Sarah McCraw Crow

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.
FictionFamily Drama

We Are the Brennans

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As its title suggests, Tracey Lange’s debut novel, We Are the Brennans, tells the story of the Brennans, a large Irish American family that’s long been established in Westchester County, New York. But the novel opens in Los Angeles, where Sunday, the only Brennan daughter, has gotten herself banged up in a drunk-driving accident.

Sunday left home abruptly five years ago, and after the crash, eldest brother Denny persuades her to return. Their dad, Mickey, shows signs of dementia; middle brother Jackie’s on probation after a drug charge; youngest brother Shane has developmental disabilities; and Denny is struggling to pay the bills at the pub he runs with best friend Kale (who is Sunday’s ex-fiancé).

With Sunday back in the family house, the other characters' secrets, and the ways those secrets have burdened them, come to light. Denny’s trouble is most apparent at first; his wife has moved out, taking their young daughter with her, and his financial troubles are much worse than we initially see. The other Brennans face their own challenges as well. Each chapter follows a family member, beginning with a repeated line of dialogue from the previous chapter, an intriguing structure that links the characters and offers a wider perspective while also propelling the reader along.

We Are the Brennans is well plotted, offering plenty of action, but it shines brightest in depicting family relationships, love mixed with resentment and guilt, and in character development. The Brennan siblings are believably flawed, their troubles multifaceted. The family house and Denny and Kale’s bar are almost characters, too, well depicted throughout: “Sunday climbed the porch, stepped across the threshold, and slammed into the familiar mixed aroma of old wood, black tea, and fresh laundry.”

We Are the Brennans is firmly in the vein of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions, though not as literary in its prose style. It’s a page-turner in the best way, slowly doling out the family’s life-altering secrets. We root for the Brennans the whole way through, waiting for them to face hard truths about one another and, we hope, to move forward together.

Tracey Lange’s debut is a page-turner in the best way, slowly doling out the Brennan family’s life-altering secrets.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Growing up in the 1970s, Julie Klam heard stories about her grandmother’s first cousins, the Morris sisters. Selma, Malvina, Marcella and Ruth Morris emigrated from Eastern Europe with their parents around 1900, were soon orphaned in St. Louis and eventually made their way to New York City, where they made a fortune. “I was told they were completely crazy, obscenely wealthy, never married, had no children, and all lived together in a house in New York City,” Klam writes in The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters: A True Story of Family Fiction, her sixth book.

In her conversational, often funny style, Klam takes us along on her intrepid search for the truth, near-truth and outright lies embedded in her family’s colorful lore about the Morris sisters. Klam visits older family members to record their conflicting stories and learns a surprising secret about the girls’ mother. She also visits sites important to the sisters’ lives, most affectingly the Jewish orphanage in St. Louis where three of the sisters were sent as children, as well as two small towns in Romania. There, Klam takes in the towns’ abandoned Jewish cemeteries and near-abandoned synagogues. 

Along the way, as Klam weaves anecdotes with uncovered records, the sisters emerge as distinct individuals and, yes, almost legendary women. But in the end, The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters isn’t about the sisters so much as it’s about Klam’s search, her wrong turns and dead ends, and the sadder truths that family members papered over. “It turns out that finding the truth in a family can be tricky,” Klam notes, an understatement.

The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters is an entertaining read that offers a substantial meditation on the meaning of family and what our ancestors mean to us, even when we can’t get as close as we’d like to their stories.

In her funny, conversational style, Julie Klam takes us along on her search for the truth, near-truth and outright lies embedded in her family’s colorful lore.
FictionPopular Fiction

Together We Will Go

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As Together We Will Go opens, 29-year-old Mark believes he’s never going to succeed at writing. He’s had suicidal thoughts since high school, he’s had enough of life, and he’s come up with a plan: a final bus trip, one last cross-country party with a group of like-minded souls who can’t carry the weight of life anymore.

J. Michael Straczynski’s novel follows this group of mostly young people intent on ending their lives. As the bus stops in several states to pick up passengers, the story cycles through all 12 characters’ perspectives, but six take center stage: the aforementioned Mark; Karen, a young woman with chronic pain; Tyler, a young man with a worsening hole in his heart; Vaughn, a 66-year-old widower with a painful secret; Lisa, whose bipolar disorder has led her to despair; and Shanelle, a lonely woman who has been bullied for her size. As the bus makes its way west, these characters connect, form alliances and deal with each other’s quirks and bad behavior.

Straczynski, a comic book writer, screenwriter and co-creator of Netflix’s “Sense8,” uses text messages, emails, online journal entries and audio transcripts to reveal the characters’ thoughts and actions, creating a 21st-century epistolary novel. Because of this format, the novel moves along quickly, although the characters’ thoughts occasionally blur together, especially when musing philosophically on the state of the world and their places in it.

But a late plot twist is satisfying, intensifying the characters’ bonds as they decide what to do. While a novel about characters planning to end their lives is not for everyone (as the introduction notes, “discretion is advised”), Together We Will Go is, in the end, about friendship and learning to love.

While a novel about characters planning to end their lives is not for everyone, Together We Will Go is, in the end, about friendship and learning to love.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Little and Often

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Trent Preszler’s memoir, Little and Often, opens with a phone call. It’s from his dad, Leon, from whom Trent has been estranged for years, inviting him to come home to South Dakota for Thanksgiving. At 37, Trent is at a high point professionally. He’s the CEO of a Long Island vineyard, he mingles with celebrities and his house has an idyllic view of Peconic Bay. But his personal life tells a different story: Divorced after a brief marriage, he’s working too much, drinking too much and has distanced himself from his friends.

As Trent makes the long drive home, he contemplates his years growing up in flyover country. His parents eked out a marginal existence raising cattle on a South Dakota ranch, 145 miles from the nearest McDonald’s. Leon was always the strong one, a former rodeo champion whose favorite book of the Bible was Job. Long ago, Leon made it clear that he didn’t accept Trent’s sexuality as a gay man—but during this visit, Leon surprises Trent by asking about his ex. Not long after this, Leon dies from cancer, and Trent loses his chance to reconnect.

Leon has left Trent two items, his toolbox and a taxidermied duck. As he ponders his dad’s tools, Trent makes an odd decision: He will build a canoe. The remainder of the memoir details Trent’s quixotic project as he teaches himself about different kinds of wood, power-tool skills and the patience to fail and try again. “Little and often makes much,” he remembers his dad saying, coaching teenage Trent through a difficult project. Throughout the book, the narrative returns to such father-son episodes, evoking ranch life with its biblical weather, rattlesnakes, long horseback rides, cattle auctions and rodeos.

The writing in Little and Often is lucid and sometimes lyrical, building on unexpected connections, such as the geological links between South Dakota and Long Island. As the narrative walks the reader through the process of hand-building a canoe, we see Trent reconsidering his parents’ lives and his own, and finding calm and trust in himself.

This lucid, lyrical memoir recalls father-son episodes in South Dakota, with its biblical weather, rattlesnakes, long horseback rides and rodeos.
FictionFamily Drama

The Guncle

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

At the beginning of Steven Rowley’s third novel, The Guncle, Patrick O’Hara’s life is a little too quiet. Only a few years ago, he was a sitcom star with his own catchphrase who was recognized wherever he went. Now he has exiled himself to Palm Springs, California, seeing no one.

But then Patrick’s sister-in-law, Sara, dies after being ill for three years. Sara was Patrick’s best friend in college before she married his brother, Greg. At the funeral, Greg reveals his addiction to painkillers and asks if Patrick will take his kids for the summer while Greg goes to rehab. Patrick resists, finding the notion preposterous, but after a surprising moment of connection, he and his niece and nephew agree on the visit.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

Patrick’s not quite equipped to parent the bereft 9-year-old Maisie and 6-year-old Grant, who in turn are mystified by their GUP’s life. (GUP: Gay Uncle Patrick, soon amended to “Guncle.”) Rowley spins Grant’s first terrified encounter with Patrick’s fancy Japanese toilet into a lovely, funny scene, and such comic misunderstandings pepper the novel. Maisie and Grant take Patrick’s snark, zingers and pop culture-laden wit literally, repeatedly reminding their uncle that they don’t understand what he’s talking about.

Patrick tries to bring color and light into his niece’s and nephew’s lives, aiming to serve as an exuberant Auntie Mame, but he’s grieving, too. When he begins to share his memories of Sara and to ponder his midlife self-exile, he connects more deeply with Maisie and Grant, which allows him to consider returning to his old life and to rethink his own sibling relationships.

The Guncle does wonderful work with its youngest characters. Patrick’s exchanges with Grant and Maisie are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, even as they reveal two kids at different stages of development and grief. The novel's light touch extends to its secondary characters, including Patrick's neighbors and old friends.

Never going too dark, The Guncle is a sweet family story that offers an unexpected yet inevitable ending. 

Never going too dark, The Guncle is a sweet family story of an uncle trying to bring color and light into his niece’s and nephew’s lives.
FictionShort Stories

The Souvenir Museum

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth McCracken has published three novels and a memoir, but to many readers, short stories are her home ground. The tales in her third collection, The Souvenir Museum, often catch characters out of sorts, having arrived at a strange destination. “All her life she’d felt foreign; landing abroad, she was relieved to assume it as an official diagnosis,” thinks Jenny, a character in “Mistress Mickle All at Sea.” Jenny, who plays a villain in a kids’ TV show, is alone on a ferry to England after visiting her brother. In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might be merely meditative, even dull, but a McCracken story is never boring, and this one offers plenty of surprises.

Four linked stories follow a couple, Sadie and Jack, through their long relationship. In the book’s opening story, “The Irish Wedding,” young Sadie and Jack arrive in Ireland for the wedding of Jack’s older sister to a Dutch man. In this wedding tale, both strange and recognizable, we get a portrait not just of the young couple and all they don’t know about each other, but also of Jack’s quirky, possessive family. In the collection’s final story, Sadie and Jack are finally getting married 20 years later. On their honeymoon in Amsterdam, they simmer and fight, but they remember their love when family tragedy strikes.

A new collection from McCracken is always welcome. Grief, loss and the passage of time run through these stories, but so does humor, both the wry and laugh-out-loud varieties. Comedy lurks in even the smallest, sharpest observations, such as in “Proof,” when an older couple’s comfortable shoes are described as looking “like baked potatoes.”

Grief, loss and the passage of time run through these stories, but so does humor, both the wry and laugh-out-loud varieties.
NonfictionAnimals

Why Peacocks?

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Have you ever thought, What my household needs is a few peacocks? Me neither. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying Sean Flynn’s Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird, which details what happened after his family took on some pet peacocks. Flynn; his wife, Louise; and their two young sons already had two chickens, a dog and a cat—so when a friend asked if they wanted a peacock, they didn’t immediately say no. Before long, the family had adopted three: Carl, Mr. Pickle and Ethel.

Flynn, a longtime magazine journalist, often writes about emotional subjects, such as Arizona firefighters who died battling a wildfire or the 2011 domestic terrorist attack in Norway, and he doesn’t shy away from sentiment here either. Still, he approaches his subject with a science writer’s eye for detail. “The noise began in the middle of April,” he writes about the peacocks’ mating calls, for instance. “Mr. Pickle, a rising two-note burst, E above middle C, up to G, a quick slur down to F-sharp . . . not a plaintive cry, desperate and whiny, but assertive, a robust announcement; I am here.”

Flynn charts his own increasing obsession with the birds, the hours he spends each day in a lawn chair, aiming to entice the skittish peacocks to eat a blueberry out of his hand. When Carl becomes gravely ill, the endeavor to treat the peacock will be familiar to any pet owner who’s pondered the price of veterinary care, and yet far stranger. 

The narrative of Why Peacocks? alternates between this family’s story and more journalistic accounts, as Flynn leads us through a natural and cultural history of peacocks, including the evolution of male peacocks’ shimmering feather trains and the roles peacocks have played in religious traditions, making entertaining digressions along the way. He visits Palos Verdes, California, where peacocks have become a nuisance, and Dunfermline, Scotland, where a long-ago gift from Andrew Carnegie led to iconic peacocks in a public park.

Although this book is a quick read, it’s well researched with an extensive bibliography. Sweet and often funny, Why Peacocks? is an engaging mix of memoir, history and journalism.

Have you ever thought, What my household needs is a few peacocks? Me neither. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying this entertaining, sweet and often funny book.

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