Two words occupy the central focus of Cassandra Williams’ existence: “Where’s Wayne?” While seeking the answer to this question, readers of The Furrows: An Elegy, Namwali Serpell’s mesmerizing and endlessly thought-provoking second novel, should keep the book’s opening lines in mind: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.”
Narrator Cassandra, or Cee, describes how her 7-year-old brother, Wayne, drowned in her care while at the beach when she was 12. His body was never recovered. As an adult looking back on the event, Cee admits that her initial account of the tragedy “must have been incoherent, inconsistent, perhaps self-contradictory.” That statement becomes an understatement as the novel progresses.
True to the subtitle, this elegy laments not only Wayne’s death but also the end of Cee’s life as she knew it, and ultimately the dissolution of her family. Cee’s mother, who remains convinced that Wayne is alive despite Cee’s insistence that he is dead, starts a nonprofit for missing children called Vigil. Eventually, Cee’s father moves away to start a new family.
As Cee speaks with different therapists, the details of her story begin to vary: Wayne was hit by a car; no, he fell off a carousel. “I’ve been trained my whole life to tell stories to strangers,” Cee reveals, describing how she rearranges her “abacus beads of memories.” She believes she encounters an adult Wayne more than once, and she even has a sizzling affair with a mysterious man who calls himself Wayne Williams. Despite the story’s blurred but precisely chiseled layers of reality, The Furrows remains sharply focused, even when, midway through, this new Wayne suddenly takes over as narrator.
Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, The Old Drift(2019), was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting second novel will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent. Serpell, who was born in Zambia and raised in a Baltimore suburb, is a Harvard professor whose book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Having lost an older sister when she was a teenager, she writes convincingly about undulating waves of grief, with intriguing nods to such literary forebears as Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston and Edgar Allan Poe.
True to her opening lines, Serpell lets readers know exactly how Cee feels as she mourns, as grief “tugs [her] back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless grooves. This is the incomplete, repeated shape of it: sail into the brim of life, sink back into the cave of death, again and again.” Turbulent, poetic and haunting, The Furrows is a stellar achievement.
Namwali Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, The Old Drift, was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting follow-up will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent.
Twelve-year-old Millie is thrilled to work her first babysitting job, but her world turns upside down the morning after, when she learns that her four-month-old charge, Lola, has died of SIDS. In her second middle grade novel, Liz Garton Scanlon beautifully depicts a middle schooler navigating an unspeakable tragedy.
Let’s start with this book’s striking cover. In the book’s acknowledgments, you write that one of your best friends created the embroidery that serves as the cover image. How did this come about? I can’t get over that art, honestly. Jill Turney, Amelia Mack and Angie Kang (the book’s designers and design fellow) conceived of the image—a mashup of stitchery and sorcery. And then—it’s true!—they partnered with my friend Kathie Sever, founder of Fort Lonesome, a chain-stitch embroidery studio in Austin, Texas, where we both live. The art was made on a weighty piece of black linen, and I think it speaks to the heart and soul of this project, piercing darkness straight through with the abiding possibilities of love and light.
How did Lolo’s Light start for you? The first scene I imagined was the one in Chapter 3, where Millie finds herself in the gorgeous airiness of the Acostas’ house, babysitting for the very first time and enraptured by the importance of her circumstances. It all seems almost too good to be true, which is a very good place to start a story, on the cusp between the before and after. I teetered there for a while with Millie, and then we fell headlong into the story.
Tell us more about Millie, who she is and where she’s at as the novel opens. I think Millie is like many of us at 12 years old—happy and also restless. She has friends and smarts and good dogs and confidence, but what she really wants is to be grown up. That yearning to be on the other side of the invisible line between childhood and whatever-happens-next—it’s so palpable and so universal. But, of course, it’s also inevitably more complicated than we think it will be.
“Not every adult can walk alongside kids as they struggle and crack and grow, but I wanted Millie to have some of the good ones—the brave ones.”
After Lolo dies, Millie must confront all kinds of emotions. As you created her journey through grief, what was most important to you to get right about her experience? I wanted to look at grief honestly—especially this first, great grief—and to allow all the nuances of it to play out for Millie. I wanted to show, for example, that while it’s unbelievably hard to feel responsible, it’s also heartbreaking when you realize you’re not, that nobody is, that there was nothing anyone could have done to change what happened.
It was also really important to me to depict grief as a journey, as something shifting over time, as something Millie navigated and grew within and maybe even eventually understood. I just aimed to see her through it, and there were so many layers and facets and stages to illuminate along the way.
Let’s talk about the adults in this novel, because there are a bunch of really great ones. Why was it important to you to surround Millie with so many adults, particularly when children’s literature often goes out of its way to eliminate adults from narratives? I wanted to make sure Millie was not alone as she walked through grief. It’s as simple as that. Even when she felt alone, I wanted her surrounded by wisdom and experience and kindness and love. Not every adult in the real world is good at this. Not every adult can walk alongside kids as they struggle and crack and grow, but I wanted Millie to have some of the good ones—the brave ones. She needed them. Every kid does.
Millie’s class’s egg-hatching project works so beautifully within the story. Based on your acknowledgments, it sounds like you have experienced similar activities as both an elementary school student and as a parent. Did you by any chance attempt to re-create this project for research? Ha—I did not re-create the project but just you asking makes me wish that I had! I did hatch eggs in science class as a kid and I did win the chance to take one of the resulting chicks home. It wasn’t until I was on the school bus with a big box on my lap that I realized the chick was already becoming a rooster who would not do well with my dogs or upon the top of my dresser. That poor bird was rapidly rehomed!
”When adults suggest that kids shouldn’t read or know or think about those things, kids feel shame and confusion and loneliness and fear. Let’s not do that to them.”
What are some things you think novelists could learn from reading or writing picture books? Picture books center the child and the child’s perspective in a most remarkable way. There is something about having to consider the very youngest humans—the pre- and early readers— having to witness and reflect what they love and fear and want and need that can help us in the practice of writing through and of kids rather than to or for them.
Although this is not your first novel, you have written many picture books. What do you find challenging about novels? I’m a short-form writer at heart, so writing a novel is a very real effort in opening up, in giving each moment and every character a little more breathing room. It’s a matter of trying to evoke meaning and emotions with the same potency I might in a picture book, but holding the reader’s gaze while I do.
You addressed a note that accompanied advance editions of this book to “adult readers.” In it, you wrote, “The grown-up world has not, historically, done a great job of acknowledging or attending to young people’s feelings.” What would you say to an adult who thinks that children’s books shouldn’t include the kinds of subjects and emotions depicted in Lolo’s Light? I would say, “I understand your worry and your love, but kids are simply young human beings who wonder about and reckon with things like loss and grief and heartache just like we do! When adults suggest that kids shouldn’t read or know or think about those things, kids feel shame and confusion and loneliness and fear. Let’s not do that to them. Let’s not make things worse. Let’s, instead, keep them company.”
What do you hope a kid who finds themselves in a similar situation to Millie’s might take away from Lolo’s Light? Honestly, I hope all kids everywhere grow to know that there’s a light they can count on, a light that can be seen through cracks and curtains, in friendships and in family and in themselves. Even on the darkest days with the sharpest edges there is still a living, humming, human light—a bioluminescent beacon—there to see them through.
Lolo’s Light contains some egg-cellent puns. I’m curious: If you had the opportunity to name a flock of chickens, what do you think would make some egg-ceptional chicken names? Oh now THIS is a fun prompt. I’m going to go for a girl group—we’ll call them The Chicks— made up of Eggetha, Yolko and Henifer. They’ll be a power trio.
Billington, Texas, might be a small town, but readers of Bobby Finger’s exquisite debut novel, The Old Place, will quickly fall in love with this boondock burg and its make-you-laugh, break-your-heart characters.
“Even a town in decline never really stops growing,” writes Finger early in the novel. “People may leave, but their stories remain, reverberating in the bones of all those left behind.” That’s certainly the case in Billington, where generations of comings and goings pulsate with bitter secrets, old hurts and unresolved feelings—in other words, small-town drama at its best.
Reminiscent of Alice Elliott Dark’s novel Fellowship Point (a tale of two New England dowagers), The Old Place focuses on best friends and neighbors Mary Alice and Ellie and their deeply intertwined past and present. Both lost their sons immediately after the boys’ high school graduation, and Finger artfully doles out just enough tidbits from the neighbors’ pasts to keep tension high.
Mary Alice has been forced to retire from teaching math at Billington High, and she hardly knows what to do beyond having Ellie over for coffee every morning. Their new routine is upended when Mary Alice’s sister, Katherine, unexpectedly arrives from Atlanta, delivering bombshell news that Mary Alice has desperately been trying to avoid. The big reveal gradually builds toward an explosive conclusion at the much-anticipated annual church picnic.
One of the most remarkable things about The Old Place is how Finger, a 30-something Texas native and Brooklyn podcaster (“Who? Weekly”), has so superbly captured the hearts and souls of this trio of 60-ish women. The novel is an extended meditation on the great joys and enduring heartaches of long-term relationships—and the hard work that’s required to maintain these bonds. Finger is fully cognizant of his characters’ many flaws, noting, for instance, that stubborn Mary Alice has at times been capable of raising “so much hell they almost had to call in an exorcist.” His portrayal of Mary Alice and Katherine’s love-hate relationship over the years is particularly poignant.
A broad supporting cast adds depth, drama and even romance to the mix. There’s also plenty of humor, with lines like “And then something wonderful happened: he sawed his damn finger off.” Mary Alice’s teaching replacement, Josie Kerr, is a newcomer to Billington, and she provides an outsider’s point of view. (She also seems like an intriguing candidate to anchor a sequel.)
Finger has created his own kind of Lake Wobegon: a vibrant literary locale that readers will be loath to leave. Here’s hoping for more tantalizing, tempestuous tales.
With his debut novel, Bobby Finger has created his own kind of Lake Wobegon: a vibrant literary locale that readers will be loath to leave. Here's hoping for more tantalizing, tempestuous tales.
How would a middle schooler navigate an unspeakable tragedy? That’s the subject Liz Garton Scanlon beautifully explores in Lolo’s Light, her second middle grade novel.
Twelve-year-old Millie is thrilled when she gets her first babysitting job. Her older sister isn’t available, so Millie gets to watch their neighbors’ 4-month-old baby, Lolo. The Acostas make the job easy, putting Lolo to bed before they leave so Millie just needs to check on her. As Millie revels in her new responsibility, she feels “something shift, like that exact moment [is] the end of her being a kid and the beginning of her being real, full-grown Millie.” The night goes swimmingly and the Acostas return home to find that all is well. But the next morning, the world turns upside down, because overnight, Lolo dies of SIDS.
Garton Scanlon clearly establishes that no one is to blame for this tragedy while also conveying Millie’s ongoing feelings of shock and anguish. As Millie grieves, she is also haunted—and comforted—by a light that seems to emanate from Lolo’s bedroom window whenever Millie walks past the Acostas’ house, which Millie believes is Lolo’s presence.
Millie receives support from numerous caring adults, including her parents, her teacher, her school librarian and a therapist, as well as the Acostas. Garton Scanlon makes superb use of Millie’s seventh grade science project, hatching chicken eggs, as a focal point for Millie’s sorrow, depression and growing anxiety. As Millie’s teacher tells her, “You are trying to make sense of something very big and ancient and scary. You’re trying to process how unbelievably fragile life can be.”
Despite its heavy topic, Lolo’s Light is ultimately a hopeful book about healing that captures how much hard work, along with time, the process can require. Garton Scanlon infuses the story with perfect moments of humor, too, such as the many puns that arise during the science project scenes. (Millie’s science project group’s name, “the Egg-ceptionals,” is only the beginning.)
In writing Lolo’s Light, Garton Scanlon undertook a monumental challenge. The result is a compelling novel that glows with understanding and empathy.
Author Liz Garton Scanlon undertakes a monumental challenge in Lolo's Light. The result is a compelling novel that glows with empathy and understanding.
American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics reveals a hidden slice of history about the emergency services that we all depend on but largely take for granted. Kevin Hazzard (A Thousand Naked Strangers), a print and television writer who worked as a paramedic in Atlanta for nearly a decade, does an excellent job of transforming his exhaustive research into a compelling narrative suitable to its gripping subject.
While the book is replete with white-knuckle medical emergencies, the real story here is the inspiring saga of how the paramedic profession was born. Before the 1970s, emergency services were “slapdash and chaotic,” with ambulance runs “treated like a Frankenstein limb rather than a full-fledged arm of public safety.” Hospital transportation might have been provided by the police, firefighters or a funeral home, with little regulation involved and a shocking absence of training. As Hazzard writes, “On any given day, the patient in an ambulance may have been better qualified to handle their own emergency than the person paid to save them.”
In 1966, medical pioneer Peter Safar, known as the father of CPR, lost his 11-year-old daughter to an asthma-induced coma while he and his wife were away at a medical conference. He channeled his grief into designing and implementing an entirely new model of ambulance care, partnering with Freedom House, a grassroots organization in the Black, immigrant neighborhood of Hill District in Pittsburgh, to train ordinary people to administer lifesaving techniques. After intensive training, a group of Black paramedics took their first call on July 15, 1968, and went on to respond to nearly 6,000 calls in the Hill District that year, saving more than 200 lives. Their response abilities got better and better under the direction of Safar and medical director Nancy Caroline, and their curriculum was eventually chosen by the Department of Transportation to serve as the model for standardized EMS training.
Astoundingly, Freedom House’s achievements were met with “the city’s unyielding resistance,” and their groundbreaking program was eventually turned over to Pittsburgh’s local government. A crew of lesser trained white men took over in 1975. Meanwhile, the longtime Freedom House paramedics who knew how to intubate in the field were asked to carry the bags.
American Sirens is a stirring, ultimately heartbreaking story in which jaw-dropping medical innovation meets racial prejudice. After finishing Hazzard’s memorable account, readers will never hear an ambulance siren the same way again.
After finishing Kevin Hazzard’s memorable account of America’s first paramedics, readers will never hear an ambulance siren the same way again.
“I can’t imagine another disease on the planet where if somebody didn’t get better, everybody in their life would abandon them,” said Chris Schaffner, director of a harm-reduction program in Peoria, Illinois. And yet, that’s the attitude many of us have toward people with addictions, thanks to America’s long-standing war on drugs mentality. After tackling the origins of the opioid crisis in Dopesick, along with its devastating effects on families near her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, Beth Macy continues this essential conversation in Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. Her fourth book zeroes in on why this crisis continues and how things can change, and the facts she presents will enlighten you and likely change your opinions on many important overdose-related issues.
Once again, Macy’s up close and personal reporting is riveting as she weaves together multiple storylines. She profiles numerous front-line heroes like Tim Nolan, who, after his full-time job is done, works as a traveling nurse practitioner in North Carolina, delivering harm-reduction supplies out of his Prius. Nolan works alongside the Reverend Michelle Mathis, co-founder of Olive Branch Ministries, which offers addiction triage, counseling, food and hygiene supplies in 10 western North Carolina counties. “I’m like the grandma that does syringe exchange and delivers biscuits,” Mathis said. In West Virginia, there’s 30-year-old Lill Prosperino, who puts their 4’10”, 125-pound frame to work helping about 800 people who use drugs. These activists share many admirable qualities, including the ability to greet substance users with “unconditional positive regard,” as one mental health counselor advises.
Macy also follows the diverse, dedicated group that brought the OxyContin-pushing Sackler family to court, including the renowned photographer Nan Goldin, who staged a series of “die-ins” and other protests at museums around the world to pressure them into removing the Sackler name from their halls and galleries. Commenting on Goldin’s success, Macy writes, “That it had taken a famous artist, of all people, to finally get under the Sacklers’ skin said as much about what captures Americans’ attention as it does about corporate influence-peddling.”
The genius of Macy’s writing is that she makes readers care, on every page, as she bears witness. This is heartfelt, informed writing at its best, and always personal. With Dopesick and now Raising Lazarus, Macy is a social historian and change-maker at the top of her game.
Raising Lazarus, Beth Macy’s follow-up to Dopesick, will radically change your opinions on the opioid crisis.
“Why is that new girl on our new horse?” Norrie asks her best friend, Hazel, as the two arrive at Edgewood Stables, where they ride and help out around the barn along with their friend, Sam. It turns out that the new girl is Vic, who used to ride at tony Waverly Stables. The four preteens form the heart of the wonderful ensemble cast in graphic novelist Faith Erin Hicks’ Ride On, a lively tale of horses and friendship.
Vic has begun riding at Edgewood after falling out with her best friend at Waverly, and she and Norrie get off to a dramatically rocky start. Passionate Norrie reacts to the newcomer with a short fuse, declaring that Waverly is Edgewood’s rival (an opinion that no one else, particularly shy, reserved Hazel, seems to share). Vic, meanwhile, tells Norrie she’s not looking to make friends at Edgewood; she just wants to be left alone to ride.
The story of Vic and Norrie’s relationship includes twists, turns and plenty of emotional fireworks that feel immediate and authentic. Hicks captures the angst and confusion that so often characterize the early teen years as interests change and friendships blossom and wane.
Hicks’ sharp, focused illustrations enliven character interactions by zeroing in on facial expressions, especially Norrie’s cavalcade of wide-eyed, accusatory looks as she feels increasingly threatened by Vic. Onomatopoeia punctuates various scenes, such as a large, bright yellow “FWUMP!” when Vic falls onto her bed in frustration. Hicks skillfully uses color to spotlight characters within panels: Vic’s blue-tinged braids, Norrie’s pink polo shirt and Sam’s blue and gray hoodie all stand out against the browns and blacks of Edgewood Stables and its horses.
Of course, those horses are also at the center of the story. Ride On contains plenty of riding action informed by Hicks’ childhood as a “horse girl,” as she explains in an author’s note. Hicks movingly conveys the love between riders and horses, as well as the nerves and challenges experienced by both during competitions.
Ride On will leave readers eager for more of Hicks’ animated tales and ready to jump in the saddle themselves.
Faith Erin Hicks’ graphic novel is a love letter to “horse crazy” kids and a lively portrait of how friendships can blossom and wane during early adolescence.
The flame that burns brightly on the colorful cover of Jonathan Escoffery’s debut is an appropriate image, because If I Survive You is a blazing success. With a profoundly authentic vision of family dynamics and racism in America, this collection of connected stories explores the young adulthood of a character named Trelawny, whose parents fled political violence in Jamaica only to face hard luck in Miami.
These eight stories (all except one were previously published) are completely immersive, humorous yet heartbreaking. The first, “In Flux,” sets the stage well, describing Trelawny’s 1980s childhood and his tortured, complex search for clarity about his identity. The questions are invasive: “What are you?” people ask him, and he turns to his mother, wondering, “Are we Black?” His confusion at school is loaded with cynical truths, such as his take on his fifth grade lessons about the history of slavery in the United States: “It’s: Mostly good people made a big mistake. It’s: That was a long, long time ago. It’s: Honest Abe and Harriet Tubman and M.L.K fixed all that nasty business. It’s: Now we don’t see race.“
Sixth grade brings disaster: “A hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fiberboard with sopping sea salt corrosion.” After the hurricane, Trelawny’s family rips apart, with his older brother and father moving out together. This parting is further explored in “Under the Ackee Tree,” a story told from the perspective of Trelawny’s father that was previously published in The Paris Review and included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. Trelawny’s brother, Delano, who longs to be a musician, shines in his own story set on the eve of Hurricane Irene, titled “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch.”
Hoping to be a writer, Trelawny goes to college in the frigid Midwest, only to find himself back in Miami amid the Great Recession, living out of his SUV and scrambling for work. As Trelawny notes, he “had faithfully followed the upward mobility playbook, only to wind up an extraordinary failure.” This quest is at the center of a trio of riveting, memorable and surprising stories: “Odd Jobs,” “Independent Living” and the exquisite titular tale.
Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America. As Trelawny notes, “If I don’t create characters who look like me, who will? Visibility is important. Otherwise, it’s as if we don’t exist.”
Jonathan Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America. As his protagonist notes, "If I don't create characters who look like me, who will? Visibility is important. Otherwise, it's as if we don't exist."
“One of the great things about writing a book about 1940s Hollywood is that you can watch a bunch of old movies and call it research,” Anthony Marra says about Mercury Pictures Presents, a sprawling, bighearted tragicomedy set in Hollywood during World War II, with additional storylines in Italy and Germany. It took six years to write. “So yeah, I did a lot of research,” he says, laughing. “I’m in my sweatpants watching Humphrey Bogart, saying, ‘Don’t worry, this is work.'”
Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and the story collection The Tsar of Love and Techno, speaks from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, with a voice that’s full of humor, passion and compassion, just like his prose. After previously setting books in Chechnya and the Soviet Union, he says he wanted to set this novel a little closer to home.
Initially, he was toying with two seemingly separate ideas, the first being a story set in Los Angeles, the author’s former home. “Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles,” Marra says. “That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”
The other idea focused on southern Italy, the home of Marra’s great-grandmother and her family. But during a trip to the island of Lipari, the author noticed a plaque commemorating anti-Fascists, artists and intellectuals who had been exiled there during Benito Mussolini’s regime.
“It seemed so strange,” Marra recalls, “that this island paradise to which I could trace my own roots had once been Mussolini’s Alcatraz. It occurred to me that a number of European refugees would refer to LA as ‘sunny Siberia,’ and I thought the same term could have easily been applied to a place like Lipari.” Marra realized that he could weave his two story ideas together into one, “about two Siberias on either ends of the world, and this one family divided between them.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles. That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”
Mercury Pictures Presents is the story of Maria Lagana, who flees Rome with her mother after Fascists condemn Maria’s activist father to confino (internal exile) in a Calabrian village. Devastatingly, it was 12-year-old Maria’s actions that accidentally led to her father’s betrayal—a theme that Marra explores in similar ways in The Tsar of Love and Techno. “Totalitarian ideology invariably undermines the family as an institution by turning each member into a potential betrayer,” the author explains. “The people you’re closest to have the power to take away your freedom, or even your life, simply by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.”
Fifteen years later, in 1941, Maria lives in Los Angeles with her mother and works as a producer at Mercury Pictures International. Maria’s boss is Artie Feldman, described in the novel as a fast-talking, “middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees.” This is where Marra’s movie watching comes in handy, particularly in the way he mirrors the screwball-comedy dialogue of the era’s films. It’s apparent that His Girl Friday was a big influence, and Maria will remind readers of Rosalind Russell’s character, just “a lot more Italian,” Marra says. It’s easy to see why Maria was the first character that came to him when he started crafting the novel. “I really just fell in love with her.”
Despite the abundance of World War II novels and movies, Marra was surprised to find this chapter of Hollywood history to be “a little hidden.” As he plunged into researching the 1940s world of madcap moviemaking, he meticulously explored more serious subjects with equal fervor, including wartime challenges, xenophobia and immigration. For example, immigrants were subject to curfews, so Hollywood studios frequently adjusted shooting schedules to ensure workers could get home on time. Immigrants like Maria had to register as “enemy aliens,” confine their movements to a 5-mile radius and surrender certain items like flashlights, radios and cameras—anything that might be used to communicate with the enemy.
Such restrictions are particularly problematic for another central character of the novel, Italian immigrant and photographer Vincent Cortese. As he complains to Maria, “You travel halfway around the world just to end up in confino again. How does an itinerant photographer make a living if he’s prohibited from being an itinerant and a photographer?”
Elements of photography and filmmaking are all over Mercury Pictures Presents, to the extent that Marra considers his role to be as directorial as it is authorial. “I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world,” he says. At times, the narrative zooms in and out, cutting from present day to the future and back again. Other scenes have an undeniably cinematic quality, such as when Vincent and another character step outside to discover that it’s snowing in Los Angeles, which really happened on New Year’s Day in 1942. Even the process of editing out unnecessary scenes was informed by filmmaking. “If you look at Dostoevsky,” Marra says, “where people are ranting for pages at a time, you can tell that clearly Dostoevsky was a man who had never seen a movie.”
“I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world.”
Marra is especially intrigued by the machinations of fantasy, escapism and propaganda in this period, particularly as the government turned to Hollywood “to use the tools of cinema to mobilize the country for war,” he says. “I was interested in exploring how the camera—and more broadly, art—can be this source of witness and documentation, but also a source of deception. And how we as viewers are asked to tell the difference.”
But for every element of darkness and wartime despair, the novel also contains just as much joy, particularly in moments of comic relief. Marra considers this his “most comic work yet,” and found that humor “collapses the distance between character and reader in a way that nothing else really does. A good joke is really powerful in terms of bringing the reader to care about a character.”
Familial bonds provide some of the most buoyant opportunities for comedy. Most memorably, a lively trio of aunts, inspired by the author’s own great-aunts, provide a lifeline for Maria and her mother in LA. “In their black dresses and sunglasses,” Marra writes, “they looked like Grim Reapers going as Greta Garbo for Halloween.” He even gave them his great-aunts’ real names: Mimi, Lala and Pep.
“Even though I initially began working on this book some years ago, it was only during [COVID-19] lockdown that it took off,” Marra says. “I felt like I was drawing more and more on relatives and friends, if only to have the opportunity to keep company with those people again. . . . Obviously, staying inside during COVID is a lot different than experiencing confino, but I think just the sense that you’re isolated from your loved ones and limited in what you can do informed how I approached the characters and their stories.”
As Marra writes in an early scene, “So much of a movie’s meaning came down to who it deemed worthy of a close-up, a perspective, a face.” With Mercury Pictures Presents, he fits a multitude of memorable personalities into his frame, transforming the novel into something quite like an epic film. After all, he says, novels are most like movies in their power to “transport a reader to a place far from their daily life that nonetheless speaks to them in a deep way.”
Photo of Anthony Marra by Paul Duda.
Comedy and tragedy collide in the author's second novel, set amid the highs and lows of World War II-era Hollywood.
Readers, prepare to meet the most memorable middle grade protagonist of 2022. Twelve-year-old Olive Miracle Martin, the instantly endearing hero of Hummingbird, is, in her own words, a “joy-kaboom.” After being homeschooled due to a medical condition called osteogenesis imperfecta (sometimes known as brittle bone disease), Olive begins attending Macklemore Middle School, where local legend tells of a magical, wish-granting hummingbird. Will finding the hummingbird make Olive’s deepest wish come true?
Author Natalie Lloyd brings a uniquely personal perspective to Olive’s story, imbuing her extraordinary hero with unforgettable warmth, honesty and heart.
You and Olive both have osteogenesis imperfecta. In what other ways are you alike? How are you different? Initially, I was very hesitant to write about a character who had the same disability that I do. I really wanted Olive’s story to be about more than her body, so I tried to smoosh the “bone stuff” to the background. But the more I revised Hummingbird, the more I realized that Olive’s disability is naturally a source of conflict for her, like it is for me. My disability informs how I move through my daily life and the world, and how I exist in my body. It’s only one part of the big constellation of my life, but it’s still a part. So we do have that Big Thing in common, Olive and I.
But we share other things too. Olive and I are both creative, and we both love love. We’re both ardent fans of Dolly Parton and Judy Blume. We both think that one true BFF can make all the difference in helping you feel like you belong. And we’re both a little weird. If I were a character in a book, I would be somewhere between Anne Shirley and Luna Lovegood, and Olive falls on that spectrum too. Even though I’ve always been a bit shy, I love theater. Olive is the same way. She puzzles over the dichotomy of wanting to stand out (in her heart-shaped sunglasses and bedazzled wheelchair) and wanting to blend in and be “normal.”
As far as our differences, Olive has a gentle boldness and assertiveness that I would like to have. Her confidence is still growing, of course, but she’s not afraid to ask hard questions and love completely, and I adore that about her.
Tell us about the word fragile and the role it plays in this story. Like Olive, being described as “fragile” has been commonplace for me for as long as I can remember. In a literal sense, it’s true. My bones break easily; my body is fragile. And yet, even though that’s true, there has always been a part of me that bristles at that description. Because I know there is so much more to me—to everybody—than a body.
In 2019, I had a hard reckoning with the word fragile. I walked through the kitchen late one night to check a door and slipped in dog drool. I heard the snap in my thigh before I hit the ground and knew I’d broken my femur. That’s supposed to be the strongest bone in a human body, but my femurs have always been fragile. It’s a painful break and a long recovery, so I felt like my world was paused again because of my fragile places.
I had tried so hard to lean into all the other aspects of who I’d become: I was a writer (which still feels like a dream come true). I was independent. I am married to a kind and wonderful man whom I describe as Gilbert Blythe with sleeve tattoos, and I loved the life we’d built. And then something in me broke, again, and I needed help with everything. I told my husband that I felt broken all over, and he said, “Your leg is broken. You aren’t broken.” It helped me get a grip on Olive’s whole story. She starts out on a mission to prove to everybody she’s not fragile. But really, the only person she ever has to prove that to is herself.
“So much of what I write comes down to how much I love and miss people. Every story is a love story.”
Olive’s narration sometimes shifts from prose into verse. How did this choice come about? What role has poetry played in your life? I wasn’t planning to write any element of Olive’s story in verse, but a whole draft came out that way. I showed it to my brilliant editor, Mallory Kass, and told her that something about it felt really freeing and right for this story, so we looked closely at the text together. I realized the places the verse felt the most important to me was when Olive was reflecting on her body. Those thoughts about her body—how it’s fragile, different and changing—break, just like her bones do. Mallory encouraged me to try writing the story with both forms, and it was the exact blend I wanted. I could lean into Olive’s humor a little easier and explore her world more fully in prose, but verse felt like the right carrier for her weightier thoughts about herself.
Poetry factored big into my middle school era. I wrote some terribly cringey poems that my parents still have. I also got a book of Emily Dickinson poems that’s still on my bookshelf. Back then, I mostly loved Dickinson’s work for its cadence and moodiness. I also loved how she compared big feelings (like hope) to ephemeral things in nature (like “a thing with feathers”). Middle school is also when I wore out Dolly Parton cassette tapes, singing “Eagle When She Flies” to my audience of Popples and Care Bears.
Between Emily and Dolly, I fell in love with poetry, and I still adore it. I used to say that I ate poems for breakfast, by which I mean: I would read a Mary Oliver poem every morning. I still try to do that. It makes my heart feel awake. And of course, I love folk and alt-country, singer-songwriter music—poetry with a banjo in the mix.
Olive’s grandfather is a well-known birder, and it’s a passion he shares with his granddaughter. Did your research include delving into birds and birding? If so, what are some of your favorite things that you learned? There’s a subtle connection Olive and I have: While my granny wasn’t a birder, she was obsessed with birds. She could name a bird by its song, and I always thought that was such a cool way to be connected to the world. I enjoy reading about birds and watching them, too.
“I’m smitten with the idea of big magic existing in a small creature.”
Sometimes when I see a hummingbird, I gasp. I know they aren’t uncommon but they feel special to me. I like their bejeweled feathers and buzzy wings. Reading about them was especially fun as I wrote this book. Here are some fun facts: Most hummingbirds weigh about as much as a nickel, they can fly backwards, and—this is my favorite—they remember human faces. There are also lots of legends and folklore connected to hummingbirds. I’m smitten with the idea of big magic existing in a small creature.
Olive’s story feels inextricable from its setting, and I think many readers will wish they could visit Olive’s fictional hometown of Wildwood, Tennessee. Why was creating such a strong sense of place important to you? Do you have any recommendations for real-world spots that might feel a little like Wildwood? It’s fun to create a town in a novel because I get to pack it full of spots I love. But I definitely understand the need to see the real inspiration. Some of my favorite go-to towns for inspiration in Tennessee are Lenoir City, Signal Mountain and Sweetwater. I also like to visit towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains, like Franklin and Hendersonville in North Carolina, when I need some fodder. If readers are ever able to visit the Smoky Mountains, I highly recommend it. That would give them a good idea of the scope of Olive’s natural world. It’s a misty, magical place full of woods and babbling brooks. And birdsong. And ghost stories. And a hummingbird, or two.
Hummingbird beautifully depicts so many different characters’ relationships to faith and spirituality. Was this an element of the book from the beginning? What was the most challenging part of incorporating it? Olive’s spirituality was always threaded through the book. The biggest challenge in writing about her faith was this: I want every reader, regardless of what they believe, to feel safe in my books. Olive’s personal wrestling with her faith is connected to mine. I’m a person of faith, but when bones break and I’m in pain (or when someone I love is in pain), obviously that’s hard to process. One of my favorite attributes of Southern fiction is how faith and folklore collide; it felt right for Olive to interact with both. And it felt right—and true—that the people Olive loves all have different relationships to faith, too.
“You get to take up as much space as you want on this planet in exactly the body you are in. You deserve to move through the world with joy and confidence. Your experience matters.”
Your books often include elements of magic, and Olive herself loves fantasy and fairy tales. What draws you to incorporating this into your work? What’s magical to you? I think we all write what we love to read, and I was once (and always) a queen in Narnia. I adored books like Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Lynne Reid Banks’ The Fairy Rebel and stories where magic was a flicker in a very real world. I’m still drawn to that gentle magic in books. Deep down, I love that the world is sometimes un-figure-out-able.
It sounds cheesy, but the best magic for me is love. There are certainly moments of little magic in every day: birds singing, dogs that snuggle, sunsets smeared on a mountain sky, cherry popsicles on a hot day, a perfect song lyric. But there’s no magic like love, like hearing the voice of someone you love. Like hugging someone you love and have missed. So much of what I write comes down to how much I love and miss people. Every story is a love story.
What did you learn about yourself from writing Olive’s story? I don’t want to spoil anything, but what Olive and I both learned is reflected in the last line of the book. And while my first hope for readers is that Hummingbird gives them joy-kabooms, I also hope that it’s found by anyone who needs that last-line reminder.
And I also learned this: You get to take up as much space as you want on this planet in exactly the body you are in. You deserve to move through the world with joy and confidence. Your experience matters. One thing I love about the KidLit community, and all the readers, writers, teachers, librarians and publishing people who abide in it, is our determination to create safe spaces where kids get to grow into their most authentic selves. It’s a deep honor to be a little part of that world.
After the publication of her landmark 2018 book Dopesick, which featured six years of reporting about how the opioid crisis affected families in her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, Beth Macy vowed to herself, “I’m not writing about this again.” Her physician feared Macy might have PTSD after bearing witness to so many tragic deaths, including that of a 28-year-old mother named Tess Henry, whom Macy had grown close to while reporting Dopesick and whose body was found in a Las Vegas dumpster on Christmas Eve 2017. Macy’s husband suggested that she should write about happy things this time, like food and gardening, while her late mother, who had advancing dementia at the time, advised her about “eight times a day” to “write a love story instead.”
Not surprisingly, Macy didn’t listen. Yet today she is feeling happy and hopeful, chatting by phone about Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis from her mountain cabin an hour outside of Roanoke. Midway through our conversation, she becomes even more ebullient, shouting, “Oh my God. I’m looking at an eagle!”
Macy explains that writing Raising Lazarus was a very different experience from writing Dopesick, and in some ways, it was healing. “I’m not writing about just death,” she says of her most recent book. “I’m mostly writing about helpers, as Mr. Rogers called them. I’m writing about people who are actually making a difference. It feels really good to give them a platform, a voice.”
One of the book’s many fascinating heroes is the Reverend Michelle Mathis of Olive Branch Ministries in western North Carolina, who uses the biblical story of Lazarus to encourage people to extend help rather than judgment to those with substance use disorder (SUD). Mathis “tells the story to get well-meaning Christians to check their blind spots,” Macy says. “Jesus does the miracle, but the people who are following him have to go in there and get their hands dirty. They have to roll the stone and unbind Lazarus.”
Blind spots play an important role in examining issues related to SUD. The opioid crisis is everywhere, but in rural areas it’s often hidden in plain sight—”literally,” Macy says, “right under the bridges you drive across.” She and the helpers she profiles in Raising Lazarus encourage an alternate approach to the war-on-drugs, “just say no,” victim-blaming approach that so many of us grew up with. “The idea that drug users are worthy human beings—that they are, in fact, equals—is harm reduction in a nutshell,” she writes. They need access to things like clean needles, hepatitis tests and buprenorphine, or “bupe,” an FDA-approved medication to treat opioid use disorder.
People with SUD also need simple things, such as casseroles, instead of stigma and reproach. “It doesn’t always smell like flowers, and you might get a little something on you,” Rev. Mathis says in the book. “But the people who are willing to work at the face-to-face level get to see the miracle and look it in the eye.” Many such solutions, Macy points out, “are kind of low-tech and high-touch,” and the good news is that they’re working. “That’s the view that America needs to see,” she says, “not just the dark but the miracles.”
“That’s the view that America needs to see, not just the dark but the miracles.”
The first time Macy visited a needle exchange program in Roanoke, “I just kind of had to take a breath and turn around and get a hold of myself,” she says. She thought of Tess Henry, who had verbalized a need for urgent care for people with SUD before she died. “She didn’t know what that meant, because she had never seen it,” Macy says, “but she knew it needed to be as easy as the urgent care center that first prescribed opioids for her.” Tess, she believes, would have loved this needle exchange and its welcoming, comfortable vibe. It’s run by a “sweetheart of a guy,” Macy says, who brings his two little white dogs with him to work and provides things like deodorant, food, computers and help with housing and job applications to anyone who needs it, in addition to clean needles.
Macy admits that she has at times struggled to forgive those with SUD, especially in the case of her father, whose substance was alcohol. As a result of his addiction, she grew up in poverty; he even failed to attend her high school graduation. Every now and then, she thinks, “Wow, I really didn’t have the experience of having a father.” But she also knows that he had an illness. “So in some ways,” she says, “I’m trying to figure all that out for myself too.”
Macy knows that she could have become addicted, too, if things had played out a little differently in her life. “I was a wild thing,” she says, “but in my small town, it was just marijuana and beer. I’m sure if everybody was doing [opioids], I would’ve wanted to get in on it too.”
“I think when the full truth comes out, it’s going to be even more shocking than it is now.”
At that time, however, the Sackler family had yet to unleash the pain medication that would eventually cause the opioid epidemic: OxyContin. With fascinating detail, Raising Lazarus describes major players in the class-action lawsuit against this “cartel of the opioid crisis,” as Macy describes them. Paul Hanly, a high-profile litigator who led the legal fight against opioid makers and distributors, told Macy, “I’ve taken 500 depositions in my career, and I have never deposed a person whose ability to exhibit empathy is zero. . . . Compared to [Perdue Pharma chairman and president Richard Sackler], Donald Trump looks like Jesus Christ.”
Macy says she would love the chance to question the Sackler family herself, but only if they first took a truth serum. “They hid so much of it for so many years,” she says. “I think when the full truth comes out, it’s going to be even more shocking than it is now.”
Still, Macy wonders whether the Sacklers wish they could have done things differently—even though board member Kathy Sackler has already testified before Congress that they do not. “They started this thing that has hurt roughly a third of American families, and they’ve taken no responsibility for it,” she says. “I just want to hear them say they’re sorry.”
Author photo of Beth Macy by Josh Meltzer
The bestselling author of Dopesick reexamines opioid addiction, this time with a more hopeful view.
Isaac Fitzgerald grabs readers’ attention with the title of his memoir—Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional—and never lets go. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller who deploys unexpected delights from his very first line: “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” Not only that, but they “met at divinity school, which is a pretty funny way to start an affair.”
Fitzgerald’s raucous life started in low-income housing in Boston’s South End. In the soup kitchen that he frequented, he was “surrounded by stories of the highest comedy and the deepest tragedy, by the sounds of pealing laughter and suffering silence.” True to that upbringing, he fills the 12 essays in Dirtbag, Massachusetts with heaping helpings of humor, joy, pain, sorrow, grace and insight. Throughout, Fitzgerald writes in carefully chosen prose that reveals “just enough that you know it wasn’t pretty.” The topics range from his upbringing in the Roman Catholic Church to life in an old mill town in central Massachusetts where he endured his father’s violence and his mother’s mania. Despite all of this, his parents instilled him with a deep love of literature, and his education continued when he applied to a nearby boarding school as a means of escaping his home life.
Throughout his gritty life, Fitzgerald has filled an incredible variety of roles: an often drunk, high, shoplifting teenager; a biker who found happiness working in a San Francisco bar; a relief worker in Myanmar; an actor in porn movies. More recently, he has talked books on the “Today” show and written the children’s book How to Be a Pirate. Indeed, this is a man who writes equally well about Sara Crewe, the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the neo-fascist group Proud Boys.
With Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald joins the ranks of some of the very best memoirists, including Tobias Wolff, Tara Westover and Dani Shapiro. This entertaining and thoughtful book reveals Fitzgerald’s talents as a master craftsman of unusual insight and will leave readers eager for more.
The 12 essays in Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts offer heaping helpings of humor, joy, pain, sorrow, grace and insight.
“Help me get back to my baby, or I’ll make your life a living hell.” That’s the voice of Erma Singleton, a dead woman whose body is found on a New Mexico highway. Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Crime Lab, is frequently haunted by the ghosts of the victims she photographs, but Erma is particularly persistent. Ramona Emerson’s intriguing debut thriller, Shutter, follows Rita through a series of crimes that eventually puts her in the crosshairs of a dirty cop who’s on the take from a powerful drug cartel.
In alternating chapters, readers follow both Rita’s battle against corruption and her coming-of-age as a photographer and vessel for departed spirits. Rita has been haunted by spirits ever since she was a child growing up on the Diné reservation, and her devoted grandmother and a tribal elder have long tried to protect Rita from these voices. Rita’s relationship with her grandmother is particularly well done, as is the novel’s portrayal of Indigenous history and discrimination. As the book progresses, the action revs up in both Rita’s backstory and her crime-solving saga.
As a Diné writer and filmmaker from New Mexico, Emerson has created an intriguing crime drama in a setting she knows intimately, and her photographic knowledge shines. Each chapter is titled after a different type of camera used by Rita, ranging from a pinhole camera in her youth to her mother’s Hasselblad and a digital Nikon. Emerson got her start in forensic videography, so her detailed crime scene descriptions are not for the faint of heart: Erma met a particularly gruesome death, and so do others, including a murdered judge and his family.
Shutter is a promising debut that satisfyingly explores forensic photography and Diné culture within the New Mexico landscape, surrounded by the voices of some very engaging ghosts.
Shutter is a promising debut that satisfyingly explores forensic photography and Diné culture within the New Mexico landscape, surrounded by the voices of some very engaging ghosts.
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