coleman into a ’72 Corvette Stingray and heads down to Florida City, stopping at iconic spots like the Last Chance Saloon to film staged dustups with his spaced-out pal. Unfortunately, his foray into reality TV is constantly interrupted by, well, reality. A car chase ends abruptly in Lake Surprise. Crowds of awestruck stoners accost Coleman after he appears on the cover of High Tides. Eventually, Serge and Coleman get caught in the crossfire between drug kingpin Gaspar Arroyo, who runs a chain of shady pain clinics that specialize in dispensing OxyContin, and Catfish Stump, who moves the drugs from Lexington to Ocala in shipments of horse blankets. Also in the cross hairs are Patrick and Barbara McDougall, special educators vacationing in Florida after losing their jobs to Wisconsin’s move to Right-to-Work. But their students’ severe behavior problems are nothing compared to the mayhem they encounter when they book a stay at the Casablanca Hotel, right in the heart of U.S. 1.

Filming and dodging bullets give Serge scant time for his other favorite hobby—vigilante justice—keeping the body count relatively low in Dorsey’s stripped-down 16th.

WRONG TURN

Fanning, Diane Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8187-8 A homicide investigator is plagued by old cases that won’t stay closed.

It was the disappearance of Emily Sherman that first brought Lucinda Pierce (Twisted Reason, 2011, etc.) onto the homicide squad. Thirty-year veteran John Boswell put together a case against Emily’s stepmother, Martha, but died of a heart attack before the trial ended, leaving rookie Lucinda to complete his testimony. Now, Emily’s body is found where it shouldn’t be: in the cellar of a rental property whose most recent tenant was almost certainly serial killer Mack Rogers. While backtracking the Sherman investigation, Lucinda gets a second shock. A new trial has been ordered for U.S. Representative Chris Phillips, |

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BLOOD MONEY

convicted on Lucinda’s evidence of killing his third wife. In the meantime, he’s out on bond, terrorizing his second wife, Gloria Martinez, and fighting to get custody of his son Trevor. While Lucinda tries to keep the teenager safe from his lethal dad, a second youngster lays claim to her attention. Charley Spencer is arrested after she’s found in a vandalized model home when she should be at school. Charley knows which of her middle school classmates trashed the place, but getting anyone to believe her is next to impossible. Can Lucinda find time to help her without neglecting her two newly reopened cases?

Multiple threads are not Fanning’s friends as she tries to decide whether she’s writing a police procedural, a psychological thriller or neither.

Grippando, James Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-06-210984-2 The courtroom verdict is only the beginning of the fireworks in Jack Swyteck’s 10th appearance before the Miami bar.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect client,” reflects Jack (Afraid of the Dark, 2011, etc.), and he should know. Against all odds, the jury has found hard-partying Sydney Bennett not guilty of murdering her toddler daughter Emma. But even before the Shot Mom, as TV commentator Faith Corso has dubbed her, is released from prison, a crowd Corso has stirred into a frenzy has mobbed the prison gates in the dead of night, and coed Celeste Laramore, who’s made herself up to look just like Sydney, is mistaken for her, attacked by someone in the crowd and sent into a coma. The Shot Mom herself, secretly released shortly thereafter, is spirited off in a private jet after warning Jack not to write the tell-all book he’s urged her not to write either. After Celeste’s parents persuade Jack to file lawsuits against the prison and the Breaking News Network, he finds himself up against BNN’s fearsome hired gun Ted Gaines, who uses every trick in his legal arsenal to counterattack. Jack, who’s taken on the work pro bono, is slapped with a gag order, threatened with stiff legal sanctions when he’s accused of violating that order and beaten by a dark figure who tells him that he’ll retaliate against someone Jack loves if Jack doesn’t flush Sydney from wherever she’s hidden herself. When the jury foreman confesses to taking a $100,000 bribe in return for freeing Sydney, Miami-Dade County prosecutor Melinda Crawford joins the legion of people who really want to know where Sydney is and are sure they can press Jack to tell them.

The criminal behind this fine mess is a cipher, but Grippando turns the screws on Jack so comprehensively that exhausted readers, turning the last page long after midnight, won’t mind.

SCENT TO KILL

Fiedler, Chrystle Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 26, 2013 9781-4516-4361-9 A naturopathic doctor tries to help a former boyfriend stay out of jail for murder.

After the murder of her aunt, Willow McQuade, ND, has left California behind, successfully taken over her aunt’s store in Greenport, Long Island, and nurtured a romantic relationship with Jackson Spade, the former police officer who helped her solve her aunt’s murder (Death Drops, 2012). Willow’s ex, Simon Lewis, has invited them to a party at the Bixby Estate, where Simon and Roger Bixby are involved in shooting a paranormal television show. When the contentious Roger is found drowned on the beach, the police fasten on Simon, who had a fight with him earlier that day. Despite her bad feeling about the old house, Willow can’t refuse Simon’s pleas for help. Soon, Jackson agrees to help with security, and Willow and her staff members take over a cottage on the estate to treat the stressedout crew. Roger’s death is a blessing of sorts for Simon’s new girlfriend, Carly, who can now drop divorce proceedings against him. But his death changes nothing for his powder-keg brother Tom, also hired to work on the show, who continues to deny his problems with drinking and drugs. Also in residence in another cottage on the estate are the star of the show, spiritualist MJ, and her husband, Rick, and, in still another cottage, the caretaker and his family. When the autopsy shows that Roger was drowned in lavender bath water, Willow learns that his death apes the murder of the caretaker’s father, a case never solved but widely believed to have been committed by Roger’s father.

Like Willow’s debut, this sequel is stronger on aromatherapy than mystery.

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WHAT’S A WITCH TO DO?

Harlow, Jennifer Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (336 pp.) $14.99 paper | Mar. 8, 2013 978-0-7387-3514-6

Just because you’re a high priestess doesn’t make your life any simpler, especially when it’s threatened by a powerhungry witch.

Mona McGregor’s life has been complicated ever since her flaky sister, Ivy, dropped off her daughters, Cora and Sophie, on her way to who knows where and never looked back. Mona’s raised the girls as her own, which is natural for her: As the local coven’s high priestess, she’s looked on by many as the matriarch of Goodnight, Va. When |

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DEAD ON CUE

Adam Blue, the beta wolf of the Eastern Pack, mysteriously shows up at Mona’s door looking for help, Mona isn’t one to turn him away, even though he hasn’t said 10 words to her in the many years they’ve known each other. Mona wants to send Adam back to his pack almost as much as he wants to go, but he’s got inside information that a local witch has her eye on Mona’s position in the coven, and the two realize that she literally may not be able to live without his help. Having a man around could be worse, but it starts to put a cramp in Mona’s style when the local pediatrician, Guy Sutcliffe, expresses an interest in Mona that goes beyond his professional responsibilities to her nieces. With all signs pointing to an increase in the threat level, Mona must decide which man she can trust and which of her friends may be out to get her.

Hell’s bells! Harlow’s balanced blend of romance and intrigue makes this one a winner—quite an improvement over her last (To Catch a Vampire, 2012, etc.).

Lake, Deryn Severn House (192 pp.) $28.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8226-4 A quiet Sussex village plays host to the rich and semifamous.

The Rev. Nick Lawrence (The Mills of God, 2010) never imagined he’d be involved in a second murder case. The seeds are sown when the director of the local dramatic society, which has ambitious plans to stage a son et lumière at Fulke Castle, suffers a fatal heart attack. The new owner of Abbot’s Manor may be just the person to save the day.

Nick has already met Gerry Harlington, a black American actor and hip-hop fan best known for playing Wasp Man in several B movies. Gerry’s wife, Ekaterina, a stunning Russian of great wealth, is fed up with her husband’s bad temper and contemplating divorce. Gerry is delighted to lead the drama group, although many of its members are less pleased. Nick, who’s attracted to one of the players, agrees to take a nonspeaking role. Despite Gerry’s failed attempt to revamp the show as a musical, all goes well until he inserts a hip-hop dance into an Elizabethan Fair scene. Although his idea is beaten back by the enraged actors, he doesn’t seem to be giving up. On opening night, the audience is wowed by the stunning visual effects and beautifully spoken narrative. The discovery of Gerry’s corpse the next morning brings DI Dominic Tennant and DS Mark Potter to the scene. They find Gerry dressed as one of the performers who enact a fight scene on the top of a tower. The actors usually throw a dummy from the tower, but this time, it was Gerry.

Nick’s second case is a classic English village mystery with flashes of humor, pleasing characters and enough suspects to keep you guessing.

RETURN TO PRIOR’S FORD

Hood, Evelyn Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8219-6

The people of the small Scottish border town of Prior’s Ford have their secrets large and small.

Linn Hall is home to the RalstonKerr family. Determined to restore the glory of Linn’s gardens, they have been working for years with the help of summer students and passionate garden expert Ginny Whitelaw. Ginny is in love with Lewis Ralston-Kerr, who is not over a failed love affair that produced a little girl. Ginny, an attractive and intelligent young woman, avoids her mother, the actress Meredith Whitelaw, a beautiful, self-centered woman who has either ignored or criticized Ginny most of her life. When Meredith agrees to open the annual garden fete, it is with the proviso that Linn Hall’s neverused formal rooms be thrown open and a dinner provided for her and the fellow actors she is bringing with her. The ground floor is scrubbed and decorated by the local women, and Meredith comes up with a plan to have their restoration paid for and filmed for TV with her as presenter. Alison Greenlees is trying to convince stubborn local farmer Ewan McNair to marry her. Sam Brennan and Marcy Copleton run the local store, but a big secret from Marcy’s past is going to cause problems. Helen Campbell is married to the Linn Hall gardener but has recently won a contest to write a serial for a magazine; she already secretly writes the agony aunt column for the local paper. When a newcomer, a retired college professor with a secret, offers to pay her double to type his articles, she accepts, little knowing that it will change her life forever. The pace of life may be slow, but there are always things going on under the surface.

Although Wood’s last Prior Ford novel did offer up a murder (Mystery in Prior’s Ford, 2012, etc.), the series and her latest entry is really a pleasant, romantic look at life in a small town.

SOME LIKE IT HOT

Larsen, K.J. Poisoned Pen (250 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4642-0096-0 978-1-4642-0098-4 paper 978-1-4642-0097-7 Lg. Prt. When a hometown boy turned shamus is killed, Cat DeLuca stops investigating liars and cheats and concentrates

on finding a murderer.

Cat DeLuca, owner and chief operative of the Pants On Fire Detective Agency, has seen her share of liars and cheats. In fact, her own failed marriage to Johnnie Rizzo was the inspiration for her life’s work. She’s investigating yet another sleazeball when Santa Claus himself runs through Tierney’s bar where she’s roosting. After rescuing the red-suited runaway from guys |

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with guns, Cat discovers that he’s none other than Bill Bonham, her childhood fiance (well, until she was 9). Billy apparently has a detective agency of his own and dreams of Bogart despite his online license. But he’s gunned down the very night that Cat saves him. Cat’s vow to find out who killed Billy is spurred by his mother, who had hopes for a romantic reunion for the two. Cat doesn’t have the heart to disabuse her of this idea, even though she and FBI agent Chance Savino have been hot and heavy for a while now. Although family friend Police Capt. Bob refuses to investigate Tierney, Cat’s convinced it has something to do with him, especially when she finds out that the last case Billy took was something involving Tierney, his unsympathetic former employee Cristina and diamond earrings that may or may not have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. With her gun-toting sidekick, Cleo, Cat’s ready to do what it takes to get justice for Billy.

All of Cat’s cases (Sticks and Stones, 2012, etc.) have been co-authored by three sisters, but this is the first installment that reads that way. The characters are sassy as ever, but their adventures are disjointed and even perfunctory.

Myers, Amy Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8223-3

A car collector and part-time police consultant’s search for a famous car turns out to be quite a dangerous job.

Maj. Stanley Hopchurch, aka the Mad Major, hires Jack Colby, who’s always hard up for cash, to find a De Dion Bouton reputed to have been driven in the 1907 Peking to Paris car rally. The major and fellow trustees Julian Carter and Helen Palmer plan to restage the race in England, complete with towns dressed up as the original stops. The money raised will enable Carter to open Treasure Island, an impressive collection of classic cars that will form the basis for a new museum.

In the meantime, the police have asked Jack to look into the suspicious death of classic car restorer Alfred King. Now that Alf is dead, dodgy businessman Connor Meyton is interested in buying out his business, which Alf ’s assistant Dean Warren has been running. Handsome Dean lures Zoe, one of Jack’s restorers, to work with him. The move leaves Jack in the lurch and Zoe in danger. When Jack tracks down the woman who claims to own the De Dion, she refuses to sell even though her family insists that she collect the windfall. They’re even more furious when the stubborn owner is murdered after leaving the car to a friend who’s equally reluctant to sell it. With so many people desperate to lay claim to the car, Jack has his hands full trying to winkle out the murderer.

Jack’s third (Classic Calls the Shots, 2012, etc.) offers a complicated mystery along with the usual insights into the world of classic cars and their often loopy collectors.

THE GRAY GHOST MURDERS

McCafferty, Keith Viking (320 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 21, 2013 978-0-670-02569-5

A second spate of high-country homicides for Hyalite County sheriff Martha Ettinger and Sean Stranahan, the former Boston PI who solves murders when he isn’t painting or fishing.

Think big-city CSI teams have it tough? Their examinations of crime scenes are hardly ever interrupted by a grizzly bear like the one that sends Deputy Harold Little Feather to the hospital. The episode puts a serious crimp in Martha’s appetite for pawing around Sphinx Mountain, where dog handler Katie Sparrow’s German shepherd Lothar had led her to the decomposed remains of two unknown men.

So Katie and Sean climb back alone to the scene of the crime and find a whopping big steel-jacketed bullet. The discovery means nothing to Sean, whom the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club has hired in an amusingly roundabout way to recover a pair of hand-tied fishing flies most fishing clubs couldn’t afford. But when Montana congressman Weldon Crawford Jr., who sold the club its land, casually mentions his fondness for big guns in the course of a visit Sean’s paid ostensibly to ask if he’s had any break-ins lately, Sean can’t help wondering if the two cases are connected. Despite the rising body count, there’ll be time for some expert and revealing forensics, Sean’s romance with a sweet barista, and a novel and lethal twist on Richard Connell’s classic story “The Most Dangerous Game.”

The same regulars and the same great scenery as Martha and Sean’s debut (The Royal Wulff Murders, 2012). Though the felonious details this time are muddled and often hard to swallow, the central concept behind the complicated pair of cases is irresistible.

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ECLIPSE

Norman, Hilary Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-7278-8224-0 A South Florida police detective chases a serial killer with a strange M.O. Detective Sam Becket (Hell, 2011, etc.) is a worried man. The Black Hole killer, who leaves each victim laid out neatly on her own bed with two gaping cavities where her eyes had been, is inching closer to Miami. There’s never a sign of forced entry, so how does the killer persuade these attractive young women to let a stranger into their homes? And where is Sam’s young friend Billie Smith, co-starring with him in an amateur production of Carmen, who has disappeared between rehearsals? When Sam’s wife, Grace Lucca, attends a conference in Zurich, a handsome young Frenchman strikes up a conversation with her. Suddenly, he seems to be everywhere: at her hotel, in front of the cafe |

NO SAFE GROUND

where she lunches and, after her return home, in Miami. Sam’s dad, David, has his worries too. His second wife, Mildred, after years on the street, has finally settled into a comfortable domestic routine. Now that’s disrupted by the news that she needs cataract surgery and must confront her pathological fear of having her eyes examined. Dr. Ethan Adams is supposed to be the best, but something about him puts Mildred off. How can she overcome her fear when all of Miami is abuzz with news of a killer who targets women’s eyes?

Norman weaves multiple strands with ease, building tension to a climax that doesn’t disappoint.

Pomeroy, Julia Five Star (340 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 15, 2013 978-1-4328-2682-6

A middle-aged veteran’s quiet life ends when his daughter begs him for help.

Once he’d served in Special Forces, Reynolds Packard could never settle down. Leaving his wife and young daughter Vida behind, he spent years as a long-haul trucker. Now, he works as a limo driver and lives in a neglected, filthy house in a small New York town near his only friend, his cousin Mitch, a retired state trooper who wants to be known as Millie. Vida turns up AWOL after being wounded with her roommate, Haley Flynn, in an IED incident in Iraq.

It’s not that she’s afraid of going back. Despite some memory loss, she remembers that the man who shot Haley as they lay injured was an American soldier. She wants Pack to help get more information before she goes to the police with her patchy story. When she gets no encouragement from him, she takes off during the night with his pistol, heading for the VA hospital in Albany where she seeks the medic who was Haley’s boyfriend.

The medic is not much help, but Haley’s mother, who lives nearby, is happy to take in Vida and talk about Haley. When Mrs. Flynn is brutally murdered, Vida plans to make a run for Canada.

She ends up hiding from the police in an Albany State dorm, where Pack tracks her down and offers to help. Now, Pack and Vida must worry about the Army, the police and a ruthless killer who wants to shut Vida up for good.

Fans of Pomeroy’s Abby Silvernale (Cold Moon Home, 2007, etc.) will welcome another strong heroine who must overcome physical and mental challenges to survive.

SILENCED

Ohlsson, Kristina Emily Bestler/Atria (352 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4391-9890-2 A second course of revenge served cold challenges DS Alex Recht, civilian consultant Fredrika Bergman and the rest of Sweden’s Criminal Investigation Division (Unwanted, 2012).

Fifteen years after a prologue presents a young girl’s rape as she picks flowers during a Midsummer’s Eve ritual decreed by her family, Alex’s group is charged with investigating two seemingly unrelated cases. One is the hit-and-run death of an unidentified man. The other is the apparent murder-suicide of Jakob Ahlbin, assistant vicar of the Bromma Church, and his wife Marja, a cantor at the church.

The Stockholm-based investigators are ill-prepared for the pressure under which they’ll have to operate. Alex fears that his unit is about to be disbanded and its members dispersed among other crime-fighting units; Fredrika is pregnant by her lover of 10 years, a married professor at Uppsala University; Peder Rydh, recently separated from his wife, Ylva, and dumped by his lover, Pia Nordh, is in hot water for his off-color remarks to a luscious new trainee. All of them would be even more uncomfortable if they knew that half a world away, in Bangkok, a woman intimately connected with their current caseload is finding her official identity systematically erased, as she’s stripped of her email accounts, her money, her identification papers, her hotel room and her name. The thread that links these mysteries involves crooked cops, neo-Nazis, identity theft, murder for hire, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, a pair of sisters whose falling out has turned them into enemies willing to fight to the death and a wounded soul with a long memory.

A Chinese box of a procedural that manages to link together not only a varied bunch of felonies and motives, but its detectives’ equally unruly personal lives as well.

AIRTIGHT

Rosenfelt, David Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-250-02476-3 If a New Jersey state cop can’t prove within a week that the murder suspect he shot dead was innocent, his brother will pay the price.

When a knife attack ends rising legal star Daniel Brennan’s life just before he’s scheduled to move up from the Superior Court bench to the Court of Appeals, Lt. Lucas Somers catches the case. The judge’s murder is so high-profile that Luke’s boss gives him extra resources, extra leeway and extra pressure. The very first lead Luke pursues—three-time drug offender Steven Gallagher, whom Brennan had promised a stiff sentence—turns up trumps for Luke, though not so much for Steven, whom Luke shoots three times as Steven, cornered in his Paterson apartment, raises his gun. It’s clearly a righteous shooting, and Luke |

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“A police procedural with the depth of a half-hour TV segment.” from rules of crime

BAD BLOOD

is rewarded with congratulations, television interviews and the kidnapping of his brother, Bryan, by Steven’s brother, Chris, a Marine who flew home from Afghanistan to help Steven face his legal woes and now intends to deal with his death by taking the life of his killer’s brother, whom he’s chained in an underground shelter with a TV, a computer, some food and enough air for seven days. Can Luke rise to Chris Gallagher’s challenge and collect enough evidence of Steven’s innocence to save his own brother’s life? Acting on another hunch, he quickly satisfies himself that the real reason for Judge Brennan’s death was a civil suit concerning fracking in upstate New York. But Luke will need every one of his enviable law enforcement contacts in order to determine just which of the many interested parties was determined to tip the scales of justice.

This latest stand-alone from the chronicler of attorney Andy Carpenter (Leader of the Pack, 2012, etc.) is twothirds perfectly controlled suspense, one-third scrambled windup.

Stabenow, Dana Minotaur (384 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-312-55065-3 A clash of family cultures may be behind a series of murders.

The Alaskan villages of Kushtaka and Kuskulana share a salmon-filled river and a deep-rooted mutual hatred. Kushtaka natives, mostly Macks, adhere to the old ways and live in near poverty. Across the river, the Kuskulana residents, mostly Christiansons, reap the benefits of modernity.

When state trooper Sgt. Jim Chopin is called in, Roger Christianson takes him to the Mack fish wheel, where the body of Tyler Mack has been found. Although Tyler’s family considered him a lazy schemer, they’re covering up evidence and plotting revenge. Jim’s girlfriend, private eye Kate Shugak, a Native Alaskan with many family connections in the vast area known as the Park, quickly becomes involved. No sooner is Tyler’s death ruled a murder then the body of Mitch Halvorsen is found sealed up in the house he’s building on the Kuskulana side of the river. Mitch’s brother Kenny demands revenge against the Kushtakers. Jim is sure that Mitch and Kenny were smuggling in alcohol and possibly drugs for the nearby mine workers, but his questions produce only silence and lies on both sides of the river. In the meantime, Ryan Christianson and Jennifer Mack, who have fallen in love, are secretly meeting even though their romance is certain to cause more trouble. Kate (Restless in the Grave, 2012, etc.), along with her half-wolf, Mutt, works her own angle and takes steps that may put her in danger in more ways than she can imagine.

To her usual atmospheric detection, Stabenow adds more than a hint of Romeo and Juliet, or the Hatfields and the McCoys.

RULES OF CRIME

Sellers, L.J. Thomas & Mercer (302 pp.) $14.95 paper | Feb. 26, 2013 978-1-611098068 The cop shop in Eugene works overtime to deal with a kidnapping and a brutal assault.

Detective Wade Jackson loves his daughter Katie dearly, but his ex-wife, Renee, a recovering alcoholic, not so much. When he learns that Renee’s been snatched and a ransom demanded from her wealthy lover, Ivan Anderson, Jackson, despite his misgivings, assures Katie that he’ll rescue her mother. Meanwhile, Lara Evans, a recent addition to the Violent Crimes Unit, is assigned to find the perp who beat college student Lyla Murray nearly to death. The kidnapping case flounders badly when two payoff attempts go belly up. The assault case stalls when Lyla’s pals at a secret sorority clam up about their initiation rites. Then Anderson’s daughter, a TV newscaster who unwisely pleads on air for donations to fund Renee’s ransom, is murdered. Is there a connection between the cases? The FBI isn’t sure. The Oregon cops don’t know. Police tails lose suspects. Bratty students call on rich daddies for legal help. And then, courtesy of an authorial curveball or two from Sellers (Liars, Cheaters, & Thieves, 2011, etc.), the cases align, but not before the body count escalates and Jackson winds up crying in his daughter’s arms.

A police procedural with the depth of a half-hour TV segment. Name a stereotype, and it’s here. Mindless pap for the undiscerning.

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BROOKLYN BONES

Stein, Triss Poisoned Pen (270 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-4642-0120-2 978-1-4642-0122-6 paper 978-1-4642-0121-9 Lg. Prt. A skeleton found in a Brooklyn row home opens a door to a past mystery and maybe a present-day killer.

When overworked, underpaid grad student Erica Donato’s contractor, Joe, knocks down a wall while fixing up her little Park Slope home, he finds the last thing either of them expects or wants: a small skeleton tucked into the wall. Erica’s teenage daughter, Chris, feels a connection with what she dubs “our girl,” perhaps since the mysterious bones are clearly those of a girl close to Chris’ age. When Chris starts to investigate, Erica |

THE GOLDEN CALF

receives a vague but menacing warning of the dangers of Chris’ involvement. Instead of waiting for more specific threats, Erica takes up Uncle Rick’s offer to send Chris to camp. But the detective bug takes hold of Erica in Chris’ absence, and before she knows what’s happening, her eye for history has her trying to understand the secret of their skeleton. The stakes get higher when someone close to her is murdered, and she comes to believe that whoever was hiding the skeleton may have something more to lose. Her search teams her up with a curmudgeonly ex-journalist who may know a little too much about the old neighborhood. Now Erica needs to make fast decisions about whom she can trust before she’s in danger of her own.

Although Stein (Digging Up Death, 1998, etc.) generates a few memorable exchanges between the quirkier characters, most of what happens is no more exciting than you’d expect from a week in Brooklyn.

Tursten, Helene Soho Crime (352 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-61695-008-8

A fourth round of multiple homicides-cum–lesser felonies for DI Irene Huss and her colleagues and friends in Göteborg’s Violent Crime Division (Night Rounds, 2012, etc.).

Even Irene’s husband, chef Krister Huss, knows who Kjell B:son [sic] Ceder is—the restaurant king of Göteborg—or was, until two well-placed bullets ended his life, leaving behind a widow who is alternately dry-eyed and hysterical and an unholy mess of domestic and financial doubledealing. Both Kjell and his much younger wife, Sanna KaeglerCeder, had carried on so many affairs that one mystery is why they ever got married. A second is whether Kjell’s first wife, a shipping heiress killed in a sailing accident, was really a victim of foul play. The meatiest mystery of all concerns Sanna’s Internet startup, ph.com, a brash high-end apparel retailer that had gone belly up in the dot-com crash of 2003. A closer look shows that ph.com was doomed from the first by both a highly unrealistic business model and the likelihood that at least one of its partners was emptying the till. Sanna’s friend, financial consultant Joachim Rothstaahl, is soon shot as dead as her husband.

So is her ex-partner Philip Bergman. Is it possible that Thomas Bonetti, the third founding partner, who’s been missing since 2000, is behind the rash of embezzlement and murder? Has he been dead all along, the first casualty in a brutal housecleaning?

And which member of this interlocking directorate is the father of Sanna’s infant son? Interrogating the diminishing pool of suspects and focusing on the enigmatic Sanna provokes many revelations. But only a visit from an Amazonian FBI agent will dispel the last shadows.

Monstrous Sanna is well worth Irene’s trouble, but the kitchen-sink financial intrigue and deus ex machina windup may tax fans’ patience.

HELSINKI BLOOD

Thompson, James Putnam (320 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 21, 2013 978-0-399-15888-9

The violent soap opera of Inspector Kari Vaara’s life continues as he and his mates scramble to mop up the consequences of their last round of wellintended thefts and executions.

The top cop in Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation has, by his own account, been “shot to pieces.” Kate, the wife whose timely armed intervention saved his life in Helsinki White (2012), has succumbed to PTSD and gone off with their daughter Anu. Someone who knows that Kari and his colleagues stole €10 million from drug dealers is threatening him with increasingly lethal parcels tossed through his front window. Naturally, Kari calls the two people who helped get him into this mess, DS Milo Nieminen and police translator Sulo “Sweetness” Polvinen. Together with Milo’s girlfriend, Jenna, and Sweetness’ cousin Mirjami, they hunker down inside Kari’s besieged apartment and wait for an excuse to go on the offensive against their old enemies: national police chief Jyri Ivalo, interior minister Osmo Ahtiainen, his hatchet man Capt. Jan Pitkänen and racist billionaire arms dealer Veikko Saukko. A pretext arrives when Estonian widow Salme Tamm reports her daughter Loviise missing. Since the girl’s beauty and Down syndrome make her an obvious target for sex slavers, Kari and company promptly lean on the Harper brothers, casino keepers and pimps, to help them go after the usual suspects and incidentally recover Loviise. The mayhem that ensues owes less to other tales of Scandinavian cops than to samurai sagas and spaghetti Westerns, with a sequel guaranteed only for the last man standing.

Though he doesn’t have Henning Mankell or Jo Nesbø’s gifts for shaping a story, Kentucky-native Thompson has created in Kari a hero as dyspeptic as Kurt Wallender and as prone to vigilante justice as Harry Hole.

BLOOD, ASH, AND BONE

Whittle, Tina Poisoned Pen (250 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4642-0093-9 978-1-4642-0095-3 paper 978-1-4642-0094-6 Lg. Prt. Tai Randolph, the cutest amateur sleuth to come along since Stephanie Plum stuck her nose in everyone’s business, rouses the ire of the KKK. As she packs up souvenirs to sell at the Southeastern Civil War Expo in Savannah, the gun shop Tai Randolph inherited from her uncle gets a visit from John, the bad boy she found |

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Fans who miss the characters and relationships Wiehl (Eyes of Justice, 2012, etc.) usually develops and find her case for a sympathetic heroine less than compelling may want to wait till next time around.

irresistible until he left her to snuggle with her roommate Hope. They need her, he begs, to find a Civil War Bible with an inscription from President Abraham Lincoln to Gen. Sherman on the flyleaf. If she can locate it, they’ll reap upward of $1 million, and she’ll get a 10 percent finder’s fee. Leery that this is just another scam of John’s, Tai runs it past her current boyfriend, Trey, heartthrob extraordinaire, whose police work caused him frontal lobe damage that turned him into a human lie detector. Trey, whose commando instincts and sniper training serve him well in his current job as a security specialist for the well-heeled Phoenix Enterprise, arranges to accompany Tai from Atlanta to Savannah, where she promises to be sensible in her detecting endeavors and he’ll oversee protection at Reynolds Harrington’s Lowcountry Classic golf tournament. Alas, sensible and Tai do not mesh. Minutes into her investigation, her former boss is murdered, she realizes that the curator of Reynolds’ sister’s collection of Civil War artifacts is tailing her, and the Klan brandishes all manner of weaponry to flush out that Bible. A Civil War battlefield re-enactment claims fresh casualties; Tai hides a gun beneath her hoop skirt at the dress ball; and poor overworked Trey gets kidnapped. Collectors, con men and cantankerous relatives will all have their say before Tai, to the relief of all, becomes sensible and heads back to Atlanta.

The plot is as deftly convoluted as ever (Darker Than Any Shadow, 2012, etc.), but this time, most everything takes a back seat to Tai’s rapture over Trey. And who could blame her? He’s one hell of a catch.

science fiction and fantasy FARSIDE

Bova, Ben Tor (368 pp.) $24.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7653-2387-3 Near-future science-fiction thriller, one of Bova’s Grand Tour series (Mars Life, 2008, etc.), detailing human exploration of the solar system.

After an Earth-like planet is detected circling a nearby star, two projects race to capture the first visual images of New Earth. On the moon’s Farside, permanently facing away from Earth, a vast distributed optical telescope takes shape under Farside Observatory director Jason Uhlrich’s watchful eye—figuratively speaking, since he’s actually blind and “sees” by means of sound waves.

Needing further sponsorship, Uhlrich has asked the filthy rich McClintock family for money, so scion Carter McClintock is now his administrative chief. Also on the staff are young astronomer Trudy Yost and dedicated technician Grant Simpson, who takes drugs to combat radiation and keep himself going so he can get the job done. Far out in space, meanwhile, the International Astronautical Authority and its wealthy backers are assembling a rival telescope. When one of Uhlrich’s mirrors cracks before installation, Simpson suggests they enlist the help of nanotechnology whiz Kris Cardenas to assemble another.

Uhlrich is doubtful—nanotechnology is banned everywhere except on the moon—but accedes. Then Anita Halleck gets wind of the move; she’s one of IAA’s backers and has vengeful personal motives to oppose the McClintocks. Soon, suspense builds as a series of inexplicable deaths makes the Farside team start to wonder if deadly rogue nanomachines are loose in the facility—which could mean curtains for the entire project. Bova carries the story forward with his usual workmanlike, technically savvy narrative, which is interspersed with background facts and biographies of the main characters.

The sort of gritty, hands-on, you-are-there yarn at which Bova has long excelled.

A MATTER OF TRUST

Wiehl, Lis with Henry, April Thomas Nelson (320 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-59554-903-7

A prosecutor investigating a colleague’s death realizes that she too could be in danger.

The death of Mia Quinn’s husband, Scott, is only the beginning of her troubles. Mia must return to work as a prosecutor for Washington’s King County district attorney to make sure she has enough money to support her young daughter Brooke and her son Gabe, whose obsession with gaining weight for his high school football team seems to cost as much as her law degree did. Mia is chatting on the phone with her friend and colleague Colleen Miller and getting ready for a yard sale of Scott’s old things, each box unearthing another secret Scott was keeping, when suddenly she hears a loud noise at the other end of the line followed by silence. Mia hands the phone to Gabe and rushes to Colleen’s, but she is too late to save her friend’s life. Paired with Detective Charlie Carlson to find out what happened, she dreads working with a man-child she knows could never have the ardent respect for the law that she does.

The two unearth more than they were expecting, including discoveries that implicate Colleen’s murder as part of a larger pattern and suggest that Mia and her family may be targets as well.

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“...fans of the previous book will at least want to know how it all comes out.” from rebel angels

BLOOD OF DRAGONS

Hobb, Robin Harper Voyager (448 pp.) $27.99 | $14.99 e-book | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-06-211685-7 978-0-06-211687-1 e-book Series: Rain Wilds Chronicles, 4 Hobb (City of Dragons, 2012, etc.) returns to the Elderling city of Kelsingra for the fourth and final installment of the Rain Wilds Chronicles.

In the first three books of Hobb’s series, a dozen dragons hatched centuries after they had been believed to be extinct.

Each dragon was paired to an outcast teenager as its dedicated keeper. Through their contact with their dragons, the teenagers began to metamorphose into Elderlings, increasing their life spans while also giving them dragonlike physical characteristics.

Accompanied by the crew of the Tarman, a sentient ship similar to those in Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy, dragons and humans set out to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra. This book finds them settled into the old city, but now searching for hidden wells of magical silver, which the dragons need to survive and the keepers need to revive the crumbling city to its former glory. To do so, the keepers must immerse themselves in the ancient memories still living within the city—possibly at the risk of losing their own identities. At the same time, they find themselves in danger of imminent attack by the henchmen of a decrepit duke looking to obtain dragons’ blood to restore his vitality. While the previous book in this series was slow-paced and relatively uneventful, Hobb makes up for lost time here.

The final third in particular is packed with action, culminating in a thrilling dragon raid on a castle with a daring midair rescue. But for all her skill with action scenes, Hobb’s greatest talent remains rendering very thoughtful, fleshed-out characters, male and female alike. For example, when childhood friends Alise and Sedric stand up to Hest Finbok, the man who bedded and betrayed them, it’s clear how much each character has grown since the beginning of the series.

A satisfying conclusion to a superb fantasy tale. (Author appearances in Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle. Agent: Chris Schelling)

A MEMORY OF LIGHT

Jordan, Robert; Sanderson, Brandon Tor (912 pp.) $34.99 | Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-7653-2595-2 “There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time.”

Even so, with this volume, the late Jordan’s hyperinflated Wheel of Time series grinds to a halt. Jordan (Eye of the World, 1990, etc.), here revived by way of the extensive |

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notebooks, drafts and outlines he left behind by amanuensis Sanderson (Creative Writing/Brigham Young Univ.), was an ascended master of second-tier Tolkien-ism; the world he creates is as densely detailed as Middle-earth, and if the geography sounds similar, pocked with place names such as Far Madding and the Blasted Lands, that’s no accident. Tolkienesque, too, is the scenario for this saga-closer, namely a “last battle” in which the forces of good are arrayed against those of darkness. The careless reader might take this to be a battle of hairdressers in a West Indian neighborhood: “The Dreadlords came for him eventually, sending an explosion to finish the job. Deepe spent the last moments throwing weaves at them. He died well.” That’s not the case, of course; instead, saga heroes Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara range the lands beyond the Dark One’s prison to do all manner of good and adventuresome things. It’s a strange world, that: Perrin finds the pit to end all pits, “[a]n eternal expanse, like the blackness of the Ways, only this one seemed to be pulling him into it.”

But then, what kind of epic would it be if it weren’t a strange place? Will wolves and orcs—or whatever they are—take over the world, or will the good guys prevail?

Jordan’s fans, who are legion, will most decidedly want to learn the answer to that question.

REBEL ANGELS

Lang, Michele Tor (320 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-7653-2319-4 Final installment of the historical fantasy trilogy (Dark Victory, 2012, etc.) wherein a Hungarian Jewish witch and her fallen-angel husband battle the Nazis in an alternate World War II. After a prolonged and tearful farewell, Magda, the last of the Lazarus witches, packs her whiny sister Gisele off to England so that she and husband Raziel can seek this book’s MacGuffin, the Heaven Sapphire, a gem powerful enough to defeat even the demon Asmodel, by whom Hitler is possessed. Again, she will need the support of her sponsor, the defiantly anti-Nazi vampire Count Bathory of Budapest. Currently, the gem appears to be located in the Caucasus, home of fire-demons and unfortunately occupied by the Soviets. With the help of magic-carpet dealer Ziyad, Magda and Raziel draw close to their objective, but there are complications. Hitler may be about to break his compact with Stalin and attack the oil fields. Asmodel has his own schemes afoot. The Soviets have invented machines that render magic null and void. And it’s far from certain what Raziel’s brothers, some of them fallen, others still angelic, will do. As before, there are long chunks of travelogue and talk but precious little actual drama, and the narrative’s degenerated to the point where much of it is mere reportage. Worst of all, the final confrontation with Asmodel— and it reveals nothing to state that there is one—manages to be both inexplicable and disappointing. science fiction & fantasy

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“Flawed...but impressive and often brilliant.” from quintessence

Promising material undermined by undisciplined, poor writing and a failure of nerve, although fans of the previous book will at least want to know how it all comes out. (Agent: Lucienne Driver)

QUINTESSENCE

Walton, David Tor (320 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-7653-3090-1 A serious 16th-century alternateworld history set on a flat Earth where alchemy works, from the author of the award-winning Terminal Mind (2008).

King Edward VI of England, Henry VIII’s young, sickly son, continues his father’s Protestant reforms. The king’s physic, Stephen Parris, dissects corpses (in secret, lest he be accused of witchcraft) in an effort to learn how the body works. Alchemist Christopher Sinclair seeks the Philosopher’s Stone, or quintessence (the three essential alchemical elements are salt, sulfur and mercury—so what’s the fourth?), believing such a substance would grant him the ability to raise the dead. Sinclair learns of Parris’ activities and blackmails him into sponsoring a voyage to the edge of the world, where the ocean plunges off into the abyss—and where he believes he will find quintessence. Adding to the pressure on Parris, the king is dying and will be succeeded by Mary Tudor, a fierce Catholic (known to history as Bloody Mary) determined to restore the primacy of Rome. As a Protestant and diabolist, Parris would not survive Mary’s reign, so he agrees to flee with Sinclair, taking along his intelligent and adaptable daughter Catherine against the wishes of his Catholic wife, Joan. Eventually, they reach an island on the brink and find that quintessence abounds: Its powers are all that Sinclair dreamed of and more. But then a Spanish galleon sails into the harbor, guided

by Joan in search of Catherine; Mary is now Queen of England, and aboard the galleon is Diego de Tavera, envoy to King Philip of Spain—and a sadistic, ruthless Inquisitor. Against this intricate backdrop, the characters experiment, explore, debate ethics, philosophy and religion, and try to coexist with intelligent nonhumans. The big drawback, however, is Walton’s willingness to ascribe all the messy and inconvenient but unavoidable details of the world’s structure to the will of God, a pretext that should rightly be regarded as a cop-out. Still, the action builds to a thrilling and memorable finale.

Flawed, then, but impressive and often brilliant.

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nonfiction REBUILDING THE FOODSHED How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: FARTHER & WILDER by Blake Bailey............................................ p. 37

Ackerman-Leist, Philip Chelsea Green (352 pp.) $19.95 paper | Feb. 14, 2013 978-1-60358-423-4

BODY GEOGRAPHIC by Barrie Jean Borich.................................p. 40 PLUTOPIA by Kate Brown...............................................................p. 42 MONTE CASSINO by Peter Caddick-Adams..................................p. 42 THE FUTURE by Al Gore..................................................................p. 48 STORY OF A SECRET STATE by Jan Karski...................................p. 54 PUKKA’S PROMISE by Ted Kerasote................................................ p. 55 HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE by Wendy Moore............p. 60 ANIMAL WISE by Virginia Morell..................................................p. 60 WHY PRIESTS? by Garry Wills...................................................... p. 72 GOING CLEAR by Lawrence Wright............................................... p. 74 THE FUTURE Six Drivers of Global Change

Gore, Al Random House (592 pp.) $30.00 Jan. 29, 2013 978-0-8129-9294-6

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In-depth scrutiny of the modern food system and suggestions on how it should change.

Ackerman-Leist (Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader, 2010) explores how to take food production and distribution away from the mega-corporations and place it in the hands of local communities and small farms. He analyzes energy consumption from the field to the refrigerator; the environment, with “the idea that a sustainable food system is one that begins and ends with the careful management of the foundation of it all: the soil”; and food security—i.e., how to ensure that everyone in the country has enough food to ward off hunger and malnutrition. The author also thoroughly investigates biodiversity of crops and conducts a study of “food systems that embrace a diversity of cultural and economic perspectives.” Ackerman-Leist culminates his studies by exploring the latest techniques used to improve food production, such as high tunnels and greenhouses that extend growing seasons or the numerous microbreweries and cider houses that provide delicious products without high energy costs. The author’s image of “local food” has morphed over time, just as the whole industry has changed: “The image that comes to mind these days is of dynamic, interlocking systems—a vast network of differently sized pulsing centerpoints connected to one other by means of surging flows that create exchanges of resources, ideas, and of course foods.”

Dense with information and studded with numerous graphs and charts, this book provides a deeper understanding of what principles need to change in order to create local food environments.

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“An elegant tour of the wild and fraught sideshow of animal biotechnology.” from frankenstein’s cat

DRUNK TANK PINK And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

Alter, Adam Penguin Press (272 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 21, 2013 978-1-59420-454-8

A brisk survey of how human emotions, thoughts and behaviors are shaped by such seemingly small factors as colors as well as such major ones as culture and weather.

Alter (Marketing/New York Univ. Stern School of Business) divides the factors into three categories: those that arise from within us; those that emerge from our connections with our social world; and those from the environment—the world around us. After launching with the now decades-old discovery that the color pink can reduce aggression and anxiety, the author looks at these three categories, starting with the effects that names, labels and symbols have on our perception of people, companies and organizations. Alter’s findings are intriguing: Children randomly labeled as “academic bloomers” did indeed bloom as teachers’ expectations of them changed.

During one day of trading, the stocks of companies with easyto-pronounce ticker names did better than those with unpronounceable names. In the second part, the author considers factors in the social world, describing experiments that reveal differences in behavior when someone is alone or in the presence of other people, finding a basis for racism in a deeply ingrained human fear of difference and looking at cultural differences in the understanding of concepts such as individualism.

The third part includes surprising data on the effects of colors, artificial lighting, sunlight, outdoor settings, noise and weather conditions. Alter peppers his text with illustrative anecdotes, incidents, studies and characters, making the book highly readable and informative. The author occasionally challenges folk wisdom—contrary to the popular notion that in spring, a young man’s fancy turns to love, Alter cites research showing that testosterone levels rise in the cold winter months—and he elucidates the reasons behind other taken-for-granted beliefs.

While the eye-catching title may suggest a hot new shade of lipstick, the contents are solid, down-to-earth insights into why we think, feel and act the way we do.

UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE FEMALE BRAIN Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex

Amen, Daniel G. Harmony (416 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-307-88894-5 978-0-307-88896-9 e-book

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A handbook for better health in women.

“You don’t think about your brain because you cannot see it,” writes Amen (The Amen Solution: The Brain Healthy Way to Get Thinner, Smarter, Happier, 2011, etc.); however, this “is a huge mistake, because success in everything you do starts with a healthy brain.” Without a vigorous brain, every other aspect of life suffers. Based on brain scans, questionnaires and blood work, Amen shows women how they can optimize their brain health through diet, exercise, supplements, meditation, friendships and loving relationships. In a reader-friendly fashion, the author breaks down complex issues such as attention deficit disorder and the numerous hormones at work in the body. Mood swings, weight changes, negativity and menopause are just a few of the challenges Amen states are easy to fix once women begin to follow his prescribed regimes, and he provides real-life stories from patients who have successfully altered their lifestyles for the better. The author includes numerous lists of what to do and what not to do to optimize overall brain health, but many more are referenced that can only be found on Amen’s website.

Annoyingly, this requires a paid membership to access the full scope of available information. Simple one-hour exercises reinforce the lessons, requiring readers to list goals, worries and failures, among other topics.

Although most of the information is common knowledge, Amen’s easy-to-follow instructions will aid readers in retaining and implementing the information.

FRANKENSTEIN’S CAT Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts

Anthes, Emily Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-374-15859-0 An elegant tour of the wild and fraught sideshow of animal biotechnology.

Scientists have been monkeying with animal genes for decades. Mice are good examples: We can now manipulate them to spend all their time burying marbles or turning to the left. “We are editing their genetic codes, rebuilding their broken bodies, and supplementing their natural senses,” writes Anthes (Instant Egghead Guide: The Mind, 2008).

The author generates a sense of awe when appropriate and, when called for, skepticism and an openness to other qualms, particularly issues of ethics, exploitation and commodification. “[S]tudying these creatures yields valuable insights into human disease. That’s good news for us, but little consolation for a tumor-riddled rodent,” writes the author. “But if there is peril here, there is also great promise.” In a bell-clear voice, the author examines the science behind genes, as well as cloning, cyborg insect armies, rescue rat-bots, “mass production of mutant mice” in China, bomb-sniffing beetle drones, prosthetic tails for dolphins, the possibility of enhancing animal sensory skills, and “ ‘pharming,’ in which simple genetic tweaks |

turn animals into living pharmaceutical factories.” Anthes lays out the facts, but it is still up to readers to decide which side of the ethical divide they will fall on.

Learned, entertaining and illuminating.

FARTHER & WILDER The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson Bailey, Blake Knopf (496 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-307-27358-1

Author of acclaimed biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates, Bailey makes a rather surprising case for the resurrection of this deeply prescient and problematic novelist, who broke open taboos about alcoholics and homosexuals well

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before it was cool and championed F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was in the process of being remaindered.

Charles Jackson (1903–1968) was the author of an unlikely best-seller, The Lost Weekend (1944), which was rendered into a tremendous film noir by Billy Wilder the next year. He rode moments of spectacular success in his early life and many more troughs of despair and drug addiction later on. Bailey traces his early upbringing in the idyllic village of Newark, in upstate New York, an iconic Arcadia in his fiction, where he nonetheless suffered the early traumas of his older sister and brother’s deaths in a car accident, abandonment by his father and molestation at the hands of a visiting organist at his church. Bailey gets at the compulsive element to Jackson’s personality and his decorous exterior as a “respectable burgher,” disguising his proclivity for excessive drink and gay sex. Yet he was always a man of high Shakespearean ideals and deep feeling who was vilified and embraced in turn. Although sober for a good decade, during which he produced his best, most feverish work, and a husband and father of two daughters living for a spell as a kind of writerly squire in New Hampshire, he succumbed to abuse

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“Insightful case studies that explore how young women are negotiating the pressures of sexual and professional liberation.” from hard to get

RAISING THE CURVE A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000 Failing Public Schools

of barbiturates as a result of recurring lung issues, and his last works—e.g., A Second-Hand Life—were committed to oblivion.

Bailey urges a revisiting of the work of this fascinating novelist of keen psychological depth.

Eloquent, poignant portrait of the artist as outsider and misfit. (16 pages of photographs)

HARD TO GET Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom Bell, Leslie C. Univ. of California (273 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 4, 2013 978-0-520-26149-5

Sociologist and psychotherapist Bell investigates the generation of women in their 20s who, despite unprecedented opportunities, are struggling to find balance in their emotional and sexual lives.

Born after 1972, the year the author identifies as a cultural turning point for women, this younger generation may have more choices than their foremothers, but she claims, they are also confused and overwhelmed by them. Bell is particularly interested in looking at the sexual attitudes and behaviors of these newly liberated young women. Using both sociological and psychological methodology, she presents several interviews as case studies. The author discovered that these women generally fell into three categories: the Sexual Woman, who is comfortable with herself sexually but has difficulty trusting the security of relationships; the Relational Woman, who seeks out relationships at the expense of her own fulfillment; and the Desiring Woman, who has found a way to successfully integrate competing societal and personal expectations to become more confident and secure. Bell also discovered that these young women are often “splitting” to form two distinct selves rather than incorporating the differences to become a whole person.

The author concludes that positive role models who can exhibit fulfillment in their sexual, professional and familial lives are necessary to help these young women become comfortable with their own identities. While this is an academic study, Bell’s clear prose and accessible subject matter will appeal to both scholars of women’s studies and young women looking for an explanation of some of the predicaments their generation faces.

Though it’s far from being a self-help book, the author does offer some sage advice for young women navigating this brave new world.

Insightful case studies that explore how young women are negotiating the pressures of sexual and professional liberation.

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Berler, Ron Berkley (256 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-425-25268-0

A journalist’s exposé of a year spent inside a fifth-grade classroom in one of America’s struggling schools.

At the beginning of the 2010 school year, journalist Berler took his seat in Mr. Morey’s classroom, focusing his attention on the teacher’s struggles to get through to the students. Yet as Berler soon learned, Morey was hardly the problem. Nor was Brookside Elementary’s principal, its literary specialist or the parents or students themselves. Rather, the blame for the school’s failures seemed to spread among all parties, a realization that provides staggeringly little direction for where the solutions might start. A specter shrouding Berler’s book is the teachers’ fear of their students’ impending standardized tests, the results of which have long-reaching ramifications for their own futures as educators. As Berler reveals, this high-stakes academic environment makes winners and losers—not of individuals, but the schools themselves, providing a less-than-ideal learning situation for the students and their anxiety-ridden teachers. When a student admitted to cheating, she admitted her motive as well: “Mr. Morey said the test was important, and I didn’t study, so I copied off somebody,” she explained. Simplistic as it was, this mea culpa offers the most insight of all— recognition that students want to succeed for their teachers, even if they don’t understand the value of learning for themselves. Equally troubling was Morey’s begrudging admission to occasionally teaching his students “test strategies” rather than course material—an illustration that points toward a shared understanding that it is better to learn to game the system, rather than try to fix it.

Though the story is hardly unique, Berler’s ability to recount the struggles of failing schools through the viewpoints of its primary players—students, teachers and administrators—provides new insight on an old saga.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Bernanke, Ben S. Princeton Univ. (200 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-691-15873-0

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke (Essays on the Great Depression, 2000, etc.) presents his views on the Federal Reserve System, central banking and the financial crisis in four lectures given to students during the course of 2012. |

The author examines what the Federal Reserve was intended to accomplish, how it performed its statutory task as it evolved over time and the special functions of the lender-oflast-resort that have been called upon during the financial crisis.

These lectures provide a useful primer on matters not often presented in such a comprehensive or unequivocal way. Bernanke’s reputation is often identified with his expertise on the Great Depression. Here, he presents himself differently, as a practitioner of central banking. Thus, his views on the Federal Reserve, called on by statute “to serve as a lender of last resort and to try to mitigate the panics banks were experiencing every few years,” come into sharp relief relative to his presentation of what has gone amiss in the financial sector. He argues that the regulatory structure of finance failed to keep up with the structure of financial institutions. The private sector took advantage, using weaknesses in risk management, the increasing complexity of financial transactions and the reliance on short-term funding and leverage to do so. Bernanke views the subprime mortgage crisis as the lesser part of a much larger threat to the global financial system, and he shows how AIG’s triple A credit rating was used to backstop these developments through default swaps. “In our estimation,” he told the students, “the failure of AIG would have been basically the end.”

A great introduction to the functioning of central banking for general readers. (1 halftone; 39 illustrations)

threat to the Russian convoys. Special Operations were enlisted to come up with a raiding plan, and new bombs and midget submarines were tested and honed in Scotland for the great mission undertaken in September 1943. Bishop builds a suspenseful story, delineating the crews involved on both sides in a sneak attack that required extraordinary courage from the seamen, who were under duress.

Armchair military historians will relish this account of bringing down the biggest prey in the German fleet.

THE HUNT FOR HITLER’S WARSHIP

Bishop, Patrick Regnery History (416 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-1-62157-003-5

Military historian Bishop (Battle of Britain, 2009, etc.) fashions an exciting, detailpacked account of the British obsession with dismantling Hitler’s prize battleship.

Named after the architect of the Imperial German Navy, Tirpitz was the great hope in Hitler’s plan to crack the supremacy of the British navy, the lifeblood of a nation reliant on maritime trade. Along with its sister ships, the steel-plated, seemingly invincible Tirpitz was employed in the North Atlantic to disrupt British trade convoys so that Hitler could turn his attention to attacking Russia. In his patiently descriptive account of the Battle of Britain, Bishop traces the key engagements, such as the bringing down of the Bismarck after an extremely costly pummeling by British torpedoes, which underscored how outmoded and outclassed the British fleet was. Subsequently, the British were on continual lookout for the deadly but elusive Tirpitz, about which Churchill maintained: “No other target is comparable to it.” Commanded initially by Capt. Karl Topp, with a crew of 2,600 living aboard in fairly luxurious style, Tirpitz was moved to Trondheim, Norway, keenly followed by British intelligence. Bomber Command devised several ill-begotten raids with “roly-poly” bombs, yet nothing could touch the massive ship, which posed a continual |

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“Poetic, complex and innovative.” from body geographic

FOLLOW THE MONEY A Month in the Life of a Ten-Dollar Bill Boggan, Steve Union/Aurum (304 pp.) $14.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-908526-21-2

British journalist Boggan delivers a “Where’s George?”–inspired debut examining the varied paths paper money can take and the hands it passes through.

Taking a cue from an ill-fated newspaper piece he was assigned by the Guardian, the author decided to follow a $10 bill for 30 days and nights, pushing off in 2010 near Lebanon, Kan. (pop. 218). Unpaid and driven by curiosity alone, the inquisitive author put the ten-spot in the welcoming hands of deer-hunting lodge owner and first-aid responder Rick Chapin, tracking its 3,300-mile journey from the supermarket where the Chapins purchased lunch. Each consumer, in turn, spent the money and told Boggan their story, many still at the mercy of a struggling American economy. After contact with Ernie, a lifelong Lebanon farmer who lamented that crop machines have predominantly replaced human effort, the bill passed to a truck stop, where a traveling single mother and her son braved the roads together. The action sputters some in Hot Springs, Ark., but then revives as the money met a Chicagobased post-recession investment banker fearful of his increasingly embittered, angry older clientele and a Vietnam veteran still nursing painful war wounds. These poignant profiles give the book its heart and personify the reality of a collapsed economy. Boggan’s eye-opening journey ends at the expansive home of a former auto maintenance welder in Detroit who remains optimistic about the future of the American automobile industry.

A fun, multifaceted travelogue.

BODY GEOGRAPHIC

Borich, Barrie Jean Univ. of Nebraska (272 pp.) $17.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8032-3985-2 Series: American Lives

A stunningly original memoir that explores a woman’s connection to the real and imagined Midwestern landscapes that have defined her life.

Borich (Creative Writing/DePaul Univ.; My Lesbian Body, 1999) takes on the formidable challenge of “countermapping [her] American body against ‘the true and accurate atlas’ any woman of [her] place and generation was supposed to follow.” The author was born and grew up on Chicago’s industrial South Side, which her Croatian grandfather helped to build. It was a place she “carr[ied] under [her] skin” in the same way she carried a tattoo of Chicago and her adopted city of 40

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Minneapolis on her back. Borich’s path to Minnesota was anything but clear-cut. As a young woman, she traveled to a “prairie college town” in Illinois to attend college, but she gave herself over to alcohol and eventually dropped out. When a much older male lover in Minneapolis invited her to live with him, she joined him. But privately, she agonized over whether she was gay, straight or “something else.” Borich’s sexual quest(ion) ing led her to the lesbian community, where she began to map out her desires through the bodies of female lovers. In this riotously gender-bent world, she met Linnea, her future “husband.” They shared a journey of partnership that would include excursions into the inevitable bodily reshapings brought about by time, desire and illness. Fragments of history—her own, her family’s and those of the cities that have marked her life-coordinates—intermingle with images and actual maps of Borich’s “Middle West.” Together, they create an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion—not only across water and land, but also through life.

Poetic, complex and innovative.

LIFE IN A MARITAL INSTITUTION Twenty Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Memoir Braly, James St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-312-60728-9

A comedic memoir of one man’s dual struggles to cope with a dying sister and

a marriage in turmoil.

Adapted from his popular monologue of the same title, Braly’s debut balances perilously on the fine line between humor and heartbreak. Forced to face his sister Kate’s terminal breast cancer, Braly headed to Houston, where observing her demise prompted reflection on his own life. Though Kate had previously endured various bouts of cancer (so many, in fact, that Braly dubbed her “The Sister Who Cried Metastasized Breast Cancer Wolf ”), it soon became evident that this particular cry was, in fact, Kate’s last. In an effort to squeeze out every last drop of joy available to her, Kate demanded a deathbed wedding, hauling her fiance and a preacher to her hospice room so she could die married to the man she loved. Juxtaposed alongside this grand gesture is Braly’s reflection on his own unconventional love story. As an undergraduate, his first interaction with his future wife, Jane, involved her snatching his recently composed poem and brashly correcting it—an act Braly called “the most irritating, irresistible thing a woman has ever done to me.” So begins a love story told warts and all, one in which family dysfunction takes second place behind only marital dysfunction. “I’ve been to thirteen marriage counselors,” Braly writes. “And the last twelve sounded a lot like the first one: I can’t help you; go home and get your affairs in order; your marriage is terminal.” Even as the author’s marriage unravels on the page, the jokes keep coming, his comedy routine leaving precious little time for grief. |

A humorous take on marriage and death, though honest introspection is often lost in the laughter.

THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works Brockman, John--Ed. Perennial/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $15.99 paper | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-06-223017-1

From a broad array of thinkers come answers to the question: “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?”

Every year, Brockman, a literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge, poses a challenging question to the diverse community of Edge contributors. The question posed in 2012, which asked responders to identify some simple, nonobvious

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idea that explains a complex set of phenomena, was suggested

by Steven Pinker. The replies come from such familiar names as Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Eric Kandel; a few surprising ones, such as Brian Eno and Alan Alda; and many who are lesser known or unknown to the public but are established and influential in their fields. What remains unclear is why these particular answers were selected for publication.

All answers are brief, most just two or three pages. Some of the respondents’ choices seem obvious—Darwin on the theory of evolution by natural selection and Freud on the unconscious— while others—the double-helix structure of DNA, the germ theory of disease, the Gaia hypothesis of planet Earth, the law of unintended consequences—will also already be familiar to many readers. Perhaps most surprising is neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel’s contribution: 20 linked haikus (“What is my problem? / I don’t need explanations! / I’m happy without!”). Not all are as entertaining, however, and general readers may struggle with the vocabulary of special fields—e.g., “Metarepresentations Explain Human Uniqueness” or “Hormesis Is Redundancy.” The sheer number of contributors and the broad scope of the book

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“There is no shortage of histories of the agonizingly drawn-out debacle at Monte Cassino, but this is certainly one of the best.” from monte cassino

PUBLIC APOLOGY In Which a Man Grapples with a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

ensure that most readers will find topics to pique their interest, but that same feature means that many will find themselves flipping pages quickly. Other notable contributors include Sean Carroll, George Dyson, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, A.C. Grayling and Katinka Matson.

A smorgasbord of ideas, best when judiciously sampled.

PLUTOPIA Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters Brown, Kate Oxford Univ. (448 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 3, 2013 978-0-19-985576-6

Turning up a surprising amount of hitherto hidden material and talkative survivors, Brown (History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, 2005) writes a vivid, often hair-raising history of the great plutonium factories and the privileged cities built around them.

During the Manhattan Project, the United States commandeered land in eastern Washington, around Hanford, in 1943 to build immense facilities and an isolated, government-run bedroom community for employees. Although a crash program with unlimited finances, technical problems and labor shortages delayed the opening. Once operation began, already rudimentary safety precautions were relaxed to speed up plutonium production. Readers will squirm to learn of the high radiation levels workers routinely experienced and the casualness with which wastes poured into the local air, land and rivers. Hanford remains by far the most contaminated nuclear site in the U.S., but Ozarks, in Russia, was worse. Convinced of an imminent American attack, the Soviet Union launched its own crash program in 1945. Despite working from stolen American plans, sloppy construction by slave laborers and Soviet technical backwardness produced a leaky, perpetually malfunctioning facility. Workers sickened and died of acute radiation poisoning; far more lived shorter, diseased lives. Over a huge area, waste in the air and local rivers killed farm animals, contaminated crops and poisoned civilians. The Soviet government responded by providing workers with increased consumer goods and housing; by the 1960s, Ozarks was an island of prosperity in an impoverished nation.

An angry but fascinating account of negligence, incompetence and injustice justified (as it still is) in the name of national security.

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Bry, David Grand Central Publishing (272 pp.) $23.99 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-4555-0916-4

A New York–based blogger’s memoir as told through a series of epistolary essays that apologize to individuals he knew as an adolescent and adult for his bad behavior toward them.

In this book, self-revelation is inextricably bound with contrition. Bry begins his narrative in junior high, a time when, among other things, he offered two of his classmates and fellow “dorks” fake drugs and stole beer from the refrigerator of friends’ parents so that his peers would see him as “cool.” As he grew older, his immature behavior developed a distinctly darker, more self-destructive edge. He drank heavily, experimented with marijuana, cocaine and other drugs, betrayed friends and disappointed those closest to him, including his terminally ill father. On the day he died, Bry did not hear his cries for help and came to him only after it was too late. “I felt like a little boy who had just broken something important,” he writes. Even after his father’s death, Bry continued drinking, smoking pot and being a “dick” to everyone. He nearly failed out of college but managed to graduate and stumble into an internship at a music magazine in New York. He passed his 20s in a stupor, yet still found love with a woman who was as “generously accepting of his lifestyle choices” as she was of his being a sweatpantswearing slob. The form Bry uses to tell the story gets tiresome, as does his constant apologizing to everyone (including people with whom he had only glancing contact) for his misdeeds.

However, his candor and genuine desire to look at the ugliest parts of his personality and past do succeed in creating a compelling portrait of a human “work in progress.”

Compassionate but repetitive.

MONTE CASSINO Ten Armies in Hell Caddick-Adams, Peter Oxford Univ. (384 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-0-19-997464-1

A superb account of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. Often stepping back to discuss leaders and histories of the numerous Allied units (British, American, French, Polish, Italian, Indian, Canadian), Caddick-Adams, lecturer in Military Studies at Britain’s Defence Academy (Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives, 2011), gives equal time to the fewer, if painfully efficient, German defenders. Using interviews, journals, letters and official records from both sides, he delivers a |

relentless, blow-by-blow description of small-unit actions enlivened by more than the usual number of vivid personal accounts.

Caddick-Adams does not quarrel with historians who argue that Hitler won the Italian campaign since the Allies, despite winning every major battle, never threatened Germany. Few disagree that the February 22 bombing of the abbey was not only unnecessary, but also positively harmful. The German high command had announced that the monastery would not be occupied; the only deaths inside were 230 Italian civilians seeking refuge. German troops occupied the rubble, now an ideal defense, and repulsed attacks for a further three months.

Fortunately for civilization, two Nazi officers had earlier urged and overseen the evacuation of the abbey’s immense library, archives and paintings to safety in the Vatican.

There is no shortage of histories of the agonizingly drawn-out debacle at Monte Cassino, but this is certainly one of the best.

BIRD OF PARADISE How I Became Latina

Cepeda, Raquel Atria (336 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4516-3586-7 978-1-4516-3588-1 e-book

Snappy, jazzy memoir of a Dominican upbringing by a New York journalist and documentary filmmaker.

Despite efforts since the election of the first black president to assume race no longer matters in America, Cepeda (editor: And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, 2004) asserts that constructing one’s identity requires expressing and celebrating its makeup. Cepeda’s parents hailed from Paradise, a neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Their relationship was an oil-and-water whirlwind romance between a handsome singer and a 16-year-old child bride whose move to Upper Manhattan quickly soured on pecuniary exigencies and pregnancy. Cepeda lived first with her mother, who cleaned houses and held many jobs at once, through new boyfriends, relocation to San Francisco and more children, then with her father, now remarried to a white woman, back in New York.

In this Dominican barrio, Cepeda spent her formative years attending Catholic school and being told she was “ass backward,” mastering street slang and class hierarchy, and enduring the grueling tennis lessons her father forced her to take. He also frequently compared her in a derogatory fashion to her mother as the worst of the Dominican lot. Love for her Dominican boyfriend and his family and shame assimilated in school created a conflicted sense of identity that often came out in fights; she identified with black culture, finding in hip-hop ideal expressions of her feelings. Later, in adulthood, with her daughter now in high school and her father recovering from heart surgery, Cepeda yearned to make peace with her conflicted selves and convinced him and other relatives to submit to DNA testing. |

Further revelations prompted trips to far-flung locations and compelled all of them to reconcile with deep-seated stereotypes of identity.

Despite occasional choppy patches, a spirited memoir deeply committed to personal self-worth.

THE GIRL WITH NO NAME The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys Chapman, Marina with Barrett-Lee, Lynne Pegasus (336 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-1-60598-474-2

The improbable story of how Chapman was kidnapped from her rural Colombian village at the age of 5 and abandoned in the jungle.

According to the tale, pieced together by her daughter, Vanessa James, Chapman adopted monkey ways—eating what they ate, climbing trees and mimicking their calls—until five years later, when she connected with some hunters in the hopes of being returned to her family. Instead, she was left in a brothel on the outskirts of the nearby city. There she was kept in semislavery as a house servant. Gradually, she relearned Spanish and the rudiments of civilized life. Escaping, she fell in with other homeless children and was ultimately taken in by a brutal Mafia family, where she was again reduced to servitude. The book ends when the author, around the age of 14, was rescued by a neighbor’s daughter, who offered her a real home in another town. Although ostensibly written as a first-person account by Chapman, the preface by James and the epilogue by novelist Barrett-Lee (One Day, Someday, 2003, etc.) provide a different picture. James explains how she was intrigued by her mother’s stories about life among the monkeys and also by the oddity of her own upbringing—for example, having to sit and howl at her mother’s feet before being fed. She decided “to piece together mum’s tangled memories” about the “magical world” living in the jungle with a tribe of monkeys and the life of a Colombian street child, characterized by “kidnappings, abductions, drugs, crime, murder and child abuse.” Barrett-Lee admits that she was given “a huge, unwieldy document” to work with, which she then scripted.

An intriguing adventure story that often doesn’t ring true. Caveat emptor. (8 pages of b/w photos)

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THE BEST BEATLES BOOK EVER

Charles, Paul Dufour (120 pp.) $16.95 paper | May 15, 2013 978-0-8023-1356-0

A short book that adds little to the exhaustive analyses of the band, this exists for two reasons: first, to share a fan’s passion for the music; second, because publication coincides with “the 50th anniversary of the release of their first album, ‘Please Please Me.’ ” Charles is most prolific as a mystery writer (The Dust of Death, 2007, etc.), but he has also worked as a music promoter.

He offers a third reason for the book: “to try and shed some light on the reasons for their incredible success.” And so he does: “The answer is simple. They wrote and recorded great songs.” Single by single, album by album, Charles gushes: “To many people—even today—‘She Loves You’—is The Beatles at their fab mop-top best;” “ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is another excellent catchy Beatle classic”; “ ‘I Should Have Known Better...’ sounds as brilliant today as the day it was recorded”; “ ‘Rubber Soul’ is still, to me, a flawless gem. . .purely and simply, ‘Rubber Soul’ is a beautiful album; I still enjoy it as much today as I did the day it was released”; “listening to ‘Rubber Soul,’ as in fact I do while writing this, it sounds like a masterly piece of work, with all the songs working together perfectly, each one in its right place.” The interjection of first-person narrative adds nothing to the appreciation, which is further undermined by the author’s propensity for exclamation points (“The early seeds of Beatlemania were being sown!”). Inevitably, all things must pass, and the author gives two explanations for the band’s breakup: “One, [manager] Brian Epstein died and, two, John Lennon met the person, Yoko Ono, for whom opportunism was an art form....Everywhere John went, Yoko went; it was really as simple and as awkward as that.”

Really, it wasn’t that simple, though the book is often that awkward.

GINKGO The Tree That Time Forgot

Crane, Peter Yale Univ. (400 pp.) $40.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-300-18751-9

Crane (School of Forestry and Environmental Studies/Yale Univ.) shares his fascination with the ginkgo tree.

During his tenure as the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, the author lived on the property. An iconic ginkgo that grew next to his house was the oldest in the U.K. and was a magnet for dignitaries and tourists. This 200-million-yearold species has proven to be remarkably resilient. It survived the extinction event that eliminated the dinosaur population 44

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and flourished in the Northern Hemisphere up until the Great Ice Age, when it maintained a foothold in China, from which it gradually spread to Korea and Japan. Buddhists considered it to be a sacred tree. As Asia was opened to the West, the tree was brought back to Europe, where it now adorns city streets, and then to North America. It has been determined experimentally that ginkgos mainly reproduce sexually, with a “rigid separate sex system,” but they occasionally exhibit bisexual behavior.

Paleobotanists and geneticists have determined the species’ approximate age but are still working on its degree of kinship to modern vegetation such as conifers and flowering plants, as well as how it “fits into the broader constellation of living and extinct plant diversity.” The tree, called the “Holy One of the East” by Chiang Kai-shek, was a symbol of Chinese nationalism in the fight against communism.

An entertaining introduction to botanical lore.

LU XUN’S REVOLUTION Writing in a Time of Violence

Davies, Gloria Harvard Univ. (368 pp.) $35.00 | Apr. 8, 2013 978-0-674-07264-0

A critical analysis of the political and polemical essays of Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), whose literary stature remains Olympian.

Though Davies (Chinese Studies/ Monash Univ.; Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry, 2009, etc.) doesn’t focus closely on biographical details, numerous details about Lu Xun’s life do emerge. (Very early, we learn his favorite brand of cigarettes; later, a bit about his married life and contentious relationship with his brother.)

Davies focuses on Lu Xun’s pioneering literary uses of baihua (the common language) and on his literary contributions to the revolutionary turmoil in China in the 1920s and ’30s, a turmoil that eventually forced him to publish using as many as 140 pseudonyms. The author notes that his celebrity afforded him some safety in the most perilous times. Readers will discover almost immediately that Davies’ is principally an academic work: The tone is scholarly, and literary allusions populate her prose—Foucault, Heidegger, Jung, Sartre, Derrida and many others. She employs numerous block quotations and sometimes-dense diction: “In using ambulatory tropes to anthropomorphize language Lu Xun…transfigured the act of writing into an agon of self-reflection on the road to attaining humanness.” However, the range of Davies’ research is staggering, and her erudition is impressive as she glides through Lu Xun’s literary career. She deals frankly and comprehensively with Lu Xun’s most prominent critics and notes how he handled them with intensity and agility. She has much to say, as well, about his theories of writing—how he decried political rhetoric, despised romantic fiction and saw the moral ambiguity of revolutionary writing. She also reproduces his list of eight tips for aspiring writers—among them: “Don’t force yourself to write when you feel you can’t.” |

“A 14-year veteran of more than 200 combat missions reflects on a career training and leading the Navy’s elite warriors.” from damn few

A rich, scholarly work that will attract more academic than general readers.

LEARNING TO FLY An Uncommon Memoir of Human Flight, Unexpected Love, and One Amazing Dog Davis, Steph Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4516-5205-5

The abrupt end to her marriage left climber and skydiver Davis (High Infatuation: A Climber’s Guide to Love and Gravity, 2007) depressed and without a sense of purpose—but not for long.

For 12 years, the author writes, she and her husband led a life of “pure adventure and self-invention, and nothing about it was safe.” Traveling around the world, they challenged each other to various daredevil adventures, including difficult solo climbs without ropes. All this changed when her husband defied an unwritten rule against climbing a possibly fragile sandstone arch in a national park in Utah. He became the target of a media-fueled outcry.

Under the threat of criminal proceedings, the pair lost the commercial sponsorship that had sustained their frugal existence, and he abandoned her and disappeared. Skydiving was the one experience she had been unwilling to share with her husband; after 20 years as a rock climber, a fear of falling was ingrained in her. Now, however, Davis was determined to engage in this new challenge.

She provides a gripping account of how she overcame her fears and her delight as she mastered the skills needed to skydive. While the adrenaline rush from landing safely is part of the thrill, the intense mental focus necessary for making split-second decisions on opening her chute was also addictive. Overcoming her previous fears, she combined solo rock climbing with potentially dangerous jumps from rocky peaks but received a necessary lesson in caution when she lost control during a jump and was injured.

A new love adds depth to this engaging story of personal growth.

DAMN FEW Making the Modern SEAL Warrior

Denver, Rorke and Henican, Ellis Hyperion (352 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 19, 2013 978-1-4013-2479-7

A 14-year veteran of more than 200 combat missions reflects on a career training and leading the Navy’s elite warriors.

Thanks to their many conspicuous successes since 9/11, the SEALs are enjoying a golden moment, celebrated in a number of books and films. Though they number |

barely 2,500, the SEALs’ special skills have proven especially effective in an unconventional terror war, so much so that intense pressure exists now to create more of these special operators, even as the brotherhood attempts to hold the line, fearful of compromising standards and quality. Denver addresses this intraservice controversy, but his story explains why it will take more than a Pentagon fiat to create more SEALs. The fact remains: Few people have the strength, resilience, aggressiveness and mental toughness sufficient to survive BUD/S, their tortuously rigorous entry program, and the subsequent years of advanced training and moment’s notice, high-risk deployments. SEALs come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s impossible to predict who will succeed. With the help of Newsday columnist Henican (co-author: In the Blink of an Eye: Dale, Daytona, and the Day that Changed Everything, 2011, etc.), Denver takes us through a few SEAL missions, including the bin Laden raid, the sniping of Somali pirates and some house-to-house operations in Iraq. But his focus here is on the training, the lessons taught—that winning pays, that small details matter, that thorough preparation is essential, that nothing about war is fair—and on explaining the SEAL culture, from the outrageous “van brawls” (don’t ask) and the enduring fraternal network, to the solemn significance of the gold Trident and the unique self-knowledge that comes with being a “meat eater,” a man who’s killed someone on the battlefield.

“What can’t these SEALs do?” To hear Denver tell it, when it comes to special operations, hardly anything at all.

Good reading for military buffs.

FOR ADAM’S SAKE A Family Saga in Colonial New England di Bonaventura, Allegra Liveright/Norton (496 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 22, 2013 978-0-87140-430-5

A scholarly study of the interactions among families—from wealthy landowners to impecunious African and Indian slaves—in New London, Conn., in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Di Bonaventura, an assistant dean (Graduate School of Arts and Science/Yale Univ.), debuts with this adaptation of her doctoral dissertation, and it retains the strengths and weaknesses of that type of writing. Her research is thorough and imaginative. Although much of the story rests on the diary of Joshua Hempstead—a diary he kept assiduously for 47 years—di Bonaventura also explores other significant primary documents from churches and various civic and private archives, integrating the work of other historians of the region and time. The titular “Adam”—Adam Jackson—was a black slave whom Hempstead—a shipwright, farmer and respected local citizen—purchased when his sons were beginning to move on to form their own families.

Virtually all of what we know about Jackson’s time with the Hempsteads comes from the slave owner’s diary, but di Bonaventura uses inference and documentary sources to flesh out his kirkus.com

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“A relatable, even-keeled, well-written account of the struggles and triumphs of infertility treatment.” from love song for baby x

story of long, dutiful servitude. She also interweaves the stories of Jackson’s family with those of other significant families—e.g., the Livingstons, the Rogers and the Winthrops. Throughout the relevant decades, these families interacted in various ways—in church, public forums, courtrooms, etc. Di Bonaventura offers some gripping stories—notably, John Jackson’s (Adam’s father) fierce attempts to keep his family together, poor Mary Livingston’s losing battle with cancer and the nasty nature of John Winthrop IV. The author pauses occasionally to instruct us about the importance of stone and wood, the legal system, Indian tribes, shipbuilding, the Great Awakenings and much more. Her voice remains generally detached and scholarly throughout.

Although the scholarship is stellar, readers may yearn for more attitude and animation from the author.

BANISHED Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church

Drain, Lauren with Pulitzer, Lisa Grand Central Publishing (304 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4555-1242-3 The inside story of a small hate group that captured big headlines.

The Westboro Baptist Church is infamous for having carried picket signs reading “Thank God for 9/11” on the day it happened. They brought the message “God Hates America” to the funerals of servicemen killed in action and picketed George W. Bush’s second inauguration with signs that read, “God Hates Fag Enablers.” Considering themselves the messengers of a wrathful, vengeful God, they warn of an upcoming apocalypse in which all but the elect members of their church will be plummeted to hell. With the assistance of former New York Times correspondent Pulitzer (co-author: Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs, 2010, etc.), Drain describes the life of this pernicious cult and the seven years that she spent in its clutches. Located in Topeka, Kan., the Church’s congregation brought together 70 people at most, many of them family members of pastor Fred Phelps, whose belief system was based on a fundamentalism that targeted homosexuals. The author’s father converted while filming a documentary about the group. In 2000, he coerced his wife and the author (then 15) to join and accompany him in a move from their Florida home to Topeka. She describes how she struggled to adhere to the group’s doctrine, a struggle caused by extreme social pressure (including her father’s physical abuse and threats to disown her.)Even so, she was ultimately banished from the group (and any contact with her immediate family) in 2007. Drain describes how her own identity eroded during the time she was a member of the cult, as she sought to quell her doubts in order to gain acceptance, and how the dynamic of an extended family intensified their paranoid delusions.

A chilling but illuminating account of the inner workings of a hate group and Drain’s ultimately successful struggle to free herself.

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THE LITTLE WAY OF RUTHIE LEMING A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life Dreher, Rod Grand Central Publishing (288 pp.) $25.99 | Apr. 19, 2013 978-1-4555-2191-3

A Louisiana-born journalist’s memoir of how he came to terms with questions of personal belonging that accompanied his “country mouse” sister’s tragically premature death.

Dreher (Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots, 2006) was a restless dreamer who never quite went along with “the intolerance, the social conformity [and] the cliquishness” that characterized the rural Southern world into which he was born. His pretty and popular sister Ruthie, however, loved their hometown of St. Francisville and knew that everything she ever wanted in life was “in front of her.” When Dreher received his first major career break away from home, he took the job. Ruthie, on the other hand, married and became a schoolteacher who took special interest in children from troubled homes. After the birth of Ruthie’s first child in 1993, Dreher felt the unexpected tug of home. His hopes of reintegrating into his family and making peace with his father were soon dashed, and he returned to his peripatetic life as a journalist in 1994. Then, in 2010, he discovered that Ruthie was dying of cancer and returned to St. Francisville with his wife and sons. The outpouring of love and support he saw from the townspeople for his sister made him wonder once again if he had made the right choice to leave. But as he re-engaged with the dying Ruthie and her family, he also saw that his ambitions had stirred deep resentment in the people he loved most.

Moved by his sister’s courageous battle and the stories of how Ruthie’s everyday acts of love had changed the lives of others, Dreher began the difficult process of humbly accepting “the limitations of place” to finally know “the joys that [could] also be found there.”

Emotionally complex and genuinely affecting.

LOVE SONG FOR BABY X How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood

Dumesnil, Cheryl Ig Publishing (240 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 12, 2013 978-19354396-3-9

A lesbian couple faces infertility in the midst of a historic moment in California’s marriage-equality movement.

Some couples trying to conceive step into a sperm bank as a last resort. Poet Dumesnil (In Praise of Falling, 2009, etc.) |

and her partner started there, but her first pregnancy ended in a blighted ovum—or might have, as she shares an experience that led her to question her dismissive doctor’s reading of the ultrasound. She had another miscarriage, then another, which, in the words of a bizarrely cheerful doctor, “w[on] [her] a ticket to endocrinology!” Though she expresses her sadness and worry, Dumesnil does not use her circumstances as an excuse to treat others badly. She complains about her HMO but appreciates that her endocrinologist did not “bat an eye at these lesbian wannabe mamas in his doorway.” Her experience speaks to the loss of control many accomplished women feel when they try to get pregnant: “[E]very other time I’ve wanted something—like a graduate degree, or a job—all I had to do was work hard to get it…if pregnancy was a merit-based reward, I’d be so pregnant right now.” After her miscarriages, Dumesnil decided not to make plans based solely on pregnancy, which led her to write about, and participate in, the same-sex marriages taking place at the San Francisco City Hall in 2004. Just days before getting married, the author found out she was pregnant. Hours after her televised wedding, she learned that an injunction had stopped the marriages, and she pushed past her anxiety and fatigue to march in protest. Dumesnil’s ability to handle disappointment and setbacks with grace and humor, along with her engaging writing style, make this an engrossing read.

A relatable, even-keeled, well-written account of the struggles and triumphs of infertility treatment.

HARLEY LOCO A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk Rock, from the Middle East to the Lower East Side

Elias, Rayya Viking (320 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 8, 2013 978-0-670-78516-2

A junkie’s-eye view of three decades of addiction in Detroit and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

First-time author Elias, who has been clean since 1997, has enough distance to speak on her past unashamedly, with cleareyed intelligence and without judging her younger self too harshly. The youngest child of a prosperous Syrian family that immigrated to the suburbs of Detroit in the 1960s when she was 8, the author suggests her addictions were a response to the disruption that alienated her from her happy childhood in Syria. Her perspective remained that of the feisty little girl who fought back against bullies and earned the respect of her peers through a kind of reckless experimentation and a constant need to prove herself. “I always knew I couldn’t be ‘the best of the best,’ ” she writes. “I think at a very young age I decided to become ‘the best of the worst,’ which seemed to attract even more attention.” Rather than take the path toward bourgeois security taken by her older siblings, Elias started a post-punk band, earning a living as a hairdresser. In New York, her dual |

careers seemed ready to take off, but her personal life was more complicated. While living unhappily with an adoring boyfriend, she fell deeply in love with a married woman who declined to leave her husband. Elias self-medicated with ecstasy, cocaine, heroin and Valium—anything to ease the pain—and soon found herself helplessly addicted. When snorting heroin became too expensive, a punk-scene friend reluctantly introduced her to mainlining. Thus began a descent into street life, homelessness, petty crime and jail time, alternating with temporary spans of redemption and health followed by heart-breaking relapse.

Though slow to get going, the second half of this memoir is strong stuff, with some truly amazing stories well-told.

THE WAR WITHIN Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation Elizur, Yuval and Malkin, Lawrence Overlook (224 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 7, 2013 978-1-4683-0345-2

Two engaged journalists offer an anxious look at how the “ultras” gained their troubling political supremacy over

a secular state.

Veteran journalists Elizur and Malkin take on the ultraOrthodox with knuckles bared. Despite the founding of Israel as a “state for Jews” and not a “Jewish state,” David Ben-Gurion made a fateful compromise with the ultra-Orthodox party in order to gain support for statehood—with ramifications that are still felt today. The ultra-Orthodox Haredim create in their close-knit communities a deeply religious, segregated lifestyle: little exposure to the outside world, employment or schools and exemption from the requisite three-year military service—in short, an ideological fringe made up of 10 percent of the population that nonetheless holds obstructionist political power because of the clout, and subsidies, it has maintained traditionally by siding with the conservative Likud party. Indeed, in that founding compromise with Ben-Gurion, the ultra-Orthodox were awarded for their compliance the regulation of certain important aspects of daily life, namely Sabbath observance, dietary laws, marriage, divorce and education. And because Israel still hasn’t managed to hammer out a constitution (including basic equal rights for women), the ultras still hold a lock on deciding who is a Jew, how people can marry and what is closed on the Sabbath. By rejecting secular influences, even the teaching of English and mathematics in their religious schools, the Haredim leaders keep control over their flock, the authors maintain, while impeding national progress and possibilities for peace and reconciliation in the country as a whole.

A succinct, polemical debate urging the neutralization of the power of this religious minority for the good of Israeli society.

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“Provocative, smart, densely argued—and deserving of a wide audience and wider discussion.” from the future

THE DEADLY SISTERHOOD A Story of Women, Power, and Intrigue in the Italian Renaissance, 1427-1527 Frieda, Leonie Harper/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $32.50 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-0-06-156308-9

A biographer delivers the scholarly yet very human story of some talented women who held surprising sway in the incredible clutter of city-states that composed Renaissance Italy.

Noting that Italy comprised some 250 individual states, Frieda (Catherine de Medici, 2005) focuses on three powerful families—Sforza, Este, Gonzaga—though others rise and fall throughout her tale, as well, principally the Borgias and the Medici. The stories (and families) are interconnected and extremely complex—witness the 10 pages of family trees preceding the text. (Assiduous readers will want to keep a finger among those pages.) The author follows the fortunes of such women as Caterina Sforza, her husband brutally murdered and mutilated, who flashed traitors in a crowd. Frieda also shows us the vilely corrupt papacy of the time. Greed, violence, sexual depravity, incompetence—all flourished. Throughout, the author wields a sharp rhetorical razor, too. Of Duchess Bona, she writes: “it would have been hard to find a stupider woman,” and Angela Borgia was a “brainless beauty.” Frieda does some restoration on the reputations of the Borgias, particularly Lucrezia, calling much of what had circulated at the time (and later) “a heap of fantastical stories and lies.” Among the most compelling of her accounts: the papacy of Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI) and the quest for power that consumed his son Cesare, who became a Spanish prisoner. Frieda also follows the international politics and military maneuvers of Italy, especially the incursions of France. Shifting alliances, deceptions and lies, the struggle for wealth and power—all are revealed in the stories of women who held (or manipulated) the reins of power when men were incompetent or away battling one another.

Richly researched and deeply complex—at times sufficient to bemuse as much as inform.

THE FUTURE Six Drivers of Global Change

Gore, Al Random House (592 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 29, 2013 978-0-8129-9294-6

A tour de force of Big Picture thinking in which the former vice president gets his inner wonk on.

Gore (Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, 2009, etc.) writes that this book had its origins in an on-the-road conversation about the drivers of global 48

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change—of all kinds, from economic to cultural to environmental. The author spent the next few years outlining, outlining and outlining again—and then thinking, gathering, sifting and writing a tome that he reckons is “data-driven and based on deep research and reporting—not speculation, alarmism, naïve optimism, or blue-sky conjecture.” It is all of the former, with a quarter of the book given over to notes, and none of the latter. One of the six drivers Gore enumerates is the emergence of a technologically driven “global mind” that tends toward the liberating and away from the repressive. At the same time, though, there has emerged a libertarian puritanism that insists on “the reallocation of decision-making power from democratic processes to market mechanisms,” dismissing “the very notion that something called the public interest even existed.”

Sustainable energy sources have similarly emerged even as market mechanisms have pushed “fracking” of fossil fuel deposits, such that—it would not be a Gore book without, yes, alarming statistics—“in the United States an estimated 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid waste have been injected into more than 680,000 wells.” Biomedicine has made extraordinary advances, and yet, because of “unhealthy corporate control of the public policy decision-making process,” medical care is in complete disarray. And so on, the good with the bad. Which will prevail is the question; if for the good, Gore urges, we will need to see “a shift in consciousness powerful enough to change the current course of civilization.”

Provocative, smart, densely argued—and deserving of a wide audience and wider discussion.

THE AIG STORY

Greenberg, Maurice R.; Cunningham, Lawrence A. Wiley (352 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 6, 2013 978-1-1183-4587-0 Greenberg collaborates with Cunningham (Law/George Washington Univ.; Contracts in the Real World, 2012) to tell his side of the story of the incredible rise, and even more precipitous fall, of AIG, once the world’s largest insurance company and the epicenter of one of the biggest bailouts ever.

The authors divide their account into two parts separated

by Greenberg’s resignation from his leadership positions in the company in early 2005 as a result of an orchestrated press campaign organized by then-crusading N.Y. State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whose own subsequent downfall was even more complete than that of AIG, which, in this presentation, he had worked so assiduously to destroy. The authors claim that what led to the 2008 bailout was the incompetence of the leadership that took over after Greenberg quit. His replacements are said to have lost sight of the significance of the risks incurred by the financial derivatives unit responsible for the credit-default swap business, the collapse of which forced the government’s hand. Few of Greenberg’s identified |

“Forced-funny bromides from yet another book-writing Fox News personality.” from the joy of hate

opponents, including AIG’s outside directors, the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, and employees of the state’s attorney general’s office, emerge with their reputations intact. Only now is the company emerging from government ownership, and the authors examine Greenberg’s career building the biggest insurance company in the world.

A Korean War veteran, Greenberg brought Western insurance products to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, helped open China to Western finance, and provided indispensable, sometimes covert, services to the U.S. government.

A useful contribution to the ongoing shaping of the story of the recent financial crisis.

WHY ARE PROFESSORS LIBERAL AND WHY DO CONSERVATIVES CARE?

Gross, Neil Harvard Univ. (416 pp.) $35.00 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-674-05909-2

Gross (Sociology/Univ. of British Columbia; Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, 2008, etc.) examines the facts behind the conservative movement’s oft-heard criticism of higher education: that American universities are, as presidential candidate Rick Santorum famously said, little more than “indoctrination mills” for the political left.

Relying on years of research, the author confirms that conservatives are correct in their belief that many professors align themselves on the liberal spectrum, though he notes also that academia has far fewer radical professors in its midst than generally thought. While a mere 8 percent of professors self-identify as “radical,” a recent study revealed that 62 percent of students believed the term accurately described their professors—proof of the conservative movement’s ability to perpetuate the myth of the radical professor. Gross readily acknowledges that some conservative scholars may feel outnumbered in a university’s social science department but that the professor’s marginalized status is hardly any different than “progressives at some elite law firms.” More interesting than academia’s demographics, however, are the causes of these demographics. In short: What is at the root of liberalism in academia? Do liberal academics share a different value system than their conservative counterparts? Does self-selection play a role? To what extent does one’s politics affect one’s career path? And a related question: How can professors protect their academic freedoms in an environment so closely tied to the politicians who hold the purse strings? Gross examines all of these questions and more, often overwhelming readers with facts and figures that lead to somewhat nebulous conclusions. Its academic tone—while appropriate given the subject matter—reminds readers that an academic in academia produced it. While Gross’ neutrality is admirable, his work’s inability to open itself up to a wider audience risks confining a valuable debate to the primary players within it. |

A dense sociological report on the facts and falsehoods of the political leanings of professors.

THE JOY OF HATE How to Triumph Over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage

Gutfeld, Greg Crown Forum (256 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 13, 2012 978-0-307-98696-2

Forced-funny bromides from yet another book-writing Fox News personality.

Gutfeld (The Bible of Unspeakable Truths, 2010, etc.) waxes outrage over the “phony outrage” of the plaintive class—by which he mostly means liberals. He counsels that the best thing to do about the “tolerati” (“those who traffic in...repressive tolerance,” said tolerance being a synonym for cultural relativism) and the “toleratic” (“a person who claims to tolerate anything until he, she, or it meets a conservative”) is not to care. This being a book full of complaints, the not-caring formula would seem to go only so far. Over the course of his argument, Gutfeld serves up a roundabout defense of racism, since “gay trumps skin color” in any event; defends Michele Bachmann; sneers at people who stop paying their mortgage once they’ve gone underwater; sneers more sneerily still at academics, who, after all, “are not even people in my book”; knocks “doe-eyed simpleton Jackson Browne” and rock-star company for daring to enjoin right-wingers from appropriating their songs; demands recognition as a pop-culture sophisticate all the same, since he was once into Gang of Four, perhaps the only band to out-Marx The Clash; wonders why Islamophobia might possibly be offensive; laughs off green energy; and sneers at Jon Stewart for japing the true patriots of the tea party. Gutfeld offers this screedy package as a species of comedy, just as Rush Limbaugh defends himself as an entertainer, but it’s the same old right-wing stuff.

Either you like it or you don’t, but there’s not much you haven’t seen before, the Gang of Four business aside.

Don’t be outraged by this book. Just don’t care.

BACK OF THE HOUSE The Secret Life of a Restaurant Haas, Scott Berkley (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-425-25610-7

A psychologist and food writer takes a close look at what motivates and defines one of today’s most celebrated chefs.

Haas (Are We There Yet?, 2004) lives close to chef-owner Tony Maws’ famous Boston restaurant, kirkus.com

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‘Going Clear’ and Getting the Story b y

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief

Wright, Lawrence Knopf (448 pp.) $28.95 Jan. 17, 2013 978-0-307-70066-7

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Many of us by now—thanks in part to its intractable reliance on celebrity—think we know something about Scientology, or the oddities of Scientology, to be exact. Tom Cruise is famously loyal to the church, and so is John Travolta; they stand in, in the public’s mind, for Scientology itself (and neither of them ever do odd things like jump on Oprah’s couch or make strange Christmas music videos). People who’ve felt curious enough about Scientology to ask questions may also know that the church’s theology insists the universe was founded 4 quadrillion years ago or that its truly faithful adherents sign a document pledging their lives to the organization for 1 billion years.

That seems to be the extent of most people’s working knowledge of Scientology. That’s partly the church’s own fault; what is required to attain the highest levels of spiritual enlightenment in the church is revealed only to those chosen to receive such information. The IRS has declared that Scientology is a legitimate church, but the church doesn’t talk about a god as frequently as other religions do. “Scientology wants to be understood as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment,” Lawrence Wright observes near the end of his investigative exposé, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief. “It has, really, no grounding in science at all. It would be better understood as a philosophy of human nature.”

But if it’s a philosophy, the practice of it, according to Going Clear, seems at times dogmatic. There are a number of violent, vindictive, odd and paranoid actions attributed to the church of Scientology, David Miscavige, its current head, and L. Ron Hubbard, the church’s founder, in Going Clear. There are pages devoted to Hubbard’s cruelty—he once made a Scientologist in his 50s race two other men by using their noses to push peanuts around the deck of a boat.

“It was hard to say which was worse to watch: this old guy with a bleeding nose or his wife and kids sobbing and crying and being forced to watch this,” a former Scientologist observes.

“Hubbard was standing there, calling the shots, yelling, ‘Faster, faster!’ ” As far as founders of religions go, Hubbard may have been a flawed man. One of the valuable lessons to be taken from Going Clear, however, is that Scientology isn’t some sham outfit to be lightly tossed aside by those who doubt the good it has apparently done for its believers. The “auditing” process Scientologists undergo is akin to therapy. Wright quotes actress Anne Archer and her husband Terry Jastow as attributing the success of their marriage “a hundred percent” to Scientology and its techniques of never interrupting one another and never being critical of each other, for example. |

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“He may have been grandiose and delusional,” Wright observes about Hubbard, “but the endless stream of policy letters and training routines that poured from his typewriter hour after hour, day after day, attests to his obsession with the notion of creating a step-by-step pathway to universal salvation. If it was all a con, why would he bother?”

To guide the reader through an organization that is often difficult for outsiders to comprehend, Wright pins his story on screenwriter and director Paul Haggis, who joined the church in 1975 and split from it in 2009. Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker, looks for a character he refers to as a “donkey”—someone who is “candid” and “intriguing,” who can carry the story. “The thing about Paul Haggis as a key figure is that he’s smart, he’s skeptical, he’s compassionate, and it’s not easy to marginalize him,” Wright says. “So that makes Scientology more interesting and actually more threatening to the readers because one realizes that if Paul could be a Scientologist, it could happen to anybody.”

Having already received the Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, in Going Clear, Wright is now, with Scientology, poking around another organization that inspires fear.

There is a fundamental instinct that drove Wright to investigate Scientology: “I don’t like seeing people bullied,” he says. But as an investigative writer, there was another motive. “When you have a situation where there’s a tremendous amount of distress as there is around Scientology and many charges and the government seems unable or unwilling to be responsive to the accusations, then it’s a great place for an investigative reporter,” Wright says.

“That’s what we’re made for. I thought it was an ideal situation for someone to go in and see what’s actually happening.”

Going Clear is reviewed on page 74 of this issue.

9 Claiborne Smith is the features editor of Kirkus Reviews.

p hoto BY K E N N Y B RAU N

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The Details: Scientology has shrouded itself in secrecy, at least in its upper echelons. But some of the details Wright uncovers in Going Clear include the facts that: • In Scientology, an Operating Thetan [OT] is an enlightened member of the church who “can handle things and exist without physical support and assistance.” An OT is more advanced than a Scientologist who is merely Clear, although the Clear has perfect memory recall and is immune to bacteria, among other skills. In 1958, the Scientology magazine Ability editorialized that “neither Buddha nor Jesus Christ were OTs according to the evidence. They were just a shade above Clear.” L. Ron Hubbard believed that people who aren’t sufficiently prepped, spiritually speaking, to take in the revelations inherent at the OT III level would die of pneumonia.

• After discovering the details of some of his past lives using the E-Meter, a device crucial to the auditing process in Scientology, Hubbard was miffed that Machiavelli, whom he used to know in a former life, stole his line—“the end justifies the means”—in his book The Prince. Hubbard also realized he had been a tax collector in the Roman Empire and a marshal to Joan of Arc. • William Burroughs was drawn to Scientology in its early days.

• Mitt Romney has said that Hubbard’s opus Battlefield Earth is his favorite novel.

Craigie on Main. Though the author wouldn’t deign to be a “foodie” by today’s terms—most restaurant experiences are, to him, “a colossal waste of time and money”—a dinner at Craigie one night launched him into an intensive, behind-the-scenes field study of life in the Craigie kitchen. Haas is painstakingly meticulous in his report, observing every member of the kitchen in turn, working alongside many of them and even interviewing Maws’ parents for the chef ’s complete family history. The author is most focused on the emotional and psychological inner workings of the kitchen dynamics. As he analyzes the inherent tensions in chef–cook relationships, he muses on the cause and effects of Maws’ hot-tempered personality with the distance and interest of a biologist observing a lion taking out a pack of hyenas. Despite his intense closeness to his subject, Haas’ writing never takes on the authority of an insider.

The book’s descriptions of what is presumably some of the most inspired food in the country are tough and dry, and most of the text reads like a court reporter’s transcript of conversations between the author and Craigie employees. Now and then, the pages-long dialogue is broken up by Haas’ patronizing diagnoses of various characters’ behavioral habits; the chef, evidently, has “father issues,” but even he finds that hard to take seriously.

While the militaristic minutiae of restaurant life and its psychological pressures might otherwise make for a gripping study, its presentation here is cluttered and clinical.

WM & H’RY Literature, Love, and the Letters Between William & Henry James

• Hubbard published more books than any other writer, according to the 2006 Guinness World Records (1,084 titles).

• There is a program in Scientology known as the Purification Rundown, which requires church members to spend up to eight hours a day in a sauna taking massive doses of vitamins in order to purge toxins from the body. The medical establishment has been “hostile” to the ritual, but Hubbard apparently thought he should have received a Nobel Prize for creating it.

• Every Scientology church location or mission keeps an office ready for Hubbard for the day he returns to Earth. A yellow legal pad and a pen are waiting for him in each of those offices.

• Hubbard was “fanatically clean but also hypersensitive to soap,” which meant that he had his clothes rinsed up to 15 times a day to remove the smell of detergent, and his chef had to cook his meals using Corningware so that Hubbard couldn’t taste stainless steel in his food. His adherents believed this was evidence of Hubbard’s “superhuman powers of discernment.”

• Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise’s former wife, was allegedly considered a Potential Trouble Source (PTS) by the church after she stopped advancing up the hierarchy of Scientology’s spiritual levels.

- C.S.

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Hallman, J.C. Univ. of Iowa (156 pp.) $21.00 | Mar. 15, 2013 978-1-60938-151-6

A short critique of the letters between the famous James brothers provides an engaging footnote on the relationship and occasional rivalry between two of the finest minds of modern times.

Since academic writing is so often impenetrable, and since philosopher William admitted to being “baffled” by his novelist brother’s writing, one might fear that a study of the siblings from a university press might prove tough sledding. However, this analysis by Hallman (In Utopia, 2010) has a conversational tone that avoids cant. There’s an intimacy here as the brothers criticize each other’s work, engage in gossip and discuss their bowel problems: “Special, and playful attention was reserved for all manner of digestive failure,” as “Henry’s bowels were a perfect training ground for practicing elegant prose that described inelegant events.” Though William was barely a year older than Henry, his “letters often strike a parental tone” toward his younger brother, who “expressed disappointment that their mutual influence did not result in mutual appreciation.” Part of the tension was likely the differing arcs of their careers and influence; while William “inched his way into an academic kirkus.com

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“A concise and controversial statement of what needs to be overcome if the world economy is to return to the path of growth and stability.” from turnaround

career, he had watched as his younger brother jetted straight into the heart of the world’s literary elite.” Rather than resolving mysteries such as the sexuality of lifelong bachelor Henry, who “had better relationships with women in his fiction than in real life,” Hallman resists the conclusions to which others have jumped, while also showing that the relationship between the two brothers was closer, and their work more intertwined, than some have suggested. “I believe there exists no other epistolary commingling of minds as complete between figures that have each proven so influential,” writes Hallman.

A readable treatment of a scholarly subject.

LITTLE RED Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond Hampton, Dina PublicAffairs (336 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-1-58648-093-6

Parallel biographies of three notorious 1960s graduates of a left-wing New York high school.

The Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village, was founded in 1932 by committed leftists and expanded into the Elisabeth Irwin High School 10 years later. In her debut, journalist and “Little Red” alumna Hampton traces the lives of three of the high school’s graduates: Angela Davis, ’61, and Tom Hurwitz and Elliott Abrams, both ’65. In the early ’60s, the school hewed to an old-left, Marxist line, to which these three students responded very differently. Davis, who entered in her junior year after living in segregated Birmingham, found classic communism a revelation to which she has steadfastly clung. Hurwitz, instrumental in the seizure of buildings at Columbia University by Students for a Democratic Society and later in the GIs Against the Vietnam War movement, chafed under the old thinking and reveled in the frenetic activity of the New Left—until he found himself on the receiving end of some Maoist criticism and was ejected from a California collective for being insufficiently revolutionary. Abrams began his political odyssey as a Humphrey liberal and ended as a prominent neoconservative, brought down by the Iran-Contra scandal and still widely vilified by other alumni. Hampton ably maintains an evenhanded respect for her subjects’ widely varying political positions as she explores their evolution over the years, but it is her narrative skills that truly shine. Her evocation of the heady, impulsive spirit of the university-building–occupation era, awash in drugs, sex and over-the-top Marxist rhetoric, is pitch-perfect. Davis’ arrest and 1972 trial for murder in the death of a California judge are presented as a gripping courtroom thriller, counterbalanced later by the inexorable pursuit of Abrams by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

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A capable and compelling memoir of the ’60s and its varied political legacies as reflected in the lives of three survivors.

TURNAROUND Third World Lessons for First World Growth Henry, Peter Blair Basic (240 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-465-03189-4

Henry, dean of the NYU Stern School of Business, argues that the United States and other first-world countries should heed lessons from the devel-

oping sector.

Three decades ago, Mexico defaulted on its debt and Latin America was entering its own debt crisis. The author documents how, in successive stages, they adopted policies that were the basis for major reforms. In the wake of that crisis and others, these policies became known as “the Washington Consensus” and were broadly applied during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Henry attributes these policies to Ronald Reagan’s Treasury secretary James Baker and the debt reorganization plan put forward by his successor, Nicholas Brady. In the author’s view, the combination laid the foundation for successful third-world economic reforms that raised living standards and encouraged equity investment. They accepted fiscal discipline and austerity and opened their economies to the world through trade and investment. Their rejection of illusory self-sufficiency through protectionism and import substitution has proven transformative. Now, writes Henry, it is time for Washington, London and Brussels to “recognize the accomplishments of developing countries, and invite them into a new dialogue about the future of the world economy.” Pointing out that the developed economies are now seeking funds from the very countries, like Brazil, on which they previously imposed restrictions, Henry suggests that developed economies “that once stood at the front of the Third World classroom [must]…take a seat and listen.” If those economies are to engineer a turnaround, it will be through shared sacrifice and disciplined policies putting a shared future ahead of political expediency.

A concise and controversial statement of what needs to be overcome if the world economy is to return to the path of growth and stability.

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STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES “Dream Life” and “Seeing Things” Herman, Michelle Univ. of Iowa (164 pp.) $18.00 paper | Mar. 15, 2013 978-1-60938-153-0

This slim volume includes two extended essays, incisive and conversational, that have plenty of connections between them.

Both “Dream Life” and “Seeing Things” were previously published in different form, but they complement each other as if they were two sides of the coin of the unconscious, the former focusing on dreams and how they work and what they mean, the latter illuminating a rare (or is it?) perception disorder that serves as a more general metaphor. As a writer (of fiction and memoir) and teacher of writing, Herman (Dog, 2005, etc.) confesses that she isn’t a specialist in these areas, that she has a “lack of expertise, paired with plenty of ideas…that combination of knowing little and having theories and opinions about much.”

Yet her opinions are often revelatory and help her overcome the challenge that is central to the first and longer essay, that “nobody wants to hear anybody else’s dreams; everyone wants to tell his dreams to somebody.” So even as readers are threatened with drowning in details about the author’s dream of her grandmother, such specifics lead to the universal understanding that “understanding one’s dreams is more like reading Wallace Stevens—or looking at a painting of Mark Rothko’s—than it is like the one-to-one correlation…of translation. To make ‘sense’ of our dreams, we don’t interpret them so much as we feel our way through them.” The second essay proceeds from the way her daughter occasionally sees things (and her mother in particular) as much smaller or larger than they really are. What initially seems rare, even unique, turns out to be surprisingly common, as so many with whom they share this experience say that they, too, have had it and thought they were the only one.

It even has a name: “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.” Eventually, the author realizes that there are “no experts when it comes to the way our minds work. It turns out that your guess really is as good as mine—or as good as a neurobiologist’s.”

An engaging companion offers a spirit of shared humanity.

THE ROAD OUT A Teacher’s Odyssey in Poor America Hicks, Deborah Univ. of California (320 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-520-26649-0

A moving memoir depicting a teacher’s experience leading a literary workshop for gifted young girls from a forsaken neighborhood in Cincinnati. |

“Though I grew up in small-town Appalachia and my students were coming of age in an urban ghetto,” writes Hicks (Program in Education/Duke Univ.), “we were connected.”

Her students were descendants of Appalachian migrants who moved North for jobs that have since vanished. In 2000, while volunteering as a teacher, Hicks decided to experiment with an after-school and summer program that emphasized literature and creative writing for a small group of girls over time.

Most of the girls in the class “had lost their mothers to drugs, neglect, and the debilitating effect of poverty,” while fathers tended to be abusive or absent. Yet Hicks found them responsive to books and authors that explored the world via workingclass or female protagonists (as well as the transgressive release of horror fiction, which the girls loved). She describes mentoring a core group of eight girls from ages 8 to 12; she reconnected with them at 16. Her carefully constructed memoir fleshes out the girls as characters, capturing their inner ambitions and innate creativity; yet this makes the economic forces stacked against them at their young ages even clearer, giving this tale a grueling, ominous undertone. “I began to realize... that there exists a shadow system of high school education for young people living in the margins of access and opportunity,” writes Hicks. In the epilogue, she asserts that even though “the lives of poor and working-class whites have come under increased scrutiny in the media,” a post-secondary education remains both challenging and vital for those looking to escape poverty and achieve social mobility.

A valuable look at the intellectual lives (and fragile potential) of girls buffeted by American social realities, and an excellent reflection on the challenges of teaching.

(10 b/w photos)

GHOSTS OF JIM CROW Ending Racism in Post-Racial America Higginbotham, F. Michael New York Univ. (352 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 18, 2013 978-0-8147-3747-7

A vision of enhancing racial equality—or simply lessening racial inequality—in America.

By African-American legal scholar Higginbotham’s account, it wasn’t until he entered a well-heeled private school that he encountered the N-word thrown his way.

When it was, a white coach cracked down hard, issuing “a zero tolerance policy for racial epithets.” No more such epithets were forthcoming, though not necessarily out of any inborn kindness on the part of the man who cast that first stone. The takeaway for Higginbotham: Civil rights movements on the part of the oppressed are well and good, but “whites needed to stand up against racism in order for it to cease.” Things are better in some respects than in the 1960s, but, writes the author, the formula has changed.

Blacks—and, to a greater or lesser extent, other nonwhite ethnic groups—are no longer judged and discriminated against strictly on kirkus.com

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“A disturbing, unique, invaluable record of Poland’s suffering and heroism during World War II.” from story of a secret state

the basis of race, but also on factors of class, education, income and access to political power, among others. For example, regarding sports: “Recruited black players could play in games, but ‘walk-on’ black players could not.” Against such broadband exclusion, Higginbotham mounts a spirited defense of affirmative action policies that is backed by good case law and by common sense—or at least a sense of fair play, for, as he notes, few complain about legacy students getting into a particular college, but people certainly do complain when the numbers of black—or Asian or Hispanic—students go up, particularly if there is a perception that they are somehow undeserving. America may be trending toward justice, but that trend is slow. Otherwise, Higginbotham asks elsewhere in this searching argument, why is there a disproportionate number of homeless blacks?

A book worthy of a wide audience and wide discussion.

THE GHOST RUNNER The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn’t Stop Jones, Bill Pegasus (352 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 13, 2013 978-1-60598-413-1

The lonely fight of a long-distance runner.

A brief, failed career in boxing earned John Tarrant (1932–1975) £17. In the middle of the 20th century, that paltry sum meant that he was no longer an amateur in the minds of the world’s sporting hierarchy. Documentary filmmaker Jones uncovers Tarrant’s starcrossed fight against those authorities in his quest to pursue competitive long-distance running, his true love. Tarrant was obsessive. He doggedly and even admirably fought capricious and seemingly vindictive British amateur sporting officialdom in his quest to have his amateurism restored—something they fully had the capacity to do. In many ways, Tarrant is a sympathetic figure. His lifelong struggle to run legally—his willingness to run unsanctioned in official races earned him fame and respect from fans and competitors alike and garnered him the nickname “The Ghost Runner”—was sandwiched around a childhood spent in a Dickensian children’s home and an early and tragic death from cancer. But his obsession also made him a lousy employee and a selfish husband and father. Except for a few occasions when he gets in his own way, Jones tells the story well, albeit in a British idiom that may occasionally ring odd to American readers. His book serves not only to uncover Tarrant’s largely forgotten story, but also to remind readers that the amateur model of sport was oftentimes a hypocritical morass that victimized poor and working-class athletes while protecting a privileged class of sportsmen.

John Tarrant fought against a sporting establishment that held him hostage in what could have been one of the great international ultra-distance-running careers. Jones restores his legend while revealing his very human frailties.

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CORMAC MCCARTHY’S HOUSE Reading McCarthy Without Walls

Josyph, Peter Univ. of Texas (304 pp.) $29.95 | $29.95 e-book | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-292-74429-5 978-0-292-74886-6 e-book

A painter, filmmaker, author and Cormac McCarthy authority/scholar/ fan/groupie (Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy, 2010) offers a gumbo of McCarthy interviews, reflections, paeans and analyses.

The title alludes to the original 1998 exhibition of Josyph paintings—scores of images, all of McCarthy’s former house in El Paso, Texas. After a rambling introduction that insists we ought to pay more attention to McCarthy’s full title of Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness in the West, Josyph commences a series of conversations with other McCarthyites. The author walks the streets of Knoxville, Tenn., with Merle Morrow, who knows all the McCarthy connections there. Then it’s a long conversation with stage director Tom Cornford about directing McCarthy—with special attention to his The Sunset Limited. Next: a lengthy exchange (email? fax? letter?) between the author and Marty Priola, a friend who set up the McCarthy Society website. They discuss The Crossing, sort of, though the conversations drift here and there—with occasional discussions about a dream woman named Heather, about Al Pacino’s capacity to play McCarthy and about theology (they exchange some sharp words in these passages). In the second part of his work, Josyph focuses on his McCarthy paintings, some sightings of his hero and a phone conversation with him. The author records his extensive travels to other writers’ homes (Poe’s in Fordham among them), reveals his liberal politics and vast reading, and displays an impressive self-regard, even for a memoirist.

The lone constant here: an unbridled admiration for McCarthy, whom he praises continually and labels “a rarefied genius.”

Combines the intensity and intentions of a true scholar with the hormonal passions of a Justin Bieber fan.

STORY OF A SECRET STATE My Report to the World

Karski, Jan Georgetown Univ. Press (400 pp.) $26.95 | $16.99 e-book | Mar. 15, 2013 978-1-58901-983-6 978-1-58901-984-3 e-book A well-deserved revival of the author’s 1944 best-seller.

A member of the Polish resistance after Germany’s 1939 conquest, Karski (1914–2000) witnessed unspeakable Nazi behavior and the courageous response of his countrymen before traveling to Britain and the United |

States with the first news of the Holocaust. He was a popular, educated 25-year-old diplomatic officer mobilized days before Hitler’s September 1 invasion. Caught up in the catastrophic rout, his unit retreated across the country and into the arms of the Red Army, which had invaded on September 17. Eventually transferred from a Soviet labor camp to a Nazi labor camp, he escaped and joined the fledgling Polish resistance. As a courier, he traveled through German lines to Paris to meet with the Polish exile government. He was caught by the Gestapo during his second mission and tortured to the point of attempting suicide. Rescued by the resistance, he spent months recuperating. Preparing for his third mission in 1942, he toured Poland at the request of Jewish resistance leaders and was a horrified witness to brutality and mass starvation inside the Warsaw ghetto and the early death camps. Karski traveled through Germany, France and Spain to London, where he delivered his report and microfilm evidence to Polish and British leaders before crossing the Atlantic in 1943 to do the same in the U.S. The mission received wide publicity, and many important figures urged action. Sadly, although Karski made his case personally to leading statesmen, including Franklin Roosevelt and Anthony Eden, the Allies did nothing.

A disturbing, unique, invaluable record of Poland’s suffering and heroism during World War II.

THE LAST BLANK SPACES Exploring Africa and Australia Kennedy, Dane Harvard Univ. (368 pp.) $35.00 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-674-04847-8

An academic correction of the “triumphalist” notion of British exploration of Africa and Australia.

Kennedy (History and International Affairs/George Washington Univ.) sorts through a far more complicated and messy history of 19th-century British exploration than the record has assumed, taking into account much failure as well as a deep reliance on indigenous help. The author asserts that the first British explorers of Australia and Africa looked to the vast continents much as the seafaring explorers had regarded the sea before them, as great unknown oceans, blank spaces to be “measured, mapped, quantified, classified, catalogued, and compared.” Kennedy sees in this epistemological process a form of “erasure” in order to impose upon the unknown continents a “maritime model” such as was employed by Capt. James Cook. Verification required eyewitness accounts scrupulously backed up by scientific method, such as demonstrated in James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) and Alexander von Humboldt’s inspiring field research work through Spanish America. A network of organizations (and accompanying armchair geographers) emerged to sponsor and criticize the scientific enterprise, such as the African Association founded

by Joseph Banks. Besides accounts by well-known explorers like |

David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and John Hanning Speke, Kennedy also looks at travels to Africa by women—e.g., May French Sheldon and Mary Kingsley—and sifts through the explorers’ methodology, shifting logistics depending on circumstances and setbacks, and reliance on indigenous guides.

Moreover, Kennedy teases out a fascinating comparative study of Australian versus African exploration that takes into account the early British settlers’ colonies in the former and the richly entrenched indigenous societies and forbidding disease environment in the latter.

A wealth of research for the armchair traveler and historian. (15 halftones; 2 maps; 1 table)

PUKKA’S PROMISE The Quest for LongerLived Dogs

Kerasote, Ted Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (464 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-547-23626-1

An engaging, comprehensive study of man’s best friend.

In 2008, Kerasote told the tale of his relationship with his beloved Merle (Merle’s Door, 2008, etc.), the stray dog who basically walked out of the desert and became the author’s stalwart companion.

After Merle succumbed to a brain tumor, Kerasote mourned his loss by investigating the factors that influence a dog’s longevity, undertaking a quest to find and raise the healthiest pup possible. “Why has nature decreed that our friendly dogs are already ancient in their teens,” asks the author, “while giving the unhuggable tortoise more than a century of life and some whales two hundred years to swim through the polar seas?” Kerasote attempts to answer that question, combining his close personal observations of canine behavior and health with extensive veterinary input and field research. With his trademark attention to detail and masterful descriptive abilities, Kerasote delves into the crucial factors affecting a dog’s life—breeding, diet, environment, spaying and neutering, living conditions—as he chronicles his hunt for and acquisition of Pukka (pronounced PUCK-ah and Hindi for “first-class”), the good-natured golden Labrador retriever puppy born in Minnesota, whom the author took back home to live with him in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Kerasote covers every aspect of young Pukka’s life, from the genetics and character of his parents, to the car restraints fashioned for their road trip home, to the best food to feed him. Kerasote also graphically probes issues in the U.S. animal shelter system, noting that in a country with upwards of 60 million dogs, 3.4 million dogs and cats are euthanized annually, a vast number compared to Europe and other developed nations. The book is packed with considered, sometimes controversial, reflections alongside accompanying illustrations and helpful notes.

At once encyclopedic and intimate—a tour de force in canine appreciation. (b/w images throughout)

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BROKERS OF DECEIT How The U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East

ONE LAST STRIKE Fifty Years In Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season

Khalidi, Rashid Beacon (208 pp.) $25.95 | $25.95 e-book | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-8070-4475-9 978-0-8070-4476-6 e-book Extracting three episodes from a complex 35-year history, a distinguished Middle East scholar exposes America’s unfitness to mediate between Israel and Palestine.

Khalidi (Modern Arab Studies/Columbia Univ.; Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, 2009, etc.) insists that the struggle over Palestine lies at the core of the Arab/Israeli conflict, with resolution impossible as long as the U.S. continues to act, in the words of one observer, as “Israel’s lawyer.” America, he writes, has only posed as an honest broker, deceiving the public with corrupted rhetoric about “progress” and “the peace process.” All the while, U.S. policymaking—with only a few Cold War exceptions—has been consistently driven by domestic political considerations distorted

by Israel’s muscular congressional lobby, the alliance with Saudi Arabia and the quiet compliance of the other Arab Gulf states, and a complete disregard for the welfare of the Palestinians.

Making use of a number of previously classified documents, Khalidi isolates three clarifying moments that illustrate America’s bias: the torpedoing of the so-called 1982 Reagan Plan by Menachem Begin’s narrow construction of the Camp David Accords; the bilateral Madrid-Washington negotiations of 19911993, especially revelatory of the collusion between the U.S. and Israel; and the Obama administration’s predictable retreat from anything resembling a new policy toward Palestine. Unpacking these episodes in sharp, take-no-prisoners prose, Khalidi maintains that the U.S. and Isreal, “by far the most powerful actors in the Middle East,” through successive administrations and a variety of key officials (Condoleezza Rice and Dennis Ross take a particular beating here), have conspired to deny Palestinians any semblance of self-determination.

A stinging indictment of one-sided policymaking destined, if undisturbed, to result in even greater violence.

La Russa, Tony with Hummel, Rick Morrow/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $27.99 | $27.99 Lg. Prt. 978-0-06-220738-8 978-0062207715 Lg. Prt.

With the assistance of St. Louis PostDispatch veteran baseball writer Hummel, former Major League Baseball manager La Russa dissects the game and his coaching style through the prism of the St. Louis Cardinals’ improbable 2011 championship season.

Though he wasn’t a great player and spent most of his career in the minor leagues, La Russa found success with three different teams in both the American and National leagues and ended up as the third-winningest manager in the history of baseball before his retirement after the 2011 season. This is the fiery baseball guru’s pitch-by-pitch account of that final season and how he successfully convinced an underachieving squad that they could climb back in the standings and win it all. The author largely eschews the interpersonal dramas often associated with America’s pastime, instead focusing on his winning coaching process. That means an almost inning-by-inning deconstruction of key contests throughout the 2011 campaign.

The approach will be familiar to die-hard baseball fans, especially those who fill out the scorecards for each game, but the venerable skipper throws a change-up here and there, harkening back to previous winning seasons with the Chicago White Sox and the Oakland Athletics. However, those forays are brief and ultimately serve to underscore some point or issue pertaining to the 2011 season. La Russa does share some of his feelings about members of the press, most of whom he doesn’t care for.

But here, once again, he doesn’t dwell, only glossing over heated confrontations with annoying sportswriters before jumping headlong once more into the intricacies of managing the Cardinals to ultimate victory.

A baseball exposé that keeps the focus squarely inside the ballpark.

STRANGER HERE How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head Larsen, Jen Seal Press (256 pp.) $16.00 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-58005-446-1

An arresting memoir about the author’s experience with weight-loss surgery.

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until well after the procedure. She admits that her librarian co-workers “probably knew more than I did” about the risks and potential complications, and she spread the first payment across three credit cards. When a doctor reprimanded her for gaining, rather than losing, weight before the surgery date, Larsen asked, “If I don’t lose the weight, can you still operate?”

She smoked and drank heavily. After her painful recovery, she “ate whatever I could fit inside me, and suffered for it, and lost weight anyway.” In the hands of a lesser writer, all of these facts could lead readers to feel judgment or disgust. Instead, Larsen’s honesty and insight make for a searing account of precisely what it feels like to be fat and to have complicated relationships with food, family and friends. We understand exactly why one would look to surgery as a solution to not only excess weight, but also fear, loneliness and unhappiness. Larsen eventually lost the weight, and she also moved on from her dead-end job and her bad relationship. But though her life is measurably better, she still reels from the shock that self-acceptance did not come automatically: “You lose weight without having to develop selfawareness, self-control, a sense of self. In fact, you go ahead and you lose your sense of self.”

Raw vulnerability and rigorous emotional honesty make this weight-loss memoir compelling and memorable.

WAR COMES TO GARMSER Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier Malkasian, Carter Oxford Univ. (336 pp.) $27.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-0-19-997375-0

Using as a model Jeffrey Race’s influential first-person Vietnam War–era analysis, War Comes to Long An, Malkasian (A History of Modern Wars of Attrition, 2002, etc.) evenhandedly examines the Garmser district in southern Afghanistan, where he was stationed as a political officer for the State Department between 2009 and 2011.

A desert strip intersected by the Helmand River, populated by the Pashtun and embroiled in the conflicts that have gained Afghanistan the epithet “graveyard of empires,” Garmser has proven to be the “hot place” designated by its very name, changing hands constantly among tribes and imperial powers. Since 1946, it has also been the key site of massive canal-modernization schemes subsidized by the West, requiring an injection of landless immigrant workers who would prove faithful supporters of the Taliban. Malkasian does a thorough job of sifting through the messy political turmoil since 1979, which slowly began to tear the place apart, and sticking to the effect on the people who live and toil there. In the 1980s, the tribal-led mujahedeen gained steam against the Soviet-backed communists, creating new leaders; the jihad sustained a kind of historical “mystique” as a time when all Muslims fought together before devolving into civil war. The Taliban’s arrival in 1994 established stability by controlling crime and violence, managing to govern |

what many considered an ungovernable country. The decade since the American invasion of 2001 caused much hardship for the people of Garmser, Malkasian writes. The Taliban retook the district in 2006 as a result of lost opportunities by the U.S., requiring subsequent massive intervention, reconstruction and political realignment. Will the Taliban return? Have U.S. counterinsurgency efforts paid off, and, most poignantly, has the investment of 100,000 troops made any difference? Malkasian offers slim optimism in this deeply engaging work.

Insightful, knowledgeable account of the “good war,” intimately informed from the trenches.

NINJA 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior

Man, John Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $21.99 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-06-222202-2 978-0-06-220266-6 e-book

Intriguing look at the enigmatic world of the deadly Asian assassin.

Historian and travel writer Man (Samurai, 2011, etc.) carefully plumbs the ninja’s surprisingly intricate history of stealth strategizing. Popularly thought of as “comic-book creatures,” the author re-establishes the folklore of these fearless “shadow warriors” and examines their historical roots in China, where a “proto-ninja” was first thought to have been enlisted. Shrouded in secrecy, these commissioned, intuitive masters of disguise were able to covertly insinuate themselves into situations, carry out orders of espionage or sabotage, and just as elusively, slip out unnoticed from even the most wellguarded fortresses. In an early chapter, the author provides a ninja-style how-to guide of self-protection secrets, though the origins of their skill sets are somewhat sketchy. Man postulates that these ninja talents may have arisen from bandits, mountain ascetics called yamabushi or nomadic monks. With a conversational delivery, the author offers a guided tour through Japan’s many ninja tourist attractions and fascinating glimpses into the shinobi legacy, which survived a hierarchy of unifiers and shoguns only to eventually acquiesce to Western culture’s mythical interpretation of them. In today’s world, Man concludes, a good amount of fantasy is necessary to keep the spirit and the lore of the ninja alive.

A thoroughly researched, appealing examination of the “original men in black.”

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BEAUTIFUL NATE A Memoir of a Family’s Love, a Life Lost, and Eternal Promises Mansfield, Dennis Howard Books/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $21.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4516-7851-2

An evangelical activist’s account of the troubled relationship between his family and his rebellious, drug-addicted son.

Mansfield was determined not to make the same mistakes parenting his children that his own well-meaning but distant father made with him. When his first child, Nate, was born, he vowed to engage in the kind of “intentional parenting” that would help him acknowledge Nate’s “personal worth and value” on a daily basis. He and his wife worked hard at creating what they believed was a happy life for Nate, which included bedtime stories, road trips and plenty of family celebrations. But what Mansfield didn’t realize was that by being so child-focused and not letting Nate (and later, his two younger siblings) “own their feelings” during moments of conflict, he was unwittingly modeling selfish and self-centered behaviors to his children. This in turn manifested in such unwanted behaviors as vicious fights between Nate and his sister, who at times looked and sounded as though “they were auditioning for roles in Lord of the Flies.”

All three of Mansfield’s children eventually learned to love God, but it was his eldest son who began to use drugs and challenge authority. Nate’s descent into addiction led to run-ins with the law and, later, a felony conviction for drug possession. The greatest tragedy, though, came after his release. Just when Nate had made a commitment to changing his life, he died, a victim of prescription drug abuse. Mansfield takes much of the blame for what happened to his son, but as he does so, he also suggests that the child-centered approach to parenting endorsed by the Christian community may have been flawed.

Candid and heartfelt, though at times penitential in tone. (8-page b/w insert)

OUR OCCULTED HISTORY Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?

Marrs, Jim Morrow/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-06-213031-0

An Art Bell–like exercise in conspiracy theory.

Fans of Rowdy Roddy Piper’s John Carpenter romp They Live (1988) know the setup: “conventional science, and perhaps even institutions administered by the federal government or funded by the wealthy elite, has worked to conceal our possible true heritage.”

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Noting the weasel words “perhaps” and “possible,” what might that heritage be? Well, children, we’re all stardust, and in the weirdness of our DNA—so much of which, conspiracy theorist Marrs (The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies that Threaten to Take Over America, 2008, etc.) writes, is made up of a useless, redundant nothingness of dead code—we may just harbor clues to a time when strange critters called the Anunnaki strode the Earth. Or maybe most of us are just meat for the overlords, who are biding their time—and maybe the “wealthy elite” and their minions are really the Anunnaki in disguise. After all, you knew Mitt Romney acted a little weirdly and robotically up there on the hustings, didn’t you? Throughout this book, which P.T. Barnum would have loved, Marrs throws every conspiracy theory he can at the problem, from the “occulted” existence of a 10th planet in the solar system (the masters don’t want you to know about that, of course) to alchemy and the hidden history of gold.

The result is an odd sort of populism, whereby we earthlings are urged to rebel against our corporate overlords and their “millennia-long agenda of attempting to subjugate the human population.” Huzzah!

To call this hokum is to malign that useful word. Suffice it to say that Carpenter’s film is a hell of a lot more fun.

THE TRIBAL KNOT A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change McClanahan, Rebecca Indiana Univ. (338 pp.) $20.00 paper | $17.99 e-book Mar. 28, 2013 978-0-253-00859-6 978-0-253-00867-1 e-book

The account of a writer’s quest to understand her place in the grand generational scheme of her family.

Poet McClanahan (Deep Light, 2007, etc.) was the family “archive junkie [and] keeper of all things outdated and moldy.”

Then one day, she realized that for all her apparent knowledge, the truth about her forebears’ lives was “wider and deeper” than she realized. She begins her account by delving into the pages of her Great Aunt Bessie’s 1897 diary, interweaving actual fragments from it with her own imaginative reconstructions of Bessie’s life in rural Indiana. McClanahan then builds on the day-to-day details of Bessie’s letters, pictures and other family documents to construct a narrative that depicts a hardworking family of farmers and day laborers who helped tame the Indiana frontier and build its cities. She includes a whole cast of colorful family characters but emphasizes the relationships between and among the females, including Bessie, her sister, their mother and the author’s mother; it was the women who unwittingly served as family chroniclers. Inevitably, McClanahan’s research uncovers painful secrets, including her grandmother’s possible participation in Women of the KKK. The narrative is complex, with the author attempting to depict several generations within a family but also place that family within larger |

SON OF A GAMBLING MAN My Journey from a Casino Family to the Governor’s Mansion

historical contexts. Because it focuses on the minutiae of lived reality (especially in the first half of the text) and tries to do too much at once, it may leave readers—except perhaps those with a specific interest in early Hoosier social history—in a knot of frustration.

Moving at times, but narratively overreaching.

CARRY ON, WARRIOR Thoughts on Life Unarmed Melton, Glennon Doyle Scribner (288 pp.) $25.00 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-4516-9724-7 978-1-4516-9823-7 e-book

A wife and mother’s reflections on being imperfect and loving it.

When people from her church started telling blogger and momastery. com founder Melton that she and her family seemed so “perfect,” she was dismayed. Rather than continue to let others believe that she led a trouble-free life, the author decided to become “a reckless truth-teller.” In a memoir that is also an inspirational guide to daily living, Melton tells the story of how she learned to carry on through the inevitable trials of living “without armor and without weapons.” For two decades, she writes, “I was lost to food and booze and bad love and drugs.” Her problems with alcohol and drugs led to arrests, a criminal record and difficulties getting a job. Although she was happily married, Melton’s relationship with her husband had begun as a result of “confusing sex with love, and [winding] up pregnant.” Then one day she was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Melton credits a deep faith in God as well as strong connections with her family as being the cornerstones of her personal success. But as with everything else, learning to make those relationships work was a daily challenge. As a wife, Melton had to be willing to not only understand her husband’s needs, but be honest about her own and find effective ways to communicate them. As a mother, she had to learn to forgive herself for allowing her anxieties “to pour out like gasoline on [the] raging fire” of her children’s tantrums and other difficult behaviors. Only by living in a state of loving vulnerability would she be able to do what she desired most: touch others and be touched by them in return.

Gentle words of wisdom from a woman driven by “senseless, relentless hope.” (Author tour to Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Naples, Fla., New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C.)

Miller, Bob Dunne/St. Martin’s (272 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-312-59181-6

The candid account of how the son of a casino owner who consorted with Chicago gangsters found his way into Nevada state politics and into the governor’s mansion.

Chicago native Miller was just 10 years old when his illegal bookmaker father got the opportunity to run “a legal (but posh) gambling resort in…Las Vegas.” The Sin City of the 1950s bore no resemblance to the sprawling metropolis it would become: “Las Vegas spread out like boiling water on a flat surface, the streets almost swallowed by the desert.” Here, Miller’s father was able to remake himself into a highly respected casino businessman and pillar of the community. After studying law, a profession his father had once dreamed of pursuing, the author began working in the field of law enforcement. Eventually, he ran for and was elected Clark County district attorney, but not without running into the shadow of his father’s colorful past.

In an attempt to discredit him, his opponent had suggested that Miller could never be “an impartial county prosecutor if [he] was the son of someone in the gaming business,” especially someone who had dealt with former mobsters. This would not be the last time Miller would encounter this kind of prejudice.

Throughout the remainder of a political career that would ultimately lead him to the Nevada governor’s mansion, Miller successfully staved off attacks against both his character, as well as that of his father. He never apologizes for what his father was, nor does he attempt to play down his father’s activities. Rather, Miller celebrates having grown up “the son of a gambling man” and having had the chance to serve a state that gave that gambling man the chance at a better life.

A refreshingly unpretentious statement of personal history and political accomplishment that avoids the pitfall of excessive self-congratulation.

CHAMPION OF CHOICE The Life and Legacy of Women’s Advocate Nafis Sadik Miller, Cathleen Univ. of Nebraska (524 pp.) $34.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8032-1104-9

A dense biography of Dr. Nafis Sadik, who changed the world for women through her work on population control.

Miller (Creative Writing/San Jose State Univ.; Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad, 1998, etc.) researched |

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“Although human cognition remains uniquely profound, evolution guarantees that it has a long history, and Morell makes a fascinating, convincing case that even primitive animals give some thought to their actions.” from animal wise

Sadik for 10 years to give us this biographical view of the former undersecretary-general and executive director of the U.N. Population Fund. The book follows the improbable path of the Pakistani Sadik through partition, medical school, her early work in local population control and her efforts for the U.N. Population Fund, which she directed for 13 years. Sadik’s family “celebrated her femininity, valued her wishes, gave her the same educational opportunities as her brothers, then encouraged her career and independence.” She worked passionately against genital mutilation, obstetric fistula and childhood marriage. Through Sadik’s tenure at the U.N., the organization was “able to bring respectability to the concept of family planning.” She helped set the tone for controlling population growth by empowering women through education and ensuring basic human rights. The apex of Sadik’s career was the U.N.’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. She outmaneuvered even the Vatican to support reproductive choice for women, brokering consensus for a 20-year plan to address world population and development. Miller intersperses each chapter about Sadik with vignettes of women she met while researching this book. These personal stories introduce us to victims of abuse, persecution, genital mutilation, prostitution and gang rape.

The author also uses extensive quotes to bolster her story, but these passages lack concision—as do other parts of the book.

Ultimately, it’s a thoroughly researched, inspiring story that runs more than 100 pages too long.

A long-winded view of a fascinating game-changer.

HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate

Moore, Wendy Basic (368 pp.) $28.99 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-465-06574-5

The award-winning author of The Knife Man (2005) returns with a true-life, truly bizarre tale set in Georgian England.

Thomas Day (1748–1789) had numerous virtues: He supported the American Revolution, opposed slavery, believed in living meanly to support those in need, abhorred social conventions, and wrote best-selling poetry and children’s books. But as Moore shows us in this often shocking tale, Day was, in contemporary parlance, a creep—a man who took into his keeping two young girls whom he raised in a sort of sick competition to see which one would become his bride. Such behavior today, of course, would land him in prison for a lengthy sojourn, and Moore struggles valiantly to balance her disdain for Day’s soaring arrogance and male entitlement (and cruelty) with her wonder and scholarly disinterest. Day wasn’t a physically prepossessing fellow, but his considerable fortune and earnest manner caused many to overlook his eccentricities. Greatly influenced by Rousseau, Day cast 60

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about for a young woman who would meet his exacting spousal standards. Seeing none, he went to a foundling hospital, where he lied to obtain the services of two pre-pubescent girls, whom he named Sabrina and Lucretia. He tutored them, toughened them up with harsh physical training and raised them to be ideal partners for him (his intellectual equals, but also his servants).

Day eventually sent Lucretia packing and invested all in Sabrina.

It didn’t work out. Both eventually married other partners (and were more or less happy), and Sabrina ended up closely allied with the family of writer Fanny Burney. Her odd story found its way into writings by Burney, Trollope, Henry James and others.

A darkly enlightening tale—thoroughly researched, gracefully written—about Enlightenment thought, male arrogance and the magic of successful matrimony.

ANIMAL WISE The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures Morell, Virginia Crown (352 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-307-46144-5

Animals not only have minds, but personalities and emotions. They make plans, calculate, cheat and even teach, writes veteran science writer Morell (Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings, 1997) in this delightful exploration of how animals think.

Until 50 years ago, most scientists—but not Darwin— believed that blind instinct governed animal behavior; thinking was unnecessary and therefore absent. Morell documents her interviews with scientists across the world whose studies have reduced this to a minority opinion. Readers anticipating the traditional high-IQ dog/monkey/elephant examples will receive a jolt in the first chapter, which reveals that ants are no slouches in the brain department. Members of a complex society, they solve problems with a flexibility that would be impossible if ant neurons were simple and hard-wired. No less impressive are fish, birds and rats, which the author examines in subsequent chapters. Fish feel pain. Birds sing because their parents teach them.

Parrots not only imitate human sounds, they know what they are saying and can identify numbers, shapes, colors and even differences between them. Rats engaged in play make sounds that reveal that they are enjoying themselves. Entering familiar territory, Morell also looks at elephants and dolphins, which have long memories and sophisticated personal relationships that include genuine affection. While chimps perform their impressive feats, dogs occupy the final chapter since many experts believe that a dog’s obsession with reading and responding to our cues make it the best model for understanding the human mind.

Although human cognition remains uniquely profound, evolution guarantees that it has a long history, and Morell makes a fascinating, convincing case that even primitive animals give some thought to their actions. |

THE NEXT SCOTT NADELSON A Life In Progress Nadelson, Scott Hawthorne Books (264 pp.) $16.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-9834775-6-3

Nadelson (Aftermath: Stories, 2011, etc.) takes a break from fiction to deliver this bit of personal history.

The author grew up in New Jersey, but the first half of his memoir takes place in Oregon, where he moved after college. There he met his ex-fiancee, the woman who acted as impetus for the book. She left Nadelson a month before their planned wedding, and the breakup and its lonely aftermath form the backbone of his musings. After spending the bulk of the book chronicling those years, Nadelson turns to memories of his high school years and one summer as an adolescent at camp. During these chapters, he occasionally refers back to the dark period he experienced after his breakup, but he doesn’t connect the segments in any major way. The lessons learned from his younger self are, when defined, eloquent and universal.

About his uncle’s suicide he writes, “What I glimpsed in Uncle Mitch’s death, I can see now, was the well of potential suffering we all live with but rarely acknowledge.” These moments hint at the wisdom acquired with time and self-examination, but they are unfortunately matched and even overshadowed by the opposite: times when the author sounds like he’s still an angry teenager. Describing parents of his fellow campers, he writes, “These parents were the tacky rich, desperate to prove how high they’d climbed, and their children were spoiled and snobbish, nothing to envy.” Nadelson may be right about this, but coming from the point of view of his older and hopefully wiser self, it just sounds bitter and judgmental. The series of vignettes he sketches are well-illustrated, but they lack focus and direction; many of them have little or nothing to do with the relationship disaster that seems to have sparked the writer’s life analysis.

Mostly for fans of Nadelson’s fiction.

PICKING UP On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City Nagle, Robin Farrar, Straus and Giroux (304 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-374-29929-3

A deserving profile of the hardworking folks who work a particularly dirty job.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, refuse collection is the seventh most hazardous occupation. Nagle (Anthropology and Urban Studies/New York Univ.), the New York Department of Sanitation’s first-ever |

anthropologist-in-residence, confirms this with insightful information on both the job itself and the men and women who scour New York City’s streets. The physically strenuous work of the garbage collector encompasses the three-part official mandate of collection, disposal and snow removal. Though these distinct laborers receive “scant notice and even less praise” for collecting citywide refuse, Nagle writes, most are dedicated to their unique livelihood and faithfully adhere to the many restrictions of the trade, including the non-acceptance of tips, the rigorous written and physical exams, and the “instant termination” drug policy. Nagle points out that it’s our “lushly consumptive economy and culture” keeping these reliable workers in business, since, without them, “the city becomes unlivable, fast.”

Her head-to-toe immersion in the sanitation process included manning a garbage-collection route and often exasperatedly reporting that the job is less a matter of on-the-job perils and more about the early-morning start times and the sheer physical resiliency required for successful employment. Nagle takes the science of scavenging seriously, as evidenced by her postgraduate seminar “Garbage in Gotham,” which included a tour of the colossally expansive Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill. Her multifaceted analysis alludes to the impermanent nature of the things we own, including our own bodies, and how the sanitation worker performs just one key component of that intricate transmogrification.

Sure to garner newfound respect for an essential yet greatly underappreciated workforce.

THE END OF POWER From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What it Used to Be

Naím, Moisés Basic (304 pp.) $27.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-465-03156-6

Former Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Naím (Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hi-Jacking the Global Economy, 2006, etc.) argues that global institutions of power are losing their ability to command respect.

Whether considering institutions of government, military, religion or business, the author believes their power to be in the process of decaying. He writes that a threefold revolution, characterized by “More, Mobility and Mentality,” is challenging the existing model of power, and he explains his argument in concise terms: “More” is shorthand for more people, more countries and more wealth; “mobility” involves both physical migration between and within countries and includes the communications revolution; “mentality” refers to the increasing openness of people to rejecting the status quo (typified by the recent uprisings in the Middle East). Naím defines power as “the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals,” and he claims that it works kirkus.com

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“An intriguing mixture of challenging ideas and Utopian solutions to the broader issues regarding social welfare currently under debate.” from creative intelligence

CITIZENVILLE How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government

through four different channels—the threat of force, codes of accepted behavior, persuasiveness, and incentives or rewards.

The author suggests that coercive potentials are undermined by increasing numbers of people who are healthier and more informed, many of whom live in jurisdictions that are more porous, less deferential to authority and harder to police. Naím supplements this broader view with discussions of the decentralization of global business, changes in how wars are fought and similar current developments.

A data-packed, intriguing analysis that is not entirely convincing.

NAPALM An American Biography Neer, Robert M. Belknap/Harvard Univ. (290 pp.) $29.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-0-674-07301-2

The book begins with the story of the iconic 1972 photograph of a 9-yearold Vietnamese girl running naked down a road after being severely burned in a napalm attack. Readers expecting a polemic may be pleasantly surprised at this lucid account of the technical, political and ethical features of a notorious symbol of American inhumanity in war.

Neer (History/Columbia Univ.) writes that napalm is a thickening agent mixed with flammable petroleum. An advantage over traditional incendiaries is that the thick gel sticks to its target and burns far longer. Developed by Harvard researchers in 1942, it was soon put to use in flamethrowers against dugin Japanese troops and in B-29 raids on Japanese cities, which killed far more civilians than the atomic bombs. Although less publicized, even more napalm fell during the Korean War, producing vast devastation and death in North Korean cities.

Only mildly controversial at this point, its use against guerillas in Vietnam produced gruesome civilian casualties and international revulsion which persists. A 1980 U.N. treaty banning the use of incendiaries against civilians was quickly adopted by most nations but not the United States. However, in deference to world opinion, military spokesmen no longer used the word.

When accused of dropping napalm during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they denied it, explaining that these were firebombs. President Barack Obama signed the treaty on his first day in office, although it includes a reservation allowing the U.S. to ignore it.

Long superseded by other widely denounced emblems of American exceptionalism (drones, cluster bombs, torture), napalm receives an overdue but thoroughly satisfying history.

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Newsom, Gavin with Dickey, Lisa Penguin (272 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 7, 2013 978-1-59420-472-2

A former mayor of San Francisco introduces methodology to improve citizens’ interaction with their government

through the Internet.

Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, reflects fondly on his mayoral terms and his efforts to accelerate the learning curve for an often bogged-down city government operating “on the cutting edge—of 1973.” As founder of an impressive array of small Bay Area businesses, the author understands the power and influence technology can wield—but how to harness and channel it to engage smart, forward-thinking consumers with their respective bureaucracies? Overcoming governmental “technophobia” is key to bridging that gap, but disinterest, privacy concerns and procurement costs are also roadblocks. Newsom cites many affirmative initiatives on data sharing, governmental transparency and numerous interactive applications like QR codes or his “Citizenville” gaming concept.

While conducting research, the author came into contact with a host of technologically savvy professionals, from software pioneers and hyperproductive tech executives to fellow entrepreneurs and even George Clooney, who laments the death of individual privacy. Newsom’s pitch for a compulsory donation system to co-fund government projects or the concept of incentivizing to gain more rapid solutions is certainly progressive. An idea to offer $1 billion to the innovator of a cure for a constantly morphing disease like AIDS, however, comes off like a lofty campaign promise. Still, the book remains fresh and lively with Newsom emerging as a persuasive, if fast-talking, progressive proponent focused on how best to “radically rethink the relationship between citizens and government.”

Empowering, motivating and just a tad self-indulgent.

CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

Nussbaum, Bruce Harper Business (368 pp.) $28.99 | Mar. 15, 2013 978-0-06-208842-0

Former BusinessWeek assistant managing editor Nussbaum (Innovation and Design/Parson School of Design; Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against Aids, 1990, etc.) makes the case that the future of American capitalism lies in unleashing creativity. |

The author believes that students can be trained to become creative and that it is a skill that can be assessed. He combines lessons from the “personal growth movement of the 1960s and ’70s” and observations about how successful enterprises harness creativity and team effort (e.g., Google, Apple and Facebook).

Nussbaum also proposes supplementing the standard IQ measure with what he calls a creativity quotient. In the author’s view, today’s dominant model of capitalism, based on the hegemony of “efficient market theory” (which makes short-term profit the main criteria for investment), was responsible for the recent recession and has “taken a devastating toll on innovation.” The author compares this to the period from 1933 to 1976, “a time when business leaders were responsible not simply to shareholders, but to many stakeholders.” The author believes that in order to compete globally, American business must pick up from the 1990s, when U.S. global hegemony was based on the inventiveness of Silicon Valley and futurists predicted major advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. He offers a radical model for investment in technology startups based on local sources of financing and the possibilities of broad-based online social networking. Such an economy would embrace risk-taking, see uncertainty as opportunity and require minimal government intervention. Education would be transformed to emphasize hands-on creative activity, and students would be encouraged to wed ideas to their implementation.

An intriguing mixture of challenging ideas and Utopian solutions to the broader issues regarding social welfare currently under debate.

ERASING DEATH The Science that Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death Parnia, Sam with Young, Josh HarperOne (256 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-06-208060-8

A pioneer in the field of critical-care medicine poses the profound question: “What does the recovery of consciousness after the complete cessation of heartbeat and brain function” tell us about the relationship between the mind and body in the process of dying?

With the assistance of Young (co-author, with Howie Mandel: Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me, 2009, etc.), Cornell Medical Center doctor Parnia (What Happens When We Die, 2005, etc.) explains that modern medicine now has the potential to bring people back to life after they have suffered cardiac arrest and ensure that they do not suffer brain damage as a result. Using the space program as a model, Parnia suggests the need for a global effort to ensure optimal standards of care available to everyone.

He reviews the development of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and up-to-date treatments using mechanical compression devices, cooling body temperature to slow the process of cell decay and administering drugs to increase blood pressure. The |

problem is that most medical professionals are not technically trained on the most advanced practices, and hospitals are under financial pressure to limit CPR. Nonetheless, Parnia is optimistic that such innovations as direct intravenous infusion of oxygen molecules will cheapen costs. Since it is now possible to resuscitate people who would previously have been pronounced dead, the question then arises: When does death occur? Death is not an event, writes the author, but a process that is sometimes reversible. This idea leads him to question the implications of near-death or after-death experiences. While they do not in themselves substantiate any religious beliefs, there are too many documented cases to be ignored. People from diverse cultures who hold different religious beliefs, including atheism, describe many common features, such as seeing a bright light and a guiding figure, and out-of-body experiences.

A fascinating discussion that addresses medical, moral and social issues and their implications for understanding consciousness, self-awareness and the soul.

TRADING BASES A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball (Not Necessarily in That Order) Peta, Joe Dutton (368 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 7, 2013 978-0-525-95364-7

A fun approach to developing the discipline necessary to separate reproducible skills from the disruptive effects of chance in baseball, finance and life.

Peta’s 15-year career as an equity trader with Lehman Brothers abruptly ended when an ambulance ran into him and crushed his leg. The author discusses how he pulled his life back together in the months when he was laid up, unable to walk and separated from his family on the West Coast. Peta developed a system for betting on baseball and began the work to turn it into a business. Conceptually, the author built on the work of predecessors from the sabermetrics school of baseball statistical analysis like Bill James and Nate Silver. Peta worked on developing statistical indicators that might give him an edge in the 2011 season, looking to find ways to separate analysis of acquired skills from chance or accident. Peta’s approach is helpful to understanding statistical analysis in any field, not just the chosen baseball specialty. He applies the same approach to Wall Street trading results and showing how using profit-and-loss results to assess a manager’s performance can be as misleading as using wins to identify a team’s best pitcher. Neither reflect quantification of developable skill sets, but rather uncontrollable external factors. Peta’s system was ready for operation by the beginning of the 2011 season; by August, he was able to walk, ready for the coming World Series. His system ended its first season comfortably ahead.

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WEDLOCKED A Memoir

Ponteri, Jay Hawthorne Books (174 pp.) $16.95 paper | May 14, 2013 978-0-9838504-8-9

What purports to be an unflinchingly, devastatingly honest look at the author’s marriage—and the institution of American marriage in general—instead reveals its layers of deceit, even self-deception.

There must be some domestic discord in the air. Thematically, this memoir by writing professor and literary essayist Ponteri shares much with the recent Judd Apatow film, This is 40, in which the director cast his wife and daughters in a marital comedy drawn from their real life, a movie that even those who found it often funny considered dark and edgy, often uncomfortable. “The phrase married man suggests a man who cannot love other women, a man doomed to loneliness,” writes the author, who confesses “the best sex I’ve ever had is in my head.” And his head is where this memoir necessarily unfolds, as he combines every woman he desires in the way he no longer does his wife into the singular Frannie, “a composite. Frannie is every girl my wife is not. Frannie is the other woman I draw into my fantasy world, every woman to which I masturbate, every woman I ogle.” Frannie is also the focus of a manuscript to which the author devoted “90 minutes a day, five days a week, all this time spent exploring our marriage separate from my wife,” a manuscript found by his wife.

She understandably felt betrayed, yet did the author really betray her with a woman who didn’t exist? Even as it explores the layers of truth that are possible within a memoir and the inventions and distortions of memory on which it depends, the writing suffers when it moves from the author’s marriage to marriage itself, the “tight, toxic silence around marriage” that results in “not only our personal failures at marriage but our culture’s collective failure at marriage, the failure of an institution.”

As this personal essay veers toward polemic, its humorless author seems a little too proud of his bravery at voicing the unspeakable, shattering the taboo.

THE DAY MY BRAIN EXPLODED A True Story

Rajamani, Ashok Algonquin (256 pp.) $13.95 paper | Jan. 22, 2013 978-1-56512-997-9 Barely surviving a cerebral hemorrhage gives the author a new perspective on life.

Set to attend his brother’s wedding, Rajamani experienced a subarachnoid intracranial cerebral hemorrhage while masturbating before the ceremony. This 64

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provides the sole unexpected moment of this memoir, which traffics heavily in clichés and a conversational tone that disserves the challenges of recovery. The narrative jumps back and forth, juxtaposing anecdotes about growing up as a bookish Indian-American with chapters on the days and weeks following the hemorrhage. Taken individually, the chapters are hit-ormiss; while some tie back into the challenges of recovery, others provide unrelated background on the author’s childhood, adolescence and his fast climb up the corporate ladder. One would guess that Rajamani is sharing his largely unfettered rise to business success to illustrate the crashing loss of his world after the hemorrhage. Unfortunately, the writing never goes to any depth in reflecting on the changes brought about. Rajamani presents the anecdotes of his life as one might share personal stories to an impromptu gathering of co-workers at a new job—guardedly, always looking to pose the events in the best possible light.

The interesting details and reflections largely fall through the cracks, leaving readers with little to reflect upon beyond a general appreciation of the resilience of the human brain.

Dramatic story, dull delivery.

DRAGGING WYATT EARP

Rebein, Robert Swallow Press/Ohio Univ. (236 pp.) $19.95 paper | $15.99 e-book Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8040-1142-6 978-0-8040-4052-5 e-book An affecting memoir of life in smalltown Kansas.

Wyatt Earp’s old haunt is still haunted by him, or at least some version of him, the heroic lawmaker that brings in tourists. Rebein (Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism, 2001) will have none of that: His Earp is “the greatest bouncer the West ever knew,” a man skilled at rolling drunk cowboys and shaking down former Confederate soldiers. More than that, Earp lends his name to a strip of asphalt that runs through the heart of Dodge City, where drag racing and beer drinking formed the heart of Saturday night. Rebein’s upbringing was eccentric but not particularly hard, by his account. His father was the master of the add-on and the remodeling project, but was otherwise fairly normal, though with twists. The owner of scrap heaps and habitué of body shops and other places where metal was king, he had a penchant for accumulating junkyard dogs, “all of them troubled in some way, unmanageable by anyone but him.” For a young Rebein, the world of wrecked cars became a wonderland, and he writes lyrically of the things that turned up in them, from porn to lighters to photographs to ammunition. Elsewhere, he deconstructs aspects of small-town life on the Western plains, including the rodeo, which as a teenager he shunned as yet one more thing that spelled hick-dom but for which he has an older fellow’s appreciation, and the casino, which has become a mainstay of Dodge City—and even more of a draw than the legend of Wyatt Earp. |

“Throughout her sojourn down the gastrointestinal tract, science writer Roach enlists her abundant assets of intelligence and humor while dissecting this messy and astounding part of the human body.” from gulp

HANK GREENBERG The Hero of Heroes

A minor but well-crafted work, and an all-too-rare glimpse of daily life in rural America.

GULP Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Roach, Mary Norton (336 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 1, 2013 978-0-393-08157-2

Throughout her sojourn down the gastrointestinal tract, science writer Roach (Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, 2011, etc.) enlists her abundant assets of intelligence and humor while dissecting this messy and astounding part of the human body.

The author ties her curiosity about this region of the body and what many consider a disgusting or off-limits subject for polite conversation to a fifth-grade classroom encounter with a headless, limbless, molded-plastic torso: “Function was not hinted at in Mrs. Claflin’s educational torso man….Yet I owe the guy a debt of thanks. To venture beyond the abdominal wall, even a plastic one, was to pull back the curtain on life itself.”

The author begins by detailing the subtle, complex role the nose plays in taste; why humans have trouble finding names for flavors and smells; and how the human nose can be thought of as a “fleshly gas chromatograph.” Roach chronicles her visit to an oral processing lab and her interview with a prisoner who patiently explained the intimate details of utilizing the alimentary canal for illegal purposes. The author grapples with the history of flatulence and adeptly describes the torment caused by Elvis Presley’s megacolon, which ultimately caused his demise.

She also fleshes out just what constitutes the “ick factor” in this tale of ingestion, digestion and elimination. Roach’s abundant footnotes serve as entertaining detours throughout this edifying excursion. When a topic heads toward sketchy territory, the author politely provides a heads-up for squeamish readers.

Whether Roach is writing about lateral tongue protrusion, the taboo surrounding saliva or whether “rectal consumption of beef broth breaks one’s Lenten fast,” the author entertains with this incredible journey into the netherworld of the human body.

A touchy topic illuminated with wit and rigor, packed with all the stinky details.

Rosengren, John NAL/Berkley (400 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-451-23576-3

A veteran sportswriter fondly recalls the life of “the greatest Jewish ballplayer of all time.”

While not the first Jew to play major league baseball—and Sandy Koufax fans will argue he wasn’t the greatest—Hank Greenberg (1911–1986) was the first to succeed spectacularly, paving the way for Jews in the national pastime as Jackie Robinson did for African-Americans. In this cradle-to-grave biography, Rosengren (Journalism/ Univ. of Minnesota; Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid, 2008, etc.) pays particular attention to Greenberg’s playing days, to his towering achievements in the game, to the 47-month chunk of his prime lost to World War II and to his later career as a baseball executive. We learn, as well, about the man: his devotion to his parents, his tireless work ethic, his modesty, his short fuse and his popularity with the ladies.

Though not especially devout, the “Jewish Babe Ruth” famously refused to play on Yom Kippur in 1934, a decision that simultaneously chanced the ridicule of gentiles and signaled to Jews that tradition need not be wholly sacrificed to assimilation. The slugger fully understood his symbolic role, the feature of Greenberg’s story that most clearly engages Rosengren. During this feared hitter’s heyday—a time when Hitler assumed power in Germany, when the KKK thrived in America’s South, Detroit’s own Henry Ford was the nation’s best known anti-Semite, “an age when Jews were considered weak, unathletic and impotent,”—Greenberg emerged as a powerful figure, an accomplished and unapologetic ethnic standard-bearer. Rosengren traces the steps toward Greenberg’s triumph, vividly reminding us of his hard-earned, path-breaking role.

A sensitive look at the cultural impact of the man who once was “the face of Judaism in America.”

THE BARONESS The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild Rothschild, Hannah Knopf (304 pp.) $26.95 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-307-96198-3

The fascinating story of a member of Europe’s banking aristocracy who spent the second half of her life swinging with New York’s jazz aristocracy.

British filmmaker Hannah Rothschild’s print debut is based on a BBC documentary she made about her great-aunt Nica (1913–1988). The book is an engaging mixture of well-researched biography and personal reminiscences about her formidable |

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relatives. A cogent account of the Rothschilds’ rise from Frankfurt’s bleak Jewish ghetto to the international capitals of finance makes palpable the world of privileged confinement Nica inhabited. Born into the English branch, Nica thought she could escape by marrying a glamorous French executive, but he proved as stuffy as her family. After giving birth to five children and narrowly escaping from France during the Nazi occupation, she was a restless diplomat’s wife on her way back to his posting in Mexico when she first heard the music of Thelonious Monk. “I never went home,” she later told her great-niece.

She checked into New York’s Stanhope Hotel and was soon driving Monk and other then-unappreciated pioneers of the bebop revolution to gigs in her Rolls Royce. Hannah paints the attachment to Monk (who was married) as devoted friendship rather than an affair, though she also quotes scornful observers who viewed Nica as a rich groupie, an opinion reinforced in 1955 when Charlie Parker died of an overdose in her apartment. Hannah’s account of Nica’s relationships with these often troubled and drug-addicted musicians, which included taking the rap for Monk when Delaware police pulled them over in 1958 and found marijuana in her car, shows her to be a stalwart champion of their music and their civil rights. Hard-drinking, night-clubbing Nica comes across as an eccentric free spirit to equal the artists she idolized.

An affectionate biography of a woman who in her late 30s finally saw the life she wanted and grabbed it.

JUST BUSINESS Multinational Corporations and Human Rights Ruggie, John Norton (224 pp.) $23.95 | Mar. 25, 2013 978-0-393-06288-5

A discussion of the creation of a new global standard for business and human rights.

The rapid growth of multinational corporations in the 1990s created “permissive environments for wrongful acts by companies without adequate sanctions or reparations,” writes Ruggie (Human Rights and International Affairs/Kennedy School of Government), who, in 2005, was named special assistant to then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to establish guidelines for corporations in relation to human rights. Multinationals grew rapidly in scope and power during that period, outsourcing production to low-cost, often remote areas of the world, yet they were not subject to global regulation. Ruggie discusses familiar cases of business-related human rights abuses—working conditions in Indonesian plants making Nike products, Shell’s conflict with local communities in Nigeria, etc.—and recounts his six-year stint developing the widely hailed U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which detail how businesses and governments can help ensure that corporations respect human rights in their own operations and through their business relationships. When he 66

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started his work, fewer than 100 of the world’s 80,000 multinational corporations had any policies in place regarding the risk of their involvement in human rights controversies. Now there is “an unprecedented international alignment” behind the belief that states must protect human rights, companies must respect them, and those who are harmed must have redress.

Unlike mandatory or voluntary responses to such issues, the new global standard makes respecting rights an integral part of business and relies on “a smart mix of reinforcing policy measures” to encourage long-term change. Ruggie believes his heterodox approach will lead to more effective human rights protection and may also prove useful in addressing other global governance gaps, such as climate change.

A valuable resource for business leaders and policymakers.

PRESENT SHOCK When Everything Happens Now

Rushkoff, Douglas Current (256 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 21, 2013 978-1-59184-476-1

Media theorist Rushkoff (Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, 2011, etc.) returns with a dire prognosis of society’s ills.

Though exaggerated, many of the author’s assertions can be summed up thusly: Technology has ruined everything, and nothing is as good as it used to be. The book is divided into five overarching concepts of how modern life has changed for the worse, with wide-reaching ideas like narrative collapse (TV shows and movies exhibit an “utter lack of traditional narrative goals”) and “digiphrenia” (in which dividing attention between online and in-person modes leads to a “temporal disconnection” bordering on mental disorder). Rushkoff does offer a few noteworthy theories—e.g., that our collective interest in postapocalyptic scenarios stems from a deep desire to return to a simpler life. However, the author repeatedly makes reference to outdated cultural touchstones—e.g., an entire page on the “dangerously mindless” show Beavis & Butthead, which last aired in 1997—while most of his conclusions are overblown. Perhaps the best example of both problems occurs in one early chapter, in which Rushkoff recalls William Hung, the man who sang “She Bangs” at a cringeworthy 2004 American Idol audition and enjoyed a few moments of fame. Rushkoff draws a direct line from how much of America had a laugh at Hung’s expense to the Milgram experiment, in which social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked study participants to purportedly administer ever-increasing electric shocks to an unwilling victim. Rushkoff claims that in today’s society, “[t]he question is not how much deadly voltage we can apply, but how shamefully low can we go?”

Sure to be loved by readers who enjoy telling kids to get off their damn lawn, but unlikely to gain traction with a wider audience.

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“Required reading for aspiring lawyers, but also intrinsically fascinating in its depiction of the frailty of human judgments.” from math on trial

WE HAVE ONLY THIS LIFE TO LIVE Selected Essays 1939-1975

Sartre, Jean-Paul New York Review Books (600 pp.) $22.95 paper | Feb. 26, 2013 978-1-59017-493-7

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) need no longer be feared as the intensely deep analytic writer of all things existential.

His essays show his brilliant ability to explain the unexplainable.

Aronson (History of Ideas/Wayne State Univ.; Camus and Sartre, 2005, etc.) and van den Hoven (Sartre Today, 2006, etc.) exhibit their incredible knowledge of Sartre, right down to tweaking the translations of almost all of the essays included in this collection. The essays have been collected from Situations, Selected Prose and newspaper articles written in 1945 and presented chronologically. His “passing thoughts” cover a wide spectrum, from literary criticism to jazz to Calder and Giacometti. Especially fascinating are his views of America in 1945, particularly New York, “the harshest city in the world.”

Sartre’s observation of American workers and their unions are still relevant. The editors clearly explain Sartre’s falling out with Camus, and his “Reply to Camus” is a true joy to read—it makes one wonder what an interesting attorney he might have been, along with all his other talents. Sartre minced no words, and his easy, natural way of writing enabled him to expound on diverse subjects with hardly a moment’s hesitation. Suddenly, existentialism is clear and logical, and the philosopher’s development clearly illustrated. Sartre wrote essays probing every political and social theme of his time, providing not only his own thoughts, but a remarkable view of history. His literary criticism should be the established standard for book reviewing.

The authors have included exceptional pieces from every period in Sartre’s life, giving readers a precise understanding of a talented writer and philosopher.

ONCE UPON A FLOCK Life with My Soulful Chickens

Scheuer, Lauren Atria (256 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-4516-9870-1

The charmingly quirky story of a woman and the flock of spirited chickens that stole her heart.

When her teenage daughter and friends abandoned it, blogger, illustrator and DIY mom Scheuer knew that her yard, which had once been “a mecca of colorful activities and adventures,” needed a makeover. So she transformed it into a home for chickens, which arrived by mail. Scheuer threw herself into the project and built the coop where her hens would roost. In love with her |

birds from the day they hatched, she documented their daily lives with drawings and photographs, which she includes on almost every page of the book. Her chickens—Hatsy, Lucy and Lil’ White—weren’t simply lawn ornaments and egg-producers; they were beings with colorfully distinctive personalities. Hatsy was the egg-laying wonder, Lucy the affectionate friend and Lil’ White the sometimes mean-spirited beauty. With insight and humor, Scheuer describes the relationships among her animals.

She recounts how her terrier Marky “drooled” over them at first but then became their dedicated guardian. The birds themselves had their own dramas. Lucy developed Marek’s disease, which crippled her feet. True to the “wild roots” of all chickens, Lil’ White suddenly began attacking her. Lucy survived and eventually became the flock “mother,” nurturing an egg that contained the flock’s one rooster. When Hatsy weakened and died, the birds closed ranks and mourned because “[they] knew.”

Scheuer adopted another bird, a scrawny “fixer-upper” named Pigeon, who became both the flock leader and Lucy’s new best friend. Scheuer shows that though feathers and fur may separate humans from animals, all creatures are capable of attachment, cruelty, joy and sadness, regardless of the skin they wear.

Pleasant, sensitive storytelling. (Photos and illustrations throughout)

MATH ON TRIAL How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom Schneps, Leila; Colmez, Coralie Basic (272 pp.) $26.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-465-03292-1

Chronicles of miscarriages of justice due to the misuse of statistics, combined with blow-by-blow accounts of criminal trials.

Schneps and Colmez are a mother-daughter pair sophisticated in the ways of probability. Schneps studied math at Harvard, and her daughter has a math First from Cambridge; both are members of an international team dedicated to improving the use of statistics in the courtroom. Many of their accounts will make readers weep with rage—e.g., a mother imprisoned for murder in the deaths of her two infant children, largely based on the false assumption that the deaths were independent events, so the likelihood that they happened by chance was vanishingly small; an interracial couple convicted of robbery based on multiplying a bunch of inaccurate probabilities of nonindependent descriptors (black man with beard: 1 out of 10; man with mustache: 1 out of 4, etc.) to conclude that only the defendants fit the bill. The testimony of “experts” in all these cases inevitably overwhelmed the jury and brought the guilty verdicts. Fortunately, the cases were overturned on appeal when true experts explained errors and/or presented new evidence.

The authors move on to more subtle applications of probability theory and fill out the volume with wonderful accounts of frauds and forgeries involving the likes of Charles Ponzi, Hetty kirkus.com

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“A must-read for anyone who has wondered why the Stone Roses ever mattered.” from the stone roses

Green and Alfred Dreyfus. Interestingly, the authors cite Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, whose decades-old essay decrying the use of math in the courtroom led to a decline. Now, because of DNA testing, probability has made a comeback. How it was applied—and eventually ignored—makes the authors’ analysis of the recent Amanda Knox case particularly chilling.

Required reading for aspiring lawyers, but also intrinsically fascinating in its depiction of the frailty of human judgments.

SONG WITHOUT WORDS Discovering My Deafness Halfway Through Life

Shea, Gerald Da Capo/Perseus (240 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-306-82193-6 978-0-306-82194-3 e-book

The moving, poignant account of how a brilliant lawyer came to terms with the midlife discovery of his own

partial deafness.

Attorney Shea heard sounds through an “invisible curtain” that gradually descended upon him after a boyhood bout with scarlet fever. Because he was so young when he began to lose his hearing, the author grew up believing that the world was not only quieter than it was, but that “spoken words were a riddle... everyone had to figure out.” People communicated through a colorful, strangely beautiful “language of lyricals,” which Shea uses throughout the text, to which he had to give meaning.

Over time, he found that he could understand what others said to him by reading both lips and contexts. Shea excelled in school and attended Yale and then Columbia Law School. But academic success came only by dint of great effort and caused the breakup of a relationship that would haunt him into middle age. It wasn’t until Shea was 34 and moving into a new job that he was finally diagnosed as profoundly deaf. Despite hearing aids and other sound-amplifying devices, however, Shea continued to struggle in his professional life. A meeting with a hearingimpaired former brain surgeon, who advised him to have the courage to “break [his] own heart,” finally convinced Shea that, for the good of himself and his family, he needed to put aside his profession and learn to embrace the partial soundlessness that defined his reality. The book is a powerful expression of loss, acceptance and the very human need to communicate.

Shea’s narrative derives its true power from the eloquence and intelligence with which he illuminates a world that may be unfamiliar to many readers.

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HOW EVERYONE BECAME DEPRESSED The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown Shorter, Edward Oxford Univ. (272 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-19-994808-6

Shorter (Psychiatry and History of Medicine/Toronto Univ.; co-author: Endocrine Psychiatry, 2010, etc.) charges that current diagnoses of mood disorders are fatally flawed and becoming “close to unintelligible.”

The author attributes this to political infighting within the discipline of psychiatry, compounded by the marketing strategies of the pharmaceutical industry. He argues that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders represents a step backward from the pre-Freudian diagnosis of depression as a medical disorder of the nerves and which was treated under the rubric of internal medicine. Past practice was closer to the truth than what is presented in the DSM, which lumps together mood disturbances with severe depression (a debilitating disorder). In the annals of modern science,” he writes, “I am unaware of any comparable wholesale demolition of a field of scientific knowledge and its replacement with a fairy castle of fantasies… the spotlight shifted from nerves, a diagnosis that implicated the whole body, to mood, a diagnosis that implicated mainly the mind.” Compounding the problem is the current practice of treating anxiety and panic attacks as disorders separate from depression. Shorter suggests that a combination of barbiturates and amphetamines was a superior treatment than today’s pharmacopoeia, which relies on Prozac and similar antidepressants. The release of DSM5 (the latest revision of the manual) has been the occasion for a critical review of current treatment practices, but Shorter’s contribution to that discussion, while timely, is questionable.

Enlivened by literary anecdotes, but less appealing as social history.

THE STONE ROSES War and Peace

Spence, Simon St. Martin’s Griffin (352 pp.) $22.99 | Apr. 2, 2013 978-1-250-03082-5 978-1-250-03083-2 e-book As definitive an account of the surprising rise and spectacular fall of seminal 1980s Brit rockers the Stone Roses as a fan could hope for.

Music journalist Spence (Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, 2011, etc.) interviewed almost every important person in the history of the band, including all of its members, managers, producers and most of its roadie coterie save |

one (road manager Steve Adge, who’s writing his own Roses history). This sounds easier than it was, given several members’ penchant for mystery and silence since the band’s bitter breakup in 1996. Fortuitously for Spence, by the time he had connected with the members of its best-known incarnation— singer Ian Brown, guitarist John Squire, drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield—15 years’ worth of ice, particularly between founders, chief song scribes and boyhood friends Brown and Squire, was beginning to thaw. Even at their heyday, the Roses could be prickly and unpredictable regarding outside expectations. Following the release of their brilliant, eponymous 1989 debut LP, which The Observer has since called the best rock album ever, the band’s creativity seemed to dry up as they battled their record company and self-aggrandizing manager Gareth Evans over two of the worst contracts in rock ’n’ roll history. When they finally produced “The Second Coming” for Geffen three years later, internal fissures, which Evans seemed to create when he gave Brown and Squire sole credit (and the attendant financial rewards) for the band’s collective compositions, began to crack wide open. A long-promised tour of the United States, repeatedly canceled, came together only after a key member had quit and just months before the band self-imploded. This book is being released in time for a reunion tour of the U.S. in the summer of 2013.

A must-read for anyone who has wondered why the Stone Roses ever mattered.

UNTIL I SAY GOODBYE My Year of Living with Joy

Spencer-Wendel, Susan with Witter, Bret Harper/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0062241450 With the assistance of Witter (Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, 2011, etc.), crime reporter Spencer-Wendel chronicles her life and the decisions she has made since being diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a wasting disease that progressively causes loss of control of voluntary muscle movement.

In her mid-40s and a happily married mother of three with a thriving career, the author rejected the option of assisted suicide in favor of making her last years memorable despite the inevitability of increasing disability. Although not believing that her death would ruin the lives of her husband and children, she understood that it might “affect their ability to live with delight. To live with joy.” Spencer-Wendel was determined to overcome her dread of losing mobility and to live her life to the fullest even as the disease progressed. As inspiration, the author found solace in Lou Gehrig’s 1939 farewell speech, in which he described himself as “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, even after ‘catching a bad break.’ ” The author decided to spend her remaining time traveling to places she longed to see, taking |

friends and family with her. In this way, she left them a legacy of joyfully shared memories. One of the more difficult decisions she made was not to hoard her remaining good health.

She determined that she would not search out experimental programs, nor even spare herself physical strain, even though traveling took a further toll on her mobility. Each of the trips more than met the author’s expectations: a visit with her son to swim with dolphins, shopping in New York with her daughter and a journey with her husband to Romania, where they lived for the first two years of their marriage.

A poignant, wise love story.

THE DAYS ARE GODS

Stephens, Liz Univ. of Nebraska (216 pp.) $18.95 paper | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8032-4354-5

One woman’s search for community and connections in Utah.

By moving from bustling California to a small town in Utah, Stephens hoped she and her husband would learn to love a place they could call home. In this literary debut, she describes how buying an old farmhouse, with its inherent history of previous owners, was just the first step in settling in. Visiting rodeos, raising chickens, learning to ride a horse, watching their Mormon neighbors attend church and family gatherings—all aided Stephens in her quest. She developed a keen love of the desolate landscape and mountains surrounding their homestead but worried that encroaching housing developments would alter her perception of time and place. Despite her feelings for this place, her husband was less satisfied, and both struggled to find work to support their new child. Stephens’ lyric, visually detailed prose will remind readers that building a home can take more than just time; it takes a sense of belonging, of roots that stretch deep below the topsoil.

“I do not think the locals are cute and a charming part of the scenery,” she writes. “I think they carry within them something magic, as do, it turns out, people everywhere who have stayed still in one place long enough to accrue this grace: a deep sense of place that I wish I could beg, barter, or steal off of them.” As the seasons stretched into a few years, Stephens still was not content. In the end, she moved on, in search of another spot in another small town where she could settle down, set some roots and make a house a home.

A stimulating search for self and place set against the vast backdrop of the American West.

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“An earthy, homespun and voyeuristically satisfying book.” from bog tender

THE DRUNKEN BOTANIST

Stewart, Amy Algonquin (400 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-61620-046-6

A comprehensive guide to the intersection of plants and booze.

Fine Gardening contributor Stewart (Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects, 2011, etc.) brings together an encyclopedia of information on 160 plants from around the world that are often used in alcoholic beverages. Her enthusiasm is evident throughout, as she brings readers into “the dazzlingly rich, complex, and delicious lives of the plants that go into all those bottles behind the bar.”

Classic plants like grapes, apples, corn and sugarcane are just a few of the botanicals that Stewart examines. She also studies the herbs and spices used to flavor base alcohols, as well as elderflowers, hops, roses and violets, which will alert gardeners to the potential living in the garden. Stewart rounds out her indepth coverage with a full section on fruit, including apricots and yuzus, and nuts and seeds like almonds and walnuts. The history of fermentation and distillation, the origins of plant-based medicines, tips on growing your own plants and more than 50 cocktail recipes add multiple layers to an already vast amount of information on botanicals. Gardeners, nature lovers and mixologists will find themselves reaching frequently for this volume; the hard part will be deciding what to try next as they discover that a liquor store is really “a fantastical greenhouse, the world’s most exotic botanical garden, the sort of strange and overgrown conservatory we only encounter in our dreams.”

A rich compendium of botanical lore for cocktail lovers.

BOG TENDER Coming Home to Nature and Memory

Szanto, George Brindle & Glass (272 pp.) $24.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-927366-08-0 978-1-927366-09-7 e-book

Twelve months of natural splendor on Vancouver Island’s eastern coast.

The stretch of wetlands where novelist and former collegiate professor Szanto (Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island, 2011, etc.) has spent the past decade is located on Gabriola, a British Columbian island the size and shape of Manhattan but with only 4,000 residents. From September to August, Szanto offers a lushly rendered, one-year pastoral chronicle of life in and around a marshland bog as observed by a seasoned writer who is both enamored and emotionally buoyed by it. Amid descriptions of the bog’s natural beauty and delicate ecology, the author also incorporates personal anecdotes of random eyesight 70

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maladies, baking homemade bread, the hoarfrost in winter and salmon fishing in summer. More momentous events follow, such as surviving the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, his courtship of his wife and the deaths of his parents, whose escape from Nazioccupied Vienna is described in gripping detail. Even richer moments include a touching midwinter dinner gathering with friends who’d all survived life-threatening illnesses. But it’s the vibrant, abundant bog just outside his windows that takes center stage as the author delightfully surveys iridescent dragonflies, raccoons and countless bird species. Though the hazards of country living are numerous, they only seem to bring out the author’s indefatigable temperament. After a nasty hornet sting that nearly killed him, Szanto resolved to keep the extinguished nest, situated above his front door, “as a war memorial.”

An earthy, homespun and voyeuristically satisfying book.

PARADISE LOT Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City Toensmeier, Eric with Bates, Jonathan Chelsea Green (240 pp.) $19.95 paper | Jan. 31, 2013 978-1-60358-399-2

How two men turned a sterile backyard into a viable garden.

“The front yard was a short, steep slope of asphalt with a tiny strip of sterile gravel and subsoil,” write Toensmeier and Bates, with a “backyard that looked like a moonscape, sparely populated with tufts of crabgrass.” It was the perfect place to launch their experiment: Could two men with horticultural experience and a love of nature turn a typical compact backyard into a garden full of lush plants and edible food? The authors chronicle their 10-plus years of trials and experiments, as they transformed their “moonscape” into a permaculture of “trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous perennials” that produced food at every level. By analyzing their soil and plotting the movement of shade and sun for a year, the authors discovered the prime locations to build a greenhouse and tool shed. They knew where to plant trees and perennials so that they could bring their site to life, and they developed a deeper kinship with the space and with each other. Along the journey, the authors present ideas like sheet mulching, which can transform a lawn into a useful garden plot capable of growing tomatoes and sweet corn in the first year. They also share their thoughts on the plants that can become noxious weeds despite their culinary uses. Toensmeier and Bates discuss both their triumphs and their defeats, as they experimented with chickens, nitrogen fixers, ground covers, numerous kinds of berry bushes and water plants.

Although not a how-to guide, the authors give readers plenty of choices and ideas to think about when deciding whether to embark on this kind of gardening.

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MANZANAR TO MOUNT WHITNEY The Life and Times of a Lost Hiker Umemoto, Hank Heyday (224 pp.) $16.95 paper | Apr. 1, 2013 978-1-59714-202-1

A Nisei’s story of being confined in an internment camp during World War II and hardscrabble years afterward, interspersed with a diary of high-altitude hiking.

Manzanar was the internment camp where teenage Umemoto, with his family and many other Japanese Americans, was relocated for three years during the war. Mt. Whitney, “The Big One,” was visible from Manzanar’s plywood barracks then. However, it took nearly 60 years before the author, as a senior citizen, was able to scramble to the top of the formidable promontory. Though Umemoto reveals a bit about California’s Japanese-American culture, the author’s story is mild and not particularly deep. Without much drama, Umemoto sets forth his journey from internment to success as a print-shop proprietor, and he discusses two marriages and his time in the military in Tokyo. Interposed are narratives of difficult trudges where the author was lost, fatigued or frozen—though his adventures never take on a sense of actual danger. Once, he wished he brought a Gore-Tex jacket, and once, an attempt to gnaw a frozen energy bar was fruitless since his dentures couldn’t make a dent in the thing. Perhaps this is the sort of intermittent memory piece that might attract intrepid readers, but the clear metaphor doesn’t work. What might have been an affecting memoir, a different sort of American story, reveals little that is memorable.

Though touching on the unique Japanese-American experience, this is ultimately an inoffensive, pedestrian trek.

POSSIBILITY Essays Against Despair

Vigderman, Patricia Sarabande (184 pp.) $15.95 paper | $12.00 e-book Apr. 16, 2013 978-1-936747-54-2 978-1-936747-53-5 e-book

A slim volume of short essays that explore the possibilities (and impossibilities) of language.

Vigderman (English/Kenyon Coll.; The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, 2007) specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connections that readers might not otherwise perceive. Most of the essays (many of them little longer than a page or two) were published independently, and all can stand on their own, but the author has provided a conceptual framework and thread of continuity as she groups them |

into four parts, moving from “Internal Conversations” to “The Measure of Grief ” in the opening and two most compelling sections. “When we are with art we are calling from a loss of ourselves, and yet one’s reason is also always part of the landscape,” she writes in the opening essay, “The Task of the Translator,” which addresses the challenge of translating not only art, but also experience into language. She closes the collection with a reference to San Francisco’s Coit Tower, cinematically and in actuality: “The place is magic you can walk in and out of, an Escher drawing in which life and art can’t be seen at the same time and also can’t be seen except as they give shape to each other.” Perhaps the most provocative essay and the emotional centerpiece is “My Depressed Person (A Monologue),” which interweaves a critical assessment of David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Depressed Person” with Vigderman’s own experience dealing with the depression of someone close to her, and perhaps her own as well. Proust, Sebald and Henry Adams are also subject to her literary examination, but the essays range wide over geography and theme, whether exploring a landscape “that unhinges ordinary response” or coming to terms with “the rupture in my own life.”

Frequent illumination within the density of compression, as the writer challenges readers to determine what they’re thinking and feeling about what she’s thinking and feeling.

THE ORDINARY ACROBAT A Journey into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present

Wall, Duncan Knopf (336 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-307-27172-3

A Fulbright fellow immerses himself in the remarkable history of circuses.

For generations, people have run away to the circus; in 2003, Wall followed suit. In his debut memoir, the author recounts the unique circumstances that led him down this unexpected path. After receiving a fellowship to study “contemporary circus,” Wall enrolled in the National School for the Circus Arts in France, where he soon learned the stark differences between the American circus and the European model. Historically, European circuses were known for their intimate performances, while American circuses placed their focus elsewhere. “In the big American circuses,” Wall writes, “all this familiarity and precision was gone, sacrificed for other pleasures: spectacle, pageantry, sensory stimulation….”

Simply put: American circuses were more interested in turning a profit than a perfect backflip. Wall sought to train alongside the world’s best circus performers. His immersion into the ranks of acrobats, jugglers and clowns provides a behind-the-scenes look into a world spectators know little about. While readers likely have some familiarity with the traditional circus performance, they will be surprised to learn the level of dedication required for performers to hone their skills. This proves particularly true kirkus.com

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“A comprehensive, critical exploration of the origin and meaning of priesthood and a formidable volley lobbed at tradition.” from why priests?

in Europe, where performers are considered artists and masters of their craft. Upon his entrance into the National School, Wall was soon humbled to learn that he was no master. At the start of the semester, even a somersault proved too complex. “It was, after all, why I had come,” he writes: “to get a glimpse of the incalculable amount of effort, embarrassment, and pain behind the seemingly effortless skills.”

Blending cultural history with biography, memoir and travelogue, Wall’s carefully balanced book is, in itself, a successful tightrope traverse.

ALWAYS THE FAT KID The Truth About the Enduring Effects of Childhood Obesity

Warren, Jacob; Smalley, K. Bryant Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 26, 2013 978-0-230-34177-7

A chronicle of the painful, long-term effects of being a “fat kid.”

With the rise of childhood obesity rates comes a new set of challenges for families and communities, write Warren and Smalley, co-directors of the Rural Health Research Institute at Georgia Southern University. Obese children face a combination of physical and psychological problems resulting in what the authors call “The Fat Kid Syndrome.” Not only do these children often suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure, but they may also develop low self-esteem and compulsive behaviors. Further, they will likely experience depression and anxiety in greater numbers than their thinner peers—not to mention discrimination based on their appearance from colleagues, potential mates and even employers. The authors touch briefly on the causes of childhood obesity, including easy access to fast food, increased portion sizes and decreased emphasis on exercise. They also argue that parents are unwilling to speak honestly to their children about weight and that even doctors are instructed to avoid the topic out of fear of insulting or upsetting children. Warren and Smalley focus on raising awareness about the dangers of childhood obesity, and a short concluding chapter offers advice on how to help children and their families. They also include a helpful resource guide that includes nutrition, fitness and weight-control programs geared toward children. While childhood obesity is a trendy topic, even the authors acknowledge that there hasn’t been enough time to research the long-term effects of the current epidemic. Therefore, much of what Smalley and Warren write about is speculation. They also come dangerously close to overgeneralizing the experience of obesity; certainly not all “fat kids” will suffer the extremes they describe.

A flawed but useful call to arms in the fight against childhood obesity.

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RED ROVER Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Curiosity Rover

Wiens, Roger Basic (224 pp.) $25.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-465-05598-2

A memoir by one of the builders of the ChemCam laser instrument now on board the Mars exploration vehicle Curiosity.

Now the principal investigator for the ChemCam instrument, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wiens describes its current operation and the development of the program. He has worked on NASA’s robotic exploration program since its inception, and he helped design the instruments taken aloft as part of the Genesis program to capture particles in the solar wind and return them to Earth, which began in 1990 and ended successfully in 2004. Wiens began work on Mars exploration and laser instruments in 1997. Both programs, unlike the shuttle and moon-shot efforts, involved scientist-led small groups. They bid competitively to place their experimental instruments on space-exploration vehicles and landing modules and dealt with cost pressures that dictated building equipment from off-the-shelf components. Improvisation was the rule.

To offset the budget constraints that delayed and threatened to undermine the efforts, it became an international program, enlisting support from French researchers. Even so, ChemCam was nearly eliminated to save funds. Wiens explains the ultimate scientific success of the earlier Genesis program, which established that solar oxygen is not composed of the same isotope that predominates in the Earth’s atmosphere. The author provides fascinating insight into the struggle to solve scientific problems despite technical constraints and equipment failures.

Their success also depended on their ability to creatively deal with ongoing bureaucratic and budgetary hassles.

A winning memoir of great achievement. (16 b/w images)

WHY PRIESTS? A Failed Tradition

Wills, Garry Viking (320 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-670-02487-2

Pulitzer Prize winner Wills (Verdi’s Shakespeare, 2011, etc.), a venerable voice on church history, thought and practice, provides a stunning critique of the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Without equivocation, the author argues that the entire institution of the priesthood is based on pure fallacy. Wills’ argument is not a Protestant one disguised as Catholic; it is entirely Catholic in its tone and approach, making it all the |

more compelling to all readers. The author begins by explaining the unparalleled importance of the priesthood in Catholic doctrine, always reminding readers that this importance is based primarily on Eucharistic theology. The miracle of transubstantiation is the linchpin for the power of the priesthood. By systematically deconstructing the Book of Hebrews, Wills begins to undermine the concept of the Roman Catholic priest. Going further, he boldly confronts the idea of Christ’s death as “sacrifice,” theorizing that the incarnation, not the crucifixion, was the truer source of humanity’s atonement. Wills’ book is sure to provoke controversy, but his arguments are well-constructed and hard to ignore. While giving due respect to those priests through the ages who served others in humility, he points out that the exalted caste of the priesthood is at best antithetical to Jesus’ teachings about community and piety. At worst, it allows sin and corruption to fester. Wills’ writing is informed by accessible erudition and marked by subtle sarcasm (such as describing the Host as “a kind of benevolent kryptonite,” or discussing the things Anselm “does not allow God to do”). Though many Catholics will flatly reject Wills’ arguments on principle, many others will find him to be elucidating doubts they may have already had.

A comprehensive, critical exploration of the origin and meaning of priesthood and a formidable volley lobbed at tradition.

MAD GIRL’S LOVE SONG Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

Wilson, Andrew Scribner (384 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-4767-1031-0

Sylvia Plath’s (1932–1963) relationship with Ted Hughes “has taken on the resonance of a modern myth,” writes biographer/journalist Wilson (Shadow of the Titanic, 2012, etc.), who argues that excessive focus on it “obscures many aspects of [her] life and work.”

The poems written before Ariel, Plath’s posthumous masterpiece, have been marginalized; the many other men she was involved with, some quite seriously, have hardly been mentioned, let alone interviewed, and the same holds true for her intense female friendships. Wilson fills in these gaps and retells the more familiar stories of Plath’s fraught relationship with her mother and her dead father, her college years at Smith, a summer guest editorship at Mademoiselle and her 1953 suicide attempt, the subject of The Bell Jar. Comments from friends caricatured in its pages suggest that Plath could be vindictive as well as almost pathologically competitive and seething with rage; Wilson depicts a ferociously driven young woman with a highly unstable sense of self that merited the clinical diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Plath despised the sexual double standard and feared marriage and motherhood as threats to her writing career, yet she desperately needed to be |

approved as a conventionally good girl; the extraordinary praise and prizes she accrued from an early age were never enough. By the time she met Hughes in 1956, it’s likely that the self-destructive pattern of her life was already set. Wilson ends his book there, with a brief afterword stating the facts of Plath’s suicide.

He doesn’t seem to empathize with his troubled, complicated subject, but neither does he try to tidy up her contradictions under a neat label, be it feminist rebel or coldhearted bitch.

Wilson is more insightful about Plath’s personality than her writings, but this warts-and-all portrait has much valuable new material about her early years.

HOW THE BEATLES ROCKED THE KREMLIN The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution

Woodhead, Leslie Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $26.00 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-1-60819-614-2

An exhaustive and exhausting look at the Fab Four’s impact on the Soviet Union.

British documentarian Woodhead (My Life as a Spy, 2005, etc.) was on the Beatles’ story early: He shot historic footage of the band at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1962. Also a minor Cold War–era spy, the author spent more than three decades researching the group’s impact on the Soviet psyche. His early chapters recount the Stalin regime’s ambivalent, ultimately repressive relationship with jazz; saxophones were actually banned by the despot. The rise of the Beatles led to a vast underground market for the Beatles’ music behind the Iron Curtain: Fans etched the quartet’s banned music on X-ray film, traded clandestine reel-to-reel tapes and fashioned electric guitars with parts from gutted pay phones. Woodhead charts the rise of the Soviet Union’s rock underground via interviews with Russian rockers and delineates the people’s mania for the Beatles through conversations with promoters and an obsessive collector, Kolya Vasin. The band became an aboveground presence after the collapse of Communism, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime embraced the group; a highlight is a detailed account of an emotionally charged 2008 Paul McCartney concert in Kiev.

There’s other fine on-the-ground reporting here, as Woodhead looks in on a show by a Beatles-punk band, a John Lennon birthday salute and a Russian recreation of the Cavern. However, by the later pages, the testimony about the social, cultural and political changes wrought from Moscow to Minsk by the group’s music becomes repetitive. By the midpoint, readers well understand that the Beatles’ tuneful message of life, love and freedom helped engender a liberated mindset that in some ways facilitated the toppling of the communist state. But Woodhead wears out his point by hammering it home relentlessly.

An imperfect but worthwhile addition to the Beatles bookshelf.

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“It won’t take the place of Strunk and White, but a useful addition to any writer’s bookshelf.” from how to not write bad

GOING CLEAR Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

HOW TO NOT WRITE BAD The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them

Wright, Lawrence Knopf (432 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 17, 2013 978-0-307-70066-7

A devastating history-cum-exposé of the Church of Scientology.

Wright has written about religion on several occasions (Saints and Sinners, 1993; Remembering Satan, 1994) and received a Pulitzer Prize for his book on terrorism (The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, 2006)—all of which clearly served as excellent training for this book. It begins, of course, with the life of L. Ron Hubbard, a manicdepressive, wannabe naval hero, sci-fi writer and self-styled shaman who “believed that the secrets of existence were accidentally revealed to him” after receiving a gas anesthetic in the dentist’s chair. After that experience, the visions kept arriving, leading to his 1950 self-help best-seller, Dianetics, which laid the groundwork for a “religion” where “thetans” (souls) are stymied by “engrams,” self-destructive suggestive impulses lodged in the brain (not a few of which were inflicted on mankind following an intergalactic war that took place 75 million years ago.)

Through personal, deeply revelatory counseling sessions known as auditing, adherents deal with these obstacles, and for wealthy celebrities, Scientology (and its many Hollywood connections) has supposedly cleared the path to success. It has also destroyed many others, usually less well-heeled people from within, who raise questions or try to leave, or outside forces (journalists, the IRS, family members) investigating the church’s multiple personal or financial abuses. Wright exposes the church’s many sins: covert espionage, psychological torment, threatened blackmail using confidential information from auditing sessions and constant physical assaults on members by tyrannical current leader David Miscavage. The author is also interested in something deeper: If it’s all a con, why is everyone involved (especially the late Hubbard) so deeply invested in its beliefs? Wright doesn’t go out of his way to exaggerate the excesses of Scientology; each page delivers startling facts that need no elaboration.

A patient, wholly compelling investigation into a paranoid “religion” and the faithful held in its sweaty grip.

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Yagoda, Ben Riverhead (192 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-59448-848-1

A forgiving—a purist might say overly forgiving—handbook for those in need of remedial grammar lessons, a category that includes most college students.

Yagoda (Journalism/Univ. of Delaware; Memoir: A History, 2010, etc.) appreciates the Anne Lamotts, William Zinssers and E.B. Whites of the world, but he fears that their entreaties to add beauty to the language are misplaced. “Most students, I’ve found, can’t handle writing ‘well.’ At this point in their writing lives,” he writes, “that goal is simply too ambitious.” He later elaborates: The chief task is to rid students of such bad habits as stacked prepositional phrases and dysparallelism. Thus this handbook and its grating title: The goal is not to write well, but not to write badly—or, now that we don’t have to worry about split infinitives, to not write badly. Yagoda strives a little too hard for laughs at times, but showmanship is part of the game.

Much of what he has to say is the stuff of every other writing handbook, especially the admonition that every good writer— every not-bad writer, that is—is a good reader. But Yagoda occasionally turns in a truly fresh take on a problem, and this dictum alone is worth the price of admission: “When possible, make the subject of a sentence a person, a collection of persons, or a thing.” Pair that with the injunction to avoid two spaces after a period, and you’ve got the makings of improved writing already, even allowing for Yagoda’s liberal take on split infinitives and the use of “they” as the pronoun for a singular subject.

It won’t take the place of Strunk and White, but a useful addition to any writer’s bookshelf.

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children’s & teen

HARRIET TUBMAN AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Adler, David A. Holiday House (144 pp.) $18.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-8234-2365-1

TOO HOT? TOO COLD? by Caroline Arnold; illus. by Annie Patterson................................................................. p. 76 RAIN! by Linda Ashman ; illus. by Christian Robinson............... p. 77 A VACATION FOR POOCH by Maryann Cocca-Leffler.............. p. 81 THE MATCHBOX DIARY by Paul Fleischman; illus. by Bagram Ibatoulline.......................................................... p. 86 TANGLE OF KNOTS by Lisa Graff............................................... p. 86 OPEN THIS LITTLE BOOK by Jesse Klausmeier; illus. by Suzy Lee............................................................................ p. 91 WHITE FUR FLYING by Patricia MacLachlan............................ p. 95 YAQUI DELGADO WANTS TO KICK YOUR ASS

by Meg Medina.............................................................................. p. 97 OUT OF THE EASY by Ruta Sepetys............................................. p. 102 RAINBOW SHOES by Tiffany Stone; illus. by Stefan Czarnecki.............................................................. p. 104 YOU ARE STARDUST by Elin Kelsey; illus. by Soyeon Kim......... p. 109 CIVIL WAR INTERACTIVE by Touchzing Media......................... p. 110

Modest production values add appeal to this carefully researched account of “a life of courage, passion, and adventure.”

Young readers already have a plethora of Tubman titles to choose from, including the author’s own 1992 Picture Book of Harriet Tubman for younger readers, illustrated by Samuel Byrd. This one, though, offers an unusually coherent picture of her character as well as her place within both the major events of her times and the work of the Underground Railroad. Laying stress on her religious faith and her selfless nature, Adler covers her career as Union spy and nurse as well as “conductor” in deep-enough detail to make mention of her later involvement in a money swindle and her ambiguous relationship with “niece” (daughter? kidnap victim?) Margaret Stewart. Sheaves of small, period black-and-white portrait photos or engravings, plus occasional atrocity reports or editorials clipped from African-American newspapers give the pages a staid look overall. This is underscored by a typeface that, intentionally or otherwise, sometimes looks battered or too-lightly inked. Tubman’s exploits and struggles make absorbing reading nonetheless.

Unassuming of aspect but judicious and illuminating of content. (endnotes, bibliography, personal note about the author’s family in the Civil War) (Biography. 10-12)

HEALTHY KIDS

A VACATION FOR POOCH

Ajmera, Maya; Dunning, Victoria; Pon, Cynthia Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-436-4 978-1-58089-437-1 paper

Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Illus. by Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Henry Holt (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 19, 2013 978-0-8050-9106-97

Ajmera’s To Be a Kid (with co-author and photographer John D. Ivanko, 1999) focused on kids the world over engaged in play; in a similar format, this latest examines what children need in order to stay healthy.

Eye-catching photos are the centerpiece of this book. Each spread lists one thing that healthy kids need—“Healthy kids need clean water to drink”—while the labeled photographs show several children from different countries and how that |

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need is met for them: A child drinks from a water fountain in Japan, and another uses a pump well in India; in Ghana, a girl pours water from a bucket carried atop her head. Healthy kids also need good food, clean bodies and teeth, a place to use the bathroom, a home, medical care and vaccinations, exercise, protection from the elements, safety gear such as seat belts and helmets, and most of all, loving families and communities.

A multicolored world map highlights the countries mentioned, and backmatter explains how, in some areas of the world, those needs are difficult to meet and what kids, no matter where they live, can do to make sure they stay healthy. When this is paired with the likes of David J. Smith’s This Child, Every Child (illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong, 2011), readers will learn not only what kids need, but just how many kids lack these basic necessities.

An attractive introduction to the topic. (Informational picture book. 4-7)

OVERRIDE

Anastasiu, Heather St. Martin’s Griffin (336 pp.) $9.99 paper | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-250-00300-3 Series: Glitch, 2 After a disappointing start, the second installment of Anastasiu’s (Glitch, 2012) dystopian trilogy will be a welcome surprise to readers returning to find out what happens next to Zoe and members of the Resistance as they battle to free other glitchers and humans being used by Chancellor Bright in her merciless quest for power.

At the newly established Foundation, Zoe and Adrien join other glitchers to hone their individual skills and prepare for the battles ahead. Readers will enjoy not only looking on as Zoe learns to control her extraordinary telekinetic power, but also meeting the other students, each with their own individual gifts. Just as Zoe is coming into her own as a Resistance fighter, her relationship with Adrien grows increasingly complicated.

Though their attraction for one another is undeniable and leads to more than a few steamy scenes, Adrien is tormented by disturbing visions of the future that cause him to pull away from Zoe, often at times when they need each other most. Frustrating as it may be, these complicating factors add a depth and urgency to their romance that will keep readers turning the pages.

Several unexpected twists, a compelling love story, high-stakes action and a stand-up heroine worth rooting for rescue this series from the dystopian abyss and make for an entertaining read. (Dystopian romance. 14 & up)

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Anderson, R.J. Carolrhoda Lab (328 pp.) $17.95 | $12.95 e-book | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-7613-8799-2 978-1-4677-0949-1 e-book Alison’s nemesis from Ultraviolet (2011) narrates the overlapping events in this mostly successful sequel-cum–companion piece.

Tori’s family flees Sudbury to reinvent themselves in southern Ontario, leaving identity, names and friends behind after her unusual DNA attracts unwanted medical attention—especially from Deckard, the Sudbury cop investigating her disappearance and return six months later. Disguise notwithstanding, Tori, beautiful and a brilliant engineer in the making, draws plenty of notice, especially from Milo, a Korean-Canadian fellow employee at the supermarket where she checks groceries. Their growing friendship, complicated by Milo’s unrequited longing, is tested when Sebastian Faraday arrives on an urgent errand and Deckard shows up, determined to solve the mystery Tori represents. Though exceptional, Tori makes a strong, convincing protagonist whose fears, blocked sexuality and indifference to her looks ring true. While Sebastian and Alison remain vivid, Milo is less compelling—more supporting player than male lead. One structural factor bogs the story down. Crucial information and back story laid out in Ultraviolet is here withheld from readers until the end. Teasing readers is a time-honored technique for building suspense and usually effective—unless they already know what’s being withheld.

Luckily, Anderson’s strong characters and rare knack for weaving contemporary realism and emotional authenticity into hard science fiction should keep even readers in the know engaged. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

TOO HOT? TOO COLD? Keeping Body Temperature Just Right

Arnold, Caroline Illus. by Patterson, Annie Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-276-6 978-1-58089-277-3 paper 978-1-60734-596-1 e-book A fascinating and thorough look at how both animals and humans regulate their body temperatures.

Beginning with the difference between warmblooded and coldblooded species (the terms endothermic and ectothermic are introduced but not used), Arnold devotes spreads to such topics as muscle movements, sweating, the shrinking and expanding of blood vessels in the skin, fat, body coverings, and the size and shape of an animal. Behavior can also affect body temperature: animals or humans can seek/avoid the sun or a breeze, cool

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off or warm up with water, find shelter, or hibernate/estivate/ migrate. The one misstep is a minor quibble—a sentence incorrectly states that “No animal can live if its body temperature falls below freezing.” The copyright page lists the illustrations as having been done in watercolor and Photoshop, but readers would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of digital artwork here. The spreads and spot illustrations have that blurry, batik quality of watercolors that lends itself so well to nature scenes, while the insets are well-delineated, allowing readers to understand the structures discussed in the text. Every animal is labeled, making this a great jumping-off point for further research into readers’ favorites. A glossary and author’s note round out the text.

A stellar addition to a rather empty shelf. (Nonfiction.

6-10)

RAIN!

Ashman, Linda Illus. by Robinson, Christian Houghton Mifflin (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-0-547-73395-1

In that house, his father worked ceaselessly to fashion a flying machine made of “the feathers of a thousand hopeful wings.”

Sometimes the dream would fade, and then father and son would take time to play. That dream is never to be realized, as the day comes when the father dons a uniform and leaves for a great war, never to return. Years later, the son, now grown, resumes work on the machine, succeeds and then shares the vision with his own son. The narration unfolds in a series of snapshots, as in an album, with some large and some small, some in monotones and some with splashes of color and golden threads. These digitally rendered illustrations create a surreal and sophisticated landscape that complements the measured cadence of the first-person narration. Perhaps it is an allegory of man’s quest to reach the stars or perhaps just a tale of filial devotion. Winner of Great Britain’s 2011 Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished illustration in a book for children.

Evocative and moving. (Picture book. 5-8)

WONDERLAND

A child and an adult look at rain from both sides.

For the grumpy man, a rainy day is cause for complaint, but for the boy, it is undiluted joy. The man dons his “[n]asty galoshes” and “[b]lasted overcoat,” while the boy is delighted to put on his rain gear. The boy happily and energetically responds to the greetings of his neighbors as he hops like a frog into the puddles. The man snaps at everyone and harrumphs his way through the streets. At the aptly named Rain or Shine Café, they bump into each other, and the boy’s cheerfulness is rebuffed.

But he is not about to let this setback kill his enthusiasm. An act of kindness and a bit of role playing lead to a change of heart, a happier outlook and a big splash. Text and illustrations are bound together in a package that is beautifully constructed and perfectly complementary. Ashman sets up the collision of disparate perspectives and imparts the essence of the tale in just a few well-chosen phrases. Robinson’s paint-and-collage digital renderings fill the city setting with crisp details. The boy and the man move briskly through the pages along with a cast of supporting characters and passersby, all of whom are depicted with expressive individuality.

Altogether delightful. (Picture book. 4-8)

FARTHER

Baker-Smith, Grahame Illus. by Baker-Smith, Grahame Templar/Candlewick (40 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-6370-4

Barnes, David-Matthew Bold Strokes Books (208 pp.) $11.95 paper | Feb. 11, 2013 978-1-60282-788-2 After her mother’s death from cancer, Destiny is sent to the tiny South Carolina island of Avalon Cove to live with her uncle and his partner.

She is immediately befriended by Tasha and Topher, the town misfits, and the pair nearly as immediately take her to Wonderland, a rundown house with magic inside. Adrianna Marveaux, the house’s owner, tells the three teens that each has a choice to make, then invites them to a dinner party that will be “a chance to come face-to-face with [their] true love.” Each teen gets only a short time with the otherworldly match Adrianna has made for them, and each responds with nearly identical, over-the-top euphoria (“We started to dance, swaying to the aching piano music Juliet played with the longing she now felt for Tasha”). So forceful is the book’s insistence upon choosing true love that Destiny’s ultimate decision is never in doubt, which takes away much of the story’s dramatic potential. When Destiny considers choosing to bring her mother back instead of opting for true love, Adrianna’s response—essentially, that after Destiny’s father broke her heart, her mother is better off dead—comes across as jarringly harsh. A subplot involving Destiny’s uncle and his failing magic business resolves slightly too quickly, though there are plenty of warm moments between Destiny and her new family.

Intriguing concept, but it’s hard to believe in all of the magic. (Fantasy. 12-16)

A dream of flying is passed down from son to son.

A boy lovingly remembers his father and their house on a craggy cliff overlooking the sea, with a pathway of red poppies. |

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“Bartoletti’s writing is always clear and at times elegant, as she creates an immensely likable young protagonist against a well-drawn historical backdrop.” from down the rabbit hole

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE The Diary of Pringle Rose, Chicago, Illinois, 1871

someone she loves dearly. On the surface, this appears to be a novel meant to satisfy ravenous paranormal-fantasy fans looking for an exciting read with a hearty order of romance on the side.

While it certainly fills the bill, there’s depth here that shouldn’t be overlooked. Dez wrestles with real-life issues about identity and belonging, about trust and loyalty, and about friendship and love that will resonate with teen readers across genres.

More substantial and satisfying than it looks. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell Scholastic (256 pp.) $12.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-545-29701-1 978-0-545-47011-7 e-book Series: Dear America

After the deaths of their parents, 14-year-old Pringle Rose and her 10-year-old brother, Gideon, head to Chicago, just in time for the great fire.

“I was Alice, tumbling headlong down a deep, dark rabbit hole,” Pringle says, upon hearing that her parents were killed in a carriage accident. Pringle and Gideon seek a new life in Chicago, hoping to learn to live without parents. But all does not go smoothly: She survives a train crash, a change in living arrangements, labor unrest, startling news about her parents’ “accident” and the great fire. Through it all, her intelligence and grit serve her well. The many apt allusions to Alice in Wonderland, Pringle’s cherished gift from her mother, elevate and deepen the story as, more than once, Pringle’s life is turned upside down, and things are often not what they seem to be. Pringle’s diary entries are a constant in her topsy-turvy life. Standard backmatter for the series includes historical notes, black-and-white reproductions of magazine illustrations and maps, and an author’s note. Bartoletti’s writing is always clear and at times elegant, as she creates an immensely likable young protagonist against a well-drawn historical backdrop.

This strong entry in the Dear America series makes history come alive through one plucky girl and her little brother. (Historical fiction. 8-14)

OTHERMOON

Berry, Nina Kensington (320 pp.) $9.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-7582-7693-3 Series: Otherkin, 2 Readers who’ve been desperate to learn what happens next to teen shapeshifter Desdemona Grey and her band of Otherkin (2012) will find plenty to enjoy in the action-packed sequel.

Fans of the series and new readers alike will find themselves anxiously turning pages as Dez risks everything to prevent a crazed cult leader from carrying out a plan to annihilate shifters once and for all. An unlikely ally emerges to help but in so doing drives a wedge between Dez and the other shifters and pushes her relationship with Caleb to the brink. As if facing extinction and a broken heart weren’t bad enough, Dez is also forced to confront new information about her past. Though she is more confident than ever in her feline form, questions about who she truly is and where she belongs shake her to the core and threaten 78

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ROSALIND AND THE LITTLE DEER

Beskow, Elsa; Illus. by Beskow, Elsa Floris (32 pp.) $17.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-86315-794-3

A little girl’s grandfather is sad because he cannot paint, so she tells him to make a picture book with her, in this tale translated from Swedish and originally published in 1924.

In their convincingly childlike story, Rosalind is sleeping in the meadow under a linden tree, with her deer nearby. A hunter comes by with his dog and points his gun at the deer, which runs away. The wakened and distraught Rosalind wants her deer friend back, and the hunter promises to return it unharmed. But the deer is captured by the king and put in a golden cage, where it refuses to eat. The hunter is locked up for allowing his dog to run free, but he sends the dog to Rosalind with a note written in charcoal, and she takes her walking stick and her linden flowers and sets off. The deer eagerly devours the linden, but the king locks up Rosalind, too, and will not let them go. Fortunately, the entire court takes a nap, the hunter frees Rosalind and her deer, and they all gambol freely and happily beneath the linden. The pictures are simple but detailed, with the colors and aspect of old prints. The king picks apples in his crown and golden coat; the hunter’s dark stone dungeon is equipped with a fireplace and a stool; the hunter, despite the presence of his gun (which disappears in the last scene) is content to blow his horn at the end.

Sweetly illogical and very old-fashioned. (Picture book.

4-7)

A CITY TOSSED AND BROKEN The Diary of Minnie Bonner, San Francisco, California, 1906 Blundell, Judy Scholastic (224 pp.) $12.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-545-31022-2 978-0-545-51006-6 e-book Series: Dear America

National Book Award winner Blundell (What I Saw and How I Lied, 2008) explores the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires in this well-crafted, literary page turner.

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Resourceful, frank and observant, with a wry sense of humor, 14-year-old Minnie must take work as a lady’s maid for the unscrupulous and ostentatious Sumps, who are moving to San Francisco, when her beloved and restless father gambles away the family’s Philadelphia tavern. “I’d rather wash the greasiest pots in the tavern. I’d rather clean the fish,” she confides in her diary. Mrs. Chester Sump, her remote, 16-year-old daughter Lily and Minnie arrive in San Francisco on April 17, 1906, just in time for the biggest society event of the season—Enrico Caruso’s appearance in Carmen. At 5:12 the next morning, a massive earthquake tears through the city.

The author deftly incorporates true events, circumstances and key historical figures into the rapidly unfolding fictional plot, in which Minnie is thrown into a moral dilemma after she is mistaken for someone else. Blundell achieves an impressive balance, portraying the catastrophic destruction and fight to save the city while imbuing the story with elements of mystery, melodrama and a Mark Twain–like sensibility. As Minnie uncovers truly corrupt and greedy goings-on, perpetrated by characters such as “Slippery Andy,” and also witnesses heroic firemen in action, her sense of what it means to live with integrity crystallizes.

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Exciting, suspenseful, absorbing and informative. (epilogue, historical note, archival photographs, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-13)

LOOK UP! Henrietta Leavitt, Pioneering Woman Astronomer

Burleigh, Robert Illus. by Colón, Raúl Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Feb. 19, 2013 978-1-4169-5819-2 978-1-4424-8110-7 e-book

Burleigh weaves imagination and information to sketch the life of a female scientist and illuminate her achievements.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, born in 1868, was a graduate of Oberlin and of the school that would become Radcliffe. Her

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interest in astronomy led her to work for many years in the Harvard Observatory. Although women were prevented from taking part in many facets of academic exploration, Leavitt made a major discovery within the parameters of her assigned work.

Though little is known of his subject’s life, Burleigh posits an early interest in the stars that may help to engage young listeners. The conversational text moves quickly, taking readers from dreamy child to dedicated researcher. Sophisticated vocabulary and complex concepts, as well as the variety of supplementary information Burleigh provides, from quotations about the stars to brief information about other female astronomers, suggest that this would be most useful as supplemental material in a science curriculum. Colón’s watercolor, pen and pencil illustrations extend the text as, for example, when the sideways glances of Leavitt’s college peers effectively convey just how unusual her interests and accomplishments were for the time. They also capture the fascination and beauty of starlight, which seems almost to twinkle at times. The current educational emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (aka STEM) will likely increase interest in biographies about women’s achievements in these fields.

An artful and inspiring effort. (quotations, afterword, author’s note, glossary, Internet resources, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)

(ME, HIM, THEM, AND IT)

Carter, Caela Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-1-59990-958-5

A “good girl” experiences an unplanned pregnancy and its aftermath.

Evelyn is a classic good girl, earning top grades and excelling in the art studio as well as on the track. When her parents start paying more attention to their acrimoniously crumbling marriage than to their daughter, she punishes them by becoming drinking, drugging, sex-having Bad Evelyn. Unfortunately, Bad Evelyn’s exploits become a punishment for her, too, as her protection-free sex with Todd leads to an unplanned pregnancy. Evelyn’s situation is the stuff of classic YA problem novels: What will she do about her pregnancy?

How will she live with her choices? Will her heart, in fact, go on? Fearing expulsion from her competitive and deeply conservative Catholic high school, Evelyn relocates to Chicago to live with her aunts Linda and Nora and their daughters while she makes her choices and protects her GPA. Evelyn is a tough nut to crack, and she’s not particularly likable, but through all her self-contradictory crabbiness and emotionally withholding fears, readers may see someone recognizably real. First-time author Carter drags her narrative out, making readers angst along with Evelyn as she chronicles every week of her pregnancy and beyond.

Readers who relish self-indulgent inner monologue and expect dramatic arguments, seething resentment, tearful 80

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heartbreak, unspoken anxieties, unexpected friendships and ultimately, graceful reconciliation, will not be disappointed. (Fiction. 14-16)

KILLING RACHEL

Cassidy, Anne Walker (320 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-8027-3416-7 Series: The Murder Notebooks, 2 A limp murder mystery, needlessly prolonged.

The second installment in Cassidy’s Murder Notebooks series takes 42 pages of awkward exposition to bring readers up to speed on the events of the preceding volume (Dead Time, 2012). As with the first book, Cassidy employs stiff dialogue and clipped sentences to describe Rose and her stepbrother Josh’s interminable investigation into the disappearance of their parents five years earlier. Meanwhile, Rachel, Rose’s former frenemy from boarding school, reappears in her life with a litany of desperate letters and phone calls, then conveniently provides surprising evidence that the missing parents are still alive just before she herself drowns under mysterious circumstances.

Supernatural red herrings abound, as do unsettling references to romantic tension between the stepsiblings. The diversionary plot device feebly resolves itself when the killer, unprompted, confesses. Rose and Josh stumble upon a few important clues this time, but this wooden tale does not deliver significant intrigue.

For enthusiastic fans of amateur detectives only. (Mystery. 12-16)

AVA AND THE LITTLE FOLK

Christopher, Neil; Neal, Alan Illus. by Wright, Jonathan Inhabit Media (41 pp.) $13.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-92709-502-7

An unhappy, orphaned boy in Canada’s far north finds a new way of life with the help of a group of tiny, magical dwarves who adopt him.

Christopher, a researcher and publisher of Inuit legends and history, and Neal, a Canadian journalist, team up for a relatively lengthy, original story incorporating traditional Inuit characters and setting. Little Ava is alone and unwanted, an outcast orphan in his Arctic village. One day, he stumbles on a tiny, dwarflike man who takes Ava home to his group of family and friends (including sled dogs the size of squirrels). Ava learns that in this new world, time, size and shape can shift, according to one’s own perceptions and inner strength. He proves himself a worthy hunter, accepts the love and respect of his new family, and finds that he is now the same size as the tiny people, the

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“Cocca-Leffler knows children inside and out.” from a vacation for pooch

Inugarulligaarjuit. Dreamy watercolor illustrations in muted tones show Ava’s growth from a cowering child to a brave and strong boy who can fight a lemming or a bear.

The story is long for the picture-book format, but children who enjoy fairy and folk tales will find the story of Ava an unusual and compelling one. (author’s note, glossary, pronunciation guide) (Picture book. 6-9)

PEEPSQUEAK WANTS A FRIEND!

Clark, Leslie Ann Illus. by Clark, Leslie Ann Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-06-207804-9 In his second outing, Peepsqueak remains the same plucky and determined chick, but this tale lacks that certain something that made the first special.

At the end of Peepsqueak’s eponymous “flying” adventure (2012), his eyes were fixed upon the pond, but Clark fails to take up that thread. On this particular sunny day, the baby chicks go out into the barnyard to play two by two, but poor Peepsqueak doesn’t have a partner. Undaunted, he simply goes into the woods to find a buddy. Warnings from several pairs of animals do not faze him, as he chirrups his catchy refrain: “You are 2 but I am 1; / my search for a friend has just begun.” The huge footprints Peepsqueak follows and the cave at the end of his search are clues as to the friend he will find and bring back to the barnyard. But Peepsqeak’s triumphant proclamation— “Friends don’t just come in 2s. / Real friends make room for all!”—may make readers wonder why Peepsqueak had to search for a friend—he already had six. The digitally colored artwork emphasizes the individuality of each chick, while the bright colors and adorable animals are sure to capture and hold readers’ attention as they follow Peepsqueak’s bouncing, dotted-line trail through the forest. The text changes type, font and color, calling readers’ eyes to it, as well.

While young readers will welcome Peepsqueak back, parents may miss the emphasis on hard work and practice that made him such a standout character. (Picture book. 2-5)

A VACATION FOR POOCH

Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Illus. by Cocca-Leffler, Maryann Henry Holt (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 19, 2013 978-0-8050-9106-9 In this small-enough-to-pack storybook, Violet and her dog, Pooch, take separate vacations: Violet to the beach, Pooch to Grandpa’s farm.

In a scene children will recognize, they each prepare a bag.

Violet packs her doll Molly and crayons; Pooch, his stuffed |

Fluffy Cat and red ball. Violet worries that Pooch will miss her, although when she arrives at the beach, bright gouache-and– fabric-collage illustrations show that she’s happily distracted, playing, walking and dining. With a turn of the page, the action comes to a halt. In a full-page spread, readers see Violet in bed pulling Fluffy Cat instead of Molly from her bag. The guilt sets in. Violet’s crisis is well-placed, and what follows is her rapid, emotional recap of her activities contrasted with what she imagines Pooch must have suffered, bored and lonely, concluding with, “While I was having FUN, Pooch was MISERABLE!” Mom suggests a phone call to Grandpa. At first nonplussed when Grandpa tells her that Pooch has had a busy day, too, she is reassured when she learns that Pooch is sleeping with Molly— and remembers that she has Fluffy Cat—making their connection tangible and secure. Cocca-Leffler knows children inside and out.

Pitch-perfect, well-paced and with a conclusion that will leave children deeply satisfied, this is a book to be shared before any kind of separation and just for fun. (Picture book. 4-8)

ON THE MOVE Mass Migrations

Cohn, Scotti Illus. by Detwiler, Susan Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Feb. 10, 2013 978-1-60718-616-8 978-1-60718-628-1 paper 978-1-60718-640-3 e-book Animal migrations offer an opportunity to see hundreds or thousands of the same species gathered in one place.

Spread by spread, in short paragraphs of straightforward exposition set on illustrations showing the animals in their habitats, Cohn describes when, where and why a sampling of North American mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians and even invertebrates come together and move. Some migrations are familiar—monarch butterflies and sandhill cranes—and others may be surprising in this context, like the nightly movement of bats from a cave or the gathering of snakes in their winter dens.

Species linked on the food chain may be described together: the horseshoe crabs and red knots who feed on their eggs; salmon and bald eagles. The author makes an effort to enliven these descriptions with interesting verbs. Salamanders “squiggle across fields.” Chimney swifts “chitter and chatter.” But sometimes word choice trumps facts. Because horseshoe crabs aren’t really crabs, they don’t “scuttle out of the bay.” They crawl, very slowly. Combined with the extra facts in the backmatter curiously labeled as “For Creative Minds,” these informational bits may help young learners broaden their understanding of animal migration, but they won’t deepen it. For that, teachers will want to turn to titles about specific species or the Seymour Simon and Elsa Warnick series that includes They Swim the Seas (1998).

An additional resource only. (Nonfiction. 5-9)

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“The opening chapters of Coley’s debut for teens will chill readers to the bone—unfortunately, the rest of the novel fails to deliver.” from pretty girl-13

PRETTY GIRL-13

Coley, Liz Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-06-212737-2 978-0-06-212738-9 e-book The opening chapters of Coley’s debut for teens will chill readers to the bone—unfortunately, the rest of the novel fails to deliver.

The haunting description of 13-yearold Angela Chapman’s abduction from a Girl Scout camping trip and her mysterious return three years later has all the makings of a deeply disturbing but satisfying psychological thriller.

With a combination of third-person narration and first-hand accounts by the multiple personalities Angie’s created to protect herself from the trauma of her abduction and sexual exploitation, the structure of the novel is innovative and rich with potential. Rather than reveling in the complexities of Angie’s broken psyche, however, the story spoon-feeds readers critical pieces far too quickly. For example, the day after her miraculous return, Angie has her first therapy session, at which she falls immediately under hypnosis and leaves with a diagnosis.

Readers are cheated out of the pleasure of suspense. For a novel about a young girl’s miraculous return to her family and community, there is also a surprising and disappointing lack of emotion. Even though her friends thought she must have been dead, Angie’s return to La Cañada High School feels more like the popular girl coming home after a stint in rehab than the return of someone who has survived the truly unimaginable.

It simply doesn’t ring true. (Psychological thriller. 14 & up)

A LITTLE BOOK OF SLOTH

Cooke, Lucy Photos by Cooke, Lucy McElderry (64 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4424-4557-4

Children might enjoy the myriad pictures of cute critters in this photo essay set at the Aviarios del Caribe sloth sanctuary, but it’s not likely they’ll sit still long enough to listen to the text.

Zoologist and videographer Cooke has already successfully expressed her support for sloths in several media. An online video she created was well-received and has spawned a film documentary, which will be expanded into an eight-part series next year. Unfortunately, what works well online—or even on the (big or small) screen—isn’t as successful on the page. The photos are crisp and clear, but they feature too many repetitive images. After the first few pages, it’s hard to tell one cute sloth clutching a tree, cuddling or snoozing, from another, despite the fact that Cooke informs readers that sloths belong to two different families (the Bradypus family and the Choloepus), distinguished by the number of claws they have and differences in 82

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color and size. The episodic text, overly precious descriptions and self-consciously humorous, adultcentric tone do nothing to strengthen the child appeal. Occasional Briticisms (“pop down to the shops”) and pop-culture references (“Baby sloths are Jedi masters of the hug”—irritatingly, Wookiee is misspelled) run the risk of further distancing young (American) listeners.

While Cooke’s intentions are commendable, the main message she unintentionally conveys is that too much cuteness can be cloying—and counterproductive. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

RAT AND ROACH ROCK ON!

Covell, David Illus. by Covell, David Viking (40 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 21, 2013 978-0-670-01410-1

Opposites may attract, but readers will remain uncharmed by this dry pic-

ture-book sequel.

Rat has allowed his best friend, Roach, to be the lead singer for his band, and the finicky insect could not be happier. Fashioning outfits worthy of Elvis’ late period, Roach is astounded when he discovers that the down-and-dirty crew doesn’t want to touch the fancy duds. Off they go to a hot gig, but Roach can’t sing a note. It’s only when the entire band concedes and gives him what he wants that they are able to rock the joint. The apparent message to be drawn is that while it’s a bad thing to force one person to abandon their sparkle and shine, it is perfectly A-OK to make three people cave in to that one crybaby’s demands. As with his previous book, Rat and Roach (2012), Covell is strongest when drawing episodes of manic energy. The book’s digital gymnastics evoke the splatter, smells and feel of the filthy pavements. While the writing lags, the gritty gleam of the city streets goes for broke.

Since it isn’t either funny or gross enough to truly succeed, place this one only where the previous title has already proved popular. (Picture book. 4-7)

THE LIVES WE LOST

Crewe, Megan Disney Hyperion (288 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-4231-4617-9 Series: The Fallen World, 2 The disease from The Way We Fall (2012) has reached the mainland, but so has Kaelyn, carrying a potential vaccine.

Kaelyn finally accesses her dead father’s laboratory and finds that he created an untested vaccine for the deadly flu before he was murdered. With the island no longer under quarantine, Kaelyn knows she must get the notes and samples to mainland scientists

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who can recreate it, if humanity is to have any hope of survival.

But the mainland is more devastated than she imagined. The novel’s title can refer both to the mass deaths and, more poignantly, to the pre-flu world Kaelyn mourns—the desire to return civilization to what was lost pushes her ever forward and strengthens her resolve. Since Kaelyn is immune, the virus is less of a threat than other people; a highly organized band of survivors wishes to get the vaccine for themselves. But Kaelyn spends more time worrying about the state of her friendship with Leo than considering them. Although the prose is no longer a diary, it’s still related in the first-person—sometimes a bit too unevenly, as side characters get lost in the background ,although they are ostensibly present and active. The ending sets up the next book instead of offering any resolution.

Kaelyn’s grim determination and character growth offer readers a reprieve from bleakness, leaving them ready for the next installment. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

SANCTUARIES

Curtis, Jennifer Keats Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Feb. 10, 2013 978-1-60718-611-3 978-1-60718-623-6 paper 978-1-60718-635-9 e-book Series: Animal Helpers What happens to a wild animal too badly injured or too acclimated to humans to be returned to the wild?

Using examples from six animal-rescue organizations across the country, Curtis describes what wild-animal sanctuaries do.

Short informational paragraphs are set on full-bleed, doublepage photographs of animals being cared for. The account begins with a series of portraits of shelter animals: several tigers, a binturong, a declawed Canadian lynx, a pair of blind bobcats and a bear. The author goes on to describe animal medical and dental treatments, training and enrichment. More than half the photographs relate to captive tigers, but other animals, even an overgrown farm pig, appear. A final page shows volunteers moving an animal into a shelter. There is no real narrative arc, nor any direct suggestion that readers could be involved in this work. Only in the four pages of backmatter—a quiz, a map, further information and thumbnail behind-the-scenes pictures— are readers invited to connect, through questions about where they live and what they like to do.

Part of an ongoing series about animal care that began with Wildlife Rehabilitators (2012), this title fills a niche but doesn’t excite. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

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SEVER

DeStefano, Lauren Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-4424-0909-5 Series: The Chemical Garden Trilogy, 3 In the third book of The Chemical Garden Trilogy, readers finally learn what exactly a Chemical Garden is.

Rhine has returned to evil Vaughn’s compound, reconnecting with her husband, Linden, and sister wife, Cecily. In Bella Swan fashion, she wonders about missing Gabriel, the servant with whom she escaped and found comfort in Fever (2012), yet rekindles her feelings for Linden and their strange relationship. The first half of the story crawls as Rhine once again makes plans to outwit Vaughn and search for her twin brother, Rowan. At long last she has the support of Linden and Cecily, who slowly realize Vaughn’s deception, as well as support from Linden’s hippie-ish uncle, who lives off the grid. Once Rhine discovers that Rowan has become a celebrity vigilante terrorist, destroying virus-research labs across the country, and the true nature of her deceased scientist parents’ work, the pace picks up. Readers, along with Rhine, learn more about the virus that kills off young adults, how American society destroyed itself, how the virus may have been unleashed and Vaughn’s secret experiments to find a cure. Ironically, in this rushed effort to tie up loose ends, holes are left in its wake.

Fans will delight in the symbolism and clues from the cover, but they will ultimately find the trilogy’s conclusion unsatisfactory. (Dystopian romance. 14 & up)

A MARKED MAN The Assassination of Malcolm X

Doeden, Matt Twenty-First Century/Lerner (88 pp.) $33.27 PLB | $24.95 e-book | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-7613-5484-0 PLB 978-1-4677-0144-0 e-book

A vivid chronicle of Malcolm X’s life and untimely death.

Few people were shocked when Malcolm X was gunned down by assassins in 1965. The 39-year-old former Nation of Islam member and civil rights leader was a lightning rod for controversy. The first half of Doeden’s biography explains how Malcolm Little’s distrust of white America was sown in his youth, how his imprisonment as a young man led to a path of selfeducation and spiritual seeking, and how the Nation of Islam provided him with an outlet for his resentment. A gifted, charismatic speaker, he rose to prominence as a civil rights leader who championed Black Power and offered an alternative to people dissatisfied with Martin Luther King’s approach of nonviolent resistance. Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca prompted in

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him a major philosophical shift that resulted in public feuding with the Nation of Islam and its leaders. Doeden thoroughly explores in the second half of the book the circumstances of Malcolm’s assassination, the trial and conviction of the killers, and the rumors of conspiracies and coverups that persist.

A brief but impressively insightful and engaging overview of the life and assassination of Malcolm X. (photographs, timeline, glossary, source notes, suggestions for further reading) (Biography. 12-18)

SHARK BABY

Downer, Ann Illus. by Bersani, Shennen Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Mar. 10, 2013 978-1-60718-622-9 978-1-60718-634-2 paper 978-1-60718-646-5 e-book This tale of an anthropomorphic baby shark trying to find out who he is has shades of both “The Ugly Duckling” and Are You my Mother?

Within his egg case, Shark Baby is curious to know what kind of shark he is. When a storm rips the egg case from its kelp mooring, a tear opens up, allowing Shark Baby to peek out and ask each of the sea creatures he meets, “What are you?” (The ocean current moves him about.) But Shark Baby is not like any of these other sharks. In the end, his instincts serve him well, and identify him, when his egg case bursts in front of a hungry sea lion. Bersani’s illustrations combine realism with slightly personified sea creatures and bring the watery ocean world into readers’ homes, but they lack a key identifying the species in the backgrounds. Backmatter provides additional facts about sharks and egg cases and a comparison of six shark species by size, from the great white to the tiny pajama shark, whose size on the page precludes readers’ making out any details. Readers can also put their knowledge to use by answering some true/ false questions and comparing/contrasting three shark species’ egg cases. Unfortunately, the ruler at the bottom of the page is obscured by a drawing of a chicken egg, which cuts off the cm/ inch delineation.

Highlights a side to sharks not often found in picture books, but readers can find better, notably Surprising Sharks,

by Nicola Davies and illustrated by James Croft (2003).

(Informational picture book. 4-7)

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NOTES FROM GHOST TOWN

Ellison, Kate Egmont USA (336 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-60684-264-5

A teenage girl gets clues from her dead best friend that help solve his murder in this soapy paranormal romance.

When Olivia Tithe, 16, kissed her childhood friend, Lucas Stern, the whole world went gray. Her sudden colorblindness foreshadowed a horrific event: A week after the kiss, piano prodigy Stern was murdered, and Olivia’s schizophrenic mother was accused of the crime. Now, as her mother’s sentencing date approaches, Stern appears to Olivia as a ghost to declare her mother’s innocence. Unfortunately, he can’t quite remember who did him in, so Olivia begins investigating. Even though friend Raina and new crush Austin offer to help, Olivia is terrified to tell them about Stern’s ghost lest they believe she has inherited her mother’s illness. Olivia uncovers shady connections to her real estate mogul father’s vacant new condo development (which she dubs Ghost Town) and finds out that her mother’s original lawyer committed suicide. When the supernatural trail leads to the real killer, Olivia has to decide if she is willing to risk her own life to save her mother’s. Though the clues come about a bit too conveniently, Ellison’s lush, occasionally overwrought writing will leave romance fans swooning, especially after one scene that reads like a homage to the movie Ghost—except instead of a pottery wheel, it’s Stern’s piano.

Sudsy but satisfying. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

A SONG FOR BIJOU

Farrar, Josh Walker (304 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-8027-3394-8

Surviving middle school and puberty is an age-old challenge that video cameras and YouTube have only complicated, as vividly demonstrated in this enjoyable, seriocomic tale of new love, culture clash, adolescent social stratification and

friendship.

His obsession with girls has already driven a wedge between seventh-grader Alex Schrader and nerdy pals Nomura and Ira (beware geeks with video cameras) at their Brooklyn, boys-only parochial school. Still, when Alex is smitten with a beautiful Haitian student at their sister school, his loyal, inexperienced posse offers aid and (dubious) advice. Bijou Doucet, who lived through Haiti’s horrific earthquake three years earlier, has more on her plate: life with her childless uncle and aunt in a new country whose adolescent culture Bijou’s expected to ignore.

No academic superstar (he didn’t know Haiti was in the West Indies) and burdened with a cello-playing older sister, easygoing

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“What debut novelist Finneyfrock captures perfectly is the powerlessness of being a teen.” from the sweet revenge of celia door

Alex cheerfully admits to being talent-free. But love leads him to unexpected places: to Flatbush and Haitian rara music, to discover a talent for drumming, to examine unquestioned values and priorities. Meanwhile, classmates threatened by the disruption of the social pecking order take action. Though Alex’s voice is stronger, co-narrator Bijou is sensitively drawn. Farrar handles race and the complexities of interracial relationships by implication, through Alex’s discovery of the vibrant, new (to him) world just blocks away.

A solid, timely effort. (author’s note) (Fiction. 12-15)

THE ART OF STONE-SKIPPING AND OTHER FUN OLD-TIME GAMES

Ferrer, J.J. Imagine Publishing (192 pp.) $14.95 paper | $6.99 e-book Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-936140-74-9 978-1-60734-658-6 e-book

Ferrer transports readers to a time gone by, when stoopball and jacks, string games and stickball, hopscotch and marbles were the staples of childhood.

As Ferrer notes in his introduction, games have been a part of childhood since the beginning of time, helping children “learn new skills, discover unknown strengths, and build peer relations—which translates directly into solving problems, creating solutions, and becoming a good team player.” Divided into seven sections, the text covers all sorts of games in all sorts of venues: ball, brain, solitary, car, card, group and partner. The format puts the name of the game (and its aliases), number of players, object and materials needed right at readers’ fingertips, summarizing the basic rules in an easy-to-follow paragraph and listing any additional rules, hints or tips in separate, bulleted sections. Most include variations to either modify the challenge or offer variety. “Fun Facts” sections are set off in black and scattered throughout, providing background on many old favorites (Bingo was invented in 1500s Italy), as well as some fascinating factoids (the stone-skipping world record is 51 skips!). Grayscale drawings break up the text and help illuminate some of the more difficult activities (string games, yo-yo tricks), though they also introduce a measure of modernity to what is largely a retro-themed book.

A wonderful resource for households, schools, Scouting groups and other organizations catering to kids. (index) (Nonfiction. 5 & up)

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THE SWEET REVENGE OF CELIA DOOR

Finneyfrock, Karen Viking (272 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 21, 2013 978-0-670-01275-6

Revenge may be sweet, but the joys of friendship and following your own star prove even sweeter in this engaging, lowkey novel about a creative, rebellious youngster.

Fourteen-year-old Celia Door has taken on the private moniker “Celia the Dark” after being roundly rejected by her classmates at the end of eighth grade. But as luck would have it, new student Drake joins her class, and his friendship gives her a fresh prism through which to see herself. Drake is also the keeper of his own secret, and how these friends support each other as they navigate the social and psychological minefield of ninth grade is the heart of the story. What debut novelist Finneyfrock captures perfectly is the powerlessness of being a teen. The things that distress Celia—her best friend being pulled out of school, a mean-girl campaign to humiliate her, her parents’ separation and her father’s move to far-away Atlanta— affect her very core but are largely out of her control. Illuminated with flashes of humor, Celia’s narration is expressive, and her poems, which are sprinkled throughout the novel, elucidate her emotional state with grace and specificity.

Although the story drags in places and the resolution feels forced, girls should sympathize with Celia and Drake and root for their success. (Fiction. 12-16)

SORTING THROUGH SPRING

Flatt, Lizann Illus. by Barron, Ashley Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $14.95 | $9.95 e-book | Mar. 12, 2013 978-1-926973-59-3 978-1-926973-69-2 e-book Series: Math in Nature

Flatt and Barron’s second in the Math in Nature series solves many of the first’s problems, though the rhythms and rhymes remain inconsistent, and there is still no answer key.

Flatt leads readers through sorting, charts and comparisons, though they will need familiarity with these concepts—math is tested but not taught in these pages, and the questions are not always the most basic. “If 8 hummingbird eggs equal 4 robin eggs, which two ratios are correct: 3 to 1, 8 to 4, 5 to 1, 2 to 1?”

On a page that finds the fox family wondering what Father will catch: “Is their dinner impossibly, unlikely, likely, or certainly a vole? A gray squirrel? A rabbit? A cat?” Several pages also ask open-ended questions, allowing readers to both construct meaning from the artwork and explain it. “Nature Notes” give a few brief facts about the featured creatures. As in Counting on Fall (2012), Barron’s gorgeous cut-paper collages are certainly

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“Writing entirely in dialogue, Fleischman employs a natural and believable matter-of-fact tone that provides a fresh view of the immigrant experience…” from the matchbox diary

the highlight, drenching every page in spring sights and colors.

Objects are easy to delineate from the background, though that doesn’t always mean that the answers are easy to find: On the schooling smelt page, readers are asked to find two patterns.

One is a simple, ABA repeating pattern, while the other asks readers to notice that the groups of fish increase by two.

The simple is juxtaposed with the challenging, making the book both flexible and hard to pin down, audience-wise.

(Math picture book. 5-10)

THE MATCHBOX DIARY

Fleischman, Paul Illus. by Ibatoulline, Bagram Candlewick (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-4601-1

Once everybody’s crying, Ducky rushes over to demonstrate a more sharing way to play, finally getting all to agree that “Teeth are for biting food, not for biting friends.” Williams suspends stubby-limbed nestlings, depicted with broad crayon and brushstrokes, in white space, and though Billy and Bunny sport similarly rabbitlike ears, the playmates are easy enough to tell apart. Along with Ford’s explanations of what’s going down (“Billy was getting frustrated. So he bit Lambkin on her chubby little arm, really hard”), the range of postures and expressions provide clear cues to the incident’s emotional highs and lows.

The morsels of behavioral insight, along with Ducky’s peacemaking, give this as much instructional value for adults as it does for little diaper-wearing beasties. (Picture book. 3-5)

I SPY ON THE FARM

The story of one person’s life is the very essence of history, transcending time, distance and generations.

A little girl and her great-grandfather meet for the first time and attempt to get to know each other. The child is intrigued by the curiosities she sees in a collection of matchboxes. These matchboxes represent the memories of the old man’s life, a tangible diary, undertaken as a substitute for the written form at a time in his life when he was illiterate. Bits and pieces contained within call forth events, emotions or people that were important in his life’s journey, from his early childhood in Italy to the difficult voyage to America and the struggles of his immigrant family in the new world. An olive pit, a pen nib, a fish bone, a piece of coal and more tell of poverty, dreams and perseverance.

Writing entirely in dialogue, Fleischman employs a natural and believable matter-of-fact tone that provides a fresh view of the immigrant experience, as the humble objects and their stories form the beginning of a loving bond between the little girl and her great-grandfather. Ibatoulline’s illustrations, done in acrylic gouache, are extraordinarily detailed and expressive. Modern scenes appear in warm, amber-toned colors, while framed sepia vignettes depict past memories as if part of a family album.

Captivating and powerful. (Picture book. 6-10)

NO MORE BITING FOR BILLY GOAT

Gibbs, Edward Illus. by Gibbs, Edward Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-6431-2 Gibbs brings a new guessing game (I Spy with My Little Eye, 2011; I Spy Under the Sea, 2012) to the youngest set.

Colors, which are an essential part of the original I Spy children’s game, are once again the focus of this clever die-cut formula. But this time Gibbs removes the factual clues and gives only animal sounds as hints instead. Farm animals, no less.

Preschoolers everywhere are cheering. Each spread begins with the inevitable “I spy with my little eye…” and concludes with a colorful hint about a favorite barnyard friend. However, Gibbs does sneak in some letter recognition and phonemic play as well. The clue for the first animal reads: “something yellow that begins with a D.” It is likely that the watery pond background and the speech bubble loudly proclaiming, “Quack, quack!” will be all the clues a youngster needs, but reinforcing the d sound adds a welcome level of early childhood learning. Gibbs’ vibrant illustrations (the fiery rooster is particularly bold) and expressive eyes make this effort all the more fun.

A format that engages, entertains and delights—for the third time in a row. Let’s hope for more. (Picture book. 2-5)

A TANGLE OF KNOTS

Ford, Bernette Illus. by Williams, Sam Boxer/Sterling (32 pp.) $14.95 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-907967-31-3

Graff, Lisa Philomel (240 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-399-25517-5

A mysterious man in a gray suit, an assortment of vintage, powder blue suitcases and a beguiling orphan girl with an amazing talent for baking cakes are among the tasty ingredients in Graff ’s delicious new novel.

A bad habit nipped, so to speak, in the bud.

Afflicted with a bad case of shyness on his first day of school, little Billy Goat—prompted by helpful classmate Ducky—tries to join Bunny, Piggy and Lambkin in play. When his whispered requests don’t get their attention, he resorts to sharper measures…and then again when Piggy objects to his pushy behavior.

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Multiple, varied characters intersect to reveal long-held secrets and imaginative connections. Cady is the only orphan remaining at Miss Mallory’s Home for Lost Girls in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where people are either Fair or Talented. Those who are Fair, like Cady’s friend, Marigold, envy those like Cady with a special gift. Cady’s is for baking: She can look at any person and immediately know the flavor of their favorite cake. Cady makes the most beautiful cakes, guaranteed to win the hearts of their recipients—and baking-contest judges. Marigold, meanwhile, has no special Talent, and the mysterious, nefarious Owner has more than his fair share. Graff weaves a miraculous tale of whimsy with the same attention to detail as a master chef.

Carefully blending past mistakes and regrets with future wishes and dreams, she shows us the power of loving ourselves and the pain of living in the past. The narrative shifts from character to character, always in the third person, revealing bits and pieces of the story; occasional cake recipes are sprinkled throughout.

Subtle and intricate, rich with humor and insight, this quietly magical adventure delights. (Fantasy. 8-12)

PRISONER B-3087

Gratz, Alan; Gruener, Ruth; Gruener, Jack Scholastic (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-545-45901-3 If Anne Frank had been a boy, this is the story her male counterpart might have told. At least, the very beginning of this historical novel reads as such.

It is 1939, and Yanek Gruener is a 10-year old Jew in Kraków when the Nazis invade Poland. His family is forced to live with multiple other families in a tiny apartment as his beloved neighborhood of Podgórze changes from haven to ghetto in a matter of weeks.

Readers will be quickly drawn into this first-person account of dwindling freedoms, daily humiliations and heart-wrenching separations from loved ones. Yet as the story darkens, it begs the age-old question of when and how to introduce children to the extremes of human brutality. Based on the true story of the life of Jack Gruener, who remarkably survived not just one, but 10 different concentration camps, this is an extraordinary, memorable and hopeful saga told in unflinching prose. While Gratz’s words and early images are geared for young people, and are less gory than some accounts, Yanek’s later experiences bear a closer resemblance to Elie Wiesel’s Night than more middlegrade offerings, such as Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. It may well support classroom work with adult review first.

A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe.

(Historical fiction. 12 & up)

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MOONGLOW

Griffo, Michael Kensington (408 pp.) $9.95 paper | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-7582-8072-5 Series: The Darkborn Legacy, 1 A teenage girl is cursed with lycanthropy.

The morning after her 16th birthday, Dominy Robineau wakes up, naked, next to the mauled corpse of her best friend.

She has no memory of what happened but knows she is the killer. This is the culmination of weeks of weirdness, marked by sudden-onset hirsutism (especially painful for the pretty, popular girl), uncontrollable rages and violent outbursts—all of which her friends somehow forgive. Far too late to be helpful, her father tells her of a crime from his youth and the subsequent Native American curse placed on him: that his firstborn child would become a werewolf. Dominy and her miraculously understanding friends must find a way around the curse and the witch who cast it, Luba—who is dubbed the “Psycho Squaw” by the shamelessly politically incorrect Dominy. The monstrousness of the werewolf curse is, surprisingly, the most believable aspect of the story, a break from the usual “monster with a heart of gold” trope. Some sprawling subplots involving a mysterious set of twins and Dominy’s comatose mother don’t go anywhere.

Instead, they, and hints at other supernatural creatures, remain underdeveloped in a resolution-free ending evidently set up as a teaser for further books.

The glimpses of monstrous action from the werewolf’s point of view don’t make up for the trite human interactions. (author’s letter to readers, preview of next book) (Paranormal adventure. 14-17)

WEDGIEMAN TO THE RESCUE

Harper, Charise Mericle Illus. by Shea, Bob Random House (48 pp.) $11.99 | $3.99 paper | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-307-93072-9 978-0-307-93072-9 paper Series: Adventures of Wedgieman, 2

Someone needs to save new readers from this book.

Sadly, the second adventure of the vegetable-loving, potty-mouth-named superhero is…not so super. As was the case with its predecessor, Wedgieman: A Hero Is Born (2012), the story starts in at one end by preaching the virtues of vegetables, and then goes out the other end with some pretty lame scatological humor. Of course, readers will only reach the point when the hero gives himself an obligatory wedgie at book’s end if they make it through the poorly conceived plot twists. These include Wedgieman savoring a snack of celery and the introduction of the story’s villain, who calls himself

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Bad Dude. This sets up the predictable punch line that finds the children who show up in the story as Bad Dude’s victims misreading his name: “D-u-d-e spells doodie.” Even though veggies, not academics, are central to the book’s didactic impulse, the hero just breezes by this misreading with the matter-of-fact line, “They can’t spell,” which seems a sad irony in a book intended for new readers. Not even Shea’s humorous, cartoonish digital art can save the day, despite some valiant efforts.

Don’t bother wedging this one on your bookshelf. (Early reader. 5-8)

BUSY-BUSY LITTLE CHICK

Harrington, Janice N. Illus. by Pinkney, Brian Farrar, Straus and Giroux (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 19, 2013 978-0-374-34746-8

Based on a fable of the Nkundo people of Central Africa, this compelling tale brings home the message that if you want something done right—or at all— sometimes you have to do it yourself.

Mama Nsoso’s shivering chicks are in desperate need of a new home. Though Mama promises to build them a cozy one that will keep the wind, rain and cold at bay, each day she is distracted by something delicious to eat, and each night the disappointed chicks cry with cold. Except, that is, for the persistent, industrious Little Chick, who, exhausted from working alone and in secret on a new nest for the family, falls right asleep.

When the nest is ready, Little Chick invites his brothers and sisters in for a good night’s rest. The tale incorporates non-English words and sounds without any context or framing device, and readers must locate the author’s note and glossary on the final page to discover that these words are from the language of the Nkundo people, who are the original tellers of this tale. To further complicate matters, while Pinkney’s vibrant, energetically loose illustrations lovingly and skillfully render Mama and her chicks, they give almost no indication of setting.

Potential confusion aside, this well-told and beautifully illustrated offering makes a distinctive addition to folklore collections. (author’s note, glossary) (Picture book/folktale. 4-8)

MYSTERY AT BLUE RIDGE CEMETERY

Heide Pierce, Roxanne; Heide, Florence Parry Illus. by Escabasse, Sophie Whitman (128 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-7695-3 Series: Spotlight Club Mysteries

After a long hiatus, the Spotlight Club Mysteries return with a new posthumous entry and a paper reprint of another.

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Blond siblings Cindy and Jay, of indeterminate age, and their neighbor Dexter, distinct mainly because he wears glasses, solve mysteries together in a fictional town so mild it could be a Beverly Cleary setting. However, whereas the physical safety of Klickitat Street exists to highlight emotional and developmental depth, Parry and Pierce’s town—Kenoska—houses whodunits (or what-is-its) that characters easily glide through, enthusiastic but free from disputes or sweat. In this world, adult strangers are no actual threat, and a child can pick up prescription medication. (In contrast, kid-made gravestone rubbings sell for $15 apiece. Really?) The kids bike around town between home and the cemetery, earning money to save a museum and forging connections among a wrought-iron bench, a missing locket, feuding adult sisters and a long-dead artist. Answers are too thin, results too perfect. A second title, publishing simultaneously, Mystery of the Bewitched Bookmobile, offers a bit more meat and interest—climbing into a bookmobile in the dark; decoding a painted sign—but feels even more dated due to old-fashioned telephone numbers and a librarian (Cindy’s role model) who wants nothing more than to be asked on a date.

White bread. Consider Jane O’Connor’s Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth (2012) instead. (Mystery. 7-10)

STRONGER THAN STEEL Spider Silk DNA and the Quest for Better Bulletproof Vests, Sutures, and Parachute Rope

Heos, Bridget Photos by Comins, Andy Houghton Mifflin (80 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-547-68126-9 Series: Scientists in the Field

The Scientists in the Field series explores genetic engineering.

Spider silk is useful in myriad ways but relatively rare in the natural world. Scientist Randy Lewis has spent his career searching for ways to produce more of this miracle fiber, using modern genetic techniques to make the genes of the golden orb weaver spider part of the heritage of goats, alfalfa and silkworms. His work is the subject of this latest series entry, which disappoints in its lack of clarity. An intriguing introduction to the spiders (illustrated with a photo of one on a child’s face) is followed by a daunting explanation of DNA. Then, chapter by chapter, Heos describes the work that has produced transgenic animals and plants that will yield silk protein and even the silk itself. Final chapters describe Lewis’ background, offer more detail about genetic procedures and silk production, and discuss ethical questions. Between each chapter is a substantial sidebar that usually fills the following double-page spread, confusing readers who have been led to expect something different from chapter-concluding transitional sentences. There are many characters to keep straight, and both scientists and goats are referred to by their first names.

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“At the New Forest pony auction, Jodie immediately falls in love with a wild, barely broke stallion—an overused element in horse fiction that actually works here.” from samphire song

The lengthy text and difficult material will limit the audience for this, perhaps just to the science students offered directions for isolating strawberry DNA in one sidebar. (Nonfiction. 12-16)

THE BALLAD OF JESSIE PEARL

Hitchcock, Shannon Namelos (131 pp.) $18.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-60898-141-0

Jessie, 15 and living on a rural North Carolina tobacco farm in the early 1920s, dreams of graduating from high school and then attending teachers’ college.

All of that becomes very unlikely after one of her elder sisters falls ill with tuberculosis, forcing Jessie to leave school to nurse her dying sibling and later to become surrogate mother to her sister’s infant son. Jessie loves her nephew, but she’s torn between staying on the farm and cultivating her growing relationship with J.T., a neighbor three years her senior who would happily marry her when she gets a little older, or satisfying a deep-seated urge to make more of her life, if she gets the opportunity. Told in a believable first-person, present-tense voice that emphasizes the immediacy of Jessie’s problems and her sometimes raw emotions, Hitchcock’s debut also neatly captures a full flavor of the setting and period. The aspects of many characters are also effectively revealed, mostly through authentic-sounding dialogue.

A satisfying tale for readers who don’t require a fully happy ending. (Historical fiction. 11-18)

FERDINAND FOX’S FIRST SUMMER

Holland, Mary Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Feb. 10, 2013 978-1-60718-614-4 978-1-60718-626-7 paper 978-1-60718-638-0 e-book Adorable photos of baby foxes that fill the double-page spreads make this one hard to resist, even though it is a little light.

Holland presents the first part of the red fox’s life cycle with the story of Ferdinand, one fox kit she photographed throughout his first summer. Short, bland paragraphs of information describe how the five fox kits grow and learn, their mother nursing and grooming them and, when they are ready, bringing back food for them to eat. Ferdinand and his siblings explore the world with their senses, putting new things in their mouths to taste and feel. They point their ears toward sounds and explore their incredible sense of smell. The kits practice pouncing on prey by jumping on each other and play fight to learn defenses. |

By the end of the summer, Ferdinand is putting all these things to use to find his own food, and next spring, his own kits will be learning the same lessons. The consistent placement of text over the photographs in a san serif type is a particularly graceless design choice. Two pages in the “For Creative Minds” section in the backmatter list some fox facts and adaptations (repeating much that was in the text), while another two contain activities.

Young animal lovers will be sure to check this out, even if they don’t return to it for repeat readings. (Nonfiction. 4-7)

SAMPHIRE SONG

Hucklesby, Jill Whitman (304 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-7224-5

A dream-horse book overcomes its trope.

Fourteen-year-old Jodie, still grieving the death of her father, finds some solace in her work at a local livery barn.

When her mother snags a regular writing gig, she uses it in part to fund Jodie’s and her younger brother Ed’s hearts’ desires: for Ed, a radiocontrolled airplane; for Jodie, a horse of her own. At the New Forest pony auction, Jodie immediately falls in love with a wild, barely broke stallion—an overused element in horse fiction that actually works here. Jodie, damaged herself, feels a bond with the horse, Samphire, and responds to him patiently, until they are galloping the beaches where she once rode with her father. Then disaster strikes: Ed needs an organ transplant, and Jodie’s mother loses her job. Jodie sells Samphire, willingly, but with great pain; several months later, the family situation eased, she attempts to buy him back only to find he’s been sold on. At that point, the story takes a turn toward the melodramatic. But the writing is lovely, the family life and affection among the characters real. Jodie expects no magic; she and Samphire heal on their own time. (But why does this obviously British book speak of dollars, not pounds?)

A worthwhile addition to a well-loved genre. (Fiction.

10-14)

FLORA AND THE FLAMINGO

Idle, Molly Illus. by Idle, Molly Chronicle (44 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-1-4521-1006-6

Klutzy but endearing Flora (dumpily clad in swimsuit, bathing cap and flippers) and a dancing flamingo are the protagonists of this whimsical, wordless tale, which will have special appeal for budding ballerinas.

Initially playing hard to get, then gradually warming to her overtures, the flamingo literally takes Flora under his wing and

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“The watercolor illustrations feature expressive cartoon animals who range from bored Daisy to seemingly over-caffeinated Lizzie.” from lazy daisy, cranky frankie

teaches her to dance. The story of the evolving camaraderie between this unlikely duo is told with humor and compassion through the use of a delicate flowing line and a limited, subtle color palette (mostly pink). The occasional simple rectangular fold-down flap cleverly allows each character to reveal a quirky new gesture or change of mood when the story demands. Illustrator Idle’s prior experience as a DreamWorks animator is evident in the flowing, musical quality of the illustrations; one can almost hear the 3/4 beat of a waltz in the background. The seamless grace of the flamingo’s dance contrasts humorously with Flora’s faltering steps, but by the end of the story, they swoop, plunge and soar together like old ballet partners.

Courageous use of white space—several pages contain a solitary waterlily—and a confident animated style are used to good effect in this sweet story of a young girl and her unlikely mentor. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE GATHERING DARK

Johnson, Christine Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (512 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 21, 2013 978-1-4424-3903-0 Dark matter is imagined as an alternate universe, existing in an uneasy symbiosis with reality in this intriguing but overlong paranormal romance.

Keira, a talented pianist, dreams of escaping her small Maine town and her perpetually arguing parents. Her relentless focus on music leaves little time for other pursuits, including boys, so she is as much apprehensive as electrified when she meets the charismatic Walker. She’s also horrified when, soon after their encounter, she begins seeing strange things—first just an unusual piece of fruit on the kitchen counter that disappears when she tries to touch it, but soon, they are larger and more elaborate visions that eventually cannot be ignored. Keira’s smart, witty third-person voice provides balance for the somewhat goofy premise, and she’s a refreshingly strong character, even as she’s inexorably drawn to Walker. (She exclaims at one point, “But I don’t like being the kind of girl who needs a guy to save her.”)

However, it’s obvious from the onset that there is some kind of otherworldly force pulling them toward each another, and the question of exactly why drags on too long.

Still, the conclusion is a satisfying one that cleverly works in her musical ability, and readers with a penchant for the genre will enjoy both the tortured romance and its eventual resolution. (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)

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LAZY DAISY, CRANKY FRANKIE

Jordan, Mary Ellen Illus. by Weldon, Andrew Whitman (24 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-8075-4400-6

Another farm where the animals misbehave—well, they are good at something anyway.

“This is my cow, / she’s called Daisy. / She should eat grass, / but she’s too lazy.” Instead what does Daisy do? She sits around all day being spoon-fed jelly. Nancy the pig is no better at doing what she ought. She’s much too fancy to roll in the mud.

“Instead she stares / at her reflection, / ‘My oh my, / you are perfection.’ ” Lizzie the chicken doesn’t lay eggs; she’s much too busy dancing in her purple underwear. Frankie the dog rounds out this rogue’s gallery. He’s far too cranky to herd the sheep.

Instead he watches television and demands tea and cakes. “This is my farm, / it might not look good. / None of the animals / do what they should.” But when nighttime comes, all of the animals display their expertise...at sleeping. Jordan and Weldon offer up this Australian farm that, like so many American farms in picture-book–land, finds itself peopled with contrary animals.

The rhyming text will be easy to learn, and audiences will enjoy watching the ever-so-slightly goofy animals act up. The watercolor illustrations feature expressive cartoon animals who range from bored Daisy to seemingly over-caffeinated Lizzie. The roller-skating sheep glaring out from under its top hat is particularly hysterical.

A good addition to the fractious-farm-animals genre, and a fine bedtime story to boot. (Picture book. 2-5)

WHAT WE BECOME

Karp, Jesse Harcourt (432 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-547-55500-3

Karp returns to the technocentric autocracy of Those That Wake (2011) armed with the same angry characters and exploring the same gadgetry issues, though with a large dose of conspiracy theory added this time around.

Mike is gone, and Jon Remak’s lost in the neuropleth, but Mal Jericho and Laura Westlake still manage to negotiate daily life in a radically altered New York City that’s characterized by a heightened police presence, an absence of bookstores and the invisible, controlling hand of the Old Man. Though separated by faulty memory, Laura and Mal both have companions to assist them as they work to recover their forgotten pasts. As the Old Man begins his mental maneuvering to seize a tool that will allow him to control every mind on Earth, Laura and Mal ascend the Lazarus Towers for a neuropleth battle. Mal’s consistent ability to take punches and Laura’s

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THE MIRRORED SHARD

obsessive focus on interpersonal connections keep them from advancing as characters. Two other characters seem meant to be foils, but Rose’s fragility and Aaron’s blasé approach to social cues are too one-dimensional to be effective. Vanishing bookstores, cancer-causing cellphone implants and omniscient Librarians add a dusty-feeling paternalism to the straining prose that fights and sexual creepsterism (sadly, sex is presented more negatively than otherwise) simply can’t overcome.

It’s gone from bland to worse. (Dystopia. 14 & up)

EMILY WINDSNAP AND THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN

Kessler, Liz Candlewick (288 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-5824-3 Series: Emily Windsnap, 5

Can half-mermaid Emily rely upon her friends to help her find the source of Neptune’s nightmares? Will they be able to unravel the mystery of his memories before an evil threat takes over the waters?

Kessler’s fifth installment in this popular series continues with a successful mix of fantasy, mystery, adventure and a touch of romance. Emily and boyfriend Aaron are summoned

by Neptune to embark on a quest that is “extremely important, extremely secret…and extremely dangerous.” With only snippets of dreams as clues, they set off north to the Arctic in search of a lake surrounded by mountains and a glacier—““a place filled with secrets and magic…and fear.” Soon they encounter underwater bubbles filled with memories, discover a frozen yet thawing twin brother of Neptune, meet a wise narwhal and confront their leader with the truth. The dialogue is quick and the action even quicker as the plot twists and turns in unexpected ways.

Questions of trust dominate, as many characters are faced with difficult decisions. Can Millie trust the love of her life even though he has been acting oddly? Can Emily count on her best friend, whom she has neglected, to keep a secret? Can Neptune believe his brother Njord truly wants to reunite and rule the oceans together?

The unexpected ending will surely satisfy as a fitting close to this light page turner. Past fans of the series should especially enjoy diving in. (Fantasy. 9-12)

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Kittredge, Caitlin Delacorte (304 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-385-73833-0 978-0-375-98570-6 e-book 978-0-90722-4 PLB Series: The Iron Codex, 3 Aoife finally gets some sense, and the series ends.

The third and presumably final volume of the Iron Codex series (billed as a trilogy but with an open ending) sees, in the final pages, a slight maturation of selfish, generally unlikable heroine Aoife. It may be too little too late, coming as it does after another stubborn journey in which she pretends her own foolish actions didn’t ensure the destruction of the world and instead turns her magical powers and remarkable perseverance (her one redeeming trait) to trying to rescue her bad-boy boyfriend from the Deadlands, since a previous foolish action of hers got him killed. Secondary characters seem to exist only to get Aoife out of trouble, as when Cal and Conrad rescue her from Alcatraz. The narrative is full of directly contradictory characterization and statements (starting with Aoife’s freeing of Draven, right through to the way the Deadlands is described as cold and then hot and then cold). Even fans may find the episodic action doesn’t hold their attention, since most of it doesn’t seem driven by anything other than plot requirements, but completists and those who really care whether or not Aoife can rescue Dean from death will be glad to have their questions answered.

Everyone else, don’t bother. (Steampunk/fantasy. 12 & up)

OPEN THIS LITTLE BOOK

Klausmeier, Jesse Illus. by Lee, Suzy Chronicle (40 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-8118-6783-2 You really can’t judge a book by its cover!

Follow the instructions of the title and find...another, smaller cover, in purple, with a frog and a rabbit both engrossed in their reading. Open that cover, and there’s a red one (with black dots) about a ladybug, then a green one about a frog, an orange one about a rabbit, a yellow (with honeycombs) about a bear, each progressively smaller, and finally, a tiny blue one, which really contains a story. It’s about a giant, the ladybug, the rabbit, the frog and the bear, dedicated readers all, who form a friendship based on their love of reading.

Meantime, the outer edges of the books that were opened on the way form a pretty, square rainbow. (Each cover features a different typeface and background design.) Getting to the end

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The Morris Shortlist: A Look at New Voices b y v i c k y

s m i t h

The countdown to the ALA award announcements day, arguably the most exciting day of the children’s-literature year, began, for me, in the fall of 2011, when I was appointed to the Morris YA Debut Committee. Not as well-known as its older counterparts, the Newbery, Caldecott and Printz, it has a very specific mission: to “[honor] a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens.” I have done a fair amount of committee work but always in the realm of children’s books, not books for teens. I thought that the Morris, with its relatively restricted scope, would be a low-impact way for me to dip my toe in the YA waters.

Ha. There were way more first books published for teens this year than I ever imagined there could be, and I was hardpressed to find time to read anything that wasn’t a debut.

Though technically the award is for any kind of writing, there were far more eligible novels published than anything else, so I spent my year splashing about in fiction of all sorts: fantasy and magical realism, science fiction and its popular little siblings, post-apocalyptic adventure and dystopian romance, mystery, historical fiction, gritty realism.

In December, the committee got together virtually to decide on a shortlist. We selected five books, and at the ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, we will choose the winner, which will be announced on Monday morning, January 28. Rerereading these five books to prepare was sheer pleasure. What I think I love most about this shortlist is the distinctiveness of all the narrative voices, one to the other. In alphabetical order by author, here is a sample: Wonder Show, by Hannah Barnaby, mesmerizingly realizes the dusty, dingy but still magical world of the small-time freak show. It becomes a haven for 14-yearold parentless Portia, who escapes the positively gothic McGreavey’s Home for Wayward Girls and lands a job “crying the ballyhoo” at the circus sideshow. Barnaby’s meticulous, lyrical narration captures readers as it lovingly creates its setting: “they wove between the fading painted trailers, ducked under half-empty clotheslines, passed through the temporary town the circus became when it was settled in place. It seemed so familiar, this progression of shapes and structures, like the set of a play Portia had seen before.”

Love and Other Perishable Items, by Laura Buzo, takes readers to that most romantic of locales, a suburban supermarket.

There, 15-year-old Amelia and 21-year-old Chris cope with unrequited love in blisteringly smart alternating narration. Amelia adores Chris with all her heart, but Chris is fixated on Michaela, his lost, first love. A spectacular example of what some are calling literature for the “new adult,” this nonromance nails both characters. And it is so, so funny: Amelia reflects that “I should have my own TV show, all right. It would be called Lifestyles of the Young and Powerless. Lifestyles of Them That Had a Mouthful of Metal Until a Short Time Ago. Lifestyles of Them That Still Let Their Mums Choose Their Clothes and Spent Last Saturday Night at Their Best Mate’s House Studying.”

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After the Snow, by S.D. Crockett, takes place in a postapocalyptic Wales in which global warming (probably) has triggered a worldwide cooling. Willo, a largely unlettered child who has grown up in the remote, mountainous countryside, speaks in an idiosyncratic, visceral vernacular that at first distances but soon draws readers in. His tightly filtered, present-tense perceptions give readers a taste of raw survival in a blasted, wintry landscape and wire them directly into his thought processes. “I shout at the snow quite a bit. The shouting aint helping me I know. It probably make me sweat more and my face get red I can feel it. But sometimes when you’re going to get angry it aint something you can stop just by saying it gonna be a good thing to stop.”

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, by emily m. danforth, chronicles the coming-of-age of a Montana lesbian in the ’90s— not an easy time or place. Twelve-year-old Cameron’s world is rocked when her friend Irene kisses her; it is upended entirely when her parents are killed in an automobile accident that very day. Over the next four years, she slowly grows into her identity, catastrophically falls in love and emerges on her own. Cameron’s voice is blunt, often extremely funny and achingly honest.

Of her born-again aunt, who arrives to fill the void left by her parents, she reflects, “we were related, and here she was, and I was glad, I think. I think I was glad to see her. Or at least it felt, just then, like it was the right thing, the correct thing to have happen, for her to walk into the room.”

Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman, makes her home in the capital city of the fantasy kingdom of Goredd, with an architecture, culture and cosmology that owe a lot to medieval Europe. Seraphina is a court musician who hides a potentially deadly secret: She is half human, half dragon in a society that has only barely maintained a tenuous, decadesold peace with dragons. Her narration of the events surrounding the murder of a royal and a state visit by the ruler of the dragons effortlessly accommodates worldbuilding without sacrificing character development, her wry observations often startlingly colloquial yet always just right: “I knew some of these courtiers.…They usually joined the choir, but that fair-haired Samsamese across from me played a mean viola da gamba.”

Five great books, five great voices. Which will win?

9 Vicky Smith is the Children’s & Teen Editor of Kirkus Reviews.

Please visit kirkus.com to read the reviews of each of the books covered in this article.

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of the story means passing back through all the previous page sizes and colors. On the final red page, the ladybug closes her book, and then “[y]ou close this little red book….” But of course, then readers are urged to “open another!” And the illustration on the real last page features a tall bookcase with all the animals around it reading, as well as the giant’s hand, other tiny creatures and a couple of engrossed children. The sleek text and endlessly inventive design register strongly by showing rather than just telling.

A delightful and timely homage to reading and, more, to books themselves. (Picture book. 3-8)

THE PURIM SUPERHERO

Kushner, Elisabeth Illus. by Byrne, Mike Kar-Ben (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper | $6.95 e-book Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-7613-9061-9 978-0-7613-9062-6 paper 978-1-4677-0996-5 e-book People forget that Superman is an alien. This book is a reminder that that’s the source of his strength.

Here’s a secret that isn’t taught in school: Everyone has a superpower. It might be drawing monsters or kindness to strangers or the ability to read an unusual number of books.

Nate’s power is that he feels like an alien. He’s the only boy in his class with two fathers, Daddy and Abba. All the boys in Nate’s Hebrew school class are dressing up as superheroes for Purim, but Nate really wants a green costume with antennae.

(Comic-book fans would, of course, suggest that he dress as the Martian Manhunter.) “Sometimes showing who you really are makes you stronger,” Abba says, “even if you’re different from other people.” Nate’s secret power gives him unusual creativity, and his solution wins him an award for most original costume. Byrne’s illustrations make the ending especially satisfying, with half-a-dozen young superheroes standing around in tennis shoes. (Longtime superhero fans, however, will feel old when they see Wolverine in a picture book.) A generation from now, this book may feel hopelessly outdated: A moral about tolerance and being yourself may seem painfully obvious. Many will view this as a sign of progress. If that happens, it will be because of the work of heroes like Nate.

For now, this book is both timely and entirely satisfying.

(Picture book. 4-9)

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THE TROUBLE WITH FLIRTING

LaZebnik, Claire Harper/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $9.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-06-192127-8 978-0-06-220304-5 e-book

High school junior Franny Pearson reluctantly accepts a job sewing costumes for the renowned Mansfield College Summer Theater Program and finds herself in the middle of her own romantic drama.

Franny enjoys acting, but with her parents divorced and money tight, she settles for working as her aunt’s assistant in Mansfield’s program and is pleasantly surprised when an old friend, Julia Braverman, arrives for the program with her brother Alex. Franny’s always had a crush on kindhearted Alex. When she’s not sewing, Franny hangs out with the self-absorbed, wellto-do Mansfield students, who find her sympathetic and intelligent. She’s pleased and hopeful when Alex pays attention to her, even though he seems involved with another student. She’s confused and mildly irritated when flirtatious heartthrob Harry Cartwright pretends he’s attracted to her. Convinced Harry’s not serious, the flattered Franny flirts back with surprising results, leaving her even more confused about Alex and Harry.

Bemused Franny’s first-person, present-tense voice gives humor and urgency to her firsthand chronicle of the vagaries of the human heart. The novel is loosely based on Mansfield Park, and unfortunately, the somewhat superficial teen characters and twisted plot pale in comparison with the original.

This light summer romance with a theater theme is good for a getaway but not much more. (Fiction. 13 & up)

THE VERY BEARY TOOTH FAIRY

Levine, Arthur A. Illus. by Brannen, Sarah S. Scholastic (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-439-43966-4

A young bear with a very loose tooth anticipates the visit of the mysterious, exciting and petrifying tooth fairy.

Being an obedient bear, Zach knows to stay away from humans; as his mother says, “They are dangerous and unpredictable.” One day, he wanders near a campsite and hears a young boy and his mother talking about a visit from the tooth fairy. Zach proceeds to ask his sister, Leah, and his friend, Harrison, about this night visitor: Just what kind of creature is this tooth-fairy, anyway? A human? Through the mischievous gift of a caramel from Leah, Zach’s tooth indeed falls out, much to his terror. It will be a long night of waiting to see if the tooth fairy is truly “dangerous and unpredictable.” Attentive readers will be rewarded by this tale of curiosity and redemption. Levine

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“Friendship is where you find it, and as this book demonstrates, sometimes it’s under the most unlikely of rocks.” from wooby & peep

creates an emotional cliffhanger for the very young, supported by clever watercolor illustrations of a nearly parallel universe between the boy and the bear. The suspense of the plot shines bright, but the visual magic lasts. And although the story is about Zach, it is Leah who becomes magical. “A bear can be anyone,” says Zach’s mom. “And anyone can be a bear.”

Inspiring and clever, this story captures the simple joy and limitless possibility of belief. (Picture book. 3-5)

WOOBY & PEEP A Story of Unlikely Friendship Liu, Cynthea Illus. by Peterson, Mary Sterling (32 pp.) $14.95 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-4027-9644-9

After an inauspicious start, two very different characters find common ground and friendship.

Wooby lives with his goldfish on a quiet street. Wooby likes things peaceful and orderly. He also likes his petunia patch and his 527-year-old tree and his pretty fountain. Then the house next door gets sold to Peep and her iguana, neither of whom are shrinking violets. Peep likes things loud and busy. The rest of the neighbors give Peep the bum’s rush, but Wooby doesn’t want to be rude, so he attends Peep’s housewarming party. But when Peep tries to solidify their new friendship, she manages to accidently break the fountain, then to topple the ancient tree and finally to destroy Wooby’s house—making herself scarce after this last disaster. Sitting amid the wreckage with his goldfish, Wooby actually starts feeling a little lonesome for his new neighbor, and when he discovers that Peep likes playing Go Fish, the deal is sealed. This is a very slim story, but it is surprisingly affectionate, both in the text and through Peterson’s artwork, with its washed pinks and soft blues and simple, expressive line.

It is also worthy that Wooby can see past his stick-in-the-mud existence and Peep’s bumbling to find something of real value.

Friendship is where you find it, and as this book demonstrates, sometimes it’s under the most unlikely of rocks.

(Picture book. 3-6)

FROGGY’S WORST PLAYDATE

London, Jonathan Illus. by Remkiewicz, Frank Viking (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 7, 2013 978-0-670-01427-9

Fans expect a flop flop flop in every Froggy adventure, but in this latest work, Froggy’s emotions flip-flop more than his webbed feet ever do.

Froggy wakes up, excited to start the weekend by going outside to play. But none of his friends are home. Luckily, his mom has a solution: She has set up a play date with Frogilina.

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Froggy’s reaction? “I’M NOT GOING!” Froggy slams the door— “BLAM!”—wails on his saxophone (“SQUAAAAAAWK”) and throws a ball against the wall (“thump thump thump”) to release some anger. But then he realizes that he does want to see the movie, even if Frogilina has to come along. He snaps on his favorite bowtie, slaps on some of Dad’s aftershave (Froggy’s true feelings come out) and heads to the theater. Froggy, of course, can’t sit still for an entire movie, and somehow Frogilina manages yet again to give him a great big smooch on the cheek.

EEEWWW. London deals with a classic young-child dilemma— wrestling with the embarrassment of having a crush—with sympathetic humor. A post-movie visit to an ice-cream stand feels more tacked on to provide additional sound-effect opportunities than derived organically from the story, alas.

Not the most smoothly transitioned of Froggy fare, but endearing nevertheless. (Picture book. 3-5)

PLAY MAKERS

Lupica, Mike Scholastic (224 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-545-38183-3 Series: Game Changers, 2 Ben McBain and his friends are still celebrating their incredible football championship season (Game Changers, 2012) when the time arrives to prepare for basketball.

As always, Ben is the heart and soul of his team and looks forward to maintaining their athletic success. A preseason scrimmage with a rival team introduces a new challenge: Chase Braggs, a talented player with an attitude that seems from the beginning to be directed at Ben. Before he realizes it, Ben has let Chase get under his skin and turned from his love of excellence for its own sake to proving he can outdo the brash newcomer.

Ben’s relentless pursuit of victory results in a serious injury to his friend Sam that will be a tough blow to their team. As if that isn’t enough, Chase seems to be making inroads in a friendship with Lily, someone who has always been an important presence in Ben’s otherwise sports-dominated life. Like the first in the series, this volume provides an action-packed look at middle school sports as it explores issues of friendship, problem solving and coming-of-age. Once again, the adults provide guidance in supportive roles, but the kid characters, especially Ben, demonstrate the ability of younger teens to learn from their experiences. A reconciliation between Ben and Chase doesn’t quite ring true, but this is a slight quibble in an otherwise satisfying read.

Sports fans will eat it up. (Fiction. 8-12)

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IF YOU HOLD A SEED

MacKay, Elly Illus. by MacKay, Elly Running Press (32 pp.) $16.95 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-7624-4721-3

A verbal and visual tone poem involving a seed, a wish and time.

A text afflicted with grammatical ambiguity (“If you hold a seed / And make a wish, / And plant it in the ground…”) and an unlikely claim that “When autumn comes again, / [The tree] will lean into the wind” chronicles the growth of a tree. With it, the book follows the boy who plants it over years and seasons until he sits, an adult, on one of its branches to show another seed in turn to a child. The seeds depicted are just generic blobs, and despite recognizable birds and butterflies in MacKay’s paper-collage scenes, her pervasive use of extremely soft focus backgrounds and slow shifts of hue set aside specific depictions of natural detail in favor of a dreamy, abstract evocation of time’s passage. Likewise, except for some of the animals, her figures look down, away or off to the side, which will have the effect of distancing viewers—younger ones, at least. MacKay’s debut could have used better writing, but artistically, she does show unusual sensitivity to effects of color and light.

Nevertheless, next to such artful treatments as The Carrot Seed and And Then It’s Spring, by Julie Fogliano and illustrated by Erin E. Stead (2012), it pretty much defines “additional purchase.” (Picture book. 6-8)

WHITE FUR FLYING

MacLachlan, Patricia McElderry (128 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-1-4424-2171-4

A rescued dog saves an unhappy, silent boy in this gentle story about families, fears and courage.

As she did most recently in Waiting for the Magic (2011), Newbery Medalist MacLachlan shows the support that pets can provide. Zoe’s mother fosters abandoned Great Pyrenees dogs. But when Jack, a new dog, runs away, 9-year-old Phillip, a new neighbor, runs after him. He gets lost, but the dog leads him to a barn where they shelter from a night of rain and hail.

Phillip’s parents are having problems; he’s staying for a while with a childless aunt and uncle with little experience with children or dogs, and he won’t talk to anyone. Zoe’s family, on the other hand, is close, chatty and compassionate. They care for each other and for their rescued animals: not only the massively shedding white dogs, but also an African grey parrot whose favorite phrase is “You can’t know.” True. There is much you can’t know about people and animals both, and much you don’t know, still, after the story ends. Zoe recalls the experience in a |

narrative occasionally interrupted by ruminative, present-tense glimpses of Zoe with the dogs at night and summed up in her little sister Alice’s concluding journal entry. The spare prose and extensive dialogue leaves room for the reader’s imagination and sympathy.

Beautifully told, quietly moving and completely satisfying. (Fiction. 7-10)

WINDBLOWN

Manceau, Édouard Translated by Quinn, Sarah Illus. by Manceau, Édouard Owlkids Books (32 pp.) $16.95 | Apr. 15, 2013 978-1-926973-77-7 Where do the seven colored shapes come from, and whose are they?

As the shapes come blowing across the clean, white pages, the chicken, the fish, the bird, the snail and the frog each in turn claim them using simple repetitive phrases. “They’re mine!” says the chicken, created when the shapes arrange themselves in the form of its head. “I saw them lying around!” But it turns out only the wind has the power to transform the puzzlelike paper shapes into the bodies of each creature and to finally blow them high in the air so readers can “catch” them and make their own (imaginary) collages. The shapes arrange themselves differently on each page to challenge children to see them as different animals. French illustrator Manceau makes extravagant use of white space; the page opposite the text that reveals the wind’s role in the drama is amusingly blank. The typeface looks light and insubstantial in relation to the strong graphic line of the illustrations. The text reads clumsily in places, possibly a poor translation from the French original, and is so sparse that some spreads are unsatisfying.

A book that at first glance might seem minimalist to the point of vacuity bears closer scrutiny when one appreciates the function the paper shapes can have in allowing a child to identify them in different orientations and even to practice counting. (Picture book. 3-7)

SNOW SCHOOL

Markle, Sandra Illus. by Marks, Alan Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-410-4 978-1-60734-593-0 e-book Over the course of the year, a pair of snow leopard cubs learn all they can from their mother, becoming ready for independence.

Starting right after birth, these feline siblings learn about the world from their attentive mother, especially about hunting.

From the first, the kittens learn the rules their mother teaches

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them: It’s a dangerous world, leave a scent, be quiet and quick while hunting, guard your food, find shelter in a storm and stay clear of humans. The blood of the hunt is neither sensationalized nor minimized. Facts about snow leopards are interwoven through the story, and the illustrations help explain more esoteric animal words like markhor, ibex and pika. Pakistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains are depicted in all their drama, bathed in watercolors of blue and white, from a number of points of view. The animals are rarely shown at rest—always moving to build up their muscles and learn the skills they need to live on their own. It is a temptation to anthropomorphize these felines, but Markle tells their story for the younger reader in a way that allows them to identify with their mutual paths to independence without overdoing that connection.

Little human cubs will want to roll and cavort like these snow leopards—and learn more about them. (endnotes, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

SHARDS AND ASHES

Marr, Melissa Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Feb. 19, 2013 978-0-06-209846-7 978-0-06-209845-0 paper 978-0-06-209847-4 e-book An eclectic assortment of terrible futures.

Viruses, terrorists, social collapse, disasters—this anthology offers variety in the horrors lurking ahead for humanity. Some protagonists rebel against invasive, controlling societies; others are just trying to get by in the chaotic ruins of civilization. The genres of individual stories are also scattered: A healthy dose of science fiction, some fantasy and even horror and paranormal romance are represented. Many of the entries read more like teasers for novels rather than fully realized and soundly structured stories. Among those, Veronica Roth’s “Hearken” stands out for tight structure, an intriguing premise relying on a musical application of string theory and, most importantly, emotional resonance. It is the most successful of the offerings. Rachel Caine’s “Dogsbody” and Margaret Stohl’s “Necklace of Raindrops” offer different views of corporate-controlled nightmares—action-packed and murderous for the former, thoughtful for the latter. Readers seeking the grotesque and creepy find it in the Lovecraft-ian tale “Corpse Eaters,” by editor Marr, involving a rebellion against an awoken reptilian god who eats the dead, or in the disease story “Miasma,” by Carrie Ryan. Diversity of content goes some way to distract from unevenness of story quality. Just about any of these stories could easily be expanded into a novel—unfortunately, this makes them less satisfying as reads in the short story form, as many feel abridged and offer weak resolutions.

Perhaps most appealing as a sampler for genre neophytes. (Post-apocalyptic/short stories. 13 & up)

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PEEP AND DUCKY

Martin, David Illus. by Walker, David Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-5039-1

A new easy-to-read friendship tale is sure to resonate with “lucky, lucky, lucky” preschoolers everywhere.

When Peep goes to the playground with his mommy and runs into Ducky and his daddy, the result is definitely lucky. In gentle rhyming verse, the two encounter the usual highs and lows of playground adventures. A trip down the slide might end in a sore bummy, but a little tickle makes everything better. Likewise a small tiff over a bucket might break it in two, but good friends always know how to make up with each other.

After a long bout of play, it’s time to go home, but the two don’t whine, promising instead to play together another time. The couplets make for easy reading, their sing-song quality lending them to large crowds or one-on-one interactions with equal ease. Likewise, the buoyant mixed-media art neatly complements the up-tempo tone. Cute without being cloying, these pudgy feathered stand-ins for child readers are bound to entice small listeners to clamor “Again” when the story’s done.

As soft and refreshing as a cool glass of lemonade, and twice as sweet. (Picture book. 2-6)

DRAGON RUN

Matthews, Patrick Scholastic (336 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-545-45068-3 In a world ruled by dragons whose minions rank and brand people like cattle, one boy has the ability to change everything.

Al, Wisp and Trillia join the crowd of 12-year-olds waiting outside the castle on Testing Day. With relatively high-ranking parents—four—Al worries more about his friend, Wisp, whose parents sport the marks of rank two.

Wisp, cavalier as always, gives Al a beaten-up hat to wear with an enigmatic message that it will give him the “luck of the Evans.”

However, luck seems far from Al when a zero is carved on the back of his neck, indicating his worth and calling for not only his death, but the death of his whole family. Al’s only option is to run. He soon discovers that rank zeros are not worthless but dangerous, capable of overthrowing the dragons and freeing the five races from their slavery. Sword fights, a mysterious society and an impossible quest keep this inventive fantasy moving at a fast clip. Harry Potter fans hungry for a new hero will be drawn to Al, but stock characters and a predictable resolution combine to steal the magic.

A distinctive fantasy with obvious flaws, this still goes down pretty easy. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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“Interweaving themes of identity, escapism and body image, Medina takes what could be a didactic morality tale and spins it into something beautiful: a story rich in depth and heart.” from yaqui delgado wants to kick your ass

STINK AND THE FREAKY FROG FREAKOUT

McDonald, Megan Illus. by Reynolds, Peter H. Candlewick (160 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-6140-3 Series: Stink, 8

Stink Moody, younger brother of Judy, hops into the spotlight with a common problem—and one that’s a bit more unusual.

Stink would like to advance in his swimming lessons, but he’s afraid to put his face underwater and seems doomed to remain a Polliwog forever. Fortunately, he’s distracted from that issue by the sudden appearance around town—in some surprising places—of a whole lot of real frogs, a few of which are deformed. These frogs give McDonald the opportunity to offer a little information, through the voice of a nature-center guide, on how adverse environmental conditions can influence frog development. Stink memorizes a variety of frog sounds, enabling him to participate in a frog count at a local pond.

Somehow, he becomes convinced that he’s turning into a frog himself, but that might just make it possible for him to swim underwater. Brief, cheery, oversized text and lot of cartoonish black-and-white illustrations (only some of which were available for review) make this a good choice for newly independent readers. A minor issue is that the text informs readers that it is early spring; even in Virginia, that’s a little early for Stink to be taking swimming lessons in an outdoor pool, as indicated in the illustrations.

Young readers with a fondness for amphibians will jump all over this one. (Fiction. 6-8)

PIGGIES IN PAJAMAS

Meadows, Michelle Illus. by Hoyt, Ard Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $15.99 | Mar. 5, 2013 978-1-4169-4982-4

The piggies may be in their pajamas, but they have little interest in snoozing.

While Mama’s in the kitchen and Papa is working late, the shoats make merry. “Piggies in pajamas, / jumping in the air, / tossing up the pillows, / popcorn in their hair.” The five little piggies of various ages finish their jumping and use their imaginations. First they are mountain climbers and simultaneously ocean divers, but “THUMP, THUMP. / OINK, OINK— / All the piggies fall. / STOMP, STOMP, / STOMP, / STOMP— / ‘Mama’s in the hall!’ ” They hurry up to hide in bed and wait to make sure Mama’s not coming. Then it’s off to pretend to be a train until they hear the stomping again!

Hide under the covers...and then a pillow fight when the coast is clear. But a scratching branch at the window sounds like a wolf or a fox or a bear! Those piggies know the best place to go |

when they’re scared! Mama’s bed is big and cozy: “Good night, piggies!” Meadows and Hoyt team up again for another tale of porcine mischief (Piggies in the Kitchen, 2011). Little listeners will see themselves in Meadows’ friendly, creative rhymes (though the noisy onomatopoeia might not make for the best bedtime read). Hoyt’s pale watercolors of full-bleed rambunctiousness (with occasional insets of a suspicious Mama downstairs) are a terrific match.

Piggies in pajamas: pure porky pleasure! (Picture book.

2-7)

YAQUI DELGADO WANTS TO KICK YOUR ASS Medina, Meg Candlewick (272 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-0-7636-5859-5

A nuanced, heart-wrenching and ultimately empowering story about bullying.

When 15-year old Piedad Sanchez’s mother moves them to another part of Queens, Piddy is unprepared for the bullying that awaits her at her new school. Yaqui Delgado doesn’t know Piddy but decides she’s stuck-up and shakes her ass when she walks—accusations weighty enough to warrant a full-fledged bullying campaign. As her torments escalate, readers feel the intensity of Piddy’s terror in her increasingly panicked first-person narration. Interweaving themes of identity, escapism and body image, Medina takes what could be a didactic morality tale and spins it into something beautiful: a story rich in depth and heart. Piddy’s ordeal feels 100 percent authentic; there are no easy outs, no simple solutions. Displaying a mature understanding of consequences and refreshingly aware (no deducing supporting characters’ feelings before the protagonist, here), Piddy also exhibits an age-appropriate sense of vulnerability. The prose is both honest (“growing up is like walking through glass doors that only open one way—you can see where you came from but can’t go back”) and exquisitely crafted (“Fear is my new best friend. It stands at my elbow in chilly silence”).

Far more than just a problem novel, this book sheds light on a serious issue without ever losing sight of its craft.

(Fiction. 13-18)

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“Although inevitably and consciously reminiscent of Make Way for Ducklings, this book impresses all on its own with its fine design, compelling story, expressive images and gentle environmental message.” from lucky ducklings

ARCADIA BURNS

Meyer, Kai Translated by Bell, Anthea Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-06-200608-0 978-0-06-209297-7 e-book A shape-shifting Mafia capo insists on romance amid dark family mysteries.

The death of her sister and aunt in Arcadia Awakens (2012) have left Rosa Alcantara the head of a Sicilian Mafia clan. Her love affair with Alessandro, capo of the rival Carnevare family, makes both of them vulnerable to vicious members of their own families. It’s bad enough that they lead different Cosa Nostra clans, but their magical abilities are at odds as well. The Alcantaras become giant snakes, while the Carnevares become panthers, leopards and lions. Rosa mostly ignores the family business while she investigates the brutal rape she endured a year and a half before. Her investigations reveal unsettling truths: Nothing in her pre-Mafia past, neither the rape nor the death of her father, is unrelated to Cosa Nostra. Her own family has engaged in heinous crimes against her and the rest of the Mafia. A climactic battle—partially described in a six-page cellphone conversation between Rosa and Alessandro—ties up a few loose ends and leaves the rest for the next volume.

Mafiosa Rosa is rarely likable, but this tough survivor takes control of her own life, determined not to be controlled, assaulted, lied to or—quite literally—devoured.

(Paranormal romance. 14-16)

SCARLET

Meyer, Marissa Feiwel & Friends (463 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-312-64296-9 Series: The Lunar Chronicles, 2 Meyer returns with the second installment of the Lunar Chronicles for a futuristic spin on “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Feisty, red-hoodie–wearing Scarlet is beside herself; her beloved grand-mère has been missing from the family farm in the French countryside for two weeks.

A mysterious, tattooed street fighter named Wolf may be able to help her—and he has these awesome green eyes. Meanwhile, in the Eastern Commonwealth, cyborg Cinder—who learned she was the long-lost Lunar princess, Selene, in the eponymous first book (2012)—escapes from jail with the roguish Thorne, a charming petty crook cast in the Han Solo mold. Cinder has a new, jacked-up cyborg hand and her Lunar powers of mental manipulation to help her in her quest to find…Scarlet’s grandmother, who may hold the key to her past. Meyer’s story ticks along smartly, showing no sign of second-volume sag. Both 98

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fairy-tale and romance elements are blended in to pleasing if predictable effect. Less successful from a plausibility standpoint is a bloody new Lunar plot to take over the world, though it does contribute to tension. Also troubling is Meyer’s tendency toward peculiar word usage that in a more stylistically distinguished work would seem fresh but here seems just, well, peculiar and may haul readers out of an otherwise effective story.

Readers who can ignore the flaws will find the book goes down easy, and they will be happy to wait in line for the third installment. (Science fiction/fairy tale. 12 & up)

LUCKY DUCKLINGS

Moore, Eva Illus. by Carpenter, Nancy Orchard (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-439-44861-1

Based on events that occurred in Montauk, N.Y., in 2000, this title begins when Mama and her five little ducks go for a walk. A surprising fall leads to a dramatic rescue and this endearing story that’s sure to warm hearts for years to come.

Moore chooses straightforward, rhythmic language that engages young readers. “Mama Duck swam to shore. She hopped out onto the grass. Right behind her came Pippin, Bippin, Tippin, Dippin…and last of all…Little Joe.” The family walks through the park, stops for “a bite to eat” and goes on their way. When Mama crosses a storm drain, her little ones follow. Unfortunately the slats in the drain are quite wide, and each duckling falls in. “That could have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t, because…” each time all seems lost for the ducklings, a concerned citizen becomes involved in a step that leads to their eventual rescue. Carpenter uses charcoal and digital media to create illustrations that have a distinctly retro appeal that enhances this classic-feeling tale. From the ducklings’-eye view of alarmed people peering through the grate to the traffic-stopping moment when Mama and her babies are reunited, young ones will be enticed by the events on every page.

Although inevitably and consciously reminiscent of Make Way for Ducklings, this book impresses all on its own with its fine design, compelling story, expressive images and gentle environmental message. (Picture book. 4-7)

BUG PATROL

Mortensen, Denise Dowling Illus. by Bell, Cece Clarion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-618-79024-1 A bug’s busy day highlights the many varied jobs of a police officer.

In rollicking rhymes with spot-on rhythms, Mortensen presents her hero: “9 A.M. / Behind the wheel, / riding in / my Bug Mobile. / Coffee, cruller, / cruise control. / I’m Captain Bob,

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/ Bug Patrol.” Sound-effect balloons contain the radio messages from the dispatcher sending him to trouble spots: the ant swarm at the donut, beetle parking troubles, speeding spiders on low riders, a picket line at the Roach Motel, a lost baby flea and some crickets partying too loudly. While Capt. Bob’s solutions may not completely reflect real life—the ants get lectured about rudeness and helping ants in need—they are creative: Capt. Bob gives the picketing roaches a ride to more suitable accommodations…at the landfill. Challenging vocabulary will stretch readers’ knowledge while giving them the context and picture clues they need to decipher them—perpetrators, urban, picket line, dignified—though some humor is clearly meant to tickle adult readers’ funny bones. Bell’s acrylic-and-ink illustrations nicely echo the tongue-in-cheek tone of the text. Her bugs wear clothes, drive cars and have fully expressive faces—the bad-boy natures of those speeding spiders are easy to discern.

The speckled texture in her artwork lends itself nicely to all the scenes, whether urban street, bright green grass or fur on the back of a dog.

A fun spoof. (Picture book. 4-8)

AWESOME BLOSSOM

Myracle, Lauren Amulet/Abrams (384 pp.) $16.95 | Jan. 8, 2013 978-1-4197-0405-5 Series: Flower Power, 4

Secrets rock the flower friends in the fourth entry in Myracle’s Flower Power series (Oopsy Daisy, 2012, etc.).

Fifth-graders Katie-Rose, Yasaman, Milla and Violet are looking forward to a quiet week, but there is never a dull moment at Rivendell Elementary. Milla is asked out on a date by her adorkable boyfriend, Max, but is having trouble telling her moms about it, let alone the flower friends.

Good-girl Yaz sneaks a peek at a note she’s been asked to deliver between two teachers and discovers a budding romance. KatieRose keeps finding tiny stuffed hedgehogs, but she can’t figure out who is leaving them. Meanwhile, Violet tries to rescue the enigmatic new student, Hayley, from the clutches of mean-girl Modessa. But Violet’s focus on making sure Hayley becomes a flower friend instead of an evil chick has Yaz feeling left out.

Myracle continues her brilliant exploration of the complicated lives of preteens as they navigate first crushes, bullying and the struggle to stay true to themselves. However, this latest entry lacks the edge of the earlier series installments. The ongoing battle between Modessa and the flower friends feels tired, and Myracle focuses more on the girls’ friendships and budding romances than on social issues, like mental illness, as she did in previous entries. Still, the girls’ giggle-worthy antics and enough dangling plot threads will keep readers wanting more.

A solid, if not outstanding, entry in the Flower Power series. (Fiction. 9-13)

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THE RUNAWAY KING

Nielsen, Jennifer A. Scholastic (352 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Mar. 1, 2013 978-0-545-28415-8 978-0-545-52951-8 e-book Series: The Ascendance Trilogy, 2 Acknowledged as Carthya’s rightful king in The False Prince (2012), shrewd prince Jaron disappears in a desperate, foolhardy attempt to save his life, his crown and his country in this action-packed second installment of the Ascendance Trilogy.

Barely a month into his reign, 15-year-old Jaron faces rival regents, threats of invasion from neighboring Avenia, a betrothal to a complete stranger and a power-hungry captain of the Carthyan guard who longs to replace him. When he’s brutally attacked in the castle gardens, Jaron finds he’s in a perilous predicament. He must surrender himself to the destructive Avenian pirates within 10 days or they and their ally, King Vargan of Avenia, will destroy Carthya to get him. Rather than comply, Jaron eschews his few trusted friends and disappears from Carthya, intent on infiltrating the pirates, settling a debt with their conniving leader Devlin and converting enemies into allies. Assuming his former identity as orphan thief Sage, Jaron covertly enters Avenia alone, where he’s eventually captured, injured and seemingly doomed. Ever flippant, Jaron narrates his story with dark humor. Readers will continue to find this arrogant, fearless, utterly reckless hero intriguing, fascinating and complex as he battles the odds to protect the kingdom and people he now holds dear.

High adventure abounds with nail-biting drama. (maps) (Adventure. 8-14)

SALVATION

Osterlund, Anne Speak/Penguin (288 pp.) $8.99 paper | Jan. 10, 2013 978-0-14-241770-6 Osterlund offers a believable and touching relationship between two protagonists readers will come to believe belong together.

Despite the hardship of immigrating to the United States from Mexico in elementary school, Salvador “Salva” Resendez, now a senior, is a straight-A student and the star quarterback of his football team.

Having taken freshman English in middle school, he’s not happy when he’s saddled with the additional responsibility of AP English with a teacher known as “the Mercenary” instead of phys ed. Beth Courant, aka the “walking disaster area,” is also an A student—though a hopelessly disorganized one—and a gifted writer. Her pitch-perfect, third-person internal dialogue, which fluidly alternates with Salva’s, reveals grief over the loss of her

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grandmother and her mother’s neglect. When Salva receives a D from the Mercenary, he turns to Beth. Predictably, Salva begins to return Beth’s hitherto-unrequited crush, but what is unpredictably refreshing is the manner in which their romance unfolds. Salva and Beth both want a brighter future, but when tragedy strikes, it will take their combined strength—not just Beth’s, as the marketing copy unfortunately implies—to pull them through.

The romance ultimately rises above occasional falsesounding slang to tell a story of friendship, love and determination that will satisfy readers. (Fiction. 14-17)

FOX FOREVER

Pearson, Mary E. Henry Holt (304 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-8050-9434-3 Series: The Jenna Fox Chronicles, 3 Picking up directly after The Fox Inheritance (2011), this colorful, highstakes finale is a speedy thriller through the streets, neighborhoods and deserted subway tunnels of future Boston.

Under Locke’s skin is blue BioPerfect, capable of things he barely understands. His existence is illegal. He’s determined to hunt down any backups of his consciousness that may be trapped without sensory input inside technological environments—just as his own mind spun in a pitch-black hell for 260 years, bodiless. But first he owes a Favor to the Network, an underground and undefined rebellion, so he insinuates himself into the life of Raine—wealthy daughter of a dangerous Secretary of Security—to glean information about a political prisoner and a pile of money. Fast-paced action and clear settings make for a vivid page turner, told in tight first-person. As Locke falls for Raine, his emotional desperation ratchets up. Revelations are about people’s connections—past and present, tugging on threads that reach back through the series. Broad politics takes a narrative back seat to the circle of protagonists, and the treatment of minds trapped without bodies is anticlimactic for a series centered around that concept; however, the previous title’s theme about Bots with human dreams reaches gratifying and tragic fruition.

The mind-bending Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008) can easily stand alone, but this is a crucial, memorable conclusion for readers who have moved on to Inheritance. (Science fiction.

12 & up)

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CRAP KINGDOM

Pierson, DC Viking (368 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 7, 2013 978-0-670-01432-3

Tom Parking dreamed of being whisked away to a fantasy realm, but his real life just wasn’t crappy enough.

Tenth-grader Tom’s mom is a great mom. His dad’s absent but not a monster. Tom has a few friends, and he loves drama club. There’s even the possibility of a girlfriend….It’s not a stellar life, but he’s no abused orphan living under the staircase; no other realm would name him Chosen One. Until one does. Just Tom’s luck: It’s a ragged, rubbishy, nameless kingdom (they won’t commit to a name and “mumble unintelligibly” when they talk of their land) that’s accessed through a charity bin in a Kmart parking lot. Nggghthththhh’s king loathes Tom and sends him to work in the Rat-Snottery (don’t ask). Just after Tom tells the Nggghthththhhians no thanks for the Chosen One gig, his best friend Kyle starts acting weird. Suddenly, there’s a new prophecy: Kyle’s the Chosen One! The king loves him, and Kyle can do magic! Then Tom finds out his body wasn’t idle while he was in Nggghthththhh, and he has trouble in two worlds. Twice as trippy and equally as much fun as his first (The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had to, 2010, for adults), Pierson’s sophomore effort is a post-Potter, self-aware, ironic, sarcastic fantasy. Some action scenes get boggy with exuberant descriptions, but the abundant laughs make up for it.

Adults might wonder what Pierson’s smoking; teens will just enjoy the ride. (Fantasy. 12 & up)

DEDUCTIVE DETECTIVE

Rock, Brian Illus. by Rogers, Sherry Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Feb. 10, 2013 978-1-60718-613-7 978-1-60718-625-0 paper 978-1-60718-637-3 e-book With a combination of clues and logic, the Deductive Detective solves the case of Fox’s stolen cake.

Detective Duck determines that one of the 12 bakers in the cake contest is the thief. He’ll “find clues that will subtract each suspect until there is just one left.” The fact that Mouse’s itty-bitty cake is the largest she can carry eliminates her from the list. Duck crosses her name off his notepad, and a subtraction problem on the page shows that 12 suspects – 1 mouse = 11 suspects. Rooster was busy crowing at the time of the crime, and a few hairs at the scene provide evidence that Swan is not the thief. The trail leads to the kitchen, up onto a counter, out a smallish window and into a tree, therefore making the only suspect left…. Tongue-in-cheek wordplay and puns liven up the kirkus.com

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“…this offers readers who only know Rivera from picture-book biographies a more nuanced view of his controversial life and distinctive art.” from diego rivera

text: Pig quips, “Nothing good ever happens when I’m bakin’.”

The only odd step is the reasoning behind Horse’s dismissal— the lights were out, and Horse “would never go into a dark room alone.” Rogers’ anthropomorphized animals walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, though many are quite realistic looking.

Facial expressions are a bit hit-or-miss, but the body language makes up for that. Two pages of activities invite readers to test their deductive reasoning with a list of questions and to compare/contrast the attributes of the 12 suspects.

A cleverly solved mystery that will get kids using their noggins. (Picture book. 4-8)

SERENDIPITY & ME

Roth, Judith L. Viking (320 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 7, 2013 978-0-670-01440-8

Overly deliberate plotting and uneven writing weigh down Roth’s debut.

Sixth-grader Sara has the potential to be a sympathetic heroine, and there’s plenty going on in her life to engender interest. She’s crushing on a cute boy in her class, disappointed to miss the school play because of illness (she had a starring role) and still sad about the death of her mother three years earlier. She’s also hurt by her father’s emotional withdrawal and yearning for a kitten. While this mix of serious and less-urgent issues is undeniably realistic, Sara’s reactions don’t vary enough to be believable, which gives the text an overall flat tone. Some of Roth’s poems use effective imagery and intriguing vocabulary to bring scenes to life. Others sound trite or forced and serve mainly to provide information necessary to push the plot along. Sara’s first-person narration captures the self-absorption typical of some middle school girls but unfortunately also prevents Roth from providing fully fleshedout portraits of other characters or nuanced descriptions of their experiences. The brisk and happy resolution will likely please some readers, but it’s possible that others won’t have hung in long enough to reach it.

Ultimately the predictable story arc and limited character development prevent this novel in verse from channeling the charm of the eponymous fluffy kitten that appears on the cover. (Verse/fiction. 9-12)

DIEGO RIVERA An Artist for the People

Rubin, Susan Goldman Abrams (56 pp.) $21.95 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-8109-8411-0

Along with biographical details (frank enough to acknowledge repeatedly that he always “liked the ladies, and the ladies had always liked him”), Rubin highlights aspects of Rivera’s art that sets it apart from Frida Kahlo’s: the focus on public settings, on depicting working classes and campesinos, on representing historical and industrial themes. The rich array of illustrations include bright images of full murals and details, sample preliminary drawings, big photos of Rivera at work (and posing with Kahlo) and even works by other artists, from Giotto to José Guadalupe Posada, that strongly affected his artistic development. Though the appended disquisitions on Mexico’s history and on Rivera’s artistic influences seem tacked on and in large part go over material the author has already presented, overall this offers readers who only know Rivera from picture-book biographies a more nuanced view of his controversial life and distinctive art.

A carefully researched, cogently argued and handsomely produced appreciation. (reading list, endnotes) (Biography. 10-13)

PERFECTLY PERCY

Schmid, Paul Illus. by Schmid, Paul Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $16.99 | $17.89 PLB | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-06-180436-6 978-0-06-180437-3 PLB What is an adorable porcupine to do when his passion is for balloons? Is he destined for disappointment, or will some careful thinking lead to the perfect solution?

Schmid (Hugs from Pearl, 2011) returns with another sweet tale about the challenges of being a porcupine. Percy loves balloons of all colors and shapes. “But HAPPY little porcupines with balloons are soon SAD little porcupines. / The balloons always go POP!” Percy is determined not to mope or give up.

Advice from big sister Pearl is not practical, and his mom is too busy. So Percy must rely upon himself and start thinking. He muses all through the day and into the night. At breakfast the next day, while eating his cereal, he finally has an inspired idea.

Young readers will immediately relate to Percy and his dilemma, and they will cheer when he independently comes up with a messy but successful solution. The simple, direct text pairs well with the soft pastel palette of the illustrations. Percy, white with a pink smudge of a nose and a mass of softly penciled wayward quills, appears more cuddly than prickly and is sure to endear.

Just right for preschoolers, who will giggle at the gently humorous ending and see a bit of themselves in this utterly charming creature. (Picture book. 3-6)

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“With a rich and realistic setting, a compelling and entertaining first-person narration, a colorful cast of memorable characters and an intriguing storyline, this is a surefire winner.” from out of the easy

WHO DONE IT? An Investigation of Murder Most Foul Scieszka, Jon--Ed. Soho Teen (368 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-1-61695-152-8

A routine writing exercise filled with in-jokes and carried to ridiculous extremes by a mammoth stable of YA and children’s authors.

Produced to benefit the creative writing program 826NYC, the anthology consists of alibis of various length offered by 83 (!) alphabetically ordered contributors accused of killing evil editor Herman Q. Mildew. Along with making frequent reference to cheese (the stinky sort, natch), pickles and frozen legs of lamb, some “suspects” protest their inability to meet any deadline (Libba Bray) or map out a scheme (“Plotting has never been my strong point. Just read any of my books,” writes Sarah Darer Littman). Others protest that they adored the victim despite his habit of callously rejecting their story ideas, mistreating their manuscripts, insulting their pets, calling them at odd hours and bilking them of royalties. Dave Eggers and Greg Neri provide lists of explicitly described ways in which they did not kill Mildew, Mo Willems and Michael Northrup claim to have been off killing someone else at the time, and Elizabeth Eulberg, Mandy Hubbard, John Green, Lauren Myracle and several others shift the blame to fellow writers. Young readers, even the sort who worship authors, will find their eyes soon glazing over.

Clever in small doses—tedious after the first few dozen entries. (author bios) (Belles lettres. 10-12)

OUT OF THE EASY

Sepetys, Ruta Philomel (352 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-399-25692-9

Step right onto the rough streets of the New Orleans French Quarter, circa 1950… …and meet 17-year-old Josie Moraine, a feisty young woman whose mother, a prostitute in a Conti Street brothel, offers her nothing but scorn and abuse. From the tender age of 12, Josie has made her own way in the world, working in a local bookstore in exchange for a safe place to sleep and cleaning the brothel to earn money toward her planned escape from the Big Easy. Equal parts book smart and street smart, Josie’s dream is to attend Smith College, and she will go to extremes, even blackmail, in her desperation to be accepted. But just when her plans start to gain some traction, her mother strikes again, putting Josie in the middle of a murder investigation and saddling 102

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her with a mob debt. There are some meaningful messages here: that love can come from the unlikeliest of sources—the roughand-tumble brothel madam is much more supportive of Josie than her mother ever was—and that we are all in control of our own destinies if only we choose to be. With a rich and realistic setting, a compelling and entertaining first-person narration, a colorful cast of memorable characters and an intriguing storyline, this is a surefire winner.

Immensely satisfying. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

BREAKING POINT

Simmons, Kristen Tor (400 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 2, 2013 978-0-7653-2959-2

The lengthy sequel to dystopian romance Article 5 (2012) sees fugitives Ember Miller and Chase Jennings deepening their involvement with a resistance operation.

Ember and Chase are stationed at the Wayland Inn, a resistance headquarters at the edge of Knoxville. Their job involves helping transport fugitives to safe houses, but anonymity becomes complicated for Ember when her name, somewhat inexplicably, appears on a list of suspects in a series of shootings. A mission to rescue Rebecca, Ember’s roommate from the reformatory and resistance fighter Sean’s girlfriend, gives the story some shape, but the action is largely episodic. Characters spend more time reacting to dangers than planning for them, and thoughtful readers may be frustrated when even the climactic rescue operation is carried out with relatively little forethought. Too often, Ember’s motivations are assumed to be obvious, when in fact many readers may not share her assumptions. Why, in a pivotal scene, should readers agree that her friend Beth is too naïve to run a safe house? What fuels Ember’s opposition to fighters targeting government officials even though other resistance members support it? Tensions among Ember, Chase and the pair’s old enemy Tucker Morris run high, but when none of the trio makes an effort at communication, their interactions quickly become repetitive.

A slog, with perhaps enough moments between Ember and Chase to appease romance devotees. (Dystopian romance.

12-16)

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WHEN WINGS EXPAND

Sinclair, Mehded Maryam Kube Publishing (224 pp.) $9.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-86037-499-2

A 12-year-old Canadian Muslim girl chronicles the death of her terminally ill mother and her slow healing.

When the book opens, Nur’s mother has been sick for months, and treatments seem to be going nowhere. Nur picks up the diary her mother gave her and names it “Buraq” after a legendary animal that flew Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem. The piety that guides her here carries her through the gutwrenching grief that is to follow, as does the discovery of some monarch butterfly chrysalises. Nur’s Baba tells her that “Allah has made everything in a pattern. He said people are part of that pattern too. Just like chrysalises don’t stay the same, people don’t stay the same either.” While skeptics may find the metaphor of a butterfly’s emergence from a chrysalis an inapt way to help a child deal with the death of a parent, it seems to work for Nur. Whether this book will work for children is another open question. Nur is so good, so pious, so ingenuous that she is very hard to relate to. While her grief and her rage never feel false, they are so quickly mitigated by her faith, at first mediated by her devout parents (her mother dies with “Allah” on her lips) and later on her own, that she seems more a role model for grieving in Islam than a real child.

There are so few children’s books featuring sympathetic Muslim characters that it’s impossible to discount this one, but it’s pretty pallid stuff. (glossary) (Fiction. 8-12)

FOLLOW FOLLOW A Book of Reverso Poems Singer, Marilyn Illus. by Masse, Josée Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 7, 2013 978-0-8037-3769-3

A companion piece to the acclaimed Mirror, Mirror (2010), this offering presents more delightful “reverso” poems to treasure.

As in the original volume, each page spread presents an expertly crafted poem based on a fairy tale coupled with a second poem which is, with only minor changes in capitalization and punctuation, the first poem in reverse. Together, the two poems offer new perspectives and insights into familiar tales and their characters. Take, for example, the poems based on “Thumbelina.” The first verse, from the girl’s perspective, begins, “Me / marry / a mole? / I am / small, / but / my dreams are / lofty and daring, / not / constant and safe,” while the second verse, in the voice of the mole this time, ends with “constant and safe, / not / lofty and daring. / My dreams are / but / small. / I am / a mole. / Marry / me.” Other featured tales include “The Emperor’s New |

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Clothes,” “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Three Little Pigs” and more. Masse’s bold and brilliant illustrations bring the poems to life, showcasing the different perspectives while maintaining a lovely sense of unity by essentially dividing each painting into two distinct images while incorporating elements that inextricably yoke each image to its counterpart.

Read alongside the traditional tales it plays off of or enjoyed on its own, this volume is one to savor. (about reversos, about the tales) (Picture book/poetry. 8-12)

TALLULAH’S TOE SHOES

Singer, Marilyn Illus. by Boiger, Alexandra Clarion (48 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 19, 2013 978-0-547-48223-1 Series: Tallulah, 3

Toe shoes are de rigueur for ballerinas, and Tallulah wants them—now!

Tallulah is one determined ballet student. She wanted a tutu and got it. She wanted a starring role in a student performance and almost got it, appearing instead in the corps de ballet. Now it’s toe shoes. Her teacher explains that she can wear them when her feet stop growing. This is not a sufficient deterrent, however. Tallulah sneakily retrieves a pair discarded by an older student and takes them home. Sore feet, sore toes, inability to balance and her little brother’s exasperation after trying to help finally make her realize her teacher’s wisdom. Singer once again wisely presents a quandary faced by many little ballerinas and any other child who is told to postpone immediate gratification. Boiger’s delicate watercolors featuring bright reds and blues winningly capture Tallulah’s loving family, her dramatic if unsuccessful struggle to stand on point and her surety of future success. A double-page-spread depiction of a ballet step, échappé en pointe or demi-pointe, performed respectively by an older girl and by Tallulah, makes an excellent reference point. Little girls in tutus and little girls who dream big will find that Tallulah is a kindred spirit. A glittery cover adds to the appeal.

A charming entry in the ongoing saga of Tallulah. (Picture book. 4-7)

BALLOON TREES

Smith, Danna Illus. by Klein, Laurie Allen Sylvan Dell (32 pp.) $17.95 | $9.95 paper | $9.95 e-book Feb. 10, 2013 978-1-60718-612-0 978-1-60718-624-3 paper 978-1-60718-636-6 e-book No, these trees don’t bear balloons, but they are the starting place for the production of these popular objects. |

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“…the richly textured worldbuilding and the complicated relationship between Fen and Daniel, as well as the constant and varied dangers they face, will keep readers up long past their bedtimes.” from orleans

Rhyming couplets and effective illustrations describe the general process by which latex is extracted from trees, converted into a colorful mix, shaped into forms, treated and sent to stores to be sold as balloons. Each double-page spread shows a separate step, watched over by what looks like a warbler with an observant eye. (Sharp-eyed observers will even see him through the red balloon on the cover.) At one point, the bird even comes close to becoming part of the process, shaking off the powder that coats each latex form after cooking. As in Smith’s Two at the Zoo (2009), the rhyming text scans well, making this a good choice for an informational read-aloud even for preschoolers. As in all this publisher’s books, there are also reproducible learning activities in the backmatter and available on the Web. Here, the four pages include a map showing where rubber trees grow, comprehension games and a text explanation with vocabulary suitable for elementary school readers. A Spanish edition is also available.

Books for young listeners about how things are made are relatively rare; this one will stretch to fit a variety of goals. (Informational picture book. 4-7)

ORLEANS

Smith, Sherri L. Putnam (336 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 7, 2013 978-0-399-25294-5 Smith imagines a captivating and truly frightening future for the United States, one in which six devastating hurricanes follow Katrina’s path right into the heart of the crippled Gulf Coast.

On the heels of the storms came the quarantine of the entire Gulf Coast region because of Delta Fever in 2020 and the government’s complete abandonment of the disease-ravaged sector a mere five years later. Thus, in 2056, 15-year-old Fen de la Guerre and others like her find themselves eking out a living in a primitive society, many choosing to organize themselves into tribes by blood type to gain a modicum of control over the spread of Delta Fever. When Fen’s dear friend dies while giving birth, Fen decides to try to get the newborn over the wall to the Outer States so she might have a better life. Meanwhile, a young scientist named Daniel sneaks across the border into Orleans to further his search for a cure for the fever. Fen and Daniel become strong, if unlikely, allies. While a couple of plot points stretch the bounds of believability and some loose ends remain, the richly textured worldbuilding and the complicated relationship between Fen and Daniel, as well as the constant and varied dangers they face, will keep readers up long past their bedtimes.

A harrowing and memorable ride. (Science fiction. 14 & up)

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THE REECE MALCOLM LIST

Spalding, Amy Entangled Teen (352 pp.) $9.99 paper | Feb. 5, 2013 978-1-62061-240-8

If this novel was a musical, it’d get average reviews and see a modest run.

After the death of her emotionally distant father, Devan is full of mixed emotions about moving to Los Angeles to live with her mother. Not only has she never met her mother, but the woman in question is reclusive, best-selling author Reece Malcolm. Reece is welcoming, but Devan is still uncertain about their relationship, even after spying on her reveals that her fears are unfounded. At the same time, Devan’s school life quickly gains in importance as she participates in show choir and gets the lead role in her favorite musical. Friendship and romantic tension keep her life off-stage just as challenging. But when Devan discovers a secret that Reece has been hiding from her, can she cope with yet another challenge? Although Devan’s love of musicals shines through, most character traits are told and not shown. The two plot threads— Devan’s adjustment to her new life and her relationship with her mother—feel unbalanced, especially in the second half of the novel. Lazy and mannered writing is evident: Coincidences and the use of the strike-through, as in “probably maybe I don’t know possibly,” are frequent.

Good for theater junkies who don’t mind some spare drama. (Fiction. 14 & up)

RAINBOW SHOES

Stone, Tiffany Illus. by Czernecki, Stefan Tradewind Books (32 pp.) $14.95 | Feb. 15, 2013 978-1-896580-85-2 Bouncy verse and clever illustrations help teach kids colors...an ideal mix.

“Rainbow Shoes” is actually the title of the first poem in this collection of 14, each dealing with clothing and color: “Got a case / of deep down blues? / Slip on a pair / of rainbow shoes!” The funny closer, “What If,” also uses a spectrum of colors: “What if you woke up covered in spots— / bright candy-coloured polka dots.” Pops of color appear not only in the predominantly blackand-white ink illustrations, but also sprinkled through the text; names of colors are printed appropriately. The 12 interior poems focus on a single color to great effect. “Orange Socks” plays on the idea of the citrus fruit as well as the color and features a little boy staring at orange socks tumbling in a dryer. “What Do Pirates Wear at Night?” offers this answer: “pink pajamas!”

“Please...” deals with a specific gift request: “Knit for me with care and love / one ghastly green and gruesome glove.” “Purple Pants Poem” has a French twist; the girl wearing them sports a jaunty beret and stands near the Eiffel Tower. “The Top Thing kirkus.com

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in Toppers” features a brown cowboy hat that is really a tasty frosted cake. There are also punny poems about Dad’s old white shirt, dingy underwear and a coat...of paint.

Stone and Czernecki’s text and illustrations are in perfect harmony. Consistently surprising and equally delightful. (Picture book. 3-6)

I SURVIVED THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG, 1863

Tarshis, Lauren Illus. by Dawson, Scott Scholastic (112 pp.) $4.99 paper | $4.99 e-book | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-545-45936-5 978-0-545-53225-9 e-book Series: I Survived, 7 The seventh (chronologically earliest) entry in the series pitches a young former slave into the middle of the Civil War’s pivotal battle.

Having saved a Union soldier named Henry Green by hurling a live skunk at his Confederate captors, young Thomas finds himself and his little sister Birdie adopted by Green’s unit.

Three weeks, an ambush and a quick march later, Thomas unexpectedly finds himself in the thick of the fighting—possibly on Missionary Ridge itself, though the author doesn’t provide a specific location. Rather than go into details of the battle, Tarshis offers broad overviews of slavery and the war’s course (adding more about the latter in an afterword that includes the text of the Gettysburg Address). She folds these into quick pictures of military camp life and the violence-laced fog of war. Afterward, Thomas and Birdie are reunited with their older cousin Clem, who had been sold away, and make good on a promise to Green (who doesn’t survive) to settle with his Vermont parents and attend the school taught by his sweetheart.

Sentimental of plotline but informative and breathlessly paced. (Q&A, annotated reading list) (Historical fiction. 9-11)

ROBOMOP

Taylor, Sean Illus. by Rodriguez, Edel Dial (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 7, 2013 978-0-8037-3411-1

benefit: The house is clean, and Robomop finds companionship (even kindling a romance with the vacuum). Unfortunately, both text and illustrations labor to be humorous. First-person narration makes readers Robomop’s confidantes, but third-person may have made him more sympathetic. Rodriguez’s hand-printed aesthetic—a combination of woodblocked ink and digital media— recreate the idealistic vision of the future presented in WPA work.

His Robomop is a Rolie Polie Olie of the 1950s done in a limited, mostly pastel palette. But for all the attractive colors and interesting shapework and printing style, some of the illustrations are lacking—perhaps because the most visually appealing elements are the people and lettering, rather than the robots.

Miscasting results in a missed mark. (Picture book. 3-6)

THE STORY OF THE SNOW CHILDREN

von Olfers, Sibylle Illus. by von Olfers, Sibylle Floris (32 pp.) $9.95 | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-86315-909-1

A simple but richly imaginative tale in a tiny book with exquisite illustrations, translated from a 1905 German book.

Poppy (called in the original Marilenchen, little Marilena) stands in the window watching little round snow children swirling and dancing, calling her to play with them. She dresses warmly and is taken on Swirly-Wind’s silver sledge to the Snow Queen’s castle. There, she joins the celebration of the little princess’ birthday with white chocolate and sweet iced tea, beautiful ice flowers and so much dancing that Poppy is exhausted.

Although the princess wants her to stay, the Snow Queen gently sends Poppy home with a snowman driver and snow bears to pull the sleigh. Poppy tells her mother of all those wonderful events.

Each illustration is framed with panels of snowdrops, beautiful in their perfect line and delicate color. Frozen branches, ice-carved, beribboned arches and the roly-poly snow children make patterns on the pages as finely etched as window frost. The colors are palest of blues and greens, except for the queen’s and princess’ golden hair and Poppy’s scarlet coat and hat.

An old-fashioned delight for new children. (Picture book.

4-7)

MERMIN

Weiser, Joey Illus. by Weiser, Joey Oni Press (136 pp.) $19.99 | Feb. 20, 2013 978-1-934964-98-9

A lonely robot finds friends in this overworked tale.

Robomop is a diligent worker, yet he yearns to leave his job cleaning the basement bathroom. After several failed escape attempts, he becomes depressed until a new BIO-MORPHIC BELLEBOT CLEANERETTE arrives. So excited by the possibility of a friend, Robomop falls into the toilet and is trashed. Coincidentally, the window cleaner’s services are also rendered useless by the new cleanerette’s technology, so the human takes Robomop home to his family. All |

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A goofy indie comic that reads like Aquaman told though James Kochalka’s whimsical lens doesn’t quite stay afloat.

When Mermin, a friendly green sea creature, washes up on the beach, siblings |

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“The flashback-heavy narration, initially confusing, proves effective, constructing a temporal mosaic that holds readers’ interest and builds suspense as events come into focus.” from mind games

Claire, Pete and Toby can’t believe their eyes. After Mermin uses his superstrength and saves Pete from a vicious shark, Pete repays the favor by letting Mermin stay with him. Truly a fish out of water, Mermin tries to adapt to life with humans on dry land but naturally struggles to fit in. On top of this, a gang of renegade sea creatures tracking Mermin are determined to bring him back to the sea, for reasons that are never explained in this volume. First volumes are often heavy in exposition, but this one offers little else, relying more on antics tenuously strung together than building a cohesive, engrossing storyline. Too many unanswered questions hinder any real fulfillment: Why would Mermin have superstrength on land?

Why are the bad guys chasing him? What is he running from?

Weiser maddeningly offers his readers nothing on this front; not even the tiniest hint. However, readers looking for a funny, bubblegum comic with art vibrant as a Saturday-morning cartoon and action to match will find that this suffices.

A decent-enough offering, but there are plenty of other fish in the sea. (Graphic fantasy/adventure. 8-12)

PLUTO’S SECRET An Icy World’s Tale of Discovery

Weitekamp, Margaret A. ; DeVorkin, David Illus. by Kidd, Diane Abrams (40 pp.) $16.95 | Mar. 12, 2013 978-1-4197-0423-9 Is it a planet? A dwarf planet? What’s up with that mysterious body that, even in our best telescopes, floats tantalizingly at the edge of visibility?

Pairing a lighthearted narrative in a hand-lettered–style typeface with informally drawn cartoon illustrations, this lively tale of astronomical revelations begins with the search for “Planet X.” It then sweeps past Pluto’s first sighting by Clyde Tombaugh and its naming by 11-year-old Venetia Burney to the later discovery of more icy worlds—both in our solar system’s Kuiper belt and orbiting other stars. Meanwhile, sailing along with a smug expression, the mottled orange planetoid is “busy dancing with its moons. / Cha-cha / Cha-cha-cha” and Kuiper buddies as it waits for Earth’s astronomers to realize at last that it’s different from the other planets (“BINGO!”) and needs a new classification. Ceres inexplicably rates no entry in the gallery of dwarf planets, and the closing glossary isn’t exactly stellar (“World: Any object in space”), but fans of Basher’s postmodern science surveys will feel right at home with the buoyant mix of personification and hard fact.

A rare chance to shine for the former ninth planet. (photos and additional detail, “Note from the Museum,” suggested reading, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 9-11)

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FRAGMENTS

Wells, Dan Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (576 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-06-207107-1 978-0-06-207109-5 e-book Series: Partials, 2 Finding the cure to a plague that killed 99 percent of humanity was only the beginning for Kira.

Baby Arwen was the first infant to survive thanks to teenage medical technician Kira’s discovery that the cure for the plague called RM was in the pheromones exuded by Partials, the genetically modified superwarriors. The last remnants of humanity—all 36,000 of them—live on Long Island and are locked in a cold war with one faction of the supersoldiers; obtaining the pheromones is no easy task. Acting on a message to “Find the Trust” left her by her guardian, Kira, who’s determined to find a more portable cure as well as a fix for the Partials’ “expiration date” (they die abruptly and in prime condition at 20), sets off to discover the true nature of the Trust, which apparently controls the Partials. Joined by her Partial buddy Samm and superassassin Heron, Kira strikes off across the desolate wastelands of the Midwest. They fight genetically modified beasts and their own misgivings while at home, Kira’s friends wage battles against the encroaching Partials. Fans of Partials (2012) will enjoy the twisty thrills, though the existential hand-wringing is both too frequent and too lengthy. Another hurried ending (if that can be applied to a book of over 560 pages) leaves all in jeopardy.

Doesn’t stand alone, but a fine and frightening postapocalyptic thriller. (Science fiction. 14 & up)

MIND GAMES

White, Kiersten HarperTeen (256 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 19, 2013 978-0-06-213531-5 978-0-06-213533-9 e-book In this series opener from the author of the Paranormalcy trilogy, two strongwilled sisters struggle to free themselves from a sinister organization that grooms girls with paranormal abilities to serve

twisted, illegal ends.

Two years after their parents’ deaths, the Keane School foundation offered to house and educate Annie and Fia. Sighted Fia—knowing their reluctant caregiver was attracted by the free ride and that Annie, blind, longed for educational opportunities—acquiesced, setting aside her suspicions about the foundation’s hidden agenda. For five years the coldly manipulative staff has controlled the girls by holding each hostage against the other. Though Annie’s clairvoyant visions interest them, Fia’s gift for making successful choices is more valuable. Scarred and kirkus.com

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toughened by brutal conditioning, the girls fight back; their unwavering mutual devotion brightens the dark tale. Annie’s a rounded, co-equal protagonist, not merely an extension of her disability. (Yes, she’s magically gifted, but so are the disabilityfree female characters, and like them, she has flaws.) While she uses the prejudice blindness evokes in sighted people to gain unique access to Keane’s powerbrokers, Fia, more damaged, is forced to serve its ends by the founder’s handsome son, James, charismatic and equally damaged. The flashback-heavy narration, initially confusing, proves effective, constructing a temporal mosaic that holds readers’ interest and builds suspense as events come into focus.

An effective paranormal thriller, even in this crowded market. (Paranormal thriller. 12 & up)

DOUG UNPLUGGED

Yaccarino, Dan Illus. by Yaccarino, Dan Knopf (40 pp.) $16.99 | $19.99 PLB | Feb. 12, 2013 978-0-375-86643-2 978-0-375-96643-9 PLB A little robot boy goes on an urban adventure.

Each morning, Doug’s parents plug him in so that he can download lots of facts and become “the smartest robot ever.”

On the second spread, Doug sits atop a stool, plugged into a computer that looks like ENIAC, with the goal of learning all about the city. He waves goodbye to his parents as they walk off the verso, briefcases in hand, presumably headed off to work.

The next page opening has the appearance of a circuit board or retro video game screen, with a tiny picture of plugged-in Doug in the upper-left corner. The spread is designed like a map through everything he is to learn that day, complete with a yellow line highlighting his planned path to various points, with facts about taxis, fountains, skyscrapers, pigeons and so on.

When Doug sees a real pigeon on his windowsill, he decides to unplug and venture out to learn about the city in person. He encounters everything from the screen, but the best part of his adventure comes when he befriends a boy in the park. They play together until the boy realizes he doesn’t know where his parents are, and then Doug helps reunite them—only to decide he wants to go home, following the classic home-away-home story arc. Yaccarino’s retro palette and style suit this robot tale to a T. A lively, colorful celebration of unmediated living. (Picture book. 3-5)

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CITY OF DEATH

Yep, Laurence Starscape/Tom Doherty (384 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 5, 2013 978-0-7653-1926-5 Series: City, 3 The world turns out to need saving from more than just one menace in this conclusion to Yep’s teeming and polymythical fantasy/alternate history/quest/ rescue/coming-of-age epic.

The long chase has taken young noblewoman Scirye and her motley band of human, dragon and magical animal allies around the Pacific Rim and beyond. It comes to an end (after diverse adventures in Central Asia) in the ruins of remote Riye Srukalleyis (the titular City of Death) with battles against both the evil sorcerer Roland and, unexpectedly, a mountain-sized mud monster. As in previous episodes, quiet moments are rare, fortunes reverse in an instant and new adversaries appear in quick succession. There always seems to be time, though, even in desperate moments, for wisecracks, arguments, explanations, declarations of nefarious intent or ruminative digressions. The result is a relaxed tale with surprisingly low levels of pain or violence, considering all the gunfire and swordplay, and a tidy ending that comes amid a wash of personal conflict resolution. Yep provides only a partial key to the plethora of gods, ifrits, griffins, talking animals, legendary or mythical locations, and villainous types here, but he closes with a list of his multimedia sources.

A tongue-in-cheek ramble with frequent opportunities for derring-do and a multitude of supernatural entities more colorful than dangerous. (afterword) (Fantasy. 10-12)

BAD GIRLS Sirens, Jezebels, Murdereses, Thieves & Other Female Villains Yolen, Jane; Stemple, Heidi E.Y. Illus. by Guay, Rebecca Charlesbridge (172 pp.) $18.95 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-185-1 978-1-60734-585-5 e-book

Brief, breezy profiles of women who committed crimes, from Delilah to Catherine the Great to gangster moll Virginia Hill, with comic-strip commentary from the authors.

With a conversational style, the mother-daughter team of Yolen and Stemple recap the crimes and misdeeds of 26 women and a few girls in this jaunty collective biography. After each two-to-four–page biographical sketch and accompanying illustration of the woman, a one-page comic strip shows the authors arguing about the woman’s guilt. The comic-strip Stemple typically comes down on the side of “guilty” or, in the case of Cleopatra marrying her brother, “icky.” Yolen tends toward |

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THE NUTONS’ KITCHEN OR HOW TO NURTURE A GNOME

moral relativism, suggesting the women acted according to the norms of their times or that they were driven to crime by circumstances such as poverty or lack of women’s rights. Thus, strip-teasing Salome, who may have been only 10, was manipulated by her mother into asking for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Outlaw Belle Starr was “a good Southern girl raised during difficult times.” While the comic strips grow repetitive, the narrative portraits, arranged chronologically, offer intriguing facts—and in some cases, speculation—about an array of colorful figures, many of whom won’t be known to readers.

Entertaining and eye-opening. (bibliography, index) (Collective biography. 12-15)

Duvivier, Jean-Luc Illus. by O’Neill, Ewa Cot Cot Cot Apps $2.99 | Nov. 21, 2012 1.1; Dec. 6, 2012

interactive e-books DISNEY AMERICAN PRESIDENTS

Disney Publishing Worldwide Disney Publishing Worldwide Applications $3.99 | Oct. 4, 2012 1.0.0; Oct. 12, 2012 An “Un-Official Oval Office Scrapbook,” built around video featurettes on each of our presidents.

Production values rule. An elaborately designed opening animation smoothly gives way to 44 uncluttered “page spreads” that each contain a period portrait, a fact box and a handful of pop-up asides (“Octodad” John Tyler “had eight children, the most of any President”). There are also a historical or fanciful sound bite (“Go ahead, make my next term,” proclaims twotimer Grover Cleveland) and a resizable two- to six-minute video. These last offer glib overviews of each presidential administration paired with lively mixes of caricatures, contemporary art and talking-head comments from a range of modern pundits and scholars. Except for a common but specious claim that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to “end slavery in the United States” and an entry for Obama that ends before the recent elections, each profile presents a relatively accurate picture. They are mostly positive in tone, but there are mentions at least of such lowlights as Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, Nixon’s “crimes” and Clinton’s “inappropriate relationship.” A full-screen, slideout collective portrait gallery serves as an index.

A painless, often entertaining way to get broad handles on our chief executives’ achievements and challenges. (iPad informational app. 9-12)

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A perplexing take on a Belgian legend takes too long to introduce itself then ends abruptly, as if by a magical trick of the forest.

Nutons, the app explains, are the cousins of gnomes (though the title would beg to differ), and though each is very old, “...he’s about the size of a 3 year old kid, from the top of his hat to the top of his toes.” Through a series of pages featuring geometric, Bauhaus-like artwork—all triangles, circles and askew squares—the nutons are shown to be night-dwelling creatures who like to live in the comfort of the woods. But the text and narration wander badly, likely the result of a bad translation, creating a confusing narrative with endless sentences that go nowhere. One example: “Mere babysteps away, alongside the rapids of the Lesse river, sits a great stone covered with small circular recesses: les Scûles, the bowls, which, according to tradition, are the nutons’ dinner plates.” The page meant to give parents discussion points to use with their kids isn’t much better. The story shifts from a five-page introduction to a five-page story of a village woman who loses a bunch of oats given to her by a nuton that she thought might turn into gold. The village woman learns not to trust nutons, and readers learn not to trust hastily assembled, badly translated offerings in the App Store.

Readers will want to stay away from these gnomes—or whatever they are: They’re full of tricks and broken promises. (iPad storybook app. 3-7)

MY BEASTLY ABCS

Flynn, Pilar Illus. by Krahenbuhl, Taylor Duncan Studio $3.99 | Dec. 4, 2012 1.0.13; Dec. 4, 2012 An abecedary with an international cast of creatures who go bump in the night.

From Nepal comes the abominable snowman and from Norway, the ettin (a “foul-smelling two-headed giant” in a perpetual bad mood). From Iceland comes the kraken, and from Arabia comes the roc. There are 26 in all, fittingly, one for each letter in the alphabet. The beasts each get a full screen on which to cavort, and frequently there’s an additional screen for some added action. The screens come with varying amounts of engagement—cued by a pulsing light—but there is always enough to keep interest strong. The creatures are drawn with originality and enough comic flair to make this app more of a scream than a terror. The artwork is also fresh as paint, and the kirkus.com

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“Though touch-activated interaction is minimal, low-key animations complement the text’s lyricism.” from you are stardust

animation is smooth. Certainly one of the highlights is the activation of a toolbar that lets users dig a little deeper behind the beasts for background information, such as traditional characteristics, body composition, what they do for mischievous fun and where, if you are lucky and patient enough, you will find them. The verse is uniformly on the light side: “A Vampire known as Dr. Voss / Politely taught me how to floss.”

Eminently amusing, it also offers not a little bit of history for the taking. (iPad alphabet/informational app. 4-8)

WINCE - DON’T FEED THE WORRYBUG

Green, Andi Illus. by Green, Andi iMagine Machine $2.99 | Dec. 6, 2012 1; Dec. 6, 2012

This playful, multisensory installment in the WorryWoo Monster series teaches children to show their worries to the door.

When Wince, the monster of worry, begins fretting about his unfinished homework, whether he left the light on at home or just about anything else, he is visited by the incessantly buzzing WorryBug. With a voracious appetite sated only by munching on Wince’s worries, the WorryBug nags Wince to continue feeding him until Wince is incapacitated and the WorryBug has swelled to epic proportions. Finally, a trip to the library distracts Wince, and he is able to quell his worries, shrinking the WorryBug to a manageable size. Vibrant watercolor illustrations with Seuss-ian linework coupled with amusing audio effects, such as the gravelly but endearing voice of the WorryBug, and an ongoing sense of movement on each page compensate for the sometimes weak rhyming text. Although this app takes advantage of many forms of interactivity, such as the opportunity for users to record a worry and have it gobbled up by the WorryBug, it has a tendency to crash, especially when pausing on a screen for an extended period.

A valuable interactive lesson with memorable characters. (iPad storybook app. 4-6)

THE TALE OF LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Jones, Janey Louise--Adapt.

Illus. by Weigert, Miklos Mindshapes $0.99 | Nov. 21, 2012 1.0.1; Nov. 21, 2012

A thoroughly sanitized retelling (sandwiched between pop-up advertisements for another app) linked to stylized illustrations that are probably intended to be sweet but are actually strange and eerie.

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woodsman and having his jaws “prised open” so that Granny can dance out, slinks off “embarrassed and ashamed.” In sharp contrast to this gooey version of the familiar plot, the art veers off into disturbing territory. Sporting enormous, glassy eyes in an oversized rectangular face, Little Red Riding Hood skips through a retro pastel forest as the menacing wolf oozes like a shaggy snake up a twisty path to the cottage. He devours Granny in a sudden whirl and then springs open-mawed after his second intended victim. Aside from a few tap-activated sound effects and floaty animations keyed by flashing outlines, the only interactive feature is a tantalizingly large “X” in the corner of each screen. Touching this abruptly restarts the story, bringing up an introductory page on which, along with auto-advance and manual-viewing options, a “Learn” mode introduces occasional quizzes interjected by the British-accented narrator: “There is a clue to show that the wolf is in Granny’s cottage. Can you find it? That’s right, it’s his tail.”

The wolf isn’t the only one who should be embarrassed by this misguided, pedantic, poorly designed rendition. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)

YOU ARE STARDUST Kelsey, Elin Illus. by Kim, Soyeon Owlkids Books $4.99 | Dec. 6, 2012 1.0; Dec. 6, 2012

This eloquent introduction to some very large concepts is science written like poetry.

Environmental consultant and educator Kelsey brings her strengths to the table in this app, which is based on the 2012 book of the same name. Though packing plenty of interesting facts (who knew we sneeze with the force of a tornado? or that many animals get their friends to babysit?), the concise writing gives even young readers the tools to think about our integral connection with nature. Readers old enough to question on their own will be eager to learn more—perhaps wanting to learn what an atom is or how it is that the water we drink is the same water the dinosaurs drank. The author carefully draws parallels between the greater cycles of nature and our own bodies; for instance, “you shed the most hair in early autumn,” just like trees losing leaves, and “will replace your skin 100 times before you are ten” just as the Earth cycles through the seasons, renewing and replacing its surface. Kim’s stunning and sophisticated 3-D dioramas adapt well to the tablet medium; tilting the tablet shifts perspective subtly, and “page turns” are pleasantly dizzying. Though touch-activated interaction is minimal, low-key animations complement the text’s lyricism. Read by the author, the app includes a section by the artist explaining how she created the dioramas, a note from the author with even more scientific facts and a build-your-own-diorama activity.

The perfect combination of art and science to get kids engaged with nature. (iPad informational app. 5-12)

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“This is an extremely and satisfyingly meaty excursus through the American Civil War. ” from civil war interactive

MUSICAL ADVENTURE

Mighty Media Mighty Media $2.99 | Sep. 14, 2012 1.0; Sep. 14, 2012

A primer on musical instruments is well-organized in terms of taxonomy, but the jumpy, incongruous screen navigation often makes it tough to follow.

This admirable effort aims to educate kids about the names, sounds and different families of instruments. There are five major categories: electronic, keyboard, percussion, string and wind. The home screen allows readers to tap on a category, which in turn takes them to instruments in that classification.

Each category has a home page; swiping upward or downward scrolls to individual instruments (one per screen) that can be tapped to produce audio clips. Instrument names can also be tapped for identification and pronunciation. Swiping right or left changes categories, but it doesn’t necessarily take readers to the home page of that family unless that’s where they left off, which could cause confusion for those who aren’t aware that they’ve switched categories. A sideways swipe from the charango (a stringed instrument) may take readers to the French horn, for instance. The audio is good, both musically and in terms of name pronunciation, and the inclusion of unusual instruments (alphorn, balafon and balalaika, to name a few) adds both educational and aesthetic value.

If kids can learn how to properly navigate it, this simple app is likely to ignite a few musical fires. (iPad informational app. 4-10)

CURIOUS GEORGE SAYS THANK YOU

Rey, H.A. Illus. by Rey, H.A. Houghton Mifflin $3.99 | Nov. 20, 2012 1.0; Nov. 20, 2012 This “multi-touch” children’s book aims to minimize distraction, but in the process, it ultimately neutralizes the

power of the medium.

This adaptation was built using the iBooks Author tool from Apple and thus must be read in the iBooks app. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except that there are clearly limitations on what the interface is capable of. Within the story itself there are four “tap here” activities: two that activate extremely basic animations and two that give readers the ability to complete trivial tasks. Other than that, the story is indistinguishable from its ink-and-paper version. There’s no narration, no music and no tap-sensitive text. There is, however, an activities section that sports a Mad-Libs–style fill-in-the-blank thank-you note; a “spot the difference” illustration comparison; and a maze that must be solved in readers’ heads, as there is no tactile way to trace a path. The multilingual “thank you” dictionary teaches 110

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the phrase in 10 different languages, complete with audio clips of pronunciations. It’s not necessary (or productive) to clutter up a storybook app with gratuitous noise and motion. But a tablet does have the potential to deepen the reading experience, and this one definitely stays in the shallow end of the app pool.

If the curious protagonist in this story were reading his own tale on an iPad, he might get a little bored. (iPad storybook app, 3-6)

I CAN DO THIS

Tone, Satoe Illus. by Tone, Satoe Kite Edizioni Srl $2.99 | Dec. 3, 2012 1.0; Dec. 3, 2012 Bad writing sinks this perplexing story about a misfit bird.

Illustrator Tone is clearly a gifted visual artist. Luscious combinations of color decorate every screen of this beautiful app, providing page after page of visual bliss. Interactive/animated elements are minimal, but fittingly so. The part that Tone could have used a little help on is writing the story (or perhaps translating it; the text can be read in English, French or its original Italian). The basic gist is easy to follow: In a family of high achievers, one little bird is a virtual failure. While others effortlessly swim, sing and fly, he falters time and again. But he’s a tenacious little guy. Eventually, he manages to tie a balloon around himself and fly, but it pops and leaves him stranded and alone. While lamenting his fate, he meets some lost flowers and agrees to stay with them until their children are born. The benevolent bird braves the elements throughout the seasons, and in the spring, a bird-shaped tree full of flowers has taken his place. Did he die? Was he a vegetable that had somehow been trapped in an avian body? Did he finally morph into what he was created to be?

Head-scratching storyline aside, it’s a beautiful book.

Here’s hoping Tone will continue to create stunning visual scenery and leave the writing to someone else. (iPad storybook app, 2-6)

CIVIL WAR INTERACTIVE

Touchzing Media Touchzing Media $4.99 | Dec. 6, 2012 1.0; Dec. 6, 2012 A natty and comprehensive scrutiny of the American Civil War. This is an extremely and satisfyingly meaty excursus through the American Civil War. It provides a more-than-adequate degree of depth, if the reader chooses; far from suffocating, but hitting on a swarm of salient points. The text roams and ranges, from the Nullification Ordinance to the kirkus.com

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cotton gin, The Liberator newspaper to the Amistad to the Missouri Compromise. Wrenching episodes are not soft-pedaled— John Brown’s abolitionist activities, the New York City draft riots—and the battles are given strategic coverage while providing a real sense of the mayhem and carnage. The fortunes of war wax and wane, always appallingly, and are driven home by the seriously impressive array of archival photographs and images. Minor drawbacks include the text being set against faint background images, which can make it difficult to read, and some of the audio portions, of which there are only a few, move at too great a clip. The embedded videos, however, are terrific and make one yearn for more.

Both richly constructed and altogether winning, a fine history of our nation’s most calamitous conflict. (iPad nonfiction app. 10 & up)

THE TALE OF THE MISSING ACORNS

WiseKids Corporation; Inergy WiseKids Corporation $4.99 | Nov. 8, 2012 1.1.0; Dec. 1, 2012 This overly cute mystery is admirable without being memorable.

Mother Squirrel, a Disney-worthy critter who wears a giant pink kerchief, loses her acorns to a burglar. Her quest to retrieve them will take her through many parts of the forest before she returns home to discover an unexpected surprise put together by her animal friends.

(Spoiler: It’s a surprise party.) Kids may be enchanted by the lush artwork, in which every creature has beautiful, cuddly fur or perfectly pretty feathers. But for adults reading with them, Mother Squirrel’s extended hunt soon becomes repetitious, even interminable. Much more interesting than the saccharine story is a set of story challenges, such as an exercise to divide up treats on a scale so both sides are equal in weight or a picture that’s revealed by connecting letters of the alphabet.

In its presentation and technical bona fides, the app soars. It has easy-to-navigate menus and doesn’t trap readers on a page with an activity without allowing some sort of escape hatch to advance the story. A separate page of study activities (Numbers, Shapes, Grouping, etc.) is nicely done and varied enough to stay interesting even if each activity is limited to only a handful of problems.

Too bad the story doesn’t match the app’s technical competence. Luckily, there are enough things to play with inside to make it worth a look anyway. (iPad storybook app. 2-5)

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HEDGEHOG BOOK

Xavier, Lara Illus. by Lucarini, Roberta Ardozia $3.99 | Dec. 5, 2012 1.0; Dec. 5, 2012

Three independent, partly cumulative illustrated minitales—none of which features a hedgehog.

All three do offer a chance to assemble a simply drawn cartoon figure from fanciful elements, following directions that appear in succession and are (optionally, and in English or Portuguese) read with great expression. Viewers spoon strawberry jam into an old coffee pot, light candles beneath, add corn kernels and—voilà! “Volcano Coffee Pot.” Likewise, a banana that is peeled, then topped with an apricot rimmed by almonds becomes a “Banana Flower.” “Daisy Girl” is the best and most complex—it requires not only dragging items from one spot to another, but shaking and blowing on the tablet to create and then feed a charming lass with flowers for eyes, feather-duster hair and a crescent-moon smile. Viewers unsure about what to do next can tap a corner button for a pop-up visual prompt. Each episode can be started over at any point, but there is no manual paging in either direction. Furthermore, though performing the indicated action makes one scene change to the next, performing it too soon will cut the text and narration short.

Still a bobble or two in the design, but an engaging imagination stretcher. (iPad play app. 4-6)

continuing series ALL ABOUT ELLIE

PRECOCIA

EXTREME BIOLOGY

THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE

The Critter Club, #2 Barkeley, Callie Illus. by Riti, Marsha Little Simon (128 pp.) $15.99 | $4.99 paper Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-4169-5789-8 978-1-4424-5788-1 paper (Fiction. 5-7)

The Sixth Circle of Heck Basye, Dale E. Illus. by Dob, Bob Random House (464 pp.) $16.99 | $19.99 PLB Feb. 26, 2013 978-0-375-86835-1 978-0-375-96835-8 PLB (Fantasy. 9-13)

Basher Science Green, Dan Illus. by Basher, Simon Kingfisher (64 pp.) $12.99 | $7.99 paper Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-7534-7051-0 978-0-7534-7050-3 paper

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Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, #8 Chin, Oliver Illus. by Wood, Jennifer Immedium (36 pp.) $15.95 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-59702-038-1 (Picture book. 5-8) |

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CANDY SMASH

EMERALDALICIOUS

Lemonade War, #4 Davies, Jacqueline Houghton Mifflin (240 pp.) $15.99 | Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-544-02208-9 (Fiction. 9-12)

SLITHER

The Last Apprentice, #11 Delaney, Joseph Illus. by Arrasmith, Patrick Greenwillow (416 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-06-219234-9 (Fantasy. 11-15)

Wolves of the Beyond, #6 Lasky, Kathryn Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-545-27962-8 (Animal fantasy. 8-12)

Unearthly, #3 Hand, Cynthia HarperTeen (448 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-06-199620-7 (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)

Vampire Queen, #2 Maizel, Rebecca St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jan. 29, 2013 978-0-312-64992-0 (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)

Seekers: Return to the Wild, #3 Hunter, Erin Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $16.99 | $17.89 PLB Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-06-199640-5 978-0-06-199641-2 PLB (Animal fantasy. 8-14)

RALPH MASIELLO’S FAIRY DRAWING BOOK

Wereworld, #4 Jobling, Curtis Viking (416 pp.) $16.99 | Jan 15, 2013 978-0-670-78457-8 (Fantasy. 12-15)

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ZOM-B UNDERGROUND

Zom-B, #2 Shan, Darren Little, Brown (160 pp.) $14.99 | Jan. 2, 2013 978-0-316-21412-4 (Horror. 12 & up)

I See I Learn Murphy, Stuart J. Illus. by Jones, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $14.95 | paper $6.95 July 1, 2013 ISBN: 978-1-58089-470-8 paper: 978-1-58089-471-5 (Picture book. 2-5)

SLAM DUNK

STAT, #3 Stoudemire, Amar’e Illus. by Jessell, Tim Scholastic (144 pp.) $17.99 | $5.99 paper Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-545-48876-1 978-0-545-38761-3 paper (Fiction. 8-12)

TITAN BASE

The Resistors, #3 Nylund, Eric Yearling (288 pp.) $6.99 paper | $12.99 PLB Jan. 8, 2013 978-0-307-97854-7 paper 978-0-375-97127-3 PLB (Science fiction. 10-14)

Ralph Masiello’s Drawing Books Masiello, Ralph Illus. by Masiello, Ralph Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $17.95 | $7.95 paper Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-57091-539-0 978-1-57091-540-6 paper (Nonfiction. 5-10)

NEST OF SERPENTS

Full Moon, #3 Schreiber, Ellen Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (244 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-06-198653-6 (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)

HAPPY, HEALTHY AJAY!

STOLEN NIGHTS

RIVER OF LOST BEARS

FULL MOON KISSES

I See I Learn Murphy, Stuart J. Illus. by Jones, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $14.95 | paper $6.95 Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-476-0 978-1-58089-477-7 paper (Picture book. 2-5)

STAR WOLF

BOUNDLESS

The Enchanted Attic, #3 Samson, L.L. Zonderkidz (176 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 22, 2013 978-0-310-72799-6 (Fantasy. 11-13)

GREAT CHOICE, CAMILLE

Bluford, #17 Kern, Peggy Scholastic (139 pp.) $5.99 paper | Feb. 1, 2013 978-0-545-39552-6 (Fiction. 12 & up)

Mythos Academy, #4 Estep, Jennifer KTeen (384 pp.) $9.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2013 978-0-7582-8146-3 (Urban fantasy. 12 & up)

DUELING WITH THE THREE MUSKETEERS

Teddy Bear Math McGrath, Barbara Barbieri Illus. by Nihoff, Tim Charlesbridge (32 pp.) $16.95 | $17.95 paper Feb. 1, 2013 978-1-58089-422-7 978-1-58089-423-4 paper (Math picture book. 4-7)

THE TEST

CRIMSON FROST

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TEDDY BEAR PATTERNS

Pinkalicious Kann, Victoria Illus. by Kann, Victoria Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | $18.89 PLB Jan. 29, 2013 978-0-06-178126-1 978-0-06-178127-8 PLB (Picture book. 4-8)

This Issue’s Contributors # Alison Anholt-White • Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Kimberly Brubaker Bradley • Sophie Brookover • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • Rebecca Cramer • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Lisa Dennis • Robin L. Elliott • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga • Judith Gire • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Julie Hubble • Jennifer Hubert • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan • Megan Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Lauren Maggio • Joan Malewitz • Jeanne McDermott • Daniel Meyer • Kathleen Odean • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Mindy Schanback • Dean Schneider • Stephanie Seales • Chris Shoemaker • Karyn N. Silverman • Paula Singer • Robin Smith • Edward T. Sullivan • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Jessica Thomas • S.D. Winston • Melissa Yurechko

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indie SIDING STAR

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Bryan, Christopher The Diamond Press (406 pp.) $14.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 10, 2012 978-0985391102

SIDING STAR by Christopher Bryan..............................................p. 113 LOVE, IN THEORY by E.J. Levy.................................................... p. 116 MARK OF THE BLOODED by Leland Myrick............................... p. 118

A detective inspector joins forces with an Anglican priest and an astronomer to thwart a shadowy organization’s sinister plans in this debut suspense thriller.

In England’s Exeter Cathedral, a man with a strange black book is found dead in front of the altar, with occult signs spray-painted on the floor and a crucifix overturned. In Australia’s Siding Springs Observatory, a young astronomer named Charlie Brown discovers a supernova that’s sending “a hail of high-energy particles and electromagnetic radiation” straight toward Earth. Linking these events are the machinations of a secret society bent on power and destruction. As DI Cecilia Cavaliere investigates the secrets of the black book, she turns to scholar and Anglican priest Michael Aarons for help. Cecilia, Michael and Charlie must confront a world-threatening challenge with cleverness, courage, science and faith—as well as love and friendship. In this entertaining, thought-provoking novel, Bryan (The Resurrection of the Messiah, 2011, etc.)—himself an Anglican priest—highlights the imaginative sweep and power of Christianity. As Charlie says, “I can say, the universe has to be the way it is, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

And that’s certainly true. But still, to be in awe or not to be in awe, that’s a choice—an emotional choice—and I don’t see opting for one as being any more or less ‘scientific’ than opting for the other.” Bryan’s heroes aren’t just likable but lovable: intelligent, amusing, hardworking, even kind to animals. In contrast, the novel’s villains are truly spooky and disturbing; readers are always aware of the urgency of stopping their evil plans.

An enjoyable novel of spiritual mystery and adventure—well-plotted, intelligent and deeply moving.

THE QURAN by Ejaz Naqvi.......................................................... p. 118 LOVING ANDREW by Romy Wyllie.............................................. p. 123

LOVE , IN THEORY Ten Stories

Levy, E.J. University of Georgia Press (224 pp.) $24.95 paper $24.95 e-book Sep. 15, 2012 978-0820343495

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LUCK OF THE IRISH Poignant Saga of an Irish Family Arriving in England Just at the Outbreak of World War II

THE VAGRANT CHRONICLE Centeno, Paul L. CreateSpace (742 pp.) $16.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Oct. 4, 2012 978-1475078268

Carroll, Ronnie Xlibris (468 pp.) $42.79 paper | $3.99 e-book Sep. 26, 2012 978-1477123522

An unlikely hero tries to save the children—and the world—in this complex but satisfying fantasy.

Mor’reius Krelsin is a mercenary with a heart. He lives by the code of xyres, a sort of religious code that involves a quest, completed for gain or for good, but always pursued with honor. Recently, the code tells him one thing: Someone is killing and kidnapping the children of Bra’dune, and he must stop the carnage.

Bra’dune is quite literally a fallen land; floating shards of granite scratch the cracked sky, fractured by a past apocalypse that can never be forgotten. But it’s not so fallen that it produces no heroes, and Mor’reius ventures out to save the children who cannot save themselves. (As a child raised in an orphanage, he can sympathize.) However, a few early battles reveal the fact that his foe is no simple man, but a powerful spirit set on destroying not only children, but Bra’dune itself. In creating a fantasy world like Bra’dune from scratch, an author must walk a fine line between familiarity and innovation. If that world is too much like our own, it bores; if it’s too dissimilar, it confuses.

Centeno risks committing the latter error, filling Bra’dune with unheard-of gods, mystifying cosmogonies, rhyming scriptures and a collection of undiscovered fauna that would make any zoologist scratch his head. Thus, we twist our way through a land infested with wycalths, quilapedes, swyvins and renjaws.

(My kingdom for a horse!) But though we may yearn for a guide to help us on our journey, these novelties are symptomatic only of the author’s enthusiasm and ingenuity. Centeno yearns to create something completely new, and if we immerse ourselves in his cosmos, we will be richly rewarded.

A dark but epic tale of heroism in a very brave, very new world.

The haunting memoir of a troubled Irish family irrevocably torn apart by World War II. The ill-omened Carroll family—parents Bridie and Jim, children Mary, Noel, Ronnie and Clare, and their grandmother—arrives in London on the brink of war. Fleeing the poverty of their native Ireland, the Carrolls seem unlikely candidates for success; in particular, Jim has more charm than job qualifications. Britain’s decision to evacuate London’s children to rural locations—purportedly for their safety—is made against the advice of the experts, which proves disastrous for the Carrolls. With Jim in the army, Bridie says goodbye to her children. Unfortunately, the foster homes weren’t vetted: First, the Carroll children went to a home where the husband molested Mary. Next, the Carrolls were sent to a more appropriate home in Cornwall, but the husband was soon called into service. For their last placement, the children were separated, with Mary and Clare sent to a convent, cared for by nuns who ignored preschool-age Clare, while Noel and Ronnie were sent to the home of evil Mrs. Meally, by turns neglectful and abusive.

The war over, the Carrolls sought a return to the normalcy that eluded them. Carroll shares the tragic stories of each of his siblings after the war; despite differences in their lives, each sibling battles alcoholism, brought on, Carroll argues, by their wartime experiences. Ronnie Carroll alone manages to achieve sobriety and success, which he credits to his childhood protection

by Noel. While books about wartime evacuation tend to feature bucolic settings, this memoir paints an uncompromising picture of opportunistic Britons seeking the ration cards and unpaid labor of children torn from their parents. Though poignant and heartbreaking, Carroll manages to end his memoir on a strong note of optimism—undoubtedly what helped him survive his experiences. Occasionally repetitious and marred by lax editing, Carroll’s story is nonetheless nearly impossible to put down. Once finished, it’s nearly impossible to forget.

A powerful, beautiful memoir about the deep scars of war.

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PICTURES OF CHILDREN Hart, Dennis Manuscript Apr. 12, 2013

An avenging gunman takes on a child prostitution ring.

Harrison “Harry” Gamble, an accountant, runs Harrison Financial Services in Revere, Mass., just outside of Boston, with the help of his faithful dog, Fu, and his moral-compass secretary, Betty Wayland. But Gamble’s talents—and his sense of right and wrong—extend far beyond balance sheets: He’s also a freelance gunslinger à la Dirty Harry, using his 9mm Glock to dispense his own private justice to those he judges guilty. In an early scene, he and his |

dog’s peaceful jog on Revere Beach is interrupted when they encounter two drunks about to rape a young woman; he shoots each of them in the head after delivering Eastwood-esque lines like “Guilty” or “You don’t have to worry about growing old.”

Betty admires his actions—she’s glad “Harrison Gamble continues to save the people in need”—as does his friend Detective Sgt. Willard Johnson of the Massachusetts State Police, who “understood the predicaments and generally agreed with the final verdicts.” When Harry aids a friend with a gambling problem by breaking into the home safe of a local mobster, he finds not only money, but pictures of children cavorting with a naked Massachusetts Congressman, a powerful and beloved figure who ran unopposed in the last two elections. This discovery leads Harry and his crew into a confrontation at a well-financed child prostitution compound called the Resort, with its delightfully despicable headmistress, Ulrika Wachmeister. Along the way, in a taut narrative chopped into expertly cliffhanging chapters, Hart piles on gunplay, snappy dialogue, graphic sadism, violence and lots more gunplay. So well does Hart manipulate the standard bits of thriller stagecraft that readers will gladly overlook the minor flaws.

An on-target, high-octane modern-day noir.

wires.” Ho’s subtle sensibilities with rhyme and alliteration are evident as he delicately portrays the innocence of the poem’s young speaker: “my flat paddle / steps in cheap sneakers, the tune / my brother hums from some cartoon.”

A rich collection of poetic images from a debut author.

STONER WITH A BONER (It’s a Long Story) K., Kathleen CreateSpace (138 pp.) $6.66 paper | $4.99 e-book Sep. 7, 2011 978-1463583682

A modern tale of sex, drugs and day jobs from author K. (Honey B., 2012).

As the title suggests rather explicitly, this is a book about marijuana and sex.

Narrated by an unnamed grocery store manager who explores naughty pleasures in his free time, the praise of marijuana and beautiful women never diminishes. Whether it’s coupling with a woman who enjoys falling asleep during the act or finding the best way to store quality weed, the narrator never bores of either subject. Always careful to maintain his day job, avoid any romantic complications with his love trysts and not get anywhere near being caught with an illegal substance, the narrator is free to enjoy himself. After all, the outside world respects him as an ordinary citizen by day, while various women devour him by night: “Margaret was not shy, she slid my hand from her knee up between soft bare thighs to her silk covered mound.” Written in a loose, free-wheeling prose that mimics the narrator’s lifestyle, the story glides from woman to woman and bong hit to bong hit without the burdens of plot or conflict. Though many reflections have the tedious feel of a stoner who can’t stop singing pot’s praises (“Marijuana leads to lingering. The herb makes nipples delicious. Nothing like being naked and doing a doobie.

Bong. Bong. Bong.”), the composition as a whole is more mature than what one might infer from the title. The narrator repeatedly praises women for their individual differences and sexuality. Erotic scenes are explicit, though the individuals engaged in them are marked with idiosyncrasies. “In Brenda’s case,” says the grocer, “I could catch her scented signal but on my tongue she felt like thick water, clear but possessing weight, it wouldn’t splash, it would smear.” The narrator never gives much more of himself to the reader beyond his somewhat predictable views on drug laws and oral sex, but his adventure is entertaining for those curious about how an attractive, tough-but-fair store manager might spend his weekends.

In spite of a silly title, occasional mature insights into mature acts make for a memorable sexual escapade.

COUNTERFEIT SKIN

Ho, Yi-Sung Oliver CreateSpace (78 pp.) $11.99 paper | $8.99 e-book Sep. 6, 2012 978-1479205882 Ho’s debut collection of poems touches on the universal themes of childhood, the passage of time and memories of place.

This three-part collection of poems moves back and forth on a timeline between adulthood and past memory, tying the poems together with recurrent household images and a voice of irony and hope. The author uses images involving animals, from crows to cats to kitchen insects, in several poems, inviting readers to explore the delicate perspective of a nonhuman species. For example, in the poem “Memory Place,” Ho describes a shotgun’s “[t]rigger clicking…with the easy tension of our cat / When she leaps from the roof to go walking.” Later in the same poem, the speaker leaps off a pier into icy New Year’s Eve water, “[u]nder the watchful black eyes of a rooftop cat.” Ho wields these feline images precisely, creating a sense of objectivity, as well as innocence, in a poem that hints at suicide with violent images—knuckles, cheekbones, shotguns and broken mirrors. Ho frequently intensifies poems by juxtaposing everyday images, contrasting soft with hard and light with dark. The theme of alcoholism saturates all three sections, as well, but it’s blended with the humor of adult life, from visits to tattoo parlors to strolls through Pacific cities. The author uses concrete images loaded with metaphors while treading lightly on the topic of substance abuse. In “Walking in Seattle,” Ho describes a “blurred fragment” of a mother’s finger filling a photograph and “parallel lines in the concrete / underfoot like tightrope |

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“Levy’s taut prose, intelligence and emotional acuity penetrate nearly every sentence.” from love, in theory

LET’S HEAR IT FOR ALMIGAL

American West mythology. Men are definitely men in Yakutuk, but Norma Faunce, this novel’s female main character, refuses to be pushed around. Faunce, Yakutuk’s newly named peace officer, leads an investigation to find out what happened to the fearless, skilled hunter Ward Hubble. In a village where everyone has enemies, ex-Marine Norma is universally liked. She’s always been able to navigate the uncertain territory between the Yakutuk’s Tlingit residents and the whites and between its most unsavory elements and its upstanding citizens. But is Norma up to the task of solving a murder case? The author confidently portrays harsh Alaskan village life with verisimilitude, offering a sort of noir version of Cicely, Alaska—the charming fictional town in the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure. (For the record, Yakutuk, Alaska, doesn’t exist; however, Yakutat, in the same region, is a real place.) The village’s quirky, eccentric characters harbor burning resentments and hatreds, but many band together when the need arises. First-person narrator Norma takes readers along on her uneasy quest to solve Hubble’s disappearance as she unearths layers of family secrets, infidelities and blood feuds. She harbors her own contradictions and surprises but remains consistently well-drawn and believable throughout the novel. The book’s poetic title and its acknowledgement to poet Rainer Maria Rilke are a bit odd and the only discordant notes in an otherwise well-balanced narrative. Overall, the story’s steady pacing, complex characters and suspense will likely draw readers in.

A great read, full of local color, from an author to watch.

Kupfer, Wendy Illus. by Lyon, Tammie CreateSpace (32 pp.) $16.99 | Apr. 16, 2012 978-0983829409

An exuberant, cotton-candy pink introduction to hearing loss and cochlear implants for ages 5 and up.

Little Almigal’s hearing loss doesn’t get much better with hearing aids. While Ali’s friend Penelope, whose hearing aids work for her, uses both her voice and signs to communicate, Almigal only knows a word or two of sign language, so she’s frustrated at missing out on the sounds in her world. She declares that she needs “to hear every single sound in the whole entire universe!”—especially her parents saying “We love you Almigal” when she’s in bed and not wearing her hearing aids. Her doctor suggests cochlear implants to improve her hearing, and Almigal is all for it. The book gently covers Almigal’s trip to the hospital for the operation and the importance of handling the implants carefully, as displayed in episodes where Almigal fails to treat the implants properly, thus learning how important that care can be. The implants successfully help Almigal hear all the things she’d been missing. Although the story skips the controversy surrounding cochlear implants and their place in the deaf community, the cheerful inclusiveness will be a welcome introduction for children. Kupfer—whose own daughter, Ali, was diagnosed with profound hearing loss at 10 months of age—celebrates uniqueness, while the delightful, full-page illustrations show the lively heroine and her friends and family enjoying their differences. Almigal considers herself to be the luckiest girl in the world. “Do you want to know why?” she asks. “Because I have so many friends and each one is different.”

The charming story of a brave child’s decision to make her life better.

LOVE, IN THEORY Ten Stories

Levy, E.J. University of Georgia Press (224 pp.) $24.95 paper | $24.95 e-book Sep. 15, 2012 978-0820343495 Levy’s award-winning short story collection masterfully explores the vagaries of romantic love.

In Levy’s (Amazons: A Love Story, 2012) 10 lyrical gems, disparate characters struggle without someone to love, and some are paralyzed and shocked by the loss of affection. In “Theory of Transportation,” Thomas sleepwalks to a movie theater on the night of his lover’s death. In “The Best Way Not to Freeze,” a reclusive English professor, Katie, falls for Ben, a man of the world who teaches her how to portage a canoe in the wilderness, but after invigorating her life, he returns to his ex. Most of Levy’s stories are peopled with highly educated characters interested in highbrow subjects—Nietzsche, French impressionism, Persian rugs. They can’t help intellectualizing the confusing whys and hows of love.

For example, in “Theory of Enlightenment,” Gil leaves Renee, trading their discussions of botany and Mahler for yogic asanas and incense at a Buddhist retreat. “Sometimes one plus one can equal less than two,” Gil tells her. Levy’s prose is deeply philosophical and sometimes heady but never pompous. It depicts

THE OLD NIGHT OF YOUR NAME Leahy, Patrick T. CreateSpace (234 pp.) $14.13 paper | $2.99 e-book Sep. 28, 2012 978-1478259695

In Leahy’s intriguing debut mystery, an officer searches for a missing hunting guide in the wilderness of southeastern Alaska and uncovers secrets and lies among a village’s residents.

Life isn’t easy in the tiny village of Yakutuk. For starters, there’s the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness and its dark, frigid winters. There are multigenerational racial conflicts festering between the native people and non-natives, as well as conflicts between the poor and the not-as-poor. Add an abundance of alcohol and guns, many more men than women and an 116

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“The lessons here are complicated—there are no gimmes— but they’re also winningly common-sensical.” from the golf swing

Only Sons

infidelity and loss yet avoids melancholy and sentimentality, as the characters often don’t have the expected reactions to difficulties—they are too cerebral for that. Levy beautifully explores the pitfalls of domestic life in “Gravity,” in which Richard attends his sister’s second wedding, as do his mother, father and father’s mistress. The bride is nearly inconsequential in this poignant vignette; instead, the story focuses on Richard, who evaluates his own relationship in light of his familial peculiarities.

The final story, “Theory of Dramatic Action,” employs a second-person narrator, as if to finally address the reader directly; it’s also the only one bordering on edgy, as a dominatrix tempts the heroine. Levy’s taut prose, intelligence and emotional acuity penetrate nearly every sentence. Fans of Amy Bloom’s short stories are likely to enjoy Levy’s work. Readers will likely savor this collection, a 2011 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, for its intoxicating language and introspection.

A smart, insightful collection of stories about life and love.

Misurella, Fred Bordighera Press (192 pp.) $17.00 paper | Jun. 1, 2012 978-1599540429 Misurella (Lies to Live By, 2005) portrays the struggles of two Italian families, the Salvaggis and the Maresciallos, as they strive to find their place in America, from the busy streets of New York to hardscrabble life in rural Pennsylvania.

At an Italian wedding in 1960s Pennsylvania, Sonny Salvaggi meets Margo, a young woman who captures his heart. Young Margo had fallen in love with Jack Maresciallo, whose wandering, artistic ways lead to trouble for her and their son, Marcello.

Later, Jack attempts to reunite with his son, bringing the families together again as they rehash old loves, losses and a quarry business. A study in ancestry, both familial and cultural, each character lurches under the weight of what it means to be from a particular line and place. Relationships and connections dominate the story, and rich back stories of family secrets, tensions and obsessions motivate each character, giving rise to plenty of drama. At one point, Jack, speaking of meeting Marcello for the first time in a decade, feels that “his love for the boy was… wrapped up with shame,” and in many ways, this sentiment sums up all of the relationships in the book, as characters try to rise above or avoid their mistakes and find new ways of relating. Despite these rich motivations, it can be slightly difficult to tell the characters apart, and the story’s tendency to jump across time can be confusing. The dialogue is sometimes clunky, with characters stating their motivations perhaps too clearly and readily to be entirely realistic. Nevertheless, the author’s knowledge of and engagement with Italian-American history shines through, and readers interested in the Italian-American experience will find plenty to appreciate.

Thoughtful and readable; sure to please fans of family sagas.

THE GOLF SWING It’s All in The Hands

Lythgoe, James Self (160 pp.) $18.99 paper | $15.99 e-book Nov. 10, 2011 978-0981339207 You’re not getting the most out of your golf swing if you’re not using your hands properly, writes 30-year golf veteran Lythgoe in his debut instructional manual.

“By far the most important factor in the achievement of an effective golf swing is the correct use of the hands.” That’s Lythgoe’s book in a nutshell—but this nutshell spirals deeper than a chambered nautilus. His instructional manual isn’t exactly a head trip, but it does require strict attention, deliberation and precision, and practice, practice, practice. The hands conduct, and the body moves in concert, Lythgoe asserts. He spends the first 90 pages of the book simply discussing club grip and how to address the ball, and he helpfully deploys a number of visual aids, such as using colored dots to illustrate how a club should be gripped or using a clock, with its fixed length and pivot, to illustrate the notion of club movement. Lythgoe’s obvious fascination and eagerness provide much of the guide’s beauty— he’s not obsessive or zealous, but keen to enjoy the game. To that end, he works hard to make his presentations ringingly clear, accompanying his text with numerous photographs and occasionally introducing historical asides. When the author discusses hands, he covers everything from the waggle—those tiny adjustments that help fine-tune the “sweet spot”—through hand pivot and rotation, foot position, shoulder alignment, establishing target lines and the legendary golfer Paul Runyan’s chipping technique. The lessons here are complicated—there are no gimmes—but they’re also winningly common-sensical.

A vital book that fills a gap in the golf instruction literature.

Come Hell or High Water, Part 2: Rising Morris, Stephen Self (556 pp.) $20.00 paper | $4.99 e-book Oct. 4, 2012 978-0984773138

An engaging, suspenseful occult novel set in historical and contemporary Prague.

In this sequel to Come Hell or High Water: Wellspring (2012), a group of professors specializing in folklore and magic attempts to prevent George, a powerful priest, and Elizabeth, an Irish vampire, from unleashing an evil that threatens to destroy all of Prague. Both George and Elizabeth were called to Prague by Magdalena, who summoned them to help fulfill |

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“A superb comparative look at Islam and its sister faiths, perfect for promoting a spiritual dialogue.” from the quran

the dying wishes of Fen’ka, a woman burned alive as a witch in the 14th century. Unbeknownst to Magdalena, Fen’ka seeks the return of Svetovit, a pagan god who will bring destruction to the modern world. Both sides scramble to find four magical items that protect Prague from evil: a sword, a staff, a pentacle and a chalice. The first half of the novel is a mystery in which the professors try to identify the magical items, while the second half becomes a suspenseful race as both sides try to obtain the items. The plot in this volume is more exciting than Wellspring and also more erotic, especially the scenes showing Elizabeth seducing men and then feeding on their blood. Chapters alternate between the main plot and loosely connected stories of the occult from medieval Prague that illustrate the effects of Fen’ka’s curse. Those historical episodes, which aren’t linked to the modern chapters, sometimes seem like parts of a different novel; however, they include evocative scenes featuring Czech slang and medieval social and religious practices, with characters, particularly women, using the occult to rebel against the rigid social bonds of the time, marriage especially. Carrying over from Wellspring, dialogue is still somewhat awkward, although it’s more naturalistic here. While the previous volume felt slow to develop, the sense of danger in this outing is palpable from the start, and the intensity, at least in the modern chapters, rarely lets up. Also included are several Czech legends, such as the story of Rabbi Judah ben Loew creating the Golem, which should appeal to readers with an interest in folklore.

A stark division of narratives, but each is absorbing, especially for history fans.

an ancient people. Meanwhile, Leoben’s minions terrorize the countryside, slaughtering children and enslaving women as the Kingdom of Graves teeters on the brink of defeat and complete annihilation. The novel continues where the first book left off and maintains its predecessor’s high-quality storytelling. Chapters are well-planned and -executed, providing glimpses of back story that creatively move the action forward and heighten the tension—not an easy task in an adventure tale. Myrick expands the landscape of the first book, adding an underground city ruled by a mournful monarch, a lone cottage guarded by a blind old man and snow-covered plains that frame the novel’s climactically bloody conclusion. Overall, the novel successfully presents a complex world through artfully visual scenes and multiple perspectives, with enough twists and turns to dazzle fantasy fanatics.

Highly recommended for genre buffs and newbies alike, this adventure carries readers through a land of magic, laughter and tears.

THE QURAN With or Against the Bible?

Naqvi, Ejaz iUniverse (394 pp.) $35.95 | $25.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Jun. 7, 2012 978-1475907759 A sober, probing exploration of the relationship among the three Abrahamic faiths—Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

Virginia Woolf once asked, “Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?”

Modern discussions of Islam tend to do just that, hastily pegging the youngest of the major monotheisms as different, foreign and far-off. In his accessible new contribution to the field of comparative religion, Naqvi tries to bridge the gaps that have too long separated Islam from Christianity and Judaism, arguing in essence that the three faiths are more alike than most people suspect. To do so, he engages in a “topic-by-topic review” that compares Muslim beliefs on a variety of themes—e.g., God, Scripture, science, ethics—to their Judeo-Christian counterparts. His review leads him to a number of basic insights that are nonetheless crucial reminders that what unites believers is often greater than what divides. Jews, Christians and Muslims all revere the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph.

Islam venerates Jesus, a man who is, for Muslims, a prophet and teacher of the highest regard. Naqvi also argues that Muslim ethics—outlined in the Five Pillars of Islam—are quite similar to Judeo-Christian moral teachings. But while the author gravitates toward likeness, he doesn’t ignore differences; he honestly and objectively explains how the three religions sometimes diverge, and he ends each chapter with a set of provocative discussion questions that challenge readers to ponder these weighty topics. Naqvi does it all with an intelligence, grace and evenhandedness that make his project appealing for believers and nonbelievers alike.

MARK OF THE BLOODED Book Two of the Kingdom of Graves Myrick, Leland Adept Books (192 pp.) $2.99 e-book | Dec. 12, 2012

In the second installment of his Kingdom of Graves fantasy trilogy, Myrick (The Ten, 2012, etc.) delivers high adventure, back-alley espionage and a little bit of romance.

Jorophe Horne and his companions have two purposes in life: Serve the king and preserve the peace he established. As a member of the elite fighting squad called the Ten, Jorophe previously killed demons and defeated the Dar Kharji people in epic battles of good and evil. But his work is far from over when the kingdom’s true enemy, the Blooded, arises in the north, led by the mysterious, power-hungry Prince Leoben. The warlord dispatches his army into the kingdom and meets little resistance. Few know how to defeat his legions of woelfin beasts and shidh slave warriors, and few realize Leoben’s true goals. The Blooded are aided by superhuman assassins called the Mortuus, who infiltrate the capital and deliver a crippling blow to the kingdom. Jorophe and company set out in search of a secret weapon that might bring down the invading forces, while the kingdom’s Lord Prosper commands his army of “shadows” to seek a new alliance with 118

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LIFEMOBILE

A superb comparative look at Islam and its sister faiths, perfect for promoting a spiritual dialogue.

Rintels, Jonathan Prospecta Press (192 pp.) $10.99 paper | $4.39 e-book Jun. 5, 2012 978-1935212928

26 POEM-STORIES ABOUT ANIMALS Pettit, Tom Guy Illus. by O’Malley Pierson, Peter CreateSpace (62 pp.) $14.98 paper | Jul. 6, 2012 978-1470136376

The semiautobiographical account of a middle-age widower who buys a classic convertible to help bond with his teenage son, who’s afflicted by Asperger’s syndrome.

Two years after the death of his wife, Annie, Rintels’ unnamed narrator faces the prospect of loneliness. His precocious 19-year-old son, Benjy, is set on attending college a couple hours away so he can live independently, but Benjy’s determination is mitigated by his Asperger’s syndrome, which requires near-constant attention, medication and special courses in school. He insists on referring to himself and others with disabilities as “different.” As Benjy waits for what he expects to be a letter of acceptance from Wheeler College, which caters to students with Asperger’s, his father reflects on his own, late father’s 1965 Chevrolet Corvair, nicknamed the Deathmobile. With its sleek design and notoriously accidentprone track record, Ralph Nader famously deemed the Corvair America’s “most unsafe car.” Nevertheless, Benjy’s father purchases one on eBay, admittedly because he needed “something to plug the gaping hole [caused by] Annie’s passing and Benjy’s leaving home,” though ever-rational Benjy simply claims, “It’s just an old car, Dad.” Dad imagines serious male bonding time during the drive home to Virginia from Florida, where the car was purchased, while Benjy sees an opportunity to prove he can survive a couple days alone at the house, despite his condition.

Besides, Benjy pleads, the letter from Wheeler might arrive early. Dad begrudgingly agrees to let Benjy stay, and while he’s a thousand miles away, the letter indeed arrives but in the form of crushing rejection. Soon after his father returns, however, Benjy learns that the car is, like him, different, so he becomes a Corvair advocate, too. Thus begins a new journey, one on which father and son encounter an embittered, wheelchair-bound veteran who owns a Corvair junkyard, and sprightly, neon-haired Katie, a McDonald’s employee and Benjy’s schoolmate crush.

The Deathmobile, which finally serves as an unlikely race car, grafts a relationship torn by loss and misunderstanding. With its fast pace, lightheartedness and themes of acceptance and determination, Rintels’ touching, semiautobiographical debut seems best suited for the YA crowd. Where the novel occasionally veers into predictable or sappy terrain (the title’s ironic significance is almost painfully barefaced), the story redeems itself with absorbing dialogue—particularly in Benjy’s deadpan responses to his father’s jokes and metaphors—and crisp prose that is, if at times oversentimental, often stirring and packed with emotion.

An enjoyable ride with an atypical father–son relationship.

Pettit and Pierson’s debut collection features poetry and watercolors of animals for each letter of the alphabet.

The poems are educational and fun; they identify each animal’s characteristics: diet, activities and behavior, appearance, environment. The volume often lists the names of the male, female and baby animal and the specialized name for a group. Each poem follows an AABB rhyme scheme, but the poems have fewer language contortions than many books of verse for children. There are a few tics (repeated rhyming of “hotter” and “water,” for example), but these do not distract.

The author clearly understands his audience and its likely level of knowledge, and he defines or explains terms that might be more challenging, such as tusk, antler, proboscis and gizzard.

Self-deprecating humor adds fun to the mix. The final verse of “VOLES (and Moles)” reads, “This poem was meant to be about voles / But then it, somehow, got mixed up with moles / And there’s even some mice in one dumb verse / And also a skunk which just makes it worse.” In a similar vein is the “Special Notice to the Absent Animals,” an apology to animals that were not included in the book. On a few occasions, internal rhyme underpins couplets that are simply fun to say, like this one about the elephant’s trunk: “They also use it to breathe and smell / It’s their nose and a hose and works just swell.” The watercolor illustrations suit the work: They realistically convey the animals’ anatomy, but they occasionally have anthropomorphic poses or speech balloons for humor. Regrettably, the book is almost entirely punctuation-free, with periods appearing only at the ends of poems, most of which have a minimum of 10 stanzas, and little attention is paid to punctuation in any other place.

Middle school students might enjoy the challenge of accurately punctuating it.

A fun, informative collection of animal poems that overcomes its weaknesses.

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Thomas Pryce’s Entirely Natural Self-Selection b y

Unnatural Selection

Pryce, Thomas Cenozoic (386 pp.) $14.99 Jan. 24, 2012 978-0984669103

K i rk us M e di a L L C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer MEG LABORDE KU E H N Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny SVP, Online Paul H offman # Copyright 2013 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 19487428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744.

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Indie novelist Thomas Pryce is deep into the plot of his latest short story–a brain-teasing thriller set inside a psych ward and somewhat ironically titled “Bad Trip”—when he pauses to reflect on a stellar year that finally saw the publication of his decades-in-the-making sci-fi saga Unnatural Selection and with it, critical acclaim and, now, Hollywood overtures.

“Unnatural Selection is still selling,” Pryce says of his debut book. “And it’s more than I expected. I just wanted to get the name out there and establish a beachhead in the industry.”

By any measure, Pryce, the former science teacher from Yonkers, New York, who decided against the traditional publishing route and instead produced his dystopian action adventure on his own with the help of CreateSpace, has done exactly that.

After receiving boffo reviews from Kirkus last spring (“Planet Earth is fried and fricasseed in this wildly suspenseful post-apocalyptic action yarn…”), the author snagged runner-up honors in a contest called the 2012 Green Book Festival, which judges books “that contribute to greater understanding, respect for and positive action on the changing worldwide environment.” In the category of General Fiction, Pryce landed right behind William J. Cobb, who’s written for The New Yorker.

Then Hollywood producers began calling.

“It never crossed my mind when I wrote it— it just flowed through me—but now that I look back on it, objectively, it would play well on the big screen,” Pryce says.

Such laurels might have proven to be an awfully tempting place to rest—especially for a writer who has cultivated a desire to become a successful author for as long as Pryce has. But Pryce hasn’t done that. Instead, he immediately shifted gears and opened up the throttle on a spate of bold, new projects designed to test his literary mettle.

“Bad Trip” is part of an ambitious anthology Pryce will debut early this year called Cosmosis.

“Really, the first big thing that happened was the Kirkus review,” says Pryce. “I remember the moment I got it; I was blown away. It was huge for me. It also gave me a boost of confidence and enforced my decision to go the route that I did.”

Pryce, who relentlessly workshops all of his creations with a fraternity of fellow Indie authors, has no doubts about going the Indie route once again and says that he’s not even going to try and shop Cosmosis around to the traditional publishing houses.

“I don’t mind doing it the hard way,” he says.

“I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback, so I’m going to stick with it. Frankly, I enjoyed the process of building the first book with CreateSpace, and I like taking full responsibility. If it’s a bomb, then

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it’s on me. I have nobody else to blame. And if it’s good, then the credit is mine.”

Pryce, who has a background in creating and managing high-end custom aquariums, is also the kind of guy who enjoys a challenge. For Cosmosis, he says he wanted to bring in a contributing writer—in this case, fellow Indie scribe Rytis Grybauskas—who is “way better than me.”

“He’s super,” says Pryce. “Rytis might even be contributing two stories to Cosmosis.”

Another Cosmosis short called “Bright Light” also serves as the premise to Pryce’s next novel.

“I’ve never had a problem with motivation,” the author says. “I just move on.”

Pryce’s work ethic is even more inspiring when you stop and consider that in the last year, he has also had to fight back from a debilitating illness that just about completely sapped his strength.

“I lost 35 pounds,” Pryce says. “And it’s going to sound corny and trite, but the most important thing I learned over the last year was not about writing—it was about how important family is.”

From the outset, Pryce says his mom, dad and sister have been his biggest supporters, but the biggest single influence on his writing has been his brother’s ever-scrutinizing eye.

“He’s very critical,” Pryce says. “Growing up, we were two nerds together. We went to every scifi film that came out.”

Not one to look back on a completed project, Pryce still can’t help imagining one of his own stories potentially making it onto the big screen sometime soon.

“There’s so much that you can do with Unnatural Selection,” says Pryce. “I think if done correctly, it could have a huge impact on audiences.”

With that cinematic indulgence over, the author is eager to dive back into his latest mindbending plot.

“I think it’s going to turn a few heads—and perhaps even turn a few inside of psych wards,” says Pryce. “It’s a little bit crazy. But it’s also fun and built for speed.”

Unnatural Selection was reviewed on Feb. 29th, 2012.

9 Joe Maniscalco is a journalist and writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.

LAS VEGAS, THE UNTOLD STORIES

JOYS AND LAMENTS OF GETTING OLDER Poems by EHR Schober

Romero, John AbbottPress (230 pp.) $3.49 e-book | Aug. 3, 2012

Schober, E.H.R. Illus. by Schober, M.E.M. CreateSpace (100 pp.) $11.95 paper | Nov. 9, 2012 978-1479336296

A longtime Las Vegas resident shares stories, photos and history from the promotions-and-publicity side in a memoir about Sin City.

In 1960, Romero left a 10-year sportswriting and broadcasting career in Las Vegas to work at the Sahara Hotel and Casino. He became executive director for advertising, promotion and publicity, and after 19 years at the Sahara, he went on to form his own direct-marketing company— but not before accumulating a trove of stories about gamblers, clients, performers, tournaments and publicity stunts. In his latest book, Romero (Casino Marketing, 1994, etc.) describes how, for example, he came up with the Super Sahara Celebration, to his knowledge “the first of the big Las Vegas cash giveaway promotions.” Cooked up to increase business in slow periods, the promotion offered randomly selected slot-machine players seven chances per day to work the “Golden Slots.” A master of ceremonies stood by to work the crowd into a frenzy, helped along by flashing lights, screaming crowds, and buzzing and dinging machines. Romero says that “the slot manager never had such a winning month.” More importantly for the casino, “it changed the way all of us looked at generating business in the low occupancy periods that always hurt us.” Romero obviously loved his work and makes even the mundane tasks of arranging rooms and comping tickets sound dramatic. Standout moments include reminiscences of how Romero got a small part in Clint Eastwood’s Gauntlet; of stars like Buddy Hackett, Flip Wilson and Don Rickles; and especially of the Beatles’ appearance in 1964, when teenage girls “launched themselves at the stage like javelins.” This rosy account of Las Vegas glosses over prostitution, drugs, violence and gambler suicides, which is partly, of course, why the book is so much fun. For Romero, the old spirit of Las Vegas surfaced in something like the Sahara Hotel’s traditional free drink on check-in. When the hotel dropped that, they “junked a small slice of creativity that had made us famous with the right people, had kicked out the mystery and delight that arose from a simple check in.” Creativity, mystery, delight: That’s how Romero sees his work in a nutshell, and reading this book, it’s hard not to agree.

Twenty years of anecdotes from a terrific storyteller add up to a very entertaining behind-the-scenes perspective on Las Vegas.

Poet Schober’s debut collection of rhyming witticisms serves as a paean to the joy of life.

This collection presents simple, unpolished verse that’s somewhat old-fashioned at times but also somewhat infectious. The author infuses these short poems with humor as she laments the aches, pains and memory loss of aging, but she also celebrates the fun of discovering the senior discount at the movies. Schober has a tongue-in-cheek philosophy regarding hearing loss: At least she “can’t hear all the bad news anymore.”

Overall, the poems temper life’s negatives with large doses of optimism, as when the author proudly embraces the wrinkles she has earned—most of which, she says, are the result of laughter. Schober also compares childhood to old age; in one poem, she describes how, as a child, she jumped off her squeaky tricycle to gaze in wonder at a little yellow wildflower, but when she grew up, she considered wildflowers to be weeds in her garden. Now older and wiser, she once again sees wildflowers as a “gift from the universe.” Readers may find some of the images and situations a bit stereotypical, as when the author describes sitting in a rocking chair, dreaming about days long gone. However, in many poems, the author resolves to live in the moment and pursue stimulating activities, such as reading every book on her dusty shelves or daring to wear vermillion.

Several poems are simply short quips intended to make readers chuckle, including, “I used to skip and run. / Oh, what fun! / Now you hear me squawking / Just walking.” The individual poems are untitled, which works well with the format—pages adorned with cute black-and-white animal cartoons. The white space and larger print provides an easy reading experience.

Readers shouldn’t look for serious poetry here, but there are serious themes beneath the humor. Although life has its share of sorrow and hardship, Schober admirably chooses to accentuate the positive in this collection.

Traditional glimpses of aging for fans of fun, light verse.

LITTLE DUCKIE’S DAY Skandle, D.L. AuthorHouse (28 pp.) $15.49 paper | Jul. 7, 2010 978-1449097059

In this reimagining of childhood bliss, little Duckie and his mother trundle through a normal day, but they see the same day in very different ways.

This breezy, two-minute read by debut writer/illustrator |

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Skandle pits simple prose against sly drawings. Duckie, the narrator, is a bright yellow duckling, and his mother is a wolf.

Mommy cleans; Duckie messes. Duckie falls off the jungle gym; Mommy barely catches him. Mommy tries to tame boiling soup; Duckie hugs her. Each of Duckie’s cheery pronouncements—“I like to start the day by singing” or “Mommy has fun at bath time too”—has a simple, belying illustration that shows the oblivious toddler matched with his alternately harried and overworked or reluctant mother. The sentences are short and declarative, and the print is bold—perfect for a budding reader. But the message is subversive enough to be as much fun for parents as for their kids. Skandle jostles the idea of pleasant parenthood, which is welcome, but Duckie’s mother, droop-lidded and constantly sipping coffee, hunched over at the end of a long day, is a jarringly real depiction of parenthood as a slogging duty. Even the colors—Duckie’s bright yellow to Mommy’s faded gray—mark the contrast. Parents will relate, smile even. But for every smile, there’s a little cringe, as parents see themselves in the image of Mommy bracing Duckie at arm’s length during an erupting bath or with her back to the baby, focused almost desperately on the coffee maker. But when the moon is up and the baby sleeps, Duckie’s mommy, like parents everywhere, is happiest.

And tired too.

A worthy inside joke for parents beset with toddlers.

if discovered. The author also has a knack for explaining decisions that led him to pursue “reparative therapy,” heterosexual marriage and fatherhood. Aside from some editing issues at the end of the book, the only drawback is Tripp’s fondness for wellworn or clunky similes, which will strike some readers as folksy or distracting. Regardless, this memoir full of sharp insights will appeal to a wide audience—not only gay men, but anyone who wants to better understand a loved one struggling with sexual orientation and identity.

A powerful testament to the importance of self-acceptance and perseverance.

NO MORE FACEPLANTS The Choice At The Fork In Your Life’s Path

Wolf, Gordon Personal BluePrint Publishing (416 pp.) $18.95 paper | Sep. 21, 2012 978-0988194502 Wolf writes a fascinating collection of chapters that transcends most selfhelp books, with research, tested ideas and logical explanations for human patterns we work to reverse continuously throughout life.

Rather than offering 12 steps or a system to rearrange one’s life, Wolf takes a more realistic and lifelong approach to the subject of avoiding “faceplants,” or patterns of self-defeat that readers all face throughout life. These faceplants are engrained behaviors or pathologies that keep us from moving forward toward success. They can come in the form of a lack of selfcare due to an unbalanced devotion to others or a creation of dysfunction due to belligerently speaking one’s mind. While occasional faceplants continue throughout life, Wolf frames an educational guide that leads to awareness, not avoidance. One of the biggest defenses against faceplanting, for example, is selfsecurity. Wolf explains that someone emotionally secure understands how to set boundaries and make informed decisions. By assessing what we want and who we are, we become intimate with ourselves and learn to create emotional safety. That safety, according to Wolf, is a key factor in diminishing patterns of repeated behavior that land us in undesirable situations. Perhaps what’s most unique about the concept is that it can be applied to so many aspects of life. Faceplanting happens in relationships, careers, child-raising, family dynamics and even personal health. Another recurring concept in the book is “inner chatter,” or the ideas or models we’ve become accustomed to hearing in our heads when certain events occur. For example, one faceplant might involve deflecting each time you hear a compliment, since internal chatter suggests that flattery creates vulnerability and ultimately weakness. Wolf explains clearly how to isolate these “inner chatters” and assess them based on how well they’ve assisted you so far. From interviews with anonymous patients about relationship patterns to anecdotes about nameless faceplanters who discovered the keys to seeing their repetitive missteps, Wolf uses a history of observation to offer

CHOKING ON SILENCE A Memoir Tripp, Paul B. CreateSpace (220 pp.) $14.95 paper | $8.95 e-book Sep. 20, 2012 978-1478152514

A remarkable journey of self-discovery and survival, as the author navigates a perfect storm of homosexuality, religion and military service.

Gay-themed memoirs have become more and more common, but this work stands out based on the unique circumstances surrounding the author’s life. Tripp describes his childhood in Montana as a kind of war zone: “Growing up in an alcoholic home, I was never sure where the beginning was or where on the path I would hit a landmine and have the evening explode in front of me.” He eventually seeks refuge in the structure and discipline of the armed forces but incurs the psychological burden of having to hide his true nature. Tripp’s inclusion of excerpts from his personnel file adds another layer to the narrative, underscoring his criticism of the massive amount of resources expended by the military in an effort to weed out homosexual service members. Amid the subterfuge, the author finds tender moments of human connection as a lonely teenager working in a nursing home, a sexually repressed young man living on a submarine and a decorated officer approaching retirement. In fact, a submarine is the ideal metaphor for Tripp’s odyssey: He attempts to move undetected through largely hostile waters while facing potentially disastrous consequences 122

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“[Wyllie’s] book is as richly absorbing for casual readers as for caregivers and loved ones of Down syndrome children and adults.” from loving andrew

steps toward awareness rather than prepackaged solutions.

With such an array of testimonials and client observations, many (if not all) readers will recognize some behavioral pattern or faceplant of their own. With more than 30 years of experience in talk therapy and behavioral experiments, Wolf seems to effortlessly demonstrate that major life changes only need be a series of small changes, decisions and commitments to personal emotional health.

A well-organized, thoughtful and thoroughly researched book that covers a wide array of emotional issues using universal concepts.

the interest of the average person who does not have a special needs child.” Transcending this aim, her book is as richly absorbing for casual readers as for caregivers and loved ones of Down syndrome children and adults.

This clear-eyed, intelligent memoir is an invaluable resource for anyone whose life is affected by a developmental disability.

LOVING ANDREW A Fifty-Two-Year Story of Down Syndrome Wyllie, Romy CreateSpace (306 pp.) $18.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Oct. 26, 2012 978-1478298342

Wyllie (Bertram Goodhue, 2007, etc.) moves away from architectural histories to document the life of her son, Andrew, who persevered and thrived despite Down syndrome.

When the hospital staff delayed bringing Wyllie her firstborn child after his birth in 1959, she was immediately uneasy, and rightfully so: Andrew was diagnosed as a mongoloid, or what is now known as having Down syndrome. Troubled by the doctor’s explanation that “sometimes the best policy is to inform the mother, before she even sees her baby, that the child has died and then place him immediately in an institution,” she and her husband decide to keep their son at home and raise him as normally as possible. Wyllie details the early struggles with Andrew, from difficulties nursing to apprehension over what their family, friends and neighbors might think.

She recounts their lengthy search for a school program to fit Andrew’s capabilities and their great fortune in finding Lambs Farm, a still-operating facility where Andrew lived happily for most of his adult life. Wyllie’s writing is lucid and remarkably forthright. She doesn’t shy away from the negatives, such as her frustrations and mistakes as the parent of a special needs child, or her concerns that her other, “normal” children were somehow being slighted. She also conveys the grief she faced in the tragic cancer death of her 14-month-old second child.

The book features Andrew’s writing and drawings, letters from his teachers and co-workers, and interviews with many of the people in his life, which provide an intimate look at his intellectual, emotional and physical development. As a comparison, Wyllie also chronicles the experiences of two younger children, one born in 1980 and one in 1994, who also suffer from Down syndrome. Her account of the history and science behind the disorder is thoroughly researched yet highly readable, and she evenhandedly discusses the possible impacts of modern prenatal genetic testing. Of her ongoing struggle for better resources, Wyllie remembers that “the most difficult task was to capture |

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LIBRARY MEDIA CONNECTION  VOYA  SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL  KIRKUS  BOOKLIST  A 2012 Kirkus Best YA Book A 2012 SLJ Best Book

By Libba Bray 978-0-316-12611-3 • $19.99

TheDivinersSeries.com

Acclaimed Books from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

 SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY  HORN BOOK  KIRKUS  BOOKLIST  LIBRARY MEDIA CONNECTION A 2012 Booklist Editors’ Choice

STARRY RIVER OF THE SKY

By Grace Lin

978-0-316-12595-6 • $17.99