reviews
R E A D M O R E AT B O O K PA G E . C O M
bel. She had fallen from a ladder back home and was consequently afflicted with brain damage. Her father finds degrading work picking mushrooms, while her mother Alma struggles to learn English and stomach bland American food. Despite her condition, Maribel manages to charm young Mayor Toro, who finds her beauty reason enough to be patient with her halting speech and unusual behavior. But their parents’ relatively conservative values conspire to confound the young lovers’ devotions, ultimately with tragic consequences for the entire community. It’s less Romeo and Juliet than a post-9/11 Latino American Beauty, set in the thick of the Great Recession, which caused many Latinos to doubt America’s long-term attractiveness. Suffice it to say that gun violence isn’t unique to Latin America, or to Latinos. While Henríquez’s focus is these two families, each chapter is told in the first person by many individuals, using a technique exemplified by Faulkner. But this is hardly
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FICTION avant-garde literature and is all the more engrossing for that. In its style and themes, it recalls the writings of Jhumpa Lahiri, though from the perspective of a very different class. Clearly Henríquez’s main interest is her characters, all of whom, however officious or self-pitying, are sympathetic. Whether by intention or accident, her only two flat and sinister characters are white. The Book of Unknown Americans is ultimately a hopeful book about the pursuit of happiness, whatever the source of the misery left behind. —KENNETH CHAMPEON
THE LOST By Sarah Beth Durst
MIRA $14.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780778317111 eBook available
POPULAR FICTION
The socks we say the dryer ate, coins forgotten in the couch cushions, an engagement ring, a home, family, even a life. What if all the things we lose, the mundane and the important, were waiting to be returned? What would we do if we found ourselves in the place that they end up? Such is the inspiration for The Lost, Sarah Beth Durst’s imaginative first novel for adults. Her disillusioned protagonist Lauren Chase is running from the reality of her mother’s cancer diagnosis. Driving off into the desert one day instead of to work, Lauren gets caught up in a freak dust storm and summarily deposited in the town of Lost. Here, foreclosed or abandoned homes of various styles sit side by side; the last pieces of pie are served at a celestial-themed diner; and stray dogs and kids roam about. Like the town’s other inhabitants, Lauren is unable to leave until she discovers what she has lost. For that, she needs the help of the enigmatic Missing Man, who has inexplicably disappeared—a fact that many of the town’s residents blame on Lauren. Claire, a young girl who carries both a teddy bear and a knife, befriends Lauren and convinces Peter, a brooding young man known as the Finder, to help her. The three form a family of need.
Durst, the author of several YA novels, knows how to captivate readers. As the first in a planned trilogy, more questions are left unanswered than resolved in The Lost, though the author unfolds her fast-moving tale in a beguiling way. The world Durst has envisioned is often disturbing and bizarre, but at times surprises with its beauty and poignancy. —MELISSA BROWN
LOST FOR WORDS By Edward St. Aubyn
FSG $26, 272 pages ISBN 9780374280291 eBook available
SATIRICAL FICTION
Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost for Words is a breezy, yet biting satirical novel about the internecine intrigue that unfolds behind the scenes of a major book award that is clearly a thinly disguised version of the Booker Prize. St. Aubyn, whose own novel, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for that honor, writes in the great pithy British tradition of David Lodge and Muriel Spark, infusing a deceptively lighthearted surface wit with more trenchant intent. The committee for the prestigious Elysian Prize (funded by a multinational that, among its many controversies, genetically modifies crops by crossing vegetables with animals) is headed by Malcolm Craig, a backbench MP hoping to raise his public profile. The rather ragtag team of judges includes a popular newspaper columnist, an actor, an Oxbridge academic (who, no doubt rightly, believes she is the only member who knows anything about literature) and the ancient prize committee chairman’s erstwhile secretary/ mistress, who now writes popular thrillers. None bothers to read more than a handful of the hundreds of books submitted, embracing titles to which they are already predisposed. The inevitable alliances form amid polite quarrels. The proceedings reach a fever pitch, albeit in a restrained, polite English manner, as the longlist becomes the shortlist and the winner proves difficult to decide. No one
is spared as St. Aubyn skewers the literary “elite” and aspirants alike. In one typically sly development, one of the presumed frontrunners, literary star Katherine Burns, is not even in the running. An editorial assistant mistakenly sent in the manuscript for a cookbook instead of Burns’ novel (the cookbook, viewed as a postmodern experiment in narrative, makes the list). Delightfully entertaining, Lost for Words nonetheless casts a cold eye on the very nature of awards, and questions whether they in any way reflect the quality and permanence of the art they ostensibly celebrate. —ROBERT WEIBEZAHL
THE FARM By Tom Rob Smith
Grand Central $26, 368 pages ISBN 9780446550734 Audio, eBook available
THRILLER
It can be perilous to venture into well-trodden subgenre territory, even if you have the talent that Tom Rob Smith demonstrated with his suspenseful Child 44 trilogy. With his fourth novel, The Farm, Smith is venturing into the territory of Scandinavian thrillers, which first caught international fire thanks to the fiction of the late Stieg Larsson. It’s a field associated with deep, dark family secrets, long-buried crimes and shocking revelations. In The Farm, Smith manages to simultaneously deliver the goods promised by this subgenre and also something completely unexpected. The result is a thriller you shouldn’t miss. When his parents sell their London home and relocate to a remote farm in his mother’s homeland of Sweden, Daniel is convinced they’re headed for a quiet retirement. Then he gets a call from his father informing him that his mother has had some kind of mental breakdown, that she’s imagining awful things. He’s prepared to go and tend to her, until he gets another call from his father, this one telling him his mother has checked herself out of the hospital and disappeared. The next call is from his mother,