Book reviews

Candice Wuehle

Monarch

SOFT SKULL

Jessica is an ex-child pageant queen with an awful memory. In fact, she can’t remember her childhood nearly at all outside of the pageants she participated in. The daughter of Dr. Clink, chair of the Boredom Studies department at a nameless Midwestern university, and Grethe Clink, a Norwegian beauty who hosts not-quite-Tupperware parties, Jessica has always had a strange life. It begins to get stranger when she starts waking up regularly with odd bruises and deduces she must be sleepwalking.

But when Jessica develops a series of gruesome crime scene photos while working at the university’s photography shop, she suddenly unlocks a jumbled chain of dreams (or are they memories?) that send her on a journey of self-discovery.

University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Candice Wuehle (who was also raised in Iowa City) pulls out all the stops with this bizarre delight of a debut novel. Wuehle has released three collections of poetry, but Monarch is her first foray into fiction, melding true crime, ’90s culture, child beauty pageants and science fiction. There’s much to pique a reader’s interest.

As we follow Jessica through the novel, we are dipped into the worlds of both the mundane and the supernatural to raise questions about identity, memory and the connection between the two: Is identity something we form internally, or is it decided for us? How much control do we actually have over our lives?

In addition to these big questions, the book also poses plenty of opportunities to create stunning mental pictures. Wuehle’s poetic background rears its head consistently throughout the novel with beautiful descriptions: “If I listen to her albums now, they possess the polyphony of a whipped dessert, too sweet for teeth, too sugar for earth.” These descriptions take us into familiar underworlds and suburban hellscapes that come alive while reading. Her knack for abjection as well as short chapters with plenty of white space make Monarch a natural page-turner.

While Wuehle does an excellent job of sowing seeds of dysfunction and mystery throughout the novel, everything is pretty much wrapped neatly into little bows by the end, leaving us with no questions about where Jessica or the supporting characters end up. For a book that starts out very cryptically, it’s certainly a change of pace. By the same token, Jessica’s first-person narration guides us confidently

through the chaos so even when the story gets complicated, it is never confusing.

These factors make the novel perfect for readers who love clean endings. Personally, I prefer both mystery and resolution. I like to balance on the edge of my seat throughout, but I also like to end the book with an idea of what happened to my favorite characters. Monarch turned out to be the perfect novel to keep me rapt for the two days I spent reading it, and I will be eagerly waiting for Wuehle’s next release. —Lily DeTaeye

CANDICE WUEHlE pUllS OUT All THE STOpS WITH THIS BIZArrE DElIGHT OF A DEBUT NOVEl.

Eric Gapstur Sort of Super

ALADDIN | SIMON & SCHUSTER CHILDREN’S PUBLISHING

He had to have known it was coming.

There is no way that a competent publicist didn’t prepare Eric Gapstur for the eventuality that his graphic novel about 11-year-old Wyatt Flynn and his family coming to terms with his newly-acquired superpowers in the wake of his mother’s disappearance would draw comparisons to the Netflix show Raising Dion (based on the 2015 comic and short film from Dennis Liu), which just dropped its second season this February, and follows the story of 10-year-old Dion Warren and his mother navigating his emerging superpowers after the death of his father.

Raising Dion is about a Black family in an urban setting, with an only child, a mother who works in the arts and a big bad rooted in questions of scientific ethics. It feels custom-designed for me. Sort of Super centers on a white rural family, explores sibling dynamics and features a father who works in law enforcement. In other words, it could be argued that I am the furthest thing from a “target audience” that this book could possibly have. That Gapstur wrote this for exactly not-me.

Well, too bad. I fell in love anyway.

There’s something about that age. It wasn’t yet called “tween” when I was experiencing it, but somehow that stretch between 10 and 14 has come to offer something incredibly meaningful and relatable. There’s a whole lot of becoming that happens in those years. And while the Raising Dion comparison may have been inevitable, Gapstur might be caught off guard as I continue by likening it to the Babysitters Club series and the recent film Finding Red.

Wyatt Flynn is navigating that same delicate territory of balancing his responsibilities to himself and to others. When his little sister, Adeline, expresses surprise that the giant W on his costume stands for Wyatt, patiently lecturing him on the concept of secret identities, it’s evident that there’s more than just childish ignorance driving his choice. He’s working hard to understand who he is, and he needs that thread of connection, even while super, to ground him.

But you don’t need a thinkpiece on the wonders of middle grade nostalgia. The keys to this work are in far more than just how well it captures old folks like me. This is a book that’s full of fun, joy and wonder. The exuberance Wyatt and Adeline express, even when faced with situations of adult-level seriousness, is brilliantly captured in Gapstur’s Bill Watterson-esque facial expression details and the way he illustrates Wyatt’s powers, grounded in his DC comics background, but extra: the way an 11-year-old reading superhero books for the first time might experience them.

I don’t often go back and purchase copies of books that I get advances on, but this is one I absolutely will, and there’s one reason for that: Dearbhla Kelly. While Gapstur’s words and pictures are compelling, Kelly’s colors are a delight, capturing that middle grade spirit in their own way. My review copy lacks colors for the second half, and I simply must read the full book as intended.

Without a doubt, though, the best thing about Sort of Super? The “1” on the spine, indicating that there will be more to come. —Genevieve Trainor