Parnaz Foroutan’s debut, The Girl from the Garden, explores the fortunes of the Malacoutis, a wealthy Jewish family in Iran at the turn of the 20th century, as remembered by the family’s only surviving daughter, Mahboubeh. Now elderly and living in Los Angeles, Mahboubeh wanders her garden, awash in memories that seem more real than her California home. 

In Mahboubeh’s memory, her great aunt Rakhel is a bitter old woman yelling obscenities out of an open window. But she also imagines Rakhel as a very young wife. At a time when a woman’s value was measured by her fertility, Rakhel’s inability to get pregnant was cause for despair. Their infertility (blamed completely on Rakhel) proves torturous to her husband, Asher, and the situation worsens after Rakhel’s sister-in-law gives birth to a healthy boy. When Asher contemplates taking a second wife, Rakhel’s behavior becomes more and more violent. 

Foroutan was born in Iran, though she currently lives in Los Angeles, and the stories explored in The Girl from the Garden were inspired by her own family. Though the reader gets a taste of what the Iranian Jewish community was like, this is really a novel about the culture of women, from the ritual baths and other religious traditions to the gardens and distinctly gendered spaces of the home. The novel mimics cinematic techniques in which one scene dissolves into another, shifting seamlessly across decades and continents. We never learn Mahboubeh’s own story, but the sense of a personality forged by the sacrifice, betrayal and restrictions of the women who came before her will remain with the reader long after the book is over. 

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

Constance Kopp has never quite fit in: She is tall and broad-shouldered, and she doesn’t care much for keeping house—a rarity for women in 1914. She sticks close to her sisters, Norma and Fleurette, and together they form an odd but functional trio. Norma is stoic and reserved; Constance is bold and proud; and Fleurette, the youngest, is wide-eyed and excitable. Since the death of their mother, the sisters have become closer than ever, living in the countryside after the need to keep secrets forced their move from the city more than 15 years prior.

On a rare trip into town, the sisters have an altercation with a powerful silk factory owner, Henry Kaufman, who refuses to assume responsibility for the damage he caused to the family wagon. Constance seeks restitution and raises Kaufman’s ire. As Constance defends her family, she is forced to confront her past and brace for a new future.

Author Amy Stewart is best known for her nonfiction (The Drunken Botanist; Wicked Plants). Her first novel, Girl Waits with Gun, grew out of a newspaper clipping about the Kopps that she discovered during her research on a gin smuggler named Henry Kaufman. While Stewart never learned if the smuggler Kaufman was the same man who antagonized the sisters, she was intrigued by the little-known Constance Kopp, who later became one of the first female deputy sheriffs.

Through painstaking attention to detail, Stewart has created an elegant, moving narrative of an unusual real-life woman who dared defy the odds to ensure the safety of her family.

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

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.