Sarah McCraw Crow

NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Didion and Babitz

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her introduction to Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik lays out her plan: “What this book attempts to do: See Joan Didion plainly; see Eve Babitz plainly. Except Joan Didion can’t be seen plainly,” only “through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.”

Babitz, born in 1943, was a child of Hollywood. Her father was a violinist for movie studios, her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. At 20, she made waves for posing nude with Marcel Duchamp as the two played chess. Though she wanted to be an artist and design album covers, she’s remembered for her memoir and short stories recounting the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll scene of early-1970s Los Angeles. But Babitz’s drug-fueled lifestyle got in her way, and her writing was largely forgotten until Anolik got to know her in 2012. Anolik’s profile for Vanity Fair and a 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve, sparked a resurgence of interest in Babitz’s writing. 

After Babitz died in 2021, Anolik stayed in touch with Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, who invited Anolik to examine the writer’s collection of letters. Anolik found one of particular interest: an unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to her friend Joan Didion. By turns earnest and angry, it sets up Babitz and Didion not as merely friends but as writerly rivals; Babitz chides Didion for dismissing Virginia Woolf and, Babitz claims, wanting to write like a man. The revelation led Anolik to begin another book about Babitz, this time including Didion.

The resulting book draws on copious interviews with Babitz’s and Didion’s networks, and the archives of Didion, Babitz and a host of others. Didion and Babitz situates the two in the 1970s LA scene that both wrote about, following them to the end of their lives—they died within days of one another. It’s a lively recounting of freewheeling partier Babitz and ambitious “cool customer” Didion. Despite the title, the narrative is notably tilted towards Babitz, more grounded in her work and life than in Didion’s. Still, the book captures a period and a vibe, and the celebrity gossip alone will entertain any ’70s-curious reader. Like Babitz herself, Didion and Babitz is an engaging narrative that Didion fans may quibble with, but that situates the two writers as the prime chroniclers of 1970s LA. 

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Wildes

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is known for his comedic plays (The Importance of Being Earnest), fiction (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and for his trial and imprisonment for his homosexuality. Less well known is that he had a family: his wife Constance, who advocated for more practical dress for women, and their sons Cyril and Vyvyan. In The Wildes, novelist Louis Bayard focuses on Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Like a play, The Wildes is structured in five acts. Act 1 opens in 1892 at a farm in the Norfolk countryside, where Constance and Oscar; their son Cyril; Oscar’s larger-than-life mother, Lady Jane Wilde; and their friends Arthur and Florence Clifton are spending a holiday. Soon, they are interrupted by the arrival of young Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie. The spoiled Bosie, a student at Oxford, seems to be one of Oscar’s “poets”—young, literary men eager to spend time with the great writer. This section, the longest in the novel, often feels like a drawing-room comedy—both Constance and Lady Jane Wilde are wits—but woven throughout is the slow dawning of Constance’s understanding about Oscar and her marriage, as she pieces together the reality of Oscar and Bosie’s relationship.  

Act 2 leaps forward five years, to a villa in Italy where Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan are living. The scandal of Oscar’s trial for gross indecency and homosexual acts, and his imprisonment, have forced Constance and the boys into exile, and they are hiding unhappily under a new last name. Acts 3 and 4 leap forward again, skipping over the tragedy of Oscar and Constance’s early deaths to episodes in Cyril and Vyvyan’s adulthoods—for Cyril, a pivotal day in the trenches in World War I France, and for Vyvyan, a theater outing with a family friend, on a night in 1925. Act 5 circles back to 1892 in that farmhouse in Norfolk, with a hopeful reimagining of this family’s life.

Although Bayard’s ending asks a little too much of Constance, the novel gives its heart to her; she’s a believable, loving, heartbroken character. In The Wildes, Bayard has built a story beyond the well-known tragedy, and though the novel never gives us Oscar’s perspective, we see him through Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan’s eyes—as an engaged father, loving but distant husband, self-absorbed keeper of secrets, and a terrified man unable to love openly.

 

In The Wildes, novelist Louis Bayard shows us Oscar Wilde through the eyes of his wife and sons—presenting a portrait of the poet and playwright as engaged father, loving but distant husband, self-absorbed keeper of secrets and a terrified man unable to love openly.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Volcano Daughters

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Gina Maria Balibrera’s debut novel, The Volcano Daughters, offers the epic early 20th-century tale of sisters Graciela and Consuelo, born into poverty and servitude on a coffee finca (plantation) on the side of a volcano in El Salvador.

In 1923, Graciela and her mother, Socorrito, are summoned to San Salvador for the funeral of the father that Graciela never knew: a peasant who rose to become the advisor to El Gran Pendejo, the strongman ruling El Salvador. There Graciela meets her sister, Consuelo, who was taken from the finca as a 4-year-old, and lives in luxury with her adoptive mother, Perlita. Soon, Graciela learns that El Gran Pendejo intends for her to advise him as her father did, though she’s only 9. Every morning Graciela is driven to the presidential palace, where she listens to the nonsense El Gran Pendejo spouts, repeating it back to him. Meanwhile, the teenage Consuelo, who failed at the same job, stays busy falling in love with her young art teacher.

That’s only the beginning of The Volcano Daughters, which spans 30 years and multiple settings, including Paris, San Francisco and Hollywood. As El Gran Pendejo’s pronouncements grow more bizarre, he lands on the idea of killing the country’s Indigenous people, who he claims are communists. The massacre that follows separates Graciela and Consuelo, as each flees the country thinking the other dead.

The Volcano Daughters is also a ghost story, as the ghosts of Graciela’s and Consuelo’s best friends from the finca—Lourdes, Maria, Cora and Lucia—share the novel’s first person-plural narration, sometimes disappearing into the story, other times butting in with commentary. 

Because The Volcano Daughters covers so much ground (both literally and narratively), and has a large cast of characters, including the ghost narrators, parts of the story slip by almost too quickly for the reader to connect with them emotionally. Still, Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances.

With its depictions of the 1930s Hollywood scene and Paris art world, and its imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history, The Volcano Daughters stands out. 

Gina María Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances, an imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Tell Me Everything

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth Strout’s 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, brings together Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess, all characters from Strout’s previous novels, following their lives and others’ in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Tell Me Everything traces the interactions between Bob and Lucy, who’ve built a friendship from their weekly walks along the river. (Lucy and her ex-husband, William, left New York for good when COVID-19 cases surged; and Bob is now married to Margaret, a minister.) Bob and Lucy share confidences and old puzzling stories, and after Bob introduces Lucy to Olive Kitteridge, Lucy visits Olive in her apartment, where they trade stories too. Olive plays a supporting role in the novel, but she gives voice to one of the novel’s themes: “Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded.”

Though the point of view dips into and out of many characters, the heart of Tell Me Everything is Bob Burgess. Bob faces late-midlife reckonings with his difficult brother, who blames Bob for a family tragedy; his troubled ex-wife, Pam; and Lucy, the friend who knows his secrets. When Bob, a lawyer, agrees to take on the case of a lonely man charged with murdering his mother (a woman that Bob, Olive and other characters remember from childhood, and not fondly), he lets this case take over his life. This murder mystery runs through the novel, adding a layer of darkness and propelling the action forward.

At the same time, Tell Me Everything is also a novel about all those unrecorded lives that Bob, Lucy, Olive and others share stories about, trying to find meaning and purpose in them. The narrative combines two of Strout’s preoccupations: the reverberating, intergenerational effects of poverty, and the power of connection and empathy, demonstrating how stories can illuminate our worst moments and commemorate our best.

Because it returns to beloved characters from My Name Is Lucy Barton, The Burgess Boys and Olive Kitteridge, and even includes cameos from Strout’s first two novels, Tell Me Everything may be most gratifying for Strout’s longtime fans. But these very human characters, with their specific yet universal questions about others’ lives and their own, are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.

Elizabeth Strout’s longtime fans will be delighted by the return of beloved characters in Tell Me Everything, but these very human characters are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Hope for Cynics

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Psychologist Jamil Zaki, who studies kindness and empathy as the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, begins his book with an unexpected confession: “In private, I’m a cynic, prone to seeing the worst in people.” The book is inspired by his colleague and friend Emile Bruneau, a psychologist who built a study of the “neuroscience of peace.” Bruneau believed that hope could change the world, and maintained that belief up until his death from terminal brain cancer in 2020, at age 47. Bruneau “diagnosed triggers that inspire hatred, and then designed psychological treatments to reduce conflict and build compassion.”

Bruneau died during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Zaki lost all hope. He realized, to his chagrin, that he had become cynical. Being a scientist, he began to take a hard look at this outlook. In Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, Zaki shows how and why cynicism is a harmful social disease, and what we can do about it.

In the first illuminating section, “Unlearning Cynicism,” Zaki identifies key differences between a cynical mindset, which is invariably negative, and a skeptical mindset, which allows room for hope. This section also lays out the conditions for today’s high levels of cynicism, noting that corruption and inequality can leave people feeling helpless and like they are unable to make a difference. And it offers persuasive research on perception, noting how often we misperceive others’ motivations (for instance, research shows that most people like helping others, though most of us think otherwise) and shares historical episodes that illustrate how overly negative assumptions can lead to catastrophic decisions.

Later sections offer narratives of people whose hopeful mindsets have led them to change their communities for the better. Throughout, Zaki shares his own failures to stay hopeful, recounting his conversations with Bruneau and Bruneau’s widow, and he explores the factors that may have contributed to Bruneau’s optimistic outlook. Hope for Cynics is a timely guide, and Zaki’s tribute to his radically hopeful friend adds an endearing, personal layer to this book.

 

Psychologist Jamil Zaki’s illuminating Hope for Cynics shows how and why cynicism is a harmful social disease, and what we can do about it.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Pearl

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sian Hughes’ debut novel, Pearl, offers a coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor.

As the novel opens, narrator Marianne and her teenage daughter, Susannah, are taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes, in Marianne’s home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Her mother’s unexplained disappearance has colored Marianne’s entire life—a mystery that she can’t move beyond. Marianne recounts her idyllic, idiosyncratic rural childhood in an old farmhouse with her creative mother, who sang folk songs and shared ancient stories. Later, during the bumpy, sad years after the disappearance, Marianne’s father Edward, a history professor, tries to patch together a life for Marianne and her younger brother, Joe. The adult Marianne narrates in an episodic, not-quite-linear fashion, looking back from early middle age to circle the mystery of her mother. The narrative is particularly strong in conveying the younger Marianne’s self-absorbed, mishap-filled adolescence, and her lurch into young adulthood.

Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and is based in part on a medieval poem of the same title. Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences and images. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis. Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast. To that end, each chapter opens with part of a nursery rhyme or nonsense poem (“As I went over the water, / The water went over me. I saw two little blackbirds / Sitting in a tree”). Throughout, the spirit of Marianne’s missing mother hovers, and this underlying mystery pulls the reader forward, though the story remains more immersive than propulsive.

Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.

Poet Sian Hughes brings vibrant language and a droll sensibility to her debut novel, Pearl, which explores a woman’s grief after losing her mother at 8 years old, set against the gentle landscape of English village life.
NonfictionScience

Do I Know You?

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Science journalist Sadie Dingfelder has known since childhood that she isn’t great at remembering people or faces. But for decades, she failed to notice that other people didn’t make the mistakes that she did, like hopping into strangers’ cars, or getting lost in her brother’s small house. After she mistook another man for her husband in a grocery store, Dingfelder began to wonder if her quirks indicated something larger. She decided to undergo a test and learned that she’s faceblind: She truly doesn’t remember faces. 

But that’s only the beginning of what she learned over the next year. “Welcome to my midlife crisis,” she writes in her charming debut, Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination. “There will be no fast cars or sexy pool boys, but there will be answers to questions that have dogged me my entire life. Mysteries like: Why didn’t I ever learn how to drive? Why hasn’t anyone ever asked me out on a date? Why was I so lonely as a kid, and how did I manage to make so many friends as an adult? (And why, despite having so many friends, do I still feel lonely?)” Dingfelder soon learned that along with faceblindness, she’s stereoblind—the world she sees is flat, not three-dimensional. She also learned that her brain doesn’t create its own mental imagery; when she reads a novel, her brain doesn’t create pictures or scenes. 

Dingfelder weaves her story into the science of how brains process information like faces and names, and how one type of neurodiversity, like faceblindness, is often linked to another. Throughout Do I Know You?, she’s both cleareyed and vulnerable, and though her mishaps and misunderstandings are often comical, she also conveys the losses that she’s only recently begun to mourn. 

Do I Know You? offers a specific story about one woman’s neurodiverse brain (and the book’s appendix offers practical resources for parents who think their child might be faceblind or stereoblind), but Dingfelder makes the specific universal, showing readers both the remarkable diversity in how our brains encounter the world, and how much more we still have to learn about ourselves.

In Do I Know You?, faceblind journalist Sadie Dingfelder explores her condition and reveals the remarkable neural diversity of humans.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Take Back Your Brain

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Before creating her popular podcast Unf*ck Your Brain, Kara Loewentheil was already ambitious and accomplished: Her accolades include a degree from Harvard Law School, a clerkship for a federal judge and a job as a litigator for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I had it all,” she writes, but “the problem was that my brain did not seem to share this understanding. . . . I felt like I was being held hostage by a voice that was a cross between a middle school bully and a disapproving English governess.”

Through working with a life coach, Loewentheil learned cognitive behavioral techniques to challenge her unproductive thoughts and emotions, but even after getting certified as a life coach herself and coaching other women for years, something was still missing. “What we needed to really change our lives—and therefore change the world—was feminist coaching.” Loewentheil’s literary debut, Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get It Out, examines how sexist and patriarchal messages impact women’s thoughts and emotions and undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence. What’s more, she offers practical advice for living well despite those long-standing messages.

The book’s first section, “Reclaim Your Brain,” walks readers through the ways pervasive, sexist beliefs play into unconscious emotional and mental cycles. Loewentheil offers a written exercise called the “thought ladder” to help readers move from a negative or debilitating thought to a neutral or even positive thought. The book’s second section, “Reclaim Your Life,” covers body image, self-esteem, romantic relationships, money mindset and time. Each chapter is grounded in cultural and social history or reportage—for instance,the beauty and wellness industries—and offers practical exercises and prompts. Throughout, Loewentheil shares anecdotes and quotes from clients, as well the missteps and successes that make up her own story.

While some of the book’s cognitive-behavioral techniques may be familiar to readers who’ve seen therapists, the feminist framework is a welcome approach for our still-evolving 21st-century society. And Loewentheil is an engaging, straightforward guide.

 

Kara Loewentheil offers a feminist take on self-help in the engaging, straightforward Take Back Your Brain.
FictionLiterary FictionGothic Fiction

Enlightenment

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sarah Perry’s new novel, Enlightenment, opens on a late-winter Monday in 1997 in the office of the Essex Chronicle, a small newspaper in the English town of Aldleigh. Fifty-year-old Thomas Hart, who’s been quietly writing about literature and ghosts for 20 years, needs to write something new, his boss tells him, suggesting astronomy—the Hale-Bopp comet will soon be visible. That same day, Thomas receives a letter from the town museum with new information about the Lowlands ghost, who’s rumored to haunt the nearby Lowlands House, and who may be a 19th-century astronomer from Romania named Maria Vaduva. These two events will send Thomas on a quest to fill in the details of Maria Vaduva’s life and work.

Intertwined with Thomas’ story is that of 17-year-old Grace Macaulay, who’s linked to Thomas through their Baptist church; Thomas has also helped raise Grace after her mother died in childbirth. Grace stumbles into her first love, which sets off a series of complications that will rupture Thomas and Grace’s friendship. The story follows the two over the next 20 years, landing on pivotal moments for both.

But this plot description does little to give a real sense of Enlightenment. Despite its contemporary setting, the novel has a 19th-century feel, with an omniscient voice and a narrative peppered with letters, newspaper columns and (fictional) historical documents. And while it’s partly a ghost story, with an occasionally Gothic feel, Enlightenment is also a novel about the love of astronomy. There’s a feminist story, too—that of Maria Vaduva, the neglected 19th-century astronomer—woven around Thomas’ and Grace’s stories. But mostly, this is a novel about friendship and belonging, the grief after a friendship is lost and the difficult path to forgiveness.

Many of Perry’s sentences are startlingly beautiful, creating an atmospheric sense of setting and character. If some of Enlightenment’s goings-on are a bit elliptical, and if some secondary characters feel a little wispy, not quite coming into focus, that too seems part of the novel’s aim and its charm. There’s a hint of the literary romance and mystery of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, though Enlightenment is more playful. Wide in its scope despite its narrow small-town setting, this gentle but insistent and inventive novel will tug on you in surprising ways.

Sarah Perry’s inventive, atmospheric novel Enlightenment has a 19th-century feel despite its contemporary setting, with a hint of the literary romance and mystery of A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For her third novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club, Helen Simonson returns to the English seaside, this time in the summer of 1919. The Great War has ended, the flu epidemic has passed and the men have returned. But for Constance Haverhill, the war’s end has brought an end to the work she’d loved: keeping the books for an estate. Now her prospects are uncertain; her mother died of the flu, her brother is pointedly unwelcoming and she’s stuck serving as a companion to the elderly Mrs. Fog at a seaside hotel. 

But soon, Constance’s lonely summer is interrupted by the trouser-wearing, motorcycle-riding Poppy Wirrall and her brother, Harris. The siblings and their mother are staying at the hotel while their grand house is renovated. During the war, Poppy and other young women delivered messages and supplies via motorcycle, and now they’re trying to build a motorcycle taxi business. Harris, a veteran who lost a leg flying bombing missions, is suffering and moody; he wants to fly again, but the world is telling him he can’t. 

The story follows Constance, her new friends and a large cast of secondary characters through the summer, as they struggle to find their way in a culture that’s still shocked by women riding motorcycles, despite all the changes the war brought. Throughout, the novel weaves in issues like racism, jingoism, the repercussions of war and the limitations that class expectations put on women. Which is not to say that this is a heavy novel; the flatly villainous characters who cause trouble—several upper crust Brits and a late-arriving American—add levity to some scenes, although the novel’s tone is generally more introspective, without the comedic punch of Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Readers may wish that the novel spent more time with the Motorcycle Club women and their hopes and efforts and discontents, rather than with subplots that meander away from the motorcycles and aeroplanes of the title. Still, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment when both everything and nothing had changed, along with a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions, romantic entanglements and a bittersweet, fitting ending.

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment, just after WWI, when both everything and nothing had changed for women in England—plus a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions and romantic entanglements.
NonfictionMemoir

The Exvangelicals

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

When Sarah McCammon was growing up in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, every aspect of her life was governed by her family’s evangelical faith, a faith underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian school with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” young adulthood that forbid sex and, essentially, dating until marriage. Within this sheltered realm, the possibility of eternal damnation was ever-present. “The thought that there was something I could do that was beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness terrified me, and often kept me awake at night,” McCammon writes. “Intrusive thoughts would slip in randomly, at any moment . . . and suddenly I’d be gripped by fear.”

In The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, McCammon details her journey away from this upbringing, into a life as a questioning adult and then a journalist covering the 2016 Trump campaign and the reproductive rights beat for NPR. Mixing memoir and reportage, McCammon focuses on the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world, often with ambivalence, a group loosely known as exvangelicals.

McCammon describes the mix of comfort, fear and trauma she experienced growing up: her confusion about her parents’ rejection of her surgeon grandfather, who came out as gay after his wife died; her first encounter with secular teens during a stint as a Senate page; the shock of the physical punishment her parents administered after she had a panic attack in high school. She weaves her story around those of her interviewees and the larger history of the evangelical movement’s quest for political ascendance; for instance, Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-women’s rights newsletter informed her mother’s activism, and McCammon worked as a high school intern for Schlafly. Though her own exodus came years earlier, McCammon notes that fervent support of Trump is the factor spurring the majority of young people to exit the evangelical faith.

McCammon renders exvangelicals’ search for life after evangelicalism with sensitivity, showing the difficult balance of gaining self-acceptance and a broader understanding of the world while often losing the comfort of families and worship, especially for LGBTQ+ people. The Exvangelicals is a welcome addition to the story of faith in 21th-century America.

Mixing memoir and reportage, Sarah McCammon documents the growing number of young people who, like her, have left the evangelical fold to navigate a new world.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

James

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Percival Everett brings The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved supporting character, Jim, into the foreground of his new novel, James, a reworking of the Mark Twain classic. Though James stays with Huck Finn’s characters, setting and first-person perspective, it’s Jim, not Huck, who narrates this story. Jim overhears that he’s about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, and, as in the original, he runs, landing on Jackson Island, where he encounters Huck, who’s faked his own death to flee his abusive, alcoholic father. The two set out together, floating down the Mississippi.

James, like Huck Finn, is a picaresque tale, one of improbable adventures and moments of reunion. Jim and Huck encounter the con men the Duke and Dauphin, and though this duo get their comic moments, Everett highlights their quick turn to brutality. Jim and Huck are soon separated, and Jim recounts a series of horrors—Everett pulls no punches in depicting white enslavers’ treatment of enslaved people—leavened with the unexpected connections Jim makes. Unlike in Huck Finn, James’ Jim can read and write, secretly reading books from his enslaver’s library. In a feverish dream encounter after he’s bitten by a snake, Jim debates Voltaire, proponent of liberty and equality, forcing Voltaire to admit to his own racism. All the while, he longs for his wife and daughter, determined to gain his own freedom and theirs.

Everett balances a moral clarity about the atrocities of slavery with a dry, Twainian humor, even turning Twain’s dialect on its head to great effect: In this telling, enslaved people use this stereotypical “slave” dialect only around white people, so as to seem unthreateningly foolish, while laughing about it together in private. On his journey, Jim repeatedly encounters other enslaved people being brutalized by white people, but he’s powerless to intervene; life has taught him that to do so leads to greater violence, and sometimes death. Throughout, the novel’s revelations feel both surprising and convincing, and its explosive, cathartic ending points at the possibility of hope for Jim and his family.

In an era of retellings, James stands out for staying true to Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people. In revealing Jim’s full humanity, deep thinking and love through his hero’s journey, Everett has written a visionary and necessary reimagining.

In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
NonfictionMemoir

Splinters

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Leslie Jamison has been lauded for her essay collections Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams, as well as her memoir The Recovery. In her new memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Jamison focuses on her first years of newly single motherhood and the unraveling of her marriage. An incisive observer, Jamison braids episodes of her past—her close-knit relationship with her mother, her uncertain relationship with her distant father and her years of drinking and recovery—with her present. She recounts scenes from her courtship with “C,” as she calls her ex-husband, their sudden wedding in Las Vegas and the complications of two writers in a relationship. She mourns the loss of this marriage, questioning her part in its end.

Jamison’s descriptions of life with a newborn are spot-on, conveying the glory and tedium of new parenthood, as are her descriptions of the patched together life of a working parent and writer. The difficulties of managing a nationwide book tour with a baby in tow may be less relatable to readers, but writers with children will recognize her struggles to squeeze in writing around the edges of a too-busy life.

Throughout, Jamison returns to the impossible question of “Am I good enough?” as she details post-marriage relationships with men who remain out of reach, and she is searing in conveying the wanting and shame that crowd disparate corners of her life. Still, there is a hole in this story when it comes to the details of the rupture between Jamison and her ex-husband. Of course, these are not episodes that any reader has the right to know, but when the narrative refers to “the unforgivable thing she did” and offers anecdotes about her ex’s continuing fury after they’ve separated, the reader is left wanting to know what happened.

That said, Splinters’ close look at early parenthood, baby love, the uncertainties of relationships and how feelings of inadequacy play out in one woman’s life, rendered in Jamison’s elegant, vivid and often sensuous prose, makes her latest work stand out.

Leslie Jamison is back with a memoir about her first years of parenting and the unraveling of her marriage, rendered in her signature elegant, sensuous prose.

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