BookPage September 2016 by BookPage

AMERICAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BOOK REVIEW

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

SEPT 2016

Ann Patchett The acclaimed author finally taps into her own family history to create the absorbing new novel

COMMONWEALTH

NOTEWORTHY

NEW BOOKS

Books we love about love Exclusive romance reviews, interviews, news and giveawaysâ&#x20AC;Ś

from the editors of bookpage.com/newsletters

contents

SEPTEMBER 2016

columns 04 04 05 06 08 08 11 12

Lifestyles Well Read Library Reads Audio Cooking Romance Book Clubs Whodunit

Ann Patchett photos © Heidi Ross

book reviews 18 FICTION

When in French by Lauren Collins Hitler by Volker Ullrich

t o p p i c k : The Underground

Historical mystery Amor Towles Fiona Davis Peter Ho Davies Brendan Kiely

Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler

Mad Enchantment by Ross King

Leave Me by Gayle Forman

The Huntress by Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen

Mischling by Affinity Konar Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

meet the author

Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

13 J. Patrick Black

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Swimming in the Sink by Lynne Cox American Revolutions by Alan Taylor

The Risen by Ron Rash The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies Ashes of Fiery Weather by Kathleen Donohoe

28 TEEN

t o p p i c k : The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

Loner by Teddy Wayne

Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard

We Are Unprepared by Meg Little Reilly

The Reader by Traci Chee

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

31 Jim LaMarche

The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks

30 CHILDREN’S

t o p p i c k : Full of Beans

The Nix by Nathan Hill

24 NONFICTION

t o p p i c k : The Hidden Life of

Trees by Peter Wohlleben

by Jennifer L. Holm A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston Freedom Over Me by Ashley Bryan

Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb

The Poet’s Dog by Patricia MacLachlan

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi

Moo by Sharon Creech

Generation Chef by Karen Stabiner

A M E R I C A’ S B O O K R E V I E W

Michael A. Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

CHILDREN’S BOOKS OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Allison

Cat Acree

Hammond

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

ASSISTANT EDITOR

CONTRIBUTOR

Julia Steele

Lily McLemore

Roger Bishop

EDITOR

ASSISTANT EDITOR

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Hilli Levin

Penny Childress

MANAGING EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

EDITORIAL INTERN

Trisha Ping

Sukey Howard

Rachel Hoge

Lynn L. Green

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

ADVERTISING OPERATIONS Sada Stipe

MARKETING Mary Claire Zibart

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy

What to believe.

Who to betray.

When to run.

Tell Me Something Real by Calla Devlin

I’m Still Here by Clélie Avit

PUBLISHER

SEPTEMBER 6

Bestselling author Ann Patchett ventures into new literary territory with her most personal novel yet, Commonwealth.

features 13 16 17 21 29

on the cover

COMING

EDITORIAL POLICY BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate and select for review the best books published in a variety of categories. Only books we highly recommend are featured. BookPage is editorially independent and never accepts payment for editorial coverage.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Public libraries and bookstores can purchase BookPage in quantity. For information, visit BookPage.com or call 615.292.8926, ext. 34.

B O O K PA G E . C O M Individual subscriptions are available for $30 per year.

“Powerful and gripping— an adrenaline-filled thriller you won’t forget.” —Kimberley Chambers, bestselling author of Payback

“An engaging, exciting read from a writer who is always a step ahead of the reader’s expectations.” —David Mark, Sunday Times bestselling author of the McAvoy Series

Send payment to: BookPage Subscriptions 2143 Belcourt Avenue Nashville, TN 37212 Subscriptions are also available on Kindle and NOOK.

ADVERTISING To advertise in print, online or in our e-newsletters, visit BookPage .com or call 615.292.8926, ext. 19.

Available wherever books, e-books, and audiobooks are sold

columns

LIFESTYLES

WELL READ

B Y S U S A N N A H F E LT S

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

The modern snapshot

A tangled legacy

A beautiful photographic image often starts where you’d least expect it: in the mundane. Bath time, coffee shop visits, quiet and sunny afternoons on the couch—these are where you’ll find the shots you’ll treasure for a lifetime, writes Amy Drucker in Real Life Family Photography (Ilex Press, $16.99, 144 pages, ISBN 9781781572979). Her guide is well balanced, featuring both helpful tips and sample images that show those tips put

Since the initial publication of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books between 1932 and 1943, generations of readers have embraced the portrait of frontier life she drew from her own family’s experience. Wilder scholars have long seen clues pointing to the significant role that Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, played in editing her mother’s writing and ferrying it to publication. But Christine Woodside’s illuminating new book, Libertarians on the Prairie (Arcade, $25.99, 292 pages, ISBN 9781628726565), looks closely at the relationship between mother and daughter and solidly supports the conclusion that the younger woman was the primary mastermind behind the literary classics—heavily rewriting most of the books and essentially writing the last two in the series on her own. Woodside, who admits she has been obsessed with Laura’s life and work since childhood, has, in essence, spent a lifetime doing research for her iconoclastic book. Yet, while Laura’s story may have been the catalyst for Woodside’s interest, it is Rose who takes center stage in this fascinating chronicle. Though largely forgotten today except as her mother’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane was, in her day, a hugely successful writer whose name would have been familiar to anyone who read the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s or many other magazines during that golden age. She was a renegade and freethinker, a woman who divorced young, went to live in Europe on her own and in many ways supported her parents, who were never very successful at the farming life Laura idealized in her books. While Laura had tried her hand at a memoir, Pioneer Girl (which was published long after her death), and wrote columns for

into practice. Drucker, a professional photographer and mother of two, explains key concepts of photography—composition, perspective and lighting—that come into play whether you’re armed with the snazziest digital camera or your trusty iPhone.“Documenting genuine interactions between children means going beyond asking them to stand next to each other and smile,” she writes sagely.

CALIFORNIA DREAMING In Rancho Mirage, California, in the middle of hundreds of miles of desert, sits a lush 200-acre estate—a paragon of midcentury modern design. Sunnylands (Vendome Press, $60, 240 pages, ISBN 9780865653313) tells the story of the historic estate, which was created by philanthropists Walter and Leonore Annenberg in the mid-1960s. Design and architecture enthusiasts will swoon over page after page of crisp, light-drenched photographs that provide a window to a bygone era and a lavish lifestyle. Sunnylands was built to accommodate stunning collections of impressionist paintings and other artworks, as well as regular entertaining; the Annenbergs’ social circle included several U.S. presidents, foreign dignitaries, businessmen and celebrities. (There’s a wonderful

image of Ronald Reagan, seated on a pink sofa in a red sweater and houndstooth slacks, giving his final radio address as president over the phone.) The Annenbergs enlisted an architect, interior designer and landscape designer to collaborate and bring their vision to life, and the result was—and is, for the estate is open to visitors today—“a fresh paradigm of American glamour, a modernist country house sensitive to both the region and the climate.”

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES Taking a cue from the slow food movement, clothing designers are challenging fast fashion’s damaging environmental and social impacts. “With the resurgent interest in natural plant-based color, we have a new opportunity to make some new and healthier design choices,” writes artist and professor Sasha Duerr in Natural Color (Watson-Guptill, $30, 272 pages, ISBN 9781607749363). Duerr has worked closely with chefs and restaurants, hosting “Dinners to Dye For” in which participants explore the color potential of the byproducts of the foods served. In this, her second book, the color palettes and projects, all beautifully photographed, are organized by season. Ambitious crafters and textile artists will discover how items like avocado pits, black beans and onion skins—not to mention common garden favorites like mint and rosemary—can add vibrant twists to pillowcases, dresses, sweaters, hats, rugs and many other items. Duerr gives clear, step-by-step instructions on different dying techniques such as shibori, dip-dye and block printing for unique and naturally colorful pieces.

a local farm paper, one gets the sense from Libertarians on the Prairie that she was not really much of a writer. It was Rose who seemed to recognize the gold mine that lay dormant in her mother’s raw material, and the Little House stories would never have come to life—certainly not in the form we know them—without her intensive hands-on input. Writing the Little House books was a way to make much-needed cash during the Depression, and Woodside goes into meticulous detail about the complicated finances of both Wilder women (perhaps a little too meticulous at times). We come to understand that money often drove them and also often drove a wedge between them. Quite simply, they hated paying taxes. It is their shared belief in the need for self-reliance (reflected in the pioneer mythology of the Little House books) and a hatred for government interference that inspire the “Libertarians” label in this book’s title, and Rose would become an early, vocal supporter Wilder’s of that rising daughter, political moveRose, was the ment. mastermind As Woodside portrays it, the behind the Little House relationship between Laura classics. and Rose was often contentious. Delving into the letters between them and looking closely at the manuscripts they worked on, Woodside attempts to flush out the truth about who wrote what, what was truth and what was fiction. In the end, despite adept detection work, she is left with two questions that can never be fully answered: How did Laura feel about ceding her story to her daughter? And how did her more talented daughter feel about giving up public recognition for her own considerable contribution to the timeless books?

Selected from nominations made by library staff across the country, here are the 10 books that librarians can’t wait to share with readers in September.

LEAVE ME by Gayle Forman

Algonquin, ISBN 9781616206178

After a life-changing event, put-upon mom and wife Maribeth takes a solo trip to Pittsburgh to escape her responsibilities. Read our review on page 19.

THE BOOKSHOP ON THE CORNER by Jenny Colgan

Morrow, ISBN 9780062467256 A librarian who excels at matching books to readers hits the road in a bookmobile, starting a journey that might lead to her own perfect match.

COMMONWEALTH by Ann Patchett

Harper, ISBN 9780062491794 The award-winning author’s most personal novel yet follows a large blended family over the course of 50 years. Read our interview on page 14.

THE TEA PLANTER’S WIFE by Dinah Jefferies

Crown, ISBN 9780451495976 In this U.K. bestseller, a young English bride joins her husband in 1920s Ceylon, only to find that he is keeping some serious secrets.

DAISY IN CHAINS by Sharon Bolton

Minotaur, ISBN 9781250103420 A defense attorney and true-crime writer is wooed by a convicted serial killer who wants her to use her skills to prove his innocence in this chilling mystery.

DARKTOWN by Thomas Mullen

Atria, ISBN 9781501133862 Mullen takes readers back to 1948 Atlanta in this gripping police procedural, which follows the groundbreaking introduction of African Americans to the police force.

The Book Case Blog Keep up with reading suggestions from our editors, guest posts from our favorite authors, best-of lists, literary news and more. bookpage.com

THE MASKED CITY by Genevieve Cogman

Roc, ISBN 9781101988664 The magical story that began with The Invisible Library, set in an alternate Victorian London, continues as librarian/spy Irene sets out to solve the mystery of her missing assistant.

THRICE THE BRINDED CAT HATH MEW’D by Alan Bradley

Delacorte, ISBN 9780345539960 The always intrepid 12-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce must solve a murder before Christmas—and a cat is the only witness.

BLOOD AT THE ROOT by Patrick Phillips

Norton, ISBN 9780393293012 In 1912, Forsyth County, Georgia, cast out its sizeable African-American population. National Book Award finalist Phillips uncovers why—and how—in this compelling story.

THE SECRETS OF WISHTIDE by Kate Saunders

Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781632864499 Middle-aged widow Letty Rodd kicks off her career as London’s most discreet private investigator in this charmingly old-fashioned story. Read our review on page 13. LibraryReads is a recommendation program that highlights librarians’ favorite books published this month. For more information, visit libraryreads.org.

BLOCKBUSTER columns

LISTENING

Macmillan AUdio READ BY ROBERT BATHURST

“Penny writes with grace and intelligence...her great gift is her uncanny ability to describe what might seem indescribable.” —T H E N E W Y O R K T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W

After listening to You Will Know Me (Hachette Audio, 9 hours), Megan Abbott’s newest, read by Lauren Fortgang, you’ll never look at those small, supremely schooled and conditioned young gymnasts in sparkling leotards the same way again. If you enjoyed watching the summer Olympics, this suspenseful tale will be all the more fun. Katie and Eric Knox should be all-American poster-parents: good-looking, two smart kids, two

READ BY ARI FLIAKOS “[An] intensely imagined and richly rewarding novel.” —P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY, S TA R R E D R E V I E W

READ BY ROBERT PETKOFF WITH BILL O’REILLY “An enthralling, gripping account of the bloody battles, huge decisions, and historic personalities... A masterful, meticulously researched work.” — GENER A L DAVID H. PE T R A EUS

cars, nice house in a nice community. But their teenage daughter, Devon, is a prodigy gymnast, a golden girl going for the gold. And the Knoxes are gym parents who will do anything, sacrifice anything to get Devon to the top of this wildly competitive sport. When Ryan, the irresistibly cute boyfriend of the tumbling coach, is killed in a hit-and-run, this gritty, behindthe-scenes look at the grueling life of aspiring gymnasts turns into a nail-biter of a whodunit, a thriller that asks those age-old, always intriguing, always-chilling questions: What’s the price of success? And how far will you go to protect your child?

TRUST NO ONE READ BY THE AUTHOR “Love Warrior reaches a depth of truth and power and emotional gravity that is rarely seen in the world, and even more rarely spoken aloud.... This book is an act of love and truth and generosity; it will change lives.” — ELIZ ABETH GILBERT

LISTEN TO EXCERPTS ON WWW.UNABRIDGEDACCESS.COM

BY SUKEY HOWARD

Going for gold

STEVE ULLATHORNE

from

AUDIO

Dr. Maria Martinez is a beautiful woman from Salamanca, Spain, with an eidetic memory who can take computers apart and reassemble them in minutes. She’s a brilliant doctor and plastic surgeon (not the cosmetic kind), and she probably has Asperger’s. But when we first meet her, she’s in prison, convicted of the gory murder of a Catholic priest. She has no memory of the killing, yet she knows she’s innocent despite the DNA evidence that puts her at the scene. That’s just for openers in Subject 375 (Blackstone Audio, 11 hours), the

taut and often terrifying first installment of the Project trilogy by Nikki Owen, narrated with compelling intensity by the very capable January LaVoy. Is Maria an unreliable narrator, or has she been the subject of an elaborate clandestine project, plunged unwittingly into the shadowy world of covert intrigue? Slowly, Maria— and the reader—begins to put the puzzle of her unsettling life together and to figure out who, if anyone, is telling the truth.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO Powerful and brilliantly imagined, The Sport of Kings (Macmillan Audio, 23 hours), C.E. Morgan’s second novel, twines and dissects two very different but very American families whose last descendants are focused on an extraordinary thoroughbred filly with a lineage carefully manipulated to produce a super-horse. Writing with a mix of extravagant lushness and vivid accuracy, fully realized here by narrator George Newbern, Morgan moves backward and forward in time with ease, first giving us Henry Forge, who inherited his father’s bigotry as well as his wealth, and then the backstory of his influential Kentucky clan. Henry’s cherished only child, Henrietta, hires African-American groom Allmon Shaughnessy to care for the horse that carries all their ill-conceived ambitions. Allmon’s history is a brutal reprise of the legacy of slavery and racism so much a part of our past and present. The clash that rocks the lives of Henry, Henrietta and Allmon is inevitable, the moral complexities it spotlights difficult, but immensely important. This is an exceptional novel by a rare talent.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Celebrate the 20th anniversary of the #1 New York Times bestseller

UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN In celebration of the anniversary of the classic memoir Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, enter for a chance to win this Tuscan-inspired package

ONE GR AND PR IZE WINNER WILL RECIEVE: • The complete works of Frances Mayes, including Under the Tuscan Sun 20th Anniversary Edition, Every Day in Tuscany, Bella Tuscany, The Tuscan Sun Cookbook, Under Magnolia, and more. • A DVD of the Under the Tuscan Sun film, starring Diane Lane. • Fodor’s Florence & Tuscany travel guide. • A gift card to Frances Mayes’s Tuscan Sun Wines. • A bottle of Bramasole olive oil. • An exquisite collection of Italian cheeses, salami, and delicious snacks from New York’s famous cheese shop Murray’s Cheese. “La Dolce Vita” comes in a Murray’s Signature Gift Crate and includes a selection of Italian favorites, like Pecorino and Gorgonzola, with perfectly paired meats, olives, and Tarallini crackers.

ENTER AT BOOKPAGE.COM/CONTESTS FRANCESMAYESBOOKS.COM | B\D\W\Y

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

columns

COOKING

ROMANCE

BY SYBIL PRATT

B Y C H R I S T I E R I D G WAY

Triumphant cooking

Love on the range

Julia Turshen, food writer, recipe developer and co-author of many well-known cookbooks, now has a big, beautiful book to call her very own. Small Victories (Chronicle, $35, 304 pages, ISBN 9781452143095), with over 400 recipes and 160 luscious photographs, is that special kind of capacious cookbook that covers it all—breakfast to dinner, appetizers to dessert—without weighing in at five kilos and doubling as

A Wyoming rancher finds love in Always a Cowboy (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373789696), part of Linda Lael Miller’s The Carsons of Mustang Creek series. Salt-of-the-earth Drake Carson runs the family ranch and enjoys his simple life. But it’s complicated when a beautiful graduate student researching wild horses arrives and upsets his routine. Luce Hale is thrilled to be observing the

a doorstop. Turshen, passionate about food since she was able to walk, has curated her collection of recipes with care, pointing out the “small victories”—her encouraging term for kitchen lessons learned— in each of these recipes. Although ideal for the inexperienced cook, the veteran will also welcome Turshen’s expert advice and ideas for multiple variations on a single dish. Her detailed instructions are supportive whether you’re cooking her superb Sweet Potatoes with Caramelized Onions or tender Turkey and Ricotta Meatballs. Small Victories is a big winner.

WEEKNIGHT WONDERS It never changes—summer slowly sinks into fall, and it’s back to reality all over again and, for many of us, back to the challenge and stress of getting a good, home-cooked dinner on the table every weeknight. Chungah Rhee, a master of no-fuss, super-easy meals and the creator of a popular food blog, has collected over 100 recipes in Damn Delicious (Oxmoor House, $24.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780848745851). It’s her first cookbook, and it just might become the sensible, go-to source that keeps you from ordering in or going out, while trimming costs and unwanted calories. Rhee shares her strategies and shortcuts

for stocking up your pantry and freezer with the enabling essentials for everything from quickie breakfasts to on-the-table-in-30-minutes dinners, plus appetizers, sides and a sprinkling of desserts. Consider Shrimp and Broccoli Stir-Fry, Greek Chicken with Kalamata Olives and Feta, Asian Garlic Noodles, or a onepan wonder like Pork Chops with Asparagus, Tomatoes, and Corn—all Damn Delicious, all damn good ways to ease the squeeze on time and tempers.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz are millennials on a mission. They are also master mavens of Ashkenazi Jewish cooking and founders of The Gefilteria, an artisanal food company dedicated to producing the traditional treasures of Central and Eastern Europe. They’re not just preserving old world recipes, they’re reimagining and reinvigorating the foods that defined that cuisine for generations. A blend of enthusiasm and expertise, The Gefilte Manifesto (Flatiron, $35, 352 pages, ISBN 9781250071385), their fabulous debut cookbook, offers Alpern and Yoskowitz’s take on time-honored comfort foods with their heady flavors and wonderful textures, like Rustic Matzoh Balls in Classic Chicken Soup (aka Jewish penicillin), Chopped Liver Pâté, light Cauliflower and Mushroom Kugel and Wine-Braised Brisket with Butternut Squash. Grandma never made Cardamom Pickled Grapes, Challah with a Marble Rye Twist or Dark Chocolate and Roasted Beet Ice Cream, but she’d approve of these delicious innovations and recognize their Ashkenazi souls. L’chaim!

animals on the Carsons’ land and doesn’t run from the sparks that fly between her and Drake. A single kiss proves what they could have together, but even though they admit to being in love, obstacles stand in the way. Luce plans on returning to California, both of their families are meddling matchmakers, and then there are the rigors of ranch life to consider—including a mountain lion and a mare-stealing wild stallion. Though Luce loves the outdoors, she wonders if she’ll fit in with Drake’s way of life. But longing has a way of overcoming doubts, and readers will root for this appealing couple. The glimpses of ranch life and the extended Carson family make this a Western to remember.

FAIRY TALE FOREVER-AFTER The first in Vanessa Kelly’s Improper Princesses series, My Fair Princess (Zebra, $5.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9781420141092), stars a very proper duke and the wild young woman he’s promised to tame. Charles, the Duke of Leverton, takes his responsibilities seriously. When a distant relation asks for his help in educating her granddaughter—the illegitimate daughter of royalty—he finds himself assuring the woman he can familiarize the

girl with English manners and customs and help her find a husband among Regency London’s social set. Gillian Dryden is not appreciative of the offer, however. Raised in Sicily, she’s unused to the mores of London’s constrained society and gets into trouble—despite Charles’ best attempts to curb her. But he doesn’t give up, and he begins to appreciate the challenge Gillian brings to his staid life. Certainly he desires the beauty, and as the feeling seems mutual, he begins to plan a future for them—if they can get past the impediments posed by a jealous ex, bloodthirsty bandits and their own wary hearts.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE Romance surprises a newly retired quarterback and a spunky P.I. in First Star I See Tonight (Morrow, $26.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062405616), part of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Chicago Stars series. With his football career behind him, Cooper Graham has a plan to build a string of successful nightclubs, a plan that is diverted when a fledgling detective, Piper Dove, begins tailing him. A confrontation with the quirky beauty ends with her agreeing to work for him as security—a situation that both repels and delights them. Piper is desperate to make a go of her agency, so she’s willing to accept employment from the arrogant and annoying sports legend. Though they each try to deny their sizzling attraction and deflect it through insults and witty banter, the two become close as they fight a threat to the nightclub—or is it a threat to Cooper himself? With engaging characters and sparkling writing, this charmer deserves a front-and-center space on the keeper shelf.

Fall into a Western romance with these rugged cowboys!

www.HQNBooks.com

www.Harlequin.com

Pick up your copies today.

Great Fall Reading

The inspiration for the major motion picture Snowden

“Fast-paced, almost novelistic....

Reads like a le Carré novel.” —The New York Times

“As close to a great American novel as this century has produced.”

“Brilliant. A poetic,

—Stephen King

A Best Book of the Year The New York Times • Los Angeles Times • NPR, and more

energetic search for the secret links between life and art—and coffee.” —Henning Mankell

“Edinburgh’s favorite

“Captivating.... Thrilling....

philosopher/sleuth is back.... Isabel’s musings...linger.”

Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend.” —The New York Times Book Review

—People

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year

“Delightful.... This memoir

has the transcendent sweep of a full life.... [Cisneros’s] prose reads like poetry, rhythmic and energetic.” —Houston Chronicle

VINTAGE

NOW IN PAPERBACK AND EBOOK Read excerpts and more at VintageAnchor.com

A rich look at five decades of collected

wisdom from the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center, including stories, crafts, and customs that define life in the Appalachian mountain region.

ANCHOR

columns

BOOK CLUBS BY JULIE HALE

A daughter’s final role The inimitable Roz Chast delivers a funny and sensitive graphic memoir with Can’t We Talk About Something More P leasant? (Bloomsbury, $19, 240 pages, ISBN 9781632861016). Mixing her trademark illustrations with family photos and handwritten text, The New Yorker cartoonist tells the story of caring for her parents—both in their 90s—as they succumbed to dementia and the physical ailments of old age. When the Chasts

become too enfeebled to stay in their Brooklyn apartment, the author makes the difficult—and costly—decision to move them to an assisted living facility near her home in Connecticut. In a narrative showcasing her signature black humor and spot-on observations about life, Chast, an only child, also looks back on her family’s history, exploring the identities of her volatile, strong-willed mother, Elizabeth, and her needy, anxious father, George. Her offbeat drawings prove a wonderful medium for this unflinching look at the intricacies of family life and the realities of growing old. A finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, Chast’s memoir is a brilliant mix of the comic and the tragic.

ALL ABOARD An international blockbuster since its publication in January 2015, Paula Hawkins’ supremely suspenseful The Girl on the Train (Riverhead, $16, 336 pages, ISBN 9781594634024) is the consummate page-turner. Rachel, a solitary alcoholic, commutes to work in London on the same train every day, passing the home of a couple whom she observes through the window. Rachel, who is divorced, imagines a picture-perfect life for

the pair and christens them Jess and Jason. One morning, Rachel witnesses a shocking incident in the couple’s home, and she soon learns that Jess, whose real name is Megan Hipwell, has vanished. Rachel goes to the authorities to share what she knows about the couple, only to become entangled in a murder investigation. The story of what really happened to Megan—and of Rachel’s possible involvement—makes for a firstrate thriller. Hawkins’ meticulously crafted thriller is a terrific choice for book clubs, who will want to check out the film version when it hits theaters in October.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (Riverhead, $16, 400 pages, ISBN 9781594634482), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, is a mesmerizing exploration of marriage and the ties that bind us all. Lotto, an acclaimed playwright, and Mathilde, his elegant, elusive wife, are the ideal couple. Intelligent, attractive and very much in love, they seem bound for longterm marital bliss. But there’s more to their relationship than meets the eye, a disjunction Groff articulates by splitting the narrative into two parts and devoting one section to Lotto and the other to Mathilde. As each partner recalls their 24-year union, long-buried secrets and private rivalries come to the fore. Groff’s depiction of her characters’ inner lives—the hidden jealousies, the misunderstandings—is electrifying. Beautifully written and uncannily perceptive, this is a probing look at the tensions that lurk beneath the surface of every close relationship.

Fantastic Book Club Reads for Fall

Family Tree by Susan Wiggs

“Clever, creative, and ingenious, this is Susan Wiggs at her best. I devoured the book, turning the pages so fast I got a papercut!” —Debbie Macomber

The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan

“A wonderfully addictive book with virtuoso plotting and characters - for anyone who loved The Girl on the Train, it’s a must read.” —Rosamund Lupton

The Total Package

by Stephanie Evanovich The New York Times bestselling author of Big Girl Panties is back with a funny, sweet, and sizzling novel about love, redemption, and second chances.

Be Frank with Me

by Julia Clairborne Johnson “The curious incident of where’d you go, Salinger.” —Kirkus Reviews

@Morrow_PB

@bookclubgirl

William Morrow

Book Club Girl

Discover a gripping new story of blackmail, greed and murder from New York Times bestselling author

CARLA NEGGERS

“[An] intense, edge-of-your-seat whirlwind.” —Booklist

Read it today!

Now in paperback.

www.MIRABooks.com www.CarlaNeggers.com

12 16_303_BookPage_LiarsKey_2.indd 1

columns

WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY

American fishermen snared in Cuba’s net State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker returns in a late summer beach read, Ghosts of Havana (Putnam, $27, 368 pages, ISBN 9780399175930), the third in Todd Moss’ diplomatic thriller series. Ryker is summoned to intervene on behalf of four American sport fishermen who have strayed

Casket (Morrow, $26.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780062458827). Poirot is summoned to the Ireland home of Lady Athelinda Playford, a novelist of some note, where he is to bear witness to a dramatic change in her will, in which she will disinherit her children and leave the entirety of her considerable estate to

into Cuban territorial waters and promptly been arrested by the Cuban navy. As in real life, the Cuban situation is complicated, and there are powerful forces on both sides of the U.S./Cuba reconciliation issue. Ryker finds himself in the middle of something much more sensitive and multilayered than the simple rescue mission he had anticipated. And Ryker is no Jason Bourne; he’s kind of professorial, preferring negotiation over pyrotechnics every time. His wife, a CIA operative, is cut from different cloth, however. And although they have sworn never to work on the same case again, they’re finding themselves drawn into the vortex of this delicate situation. Moss brings a wealth of personal experience to his narrative; he was deputy assistant secretary of state, at one time responsible for relations with 16 West African countries. Now he works in a D.C. think tank and serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University—lofty credentials indeed, and put to very good use in his writing.

Joseph Scotcher, her personal secretary who is in the final stages of terminal kidney disease. The point becomes somewhat moot that very evening, when someone uses an antique club to bash poor Scotcher’s head in. There are suspects aplenty: Playford’s children and their significant others; the young woman recently betrothed to the victim; a pair of solicitors; Scotland Yard detective Edward Catchpool; an assortment of household staff; and of course the redoubtable M. Poirot. As in the best of lockedroom mysteries, the killer must be one of them, but which one? For those who grew up devouring the Poirot mysteries, Closed Casket seems like the latest in an unbroken chain. You’ll totally forget that you’re not reading something straight from the (ghostly) pen of Dame Agatha.

A POIROT PUZZLE Hercule Poirot, perhaps the greatest detective of all time, once again twirls his luxurious mustache in consternation as he sifts through obscure clues and red herrings in Sophie Hannah’s second homage to Agatha Christie (with whom she shares the writing credit), Closed

2016-07-22 9:58 AM

DREADED RED PEN Regular readers of Ken B ruen’s moderne noir series featuring Irish ex-cop Jack Taylor will find lots to like in his latest dark thriller, The Emerald Lie (Mysterious Press, $25, 256 pages, ISBN 9780802125460). Together with sociopathic (perhaps psychopathic) Em/Emily/Emerald, the femme fatale who bedeviled Taylor in 2015’s Green Hell, he pursues a serial killer nicknamed the Grammarian, who lethally targets people who misuse the Queen’s English.

To simply describe the setup of the plot is to pay short shrift to Bruen’s prodigious writing skills. His books are atmospheric to the max, albeit an atmosphere redolent of Irish damp and chill. His characters are fueled by avarice, obsession and Jameson whiskey. His writing is peppered with world-weary and witty observations, and it’s nigh impossible to read a Bruen book without unearthing new music to listen to, TV shows to watch, books to read—such is Taylor’s devotion to, or perhaps reliance upon, pop culture. It’s simply not to be missed. That is all.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY Three Pines, Québec, is a town straight out of a Currier & Ives lithograph, a town where everyone knows one another as intimately as extended family, a town where secrets do not remain secrets for long. Think Bedford Falls of It’s a Wonderful Life, modernized and Frenchified un petite peu. It’s the home of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Sûreté du Québec, now back to work as head of the notoriously corrupt Sûreté Academy after a foiled attempt at retirement. A Great Reckoning (Minotaur, $28.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9781250022134), the 12th Gamache novel from legendary Canadian novelist Louise Penny, centers on an old map found hidden in the wall of a Three Pines bistro. Dismissed by some as just a curiosity, a copy of the map shows up in the bedside table of a murdered man, casting immediate suspicion on a small group of Academy cadets—and on Gamache as well, as there was no love lost between Gamache and the sadistically corrupt victim. The magic of Penny’s books lies in the details: the intricacies of the relationships; the vivid rendering of small village life; the thematic overlays of weakness vs. power, malleable youth vs. world-weary experience and corruption vs. innate honesty.

HISTORICAL MYSTERY BY BARBARA CLARK

Women against the odds

n three mysteries set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—an era full of misconceptions about “the fairer sex”—women of action match wits with philandering villains, escaped cons and dodgy doctors.

There’s a good deal of “I know it in my bones” sleuthing in Kate Saunders’ The Secrets of Wishtide (Bloomsbury, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9781632864499), first in a new historical mystery series set in the Dickensian England of the 1850s. Middle-aged widow Laetitia “Letty” Rodd fancies herself a private investigator of sorts, and she works with her brother, Frederick, a criminal barrister, to sort out the follies and indiscretions that originate with folks of the well-respected “gentler” classes. Wishtide is full of secrets, as the “nicer” ladies and gentlemen mix it up in all manner of seductions and clandestine affairs—clearly with no respect to class. Shadowy marriages and alliances run amok as the feisty sleuth sets out to investigate and perhaps prevent an undesirable love match, and ends up unmasking an evasive murderer known as Prince, who may have lived more than his share of lives.

GIRL RETURNS WITH GUN Amy Stewart (Girl Waits with Gun) continues the fictional adventures of Miss Constance Kopp in Lady Cop Makes Trouble (HMH, $26, 320 pages, ISBN 9780544409941). Constance is based on a real woman who, just prior to World War I, became a deputy sheriff in New Jersey, one of the first of her kind in the country. And yes, she does make trouble. Escaped convicts don’t stand a chance against this adventurous woman, as Stewart crafts a heady brew of mystery and action in

a fast-moving, craftily written novel that’s fueled by actual news headlines of the day. While serving as a matron for women prisoners in the Bergen County jail, Constance has a bad day when the electricity fails during a thunderstorm and an inmate escapes. Constance tracks down the bad guy, all the while fielding complaints from the male citizenry that revolver-totin’ women in law enforcement will just “turn into little men.”

THE DOCTOR IS IN Cuyler Overholt’s debut mystery, A Deadly Affection (Sourcebooks Landmark, $15.99, 448 pages, ISBN 9781492637363), is set in 1907 New York City and features an uncommon protagonist, Dr. Genevieve Summerford, an early practitioner— and a woman to boot—in the burgeoning field of psychiatry, a discipline not yet fully accepted as a legitimate medical field. One of her patients is arrested for murder, and though she claims she’s innocent, Genevieve fears that her own advice may have prompted the young woman to dangerous actions. She bends all her efforts toward discovering the real murderer, and in the process uncovers a complicated web of family stories involving questions of parentage, illegal adoption and genetically transmitted disease. Her investigations bring her face-to-face with Simon Shaw, an influential Tammany politician—and the man who stole her heart years ago. Overholt’s story is a winning combination of intrigue and romance.

meet J. PATRICK BLACK

the title of your new book? Q: What’s

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

spotlight

character did you most enjoy writing about and why? Q: Which

your personal survival plan for an alien invasion? Q: What’s

f you could jump into one science fiction universe, what Q: Iwould it be?

Q: As a former bartender, can you recommend the perfect cocktail to accompany Ninth City Burning?

Q: Words to live by?

NINTH CITY BURNING The residents of Earth have been fighting an alien invader for 500 years in Ninth City Burning (Ace, $27, 496 pages, ISBN 9781101991442), the epic science fiction debut by J. Patrick Black. One young cadet at Ninth City’s military academy has special powers that could make the difference between survival and annihilation. Black, who has worked as a lawyer, a homebuilder and a bartender, lives in Boston.

cover story

ANN PATCHETT

Hitting close to home

ow are you with dogs?” Ann Patchett asks as she holds back two curious greeters behind the front door. She ushers me inside her roomy red brick house to a comfortable living room drenched in morning sun. After she tries to convince me to adopt a deaf Border Collie from her sister (if only), her own rescue pup, Sparky, a tiny ball of black and white fur, makes himself comfortable on the couch between us.

Patchett is both a champion for and veteran of the literary world. She’s published six novels and three works of nonfiction, won numerous awards and owns Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville. For her, being active in both the artistic and commercial side of the publishing industry is important, and at this point in her career, inextricably intertwined. This fall, in true rock star fashion, she’ll set off on a 30-city book tour. It’s difficult and draining. “An entire day could go by, and you don’t get the peanut butter sandwich you want because it’s just thing to thing to thing,” Patchett says. But she recognizes the importance of connecting with her readers, both as an author and as a bookseller. “I love going to the bookstores. These people are my friends.”

COMMONWEALTH

By Ann Patchett

Harper, $27.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062491794, audio, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

As long as the journey ahead may be, the road to her new novel, Commonwealth, has been a much longer one. In her previous novels, Patchett has bucked the traditional wisdom of “writing what you know,” opting instead to immerse herself in research. Recently, however, she experienced an aha moment that led to her latest novel. “I read an essay by Jonathan Franzen where he said that it’s important for the novelist to always do the thing that scares him the most. For me, nothing was more terrifying than writing a novel that had to do with my family. I’ve always thought it’s so much braver and more honorable to just make everything up. But now that I’m in my 50s, I thought hey, I can do whatever I want,” she says. Aside from checking off the box of crafting an autobiographical novel, Patchett was also aiming to further explore her own obsession with time. She explains that Bel Canto deals with the suspension of time, Run is a story that takes place in real time, but what she really wanted to do was challenge herself by writing a birth-to-death novel. “I didn’t make it. But [Commonwealth] is very much bookended by birth and death. Sometimes you just get as close as you can get. I felt like [with my previous novels] I had been sprinting for a long time, and I just thought: I need to stretch and open up.” Commonwealth focuses on 10 main characters from two very different families and follows them across 50 years. The story begins on a sweltering Southern California day at a christening party for blue-collar cop Fix and Beverly

Keating’s second daughter, Franny. Amid the clamoring, cheek-pinching relatives, friends and coworkers, uninvited lawyer Bert Cousins and Beverly, emboldened by the party’s generous flow of gin, share a passionate, stolen kiss, setting off a chain of events that leads to the “Nothing breakup and was more blending of terrifying their families, than writing a complete with novel that had six children. The young to do with my stepsiblings family.” spend verdant summers together in Virginia, forge alliances, run free of adult supervision and commit shocking misdeeds. (You’ll never look at Benadryl the same way again.) It’s kids versus the world, until a sudden death carves a deep divide between them. Yet time marches on, and we are reunited with Franny as an unmoored 20-something working as an upscale cocktail waitress. When her literary hero, Leo Posen, a lothario 32 years her senior, sidles up to her bar, their instant connection leads to a passionate affair. Years later, with a bit of a wink from the author, Leo is moved to craft a novel around Franny and

INTERVIEW BY HILLI LEVIN

her family’s tragedy, enraging some of her relatives and leading to some unexpected reunions. If you’re wondering whether Patchett identifies with a character, the answer is yes, but it may not be the one you expect. “People who have read this book go, oh, you’re Franny! But I’m Leo,” she says with a laugh. “The things that happened in this book didn’t happen. But, it’s all true. . . . The emotions are very close to home. Bel Canto is the same book: a story about not being able to go home and being trapped in a house with people that you don’t know who are scaring you, and forming alliances with them and loving them. That’s what this is. That’s my story.” Her experiences with her own blended family and her move from California to the South serve as the most obvious blueprint, and readers familiar with Patchett’s nonfiction will recognize autobiographical details aplenty. But the real question is, why tap into this wellspring now, after three decades of writing? Patchett is aware that while she

was drawn to play with her personal narrative, family members may not be as game to become fictionalized. “Writing things that are too close to home can work for some family members and not for others, and I think this book would not have worked for my father,” Patchett says. While she was working on the novel, however, she knew her father would not be alive to read the finished manuscript. He died of Parkinson’s disease in 2015. Fix does share vague similarities with her father, but some of the most personal plot points are found in the later passages that deal with caring for a terminally ill loved one. “The Roz Chast memoir [Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?] had such an impact on this book. She takes a lot of ownership for her life and her past and says this is the way it is—this was hard and heartbreaking and exhausting.” Patchett insists that waiting to write her most personal story was one of the best career choices she’s made, and after reading the novel, it’s hard to disagree. Commonwealth is an all-American family saga, but her touching and even-handed approach to themes such as family politics, love, the role of literature and the acidic nature of lies is buoyed by a generous sprinkling of matter-of-fact humor. It just might be her best novel yet, an assessment that Patchett agrees with. “I feel like what I’ve been doing all my life is not writing Commonwealth. So now I have, and I’m hoping it will bring freedom.” She admits she already has an idea for another novel, and while she hasn’t started writing quite yet, she has made some notes. “I just think it’s interesting to think about all the things we might be wrong about, all the things we were sure of. I was sure that I wasn’t going to write anything that seemed autobiographical. And then I did, and it was great. And now I’m thinking, what else are you sure you’re not going to do? I’m sure that I’m not going to write a first-person novel again. Well, why not do that?”

The superstorm of the year is coming… are you prepared? Discover the thrilling climate-fiction novel from former Treasury Spokesperson

MEG LITTLE REILLY “Smart, prophetic, heartfelt… both wake-up call and salve for these uncertain times.” —Robin MacArthur, author of Half Wild

“Part environmental thriller, part exploration of marriage, it reveals the psychological storm that lies underneath the tranquil New England facade…” —Joseph Monninger, award-winning author of Eternal on the Water

Available now! 16_291_BookPage_Unprepared.indd 1

www.MegLittleReilly.com • www.MIRABooks.com

2016-07-22 11:36 AM

features

AMOR TOWLES

An outsized life in a Russian hotel

ntering a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, for an annual investment conference some years ago, Amor Towles suddenly envisioned the premise for his inventive, entertaining and richly textured second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. “It came to me in a flash,” Towles says during a call that reaches him in his study—“a 19th-century library” with windows overlooking the street, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a fireplace—in the townhouse near Gramercy Park in Manhattan that he shares with his wife and their children, ages 14 and 11. “I was looking at the people in the hotel lobby and having this eerie sense that I had seen them before. And I thought, what would it be like to live in a hotel like this for the rest of your life?” Towles rushed upstairs to outline the book. Within the first hour, he knew that his character would not be in the hotel voluntarily; he would be held by force. “And I thought if a guy has to be in a hotel by force, Russia is the perfect place.” So the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov—a Russian aristocrat arrested by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, saved from execution because he had written an influential revolutionary poem in his youth, and then sentenced in

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW

By Amor Towles

Viking, $27, 480 pages ISBN 9780670026197, audio, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

1922 to permanent house arrest in the servants’ quarters of Moscow’s grand Hotel Metropol—began to take shape. But it would be a number of years before Towles actually sat down to write the novel. Now 52, the author says he’s been writing since he was a kid. At Yale, his mentor was Peter Matthiessen, with whom he remained friends until Matthiessen’s death in 2014. And during his graduate writing fellowship at Stanford, he was close to novelist Gilbert Sorrentino. But when he moved to New York City at the age of 25, he found that he “wasn’t ready to be alone in my apartment writing all day.” Nor did he find the bartending, table-waiting and fact-checking jobs of his artistic contemporaries appealing. So he joined a friend who was starting Select Equity, an investment-advising firm, and for the next decade he worked to build a successful business. In his late 30s he began writing again, and in 2011, he published his first novel, the bestseller Rules of Civility. Its success allowed him to retire and devote himself to fiction writing. In 2013, he began to work in earnest on A Gentleman in Moscow. The action of the novel unfolds over the course of roughly 35 years. A central question the book explores is how we adapt to difficult circumstances over which we have little or no control. Towles’ Count Rostov becomes a kind of model of how to live well within very constrained circumstances. He is an educated, affable, kind man who has a passion for food, music, literature and love that seems to grow out of Towles’ own sensibilities. Towles’ evocative descriptions of food, for example, will definitely make a reader’s mouth water. “I don’t mind using the novel to sweep in many things that I enjoy,” Towles says, laughing. “That was

part of the fun of it for me.” A parallel challenge here is how a novelist makes such a confined life interesting over the course of many decades. In this regard, Towles is remarkably inventive. The Count develops surprisingly deep relationships with guests in the hotel, has an ongoing romance with a beautiful, aging actress, eventually becomes a head waiter because of his expertise in organizing social occasions, In Towles’ and finally vivid portrait, becomes a the seemingly loving, overly protective narrow adoptive father life of the to a musically Count lives talented girl whose parents large in our imaginations. disappear in the Russian Gulag. All of this happens within the confines of the hotel. And through all these changes, the seemingly narrow life of the Count lives large in our imaginations. In addition, the location of the Count’s soft-cuffed imprisonment, the Hotel Metropol, becomes a fascinating character in and of itself. It makes an interviewer wonder, could such a place actually exist in the early years of the Soviet Union? “The short answer is yes,” Towles says. “It was seized by the Bolsheviks because they needed office space for the government. Moscow, after all, had not been the seat of government for centuries. But when European nations recognized the Soviet government at the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks realized pretty quickly that the first

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

thing foreign diplomats and businessmen would see when checking in was a crappy hotel, a signal that the revolution was failing. So they restored the hotel to its former grandeur and it became the place, not only for foreigners, but for all of Russia, who dreamed of dining and dancing there.” Towles’ knowledge of Russian history and literature is deep, which adds a pleasing and provocative texture to the novel. But he says adamantly, “I am not a research-oriented writer. A premise gets brighter and sharper the more it’s tied to an area of existing fascination for me. That happened here. I love Russia. I’ve read all the Russian writers and admire them. I think Russian history is fascinating.” Instead of facts and research, Towles says he thinks of his writing in musical terms. “I think the closest cousin to the novel in the art realm is the symphony. A novel has movements and leitmotifs. It has moments of crescendo and diminuendo. You feel a growing emotional force and then it backs off for reflection. A work must feel cohesive and organic and the beginning and end inform each other in a way that we can hold in our head.” It’s an apt observation. Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow often reads like it has a song in its heart.

BEHIND THE BOOK BY FIONA DAVIS

Storied NYC building inspires a thoughtful debut

have always been intrigued by the history of buildings, whether I’m wandering around Blenheim Palace in England or the Tenement Museum in New York City. During an apartment hunt a couple of years ago, I was brought to the Barbizon 63 condo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, formerly known as the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

Built in 1927, the Barbizon stands out among its neighbors, a 23-story tower of salmon-colored brick studded with Gothic and Moorish architectural elements. It housed thousands of women, including several icons-in-the-making like Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty and Sylvia Plath. Potential guests were required to provide three character references and, once registered, obey the hotel’s strict dress codes and rules. The contradiction between establishing one’s independence while being treated like a child seemed to capture the paradoxical message of that time period: You can pretend to be a career girl for now, as long as you settle down and have a family once Prince Charming puts a ring on it.

THE DOLLHOUSE

By Fiona Davis

Dutton, $26, 304 pages ISBN 9781101984994, audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

I’d seen photos of the hotel before the renovation, and the change was striking. What had been a virtual beehive of small rooms off dark hallways was transformed in 2005 into sleek apartments with rosewood floors and marble bathrooms. When the broker mentioned that a dozen or so longtime residents had been “grandfathered” into the building after it went condo and were sequestered in rental units on the fourth floor, I couldn’t help but wonder how they viewed the changes that had been made to the building—and the equally dramatic transformation of their city—after so many decades in residence. What a perfect setup for a novel. As a journalist, I love crafting a story from research and interviews, and when I decided to write the book I approached the project in the same way. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on about the hotel and that era, I interviewed several women who lived in the Barbizon during the 1950s and ’60s. I looked through women’s magazines from the early ’50s and scoured old issues of the New York Times to get a sense of what day-to-day life was like back then. The more I researched, the more pressing it became to provide a glimpse into the way women were expected to live and behave in the early ’50s, and show just how hard it was to break out of that mold. For example, one women’s magazine from 1951 suggested that women stick to part-time jobs so as not to interfere with the “satisfactions of housekeeping.” Another dictated

that a woman dining out with a man should never speak directly to the waiter. Talk about being voiceless! Since the conversation regarding women’s roles continues even today, I included parallel timelines in the book: Darby shows up at the Barbizon Hotel in 1952, eager to do well at secretarial school and never marry. Rose, who moves into the condo of today, finds herself in a prickly situation with You can her boyfriend. pretend to In The Dollhouse, two be a career very different girl for now, generations as long as of women you settle challenge each other to stand down and have a family up and be counted. once Prince The book Charming is definitely a love letter to puts a ring New York City, on it. my home for the past 30 years, and the city played a large role in my research. A visit to Lior Lev Sercarz’s legendary spice shop in midtown, La Boîte, gave me the idea for developing one character’s passion for blending spices. When I decided to include a downtown jazz club as a setting, I signed up for a class on bebop at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University, taught by the brilliant trombonist Vincent Gardner. It seemed that inspiration was everywhere.

The Barbizon Hotel holds a special place in the hearts of the women who stayed there, as a refuge where they launched successful careers and declared their independence. Every time I pass by, I look up and marvel at the beauty of the building and feel the same thrill I did a few years ago, when I first realized there was a novel within its walls waiting to be told. The cycle of inspiration continues. Fiona Davis worked as a stage actress for nearly 10 years before becoming a freelance journalist and writer. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she now lives in New York City. The Dollhouse, her first novel, is the story of a 21st-century journalist who uncovers a 50-year-old mystery in the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

Visit BookPage.com to read a review of The Dollhouse.

Book of the Day from the editors of

A daily recommendation for book lovers.

bookpage.com/newsletters

reviews T PI OP CK

FICTION

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

A daring modern masterpiece REVIEW BY STEPHENIE HARRISON

A cursory peek into his backlist reveals that there is no such thing as a “typical” Colson Whitehead novel. Having tackled everything from post-apocalyptic zombie horror to jocular coming-of-age shenanigans in the Hamptons, this prizewinning author seems to have the philosophy that big risk equals big reward. So it should come as no surprise that The Underground Railroad, his sixth novel, is not only his most daring but also his very best—and most important—book to date. It’s also the latest selection of Oprah’s Book Club. In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead dives into the past for the first time, transporting readers back to pre-Civil War America and the plantations of the South. We are introduced to Cora, a third-generation slave in Georgia who has never set foot off her master’s property By Colson Whitehead and for whom the idea of fleeing is unthinkable—that is, until a fellow Doubleday, $26.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780385542364, audio, eBook available slave, Caesar, approaches her about hitching a ride on the rumored Underground Railroad to the North. With a ruthless slave catcher hot LITERARY FICTION on their heels, they embark on a perilous journey through America in search of a freedom that feels increasingly elusive. A sly reframing of Gulliver’s Travels within the traditional black slave narrative, The Underground Railroad is an arresting tale that puts Whitehead’s imagination and intelligence on full display. His inspired decision to have Cora adventure through the South by means of a literal subterranean locomotive suffuses the narrative with a fable-like quality, but Whitehead’s overall approach is far from whimsical. Throughout her journey, Cora is confronted with some of the most disgraceful facets of the period, from eugenics programs to the Fugitive Slave Act, and the narrative is frequently grim. Whitehead exercises his artistic license, deviating from the historical record to create an augmented reality. But his skillful balancing of intellect and fact with emotion and highly nuanced storytelling only makes the meditation on the insidious values that allow prejudice and brutality to continue to flourish all the more indelible. Chilling in its timeliness, The Underground Railroad Visit BookPage.com for a is a devastating literary masterpiece that should be considered required Q&A with Colson Whitehead. reading.

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS By Imbolo Mbue

Random House $28, 400 pages ISBN 9780812998481 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

In today’s tense political climate, with immigration in the news almost daily, it is especially welcome to discover Behold the Dreamers, the clear-eyed, thought-provoking debut novel by Imbolo Mbue. No matter your politics, this beautiful novel about an African family starting a new life in a new land offers tremendous insight into people

who still come to our shores in search of the American dream. In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, can hardly believe his luck when he gets a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. With this opportunity, Jende can better provide for his wife, Neni, and their growing family. When Clark’s fragile wife, Cindy, offers Neni temporary work at their summer house in the Hamptons, the Jongas feel that finally, everything is going their way. The Jongas begin to make plans for their future, applying for permanent residency and saving for their own home in Yonkers and pharmaceutical college for Neni. But not even a year later, the

housing bubble bursts and Lehman Brothers collapses. The Edwards marriage unravels further. Jende spends more and more of his time driving Clark to after-hours “assignations” in nearby hotels. Before long, the pressure of keeping secrets for Clark and Cindy threatens not only the Jongas’ marriage but their dreams of a future in a country they still can’t legally call home. Mbue herself came to the United States from Limbe, Cameroon, the same town that the Jongas hail from. Behold the Dreamers is her first foray into fiction, which shows in the occasionally choppy plot, as well as the depiction of a wealthy Manhattan couple with problems straight from central casting. But Mbue’s perceptive exploration of

the plight of African immigrants, especially in the character of Neni, is fresh and vivid. The book’s unexpected ending provides a welcome dose of realism, making this an utterly unique novel about immigration, race and class—and an important one, as well. —LAUREN BUFFERD

Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Imbolo Mbue.

PERFUME RIVER By Robert Olen Butler

Atlantic Monthly $25, 272 pages ISBN 9780802125750 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

It’s no secret that war tears families apart, including those comprised of militaristic parents and their pacifist offspring. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments. Robert Quinlan, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran and professor of American history, lives in Florida with his wife, Darla, an art theorist. They’re enjoying tofu curry at a local co-op when a disheveled man with few teeth enters. Robert, thinking the man is a fellow Vietnam vet, buys him a meal. This encounter takes Robert back to his Vietnam service, where he was “one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills.” Robert’s younger brother, Jimmy, moved to Canada rather than serve in the war, a decision that angered their World War II-veteran father. Jimmy now makes high-end leather goods, has an open marriage with Linda, his wife of 24 years, and hasn’t seen his parents and brother for 46 years. But with their 89-year-old father on the verge of death after a fall,

FICTION Jimmy has to decide whether to return to the States and risk unleashing decades of “unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret.” The disheveled man’s story, which Butler revisits throughout the book, feels extraneous, but Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty. There are marvelous descriptions throughout: When Robert dashes out of a banyan tree, “a needle-thin compression of air zips past his head.” As this provocative novel makes clear, each of us does what he or she must, but acts of conviction are rarely free of consequences.

older doctor, who help her come to terms with what she’s left behind. But a more glaring revelation awaits, providing Leave Me with some of its most tender moments. Occasionally, Forman’s dialogue is a little clunky and her attempts to balance comedy and drama don’t always work, though she is to be credited for exploring the lighter side of some rather dark material. Ultimately, Leave Me deftly explores the domestic struggles of 21st-century bourgeois life. This is an insightful ode to—and cautionary tale for—the overburdened working mother. —T O M D E I G N A N

—MICHAEL MAGRAS

LEAVE ME By Gayle Forman

Algonquin $26.95, 352 pages ISBN 9781616206178 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

Maribeth Klein has it all—and that’s the problem. The main character in Gayle Forman’s absorbing first adult novel has a career, family and a home in a Manhattan zip code so desirable “it seemed as if even the nannies have nannies.” Juggling all of these responsibilities has left Maribeth “overtaxed and overburdened, but show her a working mother who wasn’t.” So, when Maribeth feels twinges in her chest, she thinks she’s merely eaten something bad or is feeling the pressure from her latest deadline at work. But it turns out she has had a heart attack. Things go from bad to worse when, following surgery and a hospital stay, Maribeth’s family seems to expect her to return to the same demanding and stressful routine: “dancing on a surfboard, juggling knives, while they all went about business as usual.” So Maribeth simply takes off. She heads from New York City to Pittsburgh, for reasons that Forman slowly but skillfully makes clear. Once in Pittsburgh, Maribeth takes up with a younger set of neighbors and an

MISCHLING By Affinity Konar

Little, Brown $27, 352 pages ISBN 9780316308106 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

The depth of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people during and after World War II seems bottomless, never to be fully probed. In Mischling, the culmination of years of research, author Affinity Konar weaves an intensely emotional tale of sisters caught in the horrific experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. It’s 1944. Pearl and Stasha Zagorski, yellow-haired, brown-eyed, 12-year-old twins, are ushered through Auschwitz’s forbidding gates with their mother and grandfather. Because they are twins, the girls are singled out and sent to Mengele’s Zoo, along with other multiples and those with genetic mutations. There, Mengele both gives and takes life, affording his special subjects “privileges” such as extra food while injecting them and extracting from them at will. From caging his subjects and performing forced hysterectomies and abortions, to separating twins to study the effects of deprivation on the previously inseparable, the cruelty of the so-called “Angel of Death” is boundless. After months

of sleeping next to Stasha in their narrow bunk, Pearl disappears from a concert Mengele arranges. Told in alternating chapters, Mischling portrays each girl’s unique expression of her experience. Stasha is the more impulsive and imaginative of the two, while Pearl’s thoughtful approach is more rational and measured. The brokenness they endure and their longing for one another are captured in painful detail, and Konar is unflinching in her portrayal of Mengele’s experiments. Glimmers of light in this darkness are faint but persistent, and the unspeakable horrors are tempered with some grace, namely in Dr. Miri, a Jewish doctor who tries to ease the children’s suffering. Though Konar’s work is fiction, her research into historical figures and accounts helped form the key characters and episodes within it. Her writing bears a pointed edge, but also has a striking cadence

that is often beautiful and poetic. Despite their deplorable circumstances, the twins preserve a 12-year-old’s mix of naïveté and developing awareness. The games, memories and fantasies they share propel Pearl and Stasha onward, to find each other and embrace the world again. —MELISSA BROWN

RAZOR GIRL By Carl Hiaasen

Knopf $27.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780385349741 Audio, eBook available SATIRICAL FICTION

The latest book from Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, Razor Girl, has a plot that gets pretty crazy, out-of-control and hilariously cockamamie. Then again, it’s

“Like nothing else I’ve read this year…So strong…so powerful that it brought me to tears.” —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author

Angela Pisel’s poignant debut explores the complex relationship between a mother and a daughter, their quest to discover the truth, and whether or not love can prevail—even from behind bars. AVAILABLE 8/9/216

from all major audiobook retailers

“Every Karin Slaughter novel is a cause for celebration.” —Kathy Reichs, #1 New York Times bestselling author

The author of the acclaimed standalone Pretty Girls returns with this long-awaited entry in her bestselling Will Trent series! AVAILABLE 9/20

BlackstoneLibrary.com

reviews set in Florida. For all we know, the inspiration could have come off the Herald’s front page. When talent agent Lane Coolman’s rented car gets rear-ended 27 miles out of Key West, it’s not so much an accident as an on-purpose. The causative agent is a stunning young redhead who claims to have been distracted while performing some personal grooming that should not be undertaken with a straight razor in a car at all, let alone while driving. As a consequence, Coolman never makes it to the onstage performance of his client, faux-redneck reality star Buck Nance (né Matthew Romberg), and as a consequence, said gig goes sideways in extravagant fashion. Nance narrowly manages to escape the mayhem he caused at The Parched Pirate, but then he drops off the grid entirely, setting his agency’s honchos alight with what passes for concern in Hollywood. And when they realize that perhaps Buck’s disappearance might be good for his show, “Bayou Brethren,” they set in motion a chain of events that leads to kidnapping, manslaughter, redemption and an ever-evolving set of deal memos. This, of course, is only one through-line in the novel, whose disparate strands end up woven tighter than a macramé lanyard by story’s end. Along the way we meet a detective who’s been busted down to vermin inspector; a Mafia don nicknamed Big Noogie; a grifter who schemes to import sand from Cuba; a class-action shyster; a Syrian immigrant whose vacation cruise takes a deadly turn; a cross-section of the “Nance” clan, who fuse Honey Boo-Boo’s low-rent splendor with the Kardashians’ relentless drive for self-promotion . . . and of course, the Razor Girl herself. Only a skilled verbal stunt pilot like Hiaasen could bring this flight of fancy in for a safe landing, but there’s definitely some turbulence along the way, so you’ll want to keep those seat belts fastened. —T H A N E T I E R N E Y

Visit BookPage.com to read an interview with Carl Hiaasen.

FICTION HERE I AM By Jonathan Safran Foer

FSG $28, 592 pages ISBN 9780374280024 Audio, eBook availablee LITERARY FICTION

Has Jonathan Safran Foer spent the 12 years since his last novel solely exchanging email LOLs with actress Natalie Portman? Not quite. Foer’s much-anticipated third novel, Here I Am, has arrived. And thankfully, whatever his weaknesses as an email writer, Foer is a heck of a novelist. Foer writes with crisp sentences, dexterous paragraphs and unswerving honesty—but he’s never completely won me over. His explosive debut, Everything Is Illuminated, and his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, were worthy reads, but labored to the finish like middle-distance runners in the final stages of a marathon. By contrast, Here I Am is frisky from the starting gun through the tape. Large in physical size and theme, it follows two dire situations unfolding simultaneously: the not-so-unusual implosion of a Jewish-American family and, ho hum, the destruction of the Middle East. Jacob and Julia Bloch live in Washington, D.C., with their three sons. Their marriage, in subtle decline for a while, free falls when Julia finds a series of X-rated texts on Jacob’s phone. At the same time, Jacob’s cousin and nephew arrive from Israel for the upcoming bar mitzvah of the Blochs’ oldest son, Sam. But no sooner do they hit town than an earthquake demolishes the Middle East, fracturing the region’s notoriously thin veneer of peace. Jacob, a man who seems almost paralyzed when faced with a decision of any consequence, must make choices that will alter—or even end—his life and the lives of his family. Simply written yet complicated in the emotions it evokes, Here I Am can be construed as a cautionary tale. And no, the lesson is not to hide your secret cell phone better.

Without giving too much away, both the personal and political stories remind readers of the value of alliances. Numerous parallels between Jacob Bloch and Foer mark this as a very personal novel. It also may be a great novel. Foer, just 25 Former when Everything wunderkind Is Illuminated hit the shelves, Jonathan is no stranger to Safran Foer the backhanded returns with compliment, his most “man-child.” At 39, his writing personal has taken on a novel yet. sly maturity that feels fresh and new. Here I Am is destined to be a polarizing, much-discussed novel. Love it or hate it, it is well worth your time. —IAN SCHWARTZ

THE RISEN By Ron Rash

Ecco $25.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780062436313 Audio, eBook available SOUTHERN FICTION

alcoholic and a failure. But older brother Bill remains married and has a medical practice. Rash manipulates the reader’s prejudices about the likely culprit. Is it the hapless wastrel or the pillar of the community, trained to cut throats? “Four things can destroy the world,” wrote Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian. “Three of them are women, whiskey and money.” The Risen attempts to corroborate this. Ligeia gets Eugene started on alcohol, is careless about sex, and presses him for money. The two boys’ vulnerability to this is plausible. Ligeia is less rounded; she seems a throwaway understudy for Eve. Yet Rash holds your attention and keeps you guessing. By its end, the novel stands as a parable for the freewheeling ’60s and its backlash. In Ligeia’s murder, we see writ small the murders at Kent State and countless others. On another level, the novel is a story of how we all lose the dangerous paradise of innocence. It is also a fine portrait of rural North Carolina at a time when it was still remote. Written in simple prose, it is bound to have a wide audience—even among readers for whom the 1960s feel as distant as the Civil War. —KENNETH CHAMPEON

Ah, the ’60s. Girls with flowers in their hair. Quaaludes and Dexedrine. Free love and Jefferson Airplane. And finally, of course, murder. Murder by Charles Manson and his minions, the murder of MLK. Or the murder in Ron Rash’s chilling novel, The Risen. The slippery slope from liberty to catastrophe has seldom been so well depicted. In North Carolina, adolescent brothers Eugene and Bill come across a mermaid-like young woman swimming. Hailing from Florida, Ligeia wants to introduce them to grooviness. Soon she seduces the virginal Eugene and presses him to raid her grandfather’s pill stash. Then she goes missing. Five decades later, local authorities exhume her and rule her death a homicide. The novel thus becomes the community’s quest to determine the killer. Eugene by now is an

NUTSHELL By Ian McEwan

Nan A. Talese $24.95, 208 pages ISBN 9780385542074 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

In novels like Atonement and Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has enjoyed playing tricks with questions of his narrator’s identity. His devilishly clever and darkly humorous novel Nutshell takes another step in that direction, revealing the arc of a bizarre murder plot from the point of view of the ultimate unreliable narrator: a child in utero, two weeks away from birth. McEwan’s startlingly precocious protagonist lodges uneasily in the womb of Trudy Cairncross, who

is separated from her husband John—an uninspired poet and owner of a modest poetry publishing house—and living in the decaying Georgian mansion in an upscale London neighborhood that was John’s childhood home. Trudy and her lover, Claude, a property developer who happens to be John’s younger brother, appear to have in common only their mutual lust (whose manifestations the narrator rather graphically describes from his own intimate perspective) and a shared desire to see John dead. Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that Trudy and Claude’s scheme unfolds with all the deftness one would expect from a pair of amateur killers. Apart from his terror at the prospect of his father’s demise, the narrator has a dawning fear that he’s little more than an inconvenient afterthought in the conspirators’ minds. His own future may include spending some of his early days in prison and the rest of his childhood in a “brutal tower block.” Whether it’s a “joyous, blushful Pinot Noir” or a “gooseberried Sauvignon,” the sense-deprived but enthusiastic narrator is given to precise cataloging of his mother’s wine consumption—clearly excessive for a woman in her third trimester, but understandable for one hoping to obliterate her consciousness of the terrible deed she and her lover are about to commit. He’s also a cheeky and surprisingly well-informed commentator on the problems of the world (owing, perhaps, to the podcasts his mother devours). For all that, he hungers to enter that world, imagining himself someday as an octogenarian ringing in the 22nd century: “Healthy desire or mere greed,” he muses, “I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness.” In Nutshell, McEwan cleverly pulls off what might be little more than a gimmick in the hands of a lesser novelist. That he persuades us to suspend our disbelief so readily here is a testament to his consummate skill. —HARVEY FREEDENBERG

THE FORTUNES By Peter Ho Davies HMH $27, 288 pages ISBN 9780544263703 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

With the whole country talking about identity politics, racism and cultural awareness, Peter Ho Davies’ provocative new novel could not be more timely. Told from the points of view of four different characters over a century and a half, The Fortunes documents the history of the Chinese in America beginning in the mid-1900s. The pattern of 19th-century immigration and current Chinese adoptions is comprised of first men, and then girls, without families. With this in mind, Davies re-envisions the genre of the multigenerational saga. The novel’s artful structure allows for four distinct stories, three of which are drawn from historical sources. The son of a prostitute and a white man, or “ghost,” Ah Ling is sold off to a laundry in California. By 1860, he had become a personal assistant to a railroad baron, but then chose to work alongside his countrymen on the transcontinental railroad. The second story is told by Anna May Wong. Born in the United States, Wong was Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star, yet she repeatedly lost key roles to white actresses playing in yellowface. Four decades later, an unnamed friend of Vincent Chin’s remembers the night Chin was beaten to death outside a Detroit bar during the height of the import auto scare of the early 1980s. Finally, in the last section, Mike Smith, a biracial writer, and his Caucasian wife, Nola, travel to China to adopt a baby girl. In each of these stories, Davies’ characters wrestle with their Chinese identity and what it means to become an American. The scope and research of The Fortunes is impressive, but what makes the novel memorable is the honesty of each narrative voice, whether it’s the loneliness of Ah

q&a

PETER HO DAVIES

A saga in four voices

n his electric second novel, Peter Ho Davies unravels the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China through four immigrant stories that span 150 years.

BY LAUREN BUFFERD

FICTION

Your previous novel, The Welsh Girl, was set in Wales and England during the Second World War. This book makes a leap to the United States and also with its timespan, which covers a century and a half. What interested you in exploring the Chinese in the United States? Despite the differences you rightly note, the initial impetus behind The Fortunes is very similar to the one behind The Welsh Girl. I’m Welsh on my father’s side, Chinese on my mother’s, and both books are driven in part by a desire to understand those different heritages. I’ve also now lived half my life in the U.S., after growing up in the U.K., so I was drawn to the immigrant experience. This novel tells four distinct stories in four different voices. How did you select this structure and what were you hoping to accomplish? The form came as something of a revelation, evolving over the course of several years in response to the material. I think of it now as a kind of multigenerational novel about a community, Chinese Americans, whose history (from the “bachelor society” of the Gold Rush to the recent influx of baby girls adopted from China) is one of broken or discontinuous lines of descent. The characters in the four sections of The Fortunes aren’t related by blood, but they are bound to one another in some essential sense. The recurring themes, the jokes, the images, the echoes and “call backs” in the language are all there in place of those bloodlines, to suggest those affinities. My background as a short story writer was a touchstone, too. What are the challenges of mixing real-life people with characters you’ve imagined? The answer tends to vary depending on the historical figure involved. The places where the factual record is obscured or disputed provide a space to explore. In The Fortunes, a principal character, Ah Ling, is a manservant to Charles Crocker, one of the railroad barons who built the Transcontinental. Even though he fills a pivotal role—his example is supposed to have inspired Crocker to hire thousands of Chinese to work on the railroad—Ah Ling is only ever mentioned in passing. I found myself fascinated with this mystery man. You currently live and teach in Michigan. Are there things that you are still getting used to about the United States? One of the early seeds of The Fortunes was a train trip I took from Boston to San Francisco, 20 years ago. What struck me powerfully then—and has stayed with me—was the sheer continental scale of the country. It was typical for friends from home to ask me how I was finding America. But that train journey impressed on me how impossible it would be to try to speak about the U.S. as a whole when my experience was only of one region of it. To have asked me about Texas, say, would have been akin to asking a Londoner about Berlin! I don’t mean to say there are no regional differences in Britain, but the size of the country and its long history have tempered them. When I go home to the U.K. now, it can feel a little claustrophobic—everyone reading the Visit BookPage.com to read more same paper. of our Q&A with Peter Ho Davies.

reviews Ling, the bitter wit of Anna May Wong, or the unease of Vincent’s friend as he sifts through his memories of that terrible night. But it is the utter intimacy and introspection of the final section, “Pearl,” that digs the deepest. Though it is the section told with the most humor, this is the one that will break your heart. Davies, whose previous novel, The Welsh Girl, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize, has written a masterful, perceptive and very modern look at identity, migration and the intertwined histories of the United States and China.

FICTION readers will know what is coming, this does nothing to dim the force and shock of Donohoe’s depiction, told through the eyes of Eileen, one of the many firefighters on-site that day. Ashes of Fiery Weather is a beautifully crafted story, one that serves not only as a homage to the legacy and traditions of New York firefighters, but also to the families who love, support and often mourn them. Donohoe has created an emotional, deeply moving work that will stay with readers long after the last page. —HOPE RACINE

—LAUREN BUFFERD

ASHES OF FIERY WEATHER By Kathleen Donohoe

HMH $26, 416 pages ISBN 9780544464056 eBook available

LONER By Teddy Wayne

Simon & Schuster $26, 224 pages ISBN 9781501107894 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

DEBUT FICTION

Kathleen Donohoe’s first novel, Ashes of Fiery Weather, introduces readers to the stubborn, courageous and sometimes flawed women of the Keegan/O’Reilly family. Central to the story is the evolution of firefighting, a multigenerational career that binds the family together. Donohoe’s characters range across six generations, bound together by devotion, tradition and hardship. Each woman faces her own struggle, from Irish-born Norah, who must find a way to raise a family after her husband is killed in the line of duty, to her stubborn sister-in-law, Eileen, who fights to become one of the first female firefighters in New York City. What makes Donohoe’s novel stand out from other family sagas is the authentic insight she brings to her work. Clearly inspired by the author’s own family history, Ashes of Fiery Weather at times feels more like a memoir than a work of fiction. The crowning achievement of the book, however, is Donohoe’s unaffected and chilling portrayal of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Although

In Loner, protagonist David Federman has a quirk: When he hears a word or a name, he likes to turn it backward in his mind, reversing the letters so they spell something different. “Star” becomes “rats.” “Pupils” becomes “slipup.” “Lived” becomes “devil.” Most of the words he switches around become incoherent, recognizable only to himself. David’s wordplay comes off as geeky and sweet; he seems ready to bloom in college. But the shy kid we’re introduced to in chapter one soon grows as twisted and bizarre as his mirrored words. We learn that he views his new friends as disposable pawns and his fellow students only in terms of what they can do for him. The limited interactions he has with girls—with one girl in particular—grow heavy with innuendo and implications in his own mind. Veronica is the object of David’s affection, and the book grows darker as his choices lead him from crushing on her, to stalking her, to becoming truly frightening in his actions toward her and others. As readers, we’re left off-balance, not quite sure whether Veronica is being played by David, or if she’s

part of the game. The fact that the banalities of David’s life are so familiar makes his behavior all the more creepy, and author Teddy Wayne (The Love Song of Jonny Valentine) deftly weaves in literary allusions, to Macbeth and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in particular, that add another layer to the narrative. Loner is a genre mashup—coming-of-age meets thriller—and the result is magnetic. Campus A deft gender dynammashup of ics is a hot topic in the media, coming-ofage story and but Loner takes us back to the thriller, Loner very beginning, is a magnetic tracing how small choices reading and hidden experience. motivations lead to those attention-getting headlines. The reader has a front-row seat as David turns his privilege inside-out, twists the kindness of strangers into something perverse and loses the life he could have lived—and although that journey isn’t always pleasant, it’s incredibly compelling.

longtime citizens of Isole, Vermont, also get theirs when this storm hits. Even before the apocalypse—and Reilly is masterful at keeping this meteorological monster offstage until the right time—the ties that bind this little community begin to unravel. Ash and Pia’s marriage begins to fracture under the sheer stress of waiting for something to happen. Neither Ash nor Pia is particularly embraceable, but Reilly has created likable secondary characters: Peg, the nature-loving scientist neighbor; Crow, the hippie/survivalist/loner; Maggie, the doughty schoolteacher; and August, the half-wild boy whom Ash befriends. Suspense comes from wondering who will survive and what the world will look like once this storm has come and gone. Though writers have long warned us about what happens when humans mess with nature in general and the weather in particular, We Are Unprepared might be in the vanguard of tales that deal with the consequences of human-caused climate change. As such, it is an admirable example of the genre. —ARLENE McKANIC

—C A R R I E R O L LWA G E N

WE ARE UNPREPARED By Meg Little Reilly MIRA $15.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780778319436 Audio, eBook available DOMESTIC SUSPENSE

Some readers will open Meg Little Reilly’s novel and come to certain conclusions about the starring couple. Ash and Pia are from gentrified Brooklyn, but when the book begins, they’ve fled to Vermont, Ash’s natal state, in an attempt to live more “naturally.” Since the book is narrated by Ash in hindsight, we learn he’s survived a storm that makes Superstorm Sandy look like a breezy day at the beach. At last, some may think, the yuppies get theirs. The problem with this schadenfreude is that the nice, solid,

I’M STILL HERE By Clélie Avit

Translated by Lucy Foster Grand Central $25, 256 pages ISBN 9781455537624 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

If you’ve ever known someone in a coma, you’ve probably sat bedside and talked to him or her. You may have wondered, am I talking to thin air? Does this help? In I’m Still Here, first-time novelist Clélie Avit explores an answer. When Elsa regains consciousness, she has already spent months in a hospital bed. A mountain- climbing accident left her in a coma. Awareness is major progress—but Elsa can only hear, not move or speak. No one can tell that her condition has changed. Visitors have decreased in frequency as the months passed.

FICTION Then Thibault stumbles into her room. It’s a mistake; Thibault is visiting his brother, who has taken up residence a few doors down after a drunk-driving accident in which he was the driver. He steps into Elsa’s room looking for a place to get away, but he can’t help but start a conversation once he’s there. Thibault’s visits give Elsa a thread of hope. She focuses on his words, willing herself to open her eyes or otherwise show she’s still there. And though he can’t explain why, Thibault is convinced that he isn’t just talking to an empty room. Avit’s debut, translated from the French by Lucy Foster, draws readers deep into the private worlds of its characters. Their stories are revealed in alternating chapters. Elsa’s is necessarily slow to develop. She must rely on the words she hears to understand what landed her in this state. Thibault, on the other hand, interacts with other people and moves beyond the world of the hospital. But his is still a private viewpoint, as he is slow to let people in. I’m Still Here is a study in character development. It’s a quiet novel that packs dramatic tension into a mostly one-room world. Avit’s deft hand suggests the promise of more to come. —CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD By Alexander Weinstein

Picador $16, 240 pages ISBN 9781250098993 eBook available SHORT STORIES

Imagine a world where you bear children only to watch them “die” when your gaming system is hacked and requires a reboot, or where contact lenses act as social media implants that livestream every moment of your life. These are just two of the brave new worlds that creative writing professor Alexander Weinstein has envisioned in Children of the New World, a bold debut collection of speculative short stories.

Many of the stories deal with our culture’s growing dependence on new technologies and the profound isolation and boredom that this dependence creates. In “Migration,” families are quarantined inside their houses, their needs met through total online connectivity. One day, in an act of familiar teenage rebellion, the son steps into the outside world. The frightened father follows, only to find him playing with a tennis ball. When questioned about his actions, the son responds, “You know whenever I play Tennis, the ball always bounces smoothly and makes the same sound. But that’s not what happens in real life.” This theme reappears throughout the book—characters live in tailored, ideal virtual realities, and yet they’re bored to death. Weinstein deftly captures technology’s limitations and leaves the reader to ponder the beauty found in the real world’s imperfections. Ultimately, what is most remarkable, and chilling, about many of these stories is their resemblance to our current times. Think Her rather than “Star Trek” or Minority Report. Discomfiting as they may be, these characters’ desires and frustrations are familiar as they navigate worlds increasingly devoid of human connection. The stories in this collection, while wildly imaginative, also read as a sort of cautionary tale. As we push our dependence on new technologies further than ever before, one can’t help feeling that we may be closer to these imagined worlds than we think. —J E S S I C A P E A R S O N

THE ORPHAN MOTHER By Robert Hicks

Grand Central $26, 320 pages ISBN 9780446581769 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Robert Hicks’ sequel to his highly acclaimed Civil War novel The Widow of the South (2005) is a gripping tale of one strong and courageous woman’s quest to find

those responsible for the murder of her only child. Mariah Reddick had been a slave to Carrie McGavock—the widow in Hicks’ previous novel—since their childhoods. Now it’s the summer of 1867, and Mariah, also a widow, has her own small house in Franklin, Tennessee, near the dilapidated plantation where Carrie still lives. Renowned for her skill as a midwife, Mariah is thought of as “the mother of everyone in Franklin.” Her son, Theopolis, born into slavery but now a respected member of the Colored League and frequent speaker at political rallies, is beaten and then shot at a rally that turns into a riot just after the novel opens. What should she call herself now, Mariah wonders, for it seems there is no word for the mother “left alone by the death of her only child.” She vows to “not go forward quietly,” but to fight to discover who was involved in the death of her son. Not surprisingly, the white witnesses are not talking, but Mariah gradually speaks to as many blacks as she can find who were there that day, or who knew someone who was there, or who overheard snippets of conversations among the whites at work or in the local bars. She’s aided in her search for justice by George Tole, a lively character, new to town, who becomes an ally and confidant. When Mariah learns an investigative tribunal is coming from Nashville to look into the riot, she is fearful they won’t do anything at all. But she’s determined to at least make her case before them. The Orphan Mother resonates with readers on many levels—as a compelling novel documenting the violent years of Reconstruction, as a heartfelt story of the inner strengths unearthed by a mother confronted with unspeakable sorrow, and as a memorable testament to friendships between young and old, male and female, black and white. The latter offers perhaps a ray of hope in these times of racial injustice we readers are still experiencing, 150 years after the events of this gripping and timely novel. —DEBORAH DONOVAN

THE NIX By Nathan Hill

Knopf $27.95, 640 pages ISBN 9781101946619 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

It is clear that the ideas behind The Nix have been swimming around in first-time novelist Nathan Hill’s head for many years. Deriving its title from the name of a Norwegian spirit that takes people away from the ones they love, this 640-page novel takes on just about everything—including pop culture, advertising, trigger warnings, politics, the degradation of literature, ghosts and the obsession with cell phones. Hill weaves these elements into a charged mother-son story with great poise and humor. It’s 2011 and Chicago English professor Samuel Andresen- Anderson learns that his mother, Faye, who abandoned the family when he was 11, has been arrested for throwing gravel at a right-wing presidential candidate. Since he owes his publisher another book, Samuel decides he can help his mother—whom he hasn’t seen since she left—and himself by writing an exposé on the woman behind the most-viewed YouTube clip of the moment. Samuel visits Faye’s Iowa hometown and the Chicago suburbs, searching for fragments of his mother’s story. Hill explores Faye’s past via many angles: flashbacks to dangerous Chicago protests in 1968, Samuel’s memories and even the point-of-view of Faye’s Parkinson’s-ridden father. In these alternating sections, the reader discovers the details about Faye’s life that Samuel longs for. The Nix is a slow burn of a novel that explores the importance of empathy, family dynamics and dysfunction. When Samuel begins to understand his mother, he understands himself. Both laughout-loud funny and incredibly poignant, The Nix will be known as a great American novel. —H A N N A H YA N C E Y

reviews

NONFICTION

T PI OP CK

HIDDEN FIGURES By Margot Lee Shetterly

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES

How trees talk—and we can listen REVIEW BY CATHERINE HOLLIS

Already a runaway bestseller in the author’s native Germany, The Hidden Life of Trees now offers English-language readers a compelling look at the “secret world” of the forest. Peter Wohlleben, a forester, documents his conversion from lumber producer to tree whisperer, and in the process he reveals the highly communicative social networks of trees. Wohlleben notes that as humans, we have been more inclined to identify with animals than plants: We recognize a kinship across species when we notice that monkeys indulge in social grooming rituals, or that elephants mourn their dead. Using the language of anthropomorphism, Wohlleben seeks to persuade us that trees too are social beings, in constant communication with one another, caring for their sick and nursing their young. He wants us to recognize our kinship By Peter Wohlleben with trees so we’ll be encouraged to preserve their ecosystems more Greystone, $24.95, 288 pages readily. ISBN 9781771642484, eBook available Trees “speak” to one another through scent, as African acacia trees NATURE do when giraffes begin feeding off of them. The acacias being eaten send out a warning scent, which alerts other nearby acacias to produce the bitter toxin that will dissuade the giraffes from eating their leaves. Trees also communicate through a vast fungal network twined around their roots, which transmit electrical signals and chemical compounds. Through this “Wood Wide Web,” forests are truly an interconnected ecosystem—as Wohlleben demonstrates, trees in a community will send healing sugars to the roots of weak or ill trees, and some forests will keep the stumps of their elders alive long after their trunks and branches have disintegrated. In part, Wohlleben wants to demonstrate how centuries of forestry have harmed trees, especially the practice of thinning out trees, which keeps them from establishing healthy underground communication lines. But even more, he wants to enchant readers into taking a walk in the woods and listening to the trees themselves.

AVID READER By Robert Gottlieb FSG $28, 352 pages ISBN 9780374279929 eBook available PUBLISHING

Reading Robert Gottlieb’s literary ramblings is more fun than sitting at the elbow of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins and watching him pencil-whip Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts into shape. A master storyteller, Gottlieb doesn’t just drop names, he cluster-bombs them. Avid Reader gets off to a rather leisurely start as he recounts his early literary enthusiasms

while a student at Columbia and Cambridge. But after that, he runs full-tilt through his years mentoring authors at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, The New Yorker and then back to Knopf again as a benign éminence grise. There are also concluding sections on his years working with prominent dance companies and on his emergence as a writer with his own voice. One of Gottlieb’s duties as an editor was coming up with titles for books and overseeing dust jacket and advertising copy. That being the case, it seems odd at first that the title for his own life story feels so tepid. But the reason soon becomes clear. Ingesting and remembering vast libraries is Gott lieb’s hallmark. He’s a quick reader, too, he reports, a facility that has enabled him to pass sage judgment

Morrow $27.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780062363596 Audio, eBook available HISTORY

on manuscripts virtually within hours of receiving them. One of the headlines that heralded his move from Simon & Schuster blared, “Avid Reader to Head Knopf.” Joseph Heller, Jessica Mitford, S.J. Perelman, Lauren Bacall, ex-President Bill Clinton, Katharine Hepburn, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, John Cheever, Nora Ephron, John le Carré and Bruno Bettelheim are but a few of the literary lambs Gottlieb shepherded—and there are copious personal tales for each. It’s interesting to note that William Shawn, the revered New Yorker editor whom Gottlieb replaced amid staff furor, is the only person in the book to whom Gottlieb consistently assigns the honorific “Mr.” He calls Clinton “Bill.”

The “hidden figures” in the title of Margot Lee Shetterly’s new book will not be hidden much longer. This story of African-American female mathematicians who made a significant impact on the Space Race has already been optioned for a film due out in January. It’s a surprising story, even more so for how long it took to be told. Shetterly profiles several of the women who, upon realizing that their math skills qualified them for a better living than they could make doing virtually anything else, pulled up stakes and decamped for Hampton, Virginia, in some cases leaving husbands and children behind. Once there, they attempted to make their way into the middle class even as they chafed at the restrictions placed on them by segregation. One of the “Colored Computers,” as they were called, drew the line at a cafeteria sign designating one table as theirs. Sick of the reminder, she pulled down the sign and shoved it in her purse. Working for the NACA, as it was then known, to design the bombers flown during World War II led to employment with NASA as the Cold War generated frantic U.S. efforts to surpass Russia. If Shetterly’s prose is sometimes dry, the material it covers is fascinating and loaded with victories large and small for these highly skilled and tenacious workers. Shetterly writes about Katherine Johnson, one of the “computers” described in near-mythic terms by a growing fan club, as representative of the America we aspire to be. Her description could apply to any of the women profiled in Hidden Figures: “She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.”

—EDWARD MORRIS

—HEATHER SEGGEL

NONFICTION GENERATION CHEF By Karen Stabiner Avery $26, 320 pages ISBN 9781583335802 Audio, eBook available RESTAURANTS

Generation Chef will fascinate those eager to devour everything food-related. Even foodies who are well aware of the difficulties faced by any restaurant starting out will find Stabiner’s inside peek into this fast-paced, often cutthroat world enlightening. —BECKY DIAMOND

WHEN IN FRENCH In Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream, journalist and food writer Karen Stabiner (Family Table) tells the captivating tale of the journey taken by rising chef Jonah Miller as he fulfills his childhood dream of opening a restaurant, the Spanish-themed Huertas, in the East Village section of New York City. Her behind-the-scenes view chronicles the restaurant’s debut year, providing a vivid look at the challenges faced by Miller and his team. Although it is Miller’s story, Stabiner provides insight from the different players involved, delivering a detailed, richly layered narrative. Their highs and lows feel intensely real, from a game-changing New York Times review to a delayed opening and the initial rejection of a full liquor license. Like many young chefs, Miller is an ambitious, passionate perfectionist. He “had a hunch that the city needed the kind of Spanish food he wanted to make” and wasn’t prepared to contemplate getting “lost in the shuffle” of the overflowing world of celebrity chefs. Stabiner meticulously chronicles his growth and maturity as he secures the restaurant’s necessary funding, navigates building codes and liquor license approvals, tackles management duties and personnel issues and gives in to customers’ odd culinary requests that alter the whole structure of his dishes. Smart and frugal in his launch planning, he helped cut tile for the kitchen and enlisted friends to help stain the dining room wainscoting. And in the typical French culinary method, he was determined to incorporate a “no-waste” policy into his menu, enjoying the “challenge of transforming what another chef might throw out.”

By Lauren Collins Penguin Press $27, 256 pages ISBN 9781594206443 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

When New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins moved to London, she thought that would be the farthest she’d ever be, both physically and culturally, from her native Wilmington, North Carolina. Then she met Olivier. “Soon I was living with a man who used Chanel deodorant and believed it was a consensus view that Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was on account of the rain,” she writes in her wry memoir, When in French. Collins and Olivier established their relationship in England, a somewhat neutral zone: his continent, her language. But when his job took the couple to Geneva, Collins began to realize that she could no longer put off learning French. It wasn’t just because she was shut out of everyday life in Geneva or because she had mistakenly implied in a note to her motherin-law that she had given birth to a coffeemaker—without knowing French, she was unable to truly understand her husband. “Talking to you in English is like touching you with gloves,” says Olivier. So Collins embarks on a quest to learn French, starting with a language class and working her way up to newscasts and episodes of “The Voice: La Plus Belle Voix” on TF1. In between unsparing recitals of her pratfalls and triumphs on the road to conquering her husband’s

langue maternelle, Collins flashes back through their relationship, exploring its cultural divide. She also investigates the questions that her pursuit raises. Does speaking a different language change who you are as a person? How does language shape a culture? She visits the Académie française, researches an Amazonian tribe that requires its members to marry into a different language group and unearths other tidbits of trivia and history that will fascinate lovers of words and language. Still, the heart of the book lies in Collins’ personal story, which she tells with humor, humility and a deep affection for the people and cultures involved. Whether she’s describing the grinding exhaustion of learning a foreign language or the euphoria of a breakthrough, her determination makes the reader root for her. When in French is both an entertaining fish-out-ofwater story and a wise and insight-

ful look at the way two very different people and families manage to find common ground. —T R I S H A P I N G

HITLER By Volker Ullrich

Translated by Jefferson Chase Knopf $40, 1,088 pages ISBN 9780385354387 eBook available BIOGRAPHY

When it comes to book titles, it’s hard to think of one more ominous than Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939. The first of a two-volume project by German historian and journalist Volker Ullrich, this is a sprawling and ambitious attempt to explain how a man from humble beginnings with few accomplishments well into adulthood could morph

Today!

Get your paws on it

292716_KitKatLucyDuPont_Bookpage_0916.indd 1

7/28/16 9:19 AM

reviews into a ruthless dictator whose name has become a universal insult. With the millions of words that have been written about Hitler, why another biography? In his introduction, Ullrich notes that more than 15 years have passed since the last important work on Hitler, with much research occurring in the meantime on him and surrounding figures. Moreover, Ullrich contends, a wealth of new material has appeared, including newly public notes and speeches. And finally, Ullrich sets out to challenge conventional wisdom that Hitler was a man of “limited intellectual horizons and severely restricted social skills” and shed more light on his private life, including his relationships with women and his social interactions. Ullrich aggressively makes his case, noting that Hitler devoured books on a wide variety of topics during his struggling artist years in Vienna and Munich and that he led a varied social life, albeit one intertwined with his political activities. (Friends such as Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, had the added bonus of advancing his political interests.) As for Hitler’s relationships with women, including mistress Eva Braun, Ullrich valiantly attempts to sort fact from myth (and downright gossip) but stops short of lurid speculation. At more than 1,000 pages, with a readable translation by Jefferson Chase, Hitler: Ascent is no quick read. That’s for the best, as this is a book to be studied with one eye to-

Wait Until Sunset by Robert E. Burtt • $25.99 • ISBN 9781481090032

In 1941, Paquette was planning to go to college. The Japanese had other plans.

NONFICTION ward the past and the other toward the future—and Volume 2. —KEITH HERRELL

LOVE WARRIOR By Glennon Doyle Melton Flatiron $25.99, 272 pages ISBN 9781250075727 Audio, eBook available MARRIAGE & FAMILY

though they announced their separation a month before the book’s publication. Love Warrior, which resides in the same realm as books by Brené Brown and Elizabeth Gilbert, presents an intense and absorbing narrative while reaching for something bigger and more quixotic, the mystery of intimacy itself. — K E L LY B L E W E T T

THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH By Tom Wolfe

Glennon Doyle Melton was a mother in crisis when she turned to Facebook. “I’m a recovering alcoholic and bulimic but I still find myself missing binging and booze,” she wrote. Readers instantly responded. Melton’s website, Momastery, has become a go-to for mothers seeking straight talk and compassion, and her first book, Carry On, Warrior, was a bestseller. Now, in Love Warrior, Melton turns her truth-telling gaze toward her husband and shares the story of their marriage: how they came together, how they fell apart, and how they reunited. It sounds like a straightforward story, but it’s not. Parts are incredibly difficult to read. From the first days of the marriage, Melton felt alienated from her body during sex and struggled to establish emotional closeness with her husband. When he reveals a stunning betrayal, Melton is instantly scarred to the core. She is ready to throw the marriage away, to align herself firmly with her children and move on. But then things begin to happen. In the midst of the disintegration, Melton makes a new kind of connection with God. She finds answers on the beach and in hot yoga studios. She keeps taking one small, precise step at a time. Meanwhile, Melton’s estranged husband is doing some discovering on his own. The two circle each other cautiously while their three children watch. Their slow return to intimacy is a breathless story, beautifully told. They find out who they really are as individuals, an invaluable discovery as the couple finds the strength to stay together at the memoir’s close,

Little, Brown $26, 192 pages ISBN 9780316404624 Audio, eBook available LANGUAGE

Linguist Noam Chomsky— whom Wolfe calls “Noam Charisma”—rides in on his semantic white horse, introducing “universal grammar,” with which every child is born. Through his field studies with a small tribe in Brazil, one of Chomsky’s students, David Everett, concludes that speech is an artifact and explains “man’s power over all other creatures in a way Evolution all by itself can’t begin to.” In the end, Wolfe declares that speech will soon be recognized as the “Fourth Kingdom of the Earth” alongside the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. Stimulating, clever and witty, Wolfe’s little book is sure to provoke discussion about the role language plays in making us human. —HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR.

In his typically colorful and entertaining style, Tom Wolfe brooks no argument as he boldly declares in The Kingdom of Speech that language is the attribute that distinguishes humans from animals. Speech, he proclaims in the book’s opening pages, is “the attribute of all attributes and is 95 percent plus of what lifts man above animal!” Wolfe arrives at his conclusion after a whirlwind tour of the development of evolutionary theory. Darwin, Wolfe points out, fails to provide in The Origin of Species any clues to the way that natural selection explains the development of language. Wolfe humorously observes that “mildly negative reviews of his book hit [Darwin] like body blows, and the fierce ones cut him through to the gizzard.” Wolfe points out that in the 19th century, Max Müller and Alfred Russel Wallace challenged Darwin on the subject of language and natural selection, with Müller contending that language elevates animals in the fullest way. Although Darwin attempts to explain the rise of language as a part of the evolutionary process in The Descent of Man, he fails miserably, according to Wolfe, and, as a result, “in the entire debate over the Evolution of man—language—was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872-1949.”

MAD ENCHANTMENT By Ross King

Bloomsbury $30, 416 pages ISBN 9781632860125 Audio, eBook available ART

If you imagined Claude Monet at work on his late masterpieces, the Water Lilies, you might picture him seated in his garden in Giverny, France, placidly dabbing blues and purples onto canvas, capturing watery impressions with ease. The portrait that Ross King offers in Mad Enchantment is far more complicated. In 1914, Monet was 73 and the world’s highest-paid artist. He’d already spent several years painting views of his pond, but now he envisioned a grouping of massive canvases that would evoke a “watery aquarium.” It took him the rest of his life. King, the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and The Judgment of Paris, has done his research—the book contains 40 pages of endnotes— but he spins a readable narrative. Mad Enchantment tells the story of Monet’s efforts to bring his vision to reality, even as the Great War and all its privations interrupted. King details Monet’s

NONFICTION struggles, how he approached technical concerns such as displaying the enormous canvases in an oval gallery, and how he coped as his “prodigious” eyes began to fail. And contrary to popular belief (and Monet’s claims), he didn’t just dash off his paintings en plein air— he reworked them at length in his studio, often adding layers of paint. This is also the story of Monet’s enduring friendship with G eorges Clemenceau, who led France in the Great War. It was Clemenceau who persuaded Monet to donate his unfinished Water Lilies to France and to complete them (and to stop being a pain in the behind about it, as Clemenceau termed it). King uses the lens of this friendship to show Monet’s often-cantankerous personality (“frightful old hedgehog,” Clemenceau called him) as well as his abiding love for his family and friends. —SARAH McCRAW CROW

THE HUNTRESS By Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen Pantheon $28.95, 368 pages ISBN 9781101871133 eBook available JOURNALISM

wealth on both sides of the family. Her father, Joe Patterson, was a scion of the colorful Medill publishing clan that ran the Chicago Tribune. Joe himself founded the New York Daily News. But his daughter did have much to overcome—she was regarded as a family disappointment, unwilling to settle down in placid upper-class matrimony. Patterson was a top horsewoman, pioneering aviator and big-game hunter, but she later dismissed those avocations as “pointless.” Luckily for her, her third marriage, to rich, influential Harry Guggenheim, took. Although they constantly clashed, he bankrolled Newsday. Then came Stevenson, unhappily married, intellectual, ambitious, endlessly dithering about his future. He and Patterson were lovers on and off for years, and she helped push him to two presidential runs. He lost, but he was the era’s liberal icon. The Arlens have a breezy, witty writing style that would have pleased Patterson, an intrepid woman who finally found her true calling in journalism. Alice Arlen died earlier this year at 75; she left a buoyant tribute to the aunt who encouraged her own aspirations. —ANNE BARTLETT

SWIMMING IN THE SINK By Lynne Cox

Before anyone had ever heard of Katharine Graham, there was Alicia Patterson. She built a major newspaper out of a small-town gazette, hobnobbed with presidents, wrote about hotspots around the globe and was a close adviser to Adlai Stevenson, the dominant liberal politician of the 1950s. She was also his lover, despite the fact that both were married. Patterson, the founding publisher of Newsday, died too young in 1963, at the age of 56, and she’s little remembered today. The Huntress, a biography by her fond but clear-eyed niece Alice Arlen, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and her husband, Michael J. Arlen, a longtime New Yorker writer, revives her story. Patterson was to-the-manor born near Chicago, with serious

Knopf $25, 240 pages ISBN 9781101947623 eBook available MEMOIR

calling attention to environmental concerns. In 1987, her swim across the frigid Bering Strait helped to ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. As an elite athlete with a unique ability to acclimatize to cold, Cox also participated in scientific research studying the body’s response to extreme cold, helping to refine surgical and emergency treatment for cold-related traumas. When it came to recovering from the deaths of her beloved elderly parents, however, Cox found herself suddenly helpless, gravely ill and frightened by her damaged heart. Its fitting diagnosis: broken heart syndrome. Medications for atrial fibrillation, along with exercise and dietary restrictions, reshaped everything she knew about her body. Her swimming life seemingly over, Cox despaired: “I did not know what I was. I didn’t like the way I was. I didn’t like what was happening to me.” With the help of good friends and caring physicians, she uses the mind-body connection to lower her heartbeat and restore proper breathing. She tries to swim again— beginning, improbably, in her kitchen sink. Mindfulness and positive thinking, added to her athletic grit, help Cox learn what it takes to swim—and love—all over again. —PRISCILLA KIPP

AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS By Alan Taylor

Norton $37.50, 704 pages ISBN 9780393082814 eBook available HISTORY

Swimming in the Sink is a comeback tale told straight from the heart—the big, intrepid heart belonging to Lynne Cox. In refreshingly candid style, the legendary open-water swimmer details her many achievements and sets the stage for her greatest challenge. From setting a world record crossing the English Channel (at the age of 15) to swimming in Arctic waters without a wetsuit, she swims with a purpose, whether promoting peace between Argentina and Chile or

Our understanding of history does not always match the documented evidence. The American Revolution was not as orderly and restrained as we sometimes think. American colonists who remained loyal to the king and those wanting to break away often treated one another inhumanely. A plundered farm, the target of small raiding parties, was more common than a battle charge. After the war, 60,000

Loyalists became refugees. In his excellent American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor gives us a wide-ranging view that draws attention to the multiple empires clashing for land and power. The result, based on the latest scholarship, is a fresh and authoritative interpretation of the complex series of events that led up to the war and the many problems the new nation faced in the years immediately following. Taylor emphasizes the crucial role played by the western expansion of settlers despite British efforts to restrict them. This expansion is essential to understanding both the causes of the revolution and the republic’s growth after the war. Between 1754 and 1763, the British and their colonists claimed the West as far as the Mississippi River. The colonists already here expected to share the fruits of victory. When that did not happen—instead, the British tried to protect Indian lands from settler expansion, made unexpected concessions to Francophone and Catholic subjects in Canada, and then imposed new taxes on the colonists—dissatisfaction began to stir. Taylor’s focus on a larger area of North America gives us a more realistic understanding of the struggle. He shows “that relations with the native peoples were pivotal in shaping every colonial region and in framing the competition of rival empires. Enslaved Africans now appear as central, rather than peripheral, to building the colonies that overtly celebrated liberty.” Near the war’s end, black soldiers were one-tenth of the Continental Army. Women were also crucial to the Patriot war effort, running the farms and shops, keeping families together. Nevertheless, Patriots defended freedom for white men while continuing their dominance over Indians and enslaved blacks. Taylor’s masterful account is consistently compelling whatever the focus—on diplomacy, religion, warfare, culture or slavery. Everyone interested in early American history should read this book. —ROGER BISHOP

reviews T PI OP CK

TEEN

THE FORGETTING

Fragile truth from lines in a book REVIEW BY JUSTIN BARISICH

Set in the fictional land of Canaan, The Forgetting follows one young woman’s journey to discover why all her neighbors forget who they are every 12 years—and how all their hard truths can be so easily bent. In Canaan, if you don’t write down your memories in your book, you’re destined to forget them and lose all sense of identity. Nadia was just a toddler for her first Forgetting—when her father scratched himself out of her family’s books and abandoned them all. But Nadia knows what he did. While everyone else loses all memories after each Forgetting, Nadia secretly remembers everything, and she’s the only one who’s trying to make sense of their shared truth. The next Forgetting is looming just weeks away, and Nadia has grown careless in her race against the clock to learn how to stop it. Gray, the glassblower’s son, catches her breaking the law as she hops the high walls of Canaan, and he demands to see the other side as well. As By Sharon Cameron Scholastic, $18.99, 416 pages the two explore the world outside the walls together, their friendship ISBN 9780545945219, eBook available morphs into a romance. But their true love may soon become fiction if Ages 12 and up they can’t solve the mysteries of Canaan before the next Forgetting. The Forgetting is Sharon Cameron’s fourth young adult novel, and SCIENCE FICTION she’s grown adept at blurring the lines between fantasy, dystopian and science-fiction genres. Cameron reminds us, through Nadia’s documented memories, that we must learn to appreciate the truth as much as question it, exploring the morality tucked within the fallacy of memory.

GIRL MANS UP By M-E Girard

HarperTeen $17.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780062404176 Audio, eBook available Ages 14 and up LGBTQ FICTION

Sixteen-year-old Penelope, known as Pen, is a Portuguese girl who wears black, talks tough and struggles with who she is. She knows she’s a girl, but even though she doesn’t want to be girly, she doesn’t want to be a boy either. Pen’s identity crisis is one of the central issues of Girl Mans Up, but debut author M-E Girard takes the tale well beyond the stereotypical comments from Pen’s peers. Pen not only learns to survive typical teenage problems, such as volatile, fickle friendships and old-school parents who try to turn

her into someone she’s not, but also navigates the questions and expectations of her own sexuality and gender fluidity. With raw, honest dialogue and vivid characterizations, Girl Mans Up will resonate beyond its intended audience. Many readers will identify with Pen, who wants more than anything to be allowed to be herself. Fortunately, the beautiful girl of Pen’s dreams sees beyond stereotypes to forge a true romantic relationship. The truths that teens hold in their hearts—and the ones they sometimes show to the world—can be scary. “People should just be allowed to look in the mirror and see all kinds of possibilities,” Girard writes. “They should at least be able to see themselves reflected in there, even if they look all weird.” Thanks to Girard, hopefully more students will be able to look inward and show respect outward as they embrace all differences. —SHARON VERBETEN

THE READER By Traci Chee

Putnam $19.99, 464 pages ISBN 9780399176777 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up FANTASY

Sefia has lived a lonely and haunted life, pursued for years by the mysterious forces that brutally killed her father and still seek the enigmatic object—the “book”—that has been entrusted to Sefia for safekeeping. When Sefia’s aunt Nin, the only person who knows the truth about Sefia’s family, is kidnapped, Sefia develops several goals: “Learn what the book was for. Rescue Nin from the people who killed her father. And get her revenge.” Raised in a society where books and reading are unheard of, Sefia uses her mysterious book to teach

herself to read—and by doing so, unlocks not only the power of story but also, possibly, her own marvelous abilities. Archer, a mute and damaged boy whose uncanny talents for fighting and killing may mark him as fulfilling a prophecy, aids Sefia along the way. Traci Chee’s debut novel, set in a world full of secrets and power struggles, is a dense and rewarding opening to an exciting fantasy trilogy. “Look closer,” exhorts an inscription at the novel’s opening, and readers will feel inspired to look for hidden clues in this intricately and unconventionally structured fantasy novel. —NORAH PIEHL

TELL ME SOMETHING REAL By Calla Devlin

Atheneum $17.99, 304 pages ISBN 9781481461153 eBook available Ages 14 and up FICTION

Set in 1976, Calla Devlin’s impressive debut, Tell Me Something Real, is a compelling coming-of-age novel with a trio of sisters at its center. The Babcock siblings—tightknit but all very different—struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of their mother’s illness. Adrienne, the outspoken oldest sister; Vanessa, the introverted middle child; and Marie, the adored baby of the family, split their time between San Diego and Tijuana, where their mother receives alternative treatments for leukemia. Vanessa, 16 years old and a talented pianist, narrates the story, chronicling changes both large and small in her sisters as they react to their fractured family life. The sisters’ overworked father is often absent, so when Caleb, a 17-year-old cancer patient in need of treatment, comes to live with the Babcocks, life looks a little brighter. A rewarding read for teens, this is a smart, compassionate story about living with loss and learning to make the most of each moment. —J U L I E H A L E

teen

BRENDAN KIELY

Learning to love all across America

rendan Kiely has spent a lot of time on the road. At 19, he went in search of love (and got turned down) on an epic road trip with his buddy Ted (who also got turned down). In college, he participated in a Freedom Summer re-enactment that stretched from Oxford, Ohio, to Oxford, Mississippi. His own parents practically sent him away to “go find the real America.”

“Young people, especially teens, are so eager to get the hell away from home,” Kiely says, laughing, in a call to his home in Greenwich Village. “I certainly was, and I needed to get out.” So it makes sense that when I ask about the title of his new book, The Last True Love Story, his answer boils down to, “There is no love story. There’s the journey.” Love is not something you find, he explains. It’s something you create or discover when you’re on your own. Kiely frequently draws his stories from some of the most intimidating, hot-button issues in today’s headlines, tragedies that are sometimes easier to ignore than to acknowledge, let alone fix. In 2014, Kiely hit hard with his young adult debut, The Gospel of Winter, about a teen boy who’s betrayed and abused by the local priest. He took on another controversial subject with All American Boys (2015), his Coretta Scott King Honor-winning collaboration with Jason Reynolds about race and police brutality. His

THE LAST TRUE LOVE STORY

By Brendan Kiely

Margaret K. McElderry, $17.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781481429887, eBook available Ages 14 and up

FICTION

forthcoming fourth novel, You Keep the Sky from Falling (2017), stars three teens whose friendships are threatened by a dangerous school tradition that encourages date rape. To Kiely, writing is an act of social engagement, but he always moves beyond the headlines to honor the people behind the events. While Kiely’s third novel, The Last True Love Story, addresses some issues of race and sexism, it’s primarily concerned with the one thing we hope will save us: love. “It’s a book about family love, first love and trying to make love last forever,” Kiely says. And as the three characters at its heart make this epic road trip together, they learn how to love themselves, too. Readers meet 17-year-old Teddy Hendrix somewhere west of Albuquerque, stranded in the desert with a flat tire. It’s a hopeless moment: He and a girl named Corinna are partway through a runaway odyssey. They’re smuggling Hendrix’s grandfather, Gpa, who has Alzheimer’s, from his assisted living facility in Los Angeles to take him to his former home in Ithaca, New York, one last time. Readers then flash back to where it all began, in L.A., where Gpa’s eyes glaze over more and more often, Hendrix’s mother is always absent and working, and just-graduated, guitar-playing Corinna is looking for an escape. So they steal Hendrix’s mom’s car and head east. “They’re getting out of the city of dreams,” Kiely says, “and they’re heading out to find themselves and find ‘real’ love, as opposed to the dream version of it.” Throughout this trip, Hendrix adds entries to the Hendrix Family Book (HFB), transcribing stories from his grandfather’s life in an effort to uphold his promise to never let Gpa forget his late wife, Betty. But the HFB is also a way

for Hendrix to make sense of what love is, how it works and how to hold onto it. He’s also looking for some much-needed answers about his father, who died years ago after leaving Hendrix’s mom for another woman. “As a teacher, I would often hear students . . . talk about their family legend with this reverence, and in some ways it was their personal mythology,” says Kiely, who taught high school English for 10 years before quitting to write full time. “I think Hendrix is searching for “They’re getting those family stories to out of the city give himself of dreams, and a foundathey’re heading tion. . . . He’s lost, and he’s out to find looking for themselves and the stories of find ‘real’ love, his family to ground him.” as opposed Of course, to the dream no road trip version of it.” is complete without a soundtrack, and fierce Corinna provides the perfect playlist. Corinna may be strong and cool, but she’s also broken down by the fact that her white parents, who adopted her from Guatemala, refuse to be honest about race in any real way. “She plays bands with strong female vocalists, bands that are diverse,” Kiely explains. “I think that music is an empowerment tool throughout the whole book.” Music empowers Gpa as well, providing a lifeline to his memories. Music is such an effortless language for Corinna that she’s able to anchor Gpa to reality through classic rock ’n’ roll of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era—music originally introduced to him by Betty. Little does Corinna know that

INTERVIEW BY CAT ACREE

this connection dovetails with real-life research into music therapy and Alzheimer’s. “Music is used as a salve,” Kiely says. “If you play a particular song for them—often it might be a church hymn—they tap back into memories and are ‘more alive.’ The memory of music resides in a different part of the brain than our long-term memory.” The Last True Love Story is dedicated to Kiely’s grandmother, who for years hid from her large Irish family that Kiely’s grandfather had Alzheimer’s. When she couldn’t hide it anymore, Kiely, his grandmother, grandfather and uncle traveled to Ireland to find the family farm, from which Kiely’s great-grandparents emigrated. “It was a romantic idea and full of good intentions,” Kiely says, “but as you can imagine, it was not the smartest idea, and there were certainly moments that were very disorienting for him. I remember those very clearly, but I was grateful to be a part of it.” In the United States alone, there are approximately 5 million people with Alzheimer’s. And as Kiely points out, if there are 5 million afflicted, think of how many family members are affected. “I wanted to write this book for all of the young people who have family members [with Alzheimer’s], who have to grapple with this, and remind everybody that even though someone has a disease like this, there’s still a lot we can learn from them.”

reviews T PI OP CK

CHILDREN’S

FULL OF BEANS

Growing up as Florida recovers REVIEW BY ALICE CARY

After Jennifer L. Holm’s son read her Newbery Honor-winning novel Turtle in Paradise, he asked his mom to write about Turtle’s cousin Beans. The result is a fast-paced prequel, Full of Beans, set in Key West, Florida. It’s hard to believe, but during the Great Depression, the bankrupt, stinking city was too poor to pay for garbage collection. Enterprising, observant Beans Curry is sifting through rubbish, collecting condensed-milk cans for a seedy cafe owner, when he spots a newcomer who seems to be walking around in his underwear (actually Bermuda shorts, which Beans has never seen before). In a novel overflowing with historical details, this man is the real-life Julius Stone, sent from Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration to spruce up the island city and turn it into a tourist destination. By Jennifer L. Holm At first Beans doubts both the man’s sanity and mission. What’s Random House, $16.99, 208 pages more, he’s preoccupied with his own worries as his unemployed father ISBN 9780553510362, audio, eBook available heads to New Jersey in search of work. Beans’ ongoing moneymakAges 8 to 12 ing efforts end up backfiring, and his angst intensifies when Stone MIDDLE GRADE confesses that the federal government may find it cheaper to simply abandon Key West and relocate its residents than try to save it. Inspired by her ancestors (Holm’s great-grandmother moved to Key West in the late 1800s), the author seamlessly weaves Beans’ story with local color (sea turtles caught for stew meat, Cuban cooking, wooden houses threatened by fire) and Depression-era history. Full of Beans’ extensive cast features Beans’ brothers and lively pals, who eventually find their calling as the Diaper Gang, as well as brief appearances by Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost. Like Turtle, Beans is a spunky character with a feisty voice. A movie lover who dreams of Hollywood fame, he is a memorable tour guide who offers a fascinating glimpse into how Key West became a vibrant vacation and cultural mecca.

A CHILD OF BOOKS By Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston Candlewick $17.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780763690779 All ages PICTURE BOOK

The child of books sits on a raft, legs dangling in the water—an ocean composed of lines from classical literature and lullabies. Buoyed on this torrent of tales, the dauntless child leads a boy, her traveling companion, around the globe, through forests and mountains. A metaphor for reading, an entertaining adventure, an intriguing work of art—whatever your interpretation, A Child of Books was written for the child of books

in all of us. Boldly drawn, cleverly detailed and colorful, this is an engaging collaboration between two talented artists. Bestselling author-illustrator Oliver Jeffers is well known for his quirky and delightful picture books, and museum-featured artist Sam Winston makes a memorable literary debut with his typographical landscapes. A Child of Books is an “I spy” journey for book lovers, and readers could get lost in the captivating interchange of carefully chosen literary excerpts and original art. Winston and Jeffers insert humor in the details, choosing passages to echo each illustration. Forest-themed tales shape tree branches. Overlapping lines of adventures create a dark, forbidding cave. Lines about legendary monsters come to life as a threatening beast.

This delightful treasure hunt through children’s literature will have you digging through your bookshelves, hunting for forgotten phrases and making room among the tomes for this book. —J I L L L O R E N Z I N I

FREEDOM OVER ME By Ashley Bryan

Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy $17.99, 56 pages ISBN 9781481456906 eBook available Ages 6 to 10 PICTURE BOOK

“A name. An age. A price. People like you. Like me. For sale!” This is how Ashley Bryan opens the author’s note of his latest picture book. Years ago, Bryan

acquired a collection of documents pertaining to slaves, dating from the 1820s to the 1860s. His inspiration for Freedom Over Me comes from an 1828 document in which 11 slaves were listed for sale by a woman named Mrs. Mary Fairchilds. No ages are listed in Bryan’s source material, but for the profiles of the 11 slaves that constitute this book, he assigns ages to them, fleshing out their lives via free-verse poems. After opening the book from Mary’s point of view, Bryan brings readers a profile of each slave, followed by another poem about what he or she aspires to and dreams of. Peggy, for instance, is 48 years old, was sold on the block with her mother, was named “Peggy” by the men who took her from Africa and now cooks for the Fairchilds. In “Peggy Dreams,” we read that her parents named her Mariama and that the other slaves call her “Herb Doctor” for the healing root and herb poultices of which she is so knowledgeable. Bryan brings the slaves’ innermost pain to detailed life in these poems, and the effect is quite moving. The poems are accompanied by brightly colored pen, ink and watercolor portraits of the slaves, many of which look like stained glass. This is a compelling, powerful view of slavery from a virtuoso of the picture book form. —J U L I E D A N I E L S O N

THE POET’S DOG By Patricia MacLachlan

Katherine Tegen $14.99, 96 pages ISBN 9780062292629 eBook available Ages 6 to 10 MIDDLE GRADE

From the Newbery Medal-winning author of Sarah, Plain and Tall comes a new gem about a wise poet, two resilient children and the dog they all love. Teddy is an Irish wolfhound with a love for words, instilled in him by his owner, Sylvan. Rescued from a shelter and taken home to Sylvan’s secluded cabin in the woods,

CHILDREN’S Teddy grows up with words and soon learns to use them himself. Although Teddy can understand words, Sylvan teaches him that there are only two kinds of people who can understand him: poets and children. When wandering around the woods in a snowstorm one day, Teddy finds two stranded children, Nickel and Flora, and tells them that he will rescue them, just as Sylvan once did for him. They follow him back to the cabin, where they begin to realize that the healing they seek can be found in each other. The Poet’s Dog is sweet and heartwarming, while the simplicity of Patricia MacLachlan’s prose allows for the poignancy of the story to shine through. This is an unassuming masterpiece, the kind that endures and will be cherished by generations of children, becoming dog-eared with age and love.

adults. The relative simplicity of the storyline, coupled with Reena’s mature observations, translate well to the book’s structure, a series of poems. Some poems are strictly narrative, while others are more abstract, providing a good balance of familiarity and challenge for readers. Award-winning author Sharon Creech delivers another charming and satisfying novel-in-verse, perfect for independent young readers. —ANNIE METCALF

FURTHERMORE

By Sharon Creech HarperCollins/Joanna Cotler $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780062415240 eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Twelve-year-old Reena is shocked when her parents decide to move the family to a small coastal town in Maine. She and her little brother, Luke, are excited, if a little nervous, to explore their new home. But their parents have another surprise in store when they volunteer the kids to work for Mrs. Falala, a prickly old woman who lives with a motley assortment of animals. Reena and Luke soon discover that Mrs. Falala needs help from each of them. Luke teaches Mrs. Falala to draw, and Reena takes on the task of readying Zora, a very stubborn cow, for the fair. Reena comes into her own in the barn, building confidence as she gradually gains Zora’s trust. Reena is a witty but gentle narrator, well attuned to the feelings and insecurities of others, even

the title of your Q: What’s new book?

would you describe Q: How the book?

has been the biggest influence on your work? Q: Who

By Tahereh Mafi

Dutton $17.99, 416 pages ISBN 9781101994764 Audio, eBook available Ages 9 to 13

was your favorite subject in school? Why? Q: What

MIDDLE GRADE

—HANNAH LAMB

MOO

meet JIM LaMARCHE

In the land of Ferenwood, rainlight pours through the air, magic is currency and color is everywhere. Alice Alexis Queensmeadow covers her embarrassingly colorless body with billowing skirts and bangles, but nothing can cover the pain she’s felt ever since her beloved father disappeared three years ago. The highlight of her world is the upcoming Surrender, a ceremony in which 12-year-olds are given assignments based on their magical abilities. When Alice’s Surrender offering goes wrong, she’s consoled by a boy named Oliver, whose mysterious task (and even more mysterious talent) could bring her father home. Alice and Oliver must travel through the parallel world of Furthermore, a wonderland where doors appear out of nowhere, rulers measure time and pocketbooks are books made of actual peoples’ pockets. In language drenched with the pain of loss—and then the joy of recovery—Tahereh Mafi presents a novel that’s unique in its emotional resonance. An omniscient narrator intervenes with occasional observations as Alice and Oliver negotiate challenging physical landscapes and the even more challenging landscapes of the heart. —J I L L R A T Z A N

Q: Who was your childhood hero?

books did you enjoy as a child? Q: What

one thing would you like Q: What

to do?

message would you like to send to young readers? Q: What

POND Award-winning artist Jim LaMarche has illustrated many beloved children’s books, including The Rainbabies. In his latest picture book, Pond (Paula Wiseman, $17.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9781481447355, ages 4 to 8), three kids build a pond and explore the natural world through all the seasons. LaMarche lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his family.

WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

CORNED BEEF ON RYE

furnished restaurant that serves traditional American Jewish fare such as pastrami and corned beef sandwiches. More generally in the U.S., deli evokes a store or supermarket department that sells cold cuts and prepared foods. Contrary to some popular notions, delicatessen has no etymological connection with the German verb essen, which means “to eat.”

water level dropped so that he could never reach it. Above his head were branches loaded with delicious fruits. Yet every time Tantalus reached up to take a fruit, the branches moved up out of reach, leaving him hungry. Thus, Tantalus was always in torment, and from his name comes the English word for tormenting or teasing someone in a similar way.

The word delicatessen, borrowed from a German plural noun meaning “delicacies,” began to appear in U.S. publications toward the end of the 19th century, usually in combination with store or shop. These collocations are partial translations of German compound words such as Delikatessenhandlung or Delikatessengeschäft. By the 1920s, store or shop was dropped and delicatessen was used alone for the store. The delicatessen has become an American institution, especially in large cities, where the deli (a clipping that first appeared in the 1950s) is typically a sparely

OUT OF REACH

NO CUTLERY NEEDED

In Greek mythology, King Tantalus was once a favorite of the gods, but he offended them and they decided to punish him cruelly. He was forced to stand in a lake whose water came up to his neck. But every time Tantalus became thirsty and bent over to drink, the

The sandwich is named after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792). Montagu was not the most distinguished 18th-century British politician, and his maladministration of the Royal

Dear Editor: While we waited at a supermarket deli counter recently, my 10-year-old asked if it was called the deli because the food was delicious. I told him deli is short for delicatessen, but couldn’t tell him more. Can you help? C. N. Wausau, Wisconsin

Dear Editor: I remember learning that the word tantalize comes from a character in Greek mythology. Can you refresh my memory of the story? H. O. Hartford, Connecticut

Dear Editor: Everybody knows that sandwich comes from the name of some English nobleman. But who was he, and how did his name come to be used as the word for such a common food? P. W. Littleton, Colorado

SEPTEMBER

Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty helped the American colonies win the Revolutionary War. Among his few achievements was the funding of Captain James Cook’s last expedition to the Pacific, as a result of which Cook named a Polynesian archipelago the Sandwich Islands. (The archipelago has since become much better known as the Hawaiian Islands.) The earl’s chief claim to fame lies elsewhere. According to the French historian and memoirist Pierre-Jean Grosley, who lived in London in the 1760s, the earl once spent 24 hours at the gaming tables without eating anything but slices of cold beef between pieces of toast. Thus, allegedly, was born the sandwich. The word, as well as the item, have since been borrowed into most languages of Europe, from Portuguese sanduíche to Serbo-Croatian sandvi. Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from The Little Book of Big Word Puzzles DIFFICULTY: COMPLETION:

TIME:___________

Use the clue ot help you find the answers word-winding their way through the rid. Each Answer will connect the top of the grid to the bottom.

DEFINITION FINDER

DIFFICULTY: COMPLETION:

Using the clues below, find and cirle the words concealed in this letter grid.

ANSWERS JUMPING CYCLING HOPPING BETTING WAITING CAPPING BUMPING

Find at least five verbs ending in “ING” word-winding their way from top to bottom

workman.com

TIME:___________

ANSWERS AWARD EARLY USUAL COBRA STEAK BITTER HAMMER SCHOOL DIPLOMA SEARCH UNICYCLE

WORD WINDER

To give (a reward or prize) to someone (verb) Before the usual or expected time (adverb) Accordant with usage, custom or habit (adjective) A very poisonous snake found in Asia and Africa (noun) A thick, flat piece of meat and especially beef (noun) Having a flavor that is the opposite of sweet (adjective) To hit something in a very forceful way (verb) An organization that provices instruction (noun) A document bearing record of graduation (noun) To carefully look for someone or something (verb) A vehicle that has a single wheel (noun) WORKMAN is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.