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Romance

Small town, big love

Feature by Amy Garvey

At the heart of every small town is a community—neighbors who have watered each other’s plants for years, friends who have grown up together and family businesses that have proudly hung signs on Main Street. These three romance novels capture the homespun charm of creaky porch swings, bake sales and softball games, as well as the sweet thrill of falling in love with the whole town watching—and usually cheering.

SWEET SUMMER NIGHTS 
Moonlight on Butternut Lake by Mary McNear is the next entry in the best-selling and emotionally rich Butternut Lake series, and it’s a nuanced story of healing and second chances. Badly injured in a car accident, Reid Ford retreats to his brother’s cabin at the lake, still confined to a wheelchair and struggling to recover physically and mentally. Mila Jones is the home health aide hired to care for Reid, but Mila is fighting her own battle—on the run from her abusive husband, moving to Butternut Lake is just the first step in her plan to make a new life for herself.

As the story opens, Reid is gruff and resentful but proud, and Mila is skittish and fragile but determined to make a better life for herself. From the beginning, they’re wary of each other—Mila is intimidated by Reid’s stubborn temper, and Reid is startled to find that the pretty aide has a surprisingly strong spine. But as the summer blooms around them, the walls they’ve built start to come down—and the tight-knit community serves to rehabilitate them both in different ways.  

Love is the last thing on Reid and Mila’s mind when the book begins, which makes their tentatively growing friendship sweetly satisfying. Workaholic Reid is surprised to find himself thinking about a relationship rather than a quick fling, and Mila is stunned to learn than she can still trust—both herself and others—at all. Suffused with all the magic of firefly-lit summer nights, this entry in the series is especially heartwarming.

A NOVEL LOVE
Emma Cane’s Ever After at Sweetheart Ranch is the next book in her popular Valentine Valley series, and it’s as warm and welcoming as spring itself. Cane writes extended family well, and the novel includes many characters readers have already met while it explores the story of a writer and a rancher who make an unlikely but wonderful couple.

Lyndsay De Luca is a dedicated schoolteacher who plays trumpet in a jazz band and writes fiction in her spare time—a true geek, in Lyndsay’s own words. Will Sweet is her polar opposite, a cowboy who thrives on Colorado’s wealth of outdoor activity and has never met a woman he couldn’t charm, at least briefly. More than their temperaments stand between them, though. Will was in love with Lyndsay’s best friend, until an accident took her far too early. And Lyndsay’s mortified to realize shortly before her first book is due to come out that her hero bears an overwhelming resemblance to Will.

For Lyndsay, it’s going to be hard enough to publically own up to the steamy book simply because of her job, and she can’t imagine what will happen if Will finds out he was the inspiration for the swaggering, sexy hero of her book. In Cane’s hands, the story plays out with humor and compassion as Lyndsay learns the real thing might be better than the fantasy, and Will discovers that love is a risk worth taking more than once. 

LISTEN TO YOUR HEART
An ex-con and a waitress find everything they didn’t know they were looking for in The Closer You Come, by longtime paranormal romance favorite Gena Showalter. This novel is the second in her first-ever contemporary series and follows the Original Heartbreakers, three men raised as foster brothers who settle in quiet Strawberry Valley, Oklahoma, for a fresh start.

Showalter hits the mark with this series. Newly out of prison, Jase Hollister is a deliciously hot bad boy with the kind of emotional wounds that will melt even the hardest heart. Brook Lynn is scrappy, stubborn and struggling not only to make ends meet but to keep her wild sister, Jessie Kay, in check. Jase and Brook Lynn meet when she finds her reckless sister in Jase’s bedroom, and the sparks never stop flying.

Showalter takes a refreshingly straightforward approach to Jase’s history and Brook Lynn’s struggles, including the implants she needs to modulate her hearing. Showalter’s gift for snappy, realistic dialogue and electric sexual tension are on full display here, and the community spirit that helps to bring the couple together makes this book everything a small-town romance should be. The next book in the series promises to be just as satisfying—and sexy.

Amy Garvey is a freelance editor and the author of several romances and two novels for young adults. 

At the heart of every small town is a community—neighbors who have watered each other’s plants for years, friends who have grown up together and family businesses that have proudly hung signs on Main Street. These three romance novels capture the homespun charm of creaky porch swings, bake sales and softball games, as well as the sweet thrill of falling in love with the whole town watching—and usually cheering.
Fiction

The unsolvable Ripper

Feature by Adam Morgan

More than 100 years have passed since the Autumn of the Knife, when the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper terrorized the streets of London. Amy Carol Reeves, author of the YA Ripper trilogy, says, “writers and readers are drawn to this story because it’s a case that will never be solved,” leaving plenty of space for imagination. Such is the case with two new Ripper-themed books by celebrated historical crime novelists Stephen Hunter (Hot Springs) and Alex Grecian (The Yard).

Both, of course, begin with blood. Stephen Hunter’s brisk, gory epistolary novel, I, Ripper, combines the memoirs of an ambitious journalist with the Ripper’s secret diary. The journalist, an Irishman who goes by “Jeb” to protect his identity, warns readers straight away:

“Make peace now with descriptions of a horrific nature or pass elsewhere. If you persevere, I promise you shall know all that is to be known about Jack. Who he was, how he selected, operated, and escaped. . . . Finally, I shall illuminate the most mysterious element of the entire affair, that of motive.”

Hunter’s version of Jack the Ripper is a cold, verbose intellectual. Beginning with the first canonical Ripper murder of Mary Ann Nichols in 1888, it’s a well-researched retelling of history full of surprising revelations. Hunter’s 19th-century London is full of striking and authentic period details—including racism, class warfare and the treatment of Jews in Victorian England—but women are relegated to the alcoholic prostitutes at the other end of a knife. “I needed to puncture her more,” the Ripper says. “Why? God in heaven knows.”

In Alex Grecian’s fourth Scotland Yard Murder Club book, The Harvest Man, the Ripper returns to London after last wreaking havoc in The Devil’s Workshop. But in this installment, Jack plays second fiddle to a villain even more horrifying: the Harvest Man, who wears a medieval plague mask and slices the faces off his victims, continuously mistaking them for his parents.

“He stared intently at the mother and father, tried to gauge the shapes of their skulls beneath the masks they wore. . . . Those were features they couldn’t hope to hide from him. He had chosen the right people this time, his own parents, spotted among the teeming masses. He was nearly sure of it.”

The Murder Club regulars are back: Detective Inspector Walter Day, his old partner Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith, the forensic pathologist Dr. Bernard Kingsley and even their favorite criminal informant, Blackleg. More pulpy and hardboiled than I, Ripper, Grecian's newest trades Hunter’s intricate prose for snappy dialogue in another gripping Victorian team-up. Where Hunter excels at a carefully constructed, suspense-driven plot with clear ties to history, Grecian supplies a strong cast of beloved characters and great one-liners. Although, for the record, Hunter packs a few jokes in, too (“‘Can I say ‘belly?'’’ I asked. ‘It seems rather graphic.’”).

Unfortunately, female characters in both books are largely either victims or hero’s wives. “A surface reading of the case shows only Jack the Ripper, the all-male Scotland Yard investigators, and the female victims,” says Reeves. “But we have so many cases of extraordinary women like Aphra Behn who are under-recognized in history.” Regardless, both I, Ripper and The Harvest Man are frightening, well paced, effortless reads.

More than 100 years have passed since the Autumn of the Knife, when the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper terrorized the streets of London. Amy Carol Reeves, author of the YA Ripper trilogy, says, “writers and readers are drawn to this story because it’s a case that will never be solved,” leaving plenty of space for imagination. Such is the case with two new Ripper-themed books by celebrated historical crime novelists Stephen Hunter (Hot Springs) and Alex Grecian (The Yard).

NonfictionFiction

Behind the battle

Feature by Kenneth Champeon

Inspect Europe today, and you would struggle to believe that its greatest scuffles were once about anything other than bailouts and shared currency, or Eurovision and football. Yet 2015 marks the bicentennial of a battle that stands as a summation of that continent's centuries of bloody wars, particularly those of the 20th: Waterloo, which took place on June 18, 1815. Two new books take different approaches to remembering this conflict.

In his history, Waterloo, novelist Bernard Cornwell asks, why another book? Waterloo is among the most chronicled battles of all time. Paraphrasing the British general Wellington, Cornwell also concedes that describing a battle is like describing a dance. Yet it is describing this already well-chronicled dance in exacting detail that Waterloo attempts to achieve.

Still reeling from Napoleon's wars of conquest, Europe is appalled to learn that he has returned triumphantly from exile, retaken Paris and set his sights on Belgium. It falls to Wellington ("the unbeatable") to stop Napoleon ("the unbeaten"). Spoiler alert: He does! But the outcome is never certain in Cornwell's telling. He even points to Frenchmen like Victor Hugo, who tried to snatch a literary victory from the jaws of putative defeat.

Waterloo is wonkish as military history goes. Much attention is paid to the arithmetical and geometrical difference between columns and lines, for example. It therefore suffers from a lack of historical context, but compensates by quoting liberally from the battle's participants. Cornwell refers to a massive model of the battlefield residing today in a British museum. His book is largely the play-by-play of that model in motion.

Waterloo may be the first modern battle, both in its intensive use of artillery and its appalling rate of casualties. The dead bodies becoming mud themselves suggests the First World War. Bodies forming great fatty pyres, or being ground up for fertilizer, or their teeth extracted—or Napoleon's loose talk about exterminating barbarians and the Parisian woman's capacity for replenishing the war dead—are a reminder of the inhumanity of the Second.

Like Ken Burns, Cornwell clearly prefers to focus on the more dulce et decorum est aspects of pre-modern conflict, the gallantry and bravery, the tear-jerking letters home. He's written an elegy for war before the machines took over—poignant and inspiring but ultimately nostalgic.

PHILOSOPHY OF WAR
If the battle appears now to us as an exercise in romantic futility, imagine what it must have seemed to the hordes of rabbits near the battlefield. This thought experiment motivates Leona Francombe's The Sage of Waterloo, an unusual but effective "tale" weaving philosophical history with animal story, as if the last chapter of 1984 had been recounted by the fauna of Animal Farm.

The tale is told by William, a rabbit named after the allied commander William of Orange. It's mainly a dialogue between William and his sagacious grandmother, Old Lavender, concerning the baffling behavior of their superiors in the food chain. They conclude that rabbits would never engage in wholesale killing and that humans are only irrational for doing so. 

Francombe later posits that women don't care much for war either, suggesting that she is using her rabbits as symbols for women. Indeed, Francombe leans rather heavily on the testimony of one actual English woman, Charlotte Eaton, who witnessed the battle's aftermath. Francombe praises the "female sensitivity" Eaton brings to her account, a sensitivity she finds lacking in accounts by male writers, among whom she might include Cornwell.

This may be true, but otiose. If Waterloo proves anything, it is that men, and not just armchair warriors, tend to delight in violence. Old Lavender is right when she says that "war desperately needs a female perspective," but Francombe might be discouraged to dwell much on the female capacity for aggression, from Queen Elizabeth to today's pro-military "security moms.” In Cornwell's Waterloo, one dead soldier is a woman in disguise.

As the sage herself repeats, too much comfort "dampens the brain.” Nietzsche couldn't have said it better. But despite these inconsistencies, the novel is an exquisite and amusing meditation on a battle whose meaning clearly invites debate, by humans or otherwise. 

Inspect Europe today, and you would struggle to believe that its greatest scuffles were once about anything other than bailouts and shared currency, or Eurovision and football. Yet 2015 marks the bicentennial of a battle that stands as a summation of that continent's centuries of bloody wars, particularly those of the 20th: Waterloo. Two new books take different approaches to remembering this conflict.
NonfictionMemoir

Wise and witty books for dad

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

If you’re searching for a gift for dear ol’ dad, two celebrity memoirs and two accounts of unusual personal quests are among our recommendations for a Father’s Day reading list.

It’s especially poignant to read Stuart Scott’s memoir, Every Day I Fight, knowing that not long after the book was finished, the ESPN anchor succumbed to appendiceal cancer at age 49. Writing in a conversational tone, his prose sprinkled with colloquialisms like “dude” and “brotha,” Scott never wavers in his candid account of the struggle with disease that dogged the final seven years of his life, describing how he “refused to curl up and just be a cancer patient,” when he’d head straight from chemotherapy treatments to the gym for a mixed martial arts workout. 

Famous for trademark phrases like “boo-yah” and for bringing hip-hop culture to ESPN in the age of the “raplete,” Scott recounts the highlights of a career that saw him make his meteoric rise from a reporting job in Florence, South Carolina, to ESPN in a mere six years. In the two decades he spent at the network, he shed the perception that he was nothing more than a “catchphrase guy” and established himself as a dedicated, hard-working professional. What makes this memoir most appropriate for Father’s Day is Scott’s account of his fierce love for his two daughters. Even when he was honored with the Jimmy V Perseverance Award in 2014, Scott steadfastly avoided referring to his seven-year fight against cancer as “brave.” But after reading this revealing and courageous memoir, we can.

MOCKING MIDDLE AGE 
If you’re offended by explicit language or jokes from a comedian who admits he’s “not very politically correct, nor do I have a very useful filter,” you may want to pass on Brad Garrett’s When the Balls Drop: How I Learned to Get Real and Embrace Life’s Second Half. But the many fans who enjoyed Garrett’s Emmy Award-winning nine-year role as the big brother on the hit series “Everybody Loves Raymond” will relish a book that blends memoir with pointed and often hilarious musings on the perilous passage through the shoals of middle age.

Garrett shares entertaining stories of his early days in comedy, as he moved from small-town clubs to opening in Las Vegas for performers like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He frankly acknowledges his debt to comedian Don Rickles, something that’s evident in the book’s blunt humor.

When it comes to what might loosely be called the self-help portion of the book, Garrett takes dead aim at targets that include vegetarianism, plastic surgery and exercise. He confesses his aversion to monogamy, though at 55 he’s quite content with his 31-year-old girlfriend. “Ultimately, you have to live right for you,” is Garrett’s theme, and from the evidence he presents here, he seems to have done quite well in that regard. 

REACHING FOR THE TOP
Austin newspaper reporter Asher Price’s decision, on the eve of his 34th birthday, to spend a year endeavoring to propel his 6-foot-2-inch, 203-pound frame high enough to dunk a basketball might seem to some a trivial pursuit. But in Price’s capable hands, Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity, an exploration of what he calls the “limits of human talent,” is an informative, inspiring and often moving story of how life’s tough challenges can motivate us.

Price’s project takes him from a Texas gym, where he’s tutored by 1996 Olympic high jump gold medalist Charles Austin, to the Performance Lab of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York to the office of British zoologist Malcolm Burrows, an expert on the jumping characteristics of an insect known as the froghopper. While crisply explicating arcana like the difference between fast- and slow-twitch muscles, he documents a punishing exercise regimen that helped him shed pounds and gain vertical lift as he strained to reach his goal. He also describes unobtrusively his experience with an aggressive form of testicular cancer six years earlier.

Readers eager to learn whether Price’s project succeeded will have to look to the book for the answer. As is always the case, the outcome is far less interesting than the journey he recounts in this warmhearted story.

TRAVEL FOR THE DARING
Albert Podell’s Around the World in 50 Years: My Adventure to Every Country on Earth is the extraordinary account of a much different personal journey, or rather a series of them: his successful quest to visit each of the world’s 196 countries (plus seven that no longer exist). Podell, who achieved his goal in December 2012, is an engaging and colorful storyteller, and the momentum of this memoir rarely flags.

If you’re looking for a guide to the best all-inclusive resorts of the Caribbean or Europe’s finest five-star restaurants, look elsewhere. Instead, Podell offers tips for eating monkey brains, advice on how to bribe your way past corrupt government officials and a system for comfort-ranking countries based on the quality of their toilet tissue. At heart, this is an adventure story, one that nearly came to a premature end at the hands of a lynch mob on his visit to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the middle of the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. That’s only one of the brushes with death or serious injury that enlivened Podell’s travels.

Through all these occasionally nightmarish experiences and the daunting logistical challenges he surmounted, Podell never loses his sense of wonder or his dry, punning wit. What’s most impressive is that he logged nearly one-third of his country visits after reaching age 70, including perilous trips to countries like Somalia and North Korea. 

Even if your desire for exotic travel never takes you out of your reading chair, you’ll find Podell a fascinating companion. 

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’re searching for a gift for dear ol’ dad, two celebrity memoirs and two accounts of unusual personal quests are among our recommendations for a Father’s Day reading list.

An author discovers the joys of audio

Feature by Luis Alberto Urrea

I was never a big fan of audiobooks until I heard Bill Bryson read A Walk in the Woods. Oh, I had enjoyed audios as a kind of archive of authors’ voices, but it seemed like cheating, somehow.

I was a paper man all the way—give me pages, or give me death. Until Bryson’s hilarious complaining stopped me in my tracks and made me laugh out loud. I started bugging others to listen to it. I was like a kid with a new Led Zeppelin album. I bought cassettes of the book for people. I played passages of it in my lit classes to illustrate the Monty Pythonesque delights of awkwardness, discomfort and kvetching.

And then I had kids. And with kids came long car trips. Very long car trips. Trips during which, to arrive at Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, one had to traverse Nebraska. Or Oklahoma. Lovely places all, but somewhat lacking in teen and tween thrills. To avoid losing the kids to handheld devices and Game Boys, we discovered a miraculous combination of the past and the future.

Both my wife and I were and are Tim Curry fans. Who could ever recover from the shock of encountering Dr. Frank N. Furter in Rocky Horror? “Oh, Rocky,” indeed. And our kids were Lemony Snicket fans. And here came that sweet transvestite, with that arch and deliciously deranged voice, narrating Lemony Snicket! Everyone in the car was riveted. We all loved these audiobooks, becoming for hundreds of miles a family in the 1930s gathered around a great radio to travel into unexpected worlds. Perhaps my wife and I were seeing Curry in fishnets in our minds, while the kids were seeing what Lemony wanted them to. But never mind—it worked. And it worked so well, we often hurtled past the various Stuckeys on the road, passing up corn nuts and pecan logs to hear more story.

I have a slight bone to pick with Tim Curry, though—his nefarious influence on our literary habits inspired our daughter to force us to listen to all 9,000 hours of his rendering of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Not knocking Jules Verne, mind you. But, really. The upshot, however, was our daughter announcing that she loved science. Poor girl—she thought all science teachers would sound like Curry. 

Never mind the corsets.

Then, it was my turn.

I had published this whopping novel called The Hummingbird’s Daughter. It was my life’s work in a real sense—it took me 20 years to write and research it. When the offer came to record the audio, I thought I had to do it. Who was going to do it justice? Not me, perhaps, but at least I would understand all the jokes and get the Mexican cussing right. I have learned that my readers are very particular about their Spanish obscenities.

So. Nobody told me that a 600-page book would be a pain to record. Literally a pain—in the posterior. Because you sit on this stool the whole time, maintaining a six-inch distance from the mike. Yoga for non-yoga people. And 600 pages, even at a good clip, means about 40 hours in the studio. Perching. With an engineer endlessly stopping you for “stomach noises,” or “weird clicking in your throat” or “gross mouth sounds.” And a producer listening in via Skype to correct any deviation—even one word—from your own text. NO IMPROVISING. Plus, these shadowy characters stun you by pointing out that words you think you’ve always known are actually pronounced another way and you’ve been saying them wrong. What? Thank God I have tenure, you think, because my colleagues from rhetoric have been snickering at me this whole time!

My first producer was a lovely former Broadway musical dancer. “I’m a dancer!” she’d tell me from wherever her fortress of solitude was. “Do you have any idea what we go though? I don’t care if your butt hurts!” But she liked my reading. Except when I used a French word. My accent was appalling, apparently.

The studio was an awesome experience, however. One day, my engineer took me to a small toilet and said, “Look at this.” I looked. “So?” I said. “Dude—Madonna peed there.” I said, “Uh. Bronze the toilet seat?” And back to work.

If you want to feel insane, by the way, spend 40 hours speaking in the voices of different people all day. Especially when they argue. But you know one thing: Long after you’re gone, your voice will remain. To tell your children a bedtime story. And later still, their children. Me and Tim Curry. Forever.

 

Luis Alberto Urrea is a novelist, poet and short story writer and the author of The Devil’s Highway, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in nonfiction.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I was never a big fan of audiobooks until I heard Bill Bryson read A Walk in the Woods. Oh, I had enjoyed audios as a kind of archive of authors’ voices, but it seemed like cheating, somehow.
Romance

Newly adult, newly in love

Feature by Lois Dyer

A relatively recent entry to the romance field, New Adult stories feature heroes and heroines negotiating the tricky transition to independence after high school. These four recent releases perfectly capture the feeling of first love—and first heartbreak—that can define the early 20s.

THE BUCKET LIST
In Cora Carmack’s All Played Out, Antonella “Nell” DeLuca has reached her senior year of college with near-perfect grades. Unfortunately, she’s been so focused on studying that her social life is non-existent. Determined to remedy the situation, she makes a bucket list of things she wants to do before graduation. First on the list: Hook up with a jock.

Football wide receiver Mateo Torres has a reputation for playing hard, both on and off the field. When he meets Nell and discovers her list, he’s determined to help her check off every item. But he didn’t expect to fall in love with her. When the list is completed, will Nell choose to stay?

This is the third novel in Carmack’s Rusk University series, and it’s a winner. The hero and heroine are both intelligent, endearing and funny, and they have enough past heartache to keep readers wondering if they will find a way to stay together.

LOVE HEALS ALL WOUNDS
Tiffany King launches her Fractured Lives series with A Shattered Moment. College sophomore Mackenzie Wilson is still struggling to cope with her broken heart a year after a car accident killed her friends and left her leg badly damaged. It’s all she can do to hobble to classes and focus on studying.

Bentley James sees Mackenzie on campus and immediately recognizes the pretty girl he pulled from the wrecked SUV a year before. She’s emotionally locked down and barely speaks, however, and it takes concentrated effort to slowly draw her out of her shell. Bentley knows he’s falling in love with her, but he also knows she may break his heart. Unless Mackenzie can face her past and come to terms with everything that happened that terrible night, she may never be able to love him in return.

King has given her fans a deeply emotional novel that addresses personal and family issues. Readers will root for Mackenzie and Bentley as they fall in love and make hard choices.

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
Trusting Liam continues best-selling author Molly McAdams Taking Chances and Forgiving Lies series. College senior Kennedy Ryan breaks every personal rule and spends an unforgettable night with a stranger. Tiptoeing out without waking him, she quietly leaves the Las Vegas hotel and goes home to Florida, but she can’t forget him. A year later, a threat against her detective father has her family insisting Kennedy and her younger sister spend several months in California. Much to her shock, her new boss’ son is the man from Las Vegas.

Liam Taylor is just as stunned as Kennedy. Like her, he’s never been able to forget their night together. He’s determined to keep her close, and this time, he won’t let her slip away. But Kennedy has a complicated history, and unless both she and Liam can come to terms with the past, they may never find a way to be together.

McAdams has created thoroughly likeable characters in Liam and Kennedy and surrounded them with a cast of interesting people. The plot has enough surprises to keep readers eagerly turning pages and fans will be delighted with this latest novel in the series.

STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
Broken Juliet by Australian author Leisa Rayven is set in the world of the theater. Actress Cassie Taylor fell in love with fellow student Ethan Holt in college. Unfortunately, Ethan had deep-seated issues that compelled him to break up with her. He broke her heart and his own, as well. Several years later, they’re forced together once again when they land the lead roles in a Broadway play.

Cassie has never really recovered from losing Ethan, and much to her shock, he tells her that he’s never gotten over her either. But there is so much emotional trauma in their collective past—is it possible for them to look past it and move forward together.

The chemistry between Cassie and Ethan is steamy, their emotions raw and real. Rayven deftly juggles the lovers’ present-day relationship with their failed affair in college. Fans of the author’s debut novel, Bad Romeo, will be delighted with this sophomore offering.

Lois Dyer writes from Washington State.

 

Within the relatively new romance genre of New Adult, the heroes and heroines are focused on negotiating the tricky, independent years after high school. We’ve selected four New Adult romance novels that perfectly capture the feeling of first love—and first heartbreak—that is so definitive of one’s early 20s.
Fiction

Spotlight: Psychological thrills

Feature by Sheila M. Trask

How well can you really know someone? Can you comprehend the hidden desires harbored by your neighbor, your fiancé, your best friend or your daughter? Or do you only see the fiction they present to the world? 

These two probing psychological thrillers reveal what can happen when the perfect facade crumbles, leaving the innocent among the ruins.

In her skillfully plotted debut, The Bones of You, Debbie Howells uses two narrators to get at the truth of what happened on the day 18-year-old Rosie was brutally killed in an otherwise quiet English village. Rosie haunts these pages with flashbacks to her troubled life and terrible death, and possesses an oracle-like knowledge of others’ emotional states and motives, recalling the afterlife narrator of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Most of the story, however, comes from kindhearted Kate, a neighbor and mother to her own 18-year-old daughter, who befriends Rosie’s mother, Jo Anderson. Though she’s just lost her daughter and has another one to protect, Jo’s focus seems to be on decorating her perfect home and attending awards dinners with her internationally acclaimed journalist husband, Neal. At first Kate puts this down to the peculiarities of grief, but when Neal becomes a suspect and anonymous messages begin appearing at Kate’s door, she has to wonder what’s really happening at the Anderson house. Howells leads us down a winding path to the truth, where each character reveals just enough of his or her secrets to drive suspense skyward and keep readers from guessing who was really responsible for Rosie’s death until the strangely satisfying truth is revealed.

Appearances are similarly deceiving for Morgan Prager, the Brooklyn college student at the heart of The Hand That Feeds You, by Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment, writing together for the first time as A.J. Rich. An altruistic woman with a weakness for rescue dogs—her small apartment holds a Great Pyrenees and two pit bulls—Morgan is engaged to the charming Bennett and almost finished with her thesis on victim psychology. All is right in her world—until she arrives home to find bloody paw prints on the floor and her fiancé’s mauled body on her bed. Morgan’s grief and guilt overwhelm her as she tries to understand how she could have been so wrong about her sweet dogs. Then she discovers she was wrong about Bennett as well, who had several other “fiancées” waiting in the wings. Some have died suspicious deaths, and others are still waiting for their beloved’s return. The writing is fast-paced yet psychologically nuanced as Morgan chases down the truth, questions her own research and faces her traumatic past, all the while fighting to get her dogs back. The final twist is creepy and unexpected, and the action-packed last pages fly by as we fight alongside Morgan to understand who can be trusted in this world.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How well can you really know someone? Can you comprehend the hidden desires harbored by your neighbor, your fiancé, your best friend or your daughter? Or do you only see the fiction they present to the world?
Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Putting a magical spin on the past

Feature by Adam Morgan

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

No matter how strange or outlandish, most fantasy novels take place in a world that bears at least some resemblance to our own. 

But when a fantasy writer takes the opportunity to cast a spell over the past, it provides a different sort of magic. Two new novels put imaginative twists on history.

In Bell Weather, Dennis Mahoney (Fellow Mortals) reimagines the colonial era of the 1700s, when European empires fought over the Americas. Except in his story, the Old World is Heraldia and the New World is Floria. While the geography and historical milieu are familiar, the main departure from reality is in the details of the natural world.

The rustic town of Root in the colonies of Floria is home to a variety of miraculous flora, fauna and (as the book’s title implies) meteorological phenomena. Ember gourds burst into flame after ripening, winterbears hibernate in summer and stalker weeds roam the forest looking for defenseless plants. Cathedrals and mansions are built from pale lunarite rock, seasons change in a matter of hours, and sudden “colorwashes” transform the landscape. 

In the New World colonies, tavern owner Tom Orange rescues a mysterious woman from drowning. Her name is Molly Bell, daughter of one of the most powerful men in Floria. As a group of bandits known as the Maimers terrorize the countryside, stealing whatever part of their victims’ bodies they deem most valuable, Tom must help Molly escape the inevitable fallout from her past. 

Mahoney’s prose is lyrical and well honed, and his characters are engaging, but it’s the magical realism of the wilderness that makes this world so memorable and fascinating.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, on the other hand, takes place in a very recognizable Victorian-era London—with a few steampunk and supernatural flourishes. In 1883, a bookish Whitehall telegraph cleric named Thaniel Steepleton comes home to find someone has broken into his flat. Instead of stealing valuables, they’ve left him a mysterious gold pocket watch that winds up saving his life after a bomb is planted by Irish terrorists at Scotland Yard. Thaniel’s search for the watch’s creator leads him to one of the most interesting fictional characters in recent memory, Keita Mori.

Mori is a Japanese watchmaker who is part inventor, part mystic—he combines the deductive brilliance of Sherlock Holmes with the clairvoyance of Dr. Manhattan. Thanks to his ability to see potential futures, Mori has altered the course of history several times. Among his many inventions is a sentient, clockwork octopus, which is quite possibly the highlight of the novel. Together with Oxford scientist Grace Carrow, Thaniel tries to solve the mystery of the terrorist bombings. Could they be one of Mori’s attempts to alter the future? 

Natasha Pulley’s debut is a clever detective story, a thrilling steampunk adventure and a poignant examination of the consequences of class warfare and English, Irish and Japanese nationalism in the 19th century.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

No matter how strange or outlandish, most fantasy novels take place in a world that bears at least some resemblance to our own. But when a fantasy writer takes the opportunity to cast a spell over the past, it provides a different sort of magic. Two new novels put imaginative twists on history.
Fiction

Shivers under the sun

Feature by Arlene McKanic

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

The good and useful thing about scary stories is their variety. They may leave you sad, mad or contemplative—but all of the good ones make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Not even 40 pages into Sarah Lotz’s latest thriller, Day Four, it becomes clear that when things start going pear-shaped on a cruise, you don’t even need the supernatural to have a good horror story.

The Beautiful Dreamer is the not-quite jewel in the crown of the Foveros Line, which has a reputation for gifting its passengers with norovirus. Passage is cheaper than the going rate, and it shows. We have neon and general garishness, annoyingly chipper cruise directors and staff who are only on the ship because no one else will hire them. The passengers are spoiled, ugly and miserable. Indeed, at least two of them took the cruise with plans to commit suicide.

Then, something happens and the boat is dead in the water. There’s no electricity and no way to call for help. Passengers move to the decks to avoid the stench from the overflowing toilets. Then they start seeing and hearing impossible things. A woman spots a little boy running through the corridors, even though this is an adults-only cruise. A man swears he’s seen the devil. Stress is a perfectly logical explanation, but. . . . Lotz revels in her characters’ discomfort—a beautiful reminder that you don’t have to like a character to care what happens next. But her real genius is putting the action on a crippled, noisome ship that the world seems to have forgotten. The characters, and the reader, want to get off this bucket, but how? It’s worse than being on the Nostromo. And it makes Day Four irresistible.

After reading Paul Tremblay’s mightily disturbing novel, you may wonder why more teenage girls don’t lose their minds. In A Head Full of Ghosts, an exorcist is called in. But the real demons that torture Marjorie Barrett are external.

The story is narrated by Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry, who recounts events of 15 years before. Now 23, Merry blogs about the wildly popular reality show that featured her family. Yes, Marjorie’s suffering was on TV for the world to witness. Why? 

First, there’s the patriarchy. In one queasily funny scene, the men who torment Marjorie during her exorcism refuse to believe that she can be possessed by a female demon. Demons are male, and they like to prey on adolescent girls, who in turn need learned male priests to save them.

Second, there’s Marjorie and Merry’s dad. John Barrett is a failure. And not because the family finances were wiped out when his job went away, although money is a big reason for the camera crew. John is a failure because he doesn’t respect the women who love and live with him. He crushes his wife, and he is certainly one reason why Marjorie goes crazy. The only one he doesn’t grind down is Merry, because she’s tough and funny and smart and reminds you of Scout Finch.

But in the end, even Merry has her own demons. What happens to her 8-year-old self is so appalling and unfair that it’s almost unbelievable—a scary story, indeed.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The good and useful thing about scary stories is their variety. They may leave you sad, mad or contemplative—but all of the good ones make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
FictionDebut Fiction

Trouble in paradise

Feature by Eliza Borné

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

Two new novels set in privileged northeastern communities showcase the darker side of family life.

Julia Pierpont’s anticipated debut reminds readers of a universally acknowledged fact: It’s a strange feeling when you realize your parents are human. For most of us, it happens in late adolescence or even early adulthood—when Mom and Dad start speaking up about job conundrums or relationship woes, or even (God forbid) sex. 

Among the Ten Thousand Things hinges on a devastating event that forces Kay Shanley, 11, and her 15-year-old brother, Simon, to prematurely confront a painful secret. In an explosive opening scene, Kay intercepts a package from her father’s lover—a printed chronicle of his affair, complete with explicit emails and a cruel letter addressed to Kay’s mom, Deb, who was meant to receive the R-rated evidence. Once Kay and Simon learn of their father’s infidelity, nothing is ever the same—though the events after the crisis are neither neat nor predictable. 

The Shanley family is outwardly accomplished though inwardly troubled. Jack, the father, is an acclaimed, though controversial, artist (one memorable scene involves an installation art piece gone horribly, horribly wrong). Kay has trouble fitting in at school and understanding her father’s affair, and she expresses herself by writing smutty “Seinfeld” fan fiction. Simon is a computer game-playing, pot-smoking, sullen teenager—impatient with his sister and ticked off at both parents. Deb, a former professional ballerina and a doting mom, tries to keep life as normal as possible for her children while processing her anger at Jack.

Pierpont is a strong, confident writer, and her well-observed characters feel deeply human. She is also a deft storyteller; many readers will be floored by an unexpected narrative twist in the middle of the novel that upends the conventions of plot structure and adds depth to the second half of the book—a welcome, if initially unsettling, surprise. Among the Ten Thousand Things is an impressive debut—a family drama alternately bright and bleak from a gifted young author.

Read our Q&A with Julia Pierpont.

A NOT-SO-PERFECT SUMMER
Even bleaker is The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak, set in a “Connecticut postcard-perfect” town. In alternating chapters, the story is told by Cheryl, the second wife of a successful businessman, and her stepson, Teddy, who has recently been kicked out of Dartmouth. Both Cheryl and Teddy feel a deep dissatisfaction with daily life in Little Neck Cove, and throughout an eventful, often violent summer they turn to each other—not to mention painkillers and booze—to cope with neighborhood busybodies and gossips. 

Cheryl feels like an outsider among the Country Club set (it doesn’t help that her husband’s first wife fell drunkenly to her death off a dock). She is stuck in a loveless marriage; for pleasure, she anonymously calls random numbers from the phonebook to see who will respond to her sultry voice. Cheryl also holds a scandalous secret, the keeping of which creates much of the novel’s tension. Teddy binges on sex and drugs.

The Invaders is a stiff cocktail without a chaser: It will wake you up, though it’s hard to get down. It lacks subtlety and feels as though it were written to shock—though some scenes are also wickedly funny. Little Neck Cove seems like a terrible place to live, though readers won’t mind gawking at its melodramatic residents for a while before returning to their own, more peaceful lives.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

 

Two new novels set in privileged northeastern communities showcase the darker side of family life.
NonfictionMemoir

The best medicine

Feature by Heather Seggel

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

Laughter can tighten your abs, soothe your mind and increase your empathy. Lighten up your summer reading with two funny new books that have both heart and brains.

When Patricia Marx, a New Yorker staffer, former “SNL” writer and Harvard Lampoon alum, commits to four months of brain fitness, watch out. “I could use some buckling down,” she writes. “My mental skyscape has too many aircraft aloft.” Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties details her often hilarious forays into IQ testing, online brain games, electrical brain stimulation and mindfulness meditation to combat the regrettable effects of aging. The book is peppered with wacky diagrams drawn by Marx; most are intentionally primitive, but her Millard Fillmore, on a list of “Presidents to Forget,” is surprisingly on the money. There are also a variety of puzzles and quizzes; only some are real, but all are funny. 

Marx’s efforts don’t always go as planned—she elects to learn Cherokee for the benefits of being bilingual, but confuses it with Navajo, the language she intended to learn. She still makes impressive gains for the time invested, and offers tips for those who want to give it a try. Crossword mavens may want to pick up a sudoku, or a Cherokee phrasebook, as it’s the process of learning something new that builds brain strength.

Since one of the meditation techniques mentioned here is laughter, merely reading this book could help your hippocampus feel the burn. Start with Marx’s suggestions, then plot your personal brain boot camp since sadly, liposuction is not an option for shaping up an aging brain.

Like diners at a popular Italian restaurant chain, readers of popular suspense writer Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca Serritella enjoy the sense that “when you’re here, you’re family.” Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?, the duo’s latest collection, is true to form, featuring riffs and one-liners about relationships, fitness, work and family traditions. (Christmas ornaments that have seen better days or that memorialize beloved pets? “If you’re maimed or dead, you’re on our tree.”) 

This book—the sixth from the mother-daughter team—brings the sad news that Mary, the family matriarch who figures in many of Scottoline’s funniest true and fictional stories, has died. The loss leaves Serritella more reflective about life and love just as she re-enters the dating pool, but she recalls venting about her love life to her grandmother one day and receiving this reply, written on a dry erase board: “Motto: Who needs it?” (When Mary realized that people were taking photos of her dry-erase messages to preserve them for posterity, she began writing things like, “Eat sh*t.”) Scottoline notes that the richness of her mother’s love unexpectedly made the grieving process more bearable. 

Take this collection to the beach (Spoiler: It doesn’t make you look fat after all!) and consider it a drama-free family reunion.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Laughter can tighten your abs, soothe your mind and increase your empathy. Lighten up your summer reading with two funny new books that have both heart and brains.

NonfictionMemoir

Stirring modern-day quests

Feature by Alice Cary

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

Don’t miss these superbly written books that combine intriguing history with memorable real-life escapades.

Discovering a Golden Age pirate ship is “the hardest and rarest and most exciting thing an explorer could find underwater, or maybe in all the world.” That’s exactly the mesmerizing story that unfolds in Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship. Robert Kurson, author of the best-selling Shadow Divers, makes readers feel as though they’re aboard these search vessels.

John Chatterton of Shadow Divers is now part of a trio trying to find a 17th-century pirate shipwreck in the Dominican Republic. Joseph Bannister was a respected English sea captain who went rogue, stealing his ship, the Golden Fleece, which the British Navy nearly sank in a fierce battle in 1686.

Chatterton, partner John Mattera and financier Tracy Bowden are determined to locate the wreck, but they clash over where to look. Meanwhile, other treasure hunters are breathing down their necks, and changing government policies threaten to shut down their mission.

Their elaborate hunt involves historical detective work on multiple continents and a powerful magnetometer that detects the presence of metals used in cannonballs. Kurson’s page-turning account reads like a novel as the search threatens to implode, with exhaustion creeping in, tempers flaring and even a few guns firing. 

The hunters finally succeed when they begin to think like pirates, treating readers to ringside seats on a modern Treasure Island. 

HITTING THE DUSTY TRAIL
For another contemporary adventurer, wanderlust was bred into his bones. When Rinker Buck was young, his father took the whole family on a covered-wagon trip from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. At age 17, Buck and his 15-year-old brother rebuilt a Piper Cub and became the youngest aviators to fly coast to coast.

In 2011, Buck decided to travel the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon in a restored covered wagon pulled by three mules. He chronicles his “completely lunatic notion” in the wonderfully engaging The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey. 

He’s accompanied by his brother, Nick, an expert horseman and mechanic. Nick is seemingly the ideal partner, except that he and Buck are the quintessential Odd Couple, with Buck being fastidious Felix and Nick sloppy Oscar .

Throughout, Buck skillfully weaves historical anecdotes into their misadventures, such as the story of Narcissa Whitman, the first white woman to cross the Rockies, whom Buck regards as his “guardian angel of the trail.”

Buck definitely needs an angel, sheepishly admitting after the first night that the wagon is overloaded, forcing him to leave behind cherished items like his Brooks Brothers bathrobe, bocce balls and shoeshine kit. 

Buck set out “to learn to live with uncertainty,” and in the end he and his brother fully embrace the experience, beautifully navigating a pioneer expedition on 21st-century terms.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Don’t miss these superbly written books that combine intriguing history with memorable real-life escapades.
NonfictionMemoir

The cold hard truth

Feature by Deborah Hopkinson

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

It’s no surprise that Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, is still in print. The harsh reality of survival near the Poles continues to make gripping reading, especially from the safety of our own homes. 

In 81 Days Below Zero, journalist Brian Murphy pieces together the improbable story of a young World War II pilot named Leon Crane. On December 21, 1943, Crane set out from Alaska’s Ladd Field on a test flight in a B-24D Liberator bomber. On a whim, co-pilot Crane grabbed two packs of matches, knowing that the pilot had a fondness for smoking a pipe. That quick action might just have saved his life. 

Somewhere near the Yukon River, a failed engine and elevator controls sent the plane spiraling toward the ground. Crane managed to bail out, becoming the only member of the five-man crew to survive the fiery crash. 

Crane’s situation was dire. His flight suit was intact and he had his old Boy Scout knife, but he’d forgotten his mittens on the plane. Crane’s first act was to grab piles of driftwood near a frozen river to spell out a huge SOS in the snow. But he soon realized that without a last-minute radio call, rescuers would have little idea of their location or where to search. A week after the crash, hunger drove Crane to a decision: His only chance of survival would be to walk out of the wilderness.

Using military records and interviews, Murphy has meticulously pieced together details of Crane’s trek, as well as later efforts to identify the remains of his fellow crew members. The result is a riveting tale of survival. It seems that Crane, who died in 2002, seldom spoke about what happened in 1943 and was always reluctant to be seen as a hero. Murphy’s account brings his inspiring story to light. 

Our second survival story is a first-person account by one of the lucky few to survive a sinking ship. Matt Lewis, author of Last Man Off, was just 23 in 1998 when he joined the crew of the Sudur Havid, a South African fishing boat. Lewis signed on as a scientific observer to ensure compliance with fishing regulations and watch for endangered albatrosses. A trained marine biologist, he was pleased to have a job in his field, even if his first sight of the rusty 30-year old boat gave him pause: “That’s the boat I’m living on for the next three months. Is it too late to change my mind?”

The boat left Cape Town on April 6, 1998. Two months later, on June 6, a couple of hundred miles from South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic, the Sudur Havid began taking on water in a violent storm. The crew had no choice but to abandon ship. Without leadership from those in charge, Lewis stepped up to organize the escape onto three life rafts and was the last man to leave the ship. 

What followed was a grueling ordeal: Of the 38 men on board, 17 perished. Based on Lewis’ own recollections and testimony at the South African inquiry, Last Man Off is a sobering reminder of the power of the sea.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s no surprise that Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, is still in print. The harsh reality of survival near the Poles continues to make gripping reading, especially from the safety of our own homes. 

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