Arlene McKanic

FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Woo Woo

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s curiously refreshing to find a good book whose main character you despise. Such is the case with Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo. It’s evidence of Baxter’s talent that you stick with her self-obsessed and often mean-spirited protagonist, Sabine Rossi. At first, you just want Sabine to get her comeuppance. By the end of the book, less so.

Sabine is an artist, specifically a conceptual artist. The story follows her in the days before the opening of her gallery show, titled “Fuck You, Help Me.” It features puppets big enough for her to wear. She stages happenings with these objects that she photographs and livestreams for fans with social media handles like Pignut666 and KibbleJoy. People in her inner circle, from the gallery owner to her put-upon husband, Constantine, are not merely supportive but worshipful. But Sabine’s dramatics are nonsensical. Woo-woo just about describes her.

Consider that Sabine is mentored by the ghost of body artist Carolee Schneemann. Even more troubling, she thinks she’s being stalked by a personage she calls the Rembrandt Man because he reminds her of a portrait by the great Dutch master. A crafty writer, Baxter makes you wonder whether this man is real or not; though this reader concluded that he’s not, another reader may disagree. Whether he’s a genuine threat or another figment of her psychosis, Sabine nearly destroys her house fighting him off in one harrowing scene. She livestreams this too.

Woo Woo deftly sends up a subtype of conceptual art that is, as one critic writes of Sabine’s work, “contrived, boring, and egotistical.” It’s a world where people say things like “The tapestries of her internal and external diaspora are more evocative than your whale cakes,” with a straight face. One feels compassion for Sabine because she and her loved ones can’t see how ridiculous she is even as the rest of the world does. It matters that each chapter is headed with a quote or title of a work from artists as varied as Ovid, Chekhov, Cindy Sherman and Lana Del Ray. Art, even bad art, is essential. And so the Sabine Rossis of the world persist.

Woo Woo tells the story of self-obsessed conceptual artist Sabine Rossi’s brush with a stalker, while deftly sending up that subtype of conceptual art that is, as one critic writes of Sabine’s work, “contrived, boring, and egotistical.”
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Time of the Child

Review by Arlene McKanic

This reviewer has to wonder why an author as brilliant as Niall Williams, whose latest book is the resplendent, suspenseful Time of the Child, isn’t at the top of every reader’s mind. Few contemporary novelists create worlds and characters so amazingly alive and specific. Williams knows every nook and cranny of his Irish town Faha, from its weather, which is so damp that nothing ever dries out completely, to its farms and pubs and how it’s slowly losing ground to the estuary. His characters, even those we see only briefly, are unforgettable. Though the town is full of people, you’ll never mix up one with another. Even Faha’s animal citizens are memorable: Consider Harry, a dog who likes to nap in the middle of the street, making cars drive around him.

Time of the Child is a sequel to Williams’ other masterpiece, This Is Happiness, and is set around Christmas in 1962. Noel Crowe, the protagonist of that book, has moved to America, and our focus is now on the town doctor, Jack Troy, and his daughter Ronnie, who lives with him. In Faha, the doctor is a revered, stoic and necessary presence. He might as well be a granite plinth with a mustache. But within this pillar of rectitude, so many passions roil.

For Jack, like Faha itself, is a dour-seeming being who is full of love. He loves his patients in his brisk and discerning way. He pines for a lost romance, even as he pushes 70. And he loves his daughters, especially Ronnie, whose unmarried state he feels responsible for. When a local boy finds a baby in a churchyard and brings her to the doctor for care, the floodgates in Jack burst. Both he and Ronnie fall in love with the child, and as the unwed Ronnie can’t adopt her, he hatches a scheme so harebrained that it warms your heart even as you think, “Are you serious?” This is where the novel’s suspense comes in, as well as Williams’ genius for making you laugh out loud while he breaks your heart. Anyone who cherishes great writing should want more and more from Williams.

Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.
NonfictionSelf-HelpBody, Mind & Spirit

4 modern takes on the eternal quest for self-improvement

Feature by Arlene McKanic

Tiny Pep Talks

Reading Paula Skaggs and Josh Linden’s humorous and often snarky Tiny Pep Talks: Bite-Size Encouragement for Life’s Annoying, Stressful, and Flat-Out Lousy Moments is much like an afternoon spent with your favorite vodka aunty who’s always had your best interest at heart. After a lighthearted introduction, their advice covers sticky situations that range from the utterly trivial to the somewhat deep. It starts out, for example, with “For When It’s Time to Get Off the Couch and Go to Bed.” Other offers of comfort include “For When Your Clothes Don’t Fit,” and, inevitably, “For When You Just Got Ghosted: A Spooky Tale.” There’s also advice for if you’ve been walking around with spinach between your teeth, when your battery’s down to 5% and when you can’t stand your friend’s significant other (Skaggs and Linden specify that this means a significant other who’s simply annoying, as opposed to one who’s abusive and dangerous. That’s for a “more serious book.”)

Even weighty  stuff like grief is handled with a touch of sass. Grief, they write, “is like a toddler. At any given moment, it might be messy, it might kick and punch you in the gut, and it might refuse to go to bed when all you want is to go to sleep.” But as Scarlett O’Hara said, tomorrow is another day. You’ll be okay.

Good People

Gabriel Reilich and Lucia Knell’s lovely, open-hearted Good People comforts through example. It tells the stories of all kinds of ordinary folk who’ve gone through stuff and come out the other side, sometimes battered, like the narrator of “Invictus,” but unbowed.

In the very first story, we follow Amy B. as she happily moves from Washington, D.C., to attend law school in New York City, only to be poleaxed by a family tragedy. New Yorkers are notorious for ignoring people who break down and cry on subways or airport terminals, but in Amy’s case, someone notices and helps her. She never learned his name and doesn’t even know if she’d recognize him if she saw him again, but his brief presence permanently changed her life for the better. Good People is full of stories where an “angel” shows up at a moment of crisis. Wherever you land in this book, you’ll be comforted by the fact that despite the insanity of the times we live in, most people are indeed, good.

Life Audit

Ximena Vengoechea’s Life Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to Discovering Your Goals and Building the Life You Want is one inspirational book where you’ll need to do some work. As the title says, it asks you to do an audit of your life, but the process is led by pages of delightful bar graphs, mind maps, drawings and Venn diagrams in cool pastel colors. In other words, it’s much more fun than an IRS audit of your taxes.

Auditing your life is a worthwhile pursuit when you don’t quite know what you want to do, or if you’re in a rut. Vengoechea breaks down the process into small but revealing steps. At the beginning you’re encouraged to write down every single one of your wishes, no matter how trivial, on 100 sticky notes in the space of an hour. Though labor-intensive, this helps you prioritize your wishes, identify your core values, use your time wisely and pick the people (five of them, the author suggests) who are eager to offer you support. Vengoechea also shows you how to avoid folks who would drag you down and shares motivational tricks, such as getting an ice cream cone or putting on a party dress after you’ve turned in your manuscript. Life Audit is a lovely book to keep on your bedside table.

Not Sure Who Needs to Hear This, But . . .

Though this book is over 200 pages long, you can easily read Willie Greene’s Not Sure Who Needs to Hear This, But . . . in a few hours. Indeed, its layout allows you to just jump in anywhere, for every page holds something pithy. Greene, the founder of WE THE URBAN, which launched as a Tumblr account that dispenses similar advice, divides his book into six chapters: Peace; Love; Learning, Unlearning, Relearning; Creativity; Well-being and Affirmations. The first few pages of each chapter posit the virtue, followed by sections, none more than a couple of paragraphs long, that tell you how to achieve it. After that comes pithy adages, often framed by colorful boxes that recall sticky notes. Included are: “Forgive yourself every night before going to sleep”; “Act. Even if fear is present” and “Delete the Ex-files.” (This one, I believe, means to move right along after you’ve been dumped or subjected to that even worse 21st-century atrocity of “ghosting.”) There are dozens of these little pep pills for the soul. Who needs to hear them? We do!

 

 

Humans have been trying to improve themselves since they discovered they had selves that needed improving. As the search for spiritual, mental and physical health continues ever on, four new books are here to help.
FictionPopular FictionFamily DramaDebut Fiction

The Magnificent Ruins

Review by Arlene McKanic

Nayantara Roy’s stunning novel The Magnificent Ruins caused this reviewer to think of two things. The first was my admittedly American view of India as huge, colorful, crowded, astonishingly beautiful and astonishingly ugly, unbearably hot or tortured by monsoons, with bitterly contentious politics, mouthwatering cuisine, a deeply entrenched caste system and a patriarchy so oppressive that it’s often fatal to girls and women. In The Magnificent Ruins, all of this turns out to be true.

As the novel went on, the second thing I thought of was Eminem’s song “Kim,” where he fantasizes about murdering his wife and stashing her body in the trunk of his car. This is because the Lahiris, the family at the heart of the book, are nearly that unhinged in the way they treat one another.

The book is mostly narrated by one of the Lahiris, Lila De. An editor in New York City, she was born in Ballygunge, Kolkata, and raised in her family’s mansion, a relic from the time of the British Empire. The Lahiris are Brahmins, and though the women in the family work, the men of the older generations do not; it’s beneath them. They live, more or less, off a dwindling trust fund. When Lila’s beloved grandfather dies, he leaves the great pile of a house—the magnificent ruins—to her. This discombobulates her already fractious relatives. Lila is not only a woman, but a young woman from America. She’s technically not even a Lahiri. When faced with a crisis rite, in this case the elaborate wedding of Lila’s cousin Biddy, things go nuclear.

Yet these people love Lila, and she loves them, and, nearly miraculously, so does the reader. It is a testament to Roy’s discernment and empathy that we never break with any of the Lahiris even as they behave atrociously to each other. Many of us know families like this. Indeed, some of us come from families like this, where white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness. Lila, too, shares her family’s talent for cruelty toward loved ones, but she’s American enough to be in therapy. A deliciously long book, The Magnificent Ruins is riveting from its first page to its last.

For the Lahiris, the family at the heart of Nayantara Roy’s deliciously long The Magnificent Ruins, white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Colored Television

Review by Arlene McKanic

There’s no little irony to the release of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. It’s come just when all those beleaguered novelists who thought writing for TV would make them some real money are realizing that writers’ rooms are the latest creative labor bait and switch. Instead of wealth and acclaim, they’re faced with impossible demands, zero respect and such dismal pay that they still have to take a second job to cover rent.

Jane Gibson and her husband Lenny belong to that class of people now called the precariat. These folks work, and may indeed be talented, but they find it tough to make a consistent living. Jane has published one novel and she’s been trying for a decade to produce a follow-up. She teaches, without tenure, to make ends meet. Lenny, supremely disdainful of just about everything and everyone, is an artist whose paintings don’t sell. Because of this, they suffer from a genteel homelessness; when we meet them they’re housesitting, yet again. This time their benefactor is Jane’s old friend Brett, who’s making a killing as a showrunner. Jane and Lenny have two young children to care for, too: Finn is bright and possibly autistic, and Ruby is now old enough to feel the effects of her family’s essentially vagabond state.

Then, almost miraculously, Jane finishes her book, a doorstopper about mixed-race Black and white Americans over centuries. She has a personal connection to the topic, since she’s biracial. But when she presents the fruit of her labor to her long-suffering agent, it’s rejected (unsurprisingly, to the reader). Shocked and desperate, Jane decides to pinch Brett’s agent. Instead of a book about mixed-race people, she’ll develop a TV show about them: “The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” exults a TV producer she meets with.

Senna’s sense of the absurd is impeccable, evident throughout Jane’s time in what Hollywood types call “development hell,” and building toward a moment near the very end that will make you gasp, “Oh no!” The book is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.

Read our interview with Danzy Senna about Colored Television.

Danzy Senna’s tale of a novelist’s venture into Hollywood is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
FictionPopular Fiction

Borough Features

Review by Arlene McKanic

Gretchen Sparks, a reporter for a down-at-the-heels New York City newspaper, and the protagonist of Erica Ciccarone’s Borough Features, is a delicious conundrum. She’s not exactly unlikable, but she’s someone you’d best be wary around. She’s an alcoholic and doesn’t seem to understand social cues. Maybe her problematic nature stems from her crazy family, which includes her cloying, long-suffering mother; her father, now afflicted with dementia; and her selfish, silly sister Nico. Some of Gretchen’s troubles certainly stem from her grief over the death of her brother Dominic, a medic killed in Afghanistan.

If anyone loves and understands Gretchen Sparks unconditionally and without drama, it’s her editor, Marty. When the book opens, he’s in the hospital thanks to a heart attack, and it doesn’t look good. Marty and Gretchen are so close that his wife asks Gretchen to write his obituary when the time comes.

Marty is, or was, deeply interested in the local color of the outer boroughs, and when we meet Gretchen, she’s on her way to fulfill his last assignment to her: interview a loony Coney Island lady who claims to have a crime-fighting seagull. Soon after this, she meets a boy named Jaime Padilla, who also has an interesting story. Gretchen and the reader quickly find out that Jaime’s tale is but a tiny piece of a much larger and nastier puzzle. As eager to get to the bottom of a story as ever, Gretchen gets pulled right in.

Ciccarone, who is an associate editor at BookPage, knows much about the folkways, to say nothing of the skeevy politics, of Brooklyn and Queens. Her characters—ridiculous, creepy, heartbreaking and always human—are memorable, none more so than Gretchen Sparks, a woman as devastatingly vulnerable as she is hard and cynical. Borough Features is a great debut.

Erica Ciccarone’s debut is packed with memorable characters, but none more so than Gretchen Sparks, a tough, cynical reporter for a down-at-the-heels New York City newspaper who is currently investigating reports of a crime-fighting seagull.
FictionLiterary Fiction

There’s Nothing Wrong With Her

Review by Arlene McKanic

In Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, a young British woman ironically named Vita suffers from a ghastly, debilitating condition that doctors have no name for. She calls its worst symptom, a crushing tornado of pain and helplessness, The Pit. Because Vita’s condition is unidentifiable, doctors won’t attempt to treat it. From there comes the diagnosis that gives the book its title.

The reader might think that Vita’s mysterious illness has something to do with the painful events in her past: the deaths of her mother and sister, a wicked stepmother, the boyfriend who got away, a stuttering career in the performing arts. Vita lives in a weirdly laid out basement apartment with Max, a surgeon who cares for her but too often treats her like one of his “really sick” patients. She spends much time contemplating her goldfish, Whitney Houston, and she’s visited now and then by the ghost of Renaissance soldier and poet Luigi da Porto. (He was the author of the original Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare pinched later on. Vita wrote a screenplay about him that went nowhere). Just as Whitney spins in her goldfish bowl, Vita spins in her unhappiness, and Luigi spins in his memories of the woman who jilted him after he came back as broken from war as Vita is broken from her life.

Then, one day there’s a leak from the upstairs apartment. Max isn’t home, and Vita must leave her bed to interact with her neighbors, the ebullient and not-quite-elderly Mrs. Rothwell, and Jesse, an American who helps Mrs. Rothwell around the house. Vita befriends both immediately. Is this her first step on the path to health?

Weinberg, author of The Truants, packs a lot into this slender novel. There’s rage at a medical establishment that won’t take women’s pain seriously, and a cargo ship’s tonnage of familial trauma. But there’s also the life-enhancing, life-saving power of love and friendship, and the strength of Vita’s unquenchable need to be healthy in body and mind. Maybe her name isn’t so ironic after all.

Kate Weinberg, author of The Truants, tells the story of a woman with an illness that doctors can’t identify, with rage at the lack of belief in women’s pain as well as hope for the life-saving power of love and friendship.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

The God of the Woods

Review by Arlene McKanic

The most delicious thing about a mystery like Liz Moore’s spellbinding The God of the Woods is finding out who did it. There’s the thrill of suspecting this character, then suspecting that one a few pages later, then being absolutely sure that the other one did it—only to have your certainty upended when you find out the real culprit. Of course there are red herrings, like the sounds of footsteps in an abandoned slaughterhouse that turn out to be a family of squirrels. (Or were they?)

The story begins in the summer of 1975, at a sleepaway camp in upstate New York operated by the fabulously wealthy Van Laar family. Barbara Van Laar is a camper that year, even though her home’s a short walk from the cabins. Barbara wants to get away from her family, and as you come to know them, you can’t blame her. The only things colder than this lot are possibly freshly dead fish on beds of ice. Then, Barbara goes missing. Fourteen years earlier, her older brother, Bear, also went missing and was never found. Foul play is suspected in both cases.

Though full of nerve-shredding suspense, Moore’s novel is really about families: good families, bad families, birth families and chosen families, rich families and poor families. Living among the frosty Van Laars as a mere ornament has destroyed Barbara’s mother, Alice, in mind and body. Meanwhile, though she is considered an eccentric loner by most people, camp director T.J. Hewitt has a devotion to her blood and chosen kin that is deeper than anyone, including the reader, suspects. And investigator Judyta Luptack’s Polish Catholic family is so conservative that she, a 26-year-old woman who’s making a good living, is scared to move into her own place. Much like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Judy has to put up with condescension and sexism, and there’s even a local serial killer for her to do the quid pro quo business with. But you’ll be turning pages fast enough to forgive the unneeded resemblance. The God of the Woods is a beautifully written, devilishly clever work.

Set in the summer of 1975 at a sleepaway camp in upstate New York, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a devilishly clever work full of nerve-shredding suspense.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Fire Exit

Review by Arlene McKanic

What can you say about Charles Lamosway, the protagonist of Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit? He’s not a particularly happy man. Though he has a few friends and is devoted to his difficult mother, he’s essentially lonely. A white guy with ties to Maine’s Penobscot Nation, Charles lives right across the river from the reservation. From his side of the river, he can see the house of his ex-girlfriend Mary and their adult daughter, Elizabeth, across the water. Elizabeth, raised by Mary and Mary’s husband, Roger, doesn’t know that Charles is her father. Charles thinks it’s time for her to know, as he puts it, “that her blood is her blood.” Indeed, he’s desperate for her to know.

Charles’ mother, Louise, is elderly and racked with dementia. But she has never been well. Even when Charles was a child she’d be overwhelmed by periods of such intense depression that she’d spend days in bed, cut off from Charles and her husband, Fredrick. As with Elizabeth, Fredrick wasn’t Charles’ biological father. Yet he’s not as intent on finding out about his own bio-dad as he is determined to make Elizabeth find out about hers. Then he discovers something about his daughter that makes him more determined than ever.

Fire Exit is Talty’s first novel, following his 2022 short story collection, Night of the Living Rez. It is beautifully written, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds. This reviewer couldn’t help but think of the stories of Raymond Carver. Like Carver’s, Talty’s characters are working class, bedeviled by money troubles, drink, mental illness, lousy parents, estranged kids and difficult relationships. But in Talty’s writing, the particular history and context of the Penobscot Nation are always present. One reason Mary doesn’t want Elizabeth to know about Charles is that she wanted to raise her as a Native, supported by a community and traditions that Charles just couldn’t provide. As he puts it, “I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what it was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being.” This is a moving, humane book.

Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds.
FictionLiterary Fiction

We Were the Universe

Review by Arlene McKanic

Kit, the protagonist of Kimberly King Parsons’ We Were the Universe, is in trouble. Her 3-year-old daughter, Gilda, is horribly spoiled. Kit’s mother, Tammy, is a hoarder. Her husband, Jad, seems saintly but is simply passive in the face of Gilda’s commandeering of their lives. Worst of all, Kit’s sister, Julie, is dead. 

Kit is the last person you’d think would break herself on the wheel of domesticity. Still quite young when the book begins, she was once a smart, snarky, adventurous girl from Wink, Texas, who lusted after men and women (and still does). She enjoyed her booze and drugs: She credits LSD trips for getting her through unmedicated childbirth. She played bass guitar in a band with Julie and their friend Yesenia. All of the girls liked altered states of consciousness, but unlike the other two, Julie became hooked. The band collapsed. Julie lived with their mother in squalor. Then, she died.

What’s puzzling for the reader and alarming for Kit’s friends and family is that, though Julie’s death occurred in the last days of Kit’s pregnancy, it’s only now that Kit’s grief is starting to drive her crazy. Parsons, author of the short story collection Black Light, gives us some clues as to why. Mothering Gilda has ground Kit down to a nub. Does she long for or dread the day when this tantrum-throwing, co-sleeping, still-nursing gremlin will stop needing her, when Gilda, like Julie, will leave? A brief scene near the end of the book throws a klieg light on the last days of the sisters’ relationship. Without revealing what happens, it becomes clear that Kit has been living life as penance: performing motherhood as an endless martyrdom, abjuring the things that gave her joy (even if they weren’t exactly good for her), eclipsing her once-vibrant self. If you’re in the market for a sad yet funny yet hopeful book, We Were the Universe might be it.

If you’re in the market for a sad yet funny yet hopeful book, Kimberly King Parsons’ We Were the Universe might be it.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Wild Houses

Review by Arlene McKanic

In this reviewer’s (possibly prejudiced) view, there are few things as satisfying as a good work of Irish literature. The form doesn’t matter too much; a poem, a short story, a play, even a novel that makes no sense—looking at you, Finnegan’s Wake. A genius Irish writer can, in the words of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, make the English language “as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.” Such is the case with Colin Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses.

The setup is straightforward: Dev Hendrick lives alone in County Mayo with his late mother’s yappy little dog, Georgie. One rainy Friday night, Dev’s cousins, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, drag a teenager to Dev’s home and expect Dev to hide him. The teenager, Donal “Doll” English, is the brother of Cillian, a petty drug dealer who owes the Ferdias—or their drug lord boss—money. Cillian will get Doll back if he coughs up the cash by Monday.

Certainly, the situation ratchets up the reader’s anxiety, to say nothing of that of Doll’s mother, Sheila, and his sensible girlfriend, Nicky. These are the folks who take it upon themselves to find a lot of money in not a lot of time. Ironically, Cillian did once have what he owes, but it was washed away by a turlough, a temporary lake that, according to him, only happens in West Ireland.

But if you come for the nail-biting plot, you’ll stay for Barrett’s gorgeous language. Consider such phrases as this description of a TV: “its screen patinaed in a fuzz of glinting dust.” The sagging nets of a derelict tennis court are “as frayed as used dental floss.” Gabe Ferdia has “a face on him like a vandalised church.” And so on. Barrett, author of the short story collections Young Skins and Homesickness, treats the sketchiest of his characters with tenderness and compassion. Wild Houses is a stunning work.

Come to Wild Houses for the nail-biting plot; stay for Colin Barrett’s gorgeous language: Here, tennis court nets are “as frayed as used dental floss” and a man has “a face on him like a vandalised church.”
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionGothic Fiction

King Nyx

Review by Arlene McKanic

At one point in Kirsten Bakis’ second novel, King Nyx, Anna Fort, the protagonist and narrator, contemplates the tendency of evil men to wreck the lives of everyone they come upon, especially women and girls. Such men can never have enough money or power, and cruelty is their intention. Anna has spent a good deal of her life reacting to men like this. One was her employer and father-in-law; another a mysterious magnate named Claude Arkel who invites her and her eccentric husband, Charles, to stay as guests on his private island.

On a late autumn day just after World War I, we find Anna and Charles (who are based on real people of the same names) waiting for a boat to take them to the island. All the while, Anna hugs a cage whose cover barely protects the two little parrots inside from the cold. Anna’s obsession with their care hints at the lengths she’ll go to protect the vulnerable, introduces themes of captivity and freedom, and serves as a callback to the titular bird, King Nyx. Despite the mighty moniker, King Nyx is a toy made of tin. To the lonely, impoverished and motherless Anna, the toy—thought of as female despite the name—was a childhood friend and a totem. It will turn out that it still is.

Once on the island, the Forts meet Frank and Stella Bixby, a couple who enjoy a strange, and as we learn, very dark dynamic. The couples take to each other right away. Charles and Frank bond over their mutual weirdness, and Stella and Anna both need a female confidant. Stella is a fantastic creation: She’s quick-witted, mouthy, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and has a heart of gold. Indeed, the injection of humor in some very tense scenes comes courtesy of Stella craving a cigarette or blurting out a bon mot.

Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the first chapter, when two strange women warn of trouble on Arkel’s island while the Forts wait for their boat. Trouble happens quickly, and there are scenes so anxiety-producing that you might want to put the book down and check to see that your windows and doors are secure. King Nyx is a scary good book.

 

Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Greta & Valdin

Review by Arlene McKanic

One of the first things I assumed when I started reading Rebecca K Reilly’s sad, hilarious novel Greta & Valdin was that the titular Maori and Russian New Zealander siblings must be teenagers. They are certainly adolescently self-absorbed and lovelorn, Valdin overcome with heartache over his ex-boyfriend and Greta harboring a puppy-dog crush on her tutor. It’s a mild shock to learn that Valdin is about 30 years old and a former physicist turned comedian, while Greta is five years younger, working on a useless master’s thesis and perpetually broke.

Greta and Valdin live together, and though they won’t acknowledge it, depend on one another. She’s hurt when he flies off to Buenos Aires and neglects to stay in touch with her. When Valdin comes back, he wonders what sort of flowers to buy along with a bag of limes to soothe Greta’s feelings. Their family members—Russian father Linsh, Maori mother Beatrice and older brother Casper (not his real name, but a name bestowed at birth because he was so pale)—take the siblings’ loopiness in stride. After all, they’re a fairly loopy bunch themselves.

Reilly writes with a dry, sly humor and great love for her characters. She brilliantly builds the world of the siblings bit by bit, like a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s a mention of a popular drink, a song, a snippet of another language or dialect, the names of local shops and bars, the specific clothing people wear: All combine not just to make the world feel real and lived in, but also to explain why Greta and Valdin are the way they are. Everyone in their circle acts like they’re 16. Why shouldn’t Greta and Valdin follow suit?

Ultimately joyous and life-affirming, Greta & Valdin is Reilly’s first novel. This reviewer is eager to see what she does next.

Rebecca K Reilly writes with a dry, sly humor and great love for her characters, building the world of siblings Greta and Valdin bit by bit, like a jigsaw puzzle.

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