Arlene McKanic

FictionHistorical Fiction

Alternate art history

Review by Arlene McKanic

Some works of art are so iconic that the viewer can’t help but wonder about the backstory. Take, for example, “Christina’s World,” painted by Andrew Wyeth in 1948 and inspired by a woman named Christina Olson. The painting shows a young woman with her back to the viewer, lying in a vast field and looking up at a ­weather-beaten house and its smaller outbuildings. Though we can’t see her face, we get the impression that she’s yearning for something.

Christina Baker Kline’s superb new novel chronicles the constricted life of the woman Wyeth made famous. The Christina in Kline’s book used to yearn for things, but poverty and disability made her aware early on that some of the pleasures of life were not to be hers. We first meet her as a young child, on her sickbed. Yet, despite her challenges, the young Christina is smart, stubborn, resourceful and even physically brave. But bad luck, bad timing, other people’s bad decisions or bad faith shrink her life down to the old house and the plot of land it stands on. Alone in the house with her younger brother, her life is year after year of drudgery. Then Wyeth shows up and takes one of her upstairs rooms as a studio.

In case you’re wondering, no, Wyeth and Christina don’t fall in love and run away together. Wyeth’s most famous painting is deceptive; the real Christina was old enough to be his mother. What is forged between them is a tender connection and understanding.

The beauty of Kline’s writing and her grasp of her characters is such that at first you want to sink into this book like a warm bath. But she doesn’t allow her reader to get too comfortable. Christina is not a woman who accepts her disappointments with saintly forbearance. She is bitter, disappointed and occasionally spiteful. But the good-natured and talented young painter does not pity her—he sees her humanity.

Gentle and profound, A Piece of the World shows the healing power of simple, unexpected friendship.

 

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

Some works of art are so iconic that the viewer can’t help but wonder about the backstory. Take, for example, “Christina’s World,” painted by Andrew Wyeth in 1948 and inspired by a woman named Christina Olson. The painting shows a young woman with her back to the viewer, lying in a vast field and looking up at a ­weather-beaten house and its smaller outbuildings. Though we can’t see her face, we get the impression that she’s yearning for something.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A portrait of both sides of America’s most contentious issue

Review by Arlene McKanic

Some of our best artists seem blessed with a type of clairvoyance, or at least a deep understanding of the zeitgeist that feels like clairvoyance. This seems especially true of Joyce Carol Oates, who’s taken our peculiarly American darkness as her subject matter throughout her career. In her latest, A Book of American Martyrs, Oates is at her most incisive, wrenching and timely.

When extremist Luther Dunphy murders OB/GYN Augustus Voorhees and his driver, it’s clear that the two are American martyrs—but they are only ground zero. Their martyrdom spreads out in circles, like hard radiation, to make collateral damage of wives, children, parents, siblings and innocent bystanders. Even Dunphy is a martyr of sorts. He goes quietly when the cops come for him; he doesn’t plead for his life when he faces the death penalty. But Oates understands that “martyr” doesn’t mean “saint.” Both men are unyielding in their beliefs: For the evangelical Christian Dunphy, abortion is murder; for the atheist Voorhees, a woman’s right to her body is inviolable.

Even as she anatomizes this latest American schism, Oates touches on her usual obsessions. We have the almost casual brutality with which men treat women. Parents fail in a million ways, but only mothers are not forgiven for it. Pregnancy and childbirth are, at best, biological tragedies. There’s boxing. Yet Oates finds a path to empathy, compassion and perhaps even reconciliation. Once again, Oates proves that she remains one of our most necessary authors.

 

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

Some of our best artists seem blessed with a type of clairvoyance, or at least a deep understanding of the zeitgeist that feels like clairvoyance. This seems especially true of Joyce Carol Oates, who’s taken our peculiarly American darkness as her subject matter throughout her career. In her latest, A Book of American Martyrs, Oates is at her most incisive, wrenching and timely.
FictionDebut Fiction

An icy literary thriller

Review by Arlene McKanic

Like many coming-of-age stories, History of Wolves features a grown-up narrator looking back on an event in her teenage years that forever changed her belief in the way the world works. The brilliance of this novel is that the events that ruined Madeline, aka “Linda,” are so appalling that they may change the way the reader believes the world works as well.

The story opens in the middle of a typically punishing Minnesota winter; the superbly talented Fridlund makes you feel the cold in your joints and imagine the sound of a knock on the crust of ice over a snowdrift. Linda lives with her hippie parents in such poverty that they not only lack central heating but a door: Only a tarp stands between them and the cold. 

Then a new family moves into a new house across the lake from Linda: Leo and Patra Gardner and their little boy, Paul. Linda is taken on as Paul’s babysitter. To the perceptive Linda, they are just a shade off normal, which entices her because she’s just a shade off normal herself. But soon the reader, with a skin-crawling dread worthy of any decent slasher movie, begins to realize that something’s more than just not right. You only hope that it’s not what you think it is.

But learning that it’s not what you think it is brings no relief, because what is really going on is ever so much worse. When what happens happens, you want to stop and go back to the beginning of the book to search for the clues you knew had to be there. You’ll find them.

Fridlund earns a place as a top-notch writer with this remarkable, disturbing debut.

 

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

Like many coming-of-age stories, History of Wolves features a grown-up narrator looking back on an event in her teenage years that forever changed her belief in the way the world works. The brilliance of this novel is that the events that ruined Madeline, aka “Linda,” are so appalling that they may change the way the reader believes the world works as well.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Behind every great man is a fed-up woman

Review by Arlene McKanic

Like so many male genius-types, Albert Einstein’s behavior toward at least one woman who supported him was revolting. Fortunately, Marie Benedict’s tragic, crisply told novel isn’t about Albert, but about his Serbian, almost-as-brilliant first wife, Mileva Marić, who narrates it. The two met at Zurich Polytechnic as students in 1896, embarked on a passionate affair and launched a turbulent, 13-year marriage in 1903.

To be blunt, Benedict’s exploration of this unfortunate woman’s life makes you mad, and that’s probably the point. What really burns one up isn’t reading page after page about how ill-used Marić was by her philandering husband, or how thoroughly he derailed her career and life, but the knowledge that this story isn’t entirely a relic of the past. Somewhere in the world—yes, even in the United States of America in the year 2016—there is another young woman like Mileva Marić, whose promising future is crushed by domesticity and an ambitious, selfish partner.

At least, the way this story unfolds in The Other Einstein, Marić has the wisdom to dump Einstein before he dumps her. But even that scene isn’t a moment of feminist triumph. Worn out from years of childbearing and housekeeping, Marić becomes a single mom with few prospects, burdened by the stigma of divorce. 

Benedict does take liberties with her story: The Other Einstein is a novel and not a biography. Her speculations on how much Marić contributed to her husband’s work and what happened to their first child, born before their marriage and lost to history in the real world, are thought-provoking, if unable to be substantiated. There’s no doubt this is a novel that will inspire strong emotion in its readers. And it carries a warning: Hold on to your dreams, and find someone who’ll support them even as you support theirs. 

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Marie Benedict on The Other Einstein.

Like so many male genius-types, Albert Einstein’s behavior toward at least one woman who supported him was revolting. Fortunately, Marie Benedict’s tragic, crisply told novel isn’t about Albert, but about his Serbian, almost-as-brilliant first wife, Mileva Marić, who narrates it. The two met at Zurich Polytechnic as students in 1896, embarked on a passionate affair and launched a turbulent, 13-year marriage in 1903.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Wonder

Review by Arlene McKanic

Is Emma Donoghue cultivating a new genre? Call it “emergency motherhood.” Like her 2010 bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s ninth novel features a woman whose existence is bent around the life, health and happiness of a child whose circumstances are desperate.

The Wonder is set in Catholic Ireland, just after the ravages of the potato famine. Little Anna O’Donnell has survived months without food, leading the townspeople to believe she is a miracle. Due to her fame, the diocese where she and her family live assigns a nurse and a nun to watch her around the clock. The nurse is Lib Wright, a British veteran of the Crimean War who was personally trained by Florence Nightingale. The nun is a shadow of a creature called Sister Michael. Anxiously watching and waiting are Anna’s parents.

Lib, a no-nonsense type, assumes something dodgy is going on. After months of nothing but spoonfuls of water, Anna should be dead. Then, under the eyes of Lib and the nun, Anna does begin to die in earnest. This prompts a battle between Lib and Anna’s mother: In Donoghue’s world, those who haven’t given birth—Lib had a baby who died in infancy—just don’t get it. Virginal Sister Michael and the servant girl are compassionate but befuddled. The men are useless. The conflict can only end in catastrophe. Or maybe, to use Tolkien’s word, a eucatastrophe.

Donoghue’s strength is the fierceness with which she approaches her subject matter, and The Wonder sometimes reaches Exorcist-level intensity as Lib and Mrs. O’Donnell contend over Anna’s body and soul. Suspenseful and compelling, the story will keep readers turning pages.

 

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

Is Emma Donoghue cultivating a new genre? Call it “emergency motherhood.” Like her 2010 bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s ninth novel features a woman whose existence is bent around the life, health and happiness of a child whose circumstances are desperate.
FictionSuspenseDomestic Suspense

Surviving the storm

Review by Arlene McKanic

Some readers will open Meg Little Reilly’s novel and come to certain conclusions about the starring couple. Ash and Pia are from gentrified Brooklyn, but when the book begins, they’ve fled to Vermont, Ash’s natal state, in an attempt to live more “naturally.” Since the book is narrated by Ash in hindsight, we learn he’s survived a storm that makes Superstorm Sandy look like a breezy day at the beach. At last, some may think, the yuppies get theirs.

The problem with this schadenfreude is that the nice, solid, longtime citizens of Isole, Vermont, also get theirs when this storm hits. Even before the apocalypse—and Reilly is masterful at keeping this meteorological monster offstage until the right time—the ties that bind this little community begin to unravel. Ash and Pia’s marriage begins to fracture under the sheer stress of waiting for something to happen.

Neither Ash nor Pia is particularly embraceable, but Reilly has created likable secondary characters: Peg, the nature-loving scientist neighbor; Crow, the hippie/survivalist/loner; Maggie, the doughty schoolteacher; and August, the half-wild boy whom Ash befriends. Suspense comes from wondering who will survive and what the world will look like once this storm has come and gone.

Though writers have long warned us about what happens when humans mess with nature in general and the weather in particular, We Are Unprepared might be in the vanguard of tales that deal with the consequences of human-caused climate change. As such, it is an admirable example of the genre.

 

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

Some readers will open Meg Little Reilly’s novel and come to certain conclusions about the starring couple. Ash and Pia are from gentrified Brooklyn, but when the book begins, they’ve fled to Vermont, Ash’s natal state, in an attempt to live more “naturally.” Since the book is narrated by Ash in hindsight, we learn he’s survived a storm that makes Superstorm Sandy look like a breezy day at the beach. At last, some may think, the yuppies get theirs.
FictionDebut Fiction

Generations of secrets to uncover in this chilling debut

Review by Arlene McKanic

There’s something not right about the Evans women, the protagonists of Heather Young’s troubling debut novel; her title The Lost Girls is apt.  

The book alternates between chapters narrated by the elderly Lucy Evans, and a semi-omniscient narrator whose focus is Justine, Lucy’s rootless and timid grandniece, who inherits her Minnesota home. The tale begins during the Depression, when Lucy, her sisters Lilith and Emily, and their parents conduct their annual retreat to this same house, then a vacation home by a lake. We know that something’s wrong with this bunch from the start, and as the summer wears on the wrongness curdles, then erupts into horror. 

Much of what’s wrong with the generations of Evans women begins with the men in—and out of—their lives. We start with the sisters’ dad, Thomas. They and their mother Eleanor are afraid of him. He is a bit authoritarian, but that trait seems mediated by a gentleness and keen intelligence. He even takes Lucy fishing one morning. They have a good time. What’s there to fear? Also, why is Eleanor so suffocatingly protective of 6-year-old Emily? Why are Lucy and Lilith, who share an intense bond, so mean to the little girl?         

Then there’s Justine, abandoned by her husband and left to raise their two daughters in San Diego. Terrified of loneliness, she takes up with then tries to leave Patrick, a man who can only be called a successful sociopath. We meet Justine’s ghastly and embittered mother, Maurie, who flitted from man to man like a bedraggled moth when Justine was a child and deprived her of anything like stability. Both Patrick and Maurie, daughter of Lilith, manage to track Justine down in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The results are what you’d expect.

Though a veteran of a few writing seminars and workshops, Young is a lawyer, one of a line who have become writers of fiction. What many of these attorney/writers share is a fondness for the detail that seems unimportant at first but then becomes crucial and bits of evidence that lead to an irrefutable conclusion. Young’s summation: the patriarchy hurts women and girls, but it hurts men and boys just as much. This might not be news, but in Young’s hands it feels startling and essential.

There’s something not right about the Evans women, the protagonists of Heather Young’s troubling debut novel; her title The Lost Girls is apt.  

FictionDebut Fiction

No miracles, but two lonely souls find a match

Review by Arlene McKanic

There are some writers who represent a world with such immediacy that it’s scary. You wonder what their experience was. Has he or she ever actually been there, or done that? This is the feeling you’ll get when you read Scott Stambach’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko.

The book is the diary of a severely crippled Belorussian boy who’s spent his whole life in a hospital for sick children. Born in 1987, his deformities, and those of his fellow inmates, were no doubt caused by the radiation that resulted from the Chernobyl disaster. So the perfidy and carelessness of adults lies always in the story’s background, as well as in the foreground. Save the saintly and maternal Natalya, most of the nurses are indifferent or sadistic. The mostly unseen post-Soviet bureaucracy makes it clear it has little to spare for these damaged children, even if their damage was caused by another arm of the same bureaucracy.

Seventeen-year-old Ivan copes with this with his fierce intelligence, sarcasm and ability to make life a bit difficult for the staff, even as he lacks one arm, both legs and two fingers on his one hand. Reader, he can do some remarkable things with just two fingers and a thumb. 

Then, Polina arrives. At first, she looks like a normal teenaged girl, but she is probably another instance of Chernobyl’s collateral damage. She has leukemia, and it will kill her. But her blossoming relationship with Ivan gives them both reasons to thrive. Surely, they are a match for each other, for she’s as ornery as he is until the disease knocks the orneriness out of her. Clear your calendar for an afternoon of ugly-crying.

What’s amazing is nothing in Stambach’s C.V. would make a reader think he’d be capable of such a book. His bio says he’s a special ed teacher in a San Diego charter school who’s written for literary magazines. Is that it? How does he know what it’s like to be a boy with half a body, or a girl whose white blood cells and chemo drugs are in a pitched battle over who is going to kill her first? The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko must be counted as a miracle of a book.

There are some writers who represent a world with such immediacy that it’s scary. This is the feeling you’ll get when you read Scott Stambach’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A teen’s tortured, but fiery soul

Review by Arlene McKanic

The teenage narrator of Jesse Ball’s heartbreaking sixth novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, is Lucia, but as far as the world is concerned, she is nameless and worthless. When the story opens, we learn that she’s functionally orphaned. Her father is dead, her mother driven to such madness that she no longer recognizes her own child. Reduced to penury, Lucia lives with her elderly aunt Lucy in a converted garage whose rent they can’t afford. At one point, Lucia’s shoes are so run down that her toes poke through.

What she does have is her father’s old Zippo, and even this gets her into trouble when she attacks a boy at her school for daring to touch it. This gets her sent to another school, where she falls in with a loosely organized bunch of teenage pyromaniacs. The idea of burning things up and burning things down, to inflict hurt on a world that has inflicted hurt on her, captures Lucia’s imagination.

At times, the reader may not like Lucia very much. She lies, she cheats, she steals; her thoughts about her peers are uncharitable, to put it mildly; she smarts off to authority figures, often to her detriment. On the other hand, she’s devoted to her aunt and goes out of her way to visit her psychotic mother. Other adult authority figures rarely respect her, the kids in school despise her, her petty crimes come about because a lot of the time she doesn’t even have money to buy food. 

Maybe, this angry, sad but hopeful book suggests, having no name has its benefits, especially for kids who have nothing to lose. In an age of grotesque inequality, it’s something to consider.

 

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

The teenage narrator of Jesse Ball’s heartbreaking sixth novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, is Lucia, but as far as the world is concerned, she is nameless and worthless. When the story opens, we learn that she’s functionally orphaned. Her father is dead, her mother driven to such madness that she no longer recognizes her own child. Reduced to penury, Lucia lives with her elderly aunt Lucy in a converted garage whose rent they can’t afford. At one point, Lucia’s shoes are so run down that her toes poke through.
FictionPopular Fiction

A laugh-out-loud look at midlife

Review by Arlene McKanic

Early in Terry McMillan’s hilarious, sad, wry, raunchy novel—-aren’t all of her books thus?—the protagonist, 50-something Georgia Young, opens the door to a handsome 18-year-old pizza delivery boy. With memories of How Stella Got Her Groove Back swimming in her head, the reviewer immediately thought, ‘Oh Terry, don’t go there. Please don’t.’ I won’t reveal where McMillan goes with the hot pizza delivery boy, but the places she takes readers in I Almost Forgot About You are utterly fascinating.

Georgia is an optometrist living in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s comfortable financially: She has a big honking house and shops at Whole Foods without trauma. Her two daughters are grown; she’s a veteran of two divorces; and she’s bored rigid with her life. When a patient reveals that she’s the daughter of one of Georgia’s old flames, who is alas, no longer alive, Georgia gets the idea to contact all—well, a lot—of the men she had relationships with in her torrid past and let them know what they meant to her. A rollicking story ensues.

The reader finds herself torn between gritting her teeth at how right McMillan gets the relationships between best friends, ex-spouses, ex-lovers, parents and children and putting the book down to laugh out loud. What else can you do when Georgia describes an ex-husband’s perfidy making her want to turn her head around “like Linda Blair in The Exorcist”?

Head-spinning aside, what an amazing character Georgia Young is! She’s loving, though everyone she loves gets on her nerves. She’s wise and foolish, whip-smart and sort of dumb. Isn’t she a bit like you and me? She’s also supported by one of the best cast of characters McMillan has conjured up in a long time. Run, don’t walk, and pick up this exuberant summer read.

 

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

Early in Terry McMillan’s hilarious, sad, wry, raunchy novel—-aren’t all of her books thus?—the protagonist, 50-something Georgia Young, opens the door to a handsome 18-year-old pizza delivery boy. With memories of How Stella Got Her Groove Back swimming in her head, the reviewer immediately thought, ‘Oh Terry, don’t go there. Please don’t.’ I won’t reveal where McMillan goes with the hot pizza delivery boy, but the places she takes readers in I Almost Forgot About You are utterly fascinating.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A daughter’s trip back from the brink

Review by Arlene McKanic

In Dear Fang, With Love, the second novel from Rufi Thorpe, Lucas is given a singular opportunity to show kindness to the daughter he doesn’t know all that well, even though she’s 17. He and his ex-girlfriend, Katya, had Vera when they were teenagers themselves. Lucas didn’t meet Vera until she was 5 and has been in and out of her life ever since. It is only when the mind of this beautiful, strange and brilliant young woman finally breaks that he steps into the gap, as it were. His solution is to take her to Lithuania, the home of their ancestors, including one who escaped the Nazis and Lithuania for a prosaic life in America.

Even though Vera doesn’t know much about her traumatized great-grandmother, the effect Lithuania has on her is dramatic. Thorpe’s depiction of mental illness is painfully accurate. She shows how Vera’s intelligence and imagination are tangled up with her mental issues, through both her ramblings on her laptop and her increasingly desperate and delusional emails to Fang, the boyfriend she left behind in California. Thorpe also understands the utter helplessness felt by a sick person’s loved ones. Lucas, who doesn’t even know how to parent a teenager who’s psychologically normal—are any teenagers psychologically normal?—is out of his league with Vera. 

But Lucas is a kind if flawed man, and he uses that kindness to lead his unhappy daughter from the brink. In one astonishing, terrifying scene, he does so literally. This is what a parent does, says Thorpe’s wise and sad book.

 

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

In Dear Fang, With Love, the second novel from Rufi Thorpe, Lucas is given a singular opportunity to show kindness to the daughter he doesn’t know all that well, even though she’s 17. He and his ex-girlfriend, Katya, had Vera when they were teenagers themselves. Lucas didn’t meet Vera until she was 5 and has been in and out of her life ever since. It is only when the mind of this beautiful, strange and brilliant young woman finally breaks that he steps into the gap, as it were. His solution is to take her to Lithuania, the home of their ancestors, including one who escaped the Nazis and Lithuania for a prosaic life in America.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Far from Cartagena, the culture follows

Review by Arlene McKanic

Not even a quarter of the way through Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean, readers will realize they’re getting sort of angry. Narrated by Reina, a young woman who emigrated with her family from Cartagena, Colombia to Miami, these pages are a compendium of the lousy ways men can treat women and the reasons women put up with it. Babies are tossed from bridges because men think their women are cheating on them. Reina’s parents got married because her father raped her mother and her mother wanted to avoid scandal. Reina allows all manner of men to paw at her. She is utterly devoted to her incarcerated brother despite his lack of remorse as a child murderer. Does he return such devotion? Not a chance.

Reina is resigned to all this; she expects nothing of men when it comes to commitment, responsibility or even respect. But then she meets Nesto.

Nesto is not like any man Reina has ever met. An orisha-worshipping Cuban émigré, he is genuinely interested in how she thinks and feels. He longs for the children he left back in Cuba—and he even had them with the same woman, to whom he was once married. Very few things have worked out in Reina’s life. Can she take a chance on this gentle, handsome, enigmatic man?

Reina and Nesto’s story is enhanced by Engel’s sensuous writing. The reader can see the different shades of blue of the ocean, the greens of palms and sea grapes, the smells of the semi-tropics. But Engel’s compassion for her people, the poverty-stricken Hispanic immigrants and refugees who’ve jumped from the fire of their native countries into the frying pan of the United States, is boundless. She even makes you understand why the men around Reina do what they do, even if she doesn’t absolve them. The Veins of the Ocean reminds us of the importance of love, respect, family and forgiveness.

Not even a quarter of the way through Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean, readers will realize they’re getting sort of angry. Narrated by Reina, a young woman who emigrated with her family from Cartagena, Colombia to Miami, these pages are a compendium of the lousy ways men can treat women and the reasons women put up with it.
FictionDebut Fiction

An old-fashioned man in the modern age

Review by Arlene McKanic

How well can you know a person, even a person you’ve loved and lived with for decades? This is the question posed by Phaedra Patrick’s gentle, funny and wistful first novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper.

The curious charms mentioned in the title are not attributes of Arthur Pepper, a rather ordinary pensioner from Yorkshire. They are actual charms found on a bracelet that belonged to his late wife, Miriam. Arthur’s investigations show them to be mementos of specific times, people and places in her life. It seems that the outwardly contented wife and mother that Arthur knew was a very different person before they met and married.

As Arthur uncovers Miriam’s past, the charms of Arthur himself become more evident. Amazingly old-fashioned, he seems not to have come of age in the 1960s but the 1950s or earlier; this made the reviewer think, "Come on, this chap is younger than Mick Jagger." But this is part of the book’s sweetness. 

A virgin when he married, Arthur has never been with another woman; even chastely kissing an old friend of Miriam’s makes him feel vaguely adulterous. He dutifully waters his fern, whom he has named Frederica. He treats even the weirdest people he meets on his quest with kindness and frets that his stodginess squashed something adventurous in his wife. Arthur’s charms, in this charmless age, are curious indeed.

Charming, too, is Patrick’s straightforward and unadorned style. Because of this, when Arthur’s grief overwhelms him like the tiger who almost eats him at one point—you have to read the book—it pierces the heart. You root for him every step of the way.

 

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

How well can you know a person, even a person you’ve loved and lived with for decades? This is the question posed by Phaedra Patrick’s gentle, funny and wistful first novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper.

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