“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instance, Jill Bolte Taylor’s much-lauded My Stroke of Insight “an unsatisfactory blend of neuroscience, woo-woo, and outdated locationism.”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.
In Undiscovered, a Peruvian journalist and novelist living in Madrid confronts her past, present and future in a meditative work of autofiction. Gabriela Wiener begins with a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to see the Charles Wiener collection of artifacts, noting “that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited.” Her father has just died, and as she grieves, she examines his life, exploring his relationships with her, her mother and his mistress. As she aptly notes, “My penchant for playing detective on family cases has only gotten worse with time.”
Charles Wiener, the author’s great-great-grandfather, was an Austrian-French explorer who traveled extensively in Peru and came close to rediscovering the ruins of Machu Picchu. He is said to have taken 4,000 pre-Columbian artifacts to Europe. Undiscovered insightfully probes his legacy, noting that he was more of a “media man” than a scientist. “Back then,” Wiener writes, “you just had to move some dirt around to call it archaeology.” She is particularly horrified to discover that Charles Wiener purchased, or as she corrects him, stole, an Indigenous child from his mother, taking the boy back to Europe with him.
Wiener freely discusses many aspects of her own life, including her discomfort as a brown-skinned girl around her white paternal grandparents. From time to time, she inserts humor, noting, for instance, that after her grandfather’s death, “my white grandmother became more affectionate toward us and started farting when she walked from one room to another.” She also muses about her relationships as a polyamorous woman. She shares a child with her husband, while her wife and husband also share a child, and she finds herself being unfaithful to both her husband and wife. “I’m at a loss about what to do with my life,” she confesses, interweaving this uncertainty with the effects of her family’s long legacy of racism, desire and colonialism. Long strands from the past entangle her every move.
While Undiscovered often feels more like an essay than a novel, Wiener delivers a no-holds-barred, unflinching discussion. She reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”
Even as it probes the author’s own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”
A triple murder is at the center of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s superb second novel about the sleepy fictional town of West Mills, North Carolina, where rumors run rampant and family histories trace back through time like vines of wisteria.
Decent People, set in 1976, is quite different from Winslow’s debut novel, In West Mills, a multigenerational saga spanning the 1940s through the ’80s that won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize in 2019. But both books are character-driven treasures, and while no major characters are the same, fans will recognize crossover figures and family names.
Winslow says he always planned to write more about West Mills, and creating Decent People was in some ways more straightforward than his first book. “A murder mystery isn’t going to go on for 20 years,” he says. “Keeping the scope short made things easier for me.” The author speaks from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, where he moved a year ago after giving in to “city burnout” in New York City.
With a population of about a thousand, West Mills is based on Winslow’s mother’s hometown of South Mills, North Carolina. He changed the town’s name after feeling bogged down by his quest for historical accuracy. (A canal runs through both places, for instance, but in Winslow’s creation, the water divides the racially segregated community.)
Therein lies a foundational truth of Winslow’s writing life: Nonfiction can bring inspiration, but fiction allows him “to be free to create worlds [by] using true information as the seed.” He can trace this inclination back to the earliest days of his career.
“I didn’t come from a bookish family at all,” Winslow says. “I do vaguely remember some Dr. Suess books, but no one was really reading them to me,” so he used them as coloring books instead. After discovering Toni Morrison’s Beloved in college, he decided to try his hand at writing. The hope was to write his father’s story to better understand him after his death. Before Winslow was born to his father’s third wife, his father had five children by age 24 with his first wife. His father also spent some time in prison for house burglaries but refused to discuss it. Of course, some questions can never be answered, so Winslow began writing fiction about his father instead—and then eventually about West Mills.
The seed for Decent People emerged at a family gathering, when Winslow’s aunt asked his mother if she recalled the tragic deaths of three older women from decades earlier. The women always drove to church together, and presumably due to some sort of vehicle mishap, they drove into the town’s canal and drowned.
Winslow started writing the story with gusto, assuming that the accidental drownings would lead to revelations about the characters who knew the deceased. However, he quickly found himself bored with his plot. “I had all this social commentary down about homophobia and drugs,” he recalls, “but it needed something else. And that’s when I turned it into three people who were murdered.”
Decent People opens as 60-year-old Jo Wright retires from Harlem to her childhood home of West Mills. She has barely gotten out of her car when she learns that three people have just been murdered: the town’s prominent Black doctor, Dr. Marian Harmon, and her two adult siblings. Jo’s fiancé, Lymp Seymore, is suspected of shooting the trio, who are his half siblings.
Jo is calm, smart and a bit glamorous, an amateur investigator whose nearly 6-foot height catches people’s attention. “If she was based on anyone at all, it would be Jessica Fletcher from ‘Murder, She Wrote,’” Winslow says. I suggest that she could also be perfectly portrayed by Emmy Award-winning actor Sheryl Lee Ralph of ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.” “Now that you’ve put that in my brain,” he says, laughing, “I’m going to envision her as Jo!”
“If [Jo] was based on anyone at all, it would be Jessica Fletcher from ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”
As Jo begins investigating the murders, she acknowledges the history of Black people doing “their own legwork and [gathering] information the police hadn’t even tried to find,” she says in the book. “Cases reopened, police chiefs proven lazy, racist. Or both.” She quickly discovers that several people have possible motives for the crime, and from there, Winslow leads readers through a story told by a large cast of characters, many of whom draw on memories from their pasts.
One of the novel’s central figures is a young gay boy, whose storyline is one of the notable differences between Decent People and In West Mills. “When I was writing In West Mills, the topic of homophobia wasn’t really on my mind,” Winslow says. “I was thinking of the town in a far more loving way. But with this book, I had to think about all of the disadvantages that a town like that can pose to a queer person, especially a young queer person.”
The result is a wonderfully jampacked saga that flows well yet feels much denser than its 272 pages. Winslow admits that he loves the plots and characters of Charles Dickens’ novels but doesn’t like to read—much less write—long books. He credits novelist Ethan Canin for teaching him how to keep his own prose spare through the concept of “scene hygiene,” which means “once the point of the scene is made, move on.”
For his next book, Winslow is toying with a few ideas for stories set in West Mills, possibly inspired by his mother and aunts. He’s also contemplating something autobiographical, although he feels his own life story lacks a central conflict. “I don’t want it to be ‘young gay Black male moves to New York and works a bunch of jobs, goes to college, has some boyfriends and breakups, and at the end of the book he’s 43.’” Though honestly, if Winslow is writing it, I’d read that, too.
Photo of De’Shawn Charles Winslow by Julie R. Keresztes. This article has been updated to correct and clarify details of the author’s life.
In Decent People, De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s fictional community of West Mills is now the setting of a terrible crime.
“Having your child die is so brutally humbling I struggle to describe it,” writes comedian and “Catastrophe” actor Rob Delaney. And yet he does manage to describe it, and does it well, in his unspeakably admirable memoir A Heart That Works. The comedian’s first book was memorably titled Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. This second, decidedly different, book describes the life of his 2-year-old son, Henry, who died from a brain tumor in 2018.
Life seemed practically perfect for Delaney and his beloved wife, Leah, with their “beautiful little clump of boys”—three under the age of 5. However, Henry became ill at 11 months from an apple-size tumor right next to his brainstem. Instantly, their lives were thrust into another dimension as Henry faced surgery, chemo and 14 months of hospitalization, only for his cancer to eventually return without any safe options for treatment. Delaney recounts the ordeal in searingly honest terms, conveying the intricate cobweb of emotions he experienced, often simultaneously: grief, rage, gratitude, grace and, most of all, love for Henry, their family and the many people who supported them during this time.
“It often felt like we were falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion,” Delaney writes, “with each successive piece of bad news.” Still, they were able to savor sweet moments with Henry and his brothers, even in the face of an additional family tragedy: Delaney’s brother-in-law died by suicide during Henry’s hospitalization. This unexpected death struck hard, especially since Delaney has wrestled with suicidal ideation himself, and since he wasn’t able to reach out as he normally would have because his son had been so ill.
Despite this tsunami of tragedies, there is humor, often black humor, throughout Delaney’s account. “If you can’t have fun dressed as a family of skeletons in a pediatric cancer ward,” he writes, “I don’t know what to tell you.” There are parcels of advice amid his frank, razor-sharp writing as well. Delaney digs deep on every page, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the worst moments of his life. His is truly a heart that works.
Comedian Rob Delaney digs deep in his second memoir, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the life and death of his son.
Coretta Scott King Honor author Lesa Cline-Ransome has earned a reputation as an excellent chronicler of American history in more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. In For Lamb, she powerfully captures the events that lead to a fictitious lynching in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1940.
Cline-Ransome was inspired to write For Lamb after visiting the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where she became interested in the untold stories of Black women who were victims of lynching. Within the novel, Cline-Ransome names a number of characters after these women, including the titular protagonist, whose namesake, Lamb Whittle, was lynched in Louisiana in 1907.
As the novel opens, 16-year-old Lamb Clark (who was “quiet as a lamb” when she was born) is a naive girl, sheltered by her protective mother, Marion, and older brother, Simeon, an enterprising student determined to attend college and leave the South behind. After an encounter between Simeon and a bigoted white optometrist, the doctor’s daughter decides to befriend Lamb. Their friendship sets off a series of developments and leads to a horrifying, expertly plotted climax with unimaginable consequences.
Cline-Ransome skillfully conveys Lamb’s transformation into a young woman determined to chart her own course in life despite the obstacles and horrors of the Jim Crow South, including a sexual assault and the lynching of a member of her family. Lamb comes to a new understanding of Marion’s romantic relationship with a woman and forms a new connection with her father, who has been largely absent for many years.
Cline-Ransome depicts injustice and violence with a perfect balance of brutality and sensitivity. She particularly excels at portraying the nuances of relationships and character motivations, which are often at odds among the members of Lamb’s family. Simeon, for instance, longs to be free from the need to act submissive around white people, while Marion believes this behavior can be key to survival, and readers gain deep understandings of both characters’ perspectives.
For Lamb is a heartbreaking novel that will leave readers with a visceral understanding of history.
Lesa Cline-Ransome powerfully chronicles the events that lead to a fictitious lynching in For Lamb, which expertly balances brutality and sensitivity.
Readers of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s award-winning debut novel, In West Mills, a multigenerational saga spanning the 1940s through the ’80s, will be thrilled to return to the titular small town in Decent People. It’s 1976, and the town’s only Black physician, Dr. Marian Harmon, has been found dead from a gunshot in her West Mills home, along with her brother and sister.
The Harmons’ half brother, Lymp Seymore, had a strained relationship with the victims, and he is immediately questioned by police, who show little interest in actually solving the shocking crime. Lymp’s fiancée, Jo Wright, begins sleuthing on her own, and her investigation leads her to believe that more than one person had a motive for the crime.
As the story unspools, Winslow shifts point of view from character to character, successfully developing a large cast that’s connected by multiple intermingling plotlines, including a particularly poignant one involving a boy facing homophobia. Revelations about the cast’s relationships not only move the mystery forward but also contain pitch-perfect zingers and crushing truths about race, privilege, pride and shame. For example, Savannah Russet, the white daughter of the Harmons’ landlord, was disowned by her family when she married a Black man. Savannah was also best friends with Marian, and they had a very public argument not long before her murder. But when a police officer telephones Savannah during the investigation, he reassures her that there’s no need to come in for questioning because “You don’t exactly fit the profile, if you know what I mean.”
Anyone who adored Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, take note. Winslow invites readers on a satisfying ride that, through his keen observations of human nature, leads to deeper considerations of the glacial progress of racial equality. “It’s 1976. There’s no Klan anymore,” Savannah’s father proclaims at one point, but then he quickly admits to himself that “it still existed, and that it always would.” To reveal such underlying truths, Decent People twists the light this way and that, showing the simmering tensions that can indeed turn deadly.
In his second novel, De’Shawn Charles Winslow invites readers on a satisfying ride that, through his keen observations of human nature, leads to deeper considerations of the glacial progress of racial equality.
English author Lucy Strange (The Secret of Nightingale Wood) transports readers to a thrilling and mysterious world in Sisters of the Lost Marsh, a gothic fairy tale fueled by female empowerment.
Twelve-year-old Willa and her five sisters barely scrape by on their farm at the edge of a marsh with their mean-spirited father. Everyone assumes that the sisters are doomed because of a folk rhyme called “The Curse of the Six Daughters,” which purports to predict the fate of any family with six daughters. Despite such dismal conditions, Willa and her sisters find small joys with help from their Grammy, who taught them to read the books hidden away in her secret cupboard, many of which she and the girls’ late mother wrote, even though reading and writing are strictly forbidden for women in their village.
The delicate balance of the sisters’ existence crumples, however, when their father trades his oldest daughter, Grace, to an older man, Silas Kirby, in exchange for a horse. Silas intends to marry Grace, but before the deal can be finalized, Grace disappears.
Willa often feels “like the ugly duckling,” caught between her “taller, fairer” older sisters and her younger sisters, who are triplets. But Willa was named for her strong will, so she steals her father’s fine new steed and sets off across the marsh to find Grace. The marsh is full of mesmerizing magic and atmospheric suspense, and readers will be swept along on Willa’s epic adventure, made all the more urgent when she discovers that her father and Silas are in hot pursuit and that Grace may have fallen prey to a mythical figure from their mother’s stories.
Strange is a gifted storyteller who masterfully balances good and evil, dreariness and hope. She incorporates a few perfectly timed doses of horror that will entertain middle grade readers without overwhelming them. Honest and riveting, Sisters of the Lost Marsh is a tale of girls boldly taking charge of their own fates, flying fearlessly in the face of a community trying to scare them into submission and ignorance. These six sisters, “side by side like a row of paper dolls,” turn out to be as strong as steel.
When her sister disappears, Willa sets off on an epic quest in this gothic tale filled with mesmerizing magic and atmospheric suspense.
After sharing her life story in Becoming, former first lady Michelle Obama now offers readers an exceptional follow-up—“a glimpse inside my personal toolbox”—in The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times.
Obama describes the publication of Becoming as “one of the happiest and most affirming periods of my life so far.” That said, the night before starting her international publicity tour, she lay in bed, terrified at the thought of the arena-size audiences she would soon face. As it turns out, Obama is a worrier who understands all too well that “your fearful mind is almost always trying to seize the steering wheel and change your course.” She offers a supreme example: When her husband wanted to run for president, he first asked for her blessing. “I was pretty ready to shut it down,” she writes, because she didn’t want to launch their orderly family life into inevitable chaos. “It’s strange to think that I could have altered the course of history with my fear.”
Much later, the COVID-19 pandemic knocked Obama off her feet, sending her into what felt like a “low-grade form” of depression. During lockdown, she found salvation in an unexpected place: teaching herself to knit by watching YouTube videos. That story is one of many private moments she shares in The Light We Carry. For instance, she admits to an ongoing frustration with her husband’s lack of punctuality, writing that “when feeling cornered, it turns out, I am capable of saying some stupid, hurtful things.” It’s comforting to hear that our heroes are human, and Obama’s signature openness—in addition to her encouraging, sometimes funny, always chummy voice—make her relatable and admirable throughout the book.
The Light We Carry contains a multitude of other poignant, amusing anecdotes and helpful advice for all types of readers: anyone feeling marginalized; young people finding their way in love, education and careers; parents of young children; and just about anyone trying to keep a steady course in the world. Obama writes about the importance of forming and nurturing friendship (which isn’t easy to do when the Secret Service surrounds a potential new friend’s car) and imparts a lifetime of lessons from her parents, who showed her “what it felt like to be comfortably afraid.”
In these frequently dark times, The Light We Carry feels like a hug from a trusted advisor and a good friend. As Obama writes, “The practice I’ve had in finding and appreciating the light inside other people has become perhaps my most valuable tool for overcoming uncertainty and . . . keeping my hopefulness intact.” As one of the brightest lights in America, Obama helps shine the way for others along our shared path.
Michelle Obama’s signature openness—in addition to her encouraging, funny voice—make her relatable and admirable throughout The Light We Carry.
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