GO AS A RIVER by Shelley Read

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai Algonquin (336 pp.) $28.00 | March 14, 2023 978-1-643-75275-4

An American GI, a Vietnamese woman, and an Amerasian man who grew up in an orphanage seek closure decades after the Vietnam War. Nguyễn’s stirring if sometimes melodramatic second novel—following The Mountains Sing (2020)—braids three distinct experiences of war and trauma. Phong, mixed-race and certain he’s the son of a Black U.S. soldier, strives to acquire an American visa for himself and his family in 2016 under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, but without solid proof, his request is denied. At the same time, Dan, a veteran, is visiting the country, not telling his wife, Linda, that he’s hoping to find Kim, the Vietnamese woman he fell for while stationed there in 1969. The third thread looks back to that year and follows Kim—real name: Trang—as she and her sister, Quỳnh, head to Sài Gòn to work at a bar, chatting up soldiers to earn money to square their parents’ debts. The setup—based on Nguyễn’s dissertation research on Amerasian children of the Vietnam War—allows her to address various consequences of Americans’ presence. Phong suffers lifelong poverty, anguish over his search for his father, and racism; the novel’s title refers to one of many epithets flung his way. Trang is exploited, at times pressed into prostitution, and subjected to Dan’s moods. Dan, for his part, is carrying guilt over his abandonment of Trang and from keeping the relationship a secret from Linda. Nguyễn writes with an intimate, detailed understanding of Vietnamese women’s treatment during the war and the struggles of Amerasians seeking their parents in the present. The story’s impact is blunted somewhat by her efforts to wrap the story up tidily and by stilted dialogue. (“We share a common history that bonds us together stronger than any blood ties.”) But for a story spawned from academic research, it has the grace of a page-turner and sheds light on a neglected subject.

Pardo, Paz Atria (320 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 14, 2023 978-1-9821-8532-9

In a near future where Argentina triumphed over Britain in the 1982 Falklands War, an ambitious small-town American cop tries to unravel a case that could cost no less than her mind. High, high concept meets classic detective fiction in this debut, which manages to turn noir into a multicolored rainbow of psychedelia. Argentine American novelist Pardo imagines here a world where wars are long since lost and street battles between biotech, drug dealers, and the fuzz are fought with paint guns, albeit of a psychotropic variety. Agent Kay Curtida works for a federal law enforcement branch dedicated to policing “psychopigments,” a hallucinogenic dye developed by Argentine military scientists that’s now strictly regulated for medical and military use but has naturally found its way into the American drug trade. “So it’s like paintball, but with feelings?” asks a brochure. “Sure. But any way it gets inside you—sinking through your skin, breathed in through your mouth, or eaten—it’s going to give you some gnarly emotions.” Curtida, a depressive herself who needs Sunshine Yellow to function, is hoping to break out of her small Silicon Valley territory (big cities having been wiped out in some kind of global conflict), so when an old pal from the academy gives her a lead on a black-market cartel, she hopes it’s her entry into the big time. As Curtida and her green cadet partner pound shoe leather running down leads, it’s not so much the mystery that thrills as much as the weird world that envelops Curtida, herself a notable improvement over your average White guy gumshoe. As the conspiracy involving a radicalized scientist named Priscilla Kim, guerrilla fighters dubbed the People’s Pigment Movement, and a prototypically evil biopharma corporation unravels, this thriller ironically loses the plot from time to time, but given the phantasmagoric playground grounded in very real, painful emotions, readers are likely to enjoy the ride just fine.

Read, Shelley Spiegel & Grau (320 pp.) $26.00 | March 7, 2023 9781954118232

A stranger comes to town. Colorado native Read sets her graceful debut novel in the small community of Iola, a town along the Gunnison River in the western part of the state. Iola, readers learn in the first pages, no longer exists: It was flooded when the Gunnison was dammed to create the Blue Mesa Reservoir. But in 1948, when Read’s tale begins, Iola is the home of 17-year-old Victoria Nash, who keeps house for her father, a peach farmer; an embittered uncle who uses a wheelchair because of war injuries; and her angry, vengeful brother. Her mother, aunt, and a beloved cousin were killed in an auto accident when Torie was 12, leaving each family member bereft and Torie resigned to the burden of caretaking. After her mother died, Torie realized, “the men expected me to slip silently into her role—to cook their meals, clean their pee off the toilet, wash and hang their soiled clothes, and tend to every last thing in the house and the coops and the garden.” She hardly leaves her family’s 47 acres except to go to town, where, one day, she notices a young man who attracts her attention as no one has before. He has tan skin, straight black hair, gentle

eyes, and a dazzling smile. His name is Wilson Moon, and to Torie, he seems mysterious and exotic. He had been working in the coal mines, he tells Torie, and he had run away. Now, he’s looking for the local flophouse, where he hopes to find a room. Read delicately unfurls the growing attraction between Torie and Wil, set against the town’s vicious bigotry toward Native Americans. Their love is the “small fateful twist” that forever changes the trajectory of Torie’s life. With delicate precision, Read evokes both Colorado’s rugged wilderness and the landscapes of her characters’ troubled hearts.

Reimann, Brigitte Trans. by Lucy Jones Transit Books (192 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 21, 2023 978-1-945492-66-2

In this 1963 novel by award-winning East German author Reimann (19331973), family love is tested by idealism and ideology in a divided Germany. Elisabeth and her brother Uli have been close since their shared childhood marked by World War II and the arrival of the Red Army. In their 20s now, something has come between them: “I’ll never forgive you,” Uli tells his sister as the book opens. Narrated from Elisabeth’s point of view, the novel artfully omits his reason, flashing back instead to show us who they are and how they arrived at this impasse. An artist, Elisabeth leads a workers art group at a briquette factory. Uli’s an engineer. Neither are members of the Communist Party. Though Elisabeth has had conflicts with the party at her job, she believes in socialism and is committed to their country. Their eldest brother, Konrad, who defected to the West two years before, calls the German Democratic Republic “a few square kilometres of impoverished countryside. A government propped up by the Soviets.” Elisabeth can’t stand him: “I told myself that the whole myth of sibling love, that blood runs thicker than water, was just mystical nonsense...I was not going to put my arms around a defector, just because he happened to be my brother.” She wishes her peers had higher ideals: In the years just after the war, she thinks, “we had eyes to see the rise of the new red order.” Uli is less convinced: “We were ridiculously young and ridiculously passionate and ridiculously ignorant.” Now, he says, “I feel like a prisoner trapped behind bars, just stupidity and bureaucracy everywhere.” Detailed and nuanced, Reimann’s work brings a historical moment convincingly to life. Endnotes provide helpful context.

Ruff, Matt Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 21, 2023 978-0-063-25689-7

Be warned: This is a follow-up to Lovecraft Country, the 2016 novel, not the HBO adaptation, so what you saw on TV won’t help much here. But there’s still outrageous trickery, sharp period detail, and chilling perils.

The year 1957 finds Chicago’s roving Turner and Dandridge families once again pursued by and in pursuit of mystic forces, some of which mean to do them serious harm. Atticus Turner and his father, Montrose, are in Virginia looking for evidence of their Black slave ancestors when they’re suddenly under attack by a White antagonist they’d previously faced several hundred miles north in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Hippolyta Berry, Atticus’ aunt and the most scientifically minded family member, is way out west in Las Vegas with her 15-year-old son, Horace, and good friend Letitia Dandridge, ostensibly to gather research for her husband George’s The Safe Negro Travel Guide while also meeting with a sinister pawnbroker who carries the keys to a device able to transport people from Earth to any farflung place in the galaxy. Meanwhile, George Berry, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, makes a Faustian bargain with the ghost of Hiram Winthrop, the brilliant, malevolent scientist from Lovecraft Country who promises to provide George with a cure if George can find a cadaver for Winthrop to—what is the word?—reanimate. And then there’s Ruby Dandridge, Letitia’s sister, still leading a double life as a redheaded White woman named Hillary Hyde, whose supply of potions enabling her transformation is running dangerously low. And those are just some of the complications of what now seems an ongoing series of phantasmagoric adventures of these intrepid warriors fighting a two-front battle in mid-20th century America against White supremacy and dark magic. Where its predecessor was constructed of separate stories focusing on different family members, this book operates with more interwoven narratives that Ruff manages to yoke together into one ripping yarn with shocks and surprises at every turn. This sequel may lack some of the demented grandeur that the TV series cheekily borrowed from its namesake, but it’s still lots of fun—and, at times, historically enlightening.