Thane Tierney

FictionHistorical Fiction

Dragonfly

Review by Thane Tierney

From E.M. Nathanson’s The Dirty Dozen to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the trope of a disparate yet plucky band of outsiders deployed behind enemy lines to carry out a secret mission is well-trod territory. And in the hands of a lesser writer than Leila Meacham, author of bestsellers Roses and Somerset, it could easily descend into redundancy or even parody. Happily, in Dragonfly, this is by no means the case.

Five idealistic young Americans—two women and three men—are recruited at the height of World War II to assume secret identities in Paris and spy for the Allies. Over the course of the opening chapters, we come to realize that each has a motive beyond patriotism that qualifies them for the mission but could also endanger both their operation and their lives.

During their cursory read-in and training, one of the five, a fly fisherman, codenamed Limpet, comes up with the perfect name for the team: Dragonfly. “They’re almost impossible to snare and have no blind spots,” he explains. “Their eyes wrap around their heads like a football helmet to give them a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. Most insects, predators can attack from underneath and behind. Those are their vulnerable areas. Dragonflies don’t have them.”

Ah, but this Dragonfly does. In an occupied city where the slightest transgression or out-of-place comment can get you reported to the Gestapo, our freshly minted agents find themselves evading close call after close call—until they don’t. Is one of their number nimble enough to escape a prison cell and a firing squad? The truth, if there’s one to be had, may rest on a single mark on a convent wall’s mural.

Most people in America—and for that matter, most people in Paris by this point—have never lived in an occupied city. Meacham’s impeccable pacing and razor-wire tension evoke the daily drama of life under a Reich whose French reign might have lasted little more than four years but felt like the thousand years that it threatened to endure.

Five idealistic young Americans—two women and three men—are recruited at the height of World War II to assume secret identities in Paris and spy for the Allies. Over the course of the opening chapters, we come to realize that each has a motive beyond patriotism that qualifies them for the mission but could also endanger both their operation and their lives.

FictionComing of Age

The Scent Keeper

Review by Thane Tierney

From Proust’s “decoction of lime-blossom” to Raymond Chandler’s “I smelled like dead toads” to Hermoine Granger’s Amortentia love potion in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, fragrance has earned a hallowed space in literary fiction. It triggers memory. It invokes longing or revulsion. It fixes a place indelibly in time. And in Erica Bauermeister’s latest novel, The Scent Keeper, it forms the frame upon which the story is painstakingly—and lovingly—hung.

At the outset, Emmeline and her scientist father live a somewhat idyllic, if Spartan, existence on a remote island off Canada’s west coast. He’s invented a mysterious machine, the Nightingale, a kind of olfactory Polaroid camera that captures scent moments on specialized paper. At first, it’s not entirely clear why the duo lives in such isolation; the dad’s explanations to his daughter about their circumstances are gauzily metaphoric, and she finds it perfectly plausible that mermaids have parties that send “gifts”—like clothes, and even a goat—in their direction. But paradise, like childhood, has a fixed term, and one traumatic incident whisks Emmeline off her island into a society that she finds finds both intriguing and terrifying. When the love of her adolescent life abandons her, she sets off into the city, hoping to find either him, her long-lost mother or both.

Nearly a century ago, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse observed that “Our only guide is our homesickness,” and that theme runs like a river through Bauermeister’s story, which we experience not so much through Emmeline’s eyes as through her nose.

Reminiscent of Vianne Rocher from Joanne Harris’ beloved Chocolat, Emmeline is persistent, engaging and a savant in her chosen field. All she has to do is to take her father’s advice: follow her nose, and then get out of its way.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and has a top note of blood orange and kumquat.

From Proust’s “decoction of lime-blossom” to Raymond Chandler’s “I smelled like dead toads” to Hermoine Granger’s Amortentia love potion in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, fragrance has earned a hallowed space in literary fiction. It triggers memory. It invokes longing or revulsion. It fixes a place indelibly in time. And in Erica Bauermeister’s latest novel, The Scent Keeper, it forms the frame upon which the story is painstakingly—and lovingly—hung.

Fiction

My Coney Island Baby

Review by Thane Tierney

To movie buffs or people of a certain age, Billy O’Callaghan’s first literary novel will bring back memories of the Robert Mulligan film Same Time, Next Year, which traces an illicit love affair that gets renewed annually over the course of a quarter century. As you might guess, its sweeping arc encompasses huge changes in the couple’s emotional, political and financial circumstances. It’s a grand drama, aimed at the back of the house.

My Coney Island Baby swaps that film’s binoculars for a microscope, collapsing the history of Michael and Caitlin’s 25-year tryst into a single day, one that might turn out to be its last. Woven into the big secret that is their affair are two smaller secrets, unexploded emotional bombs set to detonate: Michael’s wife, Barbara, has been diagnosed with potentially terminal cancer, and Caitlin’s husband, Thomas, is on the brink of a promotion that would see the couple exiting New York City for Peoria, Illinois.

O’Callaghan slowly builds the tension as the novel alternates between Caitlin’s and Michael’s inner narratives until their relationship reaches a point of heat and overpressure, threatening to explode. In Caitlin’s words, “The world is turning at a thousand miles an hour. Sooner or later, we all get spun loose. No one avoids it forever, and nobody is ever prepared. And once it happens, all that remains are the things left unsaid, and the promises that can’t be kept.”

While some will likely draw comparisons with the work of Colm Tóibín (particularly Nora Webster), American readers might find Pat Conroy to be a more immediate touchstone. O’Callaghan has a keen sense of observation for emotional nuance, and his use of language is simply a delight to the mind’s ear; it’s impossible he could be anything other than Irish.

My Coney Island Baby is perfect for reading next to the fire on a gray day, snuggled under a blanket with a cup of tea or something a little stronger, as the wood and your dreams give off their last bit of heat before turning into smoke.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and will be celebrating 29 years of wedded bliss come summer.

To movie buffs or people of a certain age, Billy O’Callaghan’s first literary novel will bring back memories of the Robert Mulligan film Same Time, Next Year, which traces an illicit love affair that gets renewed annually over the course of a quarter century. As you might guess, its sweeping arc encompasses huge changes in the couple’s emotional, political and financial circumstances. It’s a grand drama, aimed at the back of the house.

FictionThrillerHistorical Fiction

The Wolf and the Watchman

Review by Thane Tierney

When you’re dead drunk, the last thing you want to deal with is a dead man. Yet duty calls for Swedish night watchman Mickel Cardell, who laboriously hauls his war-wounded body off to retrieve a drowned carcass. But the cause of death is no ordinary drowning: The corpse’s eyes have been gouged out, his teeth removed and his limbs severed. Accordingly, Cardell finds himself paired with special investigator Cecil Winge, a man so wracked with consumption and close to death that he has earned the nickname “Ghost of the Indebetou.” This unlikely couple is tasked with solving the unidentified man’s murder, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to do so before the coffin lid slides over Winge himself.

But that’s just one obstacle they’ll have to overcome. The year is 1793, just one removed from the regicide of Swedish King Gustav III, mere months after French King Louis XVI had a date with a guillotine, soon to be followed by his queen consort Marie Antoinette. Swedish adventurism has left the national treasury in shambles, and the stark divide between the ruling classes and the peasantry has left the masses in a state of agitated discontent. 

The sense of a ticking clock pervades Niklas Natt och Dag’s swift-paced, cinematic first novel, which was named Best Debut by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers last year. Though they seem to be the oddest of couples—one a man of action, the other a man of deliberation—Cardell and Winge prove to be an effective team as they crisscross political, cultural and economic strata to establish the dead man’s identity, and ultimately try to effect some rough form of justice.

In some ways, The Wolf and the Watchman calls to mind another auspicious debut murder mystery set in an unfamiliar place and time: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. It’s been nearly 40 years since that foreign-language historical thriller captured the world’s imagination, thoroughly engrossing readers and propelling its author into international stardom. So we’re about due, and Natt och Dag is certainly a worthy candidate.

The sense of a ticking clock pervades Niklas Natt och Dag’s swift-paced, cinematic first novel, which was named Best Debut by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers last year. Though they seem to be the oddest of couples—one a man of action, the other a man of deliberation—Cardell and Winge prove to be an effective team as they crisscross political, cultural and economic strata to establish the dead man’s identity, and ultimately try to effect some rough form of justice.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Finding Dorothy

Review by Thane Tierney

BookPage starred review, February 2019

It’s shocking to imagine that, while remarkably successful in its time, The Wizard of Oz now ranks more than 2,000 slots below Garfield: The Movie in terms of domestic gross revenue. And while MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer insisted that he was in the business of making money rather than magic, bestselling author Elizabeth Letts’ latest novel, Finding Dorothy, uncovers both in abundance on the set of the 1939 film.

In some ways reminiscent of Jerry Stahl’s excellent I, Fatty, Letts’ Finding Dorothy combines exhaustive research with expansive imagination, blending history and speculation into a seamless tapestry. It’s true that Oz author L. Frank Baum’s widow spent time with Judy Garland on set. And it’s from this point of departure—California, not Kansas—that Letts leads us down a parallel pair of yellow brick roads. One traverses the courtship, marriage and adult life of Maud Gage Baum, suffragette’s daughter and modern woman. She became the wife of a dreamer, a man not always financially successful but deeply committed to providing for his family and madly in love with his wife. The second road takes us into the golden age of Hollywood, where fate and opportunity conspire to make Judy Garland a superstar. Maud arrives on set to try to ensure that her husband’s vision is preserved, but she realizes that the more immediate task at hand is to take Dorothy/Judy—their identities in many ways inseparable at this point—under her wing. 

It’s a testament to Letts’ skill that she can capture on the page, without benefit of audio, that same emotion we have all felt sometime over the last 80 years while listening to “Over the Rainbow”: “Maud knew, right then, that Judy had done it. She had captured the magic that Frank had put into his story, sucked it from the air and breathed it back out through her vocal cords. Maud felt in her heart that Frank must have been listening.”

Let’s see some smug, wisecracking Hollywood cat do that.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

While MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer insisted that he was in the business of making money rather than magic, bestselling author Elizabeth Letts’ latest novel, Finding Dorothy, uncovers both in abundance on the set of the 1939 film.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Vita Nostra

Review by Thane Tierney

There’s really no way to approach Vita Nostra but elliptically, so strap in. By way of orientation, imagine that Hogwarts has opened a satellite campus inside Harry Haller’s Magic Theater from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and assigned Kafka, Dostoevsky and Rod Serling to oversee the curriculum. This circumstance is likely to incite one of three reactions from readers: befuddlement, terror or magnetic attraction. When you crack the spine of the latest novel from acclaimed Ukrainian authors Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, you’ll get a full measure of all three, and just as with the famed five stages of grief, you may experience any or all of them out of order, and more than once.

Vita Nostra starts out simply enough, with teenager Sasha Samokhina colliding with a strange man who exudes an unexplainable influence over her. Drawing her under his spell, the girl’s unbidden mentor persuades her to enroll in the Institute of Special Technologies, much to her confusion and her mother’s consternation. Once there, the lesson plan is—to put it mildly—fairly opaque, and academic failure is met with unpleasant consequences for the students’ families.

The novel belongs to an expanding Ukrainian genre known as fantastyka, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror and folkloric traditions. Much of this genre has not yet been translated into English. This particular exemplar could claim both Piers Anthony’s Macroscope (1969) and Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) as antecedents from the sci-fi realm, but also Jose Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1944) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Instantanés (1962) from the lit-fic sphere. Kudos are due to translator Julia Meitov Hersey, whose task cannot have been a simple one, given Vita Nostra’s complexity and sophistication.

I realize that this is a bit of a tease, but if you are at all intrigued by the phrase, “Time is a grammatical concept,” you will find yourself swept into this book’s estimable vortex from page one.

 

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

There’s really no way to approach Vita Nostra but elliptically, so strap in. By way of orientation, imagine that Hogwarts has opened a satellite campus inside Harry Haller’s Magic Theater from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and assigned Kafka, Dostoevsky and Rod Serling to oversee the curriculum.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A troubled inheritance

Review by Thane Tierney

Take Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, King Lear, “The Jewel in the Crown,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization; pass them along to DJ Danger Mouse for a bit of a mashup; and you’d have a sense of the shape and scope of Preti Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young.

Impressive in its heft (literally, as it clocks in at nearly 500 pages, and figuratively, as it won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize for first-time novelists), We That Are Young chronicles the changing of the guard within a family-owned multinational conglomerate, set against the backdrop of the Indian anti-corruption riots of 2011-12.

Much like some of the most thrilling novels of the past decade, We That Are Young relies on individual narratives that are self-serving and suspect. One central element is clear: Its patriarch, Devraj Bapuji, a former prince and founder of the largest business empire in India, is an unsympathetic lunatic. All the central characters—Devraj’s three daughters who stand to be potential heirs (Sita, Radha and Gargi), plus his right-hand man’s two sons (Jeet and Jivan)—are deeply flawed, so it’s a bit difficult to pick a side. Factor in the casual and untranslated bits of Hindi, and this epic novel announces itself from the outset as no beach read or airplane book; it demands (and rewards) one’s full attention.

Like India itself, the novel is beset with contradictions, as impossible wealth and crushing poverty huddle with one another in an uneasy embrace. And while the setting is uniquely Indian, hints of the rising tide of global income inequality are impossible to ignore.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted of the rich nearly a hundred years ago, “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” And yet, when the rich are turned loose against one another as they are in We That Are Young, they are still beleaguered by, and often powerless against, the same forces of human nature that bring out our best and basest selves.

 

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

Take Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, King Lear, “The Jewel in the Crown,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization; pass them along to DJ Danger Mouse for a bit of a mashup; and you’d have a sense of the shape and scope of Preti Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A love story in the midst of horror

Review by Thane Tierney

Perhaps the three scariest words in the history of human imagination were cast in iron atop a gate leading directly into the closest approximation of hell ever erected on earth: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. “Work sets you free.” The banal words that were nothing more than a cruel and tragic joke for thousands turned out to have a deeper meaning for Lale Sokolov, an Auschwitz survivor and the real-life hero of Heather Morris’ extraordinary debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Like the Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s Night, Morris’ work takes us inside the day-to-day workings of the most notorious German death camp. Over the course of three years, Morris interviewed Lale, teasing out his memories and weaving them into her heart-rending narrative of a Jew whose unlikely forced occupation as a tattooist put him in a position to act with kindness and humanity in a place where both were nearly extinct. While Lale’s story is told at one remove—he held his recollections inside for more than half a century, fearing he might be branded as a collaborator—it is no less moving, no less horrifying, no less true.

Just as a flower can grow through a sidewalk’s crack, so too can love spring and flourish in the midst of unspeakable horror, and so it is that Lale meets his lifelong love, Gita, when he inscribes the number 34902 on her arm. With the same level of inventiveness, dedication and adoration displayed by Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful, Lale endeavors to preserve their love (and safety) amid the horrors.

Make no mistake—horrors abound. At one point, Lale is called to identify two corpses seemingly marked with the same number, which is anathema to the camp’s meticulous record keepers. Upon emerging from the crematorium, Lale is greeted by his Nazi handler, Baretski: “You know something, Tätowierer? I bet you are the only Jew who ever walked into an oven and then walked back out of it.”

For decade upon decade, Lale’s story was one that desperately needed to be told. And now, as the number of those who witnessed the terror that was Nazi Germany dwindles, it is a story that desperately needs to be read. The disgraceful words that once stood over Auschwitz must be replaced with others: Never forget. Never again.

 

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

Perhaps the three scariest words in the history of human imagination were cast in iron atop a gate leading directly into the closest approximation of hell ever erected on earth: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. “Work sets you free.” The banal words that were nothing more than a cruel and tragic joke for thousands turned out to have a deeper meaning for Lale Sokolov, an Auschwitz survivor and the real-life hero of Heather Morris’ extraordinary debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

FictionFamily Drama

A long finish, with notes of horror and love

Review by Thane Tierney

Quick quiz: Which group is larger—Americans who have Nobel Prizes or Americans who have passed the Masters of Wine test? Is that your final answer? At press time, the U.S. sported a mere 47 of the latter, fewer than the number of Americans who have won the Nobel in the last decade. The Masters of Wine roster is the very definition of “elite.”

At the beginning of Ann Mah’s second novel, The Lost Vintage, protagonist Kate Elliott has committed to an extended visit with extended family in Meursault, France, in the hopes of shoring up her knowledge of French wines in advance of her third—and final—sitting for the test. To earn her keep during her excursion, Kate helps her cousin reclaim a cellar storage space that contains several surprises, not the least of which is a World War II-era diary from a great half-aunt named Hélène who has been more or less expunged from the family history. As Kate digs deeper, it appears that her relative may have been a collaborator during WWII, which is a bitter pill to swallow, but she’s determined to uncover the truth nonetheless.

Meanwhile, her erstwhile French paramour Jean-Luc has drops back into her life, and it’s unclear whether his presence will turn out to be boon or bane.

Any of these circumstances could break the concentration—even the will—of a lesser human, but Kate proves to be made of stern stuff, and she delves into the formal, informal and secret history of her family to try to make sense out of Hélène’s narrative, and perhaps to find the key to recovering her family’s pride and fortunes.

Mah’s scholarship and knowledge of French history and viticulture figure significantly in the novel’s storyline, but The Lost Vintage never feels forced or heavy-handed, and her vivid prose unlocks the musty aromatics of a long-abandoned cellar full of secrets for even the least sophisticated of palates. Drink deep.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and writes about food and wine (and occasionally France) in his blog, templeofthetongue.wordpress.com.

Quick quiz: Which group is larger—Americans who have Nobel Prizes or who have passed the Masters of Wine test? Is that your final answer? At press time, the U.S. sported a mere 47 of the latter, fewer than the number of Americans who have won the Nobel in the last decade. The Masters of Wine roster is the very definition of “elite.”

Mystery & SuspenseFiction

Still Lives

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s hard to know where an artist’s persona ends and her art begins, and this has never been truer than in the case of the mysteriously disappeared Kim Lord, the central figure in Maria Hummel’s spellbinding new novel, Still Lives. It’s also somewhat true of Hummel herself: The award-winning poet (her collection House and Fire won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2013 for best first book) worked at the perpetually cash-strapped Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and her novel’s protagonist, Maggie Richter, finds herself in a similar job at a similarly underfunded museum.

When Lord goes missing on the biggest night of her life—an A-list museum opening featuring her photographs, in which she portrays famous murder victims—speculation runs wild. Is it a publicity stunt? Or are more serious forces at foot? When Maggie’s ex-boyfriend (now Lord’s lover) falls under suspicion, Maggie’s journalistic instincts kick in, taking her places the cops can’t go and unwittingly putting her life in peril.

No doubt comparisons to Raymond Chandler’s best work will rain down upon Still Lives, dotted as it is with trenchant observations of LA and the human condition. Like Chandler, Hummel is capable of limning out a ripping yarn replete with high fashion, high finance and high society. These are the mean streets through which our heroine travels, though slightly removed from the glitter and the nastiness. And not unlike another master of the mystery, Erle Stanley Gardner, Hummel includes an intellectually satisfying Perry Mason moment that also provides an interesting twist.

It would be damning with faint praise to call Still Lives a contender for best beach read of the year—like calling Pablo Picasso a really good painter—but Still Lives is both that and so much more.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and is a member in good standing at several American and international museums.

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

Comparisons to Raymond Chandler’s best work will rain down upon Still Lives, dotted as it is with trenchant observations of LA and the human condition.
FictionPopular Fiction

Lifestyles of the rich and somewhat famous

Review by Thane Tierney

In the 1966 introduction to the paperback edition of his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” These are wise words for any of us to follow, but especially for TV actors Josie Lamar and Charlie Outlaw, the protagonists of Leah Stewart’s What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw.

And what exactly don’t we know about Charlie? At the outset, tons, but we get to join him on his journey of self-discovery and psychic rehab after a magazine interview goes sideways, provoking a breakup with longtime partner Josie. Unlike most of us who nurse our romantic wounds more locally, Charlie has traveled to a tropical island, which sets the backdrop for not only soul-searching but also kidnapping. While his fame has not preceded him, his American citizenship has, making him an attractive target for The Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight.

Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Josie is struggling to find her place in the world as an actor and a woman in that prickly hammock between ingénue and “a certain age.” The cult hit she starred in 20 years earlier (the aptly titled show “Alter Ego”) is about to be fêted at a fan convention, and she’s feeling the disconnect between her heroic character and her present-day hot mess.

Stewart, the critically acclaimed author of The Myth of You and Me, toggles back and forth between the two star-crossed lovers, both of whom are keen to attempt fence-mending but are kept apart by circumstance until a dramatic and (dare we say it?) heroic gesture dramatically flips the script. Stewart’s copious research brings the less exotic elements of stardom (insecurity, on-set tedium, lack of privacy, fluctuating finances) into sharp relief, and her characters are far more believable than most who share the small screen with Charlie and Josie.

 

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

In the 1966 introduction to the paperback edition of his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” These are wise words for any of us to follow, but especially for TV actors Josie Lamar and Charlie Outlaw, the protagonists of Leah Stewart’s What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw.

FictionPopular Fiction

A groovy kind of love

Review by Thane Tierney

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, January 2018

After Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, is there any other book written by any other Brit about the intersection of love and vinyl records that’s worth reading?

Why, yes, there is. And Rachel Joyce’s magnificent The Music Shop is it. Joyce, whose 2012 bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, digs deep in the crates and finds her groove in this novel of loves lost and found.

Frank—we never find out his last name, but we don’t need to, because he’s so indelible a character—is the sort of “music whisperer” that every serious record store geek aspires to be. As Frank correctly intuits, the man looking for Chopin is actually in desperate need of an Aretha Franklin infusion, while the unexpected “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber perfectly patches the Def Leppard-loving customer with a hole in her soul. It speaks volumes that Frank files Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” next to Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” and Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” After all, they’re all concept albums.

But Frank has some emotional damage himself, and his potential salvation shows up not in the stacks of wax, but unbidden one day in a green coat, passed out in front of his shop. Clearly Joyce has taken Holland-Dozier-Holland’s multimillion-selling song to heart: “You can’t hurry love / No, you just have to wait / She said love don’t come easy / It’s a game of give and take.”

Without giving away more of the plot, it’s worth noting that Joyce’s novel is intellectually and emotionally satisfying on every possible level. If you love words, if you love music, if you love love, this is 2018’s first must-read, and it will be without question one of the year’s best.

 

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

After Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, is there any other book written by any other Brit about the intersection of love and vinyl records that’s worth reading? Why, yes, there is. And Rachel Joyce’s magnificent The Music Shop is it.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Home is a long way from here

Review by Thane Tierney

The Scots didn’t invent stubbornness, but they perfected it, raised it to a high art where irresistible force and immovable object are sometimes locked like two neutron stars in a perilous dance. So it is with American immigrant Johnny MacKinnon and his Scottish son, Corran, in Laura Lee Smith’s second novel, The Ice House.

The elder MacKinnon is the COO of Bold City Ice in Jacksonville; his son is a recovering heroin addict and oil rig worker living near Loch Lomond. And while an actual ocean separates father and son, a more treacherous emotional ocean—strewn with a fair bit of ice—separates the two as well. On top of that, Johnny’s business is facing a potential bankruptcy due to a suspicious industrial accident, and he has been diagnosed with what might either be a benign cyst or a life-threatening tumor in his brain. Against his wife’s wishes and his doctor’s advice, MacKinnon decides to hit the road to the auld sod in order to—make amends? Find closure with his estranged son? Elicit a long-overdue apology? All of the above?

As the famous Scots poet Robert Burns noted, the best-laid schemes . . . well, you know. Not only were MacKinnon’s plans far from the best laid to begin with, but he’s also left his wife (who is the firm’s CEO) across the sea with a full slate of emotional, legal and financial calamities of her own. What could possibly go wrong?

Smith has a flair for creating three-dimensional characters who are flawed and heroic in the small ways that most of us are, and while her literary milieu is more chamber music than symphony, she is able to rivet the reader for more than 400 pages, which is no wee accomplishment.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and is descended from Scots who once lived on the Isle of Muck in the Inner Hebrides.

The Scots didn’t invent stubbornness, but they perfected it, raised it to a high art where irresistible force and immovable object are sometimes locked like two neutron stars in a perilous dance. So it is with American immigrant Johnny MacKinnon and his Scottish son, Corran, in Laura Lee Smith’s second novel, The Ice House.

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