November 01, 2014: Volume LXXXII, No 21

Featuring 296 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen

KIRKUS VOL. LXXXII, NO.

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REVIEWS

The Secrets of Leighann Dobbs’ Success p. 128

FICTION

How To Be Both

by Ali Smith This adventurous novel about art and life has been printed two ways—you can read either or both. p. 29

on the cover

Meline Toumani had grand ambitions for her book about the Armenian genocide. Then she arrived in Turkey and no one would talk to her. There Was and There Was Not is the remarkable, moving result. p. 58

CHILDREN'S & TEEN

Raindrops Roll

by April Pulley Sayre Liquid verse and sparkling photographs celebrate the ordinary wonder of rain. p. 108

NONFICTION

The Dogs Are Eating Them Now

by Graeme Smith Cheerless and even nightmarish, one of the best books yet about the war in Central Asia p. 80

from the editor’s desk:

Congrats to the Winners of the 2014 Kirkus Prize!

B Y C la i b orne

Smi t h

Photo courtesy Michael Thad Carter

On Oct. 23, we announced the winners of the 2014 Kirkus Prize.

Eighteen books were named by our judges as finalists, and three became winners (in the categories of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature). Each of the three winners receives $50,000.

In Young Readers’ Literature: Aviary Wonders Inc.: Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual by Kate Samworth (Clarion)—Modeled on mail order catalogs of the past and present, Aviary Wonders Inc. presents solid informational content and a thoughtful environmental warning—all leavened with snarky humor—in stunning visual spreads. Bird species are going extinct at a great rate, but why worry? With this splendid catalog of cusClaiborne Smith tomized beaks, wings and other bird parts, readers can assemble glorious avian creations of their very own!

Judges’ statement: “Aviary Wonders Inc. is a picture book that widens the definition of the genre. While truly a picture book, it was created for readers ages 10 and up with well-developed sensibilities and senses of humor. Confronting environmental issues in a clever and whimsical way, it is original, highly unexpected, beautiful, and thought-provoking. Aviary Wonders Inc. is by far one of the most creative books we have ever encountered.”

In Nonfiction: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)—A revelatory, groundbreaking and oftentimes hilarious memoir by the New Yorker cartoonist on helping her parents through their old age.

Judges’ statement: “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a vital, significant wonder. Chast ingeniously combines cartoons, family photos, sketches, documents and text to explore a profoundly human issue: the deaths of one’s parents. In the hands of an author whose facility in two mediums—illustration and prose—is unparalleled, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? encourages anyone who reads it to face the grim and ridiculous reality of the human condition in all its heartbreaking beauty. One can’t help but finish this book with a sense of gratitude that Roz Chast has shared her memoir with the world. It is as imperative as it is moving.”

And in Fiction: Euphoria by Lily King (Atlantic Monthly Press)—Set in Papua, Guinea, in the 1930s, Euphoria is a brilliant, astonishing and deeply moving novel inspired by the life of Margaret Mead and her passionate entanglement with two fellow anthropologists.

Judges’ statement: “Lily King has written the fiction book of the year. Euphoria stands out for its perfect construction, its economy and originality, and its fearlessness. This lushly imagined novel offers a thrilling exploration of the interplay between character and culture, between the darkness of humanity and the tenderness of the human heart. It’s going to be a classic.”

Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thanks once again to all the judges and Kirkus staff who worked very hard to give away $150,000 in a fair and thoughtful way. Now we start working on the 2015 Kirkus Prize.

for more re vi e ws and f eatures, vi si t u s on l i n e at kirkus.com.

Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N # President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com Editor in Chief C laiborne S mith csmith@kirkus.com Managing/Nonfiction Editor E R I C L I E B E T R AU eliebetrau@kirkus.com Fiction Editor L aurie M uchnick lmuchnick@kirkus.com Children’s & Teen Editor VICKY SMITH vsmith@kirkus.com Mysteries Editor THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor G R E G O RY M c N A M E E Senior Indie Editor KAREN SCHECHNER kschechner@kirkus.com Indie Editor RYA N L E A H E Y rleahey@kirkus.com Indie Editor D avid R a p p drapp@kirkus.com Assistant Indie Editor M AT T D O M I N O mdomino@kirkus.com Assistant Editor CHELSEA LANGFORD clangford@kirkus.com Copy Editor BETSY JUDKINS Director of Kirkus Editorial JIM SPIVEY jspivey@kirkus.com Director of Technology E R I K S M A RT T esmartt@kirkus.com Marketing Communications Director SARAH KALINA skalina@kirkus.com Marketing Associate A rden Piacen z a apiacenza@kirkus.com Advertising/Client Promotions A nna C oo p er acooper@kirkus.com

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contents fiction

The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.

Index to Starred Reviews............................................................ 5 REVIEWS................................................................................................ 5 editor’s note..................................................................................... 6 Michel Faber Goes Interplanetary....................................... 14 Mystery...............................................................................................32 Science Fiction & Fantasy.......................................................... 39 Romance............................................................................................ 41

nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 43 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 43 editor’s note...................................................................................44 On the Cover: Meline Toumani................................................. 58

children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 85 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 85 editor’s note...................................................................................86 Jasper Fforde’s Toughest Critics......................................... 102 Roundup: Black History Month Picture Books.............. 113 interactive e-books................................................................... 118 shelf space..................................................................................... 120

indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................121

Charles R. Smith Jr. and Shane W. Evans give readers 28 reasons to celebrate—all year long, not just in February. Read the review on p. 116.

REVIEWS.............................................................................................121 editor’s note................................................................................. 122 Back Story: Leighann Dobbs.................................................. 128 Appreciations: On Good Taste, and Otherwise...............139 |

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on the web this and the Greek pantheon. I was always interested in how human [the gods] were—the frailty of them.” We talk to Sheehan this month at kirkus.com.

w w w. k i r k u s . c o m

Photo courtesy Selby Frame

Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York— there you have an inkling of Brock Clarke’s new novel, The Happiest People in the World. Who are “the happiest people in the world”? Theoretically, it’s all the people who live in Denmark, the country that gave the world Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-face sandwich. But Denmark is also where some political cartoonists got into very unhappy trouble when they attempted to depict Muhammad in their drawings, which prompted protests, arson and even assassination attempts. Imagine, then, that one of those cartoonists, given protection through the CIA, is relocated to a small town in upstate New York where he is given a job as a high school guidance counselor.

Look for our interview with Clarke at kirkus.com this month.

Photo courtesy Cybele Knowles

Demigods on Speedway, Aurelie Sheehan’s new collection of interrelated stories set in Arizona, juxtaposes the mundane and the divine. Tucson natives know Speedway Boulevard as one of the city’s major arterial roads, peppered with an endless stream of chain restaurants and billboards. (LIFE once called it the ugliest street in America.)

This seems at odds with the notion of demigods from Greek mythology—powerful, romantic figures—yet Sheehan forges a connection between the urban and the mythological, basing her characters on Zeus, Artemis, Apollo, Cassandra and others. “Tucson always feels like a place of great worth and uniqueness,” Sheehan says, “yet it’s struggling like hell. I started to think about the relationship between

It’s no secret that men often behave in intemperate ways, but in recent years, we’ve witnessed so many spectacular public displays of male excess—disgraced politicians, erotically desperate professors, fallen sports icons—that we’re left to wonder whether something has come unwired in the collective male psyche. In the essays collected in Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, Laura Kipnis revisits the archetypes of wayward masculinity that have captured her imagination over the years, scrutinizing men who have figured in her own life alongside more controversial public examples.

Slicing through the usual clichés about the differences between the sexes, Kipnis mixes intellectual rigor and wit to give us a compelling survey of the affinities, jealousies, longings and erotics that structure the male-female bond. “Feisty, unapologetic forays into the messiness of gender relations,” our reviewer writes; we interview Kipnis this month at kirkus.com.

Photo courtesy Pieter M. van Hattem

Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9

9 And be sure to check out our Indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors. We feature authors’ exclusive personal essays and reported articles on how they achieved their success in publishing. It’s a must-read resource for any aspiring author interested in getting readers to notice their new books.

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fiction WHITE PLAGUE

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Abel, James Berkley (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-425-27632-7

LOST & FOUND by Brooke Davis........................................................16 SCREENPLAY by MacDonald Harris.................................................19

A triple dose of trouble awaits bioterror expert Joe Rush in the remote reaches of the Arctic Ocean: A U.S. submarine with superadvanced weapons is in flames, the sailors who haven’t been killed yet by a mysterious agent will die if they’re not treated soon, and a Chinese sub is fast approaching.

Not the sort of news you want to be given at 1 a.m. But the unexcitable, Anchorage-based Rush is best situated and best equipped to take charge of the situation. This despite the fact that the troops under his authority on a Marine icebreaker treat him like a pariah for a tragic incident dating back to his own days as a Marine during the first Gulf War. A brash loudmouth from the State Department isn’t his best friend, either. But with his one-time Marine sidekick Eddie, the nation’s leading authority on Arctic ice and a fetching submarine expert all alongside him, Rush is ready for battle. But what exactly is killing the sailors?

Will the Chinese annihilate Rush and his crew before they find out? Is there a spy among the Americans? And what about the Russians, who covet control of the Arctic region now that its melting icecap is creating new gas, oil and shipping possibilities? Abel (a pseudonym) is a solid, cleanly efficient writer who knows how to stage an action scene and, just as important, is a master of this chilled universe. One of the book’s memorable moments is keyed to the shifting behavior of the ice on which the ships are perched. Though the secret conspiracy underlying the events is a bit predictable, the effective flashbacks and unfolding events keep the pages turning.

Joe Rush makes a strong debut against dangerous odds in the Arctic, and so does Abel.

MORIARTY by Anthony Horowitz..................................................... 20 J by Howard Jacobson..........................................................................23 THE DEVIL IS A BLACK DOG by Sándor Jászberényi; trans. by M. Henderson Ellis.................................................................23 EVERLASTING LANE by Andrew Lovett.......................................... 24 HERE by Richard McGuire..................................................................25 HONEYDEW by Edith Pearlman........................................................ 26 HOW TO BE BOTH by Ali Smith........................................................ 29 NEVER JUDGE A LADY BY HER COVER by Sarah MacLean..........41

HONEYDEW Stories

Pearlman, Edith Little, Brown (272 pp.) $25.00 $12.99 e-book Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-316-29722-6 978-0-315-20724-0 e-book

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the multimedia dylan thomas THE WALL

I heard Dylan Thomas’ melodious Welsh voice long before I read any of his poetry. When I was in high school, a teacher played my class a record (remember them?) of Thomas reading “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and I’ve never forgotten those hypnotic cadences. In his introduction to a beautiful new Folio Society edition of Thomas’ Selected Poems, novelist and poet Owen Sheers says Dylan’s work is “a reminder that poetry has its roots in music, and always will.” In this centennial year of Thomas’ birth, the many tributes taking place around the world are a reminder that literature can take many forms beyond the current choice of paper or e-books; during the PEN World Voices Festival in New York in May, I saw a rollicking “multimedia tribute” to Thomas that incorporated jazz, hip-hop and spoken word—in English and Welsh. The deep sounds of the double bass evoked Thomas’ voice like nothing else.

Perhaps Thomas attracts more creative approaches than most writers—even in the 1950s, he was known for his groundbreaking reading tours, and in the early ’60s, the rising folk singer Robert Allen Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan in his honor (mispronouncing it, as far as the Welsh are concerned, but that’s another story). There’s a walking tour of Thomas’ Greenwich Village, where he stayed several times while on tour—and where he died—available as both a book and a smartphone app.

A Welsh journalist has started a website to urge the observance of annual “Dylan Nights” to honor the poet around the anniversary of his death on Nov. 9 with eating and drinking and poetry recitations.

But of course it always comes back to the words on the page, and I’ve been returning again and again to the Folio Society edition, with its thick creamy paper, endpapers showing Thomas’ handwritten notes and several photographs, including a contact sheet from a 1946 session for Vogue and a lovely shot of his writing cottage on an estuary in Laugharne, nestled among the hills of South Wales. Holding that book in my hands, it feels like something that will last forever. —L.M.

Adler, H.G. Translated by Filkins, Peter Random House (672 pp.) $30.00 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-8129-9306-6 Pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz,” wrote the German literary critic Theodore Adorno, “is barbaric.” But what of those who lived through Auschwitz? Just to live, to say nothing of writing, is problematic.

So thinks the protagonist of survivor Adler’s novel, the last in a trilogy, the preceding two volumes of which were published out of order a half-century ago. There is the sheer guilt of being alive when so many died, and then there are the memories, the past that “hisses in my ears, causes horrible and sometimes also multiple sensations, pressing into me, lifting me, holding ready a thousand horrors....” Arthur Landau has lived. At the beginning of the 1960s, he’s living in London, beginning to trust his neighbors a little, even though he and his family are the definitive strangers: “[T]he few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away.” The welcome trade-off, Landau says, is that no one bothers him, though the thought is always with him that he could just as easily disappear from the street with no one noticing or caring, as before. Landau’s world is one of memories that sometimes become very real—if only in his mind, though it’s not always easy for him or for readers to distinguish the real from the imagined, as with his Dostoyevski-an encounter with an “Assessor of Sympathies.” Landau’s disconnection is more affecting, and more open to the reader’s sympathy, than that of the protagonist of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, which has a similarly strident quality; Adler’s novel has a Kafkaesque dimension as well, save that Landau has at least the saving grace of an understanding wife who does what she can to make him feel safe, or at least safer, in the world: “She was happy to see,” Landau tells us, “that I had achieved a partial and tolerable sense of resignation.”

An eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.

LEARNING CYRILLIC Stories

Albahari, David Translated by Elias-Bursac, Ellen Dalkey Archive (180 pp.) $15.95 paper | $14.99 e-book Dec. 23, 2014 978-1-62897-090-6 978-1-62897-091-3 e-book

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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Expats, lovers and writers from Belgrade to Calgary wrestle with distance and loss in this pensive, postmodern story collection from the veteran Serbian author. |

Albahari’s prior works in English translation (Gotz and Meyer, 2005, etc.) emphasized the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi rule. The 27 stories here are relatively gentle, more interior tales, though World War II remains on Albahari’s mind. In “Hitler in Chicago,” a writer meets a woman on a plane who claims to have met the dictator, delivering a final line that suggests his ghost isn’t leaving soon: “Everyone must see Hitler once in their life.” In “Tito in Zurich,” a woman takes practically orgasmic joy in a poster in her room of the Yugoslavian strongman, evoking a tension between security and surveillance. More typical, though, is the title story, in which a man teaching Cyrillic to Serbian children in a cold North American town befriends Thunder Cloud, a Blackfoot Indian; Thunder Cloud’s folk tales intermingle with the church’s and the narrator’s own Serbian background to make for a somber study of displacement. Metafictional gamesmanship abounds: Pieces like “The Basilica in Lyon” and “A Story With No Way Out” are stories about storytelling and the futility of applying order to our messy lives. (“I don’t know why I began this story, nor why my wife and I turned up in it.”) Though not exactly flash fiction, these stories tend

to be brief, introducing a relationship and abstracted complication, and Albahari’s habitually open-ended conclusions can be unsatisfying. But sometimes the approach produces gems like the two-page “Squirrel, Peanut, Hat,” in which a squirrel at the narrator’s front door sparks a memory of his father’s stint in a Nazi camp. Albahari lives in a lively, quirky present, but a dark past is never far away.

Considered, sometimes-stiff experiments enlivened by Albahari’s wordplay.

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THE IMMORTALS OF MELUHA

Beatrice Kaspary and her partner, Florin Wenninger, are called to handle the body of a young woman found in a cow pasture. The physician on scene believes she was pushed from a cliff, but that’s not as interesting to the detectives as the series of numbers and symbols tattooed on the bottoms of her feet.

They determine the numbers are GPS coordinates and, after identifying the victim, follow them to a wooded area where they find a geocache holding a shrink-wrapped human hand along with a cryptic note and another set of coordinates. As Bea wearily fights with her former husband, Achim, over the way she cares for their two children, she also finds herself increasingly drawn to her partner, who already has a serious girlfriend.

Meanwhile, more and more body parts surface as the pair follow the geocaching clues in their attempt to find the killer before more people wind up dead. Though Florin refers to Bea’s amazing deductive powers, she shows very little of them in this wellconstructed if slow-moving story. Even when the bodies start piling up, Bea and Florin tend to pack it in and head home at the end of the workday. Also, Bea comes across as very fragile, almost delicate—not the type one would expect to find working homicides. The translation seems stilted in places, but the overall story is solid, and Archer ties everything up nicely at the end.

Though Bea and Florin often seem to be phoning it in, Archer makes up for their lack of energy with an inventive plot.

Amish Jo Fletcher/Quercus (448 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-62365-143-5 Series: Shiva Trilogy, 1

Amish draws from India’s rich culture to fictionalize the life of Shiva, the Great God Mahadev, of Hindu theology.

In faraway Tibet 3,000 years ago lived Shiva, a Guna warrior-chieftain.

Weary of battle with the predatory Pakrati, he agrees when Meluha, “the richest and most powerful empire in India, “invites the Guna to emigrate. Resting during the trek, Shiva drinks Somras, a restorative potion, and his throat takes on a beautiful blue color. It’s a sign the Meluha believe marks him as the Neelkanth, savior and successor to immortals like Lord Ram and Lord Brahma. With that, Shiva is drawn into conflict between the Suryavanshi of Meluha and the Chandravanshi of Swadweep centered around Somras, which has created “a remarkable and near-perfect society.” Amish offers a glossary and small map and, most interestingly, a synopsis on the various castes. There’s much about philosophy and architecture, somewhat less about dress and food, and little about everyday life in this dense but readily understandable immersion in Hindu culture. In Meluha, a “land of abundance, of almost ethereal perfection,” Shiva meets and woos Sita, the emperor’s daughter. Sita’s been relegated to vikrama (untouchable) caste because of personal tragedy, but Shiva ignores tradition. Parvateshwar, Meluha’s chief general, proves an interesting character, a gruff and practical warrior, who refuses at first to believe Shiva’s the Neelkanth.

Disconcertingly, Amish’s dialogue has noticeably anachronistic phrases—“can’t you take a joke?”; “Yeah, right.” Shiva explores philosophy with assorted temple pandits, accepts his destiny, leads Mehula to defeat the Chandravanshi, only to discover that “terrorists” making random attacks—Nagas who look “like a vulture in human form”—are not agents of the Chandravanshi, as had been assumed.

With a cliffhanger conclusion, this first in a trilogy will appeal to those who enjoy delving into works like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia.

GLOW

Beauman, Ned Knopf (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-385-35260-4 A new club drug tangles a scenester in a global conspiracy in this quirky tale of love and corporate overreach.

The third novel by Beauman (The Teleportation Accident, 2013, etc.) opens with Raf, a 22-year-old Londoner, at a rave, where he hears about an Ecstasy-like drug called glow. He’s intrigued, and not exclusively for pleasure-seeking reasons: Raf suffers from “non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome,” a condition that wrecks normal circadian rhythms, and studying glow plays into his interest in the body’s peculiar chemistry. But his investigations uncover something more sinister: Paramilitary types in white vans are kidnapping Burmese men, and Raf soon learns of an effort by a multinational mining company, Lacebark, to control production of glow’s organic source in Myanmar. Guiding him through this underworld is Cherish, a half-Burmese woman whose father was a Lacebark executive. She’s smart and tough-minded, and a romance soon develops, but Raf doesn’t know if he can trust the array of ex-Lacebark employees, Burmese expat revolutionaries and rave promoters who make a relatively benign drug seem like a deadly experience in a hurry.

(The bulk of the novel takes place across two weeks.) Beauman writes thoughtfully on how drugs play with the senses, and the novel is spiked with clever observations that connect body

FIVE

Archer, Ursula Translated by Searle, Jamie Lee Minotaur (336 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-250-03741-1 978-1-250-03742-8 e-book Archer, an Austrian writer of teen novels, has created a series of gruesome killings in her Salzberg-based first thriller for adults.

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“Bender excels at characters on the edge of despair, particularly mothers who resent the children they love.” from refund

SEE HOW SMALL

chemistry with big-data algorithms and corporate exploitation. In other moments, Raf ’s bantering with Cherish and his stumblebum investigations add a dose of comedy. But the overall plot is exceedingly convoluted, with just about every character’s motivations called into question until everybody seems like a double or triple agent. This may play into Beauman’s point about the difficulty of nailing down the nature of the human condition, but the closing pages are burdened by who-did-what-to-whom explication.

A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics.

Blackwood, Scott Little, Brown (224 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-316-37380-7 978-0-316-37397-5 e-book The grisly deaths of three girls radiate across a community, which becomes as fragmented as this novel’s impressionistic prose.

“The men with guns did things to us.”

The second novel by Blackwood (We Agreed to Meet Just Here, 2009, etc.) opens with a harrowing collective invocation by a trio of teenage girls working in an Austin ice cream shop, two of them sisters, who in a robbery, were bound and gagged with their underwear, then killed when the shop was burned down.

In brief chapters thick with fire and ghost imagery, Blackwood alternates among a handful of men and women affected by the tragedy: Kate, the mother of two of the girls; Jack, a firefighter

REFUND Stories

Bender, Karen E. Counterpoint (256 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-455-7 In these 13 stories, Bender (A Town of Empty Rooms, 2013, etc.) showcases families that “endure” in both senses of the word: suffer patiently and carry on despite enormous travail.

The title story—concerning a sublet in Tribeca that goes horribly wrong for both the struggling couple renting it out and the woman who takes it beginning in September 2001—epitomizes the high anxiety that permeates Bender’s stories. The New York setting is unusual, though. The book’s landscape is mostly drab fast-food– and mall-saturated suburbia, often in Southern states where displaced northerners, usually Jewish, have arrived under financial duress. In “Free Lunch,” two New Yorkers in North Carolina are as uncomfortable around a Hasidic rabbi and his wife as they are among their Christian neighbors; in “The Third Child,” an overwhelmed mother, distraught to find herself pregnant again, nevertheless acts generously toward a neighbor child, only to be viciously snubbed by the girl’s Baptist mother. Family and financial tensions often combine. In “For What Purpose?,” a woman whose parents died in a car crash experiences a brief sense of belonging with work mates until she’s let go. In both “What the Cat Said” and “This Cat,” the family pet becomes the metaphor, or scapegoat, for disappointment and dysfunction. “Anything for Money” offers the book’s only wealthy character, who becomes the most desperate when his daughter needs a new heart. The first two stories are among the least depressing. In “Reunion,” a woman goes off the deep end, buying a phony beach lot from an old boyfriend, but her marriage survives. In “Theft,” an aging scam artist and a jilted young woman forge a friendship that improves them both. And the volume’s gentlest story, “The Sea Turtle Hospital,” concerning a young teacher’s kindness to a kindergartner, takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting.

Although her tone can veer toward bitterness, Bender excels at characters on the edge of despair, particularly mothers who resent the children they love.

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who entered the carnage; Hollis, an Iraq vet and witness; Rosa, a reporter; and Michael, the getaway driver for the killers. A more conventional novel might apply a worlds-in-collision template to these characters, emphasizing their shared experience.

But Blackwood’s style is much more slippery, and his characters’ struggles are more particular and isolated. Michael’s grip on reality slackens as his drug use increases and he struggles to keep custody of his daughter, while Hollis finds his PTSD triggers resurgent, and Kate cycles through relationships. The connective thread among them isn’t so much the tragedy as the dour, vaguely symbolic experiences they have, from the portentous utterances of Michael’s grandmother-in-law (“Are you from the planet of men?”) to interludes in the voices of the dead girls themselves. The novel is strikingly creepy, if a bit affected—the brevity of the chapters and gauzy prose have a lyrical effect but also make the story feel diffuse, with no one peculiar, uncanny moment given the chance to build up a head of steam.

Blackwood is an excellent stylist, though in the name of unconventionality, the reader lacks a few narrative toeholds.

heavily laden with surrealistic numerology and metaphors, especially the latter third, “the distillation of destiny.”

Think of a Dan Brown–like adventure penned by an erudite Talmudic scholar.

THE COMPLETE STORIES

Butts, Mary McPherson & Company (448 pp.) $20.00 | Dec. 15, 2014 978-1-62054-009-1 This collection may depend more on the author’s historical interest than the writing’s quality, but when it’s good, it bears the reminder that T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford encouraged her.

Butts (Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, 1998, etc.) ranged widely in her life (1890-1937) and writing among ideas, relationships and places. Rural England, London, Paris and the Riviera furnish settings; booze, drugs and the occult supply atmosphere. This breadth or restlessness is reflected in the variously bland, challenging, annoying and accomplished short fiction presented here. The long early story “In Bayswater” anticipates kitchen-sink drama with its “small, beastly tragedy” involving a dysfunctional family and an intrusive outsider—a topic she revisits and revamps. Two stories later, the brief and mystifying meditations of Bellerophon compose one of several classical excursions. Then comes the fine “Angele au Couvent,” a well-told, conventional and probably autobiographical tale about girls at a convent school. She also does a nice ghost story in “With and Without Buttons,” in which a plot to frighten someone with oddly placed gloves backfires on the plotters. In “Madonna of the Magnificat,” she imagines, quite distinctively, the thoughts and conversations behind Mary’s accepting her role as mother of God. Such historical ventriloquism arises again in the engaging narrative of “A Roman Speaks,” which revisits the kidnapping of a young Julius Caesar. Butts’ writing occasionally reveals what might have been had she focused on her craft, as in her description in “The House Party” of “the seawashed, fly-blown, scorched hotel along the coast” or the evocative “[s]hadows on the moon-candied stones, cat-black and sharp.” Too often, she risks losing the reader with near-drivel: “Our affair was described in sentences that depended upon a sentence that was not written.”

Butts merits attention for her ability to stand out at times amid a group of outstanding writers, but the weakest of her uneven output may dampen even historical interest.

THE FOOL RETURNS

Block, Tom Anaphora Literary Press (250 pp.) $20.00 paper | Dec. 15, 2014 978-1-937536-85-5 In Block’s newest, Bill Willis is a Jew who doesn’t realize he’s Jewish until he discovers he’s heir to a spiritual obligation originating with 13th-century philosopher Moses Maimonides.

Bill grew up without religion, failed at professional baseball and became a bartender, all without realizing his family was inextricably intertwined in the great polymath Maimonides’ desire to heal the Abrahamic rift by creating a covenant between Jewish cabala and Sufism theology.

Long ago, “a 40-card deck [was] dispersed to the four corners of the world...imbued with spiritual powers...[to] bring these two religious paths together” by “the transposition of reality—perceived as well as unseen—into numerology.” The axis was Caceres in Andalusia, and the impetus was the Inquisition.

Even Christopher Columbus carried one of the cards to the New World. Not knowing that “the ingathering of the cards will repair the original injury to creation,” Bill has the final card, the Fool Card, tossed into his lap while riding the subway. Trapped by the prophecy, Bill is soon compelled to journey to the Iberian Peninsula and contact Jews who’ve lived as Christians since the Inquisition. There are visits to dank and dark underground reliquaries, meetings with scholarly relatives, a brief tragic love affair, a retired madam and assorted mystics. In fulfilling this “Tariqah...to acknowledge the injustice visited upon Hagar and Ishmael,” Bill’s travels come to symbolize the Fool passing from the Formative World “into the Creative World, where everything is lost in a haze of ulterior meanings.” While the writing is literary and full of imagery, the story is extraordinarily dense, 10

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MEMORY OF FLAMES

pair want him to infiltrate a royalist conspiracy group, Swords of the King, that has apparently assassinated Col. Berle, who’s drawing up plans for the defense of the capital. Cabasson knows his revolutionary history and its ever fluid loyalties and betrayals. His sketches of Margont—who “tended to see everything as black or white”—and Joseph, who styles himself Joseph I, King of Spain, and Talleyrand—who sees a “world of infinite shades of grey”—kick off the story marvelously. Margont copes with duplicity while being a duplicitous undercover agent himself.

With a macabre back story, the conspiracy’s leader, Vicomte Louis de Leaume, proves a great catalyst, though he fades away as the conspiracy ripens following the Battle of Montmartre.

As with his depiction of that battle and the disarray on Paris streets following the allied occupation, Cabasson’s descriptions of dank Paris garrets and candle-lit meetings seem spot-on, right down to his antagonist’s motivation being more personal —a little psycho-history here—than political. Cabasson’s discussions on the “paradox of liberty,” women’s rights, religion and more come across well in translation, and his anecdotal exploration of curare’s coming to Europe fits the narrative perfectly.

Cabasson, Armand Translated by Reid, Isabel Gallic Books (352 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-90604-084-0 Cabasson’s (Wolf Hunt, 2008, etc.) third Quentin Margont novel finds the loyal republican soldier caught up in the home-front chaos brought on by Bonaparte’s retreat from Russia.

It’s March 1814, and the Little Corporal is being driven home by the allied armies of Russia, Austria, Prussia and more. Lt. Col. Margont has been relegated to rearechelon duty because his mentor, Col. Saber, raised the hackles of superior officers. Margont, an experienced officer with a talent for solving unusual problems, is ordered to appear at the offices of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother. There he meets the inept sibling and the “limping devil,” Talleyrand. The

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THE BREWER OF PRESTON

A solid combination of historical fiction and adventure perhaps better appreciated by those familiar with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

Camilleri, Andrea Translated by Sartarelli, Stephen Penguin (256 pp.) $15.00 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-14-312149-7

SEARCHING FOR GRACE KELLY

In 19th-century Sicily, a cornucopia of craziness surrounds the première of an opera buffo in a small music-loving town.

The story begins on a dark and rainy night in Vigàta with Gerd Hoffer, a little boy who desperately needs to go to the bathroom but is afraid to use the privy and daren’t wake anyone else in the house. The scene shifts to a heated meeting of the Progress Social Club of Vigàta, where the proposed staging of an obscure opera, The Brewer of Preston, greatly upsets the traditionalists in the group, which includes the snide Canin Bonmartino and the esteemed Dr. Gammacurta. After the meeting, plots and subplots promptly begin to brew. Not far away, randy widow Concetta Lo Russo breathlessly prepares for a late-night rendezvous. (Colorful names abound: Pippino Mazzaglia, Dom Memè Ferraguto, Cocò Impiduglia, Turiddru Macca, etc.) And so it goes, the story rolling forward as the buffo battle intensifies and backward to incorporate juicy anecdotes from the town’s past, like the comically grotesque overkill of the teenage son of a “legitimate Sicilian businessman” that began a long-standing vendetta. Citizens on both sides of the dispute scour the small town to enlist supporters. When someone resorts to arson, it’s a comic misadventure. Puckishly titled chapters add zest to the mix, while several pages of endnotes translate the sprinkling of Italian phrases and obscure artistic references.

Fans of Camilleri’s long-running Inspector Montalbano series (Angelica’s Smile, 2014, etc.) will be familiar with his brand of lusty lunacy, carried here to a degree that rivals Boccaccio.

Callahan, Michael Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-544-31354-5 Three young women on their own in 1950s New York run into man trouble galore.

Celebrity interviewer Callahan spins an old-fashioned tale of romance and drama in this debut novel set in the Barbizon Hotel for Women, inspired by an article the author wrote for Vanity Fair. After a brief prologue in December 1955, in which an unnamed character is up on a roof about to jump, the story skips back to June of that year, when Connecticut debutante Laura Dixon arrives in New York for the summer to work on the Mademoiselle college issue. Her roommate, Dolly Hickey from Utica, is the classic sidekick—short, chubby, voluble and studying to be a secretary at Katie Gibbs. Their trio of friends is rounded out by an aspiring singer from England, the wisecracking, flame-haired Vivian Windsor, currently putting in time as a cigarette girl at the Stork Club. Despite the Barbizon’s strict rules about male visitors, romantic complications for all three ensue forthwith. Laura is wooed by New York’s most eligible bachelor, department store heir Box Barnes—but she’s also falling for a brainy Greenwich Village bartender. Vivian is involved with a rough character named Nicola Accardi, whose “skin was a tawny olive, topped by a fulsome mane of black hair that normally curved back from his forehead....There was something impossibly feral that enveloped him like a fog.” Dolly is offered less exciting options but pursues them with great energy and focus. Who gets the dreamboat? Who gets the dud? And most pressing, who was that on top of the building?

If you’re in close communion with your inner teenage girl, this one’s for you. (Author appearances in New York and Philadelphia)

THE BUSINESS OF NAMING THINGS

Coffey, Michael Bellevue Literary Press (208 pp.) $14.95 paper | $15.95 e-book Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-934137-86-4 978-1-934137-87-1 e-book A clutch of well-crafted stories, thick with literary references, that turn on busted relationships between men and women and fathers and sons.

Harold Brodkey, James Joyce, J.F. Powers, Henrik Ibsen— each of these writers finds his way into the eight stories in this first work of fiction by Coffey (Days of Infamy, 1999, etc.).

The name-checked authors hint at some of Coffey’s chief concerns—masculinity and faith most prominently—as well as his approach to style. “Inn of the Nations” centers on a priest

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“Cusk returns to...top form in a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and others.” from outline

who’s lost his passion for his calling and pursues an affair with a nun; set shortly after the JFK assassination, the brief story describes how “he’d become hardened to his own sin” but is without religious sanctimony. The broader “Sons” pursues a similar theme, following an alcoholic poet as he worries that his son is complicit in a calamity that makes national news; in Coffey’s hands, the man’s drunken fog reveals his self-loathing even while he busily labors to obscure it. This collection’s stories are carefully chiseled, and the prose is sometimes stiff, but Coffey will occasionally cut loose, as in the closing “Finishing Ulysses,” which follows a professor eager to teach Joyce’s classic who’s out on the town in Philadelphia. Though short, the story has an appealingly jazzy, impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness rhythm. (“Smokes you need and why not the bennies. Some jump. Setting sun crashing into the facade of the church over there.”) Most of these stories capture men in decline, but one of the collection’s best is more tender: In “The Newman Boys,” the narrator recalls his brief childhood acquaintance with a neighbor boy diagnosed with hydrocephaly; the story captures the narrator’s narcissism, fears, confusions about adulthood— and, in its closing pages, a sense of how small kindnesses can resonate across decades.

Sober and smart writing that evokes the more mannered American stylists of the 1960s and ’70s.

friend who asks for a nonalcoholic beer or the vivid makeup of a woman whose unfaithful husband has just redecorated his office entirely in white. The individual stories collectively suggest that self-knowledge is a poor substitute for happiness, but perhaps readers can find some hope from the narrator’s admission that she can’t shake “this desire to be free...despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.”

Dark, for sure, but rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy: a welcome change from the cloistered, self-absorbed feel of Arlington Park (2007) and The Bradshaw Variations (2010).

OUTLINE

Cusk, Rachel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-374-22834-7 Following an off-key memoir (Aftermath, 2012), Cusk returns to fiction and top form in a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and others.

The nameless narrator is on a plane from London to Athens to teach a summer writing course when an older Greek man begins to confide in her about his unhappy childhood. After learning the narrator is divorced, he tells her about his own marital misadventures.

“So much is lost...in the shipwreck,” he says mournfully. It’s the first of many keening conversation she has with her students, Greek friends and fellow writers. They reveal marriages splintered when shared assumptions diverge; parents wearied by their children’s demands but ambivalent when they cease; the struggle to give up comforting illusions and face reality—but then again, don’t we all construct our own realities? (That question, unsurprisingly, especially preoccupies her younger students.) As they pour forth the particulars of their lives, the narrator sparingly doles out some of hers while coping with texts and phone calls from her needy sons. Pained by the disconnect “between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have,” she says, “I had decided to want nothing at all....I was trying to find a different way of living in the world.” The existential musing can get somewhat abstract, but it’s grounded by Cusk’s knack for telling details: the slightly reddened eyes of the narrator’s |

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Michel Faber

The writer’s speculative new novel has the thrills of genre fiction without its pitfalls

By Clayton Moore he is to minister to the natives, who call themselves a variation of “Jesus Lover” and have taken to the Bible, which they dub “The Book of Strange New Things.”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, things are coming apart as the world turns on itself with superstorms, earthquakes and other disasters.

We caught up with the author over email while he was at home in Scotland, where Faber collaborated on the novel with his wife, the artist Eva Youren, who passed away from a rare form of cancer while Faber was completing The Book of Strange New Things. With characteristic understatement, Faber writes in the novel’s acknowledgements, “My wife Eva was, as always, my closest and most insightful advisor and collaborator.”

In our starred review of The Book of Strange New Things, we asked, “What would Jesus do if he wore a space helmet?” What questions did you want to address in sending a missionary to another world?

There’s always a gulf between us and other people, even the ones we love most, and in my book, the vastness of space and the species divide make that gulf physical. Can we be truly intimate with anyone else when we are separated by such distance? That’s one of the questions the novel asks. There are many more.

Peter Leigh is, as he acknowledges, a flawed man with a checkered past. Why might an entity like USIC choose him for this role?

In most sci-fi stories, the personnel on alien outposts are stubborn individualists who are constantly arguing. In reality, it would be madness to send such people up there; they wouldn’t last a month. But you can’t have people who are too well-adjusted and connected either, because they wouldn’t be able to cope with the loneliness. USIC’s selection procedure sin-

Photo courtesy Eva Youren

The Book of Strange New Things is the latest novel

by Michel Faber, the widely acclaimed author of The Crimson Petal and the White and Under The Skin, and the author’s first full-length novel since The Fire Gospel, which he published in 2008. It is a wildly ambitious work of speculative fiction that Kirkus dubbed “a profoundly religious exploration of inner turmoil, and one sure to irk the Pat Robertson crowd in its insistence on the primacy of humanity.”

The novel is primarily about the emotional journey of Peter Leigh, a former drug addict and petty thief who—through the love of a good woman, his wife, Beatrice—has become a man of profound faith who is faced with an extraordinary mission. Peter has been selected by the mysterious USIC corporation to travel to Oasis, a far-flung off-world colony, where 14

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gles out the candidates who are sufficiently damaged not to miss the consolations of life on Earth but not so damaged that they can’t get along. Peter passes the test. But maybe USIC bends the rules for him a little.

His love for his wife makes him vulnerable.

What appealed to you about writing a story with strong science-fiction overtones, as you did with Under The Skin and this novel?

I admire authors like Alice Munro and Anne Tyler who can focus purely on human relationships in a domestic setting, but I couldn’t write stuff like that myself. I need elements of the outlandish, the enigmatic, the awesome (in the fullest sense of that word).

I take the reader on an adventure to a place they haven’t been before, give them the thrills they might expect from genre fiction but try to avoid the pitfalls of genre—hokeyness, lack of depth, unconvincing relationships. I believe there are readers out there who can cope with a narrative that works on lots of different levels.

Does the writing of this kind of speculative novel differ from the process of writing historical fiction like The Crimson Petal and The White?

It’s the same spirit animating all my work. On the first page of The Crimson Petal, the reader arrives in 1870s London and is warned that they are “an alien from another time and place altogether.” All these narrative contexts I choose are different embodiments of displacement. Sugar is trying to figure out how she can survive in a scary, bewildering world. Peter and Bea are faced with the same challenge.

Why was it important that the Earth be imperiled while Peter is off-world saving souls?

Well, our Earth is imperiled. But the main point is that as humans, we tend to concentrate on the wrong challenges. Like trying to effect regime change in a foreign country instead of changing the way we relate to our own loved ones. When you and I are on our deathbeds, the failures that will haunt us won’t be that we didn’t kill or convert enough foreigners; it will be the opportunities we missed to cherish happiness in our own lives.

It’s been said that your own position on religion has become more moderate and, indeed, tolerant, over time. How do you think The Book of Strange New Things will be perceived by readers along the religious spectrum?

Fundamentalists don’t read literature, so I don’t have to worry about how they’ll respond to my novel.

As for people who are religious but also sympathetic, intelligent and humane, I would hope that they could find something of value in my book. I treat religion very respectfully. It’s a heartbreaking world out there, and we need something to help us through. For some people, that’s faith.

You have written this book during some extraordinarily trying times. Is there anything in your own experiences that makes its way into a book like this one?

My wife, Eva, whom I loved more than anything in the world, died of cancer while I was writing this novel. The novel is, on one level, a farewell to her. She knew that. She loved this book and helped me make it better, just as she helped me with all my others. It was always going to be a book about loss, but when she got sick, the loss became hugely amplified. It radiates out of the book like a sunset.

Clayton Moore is a freelance writer, journalist, book critic and prolific interviewer of other writers. His work appears in numerous newspapers, magazines, websites and other media. He is based in Boulder, Colorado.

The Book of Strange New Things received a starred review in the Fall Preview issue of Kirkus Reviews, which was published with the Aug. 15, 2014, issue.

The Book of Strange New Things Faber, Michel Hogarth/Crown (480 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 28, 2014 978-0-553-41884-2 |

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LOST & FOUND

looking for serenity when she moves into a charming if rundown farmhouse in the Rhode Island boondocks. Instead, she finds a pile of sludge growing in the yard next door. The sludge belongs to Holt Townsend, who sold April the farmhouse but kept the barn where he now lives and runs a landscaping business. That steamy heap of rot is an effective metaphor for the plot that unfolds. Holt’s son, Blaze, a troubled teen who excels at escaping from juvenile rehab centers, currently lives with Holt, while Blaze’s mother, Janice, 25 years younger than her ex-husband, lives with an abusive new boyfriend. Soon Blaze pays April a visit in what used to be his home, showing off his GPS ankle bracelet along with a macho blend of flirtation and menace. Although he briefly steals her car, she doesn’t turn him in. Soon April finds herself uncomfortably attracted to both Blaze and his raffish father. Flook, whose best writing takes us inside Blaze’s confused mind, drops increasingly obvious hints that something incestuous has gone on between Blaze and Janice. April senses without knowing the details that the boy is all “raw fear under his quiet.” She also realizes that the provost is working against her ambition to become department head, that someone has been stalking her online and that her dead lover had a secret life. After she sleeps with Holt, sexual tensions compound with sexual secrets until they burst open.

While Flook creates memorable moments of fear and guilt, her labored structure and tendency to overexplain undermines the novel’s impact.

Davis, Brooke Dutton (288 pp) $26.95 | Jan. 27, 2014 978-0-525-95468-2 An abandoned child, a nursing home escapee, and an angry, elderly shut-in make for a unique team in Davis’ whimsical and touching debut.

Millie Bird is only 7, though she has already seen her fair share of “Dead Things.” The most recent addition to her “Book of Dead Things” is her father. Millie’s mother, who is struggling with her own grief, leaves her beneath a display of women’s underwear in a department store with the instruction to stay put. After spending the night in the store, leaving notes for her Mum and hiding from the security guard, Millie meets up with “Karl the Touch Typist” in the store’s cafe. Eventually, Millie realizes she must disobey her mother’s orders and go looking for her. She arrives home to find it in a state of disarray, with no one home. While wandering the neighborhood trying to find someone to help her, Millie ends up on the doorstep of perpetually cranky Agatha Pantha, a widow who has sealed herself off within her home. Though Agatha follows a strict schedule, only allowing herself a moment to feel loneliness, the compassion she feels toward Millie forces her to leave her house. Eventually Millie and Agatha meet up with Karl again and set forth on their journey to find Millie’s mother. Life exists for the young and robust adults in the novel, while children and the elderly essentially become invisible, allowing for a world where a child and an old man can live in a department store with no one noticing and an old woman can be sealed inside her house by overgrown plants. Millie’s preoccupation with death is uncomfortable, as are Agatha’s and Karl’s obsessions with their own mortality and those they have lost, but this circles the central idea of the novel—death is the thing that none of us are willing to face.

Borderline cutesy but ultimately powerful exploration of grief from a skillful and original new voice.

BLOOD-DRENCHED BEARD

Galera, Daniel Translated by Entrekin, Alison Penguin Press (384 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 26, 2015 978-1-59420-574-3

Pensive, sometimes-oppressive, altogether impressive novel by a young writer only now becoming known outside Brazil.

A translator of Zadie Smith and David Mitchell, Galera here blends some of the wistfulness of Latin American magical realism with a brooding dystopianism. His Maconda is a place called Garopaba, a beach town that the world pretty well forgets once the season is over. There, a blameless and nameless young man, left in the world without family or friends, finds an anchorage of sorts and even something like love: “Jasmim is the first person he has ever met,” our narrator tells us, “who knows what prosopagnosia is.” Prosopa what? Well, the young man has an unfortunate condition that causes him to forget faces, which makes it altogether too easy for bullies to victimize him without him being able to identify the assailant. So they do, but they ’fess up to things like stealing his faithful old canine companion: “I forget people’s faces,” he says. “Now who was it?” Says the bad guy, “It was me,” knowing that his victim won’t remember in a minute, that he isn’t even capable of hating his enemies, since he can’t tell them apart from anyone else. His tormentors may have cause to behave badly, though, since, as the young man

MOTHERS AND LOVERS

Flook, Maria Roundabout Press (377 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-9858812-5-2

A professor finds herself embroiled in her new neighbors’ sordid family crisis in this novel from Flook, who has previously explored the underbelly of families and communities both in fiction (Lux, 2004, etc.) and nonfiction (Invisible Eden, 2003, etc.).

Aware that her affair with a married provost at Sinclair College, the Providence school where she teaches, hasn’t eased her grief over the death of her long-term live-in lover, April is 16

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SAVING GRACE

learns, his grandfather, who was killed in Garopaba, may not have been altogether undeserving of his fate. Galera writes lyrically of a land of jungle and beach, even when the mood turns Hitchcock-ian: “He steps on a loose stone, and his fall is broken by his backpack, but his elbow gets a good whack, and he feels the pain travel up his arm to his shoulder like an electric shock.”

The mystery mounts: Will the young man plunge onto the rocks below? Will those he trusts betray him? Are we really made of stardust? All will be revealed, though Galera warns on the last count, “Stop talking like hippies.”

An elegant, literate and literary mystery of appearances and disappearances.

Green, Jane St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-250-04733-5 978-1-4668-4773-6 e-book The perfect personal assistant can make even the most accomplished wife dispensable.

When Grace, a talented chef and assistant cookbook editor, meets legendary writer Ted Chapman, his notoriously mercurial attitude dissolves. A whirlwind romance leads to a seemingly ideal marriage, but beneath the surface, Ted’s unpredictable rages keep Grace walking on eggshells. Ellen, Ted’s longtime and efficient assistant, can usually keep Ted under control. So when Ellen leaves to care for her mother, Grace is anxious to find a replacement. Luckily, she meets Beth at a glitzy dinner. Fortified with stellar recommendations, Beth is surprisingly available to start

THE POET AND THE PRIVATE EYE

Gittins, Rob Y Lolfa/Dufour (304 pp.) $19.00 paper | Dec. 31, 2014 978-1-84771-899-0 Hired to dig dirt on Dylan Thomas during his last visit to New York, a private investigator instead finds the image of his own ruined life in the poet’s.

Stung by a 1953 profile in the coyly unnamed Time magazine, the distinguished but unruly Welsh poet has threatened a libel suit. The obvious defense, private eye Jimmy is assured by his frequent client, Time attorney Con, is to “prove everything in this profile is gospel.” That means tailing Thomas as he makes the rounds of the Big Apple’s fleshpots in order to substantiate a pattern of misbehavior. Following Thomas and watching for bad behavior is like shooting fish in a barrel, and in less than 12 hours, Jimmy has seen the poet meet Shelley Winters and Marilyn Monroe for cocktails, grope Marlene Dietrich, drink his weight in spirits and piss into a plant pot. These discoveries obviously doom the libel suit, but Con’s not satisfied. He’s convinced Jimmy is on to the story of the year and wants more, which is exactly what the poet provides.

So does his wife, Caitlin, whose behavior on her home turf, the village of Laugharne, is even more flamboyantly transgressive than her husband’s. Returning home to his wife, Jimmy finds that Beth is unaccountably prickly and remote. Before he can figure out what’s bothering her, she takes off to stay with her older sister. A child could see where this story is headed, but Jimmy, who’s no child, must learn important life lessons from the dying poet in order to save himself.

Gittins (Gimme Shelter, 2013) mines Thomas’ real-life last days for these obvious lessons with sensitivity and devotion. But the whole cast, including Thomas, who barely gets a speaking role, is muffled by Jimmy’s sincere, obtuse reflections and digressions.

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KKK–like Horse Thief Detective Association to seize Clayton’s farm. The drama here focuses more on the Jeffries family, with unhappy, laudanum-addicted mother Annabelle’s fight to wrench her son from his father’s influence overshadowing the book’s most powerful element—the post-bellum battle of African-Americans to prosper against prejudice: “Without your fear they have to kill you to stop you getting on with your life.”

A worthy historical-fiction exploration of the AfricanAmerican struggle for freedom.

immediately. She is, of course, too good to be true and quickly becomes indispensable, arranging Ted’s schedule, editing his work, keeping him out of Grace’s hair and even inspiring a character in his new book. As Beth’s star ascends, Grace’s begins to falter. A charity event she planned months in advance turns into a disaster, and someone—perhaps Grace herself?—may have sabotaged it. Worse, Grace seems fuzzier and more distracted each day, which prompts wild mood swings. She fears following in the footsteps of her mother, whose bipolar disorder tarnished Grace’s childhood, driving her to adopt her friend Catherine’s family as her own. Catherine’s mother, Lydia, taught Grace to cook, and Catherine’s twin brothers—handsome Robert and attentive Patrick—were Grace’s first love interests. Suspense builds and suspicions loom over Beth until Grace discovers a stunning secret, which sends her home to England and to Lydia.

Her sanity, career and marriage all about to shatter, Grace seeks shelter and finds unexpected love. Grace must devise a plan to save herself and snare the culprit. A rather uncertain resolution suggests a sequel may be in the works.

Green (Tempting Fate, 2014, etc.) spins a dark romance, recalling All About Eve, where intimacy masks betrayal.

THE ASSASSINATION OPTION

Griffin, W.E.B.; Butterworth IV, William E. Putnam (496 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-399-17124-6 In their second Clandestine Operations spy thriller, Griffin and his son and co-author, Butterworth (Top Secret, 2014, etc.), delve into the down-and-dirty work necessary to turn the OSS into the CIA. Griffin’s regular cast of thousands— Cronley, young captain from a rich Texas ranching family; Dunwiddie, African-American Norwich graduate commissioned into the officer corps just in time to join the CIA; Gehlen, current POW, former chief of Abwehr Ost, a so-called “good German” with the scoop on the rotten Red Menace; and Adm. Souers, Truman’s friend named Director of Central Intelligence—is charged with building a viable spy organization to succeed Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS while keeping the new gang out of the clutches of the Pentagon and FBI. Young Cronley is “chief, Directorate of Central Intelligence, Europe” in case higher-ups need a fall guy if something goes wrong in unstable occupied Germany. There are new players: Maksymilian Ostrowski, Free Polish Air Force veteran now displaced person; and (next adventure, perhaps?) Cronley’s cousin Luther Stauffer with suspected links to Odessa, a program to “help SS officers get out of Germany.” Griffin employs big shots like Bedell Smith, Ike’s right-hand man; covers internecine jealousies over bureaucratic fiefdoms; and suggests Israel’s Mossad benefited from Russian triple-agent Seven-K, who spied for Abwehr Ost for quid pro quo release of Zionists from concentration camps.

Griffin slips enough historical factoids—Katyn Forest massacre, Hoover’s botched attempt at Manhattan Project’s secrecy—to assure history buffs he’s still got the right stuff but—whoops!— again has the USAF in action one year prior to its founding.

Characters communicate in repartee, bend rules like Bavarian pretzels, and aren’t above dropping a bad guy in an unmarked grave, no paperwork required, so that a turned NKVD colonel’s family can escape Leningrad.

Another Griffin adventure to bring out the Walter Mitty in every red-white-and-blue–blooded American male.

WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

Greenburg, Bradley Dufour (450 pp.) $19.00 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-908737-87-8

In Greenburg’s debut, the McGhee family wends its way from Alabama slavery to Nashville’s unstable freedom to a hard-earned Indiana farm, never fully escaping Jim Crow’s shadows.

The Civil War over, James and Lily McGhee, with his parents, Amos and Clara, want land. Both men are woodworkers where there’s no work for blacks. The family settles briefly in Tennessee, and James’ oldest son, Clayton, whose point of view powers the narrative, finds a job in a mercantile store. James rides to Indiana searching for farmland, facing prejudice at every point, until LaFayette, where he stops two ruffians from committing rape. He’s jailed for his trouble, but after the affair is sorted out, he finds a derelict farm outside town. He’s also made a friend of the local sheriff, Colegrove, one of many intriguing characters who appear, play a pivotal, solid role, and then frustratingly disappear: Nashville storekeeper, Miss Lenore; Moberly, Fabrizio, and the Llewellyns, whites who help defend the McGhees when brutes acting for the rich Henderson Jeffries attack their farm; and Judah Furnish, a psychologically damaged veteran symbolic of war’s tragedies. Greenburg’s familiarity with the locale lends credence. His characterization of the McGhees and their enemies, the Jeffries, are of a type but nuanced. Other characters—an Irish gangster, a good-hearted Polish teamster—are more familiar. Leaping forward, the second portion compresses multiple years into exposition, establishing conflict between Henderson’s son, Peter, and Clayton. Peter schemes with the 18

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“Life and art become...gloriously confused when Harris’ narrator, Alys, does some time traveling and falls in love with a star of the silent screen.” from screenplay

THE LIFE INTENDED

eventually leads Alys on a journey to the abandoned Alhambra Theater, where they step through the screen into an alternate black-and-white universe of silent films. Alys falls in love with Moira Silver, a gorgeous young actress who used to be Nesselrode’s mistress. Alys is young and good-looking, both in the book’s “present” reality as well as in the “past” reality of the ’20s, and Nesselrode gets him a job working with the temperamental film director Reiter, a genius who supposedly invented the close-up and the dolly shot. Nesselrode then prods Reiter to put the handsome Alys into a small film role, a move that allows him to be closer to Moira. Eventually, he moves into the role he most aspires to—Moira’s lover. Art and life then conspire in cunning ways that lead Alys to bring Moira back to the bright and sunny reality of contemporary Los Angeles.

This novel hasn’t lost any of its luster since its original publication in 1982—it’s both ingeniously plotted and lyrically written.

Harmel, Kristin Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $16.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-5415-4 Harmel (The Sweetness of Forgetting, 2013, etc.) takes on relationships, family and loss.

Twelve years ago, Kate Waithman’s husband, Patrick, died suddenly in a car accident. Now 40, Kate has never truly recovered, but she has managed to make a decent life for herself. She’s an established music therapist for children, she has the emotional support of a best friend and a close sister, and she’s even poised to move on romantically, accepting a proposal from her good-on-paper boyfriend, Dan. But the night of their engagement, Kate has a dream about Patrick so vivid and uncanny that it’s clear—at least to her—that she’s experiencing the life she would have led had Patrick lived. Subsequent dreams introduce her to a daughter, a lovely, deaf piano prodigy named Hannah. Suspecting that Hannah may exist in real life, Kate compulsively begins to search for clues, signing up for a class in American Sign Language, volunteering with deaf foster children and throwing her existing life into turmoil. Dan is less than understanding, though she tells him little. Her other loved ones question her choices as well as her sanity, and Kate is torn. Have the dreams awakened her long-dormant gut instincts, her desire for a more robust happiness? Or is she simply too eager to exchange the normalcy of the present for the glow of the past? After a loss like hers, how much should be thrown away and how much kept in the rebuilding? Tensions around these questions add to the mystery of the dreams themselves to make for an absorbing read.

Though elements of the plot are predictable and the prose is unadorned, this book is well-paced and warmhearted.

SCREENPLAY

Harris, MacDonald Overlook (272 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 4, 2014 978-1-4683-0898-3 Life and art become strangely and gloriously confused when Harris’ narrator, Alys, does some time traveling and falls in love with a star of the silent screen.

While Alys acknowledges that his name is an unusual one for a man, it suits him because he falls down a rabbit hole of sorts and winds up in a cinematic wonderland from the 1920s. He was orphaned at a young age, and his parents left him rich and able to indulge his artistic passions. One day he meets the mysterious Nesselrode, a film director of many years before. Nesselrode announces that he will henceforth be rooming at Alys’ capacious house and |

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“A Sherlockian pastiche without Holmes and Watson?

Yes indeed, and it’s a tour de force.” from moriarty

THE SEASON OF MIGRATION

hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff ’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, “angry and bitter and dark.” Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by “the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face.” What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who’s been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if “[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical.” Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by “[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger” and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. “Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil.” Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that “finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption.” But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with “no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty”; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.

A top-notch psychological thriller.

Hermann, Nellie Farrar, Straus and Giroux (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-374-25547-3

Hermann follows up her well-received debut (The Cure for Grief, 2008) with a sensitive novel about a crucial turning point in the life of Vincent van Gogh.

Shortly after being dismissed from his post as a lay preacher in a Belgian mining town, van Gogh stopped writing to his younger brother, Theo, for 10 months, the only gap in their voluminous correspondence. As Hermann imagines it, the passionate, awkward, unfocused van Gogh knows he’s once again disappointed his parents, and a visit from Theo—comfortably ensconced at Goupil’s, the art dealership where Vincent once worked— makes it clear that his brother too is worried about him. “[D]on’t you want improvement in your life?” Theo asks. “[Y] ou’ve changed so much that you’re just not the same any longer.” This loss of faith by the person closest to him unnerves van Gogh, already shaken by his encounter with the grim realities of mining life and his inability to provide the soothing religious reassurances his father doles out as a minister. Hermann combines an account of Vincent’s long walk toward Paris to see Theo in May 1880 with letters describing his transformative stay in Belgium, which he plans to deliver by hand so his brother can understand what has happened to him. Hermann quietly shows van Gogh drawing compulsively as he trudges miserably through the countryside, poor, sick and starving but always looking with wonder at the world around him. Nightmarish memories of the oppressed miners whose plight he couldn’t ameliorate slowly open up into the realization that “This is life; this is my life. I am witness.” We know, although Vincent does not, that he is on the road to achieving the apotheosis he spoke of in happier times with Theo: “the way an artist could succeed at portraying a feeling in an image...translate not just the beauty of it but the exact joy that we felt.”

Finely wrought fiction eschewing the usual clichés about artistic inspiration in favor of deeper, more organic understanding.

MORIARTY

Horowitz, Anthony Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-06-237718-0 A Sherlockian pastiche without Holmes and Watson? Yes indeed, and it’s a tour de force quite unlike any other fruit from these densely plowed fields.

It is 1891. Holmes and professor James Moriarty are both presumed dead after hurtling over Reichenbach Falls, though the only body that’s been recovered is thought to be that of a chef at the Englischer Hof. The Pinkerton Detective Agency has sent operative Frederick Chase to England to investigate rumors that Clarence Devereux, fresh from his triumphantly lucrative scheme to manipulate stock prices by sending false information over Western Union wires, has come to join Moriarty in an AngloAmerican criminal empire—and, finding the Napoleon of crime deceased, has stayed to become his successor. Joining forces with DI Athelney Jones, whose admiration of Holmes is just this side of idolatry, Chase tries to trace the agoraphobic Devereux through his lieutenants Edgar and Leland Mortlake and safecracker Scotchy Lavelle. The only results of their search are a series of violent reprisals, and when they finally catch up with Devereux at a function hosted by American legate (and

COLD COLD HEART

Hoag, Tami Dutton (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-525-95454-5

In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.

While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football 20

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THE SEVENTH DAY

president’s son) Robert Todd Lincoln, he turns the tables on them with insolent ease, leaving them both scurrying to hang on to their jobs. Since Jones talks and acts just like Holmes and Chase is every bit as enterprising as Dr. Watson, they seem likely to run their quarry to earth, with pauses along the way for lightning deductions and a drastically compressed sequel to “The Red-Headed League.” But canny Sherlock-ian Horowitz (The House of Silk, 2011, etc.) still has more tricks up his sleeve.

Readers who aren’t put off by the Hollywood pacing, with action set pieces less like Conan Doyle than the Robert Downey Jr. movies, are in for a rare treat, a mystery as original as it is enthralling.

Hua, Yu Translated by Barr, Allan H. Pantheon (224 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-804-19786-1 978-0-804-19787-8 e-book In this melancholy view of the afterlife, dying without a burial place leaves a man in limbo, where he revisits his life through memories and the spirits he encounters.

The life story of Yang Fei begins, like Yu’s 2009 epic, Brothers, on a toilet, a hole in the floor of a China train. The character’s mother, near term, is kneeling over the aperture when she gives birth through it and faints. The infant is found and raised by a kindly railroad switchman, and their relationship, as the boy matures, finds and loses the love of a woman and returns to see his father through a final illness, is the novel’s sweet center. Other committed couples will appear with various ties to Yang Fei,

BOOK OF ZEV

Horowitz, Marilyn Ida Koehler Books (200 pp.) $17.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-940192-78-9 A strange brew of characters converges to save the world in a story about two Jews suffering from religious crises and finding answers once they cross paths.

Though this is billed as a “black-comedy thriller,” Horowitz incorporates neither comedy nor thrills in this monotonous outing. The story opens by introducing Gwydion, a psychic who confers with an angel that could pass for his twin; worries about what Iran’s murderous leader, the nefarious Zarafshan, is doing; and can’t die.

Meanwhile, red-haired, divorced Sarah, a kosher chef in New York who spends her free moments practicing yoga whenever she’s not actively hating God, compares her life to that of the Little Match Girl. Swimming in pity, but taking time to admire her own reflection in the mirror, Sarah is swamped in bitterness over losing her childhood cook and nanny, Sylvie. While she stews about the state of her existence, Zev, who occupies his moments at a wedding avoiding his parents’ efforts to marry him off, imagines himself in a Nazi uniform, forcing one of the pretty girls attending the nuptials to have sex. After nearly being killed by a falling construction beam, Zev spends many chapters sleeping and questioning his own life, while Sarah contemplates existentialism. They both hook up with Gwydion, who brings them together to stop Zarafshan following the revelation of an amazing coincidence. Horowitz fluffs up a bizarre and flimsy plot by padding the exposition with minute descriptions of all the characters and their wardrobes.

What this tale needs aren’t references to films, biblical passages or philosophic babble but relevant, interesting characters, believable dialogue and an intelligent plot that doesn’t rely on coincidences.

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THE GLOBAL WAR ON MORRIS

including two bickering chess players who are skeletons (limbo is flesh-optional) and recall the titular siblings of the previous novel.

Yu may be saying something about the persistence of love beyond death. He is certainly commenting, often acerbically, on how life and death are valued in contemporary China, where a young woman dies while trying to get the attention of her boyfriend, who then dies after selling a kidney to buy her a burial plot. Officials manipulate death tolls from a store fire to avoid embarrassment. A couple weary from work fails to heed the warning that their building is being demolished. Unwanted infants and fetuses are dumped in a river. The novel’s hero enters life as an apparent turd. He leaves life, by the way, because he is too engrossed in reading a newspaper account of his ex-wife’s suicide to absorb the panic around him in a restaurant that soon explodes from a kitchen fire.

Compelling moments and black humor go some way toward relieving the lugubrious funk of this episodic work, which might adapt well as a one-man show for John Leguizamo but falls short of being a fully realized novel.

Israel, Steve Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-7223-3

The entire U.S. anti-terror apparatus is trained on one hapless pharmaceutical salesman in this debut novel by a U.S. congressman from New York.

Morris Feldstein’s personal philosophy is “[d]on’t make waves,” but he winds up making a tsunami. He stumbles into a one-nighter—actually 22 minutes—with a doctor’s receptionist shortly after she’s had a bad date with a creep who adulterates stolen medications and sells them as legitimate. The creep connection and Dick Cheney’s need to boost the terror alert ahead of the 2004 Republican convention put Morris on the radar of several federal agencies. His dalliance also requires atonement by acceding to his wife’s demand for a condo in Florida. There, she befriends a young Muslim towel boy, one of four suicide-bombing volunteers in a terrorist group, who’s been waiting 30 months for a mission. Now Morris really has a connection to terrorists, and Cheney has the makings of a hot alert color. In a book dotted with Yiddish expressions from the first word—“tsuris,” or trouble—Morris, alas, is a schlub, while his wife, Rona, plays guiltbreeding Jewish mother to a nice Muslim boy who isn’t sure the 72 virgins are worth it. There’s a lot of cliché to these characters, which is fine for farce and for their main role of getting the feds into a high-tech version of the Keystone Kops. Israel has fun with the bureaucratic side of national security but offers few surprises, while his political jabs are rather flat and facile, and, after all, a decade late.

He may have meant to warn against fresh hubris, but humor is a tricky vehicle at a time when refugees, casualties and decapitations can make it hard to see the lighter side of any aspect of the war on terror.

THE RECKONING

Hunt, James Patrick Five Star (324 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 7, 2015 978-1-4328-2913-1

Three escaped convicts take a Tulsa family hostage in this thriller from Hunt (The Detective, 2014, etc.).

When Javier Sandoval, a big shot in the Tijeres drug cartel, promises $50,000 to a pair of rapist-murderers if they break him out of prison, crafty Richard Billie and his big-lug buddy Amos Denton are happy to oblige. The trail of corpses they leave in their wake—the prison guard they strangle, the driver whose truck they hijack, the business associate and his girlfriend they drop in on—are just gravy. Eventually they go to ground in the home of hard-case excavator Lee Coughlin, whose relationship to his daughter-in-law, Tracy, and her son, John, has been rocky ever since Drew, Lee’s son and Tracy’s husband, was killed in Iraq. As the two dysfunctional trios square off against each other, the stage is set for a series of cat-and-mouse twists. Richard and Amos are afraid Javier will take off without paying them the $50,000. Javier schemes to bring his colleagues into the picture so they can even the odds against the two guys who sprang him. Lee and Tracy, neither of whom is easily scared, have plenty to worry about as the roster of adversaries grows. Outside the house, dozens of law enforcement officials, headlined but not headed by Mike Prather of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, pick up the trail of the three convicts, who have nothing to lose by killing everyone in their path, and realize they can’t follow it any further without triggering a bloody finale.

Apart from Javier and his cartel, a surprisingly close remake of The Desperate Hours—Humphrey Bogart and Robert Middleton would be perfect as Richard and Amos, and Lee is the spitting image of Fredric March—that makes up in tension what it lacks in surprise.

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TELL

Itani, Frances Black Cat/Grove (272 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-8021-2336-7 A culture of silence prevails in a small Canadian town, affecting two at-risk marriages and one damaged Great War vet.

That would be Kenan Oak, who volunteered enthusiastically in 1914 as a 20-year-old and returned in 1918 to his hometown on Lake Ontario with a useless left arm and eye. Only now, in November 1919, does the still shellshocked Kenan leave his house. He doesn’t speak much to his wife, Tress, though they do make love. Tress is the link to this Canadian author’s best-known novel, Deafening (2003), which described her younger sister Grania becoming deaf as a child and her |

“Jászberényi finds a kind of poetry in these wars, even as he declines to turn a blind eye to the suffering they bring.” from the devil is a black dog

purposeful navigation through a silent world. (Grania is mentioned here but does not appear.) Itani made Grania’s journey vivid; she has a harder time getting us to care about Kenan’s journey back to normality. His leaving the house is a big deal, and his solitary skating on the rink at night a bigger one, yet we stay detached; Kenan’s upbringing is a factor. Grania was surrounded by love; Kenan, an orphan, was adopted by a taciturn, ungiving welder. In his slow return to sociability, he’s most comfortable with Tress’ uncle Am, a handyman who “grew up around silent men.” That habit of silence has bedeviled Am’s marriage to Maggie O’Neill. “How do we proceed?” Maggie wonders, sounding more like a lawyer than an aggrieved wife.

She proceeds nicely enough when she meets Lukas Sebastian, a voice teacher from Europe. He’s directing a choral concert in which Maggie will sing solos, and they become lovers. The slowmoving novel circulates among Kenan and Tress, Maggie and Am; an exceptionally awkward ending is summarized in a letter.

Though attentive to period detail, Itani seems more constricted than liberated by the past in her sixth novel.

nice indeed, to which the local replies, “We’ll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.”

A pleasure, as reading Jacobson always is—though much different from what we’ve come to expect, which is not at all a bad thing.

THE DEVIL IS A BLACK DOG Stories from the Middle East and Beyond

Jászberényi, Sándor Translated by Ellis, M. Henderson New Europe Books (224 pp.) $14.95 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-9900043-3-2

Nineteen interconnected short stories about the toll of war, written by some-

one who was there.

The old joke says that if fairy tales begin, “Once upon a time,” then war stories always start with, “You ain’t gonna believe this....” Translated from the Hungarian, journalist Jászberényi’s stories about war correspondents, combatants and victims ring as true as any nonfiction. In the opener, “The Fever,” we meet the author’s main channel to readers, a jaded war reporter named Daniel Marosh, who’s suffering from his illness in a Sudanese backwater on his way to yet another conflict zone. “I am smiling because I don’t regret anything, really,” he tells us. “I never wanted to live a sensible life. I never wanted to be a model citizen, have a family, or even a child. If something like that happened, it would end in total failure. I only have answers when the circumstances are clear, like life and death; that’s when I feel best, when the questions are easy, uncomplicated by the reflexes of a dying civilization.” This is heady, dizzying writing, rapt with cleareyed descriptions of armed children, brutal executions, sniper fire and sandstorms. Whether set in Sudan, Egypt or Gaza, each story reveals something about the nature of war and finds a kind of clinical sympathy not only for those caught up in it, but also for those who wage it. The best stories, like “Something About the Job,” delve into the psyche of the book’s determined journalist, explaining to us why he is the way he is and questioning whether the war made him or he sought out the scene. Despite the book’s very spare language, Jaszberenyi finds a kind of poetry in these wars, even as he declines to turn a blind eye to the suffering they bring. These stories sound more like Philip Caputo or Tim O’Brien than a postmodern accounting of current events.

A master class in how to tell a war story.

J

Jacobson, Howard Hogarth/Crown (352 pp.) $25.00 | Oct. 14, 2014 978-0-553-41955-9

Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.), Britain’s answer to Philip Roth, returns with an enigmatic tale of the near future.

Imagine The Children of Men appearing under the name of Fran Lebowitz, and you’ll have some sense of the dislocation Jacobson’s move from angst-y comedy to dystopian darkness might cause. Not that Jacobson’s future is all bad: In fact, the coast of a land something like Wales or Cornwall is now peppered with places with names such as Port Reuben and home to people called Morvoren Steinberg and Esme Nussbaum, “an intelligent and enthusiastic thirty-two-year-old researcher employed by Ofnow, the non-statutory monitor of the Public Mood.” For once, it seems, Jews have found a refuge and are not being killed in it, even if they’re still not entirely at home there. Born into this world is Kevern Cohen, who, deeply in love with the alluring Ailinn Solomons, finds himself puzzling over why his father impulsively drew his fingers across his mouth whenever he began a word with the letter J. Does G-d not like those who honor him with names such as Jacob and Joseph? There’s a mystery afoot there, if one less pressing than such mysteries as who killed Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock, “found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock’s caravan in pools of each other’s blood.” Who, indeed?

Kevern’s got his work cut out for him, and though everyone’s ready to talk, no one’s ready to tell. The laughs come fewer and farther between than in Jacobson’s recent string of men-lost-inmiddle-age yarns, which is not to say that his latest is without humor: When one local asks Kevern whether he knows the meaning of a dialect phrase, Kevern guesses something very not |

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THE FIRST BAD MAN

EVERLASTING LANE

July, Miranda Scribner (288 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4391-7256-8

Lovett, Andrew Melville House (368 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61219-380-9

In a bizarrely touching first novel, July (It Chooses You, 2011, etc.) brings the characteristic humor, frankness and emotional ruthlessness of her previous work in film, prose and performance to a larger canvas.

Cheryl Glickman lives a lonely, precisely arranged life afflicted by mysterious neuroses, including the persistent sensation of a lump in her throat. She obsesses over Phillip Bettelheim, a board member of the nonprofit where she works, and the belief that she keeps meeting a familiar, beloved soul embodied in the babies of strangers. Afflicted by a host of anxieties, both believable and outrageous, Cheryl keeps her world tightly ordered until Clee, her bosses’ aggressively rude and monstrously provocative daughter, comes to stay in her house and sets off a sequence of fantasies and disasters that violently transform Cheryl’s life. Told in Cheryl’s own confiding, unfiltered voice, the novel slides easily between plot and imagination, luring the reader so deeply into Cheryl’s interior reality that the ridiculous inventions of her life become progressively more and more convincing. Cheryl acts out simulations from self-defense DVDs with Clee as self-prescribed therapy for her timidity and globus hystericus burdened throat.

She becomes fixated on creating graphic, sometimes-perverted sexual fantasies between Clee and a multitude of other people. Her therapist becomes the receptionist of another therapist three times a year as part of “an immensely satisfying adult game.” Though these strange details sometimes seem to slide into heavy-handed attempts to shock, at their best, they deliver an emotional slap made sharper and more fitting by their oddity.

A sometimes-funny, sometimes-upsetting, surprisingly absorbing novel that lives up to the expectations created

by July’s earlier work and demonstrates her ability to carry the qualities of her short fiction into the thickly fleshed-out world of a novel. (Book tour to Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)

Debut novelist Lovett offers a dreamy portrait of an English childhood, with some sharp edges beneath the blur.

Following the death of his father, 9-year-old Peter and his mother move from London to a mysterious house in the country. Peter states at the onset of the novel, “I can’t promise that this is the way it was, not exactly, only that this was perhaps how it sometimes seemed to be.” He tells and retells stories, all in luminous and evocative language, as he begins to realize that the secrets of the past are layered and complex. Among the many changes that occur quite quickly in Peter’s life is his mother’s strange request that he refer to her as Kat and keep the details of their home life to himself. That secret, and the secrets that begin to rise up all around him, become more difficult to protect when he meets Anna-Marie, a bossy neighborhood girl, and Tommie, an outcast schoolmate. Taking to the countryside, they begin to investigate a series of intertwined mysteries stemming from the discovery of a hidden room within Peter’s new house, a museumlike nursery filled with artifacts for a lost baby girl that the children long to understand. The narrative is driven by images, connecting and unfolding like the mysteries beneath the surface: mirrors, clocks, butterflies and a storybook rambling through the physical Everlasting Lane, lush and green and seemingly unending. Deeper still is the reminder that the narrative itself is connected to the realm of imagination, as Peter muses on the idea that like stories, real life can be amended for happy endings and a second chance to make the right decision.

Beautifully written, and as charming as it is dark, the novel unwraps the endless secrets that elude a child.

YOU COULD BE HOME BY NOW Manaster, Tracy Tyrus Books (288 pp.) $24.99 | Dec. 5, 2014 978-1-4405-8312-4

The setting is the only thing sleepy about Manaster’s debut.

Complex, interweaving stories tangle inside The Commons, a retirement community outside Tucson, Arizona, where Mona Rosko is caught raising her grandson, which is against the rules. The neighbors maintain a tenuous, casserole-bringing civility while they assess Mona’s situation, but her plight quickly becomes a prop for their personal dramas when the story goes viral online. Ben Thales hijacks a news segment about Mona to advocate for missing children after years of searching in vain for his runaway daughter. Lily Birnam, a teenage blogger whose vitriolic fashion reviews have earned her a visit to 24

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“Illustrator McGuire once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.” from here

her grandmother’s retirement home, where she can’t access her electronic devices, rallies her readers to sympathize with Mona whenever she can sneak a moment on her grandmother’s computer. As Mona’s fate hangs in the balance, her neighbors also struggle to keep up appearances. Distinct personalities create lasting impressions as each character tells his or her version of the same events, resulting in fully formed, compelling characters whose perspectives change over time. Bratty Lily misses her best friend at home, but she’s starting to see the cracks in their relationship when Sierra gets a new boyfriend. Creepy Ben enjoys flirting with Lily’s grandmother Sadie but shows his vulnerable side when his ex-wife comes to visit. The two new employees, Seth and Alison Collier, are only pretending to fit in to escape their grief after their baby dies. Alison copes with healthy pursuits like running but is hiding a secret. Seth is unhinged, railing against his friends who post pictures of their healthy babies on Facebook. Readers may need to reread entire passages to believe their eyes because the characters’ reactions are so startlingly candid and over-the-top.

A scintillating drama that’s touching, funny and impossible to put down.

itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.

A gorgeous symphony.

THE SWEETHEART

Mirabella, Angelina Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4767-3387-6 Debut novelist Mirabella delivers a powerful blow with her coming-of-age story set in the world of women’s professional wrestling in 1953.

Leonie Putzkammer is a 17-year-old who’s primed to reinvent herself. Too tall and unaware of her striking looks, she decides to leave Philadelphia and her single father behind to take a chance on becoming a professional wrestler. After meeting with a prominent wrestling promoter, she enrolls in the Pospisil School for Lady Grappling. Though Leonie hopes this change will push her to become a new person, she doesn’t realize that the creation will be out of her control. After signing her contract, she learns the truth about wrestling: “Be fake.” The rivalries, the personas, the champions have all been scripted, and now that she is a part of that world, she is charged with protecting that secret. Reborn as Gwen Davies, she must embody her character, who will be cast as a heel, or villain, and pair up with the notorious Screaming Mimi Hollander. But being booed and harassed wasn’t part of the new life Leonie had envisioned for herself, so with some manipulation, she severs the partnership to become the face—the hero—she had longed to become. Told in a secondperson direct address to her former self, the now elderly (and reinvented yet again) Leigh Kramer tells her story of rising to fame in the world of women’s wrestling only to lose herself completely. The narration occasionally stumbles in this unique style, as the voice blessed with hindsight has partitioned all of the different women she has been as separate entities. The novel is bursting with colorful characters who are far more complex than the heels and faces they portray in the theater of professional wrestling.

A powerful tale of a person’s capacity for reinvention, without the fakery. (Agent: Marcus Hoffman)

HERE

McGuire, Richard Illus. by McGuire, Richard Pantheon (320 pp.) $35.00 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-375-40650-8 Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.

McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book |

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GALAPAGOS REGAINED

BRITISH STORY

Morrow, James St. Martin’s (496 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-250-05401-2

Nath, Michael Route (324 pp.) $39.00 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-901927-60-3

Following in Darwin’s footsteps, an actress leads an expedition to Galapagos.

Morrow’s picaresque novel, set circa 1850, is intended to be rollicking but ends up simply tedious. Chloe Bathurst, who specializes in ingenue roles in some of London’s most lurid melodramas, loses her employ through a comic series of events and, by an even quirkier twist, is hired

by Charles Darwin as a zookeeper to live specimens he brought back to England. When Chloe learns of the Shelley Prize, whereby the late poet’s followers will award a large sum to whomever can prove the existence—or not—of God, she swipes a precis of Darwin’s longer treatise on evolution and, through yet another improbable turn, is commissioned by the Shelley Society to head for Galapagos to prove Darwin’s theories (which she has misrepresented as her own). In her party are her cardsharp twin brother, Algernon, an episcopal cleric, Chadwick, a rakish ex-pirate, Dartworthy, a dissolute sea captain, etc.; almost as if one of her melodramas had been transposed to the high seas.

After being shipwrecked, Chloe’s expedition finds itself on a barge in the Amazon jungle, where it suffers attrition thanks to piranhas and an anaconda snake. After a bout of malaria, Chloe gets religion and almost abandons her quest, but then Chadwick informs her that a rival church-sponsored expedition is on its way to the Galapagos to exterminate every tortoise, lizard and iguana. Occasionally Morrow cuts away to that expedition’s progress and also to another candidate for the prize who is traveling the Middle East in search of Noah’s Ark. When Chloe and her crew get bogged down in the Peruvian rubber wars, despite their noble aims of rescuing natives enslaved on the latex plantations, readers too may be tempted to abandon the quest.

Prolix and period-appropriate language lends humor and an arch, Thackeray-esque tone but palls after hundreds of pages wherein the plot flags and the characters never truly reveal themselves.

A British academic finds his theory on fictional characters intersecting with the narratives of several eccentrics.

Kennedy is a literature professor who worries a lot: about problems with his Falstaff project, his wife’s desire to conceive, a student’s plagiarism that’s linked to a dalliance he fears will surface, and his theory that literary characters are as real as nonfictional humans. Then he meets Arthur Mountain, a Falstaffian Welshman who sounds like a fictional character: the strident nationalist Citizen in Joyce’s Ulysses. Arthur, who has his own project involving mysterious “stoplines,” brings adventure to Kennedy’s life, breaking his routines with excursions, a picnic and a long story by his wife, Natalie. It tells of a simple man who attends a soccer match and gets caught up in awful violence with “the worst man there is.” Kennedy listens, “as absorbed as a boy at the end of day in the appetising mellowness of chalk.” Things get more than a little meta when characters in the inner tale turn out to be real and everyone seems to be connected—as one might expect in a Dickensian novel, certainly one more conventional than this. Nath (English/Univ. of Westminster; La Rochelle, 2010), adds to Shakespeare and Joyce and Tristram Shandy references enough playing with modernism and literary style to offer an unorthodox survey course with this as the one required text—maybe held in classrooms suffused with the “mellowness of chalk.”

Sure, it’s a bit self-indulgent and probably too quirky to keep a lazy reader from quitting early, yet the novel has a gem of a minithriller in Natalie’s tale and an overall braintickling web of delights and surprises.

HONEYDEW Stories

Pearlman, Edith Little, Brown (272 pp.) $25.00 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-316-29722-6 978-0-315-20724-0 e-book Pearlman (Binocular Vision, 2011, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) returns with another collection of closely observed, often devastating stories of more or less ordinary life.

Pearlman is a poet of eyes and hair; nearly every story features an observation, often in the form of an arresting image, of these features. So it is that in the opening story, in which an art historian figures, a woman appears whose “eyes in her lightly wrinkled face were the blue of a Veronese sky,” and so it is, in seeming homage to Chekhov, that in another story, a character

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“Poyer is a master of the modern sea adventure, pitting both men and women against unseen enemies and turbulent waves.” from the cruiser

sports “brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other.” A vampire? No, just another character who’s not quite comfortable inside his or her own skin, as so many of Pearlman’s characters are not. Pearlman, who is in her late 70s, writes with the wisdom of accumulated experience, and many of her characters have suffered the loss of spouses, even if they themselves are not yet of age. One comparative youngster, a spry 49, has just lost her husband in war: “Each of his parts was severed from the others,” Pearlman writes arrestingly, “and his whole—his former whole—was severed from Paige.” Every word counts in that sentence, and Pearlman fills volumes with her economy of language, even if so much is devoted to such not-quite-usual matters as “corneal inlays” and people who bear odd sobriquets: “Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of assorted clothing from a junk shop.”

Without quite the moral gravity of Alice Munro but with all the skill: Pearlman serves up exemplary tales, lively and lovely.

tension of seeking closure after loss. Not every story is successfully provocative—“Felix Not Arriving” is a relatively conventional squabble-during-a-family-visit tale, while “Videos of People Falling Down” is an overly loose set of sketches questioning our urge to mock others’ online foibles. But Pierce clearly has talent to burn.

A promising debut that studies hard-luck types from new and provocative perspectives.

THE CRUISER

Poyer, David St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-250-02058-1 This 14th entry in the author’s Dan Lenson series (The Towers, 2011, etc.) is a naval thriller featuring heroism and hightech warfare.

Capt. Daniel Lenson takes command of the cruiser USS Savo Island and its demoralized crew as they ready themselves for combat in the Mediterranean Sea against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces.

Lenson’s Medal of Honor won’t count for much if he doesn’t succeed in this assignment, and a mysterious onboard death bodes ill for the mission. So do the personality clashes and the porn game some of the crewmen are playing on the ship’s computer network. Even the ship’s missile tracking capability is questionable. According to Lenson’s orders, Savo Island will position itself so it can launch missiles at targets in Iraq and Syria. He doesn’t much like those orders, “Not that liking [them] had much to do with it. That was why they were called ‘orders,’ after all.” Then Almarshadi, his unstable second-incommand, becomes a serious detriment. Does Lenson hate the XO because he’s Arab? The captain navigates personnel issues and rough seas as the crew monitors ocean traffic that includes hostile ships. Those rolling decks and rolling seas make even the experienced Lenson nauseated at times and turn one female crew member’s face “Wicked Witch green.”

For all his toughness and success, Lenson knows he’s imperfect, always one screw-up away from ending his career. Not every issue gets resolved, and some will likely carry over into the next Lenson book.

Poyer is a master of the modern sea adventure, pitting both men and women against unseen enemies and turbulent waves.

HALL OF SMALL MAMMALS Stories

Pierce, Thomas Riverhead (320 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-1-59463-252-5

People get uncomfortably close to their primal tendencies in this debut story collection that highlights the quirky and uncanny.

Pierce’s stories feel like they’re set within spitting distance of George Saundersville and occupied by residents whose need for normalcy is complicated by the inescapable strangeness of our natures. In “Shirley Temple Three,” the host of a TV show dedicated to reviving extinct animals deposits a surreptitiously freed “dwarf mammoth” with his mother. When the host goes AWOL, his mother is forced to see how well her maternal instincts will work with the creature, and the story becomes funny but surprisingly touching as well. Pierce persistently tests the ways that creatures shed light on our own inscrutability: In “Saint Possy,” an animal skull of unknown provenance unsettles a relationship; in the title story, a zoo exhibit is supposed to help the narrator connect with his girlfriend’s son but does the opposite; and “We of the Present Age” is a historical tale about a naturalist who’s propositioned to present his discovery of dinosaur bones as a lurid and highly unscientific circus attraction. But Pierce can stick with Homo sapiens to convey his perspective on humanity. In “More Soon,” the collection’s strongest story, a man awaits the delivery of his dead brother’s body, which has become entangled in the bureaucracy of an international crisis; Pierce finds the dark humor in officialese (“R has been declared a biological weapon. Will call with more after Thanksgiving”) while exploring the more sober |

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INDEPENDENTLY WEALTHY

Who’s responsible for the shootings and bombings at a Jewish shopping mall: al-Qaida? The Iranians? The Lebanese (and if so, the Shiites or the Sunnis)? And where is Pescatore’s shady friend Raymond Mercer, a rock musician, drug dealer and informant who’s converted to Islam? No sooner has Pescatore started investigating than he’s mistakenly arrested and abused by police—whose police, exactly, he’s not sure. Things pick up when he’s teamed with a sexy French counterterrorism agent, Fatima Belhaj, especially when she takes a liking to him.

They follow the terror trail back to Europe, where Pescatore learns the difference between agitation by Islamic extremists and gang riots in France—and is joined by his former boss and girlfriend from San Diego, Isabel Puente, in Spain. Rotella, who made his name as an investigative reporter, makes the far-flung complexities of geopolitical terror come alive on the page, colorfully differentiating among all the ethnic and national groups while distinguishing between the two basic types of terrorists: “furious madmen and cold mercenaries.” For all its darkness and danger, the book boasts a streak of hard-boiled humor that puts it in the company of some top espionage novels. It’s also an enjoyably musical book, with references ranging from Louis Prima to Astor Piazzolla to Bruce Springsteen, Rotella serves up international intrigue with a delectable twist.

Rosenthal, Lorraine Zago Dunne/St. Martin’s (336 pp.) $25.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-250-04035-0

In a sequel to New Money (2013), spunky heroine Savannah Morgan navigates New York’s social world while attempting to solve the mysterious death of her father.

The modern Cinderella story continues in the opening: Southern girl Savannah is still dating aspiring writer Alex, her editorial responsibilities have increased at Femme, and she’s still living an enviable life with a Central Park West apartment and a $10,000 a week allowance—all thanks to her late father, media mogul Edward Stone. Though she never knew her father (those gifts over the years were supposedly from an aunt), his will made her an heiress and pushed the children he raised, Ned and Caroline, to the inheritance sidelines. Despite the initial animosity, the three are now committed to finding out the truth about their father’s death. They suspect he may have been ready to blow the whistle on some powerful people—but whom?

Sen. Carys Caldwell, with whom he was having an affair? Her jilted husband? The COO of Amicus, accused of polluting a lake and causing the deaths of innocents? Or someone closer to home? Mixed in with the light mystery is the real focus of the novel: the state of Savannah’s various relationships.

She breaks it off with Alex because he’s too controlling; she gets closer to Caroline and enjoys newfound sisterhood; she and Ned are frequently at loggerheads, though he’s endearingly protective; and she builds a romance with Wes Caldwell that’s almost too good to be true. Watch out, Savannah!

Rosenthal’s prose is occasionally clunky, focusing on inconsequential details, but her heroine’s likability makes the flaws forgivable. After some impressive investigative work and a few moments of jeopardy, Savannah cracks the case. Her love life, however, may be less predictable.

Soapy, fast-paced fun with a murder thrown in for good measure.

THE STORY OF HOW ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL & OTHER TALES

Runkle, Matt Brooklyn Arts Press (158 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-936767-26-7

Bizarre, otherworldly tales and modern parables for contemporary life fill the 22 stories of Runkle’s debut.

Runkle excels at openings, delicately placing the reader into even the most absurd scenarios with only a few words. Take “Warmth,” a would-be Christmas tale in which Christ is actually a snow lizard. “We have to bobsled into this story,” it starts. Within Runkle’s highly imaginative and uncanny domain, the prose succeeds where the lens is most focused on a single character or event. Sherri, the protagonist of “Veterans Day,” is “a fat girl and everyone’s upset with her being fat.” She lives “in a wasteland,” “her breasts sag,” and “she spends half the day apologizing.” When they take on too wide a scope, the stories become alienating in their strangeness and density. “Face,” one of the longer stories, resists any attempts at classification. Here, an invention known as “the book” is in need of a leader. What is the book? It offers “freedom from the tethers of geography” and allows people to make “profiles” and turn friends to “followers.” It seems like an exaggeration of a social network, and the story at first reads like an extended allegory for our increasingly virtual lives. Such a reading is complicated by the overlapping subplots, a digression to New Orleans and an ill-fitting moral about the “many types of envy.” Several

THE CONVERT’S SONG

Rotella, Sebastian Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (336 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-316-32469-4 978-0-316-32470-0 e-book Former Border Agent Valentine Pescatore, now working as a private investigator in Argentina following his undercover misadventures in Triple Crossing (2011), has his life thrown further into chaos following a terrorist attack in Buenos Aires.

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THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE WICKED

of the shorter pieces, including “Columbus Was Named for the Dove” and “I Am So Alone,” consist of trippy images more than any true plot or character and would frustrate a reader searching for a more conventional tale. Even these stories, however, are told with fresh, stunning language.

Runkle creates an array of worlds that will at different times surprise, confuse and entertain.

Spector, Liv Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | $10.99 e-book Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-06-225848-9 978-0-06-225849-6 e-book

HOW TO BE BOTH

Given the chance to clear her sister’s name, time-traveling detective Lila Day returns to the scene of the crime.

Spector’s (The Rich and the Dead, 2014) sophomore novel opens with a dazed Lila returning from her fifth trip through time. Each journey seems to leave her more confused, and both she and Teddy Hawkins, her geeky billionaire patron, wonder whether her “transient global amnesia” might eventually damage her permanently. But Lila is eager to solve the next cold case when she realizes she has the opportunity to prove that her sister, Ava, didn’t kill her married lover, Jack Warren, back in 2008 when they were celebrating his 50th birthday on board his luxurious yacht. Luxurious is an understatement: Jack’s yacht took six years to build and was a master class in design, with state-ofthe-art interiors and accoutrements—none of which protected him from his own mortality. Though no body was recovered, Jack’s blood was all over the yacht, Ava went missing, and a dinghy was later recovered with more blood and Ava’s fingerprints.

Not surprisingly, Jack’s wife, Elise, and the police fingered Ava as the killer, even though Jack was Elise’s second dead husband.

And now Elise’s third husband is also dead, so maybe Ava isn’t guilty after all. Given Teddy’s blessing, Lila quickly arranges to take the place of the second stewardess—using some rather dastardly methods that imperil an unsuspecting small-time drug dealer—and boards The Rising Tide. From the gleefully stern chief stewardess to the smolderingly handsome first officer to Elise herself, Spector populates the ship with a dangerous dramatis personae. Yet Lila discovers that underneath all the glamour lies a more terrible truth, a truth that will rattle her own bones.

A fun, nubile, seductive Agatha Christie–meets–The Love Boat, promising twists and turns for everyone.

Smith, Ali Pantheon (384 pp.) $25.95 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-375-42410-6 978-1-101-87046-4 e-book This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book.

George, short for Georgia, is 16, whip-smart and seeking ways to honor her dead mother. She vows to dance the twist every day, as her mother did, and to wear something black for a year. She also inhabits a memory, a visit to Italy they made together to view a 15th-century mural her mother admired, and studies a painting by the same artist in London’s National Gallery. There, she sees a woman her mother knew and tries to study her as well. In the book’s other half, the ghost of the 15th-century artist pushes up through the earth to the present and finds himself in the museum behind George as she studies his painting and just before she spots the mystery woman. The painter’s own memories travel through his youth and apprenticeship in a voice utterly different from and as delightful as George’s. He—though gender is bending here too—also loses his mother when young and learns, like George, of the pain and joy of early friendship. He provides an intimate history for the mural in Italy and offers a very foreign take on George and modern times. The book is being published simultaneously in two editions—one begins with George’s half, and the other begins with the painter’s, which might be slightly more challenging for its diction and historical trappings. Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what’s around us and within us.

Comical, insightful and clever, Smith (There But for The, 2011, etc.) builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych.

OUTLAW PETE

Springsteen, Bruce Illus. by Caruso, Frank Simon & Schuster (56 pp.) $19.99 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-5011-0385-8 Cartoonist Caruso (Heart Transplant, 2010, etc.) adapts Springsteen’s song about the inescapability of one’s own nature into a picture book.

We meet Pete as a baby in nothing but a diaper and a 10-gallon hat, and within three pages, the enfant terrible has been in jail and robbed a bank (strangely, in that order). In the blink of an eye, he’s 25—and has added murder and horse theft to his |

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resume. But a dream of his own death drives him out West and into domestic bliss...until a bounty hunter arrives to hold Pete accountable for his sins. The text is taken verbatim from Springsteen’s 2009 song of the same name, and the work shares the doomed melancholy of many of the musician’s working-class ballads. However, Pete’s apocryphal origin and lack of clear motivation keep the book from delivering the complex ache of a Springsteen classic like “Highway Patrolman.” Caruso’s mix of cartoon figures and oil-painted, impressionistic backgrounds is enjoyably kinetic (the fleet-footed, bank-robbing baby is a delight), but the pictures’ literal representation—rather than interpretation—of the text feels like a missed opportunity for fuller collaboration. (What, exactly, was the vision of death that so radically changed Pete’s trajectory? Caruso offers only a skull and crossbones.) In the original, music lends layers of emotion, expansion and pacing that are lacking here. However, reading the book in tandem with the song (easy enough to achieve in the age of iTunes) breathes new life into the pages, Springsteen’s vocals illuminate cadences lost in Caruso’s packed and stacked Schoolhouse Rock!–style treatment of the refrain. But while songs can trade in atmospherics and repetition, invoking if not explicating, a picture book demands fuller narrative and richer interplay between words and images; here, there are simply lyrics on the page.

A handsome, undercooked curio best enjoyed by Springsteen’s devoted—and in conjunction with the source material.

both literal and metaphorical. Sleazy politicians and cops are rife, and Spademan rightly trusts no one in the public sphere.

Other characters return from the first novel and provide a hint of nostalgia and sweetness missing from the dark and mean streets of New York.

The machinations of all this sinister reality remain rather abstract and thus wind up having far more interest to Spademan than to the reader.

GENOCIDE OF ONE

Takano, Kazuaki Translated by Gabriel, Philip Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (512 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-316-22622-6 978-0-316-22620-2 e-book Best-selling Japanese author Takano blends cell-manipulating microbiology and pyscho-cultural social analysis, all while sending four men into the Congo to save the human race.

It’s 2004, and President Gregory S. Burns occupies the Oval Office. War in Afghanistan and Iraq, yes, but the Heisman Report says mankind’s biggest threat is a 3-year-old Kanga Pygmy living in Congo’s Ituri Forest. A random mutation created a quantum leap in the boy’s intelligence, and the report says it could lead to the extinction of humankind, much as Homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals. Shifting from Washington to Congo to Tokyo, Takano’s narrative zigzags from firefights to power-player conferences to the complex biochemical research required to find a treatment for PAECS—pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis. Ex-Special Forces officer Jonathan “Hawk” Yeager quit the Army for big dollar security work to finance his son’s PAECS treatment. Leading Operation Guardian, Yeager believes his team is isolating a viral outbreak, but on the ground, he learns the 40 Kangas with whom the superhuman boy lives are to be assassinated to save the world from his mutation. Anthropologist Nigel Pierce is nurturing the boy, and the child is trying to ensure Yeager won’t kill him by enticing a Tokyo graduate student to formulate a drug to save Yeager’s son. The savant has written GIFT, a program to build and test pharmaceuticals within days rather than years. Japanese racial prejudice gets a rap, but Takano’s villain is the military-industrial complex and the United States’ evolution into Big Brother via Echelon, a program tracking everyone all the time. Takano’s action will appeal to Clancy-philes, but his theme explores how individual psychological frailties shape history, using an administration similar to Bush/Cheney as the bull in the international china shop.

The dense, erudite, multiparagraph lectures on microbiology slow down this better-than-average techno-thriller.

NEAR ENEMY

Sternbergh, Adam Crown (320 pp.) $24.00 | $11.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-385-34902-4 978-0-385-34903-1 e-book Spademan—the garbageman-turned– noir hit man introduced in Sternbergh’s first novel, Shovel Ready (2014)—returns to save New York from a terrorist threat.

Armed with nothing but a box cutter and the wits his mother gave him, Spademan meets the mysterious and brilliant Jonathan Lesser, who’s been spending more time than is good for him in the limnosphere, a virtual reality where he taps into people’s deepest fantasies. What he’s recently witnessed there is both startling and seemingly impossible—a murder. Spademan’s job is to track down the mystery of the victim (or “victim,” since a murder couldn’t possibly happen in an alternate reality) as well as to find Lesser, who disappeared shortly after his encounter with Spademan. A former cop and generally nasty piece of work named Joseph Boonce becomes extremely interested in both of these mysteries. Investigating the case, Spademan meets up with a nurse (named Nurse) who’s employed to monitor the conditions of those plunging into the liminal world of the limnosphere. It turns out Nurse was with the alleged victim when the murder occurred. All of this action is played out in a postmodern and corrupt world of toxicity, 30

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“These short stories of Russian peasants, artists and lovers show few signs of their age and much that is timeless.” from subtly worded

THE VOICES

has written no poetry—wearing the wrong one. In “Duty and Honour,” a woman follows a stern friend’s advice for ending an affair yet continues it by deleting a crucial “not” in her Dear John letter. In the autobiographical “Rasputin,” history and betrayal intertwine as writers gather for a dinner where one of them refuses a tryst with the great man. “The Quiet Backwater” is one of several stories that show how Teffi enriched what formerly might have been feuilletons. An old couple shares an estate’s ramshackle lodge and an understanding about a child born while he was away fighting; and the translation offers a luminous moment: “Softly rustle the reeds forgotten by the river.” History gets touched on again, lightly and darkly, in “Petrograd Monologue,” a story about food shortages during revolutionary times in which some make flatbread from face powder or window putty. The death of a sot lets the writer move slyly through the floors of his building cataloging the masks of solemnity placed over faces of scorn and indifference.

Teffi’s grasp of a child’s tender sensibility is remarkable in “The Lifeless Beast,” as is her feeling for the range of love’s inner torments in “Thy Will.”

Like the book’s excellent introduction, which teases a reader to want to know more about this woman’s life, these wide-ranging, brief works whet an appetite for more of her fiction.

Tallis, F.R. Pegasus Crime (352 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-656-2 A composer jeopardizes himself and his family when he becomes a kind of ghost hunter.

Christopher and Laura Norton fall in love with a stately but slightly careworn Victorian house tucked away in a remote pocket of London near Hampstead Heath. It’s a perfect place to raise their young daughter, Faye, and has enough room for Christopher, a film composer, to open a studio. Never mind the partially destroyed journal entries Christopher finds mentioning “secrets” and “manifestations and vanishings” or the strangely compelling cymbals-playing windup monkey he takes a fancy to. A few months after moving in, however, minor random incidents, accelerating in intensity and oddness, disturb the calm rhythms of their new home. Christopher hears voices that he thinks must be coming from an old radio somewhere in the innards of the house, a theory soundly debunked by an engineer named Kaminsky. There’s also the time when Faye seems to disappear for minutes that, to Laura, feel like an eternity. And of course there’s a return of that mechanical monkey, leaving Laura feeling menaced. Despite evidence to the contrary, Christopher chooses to see the voices, which he now presumes are ghostly, as benign and plans an exciting new composition that incorporates them. But his plan soon snowballs into an obsession that blinds him to Laura’s genuine fears and puts them all in danger. Inviting comparisons to Stephen King’s classic The Shining, Tallis (The Sleep Room, 2013, etc.) includes many boilerplate components of the genre.

But his incisive and beautifully observed storytelling trumps his clichés to produce a genuine page-turner.

THE GUARD

Terrin, Peter Translated by Colmer, David MacLehose Press (256 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-62365-900-4 Science fiction meets Samuel Beckett in this Godot-like tale of two security guards nervously biding their time in the basement of a wealthy apartment complex.

This end-of-the-world-again satire by Flemish novelist Terrin (Monte Carlo, 2014, etc.) won the European Prize for Literature in 2010 and now makes its way to English-speaking shores courtesy of a translation from the Dutch by Colmer. It’s a strange little story that works as a disarming allegory for the conflict-ridden, anxiety-producing times we live in. Our narrator is Michel, a bit of a dim bulb who works as a security guard at the aforementioned high-rise apartment, where he’s employed by a mysterious firm called only “The Organization.” The firm makes regular supply runs that terrify Michel, but they provide him and his partner with “Flock 28” handguns and ammo, corned beef and water. His partner is Harry, a paranoid conspiracy theorist who nevertheless joins Michel in staying true to their murky mission. “We keep our uniforms neatly brushed, every day, because regulations are sacred,” Michel tells us.

“Harry and I are in complete agreement on that. After all, it’s the uniform that makes the guard. The uniform and the weapon.”

Isolation is the purest result of their strange job, but Terrin fills in all that blank space with a rambling, back-biting dialogue

SUBTLY WORDED

Teffi Translated by Jackson, Ann Marie; Chandler, Robert ; Chandler, Elizabeth; Kitson, Clare; Steinberg, Irina; Wase, Natalia Pushkin Press (240 pp.) $18.00 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-78227-037-9 These short stories of Russian peasants, artists and lovers show few signs of their age and much that is timeless.

Teffi, pen name of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952), was born in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and began publishing satirical articles in 1904, then mostly stories by 1911. The fiction collected here ranges from droll sketches to busy, deceptively simple human comedies and complex psychological excursions. A woman in “The Hat” tries on her old and new hats so often she leaves for a date—with a poet who |

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between the two guards that resembles a marriage as much as a partnership. Unfortunately, we don’t see much besides these two bickering inmates. Outside the basement, residents begin leaving, dragging their suitcases behind them, while Michel and Harry wonder if the world has ended. The only person left in their tower is a mysterious man who lives alone on the 29th floor, lending the book a paranoid edge that resonates like the Tom Waits song: “What’s He Building in There?”

A spare, dystopian comedy that doesn’t bring quite enough funny to satisfy nor enough detail to terrify.

PERFECT SINS

Bannister, Jo Minotaur (304 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-250-05420-3 978-1-4668-5722-3 e-book A second case—call it a case and a fraction—for Constable Hazel Best and Gabriel Ash, the much-tried man she befriended in Deadly Virtues (2013).

Gabriel’s career with national security investigating Somali pirates came to an abrupt end, along with his peace of mind, when his wife and their sons vanished, presumably captured or killed on the orders of the people he was investigating. Now his only goal in life is to find them, if they’re still alive. But his inquiries among weapons manufacturers like Stephen Graves move slowly, so he’s available along with Hazel to help out when Lord Peregrine “Pete” Byrfield, who employs Hazel’s father as a handyman, begins an investigation of some possible burial mounds on his estate. After he’s surveyed potential locations for Pete, archaeologist David Sperrin digs into one especially promising site and does indeed find human bones. But they’re a young boy’s, and they’re only 30 years old. Somehow Fred Best persuades his daughter that the remains may be those of David’s brother Jamie, who was reportedly carried off by his father to Ireland many years ago, at the same time that Pete is persuading himself that his own parents may have borne a son before him and then killed him—an awkward contrivance that pays off in a breathless series of complications and teasing alternatives involving Pete’s and David’s thoroughly unlikable mothers. The mystery of the buried child is solved early on, leaving veteran Bannister 50 pages to return to the question of who came close to killing Gabriel and Hazel and why.

The briefer framing case is touching but otherwise unsatisfying. But the main course of old bones is a humdinger.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE MIRROR

Williams, T.R. Atria (544 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-1341-0 Series: Rising World Trilogy, 2 The unexciting middle installment in the author’s Rising World trilogy.

The Great Disruption of 2027 tilted the Earth’s axis by 4 degrees, unleashing massive death and destruction. In 2030, the survivors must deal with aftereffects such as widespread illness and earthquakes that lack epicenters. Can humanity make a comeback? “The Rising is over,” a character states. “Now we must see if the wager on mankind was well placed....Even the simple act of loving someone is risky.” Key to the Earth’s recovery are the Chronicles of Satraya and learning how to “unearth the secret of free energy.”

Bad People will kill to control the Chronicles, which dispense such wisdom as “Mind is Mind.” Pyramids will generate electricity, a fact known to the ancient Egyptians. Exactly how the ancients used that power is not obvious, but no matter. Much is made of the real-life Nicola Tesla’s experiments with electricity, which helps cover the story’s flapdoodle with a veneer of science.

For example, there are three kinds of resonances mentioned that turn out to be real, like the Schumann resonance—is the Earth out of tune? The characters are straightforward with the notable exception(s) of doctors Josef and Rosa, mixed-gender twins conjoined at the head. They have one superhigh-IQ brain between them and routinely finish each other’s sentences. They might be the worst character concept inflicted on innocent readers in many a yarn, but kudos to the author for daring to try.

In the end, though, it’s an imaginative book with elements of science fiction, futurism and fantasy. The pace and storytelling are good, and the author makes effective use of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. The ending sets up the series finale, with more foul deeds afoot.

Worth a try for fans of the genre, but start with Book 1, Journey into the Flame.

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SCORCHED EGGS

shot dead from a distance. There was much more to Lydia than the pampered society matron she appeared to be. Assisted by her secretary, Hester Drax, Lydia, under a nom de plume, was a published author, and she was deeply interested in her Russian background even though she and her father had escaped when she was very young. DCI Gaines and DS Inskip have their work cut out for them, but as always, they suspect the husband.

Louis Challoner becomes a subject of particular interest when his pistol goes missing from the safe where he keeps it. A recent shootout between Russian revolutionaries and the law makes the police especially interested in Lydia’s Russian connections.

Marcus admits he was keeping an eye on Lydia at the request of the government but maintains that Kitty’s the one he loves.

Kitty’s sleuthing forces both her father and Miss Drax to make unwilling revelations. Which of the secrets in Lydia’s own life caused her death?

Eccles (After Clare, 2012, etc.) once again combines history and romance with a clever mystery filled with a wide array of suspects.

Childs, Laura Berkley Prime Crime (320 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-425-25559-9 Three 40-something gal pals pool their resources to solve another local crime.

Suzanne, Toni and Petra own the Cackleberry Club, a popular restaurant in the Midwestern hamlet of Kindred, where down-home cooking meets locally sourced ingredients.

While getting her hair done one afternoon, Suzanne smells smoke. Suddenly the building next door, which houses the County Services Bureau, explodes in flame, killing county agent Bruce Winthrop’s secretary, Hannah Venable. Having built a reputation by helping Sheriff Doogie solve several cases (Eggs in a Casket, 2014, etc.), Suzanne finds several people begging her to take up the case—first and foremost her friend Kit Kaslik, whose wedding to Ricky Wilcox is rudely interrupted when Doogie arrests the groom before he can say “I do.” Ricky insists the blasting caps in his car have been planted, and there are certainly plenty of other suspects, including Hannah’s cheating husband. Suzanne is busy getting her quarter horse ready for the barrel-racing competition at the fair, hosting a sold-out dinner theater at the cafe, cooking gourmet dinners for her doctor boyfriend and even playing momma to a baby owl that fell out of a tree behind the restaurant. But she’s not too busy to poke her nose where someone thinks it doesn’t belong. As a reward, she’s shot at while out riding, and her veterinarian’s office is nearly set afire while she’s visiting with her pooch. Even Doogie wants her to butt out. But she and her fearless friends refuse to give up until the killer is found.

The clutch of suspects and appended recipes aren’t quite enough to bring this up to the standard of Childs’ other series, especially the Tea Shop series (Steeped in Evil,

YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME Estleman, Loren D. Forge (240 pp.) $24.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-7653-3735-1

Amos Walker’s 24th case takes him from Detroit to the suburban wilds of Iroquois Heights, where the natives are just as restless.

Despite the posters with Donald Gates’ image she’s plastered all over town, his wife, Amelie, still doesn’t know who killed him. Nor does Lt. Ray Henty, who remembers Walker from his days on the Detroit force. So when the $10,000 reward an anonymous donor offers through Christ Episcopal Church flushes out every busybody in Iroquois Heights, Henty asks Walker, who’s just coming off rehab for the Vicodin he used to get over the trauma of his last case (Don’t Look for Me, 2014), to follow up with the most promising callers. Things happen right away, though not the things Henty had in mind. Christ Episcopal’s the Rev. Florence Melville, Don’s pre-Amelie girlfriend, hires Walker to find his killer. Roy Thompson, a maintenance man in Don’s office who heard traffic-light computer programmer Yuri Yako complain that Don had done no real work ever since installing the system years ago, is killed. So is Yako, whose last name is really Crowley. With three victims to worry about, Henty starts to get hot around the collar, especially after Deputy U.S. Marshal Mary Ann Thaler, of Witness Security, shows up to put her oar in. In short order, red flags go up concerning the Ukrainian mob, the federal spook on Walker’s back, and the Ritalin Don and Amelie’s 10-year-old son is taking. But Walker distinguishes the real leads from the phonies until he does indeed know who killed Don Gates—though not in time to claim that reward.

Modest, tidy and fast-moving: a pleasing lesser entry in Walker’s dossier. (Agent: Dominick Abel)

2014, etc).

THE FIREBIRD’S FEATHER

Eccles, Marjorie Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8426-8

An Edwardian family’s quiet life is shattered by murder.

It is 1911. A new king awaits the crown in London, suffragettes are fighting for the right to vote, and Russian refugees are raising money for a revolution. In the Challoner household, daughter Kitty is preparing to be introduced to society while her older cousin Bridget secretly helps the suffragettes as she awaits entry to Cambridge. Kitty’s beautiful Russian-born mama, Lydia, is riding in the park with her constant escort, Marcus Villiers, when she’s |

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BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART

methods backfires spectacularly, drawing the wrath of Dobbins and his enforcer, Winston County Sheriff Burkhart. When a scrawled postcard arrives from Flynn asking Thorn for help, he grabs his buddy Sugarman and saddles up, fearing the worst. But their trip is complicated by two unsought companions. First Tina Gathercole, Sugarman’s latest twist, asks to hitch a ride as far as Jacksonville. Then, FBI agent Madeline Cruz, smelling marijuana in Sugar’s car, demands to search it and then insists on joining the party, sending Tina running right into the arms of X-88, an ex-con with such a sensitive nose he doesn’t need a bloodhound to do his tracking, and his equally murderous companion Pixie. Smelling the first of a long series of rats, Thorn struggles to figure out who’s on first, and throughout the early going, Hall keeps you guessing as he hides the ball. Eventually, everybody’s forced to declare their true allegiances, and the action gets more straightforward. Thorn miraculously rises above his physical limitations to hammer the bad guys, and the townsfolk who had closed ranks against him miraculously back his play. Convenient.

The John D. MacDonald of The Green Ripper meets the Upton Sinclair of The Jungle. Better get your fill of ham and bacon before you start this one.

Fowler, Christopher Bantam (400 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-345-54765-1

As if London didn’t provide enough live citizens to worry about, the Peculiar Crimes Unit (The Invisible Code, 2013, etc.) is presented with one at least briefly returned from the dead.

Romain Curtis may be only a teenager out for a quick canoodle with Shirone Estanza, but he knows what he saw in St. George’s Gardens, a city park with a few gravesites still awaiting their tenants. And what he saw is a reanimated corpse rising from the grave. He heard it speaking to him, too, before it plopped back down in the dirt. When the problem of the late Thomas Edward Wallace, a small-beer lawyer who hanged himself last week, comes to the attention of Arthur Bryant and John May, they seize it avidly—especially Mr. Bryant—as one more case that can justify their continued funding under their new patron, bureaucratic-jargon–spouting City of London Public Liaison Officer Orion Banks. As they zero in on Krishna Jhadav, the client who pulled his brokerage account from Wallace’s practice shortly before the lawyer’s death, another case comes equally unbidden: the disappearance from the Tower of London of the seven ravens tied by legend to England’s continued safety. Dealing with reanimation, grave-robbing, ravens and the dark arts naturally brings the PCU up against several experts even more peculiar than they are, most notably the sinister academic/necromancer Peregrine Wosthold Merry. Their consultations are the comically learned high points in the team’s 11th adventure.

Not to worry: Everything is wrapped up logically, if not exactly convincingly, in the end. Sleep well, Your Majesty.

CRIMSON ANGEL

Hambly, Barbara Severn House (256 pp.) $29.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8427-5 A former slave must return to Haiti to uncover a dark secret.

Paris-trained physician Benjamin January is now a free man of color working as a musician in 1838 New Orleans to support his wife and young son. The arrival of wife Rose’s white half brother, Jeoff Vitrac, should be a joyous occasion, but the visit brings nothing but trouble. Descendants of an aristocratic French family, the de Gericaults, Rose, Jeoff, and Aramis have heard tales of a family treasure hidden at the former family estate in Haiti. Jeoff asks Ben to help find the treasure, but Ben refuses, knowing he’d probably face a death sentence if he returned to the Black Republic of Haiti, where the slaves rose up against their oppressors, killing almost all the white plantation owners before turning to fight among themselves for control. Soon after unknown people start watching their house, Jeoff is murdered and Rose stabbed in the street.

They leave the baby with Ben’s sister and flee to Aramis’ Grand Isle plantation, where the attacks continue. As much as he abhors the idea, Ben realizes that they’ll never escape persecution until they find out whether the treasure still exists. Ben’s friend the white musician Hannibal helps them by pretending Rose is his mistress and Ben his valet as they embark on a trip to Cuba in search of more clues. When Rose is kidnapped, Hannibal and Ben have no choice but to follow her to Haiti, a place where death waits around every corner. Hambly’s longrunning series (Good Man Friday, 2014, etc.) pulls no punches

THE BIG FINISH

Hall, James W. Minotaur (304 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-250-00501-4 978-1-4668-5789-6 e-book Florida fly-tier/soldier of fortune Thorn, who’s already tangled with his newly discovered son’s attachment to eco-terrorists (Going Dark, 2013), gets another chance to rescue him—from some people even worse.

Just as you’d expect from Thorn’s grown son, Flynn Moss continues to go his own way, and his way this time takes him and his mates from the Earth Liberation Front to little Pine Haven, North Carolina, home to Webb Dobbins’ hog farming operation. Unfortunately, ELF’s attempt to get undercover footage of Dobbins’ revolting, lovingly described, strictly legal hog-raising 34

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“The brutal murder of an old man in an Austrian village is one of many interlocking plot threads in this dense psychological mystery.” from the sweetness of life

THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE

in describing the brutality of the period, when slaves and women, both possessions under the law, had little recourse for ill-treatment.

The mystery is the least of this adventurous tale.

Hochgatterer, Paulus Translated by Bulloch, Jamie MacLehose Press (320 pp.) $26.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-62365-853-3 978-1-62365-853-3 e-book

THE BISHOP’S WIFE

Harrison, Mette Ivie Soho Crime (352 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-61695-476-5

The brutal murder of an old man in an Austrian village is one of many interlocking plot threads in this dense psychological mystery.

During Christmas week, young Katharina visits her grandfather at his cabin in the woods; when he disappears, she finds him in the snow with his throat cut and his face smashed in. Scarred by the experience, Katharina can no longer talk and won’t let go of the two plastic game pieces she was holding. But after this evocative start, the book abandons conventional structure and presents a series of subplots and character sketches, not all related to the main plot. Investigating detective Ludwig Kovacs and child psychiatrist Raffael Horn both have their own personal struggles—Kovacs is having a dead-end affair, and Horn has an unrequited longing for his own wife—but these threads aren’t picked up. More of the town’s violent undercurrents are revealed; peripheral characters include a pastor who thinks in unconnected (and uncredited) Bob Dylan quotes. Nothing is really resolved when the murderer’s identity is given, relatively early in the book through one of many internal monologues.

The book aims to show that all life is interconnected in its sweetness and brutality, but the weighty theme doesn’t resonate when so many smaller themes are left hanging.

Despite some beautifully written passages, Hochgatterer’s (The Mattress House, 2012, etc.) short book has too many digressions and dead ends to be enlightening as philosophy or satisfying as a mystery.

A questioning Mormon woman becomes involved in two mysteries.

A Mormon bishop is called to serve part-time, not lifetime, and his wife has no official standing. But Linda Wallheim strives to help her husband, Kurt, cope with the many calls on his time. When they’re awakened early one morning by Jared Helm and his 5-year-old daughter, Kelly, Linda has no inkling how profoundly their lives will be changed

by Jared’s claim that his wife, Carrie, has left him. Linda has 5 grown sons, but she can’t forget the loss of her stillborn daughter, and little Kelly captures her heart. When the girl tells Linda that her father dropped her mother off somewhere during the night, Linda wonders whether Carrie really ran away. Carrie’s wealthy, angry parents are equally skeptical. As the police begin an investigation, Linda, who’d like to do more with her life, strikes up a friendship with Anna Torstensen, whose husband, Tobias, is gravely ill. Anna, who has a graduate degree and worked in banking before marrying Tobias, is just the sort of independent woman Linda would like to be. Although she has no children, Anna has raised the two boys from Tobias’ first marriage as her own. Now that Tobias is dying, he rambles on about visiting his first wife’s grave even though nobody knows where it is. Despite Kurt’s entreaties to leave these problems alone, Linda is driven to investigate out of concern for Kelly.

The discovery of two bodies produces devastating revelations for Linda and the close-knit community, but she never thinks of giving up her search for the painful truth.

Harrison, herself a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is known for her children’s fantasy books (The Rose Throne, 2013, etc.). This decidedly adult tale adds twists aplenty to an insider’s look at a religion replete with its own mysteries.

RAVEN HEIGHTS MANOR

Louise, Sharol Five Star (244 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 17, 2014 978-1-4328-2940-7

A teenager adjusting to a new home searches for clues to a mysterious death.

Claire Temple’s first glimpse of Raven Heights Manor, grimly perched on a rock on the north Cornwall coast, fills her with foreboding. Lonely and despondent since her parents’ deaths nine years earlier, Claire has suffered the common fate of late-18th-century orphans and been put to school—until her bachelor uncle invites her to the manor. When she arrives, he’s still abroad, and Claire is left in the care of his second cousin, the kindly housekeeper. Vitus and Roman, two boys about her age who live on the neighboring estate, claim her acquaintance, and Roman tells her all about the smugglers who hide their treasures in caves along the coast. |

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THE SKELETON ROAD

With the natural resilience of not quite 16 years, Claire soon begins to enjoy exploring the manor and its grounds, although she’s warned away from the cliff where young Zillah recently fell to her death. Zillah was close to a little blind girl, Alice, who boarded with her at Miss Bethany Coulter’s inn. When Alice confides in Claire about a couple of notes Zillah left behind in case anything happened to her, Claire is increasingly curious about the young woman’s unfortunate fate. She takes a break from sleuthing to try to match up Bethany and Malcolm Randall, an aspiring chef, as business partners. She’s resourceful for one so young and enjoys unusual independence for a girl of her time, but it’s not her fault that her readers will probably be one step ahead of her most of the way.

For an author with a list of historical romances to her name, Louise (RoseHill Manor, 2010, etc.) doesn’t write very convincingly about her chosen period or show much originality in a slight tale that’s likely to have the most appeal for young adults.

McDermid, Val Atlantic Monthly (384 pp.) $25.00 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-8021-2309-1

A grisly discovery atop the roof of a venerable Edinburgh school slated for demolition sends two very different sets of investigators scurrying for answers rooted in the endless conflict between Serbs and Croats.

How did an 8-year-old skeleton make it to the roof of the John Drummond School, and whose skeleton is it? The official investigators, DCI Karen Pirie and DC Jason “the Mint” Murray of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, have little to go on till their inquiries about a not-quite-dormant bank account take them to professor Maggie Blake, a geographer at St. Scholastica’s College, Oxford, who’s still mourning the day eight years ago when Dimitar “Mitja” Petrovic, the Croatian Army lover who’d followed her from Dubrovnik back home, left one morning and never returned. Just as things seem to be clearing up for Karen and the Mint, they’re getting even muddier for Alan Macanespie and Theo Proctor, two underachieving drones at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, whose activist new boss, Wilson Cagney, is determined to get them to pull their weight for a change by investigating a yearslong rash of assassinations of ICTFY targets just before they were to be arrested. Macanespie and Proctor, who have considerably fewer scruples than Karen and the Mint about how they do their job, conclude that their killer must be none other than retired Gen. Dimitar Petrovic.

Working at ironic cross-purposes, the two investigative teams unwittingly duplicate, complicate and contradict each other’s discoveries as they leapfrog over repeated flashbacks to the hellish Dubrovnik landscape to come up, in miraculous synchronicity, with the real killer.

This stand-alone from McDermid (Cross and Burn, 2013, etc.) combines conscientious detection with heartfelt reflections on the enduring power of the Yugoslavian breakup to wreak violence long after the 1995 Dayton Accords.

BROKEN ANGELS

Masterton, Graham Head of Zeus (416 pp.) $12.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-78185-218-7 Typically known for horror (Forest Ghost, 2014, etc.), Masterton crams plenty of revulsion and repulsion into this crime tale, which focuses on someone taking a monstrous revenge on the Catholic Church.

On her first day off in she can’t remember how long, Detective Katie Maguire receives a call requesting her to check out an unusual crime scene firsthand. As a female member of County Cork’s Garda, Katie’s worked doggedly to get where she is, and she heads off to the scene even though that means leaving her boyfriend, John, behind in her bed. The body that’s been found has been bound, mutilated and obviously tortured, and that’s not the worst of it; it’s missing a key piece of equipment whose absence makes the male members of Katie’s team extra-squeamish. On researching the identity of the deceased, Katie learns he was a priest and music teacher. Immediately she wonders if his death might somehow be related to the child sex abuse scandals of recent years. The appearance of a second body suggests that no one in the church may be safe. Meanwhile, Katie’s sister and roommate is bringing her own brand of danger into the house by reuniting with a married ex. Good thing Katie’s got John—or has she?

The author’s penchant for horror shines through in the gruesome details, but Masterton’s crime writing is more detailed, character-driven and carefully plotted than his other recent work.

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A NIP OF MURDER

from getting blown up in the booby-trapped house. The robbers are members of the Cantree family, locals with a grudge against the county sheriff and a network of friends and family who could be helping them. Since Phoenix killed one of them and wounded another during the escape attempt, she’s sure to be added to their hit list. The gang stole cash but also targeted a safety deposit box filled with gold coins, and the FBI agents suspect Phoenix because, as consultant to a venture capital firm, she has the expertise to sell the gold. Meanwhile, another sleuthing friend, Connie Diamante, who’s directing Oklahoma! for the local community college, asks Phoenix to play the piano for the auditions. One of the kids who’s auditioning pulls a gun but claims it was just a prop to help get him in character. After a video of the incident shows up on YouTube, Phoenix and Connie are shot at in a local restaurant. They’re also presented with a case of elder neglect that involves a Cantree family friend.

Although Phoenix would prefer to get on with her work establishing a foundation to assist crime victims, she’s forced to investigate the robbery to get the FBI off her back.

Mulford (Show Me the Deadly Deer, 2014, etc.) confronts her troupe of reluctant crime solvers with plenty of action and a few surprises.

Miller, Carol Minotaur (304 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 16, 2014 978-1-250-01927-1 978-1-250-01928-8 e-book Daisy, the Balsam boys and the other likker-sipping characters from Murder and Moonshine (2013) are back for another round.

When Bobby Balsam asks for a red velvet cake from Daisy McGovern, the co-proprietor of a back-country Virginia bake shop, Daisy doesn’t mind taking his order. He’s the sweeter-natured of the Balsam brothers, even though he’s so dim he can’t find his way around in the dark. If it were a favor for Rick, his older brother, Daisy wouldn’t bother; he’s crafty, unpredictable and maddening. He’s also probably the wealthiest man in Pittsylvania County, thanks to his bootlegging business. But Daisy has a bigger problem than Rick. Three men break into the bake-shop kitchen, Daisy’s business partner stabs one of them to death in self-defense, and the two surviving intruders make off with 90 pounds of cream cheese in crates. Daisy tries to turn her mind back to the red velvet cake, which Bobby wants for his wedding to a woman he’s known two weeks. His fiancee is staying at the nearby Fuzzy Lake Campground for some serious geocaching, a kind of hide-and-seek for grown-ups. When her brother asks Daisy out, she takes him to a nip joint that Rick owns to see what happens when she trades in a red chip she found on the floor after the break-in for a jelly jar of whiskey. The joint also turns out to be the hiding place of the cream-cheese crates— minus the cheese. A second break-in, a rumor of hidden treasure and an apparent case of bat white-nose fungus lead Daisy on an extended hunt-and-rescue mission in this lively blend of local color, homicide and whiskey-fueled high jinks.

Miller puts Daisy squarely center stage in her second outing—not that she doesn’t belong there, but even her sexy nemesis remains in her shadow in this entertaining sequel.

THE HANGMAN’S SONG

Oswald, James Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (496 pp.) $13.95 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-544-31950-9 DI Tony McClean may think his life is in turmoil, but it’s about to get worse.

Since Tony’s first girlfriend was murdered by a serial killer, he’d found solace with a young lady working for the Edinburgh police. But then an attack by a crazy colleague left her in a coma. Now Emma is awake but has little memory of the past and needs constant care and therapy. Tony, who inherited a lot of money from his grandmother, takes Emma in and hires Jenny Nairn, a student specializing in physical trauma, to live in his home and work with Emma. When her physician suggests shock treatment, Jenny convinces Tony to take her to Dr. Eleanor Austin, who specializes in regression therapy and hypnosis. At work, things have gone from bad to worse. CID Acting Superintendent Duguid, who’s not really up to the job, dislikes Tony and transfers him to the sex crimes unit. He orders Tony to quickly close the hanging he’s stumbled upon, even though the medical examiner isn’t satisfied that it’s a suicide. More men are found hanged, all with the same type of rope, but Tony has to sneak around in order to keep the case alive. Meanwhile, he’s also officially working on the case of several prostitutes due to be shipped overseas, one of whom is willing to talk to Tony.

Soon her pimp is beaten to death, she’s badly injured, and Tony suspects that his fellow officer DS Buchanan is involved. When Buchanan tries to attack Tony, he dies in a freak accident and Tony is put on desk duty. Once he realizes that there may be a

SHOW ME THE GOLD

Mulford, Carolyn Five Star (304 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 17, 2014 978-1-4328-2990-2

Another case for a former CIA agent and her gal pals.

Reserve Deputy and former CIA agent Phoenix Smith and her friend and host, Acting Sheriff Annalynn Keyser, are called to help law enforcement officials in a neighboring county contain a gang of bank robbers hiding in a deserted farmhouse. Together with Phoenix’s dropout police dog, Achilles, they surround the house, but at least two of the men escape, and only Achilles’ sharp nose keeps Phoenix |

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BLUE AVENUE

connection to Emma, he refuses to back off either case.

Tony’s third (The Book of Souls, 2014, etc.) reads like a police procedural with supernatural overtones. Despite plenty of red herrings and clever twists, the villain isn’t that hard to identify.

Wiley, Michael Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8429-9 Wiley moves south from his three tales of Chicago shamus Joe Kozmarski (A Bad Night’s Sleep, 2011, etc.) to Florida, where an even less heroic sleuth faces an even seamier mystery.

Twenty-five years ago, Belinda Mabry was William “BB” Byrd’s first love. Now his friend Lt. Detective Daniel Turner of the Jacksonville Police wants him to identify her body. It’s Belinda all right, tied neck and heels, shrouded in plastic and dumped in a pile of garbage. And she’s not the only victim on Daniel’s docket. Streetwalkers Tonya Richmond (black) and Ashley Littleton (white) have already been killed in much the same way. But Belinda’s the one BB cares about, and soon he’s ringing all the wrong doorbells, meeting all the wrong people—especially Belinda’s no-good brother, Bobby, and her son, Terrence Stilman—and talking himself into a world of trouble. Luckily, he can call on tough, elderly hireling Charles Tucker whenever he needs help: “He fixed what needed fixing. He broke what needed breaking.” Even though BB, unlike Belinda, is white, Wiley echoes Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins books in both his storytelling and his first-person voice—pared down, digressive and frankly revealing. As BB works to connect the murders to the accidental death of a good-time Jamaican girl in the middle of an experiment in erotic asphyxia, the plot, fueled by a steadily rising body count, boils furiously until it reaches a climax that’s both utterly predictable and powerfully unnerving.

Repeated doses of strong sexual violence make this one definitely not for the kiddies. First of a series, though you have to wonder who’s left in Jacksonville for the sequels.

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB

Ramsay, Frederick Poisoned Pen (314 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $6.99 e-book $22.95 Lg. Prt. | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-4642-0326-8 978-1-4642-0328-2 paper 978-1-4642-0329-9 e-book 978-1-4642-0327-5 Lg. Prt. A series of mishaps and machinations change the course of history.

Gamaliel, the Rabban of the Sanhedrin, constantly argues with Caiaphas, High Priest of the Temple, who’s obsessed with Yeshua, a Galilean rabbi whom Gamaliel considers harmless.

Their real concern should be their Roman overlord, Pontius Pilate, Emperor’s Prefect of Judea and Overseer of the Palestine.

A young boy, instead of Legionnaires, orders Gamaliel to report to Pilate, who greets him in a small room in the bowels of the Antonia Fortress where he’s under house arrest, accused of murdering Aurelius Decimus, a rival for power. Cassia Drusus, sent out by the emperor to inspect outposts of the empire, arrested Pilate when he found him standing over the body of Aurelius with Pilate’s dagger in his heart. Even though they’re enemies, Pilate gives Gamaliel the thankless job of proving his innocence because he knows the rabbi’s sense of justice will oblige him to agree and accept Marius, the young boy sent with the message, as his guide and messenger. Wending their way through the crowds visiting for Passover, Gamaliel and his physician friend Loukas visit many places in Jerusalem, from the hippodrome to a theater, seeking clues, especially to the whereabouts of Marius, who’s vanished. The tension arising from political intrigue among Romans and Jews crests when Caiaphas arrests Yeshua and schemes to avoid a trial over which Gamaliel would preside. Pilate, who has his own reasons for wishing Yeshua dead, creates a rule allowing him to release the dangerous criminal Barabbas and crucify Yeshua in his stead. Gamaliel is sure Pilate is innocent of Aurelius’ murder, but it will take all his skills to prove it.

Ramsay’s fourth Jerusalem novel (Holy Smoke, 2013, etc.) links another challenging mystery to some intriguing answers to age-old questions surrounding the death of Jesus.

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THE BROKEN ISLES

Newton, Mark Charan Tor (416 pp.) $12.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-330-52168-0 Final book of the Legends of the Red Sun series (The Book of Transformations, 2011, etc.), written in the style known as New Weird—meaning somewhere between bizarre fantasy and far-future science fiction; it was first published in

GOLDEN SON

Brown, Pierce Del Rey/Ballantine (448 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-345-53981-6 Series: Red Rising Trilogy, 2 Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.

The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: “For seven hundred years we have been enslaved....We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light.” Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.

Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism. (Agent: Hannah Bowman)

the U.K. in 2012.

We return to a world where the sun is red, an ice age impends, and a war between two ancient enemies from another dimension threatens the Boreal Archipelago. Both sets of combatants are entering the world via the Realm Gates, whose malign influence, it turns out, might be causing the ice age. The city of Villjamur lies in ruins, destroyed by Policharos, an immense, flying alien artifact, source of the insensate lobsterlike warriors called Okun. Thousands of refugees from Villjamur, shepherded by Investigator Fulcrom of the Villjamur Inquisition, and occasionally aided by the mysterious, godlike but suicidal Frater Mercury, flee toward the city of Villiren. Here, albino Cmdr.

Brynd Lathraea schemes to defeat the Okun while preparing to receive the refugees and simultaneously accommodate a vast influx of good-guy warriors, the bitter enemies of Policharos, led by the giant blue swordswoman Artemisia. A subplot involving the half-vampire gangster Malum, who attempts to stir up resentment against the incoming alien allies and parlay it into a takeover of Villiren, amounts to scarcely more than an annoyance. Even the battles offer little more than standard gore, spilled abdominal organs and flying body parts. Still weird, then, but not totally outlandish, with a few involving characters, others given nothing much to do, stock plotting and a patchwork narrative that offers little in the way of tension or engagement.

A disappointing end to what had been a distinctive series.

ORIGINATOR

Shepherd, Joel Pyr/Prometheus Books (520 pp.) $18.00 paper | $11.99 e-book Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61614-992-5 978-1-61614-993-2 e-book Sixth installment (Operation Shield, 2014, etc.) in Shepherd’s ferocious, farfuture, multilateral power struggle.

The context, what with opposing human Federation and League civilizations, the humanoid alien Talee and numerous factions within each, is far from easy to assimilate. Federation Spec Ops warrior Cassandra “Sandy” Kresnov and her fellow GIs, synthetic humans with superhuman powers, have taken it upon themselves to try to prevent another devastating war with the League. But with no

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functioning government, FedInt (intelligence) feuding bitterly with FSA (security), and few natural human organics who trust the GIs, it isn’t easy. And when a quarter of a million people die in the destruction of the League moon Cresta, another war seems inevitable, especially when it becomes clear that those responsible are in the grip of a technologically induced psychosis that threatens to infect the rest of humanity. Then the synthetic Talee operative Cai shows up, warning that the Talee once nearly destroyed themselves in the same technologically induced insanity and will go to any lengths to prevent a recurrence. Renaldo Takewashi, who developed the synthetics and their technological implants using ancient Talee technology, arrives with both the League and the Talee in hot pursuit.

Takewashi insists that advanced technology implanted in the head of Kiril, the youngest of the three human children Sandy has adopted, is the key to preventing the psychosis—the same technology the Talee fear losing control of. Shepherd, who hails from Australia, writes sustained, intense and gripping action sequences interspersed with powerful dialogue that delves into the complex technological, philosophical and political implications of the situation. Evocative and eloquent, the whole impressive package hurtles along at a relentless pace.

A grand saga, though not recommended for newcomers, the implicit assumption being that you’re familiar with both the characters and the background.

trauma and offer a flood of disturbing factual information about animal rights. While the novel often balances the voices well, playing them against each other to guide the reader’s sympathies and understanding, at other times it fractures into an overwhelming number of elements and unnecessary attempts to obscure aspects of the plot. Orvo’s discovery of the parallel world becomes an unexpected anchor, giving a concrete expression to his grief and reverence for the natural world and drawing on the fascinating, cross-cultural mythology of bees.

At its best, Sinisalo’s novel engages in a fierce discussion of ecological choices while also imagining an unusually picturesque, Orpheus-tinged search for love beyond death.

THE JUST CITY

Walton, Jo Tor (368 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-7653-3266-0 What happens when the goddess Athene tries to establish Plato’s Republic on Atlantis, populated with a few hundred philosophers plucked from 2,500 years of history, more than 10,000 manumitted slave children and a handful of

robot workers?

For some reason, Plato is not invited, but Socrates is welcome, as are a number of Plato’s translators and devotees, including Plotinus and Cicero. The adults, known as “masters,” are generally happy to build the Just City, but not all the children are, especially since it’s strongly implied that the masters encouraged the growth of slavery in various eras by purchasing so many children. And although the children are well-treated and educated, they’re not allowed to leave and must follow strict rules whose provenance they can’t entirely understand, since they’re not even allowed to read The Republic. The justness of the City becomes even more questionable when evidence accumulates that the mechanical workers used in place of slaves may actually be sentient. There’s more thought experiment than plot here. The fictional and mythological protagonists have a certain appeal, but it’s disappointing that Walton (Among Others, 2011, etc.) barely sketches most of the historical characters who play minor roles in the story—readers will have to do the research themselves in order to flesh them out.

This is novel as study guide: Mary Renault meets undergraduate Philosophy 101. (Agent: Jack Byrne)

THE BLOOD OF ANGELS

Sinisalo, Johanna Translated by Rogers, Lola Peter Owen (240 pp.) $16.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-7206-1004-8

A new novel by Finnish author Sinisalo (Birdbrain, 2011, etc.) uses harrowing ecological collapse and an idyllic parallel world to examine both the possibility of global disaster and one man’s surreal, life-altering experience of grief.

A successful businessman and small-time beekeeper, Orvo lives in a world pushed slightly further into a future where poor environmental and agricultural decisions have had devastating effects. Food shortages and riots plague the United States, and the disintegration of the American economy is beginning to destabilize the entire developed world. Symptoms of catastrophic ecological damage, including the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of bees, spread until they reach Orvo’s own small hives in Finland. When Orvo’s teenage son, Eero, a fervent animal rights activist, gets killed during an idealistic stunt, Orvo’s grief over his son and the loss of his bees leads him to discover a portal to an unspoiled parallel world where he hopes to find both. The novel alternates between Orvo’s quiet, griefmuffled voice and breathless, increasingly fanatical blog entries written by Eero as a member of the “Animalist Revolutionary Army.” These two contrasting threads allow the story to both withhold essential emotional detail in a reflection of Orvo’s 40

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Lady Georgiana Pearson has been happily free of the strictures of Victorian society since she ruined herself at the hands of a man she thought she loved and bore a daughter, scandalizing polite society and setting herself firmly beyond the pale.

Since then, she’s partnered with three other titled social pariahs to create The Fallen Angel, the most successful gaming club in London, which deals in scandal and secrets as much as gambling.

Under the guise of the mysterious “Chase,” who works in the shadows and is represented by yet another alter ego, Anna— whom every assumes is Chase’s mistress—Georgiana is secretly one of the most powerful figures in England, though none but her partners know her true identity. Blissfully disreputable, she is suddenly aware of her limitations when society’s scorn turns toward her beloved daughter, and she decides to seek an aristocratic husband to raise her daughter’s social standing. However, her return to society draws more than a few eyebrows, as well as the interest of all the scandal sheets, including one published by newspaper magnate Duncan West. Understanding there are layers to this story, West digs into Georgiana’s past and realizes Georgiana and Anna are one and the same, then misreads the hold “Chase” has on her, even as he finds himself falling for her.

West has dangerous secrets of his own, ensuring he can never offer her the security or respectability she wants, but he intends to free her from Chase’s influence and pave the way for her happiness, realizing too late how misguided that plan is. MacLean wraps up her popular Rules of Scoundrels series with the clever plotting, exquisite writing and lush sensuality she is known for.

A worthy conclusion to an extraordinary series.

IN BED WITH A SPY

Alexander, Alyssa Berkley Sensation (304 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-425-26953-4 The Regency-era widow of a British Army major joins forces with a spy to expose a ring of assassins in this combination romance and thriller.

Alexander (The Smuggler Wore Silk, 2014) follows up her debut with the second novel in her Spy in the Ton series.

Alastair “Angel” Whitmore, Marquess of Angelstone first saw Lilias Fairchild wielding a saber at Waterloo, delirious with grief and rage over the death of her husband earlier in the battle. When he encounters her again in a London ballroom, he is instantly attracted to her—even after she drops a medallion out of her reticule. Angel recognizes the medallion as the mark of the Death Adders, a network of assassins he has sworn to defeat. The Adders are a threat to British security, which gives Angel a professional duty to take them down. Worse, they killed his lover years ago, and he has sworn to avenge her. Although he briefly suspects Lilias of being an assassin, the two soon discover that the medallion may have belonged to her beloved husband, Jeremy Fairchild.

If so, then he himself was a Death Adder, and Lilias’ memories of him will be tainted. Soon, Lilias and Angel are playing more than one dangerous game—carrying on a love affair under the noses of the ton and the kindly in-laws with whom Lilias lives and chasing skilled assassins through the opera houses and mansions of London. Then Lilias finds herself the target of an assassination attempt, and their investigation becomes more frantic than ever.

Lilias is a worthy heroine—beautiful and sweet but with plenty of sharp edges and innate abilities.

Angel loves her for her strength but also longs to protect her, which causes friction throughout this delightful novel.

ROULETTE

Mulry, Megan Montlake Romance (320 pp.) $12.95 paper | $9.99 e-book Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-4778-2670-6 978-1-4778-7668-8 e-book A life-altering vacation leaves Miki Durand practically running her father’s international conglomerate and sharing a passionate encounter with a French billionaire, forcing her to re-evaluate her mapped-out life.

When Miki, a business professor, sets out to spend spring break in St. Petersburg with her Russian oligarch father, she has every intention of returning to her job in Los Angeles. But her father’s sudden illness leaves the company without a leader, and her uncle encourages her to take the helm. At first determined to get back to her life, her outlook changes as she experiences the adrenaline rush of making deals. After she meets French playboy Rome de Villiers and they spend one perfect day together, she suspects she’ll never go back to her perfecton-paper boyfriend, who, if she’s honest with herself, bores her or to an academic career that satisfied her until she rolled up her sleeves and did some real business. But she and Rome have made no promises, and one amazing day does not a relationship make. As Miki settles into her new role, she must negotiate

NEVER JUDGE A LADY

BY HER COVER

MacLean, Sarah Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 1, 2014 978-0-06-206851-4

After she’s spent the last decade incognito, posing as the most enigmatic (male) casino owner in England, a ruined lady re-enters society to secure her daughter’s rightful place in the beau monde, attracting suitors, enemies and the attention of a handsome newspaper magnate. |

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some delicate business and personal connections, including an agreement that could make either an ally or an enemy of a Russian mogul with strong Mafia ties—and who’s entangled in a romance with a woman who’s supposedly also involved with Rome. Life is suddenly big and complicated; facing it with courage is Miki’s only hope for getting everything she wants. Mulry departs from her light modern-aristocracy storylines into something slightly darker and even more geographically sprawling (LA, Paris, south of France, Venice, Russia) while maintaining a sizzling romantic intensity between her main characters. Using first-person present-tense narration gives the book an odd feeling of seeming to hurry through some major plot points, but it has an ambitious quality that harkens back to the vintage romantic sagas many romance readers cut their teeth on.

A sexy, intense romance set against a deluxe backdrop.

THE DUKE OF DARK DESIRES

Neville, Miranda Avon/HarperCollins (384 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-06-224334-8

Years after the French Revolution, the only surviving daughter of a marquis travels to England to avenge herself on her family’s betrayer.

Neville (Lady Windermere’s Lover, 2014, etc.) returns with the final installment in her Wild Quartet. Jeanne de Falleron survived the slaughter of her family by sacrificing her virtue, although she was only 15 at the time. But she’s determined to deliver justice to the man she’s convinced betrayed her family, a man she knew only as Mr. Fortescue. Disguised as an English governess named Jane Grey, she manages to find work in the home of Julian Fortescue, the Duke of Denford and the head of the Fortescue family. Although she has no experience as a governess, Jane is determined to provide a good education to the Duke’s three young sisters, even while she investigates Fortescue relatives to find the culprit who caused the deaths of her parents and sisters. Little does she know that Julian himself was plain Mr. Fortescue at the time of her family’s deaths. Julian is haunted by his own guilt over the deaths of the Falleron family. He blames himself for his youthful stupidity in the incident, although he did not directly betray Jane’s father. At the heart of the story is the Marquis de Falleron’s unrivaled art collection, which Julian is waiting to retrieve from its hiding place in Belgium. The story is further strengthened by the Duke’s three sisters. Fenella, the middle sister, is a perfect depiction of a troubled young woman in a world that values looks over brains.

The main characters’ appreciation of art adds color to the story, which is otherwise an entertaining but unsurprising tale about falling in love with the enemy.

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nonfiction FINDING ZERO A Mathematician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers

These titles earned the Kirkus Star: FATHERLAND by Nina Bunjevac....................................................... 48

Aczel, Amir D. Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-137-27984-2

THE GIRL FROM HUMAN STREET by Roger Cohen..........................52 THE CAUSE OF ALL NATIONS by Don H. Doyle..............................54 SCREENING ROOM by Alan Lightman............................................. 68 COLONEL HOUSE by Charles E. Neu................................................. 75 THE DOGS ARE EATING THEM NOW by Graeme Smith................ 80 THE B SIDE by Ben Yagoda................................................................. 84

THE B SIDE The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song

Yagoda, Ben Riverhead (304 pp.) $27.95 Jan. 22, 2015 978-1-59448-849-8

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The author of the best-selling Fermat’s Enigma (1996) and other popular books on mathematics and science takes readers through a history of zero and takes himself on a journey through the jungles of Cambodia to find its earliest use.

Aczel (Why Science Does Not Disprove God, 2014, etc.) seems to have had a lifelong love for numbers and a special fascination with zero. As a child, he wanted to devote his life to traveling the world in search of an answer to the origin of numbers. In this book, he lives out part of that childhood dream. A brief discussion of the cumbersome Roman system, which lacked a zero, demonstrates the power of the zero, which makes our number system so efficient. Aczel rejects the theory that it was a European or Arabic invention but rather posits that it developed in eastern Asia. To him, the concepts of both infinity and of nothingness seem embedded in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.

To get to zero, he takes readers through a short but sometimes bewildering course in Eastern philosophy that requires close attention. On learning that in the 1930s, a French archaeologist had discovered in Cambodia a stele inscribed with a date that utilized a dot for a zero in the seventh century, Aczel set out to find the stone tablet. Because the Khmer Rouge had destroyed so many of Cambodia’s cultural artifacts, his search was long, complicated and arduous and involves a slew of characters, helpful and otherwise. Aczel is nothing if not persistent, and in the end, he found the carving and photographed it. What happened afterward as he struggled to preserve this earliest known evidence of the use of zero is a story in itself.

If readers can avoid getting bogged down in the side trips through Eastern philosophy, the journey to zero is an adventure worth joining.

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musicians with soul, on the page and the stage This is a good month for music books.

Not only is Neil Young’s second autobiographical work being released (not exactly mind-blowing, but it’s Neil Young, so it’s at least lively and mostly entertaining), but there are also memoirs by Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, George Clinton and Bruce Cockburn, as well as biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis (Rick Bragg) and Aretha Franklin (David Ritz’s Respect). Not exactly a series of lightweights.

The Santana, Hancock and Clinton memoirs are particularly significant for me, as those musicians served as vital signposts in the development of my love for jazz, rock, soul and funk, all of which I truly began to cherish in college and throughout my 20s. Hancock taught me that jazz wasn’t just about Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the other towers of bebop; it could be funky, futuristic, even psychedelic. And you can’t mention either funk or psychedelics without talking about the Grandfather of P-Funk, Clinton, the mad scientist who did more for funk music than anyone outside of James Brown or Sly Stone.

Certainly, there are plenty of paintby-the-numbers moments in all of their memoirs. However, for true fans, both Hancock (Kirkus: “warm, inspiring book by a man who seems to have little ego despite a career spent near the peak of his art”) and Santana (“appreciative and unpretentious chronicle”) prove as soulful and searching on the page as on the stage. And despite its somewhat limp second half, Clinton’s book features frequent demonstrations of his farout personality and musical experimentation (one need only check the title: Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?). For music fans, especially of the groundbreaking music being made during the 1960s and ’70s, this fall provides a rich harvest. —E.L.

SOCIAL SECURITY WORKS! Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All

Altman, Nancy J.; Kingson, Eric R. New Press (320 pp.) $16.95 paper | Jan. 21, 2015 978-1-62097-037-9

A call to arms to defend Social Security from sneak attack.

Co-authors Altman (The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble, 2005, etc.) and Kingson (Social Work/Syracuse Univ.; Lessons from Joan: Living and Loving with Cancer, a Husband’s Story, 2006, etc.), who both served as staff advisers to the 1982 National Commission on Social Security and were founding board members of the National Academy on Social Insurance, expose the method of guerrilla warfare still employed by conservatives to undermine the social-welfare system. “This is not a time to accept further cuts to our Social Security as ‘reasonable compromise,’ as little ‘tweaks,’ that will do no lasting harm,” they write. On the contrary, they believe what is required is an expansion of the social-welfare system to achieve “greater economic security for all of America’s working families.” A first step is to counter “the misinformation...so deeply imbedded in the minds of the general public”—e.g., the false claim that Social Security is economically unsustainable and imposes an unacceptable burden on the younger generation. In his cogent foreword, David Cay Johnston (Undivided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, 2014, etc.) describes this misinformation and reminds readers that the preamble to the Constitution includes a statement of the need to “promote the general Welfare.” Altman and Kingson provide a historical overview of social legislation since the passage of the original Social Security Act in 1935, give a detailed explanation about why the Social Security trust fund is solvent and will remain so, and explain why conservatives have been unable to derail the system due to broad-based popular support. Even Ronald Reagan, the champion of reducing the role of government, recognized that Social Security (dubbed by House Speaker Tip O’Neill as “the third rail of politics”) was unopposable.

A hard-hitting kickoff to the 2016 election campaign.

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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SOPHIA Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

Anand, Anita Bloomsbury (432 pp.) $20.09 | Jan. 15, 2015 978-1-4088-3545-6

The biography of an Indian royal princess, born in Britain, who found a higher purpose as she discovered her heritage.

BBC radio and TV journalist Anand devotes the first part of the book to a brief, comprehensive look at the history of the Raj in India. The story begins with |

the deposition of 11-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh from his throne in the vast Punjab, where Hindus and Muslims peacefully shared common language and culture. Duleep became Queen Victoria’s favorite, and his life in exile was extremely comfortable. In fact, royal favor allowed Duleep to live far beyond his means, gambling and incurring massive debts. Years of letters from him and his children demanding government support indicate just how well these displaced royals were treated. Princess Sophia (1876-1948), his youngest and Victoria’s godchild, led an enchanted life after being born in exile in England; her quiet charm and designation as a royal princess ensured primary status at all events. She and her siblings had no real feeling for India until Sophia’s sister coaxed her into visiting their homeland. Being exposed to such poverty and deprivation drove her to reject her life as a socialite and seek those who needed protection. At first, her work on behalf of the lascars, Indian dockworkers in London, satisfied that need, and she helped build a safe haven for them. Eventually, Sophia awoke to the women’s suffrage movement and found her voice.

She dedicated her name and status to the movement, joining in census and tax resistance, and she marched next to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, daring authorities to arrest her as she fearlessly demanded women’s rights.

A sturdy narrative of one woman’s awakening and strength in the early 20th century as she witnessed the vast societal changes in India and England.

as they continued a feudal tradition of caring for their workers.

“Lordie,” as he was known, insisted on maintaining the latest safety measures. During the long coal strike of 1926, they fed all the local children, organized games, created work on their other estates and even provided coal. The ruin of Britain’s stately homes and the end of coal as a primary industry were due to the steam engine, better transport and refrigeration, as well as the increase in inheritance taxes from 15 to 50 percent. Wartime nationalization of the mines and sequestration of estates served as the final blows. Gossipy bits—e.g., questioned legitimacy, grand entertainments and “Kick” Kennedy’s marriage to the Devonshire heir and subsequent affair with the ninth Earl— keep the reading lively.

The real value of this work is in the recounting of the ends of two classes, the lower and the very upper.

BLACK DIAMONDS The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years that Changed England Bailey, Catherine Penguin (520 pp.) $17.00 paper | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-14-312684-3

TV producer and director Bailey (The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery, 2012) uses the downfall of the Fitzwilliam family to examine the history of the coal industry in England.

The author’s remarkable story primarily covers the time of the seventh Earl of Fitzwilliam, who inherited the title in 1902.

She shows how class differences and the effect of two wars, strikes and the final blow of the postwar Labour government brought down many of the aristocracy. The Fitzwilliams lived at Wentworth House, one of England’s largest privately owned homes. Bailey uses accounts of the miners and their families to describe both the lives of the wealthy Fitzwilliam family and those of the poverty-stricken laborers. Low pay and long working days were hard enough, but when times were bad, the corporate mine owners cut pay and shortened the work week.

After World War I, German reparations included providing free coal to the European victors, undercutting the English market and halving the earnings of the miners. The Fitzwilliams, especially the seventh Earl and his wife, were particularly well-liked, |

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“A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian considers the ‘unsuspected complexities’ of recovering the past.” from sometimes an art

SOMETIMES AN ART Nine Essays on History

THE WRITERS A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

Bailyn, Bernard Knopf (336 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 30, 2015 978-1-101-87447-9

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian considers the “unsuspected complexities” of recovering the past.

In this gathering of nine essays, published from 1954 to 2007, Bailyn (Emeritus, History/Harvard Univ.; The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, 2012, etc.) illuminates the historian’s craft. In five pieces on historiography, he considers the distinction between history and collective memory and historians’ struggle to hone a sharp, clear lens—undistorted by personal “assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences”—through which to investigate the realities of past lives. In several essays on the early British Empire, the focus of much of the author’s scholarship, he examines Britain’s relationship with Scotland, the North American colonies and Australia; and the mysteriously vilified Thomas Hutchinson, about whom Bailyn wrote a biography. A tribute to historian Isaiah Berlin gives Bailyn an occasion to reflect on the political and cultural impact of perfectionist movements. The historian’s greatest problem, writes the author, lies in “recovering the contexts in which events take place.” He distinguishes between “manifest history,” “the story of events that contemporaries were clearly aware of, that were...so to speak headline events in their own time,” and history that discovers elusive “latent events,” unrecorded by contemporaries, that “form a new landscape, like that of the ocean floor...never seen before as actual rocks, ravines, and cliffs” but that inexorably shape “the surface world.”

Such events include commonplace experiences: the discomfort, for example, “of clothing that itched, of shoes that tore the feet, of lice, fleas, and vermin.” Historians that Bailyn most admires—Perry Miller, Charles McLean Andrews, Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme—were exemplars of contextualization and, therefore, “redirectors of inquiry.”

Informing all of these graceful, authoritative essays is the mind of a humanist whose project is to reanimate “a hitherto unglimpsed world.”

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Banks, Miranda J. Rutgers Univ. (336 pp.) $34.95 | Dec. 31, 2014 978-0-8135-7138-6

Well-informed survey of film and TV writers’ decadeslong battle to defend their economic and creative interests.

Banks (Visual and Media Arts/Emerson Coll.; co-editor: Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, 2009) focuses on the business rather than the art of screenwriting, which makes sense since the principal concession the fledgling Screen Writers Guild made in its initial 1942 contract was the acknowledgment that the movie studios owned its members’ scripts and had final control over them. The SWG traded ownership for the right to determine screenwriting credits, a matter of vital importance to writers whose salaries and employability depended on their credits. Banks follows the union through the ugly blacklist period, when the SWG failed to protect its subpoenaed members and acquiesced to the establishment of loyalty oaths, and through the radical changes wrought by the rise of television, which resulted in 1954 in the merger of the SWG with the Television Writers Association to form the Writers Guild of America. TV writers’ concerns came to dominate the guild as movie production declined in the 1950s; a strike in 1960 established the principle of writers’ royalties on reruns and films sold to television. The thorny issue of “hyphenates” sunk several strikes in the 1970s and ’80s, when TV writer-directors (now often called showrunners) crossed picket lines and failed to support the guild in its efforts to get fairer compensation for videocassette sales from the aggressive, increasingly corporate studios. The guild learned its lesson; new leadership in 2005 organized more effectively and persuaded the hyphenates to join the 2007-2008 strike, which wrested compensation for digital distribution (streaming, iTunes, YouTube) from the reluctant producers. Despite a few academic tics (“This chapter explores”; “The next chapters will explore”), Banks writes lucidly about complex financial and technical issues, giving a solid, unromantic sense of working writers’ lives.

An interesting case study of the impact of evolving technologies and distribution methods on a labor union’s priorities and strategies.

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HOW THE BODY KNOWS ITS MIND The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel

Beilock, Sian Atria (288 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 16, 2015 978-1-4516-2668-1

How our bodies and minds work in tandem.

“In school, in work, and in our relationships, how we act has a big effect on how we think,” writes Beilock (Psychology/Univ. of Chicago; Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Get-ting It Right When You Have To, 2010). As such, the author rejects the comparison of the human mind to a computer. “[J]ust as most software can run on any platform,” she writes, “seeing the mind as a computer... makes our body and physical experiences inconsequential, like tech support. Thinking is reduced to a programming language, the manipulation of symbols by rules, that are carried out by hardware, not influenced by it.” Supporting her argument with a combination of experimental evidence and homespun anecdotes, the author gives a new twist on the old adage, “Grin and bear it.” Botox, ordinarily injected for cosmetic purposes to obliterate frown marks, can help alleviate persisting depression. Another example is the fad of laughter clubs, where the evening starts with forced laughter that then becomes “spontaneous and contagious.” Forcing a smile or a laugh can actually help to change mood—“our body has a direct line to our mind, telling us how to feel.” Beilock cites experimental evidence on the positive effects of exercise on mood, mental acuity and preserving cognitive function as we age. Research also shows a direct link among perception, cognition and physical experience—e.g. learning to crawl is correlated to increased cognitive capability, but “baby walkers have been linked to delays in hitting cognitive milestones,” associated with learning caution; the child lacks the learning experience involved with failed attempts to walk. Evidence also shows that children enhance their reading skills by printing as well as saying the letters of the alphabet and benefit by using their fingers when mastering arithmetic.

Wide-ranging, informative and entertaining, especially for parents and educators.

VAN GOGH A Power Seething

Bell, Julian Little A/New Harvest (176 pp.) $20.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-544-34373-3 Painter and art historian Bell (Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, 2010, etc.) brings an artist’s sensibility to this distilled, intimate biography of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).

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Drawing largely on the artist’s letters to Theo, his younger brother and confidant, the author traces the trajectory of van Gogh’s life: failed jobs at his uncle’s art galleries in the Hague, London and Paris; failed efforts to become a minister or evangelist; a rebuffed marriage proposal; and squalid affairs with prostitutes. “One sometimes gets the feeling, where am I? what am I doing? where am I going? and one starts to grow dizzy,” he wrote to Theo in the midst of his theology studies. Finally, at 27, with Theo’s encouragement and financial support, van Gogh turned to art. Although his life story may be familiar, what distinguishes Bell’s elegant rendering is an astute perception of his artistic vision and shimmering descriptions of his work. After producing “hard-hacked, heavily hatched, jagged and severe” lines in his 1883 drawings, van Gogh discovered the potential of oil. “The brushwork,” Bell writes of the 1885 paintings, “accelerated and turned skittery and rhythmic.” After moving to the south of France, van Gogh felt a new “licence to aestheticize....

Confronting for the first time the southern waves, he found wild new colors coming at him. He longed, he wrote to Theo, to “express the love of two lovers through a marriage of two complementary colours, their mixture and their contrasts, the mysterious vibration of adjacent tones.” For the author, the artist’s recurring breakdowns, which so frightened his parents that they wanted to institutionalize him and which ended in bouts of delusion and mania, suggest bipolar illness. His “frantic internal bubbling,” after all, seems of a piece with the “inner seething” that infused him with both desperation and power.

A graceful, empathetic, deeply probing portrait. (8-page color insert)

THOMAS CROMWELL

Borman, Tracy Atlantic Monthly (456 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-8021-2317-6

A mildly revisionist biography of Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540).

Long reviled as the evil genius who secured Henry VIII’s divorce from Catharine of Aragon and oversaw the looting of Catholic monasteries, Cromwell received spectacular rehabilitation in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall (2009) and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012). Agreeing that Mantel was onto something, Borman (Queen of the Conqueror: The Life of Matilda, Wife of William I, 2012, etc.), joint chief curator of historic royal palaces and chief executive of Britain’s Heritage Education Trust, writes an engrossing biography of a ruthless man who rose and fell in the service of a ruthless king, a path followed by dozens close to Henry. Son of a blacksmith, Cromwell traveled and worked on the continent as a young man. At age 30, as a successful London merchant and lawyer, he entered the household of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s leading adviser, and prospered. When Henry turned against Wolsey in 1529 (largely due to his reluctance to promote the king’s divorce), Cromwell stepped in. Fiercely |

“An ambitious graphic memoir that succeeds on a number of different levels.” from fatherland

dedicated to fulfilling Henry’s desires, Cromwell switched from appeals to the pope to manipulating Parliament and browbeating England’s clerical establishment. After years of political arm-twisting, he succeeded. Henry married Anne Boleyn and, far more significant, replaced the pope as head of the English church. Cromwell presided over the dissolution of church property, a windfall for the king, and successfully distanced himself from Anne as she fell from favor. His luck and life ran out in 1540 when enemies took advantage of Henry’s growing conservatism in matters of religious doctrine (he had less interest than Cromwell in Protestant reforms) and he disastrously supported Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves.

A fine rags-to-riches-to–executioner’s-block story of a major figure of the English Reformation.

FATHERLAND A Family History

Bunjevac, Nina Illus. by Bunjevac, Nina Liveright/Norton (160 pp.) $19.95 | Jan. 19, 2015 978-1-63149-031-6

STARVE THE VULTURE A Memoir

Carney, Jason Kaylie Jones/Akashic (300 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61775-301-5

National Poetry Slam finalist Carney’s memoir of his troubled upbringing, drug addiction and eventual grace.

Addicts often refer to a moment of epiphany, when, at their lowest point, they experience a feeling of clarity that puts their disease into perspective. The author vividly describes his moment as a fortuitous brush with death, when, after bingeing on crack, he was driving with a prostitute and a car careened out of control, almost crashing into him at high speed. Dazed, Carney helped the other driver and noticed a crack pipe in his pocket. That man, tossed from his vehicle but seemingly unhurt, could have been him. So begins Carney’s tale of redemption, which is told

An ambitious graphic memoir that succeeds on a number of different levels.

Born in Canada, raised in her family’s native Yugoslavia and having returned to Canada, Bunjevac (Heartless, 2012) addresses the history of a troubled region that brought her to where she is—both in the book (which finds her reminiscing from her home in Toronto and conjuring a past she didn’t experience firsthand) and in her life. The title has dual meanings, as “fatherland” refers to the country of Yugoslavia, where German occupation gave way to communist rule and where Serbs and Croats experienced continual tension despite similar roots. The country no longer exists. Neither does the author’s father, as she tries to penetrate the mysteries of this particular “fatherland.”

A Serbian nationalist committed to overthrowing the communist leader Josip Broz Tito, he had been imprisoned in his native Yugoslavia and exiled to Canada upon release, never allowed to return to his fatherland. He became involved with a terrorist organization operating throughout North America, targeting those who supported the Yugoslavian government, and he died in an explosion in the garage where the sect had been manufacturing bombs. By this point, the author and her mother had returned to Yugoslavia, fleeing from the man who had become dangerous, erratic and increasingly alcoholic (“Dad is a nervous wreck. At this time he is certain that he’s being followed”). Thus, the narrative artistry must reconstruct not only the father’s life before and after his family left him, but the decades (even centuries) of Balkan history that led them all to this juncture. That it covers so much in such a short memoir, and in such compelling and provocative fashion, attests to the author’s mastery over such powerful material.

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through time-traveling vignettes that alternate between his fraught childhood and adolescence and the manic, drug-addled events immediately leading to his moment of “grace.” There is a sense of self-indulgence in Carney’s recollections of his lurid self-destruction, but his memory serves to contrast the extremes of his depravity with a newfound meaning in life. If addicts need an excuse to justify their excess, Carney’s list would probably dwarf most. Growing up, his family life was classically dysfunctional. He had a teenage mother and abusive father and teenage years of delinquency, homophobia and criminal apprenticeship. Behind all that, however, was a love of words and reading. Carney even fondly recalls his first encounter with poetry in which he smuggled a book out of the school library after checkout time had ended, later thinking after his first marriage ended after nine months, the “only relationship I believed I needed was with poetry.” His dedication to poetry would lead him to four National Poetry Slam finals and speaking gigs at colleges to decry the types of bigotry and hate that had led him astray.

Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation.

THIEVES OF STATE Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

Chayes, Sarah Norton (288 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 19, 2015 978-0-393-23946-1

Former NPR reporter and current Carnegie Foundation associate Chayes (The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, 2006) offers an alarming account of the role played by acute government corruption in fostering violent extremism.

The systemic corruption in Afghanistan will hardly surprise informed readers, but its extent and enormous adverse impact on American efforts there (and in other failed states) are “remarkably underappreciated.” In her 10 years as a reporter and entrepreneur in Afghanistan, the author found that the government existed only to enrich the ruling elite. Within the carefully structured kleptocracy, money flowed upward via gifts, kickbacks and the purchase of positions. In return, those making payments were granted protection or permission to extract resources. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of Afghan life, Chayes argues convincingly that resentment over flagrant corruption drove many citizens to turn against the government and join the insurgency. At the same time, while pursuing flailing efforts to stem corruption (Chayes was an adviser on the issue), the U.S. passed millions of dollars to President Hamid Karzai (through the CIA), thereby enabling Afghanistan’s kleptocracy. The author meanders considerably between her insightful observations as a reporter, as an NGO leader dedicated to rebuilding Afghanistan and as a participant in fruitless U.S. efforts to halt government corruption. Chayes 50

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weaves in many relevant quotations from Machiavelli, Erasmus and other Renaissance “mirror writers” who advised rulers to listen to their subjects and avoid acute public corruption that could destabilize the realm. She also shows how loss of confidence in corrupt rulers prompted the Arab Spring and revolts elsewhere. Much of her material is telling, but many readers will be annoyed by Chayes’ tendency to jump around between countries and between events of the past and present. The author suggests remedies for dealing with acute corruption, noting that the political courage to act is often lacking.

Scattershot but often insightful, disquieting reading for policymakers.

RESILIENCE Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness Close, Jessie with Earley, Pete Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4555-4882-8

An honest tale of living with bipolar disorder.

With the assistance of Earley (The Serial Killer Whisperer: How One Man’s Tragedy Helped Unlock the Deadliest Secrets of the World’s Most Terrifying Killers, 2012, etc.), Close, sister of actress Glenn Close, details the difficult journey of living the first 50 years of her life with an undiagnosed case of bipolar disorder. Though she holds nothing back, the author begins slowly as she outlines her maternal and paternal lineages, but her story quickly escalates into a harrowing ride for readers unaccustomed to the ups and downs of someone living with a mental disorder. When her parents joined the Moral Re-Armament in the 1950s, Close’s childhood became chaotic, with frequent moves, one of which led the family to Switzerland and another to the Belgian Congo, where her father was physician to President Mobutu. By 15, she’d moved back to America to live with her grandmother and instantly began experimenting with sex, drugs and alcohol, three things Close would continue to abuse for the next three decades. The author candidly discusses her multiple marriages and her continued inability to understand her alternating manic and depressive states, which appear to have escalated in intensity with age. It was only when her son, Calen, was hospitalized and eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia that Close began to look more seriously at her own extreme mood cycles and seek permanent help to stop her abusive drinking and to silence the voice in her head that insisted she kill herself. With the help of her sister and family, Close was able to afford good treatment for herself and her son, and Close’s sister went on to establish the nonprofit organization Bring Change 2 Mind, which targets the stigma and misunderstanding surrounding mental disorders.

Despite the slow start, the book is packed with emotion and courageous personal reflections.

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“With limpid prose, Cohen delivers a searching and profoundly moving memoir.” from the girl from human street

THE GIRL FROM HUMAN STREET Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

MY AVANT-GARDE EDUCATION A Memoir Cooper, Bernard Norton (256 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 16, 2015 978-0-393-24071-9

Cohen, Roger Knopf (336 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-307-59466-2

In an effort to understand the modern Jewish experience, distinguished New York Times columnist Cohen (Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble, 2005, etc.) examines his family history of displacement, despair and resilience.

The author has always prided himself on confronting the truth in his writing, but he knew that his work allowed him to escape the more difficult task of articulating a deeper personal truth. In this honest and lucid book, the British-born Cohen tells how his Lithuanian Jewish ancestors came to South Africa.

Tolerated by white South Africans because they were also white-skinned, the author’s relatives made prosperous lives as business people while avoiding the fate of millions of other Jews in Nazi Europe. Despite their successes, however, members of both sides of his family were plagued by mental illness. The genes that caused it “formed an unbroken chain with the past,” which many of them tried to ignore. Cohen focuses in particular on the tragic story of his mother, June. Gifted and beautiful, she was also bipolar. When she and her family relocated to London, her symptoms surfaced and remained with her for the rest of her life. Cohen links June’s unraveling with her sense of being a stranger in a strange land. Like one of his mother’s relatives who ended up in Israel and eventually committed suicide, “[June] was a transplant who did not take.” All too aware of how many South African Jews turned a blind eye to the problem of apartheid in South Africa, Cohen also examines Israel’s evolution into a colonial nation that oppresses Arab minorities.

Millennia of persecution and eternal exile have made a Jewish homeland a necessity, yet Israel will never fully succeed as a state until peaceful coexistence—of the kind white and black South Africans have slowly worked toward—becomes a reality.

With limpid prose, Cohen delivers a searching and profoundly moving memoir.

PEN/Hemingway Award winner Cooper (The Bill from My Father: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) returns with a memoir/essay collection (some previously published) that chronicles his early interest in pop art and charts where that interest has taken him.

It began in the author’s junior high school library (in the early 1960s) when a Life magazine piece about pop art caught his fancy.

He tore it out, and his adult life began. Cooper tells us how he pursued this growing obsession in local bookstores, watched a TV art teacher (Jon Gnagy) and eventually realized that art “didn’t have to be somber and lofty; it could be as laughable and blunt as a pratfall.”

The author’s interests—and his creations—puzzled his parents, but he persisted. At about the same time, Cooper was also realizing he was homosexual, an orientation he had to conceal fiercely during his youth. He dated women, but he yearned for men. He shares memories of his parents, of his school days (experiencing a gym teacher who paddled, learning about the JFK assassination from that same teacher), his search for technique, and his years as a student at CalArts, which opened its doors just at the time he was ready to walk through them. Cooper writes fondly of some instructors at the school, and he notes how he began to realize that he had talents for writing, as well. An art teacher told him, “[s]ounds like you’re ready to write.” And so he did: He spent some years as an art critic and a few as a writing instructor. Cooper also deals with crises in his life, including the death of his mother and the grim arrival of AIDS in his world. His account of the suffering of his partner is one of the most wrenching sections, and he concludes with a brief passage about his chronic insomnia. Throughout, his sentences elicit laughs, gasps and tears.

An unconventional narrative that focuses on sharp, piercing moments. (48 photos)

HOW WE ARE Book One of the How to Live Trilogy

Deary, Vincent Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-374-17210-7 Thoughts on the human condition from a cognitive psychologist–turned– armchair philosopher.

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these habits, a mindset that makes change especially difficult.

The author takes this basic idea and runs with it in so many directions that the main message is intermittently lost amid the tangential evidence. Deary’s early examples of mankind’s penchant for treading the beaten path, even if a better route is clearly available, are clear: He writes about landscape designers whose artfully arranged pathways are ignored by the masses marching to and from the market in a straight line. There’s little chance that anyone will take Robert Frost’s celebrated road “less traveled.” The irony is that Deary himself asks us to walk on the waysides rather than stride efficiently from one point to another. Much of the text is given over to movie references of uncertain merit—Adam Sandler features largely here—and interesting, if strained, literary comparisons. Putting aside the question of whether Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Stephen King’s The Shining have much in common, one leaves these discussions wondering what impact Deary’s observations actually have on his central question. Readers looking for an organized presentation of ideas and supporting studies will be disappointed in the relative lack of scientific support here, and the author footnotes some ideas but not others. How We Break and How We Mend are the next two books in the trilogy, for those who want to see where Deary’s stream-of-consciousness musings will lead.

A psychologist puts humanity on the client’s couch, but a cure seems unlikely.

They can also suggest the way that nature can mirror mankind’s destructiveness. As the author shows in his essay on the meadows near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the land has become “a sink...[that] takes life in but gives next to no life out.” Sprawling in its descriptions of nature and of the histories that inform each of the places he visits, Dee’s work defies linearity. It is best read as one man’s idiosyncratic prose-poem meditation on the way human activities affect, for better and for worse, the eternal “transubstantiation of the earth.”

Lyrical and thought-provoking but sometimes convoluted.

FOUR FIELDS

Dee, Tim Counterpoint (280 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-461-8 A BBC radio producer and nature writer visits four fields in England, Zambia, the Ukraine and the United States to reflect on humanity’s uneasy relationship with both nature and itself.

For Dee (The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, 2009), “[f]ields offer the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live within the grain of the world and against it.” He begins this collection of nine essays with the description of one field he knows best, Burwell Fen in England. An ancient seabed once covered by saltwater, humans learned to drain it and use the land for farming and herding. Ironically, the modern drive to repair damaged ecosystems and return them to their original states has subjected these “natural” spaces to still more human manipulation.

Fields in less-developed parts of the world like Zambia have also not been spared from the interfering ways of mankind. All over the African continent, “[h]abitats are being degraded, forests are cut to nothing, lakes fouled, fetid shanties grow as large as cities.” Like the Montana prairie where the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn took place, fields can also mark historical events, just as they can serve as symbols for the at-times tragic fates of the humans—in this case, the Plains Indians—who inhabit them. |

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“An important—even necessary—addition to the groaning shelves of Civil War volumes.” from the cause of all nations

WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED A Sentimental Education

THE CAUSE OF ALL NATIONS An International History of the American Civil War

Dickstein, Morris Liveright/Norton (304 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 9, 2015 978-0-87140-431-2

An esteemed cultural and literary critic charts the intellectual and religious paths of his early years, sometimes saying too much in the process.

In this varyingly astute and chatty memoir, Dickstein (Emeritus, English and Theater/CUNY Graduate Center; Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, 2009, etc.) recalls his journey from Lower East Side yeshiva boy to Ivy League academic and critic. Along the way, he lost inhibitions, struggled against ingrained Jewish beliefs and customs, and contracted at least as many neuroses as he shed.

Dickstein had the good fortune to come of age during the late 1950s and 1960s, when books (and eventually movies) were still at the center of cultural debate. The author was part of that conversation, and he leaves indelible portraits of his contemporaries and mentors. There’s the brilliant Lionel Trilling, who tended to wing his way through lectures; F.R. Leavis, a “slash and burn” critic cowed by his imperious wife; and the redoubtable Harold Bloom, who even then was already the smartest guy in every room. Dickstein also ably captures his own nervous embrace of secular culture, as the world of his youth proved all but impervious to assault. “As a freethinking intelligence yet a child of the ghetto, a vagrant offshoot of a venerable tradition,” he writes, “I would either learn to live with contradictions or perish under their weight.” He was both old and young; a member of the Columbia University establishment during the protests of 1968, his sympathies were squarely on the side of the students. He’s still that young man in many ways; while the book can get long-winded, especially as he recalls trips abroad, Dickstein hasn’t lost his zeal for art or ideas or his passion for writing about them.

There’s a compelling story in this late-in-life memoir, which is at its best when Dickstein sticks to that story.

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Doyle, Don H. Basic (384 pp.) $29.99 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-0-465-02967-9

Before and during the Civil War, both North and South lobbied hard in key European capitals to convince officials and the general population of the justness of their causes.

Impressively, Doyle (History/Univ. of South Carolina; Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements, 2010) provides some novel insights about this most chronicled of conflicts. Although he alludes periodically to the military campaigns—from Bull Run to Appomattox—he uses them principally as reference points, signposts on his journey through the complex and fierce diplomatic efforts underway in England, France, Italy and the Vatican. Many Europeans, especially those with republican sympathies, could not understand why Abraham Lincoln, early in the war, refused to declare the North’s effort as a war on slavery; Southern diplomats sought to downplay the slavery issue for their own reasons and focused on the tyranny of the North and on the Southern desire for independence. The South desperately sought political recognition from European powers and hoped for military and financial aid as well. They found precious little, and as the war wound down, the European powers backed off (some had made renewed efforts to re-establish themselves in the Western Hemisphere—France in Mexico, for example), especially when the South remained intransigent about slavery. Doyle brings onto the stage a number of figures unfamiliar to all but scholars of the Civil War— envoys and diplomats, some of whom surreptitiously sought to enlist the participation of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was virulently opposed to slavery and who toyed somewhat with the offers to lead the Union Army. Lincoln’s eloquent oratory was among the most powerful of the Union’s weapons abroad, and Doyle ably conveys the widespread, genuine grief in Europe when news of his assassination arrived.

An important—even necessary—addition to the groaning shelves of Civil War volumes.

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HOW TO BE A HEROINE Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much

MR. AMERICA The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon

Ellis, Samantha Vintage (272 pp.) $14.95 paper | Feb. 3, 2015 978-1-101-87209-3

Fair, John D. Univ. of Texas (460 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 5, 2015 978-0-292-76082-0

A literary journey to self-discovery.

Growing up in London in a family of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, playwright Ellis (Cling to Me Like Ivy, 2010) looked for models of courage and adventure and, she hoped, an escape from the future her parents planned for her: marriage to an Iraqi-Jewish man, children and a well-kept home. In this autobiography of reading, the author recalls the fictional characters she saw as heroines, including Anne of Green Gables; strong-willed Scarlett O’Hara; the elegant Anne Welles of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls; and the consummate storyteller, Scheherazade. Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March “was fabulously rebellious” but disappointed Ellis when she married a German professor and gave up writing to run a school. At 12, Ellis loved Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet “for her muddy petticoats, her irreverence and her big heart. But mostly I loved her defiance of convention.” Until she switched her allegiance to brave, clever Jane Eyre, passionate Cathy Earnshaw, of Wuthering Heights, was the heroine she wanted most to emulate. “Back then,” Ellis writes, “I wanted my heroines to show me new ways to be, like heedless, selfish Cathy.” As a college student, she found a kindred spirit in Sylvia Plath and her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, of The Bell Jar. Dressing in black, wearing heavy eyeliner, Ellis decided to go to Cambridge, “where Plath’s poetry took off, and where she met Ted Hughes.” From Lucy Honeychurch, in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, she got “the idea of becoming an artist and living an artist’s life. It was because of her that I started writing plays.” Her first was inspired by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in which she identified with the angry Martha.

As Ellis shows in this charming, gracefully written memoir, literary heroines revealed to her new life stories, new selves and her own power to invent her life.

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A history of the Mr. America pageant, the first major competitive bodybuilding showcase that helped popularize the sport.

Retired professor and bodybuilder Fair’s (Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell, 2008, etc.) study is not actually about one specific person. Rather, he focuses on the phenomenon of the first major bodybuilding competition, which paved the way for other competitions like Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia. The author argues that the “tragic” fate of Mr. America was related to the decline of “Americanism.” Specifically citing the academic movement beginning in the 1960s to decentralize American exceptionalism, Fair believes this cultural context created a fatal erosion of the meaning and identity of what it means to be an American, thereby undercutting the ideals of masculinity embodied by Mr. America in favor of pure mass building to compensate for the “male predicament.” It’s an audacious and provocative argument, and his narrative of bodybuilding culture is informative and engaging. Beginning with Eugen Sandow in the late 19th century, “physical culture” was an outgrowth of neoclassical beliefs in athletics and masculinity. Physical beauty was more than simply vanity but an overall balance of body, mind and soul. However, these ideals would quickly become secondary to the appeal of greater muscularity achieved by Charles Atlas, for instance, preferring muscular proportion and symmetry to strongman displays and weightlifting competitions. The first Mr. America was crowned in 1939, and Fair traces the growth of the competition from the postwar golden years through the 1990s when, driven by promoters’ bloodlust for spectacle, steroid use mired the bodybuilding world in scandal. At the same time, market pressure by other competitions and committee regulations had largely forced Mr. America to the fringes of the culture that had all but forgotten its classical lineage.

An entertaining narrative of the bodybuilding subculture in America.

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“Foner brings to life fraught decades of contention, brutality and amazing acts of moral courage.” from gateway to freedom

DEAD COMPANIES WALKING How a Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places

Fearon, Scott with Powell, Jesse Palgrave Macmillan (256 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-137-27964-4

Hedge fund owner/manager Fearon contrasts the methods of Wall Street experts and gurus, and the self-deception and illusions of many business managers, with his own ability to profit from such vulnerabilities.

The author has ridden the roller coaster of finance and investment since the collapse of the Texas oil patch in the 1980s. Along the way, he became a successful investor by shorting the stock of companies destined to fail, and he founded his own hedge fund in 1991 and continues to run it. Fearon passed through a succession of investing styles as he worked to understand how self-delusions, obsessions and manias obstruct business success. Insights assimilated from his own failures— like the gumbo restaurant he located amid a non-Southern, spicy food-eating demographic, among others—were fuel for his subsequent successes. Number-crunching analysis, writes the author, doesn’t function on its own, and he includes stories and incidents derived from thousands of interviews conducted with the leaders of companies to illustrate the methods that have worked for him. The author uses Ron Johnson, who was put in charge of J.C. Penney, as an example. He lost $1 billion eliminating popular coupon programs, replacing discount products with upscale goods and dropping the use of Spanish in states like Texas. Johnson wanted to build a company where he and his friends could shop, but J.C. Penney’s customer base refused to go along. During his research, site visits and interviews helped Fearon probe beneath the rationalizations for failure. When managers blame external factors and refuse to consider the possibility of internal problems, it’s another sure sign of trouble. Thus, when earnings are falling or nonexistent and liabilities are increasing, bankruptcy is at hand.

The author also discusses successful investments, like International Game Technology which can make more money more quickly than the best shorts.

Sharp insights into human fallibility as a potential source of moneymaking opportunity.

GATEWAY TO FREEDOM The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad Foner, Eric Norton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 19, 2015 978-0-393-24407-6

New sources reveal the perilous journeys of fugitive slaves.

Prolific historian Foner (History/Columbia Univ.; The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, 2010, etc.), winner of the Pulitzer, Bancroft and Lincoln prizes, traces the convoluted trail known as the Underground Railroad in the roiling decades before the Civil War. Drawing on rich archival sources, including the papers of Sydney Howard Gay, a prominent New York abolitionist who scrupulously documented his cases, Foner uncovers the tireless, dangerous work of a handful of determined abolitionists and the quests of thousands of black men, women and children to achieve freedom. Slaves risked their lives to escape primarily due to physical violence, fear of being sold or broken promises of manumission. Many headed to Philadelphia, where Quakers and freed blacks hid them, gave them money and sent them on their way North. In Canada, Foner writes, they found “greater safety and more civil and political rights—including serving on juries, testifying in court, and voting—than what existed in most of the United States.” Although a “pervasive antislavery atmosphere” prevailed in Syracuse, the atmosphere in New York City was far different. In the 18th century, slave auctions regularly had taken place at a Wall Street market, and ownership of slaves by New Yorkers was common. Even by the mid-19th century, New York was called “ ‘a poor neglected city’ when it came to abolitionism”; pro-Southern businessmen eagerly upheld fugitive slave laws, cooperating with slave owners intent on retrieving their human property. “You don’t know, you can’t...,” wrote Gay to a Boston abolitionist, “just what my position is....You are surrounded by a people growing in anti-slavery; I by a people who hate it.”

Foner brings to life fraught decades of contention, brutality and amazing acts of moral courage.

THE MIDDLE AGES

Fried, Johannes Translated by Lewis, Peter Belknap/Harvard Univ. (590 pp.) $35.00 | Dec. 15, 2014 978-0-674-05562-9 A revisionist study of the medieval era as representing a process of consolidation and transformation that eventually yielded the Renaissance.

Thanks to what German medieval scholar Fried calls the cultural prejudices of such Enlightenment thinkers as Immanuel Kant, the Middle Ages got a bad rap as a “childish and grotesque” era when, in reality, it was a period of enormous learning, democratization and secularization. The

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collapse of Rome spurred the migration of peoples, especially German-speaking, and the gradual consolidation in Europe of the Goths, Franks and Lombards. The meeting of the barbarians, who were devoted to the oral tradition, with the highly literate ancient culture of the Greeks and Romans, instigated “intensive learning processes” and the urge on the part of the invaders to emulate the civilization they had conquered. Fried sees a gradual progression toward a culture of reason, beginning with Boethius’ translation of Aristotle’s Organon and his own Consolation of Philosophy, moving through the highly educated Pope Gregory the Great (who ruled from 590 to 604) and his educational texts at the Byzantine court in Constantinople, and on to the emergence of Charlemagne and the Frankish kingdom via military conquest and Christian religious culture. Indeed, Charlemagne’s hunger for knowledge encouraged literacy and the copying of ancient, especially Latin, texts, further unifying the West. Fried tracks the importance of the Irish itinerant clergy in spreading faith and literacy (especially grammar), the inciting of the Crusades against the regrouping Islamic forces, and the first social contract forged between monarchy and aristocracy, ratified by Charles the Bald in the ninth century. The crackdown on heretical sects (e.g., the Cathars) during a period of intense papal schism helped along the evolution of the elaborate jurisprudential system. Overall, the Middle Ages brought freedom, Fried argues in this passionate but intensely scholarly book (translated from the German), and the desire to know the wider world.

A dense, often ponderous work from a deeply erudite scholar.

LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME

Fuller, Alexandra Penguin Press (272 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-1-59420-586-6

Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, 2012, etc.) resumes her memories of growing up in Africa in this wry, forthright and captivating memoir.

This time, the focus is on the slow unraveling of her marriage to a man she thought would save her from her family’s madness and chaos.

Except for her father’s insistence that his children bathe and dress formally for dinner—a gesture toward discipline that emerged nowhere else—Fuller’s childhood was as wild as the Zambian landscape. Her father made “absolute, capricious, and patriarchal” rules. Boredom, he announced, was “the worst possible sin.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, his idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the author idolized him. Her mother, with a family history of mental instability, often succumbed to “long, solo voyages into her dark, grief-disturbed interior,” fueled by alcohol. Resembling her physically, Fuller feared that along with “all that Scottish passion,” she might inherit madness, as well: “how could I have skipped the place where her ingenuity and passion sat too close to insanity on the spiraling legacy of heritage?” Unsurprisingly, |

she married an adventurous, dependable man who she thought would provide stability and order. Her husband “was the perfect rescuer,” she writes, “and I the most relieved and grateful rescue victim.” After a few years in Africa, they moved to America, where living was easier (dependable electricity and running water, for example), unthreatened by political uprisings or rampaging elephants. They had children, but financial pressures, especially after 2008, and her own loneliness gradually took a toll: “Ours had contracted into a grocery-list relationship—finances, children, housekeeping.” To reclaim her life, she insisted on divorce.

Although her batty and unhinged relatives emerge more vividly than her taciturn husband, Fuller’s talent as a storyteller makes this memoir sing.

PUBLISHING A Writer’s Memoir Godwin, Gail Bloomsbury (224 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-62040-824-7

The evolving nature of the book business over the past half-century, as experienced in one up-and-down career.

When Harper & Row published Godwin’s (Flora, 2013, etc.) first novel in 1970, publishing houses were still relatively genteel places. The author had a personal relationship with her editor there and a longterm one with Knopf ’s Bob Gottlieb, who published her next four books but lost her to Viking when he didn’t offer enough money for A Mother and Two Daughters, which proved to be her breakout best-seller. Godwin has nothing against commerce, which makes her a measured observer of the “next era of publishing,” which began for her when she lunched with Penguin CEO Peter Mayer four days after he fired the president of Penguin subsidiary Viking. In the increasingly corporate publishing world, she writes, “I was one of the many authors to be caught in the tumult while it thrashed about in search of a new business model.” Despite A Southern Family’s success for MorrowAvon, she found “the new publishing ethos was firmly in place” when she submitted Father Melancholy’s Daughter in 1990. The text and title were both judged too long; Carolyn Reidy (Avon’s president) said it wouldn’t earn out its advance. Reidy was right, and when The Good Husband also failed to earn out for Random House, Godwin returned part of the advance to pay for ads and hired her own publicist for Evensong and several subsequent books. And so it has gone for writers in the 21st century, when, fellow novelist Caroline Leavitt told Godwin, “an author has to brand herself.” The author is more bemused than outraged by these developments; her engaging memoir, similarly, is interesting primarily for its mildly gossipy anecdotes about various publishing executives and glimpses of stories begun and abandoned or morphing into other novels.

No blindingly brilliant insights into the seismic changes that have transformed publishing but an agreeable memoir that captures its pleasures and pitfalls. kirkus.com

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Meline Toumani

In the midst of an entrenched political conflict, is it ever possible to find individual freedom?

By Alexia Nader

Photo courtesy Mark Smith

When Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American journalist, first decided to move to Turkey in 2007, she had a firm plan for the book she wanted to write.

She would explain the way Turks viewed the Armenian genocide of 1915 to an Armenian audience and a general one. She would show how she, an Armenian, could engage in meaningful dialogue with Turks about the genocide, as opposed to the demonization of Turks that she perceived as ubiquitous in the discussions of the Armenian diaspora. Her book would be so revelatory and yet diplomatic that it would bring the Armenians and Turks to an understanding of the genocide they hadn’t yet reached. But once in Turkey, problems with the basic idea for Toumani’s book emerged, and she slowly realized that her lofty diplomatic visions were not going to be realized.

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“The book I wanted to write was not real,” Toumani states bluntly over the phone. “And I didn’t want to write the book that I ended up writing because the message was a lot more grim. So a lot of time passed where I sat there and wrestled with the material and figured out, ‘What’s left?’ ” The conversations and experiences she had to work with belied her intended narrative for the book that would become There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond. In Turkey, talking to a wide variety of people, she realized that Turks still discriminated against Armenians living in the country. As for the history of the Armenian genocide, few people really wanted to talk about it at all, much less sincerely. Toumani couldn’t find common ground with most people she talked to.

And as it turns out, she didn’t have the patience she thought she did for talking to people with a widely different take on the genocide than her own. Her mental health started to deteriorate from the stress of living and reporting in the country. But she stayed there far longer than she had expected. For two years, she waded into the complications and problems inherent in the idea of confronting her ethnic group’s painful past in a country that doesn’t recognize it and tried to figure out what to do with the feelings of frustration and rage that accompanied her throughout her stay.

Part travelogue, part memoir and part journalism gone awry, There Was and There Was Not is a bricolage of forms and genres—and not a neat one. This seems honest, a way Toumani could faithfully portray the strain between estrangement and belonging that she felt going deep into what would be considered enemy territory by the Armenian diaspora. “All that time and turning around of the material, both the ideas and the |

actual paragraphs and chapters, led me to the realization that this whole thing is a process for claiming a sense of individuality for myself,” Toumani explains.

“My own process reveals to me…the tension between belonging to the group and finding an identity for yourself that isn’t dependent on the group.”

Toumani’s book is also not very diplomatic. Pick any chapter and you’ll find it will likely irritate people on one side of the Armenian-Turkish divide or the other. There are several places in the book that are deeply critical of a Turkish point of view of the Armenian genocide, the current state of Armenians in Turkey or, above all, Turkish nationalism. The most notable of these is a charged interview with the Turkish historian Yusuf Halaçoğlu, who has perhaps done the most to try to conceal the history of the Armenian genocide. Halaçoğlu is quoted condescendingly explaining why Turkey doesn’t have a problem with Armenians. Near the end of the chapter, Toumani tries to explain her profound frustration in the interview, writing, “Certainty is always more powerful than doubt.”

But Toumani turns her critical eye on herself and her side, as it were, which makes the book much richer than it would be if it had just focused on what her interviewees in Turkey thought. That last line in the Halaçoğlu chapter is followed by, “I had known that once as a child.” Toumani is referring to an extremist strain in the Armenian diaspora, which she experienced in Armenian summer camps and youth groups in the United States during her childhood.

“It’s really important to me that Armenians who are interested in the book get to the end,” Toumani says.

“Because otherwise I think they’ll completely misunderstand; they might be more challenged by the early parts of the book than the later parts of the book. Likewise with Turks, the opposite is true.” After reading Toumani’s book, you’re with her when it comes to this hope, because you see how, even though the process of untangling the knots in her ethnic identity and past was painful for the author, it was ultimately liberating.

Toumani’s book may not have a lot of the qualities the author hoped for, but it is ambitious. Though Toumani couldn’t write that book about the possibilities of reconciliation, she ended up writing a book expressive of equally lofty ideas—the possibilities for creating space for individual freedom in the midst of such an entrenched conflict and the necessity of this |

individual freedom to truly participate in a community, shaped by a difficult past, in a constructive way.

At the end of the book she asks this question of her Armenian community: “If we move on from genocide recognition, with or without Turkey’s olive branch, what holds us together then?”

Alexia Nader is a writer living in San Francisco and a senior editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly.

There Was and There Was Not received a starred review in the Aug. 15, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

There Was and There Was Not A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Toumani, Meline Metroplitan/HenryHolt (304 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-8050-9762-7

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“A needed cry for justice, though perhaps unlikely to be heeded in this noisy second Gilded Age.” from caught

CAUGHT The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics

SEEKING LIGHT Portraits of Humanitarian Action in War

Grabhorn, Paul Photos by Grabhorn, Paul Viking (224 pp.) $45.00 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-0-670-01685-3

Gottschalk, Marie Princeton Univ. (456 pp.) $35.00 | Dec. 7, 2014 978-0-691-16405-2

Of “punitive sentiments and punitive policies”—a searching study of the explosion of American prisons, seemingly one of the nation’s only growth industry.

The notion of the “carceral state” has been current for half a century, thanks in good part to Michel Foucault, but only recently have the statistics caught up to the theory. Gottschalk (Political Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, 2006, etc.) describes a kind of American gulag that has “sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate.” On one hand are threestrikes laws and politicians enriching themselves at the trough of private prisons; on the other hand are powerful correctionsworkers unions that resist reforms. All demand to be fed, and they are fed with prisoners in a rigged system that no one wants to fix. Gottschalk’s densely documented study—nearly a third of the book is notes and sources—is academic but accessible, and it has an urgency to it. As she observes, much reformist political energy has gone into the three Rs of “recidivism, reentry, and justice reinvestment” and entirely too little into investigating the social causes of crime, among them a vast racial imbalance brought on by such things as “the push to build up human capital rather than address the disappearance of good jobs.” Meanwhile, the carceral state grows at immense cost, both social and financial, unchecked legislatively or even at the level of the Supreme Court, which, Gottschalk argues, seems interested only in capital-level crimes while failing to make any contributions to determining “proportionality” in the punishment of crime. Even as the carceral state grows, Gottschalk concludes, crime persists—less so in affluent communities, but ragingly in minority areas, A needed cry for justice, though perhaps unlikely to be heeded in this noisy second Gilded Age.

A photographic record, often moving while difficult to take in, of the humanitarian crises of the last quarter-century.

Related to the Grabhorn family of fine printing fame, Grabhorn here documents the labors of the International Committee of the Red Cross, with which he has worked since 1992. “The ICRC,” he writes, “is the only organization with the mission of preserving the dignity of people affected by war and standing up for basic principles and rules of humanitarian law.” Presenting images mostly from Africa but also from the Balkans and parts of Asia and South America, Grabhorn details just what that work involves, with all the difficulties of protocol and diplomacy attendant. As he recalls of an operation in Somalia, for instance, American military planes used for convoying supplies had to accommodate unarmed personnel, while the humanitarians had to bend ICRC rules to allow the presence of the military’s necessary weaponry. There are hopeful signs to be seen in the cornucopia of goods that the ICRC has been able to muster in its relief expeditions, as well as in the grateful faces of those served; these are tempered by the grimness of Grabhorn’s photographs of such things as surgical operations in the field. The photographs, documentary in nature, seldom attain the luminousness of art, but some stand out above others: a Chechen soldier gazing with suspicious weariness into the lens; a page of handwritten Arabic script, threatened by Islamic fundamentalists, trembling in the desert wind there. The best of those images show that life goes on even in the face of horror, as Tuareg women sing and children in Sarajevo draw clean water.

A more circumstantial text would have been welcome, but Grabhorn’s photographs lend urgency to the Red Cross’ important missions.

CHRISTENDOM DESTROYED Europe 1517-1648

Greengrass, Mark Viking (752 pp.) $45.00 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-670-02456-8

Greengrass (Emeritus, Early Modern History/Univ. of Sheffield; Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, 2009, etc.) reaches deeply behind the early myth of a united Europe.

The author focuses on the period of intensive religious conflicts that tore Catholic Europe apart from the advent of Lutheranism to the execution of King Charles I in England.

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construction” than a reality, a geographical conglomeration of parishes across the landmass that owed their affiliation to the Holy Roman Empire, headed by Charles V from 1520 to 1555, the last emperor to be invested by the papacy. For the masses of mostly rural dwellers, social cohesion was determined by a foundation of material stability via hugely diverse patterns of habitation, marriage and family, diet (the Columbian Exchange had introduced more staples into the European diet, yet infant mortality and death by disease remained very high), agricultural systems, debt, laws of inheritance and an intermittent simmering of popular protest. Silver and gold from the New World spurred growing military conflicts among the European dynasties: the enriched Spanish monarchy, France’s emergent absolutist Bourbon state, and the Netherlands’ financial revolution that guaranteed the debts of the Habsburg overlords. Yet while “Christendom’s belief-community” was held loosely together by its sense of “orthodoxy, genealogy, inheritance and knowledge,” the threat exposing its fragility was not the Ottoman incursions but rather its own internal religious fissures. Greengrass devotes most of the second half of this hefty, scholarly study to these “conflicts in the name of God,” from the German states to Poland-Lithuania to France, Spain and Britain.

A tour de force of scholarship that begins with a gradual and accessible buildup and then descends, like the century, into a convulsion of dynastic entanglements.

THE TYRANNY OF THE MERITOCRACY Democratizing Higher Education in America

Guinier, Lani Beacon (176 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-8070-0627-6

From admission standards to teaching philosophy, a renowned academic calls for a paradigm shift in higher education.

What her title terms “Meritocracy,” Guinier (Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice, 1998, etc.)—the first woman of color to receive tenure at Harvard Law School—criticizes as “testocracy.” Throughout the book, she demonstrates how high SAT or LSAT scores most often reflect a tyranny of self-perpetuating privilege rather than potential, or even merit, in the broader, more democratic sense of the term. “[O]nce you’re past the first year or two of higher education, success isn’t about being the best test taker in the room any longer,” she argues. “It’s about being able to work with other people who have different strengths than you and who are also prepared to back you up when you make a mistake or when you feel vulnerable.” Collaboration rather than competition is the key to the transformation, with students encouraged to work in (even take tests in) groups and to concern themselves more with the process of arriving at the correct response than with the correctness of the response itself. She cites professors Eric Mazur (Harvard) and Uri Treisman (Univ. of Texas) as |

exemplars of this “culture of collaboration.” Guinier stresses that such a philosophy is more in keeping with the democratic ideal and that it will nurture potential beyond what a test score measures. She writes that we need “a classroom culture shift,” one that encourages “students to value the learning process over the final score.”

Drawing on academic research and anecdotal evidence, the book makes a strong pedagogical case but is short on specifics as to how we get from here to there.

MORE THAN A SCORE The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing Hagopian, Jesse—Ed. Haymarket (300 pp.) $16.00 paper | Dec. 2, 2014 978-1-60846-392-3

A collection of writings about and against the educational model of standardized testing.

In the foreword, Diane Ravitch (Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, 2013, etc.) discusses the policies that she helped shape, which would lead to the need for this book.

In her position as a top-ranking official in the Department of Education, she channeled years of research into the creation of solutions to fix what was perceived as a substandard education system. Higher standards, measured by tests reflecting teacher success, were thought to be the way forward. As the standards were implemented, Ravitch’s research into the results pointed toward a different outcome—that the only things truly “fixed” by these new standards were, in fact, the parts that weren’t broken. As educators have spoken out about the failings of the approach, the criticisms have coalesced into a unified discontentment. In this collection, editor and history teacher Hagopian pulls material from a wide range of sources; his contribution stems from his role at Garfield High School, the site of the boycott of the Measures of Academic Progress testing in 2013. Other teachers from schools across the nation, with varying backgrounds (those backgrounds often provide the impetus for their essays), also share anecdotal stories, hard data and compelling arguments against a system that rewards teachers for narrowing their efforts toward achieving the all-important test score and punishes them for the outside-the-box thinking that was once considered essential for being able to reach the greatest number of students. Alfie Kohn provides the introduction, and other notable contributors include Alma Flor Ada, Phyllis Tashlik and Carol Burris.

Essays, speeches and interviews also come from students, parents and government officials, providing a comprehensive guide to the pitfalls of standardized testing, with arguments to win over even the most skeptical school reformer.

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“An examination of the erosion of personal liberty accompanying the rise of the national security state.” from lords of secrecy

FRONTIERS OF POSSESSION Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas

Readers hoping for either excoriations or excuses will find both in the authors’ reasoned and reasonable approach. “When a player leaves the league, everything changes,” write the authors. But those changes are neither uniform nor particularly predictable. Some, of course, end up in dire financial straits; others (OJ Simpson, “Mercury” Morris, Lawrence Taylor) appear in criminal courts; still others (Jim McMahon, Earl Campbell) suffer serious, lingering physical and mental consequences of participation in their violent sport. But the authors—though they shine a harsh light on the cases of failure (including an entire chapter on injuries)—also highlight the success stories of many retired players, Koonce’s included (he went back to school, earned a doctorate and served as the athletic director at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). Koonce’s story remains a touchstone throughout. We hear about the cases of ex-players who earn advanced degrees, succeed in the business world and participate heavily in philanthropy. But we also learn some facts about standard NFL contracts (once players are released, their salaries end), health insurance, retirement benefits (which commence at 55) and the amazingly short careers of most players: The average is 3.5 years. The authors also expose the enormous peer pressure among active players to spend their money and live large. Few young men (especially since many of them come from modest, often poor backgrounds) can resist such temptations. The authors also look at the family lives of players (perhaps surprisingly: Most remain married)—and at the difficult experiences that players’ wives have: They are responsible for just about everything quotidian during a player’s active career.

Although the prose can plod, the information and insights engage in a rousing race for the end zone.

Herzog, Tamar Harvard Univ. (362 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-674-73538-5

Herzog (Latin American Affairs/Harvard Univ.; Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, 2003) examines the border disputes between Spain and Portugal, comparing the players and difficulties of the two widely distant and differing situations.

Readers will need a background in the history of the area, including the original formation of Portugal and the union of the two countries from 1580 to 1640. In the South American holdings, discovery was not necessarily sufficient to claim territory.

The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1506 was designed to divide the New World and Africa between the two states, but even that created more confusion. Spain discovered, but Portugal settled. Then it was a question of whether the Spanish Jesuits or the Portuguese Carmelites had achieved civic allegiance of the natives after converting them. The author poses questions of jurisdiction and cites Roman law, bulls, treaties and natural law, but she never expounds on the details, only briefly citing the interlocutors. In the second half of the book, Herzog deals with border conflicts on the Iberian Peninsula, which have raged for hundreds of years. For the most part, these were small disputes over grazing land, agriculture or fishing rights that were generally ignored by the kings, with local resolutions lasting for decades or centuries but conflict always popping up again. “They occurred spontaneously when the situation so required...yet their persistence and change over time ended up restructuring both territories and rights.” The author presents readers with a variety of parallel situations that were dealt with using entirely different, not always efficient methods. If the kings of Portugal and Spain couldn’t be bothered with these small property disputes, one might ask why readers should.

This book is for those with a legal bent who enjoy the question more than the solution. While certainly erudite, the text is long and confusing, and many readers will wonder where the author is heading.

IS THERE LIFE AFTER FOOTBALL? Surviving the NFL

Holstein, James A.; Jones, Richard S.; Koonce Jr., George E. New York Univ. (336 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-4798-6286-3 Three academics from Marquette University, one of whom (Koonce) is a former NFL player, apply some sociological techniques to analyzing the situations of ex–NFL players.

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LORDS OF SECRECY The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare Horton, Scott Nation Books/Perseus (272 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-56858-745-5

An examination of the erosion of personal liberty accompanying the rise of the national security state.

Thanks at least in part to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, Americans are more aware than ever before of the massive amount of data that the government keeps not just on suspected terrorists and enemies of the state, but also on ordinary citizens. Even so, in specific terms, writes Harper’s contributing editor Horton, “Americans know less about what their national security forces are doing than ever before.” This contradiction perfectly describes the way things are today: We know that there are spies among us, but we don’t know what they’re really after—save that they keep their activities from us by arguing that to know too much would endanger our safety. Thus ignorant, Horton notes, citizens cannot participate fully in decisions about war and peace, matters that are now left to technocrats to decide. How we got there, by

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the author’s account, is a fascinating process. One consequence of converting the military to an all-volunteer force, he argues, was that it “deflated public interest in national security issues generally.” Wars are waged in our name without our full knowledge, while the engineers of those wars labor ever more diligently to reduce American casualties through mechanization so that American citizens will have even less cause to complain. Horton paints a somber picture, especially when he describes the failure of the civilian government to control these military and paramilitary strains; as he writes, “congressional oversight has failed in its fundamental charge of preventing large-scale infringement of the rights of citizens hidden from the public view by secrecy.”

Big Brother is watching indeed. This useful book catches him in the act and even offers some thoughts on how to poke his eyes out.

AHA! The Moments of Insight that Shape Our World Irvine, William B. Oxford Univ. (376 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 2, 2015 978-0-19-933887-0

A crisply written study of how and why eureka moments can power intellectual breakthroughs.

After having written about modern-day stoicism, sculling, the deflection of brickbats and human desire, Irvine (Philosophy/Wright State Univ.; A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt— And Why They Shouldn’t, 2013, etc.) now turns his attention to the interior flashbulbs that have supplied historical icons like Albert Einstein and Gustav Mahler, as well as our own modernday geniuses, with significant epiphanies. While Irvine admits these insightful “aha moments” are indeed mysterious in nature, they are universally experienced and covetously perceived. The author diligently examines this phenomenon, showing how the unconscious mind is often responsible for the development of creative and productive ideas. He scours five unique domains where inspiration is essential: religion, morality, science, mathematics and art. He deftly explores each of these areas, analyzing how this “rush of discovery” can transform and thus validate one’s laboratory research or creative endeavor. Irvine also examines the sensation of the aha moment, its psychology and related neurological aspects, as well as varied theories as to its frequency and the roadblocks preventing these kinds of epiphanies from having a significant impact. The author examines his own experiences with hypnagogia (the transitional, often hallucinatory state from wakefulness to sleep), compares divine visions versus hallucinations, and amusingly includes noted contrarian journalist Christopher Hitchens when intersecting inspiration and morality. His surveys of historical events where aha moments have come into play have also been thoughtfully researched. In the book’s acknowledgments, Irvine humorously thanks and endorses his muses, rationalizing that “it’s hard to go wrong if you keep an open mind.” |

Bright, absorbing look into a mystifying source of inspiration, the kind that often uncaps a wellspring of ideas and potential.

REELING THROUGH LIFE How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Ison, Tara Soft Skull Press (256 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-481-6

Novelist and nonfiction author Ison (Rockaway, 2013) unspools a montage of images that illustrate how her thoughts and feelings were channeled through lives on the big screen.

Despite seven years as a screenwriter (Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead), the author freely admits she has little background in film studies, and she eschews an analytical bent, preferring the legerdemain of smoke and mirrors. True, artistic merit is not a prerequisite for a movie to exert influence, especially on the impressionable young mind, and movies did erect a platform for how Ison saw the world. The early chapters are rooted in her reactions to movies as seen through the eyes of a child or adolescent, which occasionally becomes a catalog of varied child-of-the-affluent neuroses. Readers may not be convinced that she was so precocious as a 6- or 12-yearold that she grasped the nuances of these movies at the time.

Later chapters offer adult interpretations of films that shaped her, though it is not always clear when she is looking back or in the here and now. It may be churlish to label as “self-absorbed” a book based solely on the author and her experiences, but the confessional and navel-gazing aspects are very much a matter of taste and can get tiresome when contrasted with powerful recollections of her parents and perceptive takes on awakening female sexuality and romanticizing the writing life. Even sympathetic readers may weary of all the travails and catharses. By contrast, Ison is at her best when her self-awareness is administered from a slight remove. There are wonderful movies revisited here, as well as some dreary ones that blunt our pleasure. But all are mainstream entertainments (emphasis on melodrama) that tend to amplify and distort real life, risking superficial treatment.

Though well-written and engaging, this is basically a book-length aphorism, something discharged by Paddy Chayefsky in a single passage from Network.

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WOMEN, FOOD, AND DESIRE Embrace Your Cravings, Make Peace with Food, Reclaim Your Body

Jamieson, Alexandra Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4767-6504-4

Holistic health counselor and co-star of the award-winning documentary Super Size Me, Jamieson (Vegan Cooking for Dummies, 2010, etc.) tackles the age-old question of what women really want.

The author explains food cravings with the intent of helping women understand and overcome their private relationships with food. “It’s human nature, after all,” she writes, “to yearn, to long, to want, to desire.” Jamieson deconstructs how a habit such as stashing a “secret” chocolate croissant in an office desk drawer often becomes part of an unconscious daily routine. She explores the brain/body connection, identifying helpful techniques such as yoga, Pilates, conscious breathing and visualization that can help women better relate to their bodies and help calm their minds. The author also advocates for the practice of detoxing as a route to spiritual enlightenment, as well as a means for healing. “All of this may sound a little bit woo-woo and corny,” she writes, “but it’s not.” Jamieson dips into the science of neurogastroenterology, describing how “trusting your gut” by maintaining a healthy microbiome is a crucial aspect of overall health, and she discusses the importance of healthy sleep patterns and the joys of napping. Jamieson’s additional health prescriptions include less time spent sitting, avoiding artificial light when possible and getting more sunshine. The author advises a change of mindset; rather than thinking that you have to exercise, let loose and play like when you were a child. Jamieson weaves her personal reflections together with case studies of clients working on such issues as eliminating unhealthy foods from their diets, off-kilter family relationships, body alienation and sexual pleasure. The author includes links to her website offering helpful tips, interviews and quizzes on a variety of topics, including meditation, detox strategies and recipes for healthful smoothies.

Worth a look for those who enjoy self-help books focused on healthy lifestyles.

THE TEENAGE BRAIN A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults Jensen, Frances E. with Nutt, Amy Ellis Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-06-206784-5

This book competently covers the details of adolescent brain development but offers few surprises and scant advice.

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It’s not really news that the brain continues to develop well into the early 20s. Scholars and journalists have long written about the “unfinished” nature of the teen brain. Here to clarify exactly what that means is Jensen (Neurology/Univ. of Pennsylvania), the mother of two boys who have survived those fraught years between childhood and full adulthood. While the author shares a few stories about her sons’ teen years, this is not a book of anecdotes. Instead, Jensen, with the assistance of Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post writer Nutt (Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man’s Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph, 2011), lays out the way human brains develop: “back to front” with the impulse-controlling, executive-functioning circuits of the frontal lobe coming in last.

If you ever doubted that this was true, the author’s collection of study results will convince you. Meticulously documented and reported, the studies offer proof that it’s not just parents who think their teenagers don’t quite have it all together. Jensen ably explains neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters and so on, offering a vocabulary that provides scaffolding for understanding how the brain grows. The prevalence of medical terminology may engage some readers, but it could easily put off parents who pick up the book based on its subtitle. Individual chapters expound on the biology behind the many perils of the teen years—why it’s such a prime time for getting hooked on drugs and what those drugs do to a developing brain, for instance— but parents looking for guidance on avoiding these pitfalls will be disappointed. Parents and teens may balk at the heavily risk-oriented perspective Jensen takes throughout, which gives regrettably short shrift to the more positive flip side of the teen scene: extraordinary creativity, energy and learning capacity.

More at home in college classrooms than on parents’ nightstands.

THE TEST Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing—But You Don’t Have to Be Kamenetz, Anya PublicAffairs (272 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61039-441-3

New debates about the worthiness of standardized testing in schools.

Beginning with a comprehensive history of standardized testing, NPR education blogger Kamenetz (DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, 2010, etc.) shows how this method of analysis morphed into standard practice in the American school system to assess the abilities of students and teachers alike. The author identifies 10 major problems associated with this form of testing, including the fact that these tests analyze the wrong data, waste time and money, put undue stress on students, parents and teachers, cause teaching to the test and disregard the diversity of the test-takers. When the Common Core State Standards initiative |

“With a novelist’s eye for telling details, Katz offers a colorful, perceptive and riveting portrait of a remarkable artistic partnership.” from the partnership

takes effect in 2015, American students will be subjected to even more tests, which Kamenetz believes will only exacerbate the problems already identified with this method. Not only are standardized tests asking the wrong questions, but they are being used the wrong way: “as a single, stand-alone measure of the performance of teachers, students, schools, and districts.”

Using thorough research and illuminating interviews, the author provides readers with effective solutions to implement on both the individual level—opt out of taking standardized tests or work on individual projects that emphasize a variety of skills, not just language arts and math—and the national level, where assessments of student performance should be used for the greater good of the community as well as the individual.

With abundant data assembled in an accessible format, the book is a must-read for anyone in the educational system or any parent who has a child old enough to enter preschool. The author amply shows why the current process of evaluation must be upgraded to meet future needs.

An informative and enlightening appraisal of the regimented tests that American schoolchildren of all ages are subjected to taking on a regular basis.

THE PARTNERSHIP Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink

Katz, Pamela Talese/Doubleday (480 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-53491-8

The explosive collaboration of two brilliant artists.

When composer Kurt Weill (19001950) and poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) met in 1927, they were certain they had much in common: Both were artistic iconoclasts; both believed that art must address social, political and philosophical issues; both were intent on “liberating culture from its elitist jail cell.”

As screenwriter and novelist Katz shows in this deft, incisive cultural history, despite their artistic affinities, what divided them made their six-year partnership volatile and, finally, impossible. Weill was self-disciplined, quiet and unwilling to let distractions—women, political activism—get in the way of his work. When he fell in love with singer/actress Lotte Lenya, he married her. Brecht was messy, noisy, cynical and undaunted by scandal. By the late 1920s, he was involved with three women: his wife, Marianne Zoff, with whom he had a daughter; actress Helene Weigel, with whom he had a son; and writer and translator Elisabeth Hauptmann. Although Weigel and Hauptmann energetically pursued their own careers, they were remarkably devoted to Brecht, acquiescing to his many demands but giving him the space and freedom he desired (Weigel moved into her own apartment after their son was born so the infant would not disturb Brecht). As Weigel described him, he was “a very faithful man—unfortunately to too many people.” Katz focuses most on Weill and Brecht’s two famous collaborations: the bawdy, |

irreverent Mahaganny, a musical play about a mythical American town dominated by greed; and The Threepenny Opera, a blatant critique of injustice, corruption and hypocritical morality, which made Lenya a star. Their work incensed the Nazis, and in 1933, both men—and Lenya, Weigel and Hauptmann—fled.

Weill eventually had a successful career in the United States; Brecht, after years in exile, returned to East Germany.

With a novelist’s eye for telling details, Katz offers a colorful, perceptive and riveting portrait of a remarkable artistic partnership.

THE RADICAL KING

King Jr., Martin Luther Beacon (312 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-8070-1282-6

A reframing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy to celebrate his political radicalism.

As the civil rights movement was shifting more toward Black Power militancy, King was occasionally criticized as a moderate whose nonviolent philosophy needed to give way to a more confrontational style, one that seemed more in tune with the tenor of the times and the temper of younger activists. As editor and annotator, the provocative scholar West (Black Prophetic Fire, 2014, etc.) maintains that King and Malcolm X, for example, were becoming allies rather than remaining polarities as black leaders and that King’s leadership was not only more radical than frequently recognized, but also more pragmatic and visionary. From sermons and speeches to the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” much of this material is oft-anthologized, with the chronological context showing the intellectual and philosophical progression of a leader who was more radical than many suspected from the start. Tributes to W.E.B. Du Bois and Norman Thomas reinforce King’s radical sympathies, as do his reflections on reading Marx (he was ambivalent about both communism and capitalism). “King and [Nelson] Mandela are the two towering figures in the past fifty years in the world,” writes West. “Both have been Santa Clausified—tamed, domesticated, sanitized, and sterilized—into nonthreatening and smiling old men....Yet both were radical and revolutionary.” Permeating the collection is the theme of “radical love,” distinguishing King from those who preached hate toward the white oppressor or saw no place for whites in the fight for equality. “The aftermath of violence is always bitterness,” he preached in a sermon on Gandhi. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of...a new love and a new understanding and a new relationship...between the oppressed and the oppressor.”

Though many of the entries are familiar, this useful collection takes King from the front lines of Southern segregation to a national movement for economic equality to an international condemnation of imperialism and armed intervention.

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THE ART OF NOT HAVING IT ALL True Stories of Men, Sex, and Other Disasters Kite, Melissa Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin (288 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-250-05514-9

Spectator columnist Kite turns some of her most wince-worthy experiences as a single woman into a humorous memoir, previously published in the U.K. as Real Life.

The author’s sometimes-rueful, sometimes-biting tone thwarts despair by turning every disaster into hilarious high drama. The book begins with Kite cancelling her wedding, underscoring how hard it is to find Mr. Right. She felt bad, of course, but she channeled her energy into the absurdities of dealing with “wedding-business” people who don’t believe in the phrase, “the wedding is off.”

Even though her life was “in ruins,” the wedding gown vendor still wondered if she wanted to choose a different dress, as if that would change her mind. Working up to laugh-out-loud material, Kite writes of her “odd-job man” disappointments, including Tony, “a big, bearded man in his sixties,” possibly “the world’s most intellectual plumber” but clearly not the best man for the job, as he caused an “explosion of water” in her kitchen while repairing the boiler. Her dating life has been just as messy. A romance with a man who buys everything in groups of nine went sour when he insisted she line up her shoes just so. After more dating fiascoes, Kite sought help from a “relationship therapist” who charged £150 an hour and gave her leaflets with positive affirmations. Eager to have children but with no man in sight, the author investigated adoption, meeting a social worker who dashed her hopes with a series of Catch-22 questions.

Readers might lose patience with Kite, a successful, well-educated, admittedly high-maintenance woman who has an exciting career in journalism and posh friends but is unable to manage her life, if she weren’t such a good writer and keen observer of human foibles, particularly her own. Even if we feel ambivalent about some of her choices, we can’t help but cheer her on.

A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.

It was Nellie who opened doors and taught Muriel the best way to help the poor of Bow and Poplar. Muriel and Nellie worked together to recast Victorian values and reimagine gender and class. Muriel based her social justice brand of Christianity on Tolstoy’s interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.

Muriel and her sister, Doris, fully supported by their wealthy father, moved to Bromley by Bow in 1912 and established Kingsley House in 1915. There, they provided Bible classes, a Montessori school, an adult school for men, a baby clinic and an alcohol-free pub. They lived next door to Nellie and her mother, though the author has no record of when they met. Nellie spent five years of her childhood in a Poor Law school before she became a match factory girl. She was valued and sent first to Wellington, New Zealand, and then to Sweden to teach workers the company’s methods. However, her years of poverty and recurring bouts of rheumatic fever shortened her career and her life. Illness plagued both women, and Muriel insisted her “Prayer of Relaxation” enabled her recovery from a breakdown in 1916. Nellie served Muriel faithfully, and her letters show how she wished for an exclusive friendship. The author dwells excessively on the question of whether these two women were lesbians or chaste romantic friends.

The real story here is the idealistic work of Muriel, Doris and Nellie as they fought for universal justice and economic equality. Koven demonstrates how these women changed the world’s attitude toward the poor.

THE MATCH GIRL AND THE HEIRESS

Koven, Seth Princeton Univ. (480 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 11, 2015 978-0-691-15850-1

Muriel Lester (1885-1968) was one of the best-known faces of the 20th century’s global peace movement. Koven (History/Rutgers Univ.; Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, 2004) explains her strong connection to London’s East End through her friend, orphan Nellie Dowell.

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THE LAST WARRIOR Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy Krepinevich, Andrew; Watts, Barry Basic (336 pp.) $29.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-465-03000-2

A well-organized biography of Andrew Marshall (b. 1921), the architect of the Defense Department’s “net assessment” strategy since the early days of the Cold War. Two leading members of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Krepinevich (7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century, 2009, etc.) and Watts have both served in Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon during the last few decades. Marshall took the ONA helm in 1973. During the Cold War, the task of the agency was to create careful comparisons of U.S.-Soviet weapons systems and costs so that the U.S. could implement a workable framework aimed at gaining advantage. Following the end of the Cold War, the ONA has shifted its focus to China and elsewhere. Since Marshall’s first 1972 memo, “The Nature and Scope of Net Assessments”—issued when he had only recently left RAND after 20-plus years at the request of then–National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger—Marshall’s assessments have remained classified, yet the framework he set out has stood the test of time. Part of the puzzling information Marshall then |

“An invigorating collection of passionate, spirited voices.” from table talk

signaled was the huge discrepancy between what the U.S. spent on weaponry versus what the Soviets did. At the time, the Pentagon regularly overestimated the size of the Soviet economy and underestimated the amount of military spending from that economy; Marshall’s assessments hinted at the severe structural problems caused by the Soviet defense burden. Nonetheless, the hysterical competition with the Soviets prompted President Ronald Reagan to ramp up military spending to unprecedented levels. In clear prose (despite the plethora of acronyms, eased by the glossary at the end), the authors trace the career of this brilliant strategic thinker, from his working-class Detroit upbringing to becoming a largely self-taught statistician to working with the big-name government wonks over numerous administrations.

An elucidating intellectual history of an influential strategic sage that few outsiders have ever heard of.

TABLE TALK From the Threepenny Review

Lesser, Wendy; Zahrt, Jennifer; Chubb, Mimi—Eds. Counterpoint (320 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-457-1

Pithy literary musings on art, culture, politics and life selected from the Threepenny Review’s Table Talk section.

Featuring essays published between 1990 and 2013, the anthology emulates a gathering of critics, philosophers, writers and artists in lively conversation. Topics vary from Sven Birkerts’ battle with a stray cat, mirroring his own restlessness, to Steve Vineberg’s commentary on the “seductiveness of celebrity” so well-articulated in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. While some contributions are time-specific, most resonate with a universality that goes beyond their publication dates. Life’s exasperating moments turn into humor in Dwight Garner’s account of moving preparations, which involved “Packing (and Lugging) My Library.”

Irene Oppenheim’s attempt to help a neighbor becomes a lesson in the “art and etiquette [of] delivering phone books.” John Berger flexes his observational muscles, describing the mysterious ritual a Vietnamese woman goes through at a pool in Paris, and Greil Marcus, writing on the discovery of a 1925 Dorothea Lange photo of his mother, marvels at the photographer’s revelatory power. A lament for things lost echoes through several essays. Though technology can make life more convenient, Arthur Lubow wonders what is “getting left out” in our digitized lives and worries that “what’s new is a thinned-out version of what was old.” Evelyn Toynton mourns the closing of the British Museum Reading Room in service of efficiency, a rare space that “restores the old sense of time, a contemplative rather than harried awareness of its passing.” Claire Messud rues the disappearance from modern novels of digressions, replaced with reader-desired “closure.” “Real life,” she writes, “for all we try to impose order upon it, is but an endless string of digressions.” |

Without them, she writes, life would be “exceedingly dull.”

Not so with this assemblage of ideas, critical thinking and wry observations, which is itself a swell digression. Other contributors include Michael Gorra, Javier Marias, Sigrid Nunez and Robert Reich.

An invigorating collection of passionate, spirited voices.

THE REMARKABLE EDUCATION OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

Levin, Phyllis Lee Palgrave Macmillan (544 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-137-27962-0 The formative experiences that shaped a political mind.

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) began keeping a diary when he was 11 years old, a project that resulted in tens of thousands of pages. To produce this perceptive biography, Levin (Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House, 2001, etc.) has judiciously mined that abundant material, along with Adams’ prolific correspondence and his wife’s memoirs. Although considered by contemporaries “a frigid and icy New Englander,” Adams, as the author portrays him, was a passionate man, often lonely, self-critical and exacting of others (Thomas Jefferson, for one, who seemed to Adams shifty and calculating). Besides revealing his emotions and intellectual growth, his diary offers a vivid record of the tumultuous political events that he witnessed, including the American Revolution, Louisiana Purchase and Napoleon’s doomed invasion of Russia. Adams made his first trip to Europe in 1778, as his father’s companion and secretary, and at age 14, he accompanied Ambassador Francis Dana to Russia, interpreting peace negotiations conducted in French. By the time Adams enrolled at Harvard, he was a worldly young man but had no clear direction. Following his father’s advice, he began a legal apprenticeship in the small town of Newburyport, where, isolated and anxious about his future, he plummeted into overwhelming depression—an affliction that would recur throughout his life.

His parents, the estimable John and Abigail, had high hopes for their son. If he achieved anything less than professional prominence, they told him, “it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.” As a minister to The Hague, London, Prussia and Russia, senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state under James Monroe and professor of rhetoric at Harvard, Adams had no lack of achievement and honors. Levin focuses on his education—as a lawyer, statesman, husband and father— ending in 1815, with major roles yet before him.

An intimate, richly detailed portrait of a powerful political figure.

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“The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.” from screening room

HUCK FINN’S AMERICA Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece

Levy, Andrew Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4391-8696-1

Rediscovering Twain’s most widely read novel.

As Levy (English/Butler Univ.; A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary, 2009, etc.) acknowledges, anyone writing about Huckleberry Finn must feel “a healthy dose of humility” in the face of a plethora of literary criticism: His notes and bibliography comprise more than a third of this book. Yet he manages to offer fresh insights about the novel’s two central themes—children and race—by investigating Twain’s life and times and the changing cultural contexts in which the book has been read. In the 1870s and ’80s, Levy asserts, Twain was surprised by the love his children generated in him; children became his subject, and he aimed to bring them vividly to life. He responded, too, “to the pernicious twin narratives of his era—the reversal of political advances for blacks and the reframing of American children as the ‘enemy.’ ” His novel “was a bomb thrown” into a vociferous debate about children’s essential nature (were they savages? criminals? innocents?), how children should be raised and educated, and what they should—and should not—read.

From the first, the novel proved controversial: Some critics saw it as a nostalgic paean to boyhood; others, that the defiant, illiterate, unrepentant Huck was an influence “not altogether desirable.” Controversy also arose over Twain’s contradictory messages about race. Although he empathized with blacks, he unabashedly loved minstrelsy and wanted “to revive the complicated subversion” of his youthful awakening to blacks’ vital culture. Twain’s capitalizing on blackness strikes Levy as analogous to today’s marketers who look to “black, Latino, and transitional neighborhoods to uncover new trends in fashion, music, and language.”

Delving deeply into 19th-century sources, generations of readers’ responses and a wide range of Twain’s writing, Levy complicates the possibilities of what the novel meant for its contemporaries and what it might mean for readers today.

SCREENING ROOM Family Pictures

Lightman, Alan Pantheon (272 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-307-37939-9

A family death sends a celebrated author back to his boyhood home in Memphis, Tennessee, where many family members and memories await.

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Theoretical physicist and novelist Lightman (The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, 2014, etc.) had left Memphis as a young man, telling us later in this emotional, moving tale that he had vowed never to move back. The reason: the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King Jr. Race is a principal character in this unusual, even eccentric, memoir.

Although Lightman writes that he invented some characters and lightly fictionalized some episodes, he frankly confronts the ugly racial history of Memphis—and of his own family (they had a black housekeeper). His grandfather and father had owned and managed major movie theaters in the area (the author worked in one as a teen), and Lightman recalls how his father quietly and slowly integrated the venues with very few problems. The author’s organization is a bit like a photo album.

There are many short segments beginning in the present tense (which he uses to record his monthlong sojourn at home); he then shifts to the past when something in the present serves as a trapdoor to drop him into the past. Along the way, we meet siblings, quirky aunts and uncles, and cousins. We explore the history of Memphis and some of its notables (including Elvis, whom the author met). About the only Memphis moment of consequence he does not mention is its use as the setting of John Grisham’s The Firm (and the subsequent Tom Cruise film).

The cumulative effect of Lightman’s memories is wrenching: Loss and illness and death wander freely in his pages, reminding us of the evanescence of youth and promise.

The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.

YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW My Life

Loren, Sophia Atria (304 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-1-4767-9742-7

The award-winning actress and international sex symbol tells her life story, from her childhood in Naples, Italy, to her rise to the top of the Hollywood A-list.

In this occasionally revealing memoir, Loren (Sophia Loren’s Recipes and Memories, 1998, etc.) opens her “treasure trove of memories.” She is amusing and engaging when discussing her teenage ambition to be a star. She participated in beauty pageants (in one, she earned a “Miss Eleganza” sash) and became a popular model in Italian “photo-romance” novels before beginning her career as a movie actress. However, when she chronicles her relationship with Italian film producer Carlo Ponti—who brought her to the United States and helped make her an international star—Loren’s directness evaporates and the narrative falters. She describes Ponti as “a determined businessman” and an “authoritative gentleman,” but she gives only glancing acknowledgement of his wife and two small children— not to mention the fact that he was 39 and she was only 17 when their affair began. (To modern ears, the charges Ponti’s family |

later brought against the couple for “bigamy and concubinage” will seem archaic.) Along with her blithe dismissal of inconvenient facts, Loren repeatedly describes herself as a shy woman of high moral character; as proof, she haughtily reveals the story behind the infamous photo of her staring at Jayne Mansfield’s deep neckline at a Hollywood party in 1957—Loren claims she was scandalized and “terrified” because “one of her breasts [was] in my plate.” Throughout, Loren earnestly tells her many stories in the sentimental and often amused voice of “Nonna Sofia,” though without much scrutiny or a sharp wit. A short appendix lists each of the author’s acting roles by year.

A nostalgic recollection of the great beauty’s movies and memories.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Mann, James Times/Henry Holt (208 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-8050-9397-1 The latest in the admirable American Presidents series is premature because too little time has passed to evaluate our 43rd president, but Mann (Fellow in Residence/Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Advanced International Studies; The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House, 2012, etc.) writes an insightful biography without much partisanship.

Before he was elected in 2000, George W. Bush’s life gave few hints of what would follow. Son of a moderate Republican president, his intemperate youth gave way after marriage and conversion to evangelical Christianity. He gained experience helping with his father’s campaigns, and he won the Texas governorship in 1994. His conservative administration favored business and law and order but lacked the confrontational approach that came later. Mann maintains that, as president, Bush followed the lead of advisers, mostly veterans of his father’s term, but proved a quick study and soon exercised effective leadership. When he entered office, the United States budget was running surpluses. Eight years later, two tax cuts and two multitrillion-dollar wars financed entirely by borrowing left a gigantic deficit that frightens even Republicans (although they blame it on Democratic social programs). After the devastating events of 9/11, Bush faced the rage that swept the nation and its leaders.

The result was not an attack on terrorism (largely a police matter) but a massive, expensive military buildup and pugnacious foreign policy that seemed aimed at demonstrating America’s fighting prowess. Sheltered from traditional wartime inconveniences (higher taxes, conscription), anti-war opinion remained muted until years of frustration in Iraq and Afghanistan finally eroded Bush’s popularity.

Presidential reputations often improve with time and rarely decline. Aware of this, Mann delivers a remarkably evenhanded account, eschewing the painful emotions many readers will feel until historians sort matters out.

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ONE NATION, UNDER GODS A New American History

Manseau, Peter Little, Brown (480 pp.) $28.00 | $14.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-316-10003-8 978-0-316-24223-3 e-book Smithsonian fellow Manseau (Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead, 2009, etc.) unspools a web of gods who have had an impact on the development of the United States.

The dominant Christian narrative that runs through the history of the United States was written by Christians. What the author endeavors to do here—and does so with deep-running stories told with verve and dash—is to square that narrative with a religious syncretism that provides a more colorful, distinct, eccentric, not to mention truthful, historical record.

In each chapter, Manseau addresses a single topic, though they gradually spread a maze of intersections and dynamics. “[T]he repeated collision of conflicting systems of belief, followed frequently by ugly and violent conflict,” writes the author, “has somehow arrived, again and again, not merely at peaceful coexistence but striking moments of inter-influence.” Manseau takes on a great company of iconoclasts, from Eric the Red to North African Muslims and Chinese from the Middle Kingdom, all of who arrived in American before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. From the undaunted Anne Hutchinson’s antinomianism, the author pivots to the healers from Africa who faced smallpox with their history of inoculation. Early on, Thomas Jefferson knew that religious systems interacted, intimately and transformatively. Eventually, there would come Shakers and Mormons, Hindus and Buddhists, Sikhs and Scientologists. Manseau does not paint a peaceable kingdom; it has always been riven by exclusion leagues, immigration acts, dreadful violence and banishments. His point is that there has always existed an undeniable “inter-influence,” that the atmosphere of the country couldn’t help but be shaped and reshaped by its disorderly moments with those who found themselves here for religious reasons.

An eye-opener. After reading Manseau, readers will see the influences he writes about not only dot, but shape, the landscape.

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“An exploration of Indonesia’s shaky but resolute move into democracy.” from demokrasi

LOVE AND LIES An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love Martin, Clancy Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 3, 2015 978-0-374-28106-9

An admitted liar muses about deception.

Philosopher, essayist and novelist Martin (Philosophy/Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City; How to Sell, 2009, etc.) expounds on love, sex and lying in this digressive, interesting, but sometimes exasperatingly narcissistic book. At 46, married three times, divorced twice, a recovering alcoholic and, the author confesses, a lifelong liar, he wrote this book “to figure out how I’ve loved and how to do it better. More brutally put—and more honestly?— I am trying to behold my body and my heart without disgust.”

That question mark is unsettling: What, readers may well wonder, is true? Martin recounts his first love, of his sister, a disturbed girl several years older than he; his first erotic experience when he was a child and brushed against his mother’s buttocks; his first sexual experience, in high school, in all its kinky details; and his halfhearted suicide attempt. He insists that lies pervade all relationships and that liars are more intelligent than nonliars, supporting his assertions with “studies” as likely to be found in newspaper reports as in academic journals. He maintains, for example, that “the capacity to lie convincingly is a reliable predictor of social and financial success among adults.” “By the time we are two or three,” he says, “we are telling people what they want to hear—or what we think they want to hear. The best liars must also be mind readers.”

Among the wide range of writers and thinkers Martin draws upon are Socrates and Plato, James Joyce and Raymond Carver, Nietzsche, Kant, Stendhal, Freud, of course, and the Freudian psychiatrist Adam Phillips, Montaigne, Machiavelli and even the charming liar Pinocchio.

An intelligent, if at times self-aggrandizing, celebration of lying and love.

F.B. EYES How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature Maxwell, William J. Princeton Univ. (320 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 18, 2015 978-0-691-13020-0

Maxwell (English and African-American Studies, Washington Univ.; New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars, 1999) reveals the obsession of the late FBI director with the lives and literature of leading black writers.

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The author takes a hard look at the FBI’s reading and interpretations of African-American writing and at the personal lives of some of the greatest writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Having received myriad documents via the Freedom of Information Act (the author appends a list of more than 100), Maxwell painstakingly reconstructs the era and reimagines the principal players in this largely hidden drama— although he demonstrates later that many of the writers under surveillance were very well aware of it. Some of the author’s discoveries are startling. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry had the thickest file (over 1,000 pages); Claude McKay was the first black author the FBI focused on; Random House editor Bennett Cerf cooperated eagerly; J. Edgar Hoover believed James Baldwin was a “pervert”; Langston Hughes’ file exceeded 500 pages; Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer seemed to have had no files at all. Perhaps the most surprising discovery, though, is how thoroughly the FBI “ghostreaders” read these writers’ texts, applying critical principles worthy of graduate students.

Maxwell pauses in these sections to dive into the whirlpools of literary theory, journeys that numerous general readers would probably rather eschew. The author notes how the FBI backed off somewhat during the Depression and then returned to their focus during and after World War II. Maxwell also takes us to the current era and the works of Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. This is a dense, academic text with a very conventional organization and with paragraphs thick with information and—sometimes—jargon.

An occasionally intriguing work whose organization and diction consign it to reference status.

DEMOKRASI Indonesia in the 21st Century

McDonald, Hamish Palgrave Macmillan (322 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-137-27999-6

An exploration of Indonesia’s shaky but resolute move into democracy.

Former Sydney Morning Herald AsiaPacific editor McDonald (Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud, 2010, etc.) has been covering the developments in Indonesia since the waning of Suharto’s long authoritarian rule (1966-1998). The author begins with a brief sketch of the populous archipelago’s early history, encompassing glorious Javanese empires thriving from its strategic location within the east-west navigation routes. He then looks at the dispersal of the Malay language and spotty conversion to Islam in the early 15th century, leaving (still) many pockets of Hindu and Buddhist adherents. The legacy of the colonial era centered on exploitation of its trade rather than the uplift of its people: By 1905, 37 million people were ruled by an armed force of 16,000 Europeans. Indonesian national consciousness would ignite in the 1920s, giving rise to the country’s first liberator, Sukarno, whose collaboration with the Japanese occupiers during World |

War II helped galvanize support for independence. McDonald then moves through convulsive periods to Indonesia’s comingof-age: the country’s first election in 1955; the coup of 1965 by Suharto, which left a wave of slaughter and ushered in a “new order” marked by American-trained technocrats directing the economy; rigged elections; widespread patronage; eruption of independence movements in East Timor, Papua and elsewhere; the rise of fundamentalist Islamic groups; and the “octopuslike hold” by the military on all institutions. Yet reforms began to infiltrate through the short terms of an array of subsequent civilian presidents and what McDonald sees as fierce public support for the “civilianization of politics.” Along with signs of modernity are a growing awareness of environmental despoilment, appreciation of the immigrant Chinese entrepreneurial spirit and a growing call for religious toleration.

While there is new hope in the election of populist Joko Widodo, this new chapter has yet to be written. A trenchant, well-researched book.

TASTY The Art and Science of What We Eat McQuaid, John Scribner (304 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4516-8500-8

“Pleasure is never very far from aversion; this is a feature of our anatomy and behavior. In the brain, the two closely overlap.” So writes Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist McQuaid (Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, 2006, etc.) in this provocative investigatory foray into the nature of taste.

The author begins with a debunking of the still-practiced basic geography of the tongue that identifies—spuriously— zones for the five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. As he notes, every taste bud has five receptors waiting to be tickled and “detect molecules of one of the basic tastes.”

Though eating is as important as reproducing, it has been significantly less studied in the scientific community, from isolating taste receptors to finding the genes in the genome that play critical roles. “Like other senses,” writes the author, “[flavor is] programmed by genes; unlike them, it is also protean, molded by experience and social cues, changing over the course of a lifetime. This plasticity is wild and unpredictable.” McQuaid examines flavor chemistry and perception, and he notes that our fields of taste are oddly individual, both within and without our communities—though availability obviously plays a role in diet. The author is especially interesting when noting certain oddments and curios: the berry that turns the tastes around in our mouth; the sugar trap; the creepy, brave new world of the bland milkshakelike drink that does it all, “Soylent” (created through research into “the human body’s nutritional needs” to create “the perfect food, building it from first principles”); the advent of cooking; and the arrival of alcohol. |

McQuaid is an enthusiastic writer undisturbed by dead ends, and he provides an entertaining exploration of “the mystery at the heart of flavor,” which “has never truly been cracked.”

THE MODERN SAVAGE Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

McWilliams, James E. Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin (304 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-250-03119-8

McWilliams (History/Texas State Univ.; The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut, 2013, etc.) takes issue with the locavore movement, which preaches compassionate care of farm animals on nonindustrial farms but slaughters those animals in the end.

As a vocal animal rights advocate, the author responds to recent books by Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman and Jonathan Safran Foer, introducing readers to the “omnivore’s contradiction”—caring enough about animals raised for meat to offer them a more natural environment in which to live but, of course, ultimately killing them for food. He argues that the food reform movement is based “on an intellectually dishonest foundation” and notes how “[t]houghtful observation strongly suggests that animals exhibit powerful and recognizable emotional responses to a range of experiences.” In several chapters, McWilliams transcribes comments and stories from online forums, blogs and posts to further his arguments, quoting others on slaughter and backyard butchery, as well as on raising chicken, beef and pork on small, nonindustrial farms. By all indications, McWilliams did not interview these farmers, and in many cases, he only identifies them by their online names. While small-scale agriculture aspires to give animals a better life, the author points out the occurrence of higher rates of disease than on nonindustrial farms. He critiques many of the claims of small-scale agriculture—e.g., that its animals are healthier, their impact is low, and they are offered a more natural environment and humane treatment. However, the author does not fully condemn smallscale agriculture; rather, he sees it as a necessary steppingstone for many people to eventually cease the eating of animals and adopt a plant-based diet.

While McWilliams offers convincing arguments for animal rights, they are undermined by the extensive quotes, which become tiresome and offer little useful context.

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“Mewshaw’s account is more devilish (and sometimes downright cruel) than sympathetic, but it’s also well-written, funny and never boring. Literary lives don’t get dishier.” from sympathy for the devil

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal

YOUNG OVID An Unfinished Posthumous Biography

Mewshaw, Michael Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-374-28048-2

Vidal unvarnished: the private life of an aging provocateur.

Near the end of this memoir of life with Gore Vidal (1925-2012), novelist and journalist Mewshaw (If You Could See Me Now, 2011, etc.) writes that he prefers to remember how “generous and hospitable” Vidal was. “Not at all the bitchy, mean-spirited man his critics imagined.” It’s an odd conclusion to a book that, if anything, makes the opposite case. Mewshaw knew Vidal well, as a friend, interview subject, dinner companion and part-time expat neighbor in Italy, but the relationship clearly tested his patience. As he writes, “[Vidal] embodied Goethe’s dictum that ‘the world only goes forward because of those who oppose it.’ And those who oppose it have to expect to take their lumps.” Although he never denies Vidal his assets—literary brilliance, productivity, loyalty, professional and financial help to others—Mewshaw was also clearly worn out by the older writer’s boorishness, self-absorption, and apparent decadeslong ambition to eat and drink himself to death. As the author sees it, Vidal’s lordly, self-satisfied demeanor was something of a ruse; he was also beset by demons—old resentments, vindictiveness, oversensitivity to slights—which he battled with alcohol and pills. Luckily, he also had a hardy constitution; Mewshaw recalls one evening after the next seeing Vidal drinking enough wine or whiskey to slay an ox, only to get up the next morning and write. Consequently, the book counterbalances Vidal’s airbrushed self-portrait in Palimpsest (1995), which Mewshaw writes “wasn’t so much a memoir as a novel with a thoroughly unreliable narrator.” Mewshaw gives a good inside picture of Vidal’s domestic life, as well as showing his fears, vulnerabilities and full-time dependence on his 50-plus-year partner, Howard Austen, whose death in 2003 left Vidal with little more than alcohol for consolation.

Mewshaw’s account is more devilish (and sometimes downright cruel) than sympathetic, but it’s also well-written, funny and never boring. Literary lives don’t get dishier.

Middlebrook, Diane Counterpoint (272 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-61902-331-4

Discovering the author of the epic Metamorphoses.

When biographer and poet Middlebrook (Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage, 2003, etc.) died in 2007, she was in the midst of writing a biography of Ovid, whose poetry she had taught in her literature classes at Stanford. Knowing she would be unable to complete the project, she wrote an introduction to the first four chapters, bringing Ovid to the age of 20. She focused on a few crucial points in his life: birth in a small town in the Apennines; his move to Rome for his education when he was 12; the toga ceremony that marked his status as a man; an early marriage that ended in divorce when he was 18, possibly as a result of his wife’s infidelities; and his embrace of poetry as a vocation, encouraged by an aristocratic patron. With no historical evidence for the particulars of Ovid’s life, Middlebrook relies on histories of society, politics and culture in ancient Rome, as well as the poet’s writings, to draw intriguing inferences about his experiences, personality and especially his motivation to become a poet instead of a magistrate, as his father intended.

“The search for answers,” she writes, “requires establishing the psychological validity of speculation about emotional dynamics to be found in Ovid’s work.” Middlebrook’s speculations result in her fictionalizing some scenes, which account for about one-quarter of her narrative; half of the book contains annotated selections from Ovid’s poetry that have biographical relevance. Also included are excerpts from his early Amores, “urbane love elegies” that reflected his own relationship with a mistress; Tristia, written after he was exiled by Augustus; and especially the Metamorphoses, his longest and most innovative poem, about supernatural transformations.

In this inventive, hybrid biography, Middlebrook grounds Ovid’s poetry in an insightful reconstruction of his life.

TEA & ANTIPATHY An American Family in Swinging London Miller, Anita Chicago Review (224 pp.) $19.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-89733-743-4

An American family discovers there’s no cure for Anglophilia like living in London.

This slight comic memoir oversells its premise, as the 1960s England recounted

by Academy Chicago president and editorial director Miller (Uncollecting Cheever: The Family of John Cheever vs. Academy Chicago Publishers, 1998, etc.) is far from swinging. The story is set in 1965, but Beatlemania and Carnaby Street are at the periphery; 72

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at the forefront is a drab, provincial, day-to-day London that seems permanently stuck in the past. When her husband, Jordan, moved her and their three children to London—in hopes of salvaging what was left of the British branch of his business—Miller, with a freshly minted degree in English literature, looked forward to soaking up centuries of literary culture. Instead, life in this new old world became a series of daily torments. The landlady of their rented town house left the place in poor repair; sheets and cookware were missing, and bathroom leaks and clogs became all too apparent. The city rubbed the family the wrong way; service personnel arrived at the worst time or not at all, store and restaurant staffers were indifferent to customers, and minor requests transformed into major ordeals. The locals were boors who fetishize the queen and lecture Americans on their shortcomings. “We’re five hundred years ahead of you, you see,” explains one new acquaintance. “We’ve had more time to become civilized.” The book is at its funniest when Miller lets comic events speak for themselves, but the wit is often forced. The author’s memories aren’t so much interesting in themselves as they are buoyed by her pseudo-drollery. “[T]he English, they’ll do you every time,” says the family’s Irish cleaning lady, which is funnier the first time she says it than the tenth.

A book of modest charms just short enough not to outstay its welcome.

BLOOD OF THE TIGER A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species Mills, J.A. Beacon (272 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-8070-7496-1

Conservation consultant Mills examines the failure of conservationists to stop the commodification and farming

of endangered tigers.

In certain parts of the world, tigers and other exotic species are valued for their uses in traditional medicine, food, luxury clothing and taxidermy products. In recent years, there has been an explosion in the farming of these animals. The author fell in love with tigers after her first sight of one in the wild. However, despite her passionate descriptions and some cute nicknames for certain key players, this is not a romantic adventure story.

It is a memoir of her two decades investigating the illegal trade in endangered animal products and her efforts to end it, dealing with farmers, politicians, medical professionals, sanctuary owners and warring conservationists. Mills argues that creating legal markets for farmed tigers and other exotic species only increases the illegal trade in higher-status wild animals and that if we want to prevent extinction in the wild, we must eradicate consumer demand for these products. She describes successes in convincing the traditional Chinese medicine community to back conservation and in using celebrity advertising directed at consumers. She also shows the daunting political and economic |

obstacles and the failures of conservationists, including herself, that led to the current situation: There are now more tigers on farms than in the wild in China, and there are thousands of privately held, untracked tigers in other nations, including the United States. As is often the case with stories of underfunded activists fighting against industrial and political interests, this is a frustrating and tragic story, but Mills offers neither false hope nor despair. The author provides a list of resources for readers inspired to take action, in addition to a substantial set of notes.

A telling inside view of 20 years in international tiger conservation work, including the successes, failures and the work that is still required.

THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH

Mizumura, Minae Translated by Yoshihara, Mari and Carpenter, Juliet Winters Columbia Univ. (256 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-231-16302-6

Are these the last days of writers writing in Finnish, Catalan, Japanese and other languages? This slender book finds reason to worry that with English as the “universal language,” national literatures will disappear.

Some may find it puzzlingly meta to translate into English a book that complains, to a Japanese audience, that English is swamping the world. The idea of the hegemony of English is not new, of course; George Steiner was writing about it half a century ago. The idea that monoculturalism is undesirable is similarly old. What is new is novelist Mizumura’s (A True Novel, 2013, etc.) insistence that at least some of the blame lies with the Japanese government’s willingness to roll over, in the case of the Japanese language, before the invader. Defending a national language, after all, is the business of the nation, and in a nation whose educational system is centralized, she finds “astonishing...the meager content of junior and senior high school textbooks for courses in Japanese language arts.” A move toward increased substance, she adds, is essential, as is a commitment to the establishment and presentation of a “modern literary canon.” It is perhaps uncharitable to wonder whether there is a self-serving element in that call, but one understands Mizumura’s frustration that a great artist such as Soseki Natsume should be represented by only six lines from a single novel. Readers of this book would be well-served by some background in the Meiji Restoration and its politics, but Mizumura’s unhappiness with things as they are and her unwilling status as intermediary needs no cultural glossing.

She wonders whether she is invited to important cultural conferences abroad only because she speaks English, not because of her status as a writer of Japanese literature.

A best-seller in Japan, Mizumura’s essay is likely to find only a narrow audience here, but that does not diminish its urgency in the least.

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“A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.” from a fifty-year silence

WHERE THE DEAD PAUSE, AND THE JAPANESE SAY GOODBYE A Journey

Mockett, Marie Mutsuki Norton (352 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 19, 2015 978-0-393-06301-1

A journey through Japanese culture and religion by a Japanese-American woman grieving for her dead father and concerned that she will be unable to pass on her heritage to her young son.

Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash, 2009) returned to Japan after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, accompanied by her mother and her young son. After visiting the family-run temple located not far from the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the author made pilgrimages to other temples, met with priests, examined their treasures and tried out different forms of Buddhist meditation. Doing so provided her with the opportunity to not only describe, often at length, present-day people, buildings, festivals, places, moods and customs, but to delve into the stories behind them. One chapter is devoted to a history of Buddhism, in which readers may be surprised to learn that if they choose, Buddhists are quite free to celebrate one of the many Shinto gods. Because of the radiation danger at the cemetery in 2011, the bones of the author’s grandfather could not be buried during that year’s Obon, the annual Buddhist festival in which ancestors’ spirits return to this world to visit their relatives. At the heart of the book is the Obon festival of 2012, a time when the author visited a crematorium for a close-up look at how the Japanese treat the remains of loved ones, attended the burial for her grandfather’s bones, observed Obon’s beautiful and healing rituals, and hoped that it would bring her relief from grief over the death of her father.

Mockett, who speaks Japanese (though not perfectly), is an observant and respectful guide to Japanese customs, open to new experiences and sensitive to changes in the culture. If she sometimes rambles on or wanders off, the trip is still worth it.

A FIFTY-YEAR SILENCE Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

Mouillot, Miranda Richmond Crown (288 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-8041-4064-5

Unearthing her grandparents’ mysterious 50-year estrangement forms the foundation for translator and editor Mouillot’s memoir.

From the time she was a young girl, the author understood that she came from a turbulent family of Holocaust survivors and that her estranged grandparents’ relationship was odd. The family’s emotional terrain consisted of “fights and bitterness, 74

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illness and injury, trauma, bad memories, and crazy grudges.”

Her mother knew little about their relationship, except for the fact that they hadn’t spoken in almost 40 years. As an adolescent, Mouillot had been close to her grandmother, but it was not until she was 14 that she visited her difficult grandfather alone in Switzerland for the first time. After this visit, the author initially comprehended the volatility surrounding her grandparents’ relationship. The combination of her grandfather’s strong negative feelings for his ex-wife and her grandmother’s vague responses to Mouillot’s inquiries about their relationship prompted more questions. Through convoluted conversations with her mother and grandparents, the author began piecing together the puzzle of their traumatic daily lives.

Her grandmother was a physician during the war, and her grandfather served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. After they met, they married, had a baby and moved to a house in the countryside in southern France. Putting together the family story involved many discussions, delving into old family letters and archival research; the process took Mouillot more than 10 years. Before completing the family story, her grandfather lost his memory to dementia, but her grandmother was able to read an early version of the book. “While I was trying to remember,” writes the author, “Grandma was urging me to forget, to put it down on paper and get on with the labor or living.”

A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.

DIRTY CHICK Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer Murphy, Antonia Gotham Books (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-1-59240-905-1

An “artsy San Francisco dilettante” tells the story of how she traded her urban existence for a life of “chasing cows...and executing chickens” in rural

New Zealand.

In 2004, Murphy and her husband decided to move abroad to New Zealand, where Murphy gave birth to a developmentally delayed son named Silas and, later, a little “savage” of a daughter named Miranda. When it came time for Silas to start his education, the family moved to Purua, a tiny community that was home to a school where “no one would judge [him]” for being different. American bohemians with romantic visions of country living, they took up residence on a rented farm. Strange accents, Murphy’s own peculiar habit of wearing Halloween animal ears, and lack of knowledge regarding what it really took to raise livestock and grow their own food soon made the Murphys the object of curiosity and scorn. The arrival of a farm-savvy niece from New York proved the family’s salvation. She helped the Murphys persevere through misadventures involving baby calves with long, black tongues, alpacas that looked like teddy bears but behaved atrociously, sheep that |

required “ovine Brazilian[s]” and a dog that ate feces. Stripped of their initial illusions, Murphy and her husband learned that “[r]eal country life...involved blood, shit, and worms.” But it also involved simple yet profound pleasures, such as consuming their homemade artisanal wines and cheeses with the colorful group of expatriates and locals who eventually became family friends. Murphy’s book presents an unsentimental, at times unapologetically graphic, treatment of farm life. At the same time, it offers a comic yet thoroughly wise perspective on what it means to start over in a new country and live close to a natural world that is anything but romantic.

Warm, funny and touching.

COLONEL HOUSE A Biography of Woodrow Wilson’s Silent Partner Neu, Charles E. Oxford Univ. (704 pp.) $34.95 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-19-504550-5

An exhaustive biography of Edward M. House (1858-1938), the wealthy Texan who served as President Woodrow Wilson’s chief personal adviser and envoy to Europe in World War I. Growing up in a prominent Houston family, House proved an indifferent student at Cornell, worked in the family business and then devoted his life to pursuing his fascination with the mechanics of politics. With keen insights into human behavior and a crafty knack at behind-the-scenes political infighting, he helped elect four governors of Texas, one of whom dubbed him with the honorific “Colonel House.” In 1911, he met Wilson, then governor of New Jersey, and together, they forged “one of the most famous friendships in American political history.” Neu (Emeritus, History/Brown Univ.; America’s Lost War: Vietnam, 1945-1975, 2005, etc.), who set this massive project aside several times over the past four decades to publish other books, has used House’s diary and other papers to craft a remarkably vivid account of the political operator’s life; his critical unofficial role in U.S. diplomatic relations during the Great War; and his intimate relationship with Wilson as a supportive friend and adviser who correctly assessed the looming storm in Europe. For seven years, House was treated like a member of the White House family, carrying out interpersonal tasks Wilson found distasteful, meeting with European leaders and helping prepare the way for the war’s end.

Neu’s engrossing narrative has such immediacy that readers share House’s hurt and disappointment when Wilson abruptly ended their close friendship. The break came after the president’s debilitating 1919 stroke, when Wilson’s second wife, Edith, who disliked House, seized his role. House was not invited to the president’s funeral. Neu deems House a “patient, crafty, and sometimes cynical” infighter and “a shrewd observer of human foibles,” widely admired but faulted by some at the height of his fame for developing an exaggerated sense of his own importance.

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EQUAL MEANS EQUAL Why the Time for an Equal Rights Amendment Is Now

Neuwirth, Jessica New Press (160 pp.) $14.95 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-62097-039-3

A legal manifesto to revive the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment.

The ERA came so close to ratification so long ago that some readers might think it has already been passed, while others might wonder whether it’s still necessary. As the founder of Equality Now, Neuwirth writes, “The goal of this book is to help women and men get fired up enough about the absence of this fundamental human right to put it into the Constitution once and for all.” She shows how much momentum the movement originally had and how close it came to passage (three states short of the necessary 38 by its 1982 deadline, after Congress had passed it to overwhelming public support in 1972) and how conservative resistance raised fears of things that have already transpired even without the ERA: “What were the fears at the time? Fear of women in combat, fear of unisex bathrooms, fear of gay rights, and the unimaginable prospect of same-sex marriage all fed the flames.” Yet the disparity of wages for workers of different genders doing the same work has yet to be corrected, and pregnancy remains cause for employment termination according to some courts. Furthermore, violence against women, hardly a focus of the original campaign, has become even more of a hot-button issue. This book is mainly a summary of court decisions, in the states and at the Supreme Court, which isn’t likely to get readers fired up about much of anything, and the conclusion finds the author admitting that “the way our Constitution works, we cannot say with certainty what exactly the ERA will or won’t do for women who are hoping it will end sex discrimination.”

Neuwirth makes a good case that ratification is the right thing to do, but her matter-of-fact style won’t do much to rally the troops.

EUREKA Discovering Your Inner Scientist

Orzel, Chad Basic (368 pp.) $17.99 paper | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-465-07496-9

Orzel (Physics/Union Coll.; How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, 2012, etc.) explains that we all think like scientists, at least some of the time; we just may not

know it.

What is science? Most of all, writes the author, it is a process.

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“Predictable passages aside, Panetta offers a valuable portrait of how things get done in Washington—cautiously, like this memoir, and with exquisite calculation.” from worthy fights

we are”). In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.” In the first part of the book, the author looks for patterns. He uses the pleasures of collecting things as a way of polishing his awareness of the importance of close observation. The next step—using your experiences in life, the frame of what you know—allows you to fashion your observations into a model, which is not just a story as to why something happened, but a source of optimism, as well, since it provides a real notion that the world is comprehensible. With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative. There will be false leads, dead ends and red herrings, but the beauty is in the chase and in the pleasing fact that the practice of science is open to all races, genders and persuasions.

Orzel’s point is well-taken: Like breathing, we are engaging in the scientific process much of the time, even if we don’t know it.

SILVER SCREEN FIEND Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film Oswalt, Patton Scribner (240 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4516-7321-0

A comedian’s lively memoir about his movie addiction.

“All this filming isn’t healthy.” That’s the advice given to the title character in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), and comedian and actor Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, 2011) would no doubt say the same goes for viewing. In this lively memoir, the author focuses on his early 1990s career, when time was divided between hustling the Los Angeles stand-up circuit and filling his head with every available movie. As he devoured film after film, he told himself that he was getting an education: “As I filled in each hole in my movie buff ’s incomplete knowledge, perhaps I was unlocking some secret level of skill I had as a comedian.” Oswalt was also thinking of the Woody Allen career arc: Germinate in the hothouses of comedy clubs and movie houses and blossom as a brilliant auteur. Instead, watching movies took over, alienating him from life and people: “Don’t they want to talk about the movies of the newly rediscovered French crime master JeanPierre Melville, or the Dogme 95 movement, or the dozen or so hidden references in the latest Tarantino film? Why are people so boring?” Oswalt tells a variety of interesting stories—of halfassing his way through his days as a MADtv sketch writer, pissing off Jerry Lewis, obsessing over his first tiny film role, hearing an aging actor bellow drunken commentary during a screening 76

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of Citizen Kane—but he doesn’t go out of his way to score punch lines. Actually, he’s on to something more serious, which is how movies can simultaneously inspire and stunt ambition. After all, who has time to write a screenplay when a remastered version of Dr. Strangelove starts in a few hours?

A funny, insightful homage to movie love and an honest account of growing up, personally and professionally.

WORTHY FIGHTS A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace Panetta, Leon with Newton, Jim Penguin Press (512 pp.) $36.00 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-1-59420-596-5

Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Panetta tells all—well, some—about his life in politics.

“I have talked at length in these pages about wars,” writes the author toward the end. Indeed he has: His time in politics has run from Saigon to Syria, while his recent responsibilities have embraced such diverse matters as helping handle the return of American POW Bowe Bergdahl— a deal, Panetta writes, that he disapproved of—and weathering the David Petraeus affair. The memoir begins along familiar, formulaic lines: son of hardworking immigrants, drawn to office by a sense of “duty to country and a conviction that government could play a constructive role in the life of its citizens,” paying dues under the tough tutelage of Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, and so on. Panetta is gentle on most of the politicians who have crossed his path, though it’s clear he reserves considerable disdain for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his “divisive tactics.” It is also clear that the author was at odds with President Barack Obama at many points. Though mildly framed (“achievements cannot allow leaders to become complacent”), his criticism has a bite. Many of the sharpest divergences turn on the question of leaving Iraq: “It was no secret that I had fought to keep it from ending this way,” he writes, and he pursued doing so “with reservations.” Still, Panetta’s criticisms are mild in the context of his overall defense of his former boss: As he writes, he finds it “amusing” that Obama is seen as an ideologue instead of as a “realist and pragmatist” who has overcome unnecessarily staunch opposition to “make important progress in many areas, from fighting terrorism to righting the economy.”

Predictable passages aside, Panetta offers a valuable portrait of how things get done in Washington—cautiously, like this memoir, and with exquisite calculation. (two 16-page photo inserts)

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PUNK ROCK BLITZKRIEG My Life as a Ramone

Ramone, Marky with Herschlag, Richard Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4516-8775-0 The last Ramone standing dishes on Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy, but the drummer is a lot more revealing about his own remarkable life outside the famously dysfunctional band.

There’s nothing in Ramone’s (born Marc Bell) sometimes bitingly funny rock ’n’ roll memoir that sheds new light on the Ramones’ notoriously eccentric band dynamic. Efforts to fully understand just how the Ramones operated remain as elusive as ever. However, this story about how a longshoreman’s son from Brooklyn somehow became one of the progenitors of a new musical art form born in the bowels of downtown dive bars is compelling enough on its own. The Ramones were still in their heyday in the late 1970s when Tommy Ramone, the group’s original drummer, decided he’d had enough. At the time, the soon-to-be Marky Ramone was already a key figure in the CBGBs music scene, helping to trumpet the arrival of the “Blank Generation” with the likes of Wayne County and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. “Richard was an interestinglooking guy,” writes the author. “He wore his hair kind of spikey.

I didn’t know if it was intentional or just the result of not shampooing much.” Marky ultimately got the Ramones gig, and the New York rockers were able to march forward with their Chuck Taylors laced tight and their leather jackets zipped up. Unfortunately, the brotherhood was in shambles. The author recalls the ongoing fights and feuds, as well as his own descent into the bottle. Drumming for the Ramones sent him way over the edge and into a terrifying rehab center on Staten Island, but he was able to claw his way back to sobriety with a newfound sense of purpose. Sadly, time ran out for the rest of the Ramones, and they never got to fully share in brother Marky’s enlightenment.

A workmanlike but illuminating book for fans of the Ramones and punk rock in general.

MONEY MASTER THE GAME 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom

Robbins, Tony Simon & Schuster (512 pp.) $28.00 | Nov. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-5780-3

Robbins owns his own island. Why don’t you?

It’s just a “small island paradise,” mind you, but it doesn’t hurt that Robbins has amassed a considerable chunk of change by building a life-coaching empire. Of course, there’s a certain obnoxiousness attendant in telling an audience that you’re rich, but the |

promise that the audience can be rich too has its own charms.

Robbins seldom ceases to be rah-rah in his belief that if readers just suspend disbelief and follows “the 7 Simple Steps in this book”—the proprietary caps are his—then the big win can’t be far behind. Obnoxiousness aside, the author is no slouch; for this book, he’s interviewed and studied the portfolios of numerous billionaires (ordinary millionaires need not apply) to find out the secrets of their success, many of which fall into his own simple-step septet. It would steal Robbins’ thunder to reveal them, but one bit of general counsel that makes good sense is offered by JP Morgan Chase investment whiz Mary Callahan Erdoes: “You can never be out of balance in taking care of yourself as a person, taking care of your work as a professional, taking care of your family, taking care of your friends, your mind, your body.” On the matter of balance, Robbins offers a seemingly counterintuitive dis-recommendation of the old balanced-portfolio mantra, which, he holds, can put the holder at unnecessary risk; that provocative advice alone is worth the cover price. Of course, the rules vary from billionaire to billionaire; they call to mind Somerset Maugham’s witticism, “There are only three rules for writing a novel. The trouble is, no one knows what they are.” Still, Robbins’ common-sensical, relentlessly positive, often highly specific advice is both useful and inspirational—which is just as advertised.

Great airplane reading on the way to that private island and sure to occasion a few adjustments in one’s portfolio.

THE YOUNG T.E. LAWRENCE

Sattin, Anthony Norton (352 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 26, 2015 978-0-393-24266-9

Sattin (The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery, and the Search for Timbuktu, 2004, etc.) details the early years of the man who loved the Arabian people and determined to free them from Turkish rule.

As a young man, even before his years at Jesus College at Oxford, T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) developed a love of all things medieval, especially knights and castles. In 1906, as an 18-year-old, he bicycled 2,400 miles through France seeking medieval churches and doing brass rubbings. Even at this young age, his strength of character was obvious. His intense gaze, obsessive concentration and photographic memory helped him become a man who would succeed in being accepted and admired by all those he met. In 1909, Lawrence journeyed to Syria to explore crusader castles and research his thesis, which was titled “Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture.” He walked everywhere in the area for the entire summer, felt he could never be English again, and only left when he was robbed and beaten. His mentor, D.G. Hogarth, Director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, then led him into his happiest years, as an archaeologist. The author has explored and followed in the footsteps of Lawrence, and it shows in his deep understanding of his goals, why he did what kirkus.com

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“Smart blend of social history and biography centering on one of the funniest—and most tragic—people of our time.” from becoming richard pryor

he did and how he managed. Lawrence was assigned to the dig in Carchemish near the Euphrates searching for a method to reveal their cuneiform writings. He mastered Arabic and gained the respect of the natives, easily winning their appreciation through his abilities and fearlessness in the face of danger or hardship. Lawrence’s accomplishments in his youth are only the beginning of the legend, something he fiercely disdained; what he did after his 26th birthday is another story that readers hope Sattin will tackle.

A masterful account of the beginnings of a unique man.

BECOMING RICHARD PRYOR

Saul, Scott Harper/HarperCollins (592 pp.) $27.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-06-212330-5

Smart blend of social history and biography centering on one of the funniest—and most tragic—people of our time.

By Saul’s (English/Univ. of California; Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, 2003) account, Richard Pryor (1940-2005) wrestled out the demons of physical abuse, racism and addiction on a stage that at first wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. That effort produced some strange results. One of the more interesting detours in this already digressive narrative follows the course of the autobiographical film This Can’t Be Happening to Me, a look at Pryor’s childhood in a brothel; the film started as a broad comedy, then became serious, then took on the coloring of a “tripped-out imagination that made [the film] cousin to a midnight movie like El Topo.” As Saul observes, it helped that Pryor and the family that so often figured in his comedy were “powerfully dramatic people,” thus it was natural that Pryor should so readily bend genres to insert seriousness in funny situations and comedy into grave discussions. Saul’s psychobiographical essays are illuminating, as when he writes of a young Pryor discovering that white girls were more receptive to him than were white boys. Race is a driving theme throughout, and Saul closes on a note that is both hopeful and resigned. Asked whether he viewed the world in terms of black and white, Pryor said, “I see people...as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.” Saul is sometimes guilty of forced analogies, as when he finds an echo of the resignation of Richard Nixon, whom a Republican senator compared to “a piano player in a whorehouse who claims not to know what’s going on upstairs,” in Pryor’s own time in the house of bawd.

Still, this is a well-executed study that gives Pryor due credit as pioneer, intellectual and artist.

Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry’s Furious Cool (2013). The latter remains worth reading, but this book is the place to start. (50 b/w photos)

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FIGHTING OVER THE FOUNDERS How We Remember the American Revolution Schocket, Andrew M. New York Univ. (256 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 16, 2015 978-0-8147-0816-3

This populist study of recent speeches, films and published works reveals the many uses of America’s founding ideals.

Schocket (History and American Culture Studies/Bowling Green State Univ.; Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia, 2007) has sifted through reams of material, film and text over the last 15 years and even embarked on his own treks to national historic sites like Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg for a firsthand look at how the American Revolution is presented to the masses. He sees the allusions to the Founding Fathers and revolutionary heroes in speeches

by Mitt Romney or President Barack Obama and in bestsellers like David McCullough’s John Adams or PBS’s animated Liberty’s Kids as serving one of two points of view: An “essentialist” approach holds the memory of the founding myth as unchanging, true and knowable—i.e., the conservative approach. The “organicist” viewpoint maintains a more fluid approach, seeing America as an evolving theater of multicultural and feminist principles—i.e., the liberal approach. The mere mention of “founding fathers” seems to be a catchphrase for many essentialist notions, such as whiteness, gun possession, right-to-life, even Christian, while the Constitutional phrases “more perfect union” and “created equal” sum up many of the organicists’ tenets, such as dedication to equality and belief in progress. The discovery by DNA proof that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his black slave Sally Hemings has blown open the neat-and-tidy mythology of the upright and incorruptible Founding Fathers and forced a reckoning with a more complicated, messy story. Schocket’s visits to such historic sites as the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum and Philadelphia’s private National Liberty Museum reveal the array of co-opting of the revolutionary messages.

Along with Hollywood’s take, the author delves into recent Constitutional Supreme Court battles and the formation of the Minutemen and tea party movements.

Organized, accessible history for everyone.

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BEN-GURION Father of Modern Israel

Shapira, Anita Translated by Berris, Anthony Yale Univ. (288 pp.) $25.00 | Nov. 25, 2014 978-0-300-18045-9

In her valuable new biography, Shapira (Emerita, Humanities/Tel Aviv Univ.; Israel: A History, 2012) provides a concise appraisal of a founding father of the nation that was once only the dream of generations.

More than anyone, it was David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) who forged the state of Israel into a homeland and an independent democracy in an inhospitable Middle East. However, Israel’s first prime minister and first minister of defense wasn’t an easy man to deal with. Born in Poland, he arrived in Palestine at age 20 imbued with Zionistic zeal and ready to assume an agricultural life, but the study of law seemed more suited to his vision of a Jewish homeland. So, supported by his father and without knowledge of Arabic or Turkish, he went to Istanbul to learn Ottoman law. He also traveled to London and New York. Returning to Palestine, he became leader of Mapai, the workers’ party, and spokesman for the Yishuv, the community of Jews during the British Mandate.

Shapira reports the workings of his convoluted dealings with the formidable leaders of the nascent state during the Yishuv—these convoluted goings-on may confound readers not well-versed in the subject. After World War II and the Shoah, Ben-Gurion managed the influx of survivors fighting against British forces for admission to the Holy Land. When the U.N. voted for partition, Ben-Gurion was quick to announce the declaration of statehood and the birth of the new nation. Father of Israel’s Defense Forces, he knew there would be a war for survival with every surrounding Arab nation. In the end, he achieved his abiding goals: a return to the land, a social framework and Hebrew as the language of Israel. The old lion’s powers eventually faded. He lived out his life, among his books, in a kibbutz in the Negev desert.

A brief but full-color biography of an essential leader.

THE MORAL ARC How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom Shermer, Michael Henry Holt (560 pp.) $32.00 | Jan. 20, 2014 978-0-8050-9691-0

Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, 2011, etc.) reviews the last 400 years of human history to substantiate his claim that it is science and reason, not religion, that reveal a path to “the betterment of humanity in a civilized state.” |

“The economic problems of today are real but tractable... even in the most impoverished places on earth such as Africa,” writes the author. Brushing aside concerns about the environment, the accelerated extinction of species, looming resource shortages and political instability, Shermer predicts that by the end of the century, the levels of wealth and prosperity enjoyed in the developed world will be universal. The author believes that developments in our scientific understanding have created the conditions for an upward trend in morality, which he sees as synonymous with the advance of liberal democracies and a global economy. The author rejects the notion that religion has been the “driver of moral progress,” citing superstitious practices such as the burning of witches that were sanctioned until the 18th century. Shermer agrees with the defense of science by avowed atheist Richard Dawkins but also recognizes the positive role of religious leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama in their fight for human betterment. Taking slavery as an example, he attributes its “legal abolition and universal denunciation” to “rational arguments and scientific refutations of slavery,” which laid the groundwork for the recognition of the need to protect the rights of blacks, minorities, women, homosexuals and other persecuted groups. Shermer believes that reliance on the scientific method, multiculturalism, the free market and liberal democracy create the conditions necessary for continued progress.

A well-documented but perhaps overly optimistic view of a future likely to be challenged by both environmentalists and religious fundamentalists.

I THINK YOU’RE TOTALLY WRONG A Quarrel

Shields, David; Powell, Caleb Knopf (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-35194-2

Two writers—one successful, the other still working on it—venture into the woods over the course of four days with one objective in mind: Argue so well that people will want to read about it.

Years ago, before traveling the world and teaching ESL, Powell was a scruffy kid with long hair and a mustache sitting in Shields’ writing class, mulling over a life of letters. Flash forward to today, and the same intellectual writer has become a stay-at-home father, but one who still earnestly cultivates his art. The older man, meanwhile, has quietly spent the intervening years maintaining a steady, successful course in academia. So, which one has suffered and sacrificed more for the written word, and which one is the more successful human, effectively managing to keep himself directly involved in the flow of life? The answer to that question represents the heart of the writers’ multifaceted dialogue. Getting there, however, is just as interesting as the two men discuss everything from My Dinner with Andre to sports radio to George W. Bush. kirkus.com

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“Eloquent and sometimes-hallucinatory, reminiscent at turns of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried...” from the dogs are eating them now

They also pepper their discussion with ruthless critiques of each other’s works. While the intellectual discourse is largely dispassionate, it never comes across as bloodless, with both men subtly revealing profound aspects of their souls during the course of their galloping discourse. Of course, they delve deeply into stuffy literary criticism, as well, but that’s balanced by a deep sense of how each man feels about fatherhood, friendship, mortality and women. Powell, however, is clearly the engine behind the endeavor, driven in part by the enduring desire for both a mentor’s approval and his further instruction. He also reveals more about his past exploits, which include a harrowing life-and-death episode and an eye-opening adventure with two different amorous “transvestites,” on more than one occasion.

A stimulating intellectual interaction with lots of heart.

THE DOGS ARE EATING THEM NOW Our War in Afghanistan Smith, Graeme Counterpoint (304 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61902-479-3

Think Afghanistan is bad now? Just wait until American forces leave entirely and the dragon rises again.

The dragon trope is foreign correspondent Smith’s, borrowing from the old cartographer’s notation that dragons lurk in unmapped corners of the Earth. “The thing about modern civilization,” says one battle-hardened GI, “is that we can’t stand those empty spots. The dragons fly out and bite you in the ass.”

So they do, and by Smith’s account, the dragons are multiplying.

Eloquent and sometimes-hallucinatory, reminiscent at turns of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Smith’s narrative takes us from bad to worse. In one set piece, a coalition soldier lets loose a rocket with the remark, “There goes a Porsche,” precisely because the rocket costs as much as a sports car. Meanwhile, the enemy makes lethal weapons out of scraps, odd bits of fertilizer, plastic buckets and rusty tools.

The result is devastating, and Smith does not shy from decidedly not-for-workplace descriptions: “Charred pieces of human flesh stuck to the armour. A television reporter wrinkled her nose at the sight, and I asked her: ‘Can you believe they were trying to sell me a story about how things have gotten better in Panjwai?’ ” Smith is a master of the battlefield description, but he’s even better at slyly noting the ironies and complexities of the war: for instance, destroying a farmer’s opium crop, while falling under the rubric of the war on drugs, would likely turn the farmer against the United States. Solution? Hire mercenaries to “slip into areas secured by NATO troops and raze the fields, without telling anybody they were sent by the foreigners.” Worse, in the author’s formulation, is now that we’re mired, we’re stuck, no matter how we pretend otherwise: “At best, we are leaving behind an ongoing war. At worst, it’s a looming disaster.”

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A dragon awaits, in other words. Cheerless and even nightmarish, one of the best books yet about the war in Central Asia.

ALL EYES ARE UPON US Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn

Sokol, Jason Basic (416 pp.) $29.99 | Dec. 2, 2014 978-0-465-02226-7

Sokol (History/Univ. of New Hampshire; There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 19451975, 2006) exposes the troubled truth about the North’s racial integration.

The Northern states could point to the Southern states’ ongoing practices of Jim Crow legislation, white supremacist violence and suppression of voting rights with righteous disgust, but the author shows how, in unsubtle and pernicious ways, the North, too, was “at war with itself.” Sokol tracks the tireless work of a handful of reformers who helped uncover the hypocrisy of the Northeast’s practices in politics, housing and even sports. In 1939, the school superintendent of Springfield, Massachusetts, John Granrud, attempted to pioneer revolutionary hiring practices to incorporate a “crazy quilt of races, religions and ethnicities” and celebrate the plethora of differences within the student body. The school’s integration gained national notoriety and even a Hollywood film (It Happened in Springfield)—until a Democratic backlash shut it down in 1945.

Claiming that there was no discrimination, the new superintendent asked, “why enact, or continue, a program to root it out?”

The facts within ethnically divided neighborhoods like Brooklyn belied this smug attitude. The arrival of Jackie Robinson challenged Dodgers fans to “step away from the old prejudices,” not just in embracing the black ballplayer, but in the experience of integration in the stands at Ebbets Field. “Segregated housing,” Sokol asserts, “was the scourge of the North”—from the Robinson family’s travails at finding a welcoming community in Connecticut to the deeply divisive struggle to integrate Northeastern schools from 1957 onward. The elections of enormously influential African-Americans like Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke and New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm offered new champions to equality, while Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff challenged his colleagues to hold the mirror up to look inward and acknowledge racism’s intractable existence.

With sharp research and insights, Sokol follows this blithe and self-congratulatory legacy through the election of President Barack Obama.

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A MAN OF GOOD HOPE

Steinberg, Jonny Knopf (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-35272-7

Steinberg (Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City, 2011, etc.) weaves together the many personas of a man whose story is at once unique and an archetypal example of an all-too-large collective.

Asad Abdullahi is many things: refugee, entrepreneur, father, dreamer. In the beginning, though, his identity was simple: a happy child with loving parents living in a city he called his own. That city was Mogadishu, Somalia, and in 1991, Asad’s idyllic family life was shattered due to their identity as members of the Daarood tribe. When violence against Daarood men became common, Asad’s father started sleeping away from home to keep the family safe. One morning, he simply didn’t return. Soon after, Asad’s mother was murdered by militiamen. As his family and other Daarood refugees fled the violence and eventually their country, Asad was repeatedly separated from those he knew and loved. Upon his eventual arrival in Kenya, the ritual of leaving everything he knew behind became the norm. He created new, nontraditional family units, but he always separated himself from them because, as Steinberg writes, “he is a person with an enormous appetite for risk.” Asad’s adolescent years were marked by a pattern of being taken in and looked after just long enough for him to believe he could improve his life by moving on. So he moved continuously on and sometimes up, carrying the scars of failures and mistakes with him along the way. Steinberg’s solid prose is perfect for the task of sharing Asad’s history. He probes the darkest moments of his subject’s life without ever becoming maudlin, telling the story starkly and bluntly. He ably demonstrates to readers Asad’s absolute refusal to give up while reminding them that, despite his tribulations, in many ways, his path was his own to form.

For truly capturing the power of dreams and the resilience of human nature, this book deserves a wide audience.

(6 maps; 4 illustrations)

HOW TO GROW UP A Memoir

Tea, Michelle Plume (304 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-14-218119-5

A memoir about how sobriety helped a recovering alcoholic belatedly become an adult.

Title aside, this isn’t a how-to book but more of a cautionary tale. As Tea (Valencia, 2008, etc.) writes, “I am someone whose path to adulthood is not a clear A to B, a straight line through life. My life is |

more like A, B, back to A, but it’s a different A this time, and now B looks so different from my time back at A—and whoa, here’s C, what a trip! I’m a grown-up!” It’s a life that has encompassed marriage to a woman after a life of often passionate, frequently misguided relationships with much younger men; of finding a place of her own after living in party houses; of teaching writing in college though she never graduated; of earning a living through writing and speaking that she once did almost for free.

And of prostitution, phone sex, meth and heroin—though she treads lightly in this book on those areas. She writes, as she says, with “the dark domestic humor of a satanic Erma Bombeck,” and this is thematic territory that others have explored before her. As the memoir plays chronological hopscotch, some chapters might have fared better as stand-alone essays (particularly “How to Break Up,” which comes after she has settled down, married and her breakups are presumably behind her), and some of the concepts seem a little forced (“Hail the breakover, a breakup-inspired makeover”), but generally, the personality of her writing carries readers through. There’s also an inspirational quality to the way a life that once seemed so wayward (even to the author) has worked out so well.

An engaging and often darkly funny memoir. Life begins at 40 for the author, who got a late start on adulthood and had a wild time getting there.

CULTURE CRASH The Killing of the Creative Class

Timberg, Scott Yale Univ. (320 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-300-19588-0

A journalist investigates the state of the arts.

Anger infuses ArtsJournal editor Timberg’s (co-author, Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, 2003) report on threats to the “creative class,” which he defines, broadly, as “anyone who helps create or disseminate culture,” including artists, musicians, librarians and architects, as well as “their often-mocked supporting casts—record store clerks, roadies, critics, publicists, and supposedly exploitative record label folk...deejays, bookstore clerks, theater and set designers, people who edit books in publishing houses, and so on.” The author, who lost his job as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times as a result of downsizing, has found that many others like him—creative types wanting only to support themselves and their families— have been hurt since the recession began in 2008. Some have been forced into the “gig economy,” fighting “to keep a home, a livelihood, or medical coverage” while taking low-paying freelance jobs. Free agency, rather than allowing people “to live flexible and self-determining lives full of meaning,” instead makes their lives precarious.

Among forces undermining the creative class are the culture of celebrity, corporations’ emphasis on the monetary return of arts and entertainment, and growing income inequality. In kirkus.com

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“A vivid portrait of citizens who gave priority to day-to-day lives but rarely forgot they were engaged in the greatest war in history.” from in these times

academia, the author contends that the professoriate “is de-professionalized the same way journalism has been,” with adjuncts replacing tenured professors and a few superstars hired to teach thousands of students in profitable online courses. In response to his dismal findings, Timberg offers a few ardent but vague suggestions: “stirring passion for culture in schoolkids and college students”; inspiring academics to address readers outside of their narrow fields; expanding “midlist” offerings by book publishers and movie companies; and reviving vigorous public support for culture.

Timberg’s bibliographic essay cites many authors echoing his arguments; a more focused analysis and concrete solutions would have strengthened this book.

THE LAST ESCAPER

Tunstall, Peter Overlook (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-1-4683-1055-9

A remarkable memoir of a British lad’s salad days flying bombers against the Nazis and then repeatedly escaping their prison camps.

Tunstall, who died in 2013, suggests that his debut might be the last of its kind: “To the best of my knowledge, there are fewer than half a dozen of us still alive who were in Colditz during the Second World War.” The author grew up simultaneously irreverent and patriotic, entranced by the early spirit of aviation. An RAF officer when war broke out, Tunstall yearned to fly fighters and participated in chaotic raids against German fuel production, piloting the primitive Hampden bomber. After navigational problems forced him to land on a Dutch beach in August 1940, he and his fellow soldiers were captured by German occupiers.

The British prisoners maintained a cheerful defiance, following Tunstall’s training to become “as big a bloody nuisance as possible to the enemy” once a prisoner of war. Immediately, Tunstall became preoccupied by the determination to escape: “I had not [yet] learned that the best time to escape is usually as soon as possible.” Recaptured after two cunning attempts involving fabricated uniforms, Tunstall was sent to the notorious “punishment camp” Colditz Castle. Though considered escape-proof, the Nazis erred in consolidating the most recalcitrant Allied POWs in one place. As the war continued, MI9 increasingly aided the British POWs, smuggling in money and forged documents, while Tunstall audaciously sent them intelligence inside split photographs, via letters he was permitted to send to his fiancee. Tunstall portrays a brutal, surreal time with detailed recall and elegant, roguish humor, though he never loses sight of the larger stakes, noting how the Germans “seemed to wallow in the atmosphere of harsh oppression and hopelessness they had created.”

An engrossing valediction to the tough, imaginative generation forged by the war.

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IN THESE TIMES Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815

Uglow, Jenny Farrar, Straus and Giroux (752 pp.) $40.00 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-374-28090-1

A fascinating account of how Britons lived through a generation of war.

Despite painful memories of defeat in the United States six years earlier, Britons welcomed the 1789 French Revolution, writes British historian Uglow (A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game, 2009, etc.).

Finally, they believed, France was coming to its senses and becoming like England: a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and liberty. The 1793 guillotining of Louis XVI quickly changed almost everyone’s minds. France resumed its role as the traditional enemy but with an overlay similar to the panic in the U.S following 9/11.

The Jacobins and, later, Napoleon were considered loathsome yet fiendishly clever, bent on destroying British liberties either through invasion, spies, subversion or simply by encouraging unpatriotic attacks on the government. Yet Britain around 1800 was an imperfect democracy with a tiny electorate ruled by an aristocratic elite with few constitutional guarantees of liberty. Despite this, leaders could not ignore popular opinion and a pugnacious press, and even poor Britons considered themselves the world’s freest people; slavery, Uglow reminds readers, was illegal on the island. Despite high taxes, painful shortages, hunger and oppressive censorship, they endured for 22 years, but they did not suffer in silence. Immortals (Jane Austen, Byron, Wordsworth, Pitt, Wellington) have their say, but mostly Uglow delves into the immense archives of letters, journals, books and editorials from a highly opinionated cross section of farmers, shopkeepers, bankers, clergy, seamen, entrepreneurs, journalism and peers. “[The wars] affected everyone, sometimes directly, and sometimes almost without their knowing it,” writes the author, “and in the process the underlying structures of British society ground against each other and slowly shifted, like the invisible movement of tectonic plates.”

A vivid portrait of citizens who gave priority to day-today lives but rarely forgot they were engaged in the greatest war in history.

THE CONVERSATION A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care

Volandes, Angelo E. Bloomsbury (240 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-62040-854-4

Harvard Medical School researcher Volandes, founder of Advance Care Planning Decisions, draws the curtain aside to reveal the painful realities of dying in a hospital setting. |

Despite tremendous advances prolonging life, writes the author, “[b]y most accounts, [the] transformation of death from a natural process occurring at home to a medicalized event taking place outside the home has been disastrous.”

Volandes explores the options open to patients and their families. Taking examples from his experiences as a physician, he describes how his perspective changed over time and how he has been able to help families make tough end-of-life decisions.

Helping patients and their families anticipate their choices is important. Therefore, it is necessary to have an open conversation in advance regarding the alternatives—e.g., painful medical intervention to extend life or palliative treatment to ease a patient’s last moments. “Without this open conversation about death,” writes the author, “patients are traumatized needlessly, leaving their families with the emotional scars of witnessing hyper-medicalized deaths of their loved ones.”

Volandes references surprising results from a 2007 research study showing that patients who chose palliative care actually lived longer. He also cites a 2008 study that involved 332 patients who were suffering from advanced cancer. “The researchers found no evidence of distress or psychiatric illness in patients who had end-of-life discussions with their physicians,” he writes. Volandes describes how he prepared patients and their proxies for the kinds of decisions they would face as they sought an optimal balance between prolonging life and palliative care. In many cases, he would take them to intensive care units to witness end-of-life treatment. In the appendices, the author offers guidelines and resources available to families facing difficult end-of-life decisions.

A compassionate and informative treatment of a painful subject.

FEELING SMART Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think

Winter, Eyal PublicAffairs (288 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 30, 2014 978-1-61039-490-1

A Humboldt Prize–winning Israeli scholar of behavioral economics advances the concept of rational emotions in a book filled with fascinating studies and personal anecdotes.

Winter (Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of Rationality/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) turns to game theory, the study of interactive decisions, for explanations of how emotional behavior can bring about cooperation in situations in which rational behavior fails to do so. In the classic prisoner’s dilemma, for example, the author sees that an emotional need for reciprocity is the main motivation for cooperation. Treading the line between economics and psychology, Winter rejects the idea that the brain has separate mechanisms for emotional behavior and rational behavior. In his view, the two systems are intertwined and constantly in dialogue, with |

our emotions helping us to make rational decisions because our emotional behavior creates the possibility of influencing the behaviors of others. Besides his frequent references to the work of other economists, many of them Nobel Prize winners, and to the research experiments of psychologists, Winter often turns to his own life to make his points. A study of the difference in work habits of northern and southern Italians, an experiment revealing the cultural differences among Israeli, Chinese and Palestinian players in a game of giving and taking, and the risktaking behaviors of bomber pilots in World War II are all woven into a narrative that includes a story about his aunts’ food negotiations at holiday meals and his cool, poker-playing uncle’s ability to win by reading the faces of the other players.

No special knowledge of game theory or of economic theory is required to follow Winter’s arguments, and his insights about human behavior range over a variety of areas: politics, religion, sex, marriage and art. A lively, accessible work.

THE NUNS OF SANT’AMBROGIO The True Story of a Convent in Scandal

Wolf, Hubert Knopf (512 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-385-35190-4

The long-hidden story of the ultimate convent scandal, masterfully retold.

Accessing archival files first opened to the public by Pope John Paul II in 1998, Wolf (Ecclesiastical History/Univ. of Muenster) pieces together a mid-1800s inquisition trial of incendiary proportions. Set in the Roman convent of Sant’Ambrogio, the author lays out a perfect storm of scandal, involving heresy, decades of abuse, webs of sexual misconduct and murder. The story begins with a twice-widowed princess who, fulfilling a lifelong goal, entered the convent in 1858. Within less than a year, she escaped, fearing for her life.

Her testimony began an investigation that would uncover the secret world of Sant’Ambrogio. Wolf ’s narrative centers on Vincenzo Leone Sallua, the investigating judge who systematically uncovered and presented his case. He discovered that the nuns of the convent were venerating their founder as a saint, even though she had been condemned and exiled by Rome. Worse, their young novice mistress, Maria Luisa, was being treated as a living saint, credited with miraculous powers. Further investigations revealed generational repetition of lesbian rituals and sexual abuses, affairs with priests, embezzling of funds and murders to hush up troublesome nuns. In the end, the accused were punished, the nuns dispersed, the building razed, and even the graves of certain nuns removed. Sant’Ambrogio was to be wiped from history, and nearly was so, for well over a century.

Wolf has expertly recovered and retold this scandalous tale in all its gory, as well as bureaucratic, detail. He also provides readers with ample background to comprehend the geopolitical kirkus.com

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“A provocative, consistently engaging counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that rock ’n’ roll killed Tin Pan Alley.” from the b side

THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society

and ecclesiastical tapestry against which this drama played out.

However, modern readers are left wondering what lessons this story has to teach today. Is the tale of Sant’Ambrogio simply a titillation of history, or does it speak to deeper issues of the church? Wolf is largely silent on that count.

An eye-opening story of evil in a holy place. (37 color illustrations)

THE B SIDE The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song Yagoda, Ben Riverhead (304 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-1-59448-849-8

The latest from Yagoda (Journalism/ Delaware Univ.; How to Not Write Bad, 2013, etc.) shows good ears, strong critical instincts and an unabashed love for a variety of music, including the rock ’n’ roll that supposedly closed the pages on the Great American Songbook—the few hundred standards that have endured through a wide variety of distinctive interpretations.

“The songs were composed with sundry goals in mind, producing great art rarely being one of them,” writes the author.

“But the songs...took on lives of their own: it turned out they lent themselves to being interpreted in different styles and with different approaches by a range of singers and musicians. They became a repertoire, a canon, repeatedly redefined by distinctive performances.” They had their heyday in the first half of the 20th century, and they were the work of the likes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and dozens of others. In a conversational style and using an anecdotal approach, Yagoda traces the effects of the broadening from a New York–centric concentration to a wider expanse of vernacular popular music, the shift from sheet music to records and radio, the battle between ASCAP and BMI for licensing, the popular dominance of jazz during the big band and swing eras and its decline with bebop, the ascendance of the singer (who had once been a bit player in the jazz band) and, ultimately, the rock revolution in which songwriter and performer were often the same artist. He makes a convincing case that songwriting was on the decline (and production gimmickry on the rise) before rock and that rock performers have not only helped keep the standards alive, but have extended sophisticated songwriting through the likes of Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb and many others. “The final page had been turned on one songbook,” he concludes. “Another was just starting to be written.” Yagoda appreciates both.

A provocative, consistently engaging counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that rock ’n’ roll killed Tin Pan Alley.

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Zelizer, Julian E. Penguin Press (384 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-1-59420-434-0

A sort-of-liberal president faces an intransigent, obstructionist Congress: We mean Lyndon Johnson, of course, and the class of 1966.

Zelizer (History and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Governing America: The Revival of Political History, 2012, etc.), a lucid writer, doesn’t need to cherry-pick to line up parallels with today. We—and many historians, he writes—tend to think of LBJ’s Great Society initiatives as programs that sailed through the legislature and, as if by magic, bettered lives through various pieces of civil rights reforms and new institutions such as the Job Corps—which “caused more controversy,” Zelizer writes, “than any other program in the [Equal Opportunity Act].” But why did the Job Corps cause such controversy? Because southerners, conservatives and state’s rights stalwarts in Congress opposed any federal program that challenged homegrown traditions such as segregation. “While some southerners grumbled about any distribution of funds to African Americans,” writes the author, “they were happy to see federal money go to the poor whites who were their constituent base.” As Zelizer notes, considerable energy in Washington went to calumny over liberalism and conservative purity and pieties, the right wing having regained considerable ground in the 1950s after the years of exile during the New Deal era. The author writes carefully of how the filibuster was exercised to quash Johnson’s programs by keeping them from coming up for a vote and of the “deadlocked democracy” that resulted. Johnson may have beaten Goldwater in 1964, but the right wing came rushing at him in the election of 1966, and of course, Richard Nixon followed two years later.

The resulting opposition was fierce, and Johnson was defeated or stymied at many turns, including in his efforts to implement fair housing regulations, a nonstarter in the South—but, surprisingly, also in places like Chicago and Boston.

It wasn’t all the same, though: The Republicans had a moderate wing in those days. As with all Zelizer’s books, this is a smart, provocative study.

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children’s & teen TUNNEL VISION

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Adrian, Susan Dunne/St. Martin’s (320 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-250-04792-2

WHEN OTIS COURTED MAMA by Kathi Appelt; illus. by Jill McElmurry...................................................................... 86 MY THREE BEST FRIENDS AND ME, ZULAY by Cari Best; illus. by Vanessa Brantley-Newton...................................................... 88 BLOWN AWAY by Rob Biddulph....................................................... 88 WHALE TRAILS, BEFORE AND NOW by Lesa Cline-Ransome; illus. by G. Brian Karas........................................................................91 LAST STOP ON MARKET STREET by Matt de la Peña; illus. by Christian Robinson................................................................. 92 A FINE DESSERT by Emily Jenkins; illus. by Sophie Blackall.......... 96 WISH GIRL by Nikki Loftin............................................................... 98 TURNING 15 ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM by Lynda Blackmon Lowery; with Elspeth Leacock; Susan Buckley; illus. by P.J. Loughran.......................................................................... 99 A POEM IN YOUR POCKET by Margaret McNamara; illus. by G. Brian Karas......................................................................100 ARES by George O’Connor.................................................................101 RAINDROPS ROLL by April Pulley Sayre........................................108

What happens when your special talent is especially dangerous?

Jake’s ability to form a mental link to anyone he’s holding a personal possession of—what he calls “tunneling”—has always been a secret. Only his best friend and his dad knew, and now his dad’s dead. But when he tries to impress his friends by tunneling at a party, his secret escapes, and his entire life is soon overthrown by government agents who convince him that he has a duty to save lives. No longer free to live as a regular teenager, Jake only hopes that he can protect the people who mean the most to him—his mother and sister. An exciting plot paired with a sympathetic protagonist makes for a roller-coaster adventure that asks some big moral questions: Is it ethical to tunnel into another person’s mind, even to do good? Which is more important, the individual or the country? The action moves at a quick pace that fans of adventure fiction will appreciate while still leaving room for deeper contemplation. Toward the end of the book, convenient plot twists drive the action, but readers may not notice, caught up as they’ll be in the web of terror and deceit.

Danger, intrigue, a dash of romance, and a good, hard look at ethical dilemmas—a pretty complete package.

(Paranormal thriller. 15-18)

X by Ilyasah Shabazz; with Kekla Magoon.......................................109

PLEASE, MR. PANDA

Antony, Steve Illus. by Antony, Steve Scholastic (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-545-78892-2

THE CASE FOR LOVING by Selina Alko; illus. by Sean Qualls; Selina Alko.......................................................................................... 113 DRAW WHAT YOU SEE by Kathleen Benson; illus. by Benny Andrews...................................................................... 113 CHASING FREEDOM by Nikki Grimes; illus. by Michele Wood.....114 WANGARI MAATHAI by Franck Prévot; illus. by Aurélia Fronty...................................................................... 115 28 DAYS by Charles R. Smith Jr.; illus. by Shane W. Evans............116 KALLEY’S MACHINE PLUS CATS by Jon Alexander; Kalley Alexander; illus. by Carrie Alexander; Jon Alexander; Corbett Alexander; dev. by RocketWagon.......................................... 118 |

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The essential words are right in the title—and somehow forgotten by all but one of the animals offered a selection of brightly colored doughnuts.

The titular panda is large and blocky, black and white against a neutral background. Mr. Panda’s expression is neutral as well, lending him an air of solemnity though he carries a lovely box of doughnuts and wears a ridiculously tiny hat with just one word on it: Doughnuts. “Would you like a doughnut?” he asks several black-and-white creatures (a penguin, a skunk, |

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#WeNeedDiverseElves

The good news is that Santa is an equal opportunity employer. The bad news is that I didn’t realize the extent of it.

Back in our Sept. 1 issue, in our roundup of Christmas and Hanukkah picture books, we reviewed a book called Memoirs of an Elf, written by Devin Scillian and illustrated by Tim Bowers. We thought this story of this 21st-century elf who coordinates Santa’s Christmas Eve deliveries with his ever present smartphone was pretty silly. We also took exception to its lack of inclusiveness, carping that, “though the general elf crew is multiethnic, the head elf is Caucasian.”

Aware of the Census Bureau projection that within five years the under-18 population of the United States will be majority nonwhite, I have made more of a point of noting the presence or absence of characters of color than ever before.

Why shouldn’t Santa’s head of ops be an elf of color? Just painting in background color isn’t enough anymore.

Then, a week or so ago, I received the finished book, which we had reviewed from a full-color printout. When the book’s publicist nicely asked me to re-examine our quibble, and I looked at the actual book, I saw clearly that the elf protagonist actually has “warm, brown skin and straight black hair—perhaps he’s Asian or Latino,” as our review now confirms.

I was horrified to see that we had leveled a criticism that was entirely unjustified—that was, in fact, 180 degrees wrong.

When looking at that advance, which was quite washed-out in comparison to the finished book, it didn’t even occur to me that that head elf was anything other than white. Between the paleness of the reproduction and, probably more importantly, decades of assumptions, we were wrong.

Here, then, is my public apology to all concerned. The book is still pretty silly, but that head elf and his fellow elves “represent a step forward for ethnic elf diversity,” as our review now states. Kudos to Scillian, Bowers and the publisher—and Santa, of course. —V.S.

an ostrich, an orca) in turn. The ostrich declines, “No, go away,” but the others speak right up. “Give me the pink one,” says the penguin. “I want the blue one and the yellow one,” says the skunk. Mr. Panda’s ever-so-slightly passive-aggressive but certainly dignified response: “No, you cannot have a doughnut. I have changed my mind.” By the time a ring-tailed lemur comes up with not only a polite “May I...?” but a big “PLEASE, Mr. Panda?” tiny young listeners may be so pleased—and relieved— to see the dazzling treats given away that they won’t notice how deftly they’ve been given a manners lesson. Households with toddlers may find a new family catchphrase as Mr. Panda demonstrates one approach to eliciting those elusive “magic words.”

Simple yet funny enough for multiple readings. (Picture book. 2-5)

WHEN OTIS COURTED MAMA

Appelt, Kathi Illus. by McElmurry, Jill HMH Books (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-15-2166885

Coyote pup Cardell is perfectly happy with his parents. He lives in a cozy adobe cottage with his artist mom and visits his dad across the desert, sharing him with his stepmother and stepbrother.

When Otis comes a-courting his mother, Cardell is resentful. Mama has had other suitors, and she and Cardell had agreed on each gent’s flaws. Cardell presumes that Mama will similarly dispatch Otis and growls at the persistent suitor. Otis can’t make jalapeño pancakes like Cardell’s dad, and “his howl sounded like he had rocks in the back of his throat.” Otis does have his own talents, however, and he knows that Cardell is “one tough little hombre.” Gradually, he wins the pup over with his delicious prickly-pear pudding, exceptional pouncing skills and hilarious stories. “Cardell’s grrr...got softer and softer until it disappeared altogether.” By the time, a “few moons later,” Otis proposes to Mama, Cardell and he are aligned, awaiting her answer in matching 10-gallon hats. Appelt’s telling sparkles. She expertly foreshadows the realistic conflict between Cardell and Otis by depicting the young coyote’s secure relationships with both his parents. McElmurry’s delightful gouache paintings depict a stylized desert Southwest. These coyotes often walk upright; they paint, dance, make music and fully embrace life.

This excellent take on modern, blended families melds a believable, resonant story arc and winsome, childappealing illustrations. (Picture book. 4-8)

Vicky Smith is the children’s & teen editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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“[Illustrations] visually describe the variety of tiny experiences a single day with a toddler brings as well as a parent’s intense focus on their little one.” from little baby buttercup

LITTLE BABY BUTTERCUP

Ashman, Linda Illus. by Byun, You Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 29, 2015 978-0-399-16763-8

Little Baby Buttercup blooms under the sunny warmth of her mother’s love, beaming as she eats (and wears) breakfast, builds with blocks, works the garden hose, hits the playground and returns home.

This read-aloud assumes mother’s singsong-y voice, which rocks with simple, solid rhymes (encouraging participation and pleasingly predictable to listeners). “Little Baby Buttercup, / how I love to scoop you up. / Scoop you up and hold you near. / Kiss your little baby ear.” She addresses her beloved blossom throughout in a joyful, one-sided conversation that narrates the everyday pleasures that spring from the care for a small child. Inset scenes, both framed and floating, and full-bleed spreads visually describe the variety of tiny experiences a single day with a toddler brings as well as a parent’s intense focus on their little one. Paintbrush and ink atop watercolor paper allow for both specificity and soft washes of color. Children might point out a dog’s bristly fur or a rose’s myriad petals, while a tree’s canopy softly glows yellow across the background.

Cozy, predictable, cheerful and brimming with motherly love—a dependably pleasing read-aloud for the smaller set. (Picture book. 2-4)

brother never remarks on its impossibility; less-credulous readers will wonder about this. Meanwhile, the muted tones of Hoshino’s watercolors soothe and, on occasion, amuse, as when readers witness the slightly smooshed lips of Juna enduring a hug she did not seek.

While a little logically shaky, this fills a need for those children who find themselves adrift when their closest friends seemingly disappear. (Picture book. 4- 7)

JUNA’S JAR

Bahk, Jane Illus. by Hoshino, Felicia Lee & Low (32 pp.) $17.95 | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-60060-853-7

A seemingly ordinary kimchi jar is anything but in this gentle tale of old friends and new.

Best friends Juna and Hector collect rocks and bugs in her family’s empty kimchi jars. One day, Juna goes to Hector’s apartment only to learn from his abuela that his parents came and took him to live with them far away. To cheer her up, Juna’s brother buys her a fish to place in the empty kimchi jar. That night, she dreams of questing underwater for Hector, only to awaken to find her pet has, remarkably, grown too big for its home. She turns the now-empty jar into a terrarium with a small bean plant, and that night she imagines she is looking for Hector through a rain forest. This pattern is repeated again with a cricket, and then finally Juna is able to come to terms with Hector’s absence and is emotionally ready to make another friend. The steady narrative repetition as Juna sleeps and seeks offers a reassuring pattern for children who might be missing their own Hectors. The logic (or magic) behind the jar’s occupants’ phenomenal growth is unclear, and Juna’s |

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“Zulay’s voice shines with rhythm and sensory detail, immersing readers naturally in her experience.” from my three best friends and me, zulay

THE TERRIBLE TWO

Barnett, Mac; John, Jory Illus. by Cornell, Kevin Amulet/Abrams (224 pp.) $13.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4197-1491-7

Miles used to live near the sea. Miles had friends. Miles was his school’s greatest prankster...how will he survive a move to Yawnee Valley?

Yawnee Valley is famous for one thing: cows. All new students at Yawnee Valley Science and Letters Academy receive a booklet of 1,346 interesting cow facts from fussbudget fifthgeneration principal Barry Barkin. On the first day of school, when Principal Barkin’s car is found mysteriously parked on the school’s steps, Barkin suspects Miles and assigns Niles Sparks to be Miles’ buddy. Miles can’t think of anything more awful than spending every moment of every day with smiling, officious, king-of-the-obvious Niles. On top of that, Barkin’s son, Josh, has decided Miles is a good bullying target. To make life interesting, Miles plans a perfect prank in his pranking notebook, but it’s foiled. That’s followed by an invitation to join forces in pranking from an unexpected source...no way! Let the prank war commence! Barnett and John launch their cow-resplendent illustrated series with the humorous origin story of the pranking duo who lend the series its name. Characters may be stock; however, the pranks are anything but, and it’s peppered with cow facts. Cornell’s goofy cartoon illustrations (especially the blasé cows) add giggles aplenty.

Fluffy, fast, fun reading for fans of Clueless McGee and the Wimpy Kid. (Fiction. 7-11)

MY THREE BEST FRIENDS AND ME, ZULAY

Best, Cari Illus. by Brantley-Newton, Vanessa Farrar, Straus and Giroux (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-374-38819-5 A glimpse at blindness, friendship and perseverance.

Zulay’s classroom has 22 desks, the children’s name tags spelled in colorful braille dots. Three desks belong to her sighted friends, Chyng, Maya and Nancy, and they all help one another. Zulay’s desk contains a “fold-ing hold-ing cold-ing” white cane, which she’s reluctantly learning to use with the help of an aide, Ms. Turner. Zulay, an energetic African-American girl, is based on a real first-grader, and it shows. Like any kid, she doesn’t want to stick out “like a car alarm in the night.” She’d rather, she writes on her Brailler, “fly with [her] feet.” She gets a chance to do just that at a field day, but can she master the cane in time? Brantley-Newton’s bright colors and attention to facial expressions swiftly convey Zulay’s enthusiasm, attitude and 88

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apprehension, as well as the skeptical and encouraging looks she can’t see. Zulay’s voice shines with rhythm and sensory detail, immersing readers naturally in her experience. Zulay’s mention of learning to read braille, swim and climb trees despite difficulty will reassure blind kids whose hands are also “learn[ing] the way,” and all kids will cheer as she and Ms. Turner fly around the track. A slightly raised braille alphabet on the back cover is a nice touch.

Blind and sighted kids alike will enjoy this cheery outing, which appropriately treats learning to use a white cane with the straightforwardness another might treat learning to ride a bike. (Picture book. 5-8)

BLOWN AWAY

Biddulph, Rob Illus. by Biddulph, Rob Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-236724-2 A rhyming picture book about the perils and joys of travel.

When Penguin Blue, in the Antarctic, test-flies his new kite on a windy day, it carries him into the air.

Penguin-friends Jeff and Flo try to pull him down, but they too are blown along. Seal Wilbur—hanging clothes on his clothesline—and polar bear Clive, fishing (very far from home), also try to help, but soon all are careening through the sky, pulled along by the kite. When they see a tropical island, they let go. The island is filled with friendly jungle animals, including a gorilla, but the travelers are homesick (and hot). Using ingenuity, they get themselves home (with a monkey stowaway), and all is back to normal. Or is it? While the monkey stowaway finds the Antarctic too cold and flies back to the jungle island with another kite—reinforcing home’s emotional connection—the last page shows the gorilla holding Clive’s fishing pole and dressed in clothes from Wilbur’s clothesline. Home is comfortable, but contact with other cultures has its advantages too. This tightly crafted tale shines with the hallmarks of accomplished picturebook making. From the clever (never cutesy) rhyming text through the visual jokes within the whimsical illustrations that amplify the storyline to the expert design of the endpapers— everything works, and it works together.

A master-class of picture-book writing and illustrating.

(Picture book. 3- 7)

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VIRGIL & OWEN

fur, grass, tree bark, log and water all appearing textured and touchable. But the tale is equal in every way to the visual appeal.

Even the youngest readers will grasp the gentle message of acceptance and friendship, where differences can be cherished and enjoyed.

Sweet, tender and delightful. (Picture book. 3- 6)

Bogan, Paulette Illus. by Bogan, Paulette Bloomsbury (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-6196-3372-8 A bow tie–resplendent penguin finds a fluffy polar bear and declares he is going to keep him.

Displaying a fierce possessiveness (not unfamiliar to toddlers), Virgil the penguin tells Owen, “You are my polar bear....Come with me.” But Owen has too much fun sliding with the seals and splashing with the terns. Virgil repeats his refrain, getting more and more angry: “You are my polar bear! Come with me!” Finally, (also true to toddler form) Virgil stomps away, flops onto the snow and has a tantrum. As a solution, Owen offers the tentative suggestion that they all play together. Deceptively simple, this lesson in friendship may strike some adults as shocking—Virgil never even asks Owen his name. It’s important to remember, though, that children need to learn how to be social, which this book wisely acknowledges.

It beautifully captures how some toddlers enter play groups or friendships with force because they don’t know any other way.

Perhaps this unlikely duo from opposite polar ends of the ice caps will help struggling toddlers become more self-aware of friendship faux pas.

A story so simple it appears to only skim the surface, but it just might be what territorial toddlers need to hear.

(Picture book. 2-5)

JUST A DUCK?

Bramsen, Carin Illus. by Bramsen, Carin Random House (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-385-38415-5 978-0-375-97344-4 PLB

An innocent little duck wants to be a cat, just like his new feline friend.

Duck decides to become a cat, emulating his friend’s slinking ability and hoping to grow ears and claws. But Duck can’t climb a tree or play chase or bat at floating leaves. When Cat overdoes a leap and lands in the water, he clings to a log—and it is Duck to the rescue. Cat thinks Duck is a real hero, and Duck decides that it’s perfectly OK to be “just a duck.” They do a “drip-dry shimmy shake,” and their friendship thrives. Bramsen employs simple rhyming sentences that bounce along in an easybreezy cadence. Text and illustration are neatly matched, and Duck’s and Cat’s body language and facial expressions are just right. Readers always know which character is speaking, as each has his own particular typeface. There are single- and doublepage spreads, vignettes surrounded by bright white space, and multipaneled pages in strong, bright colors. The eye-catching illustrations have a three-dimensional quality, with feathers and |

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UNMADE

Capetta, Amy Rose HMH Books (384 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-544-08737-8 978-0-544-37429-4 e-book Following Entangled (2013), rock starturned-would-be savior Cade makes a stand to save humanity from the Unmakers.

Using her psychic musical abilities, Cade discovers the location of her mother and, with her plucky band of friends, crewmates and living spaceship, succeeds in reaching her—though her mother’s badly afflicted by the crippling catatonia of spacesick.

The mother-daughter reunion is interrupted by an Unmakers’ attack. Cade and company rescue as many as they can before learning just how devastating the attack really was. Prompted by the need to take care of the survivors, Cade decides the time is right to unite the fragments of humanity scattered across the universe and sets off to find them. While Cade pulls together her fleet and defends it, she uncovers crucial information about her musically entangled connection to the universe, spacesick, the nature of Unmakers and her own friends. Cade and Rennik’s attraction to each other wars with their priorities, creating believable romantic tension. The action consistently builds: in stakes, in tension and especially in personal costs to characters. While unanswered worldbuilding questions occasionally stress suspension of disbelief, complicated twists and swift pacing keep readers moving forward.

The ending completes the major story arc while still leaving a few (mostly logistical) questions about what’s next for the remainders of humanity.

Fast and intense, both in action and emotions—readers who liked Entangled will love its sequel. (Science fiction. 14 & up)

AROUND THE CLOCK

Chast, Roz Illus. by Chast, Roz Atheneum (32 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4169-8476-4 978-1-4424-9689-7 e-book All kinds of things can happen in a 24-hour period.

A series of common-sense–challenged characters engage in some odd behaviors that range from merely messy through weird to downright grotesque. Beginning at 6 a.m., when Pete sips a drink, and moving through the day and night in hourly increments, readers meet Hazel Jane and her 100 marbles, Lynn and her imaginary friend, the odiferous Shelley and an assortment of other strange people.

It finishes with Pete again, having nightmares from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. Each activity is described in rhyming couplets that range from the simplistic “up/cup” to the tortured “muse/chartreuse” 90

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and only hint at what is actually happening. In a style similar to that of Steven Kellogg, Chast’s ink-and-watercolor cartoon illustrations are filled with all the detail that is omitted from the text. Pete has turned his kitchen into a disaster area of spilled food and dinosaur toys, while Hazel Jane is dropping marbles down the drain one by one. Steve has set the dinner table with the usual dishes and cutlery, but he has added a hammer, saw, scissors and more. All the characters have round bug eyes and appear permanently startled. Young readers will have fun examining these vignettes many times to find new and amusing elements.

Entertaining nonsense. (Picture book. 4-8)

THE YEAR OF THE SHEEP

Chin, Oliver Illus. by Chau, Alina Immedium (36 pp.) $15.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-59702-104-3 Series: Tales from the Chinese Zodiac In this 10th installment from the Tales of the Chinese Zodiac picture-book series, a curious lamb rallies her friends to keep the town from going thirsty.

Sydney is one hungry little lamb. Her shepherdess, Zhi, guides the way to meadows, where springtime has “coaxed tender blades from the ground.” But Sydney’s desire to go off the beaten path leads to mischief: She gets stuck in an apple tree; she munches on the flowers in a garden; and she discovers that a chimney is not her friend. After a great storm passes, Sydney, Zhi and friends find their land and pastures destroyed. Ever curious, Sydney uncovers a major problem with the river. She concocts a plan to help but will need the cooperation of all her zodiac-animal friends, who aren’t accustomed to working together. According to the author’s note, readers born in the year of the sheep are kindhearted and cooperative, and Chin uses these traits well to create a sweet, wild and woolly heroine. For the first time, Chau illustrates for this series, and she is a good fit. Some brush strokes and scenes are reminiscent of Chinese brush painting, and little surprises, such as a resting tiger counting sheep in Chinese, add mysticism and charm.

The Year of the Sheep is cause for celebration, especially for fans of the series. (list of zodiac animals) (Picture book. 4-8)

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“The cover reveals what makes this enjoyable field trip stand out; the narrator is female, a child of color.” from whale trails, before and now

WHALE TRAILS, BEFORE AND NOW

neared the Chesapeake Bay, they were captured and sold South, where Emily and her sister Mary were in danger of being sold into the sex trade. Eventually, they were returned to Virginia and ransomed with help from the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, whose sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, modeled characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Emily and Mary Edmonson. Clearly written, well-documented, and chock full of maps, sidebars, and reproductions of photographs and engravings, the fascinating volume covers a lot of history in a short space. Conkling uses the tools of a novelist to immerse readers in Emily’s experiences.

A fine and harrowing true story behind an American classic. (timeline, family tree, source notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

Cline-Ransome, Lesa Illus. by Karas, G. Brian Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-8050-9642-2 The young first mate on the Cuffee sightseeing boat, descendant of generations of men who worked whaling ships, compares whaling long ago with a whale-watching excursion today.

The cover reveals what makes this enjoyable field trip stand out; the narrator is female, a child of color. In her chatty spiel, the fictional tour guide offers plenty of facts. These are set on spreads that contrast views from the present-day expedition with the past. (The sepia tones of the latter add historical distance). She contrasts historic and modern attitudes toward whales, shows ways in which times have changed on shore and on the boats, and describes whaling techniques. She points out that the crews of early whaling ships included “escaped slaves and free blacks,” and indeed, the crews in the historical pictures, like the crowd of tourists, are racially diverse. A doublepage spread shows the excitement of a whale sighting today; the next spread shows a tiny whale boat from the past, its sailors attacking a massive whale with puny lances and a harpoon. Their sailing ship waits in the background. Backmatter provides further information about commercial whaling and whale watching, a glossary and good suggestions for further research. Karas’ pencil drawings, colored with gouache and acrylics, add intriguing detail.

This inventive look at maritime history has significant modern child appeal. (Informational picture book. 5-9)

PASSENGER ON THE PEARL The True Story of Emily Edmonson’s Flight from Slavery

Conkling, Winifred Algonquin (176 pp.) $17.95 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-61620-196-8

In her first work of nonfiction for young readers (Sylvia & Aki, 2011), Conkling presents the true story of Emily Edmonson and her five siblings who escaped from slavery only to be caught and sent further south.

Amelia Culver never wanted to marry, knowing marriage meant inevitable heartbreak when children were born into slavery and sold in the slave markets. But she married Paul Edmonson anyway, and sure enough, her children, upon reaching age 12 or 13, were taken and hired out in Washington, D.C. Her 13-yearold daughter Emily and Emily’s siblings shared their mother’s dream of freedom, and in 1848, they took part in what became the largest slave escape attempt in American history. Down the Potomac River they fled on the Pearl, and by the time they |

WAITING FOR GONZO

Cousins, Dave Flux (288 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-7387-4199-4

Oz, aka Marcus Osbourne, faces unexpected challenges when his family relocates from London to a farmhouse in a northern village.

He starts his first day of Year Nine in a school where classmates with thick accents give him a new nickname, “Kecks,” for the girls’ underwear that spills out of the family’s laundry bag he grabbed by mistake. It’s downhill from there as Oz finds himself on the wrong side of tough-girl Isobel, known as “Psycho Skinner,” and befriended by a fantasy geek named Ryan, who participates in re-enactments of movies and books, down to the “hobbit socks” he made himself. When Oz finds out that his 17-year-old sister, Meg, is pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s baby, he starts to write down everything that’s happening to share with the child he calls Gonzo in the unlikely event that Meg will decide against termination. In a three-part message to the baby starting with “The Beginning / G minus 245,” narrator Oz frames a series of humorous events and near disasters with chapter headings like “The Life-Sucking Brick of Nonsense” as he navigates new emotional territory.

Cousins follows up his debut (15 Days Without a Head, 2013) with another tightly woven, heartwarming story of the ups and downs in the life of a teenager and his family.

(Fiction. 12 & up)

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“Through de la Peña’s brilliant text, readers can hear, feel and taste the city: its grit and beauty, its quiet moments of connectedness.” from last stop on market street

VIVIAN APPLE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Coyle, Katie HMH Books (272 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-544-34011-4

It’s the end of the world as she knows it, but Vivian Apple does not feel fine.

In a modern America that seems to have forgotten God, Beaton Frick has been selected by the Almighty to be His prophet. Capitalizing (in every sense of the word) on such visions as “the parable of the Starbucks,” Frick has created the Church of America and set a date for the Rapture. Seventeenyear-old Vivian is certain the paranoia will dissipate, but when her Believer parents (along with thousands of other followers) disappear and natural disasters ensue, she finds herself wondering if Frick’s prophecies might be true. The teen’s presenttense narration teems with irreverent humor as she follows her decision to solve the mystery of her missing parents. This is a book about America, after all, so a road trip from Vivian’s Pittsburgh neighborhood to California is practically requisite.

Accompanying her along the way are Indian-American and BFF Harpreet (another Rapture victim) and Peter, whom she met at a Rapture’s Eve party and who also has family secrets. As on any worthy road trip, Vivian meets a host of unusual characters and begins to form her own beliefs. Although the story loses speed toward the end, readers will already be charmed by Vivian’s transformations. An open ending paves the way for the trip to continue.

For readers who like their realistic fiction with a whopping side of satire. (Fiction. 14 & up)

LAST STOP ON MARKET STREET

de la Peña, Matt Illus. by Robinson, Christian Putnam (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-399-25774-2 A young boy yearns for what he doesn’t have, but his nana teaches him to find beauty in what he has and can give, as well as in the city where they live.

CJ doesn’t want to wait in the rain or take the bus or go places after church. But through Nana’s playful imagination and gentle leadership, he begins to see each moment as an opportunity: Trees drink raindrops from straws; the bus breathes fire; and each person has a story to tell. On the bus, Nana inspires an impromptu concert, and CJ’s lifted into a daydream of colors and light, moon and magic. Later, when walking past broken streetlamps on the way to the soup kitchen, CJ notices a rainbow and thinks of his nana’s special gift to see “beautiful where he never even thought to look.” Through de la Peña’s brilliant 92

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text, readers can hear, feel and taste the city: its grit and beauty, its quiet moments of connectedness. Robinson’s exceptional artwork works with it to ensure that readers will fully understand CJ’s journey toward appreciation of the vibrant, fascinating fabric of the city. Loosely defined patterns and gestures offer an immediate and raw quality to the Sasek-like illustrations.

Painted in a warm palette, this diverse urban neighborhood is imbued with interest and possibility.

This celebration of cross-generational bonding is a textual and artistic tour de force. (Picture book. 3-6)

MY NEAR-DEATH ADVENTURES (99% TRUE!)

DeCamp, Alison Crown (256 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Feb. 24, 2015 978-0-385-39044-6 978-0-385-39046-0 e-book 978-0-385-39045-3 PLB Reality occasionally manages to force its way into a brash young motor mouth’s 1895 account of chills and thrills at a remote Michigan logging camp.

Scarcely has Stan noted the arrival of fearsomely strict granny Cora than he’s being dragged away from his small town to the woods. There, in his mind anyway, loups-garous lurk in the shadows, rough lumberjacks conceal horrific past crimes, and Scary Geri, a slightly older cousin bent on becoming a doctor, waits to “welcome” him. Being both accident-prone and gifted with a hyperactive imagination, Stan falls victim to a string of frights as well as pranks perpetrated by a mysterious mischief-maker. These barely leave him time to pen imaginary letters from his deserter father, absorb the shocking news that his mother has asked for and been granted a divorce, and add wisecrack alterations to the 19th-century ads and other scrapbook clippings that appear here on nearly every spread.

DeCamp also saddles Stan with an inability to tell whether he’s keeping his frank opinions to himself or muttering them aloud, and since there are no textual cues, he and readers alike tend to find out which at the same time. It’s a disorienting device, though Stan’s hasty attempts to back and fill add further comedy to his headlong narrative. In the end, it’s back to town and school, with suitors welcome or otherwise trailing after his mother. The author saves the identity of the prankster as a final delicious surprise.

A knee-slapper of a debut featuring a narrator who is rather less than 99 percent reliable but 100 percent engaging. (Historical fiction. 10-12)

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THE TINY WISH

Evert, Lori Photos by Breiehagen, Per Random House (48 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-37922-9 978-0-375-97336-9 PLB A little girl named Anja has another Scandinavian-themed adventure in this story illustrated with supersized photographs, a companion to The Christmas Wish (2013).

This time the story has a summertime setting, with Anja visiting her cousins at their remote mountain farm. The three children explore the countryside, playing with goats and riding together on the family’s huge horse. During a game of hide-and-seek, Anja wishes she were small enough to hide even more successfully from everyone, and her wish is mysteriously granted. She shrinks down to just a few inches, flying off on the back of a friendly finch to experience her new size in relation to other settings and animals. She uses a pine cone as a sled, makes a birch-bark boat with a squirrel and rides home astride a helpful rabbit. The high-quality digitally composed photographs draw readers in with sweeping mountain vistas and charmingly posed interactions between Anja and her talking animal friends. The text, however, is a little too wordy and enthusiastic, with a too-jolly tone and a surfeit of exclamation points: “Anja! You’re so tiny!” The ending falls back on the tired was-it-a-dream-or-not conclusion.

“Maybe it wasn’t a dream!” marvels Anja as she notices bits of vegetation on her sheets.

With its intriguing photographs but less-than-compelling story, this will appeal mainly to fans of her first outing.

(Picture book. 3- 7)

THE HONEST TRUTH

Gemeinhart, Dan Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-66573-5 978-0-545-66576-6 e-book With only his faithful dog, Beau, for company, Mark, a boy with recurrent cancer, runs away from home to fulfil his dream of climbing Mount Rainier.

Told in alternating first-person voices, Gemeinhart’s heart-rending yet suspenseful novel tells the equally gripping stories of the boy who went to the mountain and the girl who stayed behind. In certain respects, the story of Mark’s best friend, Jessie, who spends the novel waiting, hoping and worrying, is the more morally complex of the two. Even though he’s only 12, Mark makes a personal decision that affects others but in the end is his choice. But Jessie is the keeper of the secret, a task that becomes harder and harder as Mark’s parents become increasingly frantic and a dangerous snowstorm |

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approaches. Mark, who is plagued by headaches and nausea, must use every ounce of his courage and smarts to persevere.

Along the way, he’s helped and hindered by various characters; the most poignant is a biologist who lost his son in Iraq, and the most fabulous is a dog loyal enough to give lessons to Lassie.

An overexplanatory conclusion mars the story, though it’s still undeniably moving.

Writing with care to keep from too-explicit detail, Gemeinhart presents a rousingly riveting two-hanky read.

(Fiction. 9-13)

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

Gier, Kerstin Translated by Bell, Anthea Henry Holt (336 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-62779-027-7 Series: Silver Trilogy, 1

A teen who loves secrets finds herself in the dreams of four handsome guys at her posh London school in this first volume of the Silver Trilogy.

Having lived in six different countries on four different continents in the span of eight years, 15-year-old Liv and her younger sister look forward to settling outside Oxford with their divorced mother. Instead, they move in with their mother’s boyfriend and his twin teens, Grayson and Florence. Adjusting to her new family and school, Liv has a bizarre dream in which she’s watching Grayson and his three best friends perform a demonic ritual in which Liv figures prominently. The next day, Liv remembers the dream clearly, and Grayson’s friends, especially Henry, seem very interested in her. She realizes she’s able to visit their dreams, and they can visit hers. Determined to uncover the truth behind the dreams and unsure whom to trust, Liv discovers she’s slated to complete a demonic circle. As she narrates this surreal puzzler, feisty Liv conveys the curiosity, humor and bewilderment of a contemporary schoolgirl navigating a strange dream world while coping with her first romantic crush.

While it’s less compelling than her Ruby Red Trilogy, fans should enjoy Gier’s latest chilling, unresolved tale of sinister dreams and budding romance. (Fantasy. 12-17)

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THE SPIDER RING

Harwell, Andrew Scholastic (224 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-68290-9 978-0-545-68291-6 e-book She’s pretty sure that Grandma Esme is a little bit strange, but it’s only after the woman dies and Maria gets her special spider-shaped ring that the truth gradually emerges. And that truth is

crawling with spiders.

Maria is dealing not only with her beloved grandmother’s unexpected death, but also with constant bullying from a popular girl at her school, Claire, who delights in publicly humiliating the impoverished seventh-grader. When Maria discovers that the spider ring gives her a certain control over spiders, it’s not surprising that she might use that power to retaliate against Claire, even though her best friend, Derek, thinks it is a poor idea. Maria’s situation becomes increasingly perilous as she delves into the history and power of the ring, information gained from a somewhat clunky story within the story provided by the owner of a related ring. As she learns more and realizes that Derek’s odd aunt may be more than just peculiar, Maria gains perspective on the relatively inconsequential nature of her school problems. Nicely described, frequent encounters with very large numbers of spiders keep the ick factor high, and the fast pace of the tale will ensure readers are fully engaged.

A horror story for young readers that all but oozes spiders—a surefire template for success. (Fantasy/horror. 9-12)

BO AT IDITAROD CREEK

Hill, Kirkpatrick Illus. by Pham, LeUyen Henry Holt (288 pp.) $15.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-8050-9352-0

This sequel to Bo at Ballard Creek (2013) continues the adventures of the 5-year-old gamine and her “two papas,” Alaskan gold miners in the late 1920s.

Bo’s outsized dads, who adopted her in infancy, are loving and hardworking. The conclusion of the first novel saw the family welcoming another child and relocating. In their new town they meet generous, kindly (with one exception) neighbors of various ethnicities. The children explore, make new friends and begin home-schooling. As before, the pacing is leisurely, and much is conveyed through clear exposition that evokes time and place well. Mild expletives and some mentions of smoking and drinking fill in a slightly rough-andtumble background appropriate to the setting, and some darker elements encroach in the form of a character later revealed to be the victim of heartbreaking abuse. Then, Bo’s friend says 94

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the N-word, eliciting an adult’s firm rebuke. (The author’s note explains that at the time, the word was nonchalantly used.)

Main characters are well-drawn, but some are stock—the jolly, Yiddish-speaking shopkeeper and the Japanese brothers with broken English feel tired.

Overall, another warm and charming outing, and the family’s move to a different town and larger, permanent home is a satisfying ending—though Bo’s ever changing family dynamic may summon another sequel. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

WELCOME TO THE FAMILY

Hoffman, Mary Illus. by Asquith, Ros Frances Lincoln (28 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-84780-592-8

In a companion to The Great Big Book of Families (2011), Hoffman and Asquith tackle the myriad ways families are made

in the 21st century.

The energetic scenes depicting mixed-race, same-sex, blended and single-parent families transition from a husband and pregnant wife to a variety of other family configurations discussing adoption and foster homes. A green teddy bear provides commentary. Unfortunately, both the descriptive narrative (in its brevity and possibly unfamiliar terminology) and some of the cartoon dialogue have the potential to be confusing to the intended audience. Parents trying to adopt “find a child who can’t stay with their original family, because their birth parents aren’t able to look after them.” The accompanying illustration shows an adoring dad saying, “Amazing! She looks just like your mom.” Parents looking for a book to introduce in vitro fertilization may appreciate the coverage, but the chart of the “male cell + female cell” equation coupled with the smiling boy exclaiming that he “came from a glass dish” may need further explanation. Hoffman devotes another spread to how same-sex couples get their cells (women from a friend or “special clinic,” men also needing a woman to “grow the baby”). If children ask what a cell is or where it comes from, parents are on their own.

Laudable in its inclusivity and content, imperfect in execution. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

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“Hutchinson builds believable secondary characters and presents unexpectedly fresh plotting and genuine repartee….” from the five stages of andrew brawley

MY NEW TEAM

Howard, Ryan; Howard, Krystle Illus. by Madrid, Erwin Scholastic (112 pp.) $16.99 | $5.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-67491-1 978-0-545-67490-4 paper 978-0-545-67492-8 e-book Series: Little Rhino, 1 Rhino loves everything about the game of baseball except the bully on his team.

Grandpa James practices with him every day after homework to help him hone his hitting and fielding skills. He imagines himself a hero in the major leagues, making spectacular plays and hitting huge home runs. He joins his first team in a beginners’ league, where he will learn how to be a team player in real games. The problem is that Dylan, an intimidating bully, is on the same team. Rhino must use his “thinker” to find a way to deal with Dylan. He receives support from Grandpa James, big brother C.J. and Coach Ray. He patiently defuses the situation, surprising Dylan with acceptance and a degree of kindness. Rhino is an endearing little boy who is eager to learn and improve and cheer on his friends’ accomplishments. Written by major league baseball player Howard and his wife, this is a detailed, insider’s account of baseball action. Clever use of italics to differentiate Rhino’s thoughts from his speech reinforces the reassuring message about coming to terms with bullying.

But stilted syntax, especially in dialogue, and a side serving of distracting dinosaur information, along with mostly onedimensional characterization, weaken the effect. The conclusion is saved from oversimplification by Rhino’s recognition that Dylan will be a teammate but not a friend.

Well-intentioned but not quite a home run. (Fiction. 7-9)

THE FIVE STAGES OF ANDREW BRAWLEY

Hutchinson, Shaun David Illus. by Larsen, Christine Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (304 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 20, 2015 978-1-4814-0310-8 A homeless, gay teen finds shelter and hope in the hospital where his family perished.

Traumatized by their loss, 17-yearold Drew bides his time working in the kitchen of a suburban hospital. He lives in an abandoned wing and slips in and out of the halls and staff-only areas under the pretense that his grandmother is in a coma. He befriends two teens sick with cancer and finds himself opening up and falling for a gay teen admitted into the emergency room after being set on fire in a hate crime. At the same time Drew pens a gruesome comic strip called “Patient F” to exorcise his own demons and guilt; drawn |

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by Larsen, this effectively communicates his interior turmoil, heightening it to near-grotesque levels over the course of the story. Hutchinson builds believable secondary characters and presents unexpectedly fresh plotting and genuine repartee— the conversations among Drew and his two teen friends feel particularly real and are full of insight and humor. Hutchinson has trouble finding Drew’s own voice, however, both in the text and in the comics he draws, especially when he retreats into his own depression (“The hospital is my ocean. I am its Francis Drake”). However, the story resumes its momentum when he encounters other characters. A cautionary twist toward the end may induce eye-rolling.

Hutchinson remains an author worth watching. (Fiction.

13-17)

THE PREY

Isbell, Tom HarperTeen (416 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-221601-4 978-0-06-221604-5 e-book Teens uncover their post-apocalyptic, dystopian society’s secret program that segregates those deemed inferior to use as game in rich men’s hunts.

An orphan nicknamed Book who’s grown up in an all-boys government-run camp discovers a strange new boy, near death, in the desert. Book befriends him and learns that after the boys graduate, they aren’t bussed away for leadership positions as promised—instead, they’re hunted by the rich as entertainment. Turns out they’re scapegoated Less Thans—a designation given to undesirable races, religious groups, political dissidents and a variety of other discriminatory categories. Alternate chapters break from Book’s first-person, past-tense narration for a third-person, present-tense account that follows Hope, who’s been running from government soldiers for years. She and her twin sister, Faith, are captured and brought to a girls’ facility specializing in twins for twisted medical experiments. Brought together by chance, Book and Hope feel an instant connection. That doesn’t stop them from making a weak love triangle with another character when small groups from each camp unite to escape certain extermination. Running for freedom, they face such perils as soldiers and wolves, but the most dangerous are the hunters, yielding scenes in which the teens use clever strategy to defend themselves against the better-equipped hunters. Isbell aims for inventive description but frequently fumbles, producing phrases like “anvil-shaped face.”

Light worldbuilding leaves too many questions unanswered, paving the way for the sequel.

It’s an exciting concept, but the execution is for the most part mediocre. (Dystopian adventure. 13 & up)

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“Blackall’s illustrations are as graceful and historically accurate as she can make them….” from a fine dessert

A FINE DESSERT Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat

Jenkins, Emily Illus. by Blackall, Sophie Schwartz & Wade/Random (44 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-375-86832-0 978-1-375-98771-7 e-book 978-0-375-96832-7 PLB

Blackberry fool is a fine dessert indeed, and people have been making it for centuries.

Readers learn from the historical note that the name probably comes from the French fouler and means “smushed up” rather than a silly thing. Blackall’s illustrations are as graceful and historically accurate as she can make them, as she and Jenkins take readers to 1710 Lyme, England, where a mother and daughter pick wild blackberries; 1810 Charleston, South Carolina, where an enslaved mother and daughter pick them in the plantation garden; 1910 Boston, where a mother and daughter buy their berries at the market; and finally 2010 San Diego, where a boy and his dad use store-bought berries, an Internet recipe and organic cream. Jenkins tells the story of each family’s preparation, and alert children will delight in the different tools and methods used to whip the cream, strain the berries and keep the dessert cold. But everyone licks the bowl clean in the end. Blackall even incorporates blackberry juice as one of her “paints,” using it to color the endpapers. The homes and families are wildly different, which makes their shared delight in this simple, ancient sweet all the more compelling. The notes from the illustrator and the historical notes will warm the cockles of teachers’, librarians’ and parents’ hearts. A complete recipe is included too, so readers can run right out and make it for their own families.

There is no other word but delicious. (Picture book. 5-9)

THE BELL BETWEEN WORLDS

Johnstone, Ian HarperCollins 360 (512 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 1, 2015 978-0-00-749122-3 Series: Mirror Chronicles, 1

A preteen with a hidden heritage runs from slavering Ghorhund and into the arms of his destiny when a huge bell that few can hear summons him to a parallel world.

Urged on by mysterious allies and hotly pursued by a giant black dog, Sylas is transported from a modern slum to another realm where the land looks the same but the people have a different history and practice four different kinds of magic. There, he falls in with the nearly exterminated 96

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adherents of the Fourth Way, which cooperates with nature rather than forcibly altering it like the other three, and becomes the object of a massive hunt by legions of bestial creatures made

by Thoth, last and foulest of the ruling Priests of Souls. Why? Because according to an oblique prophecy, if Sylas can find his Glimmer, his other-world counterpart, he may reunite the two sundered planes. Along with folding in missing parents, coded writings, giant eagles and other comfortably familiar elements, Johnstone rarely breaks from a single storyline in this opener for (inevitably) a planned trilogy. Moreover, with the exception of one character playing a double game, he neatly divides the large supporting cast between warm, loyal, charismatic good guys and malformed, malign baddies. Stay tuned.

Tailor-made for readers who prefer their coming-ofage fantasies thick, straightforward of plot, and unencumbered by complications or moral conundrums. (Fantasy.

11-13)

DUET

Kao, Sleepless Illus. by Kao, Sleepless Simply Read (32 pp.) $16.95 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-897476-76-5 Sora and Sarah learn an unusual but satisfactory solution to the eternal problem of “two’s company, three’s a crowd” when Sora’s new friend, Kay, enters the world of the sisterly “duet.”

A pretty series of line drawings filled with partial watercolor washes and decorated with such whimsies as flowers, musical notes, cupcakes and leaves illustrates the tale. The text is composed of large-type phrases and sentences about the closeness of Sora and Sarah throughout the seasons. “Twin souls, friends forever. ‘I know your mind, Sarah.’ / ‘I feel your feelings, Sora.’ ” One particularly sweet and original sentiment finds one suggesting, “Let’s put soil and seeds into our winter boots. When shoots peek out we’ll have grown, too.” Sora, apparently the slightly older of the two, goes off to school, leading to the arrival of Kay on a cold winter’s day. The fact that Sora’s initial reaction is to banish Sarah to a closet is an unexpectedly dark note in an otherwise light tone. Fortunately, the closet is a pretty one and not entirely black: “Sarah sits in blue darkness.” Young readers will readily identify both with Sarah’s hurt and with Sora’s discomfort about hiding Sarah from Kay, and they will be relieved as Kay inadvertently offers a perfect solution for everyone.

The delightful illustrations do not quite make up for Sora’s breathtaking, virtually unquestioned unkindness.

(Picture book. 3- 6)

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ELLA

Kasdan, Mallory Illus. by Chin, Marcos Viking (56 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-0-670-01675-4 An iconic picture book gets rebooted.

Even before the opening—“I am Ella / I am six // I am an urban child / I live at The Local Hotel”—savvy readers will recognize the cover design of a girl writing her name in red lipstick on a huge mirror. Ella has brown skin, a bubble skirt and less of a glint in her eye than Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight’s Eloise, but she takes similarly rambunctious ownership of her funky, contemporary home-hotel. Ella’s mischief and cadence (and Kasdan’s minimal punctuation) ring thrillingly familiar: “If there are a lot of wheelie suitcases trying / to get in the elevator and these people are all in a band / with a bunch of groupies and publicists / and bloggers or something I wedge myself right in / the middle of it and drop my MetroCard.” The tattooed, male nanny “might go in with some guys to buy a grilled cheese truck”; elsewhere Ella reports, “Sometimes I put edamame / in my nostrils.” Her self-descriptions are hilarious; the text winks with merry self-awareness. However, Chin’s color-focused art is flat and unfortunately earnest, lacking visual humor. This newbie mischief-maker can’t approach the original, but that’s fine—it’s not parody, correction or competition; it’s homage. Both books together make a very cool gift.

For hipsters of all ages. (Picture book. 6-adult)

MONKEY WARS

Kurti, Richard Delacorte (416 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-74441-6 978-0-385-38848-1 e-book 978-0-375-99165-3 PLB A real-life conflict between rival monkey species in Kolkata becomes a dark, violent fable of totalitarianism and resistance.

Mico is a very young monkey when humans entice his langur troop into chasing the disruptive rhesus out of the city; even so, he knows that this victory is more gruesome than glorious. When the young rhesus Papina sneaks back to discover her father’s fate, the two forge an instantaneous bond. Soon, clever, imaginative Mico ascends the langur hierarchy while secretly feeding information to Papina and the other rhesus refugees. As Tyrell, the new langur dictator, grows ever more ambitious, bloodthirsty and paranoid, Mico finds it increasingly difficult to juggle his loyalty to his tribe and his duty to his conscience. With its pomp, pageantry and brutally effective terror tactics, its ghettos and genocide, the langur tyranny |

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deliberately evokes the Nazi regime. As a Hitler analog, Tyrell’s frothing villainy overshadows his charisma, but the allure of power—even for the most conscientious—is portrayed with frightening effectiveness. The straightforward prose has a disconcerting tendency to switch viewpoint midscene, yet it also ratchets up the suspense and dread with unrelenting urgency, compelling readers to keep the pages turning. Graphic and implacably grim, the tale does not shy away from the toll oppression exacts from victims, perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders alike.

Powerful and disturbing. (Animal fantasy. 14 & up)

LISTEN, SLOWLY

Lai, Thanhha Harper/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 17, 2015 978-0-06-222918-2 978-0-06-222920-5 e-book A trip to Vietnam did not figure in Laguna, California, girl Mai Le’s summer plans!

Twelve-year-old Mai (Mia at school) was looking forward to a summer at the beach with her bestie, Montana, trying to catch the eye of HIM (a boy from school), but she’s forced on to a plane to keep her grandmother, Bà, company on a trip of indeterminate length. Ông, Bà’s husband, went missing during the Vietnam War, and a detective claims to have found a man who knows something about Ông. Mai and Bà stay in Bà’s home village, while Mai’s doctor father heads into the mountains to run a clinic. Mai’s Vietnamese is rusty, and only teenage boy Minh speaks English (but with a Texas accent). The heat, the mosquitoes...even the maybe-relatives are torture.

Out of touch with all things American, Mai worries that Montana may put the moves on HIM; and the only girl in the village her age, Ut, is obsessed with frogs. For her sophomore effort, Newbery Honor author Lai delivers a funny, realistic tale of family and friendship and culture clashes. The subtle humor of clunky translations of Vietnamese into English and vice versa are a great contrast to Mai’s sharp and sometimessnarky observations that offer a window into Vietnamese village life and language.

A touching tale of preteen angst and translation troubles. (Fiction. 9-12)

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LOVE, LUCY

Lindner, April Poppy/Little, Brown (304 pp.) $18.00 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-316-40069-5 978-0-316-40065-7 e-book A European summer flirtation blossoms into something more in this romance set in Italy and Pennsylvania.

While on a high school graduation trip to Florence, aspiring actress Lucy meets Jesse, a wandering minstrel of a boy originally from New Jersey who busks for room and board. During the last days of her vacation, they share a hotel room, and tensions arise when Lucy chooses to spend time with Jesse over her traveling companion, Charlene. When it’s time for Lucy to go home, she and Jesse reluctantly part, and Lucy is convinced she will never see Jesse again. Fast-forward to her freshman year at a Philadelphia college. Lucy lands a lead role in Rent, even though her controlling father has forbidden her to keep acting. She has a gorgeous new boyfriend named Shane but can’t stop thinking about Jesse.

When Jesse shows up unexpectedly on campus, Lucy must decide between rebelling against her father and following her dreams with Jesse or sticking with her business major and playing it safe with Shane. This novel is ideal fodder for romance traditionalists, checking off every genre trope with the regularity of a metronome in solid if unremarkable prose. And Lindner does a good job of describing how uncomfortable travel can become when friends no longer get along. But readers looking for a more juicily written romance travelogue that teases and surprises at every turn may prefer Gayle Forman’s Just One Day (2013) and Just One Year (2013).

A satisfying if predictable crowd pleaser. (Fiction. 13-17)

WISH GIRL

Loftin, Nikki Razorbill/Penguin (256 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-59514-686-1 A sensitive boy with a troubled past and an artistic girl whose cache of wishes has almost expired find solace and friendship in a magical valley.

Twelve-year-old Peter and his family have recently moved to rural Texas Hill Country to escape his issues with bullies in San Antonio. Peter’s unemployed father urges him to “toughen up,” while his resentful, overworked mother can’t understand her withdrawn son. An outsider in a loud family that considers him a weirdo, Peter retreats to an isolated valley for solitude.

Here he finds Annie, also 12, who’s staying at a nearby camp. “[W]eird and bossy,” Annie’s passionate about art, and she and Peter bond in the valley’s protective atmosphere. Annie calls herself a “wish girl,” but Peter eventually realizes she’s a 98

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Make-a-Wish kid whose leukemia has returned. When local bullies terrorize Peter, he opts to run away with Annie, who’s avoiding more cancer treatment, but their escape’s thwarted, and Peter’s forced to speak out. As in Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest (2014), the first-person narration in lyrical prose adds immediacy to Peter’s and Annie’s life-challenging situations as their transforming friendship plays out in a setting suffused with magical realism.

A moving, mesmerizing story of wishing, listening and hope for discerning readers. (Fiction. 8-12)

THE COURAGE OF CAT CAMPBELL

Lowe, Natasha Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4814-1870-6 978-1-4814-1872-0 e-book For years, Cat Campbell has dreamed of having magical powers like her greatgreat-grandmother Mabel and attending Ruthersfield Academy, “the only accredited school for magic in the country.”

Yet her mother, beloved town baker Poppy Pendle, the now-grown heroine of The Power of Poppy Pendle (2012), is adamant that magic is a terrible gift, refusing to even speak about her magical girlhood. When Cat comes across her mother’s old wand, however, she is able to use it to change a hairy spider into a colorful ball—she is magical after all! Now she just has to convince her mother to allow her to attend Ruthersfield. While learning to control her new abilities, Cat must live out the motto of her favorite book, The Late Bloomer’s Guide to Magic: “Nem zentar topello” means “Don’t let fear stand in your way.” Cat easily conquers her fear of spiders and finds the courage to face the wickedest witch ever to escape from Scrubs Prison. But her biggest challenge? How to follow her passion for magic against her mother’s wishes. Lowe’s simple plot of parent-child conflict unfolds in a now-familiar wizarding world, tension arising more from emotions than external thrills, despite that wicked witch. The appended recipes include incantations and substitutions if readers are unable to find pixie laughs or unicorn milk at the local grocery.

A sweet choice for readers who prefer their fantasy thoughtful instead of action-packed. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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“In this vibrant memoir, Lowery’s conversational voice effectively relates her experiences in the civil rights movement on and before [the titular] march.” from turning 15 on the road to freedom

TURNING 15 ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March

Lowery, Lynda Blackmon; with Leacock, Elspeth; Buckley, Susan Illus. by Loughran, P.J. Dial (128 pp.) $19.99 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-8037-4123-2

In 1965, Lynda Blackmon Lowery turned 15 during the three-day voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

In this vibrant memoir, Lowery’s conversational voice effectively relates her experiences in the civil rights movement on and before that march. The youngest person on the march, she’d already been jailed nine times as a protester, once for six days and once in a hot, windowless “sweatbox” where all the girls passed out. At a protest on “Bloody Sunday,” earlier in 1965, a state trooper beat her so badly she needed 35 stitches in her head. The terror of that beating haunted her on the march to Montgomery, but she gained confidence from facing her fear and joining forces with so many, including whites whose concern amazed her after a childhood of segregation.

Lowery’s simple, chronological narrative opens and closes with lyrics of freedom songs. Appendices discuss voting rights and briefly profile people who died on or around “Bloody Sunday.” Double-page spread color illustrations between chapters, smaller retro-style color pictures and black-and-white photographs set in generous white space will appeal even to reluctant readers.

Vivid details and the immediacy of Lowery’s voice make this a valuable primary document as well as a pleasure to read. (Memoir. 11-16)

CAT & BUNNY

Lundquist, Mary Illus. by Lundquist, Mary Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-228780-9 The dedication page’s strategic placement of acorns attached to a branch—two intertwined and one, alone, sprouting in the opposite direction—foreshadows the conflict in this story of fluctuating friendships.

Looking like children in animal costumes, the peach-hued Cat and the brown-toned Bunny have been friends since they were born—“on the same day of the same month in the same year.” Pencil-and-watercolor scenes, rendered with an earthy palette against a clean white background, depict the duo daydreaming, bicycling and picnicking in a state of halcyon happiness. The Made-Up Game (their favorite) has rules only they know. One day, the game’s appealing train tracks, acorns and leaves attract the attention of Quail, who asks to join in. When |

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Bunny warmly welcomes him, the other “creatures” follow, and Cat feels abandoned. It isn’t until an actual kitten cottons to Cat, and they devise a unique game, that she understands it is possible to enjoy more than one relationship. A final woodland scene where all play together follows organically from a simple, unforced conversation. Short sentences, often paired with several actions on a page, keep the eyes moving and the pages turning at a perfect pace for preschool attention spans.

Listeners will definitely relate to the pain of being left out; this gentle tale offers an opportunity to contemplate one’s own role in a solution. (Picture book. 3- 6)

KILLING TIME IN CRYSTAL CITY

Lynch, Chris Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-4424-4011-1 978-1-4424-4013-5 e-book A meditation on belonging, choices and denial.

Kevin, a 17-year-old runaway, dreams of living as a romantic outsider, but fellow runaways Stacey and Molly sniff him out immediately.

Utterly lacking in street smarts, Kevin is too earnest by half, and he reeks of privilege. During the day, he slums it with the girls or with a group of guys who live at Crystal City’s disgusting beach, and at night, he eats well, showers and sleeps at his welcoming uncle Sydney’s house. Kevin describes Sydney as his family’s black sheep, but Sydney is in fact a charming, self-confessed criminal who cheerfully offers to kill Kevin’s dad after Kevin implies that his broken arm is his dad’s fault. Lynch’s (Inexcusable, 2005; Angry Young Man, 2011) skill at sustaining an appealing voice while slowly unveiling the extent of his protagonist’s self-deception is impressive: Kevin—a bumbler, but every bit as winning as his sociopathic uncle—is clearly suffering, but his struggles are both garden-variety and largely self-inflicted, particularly in comparison with the true desperation of Stacey, Molly and the men from the beach. It’s easy to root for Kevin, but his self-pity and often cruel choices don’t make him much of a hero.

Ultimately, readers will wonder just who they’ve been getting to know and whether they really know him at all.

(Thriller. 14-17)

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“Karas’ gouache, acrylic and pencil illustrations sensitively extend the story, showing both the enthusiasm in the classroom and Elinor’s frustration in trying to compose the perfect poem.” from a poem in your pocket

THE BEE WHO SPOKE The Wonderful World of Belle and the Bee MacCuish, Al Illus. by Gibbon, Rebecca Thames & Hudson (32 pp.) $14.95 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-0-500-65027-1

“Once upon a time in the great city of Paris, near Rue Saint-Rustique in the 18th arrondissement, there lived a girl named Belle.”

After a few more facts about Paris are revealed, readers learn that the creative, friendly Belle visits her grandparents in the country every summer and that this summer, her special present is a bicycle. Belle pedals off into the countryside, where a minor cycling accident leads her to meet the title’s bee and then to learn a few scientific facts from it. The made-tobe-read-aloud storytelling rhythm of the first page continues throughout, with more text than is typical of contemporary picture books. In fact, the text, tone, illustrations and a song by woodland creatures are all reminiscent of Golden Books. However, one of its strongest messages is all 21st-century: Human beings need bee pollination for many of their favorite foods.

Other more general aphorisms include the bee’s comment to Belle—in French and then English—“A place and a purpose for everything—that’s the beauty of nature.” Readers unfamiliar with French language and culture will feel the lack of a glossary or pronunciation key. The red-and-white-checkered endpapers, echoed in the pages illustrating the contents of Belle’s backpack, reinforce the originality of this fantasy-and-nonfiction book. A list of “delicious foods” needing bee pollination is appended.

This book’s likable French protagonist makes its environmentalist message go down easy. (Picture book. 3- 6)

BUBBLES IN THE BATHROOM Discover the Fascinating Science in Everyday Life

Martineau, Susan Illus. by Noyes, Leighton b small (24 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-905710-21-8 Series: Science Around You

Ten easy-to-perform demonstrations of scientific principles at work in the bathroom are presented with short explanations and related facts.

This British import, part of the Science Around You series, features lively design and cartoon-style illustrations filled with bubbles, children, cats and mice. Clear instructions demonstrate the use of soap to make water elastic, the condensation of steam on a mirror, air pressure holding water in a glass, flotation, siphons, the bending of light in water, water pressure, water swirling in a vortex down a drain and skin wrinkling in a long bath. On each spread, the left-hand page contains the directions 100

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(three or four steps), while the opposite page offers a very short explanation of the results readers might see, plus a related quiz question, an interesting fact and a bathroom reminder. (“Don’t forget to clean your teeth twice a day.”) Strictly speaking, these are not the “experiments” the author calls them. There are no assumptions to be tested or statements to be verified or refuted.

The only question to be answered is “what happens if...” readers follow the directions. The nod to the scientific method is the suggestion of using a notebook to record observations. No special equipment is required, fun will be had, but little learning will result. Publishing simultaneously are Shadows in the Bedroom and Bugs in the Garden.

More foam than substance. (Nonfiction. 5-9) (Bugs in the Garden: 978-1-905710-20-1; Shadows in the Bedroom: 978-1-905710-22-5)

A POEM IN YOUR POCKET

McNamara, Margaret Illus. by Karas, G. Brian Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $16.99 | $19.99 PLB | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-307-97947-6 978-0-307-97948-3 PLB

Mr. Tiffin is back, just in time for National Poetry Month at school.

The third in what’s becoming a series about life in Mr. Tiffin’s class (The Apple Orchard Riddle, 2013, etc.) celebrates both a poet’s school visit and Poem in Your Pocket Day. By the time poet Emmy Crane visits, the children have learned all about metaphor, simile, concrete poetry, haiku and acrostic verse, as well as using a “poet’s eye.” Almost all the children are excited and ready for the big day, heads full of words and pockets full of poems. Elinor, who is thought to be the best poet in the class, has struggled with an epic case of writer’s block and arrives at school with no poem at all. As each child shares a poem with the famous poet, Elinor’s misery grows until she finally speaks with the kind writer. Karas’ gouache, acrylic and pencil illustrations sensitively extend the story, showing both the enthusiasm in the classroom and Elinor’s frustration in trying to compose the perfect poem. Sprinkling circular spot illustrations with double-page spreads of the friendly classroom, Karas shows each child joyfully looking, creating, sharing and writing. Gray and yellow are used to reflect Elinor’s moods.

Gentle and subtle, this sensitive story teaches a lot about poetry, perfectionism, and the power of a teacher and a poet. (Picture book. 4-10)

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HOW THE LIBRARY (NOT THE PRINCE) SAVED RAPUNZEL

Meddour, Wendy Illus. by Ashdown, Rebecca Frances Lincoln (32 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-84780-432-7

Take a popular fairy tale, modernize it and make the princess a sassy lass who refuses to let her hair down, and you have a nifty fairy-tale twist with a library message.

“On the sixteenth floor of a tall tower block / sat Rapunzel, quite idle, whilst growing her locks.” The milkman calls up, “The lift is not working, the stairs are too steep / my asthma is bad and my heart is too weak.” But Rapunzel refuses to let down her hair for him or the postman, the baker, her aunt and even the prince! She just sits passively, so each visitor goes away. Worried that they are neglecting her due to their reluctance to climb 15 flights of stairs, the troupe gathers together and soldiers up to the 16th floor to cook Rapunzel supper and deliver a letter. “Rapunzel leapt up and shouted with glee: / ‘I’ve got a new job at the library!’ ” So begins her love affair with library books and the discovery that “there’s more to life than growing your hair!” (The question of how she gathered the wherewithal to apply for the job is not addressed.)

The bouncy illustrations match the whimsy. Rapunzel’s hair is wildly curly and red; the prince arrives on a scooter wearing a helmet, black goatee and shades; the cast is multiethnic. The rhymes give lilt to the tale. (Two British terms, “lift” and “spanner,” are used for elevator and wrench, but this doesn’t get in the way of the fun.)

There’s plenty of hair flair and fun, if not quite so much logic. (Picture book. 5-8)

IF I HAD A TRICERATOPS

O’Connor, George Illus. by O’Connor, George Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 10, 2015 978-0-7636-6013-0

The creator of If I Had a Raptor (2014) switches out one dino-pet for another, doggier, one.

“Owning a triceratops is a lot of work,” observes the young narrator as he runs after his huge orange pet with a shovel, watches her “fetch” an entire uprooted tree and delivers a soapy scrub with a push broom (“No! Don’t shake!”). On the other hand, she’ll learn tricks, guard against burglars or “the occasional T-Rex” and (literally) bust out of the house for a joyful reunion at the end of a wearying school day. In bright, loosely drawn cartoon illustrations, O’Connor opens with the instant bonding of lad and elephant-sized ceratopsid through a pet store window and closes with a cozy clinch. In between, he shows the triceratops—lolling tongue on one end and waggy tail on the other—chasing cars, digging up (dinosaur) bones, eating homework and generally being boy’s best friend. |

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Tongue stuffed firmly in cheek, O’Connor lets his premise go positively nuts in the pictures while keeping the text understated for maximum irony.

Different dino, same goofy premise and rapturous tone.

Young dog lovers will understand perfectly. (Picture book. 5-8)

ARES Bringer Of War

O’Connor, George Illus. by O’Connor, George First Second (80 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 paper | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-62672-014-5 978-1-62672-013-8 paper Series: Olympians, 7 In the latest of his inimitable Olympians series, O’Connor comes around to Ares and the Trojan War. The heroically ripped Ares is depicted howling maniacally on the cover and later thundering into the melee in a chariot driven by Eris, the goddess of discord and plainly (as the author puts it in his closing “G[r]eek Notes”) “crazier than an outhouse rat.” Ares is openly reviled by his father, Zeus, thoroughly drubbed by his cooler-headed half-sib Athena (“Bring it, blowhard!”) but ultimately savvy enough to see his father’s subtle hand in the war’s course. In short, he comes across (like much of his immortal family) as wild and flawed but not one-dimensional. In compressed form, the major events of the Iliad and the subsequent sack of Troy serve as cause and backdrop for the internecine strife that the earthly war brings to Olympus. On both stages, Athena, still fuming from the beauty contest that started it all, practically steals the show. Zigzagging between Earth and Olympus, the sequential scenes present a typically lively mix of melodramatic action and strong reaction shots—enhanced, often, by not-exactlyClassical language. For all the chaotic violence, though, there is little visible gore.

What family doesn’t have its little disagreements?

Thank goodness the Olympians have many. (family tree, afterword, discussion questions, source notes). (Graphic mythology. 8-14)

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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Jasper Fforde

The best-selling writer’s toughest critics are his youngest readers

By Jessie Grearson

Photo courtesy Mari Fforde

The Eye of Zoltar is best-selling author Jasper Fforde’s 13th published book, but he actually dreamed up the idea for the Chronicles of Kazam series (of which Zoltar is the third volume) back in 1997 when he was still an unpublished novelist. (Fforde famously received 76 rejections before publishing The Eyre Affair.) Wondering whether he was writing for the wrong audience, he decided to “try a book for younger eyes,” he says. “I asked my sister, and she, too, had always been a fan of Ursula Le Guin, so she suggested writing ‘something with dragons and magic.’ So I did, but with my take on it—a modern world, where magic is real but no longer powerful and insanely despotic leaders rule the Ununited Kingdoms.” The book was “roundly rejected” again; it lived on his hard drive until his agent asked to see it again in 2010.

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At the center of the Chronicles series is teenage foundling and nonmagician Jennifer Strange, who, in the first two books, solves the kingdom’s dragon problem and helps save the noble powers of magic in the realm. In the third, she’s commanded by Shandar, a powerful sorcerer, to undertake a perilous quest in order to bring him the titular Eye of Zoltar, a gem with unfathomable powers. Fforde calls the series a “mashup of all the familiar magical storytelling tropes (TV, movie and book) but seen in an entirely different way.” He says he doesn’t approach genre writing by merely refreshing the old tropes. Instead, he “exaggerates” those tropes and “transplants them into the real world.” That means a nation where there is an “orphan-based economy, where magic is governed by bureaucracy, and where instead of magic being all-powerful and dragons to be feared, magic is pretty weak, and dragons are inconveniently changed to rubber for the entire story.”

With The Eye of Zoltar, Fforde says he wanted to break out of the Kingdom of Snodd. “Book 2, The Song of the Quarkbeast, seems to me now a little too domestic and didn’t really expand the richness of Jennifer’s world. In Book 2 we got to fly up to the Troll Wall, and I wanted more of that—something to explore, people to meet, unexpected stuff around each corner—a ‘quest-y’ sort of book.” The adventure of creating Jennifer’s quest to discover the Eye of Zoltar offered a “huge amount of imaginative fun,” he says. “We could meet new characters, have them battle new foes— devise Jeopardy Tourism—and put together a team of girls who can go on to defeat Shandar.”

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leads such as Thursday Next and Jennifer Strange. “I like Thursday and Jennifer a lot. I see myself very much in the Landen role [Landen is Thursday’s husband], supporting a strong and remarkable woman, and Jennifer would be a daughter about whom one would worry constantly but be infinitely proud.” The differences between the two characters are “fundamentally of reluctance,” Fforde adds. “Jennifer does what she does because she sort of has to, but I get the feeling that she’d like to put her feet up of an evening and order in some pizza. Thursday would hear gunfire and run toward it. Jennifer would avoid trouble—unless her friends were involved, and then she’d wade in without hesitation.”

Writing a series for younger readers may allow Fforde to indulge in the flights of imagination and silliness he’s known for, but he considers them tough critics and never writes down to them. “Children understand very complex ideas: betrayal, loss, happiness, camaraderie, jeopardy, danger, unfairness—normal school life, in fact,” he says. “So I tend to make characters as complex, plots as complex, but simply cut down on the number of subplots and allusion. I make the protagonists younger, too.” If anything, children may be the more demanding audience: “Children don’t want weighty prose or long tracts of exposition. A story for children needs to crack along at a fair pace. They get bored far more easily—and will have no qualms in telling you so.”

Since his publishing debut, Fforde has maintained his own extremely brisk pace; though he sometimes fantasizes about taking six months off to rest and recuperate (he says he’d indulge in flying and photography, of which he is “inordinately fond”), that vacation never seems to work out. He finds himself in front of his computer five days a week, “constantly chasing deadlines, writing, rewriting….It takes constant, constant working on and maintaining this strange and eclectic beast. If I didn’t sit down every day and work like this, I would not get a book done in a year.”

Kirkus praised The Eye of Zoltar for its “[w]ellplotted, intelligent hilarity,” but Fforde says his writing process is not marked by a use of detailed plans or outlines. In fact, he tends to take a “Gung-Ho FullAhead Both” approach to writing. “That is doubtless the wrong way to go about it, but it’s all that seems to work for me, so I’m not in a hurry to change it.”

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where things might end up but not a lot more,” he confesses. “Sometimes when I start a book, I have only a sentence or a narrative dare I have set myself.

Much of the detail that gives the world its charm arrives as I am writing—and those ideas are added to the series story arc as we go. Having little or no idea where the book will end up does allow one a huge amount of freedom. I really can go pretty much anywhere—and I do.”

Jessie C. Grearson is a freelance writer and writing teacher living in Falmouth, Maine. She is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The Eye of Zoltar was reviewed in the Aug. 15, 2014, issue of Kirkus Reviews.

The Eye of Zoltar Fforde, Jasper HMH Books (416 pp.) $16.99 | Oct. 7, 2014 978-0-547-73849-9 Series: Chronicles of Kazam, 3 |

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TWISTED FATE

Olson, Norah Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 20, 2015 978-0-06-227204-1 978-0-06-227207-2 e-book In this bracing tale of modern teenhood, the lives of estranged sisters Ally and Syd become re-entwined through an obsession with a mercurial boy.

With photonegative personalities, the sisters fill opposite dark and light spaces. Ally, the compliant, helpful, muffin-baking sister, is flattered by the attention the new neighbor, Graham, is paying her. On the other hand, Syd, the pot-smoking, rebellious, brainiac, is both fascinated and repelled by Graham’s strangeness and tousled good looks.

Syd guesses immediately that the glaze in his eyes comes from drug use. Plagued by his past, Graham sees the sisters as a fresh start in what he believes to be his genius filmmaking career. Syd becomes suspicious when a little boy in the town goes missing, and her terror mounts as Ally’s relationship with Graham becomes increasingly intimate. In short chapters that switch point of view, each character describes events in disconcertingly different ways; the story is compelling in its shifting focus. It’s a riveting scrutiny of a youth culture raised on a regimen of prescription drugs such as Ritalin and compelled to record and share every moment. The ending blindsides readers, shedding a clarifying backward spotlight on the plot and leaving a haunting afterimage.

A goose-bump–raising psychological thriller that will engross even the most jaded mystery enthusiast. (Thriller.

14-18)

DANGER IN THE DARKEST HOUR

Osborne, Mary Pope Illus. by Murdocca, Sal Random House (192 pp.) $14.99 | $9.99 e-book | $17.99 PLB Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-553-49772-4 978-0-553-49774-8 e-book 978-0-553-49773-1 PLB Jack and Annie go to Normandy on June 4, 1944.

In this “super edition” of her phenomenally successful Magic Tree House books, Osborne takes Jack, Annie and readers on their longest adventure yet. Summoned by enchanter-in-training Teddy via carrier pigeon to Glastonbury on the eve of the D-Day invasion, Jack and Annie are then airlifted behind enemy lines in France to retrieve Teddy’s colleague Kathleen, who has gone missing there. Once in France, Jack and Annie deploy their respective skills to make their way through a countryside peopled with Resistance members and collaborators—only it’s 104

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not so easy to tell the difference. It’s an ambitious undertaking, plunging elementary-age readers into a complex conflict they likely know little about, but Osborne trusts her audience to navigate the rough historical waters along with her protagonists.

Of necessity, some details are oversimplified, particularly the reason the Nazis are dangerous to the group of Jewish orphans Kathleen is protecting—but by introducing the Holocaust with Jack and Annie’s own developmentally appropriate incomprehension, Osborne establishes a clear-cut good-vs.-evil paradigm her readers can easily understand. Also developmentally appropriate is the magus ex machina deliverance that sees all players safely situated by the end of the book. Several pages of nonfiction backmatter will provide background and context for readers whose interests are piqued.

It appears there is nowhere Osborne’s Magic Tree House cannot take readers, as this successful foray suggests. (Adventure. 7-10)

I LOVE YOU NEAR AND FAR

Parker, Marjorie Blain Illus. by Henry, Jed Sterling (24 pp.) $9.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4549-0507-3

The rhyming story of a little cat who misses his grandmother and father, who both live far away.

With the world growing smaller and smaller, many children have relatives who live at a distance. Whether a parent is stationed abroad for the military or a grandmother happens to live across the country, children miss their beloved family, despite the connection that computers, letters and phone calls give.

Speaking in the first person, this little kitty starts by placing pictures of Grandma and Dad on the big wall map. “I know that we live far away, far apart. / But I can still love you with all of my heart.” Packages and Skype-like sessions work well for a while, but there are times when the little kitty is just too sad to be apart. Soon, both grandmother and father are on the way, by taxi, train and plane, and a joyful reunion occurs, just in time, it seems, for the kitty’s birthday. The singsong rhyme will allow new readers to easily memorize this comforting book, and sunny illustrations, especially of Grandma knitting all sorts of sweaters, keep the tone light. Unfortunately, the soldier’s apparent ability to simply hop on a plane on a whim will seem cruelly unrealistic to children with deployed parents, whose schedules are dictated by the military—not by a child’s loneliness.

Well-intentioned but confusing at best and actively hurtful at worst. (Picture book. 3-5)

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“While the exotic setting and intriguing plot will draw adventure lovers, Pirra and Hylas’ unlikely friendship and budding romance will keep them.” froms the eye of the falcon

THE EYE OF THE FALCON

Paver, Michelle Dial (272 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-0-8037-3881-2 Series: Gods and Warriors, 3

The epic Bronze Age adventure begun in Gods and Warriors (2012) continues in this third volume as two heroes must face terrible obstacles in their quest to find their loved ones.

Hylas travels to the island of Keftiu in search of his friend Pirra and his lion cub, Havoc. What greets him are a people decimated by plague and a land laid to waste by ash from a nearby volcanic eruption. However, Hylas is not the naïve goatherd who left his land in search of his kidnapped sister in the first book. He has fought the evil Crows, worked as a slave and been touched by a goddess. When he finally finds Pirra, she refuses to flee, claiming that as the daughter of the high priestess, it is up to her to save Keftiu. With the help of Hylas, Havoc, and her falcon, Echo, Pirra is determined to bring back the sun even if it costs her life. While the exotic setting and intriguing plot will draw adventure lovers, Pirra and Hylas’ unlikely friendship and budding romance will keep them. Fierce enemies and a harsh landscape are not the only obstacles—capricious spirits have a habit of pressing through the veil at the most inopportune moments.

A lush and riveting journey. (Historical fantasy. 8-12)

THE LEFT BEHINDS and the iPhone That Saved George Washington

Potter, David Crown (352 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | $19.99 PLB Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-385-39056-9 978-0-385-39058-3 e-book 978-0-385-39057-6 PLB Series: The Left Behinds, 1 Debut novelist Potter inaugurates a series with a new twist on time travel.

Who needs H.G. Wells’ big, clunky time machine when an Apple iPhone app will do the trick? Unfortunately, it’s a gigantic mistake that 12-year-old Mel and his classmates Brandon and Bev end up in a stable in 1776 with Gen. George Washington lying stone-cold dead in one of the stalls. The kids are the Left Behinds, students at the snooty Fredericksville School who have nowhere to go during winter break since their parents are rich, successful and too busy to be at home for them. An iTime app has brought them to the farm, but this cannot be: Washington has to cross the Delaware soon, the American Revolution must go on, and who is that Hessian guy with a German Luger (not patented for another 100-plus years)? Even worse, |

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the phone is down to 5 percent power. But Benjamin Franklin comes to the rescue with electricity, and the trio must figure out what to do about George Washington and how to return to the 21st century. Mel’s first-person narrative is engaging, the plot is fast-paced, and plenty of history is woven into the tale.

Even though there’s an awful lot of brand-dropping (skeptics may wonder if Apple paid for product placement), it still goes down easier than the similarly themed Rush Revere books. (Fantasy. 9-12)

A VIOLIN FOR ELVA

Ray, Mary Lyn Illus. by Tusa, Tricia HMH Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-15-225483-4

A long-deferred dream of music comes true.

The cover shows Elva in overalls, with a twig for a bow and a tennis racket standing in for the violin she covets. “Above the ruffle of talk and the rustle of dresses”—all the language is simple and gorgeous—“Elva heard music”; a violinist is playing at a garden party on the other side of the hedge. But when she asks her parents for a violin, they say no. So she pretends with whatever comes to hand and grows up, music always in her head.

She gets a job and responsibilities and a dog, but she borrows records (vinyl LPs!—this is a period piece) from the library and remembers. Her hair gone gray, she gets that violin at last, making music with the help of a teacher. The image of her at the teacher’s recital, a tall, elderly grown-up among a throng of tiny children, is unabashedly adorable. Tusa’s illustrations are cheery and absolutely full of life: Readers can almost hear the music Elva does. It’s a lovely story of the pursuit of a dream delayed but not abandoned, but it may be the sort of book adults give to other adults.

Though putting off a dream for decades is a foreign idea to most children, they should respond to the lilt of the words and the energy and charm of the pictures. (Picture book. 6-10)

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“Bright watercolor illustrations resemble decorated gingerbread and burst across the double-page spreads as if barely able to contain this spirited patriot and his enormous contribution.” from gingerbread for liberty!

DOABLE The Girls’ Guide to Accomplishing Just About Anything

Reber, Deborah Beyond Words/Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (208 pp.) $19.99 | $12.99 paper | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-58270-467-8 978-1-58270-466-1 paper

This how-to guide provides plenty of advice on setting goals.

In a cheerful tone that never becomes cheerleader-chipper, Reber explains the eight steps to tackling any To Do, whether it’s to change the world, become a better student or shave two minutes off your mile time. None of these steps are exactly groundbreaking—break your goal into smaller tasks, find support systems, manage any setbacks—but the practical, triedand-true advice works for the audience. The chapter on doing the work, which helps readers identify their particular Doable Styles, definitely suffers from having to explain 14 different styles, making the chapter drag somewhat. And it might be nitpicking, but the chapter on defining what success will look like could come earlier in the work to keep energy up. Yet these are minor issues in this solid work. Along the way, Reber provides opportunities for readers to figure out any obstacles that might derail their progress, including a technique called DIY Coaching. Advice from young women who have started nonprofits or achieved their own goals illuminates the struggles that even the supersuccessful face.

A beneficial resource for any teenage girl looking for help in achieving her dreams. (Nonfiction. 12-16)

GINGERBREAD FOR LIBERTY! How a German Baker Helped Win the American Revolution

Rockliff, Mara Illus. by Kirsch, Vincent X. HMH Books (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-0-544-13001-2

Rockliff and Kirsch introduce a lesser-known figure who demonstrated patriotic fire by baking bread for the Continental Army.

It is fitting that throughout the tale our hero is simply called the baker—curious youngsters only learn his name, Christopher Ludwick, in the closing author’s note. Brisk, playful text sketches Ludwick’s life and cheerful, generous nature. Although too “old and fat” to fight, when he learns the troops are hungry, “[t]he baker roll[s] up his sleeves. ‘No empty bellies here,’ he [tells] General Washington. ‘Not in my America!’ ” This is his refrain, and it is clear that this German immigrant, a gingerbread baker by trade, believes in liberty and opportunity. In fact, he volunteers to share 106

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this information with the foreign soldiers who arrive on our shores. Children must infer they are Hessians, a detail later confirmed in the author’s note. Bright watercolor illustrations resemble decorated gingerbread and burst across the double-page spreads as if barely able to contain this spirited patriot and his enormous contribution. The author’s note provides more information about Ludwick’s life and philanthropic efforts.

This appealing concoction is a powerful reminder of the good one person can do. (sources, recipe) (Informational picture book. 5-9)

ZODIAC

Russell, Romina Razorbill/Penguin (336 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 9, 2014 978-1-59514-740-0 A sci-fi refreshing for both its nondystopian plot and fallible heroine.

In the complex Zodiac solar system there are 12 Houses: Each exists on planets within a constellation from the Western zodiac. Those born into a House share certain physical attributes and embody that House’s qualities. When a tragedy kills the Guardian of Cancer, 16-year-old Rhoma Grace becomes the next Guardian.

Through her advanced star-reading abilities, Rho discovers that an ancient evil—the stuff of children’s tales—has returned. Scorned, the determined Rho journeys to warn the Houses she foresees are next to be imperiled. Accompanying her are two love interests: Mathias, the 22-year-old Cancrian she’s loved for the past five years, and Hysan, the charming, teenage Libran diplomat. This satisfying love triangle is resolved with frustrating convenience by the final pages, but Rho’s likable fallibility atones for this, at least in part. Though the narrative mentions “Risers”—people “born into the wrong house”—and Rho wants to be a citizen of the galaxy, the fact that the majority of people conform to the traits of their Houses pushes credulity.

Readers may forgive quibbles both major and minor for a story that touches on such complicated themes of identity, love, sex, class and politics. (Science fiction. 14 & up)

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BIRDOLOGY 30 Activities and Observations for Exploring the World of Birds

Russo, Monica Photos by Byron, Kevin Chicago Review (128 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2015 978-1-61374-949-4 Series: Young Naturalist

A longtime nature columnist invites young people to use their eyes, ears, hands and minds to learn about birds.

More than an introduction, this is an immersion in the world of birding. Chapter by chapter, the author discusses field marks, beaks and feet, wings, eyes and nests, habitats, feeding, migration, and ways to protect and nurture birds. Each chapter also includes directions for activities: things to look and listen for, things to make and do. The author’s stated aim is “to foster independent study by careful observation and hands-on activities.” While many of the birds described and pictured are labeled, the focus isn’t naming but what else readers might learn through close attention. Her lengthy text is full of information, presented in a chatty, conversational way that often directly addresses readers: “By now you might be confused....” While the author adds interesting facts about birds from faraway places, she’s mostly discussing birds that will be familiar to residents of the United States and southern Canada. (Both author and photographer live in Maine.) She even suggests observing chickens. The activities are relatively simple and could easily be done independently or as a family or class project.

For older readers or adults who hope to encourage young nature watchers, a thorough and interesting exploration. (Nonfiction. 9 & up)

LOVE ON THE LIFTS

Santopolo, Jill Speak/Penguin (208 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jan. 22, 2015 978-0-14-751093-8 Series: Follow Your Heart, 2 Written for teen girls, a choose-yourown-ending romance book.

It almost seems like a parlor trick; packed into 208 pages are 14 separate stories and 11 teenage boy characters, each a separate romantic lead. The book’s protagonist is “you,” a 16-year-old girl who has discovered your boyfriend cheated on you. The setting is a ski resort where your family rented a chalet. Your seasoned-at-romance older sister, Angie, convinces you the way to move past the pain is to “find a boy, flirt, and kiss him.” When you and Angie hit the slopes, your first prospect is a cute boy by the ski lift who winks at you. From this point on in the book, readers are offered choices: They can continue to ski with Angie or jump to a designated page |

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to pursue the chosen boy. Readers can continue to follow each boy’s story path to its happy ending. Santopolo does a wondrous job creating 11 distinctly different characters with such limited time for development, and the dialogue is snappy and creative. There’s no time for deep, thoughtful conversations between “you” and your potential suitor, and because of the limited plotline constraint, first base is sometimes reached with alarming dispatch. The complex construction of the book makes navigating a path back from one boy to a different romantic partner a challenge. But still, deliciously appealing fare for teenage girl readers.

Light and fluffy as new-fallen snow. (Fiction. 12-16)

THE VIEW FROM WHO I WAS

Sappenfield, Heather Flux (336 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-7387-4174-1

She’s beautiful, popular, athletic, brilliant, rich and in love—yet Oona Antunes feels herself divide into two selves at the Winter Formal on the night she takes her own life.

Frostbitten, battered and bruised, Oona is rescued after her heart stopped beating. Both selves undergo a harsh, invigorating rebirth, and one starts to rebuild relationships: with her unhappy parents (distant father, embittered mother), the best friend she’s outgrown and the boy who loves her. Partly healed, Oona (already admitted to Yale) agrees to spend a week providing collegeapplication advice to gifted students at an American Indian boarding school in New Mexico. The experience—especially her friendship with a Navajo girl—grounds Oona, pointing her way forward. The unnamed narrator, one of Oona’s halves (she terms the other “Corpse”), has a gripping, elegiac voice that invites readers’ trust. The wintry Colorado-mountaintown setting and enormous, cold Antunes mansion skillfully echo the water tropes in plot and theme. The story winds to a peak of tension, then collapses at the end like a house of cards. Big questions remain—why Oona chose this night, this route; why she split in two—whereas explanations provided not only fail to justify suicide, they consign her to secondary status in her own story.

Beautifully written—but after such polished, elegant storytelling, the end feels like a betrayal. (Fiction. 13-16)

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THE BEAR ATE YOUR SANDWICH

Sarcone-Roach, Julia Illus. by Sarcone-Roach, Julia Knopf (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-375-85860-4

Who took the sandwich?

An unseen narrator explains what became of a missing sandwich in an inventive selection that places the blame on a bear—but not in the way one might expect. Lured to a pickup truck by the scent of berries, a curious black bear dines and then falls asleep in its bed. While he snoozes, he is accidentally transported to an entirely new world. Mistaking the city before him for just a different forest, he ventures out, comically behaving as if investigating a woodland environment. The telephone poles might as well be trees, and the wet cement feels a lot like mud, after all. The text plays along with the bear’s misconception, while the energetic and appealing acrylics show what the bear really sees and interacts with; children will delight in the details as well as the humor involved in spotting the disparities between the pictures and words. But wait—just who is telling this tall tale, anyway? And is said individual worthy of our trust? A trifle more explanation or pointed questioning would have made the story just about perfect, but as it stands, this enjoyable romp is sure to elicit giggles.

Young readers and listeners will laugh out loud as they closely examine the pictures and find the jokes in this highly interactive urban adventure. (Picture book. 4-8)

RAINDROPS ROLL

Sayre, April Pulley Photos by Sayre, April Pulley Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4814-2064-8 978-1-4814-2065-5 e-book With lyrical words and striking images, a poet, photographer and veteran natural history writer celebrates rain.

“Rain plops. / It drops. // It patters. / It spatters.” From the beginning of a storm to the return of the sun, this splendid presentation reveals the wonder of water in the form of rain. Short, rhythmic lines, often only two words but rhyming or alliterative, are set one to a page against a full-bleed photograph. Sayre’s close observations, many in an ordinary garden, will lead readers and listeners to look more closely, too, both at her photographs and at the world around them.

There are insects hiding from a shower; drops cling to flowers, leaves and insect legs. There are even tiny reflections in the globules. Raindrops bend down grasses, highlight shapes and band together. Some of the pictures harbor extra secrets.

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carefully chosen images have been thoughtfully arranged and beautifully reproduced. Preschoolers can appreciate the poem and pictures, but middle graders will want the facts in the concluding “Splash of Science,” which provides some background and explanation for the short statements and goes on to describe “Raindrops Inside You,” connecting the reader to the water cycle.

Wonder-full in every way. (further resources) (Informational picture book. 3-8)

NEXT TOP VILLAIN

Selfors, Suzanne Little, Brown (224 pp.) $13.99 | $8.99 e-book | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-316-40128-9 978-0-316-40130-2 e-book Series: Ever After High: A School Story, 1 The Ever After High franchise begun

by Shannon Hale with The Storybook of Legends (2013) continues with a new companion series and new author.

Ever After High student princess Duchess Swan (daughter of the Swan Queen) is proud of her perfect grades and smooth ballet moves, and she is trying to come to terms with the fact that she won’t have a “Happily Ever After” life but is destined to become merely a swan, albeit a royal one. Her roommate, fellow princess Lizzie Hearts, is the daughter of the Queen of Hearts of Wonderland. Duchess envies Lizzie her confidence and her future, since her foretold destiny does include a happy ending.

What’s more, Daring Charming, the ultrahandsome blond prince and crush object of every girl in the school—including Duchess—has an unrequited thing for Lizzie. The actual plot is pushed forward as Lizzie, Duchess and a few more students in General Villainy class battle to reach the honor of becoming the titular “Next Top Villain.” As in the previous books, humor and puns (“What the hex?”) are generously sprinkled like fairy dust throughout the story. Garnering much of the humor here is Sparrow Hood, Robin Hood’s laid-back, soul-patched son, who is constantly riffing (both guitar and jokes). Readers will be mystified and perhaps frustrated that Duchess is so gaga over the empty-headed, narcissistic prince, but perhaps she will come to her swan senses in the next installment.

Another clever, comical story filled with fairy-tale characters’ teen progeny. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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“The unusual but effective chronology of this completely absorbing novel finds Malcolm frequently looking back from 1945 Harlem to specific years in Lansing, trying to make sense of the segregation he faced….” from x

X

Shabazz, Ilyasah with Magoon, Kekla Candlewick (384 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-7636-6967-6 Teaming with veteran Magoon, the third daughter of Malcolm X draws upon history and family stories to create a novel about her father’s life before the “X.” Malcolm Little grew up in Lansing, Michigan, during the Great Depression. Though times were hard, Malcolm felt that “when Papa was alive, I believed that I was special.” But Papa was murdered, his mother entered a mental institution, and the broken family was scattered among foster homes. The unusual but effective chronology of this completely absorbing novel finds Malcolm frequently looking back from 1945 Harlem to specific years in Lansing, trying to make sense of the segregation he faced, a teacher’s dismissal of him as “just a nigger” and his father’s legacy. Boston was meant to be a fresh start, but Malcolm soon became “a creature of the street,” and the authors’ evocation of the street hustler’s life is richly gritty indeed. Of course the street catches up to him, and ironically, it’s in prison where he begins to remake himself. He becomes a reader, corresponds with Elijah Muhammad and, on the final page, signs a letter to Elijah Muhammad as Malcolm X. The author’s note carries Malcolm’s story further and discusses the significance of his voice in American history.

Readers for whom pre-civil rights America is ancient history will find this poetic interpretation eye-opening and riveting. (notes about characters, timeline, family tree, historical context, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

THE WAY WE BARED OUR SOULS

Strayhorn, Willa Razorbill/Penguin (288 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-1-59514-735-6

Five New Mexico teens undergo a soul-cleansing ritual, with varied results.

Consuelo “Lo” McDonough is struggling with a likely diagnosis of earlyonset multiple sclerosis, which also took the life of her beloved aunt Karine. When a mysterious but oddly comforting stranger named Jay offers to perform a healing ritual, Lo jumps at the chance, quickly gathering the four similarly damaged friends she needs to complete the group for the ritual. The five teens—grieving Kit, former child soldier Thomas, drug addict Ellen, impervious-to-pain Kaya and Lo herself—discover that though they no longer suffer from their original ailments, their problems have been swapped. Kit receives Ellen’s addictive personality and uses it to embrace life again, nearly a year after his girlfriend’s tragic death, while |

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Ellen’s experience of Lo’s neurological symptoms forces her to be physically and mentally present in a way she hasn’t been in ages. The most spiritually significant transformation is also the most cringe-inducing: When Kaya takes on Thomas’ emotional trauma, she taps into supposed historical memories of white soldiers attacking her American Indian ancestors, with tragic results in the present. Although specific references to legends of and historic atrocities against the American Indians of the Southwest are sprinkled about, there is no attempt to authenticate Kaya’s experience.

The ultimate lesson—of having empathy for oneself as well as for others whose wounds may be invisible—is welltaken though sadly heavy-handed. (Fiction. 12-15)

NEIL FLAMBÉ AND THE BARD’S BANQUET

Sylvester, Kevin Illus. by Sylvester, Kevin Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $12.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4814-1038-0 Series: Neil Flambé Capers, 5

Neil Flambé, 15-year-old culinary genius, contends with Shakespearean lore in this fifth addition to the mystery series that highlights his name (and sensitive nose).

The action kicks off right away when Lord Lane of Liverpool commissions Neil to make a dinner for a party using a case of antique honey. After the dinner, Neil gives Lane a document he found hidden in one of the jars, and the peer disappears. Shortly after, Neil and his cousin Larry are commanded by an incredibly powerful British personage to find Lane. At first, Larry and Neil are stumped, but then they meet with Rose, a Shakespeare expert who is fascinated by the document. Then the story explodes: There’s a frantic car ride, pursuit by two large thugs and an abduction. This very amusing book incorporates playful character names (Brie works in a cheese store), puns (“Two Bees or Not Two Bees” reads one chapter head) and mildly gross facts (Harris tweed got its color from “old pee” in the dye), keeping readers engaged. Those new to the series should catch up quickly thanks to the carefully inserted back story.

The constant suspense, innocent romance, a lovely recipe for scones, and the flamboyant, irrepressible chef will captivate fans of the series and impel new readers to the nearest bookstore or library. (Mystery. 10-14)

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“Somber and urgent eco-fantasy, understated and tender.” from the dark wild

THAT’S WHAT MAKES A HIPPOPOTAMUS SMILE

THE DARK WILD

Torday, Piers Viking (352 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 22, 2015 978-0-670-01555-9

Taylor, Sean Illus. by Cardon, Laurent Frances Lincoln (32 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 1, 2014 978-1-84780-455-6

A little girl’s hippo friend is a bit of a handful around the house.

She opens the door—which is only wide enough to accommodate the hippo’s head—and invites him inside. His bulk brings a fair amount of the wall with him. (Throughout, Taylor’s text is straightforward and earnest while Cardon’s illustrations milk the situation outrageously in a dozen double-page spreads.) Next, it’s time for water games, which include lots of squirting and a raucous splash in the bathtub, full of toys—and what’s that frog doing there? The little girl gives the hippo a good scrubbing, then feeds him some delicious green branches. A big crunchy salad treat is far preferable to popcorn, chips or cookies. Their day of fun ends all too soon, but it’s important to “[s]ay goodbye in style,” because that will make your new hippopotamus friend smile.

And he might bring a friend of his own on the next play date. Taylor’s tale, while delivering a nice message on friendship, seems abbreviated, and the setup is awfully reminiscent of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and its many spinoffs. Cardon’s pictures, combining mixed ink and digital techniques, are quirky and bright, with simple bold shapes that should appeal to the target audience.

Nice but not memorable. (Picture book. 3-5)

I GOT THIS HAT

Temple, Jol; Temple, Kate Illus. by Foye, Jon HarperCollins 360 (32 pp.) $6.99 paper | Jan. 1, 2015 978-0-7333-3230-2

YOU AND ME

A peripatetic child shows off an impressive collection of toppers.

This Australian import opens with the image of a conical Asian hat and reads, “I got this hat in China.” The text then proceeds to show other hats the narrator has procured, rhyming them in couplets. The Caucasian child has hats from a “pilot” and “pirate,” a “diver” and a “driver,” and so forth. The text is laid out on one side of each spread in page-filling red letters, half a couplet at a time. The accompanying illustrations show the child’s nose and eyes peeking out from beneath each individual headpiece.

It can only be considered unfortunate that the imprecise and unnecessary term “Eskimo” is paired to rhyme with a hat from “Mexico.” The final pages ask, “But to bed I’ll wear which one?”

The answer (“NONE!”) features a nearly bald, gap-toothed protagonist that looks rather like an evil cousin to David Shannon’s David. This final image notwithstanding, for the most part the art pulls together and is paired well with the large, hand-drawn and -colored text. There is clear potential within these pages, buried sadly beneath some dismayingly stereotypical choices.

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In a darkening city, with only a few human, animal and insect allies, Kester toils to avert corporate violence and an animal uprising.

In The Last Wild (2014), Kester escaped a creepy prison/school (he was aided by cockroaches and pigeons) and became a Wildness—a leader of a group of animals called a wild. But animals weren’t supposed to exist anymore, and they still aren’t: A virus killed the vast majority, and the rest are vulnerable to corporateordered cullers who shoot on sight. Kester’s father invented a cure for the virus, but evil company Factorium locked him up for it. This second volume takes place in Kester’s home city.

Cullers threaten his wild, and Factorium seeks a mysterious weapon that Kester’s friend Polly is guarding. Underground, a different wild—a dark wild—plans to swarm into the streets, destroy the city and kill all humans. Feeling guilty for deaths that have occurred and desperate to avoid more, Kester slogs through a literal mountain of garbage, into underground caves and up onto a dam, all as Torday’s city settings become darker and wetter. Starlings take down a helicopter; Kester fights a dog with steel teeth. By the end, Kester’s wild is vastly increased, but defeating the corporation and restoring the natural world remain for next time.

Somber and urgent eco-fantasy, understated and tender. (Fantasy. 8-12)

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Verde, Susan Illus. by Reynolds, Peter H. Abrams (32 pp.) $14.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4197-1197-8 A chance meeting that leads to a lasting friendship is lauded in rhyming text and jaunty illustrations.

Verde celebrates not just the bond between best friends, but also the somewhat abstract concept of serendipity by describing experiences that might have brought about a different result on the day she is describing. “What if I had slept in..?” or “...the weather had been stormy gray?” or “a rock in my shoe / had caused me to pause/ for a moment or two.” Simple language, small touches of humor and an engagingly earnest tone enable her to keep things sweet without descending into the overly saccharine or sentimental, but it still seems likely that her message will resonate more with adults than children. Reynolds’ artwork, created using ink, gouache, watercolor and tea (an unusual but appropriately cozy medium for an ode to friendship), brings Verde’s words down to earth and cheerfully to life.

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shared activities of a lanky, androgynous, anthropomorphic yellow cat and a purple feline of similar proportions. Illuminating and expanding the action, amusing tableaux offer charming details and some slyly humorous misdirection. The cats’ faces, though simply drawn, are expressive and appealing.

Perfect as a gift book exchanged between kindred spirits, this could also spark interesting conversations about the role of chance in our lives. (Picture book. 4- 7)

GLAMOURPUSS

Weeks, Sarah Illus. by Small, David Scholastic (40 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-545-60954-8 A lighthearted twist on the traditional antagonism between cats and dogs takes place in an over-the-top upper-crust world.

Weeks includes several nods to fairy-tale conventions in her slyly amusing text. The saga begins “Once upon a pillow,” and the eponymous heroine turns to her mirror for confirmation that she is the “most glamorous of all.” Meanwhile, classic films are clearly the inspiration for Small. Created with ink, watercolor, pastel and collage, illustrations include a flat-screen TV showing Theda Bara as Cleopatra, a scrawny Chihuahua with Shirley Temple, Carmen Miranda and Scarlett O’Hara costumes, and a setting that evokes the glamour of old Hollywood.

Bluebelle, the dog, is a visitor in the home of Glamourpuss’ owners and, in the cat’s eyes at least, a rival for their affections.

Well-pleased with her luxurious lifestyle, cheerfully cataloged in scratchy, energetic artwork, Glamourpuss tries her best to sabotage Bluebelle. While her efforts don’t pan out, and the dog definitely has her day, young listeners will likely be pleased with the (not entirely) unexpected rapprochement between the two pets.

Sophisticated vocabulary and pop-culture references may well fly over the heads of children, making this fizzy, exuberant entertainment a treat that is best shared by an adult with a penchant for screwball comedy. (Picture book.

4- 7)

REX FINDS AN EGG! EGG! EGG!

Weinberg, Steven Illus. by Weinberg, Steven McElderry (40 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 24, 2015 978-1-4814-0308-5 978-1-4814-0309-2 e-book An exploding volcano, an unseen cliff, flying predators and other hazards challenge a dimwitted young T. Rex with a precious burden and a monosyllabic vocabulary.

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carry his find back to the nest and safety—only to trip at the last moment and send it flying. But then, seeing it lying on the ground undamaged (aside from a large crack, there from the beginning), Rex entertains a new notion: “Rock?” Using garish colors and a thick, red crayon for the scribbly linework, Weinberg crafts a mad cartoonist’s vision of a prehistoric setting that, seemingly on the verge of shaking apart at any moment, ratchets Rex’s flight into a giddy scramble. In contrast to Bob Shea’s fierce little scenery-chewer (Dinosaur vs. Bedtime, etc.), Rex is drawn as a comical figure with a dopey expression and big buck teeth. Still, nature will out. In the end, a smaller dino’s arrival offers Rex the prospect of a new “[f]riend!” Stomach rumbling like that volcano in the background, Rex decides instead that it’s time for some “[l]unch! Lunch! Lunch!”

Young dinosaur fans will like this solo debut for Weinberg a bunch, bunch, bunch. (Picture book. 5- 7)

THE TRUTH ABOUT TWINKIE PIE

Yeh, Kat Little, Brown (352 pp.) $17.00 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-316-23662-1 978-0-316-23659-1 e-book When 12-year-old GiGi moves from a trailer park in South Carolina to an upscale community on Long Island, she decides to reinvent herself.

GiGi is short for Galileo Galilei, and her older sister and guardian, DiDi, a beautiful, uneducated hairdresser, has always encouraged her to reach for the stars. So when DiDi wins a million dollars in a bake-off, she moves them 800 miles north and enrolls GiGi in the ritzy Hill Prep. GiGi has always followed DiDi’s “Recipe for Success,” earning perfect grades by studying 150 percent. But GiGi longs for friends and fun, so she concocts a different recipe for herself, starting with a new name.

Of course, not everyone in her swanky school is receptive to the girl with the hairdresser sister and Dollar Store shoes, and Yeh does a good job of making what could be clichéd characters, such as the snotty rich girl, come across as layered and original instead. The discovery of a surprising but credible family secret leads to a moving finish, though GiGi’s personality in this part of the story feels inconsistent. Many chapters end with a fun (food snobs beware) recipe from GiGi’s dead mother’s cookbook, featuring ingredients such as condensed soup or instant pudding mix.

Filled with enough characters and plot for two novels, Yeh’s nimbly voiced, combination fish-out-of-water, personal transformation and emotional family tale is also stuffed with charm. (Fiction. 10-14)

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STORMY NIGHT

Yoon, Salina Illus. by Yoon, Salina Bloomsbury (40 pp.) $14.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-8027-3780-9 Bear and Floppy of Found fame (2014) are back to soothe little fears.

A storm is noisily disrupting Bear’s attempt to sleep, and Floppy isn’t doing too well, either. Thunder rumbles, and Bear dives under the bed with Floppy. Mama comes into his bedroom under the pretense of needing comfort herself. Papa, looking uncertain, also needs Bear to help him through the storm.

Bear is happy to oblige both of them. After a particularly loud boom, Mama and Papa return the favor and kiss Bear’s nose and tickle his ear. The storm eventually quiets, and all end up cuddled together in Bear’s bed. The refrain, “Bear felt better,” is repeated throughout the story as Mama and Papa use different strategies to help Bear overcome his anxiety. Readers will appreciate the graduating reassurances that range from self-soothing to group hugs. The ditty used by both Bear and his parents is hampered by faulty meter, a minor weak point: “I’ll hold you tight. I’ll keep you warm. / My love will keep you safe from the storm.” Yoon’s familiar digitized art evokes the texture of pastel crayons outlined in heavy black. Bear’s emotions are displayed to good effect with simple tweaks of eye and mouth positions.

Youngsters will empathize with Bear and derive comfort from the loving togetherness his family displays while keeping the storm at bay. (Picture book. 3- 6)

NIGHT OWL

Yuly, Toni Illus. by Yuly, Toni Feiwel & Friends (40 pp.) $15.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-1-250-05457-9 Yuly’s latest, a companion to her debut, Early Bird (2014), introduces a young owl who’s listening for his mommy’s return.

There’s bravado in Night Owl’s demeanor: He “likes to stay up late.” He “waves good-bye to the sun” and “hoots hello to the moon.” But when Night Owl notices Mommy Owl’s absence, uncertainty creeps in. He encounters many sounds as he flies, searching. Yuly’s simple text introduces onomatopoeic words like “tap,” “toot,” “chirp” and “croak” and the refrain, “Is that Mommy Owl?” Night Owl learns that these sounds are variously too short, long, high or low to belong to Mommy Owl. He discovers their sources along with the child listener: woodpecker, train, cricket and toad. Night Owl flies home in a gathering storm that makes its own unnerving sounds. Tucked in his nest, his eyes widen as thunder booms; a little tuft of feathers near his forehead sticks straight up. Yet the safety of home enables him to wait bravely until Mommy Owl’s reassuring return. Yuly’s stylized pen, ink and digital compositions employ lavender and 112

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blue-violet to convey the inky dark. Clouds scud across the full moon before the storm; twinkling stars wreath it afterward.

Design elements include crisp white text type; sunset-gold and blue-black endpapers, front and back respectively, complete the package.

This charming exploration of sound words will stand up to repeat bedtime reads for young preschoolers. (Picture book. 2-4)

THE BIG BLUE THING ON THE HILL

Zommer, Yuval Illus. by Zommer, Yuval Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-7636-7403-8

When a mysterious “big blue thing” appears, forest animals are baffled and afraid, so they try to make it leave.

Readers (or their parents) will know that the “thing” is a VW bus, but the animals don’t. Nevertheless, they sense that it poses danger. After much speculation about what it might be (an elephant? a dinosaur? a thing?), the wolves suggest frightening it away. They howl at it in the night, all to no avail. The bears are equally unsuccessful in spooking it with growls, and the wild boars’ huffs, puffs, pushes and shoves can’t budge it either. The smaller creatures (foxes, badgers and weasels) then try to dig around it and bury it—only to have it make a noise.

This frightens everyone, and they run to seek the counsel of the Wise Owls, who suggest that the very smallest of creatures form a “BIG BUG FLYING SQUAD” with “a snake or two... for good measure” to swarm the big blue thing. Lo and behold, the plan works, and the animals can enjoy their pristine wilderness in peace—until another visitor arrives to deliver a spaceage punch line. While the story never explains why the thing is unquestionably a threat, it revels in its telling, and detailed, playful, digital art succeeds in heightening humor.

One thing’s for sure: This will be a big hit. (Picture book.

3- 7)

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“This story makes palatable for young readers a painful, personal and true story of the injustices interracial couples suffered as recently as 60 years ago.” from the case for loving

black history month picture books THE CASE FOR LOVING The Fight for Interracial Marriage

Alko, Selina Illus. by Qualls, Sean; Alko, Selina Levine/Scholastic (40 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-545-47853-3

Biography and autobiography intertwine in this account of the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia.

Richard Loving, pale-skinned and vulnerable to sunburn, and Mildred Jeter, a brown-skinned woman of African-American and Cherokee descent, fell in love in 1958. But in the state of Virginia, miscegenation was illegal and punishable by imprisonment. They traveled to Washington, D.C., to marry legally, but when they returned and moved in together, the local police arrested and jailed them. This story makes palatable for young readers a painful, personal and true story of the injustices interracial couples suffered as recently as 60 years ago. Alko and Qualls reveal the double-layered nature of this story with a photograph of themselves; this was the perfect story for a collaboration since their journey echoes the Lovings’. In the backmatter, Alko cites the current statistics on gay marriage and hopes that “there will soon come a time when all people who love each other have the same rights as Sean and I have.” The “Suggestions for Further Reading” mentions both earlier books in the same tradition, such as Arnold Adoff and Emily Arnold McCully’s Black is Brown is Tan (1973, 2002), and contemporary ones that detail other civil rights struggles.

Despite the gentle way this book unfolds, the language and images deal a blow to racist thinking and just might inspire the next generation of young civil rights activists. (artists’ note, sources) (Informational picture book. 4-9)

SEEDS OF FREEDOM The Peaceful Integration of Huntsville, Alabama Bass, Hester Illus. by Lewis, E.B. Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-7636-6919-5

Peaceful but forceful protest ended segregation in one Southern town.

The titular “seeds” are a metaphor for individual acts of nonviolence that led to desegregation in the city that is home to the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, a federally funded facility. In the early 1960s, blacks staged sit-ins at lunch counters, listened to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and, before Easter, boycotted local clothing stores and participated in a Blue Jean Sunday. Bass writes in the present tense with a conversational tone and divides her story by date from July 1962 through September 1963. She includes details that will resonate with children while also imparting an inspirational message, tinged with her own civic pride (she is a former resident of Huntsville), about community activism. Lewis’ watercolor art portrays street scenes and townspeople’s faces. His full-page portrait of a little black girl in ruffled white ankle socks, holding a paper outline of her feet, is the most telling and poignant. She wants a new pair of shoes but cannot try them on. It’s an unfortunately timely book, as Huntsville is still in the news with court cases challenging de facto school segregation.

A book that is as quietly inspiring as its subject. (author’s note, photographs, selected bibliography) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

DRAW WHAT YOU SEE The Life and Art of Benny Andrews Benson, Kathleen Illus. by Andrews, Benny Clarion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-544-10487-7

African-American artist and arts activist Andrews was an outsider by birth and politics but not an outsider, or self-taught artist.

Driven by an early passion for drawing and a desperate Depression-era childhood in Plainview, Georgia, Andrews attended college on a 4-H scholarship, served in the Air Force and earned a BFA from the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.

A black man on the GI Bill, Andrews had never even visited a museum until he went to art school. His paintings celebrated narrative; he painted the geography and the lives of black folks in the Jim Crow South and the striving, struggling inner cities of the North. Author Benson, her late husband, Jim Haskins, and Andrews (who died in 2006) collaborated on several projects |

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“Ransome’s watercolor paintings are richly evocative of the seasons while also creating memorable characters and emotions.” from freedom’s school

celebrating African-American history and achievement, including John Lewis in the Lead (2006); her passion for her subject shines clearly in the text, brief though it is. She introduces readers to young Benny, who grows up surrounded by cotton fields, finds inspiration in the church and continues with his education even as his classmates drop out to work cotton full-time.

She closes with his activism on behalf of “outsider” artists: “He believed that art was for everyone.” This singular biography refocuses attention on the struggle for social justice through the extraordinary visions of this singular painter—every illustration is the artist’s own.

Indelible. (Picture book/biography. 4-8)

FREEDOM’S SCHOOL

Cline-Ransome, Lesa Illus. by Ransome, James E. Disney-Jump at the Sun (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-4231-6103-5 Emancipation means education.

A little girl narrates her family’s story in the days and months immediately after the end of slavery. Her parents decide that she and her brother must attend school in spite of the dangers they face walking there. The school does not have very much in the way of supplies or heat, but it does have a teacher “with skin as brown as mine,” says the girl. Students come and go depending on when they are needed in the field. Then racism strikes, and the school burns down. Still, the community spirit is strong, and the African-American neighbors come together to rebuild. Cline-Ransome does not give a specific locale for the story, thus making it representative of much of the rural South after the Civil War. Telling the story in the voice of a child helps to make the story more immediate and should help young readers appreciate the difficulties involved in building, maintaining and attending school. Ransome’s watercolor paintings are richly evocative of the seasons while also creating memorable characters and emotions. The endpapers depicting a blackboard with upper- and lowercase letters written in chalk are a child-friendly touch.

Readers don’t need to have been recently emancipated to understand this eloquent testament to the overriding importance of school. (Picture book. 4- 7)

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JUNETEENTH FOR MAZIE

Cooper, Floyd Illus. by Cooper, Floyd Capstone Young Readers (40 pp.) $15.95 | Feb. 1, 2015 978-1-62370-170-3

A father shares an important holiday with his daughter.

Mazie is unhappy because it is bedtime, and she would much rather stay up. She snuggles up to her father, who tells about a big celebration that will occur tomorrow—“on a day we call Juneteenth.” It begins with “Great, Great, Great Grandpa Mose,” who is a slave in the cotton fields until June 19, 1865, when freedom is finally proclaimed in Galveston, Texas. Dancing and celebrating in the streets greet the news. Equality does not necessarily follow, but the day is always remembered. Protests, education and forgiveness, continues the father in his narration, are part of the story, which culminates with the inauguration of Barack Obama. He promises Mazie a day of good food, fun and remembrance. Cooper’s story is straightforward and aimed at an early-elementary audience, but it provides sufficient information to use with older children as an introduction to Juneteenth, which is marking its 150th anniversary in 2015. His full-page artwork—oil paintings in softly textured yellows and browns—captures the tender relationship between a father and daughter and the sadness and pride of their family story. Broad sweeps of history are encapsulated in double-page spreads focusing on determined, prayerful and happy faces.

A quiet and informative picture of belated emancipation. (afterword) (Picture book. 4-9)

CHASING FREEDOM The Life Journeys of Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, Inspired

by Historical Facts Grimes, Nikki Illus. by Wood, Michele Orchard (56 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-0-439-79338-4

Two iconic women recount their stories.

In New York state in 1904, a suffragist convention is about to begin, and Susan B. Anthony is scheduled to introduce Harriet Tubman. But first the two women meet at Anthony’s home for tea and talk. Grimes artfully creates an afternoon of conversation and reminiscence in carefully constructed, fact-based vignettes that allow each to recount her life, accomplishments and continuing dreams. Each piece—there are 21—consists of both narration and dialogue that draw readers into the world of slavery, the Underground Railroad, the struggle for women’s rights, the fight for temperance and the dangers of public speaking on unpopular subjects. While not a dual biography, there is kirkus.com

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a plethora of information about both Tubman and Anthony as well as their times. Intended for reading aloud, the text can be an excellent supplement to 19th-century American studies.

Wood’s full-page portraits are stunning. The folk-style acrylicand-oil paintings are vibrant, detailed and emotionally charged.

American quilt patterns and African motifs add to the depth of artistry.

A tremendous opportunity for children to understand what these women worked so hard to accomplish—one succeeding and one coming close. (capsule biographies, additional notes, bibliography, author’s note) (Picture book. 8-12)

I AM JACKIE ROBINSON

Meltzer, Brad Illus. by Eliopoulos, Christopher Dial (40 pp.) $12.99 | Jan. 8, 2015 978-0-8037-4086-0 Series: Ordinary People Change the World Baseball’s No. 42 strikes out.

Even as a babe in his mother’s arms, Robinson is depicted wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap in this latest entry in the Ordinary People Change the World series. He narrates his childhood alongside cartoon panels that show him as an expert runner and thrower. Racism and poverty are also part of his growing up, along with lessons in sharing and courage.

Incredibly, the Negro Leagues are not mentioned beyond a passing reference to “a black team” with a picture of the Kansas City Monarchs next to their team bus (still looking like a child in the illustration, Robinson whines, “Gross! Is this food or goo?”). In 1946, Branch Rickey signs him to play for the Dodgers’ farm team, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Robinson concludes his story with an exhortation to readers to be brave, strong and use their “power to do what’s right. / Use that power for a cause that you believe in.” Meltzer writes his inspirational biography as a first-person narrative, which risks being construed and used as an autobiography—which it is not. The digitally rendered cartoon illustrations that show Robinson as a perpetual child fall sadly short of capturing his demeanor and prowess.

A memorable life—a forgettable presentation. (photographs, timeline, sources, further reading) (Picture book/ biography. 3- 6)

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MAHALIA JACKSON Walking with Kings and Queens

Nolan, Nina Illus. by Holyfield, John Amistad/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | $18.89 PLB | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-087944-0 978-0-06-087945-7 PLB The legendary 20th-century gospel singer takes center stage in a too-short song of praise.

From her childhood in New Orleans to a move to Chicago as a teen, Nolan’s text tells readers that Mahalia Jackson loved one thing above all others—singing in church. She toured the South, performing in churches rather than nightclubs despite the lure of better pay, and without fail, her “joyful voice lifted people with hope.” A recording contract and radio broadcasts brought a larger audience, and eventually she appeared at Carnegie Hall and sang for world leaders. On the day of the 1963 March on Washington, she sang prior to Dr. King’s speech, although there is no mention of her momentous advice to him. Nolan’s brief text, with unsourced quotations, is more focused on Jackson’s musical drive than on the specifics of her career. The only mention of racism comes in the chronology, a misstep in a book about an African-American performer born in 1911; sadly, there is no note about gospel music. Holyfield’s full-bleed acrylic paintings are richly textured and feature a portrait of Jackson on every double-page spread, her voice raised to the heavens.

A noteworthy life to share but one more stirring in recordings than on these pages. (resources) (Picture book/ biography. 5-8)

WANGARI MAATHAI The Woman Who Planted a Million Trees Prévot, Franck Illus. by Fronty, Aurélia Charlesbridge (48 pp.) $17.95 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-58089-626-9

Wangari Maathai’s biographical details, including, of course, her creation of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, are explicitly linked to feminist and human rights issues during her lifetime in this picture book.

After an introduction to Wangari Maathai as a woman who “carried out her important work with important people”—and an immediate, affirming reference to “village women” as important people—the text moves into a present-tense description of the life and times of Wangari, “she who belongs to the leopard.” Every double-page spread features striking, stylized artwork in lush colors, enhancing a thoughtful text. Predominant Kenyan attitudes toward women are boldly laid out: “Who is this woman who confronts them [Kenya’s governing males]

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“Against a white background, [Ransome’s] images explode across the pages.” from my name is truth

with a confident voice in a country where women are supposed to listen and lower their eyes in men’s presence?” Similarly, the United States is indicted for its treatment of blacks during Wangari’s years of education there, and President Daniel arap Moi is exposed as both an anti-environmentalist and a man “who orders police to shoot at crowds of demonstrators.” The effects of British colonialism and tribal differences are also economically folded in. The biography officially concludes with Maathai’s Nobel Peace Prize and is followed by an abundance of further information.

This slim but emphatic biography stands out among others about Wangari Maathai with its well-crafted treatment of political issues. (Picture book/biography. 7-12)

HARLEM RENAISSANCE PARTY

Ringgold, Faith Illus. by Ringgold, Faith Amistad/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | $18.89 PLB | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-057911-1 978-0-06-057912-8 PLB Harlem Airlines flies a boy and his uncle back in time to a fanciful grand parade on Seventh Avenue, where they meet and greet a star-studded lineup of African-American luminaries.

After a breakfast of “the best fried chicken and waffles this side of heaven” (at the legendary Well’s Restaurant), the boy is on the lookout for Langston Hughes, his favorite poet. Marcus Garvey passes by, as does W.E.B. Du Bois. There’s a visit to the Africana Art Gallery, Madame C.J. Walker’s Beauty School and the Harlem Opera House, where they have a conversation with Paul Robeson. Florence Mills and Josephine Baker represent those who achieved fame overseas. At the Schomburg Library, they hear Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, who recites “My People.” A party at the Savoy with performances by Fletcher Henderson’s band, Satchmo and Coleman Hawkins is a festive finale. On the flight home, the boy reiterates his racial pride and determination to write. Ringgold has a sure hand as she delivers her message and even references her own Aunt Connie’s Dinner Party (1993). The acrylic paintings on textured canvas feature elongated figures that are boldly colored in all the primary hues. Her decision to depict her proud protagonist as light-skinned, red-haired and blue-eyed is an eloquent statement all by itself.

Black pride is strong in this homage. (Harlem Renaissance glossary, further reading) (Picture book. 4- 7)

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28 DAYS Moments in Black History That Changed The World

Smith Jr., Charles R. Illus. by Evans, Shane W. Neal Porter/Roaring Brook (56 pp.) $18.99 | Jan. 13, 2015 978-1-59643-820-0

Three pivotal Supreme Court cases, one amendment, and 25 great men and women make for memorable entries.

Smith opens the 28 days of Black History Month with Crispus Attucks, who was a slave and a patriot in Colonial Boston, and concludes with Barack Obama, the 44th president. Moving chronologically, he presents names from the armed forces, medicine, sports, performing arts, exploration, business and civil rights activism. The entries vary from poetry to prose, dramatically making the point that each is individually an important person or decision, vital to our understanding of African-American history. Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe are represented in a poem for two voices. Harriet Tubman and Madame C.J. Walker are eulogized. Marian Anderson’s poem incorporates words from “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Malcolm X is honored with an acrostic poem centered on “By any means necessary.”

Nelson Mandela, the one international citizen, is accorded a chant. Brief paragraphs provide background notes. Day 29 is aimed at children, exhorting them to “add to history.” Evans’ digitally manipulated collage-and-oil artwork is brilliant, with bright colors and broad images that are powerful, poignant and heroic. Matthew Henson holds an American flag, Rosa Parks is in handcuffs, and the Little Rock Nine hold books while segregationists stand behind them with their fists raised.

A stellar achievement for the whole year—not just its shortest month. (author’s note, bibliography) (Informational picture book/poetry. 4-10)

MY NAME IS TRUTH The Life of Sojourner Truth Turner, Ann Illus. by Ransome, James Harper/HarperCollins (40 pp.) $17.99 | $18.89 PLB | Jan. 27, 2015 978-0-06-075898-1 978-0-06-075899-8 PLB

An American story of an extraordinary woman.

Writing in free verse and borrowing the voice of the great abolitionist, Turner presents a powerful account of Truth’s life. Born into slavery as Isabella and sold from family to family, she took the name Sojourner Truth and began preaching for freedom. Later in life, she dictated her story, published as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Ransome paints in evocative watercolors that are barely contained in full-bleed pages that capture both the drama and the sorrow of her life. Particularly effective kirkus.com

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“One beautiful double-page spread features Price in the costumes of three major roles....” from leontyne price

is a double-page spread with three views of Sojourner Truth behind a pulpit forcefully “tell[ing] the news of God’s truth in meetings and gatherings.” Against a white background, the images explode across the pages. Selected words in larger type and italics are a strong component of the page design. As a readaloud, the text is strong and effective. As a part of a curriculum, there are concerns. The first-person narrative can be mistakenly taken as an autobiography, which it is not, and quotations are not sourced.

When used in concert with other sources, a powerful life of a determined woman who rose from slavery to preach for freedom. (author’s note, photograph, further reading) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)

LOVE WILL SEE YOU THROUGH Martin Luther King Jr.’s Six Guiding Beliefs

Watkins, Angela Farris Illus. by Comport, Sally Wern Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 6, 2015 978-1-4169-8693-5

Lessons for life presented by Dr. King’s niece.

Watkins defines the “six guiding beliefs” of the subtitle by describing six events from the civil rights movement in which Dr. King was steadfastly governed by his faith in “love and nonviolence.” The first precept, “Have Courage,” was demonstrated during the Montgomery Bus Boycott when his home was bombed. “Love Your Enemies” is the message of a Sunday morning sermon. “Fight the Problem, Not the Person Who Caused It” is exemplified by the letters written during his imprisonment in Birmingham. The 1965 voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama, illustrates the belief that “When Innocent People Are Hurt, Others are Inspired to Help.” “Resist Violence of any Kind” refers to a 1966 incident in Chicago when Dr. King was hit in the head by a rock. And finally, “The Universe Honors Love” is seen in the tributes bestowed after his assassination. King is always referred to as “Uncle Martin” in this very personal homage. No references or sources are provided, and beyond a mention of President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965, there is no indication that anyone else was involved in the struggle. Comport’s double-page mixed-media collage and digital illustrations are strong and more effective than the text in conveying the measure of the man.

A heartfelt sermon, but useful only as a supplement.

(Informational picture book. 5-8)

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LEONTYNE PRICE Voice of a Century

Weatherford, Carole Boston Illus. by Colón, Raúl Knopf (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Dec. 23, 2014 978-0-375-85606-8 978-0-375-95606-5 PLB Rising from the Mississippi Delta to the stages of the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, Price had a groundbreaking operatic career.

Weatherford introduces a less familiar name to children, laying out the major events in her life with poetic brevity.

Encouraged by her musically gifted parents, the young Price played the piano and listened to Saturday-afternoon opera broadcasts. She heard Marian Anderson’s legendary 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, but even so, she did not believe that she could become a performer because of her color. The turning point came when a college teacher encouraged her to study music, and gradually a career took shape. Porgy and Bess on Broadway was among her first national performances, and Aida on the opera stage was her triumph. Awards and accolades followed. The poetic text highlights Price’s firsts as an AfricanAmerican opera singer. Colón employs his signature watercolor, crayon and pencil paintings with scratchboard texturing and a palette of warm teals, greens and oranges that swirl across the pages to capture the grandeur of her performances. One beautiful double-page spread features Price in the costumes of three major roles: the regal Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra, the tragic Cio-Cio from Madame Butterfly and Minnie, the feisty saloon keeper from The Girl of the Golden West.

Weatherford and Colón’s beautiful book does children a service by giving them one more African-American performer to applaud. (author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)

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“Based on an original design by a real child—who also supplies one of the two voices for the narrative’s animated audio—the machine features interactions aplenty.” from kalley ’s machine plus cat

interactive e-books KALLEY’S MACHINE PLUS CATS

Alexander, Jon; Alexander, Kalley Illus. by Alexander, Carrie; Alexander, Jon; Alexander, Corbett RocketWagon $2.99 | Sep. 11, 2014 1.0.2; Sep. 23, 2014 A child’s scheme to keep her commuting dad home inspires a polyfunctional machine festooned with dials, switches, levers, buttons and other controls—not to mention cats.

Based on an original design by a real child—who also supplies one of the two voices for the narrative’s animated audio— the machine features interactions aplenty. There are stations in which gears move by turning a crank, “turners” raise and lower flames in a boiler, “bashers” can be made to pound faster or slower, colors and shapes can be selected, and other functions are controlled with taps and swipes. The cartoon pictures are all drawn in simple, wobbly lines on ruled notebook paper, and the text is similarly artless: “ ‘This must be a poker,’ I casually figure. / ‘No, they’re puffers!’ she scolds me. ‘They puff things up bigger.’ ” The movements are not only broad and easy to follow, they include such sophisticated elements as a color-mixing station (three colors, but still) and a remotely controlled robot arm. Furthermore, a wordless menu/index can be pulled down at will to toggle the audio, the appropriately clang-y background music...and also the inquisitive cats that narrowly escape being bashed, baked or otherwise processed in each scene. As it turns out, the machine’s purpose is to make food, and dad’s sad response that he still has to go to work leaves the undeterred young inventor planning further machines to relieve him of the necessity.

Poignant ending notwithstanding, terrific fun for the Oshkosh set, with opportunities aplenty to practice motor skills, make choices and observe cause and effect.

(Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 2-5)

THE DRAGON INTERACTIVE BOOK

Sievers, Hilke Illus. by Sievers, Hilke Hilke Sievers $0.99 | Jul. 14, 2014 1.0.0; Jul. 14, 2014

An unusual creature finds a rewarding career in theater in this multiple-

it flies into the stratosphere, then comes back down to Earth, landing in one of three places chosen by readers: Hollywood, Loch Ness, or Yangshuo, China. Regardless of where it lands, the dragon becomes the star of a play, bringing the story back to the beginning, when a storyteller narrating the app introduces the reptilian stage star. It’s perhaps one or two degrees too much narrative jumping around for what’s at heart the simple story of a solitary specimen finding love and acceptance. The app’s hand-drawn art seems intentionally crude, but it is animated in sophisticated ways, as on pages where the reader can guide the lighting of a stage light. The text, translated from Spanish, is clean if unremarkable. The fact that the dragon lacks a name becomes problematic when a second dragon is introduced to the story. Somehow, though, the animation, simple illustrative style, and unobtrusive narration and music pull together to create something distinctive and winning: It has a style that is refreshingly scruffy compared to other slick offerings in the App Store.

For young readers who can’t get enough of dragon stories, this is one they’re likely to remember. (iPad storybook app.

4-9)

POPPY CAT AND THE BUBBLE VOLCANO

StoryToys StoryToys $2.99 | Aug. 28, 2014 1.0.1; Aug. 28, 2014

Based on the British picture-book and television series, this app weaves a slight story around eight interactive games.

Poppy Cat and her friends are playing outside in the garden when they notice a sea horse trapped inside a bubble, floating through the sky. “The little seahorse looks very sad. We should take it back to the ocean. Luckily it’s a perfect day for an adventure!” So off they go to the bottom of the sea, traveling in a submarine. At each transition, young readers play an interactive game. The activities range from popping and counting bubbles to moving Poppy through a simple maze. The developers combine a good variety of games, all developmentally on target. Unfortunately, the story seems pieced together around the games and has enough holes to sink a ship. The little green sea horse who’s trapped in the bubble isn’t featured on any of the subsequent story pages. Nonetheless, the high production qualities will engage many young readers. The narration, available in British and American English, French and Spanish, is charming.

The bright, colorful illustrations arranged on 3-D pages keep the look of the original book and TV show.

Probably best for children who are already immersed in Poppy’s world from the television show. (iPad storybook app.

3-5)

scenario story.

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STAR WALK KIDS

Vito Technology, Inc. Vito Technology, Inc. $2.99 | Sep. 4, 2014 1.0.2; Sep. 19, 2014

For budding sky watchers, this much simplified version of the StarWalk apps offers quick doses of selected astronomical basics plus tantalizing leads to more.

As ethereal background music plays, users explore the visible sky. They have the option of seeing a matched cartoon rendition of any portion of the current nighttime sky to which the tablet’s back points, changing the speed of the sky’s apparent rotation, or selecting a different view by pinching or dragging.

Tapping small but recognizable images of the sun, moon, planets (including Pluto), the Hubble and the International Space Station activates a printed label, an audio identification (except, oddly, for Pluto) and assorted facts (“Aries...is a porpoise in the Marshall Islands. Isn’t that fun?”). A select few come with a short animated history or description. Sixteen major stars and 49 constellations receive similar treatment, though only 24 of the latter have any audio element. All of the above can be found quickly using a visual index accessible from any screen. Less usefully, tapping hundreds of other, unindexed stars reveals their names but no further information. The Milky Way, visible nebulae and the Andromeda Galaxy are not included. Refreshingly, there are no ads, in-app purchases or links to social media.

This guide to the heavens is cool for browsing, but it is too unsystematic for sustained research. (Requires iOS 7 and above.) (iPad informational app. 6-8)

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Sh e l f Spa c e Q&A with Fountain Bookstore owner Kelly Justice

By Karen Schechner According to the American Booksellers Association, indie bookstores have increased their numbers in the past five years. What gives your bookstore and indies in general their staying power?

Kelly Justice owns Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, which opened in 1978. Its 1867 building has hardwood floors, exposed brick walls and natural wood shelves. It looks so much like a classic independent bookstore that when author Kelly Corrigan visited (as reported in Bookselling This Week), she said: “This is the reason people quit their jobs and open a bookstore. This is what they imagine.”

I think our customers feel like they are part of something. In on a secret.

A club where everyone is welcome.

We have really embraced our online customers as part of the Fountain family, too. We want them to feel that they are in the club as well, whether they are in Boise or Bolivia or shopping in their pj’s right here in Richmond.

What is Fountain Bookstore famous for?

Our big mouths, maybe? When people come to visit us that have only met us online or heard of us from others, they invariably say: “Wow! We thought you’d be bigger.” (Which is not something anyone wants to hear, really. So, we’d appreciate it if you’d keep that to yourselves.) Then the newbie gets a few more feet in the door and realizes that it’s the Fountain Bookstore experience that’s big, not the shop. We’re 1,000-squarefeet of supercharged bookselling.

We don’t have all the books in the world, but we definitely have the one you didn’t know you couldn’t live without.

With a staff of five, we [held events or signings] with over 225 authors last year and are on track to do about the same this year. And we have a heck of a lot of fun doing it. I think that is what people feel when they come to us, whether it’s in the shop or online.

What are some of the bookstore’s top current handsells?

I am selling the Thieftaker series by D.B. Jackson (aka David B. Coe) by the bucket! I love them! Remember the first time you watched Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater? That’s what it feels like. It’s that ride.

We are also selling the heck out of the Last Policeman trilogy by Ben Winters, but only to some customers. A lot of people can’t handle that level of dark or just can’t do it right now because of whatever.

Life. It was rough on all the booksellers here who tried it, but we really think it’s something remarkable. Puts you in a really weird place.

For the readers who are up for it, we really feel like we’ve been through something together.

All of our locals we love selling. Our easiest local for me is The Southern Slow Cooker by Kendra Bailey Morris. She has somehow miraculously disappeared the cooked-to-death, bland flavor that results from most slow cooker recipes. Plus, she’s just a good writer. And it’s under 20 bucks!

Which was your favorite all-time event and why?

You know, it’s hard to beat Anthony Bourdain. What a gracious, generous-of-spirit individual. Within two minutes backstage with the crew, we were done with introductions and happily discussing public nudity. And we made so many people happy that night. He is so good to his fans and all the service people involved. And any time I can do food and books at the same time, I’m a happy bookseller. They are equal passions for me.

What is your favorite spot/section of the store?

Karen Schechner is the senior Indie editor at Kirkus Reviews.

Our 100-square-foot children’s section. I love all the colors.

And I like the two autographed copies sections. They are pretty big, and they are filled with happy memories.

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indie PERFECT MOTHER

These titles earned the Kirkus Star:

Akpabio, Uduak E. Athena Press (334 pp.) $23.95 paper | Nov. 23, 2009 978-1-84748-574-8

AMERICAN NEOLITHIC by Terence Hawkins.................................. 130 THE GOD WAVE by Patrick Hemstreet............................................. 130

In her first play, shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, Akpabio (Little Devils, 2013, etc.) crafts a modern morality tale about maternity, magic and being careful what you wish for.

Set largely in 2009, this tragicomedy centers on the Umoh family of Lagos, Nigeria, and draws on folk tales, Shakespearean tragedy, and the works of the poet and novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Businessman Aniekan and his wife, Celia, have been blessed with three daughters—but only after long years of barrenness.

The play takes perhaps too much for granted in its line “We all know what childlessness means to the African woman,” but its characters’ effusive expressions of gratitude to God reinforce the primacy of parenthood. Celia, who secretly underwent a hysterectomy following a miscarriage, finally accepts that she cannot have more children, but her mother-in-law keeps pressuring her to bear a son; she hints that if Celia cannot produce an heir, Ani must take a second wife. The timing then seems suspect when Ani’s former secretary announces that he fathered her son, Ubong, eight years ago. Ani wants to adopt Ubong, but a jealous Celia employs a babalawo, a witch doctor, to prevent the boy from infiltrating the family. In the unfolding conspiracy to install Ubong or keep him out, many characters turn out to be not quite what they seem. Some monologues can seem overcomplicated, especially as Ani’s friend Gerry (jokingly referred to as “Sherlock Holmes”) sets out the scheming step by step.

This leads to overlong text blocks, with stage directions and dialogue the only way of cramming in descriptions and machinations. The Nigerian names and British vocabulary may prove challenging, while accurate recording of African English means article and preposition use are inconsistent. Still, Akpabio successfully weaves in local superstitions and speech patterns. An interfering mother-in-law and a servant speaking in dialect (“Sir, Mama say she wan rest. She go eat later”) may seem like clichés, but they are two of the more amusing characters and bring to mind Adichie’s comic achievements. However, Akpabio maintains an appropriately bittersweet tone, even when a poisoning plot looks set to follow Hamlet into darker territory.

A tragicomedy that blends traditional customs and family intrigue.

EARTHBOUND by Dee LeRoy........................................................... 132 BEHIND THE LINES by Jeffrey B. Miller.......................................... 133

AMERICAN NEOLITHIC

Hawkins, Terence C&R Press (200 pp.) $24.00 | $19.00 paper $9.99 e-book May 5, 2014 978-1-936196-33-3

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star turns ASK A FORENSIC ARTIST The Art and Science of Law Enforcement’s Most Unique Profession

In the traditional publishing world, a big celebrity name can move titles.

Madonna, for example, has produced several best-selling children’s books, such as The English Roses, and Gwyneth Paltrow has written successful recipe books, including It’s All Good. But as self-publishing has become more accessible, celebrities with smaller fandoms have also been getting in the game.

Norman Reedus, for example, is best known for playing the crossbow-wielding zombie-apocalypse survivor Daryl Dixon on the AMC television series The Walking Dead. As such, he has a relatively small but devoted fan base—some of whom create amateur art projects, from sketches to mosaics to cakes, featuring images of Reedus himself. In October, he self-published a compilation of these artworks, Thanks for All the Niceness.

Part of the proceeds from book sales will be donated to a charitable foundation. The actor also selfpublished a photography book in 2013.

He’s not the only TV actor to go that route: Eriq La Salle, who played surgeon Dr. Peter Benton on the NBC show ER, wrote and published the 2012 thriller Laws of Depravity, which received the Kirkus Star. Last year, he told Kirkus that he felt that authors are “more empowered” in today’s publishing environment—but he also noted that self-publishing is “a lot of work,” calling it “a marathon.”

The trend could even extend further, into celebrity memoirs. Earlier this year, Carl Reiner, a comedy legend with several traditionally published books to his credit, put out I Just Remembered with Random Content, an imprint he financed. As he told Kirkus: “Times are changing, and I change with them.” —D.R.

Bailey, Lisa Honeybee Media (207 pp.) $14.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 17, 2014 978-1-5010-5563-8

A professional provides step-by-step techniques, anecdotes from the field and other information related to forensic art.

Bailey, a forensic artist who has served as an instructor in the FBI’s Forensic Facial Imaging course, wrote this book in response to many questions from the public and from law enforcement. At first, she tried to handle these queries on her website, askaforensicartist.com, but Bailey “realized that there was only so much I could do with a website, and a book would be the best way to explain what I consider the most unusual, fascinating, and misunderstood job in law enforcement.” To that end, this volume discusses a wide variety of myths and realities in forensic art: working with eyewitnesses; sketching and sculpting by hand and computer; age progression; working with physical remains; methods of facial approximation; forensic art as a career; and personal stories from several forensic artists. Numerous black-and-white photos and drawings capably illustrate Bailey’s concepts. Her approach is practical and blunt, advising readers to talk to professionals and see whether forensic art is “something you’re willing to work years for, sell your house for, move for, adjust your entire lifestyle for.

Because that’s what it may take.” She stresses the police aspects of the work, including the artist’s responsibility to victims or worried families, as well as the practicalities of working within limited law enforcement budgets. As both an introduction and handbook, the book doesn’t always go into detail. For example, Bailey provides much helpful information on how to hold a skull and how to align it properly for accurate photographs and so on, but she skims over how to attach one bone to another, beyond using “hot glue.” And while Bailey provides many helpful examples and anecdotes, she omits one of the best-known cases involving forensic art: Fugitive John List, who murdered his family of five, was located nearly two decades later with the help of an age-progressed clay bust made by a forensic artist.

Packed with information and examples, this fascinating book will make a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in the forensic arts.

David Rapp is an Indie editor at Kirkus Reviews.

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. . . TO BE A HORSEMAN

THE GIRL IN BLACK PAJAMAS

Beck, Gerald CreateSpace (198 pp.) $29.99 paper | Dec. 31, 2013 978-1-4910-9335-1

Birdy, Christy J. CreateSpace (288 pp.) $10.75 paper | $2.99 e-book | Jul. 23, 2014 978-1-5003-3539-7

A thoughtful memoir about growing up on a ranch in the mountains of Northern California, punctuated with philosophical musings on societal changes over the past seven decades.

Beck’s debut takes readers on a long journey over mountainous trails, through the vast acreage of his family’s cattle-rearing land—some of which they owned, some of which they leased. He writes about how his connection to that land, and to the wild and domesticated animals that populated it, became the defining influence in his life.

In later years, he found himself in the more citified world of Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where he became a designer and teacher in the theater department, but he never really left the ranch, either physically or emotionally. The product of a father who taught him “to be a man” and a mother who sought to protect him from physical harm, Beck seems to have incorporated these opposing forces into a strenuous and soulful life. He shows his artistic side through reproductions of his rather charming watercolors, which he scatters throughout the book. His words, however, focus on the excitement, adventures and misadventures of running the ranch, which he mostly accomplished on horseback. He tells of how his passion for horses began long before he could mount and ride them: “From the time I had enough balance to even attempt to straddle a horse, live or imaginary, I would, by God! Grow up to be a horseman.”

The narrative is sometimes unnecessarily encumbered by the names of trails, streams, rocks and hills, most of which readers will soon forget. But the essence of the countryside and the harsh details of ranching come across vividly and sensually. He doesn’t include significant biographical information about his wife, children or adult home life in these recollections; rather, this is the joyful, poignant story of one man’s changing relationship with land and beast.

An intriguing, if occasionally rambling, tale of a sometimes-solitary life.

In this latest installment of Birdy’s (The Girl in White Pajamas, 2013) mystery series, someone guns down an employee of R&B Investigations and tries to hack its computer system.

When private investigator Rose Jones hears that her hired hacker, Tommie, was shot outside her building in Boston, she calls her business partner, Bogie McGruder.

They suspect the attack was personal and seek assistance from Rose’s uncle, “hacker king” Walter Beck. It seems that a cybercriminal with a secret agenda is targeting Bogie and Walter and also attempting to infiltrate R&B Investigations’ computer system. Meanwhile, back in Florida, two local cops are threatening to stir up trouble for Bogie’s 20-year-old daughter, Amanda, and her cop husband, Randy, by trying to goad them into a pornographic-movie scheme. The titular character is Bogie’s smart 4-year-old daughter, Isabella; her “pajamas” are a martial arts uniform—her garb of choice. Although she’s merely a secondary character, she steals every scene she’s in; for example, she watches Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies obsessively and easily spots suspicious cars before Bogie and Rose’s dad, Darryl, do. There’s really no main protagonist; various people feature prominently at different points, and the two main storylines are connected by their characters, not by their plots. Both stories are equally engaging, however: The Boston plot is full of suspense as the villains’ ultimate goal is gradually revealed, while the Florida story is a soap opera of porn, drugs and false accusations. Their differences are highlighted when, at one point, Bogie visits Amanda in Florida and lectures her on excessive spending before heading to Boston to face a would-be assassin.

Some of the novel’s technological aspects, however, are a bit underexplained; for example, Rose doesn’t want cops checking on Tommie, but it’s unclear why she’s worried about his modems (or why he owns three of them).

Contrasting plotlines come together to form a worthy thriller.

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“The book...offers a personal, empathetic connection to people who might otherwise just be statistics in history books.” from exit berlin

EXIT BERLIN How One Woman Saved Her Family From Nazi Germany

A GATHERING STORM

Currier, Jameson Chelsea Station Editions (356 pp.) $20.00 paper | Oct. 9, 2014 978-1-937627-20-1

Bonelli, Charlotte R. Yale University Press (320 pp.) $30.00 | $14.99 e-book | Apr. 29, 2014 978-0-300-19752-5

Currier (The Forever Marathon, 2013, etc.) explores Matthew Shepard’s murder in richly empathetic fiction.

Currier recently unearthed his manuscript, written in the wake of Matthew Shepard’s death in 1998. Though set in a small town in the South, “This story could happen anywhere.”

Rick and A.J. meet Danny, a gay college student, in a bar and beat him in their truck before leaving him for dead, tied to a fence post. Subsequent chapters bounce between back story and aftereffects, deftly interspersing hospital and police station scenes with vignettes from Danny’s everyday life. After a roadside rape and attempted suicide, Danny wonders how to be a homosexual in the Bible Belt. It is simple to hook up with strangers but impossible “To be out, open, romantically gay in a small town like this.” Written in powerful, choppy sentences and consciously patterned after screenplays and true-crime stories, Currier’s novel is told in the present tense, shifting among the perspectives of the many characters involved.

Effective litanies of phrases beginning with “He will not”— “He will not see the snow. But he will feel the cold, his arms numb”—contrast Danny’s carefree activities on the day before the crime with his current incapacitation, revealing the legacy he will not live to see. One bravely cinematic chapter traces a blood sample’s journey to the laboratory. Technical and emotive languages are given equal importance: ““[H]is neural repatternings are transforming him into pure spirit”; “Cords snake around chairs, looking for outlets.” Currier’s sympathy also extends to the perpetrators, as he uncovers sexual traumas in their pasts. In a sensitive juxtaposition of Christian responses to homosexuality, the openness of the Rev. Fletcher combats the intolerance of the Rev. White, who brings his “God Hates Fags” message to town to boycott Danny’s funeral.

Readers might find it difficult to keep the many characters straight, especially since most chapters simply open with “He” or “She,” but the large cast shows how widely a crime’s ripples extend. “The story mushrooms, grows branches” and eventually affects us all,” Currier writes. In 1998, he felt “the crime was analyzed and politicized but oddly not humanized”; here he imbues it with human warmth.

A compassionate tribute to hate-crime victims.

In her debut work of history, Bonelli uses a trove of letters to investigate the flight of Jews from Nazi Germany.

Very few German Jews were able to escape to America during the 1930s. The reasons for this included their own initial denial about the severity of their situation, indifference from the assimilated German-JewishAmerican community and, above all, the United States government’s highly restrictive immigration policy. One of the lucky few to get out was Luzie Hatch (originally “Hecht”), a young professional woman from Berlin who was able to make the journey in 1938 with the support of her successful, American-born cousin, Arnold. She settled in New York City and soon began a lifelong career with the American Jewish Committee. During the fraught years between 1938 and 1941, she maintained an active correspondence with a wide network of relatives and friends. Her immediate family fled to the open port of Shanghai, while much of her extended family immigrated to Palestine.

Still others fled as far afield as England, Canada and throughout South America, but some never escaped and perished in the Holocaust. Luzie not only carefully saved all their incoming correspondence, but also saved copies of her outgoing letters. This archive forms the backbone of Bonelli’s book, and in addition to providing selections of Luzie’s English-language letters and translations (by Natascha Bodemann) of her German ones, she provides commentary that contextualizes them in the broader social and political situations of the time. There are a few moments where Bonelli overeditorializes, as when she speculates on Luzie’s state of mind, but she generally delivers detailed, well-researched and illuminating information. The book provides a rigorous look at the complexities, obstacles, frustrations and tragedies of the German-Jewish refugee situation in the ’30s, but just as importantly, it offers a personal, empathetic connection to people who might otherwise just be statistics in history books. For this reason, it has as much to teach readers about today’s world, which is filled with war and displacement, as it does about the world of the 1930s.

An intimate, engaging examination of the plight of German Jewish refugees.

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IN ALL THINGS A Return to the Drooling Ward

The Novel World of Angela Crown Deib, Sala CreateSpace (342 pp.) $15.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Aug. 29, 2014 978-1-5006-9459-3

Davis, Ed The Wedgewood Press (86 pp.) $5.95 paper | $2.99 e-book | Aug. 1, 2014 978-0-9860697-2-7 A 17-year-old undergoes training as a psychiatric technician at a California state hospital in this fictionalized memoir.

Davis (Road Stories, 2013) bases this novel on his experience in a training program for psychiatric technicians at then–Sonoma State Hospital in Eldridge, California, beginning in 1970 when he was 17. Noting that the book is fictional, Davis states that he has “taken some liberties to serve the story. But the place and the people are just as I remember them.” Davis skillfully evokes the setting with its hierarchies, routines, customs and varied characters. A shift supervisor explains the classifications for one ward: “The Thunderbirds...are mostly high functioning morons. The Falcons are mostly imbeciles, The Ravens mostly mongoloids with a few cretins.” The narrator’s tour that day ends in a small outdoor yard: “The Thunderbirds, Falcons and Ravens were all there; sitting or rocking or staring up at the sky through the fencing that sealed off the top of the space as well as the walls.”

Medications, the narrator learns, “did most of the supervising.” Characteristic of the book as a whole, the quiet contrast here between the patients’ soaring bird names and the reality of their caged lives is the more poignant for its understatement. There are few snake-pit horrors here, but more prevalent is the sadness that results when the best solutions available are bad ones. When a trainee trying to restore range of motion pushes a little too far, “the sound of her case study’s arm breaking echoed through the ward like a branch snapping in the forest.” The narrator’s compassion, the way he listens to and really looks at his patients, is a reminder of the possibilities for connection even among the grimmest surroundings, balanced by an acknowledgement of the limitations. Gerald, for example, is a hard case known for biting (until his teeth were pulled out) and running away (until an orthopedic surgeon’s operation prevents it). The narrator manages to build a tentative, fragile understanding with Gerald, but even so, he can’t give him the freedom he craves.

All too short but powerful; beautifully written, wellobserved and effective.

In Deib’s debut novel, a personal tragedy leads a woman to obsess over the fates of fictional characters.

It’s been over a week since Angela Crown entered Vancouver General Hospital, deep in shock after Mark, her fiance, and John, her father, were killed during a bank robbery. Her sister, Maggie, takes her home, where they both hope that the warm familiarity will help heal Angela’s shattered mind. She begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Price, and returns to her love of reading. She soon realizes, however, that she has no tolerance for the physical and mental pain that the fictional characters experience. At a book signing, she attacks author Bruce Darling, calling him a criminal for the way he’s tortured his creations. Angela then decides that she’s a “Professional Reader” who must “intervene and rehabilitate depraved plots.” Writer Martin Magier is her next target after his new novel, Sara’s Tragedy, has a successful launch. Soon, she starts believing that her own life is a novel, and although she couldn’t save fellow characters John and Mark, she’s determined to save others. To that end, she refuses to abandon Sara to the cruel end that Magier has written for her—and not even the boundaries of reality can stop her. Deib’s intriguing concept will have readers wondering about the suffering that Angela’s character goes through as the narrative unfolds. The author creates a neat, unique fantasy setup: Angela can interact with characters in fictional worlds—but only as a ghost. She also finds that Magier’s fictional creations worship him as a god, which layers the tale with effective religious commentary. The text frequently shines with simple metaphors that book lovers will understand quite well: “Angela devoured each word and each page like parched soil receiving heavy rains.” Sometimes, though, the prose is a bit overcooked: “Like small fish glued together forming a gigantic shark, they swept across the land as if they were a powerful tsunami.” The sentimental finale leaves plenty of questions open for a potential sequel.

Magical realism spurs on this solid debut.

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“[T]he fledgling author fills his verse with a raw power that one seldom finds in the works of tamer, more refined poets.” from lucifer & the indigo kids

True Ghost Stories and Eerie Legends from America’s Most Haunted Neighborhood

LUCIFER & THE INDIGO KIDS The Last Prophet...(Vol. 1) El, Ra Krishna AuthorHouse (138 pp.) $53.86 paper | $3.99 e-book Jun. 16, 2014 978-1-4969-1578-8

Dominé, David CreateSpace (310 pp.) $17.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Mar. 14, 2014 978-1-4942-8901-0

El is a brash, kinetic prophet for a new age, and his poetry is his message.

“I never knew I was a poet,” writes El early on in his new collection. And that’s a good thing, because the fledgling author fills his verse with a raw power that one seldom finds in the works of tamer, more refined poets. His words fire up off the page, and if they sometimes feel ragged and uncut, we’ll happily take the raggedness along with all the heat and light he sends our way. Also unlike stuffier authors, El is unwilling to sit on the dusty shelves of high culture; he has a delightfully omnivorous poetic appetite, and he’ll as easily shoot off a verse about Art Basel—Miami’s ultrachic contemporary art showcase—as he will lines about cable queen Kourtney Kardashian—“Hair blowing / eyes glowing / long lashes / red lips / pale skin / black dress / nice aura / nice hips / I sleep with you every night / Is that considered cheating?” It’s about time the oldest Kardashian got some love. But El spends less ink on pop-culture princesses than he does on more serious subjects, most notably the search for religious truth. Here, too, he is comprehensive in his exploration: “I studied Jesus, Allah, and Yah... / Maat and Ra...Yahweh and Jah / The sun, the moon, the ocean and star.” But if others decide they must pick one of these spiritual options, El instead selects all of the above; in a poem called “The Boddhisattva,” he writes, “I’m the alchemist, the seeker... / The prophet, / the Buddha, / the avatar, / the teacher.” As is perhaps obvious from his divinely inspired nom de plume, El will take religious answers where he can get them. Yet there is one truth that he lifts above all others—the notion that God isn’t above us but inside us. He crystallizes this insight in his poem “Thoughts...”: “If you think you are god?? / Then God you will be!” The idea that we are gods is powerful and provocative, and El’s only mistake is reminding us of it once too often. Yet he’ll have a chance to hone his language in future work: “This shit ain’t over... / Until they cover me with dirt.”

Unalloyed energy from a fresh voice.

Dominé (Old Louisville, 2014) returns to Louisville’s local haunts in this smooth cocktail of history, architecture and the macabre.

“Who says you have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a good ghost story?” asks the author, a self-identified skeptic, as he opens the floor to more than just stories of urban legends and creaky floorboards. He introduces readers to the city of Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby and Colonel Sanders’ universally recognized chicken. Since its founding in 1778, it’s become a “Victorian time capsule”—home to Millionaires Row, brooding Gothic churches and lavish mansions boasting Art Nouveau interior design. (It’s also home to once-controversial modern high-rises.) But for every humbling structure, Dominé notes, there’s an equally sinister accompanying tale. In one such story, a woman is tormented by loud knocks on her second-floor window and heavy footfalls on her staircase; after hearing them, she finds fireplace pokers laid out in the shape of a cross. In another particularly tantalizing fusion of history and legend, he tells a story of a hairless creature with massive wings who’s alleged to dwell on the spires of the Walnut Street Baptist Church. Those eager to dismiss the stories as flights of fancy may be surprised by the fact that an overwhelming number of levelheaded, sensible folks have allegedly had these encounters, making them lifelong, if reluctant, believers in supernatural phenomena. Likewise, Dominé’s skepticism adds an intriguing dimension to this collection. He occasionally relays stories whose historic origins can’t be traced, but he supports his most enticing tales with centuries-old images and newspaper headlines. In one impressive display of investigative journalism, he links Louisville’s Demon Leaper to a string of similar incidents reaching as far back as London’s legendary Spring-Heeled Jack. “Like so many of the legends and unsubstantiated stories in Old Louisville,” he says, “reports of these ghostly encounters suggest at least a tenuous connection with the past, a correlation borne out in neighborhood folklore and modern oral traditions.” His own unnerving experience at a séance at the city’s Spalding University provides a fitting endnote.

A well-researched, spooky slice of Southern American history.

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PATRICE a poemella

SASHI, THE SCARED LITTLE SHELTIE

Gale, Geri PK & Alex Co. (174 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 16, 2014 978-0-9860590-0-1

Greiner, Linda Brown Books Publishing Group

This debut picture book by sheltierescue-advocate Greiner describes how to care for Shetland sheepdogs.

Sashi, a sheltie, herds by instinct. She chases everything, imagining cars and children on bicycles to be sheep. Her owners don’t understand that this is the nature of shelties, and they drop her off at a shelter rather than try to train her. Afraid of everything, Sashi spends most of her time hiding from the people who visit the shelter. But eventually, a woman from Shetland Sheepdog Rescue comes to rehabilitate Sashi—and only a few days later, a little girl named Anna and her mother bring Sashi home. The girl and her mom know what it takes to train a dog to come, sit and investigate scary things. During the training process, Anna teaches Sashi to find her in hideand-seek games around the house—an idea sure to delight young dog lovers. Readers will be pleased to watch frightened Sashi gain confidence and feel loved (rather than being constantly scolded for her natural behavior). Based on a true story, this picture book has a lot of kid appeal, and the illustrations are delightfully child-friendly. The idea that various dog breeds act differently may help families make better decisions when looking to buy or rescue a dog. The relationship between Anna and Sashi is heartwarming and will resonate with readers who love dogs. The vocabulary is largely approachable for newly independent readers, with some challenging words and phrases. Lap readers may enjoy looking at the pictures and discussing Sashi’s happy ending.

A sweet success story about transforming a scared, neglected pup into a champion.

An intense, sumptuous prose-poetry exploration of inspiration, sacrifice and art.

With uninhibited brush strokes, Gale’s impassioned debut offers an extended, self-reflexive allegory of artistic abnegation and creation. The author marries the characterization of prose to the sensuality and linguistic precision of poetry in a form she dubs a “poemella.” She introduces Patrice, a perpetually young but weary 500-year-old muse, to Louis, an artist stripped bare by loss. His family and friends were lost in the Holocaust while he was secretly carried to freedom in a coffin, alive. Over the course of 10 years, Louis paints Patrice two dozen times, and their relationship is an evolving but always volatile combination of love and war. Patrice has spent centuries defined and limited by the male gaze, ever the nude on the red velvet couch; she’s not unlike the “captive ships slaved to the berth...waiting and waiting to unleash their bodies from land.” In Louis, she finds an artist who promises, “I will do anything you ask. All artists give up something when / they paint. I will give you everything, everything, everything.” Tired of passivity, she demands increasingly more of Louis—“We should sacrifice something of yours that causes you anguish,” she suggests—while also giving him more than she’s ever given to any other painter. Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Patrice desires immortality and release simultaneously, while Louis “[s]ecretly...mourn[s] his impotence / his inability to create without destruction.” In similarly Wilde-an fashion, Patrice doles out wisdom epigrammatically—“Nothing in art is to be despised” or “Only the unauthentic is ugly in art. If you continue to deceive / yourself, then you deceive art”—while Louis’ painting becomes more surreal. Much like her heroine, Gale strings “her words / with fine needle and thread, each letter a pearl, each line of her T a cross / between reality and fiction.” In Gale’s case, the pearls sometime hang chokingly thick, and the decadence of her imagery occasionally gives way to sickeningly sweet decay. It’s often exhausting but also oddly appropriate to the project’s intense, inward-looking aestheticism.

A baroque, sensual tour de force that elevates art above all else.

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN ANGEL NAMED BILL

Hanian, Michael Trans. by Katherine Blakeney Xlibris (92 pp.) $33.27 | $16.63 paper | $6.09 e-book May 16, 2014 978-1-4990-8600-3 In Hanian’s debut novella, an aimless young man encounters a down-to-earth angel, with whom he has a series of life-

changing discussions.

Max, depressed and contemplating suicide, unexpectedly meets a stranger named Bill on one of his evening walks. Bill wastes no time with enigmatic wordplay: He admits up front that he’s an angel who’s been assigned to attend to Max—to talk with him and lead him to “the Road of Knowledge” and, in the process, help him understand his own life a little better.

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back story Best-selling Indie writer Leighann Dobbs reveals the secret to her success Why Self-Publish?

There are a lot of advantages to self-publishing, not the least of which is that you have complete control over your business and the rights to your books. You can publish them to all of the major e-reader websites and charge whatever you want for them. You can easily experiment with pricing to see which price points earn you the most profit and gain you the most readers...and you get to keep more of the royalties since you don’t have a publisher to take a cut.

Self-publishing allows you to work within your own time schedule with no looming deadlines (much less stress!). You can also set your own release dates.

You don’t have to wait six months for your book to get to market. You can publish it, and start getting readers, as soon as it’s finished. Once your book is published, you can see your sales in real time every day and not have to bite your nails to the nub waiting for a quarterly report to tell you how your book is doing.

You can get statistics on your book launches immediately with the click of a few buttons. This allows you to see what advertising tactics work the best for you and also to change things instantly such as book covers and blurbs. You are in complete control and able to change what you want, when you want.

To me, this control is vital because no one cares more about your books than you do. You don’t have to worry about a publishing company losing interest in your books and letting them sink into obscurity—you are in control of advertising and marketing, which includes social media, paid advertising, your book blurb and cover art.

This freedom of control comes with a lot of responsibility and extra work, which is why...

Control Your Own Destiny With Self-Publishing

I think every avid reader dreams of being a novelist, and I’m no exception. But unlike many authors, I didn’t grow up with hopes of being published by one of the big publishing houses. Sweating over a novel for months or years only to suffer decades of rejections didn’t appeal to me.

Not only that, but I’m somewhat of a control freak. I like to have control over my business and, from what I can see, traditional publishing doesn’t give authors much control at all. I couldn’t imagine giving birth to a book and then handing it over to someone else for them to deliver to the world.

That’s why I didn’t write my first book until I was 50 years old—and then self-publishing changed my life.

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Self-Publishing Might Not Be For Everyone Some authors don’t want to run a business—they just want to write. Writing is the fun part, and the business stuff can be tedious. One of the benefits of having a publisher is that they take care of some of the aspects of running a business for you. But author beware—having a publisher is no guarantee these things will be done for you or done to your best benefit.

One major responsibility of a self-publisher is providing the cover for the book. A good cover can mean the difference between selling thousands of copies to readers who spread the word about your book and selling one copy to your mom. Unless you have some graphics skills, you’ll need to hire a designer because nothing will kill the sales of your book more than an amateur cover.

You also have to know what an appealing cover for your book should look like. In order to know that, you have to do some research and learn what elements, colors, fonts and so on appear on the top-selling books in your genre. Then you have to work with your cover artist to create a cover that will catch the eye of your intended reader.

Another responsibility of self-publishing is editing. You’re going to need to pay one or more editors (I use two) to look at your book and make sure there are no errors. Don’t make the mistake I made early on and publish your book unedited—nothing ruins the reading experience more than having to wade through typos and grammatical errors. Trust me, those one-star reviews hurt.

Self-publishers also have to deal with formatting the book and uploading to the various platforms where you want to sell your book (for both e-book and paperback formats). Formatting can be a painful experience, but there are software programs and services that can help.

The marketing and advertising aspects of selfpublishing are probably the most daunting for authors. Unless you have experience in this field, it’s hard to know what to do. I was lucky that I had an online marketing background, but if you don’t, there are lots of forums, groups and even author blogs online where authors share tips on the most effective advertising for books.

Make no mistake about it: Advertising is critical if you want to grow your reader base and bottom line.

Just because you have signed with a publisher does not necessarily mean they will do this for you, so it’s a good idea to learn about marketing and advertising your books whether you self-publish or not.

Self-published authors are not just writers—they are also business owners who have to sacrifice some writing time in order to tend to the task of running a business. I think that’s a worthwhile sacrifice to make because there’s no one who cares more about making my books a success than I do.

Would I Self-Publish Again?

Yes! I’ve self-published over 20 books to date and gone from zero published books to a USA Today bestseller in just under two years. Self-publishing may not be for everyone—it may not even be for you—but for me, it’s been a life-changing experience that’s allowed me to live a dream.

Leighann Dobbs is the best-selling author of the Lexy Baker cozy mystery series as well as several other mystery series.

A former software engineer, she lives in New Hampshire with her Chihuahua mix, Mojo, her rescue cat, Kitty, and her husband, Bruce.

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“The political and social commentaries throughout this unique novel are razor-sharp, as are uses of imagery and symbolism.” from american neolithic

usually found in angelic characters. Instead, Bill is often curt and abrupt—at one point, Max refers, somewhat euphemistically, to Bill’s “usually cheerful sardonic disposition”—and he has little patience for Max’s brooding ways. “You just wander around seeing nothing but what’s in front of your nose,” he complains. “You miss out on things that way.” Bill then instructs Max in all the things he’s failed to see, and they talk about the true meaning of fairy tales, the natures of faith and free will, “the mediocrity of the male sex” (a particularly grating shock to young Max), the power of words, and, ultimately, the reality and illusion of death. Hanian briskly moves the story along over the course of months, as Bill guides Max not only toward better understanding, but also toward a life with his girlfriend, Liz, a frustratingly underrealized character who takes an increasingly central role. These conversations, in Blakeney’s smooth translation, are stripped of preachy morality or heavy philosophical digression. Their relative simplicity gives the novel an unexpected feel of verisimilitude. Hanian’s characterization of Bill, in particular, is confidently done: He’s a crusty, short-tempered angel, but an endearingly individual one, who uses a cane not because he needs it, but because he likes how it looks.

A rare example of inspirational fiction that will appeal to believers and nonbelievers alike.

here you go proving evolution,” Raleigh tells Blingbling. The political and social commentaries throughout this unique novel are razor-sharp, as are uses of imagery and symbolism. The disturbing contrast of nonviolent, contemplative and deeply compassionate Blingbling to the brutality, apathy and ignorance of modern-day America is profoundly moving.

One standout among many is a brilliant sequence in which Raleigh attends a bum fight—“illegal, but illegal the way whiskey was in 1924. And I make my living off the kind of people who in the Coolidge administration would have been meeting trawlers full of booze at midnight on the North Fork. Well, kind of like them. Just worse.”

A towering work of speculative fiction that will have readers rethinking what it means to be human.

THE GOD WAVE Hemstreet, Patrick Manuscript

In this sci-fi debut, a team of neuroscientists exposes new capabilities in the brain that may steer human evolution toward miraculous—and deadly—frontiers.

Chuck Brenton, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, has been researching ways to harness the energy of the human brain for basic physical tasks. Ideally, his work would aid the handicapped or perhaps space and sea exploration. His data on gamma waves, however, is missing a baseline reading of the brain that would propel the research forward. When mathematician Matt Streegman contacts Chuck with key data from a deceased loved one’s EEG readout, the two quickly team up.

They open a lab called Advanced Kinetics and soon have test subjects using their minds—via the Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface—to manipulate both computer software and construction equipment. But Matt and Chuck differ fundamentally on what kind of investors to take on: medical or commercial.

Stronger-willed Matt wins out and finds himself courted by military interests. He keeps the involvement of Gen. Howard a secret from Chuck long enough to enmesh the company in complex, restrictive research, from which there’s no turning back. Yet Chuck and the test subjects—Mike, Sara, Mini, Lanfen and Tim—realize that military control of their work will lead to disaster. Luckily they have a few secrets of their own.

Author Hemstreet has prepared a hard-science feast in his riveting, immensely satisfying debut. The science is always clearly stated, as are the corresponding metaphors, like one that sums up the neuroscientists’ take on burgeoning brain power: “You develop the muscles appropriate to the activity, and you learn how to use them most effectively”—essentially, “these people are...flexing mental muscles we didn’t know they had.” His characters are studies in pointed charisma, especially Matt, who’d like to “[kick] God in the teeth.” Audiences will fear for them as the plot subtly, horribly coils tighter. Ultimately, Hemstreet polishes his ideals regarding individuality and creative passion

AMERICAN NEOLITHIC

Hawkins, Terence C&R Press (200 pp.) $24.00 | $19.00 paper | $9.99 e-book May 5, 2014 978-1-936196-33-3 This powerful cautionary tale mixes political satire and legal thrills in a nearfuture America where the existence of a Neanderthal threatens a government that has devolved into a “trailer park theocracy.”

When jaded Manhattan lawyer Raleigh is hired to represent a suspect accused of murdering a popular rap artist, he understands immediately that the case could interest Homeland Security. His client—nicknamed Blingbling—is described as a “crazy homeless retarded guy”; he has no Social Security number, license or Homeland passport. In a country where Patriot Amendments have been added to the Constitution to radically limit civil liberties and give Homeland Police unlimited jurisdiction over cases concerning national security, Raleigh knows that if Blingbling is involved in any terrorist activity, his own career—and his freedom—could be at stake. But the case becomes exponentially more complicated when a DNA test shows that Blingbling isn’t human: He’s a Neanderthal who, with the few others of his kind, has been secretly living in a “Nest” in an abandoned building in New York’s SoHo district. When, in an attempt to dismiss the case, Raleigh goes public with the revelation, he finds himself at the center of a national firestorm over the theory of evolution. “The mouth-breathers amended the Constitution just one step short of criminalizing modern science and 130

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COURAGE AND DEVOTION

while bowing to the action/sci-fi formula. The result should be absolute bliss for fans of everything from Star Trek to X-Men. He writes a mean cliffhanger, too, one that hints at a sequel full of further narrative triumphs.

A flat-out astonishing debut.

Kindig, Bruce R. AuthorHouse (272 pp.) $28.99 | $19.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Jul. 12, 2014 978-1-4969-1835-2

RETHINKING SREBRENICA

The comprehensive regimental history of a Confederate artillery unit.

This scholarly debut by Kindig, a retired community college history professor, chronicles the soldiers, equipment, movements and battles of a light artillery unit from its spring-1861 formation in Memphis, Tennessee, by Capt. Smith P. Bankhead to its Dec. 9, 1863, disbandment following the South’s defeat at Missionary Ridge. Kindig draws his title from praise for the troops offered by commander William L. Scott in a five-page summary he penned in 1886, previously the only work to focus on the unit. Kindig spent 30 years tracking down records that Scott thought had been lost or never knew existed, and the result is an impressive historical re-creation. Readers find themselves on the ground and in the midst of battle as a result of Kindig’s intimate and uncanny familiarity with the daily movements and moods of these soldiers. He has pieced together minute details from hundreds of sources, including government records, personal letters, memoirs and scholarly texts, all of which are footnoted for easy reference. Fifteen appendices organize rosters, ranks, recruits, transfers and desertions. Although the narrative assumes a basic knowledge of Civil War history, any reader will grasp the rank-and-file’s reactions to repeated decisions by Gen. Braxton Bragg that turned tactical victories into strategic retreats as well as their struggling morale as material shortages worsened. Kindig’s affection for the characters he has so thoroughly studied is apparent, as is his respect for their commitment, if not their cause. Though he presents the conflict from their point of view, he maintains a scholarly rather than partisan tone. The only shortcomings are mediocre illustrations and scattered typos and editing miscues. Errant words, apparently orphaned when sentences were revised, occasionally mar what is otherwise clear, well-paced prose. Given the author’s extraordinary attention to detail in every battle, it’s a shame that location maps aren’t more legible and more numerous. Nevertheless, Kindig achieves his stated goal of telling “the stories of common men,” and aficionados of the genre will find a wealth of information and insight to enjoy.

A worthy addition to any Civil War bookshelf.

Karganovic, Stephen; Simic, Ljubisa Unwritten History, Inc. (368 pp.) $19.95 paper | Oct. 31, 2013 978-0-9709198-3-0

A painstakingly meticulous, unconventional analysis of the purported 1995 genocide that took place in Srebrenica.

Originally published under the title Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide (2013), this impressively rigorous reconsideration challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the devastation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The two authors—one a medical doctor who exhaustively assessed all the germane forensic evidence, the other a man who played a part as a defense attorney in the judicial aftermath of the Srebrenica incident— call for a more “holistic approach” to the event, one that considers the three days of killing within the context of three years of war. They also scour allegedly expert testimony and eyewitness accounts, impugning their credibility. The principal, and shocking, conclusion the authors draw is that genocide, in the strictest sense of the charge, never did occur, though they do concede that war crimes were committed, specifically numerous executions. “The attention and vast logistical resources invested in propping up this misleading narrative could have been more effectively used to conduct a proper investigation,” they write.

In fact, the authors argue that the preceding three years had been riddled by war crimes, even “pogroms,” committed by Muslim combatants, systematically neglected and even covered up by global media, major governments and a slew of international institutions infected by bias. Further, they contend that such wholesale misrepresentation of the facts only stymies the possibility of future harmony between Orthodox and Muslim communities. Written in often dense prose characteristic of academic literature, this isn’t light fare, and its provocative claims are sure to stir the scholarly pot.

For those who enjoy a tireless, detailed account of controversial historical events, this is an excellent find.

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Paths Less Travelled of a Scholar Warrior (Spy) Teacher Healer

TYING THE FRINGE KNOTS Collected Poems, 2010-2014 Lentz, Mick Self

Lee, Hon K. CreateSpace (304 pp.) $13.69 paper | $6.80 e-book Jul. 20, 2014 978-1-4947-5625-3

Tackling science and religion, government and family, Lentz ably covers the waterfront in this perceptive volume of collected verse.

Because Lentz’s new book opens up with a poetic kaddish (a Jewish funeral liturgy) for his father, Rex, it’s awfully hard not to compare him—favorably, one might add—to Allen Ginsberg, whose own epic “Kaddish” memorialized his mother, Naomi. The godfather of the Beats compressed his mother’s biography into a few short strokes; by contrast, Lentz gets expansive when addressing his father’s life story: “the small boy he was took crap and drove mules. / he helped his mother clean movie theaters. / he had close friends. / he learned the secrets of his trade. / cutting metal, a craft that men at war could use in the Philippines, / he could make you a bulldozer part from a chunk of steel.” So while Naomi is tragic, shrinking, Rex is a John Henry–esque mythic hero. Yet if Lentz’s tone in “Saying Kaddish for Rex Albert” is one of nonironic lionization, the feel of the rest of his poetry is subtler, more likely to murmur than shout. Take, for instance, the fleeting, beautiful “Autumnal Dreamscape”: “rotation and tilt produce / a population with the ability to cope / each season is a step on a ladder to / the next as we try to steady our grasp / holding on for dear life to a / planet surface infatuated with change.” Along with such philosophical reflections come other insightful pieces on politics, rites of passage, technology and family. Yet given the book’s title—presumably a reference to the traditional Jewish prayer shawl—there is less orthodox religion than one would expect. In “Abandoned by the Gods,” Lentz writes, “today as I reached out to / the ineffable nothing much happened / that risible connection / did not cause the familiar shiver.” If Lentz is more likely to wrestle with the deity than to laud him, so much the better. It’s a venerable Jewish tradition.

A wide-ranging collection of verse from a sure-handed, cleareyed poet.

The curious recollections of a man whose passions include Chinese medicine and espionage.

Lee is a true Renaissance man. Raised in New York City’s Chinatown, he fought as a U.S. Marine artillery officer in Vietnam, ran secret agents for the CIA, co-founded a martial arts school and is now a practicing acupuncturist. He shares his adventures on what he calls the four “paths” of his life in this tantalizing, clever memoir. A self-described “Scholar Warrior,” he tells how he joined the Marine Reserves in 1961 while in college, escaped land mines and sniper fire in Southeast Asia, and eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel. But the most interesting item on his resume is his 30-year career in the CIA. Trained in black arts such as lock-picking, disguise and clandestine surveillance, Lee served undercover and in command positions around the globe. Unfortunately, for security reasons, he doesn’t name the countries where he operated, but he does reveal an intriguing amount of spycraft. His account of how he recruited a foreign diplomat named “Adam” to feed him information provides readers with an authentic glimpse into the shadowy world of international espionage. Lee embarked on his “Teacher” path by opening a school in Virginia that instructed students in kung fu, taijiquan, and qi gong, a type of Chinese yoga. Finally, at age 57, Lee put his boundless energy into the study of traditional Chinese medicine. On the surface, being a scholar-warriorteacher-healer seems rife with contradictions, but Lee views his life paths as “interrelated and mutually supportive,” following in the tradition of the ancient Chinese knights who prized both fighting skills and intellectual attainment. He tells his life story in vignettes arranged by theme, so it’s sometimes difficult to keep the timeline straight as Lee’s life paths overlap. The book’s greatest pleasure is the diverse cast of characters that Lee encountered over the years, such as a Chinese cook and kung fu master who bludgeoned a burglar with an iron skillet, a spit-and-polish Marine major who insisted on being saluted even while wearing a bath towel, and a renowned expert in Chinese swordsmanship.

An entertaining, inspiring story of personal reinvention.

EARTHBOUND Poems LeRoy, Dee Nov. 15, 2014

With her first collection, LeRoy delivers luminous, art-inspired poems that expertly balance the concepts of nature and the human struggle.

LeRoy, a retired science writer, could easily be an art historian given her facility with the impressionists and Dutch masters. Many of these free-verse poems have the concentrated color and frozen action of a still life. “The Yellow Fields 132

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of Gennevilliers” compares two Gustave Caillebotte paintings, while “Wheat Field with Crows” juxtaposes past and present as Vincent van Gogh’s grief foreshadows an ill friend’s demise.

“The Lady and the Unicorn,” a close reading of a Parisian tapestry, recalls author Tracy Chevalier’s literary approach to history. Permeated with color and light, many poems are like mood studies: “September” features “sapphire sky” and “afternoon’s blue”; “The Old House” exhibits shades of gray, a recurrent hue.

LeRoy chooses alliteration and assonance over rhyme—the one end rhyme, perhaps incidental, comes as a shock (“fast / passed” in “Flat Run”). Repeated consonant sounds create soothing rhythms, as in “unsuspecting sea” and “fiddleheads unfurl: / fanfare.” The poems are carefully organized to bleed into each other thematically. For instance, in “Evidence for Strings,” physics— specifically string theory—cedes to talk of music and stringed instruments; the next poem, “Violin,” then follows seamlessly.

Likewise, the striking intersection of beauty and violence in “Planting Tulips”—“a battlefield so strewn / with brightly turbaned heads / it was compared to a bed of tulips”—leads to the war-themed “Verdun.” The author’s knowledge of plants comes through in her delicate description of chicory (“this asterisk of color”) and in “Saguaro,” a poem inventively written from a cactus’s perspective. One stanza of “Ginkgo” resembles a haiku, making it germane to its Asian setting. LeRoy masters the confluence of art and science, joining writers such as Ruth Padel, Andrea Barrett and A.S. Byatt. Almost equally valuable, however, are her subtle relationship poems, such as “Firewater,” in which a collision of life-giving but destructive forces symbolizes the challenges of marriage. Five final poems about medical crises and death ease into a superb finale: “sorrowed by so much lost / hungry for what remains.”

A stunning poetic debut.

and state was meant to mutually strengthen both—a view based on a controversial reading of the meaning of the First Amendment, although not one without powerful precedent.

The book is at its best when it explores the intersection of early Christian philosophers and democratic theory, locating a common theme in the irreducible dignity of each person.

Mammoser is to be commended for shifting the debate beyond appeals to scriptural authority, instead excavating the reasoning, or natural law, that underpins Christian doctrine. Sometimes he overlooks the possibility that some of the Founding Fathers weren’t very strongly Christian, or even religious, as when he says that “[James] Madison believed the Christian faith strong enough doctrinally, theologically, morally, and intellectually that it did not need the support of civil government.” Other sources have noted that Madison was, at heart, deeply skeptical about all theological claims. Also, although the author draws some powerful links, he doesn’t entirely clarify why evangelical thought, in particular, has a special claim to influencing democracy. As a whole, however, the book does a creditable job of articulating an often overlooked perspective.

A challenging contribution to the debate over the separation of church and state.

BEHIND THE LINES WWI’s little-known story of German occupation, Belgian resistance, and the band of yanks who saved millions from starvation.

Miller, Jeffrey B. Milbrown Press (480 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sep. 7, 2014 978-0-9906893-0-0

The Evangelical Roots of Democracy

The first book of a planned trilogy chronicling Americanled relief efforts in Belgium during World War I. Just in time for the Great War’s centennial, this valuable narrative reprises a dramatic chapter of world history that rarely takes center stage in history books, as it’s often overshadowed by subsequent wars. Specifically, Miller (Facing Your Fifties, 2002, etc.) focuses on the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a multinational humanitarian organization that saved 9 million Belgian and French civilians under German occupation from starvation. Led by future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, then 40 years old and living in London, the CRB was the first mission of its kind, establishing precedents that shaped current policies regarding universal human rights and international humanitarian intervention.

Miller shows how Hoover navigated German and Allied opposition, co-opted competing humanitarian groups and improvised a distribution network that deployed young Americans as neutral “delegates” across Belgium’s provinces. Miller’s grandfather Milton M. Brown was one of these delegates, and he married Erica Bunge, a wealthy Belgian native whose family is integral to the overall story. Their diaries, letters and photos, bequeathed to the author in the 1980s, sparked Miller’s interest in the period, and

Mammoser, Thomas L. CreateSpace (234 pp.) $15.00 paper | Aug. 22, 2014 978-1-4935-1743-5

A philosophically sophisticated argument that American democracy has roots in Christian ideals.

Mammoser (co-author, Dealing with Media for the Church, 1999) swims against contemporary currents to make a case that the principles of our country’s democracy derive from evangelical concepts and that this works to its historical benefit. The scope of his analysis is ambitiously broad, investigating the remote origins of Christian thought in philosophers such as St. Augustine, Cicero and St. Thomas Aquinas and in the Enlightenment; he then gauges the collective impact of these meditations on the Founding Fathers. His argument runs contrary to the view that the U.S. government is based on a strict segregation of religious and public life, which is enshrined in several Supreme Court decisions. He says that the distinction between church |

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“[A] peek into an achingly beautiful America now gone, when seemingly everyone in New York City knew each other.” from a surgeon’s story

it’s obvious that this book was a labor of love. The narrative covers only August through December 1914, and readers contemplating 397 pages of text (plus sources, notes and an index) about a mere six months of wartime may fear a tedious journey. But instead, the pages fly by thanks to Miller’s consistently smooth prose and careful scene-setting. He effectively captures the human drama, with exquisite descriptions of how characters looked (“With his rimless pince-nez, he had the appearance of a scholar or professor and, just like one, he longed for the solitude of the writer’s garret”) and why they behaved as they did. He quickens the pace with short chapters that bounce among Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam, London and New York. Readers who only associate World War I and Herbert Hoover with trench warfare and the Great Depression (or the Hoover Dam) will discover meaningful contexts for both in a tale that personalizes extraordinary times.

Miller writes that his goal was to write for people “who never read history books”; he accomplishes that splendidly while also creating a work that scholars will admire.

An excellent history that should catapult Miller to the top tier of popular historians.

woods and wild game. When it first appeared in 1935, Morris’ book was a best-seller; this revision from Gosden and Walker (Morris’ granddaughter) could easily do the same. It presents a multifaceted portrait: a conscientious, dedicated physician who refuses to accept a fee if he’s unsuccessful; a profession shrugging off the chains of ignorant tradition for the sterile coat of science; and a fertile country destroyed by frenzied building and avarice.

Considering the current mess of health care and environmental decline, readers will weep for time passed.

Far more of a human and social portrait than a medical text, this reissue fills the prescription for fascinating reading.

QUEEN OF HEARTS Volume 2: The Wonder Oakes, Colleen Sparkpress (186 pp.) $15.00 paper | $9.99 e-book Sep. 23, 2014 978-1-940716-21-3

In the second installment of Oakes’ (Elly in Love, 2014, etc.) Queen of Hearts series, Dinah unravels more secrets of her past.

After the events of the first volume, also set in the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dinah is no longer the pampered Princess of Hearts. Instead, she’s accused of a horrible crime and is now a fugitive. Her father, the King of Hearts, framed her for a brutal murder so that he could avoid handing over the throne to her, as Wonderland law demands.

Dinah has fled to the Twisted Wood with only Morte, the monstrous Hornhoov who was her father’s chosen steed, for companionship. Dinah travels deeper into the woods to stay ahead of her father’s search parties, but she runs low on supplies and has no idea how to find more. Then she meets Sir Gorrann, one of the Spades who’s supposed to serve the King. He has reasons of his own to hate the King, however, so he helps Dinah by training her in swordsmanship and keeping her away from the King’s men. But the only place out of the King’s reach has its own perils, and Dinah finds that she needs all her wits to survive. As the story progresses, Dinah digs deep and discovers new strengths, but in the process, she becomes a harder, more ruthless person. Overall, the book works well within the framework laid out in the first volume. Oakes skillfully portrays Dinah’s inevitable toughening as she realizes that sometimes there are no right choices and the only options are bad and worse. The author’s unveiling of a certain aspect of Dinah’s past seems a bit forced, but it’s definitely unexpected. This installment engagingly shows Dinah shifting further toward becoming the infamous Queen of Hearts, but it also portrays her as a likable human being—at least, so far. Fans of the first volume will devour this book and eagerly await the finale.

The story of Dinah’s transition from girl to woman continues and reveals new, remarkable aspects of her character.

A SURGEON’S STORY The Autobiography of Robert T. Morris

Morris, Robert T.; Gosden, Roger; Walker, Pam Jamestowne Bookworks (370 pp.) $15.99 paper | $6.99 e-book Sep. 16, 2013 978-0-9897199-0-2 In this revised version of his 1935 autobiography, Morris, the author of 10 nonfiction books (Hopkins Pond and other sketches, 1896, etc.), writes about his career during a transformative age when medicine moved from horror to hospital.

Some things were better back in the good old days; not medicine. Morris, a renowned physician and surgeon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, maintained a career that saw important medical developments: the introduction of Joseph Lister’s pioneering antiseptic procedures, for instance, and the use of anesthesia becoming commonplace during surgery. It’s hard to imagine that surgeons once treasured the rancid smell of that “good old surgical stink” produced by dried blood and pus. They operated in ordinary frock coats and, Morris recalls, wiped their knives across their boots to clean them before cutting into a patient. Operations were commonly done at a person’s home and as quickly as possible since, without anesthesia, the patient couldn’t survive the agony of an extended cutting session. Over the course of Morris’ career, hospitals became germ-free centers of healing rather than foul prisons for the insane and enfeebled.

Written in a wry, self-deprecating style, Morris’ accessible, entertaining book is punctuated by examples and stories. It works on another level, too, as a peek into an achingly beautiful America now gone, when seemingly everyone in New York City knew each other, and the countryside beyond cities was filled with streams, 134

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KISSING THE SKY

wives’ favorite doctor. And there’s Jimmy Tatko, the studly contractor who decides to make a circuit on foxhunt day, apologizing to all the rich wives he’s schtupped and then forsaken. Things don’t turn out well for Jimmy, considering his stomach cancer. The most Cheever-esque story of all may be “Garbage Feud,” in which, after the unnamed narrator throws his trash, innocently, into the wrong Dumpster, the feud is on and there’s no backing down. Things escalate until Crawford, the narrator’s nemesis, flips his truck with a disastrous outcome—but in a twist for our times, a literary agent sees the newspaper account, so there’s likely a million-dollar book and movie deal in the offing. Unlike some framed stories, main characters in one chapter will reappear, often as cameos or just references, in another. Readers do get a sense of Wellington as a real place where lives intertwine. Jimmy, for instance, may pleasure a fellow’s wife in one chapter, then turn up in another to give an estimate for his kitchen remodel. For all their wealth, most of these people are not happy—an old trope, of course, but one that Orcutt slightly twists. There are random acts of kindness, and in a heartening episode, someone steals an abused dog. Sometimes, even for those characters who are disagreeable or worse, there are hints that even they deserve our pity.

Though not quite as sensitive an observer or exceptional a writer as Cheever, Orcutt lies satisfyingly in his shadow.

Olsen, Cristina Suncloud Press (121 pp.)

Oct. 31, 2014 978-0-9905328-0-4 Half poetry, half photography, this new collection is a cannily crafted hybrid.

Olsen’s poetry, which drives her book, is loosely divided into sections built around three themes: light and darkness, love and “blissful surrender.” Pieces of the first appear in “Beauty’s Passing”: “And yet here I now stand, / here in this sliver of time, / watching dark shapes / where gloom pervades / in harrowing fashion.” Much of her verse feels similar—compact, approachable, unpretentious. In other pieces, her lines stretch out and flow, notably in a touching ode to her husband, “On Seeing the Invisible”: “Standing above the fog he surveys the unseen, memories rising up from times past, faint drumbeats bearing messages from uncounted and discounted ancestors.” The telling shift between “uncounted” and “discounted” is both lovely and provocative, and Olsen fills her poetry with such subtle wordplay. This is clever work, but the author is too circumspect to flaunt her talent; she often sneaks wit in at the ends of lines, letting it hit late, when her reader is perhaps less guarded. The “bliss” that infuses the last section of the book is perhaps—or sometimes—the joy of mystical union. Thus, in “Stillness Is Not Silence,” she opens, “When silence descends, / I sink into the sound of stillness, / the symphony of all symphonies, / the universal hum, / God’s voice holding me aloft.”

That she engages the spiritual makes sense given her academic training in religious studies. Perhaps the book’s only flaw is the fact that the color photographs she pairs with her poems occasionally overwhelm them. Especially striking is the landscape Olsen matches with “Tall Grasses in the Wind”: A lush hillside meets blinding blue sky in the background, while an enticing waterway bisects the photograph lengthwise. The picture is so pleasant readers might almost forget the poem that accompanies it.

A deftly balanced melange of word and image to delight both the mind and the eye.

AT THE END OF MEADOW STREET

Paul, Michael Damianos Publishing (308 pp.) $17.95 paper | $5.99 e-book | Apr. 7, 2014 978-0-9882295-8-7 In Paul’s middle-grade debut, a crew of tough-talking 12-year-olds fake their way through their final summer before adolescence.

Coming out of the sixth grade, Sammy Johns is confident in what he knows—his neighborhood, its streets and bike trails, its pizzerias and arcades. He knows his friends and where he stands with them, how to curse and trash-talk, how to take a joke. He knows his family, enough to know he wants to be around them as little as possible. Yet he’s only one summer away from middle school and all the unknowns that accompany it. How will he fit in? Will his friends stick together? And will he learn the truth about all this sex stuff that he and his peers are constantly talking about? Caught between childhood and the teenage wasteland on the other side of August, Sammy throws himself into a summer of biking, egging and acting his age while trying to ignore the panic in his chest. It’s all going according to plan until girls and high schoolers start popping up in the park, forcing Sammy and his three best friends to confront the complexities of young adulthood. Paul is hardly reinventing the genre: The characters are recognizable, their arcs predictable, and the expected familial melodrama that lurks in the background gives this fairly shallow adventure a few inches of depth. Though nothing in the plot feels contrived, there are several points in the action, particularly in the final scenes, when one can’t help but wish the author had been

ONE HUNDRED MILES FROM MANHATTAN

Orcutt, Chris Have Pen, Will Travel (254 pp.) $12.95 paper | $5.99 e-book | Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-615-99983-8 Welcome to Wellington, New York, where, in this loose novel, readers can eavesdrop on the lives of the uber-rich and those who cater to them.

Think of a very, very upscale Winesburg, Ohio—with no inhabitant nearly so innocent as young George Willard. Or think John Cheever, for this is certainly Cheever country. Wellington is about a hundred miles north of Manhattan, populated by such as the well-named Hamilton Highgate and his trophy wife, Caprice, and Carlton Hale, M.D., the |

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“...Rieger’s writing is effortlessly funny, with deadpan humor coloring even the most mundane moments...” from the case files of roderick misely, consultant

more daring; on the whole, however, the novel succeeds. Sammy and company win the reader over with a sincerity that only kids possess. While Paul sometimes runs the risk of overexplaining Sammy’s emotional state, most of the story is meted out in the rough, simple language that makes 12-year-old boys both charming and frightening. Despite its freshman flaws, the novel reveals Paul to be a natural writer with a knack for character, plot and pacing, which bodes well for his future literary endeavors.

An imperfect novel by a new talent that should please middle-grade readers.

the municipal government are only a few of the tasks that keep a can of stew on his hot plate or enough change in his pocket for a meal at the local Greek restaurant. His specialty, however, is solving seemingly unsolvable mysteries, from the theft of expensive jewels at the local museum to the blackmail of a town official. Sometimes Roderick acts at the request of a desperate client, but other times he hangs his hopes on meddling without invitation or a possible payday. Each chapter is a glimpse into one of those cases and the variety of creative but legally fuzzy methods that Roderick employs to crack them. These bitesized whodunits toe the line between zany and dangerous without reading as over-the-top—a savvy mixture from which even more seasoned writers could learn a thing or two. All the while, Rieger’s writing is effortlessly funny, with deadpan humor coloring even the most mundane moments: “The two shook hands.

Misely could have sworn he was handling a live, wet eel. Instinctively, he looked around for a towel, but of course, there was no towel.” Roderick himself is fairly humorless but is nonetheless a refreshing take on the 1950s gumshoe. He’s a smooth talker and skillful investigator, with none of the cool glamour or idealized independence of some other fictional private eyes. Eschewing friends, he’s certainly out for himself, but his freedom comes with a healthy dose of reality. Life hasn’t turned out the way he expected; he struggles to make ends meet and sleeps on a cot in his cluttered “eyesore” of a suite. Clever and comical, this pageturner will have readers furrowing their brows one minute and laughing out loud the next.

An intricate, lively detective novel with a wink.

The Case Files of Roderick Misely, Consultant

Rieger, J.P. Aventine Press (342 pp.) $17.95 paper | $3.95 e-book | Apr. 25, 2013 978-1-59330-818-6 An aspiring lawyer scrapes together a living as a Renaissance man and amateur sleuth in Rieger’s witty debut.

Roderick Misely has dreams of joining the legal profession, but his father’s tarnished name has prevented any of the lawyers in the 1950s town of Elk Neck from taking him on as an apprentice. So Misely does whatever he can to skirt as close to the legal profession as possible as an all-purpose consultant. Chasing down lost dogs for the reward and taking on menial typing jobs with

TEN FINGERS TOUCHING Roth, Ellen A. Self

This Issue’s Contributors # Adult Elfrieda Abbe • Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Rebekah Bergman Amy Boaz • Jeffrey Burke • Lee E. Cart • Sara Catterall • Perry Crowe • Dave DeChristopher Kathleen Devereaux • Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Gro Flatebo • Julie Foster • Peter Franck Bob Garber • Devon Glenn • Amy Goldschlager • April Holder • Christina M. Kratzner Megan Kurashige • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch • Judith Leitch • Peter Lewis • Georgia Lowe Joe Maniscalco • Virginia C. McGuire • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee • Brett Milano Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Jennifer Morell • Liza Nelson • Mike Newirth • John Noffsinger • Mike Oppenheim • Derek Parsons • Jim Piechota • William E. Pike • Gary Presley Lloyd Sachs • Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Rosanne Simeone • Linda Simon • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Andria Spencer • Bill Thompson • Matthew Tiffany • Sheila Trask • Claire Trazenfeld • Rodney Welch • Carol White • Chris White • Marion Winik

Roth’s love story transcends the battle of good and evil in her classic fairy tale.

First and foremost, this book is a fairy tale, the definition of which includes phrases such as “fabricated story,” “idealized” and “magical.” The story of beautiful Marianna and devastatingly handsome Martak fits that definition. In addition to beauty, Marianna possesses intelligence, kindness and bravery.

Martak was raised in the forest, flies with eagles, and shows great loyalty and strength. They form an archetypal couple, a man and woman who fall in love at first sight and can only exist in fairy tales...which is exactly what Roth intends. Their love story is set 20 years after a standoff between Good and Evil, when Evil places the people of Good’s realm to the test. Unfortunately for the realm, they fail said test, and the forces of Evil begin to amass. Yet there is a loophole to Evil’s test, involving the children of a previously chosen couple who must resist temptation in order to break Evil’s curse. Though Martak and Marianna are not the chosen couple, they play a critical role in saving the realm. Martak is recruited by the king to protect young Princess Rosy, who is only days away from her eighth birthday and is the key to ending the curse. Martak sets sail on a journey, facing

Children’s & Teen Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Sophie Brookover • Louise Brueggemann • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • Julie Cummins • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Andi Diehn • Omar Gallaga • Laurel Gardner • Barbara A. Genco • Judith Gire • Carol Goldman • F. Lee Hall • Heather L. Hepler • Julie Hubble Jennifer Hubert • Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Angela Leeper • Ellen Loughran • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • Michelle H. Martin PhD • Jeanne McDermott • Kathie Meizner Mary Margaret Mercado • Lisa Moore • Kathleen Odean • Deb Paulson • John Edward Peters Susan Pine • Melissa Rabey • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Amy Robinson • Leslie L. Rounds • Mindy Schanback • Mary Ann Scheuer • Dean Schneider • Hillary Foote Schwartz • Stephanie Seales • Robin Smith • Bette Wendell-Branco Indie Alana Abbott • Paul Allen • Kent Armstrong • Charles Cassady • Stephanie Cerra • Wendy Connick • Simon Creek • Michael Deagler • Steve Donoghue • Lauren L. Finch • Rebecca Foster • Eric F. Frazier • Jackie Friedland • Derek Harmening • Justin Hickey • Ivan Kenneally Isaac Larson • Barbara London • Benjamin Nadler • Joshua T. Pederson • Jon C. Pope • Russ Roberts • Jerome Shea • Emily Thompson

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dragons and unexpected obstacles. Meanwhile, Marianna is in danger at home and in desperate need of Martak’s rescue. Roth’s book features all of the requirements of the genre—forest creatures, knights, dragons, a maiden in distress and a dashing hero.

The characters will be familiar to fans of Grimm and Disney, which does not detract from their appeal. Roth does an admirable job of moving the relationship along while maintaining the threads that weave together to form the larger narrative. The climax of the book is a revelation that solves several questions and neatly wraps up the loose ends. Blumen’s stunning illustrations that accompany the text are a beautiful contribution.

A satisfying story for those who can suspend disbelief, ignore any feminist misgivings and enjoy a fairy-tale ending.

many people (including me) uncomfortable.” Schattner occasionally seasons with a dry wit that will keep readers from being overwhelmed by so much information; e.g., he warns of “logistical challenges” if a Great Dane and a Chihuahua were to mate.

Further volumes would be most welcome.

A marvelous entrance for those ready to plunge into popular science.

ONE NIGHT STAND AND OTHER POEMS

Schwab, Arnold T. AuthorHouse (192 pp.) $27.99 | $16.95 paper | $3.99 e-book May 20, 2014 978-1-4969-0486-7

SEX, LOVE AND DNA What Molecular Biology Teaches Us About Being Human

A remarkable life in verse.

Schwab has had a full life to look back on and transmute into poetry. His book ranges over several subjects, from finding love and growing old to giraffes and Oscar Wilde. His story begins in high school and spans through his time in the U.S. Navy, in academia and beyond and touches on themes that speak to both common and unusual experiences. The poems cover many different periods in his life, even touching on his 60th and 89th birthdays. Schwab’s perspective on American gay life is one that’s increasingly rare—he didn’t come out until he was 26 and didn’t have a relationship until he was 38. The author came of age in a gay culture before the age of AIDS and before meaningful civil rights advances. This experience colored his friendships and love affairs, as well as his poetry. Over the course of the book, he

Schattner, Peter Olingo Press (382 pp.) $15.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Sep. 25, 2014 978-0-9914225-1-7

From the veteran science writer who brought us Genomes, Browsers and Databases (2008) comes a compendium for laypeople on the breakthroughs of molecular biology.

With backgrounds in education and physics (among other disciplines), Schattner has intended this volume to help curious and intelligent readers explore the world of molecular biology.

He uses six sections to illuminate a vast array of topics, beginning with “Proteins and Genes: The Constituents of Life,” which builds a scaffolding to more complex areas of knowledge. Throughout, stories about real people help ground the detailed science. In the section “DNA: Our Link to the Past and the Future,” we learn how family histories can be traced through genetic testing (using Jewish and African-American ancestries as examples) and how glimpses of prenatal DNA may help parents prepare for their child’s arrival by detecting potential diseases (like Huntington’s) early. Sections III (about gene regulation) and IV (epigenetics) showcase the workings of phenomena like sleep, kindness, love and memory (frequently citing animal studies) by explaining how these phenomena can malfunction at the molecular level. Next is the “Nature and Nurture” discussion, covering how genes affect human longevity, athleticism, intelligence and language. The final part focuses on gender, behaviors (like aggression) and emotions (pleasure and fear) as seen through the lens of molecular biology. In this thoroughgoing work, author Schattner writes crisply, offering lucid definitions to technical terms. For example, the double helix refers to “two strands of the DNA molecule...bound together in a very specific manner in which certain bases are always matched.” He also lets us know, thankfully, that there is an ethical line he’d rather not cross with regard to animal testing: “[T]he moral implications of changing monkey DNA make

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outlines relationships that range from one-night stands to long partnerships, always with a keen eye and a ready sense of humor.

There’s more in the book than romance, however; Schwab writes about old friends, world events and historical figures as well. A series of poems on Wilde is particularly tender and showcases Schwab’s affection as well as the Irish author’s art: “No pioneer or fighter for the cause / Directly, à la Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, Ives, / His paradoxes were the subtle knives / He wielded in his battle with the laws.” Although Schwab writes more directly on social themes, his poetry wields words and imagery in a way that can be cutting but always demonstrates his deeply held beliefs. Readers who enjoy autobiographical portraits will have plenty to linger over, as will those particularly interested in the lives of gay men.

Those who love poetry for its own sake will also find themselves charmed by this collection, which is frank and, as Schwab says of Liberace after death, “stark naked as uncovered piano strings.”

An exceptional poetic trip through an author’s life, loves and intellect.

finesse. Although the physical chemistry between Will and Callie sometimes feels forced, their emotional connection rings strong and true. Overall, the fast pace of the narrative and the thoughtfulness of the characters provide the tale with undeniable appeal.

A wholesome second-chance romance filled with modern-day family drama.

THE MARSCO DISSIDENT Zarzana, James A. CreateSpace (674 pp.) $22.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Jul. 24, 2014 978-1-4959-2583-2

After 21st-century wars and catastrophes ravage Earth, the omnipotent multiplanetary corporation Marsco assumes control—but forces within and outside the company plot its downfall.

First-time author Zarzana brings to bear an academic background in this hefty start to his planned sci-fi series, a compulsively readable future history detailing a catastrophic 21st century and the political, economic and social pathologies that leave beaten-down humanity dominated by a callous oneworld (one solar system, really) corporate empire. In the 2090s, billions have died as a result of decades of wealth inequality, global resource wars, pandemics, climate change and backsliding scientific ignorance. Enter Marsco (est. 1999), a giant software/IT/space travel monopoly possessing some of the less savory qualities of Microsoft and the Union Pacific Railroad.

Based in Seattle, Marsco remained largely untouched during mankind’s darkest days; using cyberwarfare and conventional weapons, the company technocrats stepped in and seized Earth away from governments. The ruthless corporation has barely improved life on Earth. PRIMS, a vast, war-displaced peasant class, live in backward squalor, while elite castes are marked by Marsco finger-disc implants, permitting social mobility via levels of access to all-important cybernetworks.

Opponents of Marsco include Walter Miller, once one of the company’s iconic engineers/innovators, now dwelling amid PRIMS as a high-profile dissident; defeated nationalist leaders and warlords left older but no wiser thanks to cryogenic stasis; and savage, cultish Luddites composed mainly of rebel PRIMS. Zarzana’s story—short on action, dialogue-heavy, but seldom hectoring or pedantic—recalls early Heinlein, without quite so much faith in altruistic, laissez-faire capitalist heroes coming to the rescue. The scale of Zarzana’s imagination is practically Asimov-ian, though one suspects he has many other wonders unrevealed behind the curtain; we never enjoy a tour of Marsco’s actual Martian HQ, for instance. But there’s still plenty to look forward to in upcoming volumes.

Socioeconomic sci-fi on a broad canvas that reads like dire headlines from tomorrow.

A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY Weir, Andrea Cedar Forge Press (342 pp.) $18.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Sep. 15, 2014 978-1-936672-73-8

In Weir’s debut love story, a couple takes another try at romance 25 years after their initial relationship ended.

Callie Winwood is a middle-aged divorcée who expects little more from her adult existence than the quiet companionship of her dog, Bailey.

While visiting an old friend, a bit of careless vegetable chopping lands Callie in the emergency room. The doctor on call just happens to be Will Tremaine, a man she almost married two decades earlier. As Will stitches up Callie’s minor wound, they catch up on old times and then say goodbye. However, they quickly realize that they still have unresolved feelings for each other. Widower Will is ready to start dating again, and he can’t get Callie off his mind; he finally works up the nerve to pursue her, but not until after she’s returned home. They soon embark on a long-distance relationship, and they revive their fervent connection. Callie’s grown children are supportive of their mother’s new boyfriend, but Will’s adolescent kids are less accepting. Even more resistant is the family of Will’s deceased wife, Joanna. Will and Callie soon discover that his former in-laws will stop at nothing to tear them apart, and they must decide just how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to be together. As the two main characters navigate their relationship, Weir’s vivid prose brings them both to life (“[H]e had two children to consider....I couldn’t step into his life without stepping into theirs, and that was not something I would do precipitously”). Grief looms large throughout the story, becoming something of a character in itself. The author expertly juxtaposes the sadness of loss with the joy of new beginnings, providing readers with hope that her grieving characters will recover.

She also explores the idea of blended families with insight and 138

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Appreciations:

On Taste, Good and Otherwise B Y G RE G OR Y M C NAMEE

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

That observation, along with its variant “You are what you eat,” belongs to a French lawyer who, though on the run during the darkest hours of the Revolution, always found time to nosh. Fork in hand, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin also took time to ponder what he was putting into his body and what implications the food we eat holds for the larger project of civilization.

Just two months before his death in 1826, Brillat-Savarin published Physiologie du goût, or The Physiology of Taste, in which he popularized a term well-known to gourmands today: gastronomy, the field of custom related to the gastros, the belly.

The book became a bible for French diners and chefs. When, after World War II, Jean-Anthelme Brillat de Savarin American diners who’d experienced haute cuisine clamored for more, a young cook (1755-1826) and writer named M.F.K. Fisher tried her hand at bringing Brillat-Savarin to them, and 65 years ago, in 1949, she produced the first American English version of the classic book.

Like Thomas Jefferson and the Port-Royal grammarians of whom Michel Foucault wrote, Brillat-Savarin was an ardent classifier of things and ideas. Gastronomy—“the subject is always fashionable,” he exclaimed—is, by his lights, the science of taste, that being the mysterious something that lurks close to the heart of “moral man” and that “is influenced by any savorous body.”

Gastronomy, with its moral dimension, is thus a branch of natural history, physics, chemistry, business and political economy; it governs every aspect of our lives at every time of our lives, and its fundamental purpose is to guide us into making the best choices about our “conservation.” After training in gastronomy, in other words, an acolyte will come to prefer a nice basted egg atop a bed of organic arugula to a slab of heat-lamped industrial meat, because he or she is well-armed now with both moral sense and culinary wisdom, to say nothing of a more sharply engaged set of sensory receptors.

Throughout his book, Brillat-Savarin makes observations that are oddly prescient given what we know about the chemistry of both food and humans today. For one thing, he urges, a well-cooked steak served with fresh butter, greens and a quantity of good red wine is a thing of beauty, whereas white flour and sugar are our bodies’ enemies. For another, he counsels that we eat more fish and fruit than most of us do—and did, back in his day. For yet another, he urges us to consider the economic consequences of a well-fed, healthy population—one that, because it’s wellfed and healthy, will also be happy.

We continue to eat all sorts of slop, but in the 65 years since The Physiology of Taste appeared here, Americans have become generally better guests at the table and better consumers overall. It’s possible to get a decent cup of coffee almost anywhere. You can buy olive oil in Nebraska, find a green salad in Mississippi, eat good tacos in Maine and eggs Benedict in Utah. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher earns our eternal thanks for her part in that evolution—and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, our adulation. Bon appétit!

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews. |

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In this sci-fi debut, a team of neuroscientists exposes new capabilities in the brain that may steer human evolution toward miraculous— and deadly—frontiers.

“Ultimately, Hemstreet polishes his ideals regarding individuality and creative passion while bowing to the action/sci-fi formula. The result should be absolute bliss for fans of everything from Star Trek to X-Men.” “A flat-out astonishing debut.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

For information about publishing, film rights or agent representation, email hemstreet_pat@yahoo.com