Mari Carlson

FictionLiterary Fiction

A Room Called Earth

Review by Mari Carlson

In Madeleine Ryan’s debut novel, A Room Called Earth, the young autistic narrator relishes getting ready for a house party in Melbourne, Australia. She attends to a series of preparation rituals: picking out her outfit, dabbing the backs of her ears with her grandmother’s perfume, making a vegan sandwich, dancing in front of the living room mirror, collecting martini ingredients and having the taxi drop her a block from the party so she can enjoy the approach. Her high heels hurt soon after she arrives. She endures hearing about an acquaintance’s latest crush. She is about to leave when she meets a man in line for the bathroom, and they enjoy a refreshing conversation.

In the vein of Virginia Woolf, the narrator’s incisive commentary pierces through descriptions of quotidian affairs. “We can’t go without experiencing ourselves for a millisecond,” she says, and she never fights her subjective perspective. She inquires into what people really mean by what they say, pokes through the rooms of the party house and analyzes every encounter she witnesses.

The freedom to experience the narrator’s inner world makes room for objective reality. Melbourne’s neighborhoods come alive. Mud and stars, butterflies and books inhabit the narrator’s consciousness like companions. There’s a sacredness surrounding the individuals she meets and with whom she speaks, shown by the treatment of dialogue on the page. Short exchanges are set apart from the rest of the text with double spaces, while long speeches are crammed into single-space blocks, a visual expression of how people can crowd and overwhelm the narrator. But with the man she meets in the bathroom line, the anxiousness and intensity of the party give way to the pleasure of shared company.

A Room Called Earth, written by a neurologically diverse author, culminates in unexpected intimacy, not only between the narrator and her new friend but also between the reader and an extraordinary mind.

A Room Called Earth, written by a neurologically diverse author, culminates in unexpected intimacy, not only between the narrator and her new friend but also between the reader and an extraordinary mind.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Migrations

Review by Mari Carlson

Reminiscent of adventurous Arctic tales like Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Peter Geye’s Northernmost, Migrations portrays a woman whose tragic life yields profound wisdom.

Abandoned by her mother as a child, Franny struggles with a sense of home but easily identifies with the sea and with birds. She is constantly searching for her lost mother, and along the way, she meets a professor-activist fighting mass extinction from his teaching post in Galway, Ireland. They marry, but Franny continues to roam, haunted by her past. Following a stint in prison, she travels to Greenland without her husband. There, she convinces the captain of a fishing ship to take her aboard, as the Arctic terns she tracks on their last migration can lead the crew to what might be the last schools of fish. Together, this crew creates an unlikely family of restless souls.

Details of Franny’s story emerge in unpredictable blips, like the tiny flashing lights of the bird-tracking devices that Franny and the crew watch on her laptop. Toggling back and forth in time and from place to place, the plot floats through gut-wrenching vignettes of Franny’s escapades, strung together like clues on a life-or-death scavenger hunt. Her life is a series of calamities, some of which she causes. It’s unclear whether she’s migrating from or to something.

Whether she’s in Australia, Trondheim, Greenland, Galway, Scotland, Yellowstone or Antarctica, Franny’s unsettled heart sets the scene. She’s endeared to the fishing crew, but they are also the enemy; she is a vegetarian, a lover and protector of wild animals, among whose numbers she counts herself as both predator and prey. The narrative, set in an unspecified future time, resides on the suspenseful, razor-thin edge between her extremes.

Although Franny may not know where home is, she is home to conflicting truths. Prepare to mourn a bleak image of the future and to embrace an everlasting hope in Franny’s heroic example.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Charlotte McConaghy on finding hope amid humanity’s destructive impact on the earth.

Reminiscent of adventurous Arctic tales like Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Peter Geye’s Northernmost, Migrations portrays a woman whose tragic life yields profound wisdom.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

Little Eyes

Review by Mari Carlson

In the thought experiment of Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin’s latest novel, kentukis are the latest craze. They’re motorized, furry pets, like anonymous webcams on wheels.

An explanation of how kentukis work emerges slowly, mysteriously, encounter by encounter. If you purchase a kentuki, you become its “keeper.” Someone else will purchase the rights to be the “dweller,” operating the toy and observing the keeper’s environment through the kentuki’s lens. Kentukis can be one of a handful of endearing animals, from dragons to moles. The people behind them, too, are a host of believable characters, ranging from preteen boys and teenage girls to retired people. But the kentukis’ too-good-to-be-true cuteness, coupled with the ordinary lives of the people who interact with the toys, foretells horrifying consequences.

Drawn in quotidian elegance, the novel is a string of nonstop, colorful vignettes that follow a handful of international kentuki connections: Peru-Germany, Italy-Norway, Croatia-Brazil, Sierra Leone-Hong Kong, among others. The randomness of the assorted connections breeds unpredictability. Kentukis can move on their own, but only so far, and not on rough terrain. They make noise, not speech. Many connections create ways to communicate, but some communication becomes unwanted, and some develops into co-dependence. Some keepers grow fearful or wary of their kentukis, while some dwellers are set off by their keepers’ strange behavior. The links spread across the globe like a sticky web.

Kentukis raise real-world questions about privacy and increasingly invasive, animated technology. Like Furbies or clowns, kentukis are both adorable and horrible. They’re reminders of basic human needs and vulnerabilities. They’re objects of obsession and companionship, and yet they can also be too close for comfort.

If Schweblin’s sci-fi thriller Fever Dream made sleep difficult, Little Eyes raises the unease quotient. The book seems to watch viewers creepily as it unfolds. 

In the thought experiment of Samanta Schweblin’s novel, motorized, furry pets—anonymous webcams on wheels—have an unusual effect on society.
FictionFamily Saga

Northernmost

Review by Mari Carlson

Following The Lighthouse Road and Wintering, Peter Geye’s latest novel about the Eide family, Northernmost, combines a contemporary love story with a historical tale of Arctic travail. 

Minnesota, 2017: Greta no longer loves her husband. On her way to confront him in Oslo, where he has a work event, she spontaneously detours to Hammerfest, a town in northern Norway. There, she visits her family’s graves and discovers a link to her past she’d never known: Her ancestor Odd Eide survived two weeks alone in the Arctic in 1897. His story inspires Greta to tell her own. 

Toggling between Odd’s and Greta’s stories, Northernmost has something for everyone: history, adventure, romance and spiritual awakening. Inspired by Fridtjof Nansen’s true expedition to the farthest point yet reached in the Arctic Circle, Odd’s journey across a sea of white and cold, complete with riveting bear encounters and near starvation, is as harrowing as his return home, where his wife and fellow villagers think he’s dead. Intertwined with the story of the slow rejuvenation of his marriage is the story of Greta’s renewed passion. Both Greta and Odd experience longing and loneliness, stark emotions depicted as clearly as the breathtaking wintry settings. And then, out of the darkness come peace and love as warm as the tropics. 

Strong characters steer the narrative with conviction. Stoic Greta is an independent woman, navigating divorce with both relatable mistakes and self-aware intention. Although not a believer in God, Odd is faithful, living each day for his family. His pithy and personal manner of describing what happens to him, and his feelings about these events, dignify the text. As Greta learns about Odd’s admirable bearing and spirit, she gains resolve, as well as a newfound buoyancy. 

Geye rounds out his Eide family trilogy with a beautiful ode to the enduring human spirit.

Following The Lighthouse Road and Wintering, Peter Geye’s latest novel about the Eide family, Northernmost, combines a contemporary love story with a historical tale of Arctic travail. 

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Golden Key

Review by Mari Carlson

In Marian Womack’s shadowy novel, ingenious women confront turn-of-the-century uncertainties.

In the 1880s, three children disappeared from their estate in the Norfolk Fens. Since then, other children have also disappeared, with some connection to a green light, white fungus, fog, a marsh and the appearance of a man named Samuel Moncrieff. Twenty years later, in the wake of Queen Victoria’s death, detective Helena Walton-Cisneros and her new friend, Eliza Waltraud, search for answers to this mystery.

Strong characters with murky pasts lend urgency to the quest for answers. The book begins in mourning, as Samuel has lost his lover, while England has lost its queen. Despite Samuel’s bleak, directionless mood, the new century promises to be one of light and of new opportunities. Samuel’s storyline is shrouded in mystery, but Helena’s drive for clarity about what happened in the Fens brings a crucial sense of order to the novel. She enlists help from Eliza, who plans to right the wrongs done to an academic writer, Eunice Foote, whose work was credited to her male colleagues. Together, these women’s minds and hearts open to possibilities they never expected. 

Women are the story’s primary actors, finding clever ways—including the occult—to skirt discrimination and advance their cause during a turbulent time. The action swirls in a maelstrom of spiritualism, revived after Victoria’s passing, and the subsequent rational backlash. 

Steeped in a slew of influences, The Golden Key bends genres. It’s part Shirley Jackson’s stories of inner demons, part Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (referenced throughout the book), part Astrid Lindgren’s faith in children’s resilience and part ghost story. A lush, unsettled atmosphere echoes in lugubrious descriptions of the Fens.

Enter a mysterious world in the hands of capable women. Getting drawn into this story is easy; getting out again is trickier.

In Marian Womack’s shadowy novel, ingenious women confront turn-of-the-century uncertainties.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Shuggie Bain

Review by Mari Carlson

Witness the tragic descent of Agnes Bain through the loving eyes of her youngest son, Shuggie.

In poverty-stricken 1980s Glasgow, Agnes is the beloved daughter of hardworking Catholics. Known for her elegance and beauty, and already married with two children, she wins the heart of a charismatic taxi driver named Big Shug. Agnes, her children and Shug move in with her parents, but trouble begins after they have Shuggie. One by one, the members of Agnes’ family leave until only she and her favorite, Shuggie, remain.

During the Thatcher era, “industrial days [are] over,” and in an increasing privatized economy, miners and shipyard workers are unemployed, given to restlessness. “Out came the characters shellacked by the grey city, years of drink and rain and hope holding them in place.” Scenes of abandoned coal mines and council housing mimic the dismal mood in the Bain household. Chapters chronicle a downward spiral of drinking, fighting, fleeing, stealing, revenge, sexual aggression and parties gone awry. But a few loving encounters offer hope amid trauma: Shuggie’s big brother saves the day more than once, and Shuggie befriends a girl whose mother is also an alcoholic.

Amid Shuggie’s struggles to be “normal,” Shuggie Bain develops a palpable sense of helplessness. Picked on for playing with dolls, dancing, dressing neatly and speaking with proper diction, he is mostly friendless. He works hard to help maintain his mother’s dignity, often staying home from school to keep “uncles” at bay and to make sure they have food. But despite his best efforts, Agnes’ condition is beyond his control.

Douglas Stuart’s anxious novel is both a tragedy and a survival story. Shuggie is as neglected as Glasgow, but through his mother’s demise, he discovers his strength. Shuggie Bain celebrates taking charge of one’s own destiny.

Douglas Stuart’s anxious novel is both a tragedy and a survival story. Shuggie is as neglected as Glasgow, but through his mother’s demise, he discovers his strength.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Gimmicks

Review by Mari Carlson

Chris McCormick’s tightly knit second novel begins and ends in anonymity. The opening scene finds an Irish professional wrestler searching for a pub, and the final scene is haunted by the shell of a character—bookends that are a testament to the novel’s timeless, universal message about the fine line between performance and authenticity.

In the 1970s, Ruben and Avo are Armenian cousins-of-cousins, but they’ve considered themselves brothers ever since Avo, a lovable giant, defended the bookish Ruben from classmates’ taunting. Then Ruben’s backgammon opponent, Mina, falls for affable Avo. When Ruben and Mina leave for a backgammon competition in Paris, Avo fears he’ll never see them again. Ruben disappears into France and beyond, and Avo becomes a professional wrestler in America. The triumvirate do eventually meet one another again, under circumstances none of them could have imagined. Many years later, Mina seeks out Terry, Avo’s American pro-wrestling manager, to fill in the gaps of Avo’s mysterious past.

The novel takes place in the generation after the Armenian genocide, incorporating Turkey’s denial of the event into its themes of deception and identity. Chapters toggle among the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, reinforcing time’s circularity. It becomes clear that whether or not historical atrocities are acknowledged, they inevitably shape the past, present and future.

For all the literal and figurative backstabbing throughout the book, there’s plenty of caring, too. The characters’ eccentricities—Terry’s love of cats, Avo’s fanny pack, Ruben’s stiff suit, Mina’s luck—set them apart as much as they draw them to each other. The story plays with the tension between our differences and similarities while also questioning what’s genuine and what’s an act.

McCormick’s facility for metaphor encourages us to keep asking questions and pushing boundaries. Through these creative associations, The Gimmicks stretches the reader’s imagination and capacity for empathy. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Chris McCormick discusses the big questions of The Gimmicks and his lifelong fascination with professional wrestling.

Chris McCormick’s tightly knit second novel begins and ends in anonymity. The opening scene finds an Irish professional wrestler searching for a pub, and the final scene is haunted by the shell of a character—bookends that are a testament to the novel’s timeless, universal message about the fine line between performance and authenticity.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

Review by Mari Carlson

Based on the 1726 story of a British woman who birthed rabbit parts, Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen brings the past to life with authenticity and unexpected relevance.

The novel opens as Zachary, an apprentice, accompanies his master, surgeon John Howard, to a traveling exhibition of medical curiosities. Shortly afterward, Howard’s patient, Mary, becomes an attraction of her own after the strange birthing. Her reputation follows her to London, where the king summons Howard, Zachary and other surgeons to investigate her as a scientific and preternatural specimen.

The narrative unfolds largely from Zachary’s perspective. Well-off and educated by his town’s standards, Zachary is nevertheless an adolescent, both child and man. The son of a zealous minister, he is also under the tutelage of a John Locke devotee and skeptic. When his new friend Anne, the exhibitioner’s daughter, exposes him to London’s secret haunts, he seems innocent and parochial.

Palmer’s previous two novels, Version Control and The Dream of Perpetual Motion, were literary fantasies, playing with time travel and futuristic technology. In Mary Toft, Palmer reaches into the past for imaginative insights into today’s conundrums. Its antiquated language enhances the characters’ genuine believability. Their sentiments aren’t relegated to a bygone era; rather, they address contemporary audiences directly about present-day issues, namely, how a hoax (aka “fake news”) turns into fact.

Palmer depicts London as a sprawling monster city gobbling up the countryside’s economy and land. Its hustle and bustle conjure current, not just 18th-century, conditions. The novel’s portrayal of motherhood as a woman’s most valued asset also raises the question of how far, in many ways, we haven’t come.

A zesty blend of bawdy entertainment and thoughtful coming-of-age story, Mary Toft tantalizes the contemporary conscious as its truth-seeking characters wade through truth-defying circumstances.

This zesty blend of bawdy entertainment and thoughtful coming-of-age story tantalizes the contemporary conscious.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Divide Me by Zero

Review by Mari Carlson

Lara Vapnyar’s sixth book is a clever novel encompassing love and death, couched in an instruction manual.

A writer living in New York and the mother of two, Katya is in the middle of a divorce, is engaged to a rich man she doesn’t love and is still in love with another man who will never be hers. Meanwhile, Katya’s dying mother makes notes for a math textbook that’s very different from the guides she wrote in Moscow. This textbook is intended for nonmathematicians, as it applies math to real life. These notes are Katya’s last link to her fading mother, who uses the math to make sense of her messy life.

In secular and chaotic post-Soviet Russia, math provides a clear-cut rationality in which Katya’s mom can put her faith. But to Katya, her mother’s cryptic math notes pose more questions than answers. Still, she discovers creative connections between concepts such as “operations in curved space” and her situation. Her house is like artist M.C. Escher’s “spatial paradox,” with staircases leading nowhere and rooms that don’t attach. Negative numbers take up actual, painful space. Parallel lines meet in a multidimensional universe where losing a mom feels similar to falling in love.

Graphs, illustrations, pictures and notes in the text add levity. Katya is very funny as well. She gets in trouble for laughing in sensitive situations. Her behavior is extreme and childlike. She’s easy to love, and her first-person voice is accessible and engaging. The men to whom she’s attached are bright and witty, sharing her love of literature and film. She mentions Alice Munro as a favorite author, and Vapnyar’s own admiration of Munro shows in the earthy, elegant prose.

Toward the end, the math associations fall away, and the anecdotes become shorter and more serious. The dark side of comedy shows through in a culminating glimpse of a life on the verge of sweeping change. Ultimately, Katya is narrating her tale to herself, a self-help guide to grow up and become the adult her mother wishes her to be.

A math workbook about love and death, Divide Me by Zero yields humorous and profound life lessons.

Lara Vapnyar’s sixth book is a clever novel encompassing love and death, couched in an instruction manual.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Stolen Things

Review by Mari Carlson

Stolen Things, R.H. Herron’s debut thriller, begins with a rape, a murder and a missing girl. The rape takes place at a gathering of citizens protesting police brutality at a famous football player’s house outside San Francisco. Laurie, an ex-cop who is now a 911 dispatcher, and Omid, her police chief husband, spring into action when they hear that the rape victim is their daughter, Jojo. At the site, Omid has a heart attack, so Laurie is left caring for him and her distraught daughter, as well as facing demons from her past. But to Jojo, the pressing issue is her missing best friend, Harper.

If Laurie calls dispatching “two parts boredom to two parts adrenalin,” then Stolen Things is two parts adrenaline to one part boredom. It combines scenes of everyday family life with riveting encounters between those involved in the crime. The storytelling is as smooth as a veteran ER nurse guiding a victim through trauma. Herron inconspicuously toggles between Laurie’s and Jojo’s perspectives for a seamless account of moment-by-moment action. These two heroines are multifaceted—fun-loving and vivacious as well as deadly serious and efficient.

The book confronts a slew of today’s issues—such as police brutality against black people, #MeToo, institutional scandal and sexual orientation—with pathos and conviction. Chapters are short, emotional bursts of energy that fuel the quest for answers. Each side is given credence and receives critique.

Faint-hearted readers beware; rooted in real events, the tale is graphic at times. The anger is palpable, and so is the love between a mother and daughter willing to fight for each other’s lives.

Jojo and Harper steal jewelry as a prank in high school, but what is stolen from them is much more heinous. Stolen Things explores the lengths we go to recover what is lost.

Stolen Things, R.H. Herron’s debut thriller, begins with a rape, a murder and a missing girl. The rape takes place at a gathering of citizens protesting police brutality at a famous football player’s house outside San Francisco. Laurie, an ex-cop who is now a 911…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Doll Factory

Review by Mari Carlson

In Elizabeth Macneal’s debut sensation, an aspiring artist traverses the fine line between destruction and creation.

In 1851 London, Iris works long hours in a doll-making studio. Trapped into an apprenticeship beside Rose, her unhappy twin sister, Iris plots to build a new life in which she is free to paint while Rose runs her own shop. Iris also hopes to gain a position stable enough to help the toothless street urchin Albie, who sews doll clothes for the studio and becomes like a little brother to her. When up-and-coming artist Louis offers to give Iris paintings lessons—in exchange for her modeling for a painting he wants to enter into the Great Exhibition—she feels that she’s one step closer to making her plan succeed. But little does Iris know, a lonely taxidermist named Silas has his own designs for her.

Chapters interweave like the finest lace, as Iris, Rose, Albie, Louis and Silas each take a turn in the spotlight. They are trapped in an intricate web of desire and obsession, the passions that can make or break art. Iris risks stability in her desperation for artistic freedom, Rose’s chronic regrets pull her away from Iris, and Albie wants a new set of teeth so badly he almost betrays his benefactress. While Louis rebels against the academic standards of the time, depicting fleeting moments in his pre-Raphaelite paintings, Silas is dead-set on preserving his specimens for all time. Does art break down or build up ideals? Or both?

London’s splendor as well as its squalor come alive in visceral detail, and Macneal’s attention to artists’ processes spans the extremes from ecstatic joy to macabre revenge and everything in between. The Doll Factory isn’t just inspired by the Victorian era; it takes Thackeray’s social satire and Rodin’s natural forms and molds them into a stunning portrait of a modern heroine.

In Elizabeth Macneal’s debut sensation, an aspiring artist traverses the fine line between destruction and creation.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Fake Like Me

Review by Mari Carlson

Tracking the mysterious life and death of her role model, the unnamed narrator in Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me discovers how to follow her own lead.

A painter almost loses her chance at a successful career when her Manhattan studio-home burns. She has a summer to remake the paintings in her “Rich Old Ugly Maids” series or else she’s done for as an artist. She jumps at the chance to live and work at an artists’ retreat called Pine City in upstate New York, where her heroine, sculptress turned performer Carey Logan, lived and died. The narrator’s ability to complete her project depends on finding out what happened to Carey.

Fake Like Me roars with creative impulse. Bourland captures the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature of the narrator’s artistic life with whirlwind descriptions of gallery shows, love affairs and hard work both in the studio and out. Intensity ratchets up in novel’s middle, as she hunkers down to get her summer job done. When asked at a Pine City party whether her art is political, she answers, “I make things that are emotional. . . . And it’s all that I am.” Her work is huge and unwieldy, an exploration of the seven virtues: prudence, humility, chastity, modesty, temperance, purity and obedience. Like Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowsk’s TV series “The Decalogue,” “Rich Old Ugly Maids” turns religious concepts inside out with visceral attack.

As the narrator grapples artistically with these concepts, she also grapples with the inner workings of life at Pine City. The more she knows the artists there, she begins to questions them and the relationships she thought would provide guidance. Questions lead to an urge to act in the only way an artist knows. The writing becomes fierce and urgent, the fine line between creation and destruction blurred. The climax comes as summer ends, and this up-and-coming painter risks all to make a final splash in the dangerous waters of the upper-echelon art world.

Part thriller, part performance art and wholly revolutionary, Fake Like Me confronts American art culture with female bravado.

Tracking the mysterious life and death of her role model, the unnamed narrator in Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me discovers how to follow her own lead.

FictionThriller

Into the Jungle

Review by Mari Carlson

Delve into the heart of the Amazon in Erica Ferencik’s second action-packed thriller, Into the Jungle.

In 2010, while living in a hostel in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Lily Bushwold, a Boston native, meets Omar, an Amazon hunter turned motorcycle mechanic. Two scrappy yet tender kindred spirits, they quickly fall in love. When Omar is summoned back to his jungle village, Ayachero, to avenge his mourning family, Lily accompanies him. Little does she know it’s not just Omar she follows, but a mystical calling to discover her ca’ah, her life’s purpose, intrinsically bound up with the fragile jungle ecosystem.

A mosh pit of unexpected experiences, the jungle is not unlike Lily’s turbulent childhood, which she spent bouncing from foster home to foster home. Her character develops in the steamy cocoon of jungle extremes. On one hand, in the 10 months Lily spends in the jungle, she’s rained down upon by tarantulas, infected by sand flies, made to gut freshly hunted game (she’s a vegetarian) and squeezed by a python. On the other hand, she is befriended by a pig, macaws and an orphan boy, Tuti. She learns to harvest the poison of tree frogs. The pages of Into the Jungle teem with fascinating flora and fauna.

Densely packed, sensational scenes are offset by thoughtful engagement. Lily and Omar give each other “assignments” as a way to get to know one another. She communicates with the controversial shaman, Beya, in a way no one else can. Lily and For God’s Sake, the able river navigator, discuss ca’ah and the fate of the jungle. The village suspects Lily of being on the side of poachers and loggers threatening the jungle, and she must find cunning ways to distinguish herself from these greedy messengers of civilization and prove herself capable of the villagers’ respect.

A chilling journey into jungle life, Into the Jungle is also a deep probe into environmental ethics and love.

Delve into the heart of the Amazon in Erica Ferencik’s second action-packed thriller, Into the Jungle.

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