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AMERICAN OPUS also inside

Louise Erdrich’s latest masterpiece, The Mighty Red, has its heart in the valley where she grew up

13 scary-good reads for Halloween plus interviews with

Ramona Emerson, Wright Thompson & Sabaa Tahir

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OCTOBER 2024

features

cover story | louise erdrich

The acclaimed author discusses writing The Mighty Red, a story of North Dakota’s Red River Valley.

feature | paranormal romance

This year’s best magical love stories dig deep, with tales that are as emotional as they are enchanting.

feature | graphics 8

Three graphic novels make major strides, going back to a classic—and deep into the woods. feature | halloween

Whether you prefer to spend the night partying or snuggled up with a book, we have the perfect spooky read for you.

interview | ramona emerson

For the forensic photographer-turned-mystery novelist, humanizing the victims of violent crimes is not just a profession, it’s a calling.

The Barn chronicles the fight to preserve the memory of Emmett Till. behind the book | sacha lamb

Jewish history and folklore inspired the central mystery of The Forbidden Book. q&a | sabaa tahir

Sabaa Tahir’s new fantasy duology returns to the world of her An Ember in the Ashes series, kicking off with Heir.

feature | children’s halloween

The ghoulish beings, both adorable and creepy, that haunt these books will delight young readers.

feature | meet the author

Meet Devin Elle Kurtz, the author-illustrator of The Bakery Dragon

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Cover photo of Louise Erdrich © Jenn Ackerman. Cover includes art from Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red © 2024, art by Aza Erdrich Abe, design by Milan Bozic. Reproduced by permission of Harper.

Red is an earth tone

Love, a river and sugar beets—in Louise Erdrich’s stunning 19th novel, it’s all connected .

Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.

The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for the book?

Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.

At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river. There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.

I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What kind of research did you do?

I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.

LITERARY FICTION

I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.

review | H the mighty red

A seemingly doomed wedding is the focal point of Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, a propulsive novel that further justifies this beloved author’s acclaim. Time and time again, with just a few words of perfectly placed description—like “the layaway bridal gown hung like an apparition on the outside of the closet door”—Erdrich lends Shakespearean tones to her carefully drawn scenes.

Kismet Poe is a likable, confused teenager who desperately hopes that college will rescue her from the suffocating boredom she feels in Tabor, North Dakota, in 2008. Impulsively, she agrees to marry Gary Geist, a handsome young man who will eventually inherit two giant sugar beet farms. Quarterback Gary, however, is haunted by a tragedy involving his football teammates, the details of which are gradually and tantalizingly revealed. Kismet

Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care. And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those

also remains attracted to another boyfriend, Hugo Dumach—a lovable, smart, homeschooled boy who “long[s] to challenge Gary to a duel.” He works in his mother’s bookstore, but plans to head to the oil fields to earn enough money to win Kismet over. In the meantime, Hugo and Kismet read and discuss Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as they try to resolve their romantic predicament. “Whatever Emma would do,” Kismet concludes, “I should do the opposite.”

Erdrich is a masterful literary juggler, commanding a richly drawn cast of characters whose encounters overflow with humor and pathos, as well as a variety of compelling storylines. Kismet’s father goes missing, for instance, and seems to have embezzled the church renovation fund. Her mother, Crystal, makes “bread from scratch not because it was artisanal but because it was cheaper.” Crystal and

Kismet “had come to know on some level that they were the real Americans—the rattled, scratching, always-in-debt Americans.” These, of course, are the people who populate Erdrich’s many novels.

The title refers to the Red River of the North, which snakes its way through the Red River Valley. This is very much a novel about the land and the people who have farmed it and fought to control it. Erdrich comments on the greed of agribusiness, noting that “this nutritionless white killer,” sugar, “is depleting the earth’s finest cropland.” Yet the book is also, as one character describes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “about what’s most important . . . this kind of love between a parent and a child.”

With The Mighty Red, Erdrich takes on monumental themes in what just might be a new American classic.

—Alice Cary

H The Mighty Red Harper, $32, 9780063277052

“I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there.”

six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.

Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write?

Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.

Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.

Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.

Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”

This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.

The book club scenes are marvelous! Are you in a book club?

I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.

—Alice Cary

book clubs by julie hale

Adventure awaits

In Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (Norton, $12, 9781324076155), Tiya Miles explores the lives of a group of remarkable women. As she tells the stories of Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Tubman, Pocahontas and other notable female figures, Miles looks at the ways in which the great outdoors impacted their personal development and understanding of the world. Her narrative is a beautifully observed testament to the importance of place. Reading groups will find a range of discussion topics, including women’s empowerment and the influence of nature.

Grab

one of these books, gather your book club and get outside!

What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Penguin, $19, 9780593298909) by Jennifer Ackerman offers fresh perspectives on the nocturnal predator. Over the centuries, the owl has been portrayed as intelligent, vigilant and enlightened while remaining strangely inscrutable. Ackerman penetrates the bird’s unique mystique as she teams up with ornithologists and other experts to find out how owls connect with each other, acquire food and migrate. Blending the latest research with her own discerning impressions, Ackerman delivers an exceptional scientific study that’s revealing and accessible.

In Bicycling With Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration (Timber, $18.99, 9781643262185), Sara Dykman shares the story of the remarkable odyssey she undertook in 2017. Beginning in Mexico and traveling on a ramshackle bike, Dykman followed the migration course of the eastern monarch butterfly to draw attention to the vulnerability of the species. In a tale that’s funny, insightful and poetic, Dykman reflects on the fragility of nature and the challenges of bike travel, and acquaints readers with the majestic monarch. Themes of ecology, exploration and solitude make this a rewarding book club pick.

Melissa L. Sevigny chronicles the journey of two mavericks in Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon (Norton, $17.99, 9781324076117). The hazards of the Colorado River did not deter botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, who navigated the treacherous waterway in 1938 in order to index the Grand Canyon’s plant species. Aided by a small team, the duo traveled for 43 days. Sevigny brings their expedition to vivid life in a narrative that’s at once a rip-roaring adventure story and a thoughtful account of the natural world.

A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale recommends the best paperback books to spark discussion in your reading group.

© JENN ACKERMAN

Sign

H I Did Something Bad

Set in Yangon, Myanmar, I Did Something Bad (Griffin, $18, 9781250330512) by Pyae Moe Thet War combines kisses-only romance and suspense. Freelance journalist Khin Haymar has two months of access to movie star Tyler Tun in order to write an in-depth exposé. It’s the chance of a lifetime and, even though she’s known for more serious articles, such as one featuring an underground abortion clinic, Khin is recently divorced and needs a boost. When Khin and Tyler meet, they’re immediately drawn to each other, but journalistic ethics rule out a relationship between a writer and subject. Still, Tyler is handsome and sexy, and one night he steps in to save Khin from danger . . . how could she not be tempted? As they work together to investigate the threat, love blossoms. With swoony moments and some serious ones regarding the importance of journalism, this sweet yet thoroughly modern story satisfies.

The Highlander’s Return

The Highlander’s Return (Avon, $9.99, 9780063135352) by Lynsay Sands hits all the classic notes of a satisfying historical romance: a marriage of convenience, a strong-but-silent hero and a feisty heroine who’s very deserving of her Happily Ever After. Six years ago, Annella Gunn’s husband, William, went missing the day after their wedding. After his younger brother, brawny warrior Graeme, returns home and delivers the news that William has died, Annella is a widow with an unknown future ahead of her. Graeme knows almost instantly what the beautiful Annella should do: Marry him. As he assumes his brother’s position of laird of the Gunn clan, Graeme also takes on the task of convincing Annella to become his bride. Filled with excitement in and out of the bedchamber, this romance is a sizzling addition to Sands’ Highland Brides series.

Showmance

Tony Award-nominated playwright Chad Beguelin offers up a truly entertaining debut romance in Showmance (Penguin, $19, 9780143138396). When playwright Noah Adams’ Broadway musical closes after one night, he returns to his Illinois hometown to look in on his ailing dad and lick his own wounds. The community’s local theater was his refuge as a gay teen, and when the group asks him to stage the same musical that just flopped, Noah can’t say no—even though Luke, his hunky high school nemesis/bully, is involved. Told in Noah’s first-person perspective, with well-drawn characters and bouncy dialogue, Showmance includes touching scenes between Noah and his undemonstrative father, as well as some of Noah’s old tormentors. As it turns out, hunky Luke likes guys, too, and his and Noah’s smoking chemistry leads to a happy ending that readers—especially those who catch all the musical references—will grin over.

THE MAGIC WITHIN

This year’s best paranormal romances dig deep, with love stories that are as emotional as they are enchanting .

Rules for Ghosting

Shelly Jay Shore’s tenderhearted debut, Rules for Ghosting (Dell, $18, 9780593723944), is equal parts ghost story, Jewish family epic and achingly sweet queer love story. From the time that Ezra Friedman was young, he was able to see dead people. This wouldn’t be a problem for some, but growing up in a funeral home made it all a bit more complicated. From his grandfather’s ghost giving him judgmental glares when Ezra transitioned, to the never-ending influx of spectral strangers that appeared while families grieved, there seemed to be no escape. It only made sense that when it came time to choose a profession of his own, Ezra ran to the opposite end of the life cycle and became a doula. But when his dream job falls through, Ezra finds himself right back at the family business, trying to pick up the pieces. This time, however, a very cute volunteer usher named Jonathan seems to be making eyes at Ezra. Things in that area seem promising—until Jonathan’s deceased husband, Ben, starts showing up.

Rules for Ghosting is for romance readers who like their stories with an undercurrent of sadness; think Anita Kelly or Ashley Poston. Ezra and Jonathan are both actively grieving, trying to put one foot in front of the other while finding happiness in everyday joys like queer family dinner and sloppy kisses from Ezra’s pitbull. These small moments of humor and brevity bring lightness to a book that otherwise deals with many of life’s difficult trials.

A gentle love story with a beautiful, queer, Jewish relationship at its center, Rules for Ghosting will make you laugh and make you cry, maybe even at the same time.

—Katie Garaby Rise and Divine

between Dasha and Ivy is sweet and passionate, while the relationships Dasha has with other figures—the Avramov clan, the other families, a stranger with amne sia who has a crucial role to play—give the story depth and resonance, making us care deeply about what happens to Dasha and Ivy as they face off with the evil that threatens the town. Like Harper’s other creations, Dasha has a combination of wit and grit that makes her irresistible.

—Elizabeth Mazer

Lightning in Her Hands

In Lightning in Her Hands (Berkley, $19, 9780593548592), Raquel Vasquez Gilliland returns to the small town of Cranberry, Virginia, and the fascinating Flores women she introduced in Witch of Wild Things. This time, Gilliland focuses on the mercurial Teal Flores as she embarks on a friends-to-lovers romance.

If you’re looking for spooky fun and adventure, there’s no better place to go than Thistle Grove, author Lana Harper’s wonderfully witchy town in Rise and Divine (Berkley, $19, 9780593637982).

The Avramovs are one of the four families balancing the magic of Thistle Grove, and they do that by bringing the creep factor: dealing with the dead. The most dangerous tasks fall to Dasha Avramov, the family’s devil eater. If a demon latches onto you like a tick, she can set you free—but the world beyond the veil is impossibly seductive. Its pull makes it hard for Dasha to connect with the real, living world, including her ex-girlfriend, Ivy Thorn. Dasha’s struggles come to a head during the Cavalcade, a sacred Thistle Grove event, when someone foolishly knocks on the veil and something impossibly dangerous knocks back

Harper always delivers on eerie atmosphere and warm heart. In her world, witchcraft is complex and interesting, with beautifully crafted details. But the real magic of this book lies in its rich, wonderful cast of characters. The romance

Teal has a magical gift, as all the Flores women do: She can alter the weather depending on her mood. But ever since her mother pinched a piece of her gift as a child before skipping town, Teal’s power has been unpredictable and uncontrollable. To fix her gift, she’ll probably have to find her long-lost mother, who unfortunately has a magical knack for hiding. A more pressing problem is that Teal doesn’t have a date to her ex’s wedding, but there’s an obvious, very hot solution for that: her longtime best friend, Carter Vasquez. Unfortunately, Carter decided a year ago, after a steamy, one-time-only make-out session, that he was done pining after Teal, and they haven’t spoken since.

But as it turns out, Carter needs Teal, too. To gain his inheritance from his recently deceased grandmother, he has to find a wife. So the two strike a bargain: They’ll pretend to get married, with Carter taking Teal to her ex’s wedding and giving her a cut of his inheritance. Building on a rich history of magical realism, Gilliland has crafted a family of strong but wounded women whose stories we crave and whose happiness we root for. While Teal is the main focus of this book, her sisters, Sage (the heroine of Witch of Wild Things) and Sky, are an integral part of her story. Lightning in Her Hands builds beautifully upon Witch of Wild Things, highlighting the importance of family and the strength of sisterly love, and will leave readers looking forward to Sky’s turn at the helm. But before we get there, we can savor this perfectly executed friends-to-lovers romance. Carter is an excellent foil for Teal: steady and even-keeled. The love and attraction they have for each other is palpable, and we know it’s only a matter of time before they realize it, too.

Lush and beautifully written, Lightning in Her Hands is a gorgeous novel full of heart, magic and family.

—Katie Garaby

Bold visual ventures

Three graphic novels make major strides, going back to a classic—and deep into the woods .

H Babe in the Woods

Julie Heffernan is predominantly known as a self-portraitist. Her astounding large-scale oil paintings are baroque, surrealist, highly staged and detailed, and often feature herself, barebreasted, surrounded by a riot of flora and fauna.

Many of Heffernan’s self-portraits are reproduced in Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost (Algonquin, $28.99, 9781643755595), her first graphic novel and a mesmeric work of autofiction. It is a loose retelling of how she became an artist, leaving a Catholic home where art didn’t exist and meeting people who helped her to discover the world of art history and her own fierce opinion and creative voice. A version of Heffernan recounts these events—often in the form of a one-sided conversation with her mother— while hiking deeper into the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child. We know from the outset that she’s getting herself lost, and as her mind whirls through her memories, examining traumas and questioning everything with a furious intensity, it is clear that she is making a dangerous, terrible choice. She is being a bad mother, and she says so.

Throughout Heffernan’s labyrinthine walk in the woods, we are treated to “revelations,” each centered on a work of classic art. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, and here she delivers brief lessons on famous paintings such as “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Wildens, which is accompanied by Heffernan’s revelation, “DON’T GIVE UP no matter WHAT!” as she shows how the painting uses two women’s naked bodies to create the shape of a pinwheel, whirling like blades in the center of the scene. The women are about to be raped, but they still have “ACTION! MOTION!! AGENCY!!!”

flashes further forward in time to the 1980s and 2020s as his descendants in turn pass on the tale.

Babe in the Woods is a staggering work of graphic literature, strange and enraged, carnal and emotional, encompassing the terrific force that keeps an artist moving forward. Reading it doesn’t feel like moving in a straight line, but rather a spiral, and as Heffernan writes, “a spiral always brings us back to a center, no matter how far we travel away from it.”

—Cat Acree

Big Jim and the White Boy

Countless readers have picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since it was published in 1885, and it’s commonly listed among the great American novels. Though the book is perennially popular, its author, Mark Twain, has been criticized for relying on racist caricatures when writing about Black Americans, particularly the character Jim, an enslaved Black man who travels with Huckleberry Finn in the book.

Big Jim and the White Boy (Ten Speed, $25.99, 9781984857729), by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson, offers the other side of the story of this American classic. The graphic novel retelling centers on Jim and his quest to reunite with his family after they have been sold away by Huck’s cruel and volatile father. Aided by the audacious Huck, Jim undertakes an epic journey across the antebellum South and Midwest. Interwoven with the narrative are glimpses of the elderly Jim telling his story to a group of his great-grandchildren in the 1930s, and

Walker and Anderson have collaborated before, on the Eisner Award-winning The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. Walker’s passion for storytelling shines through his prose, with humor and wisdom thoughtfully sprinkled into a narrative that is also realistic about the horrors of slavery. An author’s note explains the linguistic choices he made to humanize Jim while remaining authentic to the time period.

Anderson’s illustrations are distinctive and his attention to detail is impressive: His characters are recognizable at any age. The choice to frame the story as being told by an old and bickering Jim and Huck in the 1930s will make readers feel like part of the enthralled in-person audience, and demonstrates the power of oral storytelling in recording Black history.

This phenomenal graphic novel doesn’t set out to replace The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but to add immeasurably valuable context that has historically been left out. Jim’s story deserves to be told, and as Jim’s great-greatgreat-granddaughter says, “The story won’t tell itself.”

—Emily Koch

H Vera Bushwack

In the woods of Nova Scotia, Drew is building a cabin. Save for the company of their dog, Pony, Drew is alone—a fact that everyone seems to have an opinion or an assumption about. But Drew is determined to live their dream life in their cabin, so they go to work, accepting help from local men to chain saw the trees on their property. Sans chain saw, Drew is unassuming and a little awkward. But rev the engine, and they become the fiery Vera Bushwack, resplendent in assless chaps astride a noble steed, chain saw brandished like a sword. Drew can’t always be Vera, though, and when they aren’t working, they cycle through memories—some of kindness, some uglier.

Sig Burwash’s debut graphic novel, Vera Bushwack (Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95, 9781770467118), is about self-love, queer comfort and the importance of learning to trust again after trauma. Despite its vibrant cover image, Vera Bushwack is a quiet book. Much of the story is relayed without dialogue, through surreal memory reels and montages of Drew and Pony’s new life, which are at turns hilarious and heartbreaking.

Burwash’s illustrations are endearing and strange, even off-putting at times, which complements Drew’s story perfectly. Sparse black sketches over muted, monochromatic backgrounds capture a sense of space and isolation. One of Burwash’s biggest strengths as an artist is facial expressions; Pony, who is all ears and tongue, is simply a delight, while Drew’s emotional range, from blasé to maniacally gleeful, is something to behold. Readers may be surprised to learn that the book is a debut, not only because of the clear skill it displays, but also because it feels so lived in. That’s a testament to Burwash’s talent. Vera Bushwack is sure to be a meditative balm for any queer person who sees themself in Drew—or in Vera.

—Mariel Fechik

H The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus (Spiegel & Grau, 15.5 hours), Shirley Hazzard’s 1980 novel and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of two Australian sisters, Grace and Caroline Bell, from their arrival in postwar England to their middle age. It is a nuanced and richly detailed exploration of love, power, fate and remorse that gets better with each rereading—and is now available for the first time as an audiobook.

Hazzard’s writing is at once deceptively simple and surprisingly complex, full of wordplay, literary and scientific allusions, and sharp-eyed observations. It could have been tempting for a narrator to exaggerate the puns and games, to make sure that the reader “gets it.” Happily, acclaimed actor Juliet Stevenson beautifully balances wit, irony and compassion to mirror the subtle richness of Hazzard’s novel. The result is a performance that invites the audience to listen again and again to this remarkable book.

—Deborah Mason

Humor Me

Effortlessly engaging, Ferdelle Capistrano’s easygoing performance highlights humor and authentic character interaction in the audiobook of Humor Me (Macmillan Audio, 10.5 hours), Cat Shook’s sweet tale about navigating relationships. Presley Fry, Humor Me’s 20-something protagonist, is an overworked and underappreciated assistant at a New York City late night show. Though her job entails literally looking for humor—she scouts talent at comedy clubs— Presley’s been distracted since the recent death of her mother, Patty. Capistrano’s dulcet tones and flawless delivery capture the endearing Presley, and seamless transitions between characters in dialogue and well-timed asides bring out the humor without overdoing it. This charming audiobook will engage and delight fans of romantic comedies.

—Maya Fleischmann

Better Faster Farther

Journalist Maggie Mertens makes a compelling case for women who run to get their due in Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Hachette Audio, 9.5 hours). More than that, Mertens uses the history of women’s running as a lens through which to examine—and debunk—centuries-old assumptions about physiology, gender and race, from the mythical figure of Atalanta to the latest research on women’s ultramarathon performances exceeding men’s. Mertens’ reading of her work is matter-of-fact but engaging, and the audiobook includes image files of the running heroes she profiles. Better Faster Farther’s stories of female athletes just might inspire you to lace up your running shoes, throw in your earbuds and go for a jog.

—Norah Piehl

READ BY NATALIE NAUDUS READ BY JOHN PIRHALLA

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The Seventh Floor

In David McCloskey’s latest thriller, The Seventh Floor (Norton, $29.99, 9781324086680), the CIA team dedicated to eradicating moles is hilariously referred to as the “Dermatologists.” (I will never be able to unthink that.) There is no gentle introduction in this book, no setting of scene, no lulling the reader into a false sense of security. By the end of page six, a Russian agent is dead, having bitten down on his poison-filled Montblanc pen scant seconds before a team breaks into his office. A bit later, American agent Sam Joseph hangs upside down in a Russian blackops site, pleading ignorance to a group of unbelieving interrogators. The heart of the matter seems to be that there is an extremely high-placed Russian mole in the CIA, with one team of facilitators dedicated to seeing that said mole remains securely in place, and a second team equally dedicated to ferreting them out. But this is the world of espionage, after all, and alliances are fluid at best and downright lethal at worst, with no handy brochure that lists true affiliations. The two main characters are Sam and Artemis Procter, the latter a no-nonsense CIA operational chief who irritates most people simply by walking into a room. Together, these two must navigate the minefields and expose the mole, or very likely die in the attempt. The Seventh Floor is not really about these heroes as much as it is about the process of flushing out a traitor, but it proves remarkably difficult to put down either way. PS, McCloskey knows whereof he speaks: He is a former CIA analyst who delivered classified briefings to congressional oversight committees, and he regularly wrote for the President’s Daily Brief, the top secret intelligence summary that appears on the desk in the Oval Office every morning. It shows.

Rough Pages

Lev AC Rosen’s Rough Pages (Forge, $27.99, 9781250322449) is the third installment in his historical mystery series featuring gay detective Evander “Andy” Mills, a former San Francisco police officer who was outed and fired, and has now launched a private investigation firm serving the queer community in the City by the Bay. These postwar noir novels are set in the 1950s, when gay bashing was not only tolerated, but encouraged, even—or especially—by those sworn to “protect and serve.” Andy is drawn into a case involving the disappearance of Howard Salzberger, a bookstore owner who supplies a select clientele with queer books by subscription, and who may have run afoul of postal regulations prohibiting the distribution of “obscene materials.” At the center of the case is Howard’s missing notebook, which lists his subscribers: If the government gets hold of that, there will be hell to pay. The Mafia is also interested in obtaining the notebook, and among the mobsters, there is perhaps even less tolerance of queerness than there is by the government or general public. Like Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, Rosen’s

Evander Mills books unflinchingly depict historical— and in some ways, ongoing—discrimination against minorities. And like Mosley, Rosen takes his shots at the establishment by simply telling the day-to-day stories of marginalized people, the people who those in power tried to shove off into the shadows, but who persisted in living vibrant lives all the same.

Death by Misadventure

To begin with, a small confession: While reading Tasha Alexander’s latest Lady Emily mystery, Death by Misadventure (Minotaur, $29, 9781250872364), I happened upon the word “snarky.” As her novels are written in the vernacular of the time (in this case, 1906), “snarky” seemed to me to be very out of place. So I Googled the word, only to discover that its first recorded usage was in the year (wait for it . . .) 1906. I should have known better than to doubt Alexander. A high-society murder takes place in the shadow of Neuschwanstein Castle, a killing that has roots dating back a generation, to the days of the castle’s creator, Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig. Death by Misadventure is an Agatha Christie-esque lockedroom mystery, with the victim and the cast of potential perpetrators snowbound after an Alpine storm renders the roads impassable. Lady Emily will investigate the murder, as she has done in the 17 previous novels; she easily rivals Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote in terms of acquaintances lost to untimely and violent demise. Good luck figuring out “whodunit” before the big reveal. I certainly did not.

H The Drowned

In the 1950s, in a field adjacent to the rocky Irish coast, a Mercedes SL sits idling. The driver’s door is open, but no driver is in sight. A local outcast happens upon the car while walking his dog, and is in turn happened upon by the car owner’s distraught husband, who cries out that his wife has thrown herself into the sea. Thus begins John Banville’s atmospheric mystery novel The Drowned (Hanover Square, $28.99, 9781335000590). The local constable, a lout and a drunkard with no love for the aforementioned outcast, is first to investigate, but the situation requires an altogether more delicate and thorough touch. So Detective Inspector St. John (pronounced “sin-jun”) Strafford is called in from Dublin to preside over the case. And where Strafford goes, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that his colleague/adversary, pathologist and medical examiner Quirke, will not be far behind. As the investigation moves forward, Stafford and Quirke expose some troubling connections to an earlier case, a case that everyone thought had been solved, but now seems to have a few loose threads that require pulling. This is a book that deserves to be read slowly, not simply for the plotting and the characters (which are quite good in their own right), but for the sheer richness of the prose. The Drowned is genre fiction that rises to the level of full-on, capital L literature.

Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.

cozies by jamie orsini

H We Solve Murders

Fans of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries will devour the first book in Richard Osman’s newest series, We Solve Murders (Pamela Dorman, $30, 9780593653227). Bodyguard Amy Wheeler’s latest assignment is protecting Rosie D’Antonio, a brash, bestselling author who offended a Russian oligarch with her latest book. After Amy narrowly survives an attack, the women go on the run, and Amy contacts the only person she trusts: her father-in-law, Steve. The former London cop is a homebody at heart, preferring to spend his time with his cat. Still, when Amy needs him, Steve hops on a plane to help figure out who’s setting up Amy and why. We Solve Murders is an outstanding mystery novel, a pitch-perfect blend of the cozy mystery and thriller genres. While the central puzzle is excellent and well-crafted, the heart of the novel lies with Amy, Steve and Rosie.

The Jig Is Up

When single mom Kate Buckley receives a text from her younger sister, Colleen, asking for help, she packs up her two daughters and their cat to travel to Shamrock, Massachusetts, her Irish-themed hometown. But when Kate and her daughters arrive, Colleen is tight-lipped about her problem, and, hours later, Kate and Colleen discover the lifeless body of Deirdre, a champion Irish step dancer and Colleen’s best friend. Lisa Q. Mathews’ The Jig Is Up (Crooked Lane, $29.99, 9781639108510) deftly explores complicated family dynamics, which aren’t always depicted in the genre. At times, the mystery takes a back seat to exploring Kate’s relationships with her family, friends and Shamrock itself. However, future installments of the series may very well benefit from the thoughtful world building Mathews has done in this first Irish Bed & Breakfast mystery.

Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop

A spooky celebration conjures real frights in Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop (Kensington Cozies, $17.95, 9781496746146) by Emmeline Duncan. Bailey Briggs lives in the year-round Halloween-themed town of Elyan Hollow, Oregon. In addition to managing Lazy Bones Books, Bailey is also running the inaugural Spooky Season Literary Festival. But when she discovers a body in the middle of the town’s hay bale maze, Bailey uncovers decades-old grievances that are a lot scarier—and deadlier—than some of the stories in her bookshop. Duncan previously wrote the Ground Rules series, which similarly overflowed with Pacific Northwestern charm. The town of Elyan Hollow feels like its own character—quirky, warm and inviting (despite the murders). Fans looking for a lighthearted cozy to get them in the Halloween spirit won’t be disappointed with Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop.

lifestyles

by laura hutson hunter

H Bodega Bakes

In a heartfelt introduction that practically begs for a longer memoir, pastry chef and social activist Paola Velez calls her debut cookbook, Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store (Union Square, $35, 9781454952374), “a mix of my classical training and love of Americana filtered through the Bronx and the islands of the Caribbean.” Velez promises that you can find most of the ingredients for her recipes inside a bodega. The book’s first section is dedicated to cookies, most importantly, her popular Thick’ems. (“Makes 8 Thiiiiiick cookies,” she writes.) Velez’s casual writing is as fun to read as a cookbook gets. For example, when describing the blending process for the Matcha Thick’ems, Velez instructs readers to “pulse the mixer on and off, almost like you’re trying to jump-start a car.” Bodega Bakes also features 13(!) ways to make flan, a beginner’s guide to Dominican cakes, freezer desserts and plenty more morsels that will demand second helpings.

Great Women Sculptors

In her introduction to Great Women Sculptors (Phaidon, $69.95, 9781838667771), curator and scholar Lisa Le Feuvre uses the word “woman” to highlight a historical lack of institutional support, rather than anything inherently female about a particular artwork, subject matter or medium. That distinction is important, because even as Great Women Sculptors brings together more than 300 artists throughout 500 years of art history, women artists are still marginalized. This encyclopedic volume includes entries on established artists like Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois alongside a younger generation of stars like Lauren Halsey. The breadth of the book’s coverage is tempered by its focus on a single work per artist, an image of which is printed beautifully on heavy-duty paper and fully contextualized by a slate of 46 art experts.

Faithful Unto Death

A pet cemetery can be much more than fodder for horror stories. It can also be a way to dig deep into the ways that people live and grieve. Paul Koudounaris’ thoroughly researched book, Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves & Eternal Devotion (Thames & Hudson, $35, 9780500027516), investigates the bonds between pets and their owners. For a book that’s ostensibly about death, it’s not overly macabre: Passages about grief and Edna ClyneRekhy’s famous “Rainbow Bridge” poem are interspersed with images of a dog named Ah Fuk and a tomb for a beagle named Tippy, “the Elvis dog,” who was sung to by The King himself in her puppyhood. With archival photos and illustrations featured alongside Koudounaris’ portraits of headstones and informal altars, Faithful Unto Death will appeal to those interested in cultural rituals and the human-animal bond; readers who have lost their own pets will feel acknowledged in their grief.

Jamie Orsini is an award-winning journalist and writer who enjoys cozy mysteries and iced coffee.

Laura Hutson Hunter is a writer, curator and the arts editor of the Nashville Scene

’TIS THE NIGHT OF THE READER’S DELIGHT

Not sure what to read this Halloween? Pick a book based on your ideal way to spend the spookiest day of the year!

Model Home

Read if your Halloween plans are: A horror movie marathon, specifically A24 horror movies

Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s Model Home (MCD, $28, 9780374607135) is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). A disturbing tale that explores selfdoubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.

—Laura Hubbard

Djinnology

Read if your Halloween plans are: Exploring potentially haunted places: abandoned strip malls, creaky old houses, creepy caves . . . you get the idea

If you’re in the mood for some spine-tingling stories, cozy up to Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World (Chronicle, $35, 9781797214818), a fictitious (or is it?) compendium that is both fascinating and creepy, and made all the more so by Pulitzer Prize-winner Fahmida Azim’s striking illustrations. Seema Yasmin, a journalist, professor and physician, has created a fictional narrator named Dr. N, a taxonomist and ontologist who travels the world to investigate the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent djinn. Djinn, Dr. N writes, have been “haunting humanity since pre-Islamic times.” He submits the fruits of his research to his academic committee to explain his long

and unexplained absence from class, in this volume of stories from around the world that capture the long history and great variety of djinn. Many of these stories are related to human events, such as one concerning a ghostlike horseman who allegedly appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Another terrifying tale of more dubious origins takes place in London, when a woman delivering her husband’s specimen to an IVF clinic spots what she thinks is an abandoned baby in the middle of the road. She stops, of course, but things do not go as she expects. Djinnology is beautifully designed, with maps, English and Arabic inscriptions and more, gamely selling a high-octane, between-two-worlds vibe. Most of all, Azim’s haunting illustrations in smoky colors perfectly portray this menagerie of spirits. Readers will find themselves looking over their shoulders.

—Alice Cary

We Love the Nightlife

Read if your Halloween plans are: A bar crawl in a tiny costume, weather be damned

Quite often in fiction, the figure of the vampire represents loneliness, but we’ve arguably never seen that sense of yearning quite the way Stone Cold Fox author Rachel Koller Croft portrays it in her new novel, We Love the Nightlife (Berkley, $29, 9780593547533). Croft’s protagonist, Amber, is frozen in her party girl prime, turned in the waning days of the 1970s by her maker, the beautiful and manipulative Nicola. Decades later, Amber begins to imagine what life might be like without Nicola, and considers an escape plan. But Nicola’s influence is powerful, her ambitions are vast and her appetite for control deeper than Amber ever imagined. Despite her vampiric nature, Amber feels like one of us. This is mainly due to Croft’s skill; her conversational, warm and relatable prose depicts Amber not as a lonely monster, but as a person longing for freedom in a savage world covered in glitter and awash with pulsing music. We also get to see Nicola’s side of the story and her own brand of yearning, giving the book an antagonist who’s not just remarkably well-developed, but human in her own twisted way. These dueling perspectives, coupled with memorable side characters and a beautifully paced plot, make We Love the Nightlife an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted breakup story that’s perfect for vampire fiction lovers and for fans of relationship drama.

—Matthew Jackson

H American Scary

Read if your Halloween plans are: Watching a brainy horror documentary, or peeking at spooky clips on YouTube

Any horror writer doing their job knows how to tap into the fears that plague us most. Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond (Algonquin, $32, 9781643753560) provides a robust account of how art has reflected American dread for centuries. As it turns out, our history is rife with foundational fear, making it prime territory for some scary storytelling. Dauber starts with our country’s bloody beginnings (hello, Salem!). He then passes through slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and beyond to more contemporary paranoias reflected in film: murderous technology (The Terminator), individual indifference (the Final Destination series) and surveillance (Paranormal Activity), to name a few. Dauber’s attention to the details of myriad cultural touchstones, both famous and obscure, will entice those who care to tiptoe deeper into the darkest of the dark. American Scary’s greatest success is making readers consider what art may be born of our late-night anxieties. Spooky stuff, huh?

—Amanda Haggard

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

Read if your Halloween plans are: Curling up in a chair at home, reading a lightly spooky book or one of the more gothic Agatha Christies

Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle resides in a quiet hamlet in upstate New York. Ms. Pinkwhistle loves a good murder mystery—not only in books, but also the real-life, grisly deaths in the otherwise sleepy little town of Winesap. But when a string of local murders hits a little too close to home, Sherry realizes that she can no longer remain an unattached bystander. A demon, or several, might be at the heart of these ever-increasing deaths, and Sherry will need the help of her skeptical friends and her possibly possessed cat to root out the evil in Winesap. C.M. Waggoner’s The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society (Ace, $19, 9781984805881) is a stunning blend of genres, a supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery—and by the time readers realize this, they, like Sherry, are too deeply entrenched in the case to let it go. Waggoner infuses the pages with darkly humorous scenes and snappy dialogue, as well as unexpected magical touches that hearken back to the author’s previous fantasy novels, a combination that’s perfect for fans of horror tropes as well as lovers of mystery. Sherry Pinkwhistle is a sleuth to be reckoned with, and beneath her frumpy and soft exterior lies a pleasant surprise: a clever, determined heroine who will stop at nothing to protect the place she calls home and the people who live there.

—Stephanie Cohen-Perez

Eerie Legends

Read if your Halloween plans are: Circling up with friends and family for a night of scary stories

In Eerie Legends: An Illustrated Exploration of Creepy Creatures, the Paranormal, and Folklore From Around the World (Chronicle, $29.95, 9781797229393), Austin, Texas-based artist Ricardo Diseño’s bold, offbeat illustrations don’t simply complement the spine-tingling stories within, they lead the way. Each chapter blends elements of fiction and nonfiction, and includes a corresponding full-page illustration that stands on its own as a fully realized piece of art. The horror elements here are plenty scary, but skew toward the creature-feature end of the spectrum: Think Dracula or the Wolf Man. The chapter on Krampus details the yuletide terror’s appearance with frightening specificity: “Part man, part goat, and part devil. . . . His tongue is red, forked, creepy, and always whipping around.” Diseño’s hoofed monster, straight out of the Blumhouse cinematic universe, is shown in the midst of abducting a child. Each chapter ends with a campfire-style tale about the designated monster, written with Lovecraftian zeal by Steve Mockus. And the cover glows in the dark—a feature I hadn’t noticed until after I fell asleep with it on my bedside table. Talk about eerie.

—Laura Hutson Hunter

H The Empusium

Read if your Halloween plans are: A hike contemplating the macabre beauty of seasonal decay—be sure to leave the woods before dark!

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story (Riverhead, $30, 9780593712948), opens in 1913, when Polish 24-year-old Mieczysław Wojnicz arrives in the village of Görbersdorf, Germany, to be treated for tuberculosis. Tokarczuk is known for her penchant for the mythical and her deft, dark satirical wit, and as the subtitle, “A Health Resort Horror Story,” would lead readers to hope, the forests above the village whisper and echo with eerie sounds. The narration seems to come from ghostly entities who at times “vacate the house via the chimney or the chinks between the slate roof tiles—and then gaze from afar, from above.” A cemetery in a nearby town discloses evidence of a ritual killing every November. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Empusium is about the rigid patriarchal world of pre-WWI Europe, and the tension between rationality and emotion. It is also about a young person coming of age— like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, from which it draws inspiration. Facing a threat he does not understand, Mieczysław responds to the mysteries around him with curiosity and seeks his own way forward. Tokarczuk also favors a new path and, as usual, casts her enthralling spell.

—Alden Mudge

Witness for the dead

For forensic photographer-turned-mystery novelist Ramona Emerson, humanizing the victims of violent crimes is more than just a profession: It’s a calling .

“As a Diné person who has worked in forensics for 16 years, I saw death,” Ramona Emerson says. “I saw death all the time.”

She speaks by phone from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explaining how her Navajo heritage and work as a forensic photographer and videographer informed the creation of Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. Emerson’s first mystery starring Rita, Shutter, was a surprise hit that garnered numerous accolades and awards, including a spot on the National Book Award longlist.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone to read it, to tell you the truth,” she admits. Emerson, who is also a documentary filmmaker, adds, “I’ve never had anyone be interested in what I was doing.”

Indeed, there has been great anticipation for Exposure, the second book in her projected trilogy. Rita is summoned to photograph a horrific crime scene in the opening chapter: the murder of a retired police detective, his wife and six of their children. The oldest son, a teenager, is a suspect, but the ghost of one of his murdered sisters leads Rita to believe he is innocent.

Rita’s ability to see and hear the spirits of the dead is both a gift and a curse: The constant din of their voices becomes physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Navajo tradition, however, makes it taboo to talk about death, so Emerson had serious concerns about how her character might be received. “You don’t talk about people once they have died. You have a four-day mourning period and it’s done,” she explains. “So, my biggest fear about writing Shutter was that I was going to have some sort of Navajo backlash.” Instead, she happily discovered, many Native readers thanked her for openly discussing the subject.

“There are Navajo Nation police officers who see death—and nurses, doctors and forensic workers,” Emerson says. “Pathologists, scientists, all these people who work with life and death. And we do our jobs because that’s what we’re trained to do, and we’re good at it. And so, this second book is about this idea of Rita realizing that she has a spiritual side that she’s not tending to.”

“It’s a really big part of your work-life balance,” she continues. “Like, you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done. And a lot of what I write about in Exposure was Rita’s own healing, embracing the ideas of Navajo traditional culture, and why it’s there to protect you.”

Emerson has experienced a few paranormal events—although quite different from her character’s encounters. Once, while teaching a summer film workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she and two others heard a strange noise in an editing room where they had been having odd

technical problems with the equipment. They all turned around and watched a coffee mug move on the table, all by itself. “We saged that editing room out so fast!” says Emerson. In addition, on the same campus, she felt something grab her behind the bleachers in the black-box theater, where she and others were filming a production. “I thought maybe I just stumbled and there was something behind the curtain. But about 30 minutes later, when I got in my car, I had three huge scratches on my arm.”

Emerson has also had her own share of nightmares from difficult cases. In fact, Emerson’s late grandmother was so worried about her granddaughter that she took her to see a medicine man about a year and a half into the job. And in Exposure, Rita’s grandmother travels from the Navajo Nation town of Tohatchi— where Emerson herself grew up—to bring a medicine man to help Rita when her job becomes overwhelming.

Like Rita’s grandmother, Emerson’s grandmother played a pivotal role in her life. “She taught me to read and she was a big reader,” Emerson recalls. “She was real big on stories. She bought me my first video camera. She took me to the movies, even if she didn’t want to watch them. She just supported that idea of being a storyteller. I wrote these little stories and she always read them.” Although she died in 2001, Emerson notes, “She’s still a big part of my life. I always think about her.”

Despite her abiding interest in stories, Emerson never set out to write crime fiction, and her path to becoming a novelist has been particularly long and winding. Surprisingly, writing has never come easily to her. “It’s hard for me to sit in one place and do one thing for a long period of time,” Emerson says. Instead, her life’s dream was to make movies, and her initial attraction to film involved a touch of forensics, almost as though foreshadowing her future career.

Growing up in Tohatchi, there wasn’t much to do, so she and her friends watched VHS tapes that they rented from a man in a trailer “with like a hundred crazy strange movies in there.” That included a horror film, Faces of Death, about a pathologist who presents a variety of gruesome deaths. Once the adults left the house, Emerson recalls, “we’d go and get all of that horrible, horrible stuff that we weren’t supposed to watch, and we’d watch it right away.” Harkening back to Navajo taboos about discussing death, she adds, “So when we watched Faces of Death and didn’t explode, we figured that it’s all just a bunch of hooey.”

Later, when her mother took her to see Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues in a theater, Emerson was transfixed, and decided she wanted to make her own films. After studying film at the University of New Mexico, she had trouble finding a job, which is how she ended up as a forensic photographer. She blindly called a man whose audiovisual company had police contracts. “He was kind of a mean, gruff, walrus-looking guy, and his name was like 10th on the Yellow Pages list.” Eventually, she says, she did photography as well as video work for him, “because I was the only one who could put up with him. He was so mean.”

In addition to photographing crime scenes, part of her work was making what she calls “day in the life” documentaries to show how peoples’ lives had been compromised by injuries. “My job,” she explains, “was to get the worst stuff on camera and make sure companies settled cases before they got to a jury. Because they knew if the jury saw my video, they would give them way too much money.” She adds, “I would have dreams about these people for months. I think the live people were the ones that stayed with me more than the dead people.”

However, she says that in both her forensics work and her fiction, focusing carefully on the details of dead bodies helps humanize victims. “I would always think, ‘Oh my God, this is so horrible. This is somebody’s daughter. This is somebody’s mom.’ That’s where my mind always went. And so, by talking about the details, and everything that you could possibly say about who they are and what happened to them kind of honors them in a way.”

about a group of young Navajos who meet each week to improve their small community in Shiprock, New Mexico.

Emerson also enrolled in a creative writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, obtaining her master’s degree in 2015. While there, she began writing stories about her grandmother, and was also writing about some of her forensic cases as background for a possible documentary about Navajos who work in forensics. The resulting pages were what she describes as “a weird collection of research and stories”—and she couldn’t figure out how to unify the hodgepodge.

At the same time, Emerson enrolled in a 16-week CSI course offered by the Albuquerque Police Department, hoping to learn more about forensic science and technical procedures. The topic of the first session was a terrible case involving a woman who jumped off a highway bridge, with accompanying graphic photos. “I think half of our class didn’t come back after that,” she recalls. “It was brutal. But I went home and wrote about that case.”

When she presented the chapter to her MFA class, her mentor, novelist Sherman Alexie, responded, “I’m so disturbed. I’m sickened by that chapter. But I want you to make that your first chapter. And add six to 10 pages more, because I also want to know every detail.” Emerson took his advice. “Once I did that, everything else started to fall into place. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” Suddenly, her musings and observations coalesced into a first draft of her debut novel, Shutter

“It shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Emerson’s prose is so immediate, her descriptions so vivid. “When you’re doing a documentary and you want people to understand who a person is, you film their room, you film their hands,” she explains. “You show how dirty their fingernails are. You look at their shoes, where they live, what the town is like, all of that stuff. I think I just attack stories the same way as I would attack a visual story.” She adds, “When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”

Plus, she says, “I think people don’t realize how long you’re there [photographing crime scenes]. On TV, it’s like everybody’s in and out in 10 minutes, but when you have a big murder scene or you’ve got something like that first scene in Exposure where there’s a whole family, that could take two or three days of processing. You take thousands of photographs, pictures of every little thing, even if you don’t think it matters. You spend a lot of time out in the boonies by yourself photographing really weird things, or in strange positions, underneath vehicles. So, I think just giving readers the breadth of how many photographs Rita takes gives people a real idea of how hard it is to do the work physically.”

Emerson’s years of forensic work had a bonus of giving her access to her boss’s cameras and editing equipment. She began making her own movies as well, and she and her husband, Kelly Byars (also a filmmaker), formed a production company called Reel Indian Pictures. Byars is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and heritage is a primary focus for both. Their documentaries include The Mayor of Shiprock,

All told, however, the writing process took 10 years—quite different from the almost rapid-fire way she wrote its follow-up. “I really had 10 years to lament over every page of that first book,” she says. “This time, I just had to move on.” One thing that helped was that she was also working on a docuseries (Crossing the Line) about border town violence and death in several communities surrounding the Navajo Nation, including Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico—both of which are crime scene locations in Exposure. “It was easy for me to research both things at the same time,” Emerson explains. “And it just kind of fell into place.” She adds that she has witnessed policing from the perspective of officers, the court system and lawyers, but also notes, “It’s a different kind of experience for people of color. Policing is about enforcing white laws on brown bodies. I think a lot of people think police protect them, but brown and Black people don’t believe that police are there to protect them. And I think that’s probably why I speak about that a lot in my stories, and about corruption.”

Just as Rita Todacheene speaks for the crime victims who can no longer voice their stories, Emerson works to champion Native women in both her books and films. “I really feel like there’s not another group of women who are more underrepresented than Native women,” she says. “They’re never talked about; they’re never given a chance. And that’s why I feel the thing I have to do is give them power or give them a voice. Now, because of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, Native women are more visible. But it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”

Emerson is already hard at work on the third book about Rita— although fans are likely to clamor for more after that, even though her story began as a planned trilogy. “I may take a break after the third book and write a different book,” Emerson says. “But I have a feeling that somebody is going to try to resurrect Rita at some point, and it’ll be tough to keep her down as a character.”

—Alice Cary

REMEMBERING EMMETT TILL

Wright Thompson’s The Barn chronicles the fight to preserve the memory of Till and give meaning to his life and death .

In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.

Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.

Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”

The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi , a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.

Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”

The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.

After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”

Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”

The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of

Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.

Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.

Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.

“I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”

“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make

review | H the barn

The savage murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of a group of white men outside the small town of Drew, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, stained the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement. In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, noted sports journalist and Mississippi native Wright Thompson brilliantly recounts the story of that lynching, while deeply exploring the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta out of whose soil it emerged.

Wright made an estimated 100 visits to the barn where Till died, a site whose location has long been shrouded in mystery. To recount the terror of Till’s final night, when he was kidnapped, tortured and shot for supposedly whistling at a white woman (a report disputed

you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”

Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.

“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”

by many), Wright relies on the vivid memories of Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who accompanied Till on the fateful trip south from Chicago and was fortunate the killers did not take his life as well.

Midway through The Barn, Thompson detours from Till’s story to excavate the vivid history of the Delta’s “gumbo mud,” which includes the birth of blues music in the person of Charley Patton on a plantation some 10 miles from the barn and the activities of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Wright painstakingly traces the rise and fall of a hardscrabble agricultural economy, which produced both men like Till’s uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper whose home the teenager was visiting at the

—Harvey Freedenberg © EVAN

time of his murder, and J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two people tried (and acquitted) for Till’s murder.

Thompson was raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near the farm Wright’s mother’s family first owned in 1913 and that it maintains to this day, and by parents who taught him to reject the bigotry that infected his home state. And so, he is acutely sensitive to his own ambivalence about what it means to be a Mississippian. “We spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning the history of who we are and how we got here,” he writes. The Barn is Thompson’s brave, forthright effort to begin the process of eradicating some of that ignorance.

—Harvey

Freedenberg

H Intermezzo

By Sally Rooney

LITERARY FICTION

Intermezzo (FSG, $29, 9780374602635), Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, tells a story of loss and grieving as two brothers reckon with the death of their father in ways that threaten to fragment their already troubled relationship.

Peter Koubek is a socially and professionally competent lawyer living in Dublin in his early 30s. Beneath his polished exterior, he is bereft after his father’s death, suicidal and self-medicating with liquor and pills. His brother Ivan, younger by 10 years and once a chess prodigy, is now a loner struggling to maintain his early promise. At a regional chess match, Ivan falls for 36-year-old Margaret, who manages the local art center, and they begin a passionate romance despite their age difference. When Ivan confides in his older brother, Peter’s response is rude and dismissive. He is ashamed

What I Know About You

By Éric Chacour

Translated by Pablo Strauss

HISTORICAL FICTION

In his beguiling debut, What I Know About You (Coach House, $18.95, 9781552454855), Éric Chacour delicately explores the circumstances that create distance between people, and the limits of what anyone can know about those they love.

In 1980s Cairo, Tarek, a doctor from a Levantine Christian family, begins a relationship with a young man. Up until this moment, Tarek’s life has been a series of expected events. He grew up to become a doctor like his father, and took over the family practice after his father died. He has played the roles his wealthy family expected him to: dutiful son, successful professional.

The young man, Ali, comes from a poor neighborhood, and enlists Tarek’s help when his mother becomes ill. As their relationship evolves, Tarek is not prepared for all the ways his love for Ali changes him.

Despite several dramatic plot elements, this is a quiet, internal novel. Its brilliance is in the way Chacour plays with point of view. The opening section is written in the second person,

to confess to Ivan that his own love life is complicated. Peter is involved with two women: Naomi, a college student and parttime sex worker, and Sylvia, his first love, who suffered a disabling accident that led to their breakup years before. Peter and Ivan have long been locked into a cycle of judgment and disapproval. Now, their exchange crosses a line that it seems neither can come back from.

As is typical in a Rooney novel, most of the traumas that shaped her characters—the father’s death, Margaret’s difficult separation from her heavily drinking ex-husband, Sylvia’s accident—happened prior to the events of the story. Rooney’s focus is instead on the various ways her characters are trapped inside their pain and if they are even going to emerge

emotionally intact, and she brings skills she has honed on dissecting romantic relationships to the brothers’ bond with powerful results. Rooney underscores Peter and Ivan’s differences by changing her style when the focus shifts between them: Ivan’s chapters are told in a conventional third person, while Peter’s are narrated in a dreamy, stylized stream of consciousness that echoes Rooney’s countryman James Joyce. A tight focus on the siblings allows Rooney to delve into ideas about birth order and masculinity, while the careful balance between the novel’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Intermezzo Rooney’s most ambitious novel yet.

—Lauren Bufferd

and while at first it reads like it is addressing the reader, it soon becomes clear that something more complex is going on. Who is the narrator? Who are they speaking to? How do they know such intimate details about Tarek’s life?

On the surface, What I Know About You is an emotional family story, a queer awakening, a tumultuous romance. It’s a richly textured portrait of Cairo from the 1960s through the 2000s, and a nuanced exploration of queer relationships in Egypt during a time of intense governmental and societal homophobia. But even more compelling than all that is the story underneath: the why and the how of the narrative itself. As the narrator muses at one point, “there’s no way to stay outside your own story.”

—Laura Sackton

The Book of George

By Kate Greathead

LITERARY FICTION

By George, she’s got it! Annoying yet affable, Kate Greathead’s George is a captivatingly mediocre antihero. There’s nothing very remarkable about George or his family. They have their issues. George’s mother, Ellen, has become increasingly disconnected from him over the years,

though she remains intimidating to him. Ellen is separating from George’s father, Denis, because Denis’s enthusiasm for luxury fashion has been draining the family funds. Then there’s George’s older sister, Cressida, who is unabashedly straightforward and critical of George, and, like his mother, regards him with a hint of contempt. Despite this friction, the unassuming George manages his family dynamics with seeming nonchalance. In fact, he rarely makes a fuss about the events in his life, and only occasionally shows passion for a goal or project, such as a college major in philosophy, before quickly returning to his habitual listlessness. This passivity even applies to his on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend Jenny, who, like the members of his family, oscillates between having patience with him and finding him tedious.

The Book of George (Holt, $28.99, 9781250351029) unravels George’s life in episodes that highlight his misadventures from ages 12 to 38. The epigraph, excerpted from a letter from the mother of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to her son, sets the narrative tone: Johanna Schopenhauer tells Arthur that while he has “everything that could make you a credit to human society . . . you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable.”

Greathead’s delicious deadpan delivery, with its understatement and ironic humor, is addicting. The Book of George can take its place next to other novels with lovably frustrating main characters like Gail Honeyman’s

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove

—Maya Fleischmann

Pearly Everlasting

By Tammy Armstrong

HISTORICAL FICTION

In 1903, a wildlife photographer ventured into a remote Maine lumber camp to capture the image of a woman nursing an orphaned bear cub alongside her newborn daughter. This true story inspired Tammy Armstrong’s debut novel, Pearly Everlasting (Harper, $28.99, 9780063396142), which imagines the life of that girl and that bear, suckled at the same breast and raised as brother and sister in a cabin set deep in the pines.

Pearly Everlasting’s mother is a healer, and her father is a cook in a logging camp in the woods of New Brunswick. Her father finds an orphaned bear cub during “false spring,” brings it home, and raises “Bruno” as the newborn Pearly’s brother. It’s hard to say whether Pearly is part bear, or Bruno is part human; either way, they share a powerful connection. Girl and bear ramble through the forest on endless adventures. But when the camp gets a cruel new supervisor, Heeley Swicker, their innocent life is forced to change. Swicker turns up dead, and Bruno is blamed and sold by Swicker’s nephew to animal traders. Enlisting the help of her friends Songcatcher and Ebony, Pearly sets out on a quest to the “Outside” to rescue him. Afterwards, she and Bruno must find their way homeward alone through ice and snow, meeting good people, bad people and one cranky and dangerous wild bear along the way.

Told in a lyrical voice (it’s no surprise to learn that Armstrong is a poet), Pearly Everlasting is at times hauntingly beautiful, at times sad, yet also laugh-out-loud funny in other moments. There’s a dose of fairy-tale magic in the woodland setting: Old Jack, a spirit from the loggers’ stories, is always lurking in the shadows and threatening Pearly’s world.

This tender tale of hope and the redeeming nature of human kindness is also about coming home, literally and figuratively. At the end of her journey, Pearly remembers all of those who helped her along her way, and writes to them: “I tell them how the trees have grown so big up here on Greenlaw Mountain the spring light lives inside their boughs and rarely comes out to warm our yard. But by summer, the light climbs down and spills itself wide—a

carpet Bruno naps in longer each day. This is how we take our days. This is how we make them stay.”

—Carolyn Cates

Entitlement

By Rumaan Alam

LITERARY FICTION

Boy, the sacrifices some people will make to get ahead. It’s understandable to see another person’s shiny baubles and desire similar luxuries—but at what cost? This conflict of ambition provides the dramatic impetus for Entitlement (Riverhead, $30, 9780593718469), Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.

Brooke Orr, the novel’s 33-year-old Black protagonist, is a born-and-raised New Yorker who rides the subway every day, even knowing that there is a “lunatic at large who was jabbing unsuspecting commuters with a hypodermic.” One of the adopted children of a white lawyer who runs an organization dedicated to reproductive justice, Brooke studied art history and spent several years teaching at a charter school but left it disillusioned because the school “only cared about STEM.” Brooke wants a more elegantly ornamented life.

Then, a glimpse of a shiny bauble: In 2014, during the comparatively halcyon days of “Obama’s placid America,” she gets a job at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, dedicated to giving away 83-year-old Asher’s billions. Asher earned his money by taking over an uncle’s office supply store and then expanding into catalogs, real estate and malls. Asher comes to see Brooke as a protégé, in part because she reminds him of his daughter, Linda, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and was killed on 9/11.

Soon, Asher is seeking Brooke’s advice on everything from gifts for his wife to candidates to favor with his riches. And Brooke discovers that she likes riding in Asher’s Bentley and wearing fancy clothes. As one character remarks, however, “Nobody gets something for nothing,” and as Brooke makes more and more uncharacteristic decisions, she learns that lesson all too well.

Entitlement isn’t as deeply felt as Alam’s previous novel, the brilliant Leave the World Behind, but anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in this excellent work.

—Michael Magras

H The Last Dream

By Pedro Almodóvar

Translated by Frank Wynne

SHORT STORIES

In a career spanning more than five decades, writer and director Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as an endlessly versatile storyteller and a true emotional explorer. Whether he’s examining wrinkles in the nature of human sexuality or probing motherhood in its many forms, Almodóvar always manages to reveal kernels of compelling, often surprising, truth.

Now, in his first work of prose published in English, Almodóvar has turned that same deeply textured, boundless talent to short stories. The Last Dream (HarperVia, $26, 9780063349766), like all his work, jumps between genres, subjects and formats, with some stories playing with elements of memoir. In the title story, Almodóvar retells the events of the day his mother died, while in “A Bad Novel” and “Memory of an Empty Day,” he examines his own nature as a writer and an aging person who’s hungry for immersion in a world that’s changing around him. In “Adiós, Volcano,” he pays tribute to the late singer Chavela Vargas, a fixture in many of his films, and in “The Visit” he reveals the groundwork for his film Bad Education

But the stories aren’t limited to Almodóvar’s own life and career. The more fantastical include “The Life and Death of Miguel,” a story which he tells us was written when he was quite young, in which he examines a Benjamin Button-esque world where life and death happen in reverse. In “Joanna, The Beautiful Madwoman,” he tells the story of a princess driven mad by circumstance, while in “The Mirror Ceremony,” he examines a vampire’s strange conversion.

The sheer depth and breadth of the collection is astonishing, and it’s made more astonishing by the economy of language. A slim volume of just a dozen stories, The Last Dream is light on embellishment or lengthy description. Almodóvar’s prose is lean but evocative, elegant but grounded, and translator Frank Wynne has done a remarkable job rendering it into stylish, beautifully spare English. Almodóvar’s characters, like those in his films, are full of yearning and wonder. Both for fans of great short fiction and for fans of the director, The Last Dream is a must-read.

—Matthew Jackson

reviews | fiction

The Wildes

By Louis Bayard

BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is known for his comedic plays ( The Importance of Being Earnest), fiction (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and for his trial and imprisonment for his homosexuality. Less well known is that he had a family: his wife, Constance, who advocated for more practical dress for women, and their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. In The Wildes (Algonquin, $29, 9781643755304), novelist Louis Bayard focuses on Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Like a play, The Wildes is structured in five acts. Act 1 opens in 1892 at a farm in the Norfolk countryside, where Constance and Oscar; Cyril; Oscar’s larger-than-life mother, Lady Jane Wilde; and their friends Arthur and Florence Clifton are spending a holiday. Soon, they are interrupted by the arrival of young Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie. The spoiled Bosie, a student at Oxford, seems to be one of Oscar’s “poets”—young, literary men eager to spend time with the great writer. This section, the longest in the novel, often feels like a drawing-room comedy—both Constance and Lady Jane Wilde are wits—but woven throughout is the slow dawning of Constance’s understanding about Oscar and her marriage, as she pieces together the reality of Oscar and Bosie’s relationship.

Act 2 leaps forward five years, to a villa in Italy where Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan are living. The scandal of Oscar’s trial for gross indecency and homosexual acts, and his imprisonment, have forced Constance and the boys into exile, and they are hiding unhappily under a new last name. Acts 3 and 4 leap forward again, skipping over the tragedy of Oscar and Constance’s early deaths to episodes in Cyril and Vyvyan’s adulthoods—for Cyril, a pivotal day in the trenches in World War I France, and for Vyvyan, a theater outing with a family friend, on a night in 1925. Act 5 circles back to 1892 in that farmhouse in Norfolk, with a hopeful reimagining of this family’s life. Although Bayard’s ending asks a little too much of Constance, the novel gives its heart to her; she’s a believable, loving, heartbroken character. In The Wildes, Bayard has built a story beyond the well-known tragedy, and though the novel never gives us Oscar’s perspective, we see him through Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan’s eyes—as an engaged father,

loving but distant husband, self-absorbed keeper of secrets, and a terrified man unable to love openly.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

H The Sequel

By Jean Hanff Korelitz

SUSPENSE

Hell hath no fury like Anna WilliamsBonner in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Sequel (Celadon, $29, 9781250875471), a cleverly conceived matryoshka doll of a tale that employs pitch-black humor and nail-biting suspense to excellent effect.

It’s also, well, the sequel to The Plot, the audacious 2021 bestseller that’s soon to be a TV series alongside Korelitz’s other adapted works: Admission, The Latecomer and You Should Have Known (the basis for HBO’s The Undoing). Fans of Korelitz’s work will be delighted that The Sequel follows in the artfully twisted footsteps of her previous thrillers, this time via the very intelligent and deeply angry Anna, who’s determined to preserve authorship of her life at all costs.

As the story opens, Anna’s on tour for her husband Jacob’s posthumously published book when his editor and agent suggest she write a novel based on her life as bereaved widow of a beloved author. Anna “couldn’t think of a novelist whose next work she was actively waiting for, or whose novel she even cared enough about to keep forever, or whose signature she wanted in her copy of their novel,” but realizes it could be entertaining, if not entirely interesting. After all, she muses about other writers, “If those idiots can do it, how fucking hard can it be?”

The resulting novel, The Afterword, is an immediate bestseller, of course. Anna is jauntily casual about her increased fame until a Post-it note in a book she’s signing reveals her past is not as buried as she thought. Who wrote it? What do they know? And most important: What do they want?

Anna’s cross-country tour of fact-finding and retribution will have readers eagerly flipping the pages to see what on earth she’ll do next. (Hint: It’s not good) She moves from threat to threat, so hell-bent on squelching the truth about her past that she increases her present-day peril. Jacob published and perished; will Anna, too?

Rife with delicious tension and sharply honed satire, The Sequel is a gripping, disturbing and

wild ride, with a humdinger of a conclusion that explores just how deadly it can be when someone feels their story isn’t being properly told.

—Linda M. Castellitto

Swordcrossed

By Freya Marske

FANTASY ROMANCE

Sometimes, opening up a fantasy book is about leaving your world behind. But sometimes, it’s more about stepping into a brand-new one, so vividly detailed that you know the textures and tastes and the smells in the air. That’s the kind of world Freya Marske has created in Swordcrossed (Bramble, $28.99, 9781250341624), set in the bustling city of Glassport. Detailed, intricate and meticulously planned, this fantasy romance will dazzle genre fans who crave an immersive experience and a rich love story to lead them through it.

When Marske’s tale begins, Mattinesh Jay doesn’t have time for a love story. What he needs is money, enough to keep his disastrously unlucky family from financial ruin. That money will come at Matti’s upcoming wedding to Sofia Cooper, via his bride-to-be’s bond price (i.e., her dowry). The wedding has to go without a hitch, and that means hiring the best swordsman Matti can afford to be his ‘best man,’ a role that includes defeating any challengers at the ceremony. Given the unfortunate fact that a talented duelist has strong feelings for Sofia, a challenge is all but inevitable. When Matti falls victim to a scam and his financial situation gets even worse, the best swordsman he can afford is . . . well, the scammer himself: Luca Piere, a man who is as silver-tongued as he is deft, as dangerous as he is tempting, and as infuriating as he is gorgeous.

This is a book for those who like their romance mixed with a hefty dose of world building—and more than a bit of intrigue, as it’s quickly revealed that the failing fortunes of the Jay family owe more to sabotage than to bad luck. Unraveling all the different factors and parties involved takes over a lot of the story. But the love light still manages to shine through as Matti and Luca fight each other, then fight against their feelings for each other, and then finally learn to give in to what they truly want. Their happy ending is one of the most satisfying I’ve read all year, showing that luck might be at the whim of the gods, but love is always a gift.

—Elizabeth Mazer

H The Message

By Ta-Nehisi Coates ESSAYS

National Book Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 book, Between the World and Me, and his 2017 essay collection, We Were Eight Years in Power, exposed the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on our understanding of America’s origins and its present. Written with clarity and forensic objectivity, his revolutionary insights into our society challenged us to not only acknowledge this past but also actively redress its lasting harms. His new book, The Message (One World, $30, 9780593230381), is personal and introspective. Four related but standalone essays chronicle Coates’ own revelations about the role stories play in shaping and misshaping our perceptions of the world.

Coates argues that writing is both an artistic and a political act. Authors must write with clarity and create narratives that explain and expose the world with urgency—and they must examine the stories we have been told as well as those we tell ourselves. How do authors extract truth from history, separate myth from fact? Coates travels to the Senegalese island

H Book and Dagger

By Elyse Graham

HISTORY

Though physicists get the most attention when it comes to academic contributions to war efforts, the United States’ nascent intelligence team also relied on experts of another sort. Elyse Graham’s Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II (Ecco, $30, 9780063280847) tells the thrilling story of the professors, archivists and artists who were recruited by the U.S. and British governments to become highly effective spies and intelligence agents during the Second World War. Graham recounts the various missions made possible by professional researchers recruited from university campuses by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. These men and women put their skills to use in unexpected ways, drawing strategic insights from the most mundane texts, like Moroccan phone directories that revealed munitions

of Gorée, which is prominent for its perceived significance in the slave trade. He acknowledges it as a “mythical site of departure”: According to scholars, very few enslaved people actually passed through its infamous Door of No Return. But on the island, Coates had a remarkable epiphany about the ways in which the myth-making about Gorée as “sacred, a symbolic representation of our last stop before the genocide” has obscured the lasting impact of colonialism on Africa. Still, that myth holds unique power: “We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places,” Coates concludes, “and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”

His journey to East Jerusalem and the West Bank brings questions about objective storytelling to the fore, in an essay both heartrending and hopeful. Coates courageously allows the reader to see the confusion, grief and anger he feels observing firsthand how Palestinians are relegated to second class citizenship in a

factory locations, and scientific journals available only in Europe, which kept the Allies abreast of nuclear developments.

A Hollywood version of Book and Dagger would feature heart-pounding scenes of disheveled scholars digging for scraps of crucial information in stacks of ancient tomes. Without falling into this mire of tropes, Graham follows some recurring characters and includes some thrilling scenes of sabotage. The book is also about how the OSS and U.S. military relied on unique, research-driven perspectives to outsmart and outmaneuver the Nazis. With a keen ear for narrative prose, Graham builds suspense and intrigue, and the book is a pulpy delight.

Graham acknowledges that spycraft is a complicated, messy business, and readers may find this tale of underdog heroism difficult to square with the CIA’s later history of surveillance and subterfuge in U.S. and international politics. Even so, a story where a passion for knowledge and appreciation for outsiders defeats a regime fueled by hatred and greed is most welcome. Book and Dagger is a necessary reminder of the value of the humanities and of the freedom of information and ideas at a time when both of those things are under threat.

—Alejandro Ramirez

segregated society, all while Israel is hailed as “the only democracy in the Middle East” by the West—a situation which he finds all too familiar. Coates reports learning that illegal settlements steal Palestinian land. He shares meals with both Palestinians and Israelis, including a former Israeli soldier who tells him that Israeli forces subject Palestinians to a “constant threat of violence,” with methods that include home invasions targeting known innocents. Coates reflects on how Palestinian writers are seldom allowed to contribute their voices, and an “elevation of complexity over justice” shapes the narrative about the region.

Searching and restless, The Message is filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. Coates believes that writing can change the world. Achieving this mission is arduous, vital and necessary. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.

—Deborah Mason

Meditations for Mortals

By Oliver Burkeman

SELF-HELP

It’s time to let go of the idea that there is another checklist, another productivity hack, that will lead us to a nirvana where we can finally relax. If you feel like you need permission for this, British journalist and time management guru Oliver Burkeman outlines an exit from the hamster wheel in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts (FSG, $27, 9780374611996).

“We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes,” he writes, “defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimize our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance, or understanding of world events.” He flies in the face of generations of self-help books, arguing with kindness and empathy that there is no magic wand to complete every task and attain

reviews | nonfiction

total control. In fact, we don’t need to “do it all” . . . at all.

For example, Burkeman embraces what he calls “scruffy hospitality”: There’s no need to wait until your house is sparkling clean and you have mastered a gourmet menu to invite people over. Just pick up the major piles of stuff, make spaghetti and feed your friends! In a chapter titled “Too Much Information,” Burkeman writes that we will never be able to consume all the books and all the magazines and all the podcasts, even at double speed. Instead, “treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.” Choose a few books as they flow past you, and let the rest go with the current.

Meditations for Mortals is a generous book chock-full of hard-earned advice from someone who has felt the same pressures we all have, but has thought about it more deeply than most. Burkeman suggests that we treat his book’s chapters as daily meditations, reading one per day, and that is likely a satisfying course of action. But his compelling set of mini-lessons may have readers swiftly sprinting through. Burkeman will likely forgive us the imperfection.

—Amy Scribner

Connie By Connie Chung MEMOIR

Connie Chung broke the glass and bamboo ceiling when she became the first Asian American woman to co-anchor a national news broadcast program, joining Dan Rather at the desk of the CBS Evening News. Her visibility and success led generations of Chinese parents to name their daughters Connie. In her briskly paced memoir, Connie (Grand Central, $32.50, 9781538766989), Chung recounts her personal and professional life with candor, humor and heart.

Growing up as the youngest of 10 daughters and the only child in the family born in the U.S., Chung spent more time watching television than doing chores, and her family stopped everything to listen to Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. The legendary newsman’s coverage of politics and government lit a spark in Chung. In 1971, she landed a job as a Washington correspondent on his program. (Cronkite, she writes, “radiated gravitas and humility, never behaving like the superstar he was.”) Over the next 40 years, Chung embraced the excitement

of “getting the get”—landing an exclusive story or interview—and faced the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. Connie carries readers through the ups and downs of Chung’s career as the major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) piped her image and voice into millions of American living rooms during prime time. Readers will glimpse the relationships that have sustained Chung; she gushes about her husband, talk show host Maury Povich: “Were it not for Maury, I could never have had the career I had. . . . He helped me navigate my treacherous path up the ladder.”

Chung pulls no punches as she describes the harassment she faced from anchors who felt threatened by her work, among them Dan Rather, who sabotaged her career after the network sent her to cover the Oklahoma City bombing (Rather was on vacation and unreachable when it occurred). And she movingly recounts going public during the #MeToo movement with the story of her own sexual assault by a gynecologist when she was in college. Connie offers words of advice for future women reporters: “Remember to have a sense of humor, take your work seriously, don’t forget to have a life and—most importantly—stretch your hand to others who are trying to climb on board.” Chung’s humanity and journalistic passion reverberate through this invigorating memoir.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

H American Teenager

By Nico Lang

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

Despite the widespread passage of legislation limiting the ability of trans kids to access hormone treatment or other gender-affirming care, there has been little light shed on the lives of the young people these laws target—until now. In American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era (Abrams, $30, 9781419773822), Nico Lang, an award-winning nonbinary journalist who has spent a decade reporting on LGBTQ+ issues, documents the hopes, sorrows and joys experienced by seven American trans kids. American Teenager is not an attempt to portray a “typical transgender teenager.” Lang’s diverse subjects live in South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Illinois and California. Lang spent weeks living with each

of the seven families and conducted in-depth interviews with the teens, their relatives and friends. The result is a series of complex, sometimes searing and always sensitive portraits of young people whose right to existence currently hangs in the balance. These kids do have things in common—their resilience, their exhaustion and, happily, their accepting and loving families—but Lang recognizes their individuality as well.

Several of the kids who live in red states are already fierce advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. Ruby, a young woman from Houston, Texas, testified in her state legislature against a bill that would require trans student athletes to compete on school sports teams that reflect their sex assigned at birth. Despite her efforts, the bill was eventually signed into law. Loved by her family and her church, blessed with a mother who fights passionately for trans rights, and planning a career in costume design, Ruby seems unstoppable. But she still couldn’t stay in Texas. She’s transferring to a California college and leaving behind a state whose legislators deny her humanity.

On the other hand, there’s Clint, a 17-yearold Muslim teen who lives in Chicago and has no desire at all to be an advocate, testify in front of legislators or attend marches. Clint demands what so many of us want and have: a private life that he can live on his own terms, where his gender is irrelevant to his opportunities. Perhaps Clint’s stubborn refusal to give up his autonomy in the face of repression is the most powerful response there is. “In the end, it’s everyone’s own life,” he tells Lang. “You’ve got to live it the way you want.”

—Deborah Mason

H The Forbidden Garden

By Simon Parkin

EUROPEAN HISTORY

In March 1921, the world-famous botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was named director of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, which was located in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and devoted to the study of plant life. He initiated an ambitious plan to develop the world’s first seed bank, which he promised would be “a treasury of all known crops and plants” that would produce super crops that could alleviate global famine.

Award-winning author Simon Parkin vividly relates the tragic yet inspiring story of Vavilov

and his team’s dedication to the project in The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice (Scribner, $30, 9781668007662). By 1934, Vavilov’s pioneering effort had opened over 400 research facilities around the Soviet Union. The seeds, “stored in packets and filed for safekeeping in the wooden drawers that lined the seed bank’s dozens of rooms,” were irreplaceable; in some cases, they had been harvested from crops now extinct due to human activity. Vavilov recruited and trained a staff that understood their worth and felt a “keen sense of responsibility.”

In August 1940, Vavilov vanished. And in June 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Leningrad’s industrial factories gave the city strategic importance, and as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism, it “symbolized all that Nazi ideology opposed.” Hitler decided to “starve it into submission.” Without support from Stalin’s government and unable to move the seeds, the Plant Institute staff and others in the city lived and died through 872 days of siege.

The remaining staff now faced a moral question. “Eat or abstain?” Parkin writes. “Is any sacrifice justifiable in the name of scientific progress, or to protect one’s research? What responsibility did the botanists hold to the survival of future generations? . . . There is no doubt that the quarter of a million seeds, nuts and vegetables in the building . . . could have prolonged the lives of the botanists and, beyond that, the public.” A new director encouraged them to eat the collection, but, committed to their mission, they refused. Using the diaries and letters of the botanists, as well as later-recorded oral histories, Parkin paints a suspense-filled record of this harrowing time in history.

—Roger Bishop

H This Is How a Robin Drinks

By Joanna Brichetto

That perspective-shifting, find-joy-indaily-life revelation is just one of many the blogger and certified Tennessee naturalist shares in her wonderful, wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature (Terra Firma, $19.95, 9781595342997).

If we stroll rather than stride through our yards and neighborhoods, Brichetto assures us, we can find nature everywhere.

Brichetto—a former BookPage contributor—believes that “by paying attention to the natural world we have a chance to figure out who, where, and when we are.” Fortunately, “nature is all around”—and in this almanac organized by season, she encounters and explores nature in places we expect, like parks and gardens and birdbaths. But what about thrift stores, grocery bags and abandoned mall parking lots?

If we stroll rather than stride through our yards and neighborhoods, Brichetto assures us, we can find nature everywhere, too— despite humans’ relentless efforts to constrain, pave over or poison it. Readers will relish her thoughtful essays rife with idiosyncratic humor and poetic reverence, like her observation that a purchased-turf lawn has been “gentrified by sod.”

Frighten

the Horses

By Oliver Radclyffe

MEMOIR

The publishing industry tends to shine a spotlight on memoirs by transgender people who are already famous: actors, models, Jeopardy! champions. Their transition stories hit similar beats as those of other trans people, but the circumstances of their lives do not. This makes Frighten the Horses (Roxane Gay, $28, 9780802163158) by Oliver Radclyffe stand out—the author was a suburban stay-athome parent when he transitioned. Any parent can understand how researching “phantom penises’’ ended up low on Radclyffe’s to-do list when raising four young children.

Growing up upper-class in Britain, Radclyffe lived a privileged but sheltered life: boarding school, conservative parents and little exposure to queer culture. Although he was curious about sex and gender, his fear, shame and denial kept him in a gilded cage well into adulthood. We meet him in his 40s, as a female-presenting parent of four, married to a conventional cis man who works in finance. From the outside, Radclyffe’s Connecticut family looks perfect, but he’s in therapy trying to figure out why he is losing hair, has no appetite and is prone to extreme mood swings.

NATURE

When Joanna Brichetto sees potato chips, she craves goldfinches. An offbeat association? Sure. One imbued with enthusiasm and nature-loving logic? Absolutely. You see, she explains, the goldfinch’s call sounds like “potato-chip, potato-chip,” and the Lay’s Classic Potato Chips bag is a yellow “not unlike a male goldfinch in breeding plumage.”

In her summer section, Brichetto is particularly reverent toward cicadas, which can fall prey to new construction (the Nashville-based author was treated to two overlapping broods this summer). “He will sing with the moon,” she writes of one, “but I have his skin, which once held the sun.” In fall, her pockets “surrender snail shells, turn out twigs of spicebush, fumble oak apples round and dry.” A red-tailed hawk transforms her from a winter commuter to “a character in a fairy story.” And she composes a spring ode to catalpa trees, which she suggests may be “admired by pressing one’s face into a pyramid of blossom.”

This Is How a Robin Drinks is sure to trigger an uptick in meanderings—urban or rural, day or night—suffused with new appreciation for and a renewed determination to preserve our endlessly fascinating yet increasingly vulnerable environment. And not a moment too soon; after all, Brichetto writes, “Spoiler alert: nature’s best hope is us.”

—Linda M. Castellitto

Once Radclyffe realizes he is trans, and begins to transition, his physical presentation is not the only thing that changes. His experiences with sex, relationships and friendships are all impacted, and Frighten the Horses weaves together many narratives. It’s the story of a marriage falling apart when one spouse refuses to see the other clearly, of a parent who desperately fears that each new change might affect his children’s happiness, and of finding both acceptance and rejection in some surprising places.

Accompanying Radclyffe’s journey is his self-education about queer history and gender politics. (Bluestockings, a Lower East Side bookstore located a train ride away from his Connecticut home, is integral to this.) He learns about the marginalization of trans people, which helps him understand why he lacked a compass for much of his youth. Frighten the Horses is warm, moving and most importantly, inspiring for anyone who needs a reminder that it’s never too late to be one’s authentic self.

—Jessica Wakeman

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Health and Safety

By Emily Witt

MEMOIR

Emily Witt sets her arresting memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown (Pantheon, $27, 9780593317648), in New York City from 2016 to 2021, charting her entry into the city’s techno scene with its mind-altering drugs, ecstatic music and community of people sometimes embracing, sometimes resisting a changing new world. In her book’s first section, she describes learning the “geography of nightlife,” writing gauzily about raves and parties she attends, the drugs she takes and the general euphoria that blankets her life for several months as she falls in love with a fellow raver, Andrew.

When the Trump presidency begins, we are thrust back into the waking world with her, and the story takes on much darker hues. Still, she continues to party until she can’t: COVID-19 hits the city with ferocity. Gone are the raves and the DJs and the scene itself, “and with it the illusion of health and safety.” Witt invites us to relive a tumultuous era in the country’s history through the eyes of a keen observer.

Witt, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed exploration of nontraditional sex, Future Sex, relays her experiences covering watershed moments and national tragedies: the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, protests after the death of Breonna Taylor, and the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. She reflects on the country’s collective heartbreak and rage alongside her own personal losses, like her tumultuous romantic entanglement and breakup with Andrew, which throws her world into chaos. And she deftly analyzes her role as a journalist in a mad world where her work feels, at times, ineffectual.

Witt looks back at this time of experimentation with wisdom, writing that she used hallucinogens, to “psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted . . . that I sought a chemical window to see outside.” In the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it.

—Joy Ramirez

Paper of Wreckage

By Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo

CULTURAL HISTORY

The oral history form can sometimes feel like a cop-out—a notebook dump that requires the author to do little but interview, transcribe and put passages in a reasonable order.

Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media (Atria, $32.50, 9781982164836) gets a pass. The book’s subject, the New York Post’s past 50 years, includes so many famous and infamous characters, world events and weird historical side quests that the oral history form makes perfect sense. Most of the subjects interviewed are colorful storytellers in their own right, making the blocks of text propulsive and vibrant without authorial intervention.

This could be a book about journalism, sports journalism, political journalism, gossip journalism, celebrity, serial killers, labor, New York City, Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch. Instead, it’s all of the above. Authors and Post veterans Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo have a sense for narrative (or at times, comedic) timing. Some well-known figure is described negatively and then immediately shows up to defend themself (or admit wrongdoing). Even journalists remember things differently.

Two ex-Posties compare Murdoch’s arrival at the tabloid in the 1970s to Hitler’s arrival in Poland. But for the most part, the crew at the newspaper didn’t take themselves too seriously. Some went on to illustrious stints at more respectable publications, but still recall their time at the Post as the most fun and memorable of their careers. It was a funnier, dirtier, meaner, more violent and more exciting newsroom than most—including the New York Daily News and New York Times, with whom the Post has traded scoops and staffers for generations.

The story sobers as it nears the present day. The paper’s right-wing politics become more entrenched, and the embrace of longtime Page Six stalwart Trump and his presidency sour even those who still held out hope for the paper. The publication whiffs on the transition to television and then the internet, and its sway in New York faded. But the ride up to that point will entertain anyone interested in media, politics, celebrity or good stories.

—Stephen Elliott

Magic and murder

Sacha Lamb incorporates Jewish history and folklore into the central mystery of The Forbidden Book .

My first novel, When Angels Left the Old Country, takes a historical story that’s familiar to many Americans—immigration through Ellis Island around the turn of the 20th century—and casts it as a fairy tale inspired by Jewish folklore. I knew I couldn’t repeat the same setting for my next work. A second book is always challenging, and there was a lot of pressure in following a debut that received six(!) awards and honors. For a fresh start I chose a story that still draws on Jewish folklore and history, but was constrained within a single invented town, at a less familiar moment in history.

The Forbidden Book is a supernatural murder mystery set in the 1870s, before the great wave of migration that began circa 1880 out of the Pale of Settlement, the region where Jews were allowed permanent residency under the restrictions of the Russian Empire. At this time Jewish books were highly censored, but there was a growing political consciousness, and a growing desire for education among Jewish women. The communities of Eastern Europe were

subject to a whirlwind of forces on the sides of both tradition and change. I researched the period using historical works such as Michael Stanislawski’s Murder in Lemberg , which explores the attempted poisoning of a Reform rabbi by another Jew in the mid-1800s. Working within this setting allowed me to emphasize Jewish agency with a story whose actors are nearly all Jewish, and are all acting in the interests of their community—but are in conflict about what those interests are.

who escapes her unwanted marriage under a male identity, only to discover the name she’s using belongs to a real boy—and using his name has plunged her into the midst of a complex web of intrigues.

The Forbidden Book Levine Querido, $19.99 9781646144563

The Forbidden Book is also a dybbuk story. The dybbuk is usually described as the spirit of a deceased person that can possess the living and speak through them. As in the case of S. An-sky’s 1920 play The Dybbuk (perhaps the most famous work of Yiddish theater), traditional dybbuk stories have a gendered aspect. Many of them describe young women possessed by male spirits, sometimes male Torah scholars, which allowed young women constrained by patriarchy to access male authority while speaking in the voice of the possessor. My protagonist, Sorel, is a young girl

review | the forbidden book

Seventeen-year-old Sorel’s arranged marriage is meant to unify two powerful Jewish families in her community in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. But when Sorel hears a voice in her head urging her to run on the eve of her wedding, she doesn’t think twice, and jumps from her bedroom window, disguising herself as a young man with the name Isser Jacobs. However, as she tries to flee the city, she is recognized—not as Sorel, but as an actual boy named Isser Jacobs, who apparently has many enemies. Steeped in Jewish folklore and culture, The Forbidden Book is a fantastic tale with resonant political themes. Based on mythology concerning the dybbuk, a disembodied spirit that inhabits the body of a living person, this novel flows between the supernatural and the concrete in order to ask powerful questions about identity and beliefs. From the very beginning, The Forbidden Book blurs the line between fantasy and reality: Is the voice in Sorel’s head real? If so, whose voice is it, and why is she the only one who can hear it? From there, the story becomes more and more surreal, taking readers on a wild ride through dreams and visions that seep into reality.

Sorel and her dybbuk, Isser, have to work together to solve the mystery of his death and prevent a supernatural calamity. At the same time, each is negotiating their relationship with Kalman Senderovitch (who is Sorel’s father and Isser’s father figure), and Isser helps Sorel learn what she truly wants from her life. The personal narrative, augmented by spooky encounters with Angels of Death and sinister black dogs, is intended to help draw my teen audience through the story of censorship, feminism and social activism. I hope that the universal themes of friendship, family and self-expression will introduce readers to a new chapter in history and a very human view of the Jewish past.

—Sacha Lamb

At the heart of this story is Sorel, who spends the majority of the book trying to establish herself as an individual. As she uncovers the lies and truths around her, she must question every facet of her identity, including her family, community, faith and gender. Sorel’s nuanced and complex coming-of-age shows how developing an identity takes time, thought and care.

Author Sacha Lamb uses the magical aspects of the story to highlight and tackle serious cultural and political issues. Sorel doesn’t know much about the voice in her head, but it drives her to question her place, power and identity as the betrothed daughter of a wealthy merchant. The disappearance of the real Isser Jacobs is shrouded in mystery, but it seems connected to his passion for printing and distributing illegal political pamphlets about Jewish Emancipation. Through all its twists and turns, The Forbidden Book ultimately remains centered around hope and how it can be a powerful catalyst for change—both for an individual and a whole community.

—Tami Orendain

BACK INTO THE FIRE

Sabaa Tahir’s new fantasy duology tests the possibilities of empathy in a chaotic world .

Sabaa Tahir’s Heir kicks off a duology that returns to the world of her bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series, after 20 years have passed. This time, we follow Aiz, a lowborn orphan seeking vengeance; Sirsha, a tracker who takes on a dangerous job; and Quil, the reluctant crown prince who faces a threat to his empire. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, all three cross paths as they grapple with an elusive force committing horrific crimes throughout the land.

What led you to revisit the world of An Ember in the Ashes? Did anything in particular spark the creation of this new duology?

It was really working on the last book of the Ember quartet, A Sky Beyond the Storm, that had me asking questions about one character in particular: the future Emperor. That’s how Heir began, back in 2020. By that point, I’d spent 13 years in the Ember world and planned everything for the characters of the first series. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I didn’t know everything about this world, nor did I know everything about my characters. It made for a very unexpected writing experience!

Heir can be read as a standalone, so readers new to the AEITA world won’t have a problem keeping up. But returning fans will be delighted by some callbacks to the original series: What are you most excited for them to encounter in this book?

I’m excited for all the little Easter eggs I’ve left in the book for them, but I don’t want to spoil the book by giving them away! I’m also very

excited for them to meet this new generation of characters, who have their own journeys and stories to share.

What was it like to weave together the complex storylines of Aiz, Sirsha and Quil?

Complicated. I knew how I wanted them to intersect, but without giving anything away, I’ll say that Aiz’s storyline in particular posed a challenge. I ended up planning a lot of scenes out on notecards, laying them all over the floor and then figuring out how they all fit together visually. It felt a bit like knowing the picture I wanted and having half the puzzle pieces. I had to move them around to see exactly where they belonged and then fashion the rest of the pieces to fit the empty spots.

Which was your favorite character to write?

They each had their own appeal. Aiz was the most challenging to write—I think I learned the most from her. Quil was the most challenging to edit—he ended up needing a lot of time because he was hard to get to know, at first. Once I did get to know him, though, it felt as if a whole world had opened up. Sirsha was just a joy to write. I feel like she walked into my brain fully formed.

What was it like to continue the legacies of beloved characters from the main series, 20 years later?

It was so much fun, but also very thought-provoking. Laia, Elias and Helene are characters who have been through a great deal of trauma.

How would that impact the way they transition into adulthood and ultimately parenthood? Figuring out the answer to that question was arduous and took many drafts. I also had to focus on letting Quil, Aiz and Sirsha shine in this story. It is in the Ember world, but it is certainly not an Ember book. Finding a balance between the past and present was tricky.

What’s your secret to bringing compelling romance into your fast-paced, thrilling plots?

Well, romance is the ultimate wrench in the machine, is it not? In my books, my characters are already going through a tough time and then . . . they fall in love! Their minds go places they tell them not to, their bodies misbehave. They don’t want to fall in love because it is deeply inconvenient, and yet . . . it has happened. It’s a challenging plot twist, it raises the stakes and it is such fun to write something so hopeful in the midst of all the drama. I think finding that joy, (as well as the longing and frustration along the way, of course) is what I focus on when writing romance into my fantasy!

You don’t pull any punches with your stories, especially in Heir and your fans keep coming back for more. What do you think is the key to winning fans’ hearts with these emotional rollercoasters?

conversations and victories and heartbreaks and emotions, most of all, to feel real and believable.

Putnam, $21.99, 9780593616949

I wish I knew because I feel like that would make writing much easier! Ultimately, I strive for authenticity. I want my books to feel true, even if they take place in fantasy worlds. I want the conflicts and

review | H heir

Set two decades after the events of Sabaa Tahir’s blockbuster An Ember in the Ashes quartet, Heir entices readers back to the familiar landscape of the Martial Empire, just as Empress Helene plans to end her reign. Her nephew and successor, Quil, dreads his impending coronation, but an unexpected threat posed by the embittered nation of Kegar forces him to confront his duty to his people. Thrown into a perilous journey, he crosses paths with the exile Sirsha, who has sworn a magic oath to track down a mysterious child killer. In a riveting, large-scale narrative, Tahir weaves their storylines together with that of Aiz, an orphan from the Kegari slums, as she struggles against a heartless air squadron

Your conflicts, despite taking place in a fantasy world, feel close to reality—for example, characters born into vast inequality are faced with difficult choices in their quests to break free. Is this aspect of your writing inspired by anything specific in real life?

So much of my writing is inspired by historical and current global events. I was an editor of foreign news [at The Washington Post] after graduating college, years ago now, so I will always carry that interest in global affairs and history with me. The influences range from news stories about refugees, famines and aerial bombardments, to the poetry and literature that arise from the disenfranchisement of entire populations, occupations and those surviving despotic governments.

But ultimately, at the heart of everything I write is the question: Why do we treat each other this way? I think I ask that question because as a writer for young people, I wish to convey the hope that we can be better. And I think that being better, and seeing each other with empathy, begins with asking ourselves this question.

Are there parts of the AEITA world you still want to explore?

Yes, so many. Entire countries and continents and epochs I haven’t gotten to. I think the stories in this world really are endless. It’s just a matter of if I go hunting for them or not!

—Yi Jiang

commander claiming to be the Tel Ilessi, promised savior of Kegar and divine vessel.

Writing a spinoff to any beloved series is risky, but National Book Award-winner Tahir (All My Rage) avoids getting lost in the mire of her past success by continuously offering readers something thrilling and new, while not losing sight of the original. As a result, Heir feels wholly generative. Each possessing distinct motivations, Aiz, Quil and Sirsha hold their own alongside previous fan favorites, who themselves have grown in organic yet revelatory ways.

Tahir’s characters grapple with the scars of past tragedies and rail against suffocating circumstances with nuance that will engage readers both new and returning to the series.

Furthermore, evocative—but not overly intrusive—world building allows Heir to be easily understood as a standalone novel. Kegar’s situation, as a country that is foodscarce and depends on raiding for resources, contributes depth to the novel’s core conflict, which goes beyond simplistic good and evil. How far can one go to save one’s people? Without losing momentum, Tahir brings this energetic book to a satisfying conclusion, while dropping enough cliffhangers to leave readers hungry for the sequel. Heir offers a welcome blend of mystique and weightiness—plus a dollop of romance— that will delight anyone seeking more complexity in young adult fantasy. —Yi Jiang

H Heir

FANTASY

feature | children’s

A SPECTRUM OF

The ghoulish beings—some of whom are more will delight young readers

H Into the Goblin Market

With Vikki VanSickle’s compelling rhyming couplets and Jensine Eckwall’s lush, moody illustrations, Into the Goblin Market (Tundra, $18.99, 9780735268562) has all the makings of a modern classic, while giving a delightful nod to European fairy tales. The book is a tribute to Christina Rosetti’s 1859 poem, “Goblin Market,” about sisters Laura and Lizzie. VanSickle has used the original to create a similar tale about two young sisters who seem to live alone in a fairy tale-like world “on a farm, not far from here.” Millie is quiet and bookish, while Mina, with a head full of wild, curly hair, is always ready for adventure. One night, Mina sneaks away to the Goblin Market, even though Millie has warned her, “The Goblin Market isn’t safe. / It’s a tricky, wicked place.”

When Millie awakes and sees that Mina has disappeared, she consults her library and takes several items that end up providing invaluable protection. Eckwall’s intricate, woodcut-inspired art vividly conveys the magic and danger that awaits. Occasional red accents in these black-and-white ink drawings highlight objects such as the hooded cape Millie wears as she sets off, looking just like Red Riding Hood—and, indeed, a shaggy black wolf is the first thing she encounters.

Once she enters the market, “Everywhere that Millie looked / was like a nightmare from her books.” There are strange sights galore, including a multitude of goblins and an evil-looking witch, but there’s no sign of Mina, whom Millie knows is in trouble. The pages are definitely a feast for the imagination (although the very young may find them frightening).

Both sisters use their wits admirably to escape the many dangers, and there’s a wonderful surprise at the end, just when all seems to be lost. Into the Goblin Market is a delicious treat for those yearning for a bit of frightful adventure.

Godfather Death

As the fisherman’s captivating quest unfolds, Nicholls weaves in plenty of humor: Christening guests stare at Death—a skeleton with his silver scythe and long black cloak—as “everyone tried very hard to be polite to the baby’s godfather.” When this skeleton figure eats food, “everyone wondered where it went.”

Júlia Sardà illustrates the tale in a limited palette of orange, mustard yellow, dark green and black, imbuing the book with an intriguing, stylized vibe reminiscent of old fairy tales. Her eye-catching illustrations will help readers understand that this is a tale meant to impart wisdom. Note that, like the original, the ending is abrupt and not at all happy. Nonetheless, Godfather Death is a memorable story that’s bound to encourage interesting discussions about life, death and honesty.

H Bog Myrtle

Godfather Death by Sally Nicholls (Viking, $19.99, 9780593692103) is a lively, charming retelling of a Grimm fairy tale about a poor fisherman looking for a godfather for his newborn son. The fisherman rejects God’s offer because he doesn’t feel God treats people fairly, especially since the fisherman and his family live in such poverty. He is smart enough to also reject the devil’s offer—but when Death comes along, he believes he has finally found an honest man. After the christening, Death lets the fisherman in on a scheme that makes him a rich man.

Sid Sharp’s picture book Bog Myrtle (Annick, $19.99, 9781773218922) starts as an intriguing fairy tale about two very different sisters: eternally optimistic Beatrice and forever grumpy Magnolia, who live “alone in a hideous, drafty old house” and “are so poor that they ate rats for breakfast and cockroaches for lunch.” Beatrice decides to make a sweater for Magnolia, who gripes about being cold. Since they have no money, Beatrice, who loves nature and crafts, heads to the forest to look for helpful treasures, and eventually encounters a monster named Bog Myrtle. Surprises happen every step of the way, and Sharp’s sense of humor shines through—for instance, with a knitting store called “Knot in My Back Yarn.”

Bog Myrtle offers Beatrice magic silk, which allows her to knit a truly splendid gift for Magnolia—who immediately sees potential for profit. As Magnolia launches a magic sweater business that becomes increasingly exploitative, Sharp transforms the tale into a sophisticated, humorous fable about sustainability, corporate greed and workers’ rights. Sharp manages to integrate these themes so seamlessly that they never feel strident; readers will simply find themselves cheering when the good guys beat the villain. Bold, contrasting colors imbue Sharp’s eye-catching illustrations with a modern, energetic vibe. Bog Myrtle offers a fun-filled yet serious look at sustainability and corporate accountability. Who would have even thought that possible? Sharp’s wizardry makes it happen.

H John the Skeleton

John the Skeleton (Yonder, $19.95, 9781632063700) is a wonderfully quirky story about a life-size model skeleton who “retires” from

SPOOKY READS

adorable than creepy—that haunt these books any day of the year .

his schoolroom job as an anatomy model to live with an elderly couple on their farm in Estonia. He quickly becomes a part of the family, which includes two young grandchildren who frequently visit. There’s nothing scary or ghoulish here; instead, John’s presence allows Gramps and Grams to begin coming to terms with their eventual deaths. With 64 pages, plenty of illustrations and very short chapters, the book works equally well as a read-aloud for sophisticated younger readers or as a chapter book for solo readers.

The understated humor in Estonian writer Triinu Laan’s prose—as well as Adam Cullen’s translation—is ever present. Gramps makes wooden phalanges for John’s missing finger bones, and gives John his old musty coat “with two medals still pinned to it: one for donating blood and the other for being a good tractor driver.” The family includes John in all of their adventures. They help John make snow angels, and John even takes a bath with the grandkids.

Marja-Liisa Plats’ black-and-white illustrations, often accentuated by well-placed shades of fuchsia (a blushing face, a sled amid the snow), are full of whimsy. Her linework is perfect for this scruffy, lovable couple and their farmhouse world.

One of the book’s many delights is that John never reacts in any way; his entire “personality” is simply what this family imagines it to be. Nonetheless, he comforts them greatly, and there are particularly touching scenes at the end, where the book confronts death. John the Skeleton is an endearing story that helps normalize death while highlighting the enduring power of love.

The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything

Nadia Ahmed’s The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything (Beaming, $18.99, 9781506495118) is not only a charming Halloween tale, but also an excellent year-round story about facing one’s fears. Young Finn is scared of many things, including tree branches, butterflies, the color orange and flying. On Halloween, he stays home in his attic—noisy humans also make him anxious—while his older brother and sister have a grand time careening through the air. However, when they fail to bring back Finn his favorite Halloween treat (chocolate bats), he swears that he will fly to get his own next year.

his stomach swoops, his hands sweat, and he can’t move.” Happily, Finn’s gradual self-regulated program of exposure therapy works! He starts out small, simply touching a leafless branch “for one whole minute.”

Ahmed’s whimsical illustrations are mostly in black and white at the start, except for flashes of that dreaded orange. Despite this limited palette, the pages are wonderfully appealing, never scary or dull. Finn is a simply drawn ghost, but somehow his spirit—pardon the pun—and resolution shine through on every page. As he tackles his fears one by one, color gradually enters his world. The final spread is a glorious ode to Halloween orange, as well as other small splashes of the rainbow. Ghoulishly great, The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything will inspire readers sidelined by their own jitters.

Ahmed’s prose perfectly captures Finn’s trepidation in just a handful of words that will resonate with young readers: “When Finn is afraid,

Read at Your Own Risk

Be careful what you wish for. That’s definitely true for Hannah, the seventh grader whose journal constitutes Remy Lai’s Read at Your Own Risk (Holt, $13.99, 9781250323354). Hannah and her friends search for a diversion while “some boring author” comes to their school assembly to “talk about his spooky books, which I bet aren’t even spooky.” Instead of attending, they decide to venture into the school attic and play a Ouija board-style game they call “Spirit of the Coin.” After their session, however, Hannah quickly discovers that she is haunted by an evil spirit, who continues to terrify her, and even writes in her journal in red ink. The journal format will definitely appeal to middle grade readers, making the story all the more intimate and seemingly real. Nonetheless, be forewarned: As the cover filled with skulls and dripping with blood would suggest, this book is not for the squeamish. While many readers will revel in its thrills and chills, others may be completely terrified, especially by the frequent blood splatters, horrific dental details and the hospitalization of the narrator’s young brother. Those whom those details don’t scare off may easily find themselves reading it more than once, looking for clues about the evil spirit. Read at Your Own Risk is a dynamic display of scary storytelling and compelling, haunting graphics that challenges readers to create their own journals. Lai leans into the mysterious as she wields her craft, noting, “Telling a story is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Only the storyteller has the box and knows what the whole picture looks like.”

—Alice Cary

reviews | children’s

H Black Star

By Kwame Alexander

MIDDLE GRADE

Twelve-year-old Charley Cuffey loves a few things: her Nana Kofi and his stories; correcting the grammar of her best friend, Cool Willie Green; and above all else, baseball. She has been obsessed since her daddy took her to see a Negro Leagues game, and is determined to be the first woman to be a professional baseball player—a big goal for anyone, but even more so for a Black girl living through segregation. When she challenges a bully to a game that takes them into the white part of town, she faces consequences that extend beyond baseball.

Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander’s Black Star (Little, Brown, $17.99, 9780316442596) is the gripping second book of what is sure to be an impactful trilogy. The bestselling first installment, The Door of No Return, centered on Kofi, a tween living in Ghana during the 1860s, who loves swimming and his own nana’s stories. His story ended with him facing an unknown fate. This sequel

The Café at the Edge of the Woods

By Mikey Please

PICTURE BOOK

Rene is a chef who dreams of serving her carefully crafted “fine cuisine.” After tireless hard work, she’s thrilled to be opening The Café at the Edge of the Woods (HarperCollins, $19.99, 9780063345492).

But this charming eatery doesn’t make a splash right away. Her “Waiter Wanted” sign results in just one applicant, a little green fellow named Glumfoot. And days after the grand opening, still no customers have arrived.

A go-getter, Glumfoot heads into the woods and returns with a gigantic ogre, who listens as Rene reads him her menu. When she suggests truffle stew with peas and long grain rice, the ogre requests “bats! And slugs and buttered mice!” Would he prefer a cheddar tart? No, he wants “a bag of bats! That smells like fart!” Rene is frustrated, but Glumfoot urges his boss to hang in there—and covertly does some artful rearranging so that the tart gets “flipped onto its back, so it looked like a pickled bat”

jumps forward to segregated Virginia in the 1920s, where Kofi is a storytelling nana himself, slowly revealing the gaps of his life as he shares them with his granddaughter, Charley.

Alexander has found a magic formula in his verse novels featuring protagonists whose lives revolve around a sport: Their love of the game keeps the plot moving forward and offers a plethora of potential for metaphor. Charley is a vibrant and creative narrator, full of important questions for her Nana, and excellent hyperbole like “it’s so quiet / I can hear the moon.”

Alexander uses every aspect of his poems to his advantage. For example, a striking chapter features poems whose titles all begin with “Fifth Sunday,” showing just how significant this big game day is to Charley.

As in The Door of No Return, a significant theme throughout Black Star is the power of

and “the rice became . . . maggot fondue! The whole lot looked disgusting.”

To the ogre, disgusting is delightful! The Café at the Edge of the Woods is a wacky, wonderful ode to ingenuity and flexibility, topped with a hearty serving of teamwork and panache. BAFTA-winning animated short film director Mikey Please fills every page of his picture book debut with expertly and engagingly rendered cartoon art. Fans of Please’s expressive illustrations and clever storytelling will be happy to know a second book in this new series will be served up soon. Chef’s kiss!

—Linda M. Castellitto

H In Praise of Mystery

By Ada Limón

Illustrated by Peter Sís

PICTURE BOOK

This book about space, featuring words that will literally travel through space, is metaphysically brilliant. In Praise of Mystery (Norton, $18.99, 9781324054009) is based on the eponymous poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón that is inscribed on the Europa Clipper, a space probe bound

storytelling. In an author’s note, Alexander explains his dedication to portraying Black history accurately. He highlights real historical events through actual poetry and information about public figures from that time, but maintains focus on the stories “about the regular families that lived, laughed, loved, danced, worked, failed, hoped, cried, and died just like everybody else.”

Readers continuing the series, as well as those starting with Black Star, will be gifted with a reading experience that is equal parts difficult and beautiful. All will be called to remember Nana Kofi’s wisdom, that “when we water our words, they grow our minds.”

—Emily Koch

for Jupiter’s moon, Europa. It’s an evocative tribute not only to Earth and space, but also to what brings us together and makes us dream.

Hans Christian Andersen Medalist Peter Sís often uses unique perspectives and a hint of the fantastical to tackle complex, profound topics, and In Praise of Mystery is like falling into a dream—vibrant and vast, joyful and curious. It is a blur of fantasy and reality: A drop of rain carries a tree blossoming with life; the moon finds itself within the shape of a whale. It would take ages to fully explore these myriad references and details.

The complete text of “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” which accompanies these illustrations, can also be found in the book’s back matter. Reading out loud this immense yet intimate poem will help one fully appreciate the flawless alliteration and precise language with which Limón writes of wondrous things above, below and within all of us. An author’s afterword also gives enough tantalizing information to spark a hunt to learn more about Jupiter and the Clipper.

The Clipper’s journey will take approximately six years. Countless historical events will happen and countless new lives will be born while the poem travels to a place no human has ever been. For readers of all ages and from all walks of life, In Praise of Mystery is a chance to partake in a small piece of this wonder.

—Jill Lorenzini

H They Call Me Teach

By Lesa Cline-Ransome

Illustrated by James E. Ransome PICTURE BOOK

For many, it is easy to take education for granted: The slog from kindergarten to graduation is just an obligation. They Call Me Teach: Lessons in Freedom (Candlewick, $18.99, 9780763681555), written by Lesa Cline-Ransome and illustrated by James E. Ransome, takes us back to a time before the Civil War, when education was denied to many. As Cline-Ransome explains in her author’s note, They Call Me Teach is just one representation of what happened all over the South as enslaved Black Americans defied anti-literacy laws—an act that was both rebellion in itself and a part of their larger quest for freedom.

Cline-Ransome’s story focuses on Teach, an enslaved man given this whispered name by those he has taught to read. Written as if Teach is just matter-of-factly telling you about his day, the first-person narration is effortless and beautifully descriptive. Phrases like “a kitchen hotter than August” place you squarely in Teach’s world. There’s an easy storytelling cadence to this book that doesn’t obscure its literary complexity, with lines that are simple yet weighed down with underlying meaning.

Coretta Scott King Award-winner Ransome floods the page with deep, antique-feeling watercolors that instantly transport you back in time. Intricate details such as a collection of wooden spoons, the shadows of folded clothes on a shelf and the frayed collar of Teach’s shirt pull you so far into the story, you could be standing in the back of the room. In the book’s dedication, Ransome mentions the late illustrator Jerry Pinkney, whose gift for visual storytelling he clearly shares.

Impressive and engaging, They Call Me Teach is somber—but not without rays of light and hope. Rich with information, it opens a door to conversations about United States history, equality and the struggle for freedom and education. And while this picture book is geared toward children, older readers will find it just as powerful and moving. After all, when it comes to stories about perseverance, resistance and the power of reading, there is no age limit.

—Jill Lorenzini

meet Devin Elle Kurtz

Devin Elle Kurtz lives in Pasadena, California, with her dog, Kira, and her 33 houseplants. She works in the animation industry and was a lead background painter on Netflix’s Disenchantment The Bakery Dragon (Knopf, $18.99, 9780593710968), her debut picture book as an author, follows a tiny dragon named Ember whose inability to breathe anything other than adorable little puffs of fire isn’t doing much to help him build his treasure hoard. One night, a sudden storm leads him to stumble across something even better than gold: a bakery!

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