It’s fitting for a Civil War-era story to be told in letters: The excruciating wait between each hoped-for missive is mirrored in this debut novel’s slow and gradual denouement. Author and playwright Susan Rivers employs not only letters, but also diary entries and inquest reports to tell a story loosely based in fact. In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Placidia Fincher, young and newly wed to a major in the Confederate army, is jailed and accused of adultery and infanticide. Her husband has been away for two years, adding to the intrigue. Only Placidia and her few slaves, particularly one named Achilles, know what transpired. 

As attested to in an author’s note, Rivers’ research has been thorough, and she writes convincingly in a mid 19th-century style and mindset. She is adept at creating arresting imagery and constructs a stark contrast between the life of privilege Placidia left and the life of struggle she comes to upon marrying the major, moving to his remote farm, and mothering Charlie, his son by his first wife. After only two days as husband and wife, the major is called back to the front, and his “fair girl” Placidia must run the farm and protect the homestead. 

Passages relating to what Placidia and others suffer build slowly and unfold in painstaking detail, making them all the more appalling. The cruelty in a world besieged by war is hard to fully comprehend. Men fought on battlefields, but everyone at home was fighting, too—to survive. In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Rivers gives readers an illuminating glimpse into a part of our country’s past that still has repercussions in the present.

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

Like many coming-of-age stories, History of Wolves features a grown-up narrator looking back on an event in her teenage years that forever changed her belief in the way the world works. The brilliance of this novel is that the events that ruined Madeline, aka “Linda,” are so appalling that they may change the way the reader believes the world works as well.

The story opens in the middle of a typically punishing Minnesota winter; the superbly talented Fridlund makes you feel the cold in your joints and imagine the sound of a knock on the crust of ice over a snowdrift. Linda lives with her hippie parents in such poverty that they not only lack central heating but a door: Only a tarp stands between them and the cold. 

Then a new family moves into a new house across the lake from Linda: Leo and Patra Gardner and their little boy, Paul. Linda is taken on as Paul’s babysitter. To the perceptive Linda, they are just a shade off normal, which entices her because she’s just a shade off normal herself. But soon the reader, with a skin-crawling dread worthy of any decent slasher movie, begins to realize that something’s more than just not right. You only hope that it’s not what you think it is.

But learning that it’s not what you think it is brings no relief, because what is really going on is ever so much worse. When what happens happens, you want to stop and go back to the beginning of the book to search for the clues you knew had to be there. You’ll find them.

Fridlund earns a place as a top-notch writer with this remarkable, disturbing debut.

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

Most adults experience at least one great romantic love in their lifetime. Outcomes obviously vary, but not the initial devotion and desire. In Stephanie Gangi’s The Next, 46-year-old Joanna DeAngelis found her soul mate unexpectedly in Ned McGowan. Ned, a professor at Columbia, is 15 years Joanna’s junior. Despite the age difference, they were ablaze with passion from the moment they met. But after Joanna is diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer, Ned commits a deplorable act of betrayal.

As her daughters, Anna and Laney, care for her, Joanna spends her final days obsessed with Ned and his perfect new life, which she follows on social media. As Joanna takes her last breath, her singular focus is vengeance. So, what happens when one dies filled with such intense drive? Joanna becomes a ghost residing in “the next,” seen and felt by whomever she chooses. She is raw energy, and revenge is her only goal. 

In spirit form, Joanna is sultry, witty and as unrelenting as her combined lust and hatred for Ned. Anna and Laney take turns narrating the aftermath of their mother’s death, as does Ned himself. Each speaker’s voice and inner monologue beautifully captures the essence of that particular character while adding context to current and past events. 

In her first adult novel, Gangi has created deeply flawed characters that readers still care about a great deal. Her style is gritty and descriptive, with no subject considered taboo. The Next is a fast-paced ghost story, but it is also a story about the bonds between people: family, friends, lovers and survivors. How does one move past tragedy and injustice? Gangi has presented us with an unforgettable tale describing how one family does just that.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Set against the backdrop of World War II, award-winning journalist Armando Lucas Correa’s The German Girl follows 12-year-old Hannah Rosenthal, who is attempting to flee Nazi Germany with her family and her best friend, Leo Martin. After many refusals, the Rosenthals are overjoyed when they are given the chance to escape to freedom aboard the SS St. Louis, a floating fairy tale making its way toward Cuba. But the outlook soon becomes grimmer for the desperate family. Hannah and Leo promise to stay together—and are forced to make impossible decisions.

Alternating with Hannah’s story is that of Anna Rosen, a 12-year-old girl in present-day New York. Anna is coming to terms with the death of her father when she receives a package from the mysterious great-aunt in Cuba who acted as a mother figure to Anna’s late father. Searching for answers and a deeper understanding of her father, young Anna and her mother set off on their own journey to Havana’s shores.

Correa, the editor-in-chief of People en Español, successfully weaves a profoundly emotional coming-of-age tale, based on the real-life journey of the St. Louis from Hamburg to Havana, and the 900 refugees aboard. Despite this heavy subject matter, Correa’s impeccably researched historical details shine through, grounding the novel and honing its point.

Though at times The German Girl is heartbreaking, the novel never wallows, and readers can often feel joy and excitement emanating off the young narrators. Correa’s characters and details are beautifully crafted, creating an insightful and poignantly timed exploration of the refugee experience.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her anticipated fiction debut, The Undoing of Saint Silvanus, Beth Moore weaves an introspective, genre-bending narrative. Moore, a popular author of Christian nonfiction and founder of Living Proof Ministries, tells the story of Jillian Slater, who travels to New Orleans after receiving news of her alcoholic father’s death. 

Upon arriving at Saint Silvanus, the church-turned-apartment-building that her grandmother runs, Jillian learns that things are worse than she’d anticipated. Her father isn’t just dead but murdered, her cold and aloof grandmother isn’t happy to see her, and someone is leaving threatening, strange tokens on the doorstep of Saint Silvanus. Aided by her grandmother and a colorful cast of Saint Silvanus residents, Jillian seeks to learn more about her father’s death and her family’s secrets.

Though it’s a fast-paced story, The Undoing of Saint Silvanus also contains moments of introspection—both for Jillian and for the reader—that are among its strongest scenes. Moore’s vivid and often delightful descriptions of New Orleans, Saint Silvanus and the multiple supporting characters add a lively sense of place. The gripping mystery will keep readers engaged till the end, where Jillian finds both answers and a new relationship with God.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Charles Wang pops another aspirin and thinks of all the ways America has failed him. The country may have made the no-name immigrant into a cosmetics billionaire and given him a designer Bel-Air mansion that even Martha Stewart covets, but when the markets crashed, so did his empire. Now that he thinks about it, Charles is also angry at the Japanese for invading China and at the Communists for taking his family’s ancestral lands. Clearly, the world has screwed with the Wangs long enough!

With this exaggerated tirade, Jade Chang begins her hysterical debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, which is set soon after the financial crisis of the last decade. Too vain to believe that it’s all over, Charles has one last scheme to return glory to the family. The first step is a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to New York to gather up the Wang clan, before returning to China to somehow reclaim their lost land.

Embarking on this epic road trip in a borrowed station wagon are Charles; his second wife, Barbra; and two of his children, Andrew, a wannabe comedian, and Grace, a teen fashion blogger, each gathered up from an expensive school Charles can no longer afford. Their collective hope lies in upstate New York with Saina, Charles’ oldest daughter, who escaped the financial catastrophe but has plenty of personal struggles.

Though the Wangs are poor and desperate, they never lose humor or hope. The zany scheme to reclaim the family riches takes a backseat to the family relationships, including loving, supportive and playful moments between the siblings. Charles, too, evolves from a failed businessman to a loving father who is willing to do anything to make sure his children are taken care of. Readers will be cheering for these underdogs.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers have long been fascinated by stories of women apart from the world, from 19th-century tales of girls imprisoned in convents to more contemporary gems like Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars (1992). Sarah Domet’s debut novel, The Guineveres, is a wonderful entry into this rich tradition.

Four girls, all improbably named Guinevere, are left by their parents with the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration. The convent, at first, seems similar to an all-girls high school, complete with cutely named factions. The titular girls (known as Vere, Gwen, Ginny and Win) initially bond over their shared name as well as their desire to escape. It turns out, however, that the convent is not unlike the real world. The girls experience friendship and romance, tragedy and betrayal. 

The Guineveres is mainly narrated by the more reserved Vere, who tells the story as an older woman looking back, and Domet deftly handles this retrospective voice. Brief chapters on the lives of various female saints imbue The Guineveres with a broader sense of the adversity women have faced over the centuries. All the while, Domet sustains a sense of humor. “Who’s the patron saints of patron saints?” Win quips at one point.  

At times sacred, occasionally profane, The Guineveres is a heavenly read from an author worth watching.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Mortifications, Derek Palacio’s beautifully written debut novel, begins in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift that took refugees from Cuba to the United States. Soledad Encarnación packs her 12-year-old son, Ulises, and his twin sister, Isabel, onto an overcrowded lobster boat that carries them away from their village of Buey Arriba. Her husband, Uxbal, chooses to stay behind, but not without first trying to prevent his family’s departure by holding Isabel ransom.

In Connecticut, Soledad becomes a court stenographer and attracts the attention of lawyers who find her exotic. She falls in love with Henri Willems, a Dutch horticulturalist who grows Cuba’s Habano tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley.

At 17, Ulises, a budding Latin scholar, gets a job working in Henri’s fields. The more devout Isabel volunteers with the terminally ill at Jude the Apostle. Soon, she takes a vow of chastity and silence and leaves for Guatemala to establish a school funded by the church. And all of this is before Soledad’s diagnosis of breast cancer and a letter from Uxbal, who demands his family’s return to Cuba.

The Mortifications is a devastating portrait of the realities we construct for ourselves, the parts of our history we choose to embrace and those we yearn to escape. In deceptively simple prose, Palacio writes movingly of dreams and family legacies and reminds us that, no matter how far away you travel, some aspects of one’s ancestry are forever a part of you.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, October 2016

It may be no coincidence that the female protagonists of Brit Bennett’s remarkable debut are 17 at the start of the story: This was Bennett’s age when she first began writing The Mothers. Now, after nearly a decade of work, Bennett has completed a mature and moving masterpiece about the indelible bond between mothers and daughters and what it means for motherless girls to grow into women.

We meet Nadia Turner during her senior year of high school. It should be a time of excitement and anticipation, but Nadia is reeling from her mother’s recent suicide. She attempts to dull her pain through various acts of rebellion, including a romance with the pastor’s son, Luke. Their fling turns serious, however, when Nadia discovers she is pregnant, and their decision about how to handle her condition will shape the lives of Luke, Nadia and her religious best friend, Aubrey, in ways none of them can imagine. As the years pass, despite their collective efforts to move on, Nadia’s secret forms an inescapable anchor to the past. The aftershocks of her choice—and the nagging question of what might have been—continue to haunt the trio, threatening to unravel their friendship and shake the foundations of their tight-knit black community in Southern California.

Sharply observed and written in soul-searing prose, The Mothers is a powerful first novel that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues, taking a hard look at family, friendship, grief and growing up. In a de facto Greek chorus, the united voice of the elderly church mothers in the community who have seen it all narrate the proceedings, punctuating events with their wise and wistful insights. Bennett’s writing is ripe with emotion and empathy, but she exhibits impressive restraint, never veering into melodrama. Moreover, her inspired juxtaposition of Nadia and Audrey—how their mothers have each wounded them in different but equally damaging ways, how they attempt to make themselves whole and compensate for their losses, how they each choose to emulate or reject their mothers in turn—is fascinating, and perfect fodder for lively book club discussions. Filled with compassionate storytelling and unforgettable characters, The Mothers is a provocative introduction to a talented new author.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Brit Bennett about The Mothers.

When Rose Lewin’s boss pushes her for story ideas, she can’t help but look to her own residence. The space she inhabits is a newly renovated condo. But half a century ago, her New York City apartment got its start as a room in the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Although the building has been updated—with prices to prove it—a few of the building’s 1950s residents still call it home. These women, now in their 80s, are sequestered away on the fourth floor. There’s got to be a story there, Rose thinks, and she convinces her boss to let her dig in.

But making an in-depth, historical piece resonate with readers in a digital era isn’t going to be as easy as she thinks. Although she was drawn to the unfortunately named WordMerge because it promised to be a sort of multimedia New Yorker, the realities of media on the internet are closing in. Rose must find a captivating angle to keep the story alive.

And she’s convinced she would have just that in the fourth floor’s Darby McLaughlin—if only Darby would speak to her. The story becomes an obsession, distracting Rose from the job and romance falling to pieces around her.

In The Dollhouse, debut novelist Fiona Davis begins with a simple premise. But as the book advances, through alternating looks at Rose’s world in 2016 and Darby’s in 1952, the story becomes increasingly complex. Davis layers on relationships and intrigue, while building tension through her story structure. Each glimpse at Darby’s world leaves both Rose and the reader yearning for more, and eager to understand exactly what shaped the ladies at this women’s residence. The pace quickens as the story hurtles to its surprising—but satisfying—end. Who said history had to be dull, anyway?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book feature by Fiona Davis on The Dollhouse.

It is clear that the ideas behind The Nix have been swimming around in first-time novelist Nathan Hill’s head for many years. Deriving its title from the name of a Norwegian spirit that takes people away from the ones they love, this 640-page novel takes on just about everything—including pop culture, advertising, trigger warnings, politics, the degradation of literature, ghosts and the obsession with cell phones. Hill weaves these elements into a charged mother-son story with great poise and humor. 

It’s 2011 and Chicago English professor Samuel Andresen–Anderson learns that his mother, Faye, who abandoned the family when he was 11, has been arrested for throwing gravel at a right-wing presidential candidate. Since he owes his publisher another book, Samuel decides he can help his mother—whom he hasn’t seen since she left—and himself by writing an exposé on the woman behind the most-viewed YouTube clip of the moment.

Samuel visits Faye’s Iowa hometown and the Chicago suburbs, searching for fragments of his mother’s story. Hill explores Faye’s past via many angles: flashbacks to dangerous Chicago protests in 1968, Samuel’s memories and even the point-of-view of Faye’s Parkinson’s-ridden father. In these alternating sections, the reader discovers the details about Faye’s life that Samuel longs for. 

The Nix is a slow burn of a novel that explores the importance of empathy, family dynamics and dysfunction. When Samuel begins to understand his mother, he understands himself. Both laugh-out-loud funny and incredibly poignant, The Nix will be known as a great American novel.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kathleen Donohoe’s first novel, Ashes of Fiery Weather, introduces readers to the stubborn, courageous and sometimes flawed women of the Keegan/O’Reilly family. Central to the story is the evolution of firefighting, a multigenerational career that binds the family together.

Donohoe’s characters range across six generations, bound together by devotion, tradition and hardship. Each woman faces her own struggle, from Irish-born Norah, who must find a way to raise a family after her husband is killed in the line of duty, to her stubborn sister-in-law, Eileen, who fights to become one of the first female firefighters in New York City. 

What makes Donohoe’s novel stand out from other family sagas is the authentic insight she brings to her work. Clearly inspired by the author’s own family history, Ashes of Fiery Weather at times feels more like a memoir than a work of fiction. The crowning achievement of the book, however, is Donohoe’s unaffected and chilling portrayal of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Although readers will know what is coming, this does nothing to dim the force and shock of Donohoe’s depiction, told through the eyes of Eileen, one of the many firefighters on-site that day. 

Ashes of Fiery Weather is a beautifully crafted story, one that serves not only as a homage to the legacy and traditions of New York firefighters, but also to the families who love, support and often mourn them. Donohoe has created an emotional, deeply moving work that will stay with readers long after the last page.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.