Carla Jean Whitley

FictionFamily Drama

My Kind of People

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Sky is only 10 years old, but she’s experienced as much pain and confusion as someone three times her age. Although she was abandoned at a fire station as a newborn, she found a home with her adoptive parents. Now she’s starting over again, and this time she’s old enough to be aware of the pain. Sky’s adoptive parents have died in a car crash, and their will designates that Leo, Sky’s father’s best friend from childhood, would become her guardian.

Leo is torn up at the loss of his friend, and now he must create a loving home for Sky. Her presence sends Leo and his husband, Xavier, into a tailspin. The couple never wanted children, and Xavier is committed to their life in Boston. Leo doesn’t understand why he was named Sky’s guardian, but he loves the girl and the Massachusetts island where he was raised. He relates to her; they are some of the only dark-skinned people on the island, and they’ve both worked to find the people whom they can call home.

In My Kind of People, novelist Lisa Duffy paints a portrait of a community of people trying to find out who they are—and with whom they can be themselves. As neighbors jump in to help raise Sky, or to weigh in on what Leo could do better, Sky and Leo wrestle with their understanding of their changing circumstances. What caused the crash that killed some of the most important people in their lives? And can they form a new family with each other?

Duffy’s story is sweet but never cloying, and she’s unafraid to depict uncomfortable circumstances as the tale unfolds. My Kind of People is an emotionally complex tale that leaves some threads dangling—much like life—but still comes to a satisfying and hopeful conclusion.

In My Kind of People, novelist Lisa Duffy paints a portrait of a community of people trying to find out who they are—and with whom they can be themselves.
FictionPopular Fiction

Happy and You Know It

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

On its surface, Laura Hankin’s debut is a quick read, a novel that could be categorized as a beach book. Certainly, Happy and You Know It is the sort of novel that can suck a reader in and hold them until a whole day has passed, but it’s also a multidimensional story with riches revealed through close attention.

After Claire is fired from her band, she’s trying to pay her way through New York City life, and a gig as a playgroup musician will have to do. The mothers in the group are wealthy and wellness-obsessed, leading lives far more polished than the existence Claire is eking out. But Claire finds herself drawn to them anyway. The women incorporate Claire into their lives, and she welcomes the inclusion.

But proximity also reveals the chinks in the armor of their carefully styled lives. When one of the women’s husbands gets sick and is forced to work from home, he pushes the women to hold their playgroup elsewhere. Claire recognizes his belief that his activities are more important than his wife’s. “Back in Claire’s hometown, the church drummed into girls at Sunday school that they were special, meant to be cherished, but that ultimately, husbands were the boss. Apparently you could get a degree from Harvard and a fancy New York apartment, and still, some things would stay the same.”

As the playgroup moms work out their insecurities—within themselves and within their friendships—the metaphorical masks they wear begin to slip. With a light hand and a touch of mystery, Hankin’s debut explores feminism, class and the expectations placed on mothers. This is a romp with substance, consumed easily as a beach read but offering ample opportunity for self-reflection.

On its surface, Laura Hankin’s debut is a quick read, a novel that could be categorized as a beach book. Certainly, Happy and You Know It is the sort of novel that can suck a reader in and hold them until a whole day has passed, but it’s also a multidimensional story with riches revealed through close attention.

NonfictionEssays

Places I’ve Taken My Body

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Travel. Sex. Work. Living alone. They’re universal topics, but for women, they’re often accompanied by societal expectations and restrictions. And for Molly McCully Brown, these realities are even further restrained.

From birth, Brown has been without complete control of her physical self. She and her twin were born early—too early. Her twin, Frances, died. Brown went too long without oxygen in the birth canal and was born with cerebral palsy.

In the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body, Brown reflects frequently on her connection to Frances and the ways her own body influences her movement through the world. While visiting Europe for a writing fellowship, for example, Brown writes, “A few weeks in, I’m discovering that being abroad in a wheelchair requires an intense kind of myopia that feels both necessary and dangerous. . . . I worry that, because my body goes with me everywhere, it won’t matter how far I travel, that I’ll still just be telling its same small story over and over again. That this is all wasted on me.”

But it isn’t. Whether she’s writing about traveling Italy in a wheelchair or managing a classroom of adolescents in Texas, Brown offers poetic, contemplative insight about her experiences. Yes, these moments are all, necessarily, observed from the vantage point of her particular body. But even when she revisits an idea or a location, the ideas are always fresh.

Brown has won awards and acclaim for her poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and her prose is equally lyrical. This affinity for poetry comes naturally for Brown because of the way poetry complements her corporeal experience. She writes, “In my daily life, I was desperate to wrench away from my body and I hated how stumblingly and ploddingly it moved, but in poetry, I found a form that not only mirrored my own slowness, but rewarded the careful attention with which I had to move through the world.” That careful attention shines in this essay collection, which opens a window into Brown’s graceful interior life. 

Travel. Sex. Work. Living alone. They’re universal topics, but for women, they’re often accompanied by societal expectations and restrictions. And for Molly McCully Brown, these realities are even further restrained.

From birth, Brown has been without complete control of her physical self. She and her…

NonfictionNatureAnimals

Becoming Wild

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

What can humans learn from the animal kingdom? Quite a lot, it turns out, and Carl Safina is eager to glean all he can.

As an ecologist, Safina studies the wild creatures with whom humanity shares this planet. He’s won MacArthur, Pew and Guggenheim fellowships, and he shares his passion for conservation and nature as a professor at Stony Brook University in New York. The Safina Center, the nonprofit he founded, blends that scientific knowledge with emotion and then prompts people to act to protect the natural world.

As an author, Safina furthers his educational efforts with award-winning books about the natural world. In his 10th book, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, Safina turns his insatiable curiosity to sperm whales, scarlet macaws and chimpanzees. Though the specifics of the book’s three sections vary, throughout Becoming Wild, Safina studies how these animals aim to live the best way possible in their individual environments.

Safina brings his considerable expertise to his research, and it’s clear he doesn’t leave his heart at home. Of an early morning spent observing scarlet macaws, he writes, “In a few minutes it will be 8 a.m. How long and rich a morning can be if you bring yourself fully to it. Come to a decent place. Bring nothing to tempt your attention away. Immerse in the timelessness of reality. Attention paid is repaid with interest.”

Becoming Wild is full of such rich observations, as well as many others by scientists who recognize their own humanity in the animals they study. “Trying to learn what the whales value has helped me learn what I value,” behavioural ecologist Shane Gero explains to Safina. “Trying to learn what it’s like to be a sperm whale, I’ve learned what it’s like to be me.”

But Safina and the researchers he joins are not focused merely on what humans can learn from animals; they find joy in the animals’ very existence. Becoming Wild offers readers a window into the complex and curious lives of the three species it depicts and invites humans to observe the beauty and joy of each species’s nuances.

What can humans learn from the animal kingdom? Quite a lot, it turns out, and Carl Safina is eager to glean all he can.

As an ecologist, Safina studies the wild creatures with whom humanity shares this planet. He’s won MacArthur, Pew and Guggenheim fellowships,…

FictionComing of Age

Godshot

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

We’ve all seen them: people with charismatic personalities who seem to brighten a room. When they speak, we listen. In Peaches, California, that man is Pastor Vern, who leads Gifts of the Spirit Church—and the shine is often literal. When Vern wants to bring his congregants to a spiritual climax, golden glitter falls from the church’s rafters.

In the eyes of his congregation, Vern often has just cause to call down god glitter, but the rest of Peaches’ residents mock the churchgoers for their blind obedience to a man who claims he’ll save their parched land. Fourteen-year-old Lacey May often faces that ridicule at school, but within the church, she and the other girls who recently became “women of blood” stand in a place of honor.

Lacey May doesn’t remember the days before Peaches’ drought. She hadn’t been born yet when Pastor Vern first called down the rains that made the congregation devote itself to him. She follows this faith because the people who love her do, and because she’s heard the stories of what life could be without Vern and without his church.

Some novels tackle issues with a light hand, drawing the reader into a fun story even as the author tackles difficult topics. Godshot takes another approach. Debut novelist Chelsea Bieker leans into her story’s heft. It’s a deeply affecting picture of a megalomaniac who treats his congregation as his puppets. It’s a portrayal of what can happen when people are so hungry for hope that they abandon reason. It shows a world where women’s bodies are not their own, where one man has the authority to determine what happens to those bodies.

It’s a heightened portrait, but Godshot is a story that parallels some of the challenges faced in the United States today. Bieker, a native Californian, has already established her voice with bylines in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, Catapult magazine and others. Her debut novel, though, is a shout to the world: I’m here. I have something to say. And I can capture your imagination as I do it.

It’s a heightened portrait, but Godshot is a story that parallels some of the challenges faced in the United States today. Bieker, a native Californian, has already established her voice with bylines in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, Catapult magazine and others. Her debut novel, though, is a shout to the world: I’m here. I have something to say. And I can capture your imagination as I do it.

NonfictionMemoir

Everything I Know About Love

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Parties. Dates. Friends. Jobs. Life.

Each of those terms is crossed out on the cover of Dolly Alderton’s memoir in favor of the simpler title, Everything I Know About Love. Love serves as an appropriate catch-all term for the experiences Alderton explores. But there are indeed plenty of parties, dates, friends, jobs and life detailed within the pages of this debut book.

Alderton is now a familiar name to many, thanks to a column in the Sunday Times, the pop culture and current affairs podcast “The High Low,” which she co-hosts, and her bylines in a variety of publications. But in the years her memoir describes, Alderton was just another fun-loving Londoner trying to make her way in the world.

Everything I Know About Love recounts Alderton’s mishaps—including a drunken evening when she thought she was in Oxford, not London—through essays, satirical emails and recipes. Alderton isn’t afraid to share unflattering moments or to laugh at herself, and readers may find solace in realizing they aren’t alone at the party.

But the heart of the story is Alderton’s bonds with her friends. These women support her when she needs help paying for cab fare, and they encourage her to chase a freelance writing career. They’re her chosen family, and they’re the people she rallies alongside during their own heartaches and tragedies.

Everything I Know About Love is a vivid retelling of a woman’s growth from neophyte to independent adult, and the depth of the essays increases as Alderton’s own life experience increases. This memoir, already a bestseller in England and translated into 20 languages, is sure to remind others that it’s OK—even normal—to stumble on your way through life.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Dolly Alderton and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

Parties. Dates. Friends. Jobs. Life.

Each of those terms is crossed out on the cover of Dolly Alderton’s memoir in favor of the simpler title, Everything I Know About Love. Love serves as an appropriate catch-all term for the experiences Alderton explores. But there are indeed…

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

Riot Baby

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Kevin’s birth was uneventful, but in that moment, the world was roiling, and his life is forever shaped by that violence. Kev was born in Los Angeles during the riots of 1992, sparked by the acquittals of the police officers who beat Rodney King during a 1991 arrest.

Kev and his older sister, Ella, have powers. Ella calls them her Thing. She can visit places she’s never been, past and present, and see how events will unfold. Ella struggles to control her powers, which are ignited by her anger—and she has plenty to be angry about in a country built on structural racism. As a young girl, she recognizes the dangers of the gangs in her Los Angeles neighborhood and worries about the day when her unborn brother will be forced to declare allegiance. Kev’s future is as his big sister expected, and he spends years in prison, where she visits him both through the system and by using her powers.

During a visit to their mother’s former pastor, Ella recounts the context of Kev’s birth. The pastor responds, “Violence didn’t give you your brother.” But Ella, who has always recognized the turmoil that would surround Kev, responds, “But it will get him back.”

Young adult novelist Tochi Onyebuchi makes his adult fiction debut with Riot Baby, a novella that shimmers with Ella’s frustration and desire for justice. Onyebuchi expertly weaves supernatural elements through an all-too-realistic, thrilling story.

Kevin’s birth was uneventful, but in that moment, the world was roiling, and his life is shaped by that violence.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

A Beginning at the End

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

For Moira, it starts at a concert. Her concert, actually; she’s a beloved pop star, known as MoJo, and she’s on stage at Madison Square Garden when news of a flu-like outbreak called multi-generational syndrome (MGS) sends her fans into a panic. Moira follows the crowd into the streets of New York City and recognizes her chance. The world may be ending, but this is her shot at freedom from her overbearing father.

Rob and Sunny find themselves in quarantine after Rob’s wife, Elena, is fatally injured during a riot. Rob can’t bring himself to tell Sunny her mother has died, and he spends each subsequent day wrestling with the resulting lies. Krista is watching over her dying boyfriend—a victim of the MGS pandemic—when opportunity literally knocks on her door. She chooses life and joins a group fleeing to save themselves.

These four survivors come together in San Francisco, an unlikely group fused by Moira’s pending nuptials, Krista’s role as an event planner and Rob’s desperation to keep his daughter at his side.

A Beginning at the End, the second imaginative novel by technical- and sportswriter-turned-novelist Mike Chen (Here and Now and Then), examines the hysteria of a world where some adopt an “every individual for him- or herself” attitude. Relationships fall apart as most of the world’s remaining population wrestles with a PTSD-like condition.

Even against a science fiction backdrop, humanity is the center of Chen’s post-apocalyptic tale. Krista banks on her clients’ desire to find some joy in the midst of a bleak world. But the real hope comes from the characters’ desires to hide their pasts—and then their willingness to reveal their true selves to one another as they seek something worth living for.

“I’m out here because I love people, and that’s the American Dream today. We mourn, we rebuild, we respect the things we have,” explains one of the men who helped Moira flee her pop-star past, effectively summarizing the crew’s ongoing hope.

Chen’s fast-paced tale is an optimistic look at how our humanity can bring out the best in us, even in the darkest times.

Mike Chen’s fast-paced tale is an optimistic look at how our humanity can bring out the best in us, even in the darkest times.
NonfictionBiography

Kindness and Wonder

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Eighteen years have passed since “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” completed its 31-season run. Sixteen years have passed since the show’s namesake died. But Fred Rogers remains as relevant in 2019 as he was in 1953, when he developed “The Children’s Corner” for a local television station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Culture writer Gavin Edwards’ Kindness and Wonder examines why Mister Rogers remains a phenomenon nearly two decades after he left television. Part one of the book, “Let’s Make the Most of This Beautiful Day,” recounts how Fred McFeely Rogers became an icon of children’s television. Edwards retraces Mister Rogers’ youth as a shy, overweight child from a wealthy family in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Even as he grew and found people with whom he connected, Mister Rogers never lost touch with that child. He spent the rest of his life helping children see that they were special and loved, just the way they were.

Elements of Mister Rogers’ biography may be familiar to his fans, but Edwards’ careful research is sure to introduce new facts to most readers. Though the section, which spans half the book, would benefit from chapter breaks, it effectively sets up part two, “Ten Ways to Live More Like Mister Rogers Right Now.”

The second half of the book moves quickly, in part because of how deftly Edwards identifies why Mister Rogers remains a legend. Through chapters such as “Accept the Changing Seasons,” Edwards shares some of the challenges Mister Rogers encountered in his personal life—and what we can learn from his responses. The lessons Edwards shares are simple, just like so many of the messages on Mister Rogers’ PBS program. For example, when Mister Rogers found a dead fish in his fish tank, he used it as an opportunity to explain one of life’s biggest, scariest moments. He never hid the truth or talked down to children.

Edwards is well versed in popular culture as the author of The Tao of Bill Murray, The World According to Tom Hanks and nine other books. In Kindness and Wonder, he helps readers see how the lessons from a children’s television legend remain relevant, no matter one’s age.

Eighteen years have passed since “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” completed its 31-season run. Sixteen years have passed since the show’s namesake died. But Fred Rogers remains as relevant in 2019 as he was in 1953, when he developed “The Children’s Corner” for a local television station in…

NonfictionSocial Science

The Great Pretender

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

What if you entered a psychiatric hospital under false pretenses? What if the symptoms you presented—a voice that said the words thud, empty and hollow—were false? You’ve seen how easy it is to be diagnosed with a mental illness. From inside, you’ll be able to observe how medical staff interacts with patients. Once you convince the hospital to release you, you’ll share your findings with the professor who arranged the study.

But even then, what if it wasn’t all as it seemed?

Susannah Cahalan, the bestselling author of Brain on Fire, was enchanted by the work of psychologist and Stanford University professor David Rosenhan, who created just such an experiment. Cahalan could relate to the pseudo-patients in his study. As she recounts in her first book, Cahalan was misdiagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a psychiatric illness, before doctors eventually identified that she was suffering from autoimmune encephalitis, an illness with a known physical cause. Such diseases are called “the great pretenders.”

In the people who participated in Rosenhan’s study, Cahalan found another collection of pretenders and a window into psychiatric treatment. A psychologist introduced her to “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Rosenhan’s account of the pseudo-patient study, which became widely known after its January 1973 publication in the journal Science. (Half of all intro-to-psychology textbooks referenced it by 1976.) In her growing fascination, she studied how Rosenhan’s work affected modern psychiatry, including hospitals that were shut down as a result of the study and revisions that were made to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But the deeper she dug, the more questions Cahalan had. The pseudo-patients were difficult to identify, even with access to the professor’s notes. In some cases, details didn’t match, and Cahalan questioned the study’s veracity.

The Great Pretender is an account of Cahalan’s own research. In addition to Rosenhan’s study, she weaves in glimpses of other similar experiments, such as Nellie Bly’s well-documented experience as a journalist going undercover in a psychiatric hospital. The book is a detailed examination of psychiatry in the decades since the publication of Rosenhan’s groundbreaking, if elusive, study.

What if you entered a psychiatric hospital under false pretenses? What if the symptoms you presented—a voice that said the words thud, empty and hollow—were false? You’ve seen how easy it is to be diagnosed with a mental illness. From inside, you’ll be able to observe how medical staff…

FictionShort Stories

The Beadworkers

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Beth Piatote strings together stories like the intricate strands of a handmade necklace. The Beadworkers gathers those strings together into an illustrious whole. Piatote, who is Nez Perce and an associate professor of Native American studies, has previously written both scholarly and creative works. She brings her expertise to the page with this collection, where individual pieces often defy genre labels.

The Beadworkers begins with a poem and a pair of short stories, “Feast” I, II and III. The collection concludes with a short, poetic play, “Antikone,” a reimaginging of the Greek tragedy “Antigone.” Piatote’s creativity shows up throughout the book, such as in “wIndin!” in which the protagonist creates a board game as political art. “Katydid” traces the experiences of two women: One moved to Oregon for a fresh start, while the other was adopted and longs to travel to Oklahoma to visit her birth father’s tribe. Piatote writes, “Hippies love to glorify the tribe, which is both amusing and irritating to me. If you’re going to go tribal, you can’t just take the good—the sharing, the ceremonies, the aunties, the rez cred—you got to go the whole way. You got to walk through the minefields. You got to take the pettiness, the jealousy, the physical abuse, the diabetes, the bigoted uncle, the family that hates your family since the missionaries arrived. If you’re a woman, you got to accept that your body is prime real estate, and if you don’t reproduce for the tribe, you’ve joined the occupation.”

The collected pieces of The Beadworkers explore place and identity in vibrant scenes. Throughout, Piatote reveals Native American life in contexts modern, historic and mythical.

Beth Piatote strings together stories like the intricate strands of a handmade necklace. The Beadworkers gathers those strings together into an illustrious whole. Piatote, who is Nez Perce and an associate professor of Native American studies, has previously written both scholarly and creative works. She brings her expertise to the page with this collection, where individual pieces often defy genre labels.

NonfictionMemoir

Think Black

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“My father used chess as his guide: Black begins with a disadvantage. You have to look farther ahead, work extra hard, rely on cunning, and assume everyone else is your opponent.” 

John Stanley Ford was proud of his position as the first black systems engineer at IBM. Founder Thomas J. Watson hired Stanley himself in 1946, extending an invitation that would shape the young accounting student’s life. Stanley invested his life in the job, often passing his computer knowledge along to his son, Clyde. But Stanley was passed over for promotion again and again. Although Stanley and his wife marched on Washington in the civil rights era, Stanley had internalized some of the racism around him. He believed he was inferior, and he saw his lack of advancement at IBM as confirmation.

Clyde resisted following the path his father had paved. He was more radical and refused to adjust himself to the white business world’s expectations. Even so, Clyde too ended up at IBM—sporting a wide-lapel suit and an afro. 

The Ford men ultimately took different paths, with Stanley spending his career at IBM and Clyde leaving to pursue other dreams. But his years at the company helped Clyde understand his father. After Clyde left IBM to become a chiropractor, he learned that his father—and many others—gave up their dreams for the financial security of IBM. 

In Think Black, Clyde blends personal experience with technological and racial history to reveal how these things influenced one another. This wide-ranging memoir includes complex details about software and hardware as well as an exploration of IBM’s ties to oppressive regimes. While his examination of the past can’t change his relationship with his father, Clyde Ford’s words powerfully honor his father’s dreams and contributions to the digital age.

“My father used chess as his guide: Black begins with a disadvantage. You have to look farther ahead, work extra hard, rely on cunning, and assume everyone else is your opponent.” 

John Stanley Ford was proud of his position as the first black systems engineer…

NonfictionMemoir

Travel Light Move Fast

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Alexandra Fuller writes to untangle a knot—usually a knot in her own lived experience. 

“Everyone in my family hates the books I write, they ask me to stop, but I can’t look away. ‘Write novels,’ Dad begged, but real life never stops coming at me, and it pours from my pen more easily than fiction,” she writes. “It’s not only the old adage to write what I know, but also to write what I love. And it’s the artist’s impulse to turn again and again to the same subject until the subject gives up its secrets.”

That’s how the bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight explains why she repeatedly returns to her youth spent in central and southern Africa and her ongoing family ties to the land.

In Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller focuses her gaze on her father, Tim. She and her mother are by Tim’s side for his sudden demise in a Hungarian hospital. After his death, the pair returns with Tim’s ashes to the Fuller family farm in Africa, where Fuller attempts to help her mom resettle after losing her chaotic, iconic partner of half a century.

Tim Fuller was British, and his family lamented his move to Africa. “Tim Fuller went to Africa and lost everything,” or so went his family lore. But Tim found the life he desired: a woman who would tolerate and even celebrate his flamboyant ways, freedom to travel the land, a family and eventually—at his wife’s urging—a farm of his own.

Fuller carefully picks away at the tangle of her grief by exploring her dad’s life, gliding between her own experience in the present and his raucous past. Travel Light, Move Fast is a sensitive, meticulously wrought portrait of one family’s sometimes-challenging dynamics, set against an unforgiving African backdrop. Fuller’s beautiful prose juxtaposes the grieving process with the lessons she learned from the man whose adventures shaped her.

Alexandra Fuller writes to untangle a knot—usually a knot in her own lived experience. 

“Everyone in my family hates the books I write, they ask me to stop, but I can’t look away. ‘Write novels,’ Dad begged, but real life never stops coming at me, and it pours from my pen more easily than fiction,” she writes. “It’s not only the old adage to write what I know, but also to write what I love. And it’s the artist’s impulse to turn again and again to the same subject until the subject gives up its secrets.”

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