Sarah McCraw Crow

FictionLiterary Fiction

Sea of Tranquility

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

The sixth novel from Emily St. John Mandel, author of the award-winning, bestselling Station Eleven, is a time-travel puzzle that connects a disparate band of characters.

Sea of Tranquility opens in 1912, as Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the aimless youngest son of an English earl, makes his way across Canada. Edwin lands in Caiette, a remote settlement in British Columbia, where he experiences something that cannot be easily explained, and encounters a strange man named Roberts who claims to be a priest.

The narrative then leaps to 2020 in New York City, where Mirella Kessler is trying to discern her friend Vincent’s whereabouts. (Readers of Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, will recognize Mirella and Vincent.) Mirella finds herself talking to a stranger, Gaspery Roberts, who seems familiar. Gaspery wants to know about a glitchy moment that Vincent captured on video years ago.

The narrative skips ahead again, to the year 2203, when writer Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour, talking to audiences on Earth about her bestselling pandemic novel. Olive lives with her husband and daughter in Colony Two on the moon. Olive, like Mirella, finds herself talking to a man who calls himself Gaspery Roberts. Gaspery, a magazine reporter, asks about a brief scene in her novel, an odd moment in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.

And then once more, the narrative jumps forward in time, and now Gaspery Roberts begins to tell his own story.

How these four (and a few other) characters are linked, and how one strange moment reverberates through time, are the subjects of this novel. There’s a mournfulness to Sea of Tranquility. Its main characters feel themselves to be exiles, trying to sort out where and how they belong. But the novel is playful, too, taking a metafictional turn: Olive, like her creator, Mandel, has written a bestselling novel about a pandemic, and she’s stuck on an endless book tour, far from her family, as an actual pandemic approaches. And Gaspery is a dryly funny, self-deprecating guide to his era and his unlikely travels through time.

Although readers may question the particulars of the novel’s depiction of the future (wouldn’t the concept of a book tour be impossibly quaint, or even unknown, by 2203?), Mandel’s character development will sweep them along. Turn-of-the-century character Edwin’s sections are particularly well rendered.

Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly, the suspense building not only from the questions about that one strange moment but also from the actions of those investigating it. In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.

Read more: Through multiple audiobook narrators, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel transforms into a stage play in an interdimensional theater.

The interlocking plot of Emily St. John Mandel’s sixth novel resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story.
NonfictionMemoirMedicine

The Invisible Kingdom

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her early 20s, Meghan O’Rourke began to experience an array of symptoms—fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, hives, fever, a sensation of electric shocks along her legs and arms—that neither doctors nor bloodwork could connect to a diagnosis. When one doctor suggested that O’Rourke might have an autoimmune disease, a condition in which the immune system begins to turn on the body, O’Rourke recalled her practical Irish aunts who lived with rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s disease and ulcerative colitis, all autoimmune diseases. As O’Rourke entered her 30s, her symptoms grew worse, despite seeing multiple specialists. She found herself barely able to leave her apartment, let alone have the baby she’d been hoping for.

O’Rourke is the author of three collections of poetry and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. In The Invisible Kingdom, she chronicles her long search for healing, layering in extensive reporting on the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune disease and the way our medical system fails to see ailments that aren’t readily diagnosable or easily treated. Likewise, she notes that autoimmune diseases are far more likely to affect women, and women, in turn, are more likely to be told that their symptoms are all in their heads. “Of the nearly one hundred women I interviewed, all of whom were eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or other concrete illness, more than 90 percent had been encouraged to seek treatment for anxiety or depression by doctors who told them nothing physical was wrong with them,” she writes.

O’Rourke examines her own experience with a lucid but compassionate lens, and she brings that same mix of analysis and compassion to the book’s reporting. It’s a delicate balancing act to write about a long journey of misery without being tedious or repetitive. She pulls it off by adding lyrical imagery and the words of other writers, such as Alice James and Susan Sontag, to her descriptions of suffering, the peculiar treatments she found herself undergoing, and the effect her quest for healing had on her marriage. And yes, the book reaches a happy, though not uncomplicated, ending.

While it’s especially useful for those who have personally encountered chronic illness, The Invisible Kingdom will add to everyone’s understanding of disease and health. Ultimately it offers a fresh image of what good medicine could look like: doctors understanding each patient as a whole person, not just as a collection of parts.

With a mix of analysis and compassion, Meghan O’Rourke chronicles the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune disease alongside her own long search for healing.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Fencing With the King

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Fencing With the King opens, it’s late 1995 and Amani Hamdan is adrift. At 31, she’s separated from her husband and drinking too much, her poetry and teaching careers on pause. She’s moved back in with her parents, Gabe and Francesca, in Syracuse, New York. Then her Uncle Hafez (Gabe’s brother and an adviser to the king of Jordan) calls from Amman with a surprising invitation: The king wants Gabe to partake in his 60th birthday celebrations, specifically a fencing exhibit. As teenagers in Jordan, Gabe and the king fenced together. In the interim years, Gabe immigrated to the U.S., married Francesca and raised Amani, their American daughter.

While considering this invitation, Gabe pulls out a family heirloom, an ancient knife known as Il Saif, passed to him by his dying father. Amani returns the knife to its satchel, where she finds a note written by her grandmother Natalia, a sad fragment that speaks of loss, perhaps that of a child. Amani, wondering about this grandmother she never knew, persuades Gabe to accept the king’s invitation, and soon father and daughter are in Jordan, greeting extended family and attending the first of the king’s celebrations.

This is only the beginning of a story that focuses on multiple searches. Although the novel belongs to Amani, it includes the perspectives of her uncle and father, Hafez and Gabe, who are brothers but opposites. Hafez is a self-centered mover and shaker in modernizing but autocratic Jordan, and Gabe is a quiet contractor living a suburban American life. Amani is seeking clarity about herself and her failed marriage, but she also wants to understand her family’s past, in particular the sadness of grandmother Natalia, who was forced to flee her village in Nazareth as a child in 1918 and resettle as a Palestinian refugee in Jordan. With the help of her 19-year-old cousin Omar, Amani begins to decode the mystery embedded in her grandmother’s note, a possible secret at the heart of her family history.

Abu-Jaber, whose family’s story is reflected here, writes with a poet’s attention to language, and the novel beautifully evokes Jordan, from its modern cities and society parties to its ancient desert sites and Bedouin goatherds, all existing together under the whims of an autocratic kingdom and at a time (the mid-1990s) when peace in the Middle East seemed almost within reach. Fencing With the King is a complicated, character-driven and slow-burning mystery with a satisfying yet open-ended finale.

Diana Abu-Jaber writes with a poet’s attention to language, and her novel beautifully evokes Jordan, from modern cities to ancient desert sites.
NonfictionMemoir

Manifesto

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

When Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019, many readers, and some critics, assumed it was Evaristo’s first book and that she had achieved overnight success. In fact, she had been writing fiction, poetry and plays for 40 years at that point, and her Booker-winning novel was her eighth book. In Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, Evaristo offers her own story.

Evaristo structures her memoir thematically rather than chronologically, in seven long sections covering topics such as family, romance, writing and activism. Born in 1959 to a Nigerian father and a white English mother, Evaristo grew up as one of eight children in a working-class suburb of London. Money was tight, and the family endured a spectrum of racist hostility, from rudeness and name-calling to bricks thrown through their home’s windows. The narrative balances Evaristo’s early hardships and obstacles (being poor and biracial in class-bound 1960s England) with the gifts and support (her parents’ political activism, her convent school education) that laid the groundwork for her midlife success.

In her 20s, Evaristo formed a theater company with other Black women and began to write plays while living hand to mouth in cheap rentals. She also spent those years in lesbian relationships, before beginning to date men again in her 30s. With candor and even some humor, she looks back on an early abusive relationship, nicknaming her ex The Mental Dominatrix, or TMD. It’s a good example of the way Evaristo can write about a heavy subject thoughtfully yet conversationally.

Throughout, Evaristo describes her development as a writer, from her first attempts at fiction to the aftermath of becoming a bestselling author at 60. “Writing became a room of my own; writing became my home,” she notes. Manifesto is not a self-help book, but Evaristo’s long, persistent journey to becoming a lauded novelist is inspiring, especially for any writer who’s struggled to get a story published. The book concludes with “Evaristo’s Manifesto,” nine tenets that guide her life. Here’s one: “Be wild, disobedient & daring with your creativity, take risks instead of following predictable routes; those who play it safe do not advance our culture or civilization.”

In Manifesto, Evaristo takes her own advice, producing a thoughtful, vivid, often funny work of nonfiction that refuses to play it safe.

Read our review of the audiobook for ‘Manifesto,’ narrated by author Bernardine Evaristo.

Bernardine Evaristo’s debut memoir is a thoughtful, vivid, often funny work by an author who refuses to play it safe.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Vladimir

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

From the first paragraphs of Vladimir, it’s clear we’re plunging into a campus novel with some darkness to it but also some comedy. At 58, the unnamed narrator is a long-tenured English professor at a small upstate New York college. She should be writing another novel and coasting to retirement. Instead, her husband, John, also an English professor and chair of their department, is being investigated for his past affairs with students, and he’s on leave while he awaits the outcome.

John’s affairs are no secret; long ago, he and the narrator agreed on an open marriage of sorts. Still, she’s angry—at John and pretty much everyone else. “Lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities,” she says, explaining why she’s been avoiding faculty events.

At this moment in the narrator’s life, a new colleague appears: Vladimir Vladinksi, a younger writer with a well-regarded first novel and abs to die for. The narrator is suddenly and completely obsessed, and she concocts a plan to charm and seduce Vlad. Complicating this setup is the narrator’s grown daughter, Sidney, who returns home after a fight with her longtime girlfriend.

Vladimir sweeps us along on a sometimes claustrophobic ride, as the narrator muses on departmental politics, campus “cancel culture” and her uncomfortable perch as a feminist who’s somehow landed on the wrong side of the #MeToo movement. She’s funny, biting and given to bouts of narcissism and self-loathing. As she single-mindedly pursues Vlad, she slowly reveals past and present bad decisions, leading to a shocking climactic scene.

Part dark comedy and part satire, with a dash of the gothic and plenty of literary allusions, Vladimir is a little hard to pin down. But if you imagine the Netflix comedy “The Chair,” whose faculty characters are almost done in by contemporary campus politics, crossed with the acidic love-hate relationship at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you wouldn’t be too far off.

Vladimir is Julia May Jonas’ first novel, but she’s also a playwright who teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York. With her background as a dramatist, she brings notable verve and drama to this sharp campus novel.

With her background as a dramatist, author Julia May Jonas brings notable verve and drama to this sharp campus novel.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Paris Bookseller

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For Americans who’ve traveled to Paris, the name Shakespeare and Company will ring a bell; it’s the famed English-language bookstore founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919, a bookstore that’s intimately linked to Lost Generation writers such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In The Paris Bookseller, novelist Kerri Maher tells the story of how Shakespeare and Company came to be.

Soon after returning to Paris, where she lived with her family as a teen, American Sylvia meets Parisian Adrienne Monnier, who runs a bookshop on the Left Bank. Sylvia is drawn to the cultured, literary Adrienne, and as their connection deepens, Sylvia decides to take on the mantle of bookseller, too: She’ll open the first English-language bookstore in Paris. And thus Shakespeare and Company is born.

The Paris Bookseller follows Sylvia from her bookshop’s first days to the end of the 1930s, as war approaches. Sprinkled throughout are Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s regular encounters, mostly at Shakespeare and Company, but also at dinners, parties and café gatherings with those literary luminaries—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and others.

Sylvia’s friendship with James Joyce is at the heart of the novel. James, lauded but struggling, can’t find a publisher for his latest work, Ulysses, as American and British publishers are too prudish to take on the modernist novel and its graphic passages. Out of friendship, Sylvia volunteers to publish Ulysses, a quest that turns epic as James misses deadlines, rewrites already typeset pages and demands much, sometimes too much, of Sylvia and other literary friends.

Amid Shakespeare and Company’s ups and downs—thriving in the 1920s, when American tourists begin to visit the shop in the hopes of glimpsing famous writers, and then struggling through the Depression—Sylvia and Adrienne create a loving partnership in a time when queer relationships were far less accepted, even in Paris. Background characters are occasionally placed a bit too far into the background, but this is Sylvia’s story, and Maher has stayed true to her. With its insider’s view of the literary expat world of 1920s Paris, The Paris Bookseller will appeal to fans of Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife.

With its insider’s view of the literary expat world of 1920s Paris, The Paris Bookseller will appeal to fans of Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife.
NonfictionBusiness & Finance

Out of Office

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For those of us whose workplaces closed down during the COVID-19 pandemic, the past two years have meant balancing Zoom calls, remote schooling and everything else from our kitchen tables. But, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen argue in Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home, working from home is not what we’ve been doing. “You were laboring in confinement and under duress. . . . Work became life and life became work. You weren’t thriving. You were surviving,” they write.

With Out of Office, Warzel, a tech writer, and Petersen, a culture writer and the author of Can’t Even, aim to show that done right, remote work can make both workers and their communities happier and healthier. Warzel and Petersen have worked remotely since 2017, when they left New York City for Montana, and although this isn’t a memoir, their experiences inform this book.

Read our review of ‘Can’t Even’ by Anne Helen Petersen.

Out of Office first offers a brief history of American office work, touching on productivity culture, corporate cost-cutting, chronic understaffing, ever-expanding work hours, startup culture, burnout and the disconnect between a company’s stated values and the way employees are actually treated. Breaking their theme into four big concepts (flexibility, culture, office technologies and community), Warzel and Petersen offer a number of suggestions based on remote workers’ pandemic experiences, as well as on a handful of companies that tried to make flexible work culture a priority long before the pandemic. Some suggestions are simple—such as to standardize Zoom backgrounds for meetings so no one feels self-conscious about their messy kitchen. Others are complicated and far-reaching, like to create real trust throughout an organization and to make child care a national priority, with a living wage for child care workers. Near its end, the book takes a turn toward self-help, asking readers to recall what they loved to do when they were young, from riding bikes to playing cards with a grandparent to singing. These things can provide a first step toward prioritizing one’s self and life rather than work, the authors argue.

Out of Office is a well-researched, timely and mostly persuasive book that asks both workers and managers to reimagine the concept of work in a post-pandemic world.

This well-researched, timely and persuasive book asks both workers and managers to reimagine the concept of work in a post-pandemic world.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Once Upon a Wardrobe

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As Patti Callahan’s Once Upon a Wardrobe opens, it’s December 1950 in Worcestershire, England, and 8-year-old George Devonshire knows he’s not going to get better. His congenital heart disease is worsening, and there are no treatments left.

George, an ardent fan of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, wants his adored big sister, Megs, to answer his question: Where did Narnia come from? Megs, who’s busy with her mathematics studies at Somerville College, Oxford University, tells her brother that she has no time for children’s books. But after reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Megs changes her mind. And as George reminds her, Lewis just happens to be an English literature tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Megs finds a way to introduce herself to Lewis and his older brother, Warnie, who live together outside Oxford, and she begins to visit them and listen to their stories about growing up in Ireland and their roles in the two world wars. Megs brings these stories home to George, who in turn narrates them to the reader: “Hours in bed have taught George how to find the soft edges of the facts and drop himself into the worlds he hears about or reads of. He closes his eyes, sets his mind’s eye on the words, and floats on them like a raft.”

Once Upon a Wardrobe pivots between Megs’ and George’s perspectives. Megs takes in the Lewis brothers’ stories and slowly develops a friendship with Padraig, a literature student from Ireland. George listens to Megs and then spins out the tales for the reader. It’s a gentle novel with some beautifully cinematic images of snow, Lewis’ childhood and Oxford’s medieval colleges. Some readers may wish for a little more conflict (for instance, between Megs and her parents, or even between Megs and George), but the novel offers a strong sense of the defining moments in Lewis’ life, as well as the mythical sources for the Chronicles of Narnia. It also shows how a writer’s life can inform fiction, and how stories offer meaning in times of trouble.

Callahan is well-versed on the subject of C.S. Lewis; she’s the author of the bestselling Becoming Mrs. Lewis, an account of the American poet Joy Davidman’s midlife friendship and marriage to the author. Once Upon a Wardrobe would make an ideal companion for family book clubs reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together.

Patti Callahan’s gentle novel contains beautifully cinematic images of snow, C.S. Lewis’ childhood and Oxford’s medieval colleges.
NonfictionFamily & Relationships

Challenge the way you think about love

Feature by Sarah McCraw Crow

Valentine’s Day. If those two words inspire dread rather than desire, take heart; a new crop of books offers advice and wisdom, whether you’re out there looking for The One, long married and bored with your sex life, or downright heartbroken.

BYE BYE LOVE
The qualities that we usually look for in a partner—sense of humor, charisma, beauty, good family, intelligence—are often red flags in disguise, write Michael Bennett, M.D., and Sarah Bennett in F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship. Dr. Bennett, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and his daughter Sarah, a comedy writer, teamed up for a previous book, F*ck Feelings, in which they advised that paying less attention to feelings helps you manage life better. The Bennetts write in an irreverent, sometimes profane style—for instance, each chapter, devoted to a red-flag trait, includes F*ck in its title: “F*ck Beauty,” “F*ck Charisma” and so on. Despite the irreverence, the Bennetts’ advice is sincere and sensible. They explain how and why readers should seek partnership qualities (common goals, shared effort when times get tough) more than the red-flag traits. Though it includes advice for readers in relationships, this book is most useful for those in the dating world. 

THE RIGHT MATCH
Susan Quilliam’s How to Choose a Partner covers some of the same material as the Bennetts’ book but takes a quieter, more meditative approach. She refers to classic novels like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd for anecdotes. A British psychologist, author of 22 books and advice columnist, Quilliam also teaches classes on love and sexuality. “We now approach partner choice with bigger expectations, deeper confusion, and heavier pressure than ever before,” she writes, offering advice on meeting potential partners (aim for a “slow river”: put your energy into groups that offer a steady flow of different people) and what to look for in a partner. Quilliam emphasizes partnership qualities, breaking these down into goals, values and personality traits. The book has a straightforward style, with appealingly quirky illustrations. 

SPICE IT UP
Sex is the glue of marriage, writes Dr. Kevin Leman, a psychologist and author of more than 50 books about marriage and parenting. In Have a New Sex Life by Friday: Because Your Marriage Can’t Wait Until Monday Leman notes that what happens outside the bedroom affects what happens inside the bedroom, and readers need to consider the different ways that women and men communicate and process emotions. The book follows a five-day structure, considering a different aspect of sex (why women need sex, why men need sex, get your mother out of the bedroom) each day. This book is not for everyone; Leman writes from a Christian perspective for married, heterosexual couples. That said, his advice on how to talk to your partner about sex, and how to incorporate new sex positions and more “spicy” techniques into your routine, is frank, openhearted and sensible.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
Carrie Jenkins’ What Love Is: And What It Could Be is not a self-help book, nor is it a collection of heartwarming essays. Instead, Jenkins aims to come up with a definition of romantic love that suits her as both a philosopher and a human being. A professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Jenkins walks the reader through theories about romantic love past and present, drawing from classical philosophy, science and literature. This might sound dry and academic, but Jenkins adds fun with pop culture references and vivid images. She explains biological arguments (humans fall in love because it leads them to reproduce) and societal arguments (romantic love is a product of social expectations and traditions), and she posits that love has a dual nature. She shows how our understanding of romantic love has changed over time, and she hopes it will come to include polyamory, because she’s married, with a long-term boyfriend. I wish Jenkins had revealed a little more about her personal life, which she refers to in the book’s prologue: “On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love. . . .” I’d love to know what else she reflects on, as she goes from one partner to another.

HEALING FROM HEARTBREAK
Meditation teacher and Buddhist practitioner Lodro Rinzler takes on heartbreak in Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken. Rinzler offers ancient Buddhist wisdom in a youthful, playful style. The book’s opening lines: “If you’re reading this, you’re probably heartbroken. I mean, why else would you pick up a book about heartbreak? I’m sorry you’re heartbroken.” For this book, Rinzler met with dozens of people who shared their stories of heartbreak, not just romantic heartbreak but all sorts of loss—giving up a child for adoption, losing a parent, losing family members. The book is made up of about 50 short chapters, and Rinzler suggests readers flip to the chapter they need at the moment (“If You Feel Like You Will Never Love Again,” “If You Are Feeling Angry,” “If You Need to Hear a Less Bizarre Joke”). It also offers a primer on mindfulness meditation, and on the concept of love in the Buddhist tradition—which includes loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity—“we include in our heart the people we like, the people we really don’t like, and the vast number of people we have never even met,” Rinzler writes. As to why our hearts break, Rinzler is succinct: “Your heart breaks because life isn’t what you thought it would be.” Love Hurts is a wise, funny companion and a reminder that we can move through loss and beyond it.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Valentine’s Day. If those two words inspire dread rather than desire, take heart; a new crop of books offers advice and wisdom, whether you’re out there looking for The One, long married and bored with your sex life, or downright heartbroken.
Nonfiction

Pack it up, pack it in

Feature by Sarah McCraw Crow

Summertime means travel—family travel, solo journeys, finding lost places. Two new books take on these concepts in distinctive ways.

In Don’t Make Me Pull Over!, Richard Ratay uses his memories of family trips as a portal back to what he calls the golden age of car travel: the 1970s, when he would sit crammed in the family car’s back seat between his two brothers, his sister up front between their parents. Ratay’s dad had some eccentric ideas about saving time and money on their long car trips, and Ratay recounts these anecdotes with relish.

Ratay also takes a comprehensive look at the family road trip, starting with the patchy history of American roads and the changes wrought by the interstate system. He gives us the backstory on entrepreneurs like Howard Johnson, who grew one drugstore into a national chain of restaurants and motels, and Bill Stuckey, whose stores once blanketed the South. And he delves into smaller but memorable details of ’70s-era car trips: the CB radio craze, eight-track tape players, AAA’s TripTik guides and low-tech video games.

Don’t Make Me Pull Over! is a love letter to the ’70s and all its weirdness, and if Ratay sometimes goes a little overboard on travel-related puns, that’s OK—he just so enjoys his subject. His enthusiasm shows in this entertaining, funny book.

Northland takes a quieter journey, detailing author Porter Fox’s treks along the border between the United States and Canada, the world’s longest international border. “On a map the boundary is a line,” Fox writes. “On land, it passes through impossible places—ravines, cliff bands, bogs, waterfalls, rocky summits, whitewater—that few people ever see.” Fox begins his journey near Passamaquoddy Bay, Maine, where he puts in for a solo canoe trip up the St. Croix River, following the path of explorer Samuel de Champlain.

Fox’s journey has five legs. In Montreal, he boards a freighter bound for the Great Lakes; in Minnesota, he canoes the Boundary Waters with an older married couple; in North Dakota, he visits the pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; in Montana, he follows the border to Glacier National Park; and finally he makes his way to the Peace Arch Border Crossing, which connects Washington and Canada.

The narrative moves fluidly between Fox’s own travels and larger stories of the border, mixing history, travel writing and nature writing. Fox shows how the northern border is intimately bound up with our nation’s history, particularly in the shifting relationships between European settlers and Native Americans and the violent and sad history of the United States’ treatment of indigenous people. But he also gives nuanced profiles of intrepid French explorers Champlain and Robert de La Salle, who learned from and fought alongside Native Americans.

Most memorably, Northland offers vivid, lyrical writing about the strange and beautiful places along the United States’ northern border.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Summertime means travel—family travel, solo journeys, finding lost places. Two new books take on these concepts in distinctive ways.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Fans of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel, All the Light We Cannot See, have waited seven years for Cloud Cuckoo Land. But where All the Light We Cannot See focused on two characters during a single time period—the lead-up to the bombing of Saint Malo, France, in World War II—Cloud Cuckoo Land pings among different eras.

In this multiple-timeline story, the large array of mostly young characters includes 13-year-old Anna, an orphan working in an embroidery workshop in 1453 Constantinople, and Omeir, a farm boy who’s conscripted into the sultan’s army as it prepares to lay siege to Constantinople in that same year. Moving forward in time, we meet Zeno, son of a Greek immigrant living in post-World War II Lakeport, Idaho; and Seymour, a lonely boy in present-day Lakeport. And in the future, 13-year-old Konstance lives aboard the Argos, a spaceship that’s left a ravaged Earth for a better planet.

Narrators Marin Ireland and Simon Jones will transport you in the audio edition.

Threaded throughout their stories are sections of an ancient (fictional) Greek text titled “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” which tells the story of Aethon, who wishes he could fly to a city in the clouds “where no one ever suffered and everyone was wise.”

While the changes in points of view can be dizzying at first, Doerr’s writing grounds the reader in homely but often beautiful details: Anna’s daily rounds in the walled city; Omeir’s patient work with his oxen team, Moonlight and Tree; the friendship that Zeno finds with a British soldier when he’s a prisoner during the Korean War; the comfort that Seymour takes from the forest behind his trailer; and the stories told by Konstance’s dad to keep her occupied on their journey. Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour and Konstance all face great loss and danger, and the reader keeps turning pages to discover not only whether each of them survive but also how they’re all linked.

This is an ambitious, genre-busting novel, with climate change as a major undercurrent. And while sorrow and violence play large roles, so does tenderness. Like All the Light We Cannot See, Cloud Cuckoo Land resolves into a well-connected plot, with threaded connections that are unexpected yet inevitable, offering hope and some surprising acts of redemption.

Sorrow and violence play large roles in the latest novel from Anthony Doerr, but so does tenderness.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Living and the Lost

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As The Living and the Lost opens, Millie Mosbach has just returned to her hometown, Allied-occupied Berlin. Millie is German and Jewish, and she escaped Berlin as a teen before the war with her brother, David. She attended high school and college in the U.S. with the help of an American family friend, all the while not knowing whether her parents and younger sister survived.

Postwar Berlin is almost unrecognizable. It’s a mess of rubble and half-standing buildings, its inhabitants starving, the city divided into Allied and Soviet sections that are not yet completely sundered by the Berlin Wall. Millie has joined the U.S. Army, helping to sort out which Berliners can continue to work as editors, publishers and translators in this new denazified Germany. Meanwhile, David, who served with the Army in Europe during the war, is in Berlin, too, and he’s not telling Millie what he’s up to. 

As the novel moves between Millie’s and David’s points of view, we get vivid glimpses of life in this unsettled landscape, with uncanny scenes of American military officers enjoying beers in former Nazi halls, German Fräuleins by their sides, and the abundance in military black markets contrasting with the extreme lack faced by Berliners. Millie is haunted by the probable loss of her parents and sister and by the choices she made earlier in life. 

As Millie tries to tamp down her trauma, guilt and anger, the novel flashes back in time, filling in the siblings’ pasts. While she was a scholarship student at the tony Bryn Mawr College, Millie experienced both the joys of college life and a genteel but insidious antisemitism.

The Living and the Lost moves along quickly, and its descriptions and dialogue feel true to the era. While the novel would have benefited from more interiority from both Millie and David, it’s still an illuminating historical drama with plenty of action and even some romance, evoking a lesser-known historical period—the immediate postwar era and Berlin before the wall—and the complications and compromises that come with the end of war.

Ellen Feldman offers an illuminating historical drama with plenty of action and even some romance, evoking the rarely explored setting of postwar Europe.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Seeing Ghosts

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Early in her debut memoir, Seeing Ghosts, journalist Kat Chow recalls one of the times her mom made a goofy Dracula face, an exaggerated grin with teeth bared. “When I die,” Chow’s mother told then 9-year-old Chow, “I want you to get me stuffed so I can sit in your apartment and watch you all the time.” This strange request haunted Chow in the years after her mother, Florence, born Bo Moi in 1950s China, died from liver cancer when Chow was 14. Florence’s too-early death informs this memoir, which delves into the quiet devastation of Chow, her two older sisters and their father, and how the family’s grief has shifted over the years. Along the way, Chow carries on a running conversation with Florence, addressing her and asking unanswerable questions.

Chow recounts both her own youth and episodes from the lives of her parents, immigrants who met and married in Connecticut and whom Chow portrays with love and candor. Florence’s playful but odd sense of humor served as an anchor for her three daughters. (She enjoyed hiding around corners, jumping out to scare her kids and then hugging them.) Wing Shek, Chow’s dad, became unable to throw anything away in the years after his wife’s death, and Chow portrays this reality with compassion, as well.

Late in the book, Chow recalls recent family trips to China and Cuba, which she spent searching for truer, more complete versions of the family stories she heard as a young person. For example, in Cuba, Chow looks for traces of her grandfather’s expat life as a restaurant worker in the 1950s. As Chow’s dad likewise searches for his father’s history, he begins to face his own long-lived but unspoken grief, and we see how far the family has come in their years without Florence.

Like the experience of grief itself, Seeing Ghosts is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.

Like the experience of grief itself, Kat Chow’s memoir is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.

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