All Reviews

FictionLiterary Fiction

We Do Not Part

Review by Alden Mudge

Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, returns with We Do Not Part, her poetic, starkly beautiful fifth novel to be translated into English. Kyungha, the book’s narrator, wanders through a bewildering internal dreamscape, haunted by a recurring nightmare of graves inundated by rising water. She has lost or cut off most relationships, and spends her time alone, shedding her belongings and rewriting her will and final instructions. Then a texted summons brings her to the hospital bedside of her friend Inseon.

Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a work colleague, friend and, now, artistic collaborator. Though their current joint project, inspired by Kyungha’s nightmare, has begun to lose Kyungha’s interest, Inseon had persevered, until she severed her fingers with a power saw while preparing sculptures for their installation. She asks Kyungha to travel from the hospital in Seoul to her home to save the life of her bird, Ama, left without food or water after her accident.

It is a near-impossible task. Inseon lives to the south, on Jeju island, where she had moved to care for her mother until her recent passing. Kyungha arrives on the island in blizzard conditions. She struggles to reach Inseon’s remote and isolated house, slipping and falling unconscious in the snow more than once, then somehow arriving in the cold, dark building to find both Ama and Inseon inside.

We Do Not Part moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island. We see the shadows of birds projected on the walls by candlelight. We read the dry, crumbling documents gathered by Inseon’s mother detailing horrors perpetrated not so long ago by the Korean government on Jeju’s people. We sense the love between Kyungha and Inseon, along with their deepening understanding of the steely perseverance of that older woman, who was, in life, seemingly quiet and subdued. 

For readers unfamiliar with the history, at least 30,000 people—10% of the island’s population—were massacred on Jeju between 1948 and 1949 by the U.S. Military Government in Korea and then by the South Korean Army under Syngman Rhee. Google Jeju and this fact is not among the top hits. Han, however, considers this history with fierce humanity. She writes beautifully, with profound moral authority. Of course she should have a Nobel Prize.

In Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, narrator Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a friend and artistic collaborator before Inseon asks her to travel to her remote house on snowbound Jeju Island to save the life of her bird.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

We Could Be Rats

Review by Maya Fleischmann

When Sigrid, a 20-year-old working at an unsatisfying job, is left in a coma following a suicide attempt, her older sister, Margit, finds Sigrid’s drafts of a suicide note, along with Sigrid’s emotionally fraught request that Margit write the final version. As Margit takes on this task, she delves into Sigrid’s journals and belongings, both to accurately capture her sister’s voice and to uncover the reasons behind her actions. What Margit discovers leads to a profound reckoning with their shared past and a renewal of the bond forged during their tumultuous childhood.

Emily Austin’s third novel, We Could Be Rats, is a poignant, layered exploration of how lack of belonging can erode the human spirit and drive one to the brink of despair. Through the perspective of each sister, Austin examines how they have diverged from their shared troubled upbringing, responding to their lives in vastly different ways. Sigrid struggles as a high school dropout stuck in a stifling small town, and dreams of the carefree existence of a fat rat eating hot dogs at a fair. Her pain is amplified by the loss of her best friend, Greta. Meanwhile, Margit has achieved her goal of leaving town to attend college, but she hasn’t escaped without some emotional scars of her own. 

While both Sigrid and Margit are deeply sympathetic characters, their narratives occasionally falter under the weight of too much repetition and overly didactic moments that make the novel’s themes feel oversimplified. However, Austin successfully delivers some dramatic revelations that illuminate the complexity of the characters and add tension to the plot. The depiction of Sigrid’s growing inability to cope with the small-town environment, and with the things she finds out about Greta’s past, effectively conveys her increasing sense of alienation.

We Could Be Rats is a heartfelt and stirring read for those interested in fiction that tackles themes of mental health, family relationships and reconnection.

Emily Austin’s third novel, We Could Be Rats, is a heartfelt and stirring read for those interested in fiction that tackles themes of mental health, family relationships and reconnection.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily DramaDebut Fiction

Too Soon

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Hope and laughter animate Betty Shamieh’s debut, Too Soon, which revolves around three generations impacted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a subject so weighty, the novel feels surprisingly effervescent thanks to the witty and resolute women who make up the three main characters—Zoya, Naya and the central protagonist, Arabella.

Stretching from 1948 to 2012, the story takes us from Jaffa to New York. We follow Zoya, a mother of nine, who is forced to abandon her seaside villa to start again as a refugee in Michigan; Naya, Zoya’s youngest daughter, who grows up in the changing Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s; and Arabella, Naya’s outspoken daughter, a Yale graduate who, at 35, has achieved a version of the American dream as a theater director in New York City. These three women, each shaped by their times, have more in common than they would like to admit.

Too Soon begins in New York in 2012 with Arabella, who has just been invited by the Royal Court Theatre of England to direct Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Arabella is lukewarm about the opportunity, but she decides to go for it after her grandmother Zoya sets her up with a boy named Aziz, who is volunteering as a medic on the Gaza border.

In her great-grandfather’s one-room house in Ramallah, Arabella confronts her family’s history and her place in it, while dating Aziz and directing her radical gender-swapped production of Hamlet. Dispersed among Arabella’s angsty chapters are chapters telling Zoya’s and Naya’s stories, recounting their memories of girlhood, lost love, marriage and motherhood. Together, they spin a resonating tale of hope’s potential to survive through terrible atrocity.

Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and playwright who has written 15 plays, and is a founder of The Semitic Root, an Arab and Jewish American theater collective. In her first novel, she has crafted a page-turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.

In her first novel, playwright Betty Shamieh has crafted a page turner that is not only funny and of its time, but also steeped in history, questioning the age-old adage that time heals all wounds.
NonfictionMemoir

Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth)

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

No matter how much chaos they wreak or how catastrophic the destruction they leave in their wake, dogs can wriggle their way out of a scolding simply by casting an innocent glance or woeful expression at their owners. The truth, as Markus Zusak (The Book Thief) reveals in his playful and poignant memoir, Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth), is that owners love their canine companions no matter how incorrigible they are.

With affection and some exasperation, Zusak recalls the highlights and lowlights of life with Reuben, Archer and Frosty—the three boisterous rescue dogs who, one by one, swagger into his family’s life. The bulk of the book chronicles the misadventures of Reuben and Archer, “essentially a two-dog mafia” who terrorize the dog park with a playfulness under which lurks the animal instinct to kill. In the most harrowing moment, Reuben knocks Zusak down, breaking his knee. Reuben and Archer corner a possum in a local park and kill it; they kill the family cat; they bite the piano teacher. At the same time, the dogs are often perfect companions: They lavish affection on the Zusak children, Kitty and Noah, and slow their pace when the children are walking them. The family is overcome with misery and pain when the two dogs fall ill and die—Reuben in 2019, Archer in 2021. “There are terrible and poetic things in our lives,” writes Zusak, “and so often they’re one and the same.” Following the “dogless drought of 2021,” the family adopts another rescue dog, Frosty. Though sometimes “ADHD on legs,” Frosty slept at Zusak’s feet as he wrote this book.

Despite the many challenges Zusak and his family faced with their burdensome beasts, Zusak tenderly recalls that “on account of our many animals, we’ve lived a beautiful, brutal, awful, hilarious, escapadical life.” Telling these stories gives Zusak reason to meditate on his own nature. He reflects that Reuben and Archer, especially, “were dogs who somehow made me. . . . They were a mirror, I suspect, to my own hidden turmoils—my wilderness within.”

Though it sometimes overreaches for humor, Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) will be enjoyed by readers of the best dog tales, such as The Art of Racing in the Rain, for its ability to evoke both the aggravation and deep love that dogs foster in those who build their lives around these creatures.

 

In Markus Zusak’s playful, poignant memoir, the Book Thief author recounts the misadventures of his canine companions.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

To Walk the Sky

Review by Jill Lorenzini

Before reading To Walk the Sky: How Iroquois Steelworkers Helped Build Towering Cities, readers may not know about the first Mohawk skywalkers: Native American and Canadian First Nations steelworkers whose skill and fearlessness built many engineering landmarks that stand today, such as the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. To Walk the Sky is a beautiful peek at the history and ongoing story of these brave and determined men.

Written by Patricia Morris Buckley, herself the descendant of a Quebec Bridge Mohawk skywalker, To Walk the Sky is full of history and information, recounting events such as the 1907 collapse of the Quebec Bridge, which killed 75 workers. While Buckley’s language is significantly more sophisticated than that of many picture books, she narrates like a storyteller and not a textbook. Buckley doesn’t shy away from the struggles, risk and devastation the skywalkers faced throughout the decades, but neither does she dwell on sadness. Matter-of-fact and serious, but with moments of poetry, Buckley’s writing rings with pride and hope for the legacy of these courageous workers. Closing out with the author’s own family history and glossary as well as material on the Quebec Bridge and the Mohawk people, To Walk the Sky provides not only an engaging story, but also a tribute and an education all in one.

Each thoughtful, evocative image from illustrator E.B. Lewis rings with pride and respect. Lewis’ soft watercolor images capture historical moments and current events with equal skill. Watercolor is the perfect medium for this topic, giving plenty of detail, but with a slightly blurred and timeless aura. Similarly, most of Lewis’ characters have vague features, reminding us how often these workers go unrecognized, fading into history. Lewis uses various perspectives to bring readers into this world. We look up at a blue sky crisscrossed by steel beams, and stand behind grieving widows in the aftermath of the Quebec Bridge disaster. We sit across from skywalkers, in imitation of the famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph of workers eating as they sit on top of a steel beam during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. And we find ourselves in a haze of yellow, among the ruins of 9/11, an image that is both familiar and visceral.

To Walk the Sky is marketed for young audiences, though it is a little lengthier than your traditional children’s storytime book. However, this book will find a home in nearly every age group and setting, from families of steelworkers and proud descendants of the brave skywalkers, to middle grade students learning about Native American history. Above all, one hopes To Walk the Sky will find those imaginative little ones with their own big dreams of building something incredible.

To Walk the Sky will find a receptive audience in nearly every age group and setting, from families of steelworkers and proud descendants of the brave skywalkers, to middle grade students learning about Native American history.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

Everyone loves a housewife; housewife here meaning not the barefoot and pregnant archetype, but a girlboss with hair extensions, implants and a whole lot of attitude who’s always willing to tussle with her “friends” for an audience of millions. But what happens when a reluctant housewife ends up dead—and she’s only the first casualty of the new season? Astrid Dahl’s The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey effectively straddles the line between dark humor and suspense, following multiple characters in front of and behind the camera as they reckon with a murderer in their spray-tanned, Botoxed midst.

Garden State Goddesses is Huzzah Network’s third most popular reality show, but, as always, the real drama is behind the scenes. Showrunner Eden has her sights on greener pastures so she can finally move out of Hoboken, New Jersey: It only takes a little finagling to bring her naive cousin Hope out of a fundamentalist California commune and into the on-camera fold to boost ratings. Meanwhile, newlywed (and newly wealthy) Hope is a fish out of water among her over-the-top costars: bisexual single mom Renee, nail salon maven and self-proclaimed “Italian supremacist” Carmela, and Carmela’s bonehead of a best friend Valerie, who’s also Hope’s sister-in-law. But when a lethal cocktail leaves one of the housewives dead—and the bodies keep dropping—Eden and the Goddesses cast and crew must crack the case, or risk cancellation of the show . . . and their lives.

Astrid Dahl is the creation of author Anna Dorn: According to Dahl’s cheeky bio, she’s the “star” of Dorn’s Perfume and Pain, a novel that’s also dark, hilarious and campy. Dahl/Dorn has crafted an exceedingly colorful cast of characters, especially Goddesses regular Birdie, a dowager of indeterminate age and bottomless wealth who just can’t seem to stay sober (much to viewers’ delight), and Birdie’s adult son and assistant, Pierre, who loves horses as much as he loathes housewives. The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey shines bright in its love for soap opera-style reality TV, where manicured nails are sharp and verbal barbs over Prosecco-fueled lunch dates even sharper. Pour a healthy glass of white wine—who cares if it’s only 2 p.m.?—don your finest faux fur and get ready for a bumpy but fabulous ride through New Jersey’s toniest, deadliest suburb.

Astrid Dahl’s The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey, a murder mystery set on a Housewives-style reality show, effectively straddles the line between dark humor and genuine suspense.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

The Queen’s Spade

Review by Tami Orendain

Sarah, nicknamed Sally, is everything British society expects her to be: a polite, respectable, beautiful lady. An Egbado princess whom Queen Victoria claimed as a goddaughter, at 19 years old, Sally has learned to play the game of propriety and appearances. But it’s all in an effort to achieve her real goal: revenge against everyone who was involved with her violent removal from her homeland.

The Queen’s Spade blends fact and fiction to expand upon the heart-pounding history of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a real historical figure. In 1862 England, amidst fraught discussions between the aristocracy about colonialism and abolition, Sally carefully makes her moves against a society that both adores and others her—one that traps everyone in webs of lies and betrayal, even those at the very top.

Intelligent and intuitive, Sally knows how to use status to her advantage. Other characters admire or envy her privileges, which include favor from the Queen, familiarity with the royal family, and financial and social support. But readers are granted a glimpse into Sally’s mind, where she feels the trauma and terror of having been ripped from her home and forced to adopt an entirely different culture, while her history as a member of the Yoruba tribe is belittled and erased.

As Sally navigates a cultural, social and economic landscape full of contradictions and double standards, The Queen’s Spade becomes an intense battle of wits. How can Sally use her environment to her advantage? What role will others play in her plan? From Rui, the mysterious leader of an underground network, to Harriet, a high-born courtier who anxiously lives in the shadow of her heritage, to Bertie, the cheeky and foolish prince, Sally is surrounded by people around whom she must maneuver to achieve her revenge. What are everyone’s motives, and who can she really trust? And, perhaps, most importantly: What is she willing to pay to achieve her revenge?

The Queen’s Spade introduces readers to an incredible true story and broadens it into a powerful tale that readers seeking historical fiction and high-stakes mystery are sure to enjoy.

The Queen’s Spade introduces readers to the incredible story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta and broadens it into a powerful tale that readers seeking historical fiction and high-stakes mystery are sure to enjoy.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Many Lives of Anne Frank

Review by Roger Bishop

Anne Frank’s account of the 761 days she and her family and others spent in hiding during World War II is one of the bestselling nonfiction works ever and the best-known work of Holocaust literature. In her richly rewarding and meticulously researched The Many Lives of Anne Frank, Ruth Franklin thoughtfully probes not only the life and writings of the young author but also details the complex history of publication and dramatization of Frank’s seminal work, The Diary of a Young Girl, and its global influence (it’s available in 70 languages). “Anne Frank,” writes Franklin, “has become not just a person . . . but a symbol: a secret door that opens into a kaleidoscope of meanings, most of which her legions of fans understand incompletely, if at all.”

The author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction and a biography of Shirley Jackson, for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award, Franklin is well suited to excavate Frank’s life and legacy. “The most important misconception about Anne, with the longest lasting repercussions, has to do with the diary itself,” writes Franklin. It was not discovered after Frank’s death. In fact, it existed in three versions: The first is Anne’s rough draft; the second, the draft she hoped to publish (in response to a request from the Netherlands government); and the third, the first published version that is now taught in schools across the world. Franklin examines in detail how the three differ from one another. Anne’s father, the only one of the family who survived the concentration camps, edited that third draft after Frank’s miserable death from typhus at Bergen-Belsen. He insisted that any editing he did was what Anne would have wanted.

Some critics claim that The Diary of a Young Girl—and its adaptations to stage (in 1955) and screen (in 1959, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture)—does not emphasize Anne’s Jewishness enough, and instead creates a more humanist portrait, thus negating the unique and catastrophic experiences of Jews during the Holocaust. Still others attempt to ban the book from school and public libraries, deny the legitimacy of the diary and question whether the Holocaust happened altogether. Novelist Cynthia Ozick has written that Anne’s story has been “Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized” and “falsified.” Some blame Otto Frank’s editing for softening the text and failing to confront the “brutal reality” of the Holocaust. For his part, Franklin writes, Otto “believed in the Diary as a beacon to promote international tolerance and peace.”

“It is precisely this chameleon-like quality that has made Anne’s story uniquely enduring,” writes Franklin. Indeed, The Many Lives of Anne Frank explores how Frank has been “understood and misunderstood, both as a person and as an idea.” This assiduously researched yet accessible text is an excellent companion to the work of Anne Frank that illuminates the young girl and her undeniable impact on the world’s understanding of this tragic time in history.

Ruth Franklin’s thoughtfully probing The Many Lives of Anne Frank illuminates the “kaleidoscope of meanings” ascribed to the titular author and her foundational work.
NonfictionMemoir

The Loves of My Life

Review by Eric A. Ponce

It’s a toss up whether our culture has become more or less sex positive. Shows like Sex Education might make you think more, while the increasing popularity of the 4B movement, which uses celibacy as activism, might make you think less. Regardless, Edmund White has been writing beautifully about sex for 50 years, and his writing is very, very sex positive. Sex does not appear only in his fiction, where it plays an important role in the coming of age novel A Boy’s Own Story and the psychosexual romp A Saint From Texas, but also in his nonfiction, which ranges from accounts of his time in Paris, biographies of Jean Genet and Rimbaud (both sex symbols to literary-minded folks) and the homosexual sex guide The Joy of Gay Sex. All these books celebrate and investigate sex, showing it lucidly (and, at times, lingering on it pruriently). In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, White collects all his sex memories into one book, and the result is a brilliant, envelope-pushing memoir that explores how we have sex and why. The answer? It’s fun and feels good!

White tackles hot-button issues surrounding sex deftly and frankly. In one chapter, White writes about the men he has paid for sex. He notes that paying gets you a more attractive partner and sets very clear boundaries: I pay, you give and when we’re done, we’re done. But White also describes the complicated power dynamic at play in these relationships: The patron has the power in the bedroom or back seat, but outside, the sex worker may enjoy more attention and social capital because of their youth and attractiveness. The candid tone of this chapter carries throughout the book, as, later, White writes about the age gaps he has had with several partners. While others may frown on this kind of relationship, White embraces it: His current husband, Michael Carroll, is 25 years younger than him. To White, age gaps allow for rich cross-generational interchange and the possibility of exploring exciting power dynamics.

To any White superfan (which this reviewer is), The Loves of My Life is a must-read. To those not inducted, this rousing memoir still provides intriguing, fresh ideas about how we connect. Ultimately, pleasure reigns supreme.

Pleasure reigns supreme in Edmund White’s brilliant, envelope-pushing, sex-positive memoir, The Loves of My Life.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

The Interpreter

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Although she’s just a kid, Cecilia has two full-time jobs: elementary school student, and interpreter for her Spanish-speaking parents. 

In her picture book debut, The Interpreter, Olivia Abtahi (Twin Flames) has crafted an empathetic, gently humorous look at what it’s like to be a go-to translator in immigrant and/or multilingual families. Fittingly, The Interpreter is itself a multilingual book: cleverly conceived watercolor and pencil-crayon artwork by Monica Arnaldo (The Museum of Very Bad Smells) separates out languages by color. Orange word bubbles are for Spanish, blue for English and pink for Farsi when Cecilia’s family encounters another kid-interpreter.

Cecilia’s life has become overwhelmingly blue and orange, to her and her friends’ consternation. She’s a plucky, considerate child who beams when her mom says, “What would I do without you?” But while it’s rewarding to explain her sibling’s medical treatments, ensure the hairdresser doesn’t cut mom’s hair too short, and assist dad with his driver’s license photo (“No smiling. / Sin sonrisa.”), it’s also exhausting. 

Not surprisingly, when a perceptive teacher inquires how she—just her, not her family—is doing, Cecilia loses her cool and releases her bottled-up frustration in a gloriously explosive double-page-spread: “I don’t want to run errands every day and wait at the DMV! I want to be outside, I want to play soccer . . . I want, I want, I want.” Her parents are shocked at her outburst, and then shocked at how Cecilia’s calendar has been overtaken by interpreting without their realizing. “I want to help,” Cecilia says,. “just not all the time.”

Abtahi does a stellar job of introducing the concepts of boundaries, self-advocacy and work-life balance while cautioning readers that being super-accommodating might result in being taken advantage of or overburdened, even by those who care about us. But asking for and accepting help can make things better for all involved: By the book’s happy end, Cecilia’s aunt and brother are pitching in with interpreting, she’s back to playing with friends and everybody is smiling—especially Cecilia.

 

Olivia Abtahi does a stellar job of introducing the concept of boundaries, while cautioning readers that being super-accommodating might result in being overburdened, even by those who care about us.
NonfictionMemoir

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You

Review by Anna Christensen

Singer-songwriter Neko Case has always had a sort of feralness about her. Case cut her teeth in the ’90s Pacific Northwest punk scene, with a hardscrabble backstory perfectly suited to the era. She joined the Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers, which she still records and tours with today, and she’s recorded seven solo albums over the past two and a half decades. A self-described “critter,” Case embodies an animalistic spirit that’s tangible in the magical, swirling energy of her music. In her richly told memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Case invites readers into her origin story.

Case was born to deeply unready teenage parents of Slavic descent who she describes both as “if a tree and a doe had a baby,” and “two young people [who] had no business being together and even less business forcing a human soul into this world.” Her descriptions of their poverty, her nomadic existence moving back and forth between her parents and her fractured relationships with both ring gritty, painful and true. Yet Case employs the same fairy tale-like storytelling language in The Harder I Fight that she uses in her lyrics, casting a veil of enchantment over her experiences, however painful. For example, while in college, Case experienced a mental breakdown that caused her to believe a man was following her wherever she went—a terrifying time. And yet, when she pauses to wait for her pursuer to show himself while walking one day, a coyote, which she names “a timeless trickster god,” emerges from the mist, and the image hangs frozen in time for the reader.

Fans of Case will note that the book shares a title with her 2013 album, a sign that this literary work functions as an extension of her art and music. Even for the uninitiated, however, The Harder I Fight is lush with meaning. Now in her mid-50s, Case came of age as one of the first generations to begin parsing generational trauma, and therein are the best lessons of her remarkably tender narrative. It is a handing down of wisdom on how to turn wounds into magic, and an ode to the persistent ability to love, and how that transforms our lives.

Case describes discovering the literary figure of the psychopomp in her studies of the Slavic tales of her ancestors: a trickster god who guides a protagonist through their story, “dol[ing] out the clues—cryptic but always correct—that allow the protagonist to solve an important riddle or find the path out of the forest themselves.” She felt an immediate attachment to the archetype: “Like a psychopomp, I wanted to inhabit a den in the forest and possess the answers to transformation and growth that I’d croak out now and then to visitors.” Her disappointment was sharp upon discovering that, as a human being, she was excluded from ever being one. This book, however, might beg to differ. Hold The Harder I Fight in your lap like a warm, furred creature. Listen to what the psychopomp has to say, and let it guide you out of the woods.

Neko Case’s memoir, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, is an ode to the persistent ability to love, and how it transforms our lives.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

The Containment

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

For civil rights attorney and legal scholar Michelle Adams, the story of the fight to desegregate schools in metropolitan Detroit in the 1960s and early 1970s is personal. Born and raised in the city, she was introduced to the law early: Her father was one of only two Black graduates from the Detroit College of Law in 1957. She is now the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and has been an expert law commentator for documentaries about the Constitution and the Supreme Court. 

As readers of The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North will discover, Adams is also a consummate storyteller with an in-depth understanding of her subject. She deftly illuminates the complex history and significance of the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley, in which the court overturned a lower court ruling that had approved the desegregation of schools not only in urban Detroit, but in 53 districts throughout the wider metropolitan area. The higher court determined that the segregation that existed in suburban neighborhoods did not warrant the redrawing of school district lines to achieve integration because no intentional discriminatory acts by the districts could be proven. Adams effectively demonstrates that this decision put a stop to a visionary, holistic approach to integration—an approach that might have served as a model throughout the North. 

The prologue opens in 2006, when Adams attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court, having filed an amicus curiae brief to support a Seattle school desegregation case (which ultimately failed). Some of the issues raised in that case, especially the question of how discriminative policies in housing and neighborhoods impact schools, made her think again of Milliken v. Bradley, a case she had often taught. She reflects on the many ways in which the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, which asserted that separate facilities cannot be equal, has largely been unfulfilled. Instead, policies and practices keep Black families contained in neighborhoods served by failing schools.

Adams’ riveting narrative sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system in the 1960s and early 1970s. She digs deep to tell the story about a creative, hard-fought attempt at metropolitan desegregation, recounting how the court’s decision impacted the city, the activists and even the district judge who presided over Milliken v. Bradley in Michigan. 

While The Containment reads at times like a legal thriller, Adams never loses sight of providing readers with broader historical context and what the failure of Milliken v. Bradley means for Americans today. Nevertheless, Adams is not without hope for the future. She concludes, “In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court took us down the wrong path. But we can still choose another.”

Reading at times like a legal thriller, Michelle Adams’ The Containment sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

The English Problem

Review by Ember V. Tharpe

“This is how England claimed you—through its rain,” remarks Shiv Advani when he arrives in the country at London’s Victoria Station and finds “thin, fine icicles” pricking his skin. From these opening lines, Beena Kamlani introduces the primary conflict of her debut novel, The English Problem: the tension between the home we are from and the home we have chosen.

This detailed and informative work of historical fiction follows Shiv starting from his childhood in northern India in the 1920s. The doting son of political elites and later a semi-protege of Mahatma Gandhi himself, Shiv is staunchly dedicated to carrying out the wishes of his superiors. But once he arrives in England to study law and support Indian independence, he finds himself in settings where his ambition and his values clash. There lies the crux of Shiv’s journey. Through experiences in shame, violence, love and friendship, Shiv discovers his own moral compass. The direction it takes him in, however, is a departure from his intended path. From the halls of libraries to the quarters of lovers, readers see Shiv confront expectations, disappointment and new personal lessons against a backdrop of actual historical events.

Kamlani’s writing vividly brings us into Shiv’s experience through his senses. That said, the book may appeal more to readers who enjoy history and philosophy, due to its emphasis on both. In particular, conversations with historical figures, including the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster and Gandhi, give readers the opportunity to be immersed in some of the era’s ruling ideas.

The English Problem is a true bildungsroman, as Shiv feels out the lines between desire and obligation, and learns what it means to be at home. Readers will certainly enjoy its language and the subtle complexity of its themes.

Beena Kamlani’s detailed historical debut, The English Problem, follows an Indian man who journeys to England in the 1930s to study law and support Indian independence, but finds himself caught between his ambition, his heart and his values.

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