Carla Jean Whitley

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Art school graduate April May nearly walks past the first robot and dismisses it as another cool New York City thing. It’s the middle of the night, after all. She’s tired, she wants to go home, and there are so many “cool New York City things.”

Then she reconsiders. How sad would it be to ignore the 10-foot-tall sculpture simply because it appeared in the middle of a city where remarkable is the norm? April calls her friend Andy. They make a video and post it on the internet. April goes home and goes to sleep.

She wakes up to a new world.

The video has gone viral literally overnight, and the world wants more of April, and more of the robot-sculpture, which she named Carl. In fact, Carls have appeared throughout the world, and people turn to April for insight. She’s convinced that the Carls exist to unify the world, but others aren’t so sure. When a communal dream travels from one person to the next like an infection, popular opinion becomes further divided. April quickly becomes a pundit—the very sort of person she once railed against in her art and conversation.

“It’s so much easier for people to get excited about disliking something than agreeing to like it,” April thinks. “The circle jerk of mockery and self-congratulation was so intense I didn’t even notice I was at its center.”

In An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green explores the power of social media. As co-CEO of Complexly, a production company whose work includes the popular YouTube channel Crash Course, Green is well-versed in that realm. He is also known as one half of the VlogBrothers, alongside John Green, his superstar novelist brother and author of such YA bestsellers as The Fault in Our Stars. Green’s debut novel is an adventurous romp that combines science fiction and interpersonal drama to explore identity, relationships, a polarized world and the influence of media and popular opinion. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a fun, fast read that invites readers to contemplate their position in the modern world.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Hank Green for An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.

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

Art school graduate April May nearly walks past the first robot and dismisses it as another cool New York City thing. It’s the middle of the night, after all. She’s tired, she wants to go home, and there are so many “cool New York City things.”

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

The enduring, eternal appeal of the March sisters

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, first published in 1868, was an almost instantaneous success. Today it’s often considered a book for young girls, but in the years following its publication, men, women and children alike embraced the tale of the four March sisters. The girls’ roles in their family and paths to adulthood in many ways resembled the experiences of Alcott and her own three sisters. It’s a relatable story that continues to captivate modern audiences and writers like Jane Smiley, Anna Quindlen and Simone de Beauvoir. As Little Women marks its 150th anniversary, author and scholar Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans and scholar of 19th-century literature, looks back at its inception and influence in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters.

A passionate and serious writer, Alcott dreamed of literary success, but she didn’t imagine she would attain it with a children’s book. She wasn’t above writing for the sake of money, though, and so Alcott accepted her publisher’s request that she write a book for girls. This project would eventually become Little Women.

In the generations since its release, the book has been adapted for stage and film and has influenced children’s literature and produced literary heroines who follow in Jo March’s footsteps (Katniss Everdeen, anyone?). Little Women’s feminist undertones also continue to encourage readers to reimagine expectations for women and girls.

Rioux’s extensive research invites lifelong Little Women fans and new readers alike to dive deeply into the worlds of Alcott and the Marches. Along the way, they’ll uncover the novel’s inspiration and influence and grow to appreciate its ongoing significance, even 150 years later.

 

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

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, first published in 1868, was an almost instantaneous success. Today it’s often considered a book for young girls, but in the years following its publication, men, women and children alike embraced the tale of the four March sisters.

FictionHistorical Fiction

An empty space where her portrait should hang

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Fiona Davis has established herself as a master of historical settings and fictional recollections of those worlds. Her debut, The Dollhouse, pulled readers into a long-kept secret at New York City’s Barbizon Hotel for Women. Davis’ sophomore effort, The Address, explored Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building and the lives lived there, separated by a century. And with The Masterpiece, Davis shows yet again that New York’s historic structures are apt settings for intrigue.

Grand Central Terminal once served not only as a temple of travel but also as the home for the Grand Central School of Art, where (mostly male) artists lived bohemian lives with the prestigious school at their center. In Davis’ story, a sole female teacher, Clara Darden, struggles to make her way as an artist in a decisively male-dominated world. She sees some success as an illustrator, but there’s no trace of Clara after 1931.

Some 35 years later, the terminal is no longer the architectural masterpiece it once was. After her divorce, single mother Virginia Clay finds temporary work at Grand Central’s information booth. The job begins as a way to stay afloat, but when Virginia stumbles upon the art school, abandoned in 1944, she becomes obsessed with both learning its history and saving the transportation hub in which it resides.

Davis expertly switches between the lives of Clara and Virginia, weaving their struggles for independence and security with Grand Central’s history. Readers will be drawn into the lives of these remarkable women—and, alongside Virginia, into the mystery of what happened to Clara.

 

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

Fiona Davis has established herself as a master of historical settings and fictional recollections of those worlds. Her debut, The Dollhouse, pulled readers into a long-kept secret at New York City’s Barbizon Hotel for Women. Davis’ sophomore effort, The Address, explored Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building and the lives lived there, separated by a century. And with The Masterpiece, Davis shows yet again that New York’s historic structures are apt settings for intrigue.

FictionPopular Fiction

Little mysteries of a long life

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, August 2018

Florence isn’t sure what she would do without her lifelong best friend, Elsie. They’ve known each other since childhood, and now Elsie keeps 84-year-old Florence company at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly.

But right this moment Florence is alone. She’s fallen in her flat, and she’s waiting for someone to notice. While she waits, Florence reflects on her friend and their latest shenanigans.

In Three Things About Elsie, Joanna Cannon (The Trouble with Goats and Sheep) intersperses Florence’s moments alone on her floor with recent Cherry Tree adventures and her recollections of days long gone. A new resident has moved into the home, and Florence is convinced he’s the man who killed Elsie’s sister 60 years earlier—but he also appears to be the man whose burial they watched many years ago after he drowned. The ladies and a fellow resident, Jack, set out on a mission to uncover the man’s true identity. Their adventures are amusing and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. But there are serious moments, too. As the friends examine their pasts, Florence begins to recall moments she had forgotten—or perhaps blocked out. But her friends stand beside her through it.

“You can’t define yourself by a single moment,” Jack reminds Florence. “That moment doesn’t make you who you are.”

“Then what does?” Florence asks.

“Oh, Florence. Everything else,” he says. “Everything else.”

Cannon’s novel is a heartwarming meditation on friendship and the way people we love shape us for the rest of our days.

 

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

Florence isn’t sure what she would do without her lifelong best friend, Elsie. They’ve known each other since childhood, and now Elsie keeps 84-year-old Florence company at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly.

NonfictionMemoir

Freedom at 40

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Life moves along a prescribed path for many people. You go to school, you graduate, you get a job. You fall in love, you get married, you have babies.

But what if you don’t?

That’s the question Glynnis MacNicol asked as she faced her 40th birthday. MacNicol had a lot going for her: She lived in New York City, a city she loved, and was a successful writer and co-founder of a successful company. She had great friends and loved her family and her role as an aunt.

It’s not that MacNicol took issue with being 40, single and childless. It’s that the rest of the world seemed to. “This is why people have babies . . . because it’s exhausting not to know what you’re supposed to do next,” MacNicol says to a friend who is contemplating her own reproductive choices. “A baby is basically a nonnegotiable map for the next two decades.”

By sharing her story in No One Tells You This, MacNicol gives implicit permission for other women to embrace the lives they’ve chosen. Or the lives that have chosen them, as the case may be. After all, MacNicol didn’t exactly plan to remain single. A series of not-so-good romantic choices made singleness appear inevitable. But she’s (mostly) happy with where she’s landed. When her family needs support, MacNicol returns to Canada. When she falls in love with a ranch out West, she rearranges her schedule to spend a month there.

“I was increasingly frustrated that some people seemed incapable of believing me when I said I was happy with my life,” she writes. “My life, I was learning, was sometimes even more confusing for women a few decades older than me to comprehend than it was for me.”

MacNicol spent the year following her 40th birthday exploring and embracing her meandering path. The result is a memoir that will help women of all ages and life circumstances understand the experience of today’s single-and-joyful woman.

 

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

Life moves along a prescribed path for many people. You go to school, you graduate, you get a job. You fall in love, you get married, you have babies. But what if you don’t?

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Do your part

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Emmeline Lake has big dreams. She’s already doing what she can to support the war effort as a volunteer telephone operator for the Auxiliary Fire Service. She writes frequent letters to keep her boyfriend up to date and in high spirits while he’s fighting Hitler and the Nazis. But she wants to do even more: Emmy dreams of becoming a war correspondent.

She’s so busy dreaming, in fact, that she doesn’t pay attention during her interview for a job she spotted in The London Evening Chronicle. Emmy daydreams of seeing her byline under important reports from the front. Instead, she’s hired as a typist for another publication: Woman’s Friend. Emmy will spend her days typing up tough-love advice from Mrs. Henrietta Bird, author of the column “Henrietta Helps.”

The problem? Emmy actually wants to help. Mrs. Bird sends any letters containing “unpleasantness” to the rubbish bin. But as Emmy sorts through the mail, she sets aside such letters. Those readers deserve a response, she reasons, and it should be more thoughtful than the harsh advice Mrs. Bird doles out.

So Emmy writes them back. And signs her boss’s name.

It seems like a small offense in the context of World War II. London has so much more to worry about. But as Emmy continues to sort through her boss’s mailbag, she finds that she can provide some hope in the midst of the world’s darkest time.

In Dear Mrs. Bird, debut novelist AJ Pearce draws inspiration from women’s magazine advice columnists of the era. The result is a charming story full of as much pluck and grit as its protagonist.

 

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

Emmeline Lake has big dreams. She’s already doing what she can to support the war effort as a volunteer telephone operator for the Auxiliary Fire Service. She writes frequent letters to keep her boyfriend up to date and in high spirits while he’s fighting Hitler and the Nazis. But she wants to do even more: Emmy dreams of becoming a war correspondent.

NonfictionMemoir

And still I rise

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Love is a complicated matter. That’s true for anyone, and it’s a concept Darnell L. Moore has wrestled with throughout his life.

Moore was born into tough circumstances as the child of two black teenagers in Camden, New Jersey. What his large and close family lacked financially, they made up for in love. But Moore struggled to love himself. He recognized his attraction to other men at a young age, and he found it abhorrent. Homosexuality didn’t fit with his idea of acceptable black masculinity. Moore pushed down his feelings with a tough attitude and attempted to hide from the world with a series of girlfriends and sexual encounters with women.

It didn’t work. When he was 14, neighborhood boys suspected him of being gay and attempted to set him on fire. The fire didn’t light, but the bullying left emotional scars.

In No Ashes in the Fire, writer and Black Lives Matter leader Moore recounts decades of running from his true self. His lyrical reflection reveals a teenage boy in search of his family story—and a young man who ran from it.

“As long as I wasn’t a clone of my dad, I thought, there was no need for her to complain,” he writes of his emotionally manipulative relationships with women. “I hadn’t yet realized I was his son, his likeness, an ellipsis extending his presence into the world.”

Moore describes years of self-loathing and the drugs, then religiosity, he used to mask his desires. He faces his biases against certain people, such as black femme men, and in doing so he realizes—and invites the reader to recognize—that justice means freedom and equality for all.

 

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

Love is a complicated matter. That’s true for anyone, and it’s a concept Darnell L. Moore has wrestled with throughout his life.

The backbone of the movement

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

The list of women behind the civil rights movement extends beyond the names most of us already know such as Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. Activist Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on these forgotten heroes in Lighting the Fires of Freedom.

Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Bell’s oral history reflects on the contributions of some of the movement’s female leaders. Bell introduces each of the nine women, offering context for their lives and accomplishments. Throughout Bell’s interviews, many of these leaders refer to one another, an indication of how interconnected their contributions were. The nine histories intersect, but they are also easy to read as independent narratives.

Readers will meet Myrlie Evers, who was as passionate about women’s involvement as she was about the need for men and women to work together. She wouldn’t let Fannie Lou Hamer overlook the support of men who pursued equal rights, including Evers’ own husband. Readers will also meet Kathleen Cleaver, who is quick to humbly explain how she rose to leadership in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “I was there.”

The work wasn’t glamorous. They addressed infrastructure needs, as Gay McDougall discusses, and many used secretarial skills for the cause. Without their service, the civil rights movement could not have occurred.

McDougall says, “Most of the ground work turns out to be done by women—and women must learn to demand their recognition.” Thanks to Bell’s work and these women’s willingness to share their stories, they are gaining that attention—even five decades later.

The list of women behind the civil rights movement extends beyond the names most of us already know such as Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. Activist Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on these forgotten heroes in Lighting the Fires of Freedom.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The line between me and you

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“You see, the trick in life is learning how to see differently. . . . Castiglione taught the Chinese about perspective—parallel lines versus converging lines.”

Helen Gibbs is a captive, if not exactly rapt, audience when an art dealer shares this theory. Helen is a British journalist whose assignments carry her around the world and often lead to conversations with interesting and self-important people. Though she isn’t certain she fully grasped the idea, Helen leaves the interview and reflects on the meaning in her own life: “If you lived your life along parallel lines, it didn’t matter where you stood, things would always look the same. If, on the other hand, you lived your life along converging lines, it did matter where you stood because place determined perspective—standing in one place, things looked one way, in another—a different way. So the trick was to figure out where to stand.”

What does that mean for Helen’s relationship with her husband, financier Christopher Delavaux? The couple met on Mexico’s west coast. Their courtship, marriage and careers carry them to equally exotic and cosmopolitan locales: Saint-Tropez, Tangier, New York City. Their relationship plays out on stages accessible almost exclusively through power or wealth. Those factors, much like the romance of the locations themselves, can blur the distinction between what is and what you wish to be.

In A Theory of Love, novelist Margaret Bradham Thornton (Charleston) examines a single relationship and how it is affected by life events both mundane and dramatic. Thornton’s sophomore novel combines its protagonist’s rich inner world with her and her husband’s high-profile, high-stakes careers. Readers will be left, like Helen, contemplating how the parallel or converging lines of their lives affect their relationships.

“You see, the trick in life is learning how to see differently. . . . Castiglione taught the Chinese about perspective—parallel lines versus converging lines.” Helen Gibbs is a captive, if not exactly rapt, audience when an art dealer shares this theory.

FictionLiterary Fiction

The complexities of parenthood

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Rebecca Stone is overwhelmed by motherhood. That’s not unusual for a first-time mother, but Rebecca’s position may be: She’s a poet with a well-to-do husband, and she has the resources to do something about it. At the hospital, she turns to Priscilla Johnson, who helps Rebecca and her newborn son, Jacob, adjust to breastfeeding. Before long, Rebecca insists Priscilla leave the hospital and become Jacob’s nanny.

It’s a near-perfect fit. Rebecca is able to resume her work as a poet—that is, sitting quietly and thinking until the words come. Oblivious to the power dynamics at play between a black woman and her white employer, Rebecca sees Priscilla as a confidante. Then Priscilla gets pregnant and dies during childbirth. Rebecca steps in to adopt her baby, Andrew, and the uneven dynamics of their relationship are now unavoidable.

In That Kind of Mother, Rumaan Alam (Rich and Pretty) delves into the complexities of female friendship and motherhood. Rebecca struggles to figure out whether she and Priscilla’s adult daughter, Cheryl, are friends or relatives. The women meet for regular play dates with their children, and Rebecca is often startled by Cheryl’s directness. Cheryl is quick to note that, no matter what Rebecca claims to think about race, Jacob and Andrew are different in ways big and small. Coconut oil isn’t enough to moisturize Andrew’s skin, for example, and the world will perceive him differently than it does Jacob. Rebecca is forced to reckon with the different worlds that her boys will face.

Alam explores these issues with grace, contrasting the experiences of these two women with those of Rebecca’s idol, Princess Diana. That Kind of Mother is a meditation on race and the challenges and joys of parenting.

 

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

Rebecca Stone is overwhelmed by motherhood. That’s not unusual for a first-time mother, but Rebecca’s position may be: She’s a poet with a well-to-do husband, and she has the resources to do something about it. At the hospital, she turns to Priscilla Johnson, who helps Rebecca and her newborn son, Jacob, adjust to breastfeeding. Before long, Rebecca insists Priscilla leave the hospital and become Jacob’s nanny.

NonfictionMemoir

Childhood on the run

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Life was an adventure for young Tyler Kane. By age 9, her family had lived in nine homes. By age 12, she began to understand why.

Her name wasn’t Kane after all, she learned, but Wetherall. Her family’s frequent moves to different continents weren’t adventures—they were hiding from authorities.

Wetherall and her siblings were the children of a fugitive. Their parents began to reveal the truth as it became inevitable. Wetherall would notice a black car following her outside of her mother’s house, and every visit to her father was shrouded in mystery.

On Wetherall’s 12th birthday, Scotland Yard finally caught up to her father. But even as her dad served prison time for his crimes, she remained unsure about what he had done that landed him there. Wetherall and her sister dreamed up potential scenarios. Surely it was more than tax evasion. But could their father have done something as serious as kill a person? And if he had, how would they react? Their father had shared literature that seemed designed to increase their empathy for people on the run—Les Misérables, for example. But The Fugitive was off limits. Had he done something they would be able to forgive?

Wetherall’s captivating No Way Home is a reminder that our actions affect not only our own paths but also the lives of everyone close to us. Our stories are intertwined with our loved ones’ lives, no matter what distances—or steel bars—come between us.

 

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

Life was an adventure for young Tyler Kane. By age 9, her family had lived in nine homes. By age 12, she began to understand why.

NonfictionMusicArts & CultureArt

A city’s history in song

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Welcome to Memphis, Tennessee. It’s a city known for its music and the soulful sounds that came from Sun and Stax Records. But it’s not an industry town, nor is it part of the music factory in the way of New York, Los Angeles and even its neighbor to the east, Nashville. Memphis is a city that has lived its blues.

Longtime music journalist Robert Gordon shares the city’s tales in Memphis Rent Party, a collection of his past work. Though much of this material is previously published, each piece is injected with new life by Gordon’s introductions, in which he offers a reflection on the essay’s inception.

Gordon isn’t afraid to reveal some of the complicated workings behind the curtain. The rent parties of the book’s title were affairs during which a host would push their furniture aside, crank up some music, and partygoers would contribute some cash to help the host make rent. Gordon was close enough to the Memphis music scene to find his way to some of these gatherings when he was younger, but there was sometimes a divide. In an essay about Junior Kimbrough, Gordon writes, “I captured the good times, but there was another side. At Junior’s, we all escaped into the blues, but our escapes were not the same. At day’s end, I would go home to my comfy bed in an insulated house, romanticizing the missed opportunities of fruit beer. And Junior and all his friends would go home to shacks where the wind blows through.”

The collection is loosely autobiographical, as Gordon appears as a character in many of these portraits. He’s a man who was raised by the city, who discovered within its boundaries the music that would drive his life forward. Readers may find hope and inspiration, just as Gordon did, in the drive and passion of these musicians.

Welcome to Memphis, Tennessee. It’s a city known for its music and the soulful sounds that came from Sun and Stax Records. But it’s not an industry town, nor is it part of the music factory in the way of New York, Los Angeles and even its neighbor to the east, Nashville. Memphis is a city that has lived its blues.

FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Inventory of a life

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

When a father learns his life is nearing its end, he’s left to reckon with what remains. His wife preceded him in death, and he isn’t surprised that his own is imminent. But the couple’s adult son, who has Down syndrome, will outlive him. The father wants to embrace every day he has left with his child, while also ensuring his son will be OK in a world without him.

The father, previously a doctor, signs up for a job as an unusual census taker for a secretive government bureau. The position offers the pair an excuse to do something the father and mother had long discussed: He and his son will travel the country, from municipality A to Z, and meet the country’s citizens along the way.

As the pair travels, novelist Jesse Ball slowly reveals that the trip isn’t about the census so much as the people who fill a life and a place. The unnamed father and son meet people of all sorts, some welcoming and some skeptical of the man who will mark them with a census tattoo.

Ball’s spare prose centers on the father’s inner monologue and in the process offers a glimpse of a person facing his inevitable end. “I was a better doctor for having had my son,” the father reflects, “for it left me with a basic stance—that I should not expect anything in particular from anyone, a humility vested not so much in an appraisal of myself, as in a lack of confidence in valuation and prediction.”

Census is a thoughtful, introspective novel that may leave readers contemplating the value of their own relations and inner lives.

 

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

When a father learns his life is nearing its end, he’s left to reckon with what remains. His wife preceded him in death, and he isn’t surprised that his own is imminent. But the couple’s adult son, who has Down syndrome, will outlive him. The father wants to embrace every day he has left with his child, while also ensuring his son will be OK in a world without him.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features