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.

Charlotte Brontë makes her way to 21st-century New York City by way of Korea in this latest spin on Jane Eyre from first-time author Patricia Park. The title character is Jane Re, “a honhyol, a mixed-blood,” with a Korean mother and American father. As if the “Koreanish” Jane (as she describes herself) does not already feel like an outsider, her parents die, and she is shipped off to live with her gruff uncle in Flushing, Queens—an enclave that is “all Korean, all the time,” and where “your personal business was communal property.”

Re Jane is breezy and accessible, at its best when portraying Jane’s haplessness and frustration. “I traveled nearly seven thousand miles across the globe to escape societal censure only to end up in the second-largest Korean community in the Western World,” she says wryly of her childhood move to the U.S.

The Jane Eyre connection here is substantial (a key character even shares the pen name under which Brontë published her masterpiece), though not slavish, which makes sense given that Park’s interest in feminism goes beyond the Women’s Studies professor who plays an important role in the book.

Jane’s Rochester is an unhappily married Irish-Italian Brooklyn native who must also contend with a surly young daughter, although he moves a little more quickly than Brontë’s brooding hunk. Readers may differ on the ultimate plausibility of his relationship with our heroine, and occasionally Park’s chatty tone becomes flat or needlessly melodramatic. Nevertheless, Park offers real insight into assimilationist struggles in comments such as “Immigrant households did not talk about Derrida or The New York Review of Books. Conversation was a luxury, rendered in broken fits and starts.”

Some of Re Jane’s most intriguing sections unfold during an impulsive post-9/11 return to Seoul, where Jane lands a job teaching English, and where she must make a major decision about her love life, thus adding yet another layer of confusion to her sense of cultural conflict.

None of the conflicts here are resolved in particularly shocking ways, but Park’s portrait of Korean-American life feels authentic and is ultimately endearing. Charlotte Brontë would be proud.

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

Tolstoy is famous for writing, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What he doesn’t mention is that each member of the family can be happy and unhappy in their own individual ways. That’s where Angela Flournoy picks up in The Turner House, the story of a big African-American family struggling with the decision of what to do with their family home.

In a Detroit struck by poverty and violence live the Turners, a sprawling family of 13 children. The oldest and the youngest practically belong to different generations, different Detroits and different parents. Their mistakes and their lost hopes are the bonds that connect them to each other.

Flournoy doesn’t just detail the journey the family goes on together; she also lets us in on the problems each individual struggles with alone. Family is their support system, but that doesn’t mean they share everything. Sometimes family members only serve to make each Turner feel more alone with their personal weaknesses.

What makes The Turner House profound is its reality, its observation of a family so diverse and well-drawn that they seem real. Many books center on romantic love or parental love, but we rarely find such an honest portrait of what it means to be a sibling—defined by your differences as much as your similarities—as the one Flournoy gives us. The Turners are continually rebuilding their lives, re-establishing connections that get tangled, torn and broken. Their story is beautiful in the way family is beautiful: full of heartbreak and broken dreams, but ultimately connection and community, understanding and love.

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

Venetia Stanley was a great beauty of her day, sought after by poets and painters eager to pay homage to her good looks. Her early death in 1633 has remained a mystery over the centuries, some accusing her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby, of murder and others ascribing her demise to the toxic beauty treatments she was rumored to have used. Hermione Eyre’s brilliant debut, Viper Wine, explores the perils of achieving beauty at all costs, set against a backdrop of the political and social upheaval of 17th-century London.

After years of marriage and motherhood, Venetia fears her looks are fading and turns to her husband’s alchemical experiments for a cure. When he refuses to help, she seeks out chemist Lancelot Choice, whose viper wine, a cordial distilled from snake blood, is said to invigorate the skin and restore youth. But the remedy takes a terrible toll. Meanwhile, other women in and around the court of Charles I seek similar cures, and the dangerous elixir becomes all the rage.

Eyre notes the obvious parallels between Venetia’s search for perfection and today’s obsession with youth by sprinkling the text with quotes on celebrity from the likes of Naomi Campbell and Andy Warhol, as well as mentioning modern beauty regimens with dangerous downsides, such as Botox and bee venom. Intensifying the novel’s postmodern edge, Digby’s thoughts are occasionally bombarded by 20th-century phenomena: He hears Joy Division at a courtly dance, quotes Neil Armstrong as he scans the heavens and perceives computer code in an alchemical text. Open to these dazzling wonders that flow to him, unbidden, across the centuries, Digby proves himself a true renaissance man, part of his world but anticipating our own.

Viper Wine occasionally bogs down in the detailed descriptions of Digby’s esoteric experiments, but Eyre’s stylish flair and sense of invention is truly impressive. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Viper Wine is a historic fantasy reminding us of the limitless reaches of the imagination.

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

There is a strong tradition of Irish writers—William Trevor, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín come immediately to mind—who can turn the everyday details of an ordinary life into art. Add to these ranks Mary Costello, whose deceptively slender first novel, Academy Street, takes in the full measure of one woman’s quietly tragic life in fewer than 200 pages.

The novel begins and ends with a death at Easterfield, the Lohans’ big old house and farm in the west of Ireland. At age 3, young Tess does not fully understand the circumstances or the implications of her mother’s death, but she feels the loss deeply. A meditative and lonely child, she grows up alongside her older sisters and two brothers, her life unfolding in familiar patterns: She goes away for a time to boarding school, she moves to Dublin to study nursing, an older sister joins the Irish diaspora in New York, and Tess follows a few years later. Tess’ life in Manhattan continues largely in solitude, marked by a brief, hollow love affair and the demands of single motherhood at a time when there was little support for such a choice. As the years pass, the unimaginable will bring Tess to her knees emotionally, even as she continues to endure all with that distinctive variety of Irish fatalism.

Plot is largely secondary for Costello, who is more concerned with providing a portrait of the inner life, a thing she accomplishes with admirable deftness. Indeed, the external chronological touchstones—the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, Patty Hearst, 9/11—sometimes seem like tacked on, unwelcome distractions, although the latter will play an essential role in Tess’ story. It is a cliché to call a novel haunting, but thanks to Costello’s graceful prose and emotional honesty, Academy Street—which won the Irish Book Award for novel of the year over such heavy-hitters as Tóibín and David Mitchell—certainly stays with you.

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

The story of a young woman trying to make it in Hollywood is familiar to most. However, Shanna Mahin turns this common tale into a simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming story. Oh! You Pretty Things gives readers a glimpse of the destruction that celebrity (and the obsession with it) can cause in day-to-day life. Encompassing humor, wit, irony and sheer sass, this story shows that even in glitzy Hollywood, life can be filled with hardships.

We follow Jess Dunne on her journey from barista to B-list celebrity assistant to A-list celebrity assistant. She is a woman who actively chooses a complicated way of life. Whether it’s a complex mother-daughter relationship or an exhausting semi-friendship with her celebrity boss, Jess seems to always be either picking herself apart or letting other people do so. Although fiercely loyal and protective of her friendships and her bosses, Jess struggles to stand up for herself in ways both little and life-altering.

Oh! You Pretty Things is not only an accurate portrayal of life in Hollywood but also an accurate portrayal of life’s ups and downs. Though the setting is familiar, the plot developments are unique and surprising. Don’t expect a perfect Hollywood ending. Mahin’s intelligent and approachable story will grip you from beginning to end.

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

Readers looking for another end of days, survivalist tale with the same trite conclusions will be out of luck with British author Claire Fuller’s debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days.

Peggy Hillcoat is taken by her survivalist father, James, from their home in London when she is 8 years old. The year is 1976, and she is told that that rest of the world is destroyed, and her mother is dead. James takes Peggy away from everyone and everything she has ever known, to a hut in the middle of a European forest. Our Endless Numbered Days is the story of her life of survival there.  

Fuller, who worked at a marketing agency before becoming a writer, uses her sharp storytelling to give the reader a divergent take on post-apocalypse survival. Peggy’s life in the woods is not simply a struggle against nature, as one might imagine, but also a story of a child trying to make sense of growing up in isolation. 

The novel alternates between the years that Peggy and her father live in the woods and 1985, when 17-year-old Peggy is back at home and coming to terms with the lies her father has told. Perhaps my favorite part of the book is the end (now I sound trite), because Fuller once again defies reader expectations. This provocative book will inspire questions and discussion, and leave readers eager to see what Fuller does next.