BookPage February 2011

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february

america’s book review

2011

Love

TIMELESS

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SWEET READS

for Valentine’s Day

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The Pioneer Woman meets her match

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paperback picks penguin.com

Archangel’s Consort

The Black Cat

Blood Wyne

Here to Stay

An ancient and malevolent female immortal is rising in Manhattan to reclaim her son, the archangel Raphael. Only one thing stands in her way: Elena Deveraux, a vampirehunter—and Raphael’s lover.

Richard Jury is still dealing with the guilt of the accident that sent Lu Aquilar into a coma. But then he gets assigned the case of a beautiful woman who was murdered on the grounds of a pub called The Black Cat.

The D’Artigo sisters have just turned in their badges to the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. Now that they’re free agents they’re hoping things will be easier, but when you’re halfhuman, half-Fae, things can go astray at the most inopportune times.

Mandy Pajeck feels responsible for the accident that took her younger brother’s sight. When she meets handsome Zach Harrigan and his mini guide horse, she thinks she’s found the ticket to her brother’s happiness—and maybe her own.

9780451232946 • $9.99

9780425239742 • $7.99

9780451232410 • $7.99

9780425240137 • $7.99

Split Image

Tom Clancy’s Endwar®: The Hunted

Uprising

The Wolf at the Door

After a high-ranking crime figure is found dead on Paradise Beach, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall realize just how much they really have in common with their victims, their suspects—and each other.

She’s known as the Snow Maiden—an operative of a secret group dedicated to world domination. To get their hands on her, U.S. Special Forces Captain Alexander Brent and his team will have to outmaneuver a terrorist faction bent on wiping her off the face of the earth.

A gruesome ritual murder has stained the Oxfordshire countryside.

Now it’s plunging Alex and Joel into a deadly war between the living and the unliving—and against a horrifying tradition given new life by the blood of the innocent.

When someone begins targeting members of an elite intelligence unit known as “the Prime Minister’s private army” and all those who work with them, Sean Dillon has an idea of who it may be: an old nemesis out to destroy the unit once and for all.

9780425237717 • $9.99

9780451413062 • $9.99

9780425239315 • $9.99

9780425239735 • $9.99

The New York Times bestselling author and country music sensation presents her heartwarming debut novel.

Success in the music business is all Destiny ever wanted, and when she finds it, she feels as if her dreams have come true. But with the exhilarating rush of success comes a price—and a battle to recapture the traditions that were her foundation. Struggling to reconnect with the things that matter most, Destiny is putting an unexpected new spin on her own career—one that will redirect her professional and personal life in ways she never imagined.

NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY A Member of Penguin Group (USA)

9780451229267 • $25.95

contents

february 2011 w w w. B o o k Pa g e . c o m

features

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13 karen marie moning Meet the author of Shadowfever

cover story

the pioneer woman

How this city girl became an Oklahoma ranch wife, raising four children with the love of her life

17 kevin brockmeier On finding beauty in our pain

18 karen russell Inspired by the wonder and weirdness of her Florida childhood

20 relationships From chance encounters to the ultimate commitment Friendship, love and a few broken hearts

26 black history month Familiar and new stories of the struggle for justice

31 black history for young readers A bounty of black history books for children

31 john bemelmans marciano Meet the author-illustrator of Madeline at the White House

departments 04 buzz girl author enablers book clubs well read whodunit LIFESTYLES COOKING audio romance

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read all our reviews online at bookpage.com All material © 2011

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reviews 23 Fiction

top pick:

21 love stories

04 07 07 09 10 10 11 12

Cover illustration © Michael Koelach, from the jacket of The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—A Love Story

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A Discovery of Witches

by Deborah Harkness a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman; The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard; Invisible River

by Helena McEwen; A Man in Uniform by Kate Taylor; Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt; The Diviner’s Tale by Bradford Morrow; The Book of Tomorrow

by Cecelia Ahern; Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor; The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

27 NonFiction top pick:

The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick a l s o r e v i e w e d : J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski; Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo; Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein; Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon; The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley; Never Say Die by Susan Jacoby; The Good Daughter by Jasmin Darznik; The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

30 Children’s top pick:

Trapped

by Michael Northrop a l s o r e v i e w e d : Hide and Squeak by Heather Vogel Frederick; Close to Famous by Joan Bauer; The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

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columns

if there are any allusions to Brooks’ debut novel, Year of Wonders, which took place in England around the same time.

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

‘unbroken’ on film The incredible life of Louis Zamperini, most recently detailed in Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, is the type of sweeping saga that practically begs for a film adaptation.

Movie execs have agreed ever since Zamperini’s autobiography, Devil at My Heels, was first optioned by Universal Pictures in 1957—though despite interest in the role from stars like Tony Curtis and Nicolas Cage, no film was ever made.

Now the same studio has optioned Unbroken, and Water for Elephants director Francis Lawrence is currently attached to direct.

brooks is back

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We have long been fans of Geraldine Brooks (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning March), so it comes as great news that her fourth novel, Caleb’s Crossing, will be published by Viking on May 3.

The novel takes place in the 1660s and was inspired by the graduation brooks of the first Native American from Harvard.

Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck is taken under the wing of a minister who sees the opportunity to convert his tribe through education. His story is juxtaposed with that of the minister’s daughter, who, despite a similar yearning for knowledge, becomes an indentured servant.

Brooks writes some of the smartest historical fiction around, and we can’t wait to read her take on this era of American history—and see

author enablers

Buzz Girl

by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors

from wikileaks to books

RIGHT ON TARGET

Here’s something you don’t hear every day: A man is being forced to write a book. Knopf, a division of Random House, has confirmed that they will publish WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s memoir—whether the 39-year-old Australian likes it or not. Assange told the London Sunday Times, “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to. I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”

Assange is expected to deliver the manuscript early this year. And if that’s not enough for you, pick up Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, a memoir by former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, on sale this month (Feb. 15) from Crown.

Dear Author Enablers, I just finished my autobiography, Escape: How I Fight the Demons of the Past and Win, and it will soon be on sale online. My target audience is women of all ages because it concerns many types of abuse. If you have any suggestions on how I might promote my book I would be very appreciative. I signed on to Facebook two days ago and I’m still learning how to navigate. I heard there was a Facebook for authors, but can’t seem to find it.

Linda Leone Fernley, Nevada

more Murakami Attention Haruki Murakami fans!

The first two (of three) volumes of the Japanese master’s latest, 1Q84 (a play on Orwell’s 1984), are expected to hit U.S. bookstores in September.

bestseller watch Release dates for some of the guaranteed blockbusters hitting shelves in February:

8 known and unknown

By Donald Rumsfeld

Sentinel, $36, ISBN 9781595230676 A memoir from the former U.S. secretary of defense that “pulls no punches.” Expect insider details on the Bush administration and events like 9/11.

22 treachery in death

By J.D. Robb

Putnam, $26.95, ISBN 9780399157035 Detective Eve Dallas and her partner, Peabody, must bring two crooked cops to justice in Robb’s latest thriller.

22 the union quilters

By Jennifer Chiaverini

Dutton, $24.95, ISBN 9780525952039 The latest Elm Creek Quilts novel depicts the lives of several different Pennsylvania women at the start of the Civil War.

It makes sense to think about the audience for your book, but “women of all ages” might be too broad a category. For instance, you could start by reaching out to women who have been abused and the professionals who help them. The point of narrowing your focus is to generate interest where it is most likely to influence book sales, and then hope that this leads to broader sales.

Creating a presence on Facebook and using it to build your fanbase is a great idea. Facebook offers the opportunity to create an “official page” for your brand or business. You can either create a page for yourself as an author or for your book, and then use Facebook to promote your book and interact with fans.

You should also check out other sites popular with authors, including Redroom.com, Filedbyauthor. com, Booktour.com and the author program on Goodreads.com.

For more specific ideas on marketing and publicity, we recommend Publicize Your Book by Jacqueline DuVal.

SHARING YOUR PAIN Dear Author Enablers, I am writing my first book, an account of an unbelievable turn of events that I have lived through and was able to conquer. It is an amazing story; however, when I write, it stirs up a lot of pain and other feelings that I’d rather not experience again. Do you have any advice on how I might be able to minimize or eliminate these emotions?

Anthony Parisi Gloucester City, New Jersey

This question provoked much discussion at Author Enablers World Headquarters. The two of us had different opinions about what you should do, so we ultimately turned to a pair of professionals for their advice. We’ll provide all the responses so you can choose the approach that works best for you: Sam says, “The passage of time allows us to reflect on traumatic events and put our thoughts in perspective. Give yourself a break and let life resume its normal rhythm for a while; you will find it easier to write your story later.”

Kathi says, “Writing about a difficult personal experience immediately after the fact can be cathartic and may actually help you get over the trauma and move on emotionally. Remember that no one has to see your writing until you are ready to show it. The writing process might actually help you heal.”

Clinical psychologist Asa DeMatteo and psychiatrist Tom Brady offer this reponse: “It is perfectly understandable that your reader experiences anxiety when delving into his past in his writing, and it is also understandable that he is reluctant to revisit the emotions that the past events call up. On the other hand, if he were to seek psychotherapeutic help in resolving the emotional difficulties engendered by entering that world of the past, it would be precisely the recall and recounting of those events that his therapist would encourage. To revisit difficulties in our past within a safe present is in itself therapeutic and offers perspective and understanding that one cannot have when in the midst of pain and trauma.

“Your reader is attempting a courageous task: He wishes to share his experience, to capture and convey the emotional turmoil that had such a great effect in his life. If he is able to manage that task, he may well help other, similarly situated readers. We hope he tries.”

Email questions for Kathi and Sam to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

Some desires are worth the scandal…

I have no true regrets, Dear Reader.

Oh, certainly, I have not always chosen as wisely as I should have. I have taken roads that might have been best ignored and made some decisions that, in hindsight, were not especially wise, but even the most egregious of those inevitably led to grand adventure.

Indeed, one might say the more disastrous the choice, the grander the adventure.

I hope you take pleasure in the perusal of my reminiscences, but if you find them too scandalous for enjoyment, I make no apologies. As I said, I have no regrets. So I shall call this work what I, for the most part, was: The Perfect Mistress. from The Perfect Mistress, the Memoirs of Lady Hermione Middlebury

#1 New York Times bestselling author

VICTORIA ALEXANDER’S scintillating new romance about a proper lady who discovers passion is her legacy…

PUT YOUR SCANDALS ON PAPER! One Grand Prize winner will receive a hand tooled leather journal and an antique fountain pen, along with a signed first edition of The Perfect Mistress!

(Approximate value: $200) ©Dawn Biggs

Three runner-up winners will receive signed first editions.

(Approximate value: $10)

ZEBRA

BOOKS

Go to bookpage.com for complete details and official rules.

An imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.

FOR CONTESTS, GIVEAWAYS, AND MORE VISIT KENSINGTONBOOKS.COM AND VICTORIAALEXANDER.COM

SEE THE BOOK VIDEO AND MORE! DON’T HAVE THE APP? Get it free at http://gettag.mobi

Also available

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Escape this season with these beautiful debut novels “Schoenewaldt’s heartbreaking debut is the late 19th century immigrant coming-of-age story of poor, plain Irma Vitale . . .

Irma’s adventures and redeeming evolution make this a serious book club contender.” — publishers weekly

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“Readable and engaging . . . the people as real as your own family, and the tale realistic enough to be any American’s.”

— nancy e. turner, author of These is My Words

S

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“A compelling mystery and the story of the Owenby family in North Carolina, a novel that seamlessly, beautifully twines past with present . . . This book raised gooseflesh on my arms and had me near tears.” — tom franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter “Readers of both Pat Conroy, on one hand, and Carson McCullers, on the other, will relish Newton’s flawed characters and piquant portrayal of small town life.”

— booklist (Starred Review)

Visit www.BookClubGirl.com, a blog dedicated to sharing great books, news and tips with book clubs everywhere.

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Available now in paperback from

columns This month’s best paperback releases for reading groups

THE LURE OF FREEDOM In her electrifying debut novel, Wench (Amistad, $14.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780061706561), Dolen Perkins-Valdez tells the unforgettable story of four slave women who serve as mistresses to their masters.

In Ohio during the 1850s, Mawu, Lizzie, Sweet and Reenie meet while vacationing with their owners at a resort, where they see a true wonder—free blacks—and hear gossip about abolition. With the exception of Lizzie, who loves her

book clubs

WELL READ

by julie hale

by robert Weibezahl

es the usual teenage agitations, including concerns about dating, work and the future, which she recounts with appealing humor. Planning early on to escape from her homeland, Gorokhova is forced to come to terms with the Soviet Union’s dark past as she envisions a future for herself in the West. Marriage to an American provides a ticket out, and she eventually settles in New Jersey. Recounting events in a style that’s frank and intimate, Gorokhova’s story of maintaining her personal identity in the face of an invasive government makes for fascinating reading.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS

master, the women soon dream of being free. The odds against them are incredible. Reenie is owned by her brutal half-brother, who shares her with the manager of the resort.

Courageous Mawu also suffers at the hand of a pitiless master. Sweet, meanwhile, is expecting a baby with her owner. As the women develop plans to escape, they’re aided by freed slaves and a kind Quaker woman. Yet leaving is more difficult than they ever imagined. Based on factual research, this remarkable novel skillfully dramatizes a dark chapter in American history. Writing with lyrical grace and a gift for plot development, Perkins-Valdez has produced an inspiring portrait of four brave women and the risks they take to change their lives.

russia on my mind A Mountain of Crumbs (Simon & Schuster, $15, 336 pages, ISBN 9781439125687), the smart, funny memoir from Russian writer Elena Gorokhova, offers a revealing look at life in 1960s Leningrad during Brezhnev’s oppressive tenure. As a teenager, Gorokhova finds it hard to obey the strict political codes that shape every aspect of her life, but her compliant, worrisome mother plays by the rules and encourages her to do the same. Despite the state’s intrusiveness, she experienc-

Inspired by the work of Jane Austen, The Three Weissmanns of Westport focuses on three women in different phases of life who are struggling with changes in career and love. Betty Weissmann’s world is turned upside down when, after almost 50 years of marriage, her husband takes up with another woman. At the age of 75, she leaves behind her well-to-do Manhattan existence and moves into an old beach house in Westport, Connecticut. Betty is soon joined by her daughters: Miranda, a literary agent embroiled in legal troubles, and Annie, a debt-ridden librarian. In Westport, a place filled with fresh faces and opportunities, the trio’s prospects brighten. Miranda falls for a young actor, while Annie connects unexpectedly with the brother of a family friend. A tale of old-fashioned romance set against a contemporary backdrop, Cathleen Schine’s latest is a true page-turner.

Richly plotted and filled with emotion and heart, it’s a delightful tribute to Austen.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport

By Cathleen Schine Picador $14, 304 pages ISBN 9780312680527

fiction

A poet’s letters reveal glimpses of literary life This month marks the centenary of Elizabeth Bishop’s birth, and her longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is commemorating the occasion with a delightful collection of 40-odd years’ worth of correspondence between the great poet and her editors and friends at The New Yorker. The magazine, of course, holds a special place in the literary history of 20th-century America, and Bishop was one of its most valued contributors up until her death in 1979. These letters, ably compiled and annotated It seems

by Joelle Biele, beautifully downright capture the sui quaint that generis culture Elizabeth at the venerable periodical, as Bishop, well as Bishop’s living in own idiosynBrazil, often crasies and waited weeks sensitivities.

Most of the for proofs of corresponher poems to dence is between Bishop arrive from and two key The New editors: first, Yorker. the legendary Katherine White, who was second only to founder Harold Ross in shaping the personality of The New Yorker, and later poetry editor Howard Moss, himself an eminent poet of the age. Some letters get bogged down in editorial minutiae (it becomes clear Bishop was notoriously, though one might argue charmingly, loose with the rules of punctuation, a syntactical profligacy that the magazine’s rigid copyediting department could not abide), but even in these, the evidence of two long and affectionate literary friendships always lurks between the lines.

What strikes the reader in our era of dashed-off emails is the inherent politesse of this correspondence.

Bishop and White did not address each other by their Christian names until fully five years into their working relationship, for example, and personal details are rare, especially in the earliest letters. Bishop’s life was not without its drama—orphaned young, she battled depression and alcoholism—but the

reader of these letters catches only a fleeting glimpse of the darker side of the poet’s life.

Indeed, the suicide of her longtime female lover is mentioned only in the most elliptical manner; similarly, Moss’ apparent homosexuality is hinted at, but never openly acknowledged.

Writers in particular will be interested in the back and forth between Bishop and her editors as they discuss her poems or prose pieces. A long correspondence about “In the Village,” for instance, shows the rigor that went into making the classic story the jewel it is. Time and again these letters underscore the fact that writing did not come easily for Bishop—she produced a relatively small body of work, holding onto and fiddling with manuscripts (she mentions a number of intriguing pieces that never saw the light of day). In her case, quality trumps quantity, for what she did publish in her lifetime is often luminous.

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker provides a charming entrée into the lives of Bishop, White and Moss, as well as a dose of nostalgia for a leisurely literary lifestyle that has become a casualty of the Information Age. It seems downright quaint that Bishop, living in Brazil, often waited weeks for proofs of her poems to arrive from the magazine for checking. Sometimes they never arrived at all. Perhaps the snail’s pace by which she lived and wrote colored her work, giving it its gentle grace. For those who want to revisit the work itself, FSG is also reissuing her poems and prose in a twovolume boxed set in time for the birthday celebration.

ELIZABETH BISHOP AND THE NEW YORKER Edited by Joelle Biele FSG $35, 496 pages ISBN 9780374281380

letters

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#1 New York Times bestselling author USA Today bestselling author

brings readers stories of love, laughter and family.

Susan and her daughter pull back the veil on how a mother and daughter really plan a wedding together.

Written straight from the heart, this endearing and touching novel focuses on the bonds between mother and daughter.

Both on sale now

The newest book in the beloved Lakeshore Chronicles series tells the long-awaited story of a woman at the crossroads of love....

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On sale March 29

www.SusanWiggs.com • www.eHarlequin.com

columns

Whodunit

by Bruce Tierney

Pike steals the SHOW IN CRAIS’ LATEST For years, Joe Pike served as taciturn sidekick to Robert Crais’ wisecracking L.A. detective, Elvis Cole. Cole was nominally the brains of the outfit, while Pike carried the big stick, or perhaps more precisely, was the big stick. This time out, Pike takes the starring role in Crais’ latest thriller, The Sentry (Putnam, $26.95, 320 pages, ISBN

9780399157073). Rescuing damsels in distress is Pike’s forte, and indeed this is how The Sentry opens, with Pike intervening in a gang shakedown of a sandwich shop run by lovely Dru Rayne. Pike realizes early on that the gang will not take his interference lying down, so he decides he’d better keep an eye on things at the store; also, it should be noted that our Zen warrior is mightily attracted to Dru. Cole signs on to investigate around the edges of the situation, and discovers in passing that Dru is perhaps not who she represents herself to be, and that her presence may indeed prove lethal to Cole’s longtime friend and partner. But what to tell Pike, and when? Or is Pike so infatuated with Dru that he cannot recognize the truth, even when it engages him in a stare-down? Suspenseful, tautly plotted and diversely populated— once again, we see why Robert Crais continues to top the bestseller charts.

Dirty Russian dealings Noah Boyd’s first novel, The Bricklayer, was a hit with readers and critics alike, and Boyd fans eagerly awaited the follow-up. Well, it’s here, and I am happy to say Agent X (Morrow, $24.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780061826986) is every bit as adrenaline-fueled as its predecessor. FBI agent-turned-bricklayer Steve Vail gets drafted back into agency service, this time in conjunction with the über-secret case of a Russian intelligence officer—

code name: Calculus—who claims he has a list of Americans who are selling classified documents to the Russians. He is offering the list out of the goodness of his heart—and for $250,000 per name supplied.

Then, inexplicably, Calculus gets summoned back to Mother Russia, and the people on the list start dropping like swatted flies, often mere moments before their planned rescue is implemented by the FBI. This is a job for Steve Vail, who, as an independent contractor (think: plausible deniability) is blithely unconstrained by the rules and regs that tie the hands of full-time FBI guys.

Boyd fans, queue up; you’re in for a wild and woolly ride!

Mystery of the month The last Mo Hayder book I reviewed, 2005’s The Devil of Nanking, was my Mystery of the Month then, competing with books

by Randy Wayne White, James O. Born and George Pelecanos. I’m pleased to say Hayder goes two-fortwo (at least in my book) with her latest, Gone, which finds perennial hero Jack Caffery on the trail of a carjacker who targets vehicles containing preteen girls. Caffery is not exactly hot on the trail, however, as each lead turns into a dud, with the carjacker/kidnapper out-thinking the cops at every turn. In the meantime, Caffery’s colleague Phoebe “Flea” Marley works on a parallel theory, one that leads her into an abandoned tunnel where repeated cave-ins have created eerie subterranean rooms, ideal for the storage of the kidnapper’s paraphernalia—and perhaps the bodies of the victims. Each investigation will bear fruit, but in ways unexpected by both the protagonists and the reader. And then, just as Gone barrels full-steam toward what seems

to be the denouement— bang !—there is another kidnapping, and everything the cops held as true goes flying right out the window. Hayder writes some of the most carefully plotted, gripping and downright scary books in the mystery genre, and Gone continues that tradition in fine form.

Gone

By Mo Hayder Atlantic Monthly $24, 416 pages ISBN 9780802119643 Audio, eBook available

Mystery

Very bad neighbors Just in time for my return to Japan in December, I received an advance review copy of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X (Minotaur, $24.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780312375065), his first novel to be translated into English. The story centers on eccentric math teacher Ishigami and his cover-up of a murder by his next-door neighbor, a woman with whom he has become quite infatuated. The cover-up is sublime; every investigative move by the police is anticipated and countered by the brilliant mathematician, and for a time, it looks as if his neighbor will get away with her crime. But then she commits a grievous offense, at least in Ishigami’s eyes: She begins a relationship with another man. Meanwhile, the beleaguered police investigator seeks aid from a longtime ally, Yukawa, a respected physicist who was friends with Ishigami back in their university days. Yukawa is perhaps the only person equipped to deal with Ishigami in a full-on battle of wits, and it is unclear until the final moments which one will prevail. There’s terrific suspense, relentless plot development and a totally out-of-the-blue twist ending, so try, just try, to hold off taking a peek at the end!

In the wake of the success of The Weight of Silence,

Heather Gudenkauf ’s

latest novel, These Things Hidden. will keep you spellbound.

“A tale so chillingly real, it could have come from the latest headlines.”

—Publishers Weekly starred review

On sale now!

www.eHarlequin.com

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columns

lifestyles

cooking

b y j o a n n a b r i c h e tt o

by sybil PRATT

HAPPY MARRIAGE, HAPPY LIFE

La cuisine juive en France

The Art of Marriage: A Guide to Living Life as Two (Gotham, $22.50, 288 pages, ISBN 9781592406104)

by Catherine Blyth begins with a chapter in defense of the married state. Happily, this tone is sustained through the succeeding sections that detail, in great range and depth, every possible marital menace: in-laws, child-rearing, money, work, friends, fading desire, cheating and fighting. Glimpsing the enormity of what can go wrong

Jewish cooking in France? Not as odd as it sounds. Jews have been living in France for over 2,000 years, and the food they serve mingles Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Provençal Jewish culinary traditions with French regional cooking. Joan Nathan, author of many beloved cookbooks and mega-maven of Jewish cuisine, has combined her long love affair with France and equally long and strong involvement with Jewish cooking in Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish

Each chapter covers one essential aspect of wedding planning— budget, venue, dress, attendants, invitations, registry, guests, ceremony, reception and so on—and each begins in Elizabeth’s voice, followed by Susan’s maternal perspective on the same situation, and finishes with a dandy “cheat sheet”: a synopsis for brides in too much of a tearing hurry to read the whole thing.

TOP PICK FOR LIFESTYLES

might put a reader’s own “inventory of irritations” into perspective.

The guide is surprisingly fun to browse, due to the author’s knack for backing up every point with a variety of anecdotal and historical evidence. Where else could you find Henry VIII on the same marital page as Brad and Angelina, or Epicurus and Heidi Klum closing their vast cultural gap on one another?

The weight of so many quotes, quips and scandals is leavened by the author’s own deft hand (she did, after all, write The Art of Conversation), and the whole thing comes off as an extended meditation on marriage in all its gore and glory.

PreNup Disagreement

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As for what could go wrong before the honeymoon, see How I Planned Your Wedding (Harlequin, $21.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780373892273) by mother-of-thebride Susan Wiggs and daughter Elizabeth Wiggs Maas. Although it’s categorized as a memoir, smart bookstores will shelve copies in the wedding section, because bridesto-be can learn much from this pair. As a best-selling author of romance (including the Lakeshore Chronicles), Wiggs mater is well qualified to devise a precise and perfect wedding plan, but not surprisingly, her daughter has different ideas. They end up collaborating on the wedding and the book as well, alternating voices in a fresh and funny narrative.

Fight Less, Love More: 5-Minute Conversations to Change Your Relationship without Blowing Up or Giving In is by Laurie Puhn, a Harvard-trained family and divorce lawyer and mediator who has seen more than her share of clients at “the point where a lack of appreciation, respect, or intimacy” threatens a relationship. Communication, she argues, is key, but the big idea here is that “couples don’t need to talk more . . . they need to talk better.”

Readers pick which situation best describes the conflict at hand: Do you argue about everything? Do you avoid intimacy? Is your spouse the silent type? Do you both need to learn to apologize, negotiate or stop overreacting? Are you shockingly rude to one another? Corresponding step-by-step strategies—designed to take just 5 minutes of practice per day—can produce instant results, even when only one partner is actually willing to read the instructions. This kind of talking cure is good for any committed couple: “those at the beginning of a great relationship, couples in the thick of it who know it could be better, and even those who feel that there is no hope left.”

Fight Less, Love More

By Laurie Puhn Rodale $24.99, 272 pages ISBN 9781605295985 eBook available

RELATIONSHIPS

California cuisine.”

There’s a fresh, fun feeling in these 95 dishes— Crispy Polenta Fries and Kimchi Quesadillas are great alternatives to the usual. Keep on cooking and you’ll find Steamed Mussels with Tomato Harissa Broth, Curried Lentil Stew with Greek Yogurt and a to-die-for, chocolate-drenched Banana Toffee Panini for a sweet finish. Nothing is fussy or pretentious, everything is doable in your kitchen and packed with Michael’s unique take on genuine flavor.

Cookbook of the month Cooking in France (Knopf, $39.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780307267597).

A wonderful blend of history, great recipes and affecting personal stories gathered in kitchens and dining rooms from Paris to Alsace and beyond, it’s studded with delightful essay-style asides on aniseflavored challah, Foie Gras (kosher and non), Shabbat with the Grand Rabbi of Bordeaux and much more.

And Nathan’s selection of dishes is as rich as the French Jewish experience—Leek Terrine from Colmar, Tunisian Passover Spring Vegetable Ragout, Friday Night Algerian Chicken Fricassee, Brandade Potato Latkes and Alsatian Rhubarb Tart.

Genuinely good food Michael Schwartz, chef/owner of the much lauded Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink in Miami, believes that “the secret to good food is . . . good food” and encourages you to “spend more time shopping than cooking,” looking carefully and choosing wisely no matter where you shop. Though he stresses a seasonal, ingredientdriven approach in his debut cookbook, Michael’s Genuine Food (Clarkson Potter, $35, 256 pages, ISBN 9780307591371), he doesn’t beat you up about it. Check out his admirable intro if you want to get the full flavor of his style, or just dig into this intriguing collection of recipes that reflects what Michael calls his “East Coast version of

One-dish dinners are the perfect answer to the chronic question of how to create memorable meals without caving in or stressing out.

Now Pam Anderson, who excels at expelling the anxiety of entertaining, offers us Perfect One-Dish Dinners, a fabulous, freeing, foolproof collection of all-in-one main courses, each accompanied by a wine pairing, an appetizer and a dessert. Pam also supplies “instant alternatives,” good store-bought starters like Manchego cheese and quince paste, or lemoncurd-infused vanilla ice cream for an unbeatably easy ending. The Stews for All Seasons include a spicy Salsa Verde chicken topped with herbed cornmeal dumpling and Prunes and a sensational seafood/sausage Frogmore Stew. If you’re feeding the troops, try her Quick, Creamy Lasagna that serves 12 or any one of the three riffs on Enchiladas, and if summer ever comes again, the Grilled Salad Niçoise with fresh tuna steaks and the Grilled Antipasto Platter bathed in Feta Vinaigrette will wow family and friends. Every dish, every menu is Pam-perfect, as expected.

Perfect One-Dish Dinners

By Pam Anderson HMH $32, 280 pages ISBN 9780547195957

ENTERTAINING

audio by sukey howard

Shooting pirates Elmore Leonard is a genre unto himself, imitated by many, but never equaled. Djibouti (HarperAudio, $34.99, 8 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780062008503), both the title and setting for his 44th foray into crime fiction, is a change of place rather than a change of pace, a gritty, pirate-infested Red Sea port perfect for international intrigue and 21stcentury terrorism. So when Dara Barr, a preternaturally calm, cool (and, of course, gorgeous) Academy Award-winning documen-

on Erika since high school, is on the case, too, and more than happy to share the detecting (and more) with her. Don’t look for Larsson-esque acrobatics; Läckberg offers a very different kind of Swedish suspense, with lots of intriguing characters, possible suspects and clues, plus a few red herrings and a finely drawn picture of a provincial town with a rigid social hierarchy that knows how to hide its sordid secrets.

Audio of the month

tary filmmaker and her big, burly, septuagenarian African-American aide-de-camp (aided, himself, by a healthy supply of horny goat weed) breeze into town to make a film, they have no trouble finding real pirates to shoot. And they also find a great cast of characters who walk the Leonardian walk and talk the Leonardian talk—from the suave Saudi diplomat with a gun-running sideline, to a champagne-soaked Texan billionaire with a big yacht and a big yen to be CIA, to James Russell, now Jama Raisuli, a minor Miami felon-turned-al Qaeda operative with a major agenda and not one scruple.

Long-buried secrets Erika Falck, a serious biographer of serious Swedish women authors, back in the small coastal town of Fjälbacka after her parents’ sudden deaths, hasn’t seen her closest childhood friend for nearly 25 years.

Now she’s staring at beautiful, blond Alexandra lying in a bathtub of frozen water, her wrists slashed. That’s just for openers in The Ice Princess (HighBridge, $39.95, 15 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781615735464), ably read by David Thorn, the first in a series of seven whodunits by Camilla Läckberg, wildly popular in Sweden but making her U.S. debut here. Fascinated and horrified, Erika is drawn into the case when it becomes clear that Alex was murdered. Patrik Hedström, a local police detective who’s had a crush

If I could choose one person to have a martini with (Bombay, straight up), it would be Nora Ephron. She’s so smart, so funny, so on-the-mark, so unafraid of talking about age, so candid about all that comes with it. When last we heard from her, she “felt bad about her neck”; now, in another collection of short essays, I Remember Nothing, she muses on the mundane—email evils, not being asked to bring dessert to the annual Christmas dinner, the healing power of chicken soup—and on the more meaningful: her early days in journalism, the pain of her mother’s alcoholism, surviving a flop, surviving a divorce (maybe that’s just another kind of flop). Light or serious, there’s always a subtext (I’m sure she’d hate that word) that says a great deal about who Nora Ephron is, how she parses the world, how she’s handled life’s roller-coaster ride. Now, to all her many credits and accomplishments, we need to add audio narration. Not surprisingly, her timing is perfect, as good as any practiced standup comic, as balanced as her closing lists of everything she won’t miss and everything she will miss when it’s time to go. And guess what? She remembers everything.

“Like a Kentucky summer, Angel Sister starts slow and easy but by the end roars along, leaving the reader breathless and wanting more. What a jewel of a story.

Reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird.”

—Lauraine Snelling, author of the Red River series

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WA R M U P Y OUR WINTER WITH GREAT LISTENING FROM AUDIOGO!

I Remember Nothing

By Nora Ephron Random House Audio $25, 3 hours unabridged ISBN 9780307879219

HUMOR

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11

columns

romance b y c h r i s t i e r i d g way

HappILy ever after

F

ebruary is the month for romance, and the genre offers a variety of books that showcase the adventure ride of courtship and the joy of two people committing to a lifetime together. Enjoy these sweet stories with a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

Eloisa James presents a clever retelling of an old story in When Beauty Tamed the Beast (Avon, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062021274). Gorgeous Linnet Thrynne can get any man she wants—until a scandal turns society away from her. The solution to her now-unmarriageable state is to marry Piers Yelverton, a bad-tempered aristocrat who can’t afford to be picky. Off Linnet travels to a castle in Wales where Piers, the Earl of Marchant, practices medicine with unorthodox treatments.

Though tempted by Linnet’s looks and even more attracted to her intellect, he’s certain the grinding pain of an old injury renders him terrible husband material. Though men have fallen at her feet forever,

Linnet can honestly say only Piers has ignited her senses. She’ll have him or no one, but these two stubborn people might just avert the

happy ending called for in every fairy tale, until a fateful test proves their love strong and true. With an amusing cast of characters and two

Give yourself the gift of a good book this Valentine’s Day. ®

XTRA

It’s the e-newsletter for booklovers!

Exclusive Reviews, Interviews, Editors' Picks & Giveaways

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principals who are both beautiful and beastly at times, this is an enrapturing bedtime story.

Under the sea Devyn Quinn crafts an imaginative romance about mermaids and the human men who love them in Siren’s Surrender (Signet, $7.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780451232922).

FBI agent Blake Whittaker returns to his hometown of Port Rock, Maine, to investigate an odd undersea earthquake and an archaeologist who went missing as a result.

There, Blake comes in contact with Gwen Lonike and her two sisters. His attraction to the innkeeper is immediate, but so is trouble. When they’re attacked by strange, warrior-like women, Blake, Gwen and her family barely escape with their lives.

That’s when the agent learns that Gwen and her sisters are mermaids, though Gwen has tried to run from that heritage all her life. She can turn from it no longer, however, as a dangerous Mer queen has escaped her undersea world and is bent on destroying the Lonike women—and subjugating the humans on the planet. But that’s not the only threat to Gwen and Blake’s growing love.

The government sees all the Mer as terrorists who must be stopped— even to the point of death. Can Gwen and her sisters survive the peril surrounding them? Find out in this fast-paced and inventive tale.

Intrigues of the heart A smooth Italian nobleman and an intrepid half-American pirate’s daughter clash in Cara Elliott’s To Tempt a Rake (Grand Central/ Forever, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780446541305). After being orphaned, smart and beautiful Kate Woodridge returns to England to reconcile with her grandfather, a duke. Her friendship with a circle of intellectual women has introduced her to the dissolute Conte of Como.

He sets her nerves on high alert and she’s annoyed to find him a guest at her grandfather’s house party, yet their attraction burns as hot as the intrigues surrounding the upcoming conference that will redraw the

political boundaries of the European continent.

When a murder occurs, Marco and Kate must join forces to find the killer—but that also means they must confront their sizzling attraction. Loner Kate doesn’t know if she can depend on a man with a wicked reputation. And Marco isn’t sure his shriveled heart can open enough to let Kate in. The political context and historical detail add depth to this spicy romance of two independent lovers learning to become a couple.

Romance of the Month Susan Elizabeth Phillips delights again with the aptly titled Call Me Irresistible. The residents of small town Wynette, Texas, blame Meg Koranda, the daughter of Hollywood royalty, when her best friend reneges on her wedding to the community’s golden boy, Ted Beaudine. To make matters worse, Meg is stuck for the summer in the very place where everyone seems to despise her—including the jilted groom. But Meg rises to the challenge and learns a lot about herself and the man who was left at the altar. Ted is gorgeous, smart and just too perfect for messy Meg, but that doesn’t stop her traitorous heart from singing in his presence. While Ted has never let any woman rattle his cool, Meg seems to do that very thing on a regular basis. She’s driving him nuts, but he needs her—to help with his scheme to save the town and just maybe for something much more personal. But after one failed wedding, can he trust himself to take the leap again? Written with sparkling style and filled with witty banter and engaging characters, this story is one to savor.

Call Me Irresistible

By Susan Elizabeth Phillips Morrow $25.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780061351525 eBook available

Contemporary

meet KAREN MARIE MONING

the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

by

Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com

would you describe Q: How

the book?

The Countess

by Lynsay Sands The fairy tale courtship did not turn into a happily-ever-after… not until her husband dropped dead, that is. He had been horrible enough to Christiana, and she was not going to allow the traditional period of mourning to ruin her sisters’ debuts as well.

So she decides to put him on ice and go on as if nothing’s happened. Look for The Heiress in March by Lynsay Sands.

your favorite thing about MacKayla Lane, the book’s Q: What’s

main character?

9780061963049, $7.99

Death Echo

by Elizabeth Lowell Emma Cross abandoned the blood, guilt, and tribal wars of CIA life for the elite security consulting firm St. Kilda’s. Now she’s tracking the yacht Blackbird, believed to be carrying a lethal cargo that will destroy a major American city…in just seven days.

Tell Q: about us one thing your readers would be surprised to learn you.

9780061664427, $7.99

This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

Q: would If you could trade places with one person for a day, who it be?

On compassionate leave after the murder of his wife, Thomas Lynley is called back to Scotland Yard when the body of a woman is found stabbed and abandoned in an isolated London cemetery. His former team doesn’t trust the leadership of their new department chief, Isabelle Ardery, whose management style seems to rub everyone the wrong way.

9780061160912, $9.99

Money to Burn

three things would you want with you on a desert island?

Q: What

Q: S hadowfever is the final book in your red-hot Fever series.

What’s next for you?

by James Grippando Michael Cantella is a rising Wall Street investment banker, when his new wife, Ivy Layton, vanishes on their honeymoon in the Bahamas.

Four years later—with a beautiful new wife and his career back on track—Michael checks his investment accounts online…and discovers he’s been wiped out. All the money is gone. And there’s an e-mail message: Just as planned. xo xo.

9780061556319, $9.99

Scandal of the Year

by Laura Lee Guhrke From their very first meeting, Julia knew that Aidan Carr, the ohso-proper Duke of Trathen, had a bit of the devil in him, a devil who secretly yearned for what he could not have, a devil who harbored a desire for her. So when she needed to be caught in a compromising situation, Aidan was the answer to her prayers.

Q: W ords to live by?

9780061963162, $7.99

When Beauty Tamed the Beast

shadowfever

Karen Marie Moning’s dark fantasy Fever series has spawned five bestsellers, a growing group of adoring fans (the Moning Maniacs) and even its own fan convention (FeverCon). The latest entry in the series is Shadowfever (Delacorte, $26, 608 pages, ISBN 9780385341677). Moning worked in insurance for 10 years before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in Atlanta.

by Eloisa James

Piers Yelverton, Earl of Marchant, lives in a castle in Wales where, it is rumored, his bad temper flays everyone he crosses. And rumor also has it that a wound has left the earl immune to the charms of any woman. Linnet is not just any woman.She is more than merely lovely: her wit and charm brought a prince to his knees. She estimates the earl will fall madly in love—in just two weeks.

9780062021274, $7.99

Visit LibraryLoveFest.com for more great reading

13

the imes york t w e n 1 # lling bestse p to -u follow

interviews

the PIONEER WOMAN I n t e r v i e w b y E L I Z A B O RN é

r a y, P , t a E Lov E

now in paperback

“Entertaining and enthralling.”

—The New York Times Book review

“Smart but not intimidating, wise but not smarmy, kind but imperfect, funny in a way that makes us feel better about ourselves.”

—The BosToN GloBe

“Funny, warm, and generous.”

—The saN FraNcisco chroNicle

www.elizabethgilbert.com

14

Penguin Books

A member of Penguin Group (USA) www.penguin.com

H

A CITY GIRL FINDS HER HOME ON THE RANGE

ere’s an old-fashioned love story that will make you fan yourself, swoon and maybe even break into a light sweat: how a city girl fell in love with a country boy and changed the course of her life, all because of passion and her weakkneed reaction to an unexpected relationship.

In the mid-’90s, Ree Drummond was in the process of breaking up with a guy in California when she came home to Oklahoma to regroup. She would apply to law schools in Chicago, find an apartment and take it easy under her parents’ roof before starting the rest of her life. It was a “self-imposed pit stop.”

That was until she saw a Marlboro Man-type character from across the room at a smoky bar, a moment deliciously depicted in her romantic new memoir, The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—A Love Story.

“He was tall, strong and mysterious, sipping bottled beer and wearing jeans and, I noticed, cowboy boots. And his hair. The stallion’s hair was very short and silvery gray—much too gray for how young his face said he was, but just gray enough to send me through the roof with all sorts of fantasies of Cary Grant in North by Northwest.”

Fast forward 14 years. Drummond married Marlboro Man, became a full-fledged ranch wife in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and had four children. She launched ThePioneerWoman.com in 2006 to share sto-

ries with out-of-town friends and family, and nearly five years later the website has inspired a #1 New York Times best-selling cookbook, earned a Bloggie Award for Best Weblog of the Year—twice—and drawn countless fans who look to “I think Drummond for everyone has easy-to-follow, a story—I’ve cowboy-approved recipes, just found a insights on life in the country fun way to tell my story and humor.

(Ever suffered and convey from armpit stains in the my day-tomost inconveday life.” nient of times?

You’ve got a sympathetic sister in PW, as she’s affectionately known on her site.)

During a period of writer’s block in 2007, Drummond decided to entertain her website readers with the story of her courtship with Marlboro Man. That story blossomed into 40-plus online chapters and finally became The Pioneer Woman.

The book includes the chapters available on ThePioneerWoman. com, along with an all-new section

about the couple’s first year of marriage—what Drummond calls “a dose of reality” that chronicles the period when she was dealing with the divorce of her parents, a rough pregnancy and business troubles on the ranch.

I recently visited Drummond at her family’s ranch in Pawhuska and got a firsthand look at the landscape so present in the book. The feeling of driving down the long, dusty gravel road to Drummond’s property was a bit surreal, since the night before I’d read a scene in which the Pioneer Woman runs her car into a ditch on an early date with Marlboro Man. Luckily, I made it to the ranch in one piece.

Drummond and I got right down to business talking about her “fizzy love story,” as she describes it. It’s officially categorized as a memoir, although PW thinks “memoir has a little bit more of a cerebral, serious meaning—presidents write memoirs.”

Whatever you call it, The Pioneer Woman is perfect reading for Valentine’s Day, whether you’re celebrating a lasting love or still looking for The One. Yes, it is mushy and occasionally sentimental, but I’d venture

In the country we really lead an isolated life . . . we’re just together, we’re out here, we’re on the land and in the quiet. It’s not that everyone needs that to maintain some level of peace and contentment, but I needed it. It centered me.”

During our conversation, Drummond often comes back to the idea that her choice is not the choice for everybody, but sitting on the couch in the cozy lodge and surrounded by wide-open windows that overlook the ranch, her choice seems to make a lot of sense. That much nature is good for the soul.

In my time on the ranch, PW comes across pretty much exactly as she presents herself on her website—warm and funny with a hint of self-deprecation. She gives me cinnamon rolls for the road (I sampled them before I left Osage County) and frets about the puffiness of her face when she sits for a quick video interview.

After talking with Drummond for an hour, what stands out the most is her insistence that her tale is perfectly normal. “I know this sounds a little funny,” she says, “but I contend that I am not an extraordinary person; there’s nothing extraordinary about me or my story.

I think everyone has a story—I’ve just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

In spite of all the heart pounding described in her book, Drummond maintains that she does not live in

a romance novel. “I don’t believe that romance conquers all and love conquers all. But the passion—I don’t know—it propels you forward through the tough times.”

There is a tall order of passion in The Pioneer Woman—although as my grandmother would say, the specific bedroom details are “left to the imagination.” (The story is billed as a bodice-ripper, but Drummond quipped to me that “it’s like the first little seam is ripped—that’s about it.”)

“That’s not to say that a 20-yearold marriage or a 40-year-old marriage has to have daily bursts of roses and chocolates and diamonds,” she says, “but I remember through the rough times when we were first married—my parents split, all of the bumps in the road—I really was sustained by this guy. My heart would race when I was around him.”

(Surprisingly, Marlboro Man has not read the complete saga of which he is the hero. He read a few installments online, only commenting if his wife got an agricultural fact wrong. “He was like my factchecker when it came to cattle and horses and that sort of thing,” Drum© Ace cuervo

to say even the most cynical of readers will be charmed by Drummond’s hilarious story of being won over by a cowboy. In just a matter of weeks, she went from having a career and going out on the town in Los Angeles to working cattle and smooching under the stars in rural Oklahoma; from vegetarian to steak lover; from a woman unsatisfied with her romantic relationships to a woman hopelessly in love. It’s a dizzying transition and an adventure, and as PW writes in the introduction, “I hope it reminds you of the reasons you fell in love in the first place. And if you haven’t yet found love, I hope it shows you that love often can come to find you instead . . . probably when you least expect it.”

When I met with Drummond at the ranch’s beautifully restored lodge, it was easy to see how an urbanite could become captivated by such a remote locale. From the sweeping property below the house, to the beauty of the horses in the surrounding pastures and the calm of a still landscape, Drummond’s view made me feel a greater sense of peace and freedom than I’d felt in months of city living.

When I asked if she ever thinks about what life would have been like if she hadn’t moved to the country, Drummond answers without pause: “Yeah, I shudder.

I am thoroughly convinced that I am where I was meant to wind up.

mond says.)

From wardrobe malfunction to prairie fire, from fireworks-worthy kisses to a disaster of a honeymoon, The Pioneer Woman is a fun and sexy romp with a most unexpected setting: a working cattle ranch. This romantic journey is a delight, even though we know from the beginning what the ending will bring (reader, she married him). As you experience the woozy sensation of early love through Drummond’s writing, you’ll wonder why she even thought about packing those bags and heading to Chicago. These days, so does she.

“I was completely in love with him,” the Pioneer Woman recalls.

“In retrospect, there was no way that I was going to leave in the throes of what I was feeling.”

Watch a video interview with Ree Drummond at BookPage.com.

The Pioneer Woman

By Ree Drummond, Morrow, $25.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780061997167, eBook available

15

NOW IN PAPERBACK The National Bestseller—Perfect for Your Reading Group!

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Four generations come to life in this beautiful and haunting debut...about family, forbidden love and magic.”

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16

Amy Greene would love to set up a phone chat with your book club to discuss Bloodroot.

Visit www.ReadingGroupCenter.com to schedule your chat, find a reading group guide, tips from reading groups, and more.

interviews

KEVIN BROCKMEIER

LET THERE BE LIGHT

K

evin Brockmeier is easy to spot. He enters the café wearing a long overcoat, wire-rimmed glasses round as compasses and the subtlest look of unease. It’s harder, however, to pin him down.

Brockmeier’s reedy voice, which sounds strikingly like David Sedaris’ (without the sardonic edge), almost gets lost in the din of this bustling Little Rock bakery. After easing into a corner by the kitchen, hazelnut latte in hand, Brockmeier eyes the digital recording device on the table. (He prefers being interviewed via email.) But soon enough the conversation takes on a life of its own, ranging from the pedestrian to the profound.

In his brilliant, curious new novel, The Illumination, Brockmeier poses a weighty question: “What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?” He explores this query in all its complexity through six novella-length chapters, linked by a private journal of love notes written by a husband to his wife.

But first, the phenomenon occurs.

What people call “The Illumination” spontaneously begins at 8:17 on a Friday night, causing everyone’s wounds to shine. Everywhere, people in psychic or physical distress start to phosphoresce, to glow. In the aftermath of a car accident, the aforementioned journal of love notes passes into the care of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five others, touching each of them in different ways. The six recipients—a data analyst and divorcée, a photojournalist, a young boy, an evangelist, a novelist and a homeless man—inhabit a world that feels at once bizarre and familiar, a world in which human pain manifests as light.

The journal entries interspersed throughout the book are by turns tender and playful, revealing the intimacies of a happy marriage.

“I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you,” one note reads. “I love how easily you cry when you’re happy. . . . I love the soft blue veins on your wrist.”

Brockmeier’s hope is that the notes come together to create a composite picture of one couple’s life together, and they do. “When I was working on the novel, that was how I began each day as a way of re-immersing myself in the world I was trying to create,” he recalls.

Asked about the genesis of the novel, the author points to the missionary’s monologue in the fourth chapter of the book, a section he references frequently during our conversation. “When Ryan [the missionary] is talking about human suffering, the question of it and the value of it, he considers that maybe it’s our suffering that makes us beautiful to God, and if so, what does that imply . . . and also if so, how dare he,” Brockmeier Brockmeier says. “I was presents a thinking about those things, world in about what which the value [sufwounds from fering] could human pain possibly have, and I had this and suffering image of an inbegin to give jury shedding light. What if off an eerie that was the glow. way God saw the world— that your pain sets you aglow—and the image seemed meaningful to me, and it slowly gave rise to a novel.”

In addition to his novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer, Brockmeier has also written two children’s books, City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. It’s not surprising that his imaginative blend of literary fiction and fantasy also appeals to young readers.

Growing up in Little Rock, Brockmeier attended Christian schools, which partly accounts for his familiarity with the Bible and his interest in theology, specifically the works of G.K. Chesterton and Simone Weil (an epigraph from her writings introduces one of the chapters in The Illumination).

His upbringing, of course, informs his writing, but his interests are wide and varied. To call him an avid reader would be a gross understatement; he’s voracious, a student of all things. “I’m an explorer. I try to find writing that excites me,”

he says. Right now what excites him is an obscure slender novel, The Private Life of Trees, by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra. From a soft leather briefcase, the meticulous Brockmeier produces a series of lists. (He admits to being a prolific, slightly obsessive list maker by nature.) “It’s how my mind works,” he explains. He offers up his 50 Favorite Books, followed by 50 Favorite Stories, Movies . . .

Albums . . . Children’s Books. And still there are others, all of which give insight into this somewhat elusive author.

After discussing his favorites for a time, talk gradually returns to Brockmeier’s latest novel, which deserves its own place on a “Top 50” list somewhere. Asked whether the purpose of this phenomenon, the Illumination, is to awaken compassion in all beings, Brockmeier pauses for a moment before responding. “Ultimately, just because you’re granted a clearer vision of the suffering that’s around you, doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place,” he says.

The cacophony of the bakery’s kitchen swells as the weight of this bleak conclusion settles over the table. But what if, like heat lightning, the small flickers of awareness that occur in each individual character ultimately raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole? A silence ensues before Brockmeier answers, with great deliberation. “It doesn’t seem to change the systems of the world—it changes individual souls,” he says. “And I don’t know whether that’s a pessimistic or a cynical way of imagining the way this phenomenon would unfold or whether it’s a realistic one.” The inherent question hovers unanswered in the air between us. “There’s so much pain in the world and so much beauty in the world and they’re so intertwined. How do you tease them apart and can you tease them apart?”

The novel illuminates this paradox without resolving it. The book does suggest, however, that the

© Benjamin Krain

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

light offers a new way of seeing and relating to others through shared pain.

“There’s something very compelling about that,” Brockmeier says.

“While I was writing the book, I felt as though I was reorienting my own way of looking at the world.

It’s not as if I was walking around seeing light emerging from people, but I felt as if I was training my mind to be ready to see the world that way. And occasionally I was dreaming that I saw the world that way.

“I think the best books change the way you see the world while you’re reading them,” he adds.

The Illumination is one of those books. In it, Brockmeier reveals the interconnectedness of his characters’ lives and moments of crystalline compassion, and chronicles their suffering in prose sometimes so startlingly beautiful you have to look at it indirectly, like the sun.

The Illumination

By Kevin Brockmeier Pantheon $24.95, 272 pages ISBN 9780375425318 eBook available

fiction

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interviews

KAREN RUSSELL © Michael Lionstar

interview By Alden Mudge

COMING OF AGE IN THE EVERGLADES

W

hen Karen Russell was “lost in the swamp” of composing Swamplandia!—her outlandish and haunting first novel about the Bigtree family of Florida alligator country —a host of solicitous friends and relatives offered her well-meaning advice.

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“At one point,” the 29-year-old Russell recalls during a laughterfilled call to her “tiny, dirty apartment” in Manhattan, her dad asked her, “Why don’t you write a love story? Set on a boat? During wartime? People like those things!”

Then there were the skepticalbut-supportive “oooh-er-umms” of friends who made the mistake of asking what her novel-in-progress was about. “Try telling people you’re writing about a scary bird monster,” Russell says, laughing uproariously. “I’m like, well, one girl falls in love with a ghost. Her younger sister teams up with this scary bird monster-type man to rescue her from the Underworld.

And their brother is working on the mainland in a Florida theme park.”

And finally there were the research trips into the Florida Everglades, not far from where she grew up, with her father, brother and grandfather. “My grandfather, who [recently] passed away, was very concerned,” Russell says. “He knew I was an inside girl and he would say, why are you writing about that swamp? People don’t want to read about that place; it’s full of bugs! He just knew I was going to get everything wrong. So he went out with me on this tram tour and he kept

correcting the tour guide. She’d be like, ‘You see those brambles over there, that’s a gator’s nest.’ And he’d say, ‘That’s not a damn gator’s nest!’

He would reject all her facts. So I basically learned nothing on that research trip, except that my grandfather had strong opinions.”

Luckily, despite the strong opinions of her grandfather and the helpful suggestions from others, Russell stayed true to her swamp.

As a result, Swamplandia! achieves the same exhilarating, remarkably inventive amalgam of the real and the fantastic that won Russell universal praise for her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and led to her being chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and then, in 2010, being named one of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40 years old.

One of those much-heralded early stories, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” Russell says, provided the seed for what became Swamplandia!

“When I was done with the other stories in that collection, I had no desire to go back to them. But with the Ava story, I really felt haunted. I kept thinking about the sad things that had happened in her family.”

Thus, Swamplandia! is told

mostly from the point of view of Ava Bigtree, the 12-year-old daughter of Chief and Hilola Bigtree, the fake-Indian proprietor-performers in “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” on the Ten Thousand Islands off the Gulf Coast of Florida. When Ava’s mother, the theme park’s main attraction, suddenly dies, things fall apart. Her father goes off to raise money to save the park. Her brother Kiwi, convinced he is some kind of genius, leaves to find fame and fortune on the Florida mainland. Her older sister Ossie seeks—and apparently finds—a ghostly sort of love through the Ouija board and sets off with her lover for the Underworld.

And Ava naively decides she will hook up with her strange bird-man and go through hell and high water to bring her sister back.

“They all sort of get lost,” Russell says. “It’s like a cue-ball break: Each member of the family gets lost in their own little pocket of grief.

Everybody has their own doomed scheme to save the family and the park. And they’re all equally ridiculous in their own ways.”

But despite its wildly imaginative riffs, Russell says much of the book “feels pretty personal and exposing in a way. I mean, it’s not a memoir or directly autobiographical, “You have to but some of have a solid the emobedrock to tional stuff feels pretty grow your raw to me. crazy out of.

I was just Florida is such totally besota weird, weird ted with fairy-tale place.” worlds when I was a kid.

And we did have a swampy mangrove patch in our backyard. So at an age when I’m sure I was supposed to be using lip balm, my best friend Alexis and I were still wandering around in the muck near my house. I mean, I was not a tomboy because that implies athletic prowess. But I really loved being outdoors, and I loved reading fantasy books, all that sort of coming-of-agey, emotional stuff.

So Ava’s emotional world is close to what I remember feeling when I was that age.”

Russell found further inspiration in her research into the Florida history that serves as a backdrop

for her story. “You have to have a solid bedrock to grow your crazy out of,” she says. “Florida is such a weird, weird place. When I was researching this book I realized how much of our state’s history, or what I thought of as our state’s history, is totally fabricated. Fantasy is its big industry. . . . I wanted some of that history in Swamplandia! because the Bigtrees’ whole game is this really American project of self-invention. It seemed right for the texture of the book to let people know that the state itself is a mix of the real and imaginary.”

And then there are Russell’s marvelous descriptions of Florida’s prodigious, profligate landscape.

“My mom would insist that we go on these doomed family outings where we would go biking in the Everglades even though we are all short, potato-shaped people. And I found that, geographically, Florida is just the most beautiful place in this country,” says Russell. “But it’s rubbing shoulders with all these strip malls and fast-food chains and super-development. My mom grew up in Miami Springs and my dad grew up in Sarasota. They both have this real nostalgia for it. When I was a kid it felt like there was this world I had just missed, a time when the place was just totally foliated and a lot more wild. So I think some of the book is born out of a nostalgia I’m probably not entitled to for the old Florida or for this wilderness that we’ve paved over a decade or two before I was born.”

Swamplandia! is thrillingly permeated with those competing American emotions—hope and doom. As for Karen Russell herself?

“I’ve been very, extraordinarily lucky,” she says of her success.

“Lucky in the way that, to make the math come out right, I’ll probably be eaten by a shark before I’m 30.

I think that will just about balance the books.”

Swamplandia!

By Karen Russell Knopf $24.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780307263995 eBook available

fiction

y h c n i B i s e back v e a M with a story about unconventional families, relationships which aren’t quite what they seem, and the child at the heart of everyone’s lives

MINDING FRANKIE F R O M T H E AU T H O R O F H E A RT A N D S O U L

“Binchy is a national treasure in her homeland of Ireland, and her latest novel is a perfect illustration of why…

Your heart will have no trouble recognizing the landscape [of this] touching saga.” —Publishers Weekly

“Reading a Maeve Binchy novel is like settling in for a cozy visit with an old friend.”

—Margaret Flanagan, Booklist

“Binchy has a true gift of creating characters we either know or wish we knew.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“At the end of a long week, a long winter, a long economic downturn, [Maeve Binchy is] exactly what we need.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “[Binchy] paints a delightful picture of Ireland that elevates the everyday joys and tragedies of her characters to ones of pure romance.”

—Woodbury Magazine

» Visit MB.     » Published by Knopf

Download the Reading Group Guide at aaknopf.com

*

Also available as an eBook and Audio

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features

RELATIONSHIPS

By Amy Scribner

True tales of love and marriage

I

f a heart-shaped box of chocolates just won’t cut it this Valentine’s Day, pick up one of these unique takes on finding—and keeping—love. They’re entertaining, thought-provoking and way lower on calories than a chocolate cherry cordial.

Meet me in Manhattan What is it about New York City romances? We love those stories about couples who happen upon each other at the top of the Statue of Liberty or wandering through Times Square. Author Ariel Sabar has a theory about why Manhattan is so conducive to coupling: It’s all by design. “If you want strangers to talk, give them something to talk about: an unusual sculpture, a mime, a juggler, a musician, a street character. . . . It takes two strangers with ostensibly nothing in common and, through a shared, immediate experience, links them, even if just for a moment.”

Sabar’s thoroughly engaging Heart of the City (Da Capo, $24, 272 pages, ISBN 9780738213798) profiles nine couples who met at famous New York City public spaces, much like his own parents, a Kurdish Iraqi father and uppercrust American mother who met by chance in Washington Square Park. The stories span generations, from the sailor who met a lost teenage girl in Central Park in 1941, to

Claire and Tom, who met in 1969 at the top of the Empire State Building (“with its setbacks, clean lines, and needle-tip mast, the building looked like some precision scientific instrument, a scalpel under operating room lights”). Sabar has teased out each of these couples’ magnificent, ordinary stories and compiled them into a sparkling love letter to the city.

Supply and demand Want a more practical take on love? Settle in with Spousonomics (Random House, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9780385343947), a wry and convincing treatise from two financial journalists on why economics is the key to building a marriage that endures through good times and bad. Paula Szuchman, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and Jenny Anderson of the New York Times clearly explain why common marital problems can be solved by applying simple economic principles.

Fights over housework are really just an issue of division of labor. Are never-ending arguments the bane of your marriage? You might be

loss-averse. And sex, say Szuchman and Anderson, is a simple “function of supply and demand.”

The thing is, Spousonomics actually makes a lot of sense, and you don’t feel like you’re reading a hellish undergrad textbook. When they explain the principle of incentives (a tool to get what you want), you understand that in economics, incentives work because they entice you to buy a pair of shoes just to get a second pair half off. In a marriage, incentives work because they get your husband to finish his honeydo list.

Spousonomics “doesn’t demand that you look each other in the eye until you weep tears of remorse.

It doesn’t require you to keep an anger log, a courage journal, or a feelings calendar.” It is simply a common-sense, laugh-out-loud guide to a happier marriage.

Heart, soul . . . and kidney Angela Balcita has already undergone one kidney transplant and needs another when her new college boyfriend Charlie O’Doyle offers his kidney—an unorthodox way to kick off a romance, to be

sure. Moonface (HarperPerennial, $13.99, 240 pages, ISBN 9780061537318) is about what happens after she says yes to this most unusual proposal.

Balcita writes with humor and dignity about her second transplant at age 28, outlining the incredibly complex, fascinating process of removing and replacing an essential part of the body. But at its core, Moonface is a not-so-simple love story. “I wanted to take all of him, not just his kidney,” Balcita writes.

“I wanted us to be like one person,

one brain and one body, moving through the world. It was already starting to feel this way.”

Most gratifyingly, unlike so many memoirs of illness and recovery, this one keeps going after Balcita gets better. It won’t spoil the reader’s enjoyment to reveal that she and Charlie stay together and even have a baby. With her sharp ear for dialogue and unflinching honesty, Balcita offers a sweet story of love and healing.

We have something for everyone!

In addition to more than 10,000 book reviews, visit BookPage.com to find contests, e-newsletter signups & more— including our popular blog, The Book Case.

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Discover your next great book at bookpage.com

love stories

By julie hale

Sweet reads for Valentine’s Day

I

n the spirit of the season, we have gathered a group of new novels that delightfully explore the elusive nature of love. If you’re looking for fresh insights concerning the inscrutable ways of Cupid, then peruse the books below. Here’s to true love!

A very literary romance Fans of old-fashioned amour will cozy up to Love Letters (St. Martin’s, $25.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9780312674533). The novel’s leading lady, Laura Horsley, is a bibliophile to the bone. When her bookstore closes and she finds herself out of a job, she impulsively joins the organizing committee of a literary festival. A misunderstanding leads the committee to believe that she has inside connections to Dermot Flynn, a celebrated writer notorious for his love of privacy. Laura, who has adored Dermot’s work since her university days, is dispatched to Ireland to sign him up for the festival. Can she charm the reclusive author into participating? It’s an incredible mission, and one that seems doomed to fail when Laura finally meets the difficult Dermot.

Wrestling with his latest work, he’s moody and gruff, yet Laura finds him irresistible, and as she tries to commit him to the festival, the events that transpire defy her wildest fantasies of fandom. With Laura, British author Katie Fforde has created a spirited heroine the reader can’t help rooting for, and she spins her adventures into an unforgettable story. This hilarious romance will convince the harshest cynic that love conquers all.

Dating in the digital age A shrewd depiction of romance in an era of instant connection, Teresa Medeiros’ Goodnight, Tweetheart (Gallery, $15, 240 pages, ISBN 9781439188156) demonstrates the ways in which courting via com-

puter can expedite seduction—but also trick the heart and muddle the mind. So it goes for the story’s central character, novelist Abby Donovan. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Abby’s a writer with serious aspirations. How, then, to account for her addiction to Twitter, the famous social networking site that’s a bit, well, frivolous?

Led to the website by her publicist, Abby intends, at first, to tweet only for promotional purposes, but business gives way to romance when she connects with the bookish “MarkBaynard,” a charmer who can pack poetry into the briefest tweet. As the two forge an online relationship, Abby finds it increasingly difficult to concentrate on her work. Her story unfolds, in part, through tweets and direct messages, as she compulsively corresponds with a guy who seems, onscreen, like Mr. Right. But how much does Abby really know about Mark? The mysteries and questions Medeiros puts into play are timeless, and they give extra depth to this cleverly crafted tale.

L’AMOUR PARISIAN A poet, food critic and radio personality, Hervé Le Tellier is known in France as a Renaissance man.

His 15th book, a piece of chic, contemporary fiction called Enough About Love (Other Press, $14.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9781590513996), chronicles the turbulent romantic lives of a group of well-to-do Parisians. Elegant, accomplished and on the brink of 40, Anna has a solid marriage and a pair of ador-

able children. Yet when she meets Yves, an offbeat writer, she’s more than a little intrigued. Likewise, Louise—a successful lawyer, wife and mother—experiences sparks with Thomas, who happens to be Anna’s psychiatrist.

Blindsided by emotion, the lives of all four lovers are transformed virtually overnight. This provocative novel unfolds in brief chapters, each of which offers the perspective of a different character, creating a richly textured mosaic of incident and emotion. For Anna and Louise, the comforts of family are threatened by surprising and potent passion. It’s a classic battle—sudden desire versus the long-cultivated bonds of monogamy—and Le Tellier uses the conflict to explore the difficult decisions that so often accompany love. A wise and witty writer, he brings Parisian flair to this tale of romantic entanglement.

“Emmons perfectly captures the devastating impact of family secrets in her beautifully written and ultimately hopeful debut.”

—DIANE CHAMBERLAIN

sherri wood emmons

Love without limits A sensitive rendering of a remarkable friendship, The Intimates (FSG, $24, 256 pages, ISBN 9780374176976), Ralph Sassone’s accomplished debut novel, examines love in its many varied forms and the demands it makes on the human heart. Kindred spirits, Robbie and Maize gravitate toward each other in high school, but romance fails to blossom between them.

Instead, they become steadfast friends, attending the same college and supporting each other as they enter the “real world.” Both struggle to make sense of adolescence even as they embark upon adulthood.

Maize—at heart a sensitive writertype—goes into real estate in New York City but finds the experience, to put it mildly, disillusioning.

Meanwhile, Robbie, who has vague designs on the publishing industry, explores romantic relationships with men.

Although Robbie and Maize are driven by desires that change with time and experience, their special intimacy—a passionate yet platonic tie—endures. With authenticity and an eye for the subtle machinations that can make or break relationships, Sassone has produced a moving, often funny novel that beautifully reflects the complexities of love.

“A sweet, revealing tale of family, friendship, (and) long-held secrets.”

—KRIS RADISH, author of The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

SCAN TO HEAR AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK AND MORE! DON’T HAVE THE APP? Get it for free at http://gettag.mobi

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Romance inTime Heart of Lies

Book 2 in the Irish Angel Series!

From New York Times Bestselling Author Jill Marie Landis

“Landis writes from her heart and is able to speak to her readers through her characters.

The characters are believable, flawed, and relatable.” — Romantic Times

The Fire in Ember

From Bestselling Author DiAnn Mills Romantic Times says of A Woman Called Sage: “Mills brings readers a beautiful love story that will stay with you long a�er the last page.

Don’t miss this riveting new adventure.”

Available wherever books are sold.

JillMarieLandis.com

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DiAnnMills.com

reviews a discovery of witches

FICTION

magic, myth and mystery R e v i e w b y S t e p h e n i e H a rr i s o n

In Deborah Harkness’ debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, Diana Bishop learns firsthand just how important a single book can be. When Diana, a reserved historian, calls up a bewitched manuscript from the archives of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, she has no idea how this simple act will change her life. Although she herself is a witch, Diana denies her power and shuns the society of fellow witches and wizards, so she has no notion of the importance of the alchemical tome she has summoned. Diana is the first person in centuries to have successfully retrieved Ashmole 782, long sought by witches, demons and vampires alike, and her unwitting accomplishment soon earns her plenty of unwanted notice, including that of Matthew Clairmont, a fellow researcher with an interest in Ashmole 782, who just happens to be a 1,500-year-old vampire. The two enter into an uneasy alliance in order to prevent the text from falling into

By Deborah Harkness, Viking, $28.95, 592 pages, the wrong hands, but before long, their entire world is thrown into upISBN 9780670022410; Audio, eBook available heaval as loyalties and lives are risked. In order for them to prevail, Diana must come to terms with her true self and harness the power she has long kept locked inside. The question is, will she have the courage and strength to do so?

With books about fictional witches, it’s all too easy to fall back on tongue-in-cheek descriptors like “enchanting” or “spellbinding,” but both adjectives aptly describe the superbly entertaining saga Harkness has crafted.

This is a riveting tale full of romance and danger that will have you on the edge of your seat, yet its chief strength lies in the wonderfully rich and ingenious mythology underlying the story. Entwining strands of science and history, Harkness creates a fresh explanation for how such creatures could arise that is so credible, you’ll have to keep reminding yourself this is fiction.

A Discovery of Witches is a captivating tale that will ensnare the heart and imagination of even the most skeptical reader. This fantastic first novel will leave you anxious for the next installment, and sad to leave the remarkable world Harkness has created. Simply put, A Discovery of Witches is literary magic at its most potent.

The Red Garden

By Alice Hoffman Crown $25, 288 pages ISBN 9780307393876 Audio available

Fiction

First the settlers called the Massachusetts town Bearsville, and for good reason. Without the bears that succored Hallie Brady, the earliest settlers would not have survived their first winter. Thirty-six years later, in 1786, they changed the name to Blackwell, but every year they hold a Hallie Brady Day to celebrate the woman who, with help, saved her neighbors from starvation in the winter of 1750.

Throughout Alice Hoffman’s flowing, gentle collection of linked stories about Blackwell from then to now, bears keep reappearing as resident spirits of the village, along with other recurring themes from

the past—Johnny Appleseed, for instance. He planted an apple tree in town that still survives as “The Tree of Life,” protected by the belief that, as long as it lives, the town will too. Other meaningful characters include an elephant that is sacrificed in the name of modern science; a monster who writes poetry; a dog that is faithful past death; a mother mistaken for her daughter; and a little girl who drowns early on and keeps reappearing in later stories like a little fallen star, shining in the Eel River. And yes, there is the garden that turns everything planted in it to red, no matter its original color.

Alice Hoffman, herself a shining star among American novelists, possesses the stunning ability to express the numinous in the most prosaic language. Somehow, without elaborate wordplay, she manages to communicate a yearning interpretation of the life we all live, opening the reader’s eyes to the otherworldly riddles that make things appear just a trifle askew— when we notice them, that is. And Alice Hoffman certainly notices

them. One secret of her ongoing appeal, year after year, book after book, is her keen perception. And in The Red Garden, Hoffman delivers a body of stories that explores the depths of reality as well as its enduring quirkiness.

—Maude McDaniel

The Fates Will Find Their Way

By Hannah Pittard Ecco $22.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780061996054 eBook available

Debut fiction

fused by the mysterious unraveling of girls they thought were, in some ways, their own. The gothic tone, nascent sexuality and profound feeling of collective helplessness all harken sharply backward. It could be called derivative, but Pittard adds an important twist that makes her take on this very specific genre feel like her own.

In The Fates Will Find Their Way, the disaster that binds the boys together is not suicide but disappearance—one Halloween night, when the teenagers are all out celebrating, 16-year-old Nora Lindell goes missing. When everyone is notified, via a particularly terrible phone tree, and time presses onward, details are muddled and the boys begin to postulate theories. One remembers seeing her near the bus stop, and another thinks he saw her get into a strange car, while others suddenly remember encountering her in a distant airport, where she claimed to be on her way to visiting relatives. What results is a sort of morbid “choose your own adventure” story, as each possibility of Nora’s fate is offered and then rescinded as a possible truth.

It is this particular narrative trick and the care with which she executes it that saves Pittard, casting her as not only a talented mimic, but as an innovator in her own right. In playing out each of the theories about Nora’s disappearance, Pittard perfectly illustrates the hysteria surrounding any such disaster, and the ways in which every detail can be twisted and elevated to create endings to a story that fundamentally has none.

—Rebecca Shapiro

Invisible River

By Helena McEwen Bloomsbury $15, 320 pages ISBN 9781608192663

Literary fiction

Hannah Pittard has big shoes to fill: Her first novel, a dark story of adolescence gone awry, echoes Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides and his own haunting debut, The Virgin Suicides. Like Eugenides, Pittard narrates from the omniscient, plural voice of a group of small-town boys hurt and con-

Eve, the protagonist of this beautiful, tender novel, is an artist intoxicated by colors: the way light plays with them, how they work together, how they make her feel, even by their names. “I paint the dark street with brown madder, ma-

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reviews genta and translucent Indian yellow painted over white, so it glows,” she muses.

The opening pages of Invisible River find Eve leaving the south of England to study art in London, and it’s in London that she blossoms.

She deserves to, after a childhood marred by the mysterious death of her mother and a father incapacitated by grief and alcohol. In London she’ll not only be able to create her wild, vivid paintings but will find friendship with Bianca, a passionate Italian girl, Cecile, a former ballerina, and the happily pregnant Rob. She’ll find love, maybe, with raven-haired Zeb, maker of weird sculptures and curios. Even her persnickety art teachers are a small price to pay for such freedom. The only thing that mars this idyll is the sudden appearance of her father; when Eve left home, his final reason to cling to life left as well. What happens when Eve’s father shows up on her doorstep, sodden and drunk, is the most harrowing part of the book, and leaves a palpable veil of sadness over everything. Eve’s paintings grow muddy, ugly and useless until her friends and fierce love of life—and art—bring her back to herself.

It’s not surprising that Helena McEwen, who studied art in London, has a great eye for detail. I’ve seldom read descriptions of London as a beautiful city—maybe Dickens put paid to that—but in McEwen’s hands it becomes wondrously so.

“It is a dark and light day, with sunlight through rain, and lit-up buildings against black clouds,” she writes. “The racing raindrops have rainbows in them.” It’s a joy, in so cynical a time, to find a book that celebrates unapologetic happiness.

—Arlene McKanic

A Man in Uniform

By Kate Taylor Crown $25, 352 pages ISBN 9780307885197 eBook available

Historical fiction

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A Man in Uniform is set in the Paris of the 1890s, a world familiar to many of us from Impressionist paintings of street scenes and bohe-

FICTION mian cafes. But author Kate Taylor is looking at the more conventional cityscape of lawyer’s offices, formal balls and the broad boulevards of the Right Bank. France is recovering from the Franco-Prussian war, as well as the seismic cultural waves set off by the real-life Dreyfus Affair, in which the French captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of espionage, was exiled to Devil’s Island.

At the edge of this scandal is lawyer François Dubon, whose bourgeois life is about to be rocked by the very issues that are tearing his country apart.

Dubon’s life is order itself. His lucrative practice consists of drafting legal documents for upper-class Parisians. He enjoys a comfortable marriage to an aristocratic wife, and satisfying post-work encounters with his mistress. When a mysterious widow comes to his office with a request to save her family friend, Alfred Dreyfus, Dubon is intrigued.

Though he feels himself ill-suited to the task, he is drawn by the widow’s vulnerability, as well as the excitement the request adds to his complacent practice.

Dubon’s early legal career was spent defending the Communards (the prosecuted or exiled Socialists and Communists who had briefly held the Paris Commune following the Franco-Prussian war), and even though he keeps this episode firmly relegated to the past for fear of disturbing his well-heeled clients, the sense of working for justice once again proves intoxicating.

Dubon finds himself taking greater and greater chances in order to assist the widow, including disguising himself as a military officer and infiltrating the Bureau of Statistical Section, a cover for a military counter-espionage group. Soon Dubon is risking his well-ordered world of work, marriage and mistress.

Canadian author Taylor artfully mixes mystery and history in this enjoyable novel. She is attuned to the subtle maneuverings in both public service and the aristocratic society represented by Dubon’s friends and family.

A Man in Uniform has just enough action to keep the pages turning, while also providing a detailed portrait of a country under siege—and its impact on a single man who struggles to do what he knows is right in the face of a startling political cover-up.

— La u r e n B u f f e r d

Pictures of You

By Caroline Leavitt Algonquin $13.95, 336 pages ISBN 9781565126312 Audio, eBook available

Fiction

As Isabelle Stein’s car rushes headlong into a woman on a foggy highway, she glimpses a small boy running away from the road.

The woman, April Nash, is killed instantly, while her son witnesses the accident through the panicked haze of an asthma attack. In the days that follow, Isabelle can’t stop asking herself questions: Why was the car parked in the middle of the road facing the wrong way? Who was April? How will Isabelle ever recover? Caroline Leavitt’s Pictures of You offers a close-up view of Isabelle’s journey—a path of healing, redemption and, ultimately, rebirth.

Isabelle and April would have had a lot to talk about, if they’d happened to meet in their shared home of Cape Cod before the accident.

Both married young, earned unconventional educations and longed to reinvent themselves. In fact, both were running away from their old lives when they collided. As Isabelle learns about April, she begins to spy on April’s bereaved husband Charlie and son Sam. She cannot drive anymore (too frightening), so she bikes past their house and sees, to her dismay, that Charlie seems like a kind and intelligent man.

Meanwhile Sam convinces himself Isabelle may be an angel with special abilities that will let him talk to his mother again. The scenes of budding friendship between Isabelle and Sam—both obsessed with each other for such different reasons—are extraordinary. Isabelle takes a snapshot of her and Sam, and presents it to him with the inscription on the back, “Some connections are never broken.”

Leavitt’s emotional and rich storytelling, set against the windy backdrop of Cape Cod, takes readers to a place they’ll long to visit again and again. Whether looking down a misty road, through a Canon lens or across a kitchen table, it’s often difficult to see clearly. Many good people struggle to

understand what happens in their lives, re-examining things until they can find the right kind of meaning.

Readers will hope Isabelle, Charlie and Sam can find that meaning in Pictures of You. — K e l ly B l e w e t t

the diviner’s tale

By Bradford Morrow HMH $26, 320 pages ISBN 9780547382630 Audio available

Literary thriller

Cassandra Brooks would like to live a normal life. She tries to ignore her supernatural talents, retreating from her hometown to a quiet, underpopulated area with her twin sons. Having endured several lectures from her Christian mother, Cassandra even begins to dress in a feminine way and attend an occasional church service. Still, Cassandra’s true nature keeps asserting itself. In the woods, a terrible vision haunts her: Has a young girl hanged herself and gone unnoticed for days? Why does Cassandra repeatedly have premonitions and terrifying flashbacks—the smell of a cigar just outside her window, the memory of a woman falling from a cliff, the sight of a pale, ghostly girl who seems to have something to say?

Soon, Cassandra’s premonitions pull her away from her attempts to achieve domestic tranquility. She is on the trail of a killer and determined to learn the meaning of her strange visions—unless someone murders her first.

The Diviner’s Tale is chilling and unexpectedly powerful. What elevates Bradford Morrow’s writing above the level of an average supernatural thriller is his attention to feeling and character. Cassandra has a rich, complicated past; a fraught, bittersweet and recognizable relationship with her mother; and a lifelike rapport with her sons.

Morrow also has an exquisite gift for describing the physical world.

Here, a woman recalls the evening of the Fourth of July: “The connecting dots of constellations punctuated the purple sky, and the moon rose looking like a piece of glowing citron hard candy that had been

FICTION sucked by some giant child.”

Fans of mystery novels will want to pick up The Diviner’s Tale.

Like Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, Morrow writes extraordinarily literary thrillers, giving us beautiful language while telling an oldfashioned, nail-biting story. With the publication of this novel, both Cassandra and Morrow are certain to acquire many fans.

—Dan Barrett

The Book of Tomorrow

By Cecelia Ahern Harper $21.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780061706301 eBook available

Fiction

Sixteen-year-old Tamara Goodwin experiences an abrupt life change after her dad commits suicide, leaving his business and finances in shambles. Tamara and her mother Jennifer are forced to vacate their lavish home in Dublin and move in with Jennifer’s brother Arthur and his wife Rosaleen, who live in a small gatehouse in the countryside, miles from Tamara’s luxurious and spoiled former life.

Tamara feels “cast out,” forced to live with people she barely knows, and trying to understand why her grieving mother has become so depressed she doesn’t even leave her room—Rosaleen brings Jennifer’s meals upstairs and keeps Tamara away as much as possible.

So Tamara strikes out on her own, and meets an odd mix of characters including Sister Ignatius, a somewhat mysterious nun; Marcus, the handsome young man who drives a traveling library truck; and an invisible soul who leaves presents in odd places for Tamara to discover.

In her growing list of novels, Cecelia Ahern has increasingly included magical elements, and The Book of Tomorrow is no exception.

This time it’s a diary that Tamara discovers in the library truck. At first its pages are blank—but soon they begin describing, in Tamara’s own handwriting, what will happen to her in the future, giving her a real “book of tomorrow.” She is thus able to alter her actions to change a negative occurrence—and she be-

gins to solve such mysteries as why Rosaleen keeps her mother in her room, and who is the mysterious inhabitant of the bungalow across the road who seems to be watching her, always just out of sight.

Ahern’s latest is an intriguing look at how a young girl deals with her father’s death and the accompanying changes in her rarified life. The magical elements seem extraneous to the plot, however, tacked on to the story but never really part of it.

Still, fans of Ahern’s earlier novels will no doubt enjoy her most recent entry in the young-damselin-distress genre, and its winning protagonist, Tamara Goodwin.

—Deb Donovan

Ghost Light

By Joseph O’Connor FSG $25, 256 pages ISBN 9780374161873 Audio, eBook available

Historical fiction

In his elegiac seventh novel, Joseph O’Connor vividly resurrects the love affair between famed Irish playwright John Synge and actress Molly Allgood, the heroine of Synge’s controversial The Playboy of the Western World. Separated by 16 years, the lovers are further impeded by religious and class differences. And yet through all that, their passion for each other endures in Molly’s memory, more than four decades after Synge’s death at age 37 in 1907.

Befitting a story told through the eyes of an aging, impoverished woman whose health has been broken by alcohol and who is so close to financial ruin she is reduced to pawning her only remaining letter from her former lover, the novel is episodic and fragmentary. As she makes her way across London on a late fall morning in 1952, heading for the BBC to read in a radio play, Molly conjures up scenes of her relationship with Synge. There is an idyllic account of the lovers’ visit to the Irish countryside and another hilarious scene as Synge (alongside his friend William Butler Yeats) duels with Molly over her reading of one of his lines. Throughout, the fondness of her reminiscences is

tempered by the chill of her dire circumstances and a recognition that their often-stormy attachment could not endure.

O’Connor’s prose in his portrait of Molly’s diminishing life is lyrical.

Like the theatrical superstition that gives the novel its title, Synge’s spectral presence haunts the story, until even Molly herself feels “like a ghost drifting through some old house of a life.”

Though he confesses in an author’s note he’s taken substantial liberties with the real-life love affair of Synge and Allgood, in doing so O’Connor has created a credible, moving story that derives much of its appeal from the way it transcends the particulars of their biographies to tell a universal tale of love and loss.

—Harvey Freedenberg

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

By Elizabeth Stuckey-French Doubleday $25.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780385510646 eBook available

Fiction

There’s a killer stalking the streets of suburban Tallahassee. She’s exacting her revenge for a 50-yearold injustice with cool, calculated steps—well, more like a shuffle. It is only a matter of time before Dr. Wilson Spriggs will die at the hands of his killer, be it via a gleeful stabbing or a poisonous pineapple upsidedown cake.

The killer is Marylou Ahearn, a batty 77-year-old retired teacher from Memphis. Dr. Spriggs gave pregnant Marylou a radioactive cocktail in 1953 during a secret government study, which ultimately led to the death of her daughter. Now she takes her Welsh corgi Buster for a few walks each day to scope out Spriggs’ home and pumps herself up with self-motivations of “Today’s the day. Today’s the day. Today’s the day he’ll suffer and die.”

However, Marylou’s homicidal plans change slightly when she sees an opportunity to destroy Spriggs’ entire family. She introduces herself as Nancy Archer (the heroine from the 1958 movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) and pleasantly weasels

herself into the family, who find her annoying but interesting enough to keep around. Mischief ensues, and it gets downright dirty. Were it not for Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s puckish voice, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady could have been a drama. Luckily for us, it’s not.

Much of the book’s whimsy comes from the varied perspectives of the nutty cast, not only Marylou but also Spriggs’ entire family: Spriggs himself—now afflicted with Alzheimer’s—his menopausal daughter Caroline, her cheating husband Vic, two kids with Asperger’s (one a science genius, the other Elvis-obsessed) and overachieving youngest daughter Suzi. They are a modern dysfunctional family, and the bumbling interactions between them and Marylou have dark—and darkly hilarious—effects.

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady is surprisingly chipper as the neurotic and lovable cast turns a macabre tale into a wildly compulsive read.

— C a t D . Ac r e e

Justice hides in dark and deadly places...

“Margolin’s latest is a fast-paced yarn connecting a Supreme Court vacancy, a death row inmate, an ex-CIA chief and an attack on another Justice.”

— New York Post, Required Reading

HarperCollins.com

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features

BLACK HISTORY

By Ron Wynn

From the famous to the forgotten

B

lack History Month shines a light on lesserknown topics from our past and has the potential to open new conversations on historical events often taken for granted. The latest crop of books on black history achieves both goals.

Living history in Harlem Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ enlightening Harlem Is Nowhere (Little, Brown, $24.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780316017237) takes a new approach in her look at the venerable community. Rather than crafting a detached, straightforward account, Rhodes-Pitts makes it personal, showing Harlem’s impact on her during the time she lived there. Her trips include stops at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Lenox Avenue’s famous funeral parlor, where many of the Harlem Renaissance’s key figures were laid to rest. She encounters knowledgeable, flamboyant types like longtime Harlem resident Julius Bobby Nelson, who seems to know everything that’s ever happened there, and neighbors Miss Minnie and Monroe, who quickly become surrogate parents and close confidants. They give her insider details and a scope available only from longtime residents.

Rhodes-Pitts includes tales about photographer James Vander Zee, authors Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, and activist Marcus Garvey, among many others. Still, Harlem Is Nowhere is more an inspirational memoir than a retrospective work, and should motivate others who’ve only heard about Harlem from a distance to inspect it more closely.

Fighting on two fronts Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Men of Color to Arms! (Norton, $27.95, 315 pages, ISBN 9780393060393) looks at black soldiers who defended a

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nation that hadn’t yet fully recognized their humanity. In the period between 1863 and 1865, more than 180,000 African Americans joined the Union Army due to promises of freedom in exchange for service.

Instead they often encountered vigorous anger and resentment from whites who saw them as inferior and even responsible for the deaths of their comrades, despite the bravery of soldiers such as Medal of Honor winners Sergeant Major Christian A. Fleetwood, John Lawson, Thomas Hawkins and Robert Pinn, who distinguished themselves in combat.

There was another enlistment surge later in the decade, when blacks joined the wars against the Sioux, Apache and other Native American nations. Once again, black soldiers found themselves fighting dual sets of enemies. They were isolated and often abandoned by their white counterparts after battles and regarded with contempt by the Native Americans, who wondered how blacks could fight alongside people who openly loathed them. Yet Men Of Color to Arms! reveals the triumphs and victories achieved by black soldiers as well as the efforts undertaken on their behalf by whites of good will against vicious and sustained opposition and hatred.

The future of history Although Thomas C. Holt’s comprehensive new historical work, Children of Fire (Hill & Wang, $30, 464 pages, ISBN 9780809067138), revisits familiar territory, he does an excellent job of including newer

subjects and areas of interest too.

He traces the evolution of black Americans from the earliest arrivals to 21st-century figures, highlighting obscure figures alongside established giants like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For example, Anthony Johnson, a slave in Virginia during the late 1600s, not only bought his freedom but became one of Virginia’s most prosperous landowners. In describing how Johnson was eventually cheated out of his entire empire through a series of overtly bigoted (and now illegal) court rulings, Holt reveals how racism increasingly became part of the South’s judicial and agricultural systems.

Though Holt acknowledges the debt his book owes to other major scholars, Children of Fire includes plenty of his own assessments on topics from Reconstruction to the rise in interaction between black Americans and immigrants from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Holt’s work is both a significant addition to other vital histories of the African-American past and a suggestion of new directions for the future.

Crossing the line Daniel J. Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line (Penguin Press, $27.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9781594202827) doesn’t offer apologies for the conduct of the three black families it highlights, all of whom passed for white, but seeks to put their actions into context. The Gibsons knew all the land they’d amassed in 18th-century South Carolina would be taken over in a flash if the populace knew that blacks were the real owners. The Spencers of the mid-19th century became part of a poor community in the eastern Kentucky hills where racial backgrounds were obscured by the common struggle to survive. And the Walls ultimately revealed their true identity and paid the price, forfeiting a sizable amount of fame

and wealth in Washington, D.C., in the early 1900s.

By 21st-century standards, the ability of the Gibsons to fool people and the reluctance of the Spencers to even discuss the subject of their origin with their neighbors seems woefully naive, even timid and disgraceful. But as Sharfstein’s research shows, the restricted path for blacks in those eras was such that neither family was willing to give up what they saw as their rightful status.

Both became skilled at mimicking the language, customs and actions of whites. When contrasted with the severe price the Walls paid for coming forward, their choices might seem easier to understand. The Invisible Line is a detailed and instructive look at America’s tortured history and still-evolving attitudes toward race.

A struggle remembered Finally, journalist Wayne Greenhaw’s Fighting the Devil in Dixie (Lawrence Hill, $26.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781569763452) is the first complete chronicle of the struggle against segregation in Alabama, a state second only to Mississippi in terms of hatred and viciousness against its black citizens. The 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls got international coverage, but killings, lynchings and other attacks had been happening in Alabama long before.

Greenhaw, who covered every major event in Alabama’s civil rights era, begins with the 1957 beating and drowning of Willie Edwards Jr., a truck driver attacked by a mob for allegedly assaulting a white woman.

Edwards was married with a family and had just received a promotion.

Combining personal memories with a wealth of sources gleaned from that period, Greenhaw tracks many major developments, among them the “Bloody Selma” march, the Freedom Rides and the election of George Wallace and his rise to national fame as the face of segregation. He also documents the role of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which became one of the few organizations that publicly stood against the tide and helped ultimately defeat those who wanted to keep the Jim Crow era alive in Alabama. Fighting the Devil In Dixie shows the power of perseverance and chronicles one of the great victories in America’s ongoing struggle for social justice.

reviews the clockwork universe

NONFICTION

God is in the details

withdraw from the world.

The 60th anniversary of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye is the perfect occasion to read this absorbing and groundbreaking account of a legendary American author.

—Roger Bishop

R e v i e w b y J o h n T. S l a n i a

Seventeenth-century Europe is characterized by its contradictions.

It was a century of great scientists, philosophers and artists, the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Bach. But people rarely bathed, garbage and human waste filled city streets, and the rodents and pests that thrived on this filth spread a deadly disease known as the Plague.

Above all, Europeans of this era believed that all earthly occurrences were the result of divine intervention.

No human being better typified this conflicted period than Isaac Newton, a key figure in Edward Dolnick’s The Clockwork Universe. Newton is best known for his theories on gravity and the laws of motion, and he shares credit for the development of calculus. But he also spent much of his time tinkering with alchemy, and he actually wrote more about religion than science, believing that, in his own words, “God governs all things and

By Edward Dolnick, Harper, $27.99, 400 pages, knows all that is or can be done.”

ISBN 9780061719516, eBook available Chronicling the lives of Newton and his fellow scientists who established Britain’s Royal Society, Dolnick deftly illustrates how Western civilization slowly lurched forward from the Dark Ages to the Age of Enlightenment. Newton and his Royal Society comrades were the bridge between the two periods, Dolnick writes. From a 21st-century viewpoint, it would appear that their scientific and mathematical discoveries would refute their belief in divine intervention. Peering through a telescope, German astronomer Johannes Kepler developed principles that confirmed Copernicus’ theory that the Earth orbits the sun. Squinting through a microscope, Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered “tiny animals” which would later become known as microorganisms. Yet rather than using these and other scientific discoveries to dispute the all-controlling power of God, the members of the Royal Society cited them as evidence that the world operated as God’s perfectly regulated clock.

The Clockwork Universe will engage readers interested in history, science, mathematics or religion. Offering fascinating insights into this calamitous era filled with fear and wonderment, and the growing tension between religion and science, Dolnick is a smart, snappy writer who describes complex topics in an educating and entertaining fashion. Indeed, the writing moves the reader along quickly and easily—just like clockwork.

J.D. SALINGER: a life

By Kenneth Slawenski Random House $27, 464 pages ISBN 9781400069514 eBook available

BIOGRAPHY

Holden Caulfield famously remarks in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye that after finishing a good book, “you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” As Kenneth Slawenski demonstrates, J.D. Salinger was not an author who would take your call. Reclusive and devoted to his craft, he seems to have had little time for anyone as he got older, with the possible exception of his children. Slawenski’s authoritative and illuminating new book, J.D. Salinger: A Life, is the

result of many years of exhaustive research on the author’s writings, philosophy and the smallest details of his life.

Salinger’s decision to become a writer was made early in his life. His father was opposed to his choice, but his mother, to whom The Catcher in the Rye is dedicated, believed that her son was destined for greatness, a view he came to share. It was not, however, until Salinger heard the editor Whit Burnett read aloud William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun Go Down” to a class at Columbia University that he began to focus seriously on the craft of writing.

From this experience, he learned never to interfere with the reader and the story, to strive instead to write from the background.

Slawenski says it cannot be overstated that June 6, 1944, was the turning point in Salinger’s life. D-Day and the 11 months of combat that followed, including the Battle of the Bulge, “would brand itself upon every aspect of his personality and reverberate through

his writings.” Salinger was in the Counter Intelligence Corps, where his duty was to arrest suspects and interrogate prisoners. His wartime experience encompassed both horror and bravery; the memory of his fellow soldiers who had been killed haunted him for years.

Slawenski’s enthusiasm for his iconic yet mysterious subject is evident on every page. We learn about Salinger’s romance with Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill, who later married the much older Charlie Chaplin, as well as many other relationships in his life, such as his friendship, mostly by letter, with Ernest Hemingway; his often difficult relations with his editors and publishers; and his three marriages (especially the first two).

Slawenski offers insightful interpretations of both his well-known and obscure works and explains how Salinger began to understand his professional work as a spiritual exercise. Readers may be surprised when Slawenski explains why Salinger did not deliberately choose to

Day of Honey

By Annia Ciezadlo Free Press $26, 400 pages ISBN 9781416583936 eBook available

MEMOIR

In the fall of 2003, freelance journalist Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad, filing war stories alongside her Lebanese husband while making pasta puttanesca in their in-room kitchen.

Day of Honey is the story of their courtship and marriage, of the two wars that they lived and worked through, and an examination of the role food plays in both love and war.

The title is drawn from an Arabic proverb: “Day of honey, day of onions.” That cycle of sweetness and grief, pleasure and tears suffuses every page here.

“Many books narrate history as a series of wars. . . . I look at history as a series of meals,” Ciezadlo writes.

She traces her own wanderlust to a vagabond childhood with a single mother that included time spent in a San Francisco homeless shelter, facing down a block of tofu. Her husband was uprooted by the civil war in Lebanon as a child and grew up in New York, where the two met.

When his job sent him to Pakistan six days after the 9/11 attacks, Ciezadlo dragged friends to a series of kebab houses, keeping him near by recounting all his dietary quirks to anyone who would listen.

When their assignment in Iraq ended, they moved to Beirut and began a more settled, domestic life . . . just in time for a renewal of sectarian conflict. While rifle fire pinged past her apartment window, Ciezadlo tried to cook pasta on a hot plate, feeling that “as long as I was cooking, I would be safe.”

The book brims with Middle Eastern history, but it’s the small details that tell the story: the Iraqi

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reviews man who expounds on the greatness of Chicken Soup for the Soul; neighborhoods destroyed by war that sprout rooftop and terrace gardens; bars and cafes where Sunnis and Shiites might sit at the same table and share a meal, then leave and come to blows. Capped off with a collection of mouthwatering recipes, many from Ciezadlo’s larger-than-life mother-in-law, Day of Honey turns thoughts on food into provocative food for thought.

—Heather Seggel

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

By Peggy Orenstein Harper $25.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780061711527 eBook available

CULTURE

NONFICTION while, the reason why younger girls have ditched Barbie for Bratz lies in a principle marketers call Kids Getting Older Younger: “Toys and trends start with older children,” Orenstein explains, “but younger ones, trying to be like their big brothers and sisters, quickly adopt them.” Though she investigates many subjects you’ve probably heard too much about—sexting, children’s beauty pageants—Orenstein’s witty, pointed commentary always adds insight and clarity: “There is power—magic—in awareness,” she writes.

Today’s girls walk a perilous tightrope. Can they be feminine without being sexualized? Is it possible to keep their friends while maintaining their own identity and values?

Orenstein has given parents invaluable assistance in helping their daughters find their own answers.

—Pete Croatto

Ugly Beauty

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“When did every little girl become a princess?” journalist and “girl expert” Peggy Orenstein (Schoolgirls) asks in Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

It’s not a casual question: Orenstein had begun to observe that her young daughter, Daisy, was blithely skipping down the sparkly path of Disney-approved play ideas and high-priced, morally questionable figurines. Orenstein craved a detailed map of that path. So she dove headfirst into the swamp of marketing, science and sociology that makes being a girlie-girl—in all its pink, princessy glory—such an alluring role for females of all ages.

If you’re anticipating a screeching rant on how parents have turned their daughters into midriff-bearing fembots, you’re way off. Orenstein refuses to play the blame game.

“I am hardly one to judge other mothers’ choices: my own behavior has been hypocritical, inconsistent, even reactionary,” she writes.

More than anything, Orenstein is curious, and her insatiable quest for knowledge—ever the brave soul, she even attends a Miley Cyrus concert—reveals how the imagination of girlhood has been reduced to a troubling, and highly marketed, uniformity. Thanks to the deregulation of children’s television in the 1980s, cartoons now resemble advertisements with plots. Mean-

By Ruth Brandon Harper $26.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780061740404 eBook available

HISTORY

As anyone who has ever dropped a bundle on Crème de la Mer skin cream can tell you, its high price is a positive selling point. Luxury in a jar is more attainable than a Central Park West penthouse; it’s a sign of social mobility you can stash in your purse. Helena Rubinstein’s genius as a cosmetics entrepreneur was to recognize that a woman’s ability to buy a lotion or lipstick was also a part of her personal empowerment, as when American suffrage activists wore red lipstick as a “badge of independence.”

Ugly Beauty, Ruth Brandon’s fascinating dual biography of Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller (founder of L’Oréal), charts the rise of the cosmetics industry over the course of the 20th century through the lives of these two very different beauty tycoons. Where Rubinstein offered cosmetics as a proto-feminist tool, and staffed her salons with her sisters and nieces, Schueller developed an authoritarian

business model and believed firmly in the subjection of women. Long after their founders’ deaths, the two companies merged in 1988 when L’Oréal acquired Helena Rubinstein.

Two narratives animate Brandon’s cultural history of the cosmetics industry. One is how the fairy-tale aspect of selling “hope in a jar” intersects with beauty standards and women’s evolving identities. Brandon’s book would be amply compelling even if it had focused on this theme alone. The second narrative, however, provides an unsettling glimpse into the political forces undergirding the beauty industry: After L’Oréal’s buyout of Helena Rubinstein, long-buried scandals concerning Schueller’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis, as well as his involvement with a brutal French fascist political party, began to emerge, forcing L’Oréal into a public relations retrenchment in the early 1990s.

Brandon’s scrupulous research into Schueller’s wartime activities and his right-wing political affiliations becomes the true focus of her book, and may give pause to anyone who buys products from L’Oréal companies. Equal parts cultural history and journalistic exposé, Ugly Beauty is compulsively readable and intentionally disturbing. Pretty on the outside, as Brandon shows us, does not necessarily mean pretty on the inside.

—Catherine Hollis

The Foremost Good Fortune

By Susan Conley Knopf $25.95, 288 pages ISBN 9780307594068 eBook available

MEMOIR

power of the Great Wall, the manic preparations for the coming Olympic games, poverty and wealth sitting cheek-to-cheek on city streets.

She describes her own misadventures, misgivings and mistakes with humor in The Foremost Good Fortune, her animated account of her daily life in her new home.

As she struggles to learn the language, to absorb the stark cultural differences between her old life and her new one, and to provide stability for her sons while her husband is consumed with his own job, Conley discovers some lumps on her breast that send her to the local hospital in Beijing. Because the medical staff seem indifferent to her fears, she returns to the U.S. for medical care and eventually undergoes a mastectomy in a Boston hospital. After a six-week period of convalescence at home in Maine, she returns to Beijing, to Tony and her sons.

On the first anniversary of her mastectomy, Conley gets stuck in the elevator in their high-rise apartment building, and all the anger, fear, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that have been lurking just beneath the surface of her daily life are revealed in a phone call to her husband. When she emerges from the elevator, she decides that she should lose track of the date of her mastectomy.

In the end, she recognizes that “words are what get me up in the morning. . . . Because the stories of our lives live on. And I would like my story to be about hope. It will also have the word disease in it, but that won’t be the whole story.” Conley’s lovely memoir powerfully reminds us that we draw our strength from the many little wonders of our everyday lives.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

never say die

In 2008, Susan Conley embarked on the most adventurous, challenging and harrowing road trip of her life. When her husband Tony landed a job in Beijing and moved there ahead of his family, she and their two young sons packed up their belongings and their lives in Maine and journeyed to the East.

A woman in transition, Conley stepped off the plane into a land of transitions: the ancient beauty and

By Susan Jacoby Pantheon $27.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780307377944 Audio, eBook available

CULTURE

Susan Jacoby sees nothing ennobling and much to dread in the onset of old age, particularly as it

NONFICTION plays itself out in America. Now 65 herself, she has little patience with all the happy talk about potential medical breakthroughs that promise to turn “ninety [into] the new fifty.” In Never Say Die, she argues that Americans can either fool themselves into believing that their bout with old age will somehow be magically better than it has been for all previous generations, or they can work for social and political changes that will cushion the ravages of the final years.

In addition to her substantial research on the problems of aging, Jacoby has confronted many of them personally. Her beloved grandmother, by her own assessment, “outlived her usefulness” and died surrounded by other old people “too demented to carry on any kind of conversation.” Her once-vigorous father died in his early 70s of lung cancer, and her longtime companion was stricken

by Alzheimer’s disease before also succumbing to cancer. Until she became old enough to qualify for Medicare, Jacoby was paying 15 percent of her after-tax income for health insurance. All these experiences convinced her that aging must be treated as a common social problem, not an individual one.

“The two overwhelming problems of real old age in the United States today,” she writes, “are health, which generally worsens over time, and the tendency of all but the richest Americans to grow poorer as they grow older.”

She points out that nearly half of Americans over the age of 85 suffer from some form of dementia, a situation imposing almost intolerable burdens on all but the richest families. Home health care, while cheaper and more desirable than institutional care, still goes underfunded, and women, who tend to earn less and live longer than men, become increasingly at peril as they age. Health care needs to be funded by higher taxes and made available to all, Jacoby argues, both to be just and to avoid tension between young payers and old recipients.

While Jacoby agrees that it makes sense to seek medical advances to prolong the quality of life, she insists that it’s much more important to address the consequences of aging as they exist now—and will for the foreseeable future.

—Edward Morris

The Good Daughter

By Jasmin Darznik Grand Central $24.99, 324 pages ISBN 9780446534970 eBook available

MEMOIR

as a young child watching her own mother suffer; her marriage at 13 to the monstrous man in the photo; finally, the forced abandonment of her first daughter, Sara—the Good Daughter of the title. Darznik, as the American daughter, ultimately offers a moving testimony to the half-sister she has never known, but whose story intertwines with her own, and for whom readers will surely wish a good life.

—Linda Stankard

Imagine it: One day, having grown up as the only child of two loving parents, you stumble upon a photograph that shatters your perceptions of your identity and the past. In the photo is a young girl in a wedding veil; you recognize the bride as your mother, but the groom beside her is definitely not your father. Your mind swirls; what does this mean? It sounds like the fantastical start of a suspense novel, but for Jasmin Darznik, author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life, it was a real-life shock.

Darznik discovered the photograph in her early 20s, while helping her mother move. She realized that she had to confront her mother, an ambitious, stalwart Iranian woman who was initially unwilling to talk about her life before moving to America. After many months, however, the first of 10 cassette tapes arrived in the mail; her mother had painstakingly recorded her story, revealing her former life in prerevolutionary Iran. As Darznik learns of the abuse, neglect, poverty and guilt her mother was once subject to, she sees her in a new and gentler light, and she begins to reconfigure her mother along with herself as the drama unfolds.

“Her story began to pass like a secret life between us,” Darznik writes as she transforms the tapes for us into a Scheherazade-like narrative that begins with the birth of her mother’s mother, Kobra, and illuminates contrasting images of Iran: the exotic Persia, full of persimmons, pomegranates and soft-bellied figs, and the ugly Persia, full of injustice, danger and cruelty to women. It is into this milieu that Darznik’s mother, Lili, is born.

While Lili’s new life in America is ultimately her salvation, it is the chronicle of her life in Iran that makes this such a wrenching and unforgettable tale: the bitter years

The Hidden Reality

By Brian Greene Knopf $29.95, 384 pages ISBN 9780307265630 Audio, eBook available

SCIENCE

In The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, leads the general reader on an excursion to the farthest and most mind-bending reaches of speculative physics. It’s a journey that explores the concepts and theories that underlie nine contending versions of parallel universes, or multiverses. “Each envisions our universe as part of an unexpectedly larger whole,” Greene writes, “but the complexion of that whole and the nature of the member universes differ sharply among them.”

As readers of his previous bestsellers—The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos—know, Greene is a particularly good guide in these heady realms. Mathematics is the language of theoretical physics, but Greene has an uncanny ability to find metaphors and analogies to substitute for mathematical explanations (while allowing those interested in the math to explore it in the footnotes). The narrative flows from easily comprehensible theories of the inflationary universe, through challenging concepts evolving from string theory, to wildly provocative theories of virtual multiverses. Each chapter also progresses from easily grasped ideas to the more abstract, with Greene offering encouraging summaries and escape hatches along the way.

Does Greene himself believe any of these theories? He remains skeptical, he says. There is as yet little to no experimental data to support these theories; as he frequently points out, experimental proof would require resources far beyond those currently available on Earth.

On the other hand, counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics have been proven, so we already know that the deeper reality of the cosmos is far stranger and more varied than our human walkingaround reality. Furthermore, he writes, “all of the parallel-universe proposals that we will take seriously emerge unbidden from the mathematics of theories developed to explain conventional data and observations.” In other words, Greene remains open to the possibilities.

Likewise, lay readers with open minds and some patience will find The Hidden Reality an exhilarating—if sometimes vertigo-inducing—journey.

— Al d e n M u d g e

top shelf

this month’s top publisher picks

I Beat the Odds Michael Oher

For the first time ever, the football star made famous in The Blind Side shares his amazing journey from homelessness to living the American dream.

Gotham

HC 9781592406128 $26

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens PB 9781893670471 $20 http://tebotbach.org/publication.html#godseed

“A lovely, singing book, in both art and language— intricate beauties informed by informed passion.”

—William Kittredge “A beautiful mix of words and images, light and deep.”

—William Wiley Tebot Bach Press

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children’s books

reviews mor, showing the possibilities when different generations and community members rally together.

— A ng e la L e e p e r

Trapped

SNOWBOUND AT SCHOOL R e v i e w b y A N G E L A L EE P E R

Sophomore and rising basketball star Scotty Weems is going through the motions of a typical school day when the first signs of a blizzard appear in southern New England. As seven lingering students wait for a ride home from Tattawa High School (“in the boondocks, the sticks, the butt-end of nowhere”), readers of Michael Northrop’s nail-biting Trapped learn on the first page that some of the kids “weren’t going to get picked up, not on that day and maybe not ever.”

The nor’easter stalls over three states, gaining strength instead of weakening and dumping nonstop snow for days. There are no warm Breakfast Club moments as students from all social levels are forced together. Marooned at the school with Scotty are his best friends Jason, who’s secretly building a go-kart in the shop wing, and Pete, an allaround “normal” guy; school thug Les; strange, antisocial Elijah; and attractive freshman Krista and her good friend Julie.

By Michael Northrop, Scholastic, $17.99, 240 pages, ISBN 9780545210126, Ages 12 and up What starts out as a novelty—a night at school with no adults, with the most annoying aspect being the inability to access Mafia Wars via cell phone—turns to sheer survival as one by one they lose communication, light, heat and food. With boredom, fatigue, fear and desperation mounting as fast as the snow, Scotty and readers alike begin to wonder if and how they’ll die, especially when some of the students begin getting injured and disappearing.

Readers will continuously change their minds about potential suspects as Northrop spins a series of fastpaced twists and turns. They’ll also want to make sure they have plenty of time to read this thriller, because once they sink into it, they won’t want to surface until they reach the dramatic ending.

HIDE AND SQUEAK

By Heather Vogel Frederick Illustrated by C.F Payne Simon & Schuster $16.99, 32 pages ISBN 9780689855702 Ages 4 to 8

PICTURE BOOK

30

What child hasn’t made a run for it when it’s time for bed? In Hide and Squeak, one mouse baby sends his daddy on a wild chase up, down and all around. No territory is left untouched: the garden, the sofa, the curtains—he even scurries mischievously up the lamp chain.

It’s all a good-natured romp, though, a merry game of hide-andsqueak. Father calls out a cheerful refrain: “Mouse baby, mouse baby, where can you be? / I can’t see you. / Can you see me? / It’s time for bed. / It’s time for sleep. / No more time for hide and squeak.” Though baby is clearly a “rascal” and a “scamp,” the affection between parent and child is evident. Author Heather Vogel Frederick employs easy rhymes to draw us into the game, and illustrator C.F. Payne’s delightful pen-and-ink drawings, colored with

acrylics and colored pencils, create larger-than-life images of baby mouse and his father in gloriously colored two-page spreads.

Toddlers and preschoolers will find pleasure in the rhythmic pattern as this new bedtime favorite encourages mouse babies around the world to “wiggle a whisker / wiggle a tail” and hop into bed with a reassuring hug from loved ones.

— J e nn i f e r R o b i n s o n

CLOSE TO FAMOUS

By Joan Bauer Viking $16.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780670012824 Ages 11 and up

MIDDLE GRADE

“When your heart is ready to break, that’s the perfect time to bake,” is one of Foster McFee’s many tips for cooking—and living.

In Close to Famous by Newbery Honor-winning author Joan Bauer, 12-year-old Foster has indeed found the perfect time to bake. Still griev-

ing from the death of her soldier father in Iraq nearly five years ago, Foster and her backup-singer mother are forced to flee their Memphis rental after her mother is punched in the face by her ex-boyfriend.

After driving all night, they find themselves in Culpepper, West Virginia, where a new prison and a factory closing have hit the locals hard. With dreams of being the youngest chef on the Food Network, Foster introduces her scrumptious cupcakes—and hope—to the depressed town. With the tween’s help, aspiring documentary filmmaker Macon confronts the unfulfilled promises of the prison, secluded award-winning actress Charleena Hendley finds the courage to return to Hollywood, Wayne (of Angry Wayne’s Bar and Grill) reveals a generous side, and Foster’s mother steps out of the shadows and into the limelight as a singer.

Even Foster is transformed as she admits to being practically illiterate.

Just like her cupcakes, she springs back when ready. Her newfound friends begin to teach her to read and change her self-perception from limited to limitless. Through it all, Bauer once again displays her keen gift for dialogue and subtle hu-

THE FLOATING ISLANDS

By Rachel Neumeier Knopf $16.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780375847059 Ages 12 and up

TEEN

Imagine a place so wild and fantastical that even the characters who inhabit this strange world can lose themselves in the magic around them. These are the Floating Islands, held above the seas by the power of invisible dragons.

Trei is only 14, orphaned and alone, when he first sees the flying men of the Islands. Taken in by his aunt and uncle, he is “sky-mad” by the time he meets his fierce cousin Araenè, who also has seemingly unattainable dreams. The Floating Islands place very strict constraints on women, and Araenè’s secret of donning boys’ clothing and disappearing into the streets creates a bond between the two teens.

A tragedy causes their worlds to get a little smaller and their paths to become infinitely tougher. Doors appear out of nowhere for Araenè, and through them she finds a possible future as a mage, a career only allowed for boys. Trei attains his ultimate dream of becoming a kajurai—a flying man—only to have his life threatened by an invading army. The young cousins find that their special gifts may be the only way to save the Floating Islands from disappearing forever.

In The Floating Islands, Rachel Neumeier creates a world with special wings designed for the flight of men and stone orbs that deliver magic in the form of flavors and spices. The rich details of Neumeier’s fantasy appear with the same ease with which the Islands seem to hover over the ocean, and the alternating voices of Trei and Araenè swap back and forth like the changing of trade winds. Young readers will find this book a delicious feast of geographies, histories, magic and flavors, and this reader certainly hopes there will be a sequel.

— C a t D . A cr e e

BLACK HISTORY

By Robin Smith

meet JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

E

very year as Black History Month approaches, dozens of excellent children’s books on the subject arrive in my mailbox. It’s always a joy to discover new selections for my library and classroom. Here are three of my favorites from this year’s offerings.

Shane W. Evans’ Underground (Roaring Brook, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9781596435384) is a good choice for the youngest readers.

As soon as parents and teachers introduce books about Harriet Tubman, children want to read the story for themselves. Evans has created a book just for this audience. The font is plain, the words are few and the illustrations pack an emotional wallop. The first half of the book contains only this spare text: “The darkness.

The escape.

We are quiet.

The fear. We crawl. We rest. We make new friends.”

Each phrase is accompanied by a blueand-black illustration of the night escape. When the family is welcomed by new friends, the yellow of their lantern becomes a potent symbol of hope. As the runaways move North, the sky lightens, culminating in a brilliant yellow on the book’s last spread. This stunning simplicity respects the young audience and makes us want to join in with the book’s closing words, “Freedom. I am free. He is free. She is free. We are free.”

Slightly older readers will enjoy the poems that tell the story of The Great Migration: Journey to the North (Amistad, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780061259210). Longtime collaborators Eloise Greenfield and Jan Spivey Gilchrist come together in what I think is their best book yet. One of the universal human stories is the story of migration, but many young people still do not know about the movement of more than a million African Americans in the early 20th century, fleeing the

threats of the Ku Klux Klan and the economic conditions of the South, to northern cities. What’s remarkable about this book is how much these poems are reminiscent of the diaries of the Oregon Trail and the stories of European immigrants to America. Here is the pain of leaving the beloved farm, the excitement of new possibilities and the worry that the past will be forgotten. The story is elevated by the stunning collages—ephemera and manipulated photographs set into a lush painted background. Almost every face looks directly out, inviting the reader into the world of the frightened and excited traveler, and out at the new places to explore.

The Great Migration is a treasure for parents, teachers and students who want to learn more about this important time.

Arnold Adoff’s poetry continues to challenge and amaze his fans.

Roots and Blues: A Celebration (Clarion, $17.99, 96 pages, ISBN 9780547235547), which includes stunning Expressionistic paintings by award-winning illustrator R. Gregory Christie, inspires me each time I return to it. Adoff’s unique poetic style, with unusual spacing and lining, reminds readers of the music he is celebrating. From the days of the Middle Passage, the seeds of the blues were being planted into the musical soul of African Americans. The endpapers of the book, with handwritten names of hundreds of blues musicians from John Lee Hooker to Ethel Waters and everyone in between, remind the reader of the scope of the genre, while the poems themselves reflect the influences on it. When young readers (and adults, too!) take the time to explore Adoff’s riffs, they will never look at poetry the same way again.

would you describe Q: How

the book?

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

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

was your childhood hero?

Q: Who

Q: W hat books did you enjoy as a child?

one thing would you like to learn to do?

Q: What

Q: W hat message would you like to send to children?

MADELINE AT THE WHITE HOUSE The grandson of Madeline’s creator, Ludwig Bemelmans, artist and writer John Bemelmans Marciano is carrying on the family tradition by creating new adventures for the beloved character. His latest is Madeline at the White House (Viking, $17.99, 48 pages, ISBN 9780670012282), which takes the little French girl and her classmates to Washington, D.C. Marciano and his family live in Brooklyn.

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WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

Oodles of caboodles

ally, the prefix “ca” was attached to “boodle” to give the phrase that alliterative quality that characterizes so many of our most popular phrases, and the familiar expression kit and caboodle was born.

Dear Editor, My mother often used the expression the whole kit and caboodle.

Can you tell me something about the origin of this phrase?

D. N. Elmira, New York

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

This curious expression came to us via a long road. Its roots go back to the 18th century, when the phrase the whole kit was commonly used to mean “the whole collection.” In this context, kit refers to “a group of persons or things.”

Beginning in the mid-1800s, a variety of terms began to be paired with kit, including cargo, bilin, boodle and caboodle, all of which meant “group” or “collection.” One popular version was the whole kit and bilin, defined in an 1859 edition of Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms as “the whole lot.”

Bilin was a dialectal pronunciation of boiling, which meant “a seething mass,” particularly of people. A couple of years later, people began using the phrase the whole kit and boodle in the same way. Eventu-

Dear Editor, Could you please explain the origin of the expression by and large?

M. C. Hastings, Nebraska By and large is a common adverbial phrase that means “on the whole” or “in general.” Oddly enough, the expression comes from the language of sailing, in which by and large refers to the ability of a vessel to sail well both toward and away from the wind. In this context, the word by basically means “near” or “at hand,” and the word large means “with the wind on the quarter.”

The nautical phrase was first recorded in a 1669 Mariner’s Magazine: “Thus, you see the ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and large.” In time, like many

other nautical terms, it came to be adopted by landlubbers, first in the sense “in many directions” or “in all ways” and ultimately with its present meaning.

IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES

Dear Editor, According to the etymology in my dictionary, the word agony comes from a Greek word meaning “to celebrate.” This seems like a pretty unlikely development! What gives?

E. H. Atlanta, Georgia The ancient Greeks were fond of celebrations that included games and athletic contests. From their verb agein, meaning both “to lead” and “to celebrate,” the Greeks derived the noun agon to denote a public gathering for such celebrations. The struggle to win the prize in the athletic contests then came to be called agonia, which also took on the general sense of “any difficult struggle.” From this meaning, agonia additionally came to refer to the pain, whether physical or mental, that was involved in such a

EVERYTHING LITERARY

1

Reprinted from The Everything Literary Crosswords Book by Charles Timmerman, published by Adams Media, an F+W Media, Inc. Co. Copyright ©2007, F+W Media, Inc.

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crossword solution

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Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

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DOWN 1. Pub missile 2. Absent 3. Alpo alternative 4. B.O. sign 5. Rumormonger 6. C abinet department 7. Opus ___ 8. Program file extension 9. Antlered animal 10. Marketing 11. Skill 12. Concur 13. Some tuskers 22. Married man 24. Double reed player 25. Delay 26. From l. to r.

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70. Was a fink 71. Porn 72. Panache

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31. Set (on) 32. “___-Tiki” 33. Nick’s relation to Gatsby, initially 35. Fixed 39. They, in Tours 40. Wax producer 41. Bad-mouth 42. China’s __-tse 43. Island off the SE coast of China 45. Myrtle Wilson’s relation to 63-Down 47. Antiquity 48. ___ Kabibble 49. Tolkien creations 50. “__ of robins...”: Kilmer 53. Periodic table listings: Abbr.

55. More than dislike 57. Collide with 58. Some rush-hour periods: Abbr.

61. “It’s either you ___” 62. One of the Aleutians 65. Kind of room 67. Smoke combined with fog 68. Fabled fliers 69. Lofty

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The grEAT GATSBY ACROSS 1. Object of Gatsby’s desire 6. Midmonth day 10. Union flouter 14. Informed 15. Right after 16. Descartes quote word 17. Novarro of silents 18. “___ yellow ribbon...”

19. __ Flynn Boyle 20. Actor Hardin et al.

21. It’s definite 23. Jordan Baker’s profession in The Great Gatsby 25. Late songstress Nyro 27. Anglers’ hopes 28. Arthur Ashe’s alma mater

4

struggle. The Romans borrowed the Greek words agon and agonia with essentially the same meanings.

Agonia became agonie in 14thcentury Middle English, when Chaucer used it to mean “mental anguish or distress.” During the 17th century, agony acquired the sense of “intense pain of body” and then took on the additional sense of “a violent struggle, conflict or contest,” harking back to its Greek origins.

In an interesting twist, an entirely new sense of agony developed in the 18th century: “a strong and often uncontrollable display (as of joy or delight),” as when Henry Fielding wrote of “the first agonies of joy” in Tom Jones (1749). Thus we see a shift from intense pain to intense pleasure. Nevertheless, the distressful senses of agony still predominate.

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29. 1989 Literature Nobelist 30. How to Murder Your Wife star Virna 32. Hindu deity 34. Vitality 36. Secluded valley 37. Part of SEATO 38. Improvised bed 41. Doubt 44. L ong Island location of Gatsby’s house 45. Hamm of soccer

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46. Home: abbr.

50. At __ (stumped) 51. Actress Shearer 52. Ireland’s De Valera 54. Forebodings 56. Drum sites 58. “Dear” one 59. Gangster’s gal 60. Popeye’s ___ Pea 63. Husband of 1-Across 64. Horned Frogs’ sch.

66. Great deal

N O R M A

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I S A R M O S L L A I G S I W E S T E G G

Y I D E S E N E X T T I E A N T H E G A U R A S I C K H B O R R E A R D I M I S A N L D I S H A T N T H E R A A T T U R O C S S M U T

O M E N S O B O I S T

S C A B E R G O L A R A L F E R I T E S N G G E D L A O R E S S E N T S S A M S L B O W O B L E T Y L E