In today’s tense political climate, with immigration in the news almost daily, it is especially welcome to discover Behold the Dreamers, the clear-eyed, thought-provoking debut novel by Imbolo Mbue. No matter your politics, this beautiful novel about an African family starting a new life in a new land offers tremendous insight into people who still come to our shores in search of the American dream. 

In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, can hardly believe his luck when he gets a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. With this opportunity, Jende can better provide for his wife, Neni, and their growing family. When Clark’s fragile wife, Cindy, offers Neni temporary work at their summer house in the Hamptons, the Jongas feel that finally, everything is going their way. The Jongas begin to make plans for their future, applying for permanent residency and saving for their own home in Yonkers and pharmaceutical college for Neni.   

But not even a year later, the housing bubble bursts and Lehman Brothers collapses. The Edwards marriage unravels further. Jende spends more and more of his time driving Clark to after-hours “assignations” in nearby hotels. Before long, the pressure of keeping secrets for Clark and Cindy threatens not only the Jongas’ marriage but their dreams of a future in a country they still can’t legally call home. 

Mbue herself came to the United States from Limbe, Cameroon, the same town that the Jongas hail from. Behold the Dreamers is her first foray into fiction, which shows in the occasionally choppy plot, as well as the depiction of a wealthy Manhattan couple with problems straight from central casting. But Mbue’s perceptive exploration of the plight of African immigrants, especially in the character of Neni, is fresh and vivid. The book’s unexpected ending provides a welcome dose of realism, making this an utterly unique novel about immigration, race and class—and an important one, as well.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Imbolo Mbue.

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

There is a tendency among debut novelists, particularly debut novelists who gravitate to the trappings of genre fiction, to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Debut novels are very often grand, massive works of tremendous ambition that achieve a great many things but don’t achieve any of them all that well. You can get an epistolary tale of magic realism involving space pirates and lizard monsters and a bunch of Shakespeare references to boot, but none of it ever really gives you a clear sense of voice.

That’s not the case with The Gentleman, the endlessly clever debut from Forrest Leo. This novel weaves together a brilliant sense of voice, a classic comedic touch that’s as potent as it is gentle, and a group of characters that could just as easily exist in a “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” sketch as they could in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. With his first book, Leo delivers us a story that’s entertaining on about a dozen different levels, and he does it with a sense of joy that imbues his often self-serious narrator with a quality that makes every page lovable.

The narrator is Lionel Savage, a popular poet who, despite his success, is going broke. So, in search of financial salvation, he marries Vivien Lancaster, a woman of tremendous notoriety and wealth. It seems like a good idea at the time, but suddenly Lionel finds himself unable to write, and, in a moment of recklessness, accidentally sells his wife to a Gentleman at a party who just happens to be the Devil himself. In an effort to reclaim her, Lionel must venture out with Vivien’s dashing adventurer brother, his butler, an inventor, a bookseller and his often wild sister.

If that all sounds very outlandish to you, that’s because it is, but Leo delivers it all in a way that’s endlessly brisk, charming, and most importantly, clever. Savage’s narration is a series of quips in and of itself, punctuated by footnotes and highlighted by everything from jokes about the present tense to an exchange in which it’s made clear that The Devil doesn’t really like it when people call his home “Hell.” This is a novel propelled by voice, but the voice alone isn’t enough, so Leo bolsters it all with a wickedly funny plot and a series of characters who seem both wholly original yet clearly carved out of the page of a thumping good potboiler. It’s a marriage of old and new that’s never tiring, and it makes for a delightful page-turner.

There’s something not right about the Evans women, the protagonists of Heather Young’s troubling debut novel; her title The Lost Girls is apt.  

The book alternates between chapters narrated by the elderly Lucy Evans, and a semi-omniscient narrator whose focus is Justine, Lucy’s rootless and timid grandniece, who inherits her Minnesota home. The tale begins during the Depression, when Lucy, her sisters Lilith and Emily, and their parents conduct their annual retreat to this same house, then a vacation home by a lake. We know that something’s wrong with this bunch from the start, and as the summer wears on the wrongness curdles, then erupts into horror. 

Much of what’s wrong with the generations of Evans women begins with the men in—and out of—their lives. We start with the sisters’ dad, Thomas. They and their mother Eleanor are afraid of him. He is a bit authoritarian, but that trait seems mediated by a gentleness and keen intelligence. He even takes Lucy fishing one morning. They have a good time. What’s there to fear? Also, why is Eleanor so suffocatingly protective of 6-year-old Emily? Why are Lucy and Lilith, who share an intense bond, so mean to the little girl?         

Then there’s Justine, abandoned by her husband and left to raise their two daughters in San Diego. Terrified of loneliness, she takes up with then tries to leave Patrick, a man who can only be called a successful sociopath. We meet Justine’s ghastly and embittered mother, Maurie, who flitted from man to man like a bedraggled moth when Justine was a child and deprived her of anything like stability. Both Patrick and Maurie, daughter of Lilith, manage to track Justine down in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The results are what you’d expect.

Though a veteran of a few writing seminars and workshops, Young is a lawyer, one of a line who have become writers of fiction. What many of these attorney/writers share is a fondness for the detail that seems unimportant at first but then becomes crucial and bits of evidence that lead to an irrefutable conclusion. Young’s summation: the patriarchy hurts women and girls, but it hurts men and boys just as much. This might not be news, but in Young’s hands it feels startling and essential.

There are some writers who represent a world with such immediacy that it’s scary. You wonder what their experience was. Has he or she ever actually been there, or done that? This is the feeling you’ll get when you read Scott Stambach’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko.

The book is the diary of a severely crippled Belorussian boy who’s spent his whole life in a hospital for sick children. Born in 1987, his deformities, and those of his fellow inmates, were no doubt caused by the radiation that resulted from the Chernobyl disaster. So the perfidy and carelessness of adults lies always in the story’s background, as well as in the foreground. Save the saintly and maternal Natalya, most of the nurses are indifferent or sadistic. The mostly unseen post-Soviet bureaucracy makes it clear it has little to spare for these damaged children, even if their damage was caused by another arm of the same bureaucracy.

Seventeen-year-old Ivan copes with this with his fierce intelligence, sarcasm and ability to make life a bit difficult for the staff, even as he lacks one arm, both legs and two fingers on his one hand. Reader, he can do some remarkable things with just two fingers and a thumb. 

Then, Polina arrives. At first, she looks like a normal teenaged girl, but she is probably another instance of Chernobyl’s collateral damage. She has leukemia, and it will kill her. But her blossoming relationship with Ivan gives them both reasons to thrive. Surely, they are a match for each other, for she’s as ornery as he is until the disease knocks the orneriness out of her. Clear your calendar for an afternoon of ugly-crying.

What’s amazing is nothing in Stambach’s C.V. would make a reader think he’d be capable of such a book. His bio says he’s a special ed teacher in a San Diego charter school who’s written for literary magazines. Is that it? How does he know what it’s like to be a boy with half a body, or a girl whose white blood cells and chemo drugs are in a pitched battle over who is going to kill her first? The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko must be counted as a miracle of a book.

If you’ve ever known someone in a coma, you’ve probably sat bedside and talked to him or her. You may have wondered, am I talking to thin air? Does this help?

In I’m Still Here, first-time novelist Clélie Avit explores an answer.

When Elsa regains consciousness, she has already spent months in a hospital bed. A mountain-climbing accident left her in a coma that doctors aren’t sure she can overcome. Awareness is major progress—but Elsa can only hear, not move or speak. No one can tell that her condition has changed. Visitors have decreased in frequency as the months passed. Elsa’s family members speak when they’re around, but mostly to each other, not to Elsa.

Then Thibault stumbles into her room.

It’s a mistake; Thibault is visiting his brother, who has taken up residence a few doors down after a drunk-driving accident in which he was the driver. Things are tense between Thibault and his brother, and it’s exacerbating his mother’s distress. He steps into Elsa’s room looking for a place to get away, but he can’t help but start a conversation once he’s there.

Thibault’s visits give Elsa a thread of hope. She focuses on his words, willing herself to open her eyes or otherwise show she’s still there. And though he can’t explain why, Thibault is convinced that he isn’t just talking to an empty room.

Avit’s debut, translated from French, will draw readers deep into the private worlds of its characters. Their stories are revealed in alternating chapters. Elsa’s is necessarily slow to develop. After months unconscious, she must rely on the words she hears to understand what landed her in this state. Thibault, on the other hand, interacts with other people and moves beyond the world of the hospital. But his is still a private viewpoint, as he is slow to let people in.

I’m Still Here is a study in character development. It’s a quiet novel that packs dramatic tension into a mostly one-room world. Avit’s deft hand suggests the promise of more to come.

Vivian Feld lived 18 years before she felt alive at all.

Viv’s first year of college was as nondescript as her reflection in the mirror. She attended classes, completed assignments and was asked multiple times to join cults. What is it that makes me look like the kind of person who would be suckered into joining a cult? she wonders.

Though she may not have recognized it, Viv was waiting to be swept into the orbit of something bigger than herself. That’s exactly what she finds upon moving to an off-campus apartment with Andy and Lee.

Andy is an audiophile, an average guy, but Lee is a tempest, seemingly the typical bad girl waiting to corrupt Viv’s by-the-book lifestyle. She’s the daughter of the late rock star Jesse Parrish and model-then-fashion-designer Linda West. Lee doesn’t recall much of her father; she was 4 when he drove into a ravine with his mistress in the passenger seat. Jesse left behind a limited music catalog, his wife’s angst and, eventually, his daughter’s curiosity. 

In college Lee pulls both Viv and Andy toward her, feeding off their attention. But a decade later, Viv and Andy are a unit and Lee is a memory. Viv hasn’t heard from her best friend in years—until Lee resurfaces, asking for Viv’s help. Lee is determined to find the album her father was recording when he died, and she wants Viv to come along for the ride.

Chicago journalist Deborah Shapiro’s sharp, funny and engrossing debut novel, The Sun in Your Eyes, appears at a glance to be an examination of female friendship. It’s that, sure; through the juxtaposition of the women’s college days and their present-day road trip, Shapiro delves into her characters’ psyche and reveals how they shaped one another. But the novel goes deeper still, as Lee and Viv are forced to examine their relationships with everyone close to them. As they uncover the truth about the past, the friends are left to decide whom they trust and how to move forward.

Nine-year-old Leon, a mixed-race boy born in 1970s London to a depressed and drug-addicted mother, opens Kit de Waal’s mesmerizing debut as he tells his newborn baby brother, Jake, that he will always take care of him. But Jake is white and, being a baby, is much easier to place for adoption than Leon—so when their mother is finally deemed unfit to care for them, the boys are separated.

The author has worked in family law and as an advisor to Social Services, and she has brought that experience to this poignant first novel. My Name Is Leon depicts with agonizing clarity the details of Leon’s plight: He does poorly in school, grinds his teeth and has recurring nightmares, all the while never giving up hope that he will see Jake again someday.

Historical moments are skillfully blended into the story, first with Leon’s foster mother Maureen’s plans for a party to celebrate the upcoming wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles. But the overriding theme of de Waal’s provocative, moving novel is the power of love between siblings, and the commitment needed by those who deal with the difficulties inherent in fostering children. Blending elements of The Language of Flowers with a brave child narrator that recalls Emma Donoghue’s Room, Leon’s story is one that readers will not soon forget.

"Once you go, you know" used to be the official slogan of Jamaica's tourism board. It is a slogan brimming with ambiguity. For example, you might come to know that some of Jamaica's tourism is sexual in nature. Or that for many years, the country had one of the highest murder rates in the world. Jamaican Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, reveals the shadier aspect of this sunny locale.

The novel revolves around a 30-year-old woman named Margot. When Margot was young her mother rented her to a tourist for several hundred dollars. And not for sightseeing. As an adult, Margot continues the practice in her own right. She comes to manage several other women plying the skin trade. Margot is also a closeted lesbian in a country that refers to them as sodomites.

Margot justifies her work as a sacrifice to her half-sister, Thandi. Thandi is in school, speaks proper English and is destined to become a doctor outside of Jamaica. Or at any rate, that is Margot's aspiration for her sister, who prefers art and falls for a local boy. Thandi also aspires to being fair-skinned. To that end she treats her skin with a soup of unpleasant chemicals. All this to escape the "ugliness of being black and poor."

But Margot's work becomes self-justifying; the higher goals grow blurry. In Dennis-Benn's Jamaica, tourist development undermines the country's pride in itself. Driven by foreign capital, development also proves indifferent to local communities. The same story plays out almost anywhere that tourism dominates. But Dennis-Benn's portrayal gives names and faces to this externality of globalization.

From the book's opening scenes, the author conjures vivid and passionate characters. Not one is a spectator to her fate. Most speak in the island's familiar patois, and they revere and resent those who don't. Similarities to fellow Caribbean writer Edwidge Danticat, or early V.S. Naipaul, are plentiful. The novel buzzes with eroticism, even when the circumstances are compromising or sordid. And the author manages to portray her fallen characters free of judgment. The Jamaica tourism slogan wouldn't be a bad subtitle for this rich, accomplished novel.

Aspiring novelists are apt to underestimate the price the life exacts from an author. "Writing a book," said Orwell, "is a horrible, exhausting struggle." And quite often writers are as disastrous in their personal lives as they are exalted on the page. One such human tornado is the protagonist of Adam O'Fallon Price's bitter but authentic debut novel, The Grand Tour.

The writer, Richard, is a Vietnam veteran with a drinking problem, some failed marriages and an estranged daughter. The damaged Vietnam veteran is a Hollywood trope, but salable: after a few mediocre novels, Richard strikes gold with a war memoir. Portions of the memoir appear in Price's novel. They are unconvincing, but we later get a good if shocking explanation for this.

Price includes these excerpts because they are readings during Richard's book tour. Hence the novel's title, which also plays on yesteryear's upper-class romps through continental Europe. Yet Price's America is an ugly one, especially when seen through Richard's jaundiced eyes.

Richard’s companion on the tour is Vance, an impressionable 19-year-old who worships Richard for his writing but finds the person an unreliable nihilist. Richard has gravitas, but his writing is the only thing redeeming a life of conventional failure. (Orwell wrote about that too.) He even tells Vance to do something useful, to do anything but write.

The novel thus becomes an extended effort to justify itself against its subject's negations. Every occasion on which a blotto Richard ascends another dais is a grim triumph over human absurdity. He repeats his mantra to anyone who will listen: "The book sold."

Price, meanwhile, is a witty and mordant writer with substantial largeness of heart. He's akin to Frederick Exley, or a breezier Malcolm Lowry. For all the meretricious longueurs about Vietnam, the novel is one of the most believable American novels of the past few years, a kind of On the Road for the lumpenproletariat. Price may or may not be a wreck himself, but one hopes he doesn't take Richard's advice.

Growing up and growing apart from friends is an inevitable—and bittersweet—part of life, one that has been poignantly captured in Alice Adams’ debut novel, Invincible Summer. The novel starts in 1997 as four friends graduate on the brink of a new millennium, and takes them through 20 summers. 

Readers follow the characters through the decades, from the sunny coast of the Greek Islands to the rainy streets of London. Evie, the quiet and practical main character, finds her inner confidence while pursuing a high-profile finance job.The sweet and irresistibly lovable Benedict stays in academia to pursue a Ph.D. in physics, only to spend his life chasing scientific discoveries that are as frustrating as his love life. Added to the mix are cool siblings Sylvie and Lucien—who, despite their failures, are infinitely relatable characters. The creative Sylvie was marked from the start as a great artist but struggles to make her way in the real world, while her playboy brother works as a night club promoter.

Readers at any stage of life will see themselves within the pages of Invincible Summer and will recognize the terror of adulthood and the difficulties of keeping friendships alive. Adams, whose own background is as diverse as her characters’ (she has worked as a waitress and an investment banker, and has a B.A. in philosophy), particularly shines when focusing on Evie’s finance job. With beautiful attention to detail and keen observations on life, love and even finance, Adams has crafted a delightful novel that is as insightful as it is breezy.

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

In the Gospel of Matthew, God categorizes his flock as either obedient sheep, or goats who lack faith and compassion. But people are not so easily summed up in Joanna Cannon’s debut novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, a gentle story about the damage done by the secrets we keep and the judgments we make.

The novel opens in the mid-1970s in a suburban British housing estate called the Avenue, on a blisteringly hot summer day. The disappearance of a local woman, Mrs. Creasy, has residents on high alert, and the rumors are flying. Grace, a precocious 10-year-old, and her best friend, Tilly, decide to investigate. They start with the vicar, who delivers a confusing sermon on the whereabouts of God. Given this start, the girls become certain that if they can locate the Almighty, Mrs. Creasy is sure to follow.  

The spirited girls take their questions about faith from house to house, trying to make sense of the fragmented accounts and mixed messages they hear. What becomes clear to the reader, if not the girls, is that their neighbors are keeping a deadly secret—one that may have led to Mrs. Creasy’s departure. 

The novel is told from the points of view of the innocent but perceptive Grace and six of her neighbors, including the absent-minded Dorothy; Brian, kept on a short leash by his overbearing mother; and John Creasy, the increasingly frantic husband of the missing woman. The Avenue, with its flawed but sympathetic characters living chockablock on the suburban street, is Cannon’s most successful creation, and one in which her insight into the problems of ordinary people is most persuasive. Part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep presents our complicated world with compassion and humor, seen through a child’s eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with author Joanna Cannon about The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.
 

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

In the near future, London labors under the rule of a brutal king. Suicide cults, spawned in America, are making their way around the world on a mission to kill animals as part of their path to ascendance. While technological marvels abound, access to them has been corrupted in ways that reward the rich and punish the poor. 

At the bottom of this decadent society exist the Indigents, a growing segment of people addicted to an insidious hallucinogen, Flôt. Among the lowest of these poor and lost is Cuthbert Handley, whose life was upended when a childhood accident claimed his beloved brother decades earlier. Now homeless and deep in the clutches of a Flôt addiction, Cuthbert begins to hear the voices of animals in the London Zoo, which has become the last repository of many species on Earth. Their calls drive Cuthbert to an action that will either plunge society into chaos, or save it.

A magnificently textured story, Night of the Animals benefits from author Bill Broun’s liberal use of Midlands dialect, which reinforces Cuthbert’s unshakable connection to his past and its native folklore. Likewise, the animals’ speech is tethered to their origins and experience. As the distinction between the voices of the creatures and the internal whispers of Cuthbert’s addiction fades, Broun maintains a remarkable balance between magic and madness. This strange tale is both cautionary and captivating.

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

There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship that borders on obsession. That sort of bond draws two people together as though they’re on a crash course with destiny. They begin to mimic each other’s actions and speech patterns. They dress alike. They exist in a magical world that only they can understand.

That’s what happens when Hannah Dexter finds herself pulled into Lacey Champlain’s orbit.

Lacey is the new girl in Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, a town where teenagers are expected to play by the rules and anything else is unimaginable. After Halloween of 1991, one of Battle Creek’s golden children turns up in the woods, dead by an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The town’s residents are left asking, what could cause such a popular athlete to do such a thing?

Lacey and Dex—as Hannah’s best friend rechristens her—are curious, but more concerned with the world that’s left. With Nirvana as their soundtrack, the duo wreaks havoc on the small town. Signs of satanic worship unnerved the community even before the teenage suicide, and the girls aren’t afraid to join in the mischief.

Or well, Lacey isn’t. She’s always had something to run from; her mother became pregnant by mistake, and Lacey’s father left the family when she was small. Her mother toted Lacey to concerts—after which Mrs. Champlain would head backstage, toddler in tow, to canoodle with the band. Mrs. Champlain has attempted to straighten up, though, and the move to Battle Creek is part of that. After all, now she’s got a new husband (“the Bastard”) and a son (Bastard Jr.). Lacey is all that’s bringing her down.

The awkward Dex is an eager student, grateful for the connection she’s always lacked. Never mind that she’s not crazy about Kurt Cobain’s voice and that it hadn’t occurred to her to hate the name Hannah. She’ll follow where her soul sister leads, no matter how dark the path.

And indeed, it is dark.

Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire proves the young-adult novelist can write tales for adults every bit as powerful as those that have driven her past success. By unveiling the story in alternating perspectives by Lacey and Dex, with interludes from others, Wasserman slowly peels back the layers of teenage friendship. What’s left is a compelling study of the forces that draw people together.