Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin

Sign Up

Get the latest ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

All , , , Coverage

All Coming of Age Coverage

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

4 can’t-miss book club picks

Feature by Julie Hale

In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the summer. Set in 1962, the novel is narrated by Ruthie’s brother, Joe, and by Norma, a girl whose remote, unapproachable parents seem to be harboring secrets. Spanning five tumultuous decades, the novel brings these parallel narratives to a surprising climax. Peters’ sensitive depiction of family members learning to live with loss is unforgettable. Themes of loyalty, memory and guilt will spark lively conversation among readers.

Inspired by historical events, Tan Twan Eng’s atmospheric novel The House of Doors is about writer W. Somerset Maugham, who, with waning health and a declining reputation, goes to Penang in 1921 in search of material for a new book. He finds what he’s looking for after reconnecting with his friend Robert Hamlyn. Robert’s wife, Lesley, shares information with Maugham about her murky past, including her links to Chinese revolutionaries and a murder—perfect fodder for a novel. Writing with wonderful detail, Eng delivers a smart, suspenseful narrative that sheds fresh light on a fascinating era in history.

Rio and Gibraltar, a successful Black couple, leave behind the world of Boston academia to build a new life in Gabriel Bump’s electrifying book The New Naturals. With the backing of a rich patron, they start an experimental community founded on tolerance and trust. The community—based in a bunker-like space under a hill—draws a variety of wayward souls, but friction soon arises, and the couple’s dream of an ideal society is threatened. Grief, social justice and the nature of community are a few of the novel’s engaging discussion topics.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s genius reenvisioning of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, has been hailed as one of the best books of the century. Demon, the narrator of the novel, lives in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, with his mother, a drug addict. He’s creative and smart, but faces enormous challenges when his mother’s death lands him in foster care. Kingsolver portrays Demon’s difficult coming-of-age with vividness and immediacy. Featuring a sprawling plot and expansive cast of characters, the novel is an epic for our times and a modern book club classic.

Choose one of these buzzed-about novels for your book club and get set for a great meeting.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Only Here, Only Now

Review by Michael Magras

Teenage years are hard enough to get through as it is. Add a fractured family life, and the terrain gets even rockier. That’s the situation facing Cora Mowat, a Scottish girl growing up in a grimy post-industrial town along the Firth of Forth, in Only Here, Only Now, Tom Newlands’ uncompromising debut novel.

The book spans four years, from 1994 to 1998. Newlands has created a memorable character in Cora, who, at the outset, is 14 and lives alone with her mother, a wheelchair user, in Muircross, “a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget.” With that description, who could blame her for having her “heart set on skipping this housing estate and vanishing,” preferably to college in Glasgow?

As Cora and her mother wait for approval on an application for a better house in Abbotscraig, a school psychologist recommends that restless Cora be “checked for anxiety, and for being hyper.” Like Newlands, Cora has ADHD, which she describes by saying, “It’s like you’re always tired but you can never rest.”  

That’s just one of the hurdles Cora has to negotiate, all of which Newlands describes with memorably earthy phrases. Her mom’s new boyfriend is “a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker” who has a missing left eyeball yet is kind to her, unlike the other “kitten stranglers” her mom has brought home. After he moves in with them, however, Cora wonders what he’s doing with CDs, alarm clocks, vacuum-packed legs of lamb and other seemingly stolen merchandise in his room.

By year’s end, a sudden tragedy upends Cora’s life and expectations. Newlands dramatizes the resulting changes in the book’s subsequent sections, first in Abbotscraig in 1996, where Cora has a relationship with a young man who’s a troublemaker, and then in Glasgow in 1998, where she is forced to confront her choices of the past four years and decide what she wants to do next. 

The book sags a bit in its middle section, but the tension and distinctive characterizations return in the novel’s final third. Only Here, Only Now may be one among many coming-of-age stories, but this winning debut is distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters and the originality of his prose.

Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now is a winning coming-of-age story distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters, among them Scottish teen Cora, her wheelchair-using mother, and her mother’s shifty but kind boyfriend.
FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Blue Light Hours

Review by Laura Sackton

In her debut novella, Blue Light Hours, award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato explores how distance—between languages, cultures and places—can affect a relationship.

At the center of the story are a mother and daughter and the rituals they create to remain close to each other despite the thousands of miles between them. The unnamed daughter is in her first year at a small liberal arts college in Vermont; her mother remains at home in Brazil. The daughter goes about her mundane days and then recounts them to her mother over Skype. Her mother, in return, offers details about her own increasingly lonely life.

These exchanges between mother and daughter are both melancholic and mesmerizing. Neither of their lives are particularly interesting in the conventional sense. There are no devastating breakups or major meltdowns, no financial catastrophes or familial betrayals. The daughter does her schoolwork, makes friends with her fellow international students, eats in the dining hall, observes the unfamiliar New England seasons. The mother watches soap operas, goes to work, asks again and again about her daughter’s strange new world. 

The book, instead, probes beneath the surface: How much of a life can truly be shared over Skype? How does being apart change a relationship as foundational and important as the one between a mother and a daughter? What happens when what is shared, over time, becomes rote, empty? 

Dantas Lobato explores these questions with thoughtful nuance. Her writing sometimes feels emotionally restrained, but perhaps this is a reflection of the characters’ longing: the daughter’s longing for the particular ways her mother knows her and also for the excitement of a new, separate life; the mother’s longing for her daughter to remain close. The prose itself embodies loneliness: crisp, declarative sentences that have the flow and rhythm of poetry. Blue Light Hours is an intimate meditation on home and homesickness, belonging and wanting to belong, on what it means to leave and be left, and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.

Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut, Blue Light Hours, is an intimate meditation on home, homesickness and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.
FictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYAShort StoriesLiterary FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

The Hold List: Born this way

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Chasing Redbird

Sharon Creech’s Chasing Redbird was the first book I ever read by myself, which was a big deal for me; I am dyslexic and struggled to read when I was younger. I was captivated by the main character, Zinnia Taylor, because she was a misfit, just like me. Zinny has six siblings, and in their chaotic home, she often gets lost in the fray. She prefers to spend time with her Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate who live next door and provide her with a safe haven. When Jessie dies unexpectedly, Zinny withdraws even further from her family. As she wrestles with her grief and guilt, she discovers an abandoned 200-year-old pioneer trail on her family farm and becomes obsessed with restoring it to functionality. Her family thinks she’ll give up, but Zinny has to see this project through. It may be the only way to heal her broken world. Creech treats the topic of grief and family dynamics delicately and beautifully, painting a profound picture that will speak to readers of all ages.

—Meagan, Production Manager

Earthlings

From childhood, we’re trained to take part in society, learning what behavior is praiseworthy, and what behavior is outrageous. By adulthood, most of us conform automatically, but for some, it comes less easily—like Natsuki, the protagonist of Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings. As a child, Natsuki feels like an outsider, and she is relieved when her stuffed hedgehog, Piyyut, reveals to her that she is actually an alien from planet Popinpobopia. Her alien’s perspective lets her see her town for what it is: a “Baby Factory” in which humans serve society by working, getting married and having babies that will grow up to become society’s tools in turn. Natsuki struggles to accept that future, though she longs for the security of being normal. Her isolation increases when a teacher sexually abuses her, and no one believes her when she seeks help. Like Convenience Store Woman, Murata’s other novel that has been translated into English, Earthlings pushes readers—hard—to see the absurdity of what is and isn’t considered acceptable. While the subject matter remains bleak, by the end of the book, Natsuki finds allies, and their acts of defiance take on a kind of euphoric hilarity, despite the severity of the consequences.

—Phoebe, Associate Editor

Kaikeyi

In Vaishnavi Patel’s Kaikeyi, Princess Kaikeyi is the lone daughter in a family with seven sons. After her father banishes her mother, she is left with only the stories of the gods that her mother once shared with her. Now on her own as the sole woman in her family, she is determined for her voice to be heard. However, her world shatters when the king quickly marries her off for the sake of securing an alliance, despite Kaikeyi begging to remain independent. Before she journeys to the kingdom of her betrothed, she discovers a special magic that can influence how she is perceived within relationships. With this newfound spark of confidence, she plows through societal barriers, fighting on the battlefield for her new home and joining her husband’s council, where she resiliently presses the other men in the room to make changes in their kingdom. After years of ruthless judgment and scorn, Kaikeyi and her two sister-wives, Kausalya and Sumitra, start a women’s council for members of the community to seek advice and direction. Kaikeyi is a persistent force throughout the story, never afraid to disrupt the conditions of society. She rubs people the wrong way and inspires others, making her a dynamic character whose persistence and courage will win readers’ hearts.

—Jena, Sales Coordinator

The Complete Stories

A keen observer of idiosyncratic behavior, the inimitable Flannery O’Connor spun unforgettable, expansive short stories that brim with characters whose feelings of otherness alienate them from society. The most well-known is The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a story that is often readers’ entry point to this Southern writer. The Misfit is “aloose from the Federal Pen” and, with unfailing politeness, executes a family on their way to a vacation in Florida. Complex and contemplative, The Misfit finds “no pleasure [but] in meanness” yet tries to square his crimes with a sense of right and wrong. Other misfits in O’Connor’s stories include Olga in “Good Country People,” an unapologetically surly spinster whose leg was shot off in a hunting accident, and who gets hoodwinked by a Bible salesman. Some of her misfits crave redemption and empowerment—O’Connor was, afterall, a Catholic—while others are unwilling or unable to change. Perhaps the greatest misfit in O’Connor’s stories is the midcentury South itself. A region straining to be better? Or one unwilling to shed the yoke of violence? The Complete Stories is a compendium you can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading, feeling freshly enlightened each time.

—Erica, Associate Editor

If you've ever felt like the odd one out—the black sheep in your family, or loner in your community—you'll love these four books with protagonists who can't help but stand out.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Still Life

Review by Laura Sackton

In her sharp, funny and wonderfully observed debut, Katherine Packert Burke captures the ordinary texture of queer and trans life. Still Life is a surprising and layered portrayal of the quotidian, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals. 

Edith is a trans woman in her late 20s, muddling through life without direction. She’s living in Austin, supposedly working on her second book. In reality, she spends her days cruising dating apps, going to parties and attending protests against increasingly violent anti-trans legislation. Grieving the death of her best friend and sometimes-lover, Val, she’s trapped in a melancholic longing for her past in Boston.

When a college friend invites her to speak to his creative writing students, she reluctantly returns to Boston for a week, where she visits her ex-girlfriend, Tessa, whom she dated before she transitioned. The narrative moves between the turbulent present and the turbulent past. In both timelines, Edith’s life revolves around her tangled relationships with both Tessa and Val. The three women’s friendships shift as they age, move and fall in and out of love. Edith transitions and comes out; Val dies. It is these two world-remaking changes that give the novel its emotional heft. 

There’s not much plot in these 272 pages, but the novel is all the richer for it. Without external events driving the action forward, Burke is able to focus on the strange and singular details of her protagonist’s interior life. Burke writes about grief, transition, gender identity, desire, and queer and trans love with astonishing expansiveness. Edith’s journey is not straightforward or linear. It’s circuitous, sometimes stagnant. She tries to think her way forward, but finds, again and again, that she cannot escape the material world—her physical body.

Still Life is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of queer friendship. Its urgency lies not in what happens to the characters, but in how they feel about what happens to them. Most of all, it’s a novel about navigating that most human of conundrums: change.

Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

Mina’s Matchbox

Review by Maya Fleischmann

Powerful in its nuanced details, Mina’s Matchbox is an immersive and poignant coming-of-age story.

After the death of her father, 12-year-old Tomoko is sent to live with her aunt’s family in the coastal Japanese town of Ashiya, while her mother stays in Tokyo. Mina’s Matchbox chronicles Tomoko’s transformative year with her extended family, from 1972 to 1973, especially her close relationship with Mina, her book-loving cousin who has asthma.

Unlike Yoko Ogawa’s darker novels, such as Hotel Iris and the Orwellian The Memory Police, Mina’s Matchbox adopts a narrative tone that is curious and filled with wonder, conveying Tomoko’s enchantment with the enormous house in Ashiya and its fascinating occupants, such as Tomoko’s quiet aunt; her uncle, prone to mysterious disappearances; her German grandmother, Rosa, who has a unique bond with the housekeeper, Yoneda; and Pochinko, the family’s pygmy hippopotamus. Ogawa draws readers into the personalities and interactions of the family, unraveling the characters’ complex inner lives.

Looking back from three decades later, the adult Tomoko finds profound insights in her childhood delight with the expansiveness of life. Ogawa’s masterful descriptions, too, add depth and suggest simmering secrets that wait to boil over.

Translated by Stephen B. Snyder, Mina’s Matchbox is an elegant and stirring work that captures the dreams of youth, and the lingering sweetness that can remain even after those dreams have faded.

Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Reading outside the lines with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Interview by Eric A. Ponce

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans, has a lot in common with the titular protagonist of her debut novel, Catalina. Like Villavicencio did, Catalina attends Harvard as an undocumented student, and her broad ambitions could easily be imagined as the precursor to Villavicencio’s success. With the recent prevalence of autofiction by authors like Teju Cole, Gabriela Wiener, Karl Ove Knausgaard and many others, readers might wonder, how much of Catalina is Villavicencio?

This uncertainty, it turns out, is deliberate: “I always want the reader to not necessarily be sure what my intentions are as a writer,” Villavicencio says. She found a model in J.D. Salinger’s short stories about the Glass family. “Salinger definitely does this. . . . You start to think Salinger might be one of the brothers, he might be Seymour [Glass]. . . . And I liked the game of not knowing what Salinger was trying to do . . . but I always knew that I was wrapped around his finger.”

Read our starred review of Catalina.

Like those Salinger stories, Catalina is wholly fiction, and Villavicencio sees the book as being in the same tradition as other novels with young protagonists like Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Catalina, like a lot of college students, dreads the approach of graduation and can’t figure out what to do with the rest of her life. By capturing the tumult of young adulthood, Villavicencio hopes to provoke readers to make something out of their mess. Her goal in writing is “empowering those who need to be empowered, embarrassing those who need to be embarrassed.” In the ’60s when The Velvet Underground was playing live in New York City, it was said that anyone who saw them was inspired to start their own band. Villavicencio wants her writing to have that same effect, for readers to “think they have to go make something. . . . [To think] I feel so alive, I have to go do something now.”

Musicians who make their songs feel personal were a big influence on Catalina, especially Lorde’s album Melodrama, where, Villavicencio feels, “spilling guts out with precision and dedication” was a fierce act of artistry. Villavicencio wanted this book to “sound and feel like a breakup album or pop album,” and that inspiration comes across in Catalina’s potent mix of melancholy and moxie. Villavicencio likes to think of her work in relation to Taylor Swift as well, whose fans pore over her lyric sheets looking for clues to her personal life.

“What your family, Telemundo and García Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories. . . . The American racial binary can’t imagine us.”

There’s an allure to this sense of intimate disclosure. Villavicencio wanted reading Catalina to be like eating popcorn or potato chips, to give readers that feeling of “you can’t just eat one,” she says. “You can discover something new in every sentence, but it can also just be really fun.” When Villavicencio was sharing the book with family and friends, the reaction of one of her partner’s family members, an older white woman without the same educational background as Catalina, was encouragingly positive. She told Villavicencio that she “really related to Catalina” and felt “included with the smart kids . . . in a way that she felt she’d been excluded before.” This kind of boundary breaking, where what might have been alienating is instead enjoyable, is the foundation of Catalina, as the titular character navigates a system designed for conformity yet manages to stay entirely her complicated self. “There’s something that feels very, very freeing about entering cultural institutions feeling like it’s all there for you to use,” Villavicencio says. “I don’t have to take on the values to be able to use it.”

There’s another kind of empowering boundary breaking at work here as well, through Catalina’s position as a Latinx novel. When Catalina’s parents passed away in a car crash, she was sent to live with her grandparents, who had immigrated to the U.S. before she was born. Raised by them in New York City, and unable to leave the country because of her lack of documentation, Catalina is thoroughly a New Yorker. Still, she experiences the city and the rest of the world around her through a different language, one indecipherable by Anglos.

This transcendent language is symbolized in the novel by the khipu, an Incan recording device made from knotted strings—a “tactile” form of writing, as Villavicencio describes it—which Catalina encounters at the campus museum where she works. Western scholars have never been able to decipher the language of the khipu, so it remains a mystery what exactly they were used to record. This evokes the divide between minority and majority communities, who are often illegible to one another both linguistically and culturally. But Villavicencio puts the symbol to a further purpose: On another level, the khipu illustrates the distance between oneself and “the parts of our ancestry we can’t tap into.”

“Who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder.”

Villavicencio speaks with a wary wisdom about “the impossibility of being Latinx,” pointing out that “it can mean anything! . . . What your family, Telemundo and Garcia Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories.” In today’s political landscape, where everything hinges on identity, “there is an image for marketing,” she says, but it doesn’t account for the complicated ways history has and continues to play out. “The American racial binary can’t imagine us. You have to use these terms defensively and it puts too much pressure on them. [Identity] has to encompass everything.” She says that you have to “go down to earth, face to face, [think about] who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder. Theory gets us out of doing the real work.” She is certainly doing the real work in Catalina, and readers will feel its impact.

In her clever debut novel, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in a tradition of blurring the boundary between art and artist.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionGothic FictionDebut FictionCrime FictionComing of Age

Find something new in these 5 debuts

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Smothermoss

First lines: “It is happening again. Snow melts, the crust of frost cracks and heaves. Water sinks below ground, swelling channels. Sap rises. Wild garlic sprouts, arbutus creeps, and bloodroot quickens. Curved shoots of spotted skunk cabbage thrust toward the light.”

Read if you enjoyed: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow or Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Alisa Alering’s debut, Smothermoss, is a novel of violence, trust and the landscape of Appalachia. The mountains and hollows, the moss, quartz, water and trees are all painted in their full aliveness.

In the 1980s, Sheila, Angie and their mother are trying to figure out how to survive. Working long shifts at the asylum, their mother is rarely present, and while the two sisters share a small room, their diverging interests and ways of being make it hard for them to relate to each other. Sheila goes to work, she worries, she feeds the rabbits. Angie explores, she knows the neighbors, and she draws mysterious creatures on her own deck of tarot cards which almost seem to self-animate. Then two female hikers are murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and the murderer may not have left the area. The secrets of what happened hide in the landscape. Each scene builds in tension and a sense of wonder, surprising you with the direction these sisters’ future may take.

—Freya Sachs

 

Bright Objects

First line: “Barely an hour before my first death on a warm night in January 1995—when I blacked out in a crumpled Toyota south of a town called Jericho—a bright object was sighted somewhere in the constellation of Virgo, the sign of the maiden, not far from a star named Porrima, after the Roman goddess of prophecy.”

Read if you enjoyed: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh or The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

A fatal accident, a cosmic visitor and a mysterious stranger all come together in a small Australian town in Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects.

Young widow Sylvia Knight is recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and left her with serious injuries, both physical and psychological. Profoundly lonely, Sylvia works at the local mortuary, keeps her husband’s grave tidy and puts on a cheerful face for her mother-in-law, Sandy. But she is haunted by sketchy memories of the night of the accident.

When a rare comet appears, Joseph Evans, local meditation teacher and the heir of a wealthy family, sees the comet as a divine messenger and begins a series of mystical lectures that attract a cultlike following. He is eager to involve both Sylvia and Sandy, and Sylvia is distressed to see her mother-in-law drawn in by his promises. Wrestling with suicidal ideation, Sylvia finds her obsession with uncovering her husband’s killer pushing her to the edges of her sanity.

Bright Objects is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.

—Lauren Bufferd

 

Pearl

First line: “Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me Went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned Who do you think was saved?”

Read if you enjoyed: Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin, or Wintering by Katherine May

Sian Hughes’ debut novel, Pearl, offers a coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor.

As the novel opens, narrator Marianne is taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes in her home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and is based in part on a medieval poem of the same title. Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis. Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast, and to that end, each chapter opens with part of a nursery rhyme or nonsense poem.

Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.

—Sarah McCraw Crow

 

Between This World and the Next

First lines: “Open your eyes. Empty your mind. What’s happening in the present will pass. This is what Song tells herself. It’s dark and hot and the middle of the night. Through the light that comes from the open door, she sees a bead of sweat on the tip of his nose.”

Read if you enjoyed: Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor or Hunted by Abir Mukherjee

As Praveen Herat’s gripping debut political thriller, Between This World and the Next, opens, Joseph Nightingale, a British war photographer nicknamed Fearless after a moment of heroism during the Bosnian conflict, has accepted his old friend Alyosha Federenko’s invitation to Cambodia.

Federenko stashes Fearless at the Naga, a gathering place for the gangs and soldiers of fortune set loose upon the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the chilling pleasures of this book is Herat’s vivid, knowledgeable portrait of this threatening netherworld, from outposts like the Naga to breakaway states like Transnistria. Also at the Naga is Song, a young Cambodian woman enslaved as a cleaner. Song cares for the young children who are brought to the Naga by adult predators and whose gruesome abuse is recorded on video. The existence of one of these videos, handed off to Fearless, sets the elaborate plot rolling with increasing velocity.

The final chapters of Between This World and the Next are breathtaking in their descriptive power and imaginative reach, and the novel’s ending is very satisfying. But some threads still dangle and not all questions are answered—which makes one hope for a sequel.

—Alden Mudge

 

They Dream in Gold

First lines: “His pillow ruptures between her knees. Feathers plucked from the breasts of live geese burst into the darkness of the room. She watches them by the flashes of the storm’s lightning.”

Read if you enjoyed: Village Weavers by Myriam J.A. Chancy or True Biz by Sara Novic.

Playwright and director Mai Sennaar’s debut novel, They Dream in Gold, crackles. Her prose is elemental, flowing like a river at times, then burning like fire, heightening the reader’s senses until all five mingle into one.

Mansour, a child first of Senegal and then of the world, exudes music and wants to make his mark as a musician. Mama Eva, who raised Mansour and keeps her own secrets, aspires to culinary heights. And Bonnie, an only child raised by her grandmother, is entranced by Mansour’s sound on a demo CD before she ever meets him. They all have, as Sennaar writes, “a need for a life of wonder.” After Mansour goes missing while on tour in Spain, the lives of the women who love him are strung painfully taut as they wait for news: Back in her crumbling mansion in Switzerland, Mama Eva worries as she cooks for her long-awaited restaurant’s opening day, while pregnant Bonnie broods and paces.

They Dream in Gold wends from Mama Eva’s 1940s youth in Dakar to Bonnie and Mansour’s first meeting in 1960s New York City, to a Brazilian music festival in the middle of Carnival where Mansour’s star is born. Unreserved and confident, Sennaar’s piercing narrative voice reverberates through a novel pulsing with all the intensity it takes to compose a life and make it sing.

—Melissa Brown

These vibrant novels from first-time fiction writers grabbed our attention right from the opening lines.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Pearl

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sian Hughes’ debut novel, Pearl, offers a coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor.

As the novel opens, narrator Marianne and her teenage daughter, Susannah, are taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes, in Marianne’s home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Her mother’s unexplained disappearance has colored Marianne’s entire life—a mystery that she can’t move beyond. Marianne recounts her idyllic, idiosyncratic rural childhood in an old farmhouse with her creative mother, who sang folk songs and shared ancient stories. Later, during the bumpy, sad years after the disappearance, Marianne’s father Edward, a history professor, tries to patch together a life for Marianne and her younger brother, Joe. The adult Marianne narrates in an episodic, not-quite-linear fashion, looking back from early middle age to circle the mystery of her mother. The narrative is particularly strong in conveying the younger Marianne’s self-absorbed, mishap-filled adolescence, and her lurch into young adulthood.

Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and is based in part on a medieval poem of the same title. Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences and images. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis. Pearl is also full of the gentle landscape and hallowed folklore of English village life, sometimes with a slightly gothic cast. To that end, each chapter opens with part of a nursery rhyme or nonsense poem (“As I went over the water, / The water went over me. I saw two little blackbirds / Sitting in a tree”). Throughout, the spirit of Marianne’s missing mother hovers, and this underlying mystery pulls the reader forward, though the story remains more immersive than propulsive.

Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.

Poet Sian Hughes brings vibrant language and a droll sensibility to her debut novel, Pearl, which explores a woman’s grief after losing her mother at 8 years old, set against the gentle landscape of English village life.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Catalina

Review by Eric A. Ponce

College is supposed to be the best four years of your life. Throwing a Frisbee on the quad, spending late nights in the library, meeting people from all over the world—in the American imagination, college is a utopia. In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, the titular character goes to Harvard and realizes that college can be a dystopia, too. As an undocumented person in the United States, Catalina Ituralde is forced to live her life quietly, mostly staying home with her two grandparents, who are also undocumented and at risk of deportation. But Catalina can’t avoid attention, or at least she doesn’t want to. An adventurous free spirit, she wants to live life to the fullest. She wants to fall in love and experience all of life’s pleasures and pains.

Every college student dreads graduation: After four years of security, what comes next? The “real” world? For Catalina, in her senior year, this dread is emphasized by an actual existential threat. Her status as a student helps to keep her from being deported, and if she can’t find a sustainable life path to follow after college, she risks being taken from the only world she’s ever known. When a pretty, privileged boy starts to take interest in her, it seems like a way is opening to get everything she wants. Nathaniel—whom Catalina never refers to as “Nathan” or “Nate,” underscoring the disparity of their social statuses—is the son of a famous director and an aspiring anthropologist. Both he and his father have a keen interest in the culture of Latin America, particularly Ecuador, where Catalina and her family have roots. Catalina flirts with Nathaniel, ensuring that he slowly, helplessly falls for her, and she starts to catch feelings too. But when the threat of deportation becomes a reality for her family, Catalina has to take advantage of her budding romance, asking Nathaniel’s father to help her gain public support by collaborating on a documentary. The project puts a strain on Catalina as she is forced to define herself, to speak for her dysfunctional family and to confront what kind of person Harvard has made her.

Written in brilliant, overflowing prose, Catalina is one of the best, most fun-to-read books you will find. You may see a bit of yourself in Catalina, or you may learn how to empathize with someone whose entire life is chaos.

Read our interview with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about Catalina.

In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina Ituralde, an adventurous free spirit and an undocumented student at Harvard, finds college to be a more dystopian experience than the typical American envisioning.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Humor Me

Review by Thane Tierney

The British poet Philip Larkin once famously opined that parents “fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Protagonist Presley Fry in Cat Shook’s sophomore novel, Humor Me, could find many faults with her alcoholic mother and their toxic relationship. But after suddenly losing her, 20-something Presley is a bit of an emotional wreck. 

On the surface, it would seem that Presley’s well on her way to having it all: After moving from a small town in Georgia to New York City, she’s landed a gig as a production assistant on Gary Madden’s Late Night Show, with a supportive boss and an imminent promotion to talent booker. Like many city-dwelling professionals her age, Presley has a roommate, Izzy, who acts by turns as agony aunt and partner in crime. 

Much like the women of Sex and the City—she identifies as a Miranda—Presley breezes through a frothy sequence of confusing connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals at local nightspots and career-enhancing forays into the lower rungs of the entertainment industry, where she hopes to discover the unpolished gem upon whom she can hitch her own star. But the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step. 

And Presley is not the only one mourning her mother’s death. Susan Clark, her mother’s childhood best friend, is also working through her grief, with a side of distress over her wealthy and influential husband having been named in a #MeToo-era sexual misconduct scandal. After a couple of semi-awkward interactions (which seem to be the only type of interaction Presley has), Susan asks to be friends, and Presley somewhat reluctantly accepts. The relationship turns out to be fortuitous for both of them: Susan gets to spoil the daughter she never had, and Presley gains some valuable insight into her mother’s formative years. 

Though it certainly has rom-com-esque appeal, Humor Me goes beyond that, navigating the complexities of breaking old patterns, forging new connections and establishing one’s identity. It’s also a bit of a love letter to the City That Never Sleeps, even if its inhabitants do, occasionally to their detriment . . . and sometimes to their delight.

Like the women of Sex and the City, Humor Me’s protagonist Presley Fry breezes through connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals and career-enhancing forays in NYC, but the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Hombrecito

Review by Laura Sackton

In their haunting debut novel, Hombrecito, Santiago Jose Sanchez illuminates the hidden. The story begins in Ibagué, Colombia, a city that the protagonist, Santiago, returns to again and again, in dreams, memory and reality. Santiago is a young boy trying to make sense of a world he doesn’t understand: his absent father, his mother who sometimes “forgets she is a mother,” his feelings of alienation and otherness. When he moves with his mother and brother to Miami, those feelings continue to grow, even as he begins to embrace his queerness.

Sanchez traces Santiago’s search for belonging as he grows up and eventually leaves home for college in New York. The story follows the expected beats of a queer coming-of-age novel, but does so at a slant. Time moves unexpectedly. Scenes that take place over a few hours go on for pages; several years pass in the blank space between chapters. The prose is intensely visceral and deliberately opaque. It feels as if the narrator holds both himself and the reader at a distance before, distraught and needy, suddenly pulling them close. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.

Santiago’s complicated relationships with his brother and his mother shift with time, but never get easier. This is true of every relationship in Santiago’s life. There’s his first boyfriend, whom he meets in an internet chat room; his father back in Colombia, who drifts in and out of Santiago’s life; his roommate in New York; the men he sleeps with but doesn’t show himself to. His relationships to places are equally fraught: He longs for Colombia even as he distances himself from it. He leaves Miami but feels constantly pulled back by his mother.

Hombrecito is a novel about the events, sometimes unseen, often beyond our control, that shape our understanding of the world. It’s about growing up amid silences that reverberate into adulthood. It’s about self-destruction and self-denial; about fierce and unconditional love; about the cost of hiding and the turmoil of leaving a country. It’s about queerness and transience and one man’s long, slow journey to find a home inside both.

Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut, Hombrecito, is a queer coming-of-age following a boy’s life from Colombia to Miami to New York. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.
FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

Marcela Fuentes: Fates and furies

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

In Malas, the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) ties together the stories of two women from different generations in a Texas border town. When the two meet in the ‘90s, their connection—including a shared love of Selena—threatens to surface buried town secrets.

Malas is your first novel. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process for the book? When did you start writing it and where did your inspiration come from?

Malas began as my attempt to write a fairy tale for a fairy tales course during my M.F.A. The first thing that came to me was a young and very pregnant Pilar being confronted by an elderly woman claiming to be her husband Jose Alfredo’s ‘real’ wife. I was in Iowa at the time, buried in snow, which made me vividly recall the other extreme—the merciless heat of a south Texas summer, and the dreamlike quality of those still, hot afternoons, perfect for the apparition of this old woman in the street. But though I set out to write a villain, I ended up digging into a lot of vulnerability. I wrote about 40 pages, the opening to the novel, and didn’t turn in my fairy tale after all because the story would not end. Probably six months later, another big chunk came to me, in the form of Gen-X teen Lulu running around at night, full of hurt and rage at her father. Looking back, I think my inspiration came from the style of storytelling I’d heard all my life, a family or local history that might pass for folklore.

This book brims with colorful descriptions and vivid imagery. Your description of the dusty border town of La Cienega was particularly captivating, lending Malas a very precise sense of place and cultural richness. Did you draw at all upon your hometown of Del Rio, Texas, when developing the setting for this book?

Certainly there’s a lot of Del Rio in my novel, but I also drew on other small border towns I’m familiar with, and Laredo, which is my mother’s hometown. I considered setting the novel in an actual place, but ultimately there was more freedom in a fictitious one. I wanted to respect the individual histories of those actual towns, while retaining an authentic sense of the complexity of these communities.

Read our starred review of Malas.

One surprising thing about Malas is that although it begins rooted in the supernatural, it evolves into a story that is more grounded in reality. Can you discuss how you approached that balance and made the choice to shift it over the course of the novel? 

I would say that there are different realities for different people. Pilar has a perspective that might be more susceptible to a belief in the supernatural, and to a certain extent Lulu’s father does too. One of the things I wanted to explore was this idea of reality being very much in the eye of the beholder, and also, the idea that overcoming generational trauma might sometimes be related to not accepting a fate-driven narrative. Another preoccupation in Malas was the idea of stories, romanticized or folkloric, taking the place of factual events, because people are prone to mythologizing, even family histories.

An intergenerational saga, Malas moves between different decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s. What was it about this time period that interested you?

I am very interested in the period before the Civil Rights Movement in Texas, the history for Mexicans and Tejanos, the strictures they dealt with, but also the strength and creativity of this community. Malas is a music novel too, and the 1950s is when Tejano, like many genres of music, began to be influenced by rock ’n’ roll, which very much started the trajectory that led to the “Tejano Boom” of the 1990s, and Selena’s unique sound. The history of Tejano music is the history of this place.

Lulu is an avid music fan and aspiring punk singer, and the book is peppered throughout with musical references, particularly to Tejano and norteño bands. If you were to create a soundtrack for readers to listen to while reading Malas, what songs would you include?

For sure, “Hey Baby, Que Paso” by The Texas Tornados, “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” by Selena, and so much Pedro Infante.

Listen to Marcela Fuentes’ full Malas Spotify playlist!

One powerful scene in the book occurs when Lulu’s father educates her about the various types of gritos in Mexican music and teaches her how to perform one. Could you tell us more about the importance of the grito?

A grito is a vocal eruption of emotion—joy, grief, rage, love, pride—and sometimes the sound of rebellion. In music, it’s a cathartic yelling, amping up the emotion. And, as Lulu says in the novel, it’s a war cry. There’s a highly mythologized account of the “grito de Dolores” the cry of a priest to call his congregation to arms on the eve of Mexican Independence. The scene in the book is an important moment between Lulu and her father because music is one thing that remains a bond between them. Fraught as their relationship is, the heartbreaking thing is they actually love each other very deeply and they are quite similar personalities. I wanted this to be a moment of that love, a bit of closeness and vulnerability for both of them. He’s handing down a heritage to her, and it is a heritage of rebellion, though he doesn’t realize she wants to use it to rebel against him.

Throughout the book, we observe Lulu grappling with the transition between girlhood and womanhood, something that is also symbolized by her impending quinceañera. What did you find the most challenging about telling the story of a protagonist who is navigating this particularly complicated time in one’s life?

The most challenging part was going to that emotionally vulnerable place and trying to forget my adult consciousness, placing myself in the headspace of an angry, hurt kid. I kept having to remind myself that a 14-year-old can morph from child to adult, even moment to moment. Lulu’s a smart girl, overconfident in her abilities and toughness. Her feelings, much as she disavows them, are ardent and immediate and she doesn’t have the maturity or the parental guidance to process them.

“[F]ind your writer friends. You’ll keep each other writing no matter what life throws at you.”

With your debut novel under your belt, can you tell us what you’ll be working on next?

I’m finishing a linked story collection called My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse. It follows the members of an extended Latinx family and explores the pressure points of familial obligations and the complexities of love. A young boy from the barrio settles a wager his dead father made with a rich man. A sister tries to make sense of her brother’s career as a bull rider. A group of kids search for the bogeyman haunting their grandmother’s house. A suburban wife aches to understand her volatile husband. The people in these stories navigate the web of family allegiances while trying to find breathing space for themselves.

You are a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now teach Creative Writing at Texas Christian University. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve received and now give to your students?

The best piece of advice I got was that my writing community, writer friends, were the best thing I’d get from my M.F.A. I have a group of writer friends. I trust their eyes on my work, as they trust mine on theirs. I tell my students the same thing: find your writer friends. You’ll keep each other writing no matter what life throws at you.

Rebellious women face a family curse in Marcela Fuentes’ debut novel Malas, infused with folklore and Tejano culture.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Recent Reviews

All Reviews

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features