Amy Scribner

FictionDebut Fiction

When our paths crossed

Review by Amy Scribner

For years after Eve’s mom was killed by falling debris on Sept. 11, Eve sticks with New York. She goes to school at Columbia, waits tables at Nobu, dates a musician and writes freelance pieces for publications with names like the American Journal of Office Supplies.

“The city didn’t care,” she realizes one day. “I wouldn’t win any awards for sticking it out in this world where I was panicking inside and my heart was always racing because of all these strangers down my throat from the second I got onto the subway each morning. . . . Sometimes, the fact that my mother disappeared into this city—was very literally swallowed up by it—instilled in me a certain amount of horror.”

So Eve decamps for Colorado, writing for a few years about music for a small newspaper and pretending she enjoys hiking and skiing and other slightly dangerous outdoorsy activities. But New York draws her back, and she sees fresh possibilities in the bright, dirty city. Over dinner with old college friends, she gets reacquainted with Ben, a fellow Columbia grad who’s now an engineer working on the plans for the new Freedom Tower.

Somehow, after years of barely noticing each other, they can’t stop talking. Remember those giddy early days of a relationship? Staying up all night, not caring that the sun was coming up, “threatening to end it all, to usher us on to the next activity. . . . We just kept doing whatever it was that we were doing, and laughed at the daylight.”

Yet Eve is used to the world shifting under her feet, and she struggles to trust that Ben is as steadfast as he seems. When Ben realizes he and Eve have a past connection, he is unsure whether to share his newfound knowledge with her.

This Love Story Will Self-Destruct is Leslie Cohen’s first novel, and it sweetly recalls the uncertainty and exhilaration of the post-college years, when life is brimming with possibilities (if not cash). Eve, as much as anyone, knows how quickly the world can change. The trick is to find happiness in the chaos.

For years after Eve’s mom was killed by falling debris on Sept. 11, Eve sticks with New York. She goes to school at Columbia, waits tables at Nobu, dates a musician and writes freelance pieces for publications with names like the American Journal of Office Supplies.

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

A secret that could tear a friendship apart

Review by Amy Scribner

Zadie and Emma have been best friends for years, ever since they were randomly paired as summer camp roommates. They supported each other throughout the grueling years of medical training, and every high and low since. Now they’re both successful physicians in Charlotte, North Carolina, keeping each other sane as they juggle careers and family. Zadie is outgoing and energetic, with four kids and a thriving career as a cardiologist. Emma is reserved and private, an emergency room doctor who fiercely guards her friendship with Zadie.

“Ours was a friendship forged when we were young, the kind that endures no matter what because losing it would be like losing an aspect of your own personality: your sense of humor or your ability to empathize,” Emma says. “You wouldn’t be the same person with­out your friend as your external hard drive. I know, because for quite a while I thought I would lose her.”

When a child dies while in Emma’s care, the tragedy rocks their close-knit community. While the friends are still reeling, an unwelcome figure from their past reappears. Nick Xenokostas, who served as chief resident while Zadie and Emma were in medical school, takes a job at Emma’s practice. Nick and Zadie had an affair while he supervised her as a student, and he broke her heart. This ancient history is dredged back up when Zadie discovers Emma’s role in the breakup, and is unsure whether she can forgive her.

Kimmery Martin’s excellent debut novel serves up an irresistible mix of romance, ER drama, friendship and betrayal. Martin, a physician herself, writes in a clear and lively way, flashing between the friends and between present day and their exhausting but exhilarating medical school years. In her hands, dramatic hospital scenes and routine kitchen conversations are equally compelling.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kimmery Martin’s excellent debut novel serves up an irresistible mix of romance, ER drama, friendship and betrayal.

FictionComic Fiction

This Could Hurt

Review by Amy Scribner

Corporate America: boring, soulless, fixated on profit. So how does This Could Hurt—based entirely around the daily happenings of a human resources team—yield such a delicious, satisfying book? Because Jillian Medoff delivers a story that is about so much more than run-of-the-mill office politics.

Rosa Guerrero, a widow and seasoned executive whose career has been her proudest accomplishment, heads up human resources at Ellery Consumer Research Group, a Manhattan company feeling the pain of the Great Recession. “If 2008 was a rollicking roller coaster of pink slip parties and ex-banker bacchanals,” Medoff writes, “then 2009 was the head-splitting hangover, the global economy splayed on the couch, wired, tired, too broken to move.”

While Rosa is fiercely protective of her employees, she also gets the sense that they’re not exactly living up to their full potential. There’s Peter, her trusted VP of operations, who gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Rob, her lead for recruiting and training, manages to defeat a few levels of Brick Breaker on his Blackberry every day, but not much else. Lucy, who oversees policy and communications, soldiers on through the recession, but loses a little bit of her drive every day. Kenny, a whip-smart Wharton grad in charge of compensation, knows he’s underemployed but doesn’t have a clue how to fix his life.

Only Leo, her trusted employee benefits manager, lives up to Rosa’s exacting standards. But he is miserable in his job and his life. When Rosa is stricken by a serious health issue a few months before retirement, her team comes together to protect her. But can they step up after so many years of inertia?

This Could Hurt is a worthy follow-up to Medoff’s bestseller I Couldn’t Love You More. Filled with heart and humor, it will ring true to anyone who’s experienced both the cruelty and the camaraderie that make up the modern American workplace.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Corporate America: boring, soulless, fixated on profit. So how does This Could Hurt—based entirely around the daily happenings of a human resources team—yield such a delicious, satisfying book? Because Jillian Medoff delivers a story that is about so much more than run-of-the-mill office politics. Rosa…
NonfictionPolitics

How to rise above

Review by Amy Scribner

Dan Rather has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently, emerging as the leading force behind News and Guts, an online outlet that provides critiques of and insights into current happenings in Washington, D.C. It’s been gratifying to see this lion of the press corps get a second act, after a semi-scandal involving his reporting of unverified documents relating to President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service hastened his exit from CBS News in 2007.

Now, Rather delivers What Unites Us, in which he reflects upon what it means to be a patriotic American. Written with collaborator Elliot Kirschner, the book is a deeply felt reminder of what is the best of America.

“Our Constitution, our rule of law, our traditions, our work ethic, our empathy, our pragmatism, and our basic decency,” he writes. “As I have seen over the years, when we cultivate these instincts, we soar. When we sow seeds of division, hatred, and small-mindedness, we falter.”

Given the Twitter wars, the tragedy in Charlottesville and the general vitriol currently ruling our national conversation, What Unites Us is at times almost unbearably poignant. Yet Rather’s words provide a sort of salve—and clear thinking about how to recover from these ugly times. He reflects on the role of the press, the need for sound science in making policy and public education as a pillar of patriotism. Deeply grounded in his upbringing in segregated Houston, Rather reminds us how far we have come as a nation.

Although this is a set of essays, not a memoir, Rather adds another dimension to the book by sharing remembrances from his remarkable life. This is a man who has so often been in the front row of history. He recalls drinking cola with civil rights activist Medgar Evers as they talked about voter repression in the 1960s South and rushing to the studio the morning of September 11, 2001.

What Unites Us is a passionate treatise on preserving the best of America and letting go of that which makes us weaker.

Dan Rather reflects upon what it means to be a patriotic American in What Unites Us. Written with collaborator Elliot Kirschner, the book is a deeply felt reminder of what is the best of America.

FictionDebut Fiction

Visions of a midlife crisis

Review by Amy Scribner

Andrew Cohen is part of the New York City cultural elite—a New York University professor and prominent thinker who has designed his whole life around optimum comfort and aesthetics. His urban apartment is sleek—albeit unwelcoming to his two daughters—and he enjoys a relationship with a former student nearly half his age.

Andrew’s well-curated life is flipped on end when he starts having disturbing visions that leave him shaken and physically ill. They appear to be connected to an ancient ritual taking place in a Jewish temple. A secular Jew, Andrew doesn’t know what to make of the scenes flashing through his mind.

The Ruined House, which won Israel’s biggest literary award (the Sapir Prize), is a fascinatingly claustrophobic year inside Andrew’s mind. He is not a particularly likable man, focused as he is solely on his reputation and physical appearance. Yet, as he descends into the hellish clutches of increasingly frequent visions, one can’t help feeling for him.

The story is in part a meditation on the isolation of the modern age, when one can live among millions of people in a vibrant city, yet still be utterly alone. It’s also, not coincidentally, set in the year before September 11, 2001, and a sense of doom hovers over every lyrical page: “The sky blue of the river meets the water blue of the sky, divided only by the thin filament of the George Washington Bridge, stretching from bank to bank like the hint of a knowing smile: The day would come when all would return to what it had been and the world would revert to chaos.”

But at its core, The Ruined House is an examination of one man’s midlife crisis, and how we all are the sum of our inescapable, barely beneath-the-surface history.

The Ruined House is an examination of one man’s midlife crisis, and how we all are the sum of our inescapable, barely beneath-the-surface history.

FictionFamily Drama

We’re all in this together

Review by Amy Scribner

Abel Campbell is the patriarch of a mightily dysfunctional yet close-knit Midwestern family, “the sun around which their lesser planets circled, the god they hoped to please.”

A retired attorney and judge, Abel presides over his mild and devout wife, Hattie, and their grown children: Doro (successful college dean who stoically wears the mantle of oldest living child with a whiff of martyrdom), Jesse (farmer and alcoholic in recovery), Gideon (wanderer not in recovery), ClairBell (divorced mom with a secret addiction to painkillers) and Billy (underemployed masseuse with a not-so-secret addiction to anything he can ingest).

Abel and Hattie’s eldest son, Nick, died 40 years before after a lifetime of health issues, and it’s clear their youngest, Billy, is next. Diagnosed with AIDS in his 20s, Billy “endured his fate with a shifting array of denial, humility, gallows humor, despair and hope, but from time to time things could get dicey, for in addition to his precarious health he was an addict. Painkillers, black tar, methadone, drink—any substance at hand. Cough syrup, cigarettes, codeine, cocaine. On a lean day even candy.”

The story begins with a family dinner, the most Norman Rockwellian of scenes: All except Gideon are gathered around the Campbell table in Amicus, Kansas, to celebrate Abel’s birthday. When Billy passes out face-first in his serving of cake, it sets in motion a series of clumsy interventions and accusations that threaten to fracture the family.

A National Book Award finalist for The River Beyond the World, Janet Peery is a masterful, poetic storyteller with a sharp eye for details that draw the reader into any scene. The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs is a heartbreakingly spot-on portrait of the ways families support and enable each other. It’s also a timely depiction of the ravages of opioid addiction on average American families, in a time when our nation faces a worsening crisis.

Abel Campbell is the patriarch of a mightily dysfunctional yet close-knit Midwestern family, “the sun around which their lesser planets circled, the god they hoped to please.”

NonfictionSelf-Help

Step away from the screens

Review by Amy Scribner

My name is Amy, and I’m a Candy Crush addict.

Whenever I pick up my phone, those brightly colored, glossy squares beckon, and I can easily squander 30 minutes mindlessly swiping at the screen. It’s soothing—and hugely unproductive. In Bored and Brilliant, Manoush Zomorodi argues that stepping away from technology is not just healthy, it is essential for creativity and productivity. Research shows that people are now shifting their focus every 45 seconds while working online due to interruptions and competing messages. But being constantly tethered to a phone or tablet is no way to treat our brains if we want to foster new ideas.

Zomorodi, who hosts the popular podcast “Note to Self,” writes, “Creativity—no matter how you define or apply it—needs a push, and boredom, which allows new and different connections to form in our brain, is a most effective muse.” More than 20,000 people around the world signed up when Zomorodi launched the Bored and Brilliant Project, a weeklong challenge to get people to disconnect from their gadgets and tune in to their own thoughts. Challenges like going photo-free for a day are all specifically designed to reconnect us with the world.

In this age of information, Zomorodi’s book seems revolutionary, almost subversive. Sprinkled liberally with research and insights from some of the leading minds in technology and futurism, Bored and Brilliant is an important reminder that we are not beholden to our devices. As for me, I’ve deleted the Candy Crush app from my iPhone . . . for now.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Manoush Zomorodi for Bored and Brilliant.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Bored and Brilliant, Manoush Zomorodi argues that stepping away from technology is not just healthy, it is essential for creativity and productivity. Research shows that people are now shifting their focus every 45 seconds while working online due to interruptions and competing messages. But being constantly tethered to a phone or tablet is no way to treat our brains if we want to foster new ideas.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A woman’s work

Review by Amy Scribner

“Children are not on the table,” Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. “I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood.” This is no surprise, given Joan’s white-hot career as a writer of short stories—and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.

While Martin’s soaring surgical career takes him around the world, the famous Joan Ashby becomes Joan Manning, a housewife who takes yoga classes and shuttles her boys to school and swim lessons. She tells no one when, during the days while the boys are at school, she comes back to her writing. To her, the act of writing is “exquisitely important, so much like prayer.” Over nearly a decade, she writes a remarkable novel that she feels sure will signal her return as a force in the literary world.

But the time never seems right to publish. Younger son Eric blossoms into a gifted computer programmer who makes his first million (and many more) while still a teenager. Joan finds herself a stranger in her own home when a gaggle of coders move in seemingly overnight, much to Martin’s delight.

In a family of extraordinarily accomplished people, Joan’s other son, Daniel, struggles to find his identity. After showing early promise as a writer, a well-meaning teacher mentions Daniel’s mother’s fame. Daunted, he sets aside his stories and embarks on an ill-suited career in venture capital.

After a breathtaking betrayal threatens to fracture the family, Joan retreats to India and reclaims a room of her own.

It’s almost impossible to believe that The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is the first novel by Cherise Wolas, a lawyer and film producer. Gorgeously written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood and self-identity.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Children are not on the table,” Joan Ashby tells her future husband, Martin. “I possess no need, primal or otherwise, for motherhood.” This is no surprise, given Joan’s white-hot career as a writer of short stories—and her own lonely childhood with two loveless parents. Yet, when she finds herself pregnant shortly after she and Martin marry, she sets aside her fame to raise one, then two boys in the suburban Virginia town of Rhome.

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Lots of books and a little romance

Review by Amy Scribner

In this charmer of a story, Nightingale Books is in many ways the main character. A beloved if slightly rundown shop run by Julius Nightingale, it is a central meeting place in the British village of Peasebrook. Gossip is exchanged, tea is consumed, and occasionally, books are purchased. When Julius succumbs to cancer, his adult daughter, Emilia, inherits the business.

Julius had impeccable taste in literature, but his bookkeeping left much to be desired. Emilia is left to figure out whether she can keep the store afloat—or if she should sell the property to an eager real estate investor and flee her grief. Even as she grapples with this decision to stay or go, it’s complicated by her deepening friendships with some of the bookshop regulars: the shy but sweet chef Thomasina; the brilliant and bored housewife Bea; and the wealthy lady of the manor, Sarah, who has a secret connection to Julius. There’s also Emilia’s growing attraction to Marlowe, a violinist in the Peasebrook Quartet, of which Julius had been a member.

It truly takes a village for Emilia to untangle her finances, create a publicity campaign to bring in new customers and design a physical makeover that dusts off Nightingale Books but stays true to its history. As she slowly develops a plan to give the shop a new life, Emilia finds her own life in the process.

Veronica Henry is an award-winning romance novelist in her native United Kingdom. In How to Find Love in a Bookshop, her first novel to be released in the U.S., she takes the best of romance novels—the dashing figures, the complicated love triangles—and smartly ditches the clichéd sex scenes and overwrought dialogue. The book is reminiscent of the very best Maeve Binchy novels. It’s an enchanting story about the power of community—and books—to help heal a broken heart.

In this charmer of a story, Nightingale Books is in many ways the main character. A beloved if slightly rundown shop run by Julius Nightingale, it is a central meeting place in the British village of Peasebrook. Gossip is exchanged, tea is consumed, and occasionally, books are purchased. When Julius succumbs to cancer, his adult daughter, Emilia, inherits the business.

FictionDebut Fiction

A slow, complicated farewell

Review by Amy Scribner

A slim but powerful volume, Goodbye, Vitamin is written in journal-like dispatches as Ruth watches her father, Howard, slide down the tunnel of Alzheimer’s disease. Ruth, a 30-year-old sonographer whose own path was derailed by an unexpected breakup, moves home for a year to help care for Howard.

A recovering alcoholic, occasional philanderer and well-loved professor, Howard is a complicated father figure. He kept mustard packets in his glove compartment to disguise alcohol breath, but also kept in that same glove compartment a photo from an old family vacation to Washington, D.C. He is also somewhat of an idol for Ruth, who left for college before his father’s behavior really escalated.

“Okay, but listen: this is why I so seldom visited,” Ruth explains. “I wanted to preserve my memory of my perfect father. I didn’t want to know the many ways he’d hurt my mother. I didn’t want to have to pick sides.”

Ruth drifts through the first weeks at home, but is then approached by Howard’s teaching assistant, who proposes setting up a fake class for the languishing Howard to teach. The class is populated with graduate students who know Howard, including, Ruth realizes, one woman who recently had a dalliance with him. As Ruth comes to grips with the messy reality of her family, she strengthens her ties with her long-suffering mom and younger brother.

Rachel Khong’s first novel (she also authored the wonderfully titled All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World’s Most Important Food) offers the fresh, quirky voice of a young woman who is straddling wide-eyed youth and world-weariness. She’s given to random ruminations, such as, “Something else I appreciate about hangovers: You are given the chance to value your regular things. Water, for instance, becomes so delicious and appealing.” Goodbye, Vitamin is a funny and beautiful meditation on family bonds and finding one’s place in an ever-changing world.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Rachel Khong for Goodbye, Vitamin.

A slim but powerful volume, Goodbye, Vitamin is written in journal-like dispatches as Ruth watches her father, Howard, slide down the tunnel of Alzheimer’s disease. Ruth, a 30-year-old sonographer whose own path was derailed by an unexpected breakup, moves home for a year to help care for Howard.

NonfictionEssays

Don’t look away

Review by Amy Scribner

Mandy Len Catron’s essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” went viral after being published in the New York Times Modern Love column in 2014. In it, she details a study in which couples sit face to face, asking and answering progressively more personal questions. Six months after the study, two participants were married.

Catron tried the questions out with an attractive acquaintance named Mark, and lo and behold, they are now a couple. (She is the first to admit, in the last paragraph of the essay, that love didn’t happen to them because of the questions—they chose to be together.)

Now Catron is tackling the many facets of love in a book that builds upon her famous essay.

In truth, the book’s name is a bit of a misnomer. Catron, a professor in British Columbia, is not making the case, as the title suggests, that love is either random or formulaic. Rather, she examines what science tells us about the elements of lasting love, and explores why her Appalachian grandparents stayed married for life while her parents divorced after so many seemingly happy years and her own long-term relationship (pre-Mark) slowly crumbled.

She writes, “Deciding to break up, I thought, was like learning a star had burned out in a distant galaxy, even though you can still see it in the sky: You know something has irrevocably changed, but your senses suggest otherwise.”

Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on the most universal topic.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mandy Len Catron’s essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” went viral after being published in the New York Times Modern Love column in 2014. In it, she details a study in which couples sit face to face, asking and answering progressively more personal questions. Six months after the study, two participants were married.

Fiction

Heartbreak and secrets of four women in Las Vegas

Review by Amy Scribner

Four seemingly unconnected women’s lives intersect in ’Round Midnight, the moving new novel from the author of We Are Called to Rise. Readers first meet June, a beautiful but restless woman who owns the glittering El Capitan casino with her husband, Del, in dusty 1950s Las Vegas. She becomes pregnant and spends nine months praying it isn’t the child of their headlining act, a talented black singer. When the baby is born, Del takes it away, shattering June.

Honorata is a young Filipina woman whose cruel uncle arranges her marriage to a rich man in Chicago. When she hits a slot machine jackpot during a trip to Vegas, she leaves him and starts a new secret life, taking care to cover her tracks so he’ll never find her.

Coral is raised in a large, loving African-American family. She knows she’s different from her three siblings—her skin is markedly lighter—but her mother insists it doesn’t matter how Coral came to be a part of their clan. She searches for the truth of her heritage, ultimately stumbling across it in the most unexpected way.

Engracia is a hotel maid, an undocumented worker from Mexico who is grieving the loss of her young son after a freak accident. She’s not sure whether she even wants to live—until she’s caught in someone else’s domestic drama and her next steps become clear.

Each of these women is quietly extraordinary in her own way. As their stories unfold, we come to understand their bonds, through community, compassion and, in one case, blood. They are women of different eras, all doing the best they can with their own flawed choices and circumstances, all woven together in this jewel of a novel. Haunting and unpredictable, ’Round Midnight is the beautifully told story of how fates intertwine in ways we can’t plan.

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Four seemingly unconnected women’s lives intersect in ’Round Midnight, the moving new novel from the author of We Are Called to Rise. Readers first meet June, a beautiful but restless woman who owns the glittering El Capitan casino with her husband, Del, in dusty 1950s Las Vegas. She becomes pregnant and spends nine months praying it isn’t the child of their headlining act, a talented black singer. When the baby is born, Del takes it away, shattering June.

NonfictionSportsMemoir

The beginning of a legend

Review by Amy Scribner

I may be getting cynical in middle age, but my first thought upon hearing that Tiger Woods was writing a memoir about his triumphant victory at the 1997 Masters was, “How clever! He gets to relive his glory days without having to address the mess that came later in his personal life.”

It’s true that Woods neatly sidesteps the revelations of his serial cheating that became a public spectacle and cast shadows on his storied career. The only mention is on the second-to-last page: “I’ve gone through a lot on and off the course, what with different injuries, changes in the game, and the equipment we use, as well as being married, having kids, and getting publicly divorced. It’s definitely been tough at times.”

To be fair, this book is clearly for fans of golf, not scandals. Woods dives deep into his preparations for and experience at the 1997 Masters. Just 21 at the time, he electrified fans with his decisive win and became a global icon.

At the start of the book, Woods writes compellingly, if briefly, about his childhood as a golf prodigy. Life wasn’t always perfect for the Woods family, who experienced racism after moving to a mostly white city in Southern California. “Some of the residents weren’t happy that a mixed-race family had moved in, and threw things at the house—lemons, limes, rocks,” Woods writes.

Still, Woods remained laser-focused on the sport he loved, dreaming about someday playing at Augusta. He finally did as an amateur, but it was in 1997 that the stars aligned for him. Woods takes readers behind the scenes at the legendary club, writing about the accommodations, his interactions with reporters and other golfers, the African-American staff at the club who snuck out to watch him play and even the types of clubs he chose for major shots throughout the four days.

Capped off by Woods’ reflections on his nagging injuries and what he would change about the course at Augusta, The 1997 Masters: My Story is a vivid and ultimately satisfying read about a singular event in American sports.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Woods dives deep into his preparations for and experience at the 1997 Masters. Just 21 at the time, he electrified fans with his decisive win and became a global icon.

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