All Reviews

Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Darkly

Review by Mariel Fechik

Seventeen-year-old Arcadia “Dia” Gannon lives in Eminence, Missouri, where she gathers cobwebs much like the objects lining the walls of her family’s shop, Prologue Antiques. Then she finds a cryptic online posting for a summer internship at a foundation named for her hero, the late, legendary British game designer Louisiana Veda. Through her company, Darkly, Veda created complex board games, infamous for their macabre conceits and immersive gameplay. 

Despite Dia’s excitement, something feels off about the internship. Veda’s life and death were shrouded in mystery, controversy and conspiracy, and what Dia knows about Veda and Darkly does not square with the posting’s vague descriptions of “clerical work.” Still, Dia feels pulled toward a larger purpose, so she applies and wins one of the coveted spots.

Dia and six others from all over the world arrive in London with no idea what to expect, but Dia soon learns that her instincts were correct: The internship is not what it appears. Soon, she and her fellow interns are in mortal danger. To survive, they must immerse themselves in Veda’s long-buried secrets amid the company’s jagged remains—and the only way out is to play.

Marisha Pessl’s second young adult novel, Darkly, is a twisty, dreamlike puzzlebox thriller. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reflected in a horrifying funhouse mirror, Pessl’s gothic narrative is slyly referential, replete with plump German boys and chases down dark streets. Pessl’s signature surrealism, honed in adult bestsellers like Night Film, is on full display here: The further the characters’ journey descends into unreality, the more delightfully disorienting the reading experience becomes. 

Unfortunately, the novel’s characters suffer from underdevelopment. Darkly is ambitious in scope, but even its 416 pages are not enough to fill out the seven interns beyond the bare outlines of personhood, which may frustrate fans of character-driven thrillers. However, Darkly’s central mystery is tantalizing; it’s sure to entice readers who love a puzzle and will reward their efforts with a delicious twist.

Darkly’s central mystery is tantalizing; it’s sure to entice readers who love a puzzle and will reward their efforts with a delicious twist.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Clever Little Thing

Review by Elyse Discher

There are so many plot twists in Hannah Echlin’s Clever Little Thing that it’s impossible for a synopsis to truly do the story justice—this book will genuinely keep readers guessing, wondering what is a mother’s intuition and what could be perinatal psychosis.

Charlotte knows that her 8-year-old daughter Stella isn’t like other children. Stella can’t stand certain sounds, has sensory issues with tight-fitting or scratchy clothes, and goes into an apocalyptic tantrum Charlotte calls “freak-out mode” when she’s overstimulated. But Stella is also reading vastly above her grade level, and is curious about the world in a way that makes her precocious and unique.

But after Stella’s babysitter, Blanka, quits her job with a vague text message, things begin to change. Charlotte notices her daughter accepts change more readily and even begins to change physically, gaining weight rapidly. Alarmingly, Stella also seems to be regressing in her reading skills and her once avid curiosity is gone.

Teachers, counselors and even Charlotte’s husband, Pete, assure her that Stella is merely changing as she grows, and that she should be happy her daughter is turning into a more typical child. Charlotte isn’t so sure: To her, Stella is an entirely different child, almost like a changeling. As Stella continues to evolve, Charlotte begins to feel like she’s the only one who can see the truth about her daughter. However, she’s also in the midst of a high-risk pregnancy, a situation that others seem to think may be the true source of her anxiety.

The book is entirely narrated from Charlotte’s point of view, and her rising sense of panic and the “wrongness” about her daughter is acutely palpable. Still, Echlin keeps the reader removed enough that they’ll begin to wonder if the pressures of motherhood to a challenging child (Pete is a rather absent father) and a difficult pregnancy are clouding Charlotte’s judgment.

Clever Little Thing is an impressively twisty thriller, but it’s also a testament to a mother’s intuition and her love for her child exactly as she is, not as society wants her to be. Sometimes spooky, sometimes rage-inducing, Clever Little Thing concludes with a truly unexpected, impossible to predict ending.

Clever Little Thing is an impressively twisty thriller, but it’s also a testament to a mother’s intuition and love for her child.
Children's & YAMiddle GradeChildren's

Cassi and the House of Memories

Review by Alice Cary

Dean Stuart makes a stellar debut with Cassi and the House of Memories, a graphic novel about a girl whose beloved grandfather suffers from dementia. It’s not only a sensitive, informative portrayal of how the disease might affect a loved one—especially for young people—but it’s also an exciting adventure story.

Cassi and her grandfather enjoy time together in his garden, but she is puzzled by some of his behaviors, especially when he suddenly doesn’t seem to recognize her. He confesses, “Sometimes I find myself in the dark” and “alone and confused.” Cassi’s grandmother further explains the situation with a helpful visual demonstration that compares falling dominoes to memories, adding, “Sometimes Grandpa goes to places that are familiar only to him. We can’t see them, but they are very real inside his head.” Cassi’s exuberant personality and Stuart’s dynamic illustrations keep things lively, even during these contemplative moments.

When her grandfather wanders off, Cassi begins to search but suddenly finds herself in a mysterious place, which turns out to be what Grandpa calls “his memory palace.” Cassi finds herself rambling through Escher-like structures of stairways, windows, and doors, and also a huge portrait gallery that allows Cassi access to events from her grandfather’s life. When certain scenes disintegrate, Cassi notes, “This must be his memory falling apart!”

Stuart’s distinctive illustrations are painterly in the very best way—distinct from the comic-book styles found in many other middle grade graphic novels—and full of both action and beauty. He cleverly distinguishes between the present, Grandpa’s memories and the haze of confusion that sometimes overtakes Grandpa’s brain.  Stuart’s use of color and pattern is particularly adept. Many colors that should be bright are muted throughout, accentuating the book’s exploration of fading memory. Cassi’s striped dress helps readers keep track of her in each scene, as does the red sweater Grandpa wears in his old age. Throughout, an elusive, colorful blue butterfly helps steer Cassi through the chaos. In an afterword, Stuart explains that his own father suffered from dementia, and that his goal with Cassi and the House of Memories “was to make a story about connecting.” Cassi learns to appreciate the many dreams, disappointments and events of her grandfather’s life—aspects such as his musical talent—and even manages to alter a past tragedy during an action-packed circus episode. Cassi and the House of Memories is a moving depiction of a grandparent and grandchild’s enduring love and continued understanding in the face of dementia.

Cassi and the House of Memories is a moving depiction of a grandparent and grandchild’s enduring love and continued understanding in the face of dementia.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

A Curse for the Homesick

Review by Jessica Peng

Tess is an engineer. A good swimmer. A young woman with a life in California, sunshine and Silicon Valley. When she’s asked to return to her home island of Stenland, a “small rock between Scotland and the Arctic,” for her childhood best friend Linnea’s wedding, she assumes it will be no more than a blip in her schedule. A couple of days of PTO. 

But as A Curse for the Homesick unspools, it’s obvious Tess has unresolved history with Stenland. Years ago, she left behind her great love, Soren, among the Stennish caves and sheep pastures. Soren, with whom she’d felt the most like herself, to whom she’d devoted her most formative years. Soren, who before everything else, was a reminder of why she needed to leave. In a swish of magic reminiscent of Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, the island of Stenland is cursed. Every so often, and without warning, a few Stennish women are marked with three black lines across their foreheads, becoming “skelds.” For the month the lines remain, anyone who makes eye contact with a skeld will turn to stone. Soren and Tess have been inextricably bound since their elementary school days, when Tess’ mother turned Soren’s parents to stone during her skeld season. Growing up in the dark shadow of the curse, of how it killed, Tess was adamant to never be a skeld, to never stay. When she fell for Soren, who loves Stenland, she knew it was star-crossed. 

But once she’s back on the island for Linnea’s wedding, Tess and Soren meet again. A Curse for the Homesick is above all a second-chance romance, and author Laura Brooke Robson does a phenomenal job mixing flashbacks with scenes in the present, following Tess’ journey from a young girl into adulthood. We see her with Soren, but also with her dear friends Linnea and Kitty. We watch her navigate what it means to grow up, to grow into or out of a place, to choose between escaping and accepting a complicated past. Robson writes with simple elegance, and her book is not only a devoted character study, it is a love letter to her gorgeous fictional setting of Stenland: the wind, the cairns, the old towers; the ice cream spot and Hedda’s, the only coffee shop; the concrete swimming pool and the claustrophobia of a small town. This grounded, moving novel is a perfect rainy day read and an ode to what it is to be human—to desire and gain, to desire and lose, to find again.

Laura Brooke Robson’s debut fantasy romance is both second-chance love story and devoted character study, all written with simple elegance.
Audio

Master of Me

Review by Tami Orendain

Actress, musician and award-winning performer Keke Palmer dives deep into art, media and owning your life’s direction in Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative (6 hours). Palmer uses personal stories and excerpts from her podcast to reflect on creativity and self worth, and to investigate what it takes to live a full, meaningful life.

Narrated by Palmer herself, Master of Me is a highly vulnerable audiobook. She brings listeners deep into her thoughts as she navigates the ups and downs not only of being a performer, but also of creating relationships and becoming a mother to her son. She’s not afraid to delve into serious topics, like child abuse and trauma, using honesty about tough issues to share universally relatable, poignant wisdom. Palmer narrates with her signature dynamic tone, achieving humor, gravity and sarcasm, sometimes all within the same chapter. With Master of Me, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll walk away inspired to take charge of your own life.

With Keke Palmer’s intimate Master of Me, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll walk away inspired to take charge of your own life.
NonfictionSocial Science

You Didn’t Hear This From Me

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip isn’t a volume of titillating tales. Rather, in this well-researched, passionate ode to shared storytelling, the journalist and author of novel God Spare the Girls (2021) interrogates the concept of gossip, examines its place in popular culture, and reflects on its role in her own life.

Rather, in this well-researched, passionate ode to shared storytelling, the journalist and author of the novel God Spare the Girls interrogates the concept of gossip, examines its place in popular culture and reflects on its role in her own life.

McKinney traces her gossip origin story back to her childhood in the evangelical Christian faith, which considers gossip “unequivocally, absolutely an affront against God, closer to murder or adultery than dancing.” Now, having left the church, she asserts, “It is certainly true that gossip is not helpful if your goal is to maintain the status quo and keep the peace, but those are two things Jesus Himself was very uninterested in doing.” Especially, she realized, when “the codifying of gossip as a sin could be used as a shield for misbehaving men in power to subjugate women in their congregations.”

The theme of gossip as liberation echoes throughout You Didn’t Hear This From Me, as does its ability to inform and, often, prevent harm, create community and help us better understand ourselves. McKinney adeptly leads readers through in-depth consideration of everything from the epic of Gilgamesh to Gossip Girl, saucy Doja Cat lyrics and Françoise Gilot’s Life With Picasso, analyzing gossip-adjacent phenomena like urban legends, conspiracy theories and whisper networks along the way.

McKinney’s fans are sure to be just as obsessed with You Didn’t Hear This From Me as they are with the “Normal Gossip” podcast she created and hosted for three years, wherein she and guests reveled in anonymous listener-submitted juicy stories. (Launched in 2022, the pod has 10 million listens and counting; in December 2024, McKinney handed the reins to a new host.) Her voice is smart and funny, and her arguments for considering gossip valuable and meaningful are compelling and clearly heartfelt. There’s no longer any shame in her game, either; she is “professionally nosy,” and beckons readers to join her in viewing gossip with a more appreciative eye—perhaps luxuriating in “the joy of snooping” while they’re at it.

The host of the “Normal Gossip” podcast, Kelsey McKinney, investigates gossip with an appreciative eye in her winning ode to snooping, You Didn’t Hear This From Me.
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.
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Waiting for the Long Night Moon

Review by Cat Acree

Amanda Peters’ bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers (2023), which received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is a story of significant tragedy, about Indigenous family separation in Nova Scotia. Similar abuses appear throughout Peters’ book of short stories, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which opens with a dedication “to all those who have shared their stories and planted the seed of imagination.” 

The 17 stories that follow are, for the most part, seeds. Many were practice exercises while Peters was working toward The Berry Pickers, and she had no intention of collecting them into a book. Because of their origins, some are little more than fables to be told around a fire, with guidance passed down from matriarchs, and simple axioms like town is a bad place, forest is good. Other stories explore plot elements, like how to deliver a shock of horror: a water cannon used by American government forces to assault the bodies of Standing Rock protesters; a girl’s tongue pierced with a steel pin at a Christian residential school; women jumping to their deaths or being murdered in the woods.

All of Peters’ first-person narrators speak similarly, as if each voice—no matter the age, era or gender—were the same storyteller. But despite this, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world. Read individually, a few stories stand on their own. “The Virgin and the Bear” is a stunning piece about a woman learning her grandmother’s tragic history while placing it within the context of other genocides. The titular story is tender, lyrical and lovely, with forest scenes so lush that you can feel the earth underfoot, and the sharp pain of memory as an older man recalls his late sister. And the Dakota Access Pipeline story, “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” is the freshest premise in the collection, following a young woman who heals her grief through resistance.

When it comes to contemporary Native fiction, the majority of readers—and likewise, the publishing industry—still focus on stories that whittle down the history and present life of American Indigenous people to colonization and trauma. As Terria Smith, editor of Heyday’s News From Native California, wrote in Publishers Weekly in 2023, “There is a real possibility that a lot of our own literature is unwittingly perpetuating the narrative that tribal people are tragic, but there is much more to us than this.” Peters’ best stories probe the possibility of venturing beyond those tropes.

In these 17 stories from Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world.
FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

We All Live Here

Review by Arlene McKanic

Lately, a good deal of attention has been given to women who are in what’s called the “sandwich generation.” These are women who’ve taken on, or been given, the responsibility of caring for their elders even as they still have children to raise. In the case of Lila Kennedy, the protagonist of Jojo Moyes’ We All Live Here, this sandwich is a muffuletta. Everything is in it.

Lila, the British, 40ish writer of a bestselling self-help book, can’t be said to have a bad life, but when we meet her she’s having a series of bad days. Her stepfather, the overly fastidious but devoted Bill, has pretty much moved into her home. Her ex-husband, Dan, has moved out and is now shacking up with his girlfriend, Marja. Lila discovers by accident that Marja is pregnant, even though Dan said he didn’t want any more kids—at least not with Lila. The kids, by the way, are stroppy 16-year-old Celie and confident 8-year-old Violet. Truant, the dog, bites people. Lila has the feels for Jensen, Bill’s gardener. On top of all this, Lila is imposed on by Gene, her dad, a bombastic has-been American actor who abandoned her and her lovely, bubbly mother when Lila was a child. Her mother who died, hit by a bus. 

Moyes, the author of Me Before You, Someone Else’s Shoes and Paris for One, deeply understands the tribulations of women like Lila, who have a roof over their head, a garden out back that needs renovating and a bit of money even though their exes aren’t paying their fair share of child support. It’s easy to dismiss these women as privileged and clueless about what real hard times look like, but Moyes knows we all live in an entropic universe and things fall apart even in the cushiest life. It’s not a coincidence that nearly everyone in the family ends up at Violet’s school to watch a rather alternative production of Peter Pan. Growing up is not for the faint of heart, says this wise, funny and compassionate book.

Jojo Moyes, the author of We All Live Here, deeply understands the tribulations of women like Lila Kennedy, who have taken on the responsibility of caring for their elders even as they still have children to raise.
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.
Science Fiction & FantasyHorror

Victorian Psycho

Review by Matthew Jackson

A considerable wave of hype has grown around Victorian Psycho. Well before it hit bookstore shelves, Virginia Feito’s follow-up to her hit debut (Mrs. March) was set to be adapted into a Hollywood film starring Thomasin McKenzie and Margaret Qualley, cementing it as a horror story we’ll be discussing for quite some time.

And, happily, there’s good reason to keep talking about Victorian Psycho, well beyond a movie deal. Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Feito’s novel is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities, and one of 2025’s must-read genre releases.

The “psycho” of the title is Winnifred Notty, a young woman who’s taken a post as a governess in a stuffy, shadowy old manor house in Yorkshire, a setting full of all the requisite repression and strange fascinations of the Victorian era. As Winnifred narrates the story with a mixture of black-hearted wit and misanthropic glee, we learn that she has plenty of strange fascinations of her own, many of them springing from an unhappy childhood that taught her to survive and to make her own rules. Now, with Christmas fast approaching, Winnifred’s way of life is about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting Pounds family, and no one is safe.

Fittingly, Winnifred’s voice is the star of this particular show. Feito draws on her novel’s namesake, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, when it comes to portraying Winnifred’s inner turmoil, and blends that with the polished Victorian intricacy of writers like Henry James and Charles Dickens. We learn about the jealousy and rage inherent in Mrs. Pounds; the lecherous curiosity of Mr. Pounds; Winnifred’s young charges, Andrew and Drusilla, who are tiny monstrosities in their own right; and, of course, the darker side of the servants stationed throughout the labyrinthine home. Through Winnifred’s eyes, we see all of these elements quickly stacking together, a delicate house of cards primed not merely to tumble, but to burst into flame.

At just 200 pages, Victorian Psycho is lean, lithe and clear in its purpose and its violent delights. It’s a book you can easily finish in a single sitting, yet Feito’s prose is so dense with meaning and subtlety that you may just pick it right back up again. The novel whistles along at a breakneck pace but also immerses you deeply in everything, from the tapestries adorning the house’s walls to the joys of Victorian mummy unwrappings. You won’t want to leave Winnifred’s dark world.

Perfect for fans of CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw alike, Victorian Psycho is one of those books you won’t just read. You’ll get lost in it, and you’ll be delighted by what you find in its sardonic embrace.

Sleek, deadly and paced like a runaway train, Victorian Psycho is an absolutely delectable mashup of horror sensibilities.
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.

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