Lauren Bufferd

FictionHistorical Fiction

Love and Fury

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Radical thinker and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, a baby girl who would grow up to become the author of Frankenstein. Samantha Silva’s Love and Fury uses the last 11 days of Wollstonecraft’s life as a frame, allowing her to tell her life story to her infant daughter. 

Wollstonecraft’s childhood was shaped by a dissolute father and a withholding mother. A young woman of remarkable intelligence and precociousness, she formed many of her theories about marriage and the evils of patriarchy early on. She set out to change opinions, first by running a small school with Fanny Blood, a botanical illustrator with whom she shared a passionate friendship, and then by writing, most significantly A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Wollstonecraft’s uncompromising romances with Swiss artist Henry Fuselli and American businessman Gilbert Imlay (father of Wollstonecraft’s first daughter, Fanny), though unsuccessful in the long run, led her to friendships with some of the 18th century’s most notable intellectuals and radicals, including Thomas Paine, William Blake and Abigail Adams.

Hers was a peripatetic life, spent traveling all over England with a short stint in Ireland as a governess. Living in Paris during the French Revolution inspired many of the ideas that found fruition in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In 1797, she married William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father, after a long friendship, though their relationship is barely alluded to in the novel.

After the birth, when it becomes clear that Wollstonecraft has a life-threatening infection due to a male doctor’s procedure for delivering the placenta, midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop is called to the house to tend to mother and daughter during their only days together. Love and Fury is told in a series of short chapters, alternating Wollstonecraft’s memories with Parthenia’s experience of caring for the ill woman and new baby. Silva’s attention to period detail creates a heartbreaking novel of compassion and grace, as well as an elegy to one of the world’s most influential thinkers.

Samantha Silva’s attention to period detail creates a worthy elegy to one of the world’s most influential feminist thinkers, Mary Wollstonecraft.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

The Kingdoms

Review by Lauren Bufferd

When Joe Tournier steps off a train from Glasgow in 1898 Londres, he can remember his name but very little else, and he barely recognizes his surroundings. He learns that the former British capital has been a colony of the French Republic ever since France won the Napoleonic Wars 90 years ago. So begins Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms, a deliciously transgressive work of steampunk speculative fiction.

Joe is diagnosed with “silent epilepsy,” the official name given to the visions and amnesia that sometimes afflict people in this world. Otherwise in good health, Joe is returned to the French family to whom he is enslaved and to his wife, Alice, none of whom he recalls. After several years and the birth of his daughter, Joe receives a postcard of a lighthouse in the Scottish islands with a message signed by “M.” Most mysteriously, the note arrives almost a century after it was written.

Joe is determined to get answers about his identity as well as that of the card’s sender. He returns to Glasgow, now the site of a simmering British rebellion, and then travels farther north where he discovers a portal that acts as a pass-through from one era to another. Finally, at the lighthouse, he meets Missouri Kite, a Royal Navy officer from 1807, and is drawn into a complicated plan to use technology such as telegraphs and steam engines to aid in the British fight against the French.

Along with a cast of characters that includes the real-life Admiral Lord Nelson, Joe and Kite race from Scotland to Spain, trying to sway the forces that led to France’s victory. The butterfly theory, which posits that complex changes often originate from minuscule actions, plays out as Joe ricochets from century to century, trying to help his friends and ensure his own future existence and that of his family.

Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in tidbits of naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.

Natasha Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.
FictionFamily Drama

Secrets of Happiness

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The challenges of balancing money and personal happiness wend their way through National Book Critics Circle Award winner Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness, which begins with a startling act of duplicity and ends with acceptance and reconciliation despite the characters’ changed circumstances.

The novel opens as Ethan, a gay lawyer in Manhattan, relates how his family was blown apart when his father, Gil, was named in a paternity suit by Nok, a woman he brought to New York from Thailand and with whom he had two sons. Gil’s wife, Abby, divorced him and journeyed to Bangkok to teach English, seeking serenity in the unfamiliar surroundings of Thailand, and Gil moved in with Nok after he had a debilitating stroke.

Meanwhile, Ethan’s new half brother, Joe, also travels to Thailand, hoping to bribe police to release his wastrel brother from prison. After Joe’s return to New York, he falls back into an awkward relationship with a high school girlfriend who was abruptly widowed and then swindled out of inheriting her husband’s estate by his greedy family.

The complex seesaw of love and finances, both offered and withheld, is explored throughout seven chapters and across four continents. Silber’s device—a secondary character from one chapter commanding the narrative in the next—is as effortless as a dragonfly skimming over a pond. The multiple perspectives bring an unexpected cohesion to the novel’s diverse cast, which includes Ethan’s boyfriend, who lives with his terminally ill former partner, and Gil’s old girlfriend, a free spirit who raises two daughters in Kathmandu, Nepal.

As more connections reveal themselves, the slim threads that bind these characters take on emotional weight, exposing the ways Gil’s infidelity has trickled out into the world. But Secrets of Happiness also explores the great generosity of love that exists in families, whether we’re born into them or choose them. Rarely is a novel of moral ideas so buoyant in spirit or so exquisitely crafted.

Rarely is a novel of moral ideas so buoyant in spirit or so exquisitely crafted.
FictionFamily Drama

The Arsonists’ City

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Hala Alyan’s second novel, The Arsonists’ City, follows the members of the Nasr family as they debate the sale of the family home in Lebanon. Like the Yacoub family in Alyan’s debut novel, Salt Houses, the Nasrs are spread all over the globe, but when Idris, the family patriarch, decides to sell the ancestral home in Beirut after his own father’s death, his wife and children unite in their shared desire to stop him.

Though the house in Beirut has been a constant touchstone, the Nasrs’ lives are marked by the effects of political upheaval, migration and globalization. In 1978, Mazna met Idris through mutual friends while she was training to be an actor in her hometown of Damascus, and she began secretly visiting him in Beirut, though her romantic interest was initially sparked by Idris’ best friend. After the city was torn apart by civil war, Idris and Mazna married and immigrated to suburban Los Angeles, where Idris worked as a cardiologist. Mazna abandoned her dreams of being an actor, raised their three children and took a job in a small garden center. 

Now their oldest daughter, Ava, lives in Brooklyn, and their middle son, Mimi, manages a restaurant in Austin, Texas, though most of his passion is thrown into a middling rock band. Mimi’s lack of fulfillment puts him at odds with his younger sister, Naj, whose music career took off internationally and who chose Beirut as her home, in part to keep her sex life far from the judgmental eyes of her parents.

Idris’ decision to sell the house brings the parents and adult children, with and without their life partners, to Beirut, where the safe distance that cushioned their complicated relationships is eliminated. Old passions, betrayals and bitter jealousies quickly arise.

Alyan, who is a family therapist as well as a poet and novelist, has a gift for depicting the knotty, messy but ultimately resilient bonds of family love. Though The Arsonists’ City lays bare how civil war and brutal violence impact a single family, it is the everyday, sometimes petty squabbles between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child that make this novel both memorable and relatable.

Hala Alyan, who is a family therapist as well as a poet and novelist, has a gift for depicting the knotty, messy but ultimately resilient bonds of family love.
FictionSpeculative Fiction

American Delirium

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Argentinian novelist Betina González’s English-language debut is a wild romp of aggressive deer, abandoned children and a cultish back-to-nature group of adults who have taken to the wilderness.

The story is told by three residents of an unnamed American city that’s barely survived some kind of economic or environmental apocalypse. Both Vik and his elderly co-worker, Beryl, are employees of the local natural history museum, though Beryl’s roots in the community date back to the 1970s, when she joined a commune of young people experimenting with mind-altering drugs. Beryl now leads her fellow senior citizens in an all-out armed war against the deer that have begun attacking people. (Note: There is some graphic animal cruelty here, so if you are sensitive to that, this is not your book.) 

At the same time, Vik, a chronically ill taxidermist from the (fictional) Caribbean island of Colonna, realizes that an intruder has broken into his home and is living in his closet. Meanwhile, Berenice, the daughter of the town florist, uncovers ties to the old commune after her mother disappears.

The storylines gradually come together over the search for a plant that originated in Colonna called albaria. It’s so potent that one dose creates life-altering hallucinations and a lifelong addiction.

The lively pace and absurdity of American Delirium could easily go off the rails, but González keeps a tight control over each of her characters even as they navigate their ever-stranger adventures. The novel is well served by translator Heather Cleary’s light touch, which allows for a certain amount of zaniness without sacrificing the plot or the well-defined characters.

In the author’s afterword, González explains that she drew inspiration from an international array of news stories, and it’s clear that some of the strangest elements in the novel are taken directly from these real-life events. Perhaps one person’s magic is another person’s realism after all.

Argentinian novelist Betina González’s English-language debut is a wild romp of aggressive deer, abandoned children and a cultish back-to-nature group of adults who have taken to the wilderness.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The voice of North African novelist Meryem Alaoui is a welcome one. Her debut, Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, is a powerful character study of a lively young sex worker who meets a filmmaker seeking her expertise.

The fast-moving novel is told by quick-witted and resilient Jmiaa, who reflects on her life in a bustling working-class Casablanca neighborhood, including the small bars, the open-air markets and the women who spend their evenings alongside her, drinking and chatting as they wait for potential clients. As a prostitute, Jmiaa keeps her mother in the dark about her occupation while earning enough money to support both herself and her 7-year-old daughter. Jmiaa also pays her pimp, Houcine, for protection and helps her dead-beat ex-husband, Hamid, who forced her into sex work after his business failed.

Aspiring Dutch filmmaker Chadlia is visiting Casablanca to research a movie about Moroccan urban life, and she hires Jmiaa as a consultant to keep the plot and dialogue authentic. But when Chadlia has trouble casting the film, Jmiaa steps in to help, opening doors into a life that neither woman could have predicted.

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth follows a familiar rag-to-riches storyline, but Jmiaa’s unfaltering optimism will keep readers hooked. She is matter-of-fact about the day-to-day details of her profession, boasting of her ability to provide for her family and proudly defending the women who share the streets with her.

Alaoui is ably served by her translator, Emma Ramadan, who captures Jmiaa’s irreverent spirit and sass. A simple glossary at the end adds context to the shop names, local personalities and food that contribute to the richness of everyday details.

The voice of North African novelist Meryem Alaoui is a welcome one. Her debut, Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, is a powerful character study of a lively young sex worker who meets a filmmaker seeking her expertise.

FictionComing of Age

The Lying Life of Adults

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Published in Italy in November 2019 (fans lined up outside bookstores to purchase their copies at the stroke of midnight), The Lying Life of Adults is the first novel from Elena Ferrante since the final installment of the Neapolitan quartet, the series that made her an international literary star, was published in 2016. Set in an upscale neighborhood in 1990s Naples, her new novel is a powerful coming-of-age story like no other.

Dutiful, bookish and sweet, Giovanna is on the cusp of puberty when she overhears her father comparing her to his ugly sister. Used to receiving compliments, Giovanna is alarmed but curious, and despite her parents’ concerns, she initiates a relationship with her tempestuous Aunt Vittoria. As Giovanna learns more about her father’s background, she begins to see how her parents’ lies and treachery have impacted their lives as well as hers.

Giovanna travels between areas of Naples so different, they might as well be opposing planets: from the comfortable, progressive household where she was raised with a secular education, including access to sex education, to her aunt’s working-class neighborhood, which is mired in violence, religion and superstitions, all expressed in the dialect that Giovanna’s parents forbade her to speak at home.

Ferrante’s ability to draw in her reader remains unparalleled, and the emotional story is well served by Ann Goldstein’s smooth and engaging translation. The novel simmers with overt rage toward parental deception, teachers’ expectations and society’s impossible ideals of beauty and behavior. For readers who are familiar with Ferrante’s work, there will be much that is recognizable: the belief that poverty can be transcended through education, the power of a talismanic object (in this case, a bracelet that may or may not have belonged to Giovanna’s paternal grandmother) and the absurd linkage of physical beauty with purity and goodness. There is even an unattainable man who holds the promise of escape.

But The Lying Life of Adults is very much its own story. Giovanna’s self-reliance and her efforts to become the kind of adult she has yet to meet will resonate with thoughtful readers.

The Lying Life of Adults is the first novel from Elena Ferrante since the final installment of the Neapolitan quartet, the series that made her an international literary star, was published in 2016. Set in an upscale neighborhood in 1990s Naples, her new novel is a powerful coming-of-age story like no other.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Transcendent Kingdom

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, takes us deep into the heart of one woman’s struggle to make sense of her life and family. 

Gifty was born in Huntsville, Alabama, after her family emigrated from Ghana. Now she’s finishing up a Ph.D. at Stanford, studying addiction and reward-seeking behaviors in mice. She has a personal connection with her chosen subject: When she was 10, her adored older brother, Nana, died of a heroin overdose after a basketball injury left him hooked on opioids. Their mother spiraled into depression soon after. Over a decade later, Gifty brings her mother to California after the older woman shows signs of another approaching breakdown. As Gifty keeps a watchful eye on her mother and continues her research, she begins to experience the pull of the strong evangelical Christian faith of her childhood, which she’d intended to leave behind in Alabama.

Gifty’s determination to better understand her family’s suffering and the tension between two opposing belief systems (faith and science) forms the heart of this empathetically written novel. As Gifty begins the final months of her experiments, the narrative shifts in time to include stories of Gifty’s father, known as the Chin-Chin Man, as well as Nana’s tragic tumble into addiction and Gifty’s single summer spent in Ghana. Gifty’s move from the tight embrace of organized faith to the wide-open questions of the sciences is depicted in exquisite detail. The casual but cutting racism of the all-white church of her childhood, the alienation she felt as a Black Christian woman pursuing a science degree and the unease with which she encounters other students in her lab are all unforgettable.

Gyasi’s bestselling debut novel, Homegoing (2014), was a multigenerational saga that traced the families and fortunes of two Ghanaian half sisters over three centuries. Despite its focus on a single family, Transcendent Kingdom has an expansive scope that ranges into fresh, relevant territories—much like the title, which suggests a better world beyond the life we inhabit.

Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, takes us deep into the heart of one woman’s struggle to make sense of her life and family. 

FictionLiterary Fiction

Empire of Wild

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline blends fantasy, monsters and contemporary First Nation struggles in a powerful and inventive novel. Dimaline drew inspiration from stories of the rougarou—a werewolf-like creature that is always on the lookout for misbehaving boys and girls—that she heard about as a child in the Métis community near Canada’s Georgian Bay in Anishinaabe territory.

Set in a small community in rural Ontario, Empire of Wild opens a year after Victor Beausoleil walked out in the middle of a heated argument about land rights with his wife, Joan. Nobody has seen him since, and though Joan’s close-knit family assumes Victor has left the marriage, she is convinced that something is preventing his return. His absence is getting to her when, one hungover morning, she stumbles into a tent revival service set up in a Walmart parking lot and believes she sees Victor there, dressed in a suit and leading the congregation in prayer. The minister, who introduces himself as Eugene Wolff, assures Joan that he is not her husband. But something about the situation doesn’t seem right, especially after Joan encounters the church’s financial backer, the creepy Thomas Heiser.

With her 12-year-old nephew riding shotgun and armed with Native medicine and advice from community elders, Joan goes in search of the truth. The quest will take her deep into indigenous traditions and present-day struggles over property and ownership.

Like Dimaline’s award-winning The Marrow Thieves, a chilling YA novel that takes place in a dystopian future of ecological devastation and gruesome colonization, Empire of Wild seamlessly mixes realistic characters with the spiritual and supernatural. As much a literary thriller as a testament to Indigenous female empowerment and strength, Empire of Wild will excite readers with its rapid plot and move them with its dedication to the truths of the Métis community.

Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline blends fantasy, monsters and contemporary First Nation struggles in a powerful and inventive novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Pew

Review by Lauren Bufferd

An ambitious fable that speaks to our need to classify and control, Pew tells the story of a person of indeterminate race and gender whose arrival throws a community into an existential crisis at the same time that they are readying themselves for the ominously named Day of Forgiveness.

Arriving at church one morning, residents of a small Southern town find a young person asleep in a pew. The person, who refuses to identify themselves or even speak, appears to be gender nonconforming as well as racially nonspecific. A well-intentioned family volunteers to take the stranger home, naming them Pew after the church bench where they were found. 

Pew’s silence creates a kind of blank slate that draws in members of the community; confessing fears, dreams and past transgressions is easier to a wordless stranger. But kindly curiosity quickly becomes threatened by Pew’s utter refusal to self-identify, reveal anything about their past or even allow a doctor to examine them. The community’s compassion turns quickly to fear and skepticism, and soon Pew is moved behind lock and key, separated from the other children and eventually relocated to a different part of town. 

In Pew, Catherine Lacey explores the human need to classify along with the narrowness of the human imagination. The townspeople’s urgent need to know just who and what Pew is appears shallow, even racist, when their level of care seems to ebb and flow with this information or lack of it. With creepy allusions to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and a timely exploration of gender’s mutability, Pew is provocative and suspenseful, a modern-day parable about how our fear of otherness stands in the way of our compassion. 

An ambitious fable that speaks to our need to classify and control, Pew tells the story of a person of indeterminate race and gender whose arrival throws a community into an existential crisis at the same time that they are readying themselves for the ominously named Day of Forgiveness.

FictionFamily Drama

The Boy in the Field

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The discovery of a random crime leads to an empathic exploration of family, connection and creativity in Margot Livesey’s ninth novel, The Boy in the Field. 

Walking home from school outside of Oxford, England, siblings Matthew, Zoe and Duncan Lang find Karel Lustig lying in a field, stabbed and left for dead. Their intervention saves his life, but it also sends each of them on a voyage of self-discovery. The oldest, Matthew, avidly follows the police investigation but also seeks out Karel’s family and is discomfited by their complicated dynamic, especially when Karel’s hostile older brother demands that Matthew assist him in finding his brother’s assailant. At 16, Zoe is discovering the potency of her own sexuality and is bored by boys her own age, so she pursues an American Ph.D. student at the neighboring college. Adopted as a baby, 13-year-old Duncan announces that he needs to find his birth mother and seeks permission from everyone in the family before trying to contact her. As the young people pursue their separate paths, their parents, Betsy and Hal, have their own problems, as their marriage is strained by Hal’s affair and Betsy’s withdrawal into her studies.

From her earliest work, Livesey has displayed an interest in how individuals cope with the physical and psychic space left by missing family members. Livesey’s excitement over her own discovery of family in Australia, after she believed she had no living relatives on her mother’s side, is reflected in Duncan’s search for the woman he calls his “first mother.”

It’s not the solving of the crime that moves the plot along—the discovery of Karel’s attacker is anticlimactic at best—but rather the quiet way Livesey explores the enduring and, in this case, elastic bonds of family love, even in the most stressful situations. Filled with detailed observation and a precisely delineated plot, The Boy in the Field will please readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories written with psychological precision and empathy.

The discovery of a random crime leads to an empathic exploration of family, connection and creativity in Margot Livesey’s ninth novel, The Boy in the Field. 

FictionComing of Age

Miss Iceland

Review by Lauren Bufferd

To say that Icelanders love literature may be an understatement. Per capita, Iceland has more books published and more books read than anywhere else in the world, and Reykjavík is well known for its authors and independent bookstores. But in the early 1960s, it was hard for a woman to penetrate Reykjavík’s artistic community. In her new novel, Miss Iceland, Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir explores this conflict.

Named after a dormant volcano by her weather-obsessed father, Hekla leaves her rural home in Dalir for Reykjavík with a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses and an English–Icelandic dictionary. She moves in with her former classmate Jon, a gay man who has moved to the capital with his sewing machine in hopes of getting a job designing costumes for the theater. But when Jon and Hekla find themselves firmly on the outside of their dreams, Jon accepts arduous work on local fishing trawlers, hoping to travel to a place where he is free to love whomever he chooses. At night after waitressing at the Hotel Berg, where avoiding the wandering hands of male patrons is as much a part of her day as serving coffee, Hekla stays up late to write.

Even after Hekla begins dating a poet, she is unable to break into the male-dominated literary cafe crowd. When she reveals her true vocation (and prolific output) to her boyfriend, the relationship falls apart, leaving her to wonder if she can pursue her dreams in Iceland at all.

Ólafsdóttir is an art historian and writer whose work is just beginning to receive the attention it deserves in the United States. This quietly moving tale of friendship and artistic fulfillment will appeal to readers of Elena Ferrante and Margaret Atwood, and the unusual setting offers an interesting twist on the portrait of an artist as a young woman.

In the early 1960s, it was hard for a woman to penetrate Reykjavík’s artistic community. In her new novel, Miss Iceland, Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir explores this conflict.

FictionFamily Drama

The Party Upstairs

Review by Lauren Bufferd

There’s nothing like a great New York City novel, and praise be to the novelists who take us there: Think Cathleen Schine, Elinor Lipman, Emma Straub, Jennifer Egan and now Lee Conell, whose exquisite debut gets to the heart of the city via the super of an Upper West Side co-op and his frustratingly underemployed daughter.

Martin lives in the building’s basement apartment with his wife, Debra, and 24-year-old daughter, Ruby, who has just moved home with an art history degree but no way to pay her student loans. Ruby’s friend Caroline, whose affluent family lives in the co-op penthouse, is also back home, but her wealth has cushioned the transition from college to what-comes-next. Though the girls have been friends since childhood, Ruby has grown increasingly discomfited by Caroline’s obliviousness to how her wealth brings her certain advantages.

The Party Upstairs is told over the course of a single day, beginning with an argument between father and daughter when Martin tries to get Ruby to meditate with him before work. Ruby readies herself for a job interview at the Museum of Natural History and plans to attend Caroline’s fancy penthouse party that night. Meanwhile, Martin’s anxiety is through the roof after dealing with needy tenants and his grumpy daughter, and now vivid memories of a recently deceased tenant are starting to trouble him. 

After a disheartening job interview, Ruby is further provoked by flashbacks of the decades of inequities between herself and Caroline and by an unfortunate run-in with a neighborhood photographer. By the time of the party, Ruby is moved to act out in a way that dramatically disrupts the course of her life and the lives of her parents.

Like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, The Party Upstairs will make you laugh even as you grapple with how money defines many of its characters’ most significant choices. As chapters alternate between Ruby’s and Martin’s perspectives, Conell’s realistic dialogue and thoughtful plotting take us deep into the often unexpressed shame linked to financial uncertainty. The Party Upstairs is an on-the-nose, of-the-moment dark comedy that delves deep into issues of wealth, gender and privilege in the most iconic of American cities.

Like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, The Party Upstairs will make you laugh even as you grapple with how money defines many of its characters’ most significant choices.

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