Jessica Wakeman

FictionShort Stories

Filthy Animals

Review by Jessica Wakeman

In fiction, the corporal ecstasy of sexual tension often comes in peaks and waves. That’s not always how it feels in reality, however. In Brandon Taylor’s short story collection, sexual tension acts more like an undertow, lurking to pull its victims down below.

Author Roxane Gay has described the stories in Filthy Animals as “melancholic”—truly the right word for this collection. Taylor’s characters endure rape, sexual abuse, suicide, violence, cancer and familial abandonment while searching for friendship, love, sex or even just respect. Many of his characters are LGBTQ, partially closeted and living in the Midwest, which in many cases amplifies their struggles.

Several of the stories center on three young adults named Lionel, Charles and Sophie. Lionel is a former graduate student who recently tried to take his life. At a party, he meets Charles and Sophie, two dance students who are in an open relationship. The enigmatic and possibly sinister couple is drawn to Lionel’s fragility, and they begin to pull at his threads, trying to unravel him. Taylor’s depiction of the complicated power dynamics in an open relationship calls to mind Luster, Raven Leilani’s brilliant debut novel.

As difficult as the subject matter may be to stomach at times, Filthy Animals is full of beautiful writing. However, since some stories feature the same characters and others do not, the reading experience lacks cohesion. It’s easy to spend too much time trying to find connections where none exist, which can be a frustrating way to engage with a book.

Nevertheless, the characters in Filthy Animals are relatable in ways we may not want to admit to ourselves, especially regarding unmet desire. A reader doesn’t need to share Lionel’s mental health issues and sexual confusion to understand his shame at being truly seen. Fans of Taylor’s work will be fascinated by Filthy Animals, but newcomers should be aware that it’s an intense read.

In Brandon Taylor’s short story collection, sexual tension acts like an undertow, lurking to pull its victims down below.
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Both Can Be True

Review by Jessica Wakeman

“We’re all in the same boat, paddling through the chaos of seventh grade. Except everyone else’s oar is pink or blue and mine’s purple with glittery flecks of angsty confusion on it,” says Ash, who isn’t like most kids in their suburban Ohio middle school. Some days Ash dresses like and feels like a boy. Other days, they dress like and feel like a girl. Some people know them as Ashley, others as Asher. It’s all a little confusing, especially for Ash. Lately, they feel a lot of pressure to choose a single permanent name and gender identity.

Throughout Jules Machias’ debut middle grade novel, Both Can Be True, Ash explores their gender fluidity and what it means to be nonbinary in a culture that often demands people choose between pink or blue. Although Ash’s mom and best friend are supportive, a traumatic assault at Ash’s previous school has made them fearful of what might happen if they came out to their new classmates. Plus, they’re afraid of scaring away their crush, Daniel. Both dog lovers, Ash and Daniel grow close as they work together to save an old dog named Chewbarka from being put down.

Machias alternates between Ash’s and Daniel’s perspectives as both kids take tentative steps toward being fully themselves. Each serves as a gentle and appealing conduit for readers to discover issues that LGBTQ tweens face, as well as the right and wrong ways parents can support them. Machias highlights how Daniel is also bound by masculine gender norms, such as false notions that boys shouldn’t be emotional and definitely shouldn’t cry.

Both Can Be True illustrates how the many existing anxieties common during middle school multiply when one’s gender identity is in question and when gender norms are socially enforced. It’s a heart-wrenching but hopeful look at what everyone has to gain by embracing a more expansive understanding of gender.

“We’re all in the same boat, paddling through the chaos of seventh grade. Except everyone else’s oar is pink or blue and mine’s purple with glittery flecks of angsty confusion on it,” says Ash, who isn’t like most kids in their suburban Ohio middle school.

RomanceContemporary Romance

Seven Days in June

Review by Jessica Wakeman

“Grown women knew better than to attach themselves to time bombs. Teenage girls couldn’t wait to be ruined.” So writes Tia Williams, author of the smart and steamy Seven Days in June. The “grown woman” is Eva Mercy, a 32-year-old romance novelist and single mom in Brooklyn. The “time bomb” is Shane Hall, a literary novelist and former paramour who unexpectedly reappears in Eva’s life at a book festival. The Black literary world doesn’t know that Eva and Shane were teenage lovers—or that they’ve been communicating to each other through their books for years. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

Seven Days in June is a slow burn as Shane and Eva attempt to heal old wounds, their love affair made all the more delicate by Eva’s history of abandonment. Chosen family is a strong central theme in the novel, and characters like Eva’s spunky daughter, Audre, and book editor, CeCe, bring warmth to the pages. But this isn’t a light romance by any means, especially during flashbacks. Shane entered foster care as a child and is now in Alcoholics Anonymous. Eva has a history of self-harm, and an early scene depicts an attempted sexual assault. 

In addition to addressing mental health concerns, Seven Days in June portrays the daily difficulties of having an invisible disability. Eva has experienced migraines since she was young, and she still struggles to manage them without revealing her pain to the world. But Williams never uses Eva’s illness to inspire pity or to cast her as somehow weak. It’s refreshing to see a character whose disability is fully developed and integrated into the narrative from start to finish. 

Through this gripping love story, Williams reckons with family histories and shows the power in rewriting our origin stories. She lays bare what happens when we are “fearless enough to hold each other close no matter how catastrophic the world” becomes. Readers will feel as attached to these characters as Eva and Shane are to each other. 

In this poignant romance, readers will feel as attached to Tia Williams’ characters as Eva and Shane are to each other.
FictionSatire

A Special Place for Women

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Laura Hankin’s A Special Place for Women has a ripped-from-the-headlines hook: It’s heavily based on the controversial, real-life, women-only coworking space the Wing and related critiques of “girl boss” feminism, a phrase that diminishes women’s authority while masquerading as empowerment.

Narrator Jillian Beckley is an unemployed journalist from an unsexy part of Brooklyn who recently lost her mom. Jillian doesn’t have any female friends to speak of, but there are two men in her life: her childhood neighbor, who is New York’s hottest new chef, and a magazine editor on whom she has a crush. In a convoluted plan to impress the editor, Jillian pretends she is dating the chef in order to gain access to an elite club of powerful women called Nevertheless.  

This part of the story is similar to the movie Mean Girls, as Jillian initially mocks these out-of-touch women but quickly finds herself under their spell. Much of the novel alludes to possibly sinister goings-on at Nevertheless; Jillian worries that the organization is a shadowy cabal that ruins its enemies. At this, the reader may wonder if the novel is an overwrought sendup of the #girlboss culture that lauds female billionaires. After all, is there anything original left to say about wealthy, status-seeking women and the corrupting influence of power? 

But then, halfway through A Special Place for Women, a creative twist makes these events delightfully complex. This is where Hankin shows her range as a writer: The book you think you’re reading turns into something else entirely.

Admirably, the class analysis in A Special Place for Women is more finely tuned than most novels with an outsider-masquerading-as-an-insider storyline. That’s largely due to Jillian’s rock-solid millennial Everywoman voice, which allows her to stay relatable amid escalating bizarre circumstances. 

A Special Place for Women is a slow burn that’s ultimately fun, fresh and entirely worthwhile.

Halfway through A Special Place for Women, the book you think you’re reading turns into something else entirely.
NonfictionMemoirArt

Negative Space

Review by Jessica Wakeman

“I had a happy childhood, and my parents were junkies,” writes Lilly Dancyger. “Both of these things are true.” Her father, Joe Schactman, was not a famous artist, but he was prolific and left deep impressions on those who knew him. His sudden death when Dancyger was 12 threw her into a tailspin but also cemented Schactman as an artistic idol in her mind.

In her memoir, Negative Space, Dancyger carries us back to New York City’s gritty East Village in the 1980s as she investigates Schactman’s tumultuous life. She pages through her father’s old notebooks that she saved after his death. She studies his often strange artwork (depicted throughout the book) made from found objects and roadkill. And she interviews Schactman’s friends, colleagues and even her own mother to learn how and why he descended into heroin addiction.

Dancyger’s struggle to escape the need to prove herself to everyone, including her dead father, is moving. Mourning is not linear, and she skillfully shows how grief mutates during different stages of life. The phantasm of closure stalks all of us who have experienced loss, as both Dancyger’s writing and Schactman’s artwork make clear.

The strongest portions of Negative Space explore Dancyger’s experience as the child of addicts. She largely parented herself, and when she builds a more stable adulthood than the one modeled by her parents, it’s a hard-won victory. Other children of addicts who experienced difficult transitions into adulthood will find much to relate to here.

To this end, Dancyger’s bravery in the face of negative revelations about her dad is admirable. She wants the whole truth, no matter how painful it is to reopen these wounds. Dancyger knew little about Schactman’s addiction when she was young, and she knew nothing about his sometimes abusive relationships with women. But in Negative Space, Dancyger allows her father to be an imperfect and much loved person—her idol still, but a troubled and complicated one.

Lilly Dancyger sets out to uncover the whole truth about her late father’s art, relationships and addiction, no matter how painful.
YA FictionYA

We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

Review by Jessica Wakeman

In We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire, Joy McCullough (Blood, Water, Paint) portrays the inner workings of a young woman whose anger ignites like a gallon of gasoline touched by a lit match.

Em Morales is the youngest sister in a close-knit family. As the book opens, she is preoccupied by her older sister’s court case. Nor, a college student, was sexually assaulted outside of a frat party and is pursuing justice through the legal system. The jury finds Nor’s attacker guilty, but a sympathetic judge sentences him to time served. Outside the courthouse, a furious Em goes viral for commenting that the sentence makes her want to learn to use a sword. In fact, violent revenge is the subject of the book’s parallel narrative, a series of poems written by Em about Marguerite de Bressieux, a 15th-century noblewoman who hunted rapists. 

We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire explores how one person’s traumatic experience can ripple through an entire family and depicts how trauma can affect every person differently. Nor wants to put the horror of the past behind her and rebuild her life, but Em is consumed by her anger. Though the book features many strong and unapologetically feminist characters, the extent to which Em’s own feelings are foregrounded is sometimes uncomfortable, given the other characters in the book who have personally experienced sexual violence. Nonetheless, We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is an unusual novel that readers drawn to complex, imperfect protagonists will appreciate.

In We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire, Joy McCullough portrays the inner workings of a young woman whose anger ignites like a gallon of gasoline touched by a lit match.

NonfictionHistory

New Yorkers

Review by Jessica Wakeman

In January 2014, Canadian writer Craig Taylor relocated to New York City with a mission: He would interview New Yorkers about themselves and their city, similar to the task he undertook to create his 2012 book, Londoners. Over six years, Taylor interviewed more than 180 people and recorded 400 hours of conversations. The final product is New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, which contains 75 oral histories about America’s most populous metropolis.

Taylor groups the book by themes, such as wealth, stress and “hustle.” An array of only-in-New-York careers are represented, such as a security guard at the Statue of Liberty and an electrician for the Empire State Building. Nearly all the isolated stories are interesting; there are only a few duds.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: The audiobook for New Yorkers brings this “profusion of voice in New York” even further into the realm of oral history.

The emotional heart of New Yorkers can be found in the testimonies of people who directly experienced the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Sandy and the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading firsthand accounts of these extraordinary events is poignant and resonant. Likewise, the New Yorkers who share their experiences with homelessness and racism reveal as much about these societal scourges as the best reportage could.

All of that said, New York City is home to roughly 8.5 million people, so readers will inevitably emerge with the feeling that plenty of stories were left out. For example, even with the number of women included in the book, the overall collection leans toward traditionally masculine occupations. Why not include a manicurist, an OB-GYN, a burlesque dancer or a personal shopper from Bergdorf Goodman? And how could a book about New York City include no public school teachers or librarians?

To this end, New Yorkers is more of a collection of Taylor’s own experiences in New York City than a comprehensive representation. Nevertheless, it’s a delightful book for anyone with an interest in New York—and a reminder that everyone has a story, if we’re willing to listen.

In January 2014, Canadian writer Craig Taylor relocated to New York City with a mission: He would interview New Yorkers about themselves and their city.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Girlhood

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Girlhood is a time of life that’s often idealized as innocent and safe. This, of course, speaks to our gendered expectations for the so-called fairer sex. But the truth about girls’ early lives is more complex. Girlhood can be exploited just as often as it is protected, and Melissa Febos brings these complications to the fore in Girlhood, a collection of seven memoiristic essays.

The author of Whip Smart, about her time working as a dominatrix, and Abandon Me, another essay collection, Febos is a dab hand at the memoir genre. The essays that compose Girlhood tell a story of Febos’ life that reaches back to her childhood on Cape Cod and her young adulthood in New York City to examine her internalized beliefs. While her route to making sense of her own life is usually circuitous, her thoughtfulness as she reaches toward a conclusion is a delight to follow.

Many of Febos’ girlhood experiences stemmed from her body developing maturely at a young age. She fearlessly interrogates her adolescent reaction to these changes and the attendant shame, voyeurism and almighty male gaze that subsumed her young life. Each essay is layered like a sfogliatelle: Recollections of a growing girl in a sexist culture lay upon her adult analyses and rich cultural references, from Greek myths to 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault. Sources listed at the book’s conclusion range widely from Black feminist and race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw to British art critic John Berger.

In one of the strongest essays, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” Febos and her partner attend cuddle parties. Based on the belief that there is a primal need for human touch, a cuddle party is when strangers gather together to experience consensual, nonsexual touch. These parties prompt Febos to examine her history of accommodating and prioritizing men’s needs over her own.

Girlhood offers what some may view as a dark portrayal of young adulthood, in which opportunities for degradation are seemingly limitless. And some of Febos’ later-in-life experiences, such as heroin addiction and sex work, won’t be shared by every reader. But anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective.

Anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective.
FictionFamily Saga

Of Women and Salt

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The relationship between mothers and daughters is a richly mined topic in fiction. In her beautifully written debut, Gabriela Garcia presents a new classic of mother-daughter literature. 

Of Women and Salt tells the intertwined stories of women in two families from the 19th century to the present day. After an unstable childhood during the Cuban revolution, Carmen leaves her mother behind and immigrates to Florida. Later, in a wealthy suburb, Carmen tries to provide her daughter, Jeanette, with a comfortable American life. Jeanette has a drug addiction, is hiding a tragic secret and is desperately seeking a purpose. 

Their lives intersect with that of Gloria, an immigrant from El Salvador who hopes to give her young daughter, Ana, a better life in Miami. Then Gloria is seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Ana must reunite with her mother at a detention center in Texas. They are deported to Mexico with no resources and forced to start over on their own.

Some novels attempt to tell a sweeping narrative only to get bogged down by a busy plot and too many characters, but despite a large cast from numerous time periods, Of Women and Salt expertly threads each woman’s story to another’s and pulls their stories taut. Disparate hardships propel each of their lives, but they are linked by a shared struggle to carry on in a harsh world, whether each survives her circumstance—or not.

Motherhood is “a constant calculation of what-if,” Garcia writes. At the heart of Of Women and Salt are the sacrifices made by mothers so their daughters can have different lives—perhaps better ones. But daughters may make choices based on their own wishes and needs, and this possibility is ever poised to pierce a mother’s heart. In this way, the novel is quietly heartbreaking. As Garcia writes, “Even the best mothers in the world can’t always save their daughters.”

In her beautifully written debut, Gabriela Garcia presents a new classic of mother-daughter literature.
NonfictionMemoir

Speak, Okinawa

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The Japanese word sumimasen means “I’m sorry” as well as “thank you.” This concept perfectly describes Speak, Okinawa, a memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina.

Brina’s father was a privileged, white American soldier when he met her mother, a nightclub hostess in Okinawa, Japan, who longed to marry up and out of a difficult life. They did marry, then settled in upstate New York to chase the American dream. Although Brina and her mother were provided for by her father, neither woman felt entirely welcome in their largely white suburb. Her mom was isolated, linguistically as well as culturally, and struggled for years with her decision to leave her family in Okinawa for life in the U.S.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Elizabeth Miki Brina shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.

Although technically a memoir, Speak, Okinawa largely centers on the different mental health crises experienced by Brina’s parents. Her father is scarred by PTSD from his service in Vietnam, as well as by a toxically masculine pressure to protect his family. Her mother has developed alcoholism after growing up in poverty and then moving to a country that’s racist against her. The question that Brina strives to answer throughout the book is whether love can heal either of them. In this way, Speak, Okinawa reads like a deeply personal apology from Brina to her mother.

Speak, Okinawa blends Brina’s own narrative of being a confused young person finding her way with her parents’ stories about their lives and the history of Okinawa. For readers who are unfamiliar with Chinese-Japanese-Okinawan-American relations, the history of Okinawa, told in the first-person plural, is jarring in the most eye-opening way. The story is strongest when Brina connects the dots between the U.S. military’s colonization of Okinawa and her family’s, as well as her own, disrespect toward her mom.

Assimilation is often touted as a goal for immigrants in the U.S., but Brina shows how difficult it is for someone to assimilate when they’re already branded as an outcast—especially within their own family.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Elizabeth Miki Brina searches for whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization in her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.
NonfictionTrue CrimeLGBTQ+

Last Call

Review by Jessica Wakeman

A serial killer in New York City sounds like an atrocity that would dominate the headlines. Men were disappearing; days later, their body parts would be found in trash bags outside the city. These were grisly deaths. Yet because Richard Rogers, known as the Last Call Killer, murdered gay men in the 1980s and ’90s, during the height of the AIDS crisis, you may not have heard of him or his victims.

In Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, author Elon Green recounts this particularly frightening chapter in New York, contextualizing it within the city’s history of anti-queer violence. Weaving together multiple histories and jumping back and forth in time can be hit-or-miss as a narrative structure, but Last Call does it well, thanks to Green’s original reporting conducted with law enforcement, politicians, victims’ families and patrons at gay bars where Rogers lurked.

True crime too often focuses on the “bad guys,” as if repeatedly mulling over their motives may eventually explain evil. In Last Call, Green instead foregrounds Rogers’ known victims. He shows us the people they were and the lives they left behind. Their lives mattered, and Last Call is a testament to how homophobia shaped these men’s lives and, eventually, their deaths.

Readers should be aware that there’s a lot of gore in Last Call; after all, Rogers dismembered his victims. Regular readers of true crime may not find the violence unexpected, but the cultural context of the AIDS panic adds additional weight to this brutality. To his credit, Green never lets us forget the amplified threats that existed for gay men during this era. However, because Last Call shows how the passage of time often changes culture for the better, it’s ultimately uplifting—if a book about a serial killer could, in any way, be called “uplifting.”

In Last Call, Elon Green foregrounds the Last Call Killer's known victims, showing us the people they were and the lives they left behind.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Vera

Review by Jessica Wakeman

“I sometimes wondered what it would have been like to be raised a normal girl,” says the narrator of Carol Edgarian’s novel Vera. “But that was not my story.”

It is 1906, and Vera Johnson is being raised in a “respectable” household by a widowed Swedish woman pretending to be her mother. Vera’s real mother, however, is Rose, the madam of San Francisco's most infamous brothel. Rose has kept Vera a secret for nearly 15 years while continuing to provide for her financially. Then the destructive San Francisco earthquake happens, shaking more than the ground beneath their feet.

Readers may come to Vera for a tale about the San Francisco earthquake, or for a juicy novel about the women who populate society’s underbelly. But the novel is actually about motherhood and Vera’s struggle to be cared for as she needs to be. Vera yearns for her mother’s love and respect, and she doesn’t care about how Rose’s disreputable place in society could impact her own life.

The many memorable characters populating Vera may provide interesting fodder for book club conversations. Vera is feisty and chafes at the confines of life in this era; her refusal to conform brings to mind a more street-savvy Scout Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. She is forced to be stronger than any 15-year-old should have to be. And Rose intriguingly demonstrates the tough choices a woman of her time must make in order to be truly free.

That said, the plot of Vera is overly complicated and features a bloated cast of characters. Rose’s employees and neighbors, as well as the city’s politicians, all have subplots to which Vera is only loosely connected. As a result, much of the novel feels like it’s scrambling to tie up loose ends rather than foregrounding the narrator’s own story.

Vera is an engaging novel that could have been executed more succinctly.

Readers may come to Vera for a tale about the San Francisco earthquake, or for a juicy novel about the women who populate society’s underbelly. But the novel is actually about motherhood and Vera’s struggle to be cared for as she needs to be.
NonfictionEuropean HistoryBiography

The Crown in Crisis

Review by Jessica Wakeman

In the past 30 years, the British monarchy has kept the tabloids busy with Diana, Charles, Camilla, Harry, Meghan et al. So you would be forgiven for knowing little or nothing about the royal family’s biggest scandal before our current era: when King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson. Consider filling in the gaps in your knowledge with The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to Abdication by journalist and historian Alexander Larman.

The year was 1936, and Edward was a reluctant monarch, unmarried and lonely. He became enchanted by society gadfly Simpson; some even say he was obsessed with her. That she was married and American (both no-nos according to the British public) did not rein in Edward’s sexual pursuit. If having Simpson as a wife meant finessing her quickie divorce and abdicating his throne, so be it.

Certainly Edward’s determination changed the course of history. Some view his pursuit of Simpson as the ultimate love story, but The Crown in Crisis takes a darker view of his behavior. Simpson seemed less invested in the relationship and was willing to walk away. Larman illustrates how Edward's “patriarchal entitlement” to be with her, no matter what, upended her life and caused enormous suffering. The Crown in Crisis presents Edward as reckless in his love life, as well as in his political associations. (He was more sympathetic to Germany’s ascendant Nazi party than the British government would have liked him to be.) This was a man who enjoyed the perks of his wealth and privilege but shrugged off many of his responsibilities and ran his staff ragged keeping up with his whims.

Larman examines all sides of this unprecedented crisis: the prime minister, the king’s courtiers, media magnates, religious leaders, Nazis, fascists, the couple’s posh friends and even the royal family. He blends previous reporting and newly published archival sources into a deeply researched account that will fascinate royal lovers and history fans alike.

Many aspects of British culture have changed since 1936. In The Crown in Crisis, the appeal of palace intrigue stays the same.

In The Crown in Crisis, historian and journalist Alexander Larman details one of the royal family’s biggest scandals: When King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson.

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