Amy Scribner

FictionLiterary Fiction

A ravaged mining town turns fracking target

Review by Amy Scribner

The dying town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, was fueled by the coal industry for generations, but now its only hope is natural gas. Bakerton sits atop an enormous deposit, which can only be accessed by fracking: violent drilling that leaves the surrounding ground poisoned.

The families with properties on the Marcellus Shale don’t know what fracking entails. They just know that a mysterious Texas company with the vaguely sinister name Dark Elephant Energy is offering them a golden ticket out of poverty. Never mind the past ravages mining has brought to their community. In Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh reminds us of our short memories when it comes to choosing between our environment and our wallet.

Heat and Light is a searing novel that shows all sides of the fracking debate: the charismatic Texas businessman who sees natural gas as the future, the organic dairy farmers who see their livelihood threatened by pollution, the zealous environmentalist trying to organize opposition.

Haigh previously wrote about the 1940s heyday of real-life Bakerton in Baker Towers, and she returns in top form. Her writing is clear-eyed and nonjudgmental. A low-grade dread pervades every page of the book—the instability and uncertainty of a bad economy and limited choices. Haigh’s characters are deeply sympathetic; they are good people looking for a way forward. She delves into each of their lives, unfolding their flaws and histories for examination. Heat and Light is as thought-provoking as it gets, brilliantly written and resonant.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The dying town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, was fueled by the coal industry for generations, but now its only hope is natural gas. Bakerton sits atop an enormous deposit, which can only be accessed by fracking: violent drilling that leaves the surrounding ground poisoned.
FictionDebut Fiction

When private correspondence becomes public

Review by Amy Scribner

When a protagonist spends 90 percent of a book making awful choices, the reader can be in for a slog. Yet despite main character Cassie Sunday’s penchant for self-destructive behavior, Lisa Beazley’s winning Keep Me Posted is pure pleasure to read.

During Christmas at their grandparents’ house in Ohio—and over many glasses of wine—Cassie, who lives in Manhattan, and her sister, Sid, who lives in Singapore, bemoan how out of touch they’ve become. Sid eschews social media, and the time difference makes phone calls nearly impossible. The tipsy sisters pledge to spend a year writing each other good old-fashioned letters.

By the time Cassie returns to New York with her husband Leo and their young son, she already has a letter from Sid. Bored and lonely since quitting her job to be a fulltime mom, Cassie throws herself into the letter-writing project. Soon the sisters are divulging their deepest secrets, including Cassie’s drunken kiss with her ex-boyfriend, who is now a rising-star chef, and Sid’s suspicions that her husband is being unfaithful.

Inspired to preserve the letters, Cassie sets up a private blog and scans their letters in. But a glitch in the blog’s system makes all their letters public, and soon #slownewssisters is trending online. Cassie has to decide whether she should tell Leo and let him read about her bad choices, or hope it blows over.

Despite Cassie’s reckless behavior, she is a character with heart and brains, and the rich back-and-forth between the sisters is poignant. Keep Me Posted is a wonderfully modern epistolary novel, in which the letter-writing tradition collides head-on with the perils of technology.

When a protagonist spends 90 percent of a book making awful choices, the reader can be in for a slog. Yet despite main character Cassie Sunday’s penchant for self-destructive behavior, Lisa Beazley’s winning Keep Me Posted is pure pleasure to read.
FictionDebut Fiction

An investment in love

Review by Amy Scribner

Richard Baumbach is technically a Hollywood producer, but at 29, he has yet to actually produce anything noteworthy. So when he gets a mysterious proposal via a lawyer—spend two hours a week for a year with a woman he’s never heard of and get half a million dollars—Richard jumps at the chance.

Elizabeth Santiago, however, is much less sure. A successful attorney with no social life—her co-workers call her La Máquina, or The Machine, for her billable hours—Elizabeth wonders why anyone would pay her to spend time with the handsome, aimless Richard. But she reluctantly agrees. 

The first few meetings are awkwardness incarnate. Richard’s exuberance and Elizabeth’s bookish reserve are like oil and water. To make the time pass, they agree to discuss books (her choice) and movies (his) each week. As they get to know each other, the forced dates become something they both look forward to, but they each have reasons to be hesitant about admitting any attraction. Instead, they team up to discover who has set them up, with a million dollars on the line.

In addition to being a smart, funny rom-com, The Decent Proposal is also a love letter to one of America’s strangest and most singular cities. “To love L.A. is to love a mess,” Donovan writes. “A jumble of sand, concrete, sunsets, and strip malls; a snake’s nest of highways on top of which the full emotional spectrum, from rage to carelessness, may be witnessed inside every single hour of the day.”

Donovan’s debut novel shimmers like a Los Angeles sunset. The characters are unforgettable, the dialogue crackles, and the ending is an absolute killer. The Decent Proposal is a story about taking chances and finding love in the most unlikely ways.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Richard Baumbach is technically a Hollywood producer, but at 29, he has yet to actually produce anything noteworthy. So when he gets a mysterious proposal via a lawyer—spend two hours a week for a year with a woman he’s never heard of and get half a million dollars—Richard jumps at the chance.
NonfictionNature

Before and after Mount St. Helens

Review by Amy Scribner

I was 5 years old when Mount St. Helens blew its top in southwest Washington State in 1980. Although I lived nearly 300 miles away, I remember my hometown of Spokane going dark in the middle of that Sunday and ash falling from the sky like eerie, gray snow.

Everyone who experienced the massive blast remembers that 57 people died that day. But what struck me after reading Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens is that, aside from the famously cantankerous octogenarian Harry Truman, who refused to leave his lodge near the mountain, we know very little about those who died. We assume that they took unnecessary risks that cost them their lives. 

In this captivating and damning book, Steve Olson examines why people were near the mountain despite warnings from geologists after a series of quakes and smaller eruptions. Government officials didn’t want to appear overzealous or hurt the already shaky timber industry by overstating the danger zone. The resulting hazard map made it appear that people could get close to the mountain on the west and northwest sides and be safe. That misleading information would have deadly consequences. 

Dozens of individuals who thought they were following the rules ventured dangerously near the volcano to camp, hike or simply take a curious peek at the awakening mountain. They were unaware that a blast would flatten the landscape for miles around, sending a cloud of searing crushed pumice zooming over the nearby ridges. One couple was camping nine miles away from the summit of the mountain. The husband, John Killian, was never found. His wife’s left arm was recovered months later. Many of the victims burned to death or were suffocated by the blast cloud. Others were crushed by falling debris.

Olson, an award-winning science writer, brings a new perspective to the navigation of natural disasters, drawing a clear picture of how industry and politics affected who lived and died that day. Eruption is an eye-opening and dramatic read that reminds us of nature’s power and unpredictability—and our human propensity for underestimating it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Olson about Eruption.
 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I was 5 years old when Mount St. Helens blew its top in southwest Washington State in 1980. Although I lived nearly 300 miles away, I remember my hometown of Spokane going dark in the middle of that Sunday and ash falling from the sky like eerie, gray snow.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A life written in the stars?

Review by Amy Scribner

Caroline Herschel’s prospects as a plain, poor and pox-scarred woman in 19th-century Germany are not good. Living in a cramped home surrounded by siblings and an affectionless mother, her only saviors are her brilliant older brother William—who moved to England—and her loving but sickly father, who after attending the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter wails to Caroline, “Oh, my dear. You are neither handsome nor rich. What is to be done?”

After Caroline sends her attractive, eccentric brother a letter in which she pleads, “Save me,” he brings her to England to serve as his assistant. An astronomer of growing renown, William teaches Caroline (he calls her Lina) to help him chart the skies. She also cooks, cleans, handles his records and keeps the household accounts, while managing to become an accomplished astronomer in her own right. When William decides to marry—it is not coincidental that his betrothed has inherited a sizable estate—Caroline finds herself on her own for the first time in her life, faced with deciding who she is.

The Stargazer’s Sister is a lovely addition to Carrie Brown’s works of historical fiction. Brown brings the true story of the Herschel siblings to life in exquisite detail and deftly explores what it meant for Caroline to be an intelligent woman far ahead of her time. 

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Caroline Herschel’s prospects as a plain, poor and pox-scarred woman in 19th-century Germany are not good. Living in a cramped home surrounded by siblings and an affectionless mother, her only saviors are her brilliant older brother William—who moved to England—and her loving but sickly father, who after attending the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter wails to Caroline, “Oh, my dear. You are neither handsome nor rich. What is to be done?”
FictionHistorical Fiction

A mystery on Alcatraz

Review by Amy Scribner

Kristina McMorris evokes such a strong sense of place in her writing that to open her books feels less like reading and more like traveling.

Her absorbing new novel, The Edge of Lost, opens on Alcatraz Island in 1937, where on a foggy night the warden’s 10-year-old daughter has gone missing. An inmate working in the warden’s greenhouse is hiding information about where she is. We are quickly zipped back to 1919 Dublin, meeting Shanley Keagan, a 12-year-old orphan whose vicious Uncle Will forces him to perform in pubs for spare change. Shan grabs an opportunity to get on a ship to America, scrabbling to forge a future in New York.

How those two storylines intersect is at the heart of this epic, deeply felt tale of struggle and second chances, where Shan goes from a boy with dreams of Broadway to an inmate who “waited for the steel bars to slam” while he served 15 to 25 years.

McMorris has made a name for herself with beautifully written World War II fiction, including her debut, Letters from Home, which was based upon her grandfather’s wartime letters to a girlfriend. Her latest novel was inspired in part by McMorris’ reading about children who grew up on Alcatraz Island, whose parents were employed at the infamous prison. Some of the children claimed to be friends with inmates, although they were forbidden to talk to them.

But Alcatraz is just one of many places in The Edge of Lost, a transporting piece of historical fiction in which America is a melting pot, a place of supper clubs and Model Ts, Prohibition and fedoras, dreams and disappointments. 

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kristina McMorris evokes such a strong sense of place that to open her books feels less like reading and more like traveling.
NonfictionMemoir

Joining Team Terminal

Review by Amy Scribner

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, November 2015

Home Is Burning is perhaps the funniest book about dying I’ve ever read. Dan Marshall deftly chronicles the months he and his four siblings dealt with the terminal illness of not one but both of their parents. His beloved father, Bob, has held the family together for more than a decade while his mom, Debi, fights non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So when Bob is diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), it’s a punch in the gut for a family already dealing with bad news.

Marshall, 25, moves home to Salt Lake City from Los Angeles, where his public relations career was blossoming and he had a serious girlfriend. He joins his brother Greg, fresh out of undergrad, and sister Tiffany, already burned out from dealing with the parents, to care for Bob as his disease progresses faster than any of them could have expected. Within months, Bob goes from running marathons and shuttling his younger daughters, Chelsea and Michelle, to school and dance class to being unable to lift his arms or breathe without a respirator.

So what’s possibly funny about all that, you ask? For one, the Marshall clan has one of the filthiest collective mouths in history. Even Debi chimes in with well-placed f-bombs from the chemo chair. They also have a pitch-black sense of humor that holds them together through the worst time of their lives. When Bob insists on going to daughter Michelle’s hearing on a drinking violation—no matter that he can barely speak—Marshall’s response is, “Really? Why don’t you rest up so you can try to not die later today?”

Bob is so insistent on getting to that court date, Marshall realizes, because “the disease made it so he could no longer parent his children the way he wanted to. He could no longer drive them to school. He could no longer patiently help them with their homework. . . . But he was still our dad. He wasn’t dead yet. He was still capable of flashes of greatness, flashes of his old self.”

Home Is Burning packs a wallop. Marshall doesn’t hold back in his descriptions of how a horrific illness wreaks havoc on his dad’s body, and he takes an unflinching look at how real families fall apart—and pull together—in their own ways.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Home Is Burning is perhaps the funniest book about dying I’ve ever read. Dan Marshall deftly chronicles the months he and his four younger siblings dealt with the terminal illness of not one but both of their parents. His beloved father, Bob, has held the family together for more than a decade while his mom, Debi, fights non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So when Bob is diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), it’s a punch in the gut for a family already dealing with bad news.
NonfictionEssays

How we see our hair

Review by Amy Scribner

“Gorgeous hair is the best revenge,” said Ivana Trump, she of the platinum blonde, sky-high hair. Hair as tool of revenge, as obsession, as embarrassment, as source of pride: Why does a long string of protein absorb so much of our attention? 

In Me, My Hair, and I, authors including Anne Lamott, Adriana Trigiani, Jane Smiley and Hallie Ephron explore women’s unique relationships with their hair. As Elizabeth Benedict, who edits this glowing collection of essays, writes in the introduction, “Hair matters because it’s always around, framing our faces, growing in, falling out, getting frizzy, changing colors—in short, demanding our attention: Comb me! Wash me! Relax me! Color me! It’s always there, conveying messages about who we are and what we want. Invite me to the prom! Love me! Hire me! Sleep with me! Don’t even think about sleeping with me! Take me seriously! Marry me! Mistake me—please!—for a much younger woman.”

The essays range from poignant—Suleika Jaouad writes about losing her hair to chemo at age 22—to hilarious—Alex Kuczynski explores trends in pubic hairstyling. All of them are illuminating, revealing that for women, hair is inextricably linked to identity, a visual cue to who they are and what matters to them. 

“I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn’t, wanted so badly to find a way to be comfortable in my skin,” writes novelist Jane Green in an essay that chronicles how her hair has changed to mirror her life circumstances over the years. “Hair was simply the easiest thing to change, the most obvious aspect of my appearance to alter.”

Thought-provoking and insightful, Me, My Hair, and I is a must-read for anyone who has ever dealt with frizz, gray hair, mothers insisting we get a haircut, fathers insisting we not, hair envy or hair disasters. In short, all of us.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Gorgeous hair is the best revenge,” said Ivana Trump, she of the platinum blonde, sky-high hair. Hair as tool of revenge, as obsession, as embarrassment, as source of pride: Why does a long string of protein absorb so much of our attention?
NonfictionTravel

Journey to a ‘nice Pacific island’

Review by Amy Scribner

Call it the male answer to Eat, Pray, Love. 

Alex Sheshunoff was running a not-particularly-successful Internet startup in the late 1990s when he decided to walk away from it all: his Manhattan apartment, his girlfriend, his world. A health scare had landed him in the emergency room, where he vowed to turn his life upside down if he survived.

“I’d been screwing up my life, I thought, pissing away years on this failing company, this failing relationship, this . . . materialistic city and its dead-end ideas of success, this hope that enough hours at work could make me rich, my parents proud, and democracy stronger,” Sheshunoff writes.

His plan, as much as he had one, was to find paradise and move there. To give this journey a little more heft, he would read 100 great books while traveling. He started where any 20-something probably would: He googled “nice Pacific island” and eventually found a message on a travel site pointing him to an island called Yap. 

Sheshunoff traveled to Yap, which was interesting in that the island’s residents used enormous round stones as currency and the women all went topless. But it was not quite paradise. He meandered on to other hot, tiny islands with names like Pig and Tinian, making some quirky friends along the way. It was on the island of Koror, in the Republic of Palau, that he met Sarah. They hiked, they kayaked, they swam with jellyfish, and bit by bit, they fell in love. 

A Beginner’s Guide to Paradise is extraordinarily entertaining, one part guidebook to two parts love story. This heartfelt account reveals what can happen when you leave everything behind—and find more than you ever hoped for.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Call it the male answer to Eat, Pray, Love.
FictionPopular Fiction

A satisfying story of a lifelong romance

Review by Amy Scribner

 

As the stack of Jennifer Weiner bestsellers grows (14 and counting), one wonders how many more tricks she has up her sleeve. When will her books start feeling like retreads? How many times can she write about women, love and Philadelphia?

The answer, it seems, is as many times as she wants. Weiner delivers yet another fresh, funny winner in Who Do You Love, the story of Rachel Blum, who grows up with a heart defect, and Andy Landis, the biracial son of a single mom. Rachel and Andy both feel perpetually different from other kids at school, so they instantly bond when they meet as kids in the hospital, where Rachel is having yet another surgery and Andy is brought to the ER with a broken arm after falling off a hotel balcony.

Rachel lives in Florida, and Andy lives in Philadelphia. It’s several years later and totally by chance when they meet up during a youth group mission trip to Atlanta. They engage in heavy flirtation and even heavier petting, but then go their separate ways. Fate continues to bring them together and push them apart over the years, even as they go to college, find partners and careers, and, in Rachel’s case, have children. Andy becomes an Olympic runner and Rachel a social worker, both finding satisfaction in their work but not their love lives.

Who Do You Love is a little steamier than most of Weiner’s books, which is to be expected in a story about two star-crossed lovers who don’t even live in the same town til they’re in their 20s. And while it is filled with Weiner’s sparkling brand of humor, it also delves into some heavy issues: Race, poverty, adultery, the perils of fame. (Although she is famously one of the godmothers of the chick lit genre, it is not unprecedented for Weiner to explore deep themes—prescription drug abuse in All Fall Down, rape in Best Friends Forever).

Although the ending feels hurried, Who Do You Love is, ultimately, a great summer read by a storyteller who may have big sales, but hasn’t always gotten enough credit for her ability to spin tales that are heartfelt, funny and satisfying. 

 

Weiner delivers yet another fresh, funny winner in Who Do You Love, the story of Rachel Blum, who grows up with a heart defect, and Andy Landis, the biracial son of a single mom.
NonfictionBiography

The woman behind the beautiful faces

Review by Amy Scribner

Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, Jean Shrimpton, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell: Name a famous model, and more likely than not, she was once represented by Eileen Ford, who started her eponymous modeling agency with husband Jerry in 1947 and built it into an international powerhouse.

In the fascinating Model Woman, author Robert Lacey paints Ford as an intriguing paradox. She was a ruthless businesswoman about whom rival John Casablancas once said, “I will fight. I will never sleep with both eyes closed as long as that woman is around.” She was a woman uncomfortable with her own history, whitewashing her Jewish heritage and erasing an impetuous early marriage from her biography. And she was a motherly figure who raised four successful children and many of her models to live with her family as they came to New York as mere teens.

 “She kept an eye out for me, and because she did, I think other male agents and photographers were more careful around me, more respectful,” Turlington said. “Every young model should have such protection.”

Ford, who died in 2014 at the age of 92, broke new ground in the modeling industry again and again. She was an early adopter of the practice of international scouting, plucking leggy blondes from obscurity in Scandinavia. She also was shrewd in the art of brand-building, launching a makeup line in the 1960s and writing a monthly beauty advice column that was syndicated nationwide. She and Jerry helped negotiate some of the earliest long-term makeup contracts, signing Lauren Hutton with Revlon for a record-setting $200,000 in 1973.

Lacey highlights the heady world of New York City modeling: The drug-fueled nights at Studio 54 in the 1970s, which Ford likened, not flatteringly, to the last days of the Roman Empire. The 1980s, when, “at one stage . . . every member of the pop group Duran Duran had a girlfriend who was on the books with Ford.” The 1990s, when supermodels danced in George Michael videos and didn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.

Model Woman is a wholly entertaining, insightful and slightly bitchy look inside the moneyed world of modeling.

 

Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, Jean Shrimpton, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell: Name a famous model, and more likely than not, she was once represented by Eileen Ford, who started her eponymous modeling agency with husband Jerry in 1947 and built it into an international powerhouse.
FictionDebut Fiction

And suddenly, you’re in the middle of adulthood

Review by Amy Scribner

A world-famous actor (a former Disney Channel star who’s back for a reunion special—think Ryan Gosling meets Justin Timberlake) walks into the small-town Florida bar where three 19-year-old friends are drinking their way through another dull night. 

He is, as narrator Maggie puts it, “a man who couldn’t part his hair differently without people demanding a press conference to fawn over him for it.” And now he’s at The Shamrock on what turns out to be the last night of his glamorous life. This is not a spoiler—it’s on page one.

In Local Girls, Henry Holt editor Caroline Zancan’s funny and poignant debut novel, Maggie, Nina and Lindsey are dead-end girls living in the recession-rotted Orlando suburbs. They didn’t do well in school and don’t really have any plans now that they’ve graduated. But as they get progressively drunker with Sam Decker, the story of their friendship unfolds.

None of them are flying these days—Nina is teaching Jazzercise at the local gym, Lindsay still lives at home with her dad and many brothers, and Maggie wants nothing more than to ditch her boyfriend and coffee shop job and head, well, anywhere but here. A prank gone horribly wrong alienated them from the fourth member of their group, Lila, and when she walks into the bar that night, we start to learn more about how they came to this moment in their young lives. 

Local Girls is an achingly good, ennui-drenched story of friendship and shared history in the humid depths of Florida. It’s a perfect summer read about the moment when, just like that, you’re an adult.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A world-famous actor (a former Disney Channel star who’s back for a reunion special—think Ryan Gosling meets Justin Timberlake) walks into the small-town Florida bar where three 19-year-old friends are drinking their way through another dull night.
NonfictionMemoir

The long road from the Midwest to mega-success

Review by Amy Scribner

Blonde, svelte, former Miss America, musical prodigy, successful news anchor on national network with a hot husband: I was, quite honestly, prepared to hate (or at least strongly resent) Gretchen Carlson. But darn it if she didn’t charm me from the first page of Getting Real, her memoir of growing up wholesome in Minnesota. 

Carlson, who hosts her own show on Fox News called “The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson,” grew up in a loving, devout Lutheran family. She emerges as a violin virtuoso by the time she’s 7, paving the way for a lifetime of larger-than-life achievements. She attended Stanford University before taking time away to train for, compete in—and win—the Miss America pageant at 21. 

But Carlson’s saving grace is that she isn’t perfect, and she hits bumps in her road. Overweight throughout junior high and high school, she recalls being mortified when a sales lady called out that she needed a bigger size “for the chubby girl in the dressing room.” As she launches her reporting career, she loses broadcasting jobs and is the victim of sexual intimidation by men in power.

Carlson is frank and open about her struggles (“I was so confused about who I was and what I would face as I moved forward in what appeared to be a really scary world,” she writes about a top television exec trying to force himself on her in the back of a car). But mostly, she conveys a steely determination and clear-headed sense of self-worth that is inspiring and refreshing. She is unapologetic about her drive for success, pursuing ever bigger career goals while raising two small children. She even displays an intriguing feminist streak. 

Carlson may have pageant looks and a megawatt career, but in this memoir, she does indeed get real.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Blonde, svelte, former Miss America, musical prodigy, successful news anchor on national network with a hot husband: I was, quite honestly, prepared to hate (or at least strongly resent) Gretchen Carlson. But darn it if she didn’t charm me from the first page of Getting Real, her memoir of growing up wholesome in Minnesota.

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