Cat Acree, Author at BookPage | Discover your next great book!

by Cat Acree

The Michigan backyard of wildlife photographers Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick appears to be a busy place, full of deer, doves, turkeys and squirrels. Best known for their 1999 picture book, Stranger in the Woods, the husband-and-wife team transforms their stunning nature photography into beloved children’s books by imagining the sweet, funny dialogue between different woodland creatures.

In their latest book, A Magical Winter, the forest animals anticipate the arrival of another stranger. Against a backdrop of freshly fallen snow, the animals squabble over the mysterious creature until it finally arrives: an all-white, blue-eyed deer that appears to be made of snow. But Mother Doe kindly lets everyone know there’s no reason to worry: “He’s one of my three fawns. He is not made of snow . . . he is not going to melt.” When a white turkey also appears, the animals wonder if their woods are enchanted, which is a good reason to celebrate. They parade and party until spring; after all, parties are more fun when everyone is accepted, regardless of physical differences.

Children will love discovering the magic of this backyard, while dreaming up stories for their own.

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

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Suspense

Science Fiction & Fantasy Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense Science Fiction

A treasure hunt for truthers

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

Several years ago, after researching his true crime book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, James Renner was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not uncommon for journalists to suffer such effects after witnessing trauma for a story, and Renner’s 10 years of hunting serial killers and writing about unsolved murders caught up with him. Fiction provided an unexpected safe haven, and his genre-bending time-travel thriller, The Man from Primrose Lane (2012), was a crime he could finally solve. His latest thriller, The Great Forgetting, digs at a much larger mystery, one with more questions, no generic answers and therefore plenty of room for an imaginative author to play. The result is a mix of conspiracy theorist paranoia, alternate history and cross-country adventure.

The story begins with an epilogue—our first clue that nothing is as it should be—which provides several bizarre nuggets of information: Fourteen years after 9/11, the coroner who oversaw and organized the remains of Flight 93 returns to the crash site, where he finds a severed monkey’s paw, clasping a man’s watch that reads, “RIP, Tony Sanders. 1978 to 2012.” And on the monkey’s palm is tattooed a bright red swastika.

In 2015, Jack Felter has returned home to Franklin Mills, Ohio, to help care for his father, who suffers from dementia. Franklin Mills is a place Jack would like to forget—especially his former love interest Sam, who immediately enlists Jack’s help in finding her husband (once Jack’s best friend), Tony Sanders, who has been missing for three years. Tony’s trail leads Jack to an institutionalized teen named Cole, who promises to reveal Tony’s whereabouts if Jack listens to Cole’s story—and begins boiling his water to counteract the pacifying effects of Fluoride. Jack soon learns about the Great Forgetting, a vast conspiracy that conceals the true events of World War II, contradicting everything he knows about history, science, the government and even time itself.

The Great Forgetting explores humanity’s desperation to forget the worst things that happen to us and the worst things we do to each other. It never loses speed as it reveals large-scale histrionics and builds to a zealous reveal. However, in Renner’s attempt to exorcise our prejudices and transform history, he risks alienating his audience, as many readers may find themselves defensive of their living memory, holding tighter to their real history. Perhaps some things can’t be rewritten, even for fiction’s sake.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” These words can be found in an etching by Francisco Goya of a young man asleep, slumped over a table as a horde of wide-eyed and shadowy creatures bear down upon him. This nightmarish image is reproduced at the beginning of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (or 1,001 nights, that magical number). But Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, his first for adults in seven years, is not so tidy as monster against human. This is a fairy tale for the modern era, A Thousand and One Nights for the age of reality TV, The Odyssey in the time of Disney World.

Rushdie’s jinn are mischievous, lascivious creatures, made of “smokeless fire” and generally disinterested in unfortunate human concerns about right and wrong. But the line between the human and jinn worlds is crossed when the jinnia princess Dunia presents herself at the door of the disgraced 12th-century philosopher Ibn Rushd. Dunia has fallen in love with his mind and so bears his many children, descendants now part human and part jinn, all with the distinguishable trait of lobeless ears.

Leaping centuries forward to the present day, a storm strikes New York City and leaves “strangenesses” in its wake: A gardener finds himself floating a few inches above the ground. An abandoned baby marks the corrupt with boils and rotting flesh. A wormhole opens in a failed graphic novelist’s bedroom. A war of the worlds has begun.

Rushdie spins this action-packed, illusion-filled, madcap wonder of a tale with a wicked, wise fury. It’s a riot of pop culture and humor, with bursts of insight that stop readers dead, only to zip them up again like a jinn flying across the sky. To tell a story about the jinn is to tell a story about ourselves, and this is why we love myth: The contrast of the fantastical allows us to peer at ourselves from a safe distance.

In this boisterous doomsday legend, reality is no longer a given, and what remains is a brilliant, bawdy world where stories are both the knife and the wound.

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

In this boisterous doomsday legend, reality is no longer a given, and what remains is a brilliant, bawdy world where stories are both the knife and the wound.

Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fiction Science Fiction

Armada

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

It’s hard to follow a debut that immediately became an international phenomenon, was published in 40 countries and is in the works to become a movie (hopefully with the same mind-blowing visual effects Warner Bros. brought to movies like Inception, The Lego Movie and The Matrix). The thing that made Ernest Cline’s first book, Ready Player One, so good was a nearly impossible balance between where-the-hell-did-that-come-from originality and the familiarity of Gen-X pop-culture references. There’s no such balance in his second novel, Armada. Familiarity surpasses originality—intentionally.

High school student Zack Lightman is staring out a classroom window, dreaming of adventure, when he spies the impossible: a prismatic alien spacecraft straight out of his favorite video game. His gamer father, who died in a freak accident years ago, predicted as much in his seemingly incoherent journals about a conspiracy involving the government and the entire sci-fi industry. But now it’s clear his father wasn’t crazy: The government has indeed been preparing for an impending alien war by training gamers as an army of drone-flying soldiers. Over the course of only a few days, Zack finds himself on the frontlines of intergalactic warfare as one of the best gamers around, and therefore Earth’s greatest hope.

Does all this sound a little . . . familiar? Is it ringing of Ender’s Game and The Last Starfighter? Not to give anything away, but of course it does. Science fiction is a genre constructed through reused tropes, which can be manipulated to expand the cultural conversation of genre fiction—but in Armada, even Zack feels uneasy about falling into such a classic sci-fi narrative.

Armada is almost pure action-adventure while winkingly employing a barrage of jokes and clichés from video games and sci-fi movies, television and books. It’s big fun, especially if your idea of fun is sitting around watching your friends play video games while discussing important theories like Sting vs. Mjolnir.

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

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Seeing Off the Johns

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

Early in Seeing Off the Johns, author Rene S. Perez II gives us the key word in the story: onus—a burden or responsibility, often an unpleasant one.

Greenton is a small, dead-end town in 1998 Texas where no one expects greatness but some dream of it nonetheless. As the novel opens, the entire town has showed up to bestow well wishes upon their two hometown heroes, John Robison and John Mejia, athletic superstars who are headed to UT Austin. But the Johns never make it to the university—their car flips en route, and the two are killed.

Perhaps the only person in Greenton who didn’t see off the Johns was Concepcion “Chon” Gonzales, who has been waiting nearly his entire life for John Mejia to get out of dodge so he can take a shot at Mejia’s girlfriend, Araceli. As cold and insensitive as it sounds, death has made Chon’s dreams come true, and he finds relief from resentment as he finally pursues his dream girl. But like a child who learns the world doesn’t pause while he sleeps, Chon begins to recognize the crushing unfairness and ugliness of death’s gift. Mejia’s parents’ grief becomes Araceli’s unwanted burden, and the citizens of Greenton turn to her, watching her reaction as if it were a barometer for their own. Chon evolves beyond both his shallow, lustful desire for Araceli and his pursuit of some kind of machismo protector status, and he eventually finds the capacity to connect—with Araceli and his community—and acknowledge the tragedy in the Johns’ passing.

Loss, and our response to it, is no simple thing. This is a searing, mature novel, not just because sexual scenes (which are among the most complex and thoughtful moments in the book) are included, but in the way it handles the innumerable challenges associated with grief and love.

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

BookPage Teen Top Pick, July 2015

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

The Harder They Fall

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

The men of the American Wild West called it the “shining times,” when the law held no sway over any place beyond the Mississippi. The new novel from T.C. Boyle takes this tradition of renegades and focuses on the violence.

Twenty-five-year-old Adam worships one of these survivalist mountain men, even renaming himself after him: Colter. He’s manic, raging and growing his own stash of opium poppies, and he easily falls in with 40-something Sara, a hardcore member of an extremist anti-government movement. Together they are citizen soldiers, making war (not love) and defiantly, desperately searching for something to burn down—and burn they do. Adam is also the son of ex-Marine Sten, the epitome of claustrophobic rage and frustration, who kills someone with his bare hands while on vacation in Costa Rica.

As these three stubborn minds draw together like fire and kindling, violence becomes more than an inherited trait within one family but rather a syndrome of a nation built on revolution and stoicism, distorted by fear and hysteria. It may be a stroke of genius that the characters themselves are maddening in their own right, leaving readers with a pounding pulse not only from suspense but from infuriation.

The bestselling, unbelievably prolific Boyle has described The Harder They Fall as a counterpoint to his historical novel San Miguel (2012), which unfolded through the perspectives of three women who sought refuge and sanctuary on an island off the coast of California. San Miguel was a departure for Boyle, and now the pendulum swings back to high-adrenaline zaniness and pertinacious, destructive misfits. Individualism remains central, but unlike San Miguel, it’s far from contemplative. It is a juggernaut, twisted to its breaking point.

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

Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fiction

Robots on the rise

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

Robotics engineer Daniel H. Wilson’s 2011 debut, Robopocalypse, blurred the line between man and machine in a world on the brink of human extermination. In the second act, the line threatens to disappear altogether.

With the help of freeborn robot Nine Oh Two, an extraordinary girl with prosthetic robot eyes and an army from the Osage Nation, the New War was won. The powerful artificial intelligence Archos R-14 was decimated, and his legions were left orphaned. But in the months following the New War’s end, a new battle takes its place—the True War. This time, the remnants of Archos may be humanity’s best hope.

Like Robopocalypse, Robogenesis is pieced together in postwar vignettes. A narrator named Arayt Shah shares stories pulled from the minds of Robopocalypse survivors to recount how he won the True War. But there’s something off about our storyteller, and as in so many post-apocalyptic thrillers, humankind has a tendency to become its own worst enemy.

As the stage resets for even bigger problems, Wilson’s imagination gains new heights. His new creations recall the biomechanical designs that might be found in H.R. Giger’s garden of twisted delights, and an army of zombie human-robot hybrids rivals the ice zombies of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. In the wreckage of our former society, beauty hides among the growing horrors—a necessary foil to our gleeful fascination with the grotesque.

While lacking some of the intensity of Wilson’s blockbuster debut, Robogenesis is rife with promises we can’t wait for Wilson to keep.

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

Fiction, Literary Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction Literary Fiction

Kinder Than Solitude

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

The death that launches Yiyun Li’s second novel, Kinder Than Solitude, has been a long time coming. Twenty years before, Shaoai was mysteriously poisoned by someone close to her, leaving her crippled and diminished. Her death comes as a great relief for the novel’s three main characters, Moran, Ruyu and Boyang—once childhood friends in China, but now estranged. But with that sigh of relief comes the truth.

The story unfolds in flashes of past and present, dipping between the storylines of the three distant friends to reveal how they have been transformed by the poisoning of Shaoai. Orphan Ruyu, who “defied being known” and avoids interpersonal connections, now lives in California and works as a glorified assistant for a local woman. Moran, who lives in Wisconsin, goes from relishing life’s ideal moments to removing herself from all moments, past or present. Solitude is clarity; connection is clutter. But it is a tenuous insouciance, and news of Shaoai’s death, immediately followed by her ex-husband’s own terminal illness, sends her out of the shadows. “Sugar daddy” Boyang, the only one still living in Beijing, cared for Shaoai up until the end. He is the only one able to recognize the existence of the past, but even then, his recollection is lacking any sense of nostalgia.

Chinese-American Li, who was born in Beijing and moved to the U.S. in 1996, is a MacArthur Fellow and was named one of the New Yorker’s top 20 writers under 40. Her new novel is penetrating and emotionally tasking, but there’s something compulsive about it—something that hooks a nerve and tugs again and again.

Kinder Than Solitude promises a mystery at its heart, but solving the crime is far from this story’s point. It’s about forcing memory to the surface. The greatest reprieve from all this repression and melancholy is the subdued prose, which unfolds with immense grace and astonishing insight. This is an intense and elegant book, a dark tale with great reverence for the depth of the human heart.

This is an intense and elegant book, a dark tale with great reverence for the depth of the human heart.

Fiction

Fiction

Dissident Gardens

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

With the epic Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem remains to the realm of New York borough fiction but turns his merciless humor and judgment to the fall of American Communism and the search for the “new” American political ideal.

Spanning a complex history from Communist discussions in 1930s parlor rooms to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, Dissident Gardens hinges on tyrannical matriarch Rose Zimmer. She is the Last Communist, the “Red Queen” of Sunnyside Gardens, who is ousted from the party in 1955 for taking a black cop as a lover but continues to impress her ideals upon everyone within range. Her daughter, Miriam, attempts to escape to Greenwich Village and goes searching for her German Jewish father. Miriam’s son, Sergius, scrabbles for some sense of his grandmother. Cicero Lookins, the son of Rose’s lover, becomes Rose’s greatest beneficiary as a “black brain” in academia. Others who cannot escape Rose’s grasp include cousin Lenny Angrush, named for Lenin, and Tommy Gogan, Miriam’s phony folk-singing husband.

As the novel moves back and forth through time, generations remain mired in the legacy of the Party and Rose’s efforts to keep “the intellectual apparatus alive.” In a lecture to a class, Cicero says, “The deep fate of each human is to begin with their mother and father as the whole of reality, and to have to forge a journey to break into the wider world.” Rose is the whole of reality, even to those who can claim no familial obligation. She is the icon to rally against, the impetus to self-definition, so each of these characters does his or her best to leave her behind, but Rose’s influence is not limited by distance or time.

This is a beautifully constructed, highly complex story of social realism and the transformation of radical American politics, but it is also a hilarious satire and a sympathetic portrayal of family. Dissident Gardens is one of Lethem’s finest, most ambitious works to date.

A family epic of American Communism

Children's & YA, YA, YA Fiction

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Maggot Moon

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

The young adult genre can be as repetitive as it is inventive, so the popularity of the dystopian YA subgenre guarantees some familiar storylines. It seems unfair, then, to classify Sally Gardner’s new novel, Maggot Moon, as dystopian YA, as it defies comparison to all of its shelfmates. Rather than looking ahead to a bleak future, Gardner imagines what the 1950s would have been like if the Allies had lost World War II. In the Motherland, “impurities” are “rubbed out,” citizens snitch or starve, and sheep have the best chance for survival.

Fifteen-year-old Standish Treadwell is no sheep. He is dyslexic (like the author)—“Can’t read, can’t write, Standish Treadwell isn’t bright”—and therefore an impurity, an easy target both at school and in the Motherland. His dyslexia, however, is more a power than a hindrance. It keeps his eyes up and his ears open, and through his wry, incisive and original voice, he creates a narrative that is not quite linear, resembling instead the colorful mind of a daydreamer.

Standish escapes his circumstances by retreating into his one remaining vestige of independence, his imagination. He and his best friend Hector dream of the free world, “Croca-Colas” and Cadillacs. They build a rocket ship to take them to Juniper, an imagined utopian planet with a name that feels within the realm of possibility, yet is obviously unobtainable. They are not alone in their dreams of reaching the stars, as the Motherland takes strides each day to be the first nation to land a man on the moon.

When Hector and his family are taken away just before the moon launch, Standish finds himself uniquely positioned to risk all and unveil the Motherland’s elaborate ruse to its citizens and the rest of the world. He is the wolf among the sheep.

In Maggot Moon, hope lies in truth. This is a small victory, but an achievable one, especially for a clear-eyed boy driven by friendship.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

San Miguel

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

Few authors so easily disassemble the American dream as T.C. Boyle. Over the course of 13 novels, he has made it a signature move to take the core tenets of our identity—the right to define your sense of place, to own and control the land beneath your feet—and dissect them, move the pieces around and put them back together however he likes. This theme returns in his new novel, the surprisingly restrained San Miguel.

Boyle first wrote about California’s Channel Islands in his novel When the Killing’s Done (2011), a contentious story of environmentalists battling over the lives of animals. The backdrop might be similar, but San Miguel is driven less by conflict and more by the emotions of three real historical women.

In 1888, Marantha’s husband Will brings her to the island with the promise of warm Californian air to help soothe her violent consumption. What she finds instead is a moldy house that smells of sheep, terrible storms and the interminable ennui of forced exile. Two years later, Marantha’s adopted teenage daughter, Edith, desperately seeks a way off the island and will stop at nothing to return to civilization. In 1930, the care of the sheep falls to newlyweds Elise and Herbie, who find romance and freedom in their seclusion. However, World War II is a constant, growing threat to their 12 peaceful years as King and Queen of San Miguel.

If Boyle’s past works have chuckled and made glib asides—he was once dubbed an “adventurer among the potholes and pratfalls of the American language” by the L.A. Times—San Miguel simply breathes. Stripped of Boyle’s characteristic irony and comedy, San Miguel allows human frailty to stand, Ahab-like, in stark contrast to a hostile environment. Readers will find within San Miguel a gentler touch, a reticent style capable of rendering a reader speechless with its quiet beauty.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Just one piece of a wonderful world

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

A young boy named Baz longs to see the world beyond his dusty village, so when he is apprenticed as a weaver, he believes his life has finally begun. However, it is when his cruel master trades him for a sword that his life gains meaning. Baz becomes an apprentice to a magician named Tadis, who takes him on a journey through desert, water and mountains to discover the depths of his own soul and his place in the universe. They face starvation, loneliness, peril and uncertainty, but as they traverse the earth, Baz begins to open his eyes to the mysteries of life and discovers the magic behind the journey itself. Just as a river twists and transforms, Baz grows into a young man who understands that he is just one small—but still significant—part of a wide, wonderful world.

Author Kate Banks, whose past works include Max’s Castle and Dillon Dillon, crafts a powerful story of enlightenment with sparse yet rich prose, vibrant images and simple, touching characters. Caldecott winner Peter Sís punctuates the story with delicate, medallion-sized illustrations that look much like ancient etchings. With their gentle tale, Banks and Sís become philosopher kings to children, imparting to them the quiet beauty of all things.

The excitement and adventure of a children’s book can captivate a young reader, but it is the deeper meaning that can make a book a lifelong favorite. The Magician’s Apprentice will enchant children with its danger and magic, but its brilliant philosophy, reminiscent of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, will fascinate more mature readers. This is a story to be rediscovered again and again.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

A small bunny with a big heart

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

It is no surprise that David Petersen (creator of the Eisner Award-winning comic book series Mouse Guard) attributes his inspiration to cartoons, comics and tree-climbing. Readers of his debut picture book, Snowy Valentine, could easily believe this author/illustrator spends much of his time perched in trees, watching the daily lives of woodland creatures. In the spirit of The Wind in the Willows, Petersen offers a charming portrayal of the sweet, subtle relationships among the animals in a snow-covered forest.

On Valentine’s Day, Jasper Bunny heads out in search of a gift for Lilly. He seems undeterred by how small he is (even in relation to his own impossibly large ears) as he seeks gift recommendations from his neighbors. However, he can’t knit like the porcupines, Mrs. Frog’s chocolate-covered flies won’t do and the raccoon’s flowers have wilted in the cold. Jasper narrowly escapes Teagan Fox’s gift for his vixen—a rabbit stew swirling with potatoes, onions and (oh, irony!) carrots.

When Jasper is about to give up, his ears drooping and his red coat dripping, he exclaims, “I have nothing for Lilly.” High above, Spalding the cardinal sees Jasper’s true gift—an enormous heart tracked in the snow. Lilly steps out of her burrow to see “the heart he had made for her . . . and she loved it.”

Petersen’s ink and digitally colored illustrations are full of personality, movement and light. Their precision in capturing the temperatures and textures of winter is unmatched, from the low-hanging sun leaking through the skeletal trees to the contrast of a fire’s glow with the purples and blues of the forest. Breathtaking bird’s-eye spreads make Jasper seem so very small, yet when he is just about to give up, the illustrations reveal his power to do great things.

Young readers, no matter how small, will enjoy seeing just how big the gift of love can be, as well as their own ability to give it.

Cat Acree

A Magical Winter

A treasure hunt for truthers

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Armada

Seeing Off the Johns

The Harder They Fall

Robots on the rise

Kinder Than Solitude

Dissident Gardens

Maggot Moon

San Miguel

Just one piece of a wonderful world

A small bunny with a big heart

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