Yara is a young wife, mother of two girls, a teacher and graphic designer at a North Carolina college, and one day she comes to a startling conclusion: “Everything in her life had been a succession of things that she hadn’t really wanted to do.” Following her bestselling 2019 debut, A Woman Is No Man, Etaf Rum returns with an introspective second novel, Evil Eye. Both books tell universally appealing, tightly focused stories about Palestinian American women and explore multigenerational issues of inherited trauma, misogyny, the difficulty of balancing career and motherhood, and what makes a fulfilling marriage and a well-lived life.
The daughter of extraordinarily protective Palestinian immigrants, Yara had a sheltered childhood in Brooklyn and often watched longingly through a window as her brothers were allowed to do whatever they pleased. Now, living in a North Carolina college town with her workaholic husband, Yara realizes she still doesn’t have the freedom she has long craved—to travel, be creative and shape her own life. In the art class that she teaches, she bristles at expectations to “center whiteness as the custodian of high art.” No, Yara thinks, “she had not worked this hard over the years—rushing through her degrees while raising two kids and maintaining a home and standing up to her mother-in-law and trying to succeed in a world that did not value her contributions—so she could stand in front of a classroom and perpetrate the very injustices that had colored her entire life.”
Yara is a volcano waiting to explode, and she finally does, calling out a colleague on their racism in an incredibly well-told scene. There’s immediate fallout, with Yara put on probation and assigned to receive therapy. Rum excels at writing internal dialogue and keeping readers immersed in Yara’s fight for freedom, friendship and, ultimately, a purpose in life. Though resistant to her forced therapy, Yara eventually begins journaling at her therapist’s suggestion, and she finds herself carefully examining not only her life but that of her mother and beloved grandmother, Teti, giving readers an intriguing glimpse of how trauma, aspirations and cultural expectations have shaped each woman, and how political events have ongoing personal ramifications for legions of Palestinian and Palestinian American families.
Rum’s observations about the intersections of Arab and Southern traditions and their similarities in art, history, media and food are particularly strong. Yara gradually befriends a gay man, Silas, who lends support as she slowly but boldly becomes the person she yearns to be. Just like A Woman Is No Man, Evil Eye has the power to reach readers of all ages and cultures, who will undoubtedly cheer Yara on as she forges a new path.
Just like A Woman Is No Man, Evil Eye has the power to reach readers of all ages and cultures, who will undoubtedly cheer Yara on as she forges a new path.
Certain memoirs are easily devoured, practically in one sitting, leaving the reader breathless. Such is the case with Meg Kissinger’s While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. Like Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, it sheds light on the vise-like grip that mental illness can have on generation after generation. In this case, however, Kissinger—an investigative reporter and a Pulitzer Prize finalist—writes from an insider’s point of view, describing how mental illness ripped her family apart.
Born in 1957, Kissinger spent most of her childhood in Wilmette, Illinois, in a large, rollicking family whose zany anecdotes are at first reminiscent of Cheaper by the Dozen. The many scrapes, mishaps and family tales are entertaining and often poignant, such as Kissinger’s description of how much she enjoyed an eye doctor’s appointment because it afforded a great rarity: one-on-one time with her mom. Kissinger gradually ups the tension, noting that her mother was taking medication “for her dark thoughts” before she was married, and that throughout Kissinger’s childhood, her mother would disappear from time to time for hospitalizations that were neither discussed or explained. Kissinger explains her family’s situation in a nutshell: “Take two alcoholics—one with bipolar and the other with crippling anxiety—and let them have eight kids in twelve years: What could possibly go wrong?”
Plenty, of course. A number of Kissinger’s siblings began having difficulties in high school or college, especially her older sister, Nancy, who, at age 24, shortly after having her stomach pumped for taking too many tranquilizers, slipped out of the house and ended her life in front of a train. Kissinger’s father instructed his family to tell others that Nancy’s death was an accident. Kissinger recalls her devastated and stunned thoughts at the time: “More secrets, more lies, just like when my mother disappeared years earlier. Why couldn’t we just tell the damn truth? By hiding what really happened, we’d not only be dismissing Nancy’s suffering but fortifying the notion that her mental illness was a choice, one that we should all be ashamed of.”
In 1987, Kissinger wrote an essay for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Nancy’s suicide. “Meg needs to tell this story,” her mother told her horrified father. Indeed, she did—especially when, 19 years later, a similar family tragedy happened once again. Kissinger then spent 25 years traveling across the country to explore the state of mental health issues in families like hers.
While You Were Out is a spellbinding account of one woman’s experience living through family trauma and a thoughtful attempt to reckon with the past. Kissinger asks tough questions and freely admits her own regrets while pointing out systemic problems with no easy answers. Her best advice comes from a letter from one of her siblings, a piece of wisdom that became her mantra: Only love and understanding can conquer this disease.
In a thoughtful attempt to reckon with the past, Meg Kissinger delivers a spellbinding account of how mental illness and addiction ripped her family apart.
Etaf Rum barely remembers the exchange, but as a child, she apparently used to jokingly threaten to write a novel about her mother. At least that’s what her sisters tell her, and as the oldest of nine children of Palestinian immigrants living in Brooklyn, Rum no doubt had plenty of family stories to tell. “I was an avid reader,” she says, “and I think that storytelling came to me as second nature.”
Despite these early inclinations, the wild success of Rum’s novel, A Woman Is No Man (2019), is still astounding. For readers, Rum seemed to appear out of nowhere, like a meteor lighting up the sky. “To think that I penned a New York Times bestselling novel with no experience—even talking to you now, it still blows my mind,” Rum says, speaking by phone from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. A Woman Is No Man chronicles several generations of Palestinian American women, all of whom are forced to marry a man of their family’s choosing, live by his and his family’s rules, and undergo verbal and physical abuse—until one young woman finds a way to break the cycle.
“Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”
“I thought I was writing a story for underrepresented Arab women,” Rum says, “[but] the story has touched women across cultures. The universality of the message has stunned me. Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”
These readers have been eagerly awaiting Rum’s second novel, Evil Eye, which begins with mention of a family curse. Protagonist Yara’s grandmother peers into leftover Turkish coffee grounds to read the fortune of her daughter, Meriem, who is about to marry and immigrate to the United States. The novel then flashes forward several decades, to when Yara is experiencing serious job trouble while teaching at a North Carolina college, and Meriem suggests that this predicament is a continuation of the old curse. It’s an opening scene reminiscent of Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, and it sets the stage for the way fear, curses and superstition permeate Yara’s story.
“Fear that something bad will happen, that you have to worry about someone or something robbing you of that goodness—it’s such a human trait,” Rum says, noting that this is the root of habits like knocking on wood or hanging an evil eye at an entrance. On a recent trip to Greece, she was amazed by the number of evil eyes she saw. “When I say they were everywhere,” she says, “I mean everywhere. Like every store. I thought it was an Arab thing, but I think the Greeks have definitely won this one.”
“Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma.”
In many ways, Evil Eye is a continuation of A Woman Is No Man, although the writing processes were vastly different. The plot of Rum’s debut came “in a flash” as a result of processing “repressed emotions” with therapy and journaling. “Instantaneously, overnight it seemed, I wanted to write a novel,” she says. “I had this urge to write about the Arab American experience, or at least one aspect of it. I drew very heavily on my own upbringing and my own experiences as a Palestinian woman. I had to capture these feelings and maybe make someone feel seen.”
Not only did Rum write quickly, but the novel was also published quickly, making the whole experience feel like a “miracle” and leaving her with a startling revelation: “Up until that point, I was living a life that I thought was of my own choosing, but really wasn’t,” she says. “I think I went through a sort of awakening. I found my voice, and I found out who I was.” As a result, she ended up divorcing her husband, much to her family’s shock and dismay. “I cannot want courage and freedom and bravery for these characters and yet, in my own life, be living in this sort of denial,” she says.
There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.
Ironically, Rum did not want her second novel to be autobiographical, but she soon realized, “I’m a sheltered artist who grew up in a sheltered world, so I can’t escape the fact that some of the novel is autobiographical.” Like Yara, Rum grew up with highly protective parents and was given none of the freedoms that the men in her family enjoyed.
“Their future is so uncertain,” she says of her Palestinian family. “And even though they live in America, that trauma is still there for my mom and dad; it’s present with them every day. They conduct their life out of fear and wanting to protect their family. Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma. That feeling of displacement—it’s even more than that, because it’s almost as if you’re actually displaced from your own body. You’re constantly running, you’re constantly searching, you’re constantly trying to improve. And I think that’s inherited and acquired. Even now, as a mother of my own kids, I sometimes catch myself and say, ‘Relax. No one’s coming to hurt you or to take away your home.’ But how do you relax when you’re raised on fear?”
In Evil Eye, the author notes similarities between Arab culture and life in the American South, “a place [Yara knows] about only from her favorite southern writers: Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. From their books she’d gathered that southern culture was not so unlike her own: full of loud and large close-knit families where women married young and had many children, focused on conservative values with an emphasis on religion or tradition, with an adherence to recipes that were passed down through generations. Even the obsession with tea at every possible social gathering—though southerners preferred it iced while Arabs served it boiling—felt like a point of connection. The similarities filled her with both comfort and dread.” Indeed, a simmering culture clash becomes a flashpoint in the novel when a colleague makes an offensive remark, causing Yara to explode in a way that has serious career consequences.
While depicting her culture in fiction, Rum remains wary of perpetuating stereotypes, especially because there are so few American writers of Arab or Palestinian descent. “Unfortunately, my stories are very dark, and that just happens to coincide with the world I come from. I’m sure there are many Palestinian communities and families that do not live in such a stereotypical world. I wish I could write about those worlds, but I’m not there yet.”
After initially feeling like an outsider when she moved to North Carolina, Rum has now established a robust sense of community. She has remarried, and she and her husband own both a pizza shop and a coffee shop called Books and Beans. “Now I feel like this place is home,” she says. As for her next project, she’s ready for a change of pace and is considering a screenplay or a children’s book. “There are a lot of ideas popping up in my head,” she says, “but I think that the literary adult trauma novels are for now complete.”
Bestselling Palestinian American author Etaf Rum was utterly transformed by the characters in her debut, A Woman Is No Man. With her second novel, she begins to process the aftermath.
Writer and illustrator Grace Lin loves to order takeout Chinese food but confesses she’s not a whiz when it comes to chopsticks. Speaking by phone from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, she laughingly explains: “I can get the food to my mouth, but you’re supposed to hold one like a pencil, and just one chopstick is supposed to move. When I do it, both chopsticks move. It’s definitely not the correct way, but it works.”
Lin’s latest creation, Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Food, will make readers’ mouths water regardless of their chopstick skills. It’s a project she has been contemplating since 2004 but wasn’t ready to tackle until recently. Beautifully illustrated by Lin—who has won both the Caldecott and the Newbery—Chinese Menu features 40 or so stories about the legends and history behind popular American Chinese foods—everything from egg rolls and wonton soup to General Tso’s Chicken and fortune cookies.
“In my circles, it seems like people know lo mein just as well as a hot dog, you know? Working on this book has really shifted my idea of what American food is.”
“I spent most of my childhood trying to pretend that I wasn’t Asian,” Lin says, reminiscing about growing up in Utica, New York, where few Asian families lived at the time. “The two tenuous connections I had to my heritage were reading Chinese folktales and legends that my mom snuck me and the food that we ate every day. So those were the two ways that my culture was passed on to me as a child. I guess that’s why I use them so often in my books, because they were the only roots that I felt I had. I’ve been strengthening them over time.”
Even though her very first books—The Ugly Vegetables (1999) and Dim Sum for Everyone (2001)—were about Chinese food, she says, “I think for years I almost felt like I was faking it. That I look Asian on the outside, but didn’t really feel Asian on the inside. It’s really through doing all these books that I finally feel like I can claim that part of my identity.”
Her first editor advised her to write a book featuring a white character to avoid being pigeonholed as a “multicultural author and illustrator.” She didn’t take his advice. “Back then, that was a burden,” she muses. “Now I take it as a badge of honor.” Throughout a career that has spanned over two decades, Lin has created board books, picture books, early readers and children’s novels featuring Asian and Asian American characters. Several novels (Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat and Dumpling Days) are based on her own life as the child of parents who grew up in Taiwan while it was still called the Nationalist Republic of China.
Lin has come a long way since those early days of self-doubt. In 2022, the American Library Association awarded her the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. As for Chinese Menu, she says, “This book is not me claiming that part of my identity. This book is not to prove to myself or to others that I’m Asian enough or American enough. This book is a celebration to show the world how wonderful that identity is. It’s something with a lot of richness, joy and wonder, and that’s enjoyable for everyone, because it’s food.”
Over the years, Lin had filed away numerous Chinese restaurant menus that she found interesting, and she would occasionally discuss the project as a possibility with her current editor (who happens to be a best friend she met in fifth grade). During COVID-19 lockdowns, incidents of anti-Asian prejudice and violence increased, and Lin felt compelled to tackle this book. “It seemed like an opportune time to celebrate being Asian American,” she says. She dove into her boxes of material and hired a research assistant, Izabelle Brande from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture at Smith College. Lin doesn’t read Chinese, but Brande provided her with translations of many secondary sources. “I had a lot of stories via word of mouth from my parents and relatives,” Lin recalls. “I would know one version of a story, and [Brande] was really amazing because she would tell me that there are actually three versions.”
“I absolutely adore myths, legends and folk tales, as you can tell from all of my work,” she continues. “But one of the things that I really wanted to do with this book was to show how these stories are still part of our culture today. What’s more tangible and easier to understand than the food that we eat?”
“This book is not to prove to myself or to others that I’m Asian enough or American enough. This book is a celebration to show the world how wonderful that identity is. It’s something with a lot of richness, joy and wonder, and that’s enjoyable for everyone, because it’s food.”
Lin not only wrote Chinese Menu, but also illustrated it, using her tween daughter and her daughter’s friend as models. Being both an illustrator and writer allows Lin to make adjustments in both pictures and prose as she goes—for instance, shortening text that she realizes is shown in the art—even up until the last minute. Chinese Menu is unusual because it’s the first time Lin has illustrated digitally. For the cover and the present-day food pictures, she painted with gouache by hand—her usual way—but to illustrate the traditional stories, she scanned initial drawings and colored them digitally in a limited color palette.
“I wanted to separate the folktales from present-day life,” she says. Lin is happy with the results, but it took a toll physically—she moved around less at the computer and became sore from being in the same position for hours. Nonetheless, she says, “I often dream about doing a graphic novel, and I realize now that the only way I would ever be able to do that is to embrace digital media.”
Lin encountered a few surprises as she worked. First, she hoped to find a good story about soy sauce but found nothing—“just stuff about trying to make food salty without using so much salt. It was all really boring.” One discovery that delighted her, however, was the realization of how important American Chinese food is to American culture: “It’s become integrated into our lives just as much as hamburgers and pizza. In my circles, it seems like people know lo mein just as well as a hot dog, you know? Working on this book has really shifted my idea of what American food is.”
Her book includes just one recipe, for her mother’s scallion pancakes. “It’s called Chinese Menu because it’s about food that you order at a restaurant,” Lin says with a laugh. “I don’t mind cooking, but I would rather read a book!”
The increase in incidents of anti-Asian violence during COVID-19 compelled award-winning writer and illustrator Grace Lin to compile this mouthwatering tribute to American Chinese foods.
A fictitious waterway plays a major role in William Kent Krueger’s mesmerizing new novel, The River We Remember, so it seems more than fitting when Krueger says, “Your first order of business as a storyteller is to hook your reader.”
And boy does he, like a seasoned angler reeling in a prizewinning bass. At the end of a short prologue, after describing how the Alabaster River snakes across Black Earth County, Minnesota, in “a crooked course like a long crack in a china plate,” Krueger describes the catfish that feed along the bottom before announcing “This is the story of how they came to eat Jimmy Quinn.”
“I had that opening in mind for a very long time before I actually sat down to write the story itself,” Krueger says, speaking by phone from his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author of 19 Cork O’Connor mysteries adds, “I’m very fond of both prologues and epilogues,” which he believes have distinct purposes: the prologue gives readers “a sense of the story that they’re about to be a part of,” and the epilogue is his way of not leaving them “high and dry, wondering about what happened to characters after the story ends.”
“That’s really where my heart is. . . . Whenever I write a story, I love to just tap into that small town sensibility.”
The River We Remember is set in 1958, when the gruesome discovery of Quinn’s body in the river casts a deep shadow on the town of Jewel’s Memorial Day festivities. Quinn is the richest man and largest landowner in the area—and someone whom no one seems to like, not even his family. It’s up to Sheriff Brody Dern to get to the bottom of how Quinn came to such an ignominious end. Upon hearing the news, Brody is playing chess in the county jail with a prisoner, an otherwise law-abiding widower prone to frequent, disruptive Wild Turkey-fueled benders that land him temporarily behind bars. The friendly, avuncular scene is reminiscent of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Krueger laughs at the comparison, saying, “I don’t have a Barney Fife in my story, but yes.” Although The River We Remember is far from a comedy, he imbues Jewel and its intricate, long-established community with rare authenticity and warmth. The author explains that although he and his wife have lived in St. Paul for many years, he spent much of his childhood moving from place to place, living in farm towns in states like Ohio, Oregon and California. “That’s really where my heart is,” he admits. “Whenever I write a story, I love to just tap into that small town sensibility.”
The townsfolk include a diverse cast of multigenerational characters, such as retired sheriff Conrad Graff, who helps Brody investigate, and 14-year-old Scott Madison, born with a hole in his heart, who delivers meals to prisoners from his mother’s cafe. This young character, Krueger says—one of his favorites—is much like he was as an adolescent, especially in his “desire to see the world, experience it, and somehow prove to everybody that he really is a man.” With his trademark finely chiseled prose and taut plotting, Krueger uses his characters to explore a variety of themes, including racism, prejudice, war, violence, manhood, justice and redemption. “One of the things that I’m aware of,” Krueger says, “is that if you write a popular mystery series, readers are going to be a little reluctant to follow you to a place that doesn’t have all of the series’ characters and elements in it. When I set out to write this book, I wanted to write a mystery first and foremost, and then use that mystery to explore other themes.”
When The River We Remember’s similarities to To Kill a Mockingbird are mentioned, Krueger says the book is his favorite American novel, “so it’s no surprise that I’m probably greatly influenced in every story by Harper Lee.” However, he says the comparison is more apt for his previous standalone novel, Ordinary Grace, which he calls “a kind of reimagined” Mockingbird. “War informs The River We Remember,” he notes, “although it’s not a war novel.”
Krueger first tried to write the book almost 10 years ago, inspired by his father’s experiences as an 18-year-old leaving to fight in Europe during World War II, as well as by similar ordeals suffered by his friends’ fathers. Each of them “were deeply wounded by the horrors they had seen, and the horrors that they had been a part of,” he says. “All my life, I’ve wondered, how did these men manage to heal from that, those great wounds? And what about the people they left behind—mothers and wives and sisters and fathers—who were praying desperately for their loved ones while they were far away, and who in the end may have lost them? What about those wounds? That’s really what I set out to explore.”
Brody is a World War II veteran, and Krueger writes that, “No one knew the details of his war experiences but they knew of the medals.” Brody has PTSD (although, of course, it wasn’t called that in 1958) after his experiences in combat and in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, while newspaper editor Sam Wicklow lost part of his leg in the battle of Iwo Jima. Many people in town suspect that Quinn’s killer may be Noah Bluestone, a Dakota Sioux veteran who returned with a Japanese wife, Kyoko. Krueger set his drama in 1958 so he could draw from some of his own childhood memories and because he “wanted a time frame that was soon enough after the war that the war experience is still going to be fresh in people’s minds. All of those deep wounds were still there, and yet we weren’t acknowledging them.”
However, Krueger’s first attempt at writing the story didn’t go well, so he put the idea aside for years, finally giving it another go during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I know the pandemic created a great deal of chaos in so many people’s lives,” he says, “but it was one of the most creative periods for me. I wrote two manuscripts for my Cork O’Connor series. I wrote three novellas, and then I turned my attention back to the original story for The River We Remember.”
“I don’t know what happened in the intervening years,” Krueger says. “Maybe I’d just grown wiser as a storyteller, or maybe it just required more time to gestate. But I saw how to write the story now. I heard the voice of the story speaking to me. And this time around, I was able to write a much tighter, more cohesive and more deeply felt narrative than I had created the first time around. I completely rewrote the story.”
“If you wrap the ideas that you want to get across to a reader in a really good, compelling story, you get the point across so much more effectively.”
“I wanted to talk about racism,” Krueger adds. “I wanted to talk about war, the way we characterize it, and the myth that we continue to feed our sons, particularly. But I didn’t want to write a polemic. Nobody’s going to read that, so if you wrap the ideas that you want to get across to a reader in a really good, compelling story, you get the point across so much more effectively.”
Krueger’s strong feelings against war emerged early and changed the course of his life. While a freshman at Stanford University in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, he joined a takeover of the president’s office to protest the university’s compliance in the production of military weapons. “They yanked my scholarship,” he says, noting that he had had a full ride. When asked if he was shocked, he says, “No, I was really inspired. And I have to tell you, when I called my folks to tell them what had occurred, they told me that they had never been prouder of me.”
“Vietnam,” he says, “for so many of us, was finally a look at the reality of the horror that war is, and the destruction that it does to everybody.” After leaving Stanford, he logged timber, worked construction and did a lot of physical labor. “I decided very early on that I wasn’t going to be a career person,” he says. “I didn’t want to have a job that was going to suck all of my creative energy out of me.” He was inspired by his father, who taught high school English, worked for Standard Oil, then returned to teaching.
Krueger settled in St. Paul in 1980 and took a job researching child development at the University of Minnesota while his wife, Diane, attended law school. He wrote early in the morning at a coffee shop before work, and joined a mystery writers’ support group called Creme de la Crime. “That group was really tremendously important in my development as a writer,” he says, “because they never let an easy answer pass.”
Since those early days, his award-winning mystery series featuring private investigator Cork O’Connor, the half Irish and half Ojibwe former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. “In every book that I’ve written, even my standalones, the plight of the Native people here in Minnesota plays an important role,” Krueger says. “If you set a story in Minnesota, it’s hard to get away from the treacherous history of whites and the tragic history of the native people.” As he began researching the Ojibwe culture, he met and formed relationships with Ojibwe people, who, he says, “have guided me so beautifully. They’ve been so generous in their sharing.”
Krueger notes that if he were starting out today, he would probably refrain from writing about a Native character “because of the very volatile issue of cultural appropriation,” which was not as widely considered when he began writing the Cork O’Connor series in the early 1990s. “The feedback that I’ve had from my friends in the Ojibwe community, and from Native readers who’ve contacted me, has been very positive. That encourages me, but I’m always painfully aware that I’m a white guy trespassing on a culture not my own, and I work very hard to get it right.”
Krueger is currently penning his next Cork O’Connor mystery. “When I put that to rest,” he says, “I have another standalone that is just beating at my door, begging me to write it.” In the meantime, visit his website if you want to arrange a Skype or Zoom book club visit to discuss one of his many books. “I have zoomed with hundreds of book clubs,” Krueger says, “and I really enjoy it. It’s a great way to connect with readers. It’s not quite like being there in person, but you can still connect.”
Photo of William Kent Krueger by Diane Krueger.
A murder rips a midcentury Minnesota town apart in the author’s latest standalone mystery, The River We Remember.
Alix E. Harrow and her husband know a thing or two about creepy old houses. Before they were married, they pooled their savings and bought an abandoned house on several acres of land in Madison County, Kentucky, in hopes of bringing it back to life. “It was such a wild choice,” Harrow recalls. “When we closed on the house and walked in, rain was coming into the second floor. We looked at each other and asked, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Nonetheless, over the next seven years or so, the couple forged ahead, completing almost all of the renovations themselves.
It’s not surprising, then, that a mysterious, dilapidated house is the subject of Harrow’s third novel, Starling House. The book features a down-on-her-luck young woman named Opal McCoy who takes a housekeeping job at the titular home, which has haunted her dreams since she was a girl. It’s an eagerly awaited, exceptional follow-up to the bestselling author’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a portal fantasy set in the early 1900s, and The Once and Future Witches, about suffragettes in the late 1800s who happen to be witches.
“What’s funny,” Harrow says, speaking from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, “is that all my other books have historical settings, so with this one, I wanted to do contemporary. But then, of course, when I actually started to write it, I realized, oh, it’s all about the past, actually.”
The author is a pro at genre mashups, having also written two “fractured fables”—A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended—that romp through classic fairy tales. “One of the fun things about writing a house book is that you get to play with all the literary tropes and traditions of haunted houses,” Harrow says. “But then I also know the very literal experience of dealing with an old, rotten house. There’s stuff about patching drywall and glazing old windows that are jokes just for me and my husband.”
“. . . this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?”
Harrow describes her new novel as a Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast, with Opal as the beauty and her employer, Arthur Gravely, the beast—described in the book as a “Boo Radley-ish creature” whose face “is all hard angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, and his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becoming a mullet.” Opal is desperate to get her younger brother, Jasper, out of their dingy hotel room and the dying town of Eden, Kentucky, so she takes the generous-salaried job Arthur offers. It’s a big step up from her shifts at Tractor Supply Company, and Opal is beyond curious to venture inside Starling House, despite the fact that inexplicable and terrifying things seem to happen there. For instance, both of Arthur’s parents mysteriously died within the house and Opal gets a strange, bloody cut on her hand the moment she touches Starling House’s gate—a cut that won’t seem to heal.
Harrow was initially inspired by a well-known John Prine song, “Paradise,” about how strip mining destroyed the town of Paradise in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. “It’s like a tiny little Kentucky Chernobyl,” Harrow says of what’s left of that town. “Now it’s dead financially and ecologically. So, I was like, ‘What if it had survived? And what if it was haunted more literally? And what about the people who would still kind of cling on and love it despite everything?’ ” Like Prine, whose parents came from Paradise, Harrow has deep Kentucky roots. Part of her childhood was spent two counties away from Paradise. Prine describes how the coal company used “the world’s largest shovel” to dig coal, and Harrow’s father actually rode that same power shovel to the top of a mountain. (The shovel is called “Big Jack” in Starling House.) “Mountain coal is my family,” she says. “I never met my maternal grandfather because he was killed by a coal train.”
Her father, in fact, jokingly accused her of plagiarism because “I’ve just taken all of these pieces of my life and put them into a different collage.” She acknowledges that she incorporated many bits from her past into her book, but is quick to clarify, “It is mostly details, not the overall shape of my childhood. I don’t want to give people the impression that I was seriously impoverished or living on the edge of society, in a motel. I had a stable, loving household and all of that stuff. But the details—like my first job, I graduated from college in the middle of the recession and I worked as a cashier at Tractor Supply in Allen County, Kentucky. So, there are a lot of things that were just familiar to me. But, of course, there is a lot of air between me and the actual characters.”
Interestingly, there’s no trace whatsoever of a Kentucky drawl in Harrow’s voice. She attributes this to her mom’s influence as an English teacher as well as her family’s move to Boulder, Colorado, for three years when she was 10. “You can lose an accent fast when someone makes fun of you for it,” she says.
Harrow began writing this book as she and her husband and two children moved from Kentucky to Virginia, and a sense of yearning informed the process—a feeling that’s hardly new. “I moved around quite a bit as a kid,” she explains, “even within Kentucky. And then when we left for Colorado, it was huge. I remember my dad literally saying to me, ‘Aren’t you a little young for nostalgia?’ I’m just a naturally wistful and nostalgic person. So I had in my head this idea of Kentucky and the idea of home.”
As she began writing Starling House, she realized that she hadn’t set any previous fiction primarily in her home state. “All my short stories were kind of about escape and going on adventures and going through magic doors,” she adds. “Like, finding a way out, which I now see pretty obviously was a fantasy of mine. I think it’s very funny that it was only once my husband and I decided to leave that I wrote a book about staying.” She says she had always wanted to make a home in Kentucky, “but then I had children and the political climate darkened. I just could not find a way to stay, given the means and resources and ability to find somewhere safer and kinder and with more possibilities for my children. So, this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?”
Before turning to fiction, Harrow earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Vermont, then taught history at Eastern Kentucky University. She first tried her hand at writing a fantasy novel in middle school, but then didn’t write fiction again until she was in her 20s, working as an adjunct. She started writing short stories “as an experiment” and “I loved it,” she says, laughing.
A sense of history permeates Starling House: Harrow adds intriguing footnotes, as well as a bibliography containing both real and imagined sources. She also created a very convincing fake Wikipedia page within the novel for Eleanor Starling, one of Arthur’s ancestors, a 19th-century children’s writer who wrote a book called The Underland that Opal read as a child. That book plays a huge part in the novel, and harkens back to Harrow’s master’s thesis on British children’s literature in the late 1800s and early 1900s and its ties to imperialism.
“I never had a creative writing class or tried to pursue creative writing since middle school,” she says. “But the skills that you learn in academic historical writing are basically the same. You’re trying to build an argument about the world, you’re trying to make a narrative that makes sense based on little bits and pieces in support of your cause. All the research skills and all the organizational skills and the belief that if you just keep writing, eventually you’ll come to your point—all those things are not as far away from fiction as you would think. The same interests led me to history, which are basically just wanting to know why the world is the way it is and how power works.”
The novel’s corporate villain is Gravely Power, started by Arthur’s ancestors, which is lobbying to obtain the mineral rights of Arthur’s property. A relentless, devious company representative named Elizabeth Baine tries to bribe and blackmail Opal into spying on Arthur and photographing Starling House as she works. Harrow was inspired to create Elizabeth after writing The Once and Future Witches and encountering some reader reactions that were “very like, women are good and men are bad and having very little sort of critical engagement with the history of white feminism in ways that I found sort of teeth grating.” Harrow concluded she was ready for a change of pace, deciding her next villain would be a white woman as “certain forms of ambition are not specifically gendered.”
The Southern gothic, Harrow says, proved to be the perfect vehicle for this corporate showdown because one of its central conflicts can be “a huge nostalgia for a time that was just ontologically evil.” Harrow mentions the diverging viewpoints of white Southern gothic writers and Black Southern gothic writers, noting, “That’s why there’s so many different versions of the story of Starling House in the book—often it’s the same story told from a different perspective with wildly different ethics and takeaways.” As Opal hears these conflicting tales, she keeps digging to get closer to the truth, despite mounting danger.
Starling House incorporates other influences beyond Southern gothic, pulling from fairy tales and supernatural thrillers, with a touch of horror. Harrow admits, “I’ve never been particularly faithful to one single genre. I’ve always been kind of a messy reader. And when you come up with a book idea that dabbles in multiple genres, it’s almost like at the beginning of a history paper, when you want to have your historiography. I always want to be doing tropes on purpose. If it’s cliche, it’s a cliche on purpose.”
As Harrow describes her writing process, she sounds more like a historian than a fiction writer. Did she always know, for instance, how Opal would get along with Arthur? “Oh, I know everything from the start,” she replies, laughing. “I am not a casual drafter.” She begins with a general synopsis and a chapter-by-chapter outline before beginning to write. “And then I draft the book and realize that the whole thing is wrong,” she explains, “and go back and change it with a new outline. But very rarely—not never—but rarely, am I drafting a scene and like, ‘Oh my God, it just came out completely differently than I planned it.’ ”
She also notes that she is not “a haunted house person.” “When I wrote the witch book,” she recalls, “I got a number of very sweet and generous messages from people who were practitioners of witchcraft. I was very much like, ‘Oh man, I’m so sorry. Wrong audience.’” She anticipates that readers of Starling House may reach out with similar messages about ghosts and hauntings.
“I’m a huge chicken,” Harrow confesses.
What she is, it turns out, is a comedian—and one of Opal’s many endearing qualities is her often-snarky, sarcastic wit, as shown in both her narration and dialogue. Was her humor hard to write?
“No,” Harrow says with a laugh. “I find my main problem is to stop making jokes and try to rein it in a little bit.”
Photo of Alix E. Harrow by Elora Overbey.
The author poured her yearning for the past into Starling House, a fantasy that’s best described as a Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast.
With beautiful prose and engaging, colorful art, Every Dreaming Creature manages to be exciting and entertaining, yet ultimately calm and comforting. A child narrator dreams of experiencing how it feels to be a variety of animals, beginning with a salamander: “All the world was safe, snug spaces and a warm, wet blanket of decaying leaves. Secrets from the soil tickling my hands and soft belly.” The language describing each creature is sensory and evocative, while the art features bright, often close-up images, which range from varying sizes of spot art to spreads that stretch across the page. These size variations lend the images a certain sense of movement and mimic the barrage of images one might visualize while dreaming. Author and illustrator Brendan Wenzel’s website notes his “great affection for “all things furred, feathered, and scaly,” which shows in both this work and previous: He earned a Caldecott Honor for They All Saw a Cat.
Young readers will love guessing the next animal dream from clues in the text and art. For instance, a cloud above the elephant herd turns into a falcon. In dreamlike fashion, the animal appearances gradually speed up until an entire menagerie rapidly unfolds—a chameleon, a star-nosed mole, a hummingbird, sea turtles and more.
There’s a lovely, curvaceous fluidity to Wenzel’s art that ties each animal dream to another. He is a master colorist, whether when drawing a monarch butterfly so vivid you can practically see its wings flutter, or a prowling tiger jumping into a bright rainbow of a jungle with a giant paw so fluffy you can almost feel it. Throughout the intriguing mixture of animals and habitats, Wenzel uses eyes as a unifying theme and makes each pair a focal point that will draw in readers.
Variations of the refrain “until you came . . . and woke me from that dream” repeat until finally the child wakes up for real. Later, as the child slips “beneath the warm weight of a blanket,” readers are brought back to the salamander’s blanket of decaying leaves from the book’s beginning. Every Dreaming Creature is an eye-catching succession of nighttime visions that promotes a sense of empathy and admiration for the world’s many creatures.
Every Dreaming Creature is an eye-catching succession of nighttime visions that promotes a sense of empathy and admiration for the world’s many creatures.
“I was transformed into an old man quite suddenly, on June 11, 2011, three days short of my sixty-ninth birthday,” writes Jonathan Raban, describing the effects of a massive stroke that left him a wheelchair user and without the use of one hand. Raban, who died in January 2023 from complications from that stroke, used voice dictation software to write and edit this posthumously published book, Father and Son, which interweaves his weeks in rehab with the World War II story of his father, who served for three years in the British Army—in Dunkirk, Tunisia, Anzio and Palestine—not meeting his son until his return. It’s a highly personal account of two very different experiences of trauma, loss of agency and adjustment.
Throughout, Raban is brutally honest, not shying away from the ways his personal habits may have contributed to his stroke (“I had left my high blood pressure unmedicated. I was a daily wine drinker and . . . a lifelong smoker.”) or the many indignities he had to suffer during his recovery, such as asking for assistance going to the bathroom. He sings the praises of kind helpers and skewers others, such as a doctor who greeted him by saying, “You’re the one who used to be a writer.” With piercing humor, he notes: “I very much hope that I’m still a writer. I very much hope that I’ll write about this—about you—when I get out of the rehab ward.” He devours other memoirs about strokes and is never short on opinions, calling, for instance, Jill Bolte Taylor’s much-lauded My Stroke of Insight “an unsatisfactory blend of neuroscience, woo-woo, and outdated locationism.” In alternate chapters, Raban meticulously traces his parents’ courtship and his father’s unhappy stint as a teacher and rapid rise as a military officer during the war, using his parents’ letters as well as other histories. Although it’s not exactly a natural pairing with his own medical journey, Raban’s masterful prose makes it work.
The book ends rather abruptly as Raban leaves rehab for a rental home while his own house is being remodeled to meet his new needs. A brief editor’s note provides little additional enlightenment but drops a bombshell: When he died, Raban had been drafting a chapter about a son he had been recently getting to know. (Interestingly, his obituaries mention only one child, Julia.) That chapter, I’m sure, would have been a fascinating addition to Father and Son, and certainly fitting with its title. It’s a sign of Raban’s talent and powerful voice that, even in death, he leaves readers wanting more.
It’s a sign of Jonathan Rabin’s talent and powerful voice that he leaves readers wanting more in his posthumous memoir, Father and Son.
You’ve got to hand it to Amy Chua. The Yale law school professor made a name for herself with her much-discussed 2011 parenting book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and now she’s written The Golden Gate, a jampacked historical mystery set in San Francisco in 1944. Detective Al Sullivan happens to be at the Claremont Hotel on the night that someone tries to kill wealthy presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson not once, but twice. The second time, the attempt is successful, and the high-profile murder leads Sullivan down a rabbit hole of an investigation that gives Chua ample opportunities to explore midcentury San Francisco, especially the many social and economic injustices of the era.
Suspicion for Wilkinson’s murder largely falls on the three granddaughters of wealthy socialite Genevieve Bainbridge, shifting from one to the other and back again. One of them, Isabella, was part of another Claremont Hotel tragedy in 1930. When she was 6, her older sister, Iris, was found dead in the laundry chute after a game of hide-and-seek, and as Sullivan delves into the case, he suspects there may be links between that tragedy and Wilkinson’s murder. This aspect of the case as well as the Bainbridge characters are intriguing, although Chua’s repeated returns to Genevieve’s deposition regarding Wilkinson’s murder slow down the novel’s momentum.
Narrator Sullivan is a likable guide as well as a savvy investigator whose background gives him a unique perspective on the intersections of race, class and power that the case brings to light. His given name is Alejo Gutiérrez—he’s half Mexican, half Jewish American—and years ago, his father was forcefully “repatriated” to Mexico. He’s also caring for his 11-year-old niece Miriam, whose mother seems to have disappeared, and their relationship provides a snappy side plot.
Along the way, readers are briefly introduced to a variety of historical figures, including Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, architect Julia Morgan, Margaret “Mom” Chung (the first female Chinese American doctor in the United States) and Berkeley police chief August Vollmer, called “the father of modern policing.” The Golden Gate is an overly sprawling novel, but readers will be both entertained and enriched by its historical details
Readers will be entertained and enriched by Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother author Amy Chua’s debut historical mystery, The Golden Gate.
Remember Us packs an understated but powerful punch. National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson’s lyrical coming-of-age novel is set in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1970s, when people called Bushwick “the Matchbox” because so many houses and buildings were burning down—some purposely set on fire by their own landlords in hopes of collecting insurance money. Although Remember Us is fiction, Woodson notes in an afterword that the novel is inspired by her own childhood: “We knew people who had lost their homes to fire, and my family worried about our own house going up in flames.”
For 12-year-old narrator Sage, who dreams of becoming the first woman player in the NBA, seventh grade is “the year when, one by one, the buildings on Palmetto melted into a mass of rock and ash and crumbled plaster.” It’s also the year that she befriends Freddy, who shares her love of basketball.
Sage’s deep sense of nostalgia intertwines with a palpable fear of those fires, which act as a metaphor for Sage’s recognition that her body and her world are changing: The present is constantly turning into the “once was.” Sage and her mother live in the boyhood home of Sage’s late father, who belonged to the Vulcan Society (a fraternity of Black firemen) and died in a fire. Although Sage hardly remembers him, she cherishes using his basketball. “He, too, was a part of the once was,” she muses. “And soon I’d be part of the once was of Bushwick, of my block, of the park and the hundreds of basketball games I’d played there.”
Remember Us has the feel of a new classic, ageless in its universal themes while wonderfully rendering a specific time and place. The pure magic of this novel is that Woodson somehow makes readers feel as though they are experiencing these moments of growing up along with Sage. Woodson flawlessly intersperses explosive moments—and games of basketball—among quiet, reflective scenes while responding to Sage’s weighty fears with reassurance about the permeance of loving memories.
Jacqueline Woodson flawlessly intersperses explosive moments—and games of basketball—among quiet, reflective scenes while responding to her protagonist’s weighty fears with reassurance about the permeance of loving memories.
Ever since I was a kid, I have loved reading books featuring a haunted house with a creepy resident; a feisty, determined heroine; and strange goings-on that gradually turn scary. But rarely, if ever, have I read a haunted house book that features such gorgeous prose as Alix E. Harrow’s latest novel, Starling House. Early on, Harrow describes how 26-year-old narrator Opal McCoy has been dreaming of the titular house since she was a child: “I often wake up with the taste of river water and blood in my mouth, broken glass in my hair, a scream drowning in my chest. But that morning, the first one after I set foot on Starling land, there’s nothing but a deep quiet inside me, like the dead air between radio stations.”
Opal works hard at Tractor Supply Company to try to save enough money to send her younger brother, Jasper, to a fancy boarding school. Their mother died a mysterious death, their father has never been in the picture and they live in a dingy motel room in the dying town of Eden, Kentucky. Opal is desperate to escape Eden, which offers nothing much besides two Dollar Generals and a strip-mined stretch of riverbank, thanks to the operations of nearby Gravely Power.
The big, churning wheels of this lusciously plotted book begin to quickly turn when Opal takes a job cleaning for Starling House’s current owner, a reclusive young man named Arthur Starling. Opal finds herself increasingly intrigued by Arthur despite his odd ways and off-putting looks. But Gravely Power representative Elizabeth Baine, in hopes of obtaining the mineral rights to Arthur’s land, demands that Opal spy on Arthur and his residence, threatening Jasper’s future if she declines.
Harrow invents a rich backstory for Starling House, making clever use of footnotes and even a fake Wikipedia page for 19th-century author Eleanor Starling, who married into the family and wrote and illustrated an unsettling children’s book, which may have been the source of Opal’s Starling House nightmares. Opal uncovers many different versions of the same stories about the house and its inhabitants, past and present, and the truth is hard to sort out. “The Gravelys are either victims or villains; Eleanor Starling is either a wicked woman or a desperate girl. Eden is either cursed, or merely getting its comeuppance,” she concludes.
Excellent social commentary unfolds in the matchup between feisty, sarcastic Opal and the greedy power company. Harrow has tons of fun along the way, noting in Eleanor Starling’s Wikipedia page, for instance, that “director Guillermo del Toro has praised E. Starling’s work, and thanked her for teaching him that ‘the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier, but to lay it bare.’ ” Alix Harrow does just that in Starling House, a riveting fantasy overflowing with ideas and energy that clears away the cobwebs of corporate power and neglect.
Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House is a riveting Southern gothic fantasy with gorgeous prose and excellent social commentary.
When Jacob Hampton returns home wounded from the Korean War, his parents couldn’t be happier. Before his conscription, they had disinherited him for marrying a poor, uneducated hotel maid who became pregnant soon after their elopement. Now that Jacob has come home, “They believed him ready at last to be their prodigal son,” writes Ron Rash in his stellar novel, The Caretaker. Jacob, however, quickly informs them, “I’m only here for my truck.”
A PEN/Faulkner finalist and three-time recipient of the O. Henry Prize, Rash writes about the North Carolina mountains and their inhabitants with exceptional beauty and grace. In The Caretaker, he has created a Shakespearian plot so riveting that it begs to be read in one sitting. An exceptional storyteller, Rash sets up an explosive standoff between Jacob and his parents from the start, then quickly sets into motion a jaw-dropping turn of events.
Rounding out the cast are Jacob’s wife, Naomi, who yearns for her husband’s return, dreams of their future, and is desperately trying to improve her third-grade reading skills as she writes to him. She is looked after by Jacob’s best friend, Blackburn Gant, who lives in a shack on the cemetery grounds, where he works as caretaker. He finds tending to the dead easier than dealing with the living, who are often repulsed by his limp and disfigured face, a remnant of polio.
Rash’s prose is spare, yet piercingly sharp, whether writing about a gathering of men at the Hampton family country store or Jacob’s life-and-death battle with a North Korean soldier. Like Richard Russo, he’s a narrative maestro who creates entire communities, giving brief but meaningful backstories to characters big and small, including the town doctor, the girl whom Jacob’s parents want him to marry, and the man in charge of receiving and delivering telegrams.
Readers will likely find themselves galloping toward the end of this novel, but should be sure to stop to appreciate its quieter moments, such as when Naomi reflects on the often-extraordinary beauty of an entirely ordinary day: “Maybe that was the saddest thing about life, that you couldn’t understand, not really, how good something was while living inside of it. How many such moments swept past, lost forever.” The Caretaker is an unforgettable novel of class, power, war, family, yearning and betrayal. Don’t miss it.
The Caretaker is an unforgettable novel of class, power, war, family, yearning and betrayal. Don’t miss it.
A new book from Kate DiCamillo always gives reason to celebrate, and her latest fairy tale is no exception. The Puppets of Spelhorst is the first of a trio of novellas called the Norendy Tales. Linked together by a common atmosphere and setting, each book is to be illustrated in black and white by a different artist. (DiCamillo first ventured into the atmosphere of this series with a bonus fairy tale called “The Tapestry at Norendy” included in the 20th anniversary edition of The Tale of Despereaux.)
The Puppets of Spelhorst salutes the power of storytelling through a tale of five puppets—a king, a wolf, an owl, a boy and a girl—who are passed from person to person, before finally coming to life in a play through the hands of two young girls and a maid. The book opens with a lonely old sea captain named Spelhorst buying a box of puppets because the girl puppet reminds him of his long-lost love, Annalise. As the puppets wait “to be part of a story,” their distinct personalities and desires emerge, accompanied by DiCamillo’s trademark dashes of humor. For instance, the wolf puppet is obsessed with his sharp teeth, while the owl puppet says wise things and dreams of flying. But as the girl puppet tells everyone, “We are all here in the dark together. How will it help us to fight with one another?”
The Puppets of Spelhorst’s short chapters of simple yet often profound prose beg to be read aloud. This exciting, fast-paced story contains several pointed touches of female empowerment as well as a glorious surprise ending that is revealed in a full-page spread. Julie Morstad’s illustrations do an excellent job of setting an old-fashioned, fairy-tale mood while achieving a delicate feat: making these puppets look both inanimate yet lively. Morstad’s art contributes to both this tale’s momentum and meaning—such as when the wolf puppet is carried away by a fox, or when Spelhorst gazes regretfully at the girl puppet.
As the girl puppet concludes, “Stories without end—watching them unfold, being a part of their unfolding—what a blessing that would be.” Such a sentiment might be applied to the experience of reading DiCamillo’s books. With all the makings of a classic fairy tale, The Puppets of Spelhorst skillfully addresses many of DiCamillo’s favorite themes: the power of love and togetherness; the many unexpected wonders of the world; the importance of following one’s dreams; and the majesty of stories and storytelling.
With all the makings of a classic fairy tale, The Puppets of Spelhorst skillfully salutes the power of storytelling through a tale of five puppets.
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There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.
