All Reviews

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Flavia de Luce burst onto the cozy mystery scene in 2009, and now the precocious 12-year-old chemistry prodigy is back for the 11th time in bestselling author Alan Bradley’s What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust.

Once again, Bradley beckons readers into post-World War II England—specifically, Bishop’s Lacey, a hamlet in the countryside. Flavia roams the area on her bicycle, Gladys, searching for things to test in her home laboratory (ensconced in Buckshaw, the crumbling de Luce manor) and, lately, places to escape “pestilent little cousin” Undine, who’s come to Buckshaw after becoming an orphan.

Flavia, now an orphan as well, tends to the mansion with the help of two beloved adults: Dogger, handyman and helpmeet, and the estate’s housekeeper, Mrs. Mullet, who’s also been cooking for their neighbor Major Greyleigh, a former hangman who is found dead as the book opens. Alas, the police consider Mrs. Mullet the prime suspect because she accidentally served the major a dish of poisonous mushrooms directly before his demise.

Convinced of Mrs. Mullet’s innocence, Flavia resolves to solve the crime and clear the cook’s name. After all, she’s so important to her—and as a bonus, it’s yet another opportunity to test her sleuthing mettle: “I have to admit that I’d been praying . . . for a jolly good old-fashioned mushroom poisoning. Not that I wanted anyone to die, but why give a girl a gift . . . without giving her the opportunity to use it?”

As Flavia questions locals, sneaks into crime scenes and conducts experiments, she realizes the murder is just the tip of a very strange iceberg looming over Bishop’s Lacey. Is the usually chatty, now oddly reticent, Mrs. Mullet hiding something? And some of the American soldiers still stationed at nearby Leathcote air base seem especially interested in the goings-on. Might they be involved? 

Bradley’s intrepid amateur sleuth is witty and whip-smart as ever, and Bishop’s Lacey remains both a colorful backdrop and a microcosm of a nation in transition, paralleling Flavia’s own trepidation at entering adulthood. A layered plot rife with dastardly deeds and shocking revelations makes for an intriguing and entertaining read, and nicely tees up the (one hopes) next installment in the irresistible Flavia de Luce series.

In Alan Bradley’s 11th mystery starring preteen sleuth Flavia de Luce, the chemistry prodigy faces murder by mushroom and her own impending adulthood.
NonfictionScienceEnvironment

Trash Talk

Review by Kelly Blewett

Have you ever wondered what happens to your trash? Or who lives next to landfills? Or why recycling is so complicated? If you struggle to wrap your mind around humankind’s relation to waste, check out Trash Talk: An Eye-Opening Exploration of Our Planet’s Dirtiest Problem by science writer and illustrator Iris Gottlieb.

Gottlieb offers a no-nonsense explanation of the global trash production system that is both timely, informative and digestible. Writing that their goal is not to change anyone’s behavior, but rather to offer more context about the trash crisis itself, Gottlieb avoids berating us for our stagnant composters and single-use floss picks. Instead, they illuminate the complexities of electronic and digital waste, the debate over whether to incinerate or use landfills, the reason that not all paper can be recycled and much more. Readers learn about sustainability interventions in construction, electronics and plastics. The book is rife with discoveries; a particularly shudder-inducing one is of fatbergs, “huge masses” of nonbiodegradable material, fats, oils and grease “that harden into bus-sized, concrete-like chunks” in our sewer systems.

Yet Trash Talk can also be lighthearted, thanks in part to Gottlieb’s whimsical line drawings that illustrate everything from trash barges to scrounging raccoons to subway rats. Quick asides called “Trashy Tidbits” highlight a range of facts and anecdotes, like how Disney World employs underground vacuum tubes to send its trash behind Space Mountain, where it is compacted. Another tidbit tells how a small community on Lake Huron ceremoniously buried 29,188 frozen mushroom pizzas deemed unsafe by the FDA; “Pizza was served at the funeral,” Gottlieb notes. These asides balance out the growing sense of dread readers may feel while confronting how waste management is contributing to global warming.

Like water to a goldfish, our trash crisis is simultaneously omnipresent and invisible. Gottlieb unpacks the way our environments are built and argues persuasively that our society needs major interventions to move beyond linear thinking regarding the use of resources. We also need to reckon with the fact that the poorest and most vulnerable among us are the ones most exposed to danger because of racism and other long-standing social injustices. Gottlieb’s candor and willingness to call out these painful truths make Trash Talk a book readers will remember and share.

 

Science writer Iris Gottlieb uncovers the crisis of our waste management systems in their timely, playfully illustrated Trash Talk.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Two-Step Devil

Review by Cat Acree

Jamie Quatro cultivated a reputation as a provocateur with her two previous books, the story collection I Want to Show You More (2013) and her debut novel, Fire Sermon (2018). She complicates Southern Christian narratives through characters who hold faith in one fist and lust in the other, carrying out sins like adultery while maintaining deep relationships with the divine.

Quatro continues this inquiry with her second novel, Two-Step Devil, a narrative in three acts. The first introduces a 70-year-old man who calls himself the Prophet. Living alone in Alabama in 2014, the Prophet detests organized religion, but the inside of his cabin is covered with paintings of his visions from God. He is also taunted by a figure he calls the Two-Step Devil. One day, at a gas station, the Prophet sees a teenage girl, drugged and zip-tied, being shoved into the backseat of a car. 

After a bumbling rescue, the Prophet helps the girl, Michael, regain her health. Their time together is beautiful, a quiet kinship, but it can’t last. Michael must eventually move on to the next stage of her life, and she narrates the vulnerable second section as if she’s giving a hurried walking tour of Chattanooga, Tennessee, intercut with memories of her childhood sexual assaults and coercion into trafficking.

In the novel’s third section, Two-Step steps into the spotlight—quite literally, as the story is now structured as a play, with the Prophet wasting away upstage. The devil ecstatically monologues at the reader (“Greetings, fleshsacks!”) on the misconceptions in Christian narratives, and goes wildly off-script from scripture.

Two-Step Devil is a bold interrogation—even a condemnation—of rigid adherence to Christian rules, and it’s apparent that it is intended first and foremost to provoke. While it is rousing to see a Christian writer lay claim to their God in this way—challenging their religion to do better, and insisting upon critical thought amid ambivalence rather than blind faith—the story can be tedious and pretentious, as during the devil’s lectures, or gratuitously violent and unsettled, as in Michael’s section. Still, Quatro’s characters are beguiling, and Two-Step Devil is often tender, especially during the Prophet’s section. Quatro’s prose ranks among the best Southern writing: “When God looked down at the planet, he was seeing what people saw when they looked up: darkness, with a few brave lights trembling here and there. The darkness was evil and the lights were God’s children staking a claim.” 

Quatro excels at getting the hairs on your arms to stand on end, if not through narrative suspense, then through the radical nature of her narrative aim: taking on the South’s political obsession with following religious guidelines, its dogged insistence on dogmatic good versus evil, which is completely impotent when a person is caught in the throes of actual evil. Without question, Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South, our patron saint of Southern discomfort.

Jamie Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South—our patron saint of Southern discomfort—and her second novel, Two-Step Devil, is a tender and bold interrogation of rigid adherence to Christian rules.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

The Zebra’s Great Escape

Review by Alice Cary

The Zebra’s Great Escape is a delightful, action-filled saga packed into picture book format—which its creators use to their full advantage. Katherine Rundell’s text brims with heart and humorous details, while Sara Ogilvie’s illustrations feature explosions of color that nicely contrast with the black-and-white zebras at the center of this adventure. 

An exuberant girl nicknamed Mink befriends a zebra who suddenly appears one day. “Mink was not usually gentle,” Rundell writes. “She liked doing things fast and wild. But it was with all the gentleness in the world that she reached out and laid a hand on the zebra’s fur.” The zebra, Gabriel, communicates through swirling streams of color, and explains that he needs help finding his parents, who have been kidnapped by an evil “Collector” named Mr. Spit.

Mink discovers that she can also communicate via color with her elderly pet dog, Rainbow (aptly named). He is loath to help “the barcode-horse,” but Mink begs, noting, “Daddy says, when people ask you for help, they’re actually doing a magnificent thing—they’re giving you the chance to change the world for the better!” Rainbow is persuaded, with the help of a small bribe, to send a message to all the animals in the city, and off our heroes go, to confront the evil Collector and free an entire alphabet of animals in dire straits. 

The picture book combines an appealing old-fashioned feel with modern flair, in moments such as when oblivious adults, busy staring at their phones, don’t notice a girl riding a galloping zebra through the streets. Ogilvie’s lively illustrations bring Rundell’s delicious prose to life. Mink is so full of zest that she practically leaps off the page, while the dastardly Mr. Spit resembles Captain Hook with his long, thin mustache, jutting chin and fancy attire. The color orange pervades the book—in Gabriel’s fiery communications, in Mink’s polka-dotted shirt, in the burning rage that surrounds the evil Mr. Spit. It’s nicely offset by numerous pages bathed in blue: cozy bedtime scenes, the animals running to freedom and spirited celebrations at the end.

Don’t miss The Zebra’s Great Escape, a kaleidoscopic celebration of communication and the rewards of helping one another. 

Sara Ogilvie’s lively illustrations bring the spirit of Katherine Rundell’s delicious prose to life in The Zebra’s Great Escape, which features a protagonist so full of zest that she practically leaps off the page.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Review by Thane Tierney

Water. Generally, we don’t give it much of a thought. Unless there’s too little . . . or too much. Then it fills our consciousness, saturating our brains with phrases like “atmospheric rivers” and “glacial retreat,” or such devastatingly commonplace words as “drowning” and “drought.”

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, here on the head of a learned and cruel Assyrian king, there as a snowflake on the tongue of an impoverished British baby, and yet again as a lifesaving elixir in the possession of a Yazidi grandmother driven into exile by the Islamic State group.

In a fabulist twist, the Booker-shortlisted, bestselling author imbues this recurring molecule with a sense of memory. After a particularly disturbing and graphic passage near the book’s opening, Shafak states her case clearly and succinctly: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

The book opens with King Ashurbanipal in the 640s B.C.E.; then the narrative takes a leap of thousands of years and miles, to Victorian era London. There, a young lad born to an itinerant scavenger is crowned “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums.” Modeled on real-life Assyriologist George Smith, Arthur rises above his station to become a scholar who, like Ashurbanipal before him, is enchanted by the Epic of Gilgamesh.

From there, the scene shifts to 2014, by the Tigris river in southeastern Turkey. There, Narin, a young Yazidi girl, is preparing for a journey to Iraq with her grandmother so that she can be baptized in a sacred temple. When the girl questions her elder about why they are being forced from their land, the grandmother recounts a brief history of the Yazidi people, concluding that “For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors.”

Shafak seems to be on a mission to prevent us from forgetting, whether it’s the majesty of ancient Mesopotamia, the horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated upon the Yazidis, or the fragile ecosystem of rivers such as the Tigris and the Thames. Like water itself, There Are Rivers in the Sky seeps into the cracks and crevasses of our humanity, unlocking a sense of wonder.

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
NonfictionMedicineBiography

The Story of a Heart

Review by Jessica Wakeman

On a TV drama, performing a heart transplant is frantic. Nurses race the patient down the halls; the surgeons snap at each other. Maybe the patient’s heart stops before they are brought back to life.

That narrative couldn’t be further from the truth. As told in The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle that Saved a Child’s Life, the process of heart transplantation can require stagnant months or years as patients and their families wait for donor organs; this is especially the case when the patients are children. One in five children in Great Britain and America might die while waiting on the transplant list, reports author and a palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke.

Clarke braids a rigorous scientific and, at times, troubled cultural history of transplant medicine with the often harrowing story of two children: 9-year-olds Keira Ball and Max Johnson. The Story of a Heart starts with a terrible car crash that Keira survived with injuries so severe that the following day, all activity in her brain ceased. But while nearly every other major organ in her body was grievously injured, her heart, miraculously, beat vigorously.

Meanwhile, a mild viral infection caused Max to have dilated cardiomyopathy—a severely  enlarged heart—and his prognosis was grim. A once active child, Max spent a year in bed, his parents aware that at any moment, a cardiac arrest could cut his life short. The day after Keira’s accident, her family removed her from life support. They placed her on a pediatric organ donor list, knowing it’s what the kind, loving little girl would have wanted. And then Keira’s heart gave Max a second chance at life. Clarke shows the psychological calculus that the recipients of transplants make, writing of Max’s parents, “They were equally aware that the only thing that could give Max what he needed to live was the death, appallingly, of someone else’s child.”

Clarke’s reportage of minor characters, like a junior doctor who happened to be driving on the same highway when Keira’s family had their car accident, also personalize the story. And not surprisingly, the narrative about Keira and Max’s families, and the team of professionals caring for them all, is very touching. Clarke never strips Keira of her humanity; the story of her heart, and her life, continues to help others in this informative, important book.

Rachel Clarke’s powerful The Story of a Heart braids the true story of a pediatric organ transplant with a rigorous history of transplant science.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Volcano Daughters

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Gina Maria Balibrera’s debut novel, The Volcano Daughters, offers the epic early 20th-century tale of sisters Graciela and Consuelo, born into poverty and servitude on a coffee finca (plantation) on the side of a volcano in El Salvador.

In 1923, Graciela and her mother, Socorrito, are summoned to San Salvador for the funeral of the father that Graciela never knew: a peasant who rose to become the advisor to El Gran Pendejo, the strongman ruling El Salvador. There Graciela meets her sister, Consuelo, who was taken from the finca as a 4-year-old, and lives in luxury with her adoptive mother, Perlita. Soon, Graciela learns that El Gran Pendejo intends for her to advise him as her father did, though she’s only 9. Every morning Graciela is driven to the presidential palace, where she listens to the nonsense El Gran Pendejo spouts, repeating it back to him. Meanwhile, the teenage Consuelo, who failed at the same job, stays busy falling in love with her young art teacher.

That’s only the beginning of The Volcano Daughters, which spans 30 years and multiple settings, including Paris, San Francisco and Hollywood. As El Gran Pendejo’s pronouncements grow more bizarre, he lands on the idea of killing the country’s Indigenous people, who he claims are communists. The massacre that follows separates Graciela and Consuelo, as each flees the country thinking the other dead.

The Volcano Daughters is also a ghost story, as the ghosts of Graciela’s and Consuelo’s best friends from the finca—Lourdes, Maria, Cora and Lucia—share the novel’s first person-plural narration, sometimes disappearing into the story, other times butting in with commentary. 

Because The Volcano Daughters covers so much ground (both literally and narratively), and has a large cast of characters, including the ghost narrators, parts of the story slip by almost too quickly for the reader to connect with them emotionally. Still, Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances.

With its depictions of the 1930s Hollywood scene and Paris art world, and its imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history, The Volcano Daughters stands out. 

Gina María Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances, an imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history.
NonfictionMemoir

The Slow Road North

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Rosie Schaap lost her husband to cancer at 42. Her mother died a year later, followed by her ancient, beloved cat. Awash in grief, Schaap needed a place to mourn. She would find it in Northern Ireland, a country still recovering from decades of sectarian strife known as the “troubles.” The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country is a magnificent love letter to a region that brought her back to life.

Glenarm is a small village in County Antrim, along Northern Ireland’s northeastern coast. On a travel writing assignment in 2016, Schaap stayed at the Barbican, “the fairy-tale castle folly at the entrance of Glenarm Castle.” A forest and a seashore, a few small shops, two pubs and a grocery store: She fell in love. “It had a feeling, a spirit, a strong sense of place to which I succumbed. I knew I would be back. And I had a feeling that someday I would stay much longer.”

After her various griefs at age 47, the Drinking With Men author enrolled in a creative writing program at a Belfast college. Her studies soon expanded beyond the classroom as she took in the history of her village and the people there, and the stories of those still being mourned from the troubles. The Irish are excellent at death, she learned. Strangers became friends and empathetic listeners. She could pour her grief out to them and they understood everything.

As idyllic as it all seemed, Schaap was not so much entranced as curious—and cautious. To be asked “What are you?” still meant “Protestant or Catholic?” Her being Jewish confounded them, just as they sometimes did her. A “reticence” she often encountered on the subject of the troubles, was, she believed, “a reflection of the trauma those years inflicted upon the people here . . . too sensitive and painful to discuss, too unhappy to recollect at will.”

Schaap nicely balances lush descriptions of the Irish countryside with sharp observations and wit, as she sheds her old city life and finds a home to tend to her grief. The Slow Road North is a winning memoir about loss and life.

 

The Slow Road North is Rosie Schaap's magnificent love letter to Northern Ireland, the region that offered her solace and community while she was reeling from grief.
NonfictionHistory

The Stalin Affair

Review by Roger Bishop

In the summer of 1941, Germany broke its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and invaded the Soviet frontier. Joseph Stalin was stunned and unprepared, and his army suffered many casualties. Hitler’s about-face was good news for Great Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. Now, Germany’s forces would be split, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union had a common enemy. 

Only four months prior, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed to aid Great Britain and appointed millionaire businessman Averell Harriman to be his personal liaison to Churchill. As bestselling historian Giles Milton describes in his vivid portrayal of high-stakes diplomacy and personal relations during World War II, The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War, this invitation “would lay the foundations of a remarkable, if bizarre, three-power wartime alliance.”

Soon after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet ambassador presented a formal request to the U.S. government for $2 billion in guns, ammunition and aircraft. Once the decision was made to help the tyrannical government, with whom the U.S. strongly disagreed on almost everything, Harriman soon found his mission expanded. He worked closely with Churchill and Stalin, coordinating the ordering and shipping of military supplies. He was also FDR’s eyes and ears, reporting back the goings-on of political leaders. Harriman’s astute judgment of Stalin, as a leader suspicious of everyone and focused on dominating all the territories “liberated” by his army, would prove critical. Milton writes that “Averell had helped to manage a complex relationship between three leaders with widely different backgrounds, approaches, and goals,” often assuaging Stalin’s fears of betrayal to keep the alliance on course. 

In addition to relying on a vast archive of official records of events, Milton also uses accounts written by some of the less prominent observers of this political alliance, which brings a sense of immersion and immediacy to The Stalin Affair. Among the previously unpublished sources are letters from Harriman’s daughter, Kathy, who accompanied her father and worked as a news service reporter. Her many letters to family and friends give us a special window into events. 

Milton’s outstanding writing and research make The Stalin Affair an authoritative and lively account that shows how despite tensions, strong egos and different approaches to leadership, these unlikely partners worked together to end the war. 

The Stalin Affair is an authoritative and lively account of the unlikely World War II alliance among the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

The Phantom Patrol

Review by Alice Cary

“I didn’t know anything about Gustav Klimt except that he liked naked ladies,” notes Billy Boyle, the narrator of The Phantom Patrol, the 19th entry in James R. Benn’s series of action-packed World War II mysteries. Billy has become involved with efforts to return the priceless sketch, a study for Klimt’s painting Water Serpents II, to its rightful owner after it was appropriated from a Jewish family in Vienna. 

Billy, a former Boston cop, is a detective on the staff of his “Uncle Ike”—none other than the famed General Eisenhower. Billy’s “older cousin of some sort” makes a brief appearance, commenting, “even a fella from Abilene can appreciate fine artwork.” (Newcomers to the series can easily jump in; Benn succinctly fills readers in with relevant bits of backstory.) Billy’s also trying to track down a violent network of Nazi art smugglers, and it turns out even bigger trouble is brewing: It’s the winter of 1944 and France has been liberated, so these thugs have little to lose. Just a few pages in, the bullets start to fly and the bodies begin to fall in Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Billy eventually finds himself in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, traipsing through snow and cut off from communications. 

Benn excels at making history work in his favor. For instance, he includes J.D. Salinger and actor David Niven as fairly major characters—both of whom did indeed serve during WWII. Benn nimbly traverses between moments of absolute horror (the scene of a murdered family at their farmhouse, and the massacre of American GIs) to numerous lighthearted moments, understanding how desperately they were needed for those who endured war’s horrors. Niven, for instance, comments about a German posing as an American: “I should have known . . . The chap never asked for an autograph.” 

Fans of The Monuments Men and The Curse of Pietro Houdini will relish The Phantom Patrol, and newcomers to Billy Boyle’s investigations will be immediately intrigued and ready for more. The book’s art-related plot will appeal to a wide variety of readers, as will Benn’s snappy but detail-rich prose. History buffs, military enthusiasts, art lovers and thrill-seekers alike will all be enthralled with this enticing blend of high-stakes action and old-fashioned detective work.

Billy Boyle breaks up a Nazi art smuggling ring in James R. Benn’s enthralling The Phantom Patrol, which will delight history buffs, art lovers and thrill-seekers alike.
RomanceContemporary Romance

The Royals Upstairs

Review by Dolly R. Sickles

Karina Halle’s latest royal rom-com, The Royals Upstairs, takes place at the historic and lovely Skaugum Estate, a remote retreat in the Norwegian countryside where two former lovers reignite their affair.

James Hunter is the Norwegian royal family’s new personal protection officer. He’s an experienced, regimented man with a penchant for suits and a preference for being on the go in the buzz of a big city. He meets the surprise news that, instead of jet-setting around the world, he’ll be stuck at an isolated manor on the outskirts of Oslo with . . . the opposite of enthusiastic revelry. To make matters worse, when James arrives he learns that the former love of his life, Laila Bruset, is the family’s nanny.

Laila loves her work, even though her hands are very full with Bjorn and Tor, the two unruly, wild young Norwegian princes. She’s got a spine of steel and a heart full of determination, but even her quiet strength falters with the arrival of James. When they were together, he abruptly ended things, flooding her with feelings of rejection and unworthiness that she has no intention of revisiting.

Both James and Laila have experienced tragedies and loss that make them hesitant to take a leap of faith, but time and maturity offer a new lens through which to consider their potential. Besides, what else is there to do on their days off out in the boondocks? As readers, we have the advantage of perspective: Knowing the sad circumstances of James’ and Leila’s pasts lets us understand their hesitation better than they do. In their crowded worlds of constant spotlight and care for their charges, both are remarkably alone. They see each other, though, and can be themselves together—and being at odds is more painful than the circumstances that drew them apart. The romance here is a slow burn, and the characters often put themselves through more misery than is warranted, but in the end, The Royals Upstairs is a transportive pleasure for us commoners.

Karina Halle’s The Royals Upstairs is a transportive pleasure for us commoners.
FictionPopular Fiction

The Life Impossible

Review by Matthew Jackson

In his bestselling 2020 novel, The Midnight Library, Matt Haig told the story of a woman, who, after deciding to end her life, finds herself transported to a new metaphysical plane in the form of a magical library. With his new book, Haig sticks to our ordinary world and makes it magical, which makes The Life Impossible an instantly engrossing, page-turning delight.

The Life Impossible begins with an email, a very ordinary thing, from a former student to retired math teacher Grace Winters. The student, now studying math at a university, shares his grief and despair, and Grace responds with kindness, then sets out to soothe the student’s aching soul by telling the story of a life-changing experience that recently happened to her. Her story, attached to the email as a manuscript, forms the rest of the novel.

A widow living a quiet life in England, Grace is surprised to receive word that a friend she hasn’t spoken to in decades has bequeathed her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Intrigued by the mystery of this gift, Grace heads to Ibiza to unravel the saga of how she came to be left the house, and to learn how her old friend died.

What she finds when she arrives is something much more complex than the unexpected inheritance. Grace, it seems, has been chosen for something that her rational math teacher’s mind struggles to understand, let alone embrace. As she draws closer to the secrets of her friend’s life, she comes to realize that Ibiza could change her own life, not just through its natural beauty and charming, energetic residents, but through a supernatural power.

Grace narrates the action not like a novelist, but like a human searching for meaning in the strangeness of her reality. Haig’s attention to detail and pacing never flags, and neither does his commitment to Grace’s voice, which is resonant with her insecurities, fears and confusion over what’s happening to her. This remarkable balance allows Haig to insert humor, heart and a kind of palpable power into the narrative, and it works extremely well. 

Even beyond the novel’s structural charms, of which there are many, The Life Impossible succeeds because of Haig’s ability to treat Grace’s journey not as a straight line, but as a vibrant interconnected web. As in our own lives, things that happened to Grace as a much younger woman ripple down through the decades, with often unexpected bearings on her present and the future she seeks. Though it deploys familiar fantastic elements, this is a book that refuses oversimplification through genre: It’s part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self. Like the bright, yearning human being at its center, it pulses with life, which makes it well worth reading for anyone who wants a hopeful, warm, very human journey that crackles with magic.

Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible is part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one's self, and that makes it well worth reading for anyone seeking a hopeful, warm journey that crackles with magic.
Mystery & SuspenseHistorical Mystery

The Mesmerist

Review by Alice Cary

At one point near the end of Caroline Woods’ lively historical thriller, The Mesmerist, a truly clueless, chauvinistic detective working a murder case announces, “I hardly need the advice of a couple of nosy old crones.” Unbeknownst to him, however, the women he has insulted have already solved the puzzle, and are busy meting out their own form of justice. Set in Minneapolis in 1894, the novel offers a Dickensian plot and cast of characters, prose rife with Victorian details and atmosphere, and even a ghost story, as it exposes the lack of autonomy many women dealt with during the era.

As in her previous novels, The Lunar Housewife (about CIA intervention in 1950s arts and letters) and Fraulein M. (set in 1930s Berlin), Woods transforms real-life aspects of history into an intricately plotted mystery. Her well-drawn, intriguing setting is the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, which Woods notes in her author’s note was “surprisingly progressive for its time, respectful and relatively compassionate toward not only unwed mothers, but also madams and ‘sporting women.’ ” Several of these real women appear as characters alongside Woods’ fictitious young residents who live in the institution.

Among the fictional heroines is May, a 24-year-old who is trying to chisel a respectable life for herself while her child is being raised by her brother and sister-in-law in Chicago. May becomes roommates with a new arrival at Bethany House, a mysterious, seemingly mute, pregnant young woman who goes by the name of Faith. The other residents fear that Faith is a mesmerist— someone able to hypnotize others—an ability that was much discussed at the time given the en vogue spiritualism movement. 

Faith and May gradually form an alliance, only to discover a dangerous web of lies surrounding both Faith’s origins and, increasingly, Bethany House itself. As May delves deeper, this amateur detective finds herself in the midst of plenty of action, including stranglings, gunfire and dripping blood.

Woods nicely develops relationships among her characters while ably illustrating the plight of Bethany House’s inhabitants. The Mesmerist does an admirable job of transforming history into mystery, championing the rights of women and illustrating how many of these same battles continue to be fought today.

Caroline Woods exposes the plight of Victorian women and transforms history into an intricately plotted mystery in The Mesmerist.

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