Sarah McCraw Crow

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.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Oh, does Lauren Hough have a story to tell. Born into an apocalyptic cult called the Family (also known as the Children of God), Hough grew up in group homes in Germany, Japan, Switzerland and elsewhere, often without enough food, and steeped in the strange prophecies of cult leader David Berg. Because of the Family’s theology, Hough had to smother her identity as a gay kid throughout her adolescence.

After high school, Hough joined the Air Force during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era (1993–2011) and was stationed in South Carolina. This is where we first meet her in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing—in 1999, standing in her yard watching her new car burn. Someone, likely another airman, has set it on fire, but the sheriff thinks Hough is the prime suspect.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the audiobook! Author Lauren Hough and actor-producer Cate Blanchett create a heartbreaking and intimate experience for listeners.

In the 11 linked essays that make up Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Hough recounts these sorts of experiences, such as her last days in the Air Force, when she was more or less pushed out for being gay; her desperate search for a job and home; her work as a bouncer at a gay club in Washington, D.C.; her first romantic relationships with women; her stint in jail for an assault she may or may not have committed; and her years working as a cable guy. Beneath all her turmoil is the trauma of growing up in the Family—the sleep deprivation, the endless singing, chanting, praying and preparing for Armageddon, the proselytizing and selling posters on the street, all while trying to avoid adults’ and boys’ sexual advances, which the Family tacitly encouraged.

These essays are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar. But they’re also well crafted and make unexpected connections among Hough’s disparate experiences, her search for identity and the larger culture. Most of all, Hough’s writing is about voice, and her distinctive style is what carries the reader through. By the collection’s end, you feel you know her, and you know she’s finding her own way through writing. Hough is a writer to watch.

The essays in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing are funny, profane and deceptively loose, as if Lauren Hough is talking to you late at night in a quiet bar.
FictionPopular Fiction

Faye, Faraway

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In Helen Fisher’s debut novel, Faye, Faraway, Faye mourns her late mother 30 years after her mother’s death, describing grief as a feeling that’s “like a missing tooth: an absence I can feel at all times, but one I can hide as long as I keep my mouth shut.”

Faye has a good life in London, where she’s a mother to two young daughters, Evie and Esther. She’s married to Eddie, an all-around good guy who’s studying for the ministry, though she can’t picture herself as a vicar’s wife. She loves her friends and her career testing product designs for blind people. Still, there’s a hole at the center of her life, left by the death of her mom when Faye was 8 years old.

When Faye finds an old photo in which her 6-year-old self is sitting in an empty toy box, she’s surprised to encounter the same box later in Eddie’s study. Eddie has brought the tattered box down from the attic to fill with textbooks, but Faye returns it to the attic, feeling possessive about the box and aggrieved by the loss of her mother. When she hits her head on a lightbulb and shatters it, she steps into the box to avoid the broken glass. Once in the box, she falls through time to her childhood home in the mid-1970s, where her mother is asleep, as is 6-year-old Faye.

The rest of this gentle time-slip story is composed of Faye’s interactions with her young mother, Jeanie, and her own younger self, and then her return to the present, where she ponders what to do about this new ability. Faye’s voice is charming, funny, sometimes philosophical and occasionally digressive. Her first-person perspective is in direct conversation with the reader, asking us if we’re still with her and assuring us that she understands if we’re not. Faye, Faraway is a welcome escape.

Faye’s voice is charming, funny, sometimes philosophical and occasionally digressive. Faye, Faraway is a welcome escape.
FictionFamily Saga

What Could Be Saved

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

At the heart of family novels there’s often a secret, and how that secret plays out in family dynamics forms the heart of the story. Liese O’Halloran Schwarz’s third novel is no exception, with several secrets reverberating from the past.

As the novel opens, 54-year-old Laura Preston is treading water. Her art plateaued years ago, and she’s in a stagnant relationship with a lawyer named Edward. She doesn’t get along with her disapproving sister, Bea, and their mother, Genevieve, is slipping away to dementia. When Laura gets a call from a stranger who says her long-lost brother, Philip, has been found, she impulsively buys a ticket to Bangkok and sets off to find him.

This sounds like a setup for a suspense novel, and What Could Be Saved does offer suspenseful moments and surprising reversals. But two other elements make this novel uniquely satisfying: the portraits of each Preston family member, and the novel’s depiction of the unintended consequences of late 20th-century Americans abroad.

In Bangkok, Laura connects with the man who might be Philip, and from there, the narrative slips back to 1972, where it rotates through the perspectives of mother Genevieve; father Robert; young Laura and Philip; and Noi, a homesick Thai servant to the Prestons. Through their stories, readers learn what brought the Preston family to Bangkok, how the Vietnam War has spilled into other countries and the truth behind Philip’s disappearance. As the story shifts back and forth in time, the present-day Laura warily tries to make sense of Philip’s new presence, unearthing further truths about her family.

Genevieve is an especially memorable character, depicted at first as a shallow expat wife but when confronted with extreme loss is forced to change dramatically. Schwarz also gives wonderful texture to life in early 1970s Bangkok, although occasionally those details go too far, lending weight to moments that don’t need them.

What Could Be Saved juggles a complex story and structure, creating believable characters in its portrait of a family shattered by loss.

At the heart of family novels there’s often a secret, and how that secret plays out in family dynamics forms the heart of the story. Liese O’Halloran Schwarz’s third novel is no exception, with several secrets reverberating from the past.

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