Get ready for a pirate adventure unlike any other, with fierce pirate queens, mystical swords and a surprisingly hefty dose of humanitarian feeling. Carrie Vaughn’s newest novel Steel treads new ground for the writer, whose Kitty Norville werewolf series for adults has gained her quite a reputation for daring tales. This time, however, Vaughn whisks her teen readers—as well as her unassuming heroine Jill—back to the wildest pirate days of the Caribbean.
A family trip to the Bahamas turns intriguing when Jill discovers a rusty rapier tip in the sand—which then mysteriously transports her back in time. A competitive fencer (albeit a second-rate one in her own eyes), Jill is used to handling a sword, but nothing can prepare her for the moment when she is hauled aboard the Diana to face Captain Cooper and her band of cackling pirates. Jill might be handy with a blade, but she has never had to fight for blood, and the deck of a pirate ship is no place to spare a life. However, the only way to get back home is to become a part of the crew. Jill must face the adventure of a lifetime, and it all comes down to whether or not she is pirate enough to survive.
Carrie Vaughn makes it clear that her pirates are neither historical nor cinematic, but they seem to be a hybrid of pirates as they really were, and pirates as a teenage girl might wish them to be. Does Jill actually time-travel to the deck of a pirate ship that is captained by a fierce woman who seeks revenge for a deep heartbreak? Does she really see pirates setting free the slaves from a trade ship? Or is it all a dream? Aye, Steel be a story not for t’ faint o’ heart!
Get ready for a pirate adventure unlike any other, with fierce pirate queens, mystical swords and a surprisingly hefty dose of humanitarian feeling. Carrie Vaughn’s newest novel Steel treads new ground for the writer, whose Kitty Norville werewolf series for adults has gained her quite…
Delilah Hannaford’s life is a complete mess. She is caught stealing lipstick, she is caught sneaking around with her “non-boyfriend” and her grades are tanking—not that her career-obsessed mother has even noticed. However, when her estranged grandmother dies, Delilah and her mother must spend the summer in Red Falls, Vermont, for the first time in eight years, to settle the Hannaford matriarch’s estate. They are reunited with Delilah’s aunt, a tarot reader who avoids the issue of the eight-year-old fight just like everyone else. The air between the three women is tense and unforgiving, and no one seems willing to budge.
Delilah’s summer suddenly becomes maple syrup-thick with unanswered questions—about the Hannaford sister who died long ago and about the sudden silence between the remaining Hannaford women—and Delilah cannot seem to let any of it go. As they rummage through the piles of junk in the old house and unearth a treasury of family history, the women start to get along. Nevertheless, some secrets are just too difficult to tell.
As Delilah goes head to head with the mysteries of Red Falls, her life gets even more complicated. She discovers some inconvenient butterflies in her stomach when she runs into her childhood friend Patrick, who has over the years turned into a sexy musician with the ability to challenge Delilah’s previous notions of love and relationships. He forces her to rethink yet another personal connection she has forfeited, but Delilah is never without a fight, and sometimes close is just too close.
Sarah Ockler follows up her debut novel, Twenty Boy Summer, with another story of great emotional depth and empathy. Fixing Delilah contains multiple levels of teenage heartbreak, and Ockler captures the small-town atmosphere of one lazy summer from the perspective of a lost teenage girl with too many holes in her past. With a multigenerational touch, she has whipped up a story with a vast emotional range and plenty of challenges to test the bonds of mother and daughter.
“We all long for what could have been,” Ockler writes, but as Delilah discovers, it takes a real family to move on from what has been lost.
Is one summer long enough to rethink your whole life?
Early in Sarah Blake’s debut novel, the titular character, wife of Noah, smashes a pair of gerbils with a hard thwack of her spoon. The reader doesn’t yet know that there are spare gerbils—they brought extras of the “clean” animals, Naamah explains—so in this brief moment, she becomes an exterminator, an Old Testament God in her power and willful engagement with easy death. She is the one who determines which species will survive the interminable floodwaters—not Noah, not her sons or their wives, and not God.
But perhaps most alarming is that she cannot see the gerbil, nor any of the animals on the ark. She can hear them, smell them, but she has gone blind to them. “When someone dies and you forget how they look or how they laughed, that is how they forgot the land,” Naamah says. In the same way, she has forgotten how to see the animals to whom she is protector. And as she begins to take long swims in the sea—once a punishment and now an escape from the holding cell of the ark—she seems on the cusp of forgetting her former life altogether.
Beneath the surface of the water, there is an angel who seduces Naamah, inviting her to the depths where a ghastly world awaits. Soon her life on the surface becomes just as adrift, as she succumbs to dreams that seem endless, and she explores this dreamland and its mysteries with the help of a cockatoo named Jael. When the waters begin to recede, Naamah’s hallucinatory experiences continue, and the promise of firm ground seems to offer no assurance of stability to a woman so irretrievably, determinedly lost.
Revelatory, ethereal and transfixing, Naamah cracks open the ancient tale of Noah to reveal a danger that exists in supposedly safe places, the force of a woman charged with maintaining the world’s tremulous balance and the depth of our mind’s eye. Blake has previously published two poetry collections, and her language and storytelling style are as playful as they are sensual, as fluid and surreal as they are crisp and hyper-realistic.
In the tradition of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Naamah plucks a female character from myth and imbues her with sexuality, personality and intimacy, making her an altogether more modern hero—the kind of woman capable of giving a stern talking-to to a vengeful god.
The fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. Instead, they enact and re-enact the rituals of their former day-to-day lives. Retail workers fold shirts in empty stores. Old women laugh at the television and change the channel. Families mime the act of sitting down for dinner, chatting about their days; they clear the plates and do it again. In the world of Severance, the drone of normal life becomes a buzz too loud to ignore.
The novel follows the story of Candace Chen, the 20-something daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose mother has recently died of Alzheimer’s. Candace splits her narrative into two timelines: before Shen Fever decimates the global population (she calls this “the End”) and after (“the Beginning”). In the End, she works in the Bible production department of a New York City publishing company. She has a boyfriend named Jonathan with whom she watches classic New York City movies. As Shen Fever begins to spread, Candace continues to work—until she is one of the only living humans in New York, capturing the deserted metropolis via photographs posted to her anonymous blog, NY Ghost.
In the Beginning, Candace has joined a group of survivors led by a man named Bob. Bob leads the group on “stalks” into homes throughout the Midwest, gathering supplies and killing any of the fevered. The stalks are enacted as ritual, the survivors conducting a type of prayer over each house they enter. There is repetition here as well. The internet once rendered this world “nearsighted with nostalgia,” as Bob says, and the Beginning is supposed to be a second chance. But the stalks are laden with memories of who we once were. The fevered are even described as having the eyes of someone who is incessantly checking their phone, or who is staring at their computer, glazed and unseeing.
“It was like burrowing underground and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working,” Candace says of one of these stalks, though she easily could’ve been referring to a Bible she’s working on, or when she’s drifting about the city as NY Ghost, or even when she’s moisturizing her face.
Ma’s engrossing, masterfully written debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned. It’s just an office novel, after all, with some worker-bee politics and consideration of the commute, the lunch break, the after-work cocktails. But Severance demands to be wondered at, only to flip around the gaze and stare back at you.
To be a millennial is to have been betrayed by an economy that once promised you everything. So after that fails, where do you look for yourself? In religion, in family, in memories on the internet? As a reader of Candace’s blog writes to her, “How do we know . . . that you’re not fevered yourself?”
Ling Ma’s engrossing, masterfully written debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned.
It’s been 12 years since the publication of Uzodinma Iweala’s astounding debut, Beasts of No Nation, a novel of West African political unrest narrated by a child. With his second novel, Speak No Evil, Iweala once again allows a young voice to ring clearly, shattering assumptions and demanding attention for unavoidable truths—this time about being black, queer and the child of successful immigrants in the United States.
High schooler Niru, the son of affluent, conservative Nigerian parents in Washington, D.C., tries to follow his parents’ wishes (he’s attending Harvard premed next fall), and his sexual awakening as a gay man comes with self-loathing and shame. He begs God for deliverance, and after his father drags him to Nigeria to “cure” his homosexuality, Niru attempts to block out his desires. But then Niru meets Damien, who makes it impossible to ignore his true feelings.
The majority of Speak No Evil unfolds through Niru’s perspective, but there is a shorter, final section told by his best friend, a white girl named Meredith. Her section, set six years later, recalls a horrifying act of violence. For this tragedy to be told from a white heterosexual character’s perspective is a crushing blow to Niru’s story—who gets to have a voice, after all? But those who get the last word have the greatest responsibility, and for all the mistakes made in Niru’s life—by his family and by himself—and for all the wealth and security his family possesses, it does not fall to the black child of immigrants to fix the American system’s deepest cruelties.
This graceful, consuming tale of differences, imbalances and prejudices is necessary reading.
This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
It’s been 12 years since the publication of Uzodinma Iweala’s astounding debut, Beasts of No Nation, a novel of West African political unrest narrated by a child. With his second novel, Speak No Evil, Iweala once again allows a young voice to ring clearly, shattering…
From a young age, we are taught that the Statue of Liberty is a universal symbol for freedom and hope that has stood steadfast over New York Harbor since her dedication in 1886. She has never faltered, never moved—but as author Dave Eggers and illustrator Shawn Harris show us in Her Right Foot, this statue is not exactly stationary.
First, Eggers takes us to France, where absurdist scenes pave the way for Lady Liberty’s creation. (A woman plays a tuba on the street outside a café; the designer of the sculpture emphatically waves a banana.) Through Harris’ cut-paper illustrations and Eggers’ cheeky narration, we follow the statue from her assembly in Paris to her Atlantic Ocean voyage and finally to her arrival at what we now call Liberty Island. Over the course of this 104-page picture book, we learn of her in parts, from her knee to the grim look on her face—a collage to help us see the whole, while also conveying her immense size. But have you ever noticed her right foot?
As a dark-skinned boy and white man look closely, it seems the statue may squash them, as her foot is lifted. “That’s right!” Eggers writes. “She is going somewhere! She is on the move!” Harris plays with perspective as we see Liberty’s shadow looming over people below (you can practically hear the fee-fi-fo-fum) as she strolls through New York City.
“Liberty and freedom from oppression are not things you get or grant by standing around like some kind of statue,” Eggers writes. “No! These are things that require action. Courage. An unwillingness to rest.” In the subsequent breathtaking spreads, Harris zooms in and out in perspective to reveal a refugee camp, Liberty looking out over a bay full of boats and planes, and a mother and child gazing down from an airplane window. “After all,” Eggers writes, “the Statue of Liberty is an immigrant, too. And this is why she’s moving. This is why she’s striding.”
With Her Right Foot, Eggers and Harris achieve something truly remarkable: They make a well-loved symbol seem brand new. Lady Liberty is vital, and what readers of Her Right Foot know and understand about her matters now more than ever.
From a young age, we are taught that the Statue of Liberty is a universal symbol for freedom and hope that has stood steadfast over New York Harbor since her dedication in 1886. She has never faltered, never moved—but as author Dave Eggers and illustrator…
With the touching and very funny story of Arthur Less, author Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli) takes readers on an around-the-world tour, leaping from Mexico City to Berlin, from Marrakech to Kyoto, in a grand midlife adventure of the heart.
Gay novelist Less—like anyone with such a name—is a hapless, dreamy hero, a man straight out of a James Thurber story. He’s known more for his relationship with a much older, Pulitzer-winning poet than for his own work. Now, his most recent lover is getting married, and in an attempt to avoid the upcoming nuptials, Less has decided to accept every literary invitation on his desk. It just so happens that Less is about to turn 50, and his latest novel will soon be rejected by his publisher.
Dressed in his trademark blue suit, Less adorably butchers the German language, nearly falls in love in Paris, celebrates his birthday in the desert and, somewhere along the way, discovers something new and fragile about the passing of time, about the coming and going of love, and what it means to be the fool of your own narrative. It’s nothing less than wonderful.
This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
With the touching and very funny story of Arthur Less, Andrew Sean Greer takes readers from Mexico City to Berlin, from Marrakech to Kyoto, in a grand midlife adventure of the heart.
The debut novel from Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, is an intense, twisting tale of prejudices ripped open, guilt that cannot be ignored and the inconvenience of having another person’s humanity exposed before you.
Israeli neurosurgeon Eitan Green wakes up next to his wife, cares for his sons, goes to work at the hospital, returns home, ingests food, sleeps. His fingernails grow four centimeters a year. Things continue normally. Such could’ve been the life of Eitan, husband to police officer Liat and father to Yaheli and Itamar. But one night, beneath a moon that he thinks is the most beautiful he has ever seen, Eitan drives his SUV into the desert. He’s feeling stifled. As he’s tearing through the desert, singing along to Janis Joplin, Eitan runs over a man who appears seemingly out of nowhere. It is a black man, an illegal Eritrean immigrant, and Eitan flees, leaving the man to bleed out and die.
But the next day, the dead man’s wife, Sirkit, appears at Eitan’s front door with his dropped wallet in her hand. She is a force unlike anything Eitan has ever known, and she demands he come to a shabby garage in the middle of the night. There, Eitan is forced to tend to Eritreans, some with infected wounds from their journey through the Sudan and Egypt, others with internal diseases. Every night, Eitan steals away to the desert to treat them, and he begins to acknowledge a population that he’d be much more comfortable to ignore. Sirkit’s fingernails, too, grow four centimeters a year.
All the while, Liat investigates the murder of the Eritrean man. Eitan and Liat’s marriage grows brittle beneath the tension of his many secrets, and his double life builds to an explosive moment that is as heart-rending as it is inevitable.
Gundar-Goshen has worked for the Israeli civil rights movement and won Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize for best debut. Waking Lions is her first novel to be published in the U.S., and it is a literary achievement for its page-turning exploration of inconvenient empathy and culpability. Gundar-Goshen’s descriptions of pain and medicine are tender and startling, but perhaps the novel’s greatest strength is the way it considers how we look at each other, the power of our gaze on strangers and on those we love. It’s about seeing and being seen, about pride and power.
This is a brave novel, socially aware and truly unforgettable.
The debut novel from Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, is an intense, twisting tale of prejudices ripped open, guilt that cannot be ignored and the inconvenience of having another person’s humanity exposed before you.
In 2011, 23-year-old Veronica Roth’s debut, Divergent, set the stage for a series that would become a worldwide phenomenon. And while the series is ripe for obsessing, Roth took the story of Tris Prior to a shocking place—a place not every fan wanted to go. This unflinching pursuit of weighted questions carries over to her new duology as Roth considers faith and loyalty within a sci-fi setting. Carve the Mark is set in a solar system where a supreme force called the current flows through all beings, imbuing people with gifts similar to X-Men abilities.
The story opens when Akos and his older brother are kidnapped from their peaceful home in Thuvhe, in the northern part of their icy planet, by Shotet soldiers. The Shotet are an unrecognized nation of scavengers and warriors, and as their prisoner, gentle Akos (a win for Hufflepuff heroes) is trained as a soldier and charged with attending to hard-edged Cyra, the sister of the tyrannical Shotet ruler. Their friendship will change them both, but this is a world bound by fate, where kills are marked on the arms of killers. Loyalty to one’s family is everything, and it seems violence may be the only way to change that.
Roth’s cultural worldbuilding is meticulous and intricate, although explanatory passages slow the novel’s pace. But Roth’s conjuring of religions, belief systems and language differences is well done, and her prose has strengthened with this new series. Diehard Roth fans will be rewarded.
This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Amid the deluge of unreliable, devious narrators that compose so much of recent fiction, meet Tom Barren. He’s refreshingly truthful, completely forthright—and an abject failure. In the debut novel from Toronto author and screenwriter Elan Mastai, Tom would like to tell you how he screwed up the future.
Tom’s self-effacing memoir opens with a dose of physics, as our apologetic hero does his best to explain just how he got stuck in the “dank, grimy horror” that is our 2016. Tom is from an alternate reality, the kind of utopian future that Americans dreamed of in the 1950s. In this technological paradise, the groundbreaking Goettreider Engine uses the Earth’s rotation to power all of humanity. Below-average Tom might be a disappointment to his genius father, but things are generally pretty good for humankind in his 2016. That is, until—in a fit of rage, guilt and grief—Tom defiantly hops into the time machine his father has built and accidentally halts the creation of the Goettreider Engine.
Mastai’s utopian worldbuilding is complex and imaginative, but some of the book’s most memorable sections are when Tom attempts to navigate our “retrograde” world. Here, his family is different: His mother is still alive, his father is kind, and he has a sharp-witted sister. His love is different, and his failures are different. This isn’t your typical time-travel story where the wrong reality needs to be righted.
An entertaining rom-com of errors, All Our Wrong Todays backflips through paradoxes while exploring provocative questions of grief and the multitudes we contain within ourselves. Ultimately, it’s a story about love—and the stupid things we’ll do for it.
Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s English-language debut, Fever Dream, snares readers. It’s a page-turner of mounting dread, unfolding entirely through a conversation between a bedridden young woman and the boy who whispers in her ear.
Amanda lies dying in a hospital clinic in rural Argentina. Sitting next to her is David, a boy who asks her—urges her—to remember the events of whatever trauma rendered her terminally ill. At his behest, Amanda recalls meeting David’s mother, a nervous and elegant woman named Carla. Carla tells Amanda a strange story about a very young David, who drinks the same toxic water that kills Carla’s husband’s prized stallion. To spare her son’s life, Carla calls upon a local woman with medicinal and magical abilities. By splitting David’s soul with another child’s, she saves the boy.
But this is only the beginning. Why is Amanda in the hospital? And what has happened to Amanda’s own daughter, Nina? Time and again, Amanda references the “rescue distance,” the variable space between her and Nina, the distance between a mother and any worst-case scenario that may imperil her child. “I spend half the day calculating it,” Amanda says. As she recalls more and more details, Amanda begins to tell the story her own way, trying to make sense of what matters in these events and what does not—and decide which threats are inevitable or imagined.
With the urgency, attention to detail and threat of an abrupt ending that define short stories, the novel builds unease seamlessly through exceptionally well-paced dialogue. The sparseness of Schweblin’s prose, translated by Megan McDowell, anchors this strange conversation and keeps it from becoming disorienting.
Minimalist yet complex, monochromatic yet textured, Fever Dream is a delicate and marvelously constructed tale, like a bundle of our darkest worries artfully arranged into our own likeness.
This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook
There was a prophecy that foretold of the next witch queen. She would be a descendant of one of the Hawkweed sisters, Raven or Charlock. To ensure that her own daughter would become queen, powerful witch Raven ensured her sister would only carry sons, which are unwanted by the coven and destined to die. When Charlock finally becomes pregnant with a girl, Raven switches the baby witch with a human child, in a flash of magic that no one notices.
But Raven never expected the girls to find one another in a wooded glen one day. The two girls—sweet Ember Hawkweed, with her inability to produce even the most meager spell; and troublemaker Poppy Hooper, who has lived her whole life with the strangest occurrences happening around her, from cats shadowing her to spontaneous fire—make an instant connection. But as the truth comes out about Raven’s betrayal, it won’t be easy to make things right, especially when the two girls begin to fall for the same boy, Leo, who feels electricity from Poppy and warmth from Ember.
In this world, created by the acclaimed screenwriter of The Little Prince, magic is a delicate lattice that connects witches in their jealousies, power struggles and insecurities. Everyone in this story is an outsider, from Poppy’s mother who has gone mad from believing that her daughter is not her own, to Leo who lives on the streets. It seems that no one belongs, but their efforts to make sense of a world that doesn’t want them is what connects them all. The love triangle between Poppy, Ember and Leo is but a mere distraction as magic builds, and despite all the spells in the air, it’s the most unbelievable aspect of the story.
Author Irena Brignull tugs heartstrings here and there in The Hawkweed Prophecy, but she excels at tapping into something a little wicked. In the end, the reader isn’t so concerned that Poppy will end up happy, as much as they want to see just how much havoc she can wreak.
Irena Brignull tugs heartstrings here and there in The Hawkweed Prophecy.
From the digestive system (Gulp) to the body after death (Stiff) to the science of sex (Bonk), Mary Roach’s books have all touched on familiar topics that have been written about over and over again. But Roach, a self-described “goober with a flashlight,” brings a glorious level of glee to each of her subjects as she transforms well-worn topics into fresh learning experiences. At first pass, her latest book is her least universal: Grunt explores the science of the human body at war. After all, everyone has a digestive system, we all experience death, and most of us have had sex or at least considered it—but few of us will ever fight on a battlefield.
As Roach makes clear, Grunt is no Zero Dark Thirty, nor is it about the science of military armaments. She never ignores the bullets and bombs but instead focuses on the unsung heroes of battle. At the fashion design studio of the U.S. Army Natick Labs, Roach learns about the ballistic qualities of silk underpants and why snipers can’t wear zippers. She runs around with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss in combat. She even discusses penis transplants, a particularly timely topic since the first successful procedure occurred just last December.
Grunt has everything Roach fans look for: guffaw-worthy footnotes, questions pursued to hilarious and rewarding ends and connections that we never would’ve considered. Perhaps no one else walks the line of irreverent and considerate as skillfully as Roach does, and with this book, she presents something important, difficult and often ugly, leaving readers with a new appreciation for the bizarre sciences and creative minds that strive to better the lives of soldiers.
This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Perhaps no one else walks the line of irreverent and considerate as skillfully as Mary Roach does, and with this book, she presents something important, difficult and often ugly.
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