BookPage May 2015 by BookPage

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

o k

r e

•

w s i e

n e w

MAY 2015

i n s i d e

THE

CAMERA’S

candid eye

A groundbreaking memoir from acclaimed photographer

SALLY MANN

PaperbackPicks Whiskey Beach The #1 New York Times bestselling author weaves together passion and obsession, humor and heart, in a novel of two people opening themselves up to truth— and to each other.

The Secret Life of Violet Grant New from the author of A Hundred Summers: a story of love and intrigue that travels from Kennedy-era Manhattan to World War I Europe. “Perfect poolside entertainment.” —People Stylewatch “Must-Read Books”

Shots Fired

A Shiver of Light

From C. J. Box, the New York Times bestselling author of the Joe Pickett novels, comes a thrilling book of suspense stories about the Wyoming he knows so well—and the dark deeds and impulses that can be found there.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes the latest in the Merry Gentry series—now in paperback.

On Dublin Street

A Midsummer Night’s Romp

Now in a stunning new package—discover the New York Times and USA Today bestselling sensation that has enraptured readers everywhere.

From the New York Times bestselling author comes an irresistible new novel where finding love means falling head over heels.

Robert B. Parker’s Cheap Shot

The Dead and Those About to Die

The iconic, tough-but-tender Boston PI Spenser returns in an outstanding new novel in the New York Times bestselling series.

The 1st Division had fought from North Africa to Sicily, earning a reputation as stalwart warriors on the front lines and rabble-rousers in the rear. On D-Day, these veterans merged with fresh-faced replacements to accomplish one of the deadliest missions ever.

Feature

of the

Month

“A thrilling hunt... gripping and gruesome.” —James Becker, bestselling author of The Lost Testament

NEW IN HARDCOVER A chilling novel of murder and madness in post-World War II Germany. U.S. Army criminal investigator Mason Collins is charged with hunting down a dangerous killer who is enacting mysterious rituals with his prey. Relying on his wits and instincts alone, Mason must venture to places where his own life is put at risk.

“Ruins of War is the best historical crime drama I’ve read all year.” —Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest and Hop Alley

contents

MAY 2015

B O O K PA G E . C O M

features

12 LISA GENOVA

Celebrated photographer Sally Mann exposes her life and family history in a marriage of words and pictures.

Meet the author of Inside the O’Briens

13 SARA NOVIć Memories of war-torn Croatia

Cover photos by Sally Mann and Beth Trabue Gorman Reprinted with permission from Little, Brown

16 GRADUATION Four books offer encouragement for new grads

reviews

17 MOTHER’S DAY

19 FICTION

Appreciating motherhood

top pick:

The Blondes by Emily Schultz

also reviewed:

18 SPOTLIGHT: PARIS

The Last Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl Early Warning by Jane Smiley God Help the Child by Toni Morrison How to Start a Fire by Lisa Lutz Re Jane by Patricia Park Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry

Explore the city of lights

21 SPOTLIGHT: WOMEN’S FICTION Two daring authors take a fresh approach

25 KATE BOLICK

23 NONFICTION

Rethinking the single life

29 CYNTHIA RYLANT

top pick:

Orient by Christopher Bollen The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

also reviewed:

Return to Gooseberry Park

The World’s Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key The Hand on the Mirror by Janis Heaphy Durham Spinster by Kate Bolick On the Move by Oliver Sacks The Quartet by Joseph J. Ellis Stepdog by Mireya Navarro

31 LITA JUDGE Meet the author-illustrator of Good Morning to Me!

columns 04 05 06 06 09 10 11 12

cover story

Spring Brings Hot New Romances from Your Favorite Avon Books Authors

ROMANCE LIBRARY READS LIFESTYLES COOKING BOOK CLUBS WHODUNIT AUDIO WELL READ

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander It’s a Long Story by Willie Nelson The Nurses by Alexandra Robbins No Better Friend by Robert Weintraub Reagan by H.W. Brands The Spy’s Son by Bryan Denson

27 TEEN

30 CHILDREN’S

top pick:

also reviewed:

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman

Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge Undertow by Michael Buckley The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough

The Way Home Looks Now by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

This Is Sadie by Sara O’Leary Tad and Dad by David Ezra Stein Woof by Spencer Quinn Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia Grounded by Megan Morrison

A M E R I C A’ S B O O K R E V I E W PUBLISHER Michael A. Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Cat Acree

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Allison Hammond

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

CONTRIBUTOR

ADVERTISING COMMUNICATIONS

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Julia Steele

Lily McLemore

Roger Bishop

EDITOR

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Hilli Levin

Penny Childress

MANAGING EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

PRODUCTION INTERN

Trisha Ping

Sukey Howard

Sadie Birchfield

Lynn L. Green

Sada Stipe

MARKETING Mary Claire Zibart

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy

EDITORIAL POLICY BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate and select for review the best books published in a variety of categories. Only books we highly recommend are featured. BookPage is editorially independent and never accepts payment for editorial coverage.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Public libraries and bookstores can purchase BookPage in quantity. For information, visit BookPage.com or call 615.292.8926, ext. 34.

Individual subscriptions are available for $30 per year. Send payment to: BookPage Subscriptions 2143 Belcourt Avenue Nashville, TN 37212 Subscriptions are also available on Kindle and NOOK.

AvonRomance.com

columns

ROMANCE B Y C H R I S T I E R I D G WAY

The girl next door Former teenage lovers reunite in Let Me Love You Again (Montlake, $12.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9781477829158), the second book in Anna DeStefano’s Echoes of the Heart series. When entrepreneur Oliver Bowman’s foster father suffers a heart attack, Oliver returns home and reconnects with

Books we love about love. NEW from the editors of ®

Subscribe now!

BOOKPAGE.COM/NEWSLETTERS 4

stantly gets under her skin: her new brother-in-law’s captain of the guard. Fagan Murray can’t help but needle the English miss who’s always looking down her pretty nose at him, but he must stay close and protect her. This closeness creates an unwanted but simmering attraction that only heats up further when Fagan is ordered to escort Grace back to London. The journey the loving couple that raised him. gives both a better appreciation Although he’s been sending them of each other and their growing money to aid in raising more foster passion. While Grace’s future now children, Oliver hasn’t been back seems tied to the Scottish soldier, a since leaving at 18 after a disasnew danger means she and Fagan trous, drunken night. But when may have no future at all. This he visits, he learns that Selena pleasing tale of two sparring lovers Rosenthal, the girl he once gave his opening their hearts is full of fun heart to, is living next door with her and adventure. young daughter. Could the girl be TOP PICK IN ROMANCE his daughter, or is she simply another reason to ignore his renewed A woman returns home to attraction to Selena? As a single rebuild her life in Lucy Monroe’s mother dealing with a difficult Wild Heat (Forever, $6, 336 pages, divorce, Selena shouldn’t be feeling ISBN 9781455575480), the first so much for Oliver, despite the fact book in her Northern Fire series. After her divorce, Kitty Grant leaves that they were each other’s solace LA and returns to her family in as teens. Trusting that good things can happen is hard for this couple, small-town Cailkirn, Alaska. In yet necessary if they have any hope Cailkirn, it’s impossible for Kitty of a future together. DeStefano has to avoid the best friend she once spurned for her husband-to-be. written an emotional family drama—readers should have a hankie Tack MacKinnon is glad Kitty’s back, for her sake, though he’s at the ready. decided to keep his distance— OPPOSITES ATTRACT one broken heart is enough for a A Highland captain of the lifetime. Their tight community doesn’t allow much space, howevguard tames an English lady in the second installment of Victoria er. Soon Kitty is working for him, and he’s helping her heal from Roberts’ Highland Spies series, Kilts and Daggers (Sourcebooks a serious eating disorder. Their Casablanca, $7.99, 320 pages, relationship turns physical, and although he’s made it clear it’s a ISBN 9781402292033). Lady Grace Walsingham visits Scotland for her friends-with-benefits situation, sister’s wedding, and Grace intends Kitty begins to see her buddy in to stay in the Highlands for a few a new light. Can they overcome more weeks while her betrothed, their fears and become a couple? a nobleman, returns to London. Characters to cheer for, steamy love scenes and a beautiful setting However, this means she will have to put up with a man who conmake this book a standout.

Selected from nominations made by library staff across the country, here are the 10 books that librarians can’t wait to share with readers in May.

F R O M T H E E D I TO R S O F

UPROOTED by Naomi Novik

Del Rey, $25, ISBN 9780804179034

The best-selling author of the Temeraire novels introduces a bold new world rooted in folk stories and legends, as elemental as a fairy tale.

A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES by Sarah J. Maas

Bloomsbury, $18.99, ISBN 9781619634442 As this thrilling new YA series opens, 19-year-old Feyre discovers that by killing a wolf, she has broken a centuries-old truce—and the Fae demand her life as a price.

A GOD IN RUINS by Kate Atkinson

Little, Brown, $28, ISBN 9780316176538 In this companion story to the bestseller Life After Life, Atkinson explores the life of Ursula’s brother Teddy, a World War II pilot. BookPage review on page 22.

THE WATER KNIFE by Paolo Bacigalupi

Knopf, $25.95, ISBN 9780385352871 This near-future thriller from the author of The Windup Girl sheds light on how we live today—and the crises we may face tomorrow.

THE KNOCKOFF by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza

Doubleday, $25.95, ISBN 9780385539586 This stylish story, set behind the scenes at a high-end fashion magazine, is an outrageous romp that will please fans of The Devil Wears Prada.

EARLY WARNING by Jane Smiley

Knopf, $26.95, ISBN 9780307700322 Smiley continues her tale of the Langdon family as they make their way through the changing landscape of midcentury America. BookPage review on page 19.

TO P 10 bookpage.com/newsletters

BRINGING YOU TIMELY

TIPS ON WHAT TO

READ NEXT

SEVENEVES by Neal Stephenson

Morrow, $35, ISBN 9780062190376 The best-selling author of Cryptonomicon returns with an epic vision of the future that spans more than 800 pages and 5,000 years.

THE GHOST FIELDS by Elly Griffiths

HMH, $25, ISBN 9780544330146 The chilling discovery of a downed World War II plane with a body inside leads Ruth and DCI Nelson to uncover a wealthy family’s secrets in the seventh Ruth Galloway mystery.

OUR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf

Knopf, $24, ISBN 9781101875896 In his final novel, Haruf takes readers back to Holt, Colorado, for a bittersweet story about a man and a woman who find each other later in life.

LITTLE BLACK LIES by Sharon Bolton

Minotaur, $25.99, ISBN 9781250028594 When children start to disappear in a small Falkland Island community, three people with dark secrets must work together to solve the mystery. LibraryReads is a recommendation program that highlights librarians’ favorite books published this month. For more information, visit libraryreads.org.

columns

LIFESTYLES

COOKING

BY JOANNA BRICHETTO

BY SYBIL PRATT

A reason to redecorate

Savoring the seasons

Despite its subtitle, you don’t have to be outright fanatical to enjoy Materially Crafted: A DIY Primer for the Design-Obsessed (STC Craft, $24.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9781617691409). Author Victoria Hudgins is the founder of the popular lifestyle blog A Subtle Revelry. She knows her materials—plaster of Paris, paper, thread, metal,

On a bleak day during the bleak, endless, snow-blanketed New England winter, an early copy of Hugh Acheson’s The Broad Fork: Recipes for the Wide World of Vegetables and Fruits (Clarkson Potter, $35, 336 pages, ISBN 9780385345026) arrived. What a treat it was to leaf through it, to think about local asparagus in

wood, spray paint and so on—and she lays out 30 projects that utilize each one. Concrete jumps out as something most of us haven’t tackled yet, but she shows that the mess is worth it for the payoff of her Backyard Fire Pit. My favorite is the Concrete Cake Stand: clean, industrial and a humorous contrast to the (hopefully) light crumb that sits atop. But don’t worry; there are plenty of tidier projects, such as Rolled Beeswax Tea Lights and Instant Pipe Candlesticks. And for the most dramatic room restyle, try the beautifully simple Hand-Painted Temporary Wallpaper. Hudgins will have you skipping to your nearest craft store in no time.

HANDS-ON ART HISTORY Modern Art Adventures: 36 Creative, Hands-On Projects Inspired by Artists from Monet to Banksy (Chicago Review Press, $19.95, 160 pages, ISBN 9781613731772) brings great art to life for kids ages 6 and up. The projects are laid out in chronological order through the major aesthetic movements from Impressionism to street art. A selection of popular masterworks are paired with narratives—a section titled “What’s the Story?” precedes each piece—and projects that are all-around kid-friendly. For example, the chapter devoted to Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist” (a painting ironically devoid of any lavender paint) explains how Pol-

lock nailed canvas to the floor and worked in a methodical way to create a piece that looks anything but methodical. Kids can create their own Pollock-inspired Drip a Picture project (mercifully sized for a table instead of the floor), which utilizes cups of paint swung from strings. Authors and educators Maja Pitamic and Jill Laidlaw make sure the entire process is meaningful and fun, and the finished product is something a kid can be proud of.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES Award-winning architect Lester Walker’s American Homes: The Landmark Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture (Black Dog & Leventhal, $24.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781579129927) offers a stunning and definitive survey of homes from prehistoric times to the present day. Back in print for the first time since 2002, Walker’s chronologically ordered tome is as impressive as it is educational. Hundreds of styles of homes are paired with his delightful line drawings and annotated floor plans. Have you ever gone for a walk in your own neighborhood and wondered about its architectural patterns? Or have you questioned why some houses seem natural in their design and aesthetic proportions, while others seem to radiate ugliness and contempt for their environment? Walker’s magisterial knowledge will provide the clearest possible foundation for understanding what’s what and how each style came to be. American Homes clearly distinguishes between Tipi and Wigwam, Chalet and Colonial, while also showing the historical and structural differences between them all.

a savory custard, Salmon with Ramps and Peas, and Fiddlehead Ferns and Morels on Garlic Toast. Now, spring is here and the juicy joys of ripe summer tomatoes and fresh corn—think Tomato, Okra and Corn Maque Choux— will soon follow. An enthusiastic advocate of farmers markets and CSAs, Acheson, a James Beard Award-winning chef/partner of four Atlanta restaurants, gives us a guide to seasonal standouts with three or more confidence-building recipes for more than 50 veggies and fruits, ranging from the super-simple to party-perfect. And when the leaves begin to turn and icy winds are in the offing, you’ll have a cornucopia of ideas for dishes that feature the bounty of fall and winter.

EASY-TO-MAKE MEXICAN More Rick Bayless? More sensational, seasonal Mexican recipes? ¡Qué bueno! Bayless, master maven of Mexican cuisine, has done it again. He truly understands the essence of Mexican cooking and knows how to interpret it for American home cooks so that nothing is lost in translation. In More Mexican Everyday (Norton, $35, 384 pages, ISBN 9780393081145) he lets us in on his four “Secret Weapons”: super seasoning preparations with long fridge lives that make the ordinary sing with Mexican pizazz. He guides us through Go-To master recipes, like Roasted Poblano

Cream and Red Chile Roast Chicken, and focuses on an array of wonderfully refreshing veggie-centered creations, highlighting new ideas for traditional ingredients— Roasted Chayote with Herbs and Tofu—and new ingredients used in traditional ways—Spicy Chipotle Eggplant with Black Beans. More daily delights are made with fuss-and-muss-saving rice cookers and slow cookers, cooked on the grill, stove or in the oven. Whatever the means, the end results are vivid, vibrant and muy auténtico. ¡Gracias, Señor Bayless!

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS April Bloomfield, chef and co-owner of four New York restaurants, one with a Michelin star, brings her irresistible, amped-up attitude to A Girl and Her Greens: Hearty Meals from the Garden (Ecco, $34.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780062225887). A true omnivore (her debut cookbook was A Girl and Her Pig), Bloomfield finds the same delight in fresh peas as she does in a juicy steak. Whether she’s serving up the simplest of preparations, such as plain boiled potatoes, or a more complex, sophisticated dish of Roasted and Raw Fennel Salad with Blood Oranges and Bottarga, Bloomfield wants you to have all the info you need. So she doesn’t stint on the details that make food great: Her header notes have in-depth explanations of the hows and whys of cooking combos, and her recipes all have chatty, supportive and meticulous instructions. She celebrates seasonal splendors with Watercress Soup with Spring Garlic, Snap Pea Salad, and Roasted Treviso with Breadcrumbs and Gorgonzola and savors adding a “bit of the beast,” as in her recipe for Broccoli with Bacon. What a way to veg out.

“IN THE TRADITION OF GREAT SOUTHERN NOVELS, this lyrical tale explores the emotional terrain of love, loss, and memory. It’s about the tug of a person and of a place, leading us to confront what it means to look homeward again.” —WALTER ISAACSON “A refined romance . . .

THORNTON WRITES WITH CHARACTERISTIC ELEGANCE AND RESTRAINT.” —Wall Street Journal

“[With] LYRICISM

AND PRECISION . . . Thornton’s mapping of Charleston’s array of streets and squares is in many ways a metaphor for an exploration of the vicissitudes of its citizens’ family life.” —New York Times Book Review

“ HOT TYPE.” —Vanity Fair

Photo © Louise Field

NOW IN PAPERBACK “ Eliza Poinsett is a fictional heroine, Southern at that. But she doesn’t depend on the kindness of strangers. Eliza is the invention of MARGARET BRADHAM THORNTON . . . the award-winning [editor] of Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks.” —Charlotte Observer Also available as an e-book · www.hc.com

columns

BOOK CLUBS BY JULIE HALE

Finding his true colors Deeply inquisitive and beautifully rendered, Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Vintage, $15.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9780804170123), features a troubled protagonist who is trying to make sense of a painful past. A successful engineer, Tsukuru lives in contemporary Tokyo, where he

builds railroad stations and has a new girlfriend named Sara. Pretty, smart and perceptive, Sara knows that something is holding Tsukuru back from living a life of complete fulfillment. And she’s right: Tsukuru was wounded years ago when four close teenage friends turned their backs on him without explanation. In the wake of their abandonment, Tsukuru felt suicidal, certain that he was somehow to blame. When Sara persuades him to seek out his old friends and learn the reasons behind their desertion, he finds himself on the quest of a lifetime. Out of Tsukuru’s attempt to solve the mystery that lies at the center of his life, Murakami spins a compelling and emotionally authentic narrative. It’s another masterwork from a writer who’s in a class by himself.

scene is Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, whose iconic photos of Paris nightlife come to symbolize the era. Prose tells their story over the course of her mesmerizing, multifaceted novel. Using a variety of narrative vehicles—including writings by expat American novelist Lionel Maine (a character based on Henry Miller)—Prose creates a captivating account of Lou’s life and the dark work she eventually does for the Nazis. Inspired by a Brassaï photo from the 1930s, Prose’s seductive tale of a permissive Paris between the wars is also a provocative exploration of identity and the search for acceptance.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS

The Invention of Wings (Penguin, $17, 384 pages, ISBN 9780143121701) by Sue Monk Kidd is based on the life of Sarah Grimké, an outspoken abolitionist who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1800s. Headstrong Sarah is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. A woman of principle who believes in justice and equality, she seeks a platform for her energies. Since childhood, she has been friends with Handful, a slave owned by the Grimké PARIS AFTER DARK family who is her personal maid. In her stunning novel Lovers at Smart and courageous, Handful puts up an obedient, dutiful front the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (Harper Perennial, $15.99, 464 but has hopes of making a new pages, ISBN 9780061713804), Fran- life for herself. The two women cine Prose offers up an intricate remain friends over the years, and narrative filled with characters who both work in different ways to find dwell on the city’s margins. Lou Vil- their own versions of liberty. Kidd’s characters are larger than life, but lars is a crossdressing lesbian and an athlete of exceptional ability. she tells their story in a way that’s Her lover, the unscrupulous Arintimate and personal, presentlette, is a performer. Together, they ing a nuanced depiction of their frequent a bar that flouts convenfriendship. A pick for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, Kidd’s latest novel will get tion by welcoming gays and other unorthodox types. Recording the book clubs talking.

Fresh

Book Club Reads for Spring Moonlight on Butternut Lake by Mary McNear

“Mary McNear takes the reader on an emotional journey with this story of second chances, starting over, and the healing power of love. A book to relax, enjoy and savor any time of year, but especially during the long, lazy days of summer.” —Susan Wiggs

The Predictions

by Bianca Zander

“An unforgettable novel about breaking away from others’ doctrines in order to discover what you truly believe and desire. Absorbing, compassionate, and filled with gloriously flawed characters that are sure to set off book club fireworks!” —Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue

Love and Miss Communication by Elyssa Friedland

“Funny, fast-paced, charming, and totally relatable, Friedland gives us a brilliant love story and reminds us it’s nice to pick up a smart book instead of a smartphone for a change.” —Jennifer Belle, bestselling author of High Maintenance and The Seven Year Bitch

Under the Same Blue Sky

by Pamela Schoenewaldt “Absorbing and layered with rich historical details... Schoenewaldt skillfully portrays conflicted loyalties, the search for belonging, the cruelty of war, and the resilience of the human spirit.” —Ann Weisgarber, author of The Personal History of Rachel Dupree and The Promise

@Morrow_PB

@bookclubgirl

William Morrow

Book Club Girl

columns

WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Murder, politics and other unnatural disasters It has been six years since I picked up Attica Locke’s debut, Black Water Rising, in which activist-turned-attorney Jay Porter rescued a drowning woman and set off a sequence of events that reverberated through the halls of Houston’s power elite. In Locke’s latest thriller, Pleasantville (Harper, $26.99, 432 pages, ISBN 9780062259400), Porter is recently widowed and struggling to keep his life on track as he looks into the case of a missing political volunteer. As an environmental law practitioner, Porter is best known for having won a huge settlement against an oil company (for which he has yet to be paid), so an abduction/murder case is a bit outside

his area of expertise. The crime scene complicates matters, as Pleasantville is an upwardly mobile black suburb pivotal to the Houston mayoral election. The outcome of the trial and the election are intertwined in ways that Porter

cannot begin to imagine. Fans of Louise Penny or Sara Paretsky should buy all of Locke’s books and start reading. She’s that good.

TERRORISM IN FRANCE Murders don’t happen often in quiet Saint-Denis, France, the

Two Mothers You’ll Never Forget “Jonathan Odell can take his place in the distinguished pantheon of Southern writers.” Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Death of Santini

“A big brilliant novel whose time has come.” Lee Smith, author of The Lost Girls and Guests on Earth

“Book groups, this one’s for you!” Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters

Set in 1950s Mississippi, two mothers, one black, one white, learn that great change can begin with small things, like unexpected friendship Visit Jonathan Odell at www.jonathanodell.com

home of Bruno, Chief of Police. But within moments of the opening of Martin Walker’s new mystery, The Children Return (Knopf, $24.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9780385354158), Bruno is slapped upside the head with one of the most difficult cases of his career. An undercover agent is brutally assaulted with a hot cattle prod and left mutilated almost beyond recognition. When Bruno is called to the scene, his experiences as a policeman have in no way prepared him for this degree of barbarity. It comes to light that the victim was involved in the investigation of jihadists, which provides the perfect segue into the next event to rock St. Denis: the reappearance of Sami, an autistic young man suspected to have been recruited by Islamic terrorists. Sami is a veritable wealth of information on the inner workings of al-Qaeda, so the good guys want to debrief him immediately, and the bad guys want to silence him sooner than that. Thus, at the drop of a beret, Saint-Denis takes reluctant center stage in the war on terrorism. Nicely crafted with sensitivity and humo(u)r, The Children Return is tailor-made for fans of Peter Mayle, Colin Cotterill and Alexander McCall Smith.

SOUTHWESTERN LEGACY I had some initial trepidation about reviewing Anne Hillerman’s debut novel, Spider Woman’s Daughter, which continued her father Tony Hillerman’s series featuring Navajo tribal cops Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. But Hillerman fille put my fears to rest with her Tony-like, unembellished writing style and the fleshing out of some of the female characters. The second installment in the series, Rock with Wings (Harper, $27.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780062270511), finds Leaphorn sitting on the sidelines, thanks to a bullet wound that by rights should have dispatched him to his final reward. Confining Leaphorn to the bench certainly doesn’t shut him up, and he serves

as a sounding board and mentor for Chee and Chee’s wife, policewoman Bernadette Manuelito, as they struggle through a pair of perplexing cases, one involving the murder of a film company employee on the set of a B-grade zombie flick, and another featuring a very suspicious character furtively moving boxes of desert soil around the Southwest in the back of a rented Chevy Malibu. For chapters at a time, I totally forgot I was not reading Tony Hillerman’s writing, a strong compliment both to Anne and her much-missed dad.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY Yeah, yeah, I know. One more Walter Mosley book, one more Top Pick, a recurring theme. But here’s the thing: Mosley’s series featuring NYC private eye Leonid McGill has done what nobody expected, garnering critical acclaim and loyal readership to rival the author’s legendary Easy Rawlins books. The latest, And Sometimes I Wonder About You (Doubleday, $26.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9780385539180), finds the diminutive PI hot on the trail of a purported rare manuscript thief—although in this case, “purported” refers to the rare manuscript, not the thief, because the stolen papers are anything but an important antiquity. Instead, they are something of a modern-day salacious headline generator that one or more people are willing to kill for. The McGill mysteries always have lots going on, and this one is no exception: Our protagonist is dallying with no fewer than three beautiful women, one of whom is his suicidal wife; his long-thoughtdead father shows up for a familial encore; and his son Twilliam finds himself caught up in the machinations of a shadowy underworld figure who manipulates a city-wide team of underage lawbreakers. The Easy Rawlins and McGill series are wildly different from one another, but I would be hard-pressed to choose which I prefer.

AUDIO BY SUKEY HOWARD

Whale of a tale Richard Price set out to write a slick, quick police procedural using the pseudonym Harry Brandt. But what emerged four years later was The Whites (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 10.5 hours, ISBN 9781427213143), an intricate Price-perfect crime novel set in his signature stark, gritty urban landscape, filled with fully imagined characters with pasts and passions

members who kill without remorse and younger almostaccidental killers; and witnesses who risk their lives to come forward. But Leovy, who covered crime for the Los Angeles Times and embedded herself with a precinct in Watts, isn’t just telling gripping stories. Her indepth, years-long research offers a reality check, especially vital that resonate in the present. NYPD now, and an inconvenient truth: Detective Billy Graves anchors the Letting the vast majority of murders story. Demoted to Manhattan night of black men go unsolved, letting watch because he accidentally shot our criminal justice system fail, a Hispanic boy a decade ago, he’s says that murdering black men is still involved with the “Wild Geese,” OK, that we (and it’s a big we) will his band of brother cops who let this plague continue. shared their glory days working the mean streets of the East Bronx. TOP PICK IN AUDIO Each of these cops, Billy included, Every publisher in the Enhas one case that still festers, one glish-speaking world, and well malicious, evil perp who didn’t get beyond, has been looking for the what he deserved, and each one is next Gone Girl. And The Girl on obsessed with getting Ahab-esque the Train (Penguin Audio, $40, 11 revenge on that Melvillian white hours, ISBN 9781611763737), Paula whale (hence, the book’s title). Hawkins’ best-selling domestic More edgy, high-octane subplots thriller, may be it. It may also be play in as Price explores the gray one of the best suspense audios of areas, the moral ambiguities of the year. Hawkins’ cleverly plotted these cops’ inner lives. The diatale keeps listeners slightly off-killogue, a Price specialty, is spot-on, ter. Her three narrators, Rachel, and narrator Ari Fliakos nails every Megan and Anna, given voice by voice, every cadence, every distinct three excellent readers, are unreNew York accent. liable in different ways. Rachel’s messy, blackout-filled alcoholism BLACK MEN DOWN has left her a voyeur, peering out Ghettoside: A True Story of the train window every day at Megan, half of the “golden couMurder in America (Random House Audio, $45, 12.5 hours, ISBN ple” whose life she covets. Rachel 9780449009710), Jill Leovy’s extraor- makes cringe-producing attempts to get attention from her former dinary exposé of how black-onblack murder in our urban centers husband, now married to Anna is handled—or mishandled—could and living down the street from Megan. When Megan goes missbe seen as the nonfiction flip side ing and a media cyclone follows, of a Richard Price novel. It has heroes, a very few committed LAPD bleary Rachel feels compelled to detectives who won’t let a murder get involved. In non-spoiler mode, go unsolved; deftly drawn portraits that’s all I’ll say about this oddly of victims and their grief-haunted connected trio. But I can say that a families with empty eyes; gang diabolical twist awaits.

Spring Listening! “Kathleen McInerney does a terrific job bringing the characters to life.” —AudioFile on Ladies’ Night READ BY KATHLEEN M c INERNEY

“Polly Stone delivers an impeccable narration ... that will keep listeners coming back for more.” —Library Journal, starred review READ BY POLLY STONE

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE PRINCESS DIARIES

“Author Meg Cabot is ready to put her tiara back on [with] a new character, Olivia Grace.” —USA Today

“Their secret heartaches and desires are as toothsome as the biscuits and pies they bake.” —SarahMcCoy NYT bestselling author of The Baker’s Daughter READ BY JULIE BARRIE

PINHEAD IS BACK “Clive Barker is so good that I am literally tongue-tied. He makes the rest of us look like we’ve been asleep for the past ten years.” —Stephen King READ BY JOHN LEE

WELL READ

meet LISA GENOVA GREG MENTZER

the title of your new book? Q: What’s

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

Q: Why did you choose to focus on Huntington’s disease?

had some training as an actress. If you could play one Q: You’ve character in this novel, who would it be and why?

novels deal with heavyweight subjects. What do you do Q: Your for fun when you’re not writing?

Q: What’s your greatest fear? Q: Your proudest accomplishment? Q: Words to live by? INSIDE THE O’BRIENS Lisa Genova, who earned a doctorate in neuroscience from Harvard, is the author of four best-selling novels, including Still Alice, which inspired an Oscar-winning film. Her latest book, Inside the O’Briens (Gallery, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9781476717777), is the poignant story of a Boston police officer who learns he has Huntington’s disease, a diagnosis with agonizing repercussions for his four adult children. Genova lives with her family on Cape Cod.

Champions of the West While they are often roped together as Western or regional writers (narrow classifications they both loathed), and their prime writing years and geographic terrain overlapped to a degree, there could not have been two more different writers—or men—than Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Stegner, a buttoned-down careerist and nurturing teacher, curated his life as carefully as he honed his exquisite prose. Abbey was, at turns, a curmudgeon and a wild man. Yet, as David Gessner conveys in his superb new book, All the Wild That Remains (Norton, $26.95, 368 pages, ISBN 9780393089998), these two great American writers shared a commonality in their love of the West and the passionate, albeit very different, ways they celebrated and fought to preserve it. Part dual biography, part travelogue, this study of literary legacy and environmental conservation is structured around Gessner’s own road trips through the Western landscape. He travels to Lake Powell, formed by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which obliterated the glorious canyon and spawned the eco-terrorism movement called monkeywrenching (inspired by Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang). In Salt Lake City, he finds the roots of Stegner’s work, which was deeply shaped by autobiographical details, particularly his troubled relationship with his father. A through-line of Gessner’s narrative is the specter of climate change and the West’s unquenchable thirst for water. In their writing and their activism, Stegner and Abbey each understood the dangers of treating the arid land of the West as if it were the wet landscape of the Eastern states. Both Stegner’s measured warnings and Abbey’s more renegade approach have

been largely ignored. “What I came to believe over the course of the year, and what I suspected all along if I am honest, is that Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey, far from being regional or outdated, have never been more relevant,” Gessner writes. While extolling the work of both men, Gessner makes the stronger case for Stegner’s lasting place in the literary canon (which would have pleased the writer who, despite winning a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, was often ignored by the Eastern establishment). Abbey was a more unpredictable writer, his fiction flawed, Gessner suggests. It was through his essays, highly personal and idiosyncratic, that Abbey continues to leave his mark, and his Desert Solitaire is a perennial seller that, ironically, has inspired countless readers to head west, further threatening its delicate ecosystem. The two men died “Wallace four years Stegner and apart, with Edward Abbey, Stegner, a generafar from being tion older, regional or outliving the outdated, have man who had briefly been never been more relevant.” his student. Stegner has a fellowship at Stanford named for him and a prize for environmental or Western American history endowed in his name at the University of Utah. Abbey was buried illegally in a secret grave in the remote desert. These contrasting legacies exemplify the ways these two writers lived their lives, wrote their books and fought their battles against the destruction of the West. Abbey was Mr. Outside, while Stegner was Mr. Inside, Gessner says. But they both remain vital in reminding us why we need to preserve what is left of the wilderness.

interviews

SARA NOVIć

Girl, interrupted

uch like Ana, the heroine of her engrossing debut novel, Sara Nović isn’t entirely sure where to call home. “This is what I’m trying to figure out,” the author says, laughing, in a recent interview. “I really don’t know.” Nović, 28, has lived in Queens for about a year, and in New York City for a few years, but she grew up dividing her time between the U.S. and Croatia, where she has friends and family. The dual perspective informs her powerful story. Remarkably well-crafted and emotionally mature, Girl at War plunges readers instantly into the world of 10-year-old Ana, who lives in a tiny flat in Zagreb with her parents and baby sister, Rahela. The city seethes in the oppressive summer heat, and Ana hears whispered rumors of “disturbances” in nearby towns, but she’s still relatively carefree, spending her days playing football and riding bicycles with her best pal, Luka. Then one day the guy at the corner store refuses to sell her the usual pack of cigarettes for her uncle unless she can tell him whether it’s a Serbian or a Croatian brand. War has arrived. In Nović’s skilled hands, it takes the form of such concrete details, interruptions of daily life—small at first, then catastrophic. Ana and her family adjust to the sudden chaos: They forgo

GIRL AT WAR

By Sara Nović

Random House, $26, 336 pages ISBN 9780812996340, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

their annual trip to the coast, make do with severely restricted food and water and hide in underground shelters during air-raids. But when Rahela falls ill and no local hospital can help, the family is forced to take a huge risk. The consequences of that decision will shape Ana’s entire future. When we see her again 10 years later, in New York City in 2001, Ana is still reeling. Ana’s difficulty dealing with her past is complicated by the general ignorance of the American public about the Croatian Civil War, which Nović was awakened to after her first extended trip to the country. “I was shocked that nobody [in the U.S.] had heard about the war. It kind of freaked me out, because it still feels very fresh there.” In response, she wrote a short story for a creative writing class. In it, the character who would become Ana was “having a meltdown,” as Nović puts it, triggered by news of the death of Slobodan Milošević and the memories it dredged up. After she’d turned in the story, her professor called her into his office; she assumed she was about to be scolded. Instead, he told her, “You are going to write this novel, and you’re not going to pull any punches.” “I kind of doubted that I had a novel in me,” she says now. “I was like 18! But eventually I just kind of started writing out in a web from that starting spot.” She kept working at the story, in chunks, for a few years. Getting the structure right was especially tricky. “I knew I didn’t want it to be chronological,” Nović says. “I wanted readers to have a break after what happens in Part 1. I tried all sorts of weird stuff—I tried starting the book in the present, but that was terrible.” Then, while working on her MFA at Columbia, she had a meeting with writer Sam Lipsyte.

He hadn’t read the novel yet, but he said, “Just tell me about it.” That did the trick: “I just spilled my guts, and he drew a picture on an envelope, and that ended up being the order in which things are now.” As it stands, the narrative structure works beautifully, adding a whole extra layer of tension to the story. Readers slowly discover that there’s a secret buried in Ana’s past, even beyond the dark history she keeps from even her closA survivor of est friends, but Croatia’s civil uncovering it war attempts is not a simple to make peace process. Ana’s ambivwith her alence about past in this discussing the accomplished war might also reflect Nović’s debut. experience. “Some people adapt better than others,” she says. “There are people in Croatia now that just don’t want to talk about it. Then there are other people who want to get it all out, and there’s a lot of cool art coming out of it.” She mentions, for example, a theater group called Heartefact that stages performances in some of the villages that were hit hardest because of their ethnically mixed populations. Still, she says, “It’ll take a long time for things to get better.” She’s certainly not one to sit around waiting; Nović is busy. In addition to fiction, she writes essays and nonfiction, works as an editor at Blunderbuss magazine, teaches at Columbia and is the founder of the deaf-rights website Redeafined. Nović, who is deaf, says the site started as “an anger project, but a

BY BECKY OHLSEN

productive one.” She’d been reading some op-eds about parents of deaf kids advocating for cochlear implant surgery, and she wrote a counterpoint op-ed in response, but no one wanted it. So eventually she decided to publish it herself, and Redeafined was born. To her surprise, “people are reading it!” The topic is heated, she acknowledges, in part because it’s usually the case that a deaf kid has hearing parents. That means “it’s a weird kind of identity . . . you probably don’t share it with your family.” She’s working on a story now that’s set at a deaf school, and she’s been trying to figure out a good way to put sign language on paper. “When I finished this book I thought, well, that’s it, those are all the thoughts I really had,” she says, which is probably how everyone feels after their first novel. “It’s literally everything you’ve ever thought about. But now I have thoughts again, so that’s encouraging!” Nović also loves teaching. There’s a character in Girl at War, a professor who acts as a sort of book angel, lending Ana new books each week and guiding her reading. Nović says he was inspired by a professor she had at Emerson as an undergrad, whose office was similarly crammed with piled-up books. “I’ve been really lucky to have a couple of teachers like that who just feed me books,” she says. “I hope to become that person.”

cover story

SALLY MANN

A family portrait, in words and pictures

oes photographer Sally Mann really have a bulging file called “Maternal Slights,” as she writes in her courageous and visually ravishing memoir, Hold Still?

“Are you kidding? Oh my gosh. I can put my hand on it right now!” Mann says during a call to her home on cherished and much-photographed farmland in the small Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, Virginia, where she grew up. Mann, who is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost photographers, lives there with her husband, Larry, an artist-turned-lawyer she met when she was 18 and married soon after. Their three children, subjects of Mann’s beautiful but controversial 1992 photography project Immediate Family, are adults now, living their own lives. “I’m so mean-spirited,” Mann continues, “I wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them.” An example Mann recounts in Hold Still is that her mother planned a trip to Europe that began just days before Mann was to give birth. “She was oblivious to the effect of things like that. Just oblivious. And that’s because she herself had been so badly injured. I knew she had had a rough time, but until I did the research for this book, I didn’t realize the full extent of what her childhood and her adulthood—I mean, being married to my father was no picnic—had been like. In

the end, one of the main things that came out of writing this book was this profound regret that I hadn’t been a better daughter. It troubles me no end, even now.” Mann’s revelatory investigation of the fascinating, wounded histories on both sides of her family— and the shocking tragedy of her husband’s parents—began with an invitation to deliver the Massey lectures at Harvard University. In preparation, she began opening boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, newspaper clippings and other papers that had been gathering dust in her attic—uncovering, as it were, family secrets—and found herself “wondering what part of these lives, this dolorous DNA, has made me who I am.” This is a central question of Hold Still, which is part personal memoir (a word Mann says she hates), part family history, part brilliant photo album and part aesthetic manifesto. “I think we turn into what our genes tell us to turn into, to a large extent,” Mann says. What that means for her memoir is that each family story leads inexorably to a searching, vividly written examination of one of the obsessions that are the subjects of her sublime photographs, some of which are

COLEMAN BLAKE

Sally Mann and her husband, Larry, at their 1970 wedding in her parents’ garden.

LIZ LIGUORI

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

reproduced in the book. An example? In the book’s fourth and final section Mann writes about her father, an emotionally distant but compassionate country doctor she describes as a man with an “air of solipsistic distraction,” a passion for art and a lifelong fascination with death. This leads to a profound discussion of the fearless work compiled in Mann’s book What Remains, which includes photographs she took of dead bodies at the University of Tennessee forensic reMann’s search facility stunning known as the Body Farm, memoir is and of the part family photographs history, part she took of the photo album, body of her part aesthetic father, who committed manifesto. suicide to end a long illness. “I talk very cavalierly and confidently about photographing those bodies,” Mann says. “But the first ones I saw were a shock. It was hard. Once I got used to it, I found it helpful to accept that part of death, the physical decay. I’m more than fine with that. What I don’t want is to die until I’m ready to die. Like everybody else, I want to have everything tied up. I want my bed to be made. I want the perfect death.” Similarly, a regretful consideration of all she failed to ask about the life of Gee-Gee, the African-American woman who raised her and who, more than her own parents, offered Sally unconditional love, propelled Mann into a photography project that explores the emotional and physical landscapes that are a legacy of slavery. And Mann’s investigation of the

hidden life of her mother’s family, especially the life of her sentimental grandfather and his nostalgic love of the land, leads her to write passionately about the place where she has lived all her life and the impulses behind her haunting photographs of Southern landscapes. “I derive so much strength from being in the South,” Mann says. “It can be hideous in places, but there’s just something fundamentally gorgeous about the South.” Still, as a young would-be artist from the South, Mann found it painful to be far from the cultural power of New York. She says she and Larry lacked the funds, and she herself lacked the courage, to move to New York. “I put my faith in my work, as I always have, and believed that if it was good enough it wouldn’t be ignored.” Mann’s breakthrough came with the Immediate Family pictures, which catapulted her to international fame—or maybe infamy. The critical attention she received was clearly a mixed blessing. In some quarters she was vilified for a collection that included nude photographs of her young children. Her harshest critic called her a child pornographer. In a riveting passage in Hold Still, Mann offers a kind of rejoinder. There, in wonderfully expressive pictures and text, she dissects the aesthetics of a sequence of photographs of her young son who

Don’t Let the Fear PuLL You unDer stands naked and shivering in the river at the edge of the family property. One of these pictures found its way into the Immediate Family portfolio. Mann’s exposition offers an illuminating analysis of why she chose one picture over another, of what makes one photograph more beautiful than another. “When I see a good picture of my own,” Mann says, “when it comes up in the developer, my heart will skip a beat. I’ll have a physical reaction. It’s like, as some Romantic poet said, you’ve taken a mortal blow to your chest.” Great pictures or not, Mann says one of her concerns about the publication of Hold Still is of “dredging all that up again. I didn’t want that to be the focus when the family pictures came out, and I don’t want that to be the focus now. One of the questions back then was, have I done something that is going to irremediably change the kids? It’s good to get to the end of that long tunnel and find that things are OK.” In her early 20s, a few years after she had begun taking pictures with her first good camera, Mann got a master’s degree in creative writing. “Back then I thought it was possible to marry writing and photography artistically,” she explains. “Naturally that was a dismal failure. Because who can actually do that?” Forty years later, Hold Still, a glorious marriage of words and pictures, will lead a reader to conclude that, actually, Mann has done it.

HOLD STILL

30,000 of them arrived on shore. Each one a threat. And they’re about to change . . . everything.

“overflows with innovative, terrifying monsters —human, emotional, and undersea.” — e. Lockhart, author of We Were Liars

Watch the trailer, read a free excerpt, and more at UndertowTrilogy.com

#undertowtrilogy

I KnoW WhAT YoU ArE. A liar and a thief, Billy Zeets is untrusted and unwanted. But when local boys are taken by a killer, he may be their only hope.

read the Book That EVErYonE Is Talking About: “The story will keep you up all night. I wish I’d written it.”

—Michael Grant, NYT best-selling author of Gone

“In a word, BrILLIAnT!”

—Kimberly Derting, author of the Body Finder series

“A hold-your-breath page-turner!” —Charles Benoit, author of You Watch the trailer at hmhbooks.com/askthedark #askthedark

By Sally Mann

Little, Brown, $32, 496 pages ISBN 9780316247764, audio, eBook available

Clarion Books

MEMOIR

FOLLOW BOOKPAGE ON INSTAGRAM

features

GRADUATION BY HILLI LEVIN

@READBOOKPAGE Time to go your own way

raduation: a special time when feelings of joy and celebration collide with a healthy dose of sheer terror. All of those hours of hard work have finally paid off in the form of a high school diploma or a university degree . . . but what’s next? How to make it in the real world is a big question with no easy answers. Whether your grad needs some level-headed advice on living well from some of our greatest authors, a few first-job stories or a collection of essays from much-admired leaders, four new books offer plenty of calming wisdom.

Nerves and plenty of other things usually ensure that a graduate will retain little to none of the commencement speech on their big day. Cue Way More than Luck (Chronicle, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 9781452135199), a collection of 14 of the most inspiring (yet practical!) commencement speeches ever delivered, from influential thinkers and best-selling writers such as Ira Glass, Barbara Kingsolver and David Foster Wallace. Instead of a bunch of feel-good platitudes, these speeches plainly address those creeping fears new grads can’t help but harbor, while championing bravery, empathy and other “existential skills” that have become increasingly crucial for Millennials in our still-unstable professional sphere.

FINDING YOUR FIELD

#FUN 16

All of the exams, the hours spent sitting (or sleeping) during class lectures, and the ink and tears spilled over term papers can only prepare a young graduate so much for the lurking inevitable: their first job. Thankfully, journalist Merritt Watts has collected 50 real stories in First Jobs (Picador, $16, 256 pages, ISBN 9781250061256) to brace

any grad for their dive into the workforce. From pet gravediggers to bar-backs to carnies, these stories are often hilarious enough to drive the jitters away. A short note on the story’s narrator closes each story, and spoiler alert: All of those profiled here are doing just fine.

Ever wonder about Warren Buffett’s early jobs and setbacks? How about Anderson Cooper’s or Hans Zimmer’s? Gillian Zoe Segal has collected 30 essays from a diverse group of today’s leaders and innovators in Getting There: A Book of Mentors (Abrams Image, $24.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9781419715709), and they don’t shy away from the gritty truths. Buffett would “literally throw up” if he had to speak in front of a group of people until he forced himself through a public-speaking course; fashion maven Rachel Zoe was the scapegoat for her sticky-fingered boss; and Matthew Weiner (the Emmy Award-winning creator of “Mad Men”) waded through seven years of brutal rejection before his script made it onto the screen. Capping

off each essay are bulleted lists of “Pearls,” and these bits of wisdom beg to be taken to heart.

A BIT OF MAGIC If there’s any writer who has served as an influence on today’s graduating Millennials, it’s J.K. Rowling. And with more than 450 million copies of her Harry Potter books sold worldwide, it’s safe to say Rowling knows a bit about success. But in Very Good Lives (Little, Brown, $15, 80 pages, ISBN 9780316369152), her Harvard commencement speech from 2008, she chooses to address the subjects of failure and imagination. Rowling’s experience at rock bottom as “the biggest failure [she] knew” pushed her to pour all of her energy into her biggest passion— writing. But imagination is just as important for living well, and not only for creative professionals, as it allows us “to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” Re-readability and engaging illustrations from Joel Holland make this a perfect gift, and as a feel-good bonus, proceeds from the sale of Very Good Lives will be donated to Rowling’s international children’s charity.

features

MOTHER’S DAY BY ALICE CARY

A mother lode of treasured advice he lessons we learn from our mothers shape who we are, even the lessons we don’t particularly appreciate. Those lessons keep coming year after year, and their most valuable messages stay with us forever.

NPR journalist Scott Simon’s mother was a character in every way, a funny, gorgeous, gracious woman whose last days inspired her son to write Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime (Flatiron, $24.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9781250061133). Simon’s memoir expands upon tweets he sent to his 1.25 million Twitter followers as his mother lay dying of lung cancer in a Chicago hospital in the summer of 2013. Her devoted son found his mother so funny and interesting that he decided to share her final moments with the world. As he explains, “She was an old showgirl who gave a great last performance.” And tweets such as this one helped him process what his family was going through: “I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.” Patricia Lyons Simon Newman married three times, and over the years, her many jobs included being a model, secretary, typist and an ad agency receptionist. She had worked in nightclubs and dated mobsters, and Simon’s father was an alcoholic comedian. Simon interweaves memories of their colorful life together with descriptions of their time in the ICU. He recalls frustrating moments when needed medicine was delayed and moments of supreme grace as his mom rallies for a final visit with Simon’s wife. No doubt Patricia Newman would be proud

of her son and his extraordinarily compelling, heartfelt tribute.

THERE IN SPIRIT Alice Eve Cohen certainly has a complicated relationship with motherhood, and it smacked her in the face during a daunting period she chronicles vividly in The Year My Mother Came Back (Algonquin, $23.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9781616203191). Strangely, the ghost of her mother suddenly appeared, 31 years after her death, just when Cohen faced seemingly overwhelming personal challenges. In a previous book, What I Thought I Knew, the divorced mother of an adopted daughter wrote about finding out at age 44 that she was six months pregnant, after years of infertility and months of strange symptoms. In her latest book, her beloved surprise daughter, Eliana, is an active fourth-grader in need of painful surgery. At the same time, Cohen (now happily married) is diagnosed with breast cancer, just as her mother was years ago. Meanwhile, as Cohen’s older daughter, Julia, is about to leave for college, she gets in touch with her birth mother. This collision of events results in a maelstrom of emotional upheaval for Cohen, who finds much-needed comfort in the presence of her mother’s spirit: “We revisit events from our past together. Sometimes we just talk. Always, my mother is there and she is not there.”

This thoughtful memoir shows how our past and present remain constantly intertwined, and how being a mother is a complex journey that’s often full of stunning surprises.

THE FAMILY TABLE

Pam Anderson (center) teamed with daughters Maggy Keet and Sharon Damelio to write Three Many Cooks.

Cookbook author Pam Anderson and daughters Maggy Keet and Sharon Damelio, the trio behind the food blog Three Many Cooks, have always centered their lives on food, family and faith. When they began to collaborate on a cookbook, they realized they had much more to share than recipes. The result is a delectable biography of their family’s food history, Three Many Cooks (Ballantine, $26, 336 pages, ISBN 9780804178952). They chronicle their “incredible, messy, hilarious, powerful, screwed-up, delicious, and life-changing love affair with food, with one another, and with the people we have come to cherish.” The book is told in alternating chapters by each of the three, with every reflection accompanied by a relevant recipe. Anderson begins with memories of learning to cook comfort food like chicken and dumplings in the Southern kitchens of her mother, aunt and grandmother. In subsequent chapters she tells how as a young mother and wife of an Episcopal minister, she mastered the styles of Child, Beard and Claiborne. These well-written, captivating accounts describe such things as Keet’s most memorable meal (at the home of a colleague in Malawi, Africa); the three women’s weight struggles; and an unforgettable dinner to celebrate Anderson’s mother’s 89th birthday. This book will make readers hungry, not only for

the wonderful meals, but for the camaraderie that accompanies each feast. As Pam says of a lunch shared with a dying friend: “I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the moment I started caring less about perfection and more about connection.”

MANY TYPES OF MOMS Want to broaden your Mother’s Day experience beyond the greeting-card-and-box-of-candy routine? Dip into the wildly varied essays in Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now (Putnam, $25.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780399169854). In 2010, blogger Ann Imig (Ann Rants) organized a live reading called “Listen to Your Mother” to celebrate the holiday. It was such a success that more readings have been staged. This collection of the readings is refreshingly diverse, touching and funny. It’s a book that’s easy to dip into and likely to bring immediate rewards. In “More Than an Aunt, Less Than a Mom,” Jerry Mahoney writes about his husband’s sister’s decision to become an egg donor for their unborn child. This was tricky business for everyone involved, he acknowledges, adding: “But that didn’t mean we shouldn’t proceed. It just meant we’d have to educate people, to show them what a functional family we had and demonstrate that our family, like any other, was built on love.” No matter what the makeup of a family might be, isn’t that what Mother’s Day is all about?

spotlight

PARIS B Y K E L LY B L E W E T T

Paris is a woman’s town

S K C I P S ’ R O T I

IN T ERV IEWS E XC LU

SIVE

V E R

GIV

S W IE

S Y A W A E

Xtra

MORE BookPage MORE OFTEN

bookpage.com/newsletters 18

here is something irresistible about a talented American woman in Paris. She feels sexy and alive while strolling the city’s streets, confident the world will unfurl in her hand like a blossoming flower.

Such young women are featured in new books by Kate Betts and Christine Sneed, and both tell wonderful stories—one true, one fictional—about taking risks and pursuing dreams abroad. Betts’ memoir, My Paris Dream (Spiegel & Grau, $27, 256 pages, ISBN 9780679644422), recalls her years in the city of light after graduating from Princeton in the 1980s. Her Paris was a ladder whose climb began with freelance writing assignments for travel magazines and culminated with a position as a fashion editor and associate bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily. Betts, who later became the editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, is an instantly likable storyteller. She takes you to the Parisian boulevards and describes in terrific detail what people were wearing. Perhaps occasionally too much detail. “Only the French could invent seamless stockings that stay up with a rubber sticky band that grips the upper thigh,” she writes. As a young woman looking to make a good impression, she bought several pairs. “Fashion is tribal,” she explains. “It’s not about who you are but where you belong.” This is a story of how one American woman came to belong in the fashion capital of Europe, and how she wrote about that world for an American audience. Along the way, Betts made some terrific friends, fell in love and witnessed the world of style up close during a time of major transition. Full

of slangy French, delectable food and swoon-worthy fashion, Betts’ memoir is well worth the read. If Betts’ Paris is a ladder, then Sneed’s is an escape hatch. Jayne Marks, the protagonist of Sneed’s novel, Paris, He Said (Bloomsbury, $26, 336 pages, ISBN 9781620406922), is an aspiring artist in New York who can’t find time to paint. Then she meets gallery owner Laurent Moller. Decades older and maybe a little too suave, Laurent sweeps Jayne away to Paris to be his girlfriend and to live in his luxurious apartment. In her new life, Jayne has hours each day to paint, cook and work in Laurent’s French gallery, which is located on the same street as the Louvre. “I am closer to my twenty-year-old self here,” she thinks, “closer than I am at home.” Yet she finds it hard to settle into such a decadent existence. Can she maneuver the complexities of Laurent’s social world? Will her paintings ultimately be any good? Is Laurent being totally faithful to her? And why can’t she stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend in New York? Sneed, whose previous novel, Little Known Facts, drew considerable acclaim, expertly keeps the pages turning in this delightful novel. Paris, He Said offers readers, too, an entertaining escape from the mundanities of daily life. With clever and graceful prose, Sneed deftly guides a story that explores whether satisfaction follows when all one’s deepest wishes come true.

reviews

FICTION yarn that will enthrall bibliophiles and adventure fans alike. —CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

EARLY WARNING THE BLONDES

When beauty turns deadly R E V I E W B Y C A R R I E R O L LWA G E N

It’s a regular day in New York City. The subways are running, people are getting coffee and listening to headphones and going about their business. Then, in one seemingly isolated incident, a woman with blonde hair lashes out and kills without reason. As it turns out, the incident is not isolated at all. In Emily Schultz’s third novel, The Blondes, the world succumbs to a mysterious, rabies-like pandemic that causes people to attack and kill at random. But it’s not everyone who is affected by the disease: It’s women. And not all women, but blonde women—both those who’ve colored their hair and those who were born blonde. Suddenly, the preferred hair hue for starlets, beach babes and Barbie dolls is dangerous and nearly forbidden. Women shave, color and cover their hair to try to stem the disease’s spread. In the midst of these events, our main character, Hazel Hayes, tries By Emily Schultz to cope with a breakup and a pregnancy. She wants to get out of New Thomas Dunne, $25.99, 400 pages York and go home to Canada, but the world is suspicious of women, ISBN 9781250043351, eBook available and she faces literal attacks (from “Blonde Fury” victims), plus discrimSUSPENSE ination and paranoia. Clearly, The Blondes touches on themes of gender identity and politics, broaching topics of adultery, pregnancy, abortion, gender studies, myths about female hysteria, menstruation prejudices and female portrayal in media. But the book delves deeper than hot-button issues and talking points to explore what happens when women turn against other women, what we do when we feel out of control and the choice of whether to stand aside when someone needs help or to hold out a hand. Schultz handles all these themes masterfully, and that alone is impressive, but what really makes the novel great isn’t the gender politics—it’s the story. Hazel’s journey is outwardly terrifying and inwardly harrowing at the same time, creating a narrative we want to follow and a character we truly care about. The Blondes is the book you can’t put down; it’s also the book you can’t stop thinking about after you do.

THE LAST BOOKANEER By Matthew Pearl

Penguin Press $27.95, 400 pages ISBN 9781594204920 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

It’s late in the 19th century, and literary works are often plundered by so-called “bookaneers.” These literary pirates swoop in, abscond with a manuscript and sell it to the highest bidder. The stories should be property of the reader, not the writer, the bookaneers argue. And they’ll stop at nothing to ensure it. In The Last Bookaneer, book-

By Jane Smiley

Knopf $26.95, 496 pages ISBN 9780307700322 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Readers met the Langdon family in Some Luck, the first novel in Jane Smiley’s trilogy about an American family and an Iowa farm. A straightforward, almost old-fashioned novel, it opened in 1920 and covered the following 33 years—one year per chapter—in the lives of Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their six children with tenderness and surprisingly subtle humor. Now, in the more ominously titled Early Warning, Smiley casts an even wider net, as the Langdon children, now grown to adulthood and with children of their own, navigate the immense social changes of the 1960s and ’70s. When Early Warning opens, Walter, the Langdon patriarch, has died. Only Joe remains to work the land; his brothers and sisters have married and fanned out across the country from San Francisco to nemesis is close at hand and time Chicago to Washington, D.C. The seller Mr. Fergins recounts to railnext generation of Langdons have way waiter and enthusiastic reader is running out: A new copyright Mr. Cotton the fascinating exploits treaty is set to go into effect on July their own non-rural challenges— twin boys who are vicious rivals, of these bookish pirates. Fergins 1, 1890, and manuscripts will no first encountered such a man, Wild longer be fair game. a troubled daughter drawn to the Bill, when the bookaneer slipped The Last Bookaneer is a rollicknotorious Jim Jones and the Peoing romp in which the publishing a pirated manuscript into Fergins’ ples Temple and a risk-taking son industry is depicted as a business hands. The next day, a patron who drops out of college to fight in picked up the book and left Fergins as scintillating as mining for gold. Vietnam. Character traits and perwith entirely too much money. Equal parts adventure on the South sonalities jump generations, and His curiosity piqued, Fergins Seas and literary fiction set in events that seemed peripheral in eagerly follows the money trail of civilized and cerebral England, this Some Luck circle back to affect the Bill’s subsequent requests. Before story is chock full of sly remarks family in later decades. As land vallong, it leads Fergins to one of the skewering the publishing indusues sour and plunge, the Langford greatest bookaneers of the age, try. The questions of intellectual family farm is almost a character Pen Davenport, who has his eye property faced in the 1890s are just in itself, mimicking the fortunes on his biggest mark yet: Robert as complex and engaging as those of the various siblings. Toward we encounter in today’s technolog- the novel’s end, the appearance Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island. The ailing writer is ical world. As in his previous work of a previously unknown family sequestered in Samoa, and so the (The Dante Club, The Last Dickens), member provides an important pair of pirates set sail in hopes of Matthew Pearl seamlessly braids opportunity for intergenerational retrieving treasure. But Davenport’s fact and fiction into an imaginative healing.

reviews Smiley’s narrative captures many of the touchstones of America’s postwar events and social changes: the Cold War, Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, the women’s movement, AIDS—yet the novel rarely feels generic. Like Some Luck, Early Warning focuses on the prosaic as much as the singular, and it is what each of her finely drawn characters does with what is handed to them that makes the novel so engaging. While Early Warning lacks some of the encompassing warmth of its predecessor, the strength of Smiley’s storytelling will keep readers hooked and looking forward to the third and final volume. —LAUREN BUFFERD

GOD HELP THE CHILD By Toni Morrison

Knopf $24.95, 192 pages ISBN 9780307594174 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

FICTION daughter. Sweetness also mentions that her husband was a porter and that Lula Ann was born in the ’90s. At first, this reviewer thought it was the 1890s, but no, Lula Ann was born in the 1990s, which makes her parents’ attitude even more disturbing. Do light-skinned African American parents still reject their dark-skinned children? And who names a child born in 1991 or so “Lula Ann”? But again, this slim and accessible book is a fairy tale, and fairy tales are timeless. It’s not so much about race but about wounded children, not to mention how pain is passed along—and how pain can be healed, at least partially. Bride has been hurt by her mother’s rejection and has hurt others in return; her lover has been forever scarred by the murder of an adored older brother. Though this will likely be considered a minor work from one of our greatest novelists, God Help the Child is gracefully written and full of surprises. —ARLENE McKANIC

The latest work from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is puzzling until you realize that it’s actually a fairy tale. How else to describe a story about a woman who is so bereft without the man in her life that the lack of him causes her to regress back to childhood—literally. Bride, the book’s beautiful, very young cosmetics tycoon, slowly loses all the physical signifiers of womanhood. Even the holes in her pierced ears close up. Also strange are the circumstances of Bride’s birth. Named Lula Ann Bridewell, she is born a dark-skinned baby to parents who take refuge in their light skin and “good” hair. The sight of Lula Ann repels them to the point that her mother doesn’t want to touch her and insists she call her “Sweetness” instead of “Mother.” Lula Ann’s father eventually abandons his wife and child altogether. The reader believes that Sweetness’ hard-heartedness comes not only from her internalized racism but also from a desire to protect her

HOW TO START A FIRE By Lisa Lutz

HMH $25, 352 pages ISBN 9780544411630 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

Anna comes from a wealthy Boston family—her father preoccupied with business, her mother with shopping and keeping up appearances. Kate’s parents died when she was 8, and she was raised by her very traditional Czech grandfather. Her highest ambition is to eventually take over the family diner, where she has worked since she was 12. George, the gorgeous, athletic basketball player, is the outdoorsy type, working toward a forestry degree. Just before graduation, Kate’s grandfather dies, sending her into a downward spiral of “retirement,” which consists mainly of watching TV for 12 hours at a stretch. At about the same time, George finds out her parents are divorcing due to her father’s infidelities. And Anna, who takes a fifth year to get a chemistry minor to bolster her med school applications, develops a serious drinking problem—leading to an episode involving all three women which will haunt them for at least the next 15 years. Lutz gives the reader sporadic glimpses into their lives over that time frame, as they come together, drift apart and repeat the process over moves, marriages, adventures, tragedies and professional pitfalls. With wit and a gift for capturing the repartee between siblings and old friends, Lutz brings us a memorable and ultimately uplifting saga of three strong, unique women. —DEBORAH DONOVAN

RE JANE Screenwriter and author Lisa Lutz is well known for her zany mystery series starring Izzy Spellman, private eye. Here she jumps into mainstream women’s fiction with How to Start a Fire, an engaging portrait of female friendship spanning two decades. In 1993, when all three are students at UC Santa Cruz, freshman roommates Kate and Anna find George passed out on the lawn outside the party they had all attended. The three young women quickly become friends during their undergraduate years and beyond, the bonds between them tightening and loosening over the years.

By Patricia Park

Pamela Dorman $27.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780525427407 eBook available DEBUT FICTION

Charlotte Brontë makes her way to 21st-century New York City by way of Korea in this latest spin on Jane Eyre from first-time author Patricia Park. The title character is Jane Re, “a honhyol, a mixedblood,” with a Korean mother and American father. As if the “Korean-

ish” Jane (as she describes herself ) does not already feel like an outsider, her parents die, and she is shipped off to live with her gruff uncle in Flushing, Queens—an enclave that is “all Korean, all the time,” and where “your personal business was communal property.” Re Jane is breezy and accessible, at its best when portraying Jane’s haplessness and frustration. “I traveled nearly seven thousand miles across the globe to escape societal censure only to end up in the second-largest Korean community in the Western World,” she says wryly of her childhood move to the U.S. The Jane Eyre connection here is substantial (a key character even shares the pen name under which Brontë published her masterpiece), though not slavish, which makes sense given that Park’s interest in feminism goes beyond the Women’s Studies professor who plays an important role in the book. Jane’s Rochester is an unhappily married Irish-Italian Brooklyn native who must also contend with a surly young daughter, although he moves a little more quickly than Brontë’s brooding hunk. Readers may differ on the ultimate plausibility of his relationship with our heroine, and occasionally Park’s chatty tone becomes flat or needlessly melodramatic. Nevertheless, Park offers real insight into assimilationist struggles in comments such as “Immigrant households did not talk about Derrida or The New York Review of Books. Conversation was a luxury, rendered in broken fits and starts.” Some of Re Jane’s most intriguing sections unfold during an impulsive post-9/11 return to Seoul, where Jane lands a job teaching English, and where she must make a major decision about her love life, thus adding yet another layer of confusion to her sense of cultural conflict. None of the conflicts here are resolved in particularly shocking ways, but Park’s portrait of Korean-American life feels authentic and is ultimately endearing. Charlotte Brontë would be proud. —T O M D E I G N A N

FICTION CHURCH OF MARVELS By Leslie Parry

Ecco $26.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780062367556 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

Parry has plenty more tricks up her sleeve. —STEPHENIE HARRISON

Visit BookPage.com for a Q&A with Leslie Parry.

ORIENT By Christopher Bollen

What do two twin sisters who star in a Coney Island sideshow, a woman whose mother-in-law may have had her committed to an insane asylum, and a sanitation worker who finds an orphaned baby girl while completing his rounds one night have in common? The question sounds like the set up to a rather ghoulish joke, and yet untangling this mystery forms the basis of Leslie Parry’s dazzling debut, Church of Marvels. Set in 1895, Church of Marvels takes readers deep into the shadowy underworld of turn-of-thecentury New York City and its fringes. It is a story of hardscrabble lives intersecting in the most shocking ways—a story that is sometimes quite ugly but often made beautiful by its colorful cast of characters. This is not a novel with a single heart to it, but rather a chorus of four, and they are engaged in a scavenger hunt where their very salvation is at stake. To say any more would do a disservice to the devilish twists and legitimately shocking surprises that Parry has plotted for her readers. This is a book best entered in the dark, so when its revelations unfold, they are all the more dazzling. Despite its historical setting, Parry’s world-building and character crafting are so strong that Church of Marvels feels fresh and timely, a thoughtful and satisfying modern work dressed up with all the bells and whistles of an old-fashioned Victorian romp. At times it reads like a Sarah Waters novel—with the compassion and cunning that implies—set in America. Utterly electrifying, this is the kind of novel readers will race through, only to turn the final page feeling ever so slightly heartbroken that the story has reached its end. Let’s hope that

Harper $26.99, 624 pages ISBN 9780062329950 Audio, eBook available SUSPENSE

In his second novel, Christopher Bollen brings a fresh perspective to the tale of a small town that hides secrets beneath its sleepy facade. With Orient, Bollen takes a real place—the North Fork of Long Island—and weaves a mesmerizing fictional web of characters and mysteries into a story that is as viscerally thrilling as it is intellectually precise. Orient is an isolated, quiet New York town, almost an island unto itself, but its peaceful facade is threatened by a cultural clash between the “year-rounders” who’ve called the place home forever and the wealthy newcomers who consider the town a refuge from the chaos of Manhattan. Even in its more peaceful moments, Bollen makes the place feel a bit like an idyllic powder keg waiting to burst into a firestorm. Things get more complicated when the body of a local caretaker is found floating in the water, followed shortly by the body of a creature that all the locals think might be from a research lab in the area. Rumors swell in the town, and many are centered on Mills Chevern, an orphan with a murky past who just arrived in Orient. More deaths follow, the town gets more fearful, and Mills ultimately joins a Manhattan transplant named Beth—who has problems of her own—in an effort to find out what’s really going on. A sense of dread, of creeping disaster, builds in Orient from the very first page, and even though it takes a while for the first body

spotlight

WOMEN’S FICTION BY TRISHA PING

A duo of daring debuts

hat comes to mind when you think of women’s fiction? If the word is “predictable,” think again: Two fearless first-time novelists are turning tropes upside down. In their first novels, authors Eliza Kennedy and Sarai Walker are pushing the boundaries of popular fiction with female-centered stories that blend dark twists and searing social commentary in ways that draw from literary fiction (Notes on a Scandal to Anna Karenina) and suspense (insert obligatory Gone Girl reference). Lily Wilder, the charismatic narrator of Kennedy’s I Take You (Crown, $24, 320 pages, ISBN 9780553417821), is doubting her decision to marry—but not for the reasons you’d expect. Lily, a successful lawyer, isn’t worried that the ceremony won’t be picture-perfect or that her fiancé will run out on her: She’s afraid that marriage will cramp her not-exactly-monogamous lifestyle. As for Plum Kettle, the overweight protagonist of Sarai Walker’s Dietland (HMH, $26, 320 pages, ISBN 9780544373433), the person who changes her life isn’t a man. It’s a mysterious young woman, who initiates the virtually housebound Plum (who is planning on having bariatric surgery) into a secret society of guerrilla fighters who are committing terrorist acts against the patriarchy. Targets range from gang rapists to a “Girls Gone Wild”-type filmmaker. Lily and Plum are heroines who lie outside the social norms, both those of real life and those of women’s fiction. Lily loves her

fiancé, Will, but she also loves sex—lots of it. She isn’t sure if she can change that about herself, or if she even wants to, although by accepting his proposal she’s signed on to try. For her part, at more than 300 pounds, Plum is not conventionally beautiful, although it’s hard to say for sure since she is usually described through her own very critical eyes. Plum defines herself by her weight, hiding her body in shapeless, colorless clothes and spending years on thankless diets waiting for her skinny self— whom she calls Alicia— to emerge so she can finally start living. Still, it’s not entirely unusual for stories to start out with women who are a little bit different. After all, that’s why their lives aren’t perfect, right? As the pages turn, you’re waiting for the moment when Lily and Plum transform, become what society expects— which makes you realize just how well-trodden the tropes of popular fiction can be. But as Dietland and I Take You approach their very different but equally satisfying conclusions, it becomes clear that this isn’t the point. Plum and Lily aren’t the ones who need to change—the world is. Readers will find themselves cheering on these two truly unconventional heroines all the way to the last page—and be thinking about their choices long afterward.

Find Q&As with Eliza Kennedy and Sarai Walker on BookPage.com.

reviews to show up, Bollen has a knack for building tension through character, pacing and a sure sense of place. If you’re just looking for a great murder mystery, Orient has it, but there’s so much more to savor. Through this prism of a doomed American town, Bollen examines everything from class to parenthood to sexuality to privacy, and it’s all embedded within a central plot so intoxicating that you can’t help but linger on every moment searching for meaning. That Orient achieves this is enough to make it a page-turner. That the meaning you find often deepens as it dawns on you makes it a mustread novel. —MATTHEW JACKSON

THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS By Aleksandar Hemon

FSG $26, 320 pages ISBN 9780374203412 eBook available LITERARY FICTION

Bosnian-born author Aleksandar Hemon’s fiction has always been a sobering, sometimes bleak look at the lives of immigrants and exiles in Chicago who are not unlike the writer himself (see The Lazarus Project and Love and Obstacles). But in a dramatic change of pace and tone, his new novel, The Making of Zombie Wars, is an eccentric comedy, albeit one with the same level of subtlety and resonance we’re accustomed to from Hemon, a MacArthur “genius grant” winner. An aspiring writer from an affluent Chicago suburb who never finishes anything he starts, Joshua Levin has never had to suffer much. His life is “a warm blanket,” in contrast to the lives of the immigrants he teaches as an ESL instructor, and his creative endeavors have been as futile and disheartening as the Cubs at nearby Wrigley Field. That is, until Joshua comes up with an idea for a script called Zombie Wars that could be his big break, and the sad but beautiful Bosnian woman in

FICTION his class, Ana, starts to seduce him. Of course, Ana is married, and Joshua just moved in with his girlfriend. As Ana turns his life upside down, Joshua finally has some real-life drama to funnel into his writing. Excerpts from Joshua’s script draw parallels between a zombie apocalypse and the culture-cannibalizing effects of war and exile, be it in Hemon’s native Bosnia or in Iraq, which U.S. forces have only just begun to invade when the novel opens in 2003. As the story oscillates between hysterical and heartbreaking, Hemon once again renders the city of Chicago authentically, forgoing the whitewashed suburbs of John Hughes movies and invoking the city’s social and cultural realities as faithfully as Alex Kotlowitz. The wit and intelligence of The Making of Zombie Wars should please Hemon fans and entice new readers. —ADAM MORGAN

A GOD IN RUINS By Kate Atkinson

Little, Brown $28, 480 pages ISBN 9780316176538 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Teddy Todd, who first appeared in Kate Atkinson’s thrilling Life After Life (2013), served as a British pilot in World War II. As a young man in the throes of a brutal war, he “didn’t expect to see the alchemy of spring, to see the dull brown earth change to bright green and then pale gold.” Teddy does survive the war, barely. In A God in Ruins, we follow the rest of his life as brother, husband, father and grandfather through the lovely, effortless storytelling of Atkinson (or, as I think of her whenever I glimpse one of her many near-perfect books on my shelves, She Who Can Do No Wrong). Teddy wanders around Europe for a bit after the liberation, writing mediocre poetry at cafes on the Riviera. “If only he was an artist—

paint seemed less demanding than words. He felt sure that Van Gogh’s sunflowers hadn’t given him as much trouble.” A responsible British lad at heart, Teddy returns home to marry Nancy, literally the girl next door, and get a series of respectable if non-glamorous jobs. They have a volatile daughter, Viola, who lives with her boyfriend on a commune and gives Teddy and Nancy two grandchildren (their names, of course, are Sunny and Moon). A God in Ruins is not so much a sequel as a companion to Life After Life, in which Teddy’s sister Ursula lives her life over and over. And Teddy’s story more than stands on its own. Atkinson effortlessly toggles to and from Teddy’s childhood, the war, and his daughter’s and grandchildren’s lives in a story so seamless that one barely notices skipping among decades. And Teddy . . . it is hard to stop thinking about the steadfast yet slightly poetic Teddy. He apparently has that effect on women. When Viola unceremoniously moves him into a retirement home, the women flock to him: “Of course he was still pretty spry then, and competent, and the women belonged to a generation that could be impressed if a man simply knew how to flick a switch on a kettle. He set quite a few frail hearts a-flutter in Fanning Court.” He is a singular character in an extraordinary story. —AMY SCRIBNER

THE BOOK OF ARON By Jim Shepard

Knopf $23.95, 272 pages ISBN 9781101874318 eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Of the estimated six million Jews extinguished during the Holocaust, perhaps one-fourth were children. To make this figure somewhat conceivable, imagine if every one of them had, like Anne Frank, left behind a diary—or if that many novelists reconstructed in fic-

tion the horrors these innocents had to face. Something like this imperative motivates National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard’s seventh novel, The Book of Aron, a loosely historical account of the children of the Warsaw ghetto. The novel begins with the relocation of Aron and his family to Poland’s capital under the pretext of containing a typhus epidemic. Instead, the Germans impoverish the ghetto’s inhabitants via theft and starvation. Shepard deftly shows how the Jews’ accommodating, fatalistic ethos blinds them to the Germans’ monstrosity. An officer assigned to supervise the orphanage in which Aron ends up puts it thus: “The Jews adjust to every situation.” Several pages carry the news that the ghetto has yet again shrunk, like a noose. Shepard ventures into the delicate subject of how some Jews were complicit in their co-religionists’ destruction. Hannah Arendt argued controversially that the Judenrate, or Jewish councils, helped the Nazis by tabulating Jewish constituents; the Judenrate are shown here stifling rumors about deportation to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Even Aron becomes an informer for the Gestapo. But Shepard underscores how famine makes nonsense of much ordinary morality. The novel is too grave to admit much stylistic ornamentation. Much of it is dialogue, but not mere patter. There is humor of the blackest sort, jokes about Hitler or the Jewish Police. But the overriding tone is somber and tense and suffocating, like the climate before a storm. Shepard tackles his grim subject without a hint of sentimentality, though it is clear that the subject is not an easy one for him. Every day’s newspaper shows that children continue to be the tragic pawn in the ideological games of adults, from massacres in Peshawar or Norway to the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. To say “never again” might be wishful thinking, but Shepard’s taut, discomfiting novel at least illuminates what adult atrocities seem to children’s eyes. —KENNETH CHAMPEON

NONFICTION THE HAND ON THE MIRROR By Janis Heaphy Durham

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

The first family of flight REVIEW BY KEITH HERRELL

Grand Central $26, 288 pages ISBN 9781455531301 Audio, eBook available

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT

Nowadays, the title of a nonfiction book is almost invariably followed by a phrase hyping the contents, including words like incredible, survival or secret. No such subtitle is needed for two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough’s latest book, The Wright Brothers, even though it contains all three elements. Of course, McCullough’s name alone virtually guarantees bestseller status. Author of Mornings on Horseback and The Path Between the Seas and acclaimed biographer of Harry Truman and John Adams, he has earned his reputation as one of the best (and most-read) historians of our time. By turning his attention to the two shy brothers from Dayton, Ohio, who pioneered the age of flight, he guarantees that millions will learn a story that is, well, incredible. “Shy” doesn’t quite do justice to the brothers (an armchair psychiaBy David McCullough trist would likely conclude that one or both had Asperger’s syndrome), Simon & Schuster, $30, 336 pages but McCullough does his best to bring out the personalities of two men ISBN 9781476728742, audio, eBook available virtually indistinguishable in the public eye. (If you don’t know which brother was which, join the crowd.) For McCullough, it’s not all propelBIOGRAPHY lers, wind tunnels and sand dunes: By emphasizing the Wright family dynamics, with a particular focus on their father, Bishop Milton Wright, and ever-supportive sister, Katharine Wright, he humanizes their story and makes it more relatable. As for the technical side, readers won’t be disappointed. McCullough traces the development of powered, piloted flight from the brothers’ earliest interest in a crude flying toy to hard-won success at Kitty Hawk. Amazingly, in hindsight, it was another five years after the historic Dec. 17, 1903, flights before the brothers achieved worldwide acclaim. McCullough is at his best recounting this period, when fish-out-of-water Wilbur travels to France to disprove the doubters and Orville almost loses his life in a crash near Washington, D.C. The Wrights didn’t totally shun fame, but they didn’t chase it either. The story of the brothers’ singleminded quest to master the skies is a compelling one, made even more compelling by McCullough’s sure-handed storytelling skills. He knows the prose doesn’t need to soar—the brothers and their accomplishments provide all the soaring that’s necessary.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST MAN By Harrison Scott Key

Harper $26.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780062351494 eBook available MEMOIR

Not long after his family moved from Memphis to rural Mississippi, young Harrison Scott Key began to notice how out of step he was with his surroundings. Willing to rise at 4 a.m. to accompany his father and brother on hunting trips, he nevertheless preferred to read, or bake, or simply not shoot things.

With The World’s Largest Man for a parent, though, those options often took a backseat to a day spent in camouflage with gun at the ready. Key’s memoir is frequently hilarious. His storytelling pulls no punches: Pop was physically abusive, somewhat racist and entirely sexist, and while Key is different in many ways, some of his father’s worst behaviors are handed down and threaten his own marriage. Yet this material is all fodder for stories that balance wit and gut-punch delivery. When a Thanksgiving dinner is blown off course by Pop’s ruminations on breastfeeding, Key muses, “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve just started shooting everyone, to save the world from us.”

Janis Heaphy Durham walked into the bathroom of her home one year to the day after the death of her beloved husband, only to stare in amazement at what appeared to be a handprint on the mirror. This was just one of many strange things that had happened since Max’s premature death from esophageal cancer at age 56. Was Max trying to contact her from beyond the grave? In her gripping new book, The Hand on the Mirror: A True Story of Life Beyond Death, Durham reveals her own awakening to possibilities beyond the material world. Durham is the former publisher of the Sacramento Bee, which earned two Pulitzers during her tenure. She relies on her background in journalism to investigate the supernatural events following Max’s passing, though that very background also prevented her from sharing her experiences for many years. Afraid of losing her credibility as a newspaperwoman, she talked about the events Like Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend with only a few friends. After she This Never Happened, The World’s realized how many people had Largest Man is about a willful had similar experiences, she began Southern father, a wife trying to to be more open about what had eke out a little sanity for the family happened to her. and the kids who nevertheless bear Durham spends much of the the scars of such an upbringing. book describing her encounters And as was true with Lawson, Key with leading parapsychologists as continues to look for the familiar she tries to decipher the messages in his adult life. When his creepy she believes Max is sending her. neighbors in Savannah, Georgia, Whether or not the reader accepts burn trash in the yard and tear out her story as true, Durham’s book is all the landscaping with a truck, his a moving account of how we deal annoyance is clearly tempered with with loss and how many of us hope some nostalgia. for reunion in the next life. ParticuBoth laugh-out-loud funny larly touching is the account of her and observant about the ways we mother’s decline and death, which become our parents while assertdemonstrates the possibility of ing ourselves, The World’s Largest change and the power of forgiveMan is a wise delight. ness, even at the very end of life. —HEATHER SEGGEL

—MARIANNE PETERS

reviews SPINSTER

ON THE MOVE

By Kate Bolick

Crown $26, 336 pages ISBN 9780385347136 Audio, eBook available GENDER

More people live alone in America and more American women identify as single than ever before. Kate Bolick’s blockbuster 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies,” ignited a conversation about how unmarried women are changing contemporary culture. In her thoughtful follow-up to that article, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Bolick considers the deeper questions emerging from the statistics on single women. How do women (like Bolick, like this reviewer) who are working, living and aging alone construct meaningful, loving lives? How do we negotiate between solitude and community? Spinster addresses these questions through a lively mixture of memoir and biography. Like many young bookish women, Bolick migrates to New York and journalism. In the aftermath of her mother’s early death, she finds female role models in a group of women she calls her “awakeners”: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Neith Boyce, Maeve Brennan, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Each of these women struggled to become a writer, a struggle that sometimes felt like a stark choice between being professionally successful and being married. If the choice is less stark these days, the stakes are still high. While the stereotypes of spinsters are mostly unflattering—cue the cat lady, the bag lady and Grey Gardens—Bolick’s Spinster offers a corrective through nuanced portraits of women who love and are loved, and who choose to place their work and their friends at the center of their lives. Engaging and informative, Spinster offers a decidedly non-“Sex and the City” portrait of the challenges and opportunities of single life. —CATHERINE HOLLIS

NONFICTION

By Oliver Sacks

Knopf $27.95, 416 pages ISBN 9780385352543 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

The frequent surprises in Oliver Sacks’ guardedly self-revelatory autobiography begin with the book’s cover photo. There we see a buff, leather-jacketed Sacks astride his new BMW motorcycle in Greenwich Village in 1961. Who knew that the genial, gray-bearded, best-selling writer-neurologist once portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings (1990) was such a hunk in his late 20s? Or a state-champion lifter on Southern California’s Muscle Beach? Or a physician addicted for a while to amphetamines? Or a closeted gay man who had sex during the week of his 40th birthday and then not again until he fell in love at 75? Revelations like these will keep a reader turning the pages of On the Move. But Sacks’ book, self-effacingly subtitled “A Life,” actually has much more to say than these headline grabbers would indicate. The book is a kind of reckoning, a summing up, of Sacks’ growth as an intellectual and a writer. Born in England to a prominent Jewish family, Sacks was from an early age a ceaseless letter writer and journal keeper; he draws liberally on those writings to give readers a sense of who he was as a younger man. Many of this autobiography’s 12 chapters offer the backstories to Sacks’ books, known for illuminating the curious workings of the human brain. Sacks also writes with feeling about his immediate family, almost all of them doctors, as well as his lasting friendships with the likes of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick and the poet Thom Gunn. In fact it is an early Gunn poem that provides the title for this book. And what an appropriate title it is! In these pages, Sacks is always on

the move, leaping adroitly from one topic to the next. We are swept along by the velocity of his account of a long and eventful life. —ALDEN MUDGE

THE QUARTET By Joseph J. Ellis

Knopf $27.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780385353403 Audio, eBook available HISTORY

Nationhood was never a goal of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence refers to “Free and Independent States.” After the Revolutionary War ended, a majority of the population was opposed or indifferent to a transition from individual states to a federal government. In his brilliant and exciting new book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, historian Joseph J. Ellis tells the story of how a small group of leaders, disregarding popular opinion, took the American story in a new direction. There were four men of vision— George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay—who led the way to the next stage of development. Ellis’ thesis may be controversial to some because he argues that radical change came not from “the people,” but from the political elite. It happened because the four leaders, all with impeccable revolutionary credentials, were keenly aware of the systemic dysfunction of the Articles of Confederation. They used their skills to call for a Constitutional Convention and, as best they could, to control the agenda. They even attempted to orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions and then drafted the Bill of Rights (a popular move), which would, they thought, assure that states go along with the constitution. Ellis says that if he is right, “this was arguably the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American

history.” Ellis offers insightful portraits of his main players and penetrating analyses of major issues while beautifully evoking the atmosphere of the era. The Quartet is the best kind of history—authoritative and superbly written. —ROGER BISHOP

STEPDOG By Mireya Navarro Putnam $26.95, 256 pages ISBN 9780399167799 eBook available MEMOIR

So-called “blended” families are a complex ecosystem, where kids can play adults against one another and even the goldfish gets a say about who does what on the chore wheel. It’s therefore not so unusual that one family was thrown into disarray by a possessive mutt. Enter Eddie, the Stepdog of the title. For Mireya Navarro, it was easy to fall in love with Jim—both were successful reporters at the New York Times, and they had much in common. Mia could work well enough with Jim’s two kids, but Eddie seemed to have her number. Defying every command, ecstatic to see Jim or the kids while he barked at Mia, Eddie made it clear how he felt about the newcomer. When her attempts to befriend the dog fell flat, she began scheming to get him out of the picture. Navarro’s story is ostensibly about the dog, but go beyond that and you’ll find a layered tale of family love. Mia and Jim know they’re right for one another, but her relationship with the kids never becomes “parental” despite living with them half the time. Jim loves Eddie in large part because he loves Jim unconditionally, a rarity when juggling the needs of so many humans. And Eddie? Mia’s psychological read on his behavior—that the dog is jealous—gets turned on its head by a canine counselor, who helps the two form a friendship of sorts.

Stepdog is fun and often funny, but it will be of special interest to anyone with a blended family life. It’s a powerful reminder that all you need is love, and possibly kibble. —HEATHER SEGGEL

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD By Elizabeth Alexander

Grand Central $26, 224 pages ISBN 9781455599875 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

In the poem she wrote for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day,” Elizabeth Alexander asked, “What if the mightiest word is love?” In The Light of the World, her memoir about the sudden death of her husband in 2012, the poet, essayist and playwright renders her own exquisite response. Using her medium of words, she illuminates and lyricizes the life of her mate—the painter and political refugee Ficre Ghebreyesus—and the shattering grief that follows his death at age 50. Her tool is the brush of poetic sensibility, casting her words through the filtering lenses of the African diaspora, the couple’s Eritrean and African-American ancestors, and her own sustaining community. Alexander creates an intimacy that coaxes a transformative empathy from her reader, and she rewards with a profound understanding of love and loss. Yet, as sudden as Ficre’s death is, Alexander describes her grieving as mercifully graded, an evolution that allows her and their two young sons time to retrieve Ficre’s essence. First, there is the gut-wrenching physicality of the moment of his death, all senses erupting as she sees her lover leave his body behind. In the aftermath, she looks for him in what was once the familiar: Ficre in his garden, among the peonies he planted to bloom on her birthday; Ficre in his studio, where brushes still hold his touch; Ficre in the dishes he created as a popular chef. These

comforting remainders—intensely sensual—carry her through that first aching year of widowhood. Finally, she moves her family from suburb to the city, not to flee memory’s hold in the house they all had shared, but to resume the plan the couple once had for their future. Ficre too will live on because, as promised in Alexander’s poem, “Love beyond marital, filial, national . . . casts a widening pool of light.” —PRISCILLA KIPP

IT’S A LONG STORY By Willie Nelson with David Ritz

Little, Brown $30, 400 pages ISBN 9780316403559 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

Willie Nelson was born to be a rambling man, but he was also born to be a gifted songwriter and storyteller. In his rambunctious and meandering memoir, It’s a Long Story, Nelson regales readers with stories of his life, from his childhood in Abbott, Texas, to his now-famous run-in with the IRS over back taxes in the 1990s. Nelson attributes both his love of music and his penchant for the peripatetic life of a singer to Ernest Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, whose candor in crooning the blues made a deep mark on the young Nelson. By the time he was 7 or 8, he received his first guitar and began to realize that music and emotions could be combined; as a result, Nelson was motivated to keep writing poems, to learn to play his guitar with “crazy precision” and to use songs to overcome his shyness. Although fans may be familiar with many of the stories here, they will nevertheless be entertained as Nelson recalls his first night in Nashville—where he lay down in the middle of Broadway—or his efforts to save a guitar case full of pot from a house fire. He also discusses his three marriages and his relationships with musicians from Ray Price and Johnny Cash to Waylon

q&a

KATE BOLICK BY CATHERINE HOLLIS

Single-minded

WILLY SOMMA

NONFICTION

ith a record number of American women now unmarried (more than 50 percent) Kate Bolick offers a fresh look at “going solo” in Spinster.

As a 40-something confirmed spinster, I’m a member of your target audience. What do you imagine men, or married women, learning from your book? All of us spend at least part of our lives alone, possibly more so now than ever before, between the rising age of marriage, the ubiquity of divorce and our increasingly longer lifespans. My hope is that Spinster will remind any reader that being alone, whenever it happens, is something to treasure, not fear. Spinster grew out of your 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies,” which I read standing up at a magazine rack in one fell swoop. That article seemed to focus on the demographics of single women, as well as on the sociology of men’s lives, while your book makes your own experiences central. Can you say a little about the process of moving from article to book? I wanted to take advantage of the intimacy that a book offers, and draw the reader into my imaginary life, to better share the nuances of my single experience, which was (and remains) shaped by the women who influenced me. I thought that by putting my life on the page alongside theirs, I could animate the similarities and differences between our historical contexts, and show that the ways in which we talk about marriage and not-marriage today, which seem so modern and contemporary, have been around for centuries. Your book opens by claiming that marriage—to do or not do—is a central question for women, but by the end of the book you say that this is a false binary. Can you clarify what populations of women you’re thinking about here? All of us are raised to assume we’ll someday marry—the institution of marriage has always been the foundation of our social order. But already, in our lifetime, that’s changing. I’d like it if we all grew up understanding that marriage is an option that may or may not be right for us. Aging and illness, the specter of the crazy bag lady, haunts single women of a certain age. What housing solutions or living arrangements can we develop to ensure the balance between autonomy and community as we age? It’s time to send the specter of the crazy bag lady into permanent retirement! She represented a legitimate fear at a time when women relied on marriage for financial security and social acceptance. But that’s no longer the case. . . . All over the country, single parents are moving in together, couples are living apart, and people are approaching aging in ever-more innovative ways, from “aging in place” initiatives to co-housing arrangements. The isolated nuclear family in its single-family home still exists, but it’s no longer the only way to live. The April issue of Harper’s had a cover story by Fenton Johnson on solitude and living alone. What is your own relationship to solitude? Isn’t that a wonderful piece? Solitude is central to my sense of self. Figuring out how to balance that necessity with those other necessities—intimate love, meaningful work and close friendships—has been the central conflict of my adult life.

reviews Jennings and Leon Russell. Above all, the music is the thing for Nelson: “Love every style. Love every musical thing. . . . You will become a part of everything. And everything will become part of you.” —HENRY L. CARRIGAN, JR.

wife of 68 years to watch their last sunrise together). Robbins concludes by offering remedies for the many problems nurses encounter, with suggestions for what patients, families, nurses and aspiring nurses can do to make things better. —ALICE CARY

THE NURSES By Alexandra Robbins

Workman $24.95, 368 pages ISBN 9780761171713 eBook available HEALTH

With 3.5 million nurses in the United States, they are the country’s largest group of healthcare providers. So it’s not surprising that after investigating sororities, geeks, overachievers and more, award-winning journalist Alexandra Robbins has turned her attention to The Nurses. After interviewing hundreds, Robbins narrowed her focus to the personal narratives of four nurses. Although the author relies on pseudonyms and doesn’t identify the names of their hospitals or their locations, their stories are compelling in every way. While undergoing fertility treatments, “Molly” quits her job at a hospital that treats nurses horribly and signs on with a nursing agency to seek out better working environments. A real-life Nurse Jackie, “Lara” is a highly skilled nurse who accidentally became addicted to narcotics while on the job. “Juliette” is an ER nurse who feels ostracized by a group of clique-y nurses. “Sam” is beginning her career and learning to navigate the ropes, with her first-day mantra being “Just don’t kill anyone.” Interspersed with these narratives are discussions of nurse bullying, sex, on-the-job injuries, burnout, drug issues, heroism and more. There are horrific anecdotes (a nurse is ordered to keep working after being attacked by a patient, and ends up with a fractured neck), as well as heartwarming moments (Molly wheels a dying man and his

NONFICTION

Visit BookPage.com for a Q&A with Alexandra Robbins.

NO BETTER FRIEND

of friends did about that. No Better Friend is an inspiring story, and one that both dog lovers and history buffs will embrace. —DEBORAH HOPKINSON

REAGAN By H.W. Brands

Doubleday $35, 816 pages ISBN 9780385536394 Audio, eBook available BIOGRAPHY

By Robert Weintraub

Little, Brown $28, 400 pages ISBN 9780316337069 Audio, eBook available

Ronald Reagan is trending. Everyone from Ted Cruz to Barack Obama sings his praises. Why is Reagan so popular? Was it his movHISTORY ie-star looks? His cowboy swagger? His “America first” doctrine? H.W. Brands covers it all in his thorough Clearly it’s not just cats that have biography, Reagan. nine lives. In Robert Weintraub’s Don’t look for any new ground to exceptionally well researched be broken here. But if you admire and engaging No Better Friend, the 40th president as much as we meet Judy, a purebred English many politicians do, you’ll enjoy pointer and hero of World War II. Brands’ telling of familiar stories. Born in Shanghai in 1936, Judy The author takes us on a journey was adopted as a mascot by the from Reagan’s boyhood home British Royal Navy and had already in Dixon, Illinois, to Hollywood, survived a ship’s sinking and a where he became a reliable B-movjungle march before encountering ie actor. Reagan got his footing in 23-year-old Royal Air Force techni- politics as president of the Screen cian Frank Williams. The two met Actors Guild, where he cooperated in 1942 in a Japanese POW camp with the FBI during the Red Scare. in Sumatra. After another prisoner During his two-term presidency, he who’d been slipping scraps to Judy was credited with being tough on died, Williams made a life-changRussia and cutting the size of the ing decision: He gave the dog his federal government. entire ration, beginning an inspirBrands, who has written five ing partnership. previous presidential biographies, To protect Judy from being argues that Reagan rivals FDR as killed and eaten by guards, Frank the greatest president of the 20th convinced the camp commander century. While his detailed biograto give the pointer official POW sta- phy is thorough, there is a shorttus. That paper was to save Judy’s age of arguments to help Brands life more than once. make his case. The book ends Through luck, gumption and with Reagan’s death in 1989, and sheer force of will, Frank managed there is a longing for Brands to add to keep himself and his dog alive in perspective in a postscript. Having camp, on a harrowing march and had 25 years to ponder, surely this even after a torpedo attack on a accomplished writer could help us prisoner transport ship. And as for understand why Reagan remains regulations that no animals would so beloved. be allowed on the troopship reNo matter. Despite its flaws, turning survivors to England when there’s little doubt this book will be the war ended, well, you can just as popular as the former president. imagine what this remarkable pair —J O H N T. S L A N I A

THE SPY’S SON By Bryan Denson

Atlantic Monthly $26, 368 pages ISBN 9780802123589 eBook available TRUE CRIME

In his early Cold War novels, John le Carré referred to something called “Moscow Rules”: the tradecraft used by spies in a hostile city when they had to be super-cautious to avoid getting caught. If you want to learn the 21st-century equivalent of those rules, The Spy’s Son is a great place to start—although in real life, they don’t always work as smoothly as in fiction. Author Bryan Denson, an experienced journalist, leads us stepby-step through an extraordinary espionage case that stretched, in two phases, from the mid-1990s to 2011. In phase one, Jim Nicholson, a rising star in the CIA, sold his agency’s secrets to the Russians to get himself out of a financial jam. He was caught and sent to prison. Then, in a remarkable twist in 2006, Jim, still imprisoned, recruited his son Nathan to sell more secrets to the Russians. Nathan was a somewhat adrift young man in his 20s who loved his father too much to fathom how he was being manipulated into treachery. With words of paternal care and religious faith, Jim lured his son into his scheme. The Russians were happy to play along; luckily for U.S. national security, the FBI caught on to Nathan as fast as it had to his father. The book’s strength is its wonderful detail. We follow Nathan as he meets his grizzled Russian spymaster “George” in San Francisco, Lima, Mexico City and Malta; we track the FBI agents on his trail. The feds wouldn’t let Jim talk to Denson, but we end the book with a strong sense of the two-time spy’s plans and motives. Clever and narcissistic, Jim did love his son. But he had no compunction about turning him into his “last asset.” —ANNE BARTLETT

reviews CHALLENGER DEEP

TEEN

Plumbing the depths REVIEW BY JENNIFER BRUER KITCHEL

Characters with a mental illness often find a place in literature, but they are infrequently the main character and seldom found in young adult novels. Although teens with psychoses garner plenty of attention in the news today, the fictional world is still catching up. Award-winning author Neal Shusterman takes the topic head-on in his new book, Challenger Deep, and does so with sincerity. In his own voice, Caden Bosch tells the story of how he slowly loses his connection to reality and how his world starts to look very different from everyone else’s. The chapters fluctuate between “real time”—going to school, talking to his parents, hanging with his friends—and “ship time,” when he finds himself on a galleon at sea that seems to be his waking dream. As Caden spirals further into mental illness, the lines between these two realities blur and merge seamlessly, pulling readers ever closer to the sensation of a psychotic episode. By Neal Shusterman Shusterman’s personal experience of his own teenage son’s mental HarperTeen, $17.99, 320 pages illness lends a powerful and genuine tone to the book. His son, BrenISBN 9780061134111, audio, eBook available dan Shusterman, penned the illustrations for the story, many of which Ages 14 and up were drawn during the worst of his illness. FICTION Challenger Deep is difficult to read at times—as it should be—as readers are drawn into the depths along with Caden, but it is also extremely compelling and hard to resist. Shusterman is a master storyteller and it shows.

CUCKOO SONG By Frances Hardinge

Amulet $17.95, 416 pages ISBN 9781419714801 Ages 12 and up HORROR

Something terrible has happened to Triss. It’s worse than the story her parents tell, that Triss fell in the lake and came back with a raging fever. It’s stranger than the bratty behavior of Triss’ little sister, who seems tortured by Triss’ presence. Triss’ memories are spotty, but when she finds herself devouring one of her own dolls, she can no longer ignore the truth that she is no longer Triss. As Not-Triss, she finds herself in an eerie game of cat-and-mouse with a bizarre magical force that seems to be terrorizing her family. The novel is set just after World

War I, when Triss’ older brother was purportedly killed, and author Frances Hardinge’s version of England reflects the desperate attempts of a people trying to forget. With a combination of horror and wry humor reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Cuckoo Song transcends its teen-reader designation. The psychological and historical nuances, along with the sheer horror of Not-Triss’ existence, will mesmerize older readers as well. —DIANE COLSON

UNDERTOW By Michael Buckley HMH $18.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780544348257 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up SCIENCE FICTION

In the powerful first installment of a new trilogy from Michael

Buckley, species collide in this sci-fi tale infused with emotionally charged themes of immigration and xenophobia. Lyric Walker and her family live in “Fish City,” Coney Island’s nickname since the arrival of the Alpha, aquatic humanoids that emerged on the shore three years ago. With Alpha looting the city by night and human gangs retaliating with extreme violence, Lyric’s neighborhood is under martial law. Lyric’s father is a policeman, but it’s not a sense of duty that keeps the Walker family in Fish City; they’re guarding a secret that makes passing the checkpoint impossible. Despite protests, the president has ordered Coney Island to allow Alpha children into public schools. Lyric’s mysterious new principal assigns her a dangerous task: befriending Fathom, the handsome but deadly Alpha prince, in hopes that their relationship will influence other students and quell the interspecies brutality. As Lyric defends herself against mistrust from

both sides, she is pulled into the heart of the integration conflict and drawn perilously closer to Fathom. Buckley delicately mirrors two cultures steeped in violence, subtly indicating parallels between the novel’s world and our own. Well-plotted and containing one of the most beautifully written family relationships in recent YA fiction, Undertow’s execution is as captivating as its premise. —ANNIE METCALF

THE GAME OF LOVE AND DEATH By Martha Brockenbrough

Arthur A. Levine $17.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780545668347 eBook available Ages 12 and up LOVE & ROMANCE

Love and Death are inexorably intertwined. Love seeks to fulfill life; Death seeks to end it. In The Game of Love and Death, Love and Death take an active role in this eternal struggle, each selecting a player at birth and then competing to see if the players fall in love or if they die. It is a hard-fought game filled with subterfuge, manipulation and deep passion, and in the centuries that they have played, Love has never won. Flora Saudade and Henry Bishop are about as different as two people can be. And in Seattle in 1937, they should have no reason to meet, let alone spend time together. But Henry, the white adopted son of a wealthy newspaper magnate, and Flora, a black airplane mechanic and owner of a jazz club, not only meet but fall in love. Against all odds, it looks as if Love might win the game for the first time. However, Death is not so easily defeated. The Game of Love and Death is a unique and deeply moving novel. Beautiful language, original characters and a haunting story draw the reader into a relationship that is forbidden both by the era and by the master of the game. It’s heartbreaking to the end. —KEVIN DELECKI

children’s

CYNTHIA RYLANT INTERVIEW BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO

Animal friends reunite to save the day

t’s been 20 years since Cynthia Rylant’s beloved middle grade novel Gooseberry Park introduced the world to Stumpy the squirrel and her quirky, clever, community-minded friends. Now, the furry and feathered bunch is back in Gooseberry Park and the Master Plan, and readers will delight in discovering that the Gooseberrians are as adorable, smart and resourceful as ever.

The park is still a peaceful, beautiful place, too. As Gwendolyn the hermit crab observes, “There was a stillness to Gooseberry Park that is rare in this world. It seemed that every tree, every flower and bird and creature, had taken a deep breath and settled in.” Despite the lovely qualities of the characters and place she’d created, Rylant hadn’t been particularly keen on writing another Gooseberry Park novel. She explains to BookPage via email from her home in Portland, Oregon, “Animal fantasy is harder for me. My imagination is not really very good. . . . So even though I wished I could write a second story, I wouldn’t try, sure I couldn’t make it happen.” It must be noted that in the intervening years since Gooseberry Park, the Newbery Award- and Caldecott Honor-winning author was busy writing many, many

GOOSEBERRY PARK AND THE MASTER PLAN

By Cynthia Rylant

Illustrated by Arthur Howard Beach Lane, $16.99, 128 pages ISBN 9781481404495, eBook available Ages 8 to 12

MIDDLE GRADE

other books, including entries in her Henry and Mudge series, seven other series and numerous standalone titles. And then, one day, the characters pushed aside Rylant’s doubts and demanded another outing. “All I know is that Kona and Gwendolyn and all the rest of the gang Teamwork came back. and lots of I went to a laughs help coffee shop to solve a water read the New York Times, shortage in and before I Gooseberry finished page Park. one, suddenly I was fishing my little notebook out of my purse, and I wrote the entire first chapter without stopping. No editing. No pausing. What I wrote is what is in the book. It’s inspiration, and it just has its own calendar.” She adds, “I didn’t know what the book would be about exactly, just a water shortage. I like the characters to be able to do brave and noble things, so I give them weather disasters.” Everyone at Gooseberry Park rises to the occasion, working diligently to craft and implement the titular Master Plan to bring water to everyone in the drought- bedeviled park. First, Gwendolyn and Kona (a black Labrador retriever) realize they need their neighbor, a genius crow named Herman, to help them figure out the mathematical aspects of their ambitious strategy. Herman agrees to join the cause (thank goodness he likes a challenge). Next, they need to recruit a few more animals, gather 20 packs of chewing gum and corral 200 teamwork-averse owls. Good thing Murray the bat’s long-lost broth-

er is coming to town; he’s super-aggravating to Murray (who copes by using his “toesies” to shove raisins in his mouth even as he complains to his friends), but he’s also got the gift of gab—just the thing to get those owls to work together, even for a little while. And yes, the book is as funny, even funnier, than it sounds here. Rylant’s gift for sly yet sweet humor is on every page, whether describing Herman’s learned family of crows (“At suppertime . . . every member . . . ate with a book in one foot”) or Kona’s wandering thoughts during a serious discussion about the need for water (“For a moment he wished he were someone else. Maybe one of those dogs on a surfboard in Hawaii.”). As with Gooseberry Park, Gooseberry Park and the Master Plan will simultaneously entertain and teach readers about the relationship between human actions and consequences for our earth, and inspire them to look at animals with a more imaginative eye. The illustrations by Arthur Howard contribute to that cause and are wonderfully suited to Rylant’s prose. His portraits are evocative: Augustina the owl looks thoughtful, a bit skeptical and ultimately, er, unflappable. Howard’s action-shot drawings are a joy to behold as well: pictures of animals solving problems, cooking with The Zen of Stir-Fry cookbook and relaxing, as in the hilarious image of Gwendolyn giving Murray a soothing Reiki massage in the warm glow of a single candle. That perfect pairing of words and pictures is no surprise. Rylant and Howard have worked together for

decades. The author says, “He and I have still never met. We did our first Mr. Putter and Tabby book back in the 1990s. . . . Arthur has been a part of my life ever since. I think he and I have the same child inside us.” In fact, she says, “I don’t tell him what to draw. Arthur is really a genius (just like Herman).” Speaking of Herman, Rylant says that while much of the book came to her as she wrote, there was one sticking point: “The hardest part for both Arthur and me was trying to figure out Herman’s mathematical calculations. We drove ourselves crazy counting seconds and minutes and making sure the clocks had the right time in the drawings. Our editor also. She even called in her math-teacher husband to double-check our numbers.” Headaches aside, she says, “We had a really good time with all the work, because we all really love the characters. They are part of us. They are our better selves.” That respect and appreciation for nature and its creatures is palpable in Gooseberry Park and the Master Plan, in the way the characters communicate, accept each other’s differences (not without a little teasing, of course) and work to ensure a healthy, safe environment. Here’s hoping Rylant’s latest inspires her readers, young and not-as-young, to enjoy and care for their own version of Gooseberry Park.

reviews THE WAY HOME LOOKS NOW

CHILDREN’S

Bonding over baseball REVIEW BY JILL RATZAN

In the time Before, Peter Lee and his older brother, Nelson, loved baseball. They played it, listened to it on the radio and cheered for both Taiwan and the United States in the 1972 Little League World Series. But now Peter lives in the After. With Nelson dead from a car accident, Peter’s mother does nothing but watch TV, his younger sister is increasingly frustrated and his father, Ba, has become more distant than ever. All this changes when Ba volunteers to coach Peter’s Little League team. While Peter wonders how baseball can have meaning without his brother, he finds himself rethinking almost everything about the game, including his father’s knowledge and his relationships with his teammates. As games are won and lost, new friendships form and old ones are redefined. Larger issues loom in the background, including By Wendy Wan-Long Shang women’s struggle for equality and ongoing protests against the VietScholastic, $16.99, 272 pages nam War. ISBN 9780545609562, eBook available Author Wendy Wan-Long Shang established herself as a fresh voice Ages 8 to 12 in diverse middle grade fiction with her debut, The Great Wall of Lucy Wu. In The Way Home Looks Now, she uses her characteristically MIDDLE GRADE accessible language to tell a story that combines historical fiction, detailed sports scenes and the unique perspectives of a grieving Asian-American family. The book concludes with instructions on how to play the neighborhood pick-up games that Peter and his teammates use to practice their skills. For a preteen who isn’t quite ready for Kwame Alexander’s Newbery Medal-winning The Crossover but wants a similar read, this exciting, poignant and ultimately redemptive baseball tale is the perfect choice.

THIS IS SADIE By Sara O’Leary Illustrated by Julie Morstad

Tundra $17.99, 32 pages ISBN 9781770495326 Ages 3 to 7 PICTURE BOOK

Author Sara O’Leary and illustrator Julie Morstad invite us into a day in the life of Sadie, an imaginative young girl who loves diving into stories. In the opening illustration, Sadie is hiding inside a box, her head barely peeking above the top, but, as she tells readers, she’s actually on a giant boat, crossing the ocean. Sadie has learned to be quiet while engaging in her grand adventures, because “old people need a lot of sleep.” Her room is the type

of inspiring, chaotic mess that can only come from a child exploring the robust and active world of the mind. She’s not only crossing the wide sea, still in her pajamas—she’s also a mermaid; a wolf-child, à la Mowgli; and the “hero in the world of fairy tales.” (Refreshingly, she isn’t the damsel in distress; she’s the seeker on the horse, armed with a bow and some arrows.) Morstad sets off Sadie’s fantasies with lush full-bleed spreads, where white space takes a back seat to color and drama. Sadie also has wings; they’re just “very, very hard to see.” Maybe readers have them, too. “Have you checked?” we read. These chummy moments where the narrator breaks the fourth wall are engaging and enjoyable. In a story all about one child’s whimsy, both author and illustrator manage to keep things from getting too cloying, and these moments of direct ad-

dress are part of that charm. Sadie’s days are never long enough, and readers may feel the same way about this story: It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and every moment is a pleasure. And don’t forget to remove the book jacket to see the surprise waiting on the cover. Here’s hoping for more of Sadie’s adventures in the future.

sing loudly (especially early in the morning), swim fast and snap up flies with his sticky tongue. Tad follows Dad everywhere, preferring Dad’s lily pad to his own cozy pondweeds. But as Tad grows from happy tadpole to spirited frog, Dad’s lily pad gets smaller, as does Dad’s patience for sleepless nights. It’s clear why David Ezra Stein has won so many awards for his children’s books. Every page of Tad and Dad swims with bold, colorful illustrations. Tad’s big-eyed, exuberant expressions convey his adoration and pride, while Dad’s sleep-deprived eyes will entertain any grown-up who has been woken by flailing toddler limbs. Stein easily and expertly captures the excitement of a growing child and knows how to make readers smile. Whether it’s bedtime or storytime, Tad and Dad is meant to be shared by big and small, so gather your tadpoles, no matter how jampacked your lily pad. —J I L L L O R E N Z I N I

WOOF By Spencer Quinn

Scholastic $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780545643313 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Bowser has led a tough life, avoiding thugs in the city before ending up in an animal rescue shelter in Louisiana’s bayou country. Life hasn’t been easy for 11-year-old Birdie Gaux, either. — J U L I E D A N I E L S O N With a police detective father killed in the line of duty and an engineering mother working on an oil rig off TAD AND DAD the coast of Africa, Birdie is being By David Ezra Stein raised by Grammy, who owns a bait store and gives swamp tours. When Nancy Paulsen $16.99, 40 pages Birdie selects Bowser as a belated ISBN 9780399256714 birthday present, the lovable mutt eBook available and spunky tween become a formiAges 3 to 5 dable sleuthing team. Their skills are tested in Woof, PICTURE BOOK the first in a middle-grade mystery Tad the tadpole’s dad is a pheseries, when Grammy’s mounted nomenal frog. With large, noisy championship black marlin from Dad as inspiration, Tad learns to 1945 goes missing. The value of a

CHILDREN’S stuffed fish seems questionable until Birdie learns that a treasure map from her great-great-granddaddy may have been inside. Could a rival bait-shop owner be the prime suspect? As Birdie uncovers not only the thief but also a top-secret family history, Bowser deduces the strange language of humans. Spencer Quinn, whose best-selling Chet and Bernie mysteries have captivated adult readers, spins a ruff-and-ready tale for kids. As young readers piece together the clues, they’ll discover the fun of both owning and being a dog. —ANGELA LEEPER

GONE CRAZY IN ALABAMA By Rita WilliamsGarcia

Amistad $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780062215871 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Almost-13-year-old Delphine, middle sister Vonetta and baby sister Fern Gaither are back in the final installment of the award-winning series by Rita Williams-Garcia. This time they’re spending the summer of 1969 in Alabama with their grandmother (Big Ma), great-grandmother (Ma Charles) and great-aunt (Miss Trotter). Delphine is losing her grip on her sisters, and poor Big Ma can hardly keep her citified granddaughters in line. She blames their fresh behavior on their Black Panther mother and women’s libber stepmother. “One don’t eat chicken or ham. One don’t forgive. The other don’t iron. Just git, Delphine. Take your sisters and git.” But there is no place to git to. They head across the creek to visit Miss Trotter, who has plenty of family stories to tell. Half-sisters Big Ma and Miss Trotter do not speak to each other, except through the stories told to the younger generation. It’s impossible to ignore the parallels between the Gaither sisters’ growing rift and the chasm between the elderly half-sisters. Delphine grows increasingly wor-

meet LITA JUDGE

ried about her family, just wishing they could all get along under one roof. When danger comes to the family, she gets her wish—in a way. The harrowing ending will have readers on the edges of their seats until the book’s satisfying resolution. Delphine might not be able to control her sisters, but she is a true sister: She’s there when needed. —ROBIN SMITH

GROUNDED By Megan Morrison Arthur A. Levine $17.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780545638265 eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Rapunzel could not be happier. She has a beautiful tower that obeys her command; no one bothers her when she reads stories or brushes her hair; and a loving, caring Witch protects her from the evil people who would want to steal her away. In Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel, life is innocent and perfect—until Jack arrives. Jack thinks Rapunzel was involved in the injury of a fairy yesterday, but she’d remember something like that . . . right? Challenged and intrigued by Jack, Rapunzel (and her hair) makes the choice to leave her tower for the first time. She encounters the Red Fairies, who begin to make her doubt, just a little, the perfection of Witch. Soon Rapunzel, Jack and her new friend Prince Frog are traveling across Tyme in search of many things—answers for Rapunzel, healing for the Red Fairies and something altogether mysterious for Jack. Rapunzel quickly learns that the world is much larger, more beautiful and more dangerous than she had ever known. Filled with mystery, adventure and myriad twists and turns, Grounded turns a traditional fairy tale into something more. Strong characters and a complex story will encourage readers to return for the next journey in the world of Tyme. —KEVIN DELECKI

Lita Judge is the award-winning author-illustrator of several beloved children’s books, including Red Sled. Her new book, Good Morning to Me! (Atheneum, $17.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9781481403696, ages 4 to 8), stars an exuberant parrot named Beatrix who just can’t wait to start the day. Judge lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two cats and the real Beatrix.

WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

County, persisted in delivering an exceptionally wearisome speech to the 16th Congress, despite Dear Editor: the objections of his impatient Why do we say that something colleagues. In self-defense, Walker is bunk when we don’t believe it’s explained that he had done what true? his constituents expected of him, E. P. which was “to make a speech for Troy, New York Buncombe.” Whether or not this Bunk is most likely short for bun- story is true, bunkum has rekum or buncombe, meaning “insin- mained thoroughly entrenched in cere or foolish talk, nonsense.” The American English. Bunk is probably short for bunkum, though it has history of these words starts (you might say appropriately enough) in likely been influenced by bunco (or bunko), a word that developed in the halls of the U.S. Congress. The the late 19th century in reference first known occurrence of this use to rigged games of chance. of bunkum or buncombe is from 1828 in the phrase to talk bunkum, alluding to overly long congresDOUBLE DUTY sional speeches given to a nearly empty chamber. Dear Editor: According to a tale that has Where does the word knickknack become part of American political for a decorative trinket come from? folklore, the phrase originated L. B. around 1820, when Felix Walker Alton, Illinois (1753-1828), a U.S. Congressman who represented a district in North Many common English words Carolina that included Buncombe came about through the process

LONG-WINDED

of reduplication: the repetition of a root word or part of a root word, often with a vowel change. Knickknack is one example. It resulted from the reduplication of the word knack. Long ago, knack referred to an ingenious device, or more broadly, to a toy or to what we now call a knickknack. Sometimes in reduplication, the vowel in the root word remains the same in both parts of the word. For example, humdrum, which means “monotonous, dull,” was formed through the reduplication of the word hum. Chitchat, which means “small talk, gossip,” was coined from the reduplication of chat. Other examples include dillydally, hoity-toity, mishmash, palsy-walsy and razzle-dazzle.

SECOND HARVEST Dear Editor: When something happens (usually something bad), we talk about what comes later as the aftermath.

The after part makes sense, but what about math? N. I. Clearwater, Florida Aftermath comes from the language of agriculture. The second part of aftermath comes from the Old English word maeth, meaning “the result of mowing or harvesting”—that is, a crop. This word was derived from the Old English verb mawan, which survives as our modern word mow. During a good growing season in England, a second and sometimes third crop of hay could be grown after the first mowing. When this crop was cut, it was the aftermath. Since the 17th century, the meaning of aftermath has broadened to include all kinds of results, often bad ones. Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from The Little Book of Big Mind Benders assemblies

puzzle type: number completion:

Difficulty: time: ___________

Here are two different ways to fit five pieces into a black box. What is the total number of ways to fit these five pieces into the box?

puzzle type: logic completion:

Difficulty: time: ___________

abe and barb sat as far away from each other as possible. Carl sat behind and one seat to the left of Deb. Ed sat farther to the right than Deb. Where did Fay sit?

two squares long. Vertical pieces appear in pairs that form squares.

pieces, and three solutions with four vertical pieces. Answer: There are eight ways to fit the pieces into the box, as shown below. There is one solution with no vertical pieces, four solutions with two vertical

hint: Each piece is

Out Of Order

WHO sat WHere?

puzzle type: worD completion:

Difficulty: time: ___________

unscramble the letters in each word pair to make two new words with opposite meanings, like “on vs. off.” have sat either in seats 1 and 6, or in seats 3 and 4. hint: Abe and Barb must Answer: Fay sat in seat 5. Abe and Barb sat in seats 1 and 6, Carl sat in seat 4 behind and one seat to the left of Deb in seat 2. Ed sat in seat 3, to the

hint: don’t mix, gets the worm, time, quantity Answer: oil vs. water; early vs. late; past vs. future; zero vs. infinity 4. Bookpage Ad_3.indd 1

right of Deb, leaving seat 5 for Fay.

workman.com

Workman is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.

1/6/15 10:33 AM