Arlene McKanic

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

A Map for the Missing

Review by Arlene McKanic

The Chinese Cultural Revolution, devised by the appalling Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was catastrophic for most of the people caught up in it. Children were separated from their families and sent to work farms to get a taste of proletarian life. Educators were targeted as agents of capitalism or the bourgeoisie. Dissidents were incarcerated in forced labor camps, and many people were arrested, denounced and disappeared for displaying even a hint of disagreement with government policy. The really bad news, as is seen in Belinda Huijuan Tang’s splendid A Map for the Missing, is that for some, the Cultural Revolution never quite ended.

In January 1993, Tang Yitian receives a call from his mother in China, which is startling in itself because she must travel to even find a phone. Yitian’s father is missing, she says. No one knows where he is or why he was taken—if indeed he was taken at all. Heeding the call of duty, Yitian, who has lived in the United States for nearly 10 years, flies home to investigate. 

The operative word for Yitian is duty, not so much love. He and his father never got along, and the older man always disparaged Yitian’s desire for a better education and an easier life than the hardscrabble one his family endured in their little village. Tang gives a beautiful sense of Yitian’s fear, sorrow and unspoken resentment—toward both his father, for his bullying nature and the favoritism he showed toward Yitian’s late older brother, and his mother, for her seemingly endless subservience.

At times, A Map for the Missing brings to mind George Orwell’s 1984, though unlike that novel’s dystopian England (called Airstrip One), the chilling and deeply sad China depicted here is real. Yitian’s search for his father makes Winston Smith’s life on Airstrip One seem like a holiday in a warm climate. Even Winston’s love interest, Julia, has a counterpart in Yitian’s story: a woman called Hanwen, whose hunger for education and betterment is as strong as Yitian’s. She hails from the big city of Shanghai, but she’s been sent to the provinces for her edification, and her desire to help Yitian is prompted as much by the trauma of this forced relocation as it is by her not-so-secret love for him.

Along with Yitian, Hanwen and Yitian’s parents, Tang brings additional secondary characters to life, such Yitian’s beloved, broken grandfather and the unhappy girls who labor on the farm with Hanwen. The novel’s many teachers, police officers, clerks, shopkeepers and other bureaucrats are individuals and never interchangeable.

It’s astonishing that A Map for the Missing is Tang’s debut novel. This 400-page book, whose protagonist navigates a purgatory of twists and turns, red herrings and dead ends, is gripping from its first page to its last.

Belinda Huijuan Tang’s splendid debut novel follows a Chinese American son through a purgatory of twists and turns, red herrings and dead ends, in the search for his missing father.
FictionComing of Age

The Girls in Queens

Review by Arlene McKanic

Even in the dawning years of the 21st century, there are women and girls who would give up anything for a man. That man doesn’t have to be good. His needs and wants, no matter how fickle, would be prioritized over everything, including a woman’s happiness, safety and the well-being of her children, if she has any. This is the bruised and bruising world of Christine Kandic Torres’ debut novel, The Girls in Queens.

The story unfolds from 1996 to early 2007, beginning in an era in which egregious misogyny and slut shaming are rampant, and ending just after Tarana Burke launches the #MeToo movement. Of course, the protagonist, Brisma, and her best friend, Kelly, who live across the street from each other in Woodside, Queens, have no inkling of the changes to come. In 1996, the girls are 11 years old and lack political consciousness, though they know that puberty is making boys and even grown men notice them in ways they don’t particularly like. Neither girl is a wallflower, especially Kelly, who’s not above getting physical with a neighborhood ignoramus. But for the two friends, being harassed, belittled or ignored is just part of life. It’s like taking your life in your hands to cross Queens Boulevard, or rooting for the hapless Mets: Now and then, you have to cross the street, and cheering for the Yankees is never an option. So what can be done?

Handsome and suave Brian is one of Kelly and Brisma’s childhood friends. As they enter adolescence, he takes a liking to both girls, which causes them to fall out (but just as quickly fall back in; they’re sisters from different mothers). Then in 2006, Kelly and Brisma discover something about Brian that pushes their tolerance of male misbehavior to the limit. At first the women support him instinctively, until Brisma, a budding journalist, can’t any longer. This causes a rupture between her and Kelly that threatens to become permanent.

Kandic Torres’ way with her characters is superb. Kelly’s toughness hides an almost sickeningly intense fear and vulnerability, which few but Brisma see. Another neighbor, an Iraq War veteran that readers are initially wary of, becomes a voice of wisdom. Brisma’s mother, who first modeled female deference for her daughter, blesses Brisma’s ambitions to both write and leave their neighborhood behind. The Girls in Queens is a moving debut from a writer to watch.

Within the bruised and bruising world of Christine Kandic Torres’ The Girls in Queens, two girls find that being harassed, belittled or ignored is just part of life—until one of them can’t take it anymore.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Bloomsbury Girls

Review by Arlene McKanic

Post-World War II London was a grim place, despite the Brits’ nominal victory: The skies seemed forever gray, rationing made life difficult, and rubble from the London Blitz needed to be cleared away. Still, some things persevered, like the monarchy and even quirky little bookstores. One such bookshop is the setting for Natalie Jenner’s captivating second novel, Bloomsbury Girls.

Something else that survived the war was unrepentant male chauvinism. It’s in just about every move made by Herbert Dutton, general manager of the century-old Bloomsbury Books. It is the reason Evie Stone is working at Bloomsbury Books instead of at Cambridge University, despite being one of the first women to earn a degree from that institution. It’s why Grace Perkins, Herbert’s secretary, has to rush home to make tea for her lousy layabout of a husband, and it’s what’s driving Vivien Lowry, who works in the store’s fiction department, out of her mind with rage.

Fortunately, the bookstore owner is a genuinely kind man despite his lofty status as an earl, and the head of the store’s science and naturalism department, Ash Ramaswamy, has a gentle demeanor as well. However, Ash is from India, so his mildness might be a defense mechanism against English racism, which is just as bad as English sexism. Ash and Evie strike up a sweet relationship, but in this world, men make the decisions, and women, as Evie says, “abide ’em.”

Until they don’t.

Jenner boldly mixes real history with her fictional creations, and readers who enjoy the “nonfiction novel” genre will find pleasure in parsing facts from embellishments. In particular, Evie’s great passion for cataloging books leads her to the rediscovery of one of the rarest books in the world, a science fiction novel titled The Mummy! This real-life prescient work was published in 1827 by 17-year-old Jane Webb, who went on to write more anodyne books on gardening. The Mummy! might be the way out for the downtrodden women of Bloomsbury Books. It might even be a vehicle for revenge.

Jenner, the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society, draws readers into her tale with a genial, matter-of-fact style that’s exactly what’s expected for a novel about a humble London bookstore. Each chapter begins with one of Herbert’s many ridiculous rules, most of which are broken over the course of the book. But Bloomsbury Girls’ surface coziness puts the tumult of its characters in relief, giving the novel unexpected depth and complexity.

Natalie Jenner's captivating Bloomsbury Girls has a genial, matter-of-fact style that's exactly what's expected for a novel about a humble London bookstore.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Lioness

Review by Arlene McKanic

The story in Chris Bohjalian’s The Lioness is straightforward: Beloved movie star Katie Barstow hosts an all-expenses-paid photo safari to Kenya with her new husband, David Hill; her brother, Billy Stepanov; Billy’s pregnant wife, Margie; and their friends, including the actors Terrance Dutton and Carmen Tedesco, and Carmen’s husband, Felix Demeter. Shortly after they arrive, the group and their guides are kidnapped. As they soon winkle out, their captors are Russian with noms de guerre taken from American astronauts.

It’s important to know that this all goes down in 1964, a year of not only the Cold War but also the Simba rebellion in the eastern Congo, the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence and various other conflicts around the African continent. It is a terrible time to fly to East Africa to take pictures of wildlife.

Summer reading
Read more: Your 2022 BookPage summer reading guide

Each chapter is narrated by a different person, framed by the narration of a now-elderly member of the group who’s looking back on these events from 2022. While most of the captives show a surprising amount of mettle when faced with a group of criminals who will shoot them as easily as they would a game animal, some readers may wonder whether Katie and her guests are acting as if they are in a movie in which everything depends on outsmarting the latest Bond villain. They seem to have learned survival strategies from somewhere, and why not Hollywood?

Some of the captives discover that escape comes with its own problems, including the scorching sun and a lack of food, water and first aid out on the savanna. There are also dangerous animals, some of which target humans as an easy meal. With a matter-of-fact tone, Bohjalian details death by leopard, hyena and, in one truly satisfying scene, puff adder. When the captives have a moment to catch their breaths, they wonder why they were nabbed in the first place. Of course the kidnappers wanted high-profile targets who’d bring them a nice bit of ransom money—but there’s also a darker reason connected to the Cold War.

Bohjalian traveled to the Serengeti to research this novel in 2020, but his fast-paced tale allows little time for contemplating sunsets through the branches of baobab trees. Instead, The Lioness succeeds in showing how otherwise pampered folks react when faced with the unthinkable.

Chris Bohjalian’s fast-paced tale of a safari gone wrong shows how pampered folks react when faced with the unthinkable.
FictionLiterary Fiction

My Volcano

Review by Arlene McKanic

Have you ever read a book that was so off-the-wall bizarre that you thought, I can’t read this anymore, it’s too ridiculous, but it was also so compelling that you had to keep reading just to see what happens? John Elizabeth Stintzi’s harrowing novel My Volcano is one of those books.

The story, if it can be called that, begins in 2016, when a volcano sprouts from New York’s Central Park reservoir. This is weird, but it’s not unheard of.

After all, a volcano really did pop up in a Mexican cornfield in 1943. But the volcano in My Volcano brings not fountains of ash but instead much stranger complications. For one thing, it appears to be Mount Fuji, even though researchers confirm that the original Mount Fuji is where it should be and hasn’t tunneled through the Earth to reappear in midtown Manhattan.

Against the backdrop of this volcano’s appearance, the novel’s narrative scope is tremendously broad: A girl in Russia wakes up in the body of a huge insect, but unlike with poor Gregor Samsa, nobody seems to notice this but her. A golem made of rocks from the Libyan desert wreaks destruction on entities that pollute and despoil the environment. A nomadic herder leading his flock through Mongolia transforms into a spiky plant, and everything he passes also turns into the same spiky plant until there are millions of them. A woman dreams that she inhabits the bodies of other people, including the boyfriend of the insect-girl. And five centuries ago, a boy possessed by an angry spirit fails to save the Mexican people from the Spanish conquistadors.

My Volcano is perhaps most likely to remind readers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, in which everything becomes a mashup of everything else’s DNA. Why is all this happening? Each of the book’s sections begins with a description of a real human atrocity, from homicides and drug overdoses to shootings by police officers. Maybe the Earth has decided it’s not going to wait for climate change to put an end to human malfeasance. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so much about bringing about the end of humanity as encouraging us to clean up our act.

We are less than a dust mote in the universe, and no one will miss us when we’re gone, Stintzi’s deranged Mobius-strip of a book suggests. Should we still be saved? Can we?

John Elizabeth Stintzi’s deranged Mobius-strip of a book is perhaps most likely to remind readers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
FictionFamily Drama

The Unsinkable Greta James

Review by Arlene McKanic

​​While reading YA author Jennifer E. Smith’s first novel for adult readers, The Unsinkable Greta James, I wondered how a story like this one, about a vivacious, career-minded woman who is iffy about settling down, would have worked out 70 years ago. Of course, the woman would meet a nice chap on an ocean liner, as Greta does in this novel. An epilogue would see her married to the good man, happily pregnant in a sunny kitchen while the souvenirs of her old career, whether as a singer or an athlete or what have you, collected dust in the attic.

Of course, that’s not what happens in The Unsinkable Greta James.

Greta is a rock ’n’ roll musician who is famous enough to be recognized but not so famous that a room goes silent when she walks into it. Ben, a Jack London fanatic, is the love interest whom Greta meets on the cruise ship (and who doesn’t know who she is at first). But for Greta, the “man in her life” isn’t Ben, but her father, Conrad. Greta agreed to join Conrad and his friends on the Alaskan cruise after the sudden death of her mother, Helen, who planned the trip.

Greta and Conrad’s relationship has always been uncomfortable. While he acknowledges her talent, he’s nervous about the precariousness of a career in entertainment. She thinks he’s never been on her side and favors her brother, who has a wife, kids and a steady job with health insurance. They’re completely different and too much alike, and Helen’s death poleaxed both of them. (Another reason Greta is on this ship is to forget an onstage episode when her grief became too overwhelming. She’s not quite unsinkable.)

Smith’s style is as smooth as an Alaskan cruise is supposed to be—though like Greta, the ship does rock and roll now and then. Smith’s characters are good and nice. She does allow for some eccentricity, as in Helen’s friend Todd, an obsessive bird watcher who longs to see some avian rarity on an ice floe. But Smith reserves nearly all the novel’s real complexity for Conrad, a man who can’t seem to overcome a certain midcentury rigidity. Greta is wary of him, and because she’s wary of him, so are we, and this is the real meat of the novel. Can these two stubborn people lay down their arms at long last and connect? That’s the question of The Unsinkable Greta James.

Can two stubborn people lay down their arms at long last and connect? That’s the question of Jennifer E. Smith’s first novel for adult readers.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Christie Affair

Review by Arlene McKanic

The title of Nina de Gramont’s second novel for adults, The Christie Affair, has a double meaning. The first is Agatha Christie’s notorious disappearance in 1926, and the second is the affair her husband, Archie, is carrying on with Nan O’Dea (the real mistress’s name was Nancy Neele), the suspiciously omniscient narrator. But in the end, the story isn’t really about either of these affairs; it’s about motherhood.

A long list of authors has imagined what really went on when Christie left her husband and young daughter for 11 days in December 1926. In de Gramont’s telling, Christie’s leaving is prompted almost as much by her despair over her mother’s death as it is by her fury at her husband’s cheating. As for Nan, her life was blighted after being banished to a hellish Irish convent for “fallen” women when she became pregnant at 19. Nan’s baby daughter was taken from her, and her goal ever since has been to find her child, or get revenge, or both.

Tying Nan’s anguish with Christie’s disappearance is part of the book’s allure, but even a reader superficially familiar with the famous author’s biography can see that de Gramont’s novel is heavily fictionalized. Christie never discussed what she’d been up to those 11 days, not even with her own daughter, and this creates a lacuna for a novelist to fill up with some outlandish stuff. Indeed, at one point the story becomes a Christie-esque murder mystery: Who has poisoned that jolly newlywed couple in the hotel where Nan has chosen to hide out, and why?

Few of the characters are particularly likable in The Christie Affair, but all are fascinating. Archie is one of those entitled, upper-crust British military men who prides himself on not understanding the minds of women, children or even small dogs. Trauma has made Nan duplicitous. Christie, in her own way, is as arrogant as her husband. When she discovers that basically all of England is searching for her, she decides to extend her holiday a few more days and work on a new book. She figures her own 7-year-old daughter won’t mind, since she has a nanny.

Despite these liberties and embellishments, de Gramont doesn’t let her story stray too far from the basic facts, so the ending’s a bit of a letdown for Nan. Still, The Christie Affair is an enjoyable entrant to the canon of “Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance” novels.

Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair is an enjoyable entrant to the list of “Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance” novels.
FictionPopular Fiction

Wahala

Review by Arlene McKanic

Have you ever seen a simulation of what might happen if a rogue planet wandered into our solar system? The animation shows how the planet would be as disruptive as a cue ball, knocking heavenly bodies hither and thither. It might even push them out of their comfortable orbits. That’s essentially what happens to a group of women in Nikki May’s first novel, Wahala.

The rogue planet is a woman named Isobel, and the orderly, cozy solar system she fumbles into is comprised of three British Nigerian besties. Boo is a frustrated wife and mother with a part-time job that doesn’t satisfy her. Her French husband adores her and their bratty, bossy daughter but is one of those “fun dads” who leaves all the heavy lifting to his wife. Ronke is a dentist who has lousy taste in men and lacks her friends’ impeccable sense of style. And Simi’s husband is eager to have a baby, but she isn’t.

These well-heeled ladies, concerned as they are with clothes and shoes, weaves and gel manicures, brunches and lunches at chichi restaurants and, of course, men, are meant to be a London version of the “Sex and the City” quartet. Maybe, the reader might think, these women need to have their lives shaken up a bit. Maybe a bit of wahala, that word often used by Nigerians to describe chaos or trouble, isn’t such a bad thing.

As it turns out, the wild stuff on “Sex and the City” doesn’t come close to what happens to Boo, Ronke and Simi. That’s because Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha didn’t have to deal with an Isobel. You’ve certainly heard of people like Isobel, and if you’ve run into one and lived to tell the tale, consider yourself lucky. She’s the person who wants to be everyone’s best friend, who showers you with expensive gifts if she’s rich enough to afford them, who beguiles you into confiding your disappointments, your uncertainties, your fears, your secrets.

For all its wittiness, fast-paced writing and recipes for Nigerian chicken stew and Aunty K’s moin moin, Wahala is a much darker read than you might expect. Many people get hurt—badly. It’s a story that reminds us of the ties that bind, and sometimes gag.

This tale of three besties whose orderly lives are disrupted by a planetary force of a woman named Isobel reminds us of the ties that bind—and sometimes gag.
FictionThriller

The Anomaly

Review by Arlene McKanic

Why are a bunch of airplane passengers being rousted by the FBI and the CIA? Their only commonality is that they were on an exceptionally turbulent flight from Paris to New York City. A few chapters into Hervé Le Tellier’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Anomaly, we learn that it’s because their plane did not land where and when it should’ve and so triggered something called Protocol 42. Furthermore, it’s not the only plane of its kind, but the other plane landed in China and the Chinese government isn’t talking.

The passengers of Air France Flight 006 are the types of people you’d expect on a transcontinental flight—or maybe you wouldn’t. There’s the wife of an Afghanistan War veteran and her young children; a brilliant and ambitious lawyer who recently married the great love of her life; a translator who wrote a novel titled The Anomaly; a rapper who dreams of jamming with Elton John; and a man who leads a double life as a reliable father and hired assassin. And of course, there’s the pilot, who finds that the mess he’s in may, ironically, give him a second chance at life.

First published in France, The Anomaly is pleasingly Gallic, with chapters weaving together comedy, melancholy, tragedy and a strand of noir. Lovers and would-be lovers have their hearts broken. The stone-cold assassin seems right out of a Jean-Pierre Melville movie. Only the children on the plane seem to take things in stride, as children often do. A battalion of scientists, government agents, philosophers and clergy members struggle to figure out what happened, but there’s simply no good explanation.

No doubt you’ll find yourself wondering how you would react if you were a passenger on Flight 006. Would you find your situation intolerable? Would you try to live with this new reality to the best of your ability? It is to Le Tellier’s credit that these questions linger long after you turn the last page.

In Hervé Le Tellier’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, the passengers of Air France Flight 006 must learn to live with a life-altering situation.
FictionLiterary Fiction

New York, My Village

Review by Arlene McKanic

Literature and myth are full of tales of the naif who finds himself embroiled in circumstances so off-the-wall that only his innocence and good nature save him. Uwem Akpan’s first novel, New York, My Village, is almost one of these tales.

Nigerian editor Ekong Udousoro has been granted a Toni Morrison fellowship to work on a book about the Biafran War at a boutique New York publishing house. But first, he has to get to the United States, and the novel’s opening chapters deal with the frustrations of acquiring a visa. Ekong experiences a foretaste of what he’ll find in New York City: people who are indifferent and reject him, and people who seem kind and still reject him. No one bothers to tell him why his visa application is rejected, even though he has all the reams of necessary paperwork. They reject him—and others, including a woman who becomes so distraught that her clothes fall off of her—because they have the power and they can. Finally, on his third try, Ekong gets his visa.

New York City is just as baffling. Ekong’s colleagues at the publishing house, every one of them white, welcome him effusively. They’re happy to treat him like a king as long as he keeps a low profile. When Ekong, his childhood friend Usen and Usen’s family go to church, they’re nearly thrown out, then embraced, then ushered into the sacristy where the priest tells them never to come back and suggests they worship at an African American church nearby. This nearly sparks an international incident. Worst of all, Ekong and his screwy neighbors in their Hell’s Kitchen walk-up have bedbugs.

But Ekong is no Candide, nor is he Xi from The Gods Must Be Crazy. Intelligent and sophisticated, he’s capable of a rage that would never occur to these characters. Even as he comes from a place roiling with strife, corruption and intertribal bigotry—his very name means “war”—he just can’t wrap his mind around the perfidy, hypocrisy and smarmy racism that he’s found in America.

Akpan, author of the award-winning story collection Say You’re One of Them, allows Ekong’s astonished anger, acerbic humor and, despite everything, love of New York and its people to anchor him. Of all the characters in New York, My Village, Ekong knows who he is. We are privileged to get to know him, too.

Uwem Akpan takes us into the horrors of the visa process in a Behind the Book look at ‘New York, My Village.’

Uwem Akpan anchors his first novel in astonished anger, acerbic humor and, despite everything, love of New York City and its people.
Fiction

Three new books explore the power of belief

Feature by Arlene McKanic

Religion is a motivating force in the lives of millions of people, for good or for ill. In these three books, characters’ religious beliefs spur the action, influence major life decisions—or leave them with at least a shred of dignity under dire circumstances.

FBI-trained forensic artist Carrie Stuart Parks’ suspenseful novel, A Cry from the Dust, is inspired by a dark moment in history: the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, where a posse of renegade Mormons slaughtered a group of pioneers and tried to blame it on the Indians.

Gwen Marcey has no idea what she’s in for when she agrees to sculpt the death masks of three victims of the massacre. The forensic artist has taken the job at the Mountain Meadows Interpretive Center to pave the way for a return to a normal life after beating cancer. Mother of a stroppy teenager, ex-wife of a narcissistic best-selling author, owner of a pony-sized Great Pyrenees, Gwen is also intelligent, talented and amazingly perceptive. She will need all of her gifts to survive the mess she will soon find herself in: A remnant of a secret Mormon sect holds a grudge over the long-ago incident, and they want something from Gwen badly enough to kill.

Fortunately, our heroine is lucky even in her misfortune. As her Spock-like friend Beth says, “Everything happens for a reason.” Case in point: The ravages brought by Gwen’s cancer treatments—double mastectomy and hair loss—help her disguise herself during one of many close calls.

Besides having a resourceful and likable heroine, the book also features that rarest of characters: a villain you don’t see coming, but whom you hate with relish. Moreover, you think said villain’s crazy plans for world domination just might work. Let’s just say it’s amazing what some people think they can do with Semtex.

A Cry from the Dust will keep you hoping, praying and guessing till the end.

HOPE AND CHANGE
Philip Gulley’s latest novel, A Place Called Hope, begins propitiously. You’re about six pages in when you realize there are about a half dozen characters you want to smack. This might even include the lovable protagonist, Quaker minister Sam Gardner. That’s because everyone in his small town is pleased to walk all over him, from his wife to his secretary to the church elders.

Sam seems content to tolerate the abuse, until he isn’t. The last straw comes when, as a favor to another minister, Sam presides over a same-sex wedding at the Unitarian church. It gives his church elders the excuse to fire him that they’ve been looking for. It’s no wonder that he fantasizes, for a hot second, about writing a novel about a pastor who slaughters the elders of his church and stows their carcasses in a freezer.

But no matter—Sam finds another meeting to pastor, even though it does only have 12 members. Why, when it used to have more than 100, is one of the mysteries Sam needs to suss out. Gentle and humorous, A Place Called Hope strikes the reader as a sort of extended episode of “Leave it to Beaver” with email and smartphones. That, by the way, is a compliment.

HISTORY'S LESSONS
Though much has been written about World War II, the fight against Japan is often overshadowed by stories of Nazi brutality. This novel changes the balance. A little more than halfway through Sigmund Brouwer’s heartrending Thief of Glory, the sadistic director of a Japanese concentration camp in what was then Dutch East India demands that every girl over the age of 16 be turned over to him as a concubine. The women decide to refuse, knowing it may cost them their lives. Then, they break into “Amazing Grace.”

Though this is the most overtly religious scene in Brouwer’s book, faith pervades the narrative of this Empire of the Sun-like tale of Jeremiah Prins’ childhood in a Jappenkamp. We see it in the piety of the Prins family before they are torn asunder by the occupation. We see it in Jeremiah’s repudiation of his faith after he’s lost everything, and his struggle to get it back.

The author of more than 30 novels, Brouwer based this novel partly on his father’s own experiences in Indonesia during WWII. Not just a book about faith, Thief of Glory is also about redemption and forgiveness.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Religion is a motivating force in the lives of millions of people, for good or for ill. In these three books, characters’ religious beliefs spur the action, influence major life decisions—or leave them with at least a shred of dignity under dire circumstances.
Memoir

Pearls of hard-won wisdom

Feature by Arlene McKanic

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.

AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND LEGEND
The late Louis Zamperini—the Olympic athlete and war hero who died in July at age 97—was indeed an inspiration. He wrote about his POW nightmare in Devil at My Heels, and Laura Hillenbrand chronicled his experiences in the bestseller Unbroken. In the last book from Zamperini, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life, co-written with David Rensin, he mines his experiences for advice that will encourage others. Even as a young man, he had the gumption to turn his excess energy into something positive and became a champion athlete. His ebullience led him to set up camps for delinquent boys. In his twilight years, Zamperini carried the Olympic torch and went skateboarding. He also fully appreciated getting hugs from Angelina Jolie, whose film of Unbroken opens on Christmas Day.

THE POWER TO FORGIVE
Thank goodness for Anne Lamott. Her writing style, both unfussy and diaphanous, her congeniality, loopy humor and dogged optimism are balms. Her latest book, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace is a gem. In addition to hope, she also brings anger, even rage, and uses it like a finely honed weapon. Because of her rage—at ridiculous men found on match.com, at politicians both heartless and gormless, at perfect, stay-at-home moms who wear size 0 and run around in biker shorts, at her rather grotesque mother, long-dead father and the state of the world in general—much of the book also focuses on forgiveness. Forgiveness may be a useful thing, she says, but people often need to be dragged to it kicking and screaming. According to Lamott, forgiveness probably needs one of those improbable moments of grace to happen at all. Surely, when it comes to questions of faith, Lamott is to essay writing what Marilynne Robinson is to fiction. Awesome.

ABOVE & BEYOND
Eric Metaxas, author of Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life, certainly believes in miracles, those eruptions of the ineffable into the mundane. He has no patience with those who think what the human being can discern with five senses is all there is. The miracles Metaxas writes of here range from the spectacular to what can be called “miracle light.” One of his acquaintances, a very British, High Church Anglican type, sees 50-foot angels in full battle rattle. Others see an incandescent Jesus or are healed at the last minute from deathly illnesses. Metaxas has no use for subtlety; these miracles only happen through the intercession of Jesus. But his writing, and the miracles he describes, encourage all of us to ponder the possible.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.
Fiction

Shivers under the sun

Feature by Arlene McKanic

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

The good and useful thing about scary stories is their variety. They may leave you sad, mad or contemplative—but all of the good ones make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Not even 40 pages into Sarah Lotz’s latest thriller, Day Four, it becomes clear that when things start going pear-shaped on a cruise, you don’t even need the supernatural to have a good horror story.

The Beautiful Dreamer is the not-quite jewel in the crown of the Foveros Line, which has a reputation for gifting its passengers with norovirus. Passage is cheaper than the going rate, and it shows. We have neon and general garishness, annoyingly chipper cruise directors and staff who are only on the ship because no one else will hire them. The passengers are spoiled, ugly and miserable. Indeed, at least two of them took the cruise with plans to commit suicide.

Then, something happens and the boat is dead in the water. There’s no electricity and no way to call for help. Passengers move to the decks to avoid the stench from the overflowing toilets. Then they start seeing and hearing impossible things. A woman spots a little boy running through the corridors, even though this is an adults-only cruise. A man swears he’s seen the devil. Stress is a perfectly logical explanation, but. . . . Lotz revels in her characters’ discomfort—a beautiful reminder that you don’t have to like a character to care what happens next. But her real genius is putting the action on a crippled, noisome ship that the world seems to have forgotten. The characters, and the reader, want to get off this bucket, but how? It’s worse than being on the Nostromo. And it makes Day Four irresistible.

After reading Paul Tremblay’s mightily disturbing novel, you may wonder why more teenage girls don’t lose their minds. In A Head Full of Ghosts, an exorcist is called in. But the real demons that torture Marjorie Barrett are external.

The story is narrated by Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry, who recounts events of 15 years before. Now 23, Merry blogs about the wildly popular reality show that featured her family. Yes, Marjorie’s suffering was on TV for the world to witness. Why? 

First, there’s the patriarchy. In one queasily funny scene, the men who torment Marjorie during her exorcism refuse to believe that she can be possessed by a female demon. Demons are male, and they like to prey on adolescent girls, who in turn need learned male priests to save them.

Second, there’s Marjorie and Merry’s dad. John Barrett is a failure. And not because the family finances were wiped out when his job went away, although money is a big reason for the camera crew. John is a failure because he doesn’t respect the women who love and live with him. He crushes his wife, and he is certainly one reason why Marjorie goes crazy. The only one he doesn’t grind down is Merry, because she’s tough and funny and smart and reminds you of Scout Finch.

But in the end, even Merry has her own demons. What happens to her 8-year-old self is so appalling and unfair that it’s almost unbelievable—a scary story, indeed.

 

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

The good and useful thing about scary stories is their variety. They may leave you sad, mad or contemplative—but all of the good ones make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

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