From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s doomed Puritans and Flannery O’Connor’s cursed freaks, right up to Marilynne Robinson’s devout, reserved Midwesterners, there is a rich tradition of religious novels in American literature. Val Brelinski explores similar themes in her provocatively titled debut novel The Girl Who Slept With God. Brelinski, who has served as a fellow and lecturer at Stanford, clearly drew upon her own life to write this book. She grew up in Idaho, a daughter of devout evangelical Christians, just like Grace and Jory, the troubled teens at the center of her novel. After a brief, compelling opening, which finds Jory in a “house of . . . exile,” running off to meet a mystery man in an ice cream truck, Brelinski downshifts to introduce us to the Quanbeck family: Jory, 14, and Grace, 17; their younger sister, Frances, their father, Oren (a devoutly religious professor of science) and their sickly, unstable mother. It is 1970, and Grace has returned from a missionary trip to Mexico pregnant. Equal parts enraged and perplexed, Oren banishes Grace and Jory, who’s having her own coming-of-age problems. This means a new school and new friends for the withdrawn Jory, as well an outgoing neighbor named Mrs. Kleinfelter. By the time the man in the ice cream truck arrives, Grace and Jory have built themselves an alternative—and possibly more supportive—family.

The Girl Who Slept With God is not without flaws: The family sparring occasionally becomes tedious and some dialogue could have been pruned. But Brelinkski builds a realistic depiction of Jory's struggles with school, love, clothes and even her own body. And she commendably avoids the pitfalls of so many books, movies and TV shows by examining religion with depth and complexity. The narrative momentum builds impressively as Jory uncovers secrets and confronts painful truths about family, love, religion and growing up.

C-H-A-R-L-A-T-A-N.

When that word comes up at the 1960 National Spelling Bee, Vera Baxter feels that a name has been given to her out-of-place ways. Staying at a fancy Washington, D.C., hotel isn’t right for this girl who travels the East Coast, staying at cheap motels as her mom claws her way up the sales ladder. 

I-N-C-O-R-R-I-G-I-B-L-E.

As Stanley Owens steps to the microphone to spell his assigned word, Vera immediately pegs it as his perfect description.

As the 15-year-olds watch the pool of contestants around them dwindle, they recognize each other as prime competition. As they spell through the list of approved words, only Vera and Stanley are left standing. It’s a tie.

Words bring them together. And a love of words will tear them apart.

Stanley and Vera reunite at each year’s event, forming a bond over their shared victory and their mothers’ quirks and ambitious goals for their lives. They seem destined for success, sure to cross paths again at Harvard—until Stanley proposes a deal.

And that deal involves a proposal. The pair will marry, sell off the gifts and split the profits. Vera will be free to head to college according to plan. With a little starter money in his pocket, Stanley would chase another dream: a career creating crossword puzzles.

But there’s a hitch: Vera is secretly in love with Stanley and wishes the marriage weren’t a sham at all.

Two Across, the debut novel from Jeff Bartsch, follows the developing relationship of two young people from their school days far into adulthood. As Bartsch unravels Stanley’s charades and how they affect people around him, he weaves in enough crossword clues to keep any puzzle fans curious. That entertaining approach flows naturally from Bartsch’s background: He is an ad copywriter who also studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin

Bartsch sometimes sacrifices cleverness for plot development—there are moments in which the story seems to race ahead after previously taking carefully calculated steps. But the end result of Two Across is an examination of a relationship’s points of intersection and the clues that lead us back to ourselves.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Robin Kirman’s first novel, Bradstreet Gate, is set amidst the hallowed halls of Harvard, peopled mostly by elite young scholars and their erudite professors and mentors. Her story revolves around three of these students, whose lives become entwined over the course of their undergraduate years—and remain so over the next decade.

Georgia is the sought-after beauty, daughter of a famous photographer. Charlie, the son of blue-collar parents from whom he is estranged, sees Harvard as a stepping stone: a place to “forge as many connections for the future” as he can. He falls for Georgia almost immediately, launching a crush lasting four years, nearly until graduation. Like Charlie, Alice also sees admittance to Harvard’s class of 1997 as an escape: The daughter of Serbian immigrants, Alice has spent her childhood toggling between a father who embraces America and a mother who won’t even try.

Early in Kirman’s character-driven novel, a murder occurs on campus, just a week before graduation. The prime suspect is Rufus Storrow, an enigmatic young professor and new housemaster with a unique background—a graduate of West Point and a stint at the Pentagon, where he’d served as chief of the International Law Branch. One of Storrow’s students is the victim, and though circumstantial evidence points to him, he is never brought to trial.

How the murder affects Storrow and the three young graduates over the next decade constitutes the crux of Bradstreet Gate—guilt festered, lies were told and dreams abandoned. The unsolved crime will disappoint readers focused on the novel’s mystery elements; nevertheless Kirman’s psychological study of the lingering effects of tragedy on her characters over time engages from start to finish.

Raymond Chandler once said about writing fiction: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” In his first novel, Bull Mountain, firefighter Brian Panowich seems to have taken Chandler’s advice to heart: His characters brandish weaponry in a way that Charlton Heston might have found disconcerting. The result is a fast-paced and intricate revenge story culminating in a Shakespearean bloodbath.

The novel concerns three generations of a Georgia family, the Burroughs, living on the edge of the law. They run guns, make meth, sell moonshine and are so tough they take their aspirin dry. They drink hard, solicit prostitutes and then beat them up, but the offspring of one such encounter grows up to become a G-man bent on vengeance. The Burroughs’ hatred of the “Feds” hints that the Civil War didn’t end for them at Appomattox; they take freedom very seriously.

Like perhaps too many American male writers, Panowich writes in the shadow of Cormac McCarthy’s almost pornographically violent Blood Meridian. Panowich shows us men being burned alive, heads exploding and more, with a kind of Caligulan relish, or perhaps that of an avid gamer. 

Despite Panowich’s apparent admiration for McCarthy, he does not write in McCarthy’s often ponderous style, or emphasize style over characterization and plot. Some of his characters are monstrous, but they are drawn with conviction and sympathy, and the action proceeds briskly.

By the close of this vivid and gritty journey, does the Burroughs family—as McCarthy’s precursor Faulkner might have asked—prevail, or merely endure? The answer to that comes when someone—you guessed it—pulls out a gun.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lois Lonsdale is an enigma to those around her. The British literature professor is a respected academic, but also something of a threat to others in the department. That’s partly due to the former spelling bee champion’s striking looks, but her publishing success and standoffish nature don’t help. 

Only her best friend in the department, Brad, knows Lois was kidnapped nearly two decades earlier. The kidnapper held Lois and another captive, Carly May Smith, in a cabin in upstate New York. Although the girls weren’t allowed out in daylight, their captor was otherwise more like a benevolent camp counselor. After two months, they returned, visibly unscathed, to their adolescent lives. 

Carly May, who left her Nebraska hometown and pageant titles behind to pursue acting under the name Chloe Savage, is the only one who understands their shared history. And she’s about to play the role of a lifetime—in the movie adaptation of a novel about two girls and the summer they were kidnapped. A novel by Lois Lonsdale.

As they circle back to one another decades after the events that initially bonded them, Lois and Carly May individually contemplate the repercussions of that summer. With their captor’s motives unclear and a lifetime surrounded by people who can’t possibly understand, each woman carries her own baggage and unanswered questions.

In Pretty Is, debut novelist Maggie Mitchell toggles between her main characters’ perspectives and the novel based on their real-life story. As she peels back layers of her protagonists’ lives and memories, Mitchell carries readers through a thrilling, literary psychological adventure that examines how pivotal moments can echo throughout our lives.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A world-famous actor (a former Disney Channel star who’s back for a reunion special—think Ryan Gosling meets Justin Timberlake) walks into the small-town Florida bar where three 19-year-old friends are drinking their way through another dull night. 

He is, as narrator Maggie puts it, “a man who couldn’t part his hair differently without people demanding a press conference to fawn over him for it.” And now he’s at The Shamrock on what turns out to be the last night of his glamorous life. This is not a spoiler—it’s on page one.

In Local Girls, Henry Holt editor Caroline Zancan’s funny and poignant debut novel, Maggie, Nina and Lindsey are dead-end girls living in the recession-rotted Orlando suburbs. They didn’t do well in school and don’t really have any plans now that they’ve graduated. But as they get progressively drunker with Sam Decker, the story of their friendship unfolds.

None of them are flying these days—Nina is teaching Jazzercise at the local gym, Lindsay still lives at home with her dad and many brothers, and Maggie wants nothing more than to ditch her boyfriend and coffee shop job and head, well, anywhere but here. A prank gone horribly wrong alienated them from the fourth member of their group, Lila, and when she walks into the bar that night, we start to learn more about how they came to this moment in their young lives. 

Local Girls is an achingly good, ennui-drenched story of friendship and shared history in the humid depths of Florida. It’s a perfect summer read about the moment when, just like that, you’re an adult.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, July 2015

Simon Watson lives on a precipice: His family’s old house on the Long Island Sound is slowly dying, leaning closer to the sea with every storm, and his job as a librarian is in peril thanks to looming budget cuts. In the midst of all this uncertainty, a bookseller sends a curious book to his doorstep—a journal kept by the proprietor of a traveling carnival. Full of sketches and damaged by water, the book has been passed down and annotated for centuries, and Simon is surprised to find the names of his grandmother and other ancestors within its pages.

Intrigued, Simon digs deeper into the book’s history, teetering on the edge of obsession while piecing together the water-smudged stories in the journal. He learns his family’s ties to the book are deeper than just his grandmother’s work as the circus mermaid: Generations of women have drowned on July 24. Are the women in his family cursed? If so, he has just six weeks to figure it out—his long-absent sister, Enola, is planning a trip home in July.

A strikingly written debut, The Book of Speculation is reminiscent of The Night Circus, but with more grit and darkness. Author Erika Swyler’s short fiction has appeared in WomenArts Quarterly Journal, Litro and elsewhere, and her work as a playwright has received the Jane Chambers Award. Her recent move back to her hometown on Long Island’s North Shore inspired the setting of the book. She proves her storytelling skills here, as generations and lifetimes are seamlessly woven together, and a beautiful narrative of magic, love, death and loss unfolds with every page.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a handwritten Meet the Author Q&A with Erika Swyler.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Growing up may be hard to do under the best of circumstances, but for two best friends at the dawn of the millennium, it's outright agony.

The would-be heroes of The War of the Encyclopaedists, Mickey Montauk and Halifax Corderoy, are best buddies bonded by a shared summer in Europe and their penchant for throwing deeply ironic high-concept parties. During the summer of 2004, the two are preparing to head off to Boston for grad school, but on the eve of their farewell blowout bash, Mickey receives news that he will be commanding a squad deploying to Iraq instead. That night triggers a series of events where the decisions each young man makes will ricochet through the following year, some with incendiary consequences, and each threatening to tear their friendship apart the way geography never could. In the months that follow, as Mickey and Corderoy struggle to bear the weight of the mantle of true responsibility that neither one truly wishes for (nor feels entirely equipped to carry), they keep in touch by editing a series of escalating Wikipedia entries based on themselves that, like Mickey and Corderoy, begin as something glib and flippant and mature into something more.

Written by two real-life friends, Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, The War of the Encyclopaedists, is an explosive debut. It’s edgy and erudite, not to mention remarkably self-assured for a first novel. It perfectly captures the aimlessness as well as the bluster and bravado of youth, and though it does not ever pull its punches—particularly when discussing the brutality of war—it is sharply sentimental too. The War of the Encyclopaedists works not only as an excellent piece of fiction about war in the 21st century, but also as an incredibly timely and compassionate coming-of-age story for the new millennium; Robinson and Kovite have authoritatively homed in on the specific anxieties and alienation that afflict the latest generation of twenty-somethings attempting to find their place in the world. Daring and ambitious, The War of the Enyclopaedists is an essential piece of fiction for readers of all ages. 

If there’s a life before this one where people are allowed to pick their parents, the two young protagonists of Rebecca Dinerstein’s debut novel came up snake eyes, or nearly so. Three out of four of the parental units are nutcases; monstrously self-absorbed and melodramatic in ways that would suck the air out of the hangar of a jumbo jet. The one good parent, the Russian immigrant baker and father of Yasha, can do nothing against the energies of his estranged wife, even though he hasn’t seen her for 10 years. The parents of Frances are a tag-team of lunacy, made all the more unbearable by the fact that they all live in a New York apartment so tiny there’s hardly room for the fold-out bed in the living room. What can Frances do but escape to the back of beyond? In her case, this is Norway’s slice of the Arctic Circle, a place where the sun never sets during the height of summer.

Actually, Frances does have a reason to be in Norway. She has fled to an artist’s colony where she and this odd chap named Nils are the only artists. Their task is to paint a barn. Yasha also has reason to be in Norway, and that’s to bury his beloved father, who wanted to be interred at the top of the world. He is accompanied by his uncle and, alas, his mother, Olyana, who is incapable of toning down her self-obsession even a little bit.

Lots of writers have a place, real or imagined that simply possesses them. For Dinerstein, at least at this point in her young career, it’s northern Norway. She has already published a collection of bilingual poems set there, and she’s clearly enraptured by its austere beauty. It is a place of peace that encourages forbearance, if not forgiveness. The Norwegians are accepting, if a bit strange for living in a place of perpetual daylight. And Yasha and Frances are drawn together by the screwiness of it all. It seems that for Dinerstein’s characters, the sun does still shine in the darkest night after all.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The setting of Sara Taylor’s ambitious and unique debut novel is The Shore—three islands off the coast of Virginia, just south of Maryland, “trailing out into the Atlantic Ocean like someone’s dripped paint.” Parksley Island is the biggest, with two bridges to the mainland and little villages all up its length. Off Parksley’s northeast coast is Chincoteague Island, where “the people with money” have summer homes; further east is Assateague Island, now a national park and home of the wild ponies.

In this atmospheric novel, each character is steeped in these islands and their lore—some leaving briefly, but all eventually returning, if only in their minds and memories. Taylor’s saga moves back and forth in time, highlighting characters at different moments in their lives, gradually revealing how their stories overlap and come together, like a slowly assembled jigsaw puzzle. The earliest inhabitant portrayed by the author is Medora, a mixed-race Shawnee woman who comes to the islands from Kentucky with her husband in 1876. Four generations later, we meet twins Sally and Mitch—Sally inheriting from Medora’s grandson “the gift” of bringing rain on command when the crops are dry.

Out-of-wedlock pregnancies, rape, drug addiction and murder are all part of Taylor’s story, with the isolation of the islands undoubtedly playing its own pivotal role in her characters’ decisions. Events on the mainland take their toll as well, as we learn of the slow demise of Assateague in the early 20th century: the closing of the school, kids “skiffing across the channel” to Chincoteague for classes, or not going at all. By the early 21st century, “the old families are dying out” and kids leave as soon as they can, few wanting to work in the chicken plants that are the only viable sources of jobs.

The Shore will appeal to readers who enjoy family sagas and like to lose themselves in an atmospheric setting—think Pat Conroy combined with Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Our past never really leaves us, as much as we try to leave it behind and erase the marks it leaves on us. The especially painful memories etch themselves deeper than those of happier times.

In Sarah Nović’s first novel, Girl at War, her protagonist Ana Jurić lives  “suspended between the living and the dead” after witnessing the atrocities of the Croatian War of Independence. Violence methodically consumes everything that was once good and innocent in her young life, ensnaring 10-year-old Ana, her mother and father and her baby sister, Rahela. Not fully understanding the growing danger, Ana and her best friend, Luka, try to continue being kids, riding their bikes all over Zagreb, teasing one another, and making games out of the power outages and food shortages. When the war inevitably becomes personal to Ana and her family, it does so in truly horrific fashion.

Nović steers us along Ana’s trajectory from an impressionable and impatient child to a 20-year-old New York college student soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Ana has spent the past 10 years refusing to talk about her history to most everyone outside her adoptive family. Memories of what she has endured haunt her and propel her toward seeking some kind of resolution. Her mind continually returns to the pain of her past; it is only a matter of time before her feet must follow. 

Nović’s observant prose is visceral and incisive, capturing Ana’s inner turmoil and vulnerability as well as the practiced harshness she tries to use to cover it. Her story is also firmly rooted in the tangible. Detailed depictions of the horrors of war share space with the mundane, everyday aspects of a child’s—and then a young woman’s—life. Nović writes in a self-assured voice that ably carries the weight of tragic history and explores the depth and contradictions of the human response to that history. A remarkable story of one girl’s struggle to survive and her struggle with surviving when others did not, Girl at War is devastating to read but too compelling to put down.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Sara Nović.

What do two twin sisters who star in a Coney Island sideshow, a woman whose mother-in-law may have had her committed to an insane asylum, and a sanitation worker who finds an orphaned baby girl while completing his rounds one night have in common? The question sounds like the set up to a rather ghoulish joke, and yet untangling this mystery forms the basis of Leslie Parry’s dazzling debut, Church of Marvels.

Set in 1895, Church of Marvels takes readers deep into the shadowy underworld of turn-of-the-century New York City and its fringes. It is a story of hardscrabble lives intersecting in the most shocking ways—a story that is sometimes quite ugly but often made beautiful by its colorful cast of characters. This is not a novel with a single heart to it, but rather a chorus of four, and they are engaged in a scavenger hunt where their very salvation is at stake. To say any more would do a disservice to the devilish twists and legitimately shocking surprises that Parry has plotted for her readers. This is a book best entered in the dark, so when its revelations unfold, they are all the more dazzling.

Despite its historical setting, Parry’s world-building and character crafting are so strong that Church of Marvels feels fresh and timely, a thoughtful and satisfying modern work dressed up with all the bells and whistles of an old-fashioned Victorian romp. At times it reads like a Sarah Waters novel—with the compassion and cunning that implies—set in America. Utterly electrifying, this is the kind of novel readers will race through, only to turn the final page feeling ever so slightly heartbroken that the story has reached its end. Let’s hope that Parry has plenty more tricks up her sleeve.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Parry about Church of Marvels.