Sarah McCraw Crow

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.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Woman in the Sable Coat

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth Brooks returns to World War II-era England with her fourth novel, following two young women connected by their love of the same man. But The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.

Nina Woodrow and Kate Nicholson are first brought together on an August afternoon in 1934 when 14-year-old Nina is on the outs with her best friend, Rose, and Kate, married to her childhood friend Guy Nicholson, is pregnant and miserable in their new home in Cottenden village. That night, a spontaneous dinner party has both Nina and Kate acting impulsively and seemingly out of character.

Eight years later, the war is grinding on. Nina, now 22, has joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she folds silk parachutes and tries to find her footing. Back in Cottenden, Kate cares for her son, Pip, and takes in refugees. But Guy, now a Royal Air Force Pilot at the same base as Nina, tells Kate he wants a divorce and that he’s in love with Nina. This revelation draws the despairing Kate to Nina’s father Henry, an awkward, cautious widower.

The novel rotates between Nina’s and Kate’s perspectives, as each contrives to live with her decisions and precarious situations: Nina as the second wife of a divorced man and Kate as a divorcee. With a sense of suspense and menace in the vein of Daphne du Maurier (to whom there’s a nod as Kate obsessively reads du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek), The Woman in the Sable Coat lays clues for the reader to suspect a long-hidden deception, a secret that turns out to affect both women in unexpected ways. The novel also shows how the era’s prim morality feels suffocating for middle-class women, and how the trauma of the Great War still reverberates for some of these characters decades later. The Woman in the Sable Coat is a slow burn of a novel, with a lovely, surprising moment of redemption and connection for both Nina and Kate at the story’s end.

The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Interesting Facts About Space

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As with her first novel, Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin’s Interesting Facts About Space features a quirky main character in Enid, who loves listening to true-crime podcasts to calm down. “I hate being startled,” she notes. “I like my podcasts, horror movies, and ghost stories that I can pause and rewind. I handle fear sort of like a workhorse. I could charge bravely into a planned battle, take in the sights of bombs and corpses, but I would still be spooked by an unanticipated barn rat.” When we first meet her, Enid is listening to a particularly grisly podcast while baking a gender reveal cake for her pregnant half sister Edna. Into this moment comes a stranger who’s furious at Enid, and the exchange unfolds in such an unexpected way that I laughed out loud more than once.

Enid is half-deaf, neurodivergent and gay. She’s also pretty sure that she’s a terrible person. In short vignettes, Enid narrates her attempts to navigate an uncomfortable new relationship with her half sisters and keep tabs on her depressed mom. With the help of her best friend Vin, Enid’s also trying to figure out what’s causing her panic attacks, and why someone seems to be stalking her. Enid and Vin work at the Space Agency, managing information, from which Enid’s gathered a vast array of random facts about outer space, which she shares with her mother in attempts at connection.

The novel’s comic scenes of misunderstandings and non sequiturs are interspersed with Enid’s musings about herself, her high-school years and her parents. Enid may be in her 20s, but Interesting Facts About Space is a coming-of-age story. Balancing the comic and the dark, the novel slowly reveals the essential sadness in Enid’s past that she can’t let herself see, and though occasionally the novel’s first-person, present-tense voice can feel a little claustrophobic, that’s a small quibble. In a lesser writer’s hands, Enid’s quirky traits could feel constructed, but Austin makes Enid’s vulnerable voice and deep thoughts feel brave, heartbreaking and true.

Emily Austin’s quirky main character, Enid, is trying to figure out what’s causing her panic attacks, and why someone seems to be stalking her. She’s also pretty sure that she’s a terrible person.
NonfictionScienceFamily & Relationships

Come Together

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Emily Nagoski’s third book, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, like her second, Come as You Are, focuses on better sex. But where Come as You Are was aimed at women, Come Together is for couples in long-term relationships. To be clear, though, Come Together isn’t a book filled with sex tips or techniques; it’s a book about relationships, communication and methods to frame and understand emotions.

Nagoski, a sex educator who trained at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute, sets out to debunk popular beliefs, primarily one that “puts desire at the center of our definition of sexual wellbeing.” She argues that when we focus too much on desire—a “spark, a spontaneous, giddy craving for sexual intimacy”—our worry about losing that spark “hits the breaks and puts sex further out of reach.” Instead, Nagoski argues that partners should center pleasure, writing that “great sex over the long term is not about how much you want sex, it’s about how much you like the sex you’re having.” Nagoski offers tools to increase pleasure, such as an “emotional floorplan,” a map of the brain’s different emotional states, some which are pleasure-favorable (lust, play, seeking), and some pleasure-adverse (fear, grief, rage); prompts to help partners discuss sex; and even a breathing exercise to help readers tap into their “erotic wisdom.”

Happily, Nagoski does not exclusively focus her attention on heterosexual sex. Through the dozens of interviews conveyed in the book, Nagoski includes LGBTQ+ couples, as well as those in polyamorous relationships, kink and BDSM communities, and more.

Nagoski reminds readers that the key to great sex over the long term isn’t frequency, novelty or special skills. Instead, it’s trusting and admiring your partner, prioritizing one other and prioritizing sex. She shares research findings, the ongoing stories of three very different couples, and pieces of her own story—for instance, how her work as a sex researcher and coach caused her to lose all interest in sex, and how she and her partner grappled with this loss. For readers with shorter attention spans, Nagoski closes each chapter with a TL;DR summary and questions to consider. Well-researched but accessible, Come Together is an inclusive, good-humored and reassuring book that offers something for every couple in a long-term relationship.

Emily Nagoski’s Come Together is a refreshing, inclusive and good-humored guide to sex between long-term couples.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Goldenseal

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Maria Hummel’s fifth novel offers the atmospheric story of an old friendship gone awry. As Goldenseal opens in 1990, Edith has arrived in Los Angeles, a city that’s unrecognizable to her after 40 years in Maine. Her destination is a grand hotel she once knew well. Waiting for Edith is Lacey, who has withdrawn not only from her old friend, but from the world, making herself a recluse high above the city in the hotel her father owned for decades. 

Lacey is agitated and doesn’t know why Edith has returned, but she has planned a fancy room service dinner for the two of them. As the dinner begins, the two are wary, feeling the presence of the long-ago rupture in their friendship. At 70, Lacey is troubled and fragile, while Edith is restrained, a cipher, “the headmistress incarnate.” Both women have been pummeled by time and by the world.

As each woman guardedly tells the other her perspective, we learn how Lacey and Edith became like sisters. Occasionally, one will wish for more of this recounting to be shown in scene rather than dialogue, because the novel describes Edith and Lacey’s youth so gorgeously, beginning with Lacey’s late-1930s childhood in her beloved Prague before the sudden move with her Mutti and Papi to New York City as war and the Holocaust loom. When Lacey is sent to summer camp in Maine, she encounters Edith, and they begin an intense friendship. They’re outwardly opposites: Lacey is a pampered only child, while Edith was born into rural poverty and is attending camp on scholarship because her father is the camp’s handyman. Eventually, Edith and Lacey both follow Lacey’s parents to Los Angeles to try out the film business, setting in motion the events that cause their dramatic split. In the novel’s present, the reunion dinner’s end leads to a surprising moment of tenderness: a bittersweet, fitting conclusion. 

In the afterword, Hummel notes that she wrote Goldenseal as an homage to Hungarian author S&aacutendor M&aacuterai’s novel Embers, drawing her structure—two old friends reuniting for one night after a 40-year rift—from the older novel. Goldenseal is an inventive, immersive book recounting the particular past, old hurts and late healing of two singular characters.

Maria Hummel’s Goldenseal is an inventive, immersive novel recounting the reunion of two old friends 40 years after a dramatic rupture.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEssays

Transient and Strange

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For much of her career, Nell Greenfieldboyce has written about science for NPR, reporting on a range of topics, among them a giant collective of octopuses, asteroid dust, the color of dinosaur eggs and signs of life on Mars. In Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life (Norton, $27.99, 9780393882346), Greenfieldboyce adds the personal to the scientific, threading the two together to create a memoir in essays.

In the book’s opening essay, “The Symbol of a Tornado,” Greenfieldboyce recounts a phase that most parents will recognize: the quest to calm her preschool-age son’s nighttime fears. When he first asks her about tornadoes, she eagerly lays out the facts—a misstep that only intensifies his anxiety. The essay braids substantial reporting on the history and science of tornadoes with her earnest fumbling as she tries to help her kids feel secure in an insecure world.

Some of Transient and Strange’s essays hew closer to science writing—in one, she charts the scientific community’s resistance to accepting black holes—while others go more deeply into personal essay territory, excavating pieces of her youth. The sweet, quirky “Automatic Beyond Belief” ties an ancient toaster to her parents’ faith, the stability of her childhood and her predictions about what her children will remember about their younger years. The 50-page essay that closes the book, “My Eugenics Project,” is a standout. It describes Greenfieldboyce’s strategies for coping with the knowledge that she and her husband might pass a devastating genetic mutation on to their children, her obsessive quest to solve this problem and how it has affected her marriage and family.

Throughout, Greenfieldboyce doesn’t spare herself or put on a wise affect; we see and relate to her foibles and fumbling. Transient and Strange is a book that you can read as the memoir of a woman who’s measuring the shape of life at its midpoint, and also as a series of essays riffing on a range of science-related topics. Either way, it’s a thoughtful, heartfelt and idiosyncratic collection.

Nell Greenfieldboyce’s thoughtful, idiosyncratic memoir in essays twines the personal with the scientific.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Day

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Michael Cunningham has used three timelines to great effect in his novels Specimen Days and The Hours, his acclaimed homage to Mrs. Dalloway. He does so once again in Day, which follows a Brooklyn family on the same April day over three years: 2019, 2020 and 2021.

As Day opens, Isabel and Dan, in early midlife, are muddling through an ordinary morning with their school-age kids, Nathan and Violet. Isabel is a creative director in an industry that has mostly evaporated, and Dan is a former rocker who still yearns for the spotlight. Isabel’s brother, Robbie, teaches sixth grade history and lives in their attic bedroom. Though the point of view roves among characters and occasionally out over the Brooklyn landscape, it’s Robbie who forms the center of the novel. Robbie’s feeling regret about his ex, Oliver, and about his long-ago decision to turn down medical school. Now he’s about to make a big change: Isabel has asked him to move out. Everyone’s floundering, including secondary characters Garth (Dan’s brother) and his ex Chess, who struggle to navigate their new status as parents. The only one who’s not floundering is Wolfe, Robbie’s Instagram persona—a perfect, though fictional, gay man.

The novel’s middle section takes place a year later, on an April day during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, with Robbie stranded in Iceland, Isabel trying to manage her worries about her kids and her marriage, and Dan starting to write songs again. This section incorporates emails, texts, letters and stretches of unadorned dialogue, including a heartbreaking phone conversation between Isabel and her dad. One year later, in April 2021, the cast of characters gathers upstate, each changed in their place in life and in their relationships with one another.

Despite contemporary details like Instagram follows, Zoom school and long text exchanges, Day has a dreamy, timeless feel. Using gorgeous, often heightened prose, Cunningham offers intimate glimpses of weighty moments instead of big scenes to examine the family’s strands of connection and disconnection, along with the ripple effects of the pandemic. Day may be a spare, short novel, but it’s a novel that asks to be read meditatively, rather than rushed through.

Michael Cunningham’s gorgeous prose gives Day a dreamy, timeless feel as it examines a family’s strands of connection and disconnection, along with the ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Endpapers

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As Jennifer Savran Kelly’s debut novel, Endpapers, opens, main character Dawn Levit has stalled. She’s in her mid-20s, dissatisfied with her art (she designs, prints and binds handmade books) and unable to make anything new. She’s also feeling stuck in her relationship with Lukas, whom Dawn is pretty sure would love her more if she were a man. Dawn has been exploring her own gender and sexual identities since high school, taking tentative steps to find her way, but she’s still doubting her instincts and herself. Lately, she and Lukas have found comfort in “slipping back into the closet,” where neither has to worry about feeling accepted. But neither of them is content, either.

While at work in the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dawn finds a torn-off paperback cover bearing the title Turn Her About, which depicts a woman looking into a mirror and seeing a man’s face. On the back is a letter handwritten in German; the correspondents’ names (Gertrude and Marta) and Ich liebe dich (“I love you”) are the only words Dawn can understand. But this letter, apparently from the 1940s or ’50s, sends Dawn on a quest to learn more about the pulp novel, and about Gertrude and Marta. 

Following Dawn through the spring of 2003, Endpapers depicts a New York City still shrouded in post-9/11 gloom, evoking an uneasy mood and underlining Dawn’s sense that even in early 21st-century New York, being different isn’t safe. Out at a bar one night, Dawn, Lukas and their friend Jae are harassed by two men, which leads to a hate crime that Dawn feels she incited.

Dawn’s introspection is at times painful; she’s young, self-absorbed and prone to missteps with her friends and co-workers. But as the story progresses, the mystery of Gertrude and Marta converges beautifully with the artwork that Dawn begins to conceive. Kelly is a bookbinder and book production editor, and the novel’s details of book and print restoration ground and add depth to Dawn’s story. 

Endpapers is a coming-of-age story about growing as an artist and learning to trust and build relationships in a world that doesn’t want to make room for you. Despite its early 2000s setting, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.

Though set in the early 2000s, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.

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