So much can happen in one day. And when it comes to Eddie Joyce’s first novel, so much is remembered in one day: Small Mercies is the story of the Amedolas, an Irish-Italian family living on Staten Island. The story is set in the current day, but it stretches back through generations with a particular emphasis on September 11, 2001, the day they lost Bobby—he was a firefighter, but he was also a son, brother, father and husband.

Losing Bobby is the pebble dropped in the middle of this plotline—everything centers on that day, but its ripples extend into both the present and the past. This is an intergenerational story of family dynamics that’s layered, complicated and intensely readable.

Staten Island features as more than a setting. It’s the heart of the family, what they cling to for stability, especially after they lose Bobby. The fact that they all grew up watching New York City without being a part of it stands in harsh relief against the reality that their favorite son was lost protecting it. Firefighting was a family business, and the idea that you can save others but you can’t save yourself is a metaphor that informs the rest of the book.

Just as this family’s history is a huge part of their story, so are their shortcomings. Because the novel is told from the perspectives of different family members, we have a clear view into each person’s private sins. This isn’t a novel that paints people as saints and sinners; every character here comes complete with individual triumphs and failures. We see in detail the way coping mechanisms drive the Amedolas apart and bring them back together in a way that, far from being unique to them, is part of the fabric of every close family.

Kitty Miller is living the dream. OK, so maybe her life isn’t picture-perfect according to society’s standards; it’s 1962, and she’s an unmarried woman. But after a failed long-term relationship, Kitty has come to accept that life isn’t always meant to be as we imagine. Instead of being married with kids, she and her best friend, Frieda, own a bookshop in Denver. They’re not rich—in fact, sometimes it’s hard to make ends meet—but the pair is so close they refer to one another as Sister. It’s a good life.

Or is Katharyn Anderson living the dream? Although Katharyn once ran a successful business with Frieda, she has traded the nickname Kitty for the more grown-up Katharyn, and ceded her independence for a suburban home, husband and children. It seems she has it all.

In The Bookseller, debut novelist Cynthia Swanson portrays one character in two distinctive lives. When she goes to sleep each night, Kitty leaves her world as a bookseller and slides almost seamlessly into her dream life as Katharyn, aka Mrs. Anderson. But the more time Kitty spends in this other life, the clearer its imperfections become. Although she has the love of her life and a beautiful family, she has lost a lot along the way. 

“Living,” Swanson writes, “is not made up of details, but rather of highlights.” In The Bookseller, she combines the two to answer the question we so often ask ourselves: What if?

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

When Nica Baker, a gorgeous, popular 16-year-old, is found dead on the campus of her prestigious private high school, her family, friends and community are shocked and devastated. While the case is closed neatly and quickly—an awkward classmate with an unrequited crush and a bad temper—Nica’s older sister Grace has the sick suspicion that the obvious answer is not always the right one. She goes on a quest to find out what really happened to Nica—and ends up discovering far more than she ever wanted to know about her family, her friends and herself.

Lili Anolik’s Dark Rooms is an impressive, haunting debut. Her writing is fast-paced and decisive, her characters rich and nuanced. And while the bones of her story are familiar—a beautiful girl murdered in a seemingly safe community—its plot twists and turns are anything but. Could Jamie, Nica’s rich and charming on-again, off-again boyfriend, be her killer? Or what about Damon, a troubled student with an unusual connection to Nica? Or maybe it’s someone even closer to home—someone who knows both girls better than anyone. As she gets closer to solving her sister’s murder, Grace gets farther and farther away from the life she thought she knew.

Dark Rooms is at once a crime novel and a high school drama, with shades of both Gillian Flynn and Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s a story of life and death, perception and reality, and how to go on when your world shatters before your eyes. With complex characters and a multilayered narrative, it can be hard at times to know whom to root for; thankfully it’s equally difficult to put this stunning debut down.

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

New Orleans-based writer Tom Cooper’s The Marauders is a debut novel that does nothing in half measures. It isn’t afraid to take risks, dabble in darkness and skirt the edge of ruin, and this is what makes it such an exciting read.

Set in a bayou shrimping community still dealing with the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, The Marauders takes readers on a rollicking adventure deep into the heart of Louisiana’s marshes as well as some of the darkest corners of the human psyche. Featuring a colorful cast of characters—from identical twin marijuana moguls to a one-armed treasure hunter to a slick oil company rep trying to swindle his own mother—it tells the stories of folk on the fringes, many of whom can only find common ground in their shared desire to carve out a living (some noble, some less so) in their tiny corner of the world. Alas, as competing interests cause their lives to collide, only a few will succeed and not all will survive.

Brash and unapologetic, The Marauders is a thrill ride. The plot is brisk, the characters are captivating and the writing is lush and striking. Cooper’s writing is the kind a reader can happily get lost in, and his depictions of the Deep South are so evocative that if he ever gets tired of fiction, he might give travel writing a try. But The Marauders is such an impressive offering from an audacious new voice in fiction that one can only hope it is but the first of many. As far as bibliophilic treasure hunts go, this one is literary gold.

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

Will’s entire world exists inside the walls of his house. Raised by an agoraphobic mother, he’s taught to fear the world outside—and the world inside, too, wearing a helmet constantly and donning body armor just to change a light bulb. He feels safe. Then he goes outside, and everything feels strange.

It doesn’t help that what he encounters really is bizarre: Neighborhood kids steal water hoses and make explosives, and he’s lied to by a boy he doesn’t know better than to trust. Despite its dangers, the outside attracts Will. Determined to solve a particular mystery in town, he forces himself and his mother to accept his going to school, walking and playing on the outside—even skateboarding.

Michael Christie, who was a professional skateboarder before turning to fiction, does an outstanding job exploring agoraphobia and panic disorders. He describes the “Black Lagoon” of depression that envelopes Will’s mother with remarkable insight and accuracy without either glorifying or trivializing her condition. The rest of the novel is fully drawn, too, including the psyches of Will, his friend Jonah and even the bullies. If I Fall, If I Die begins within the walls of a single home, but it eventually stretches to encompass an entire town, including its history and its mysteries.

Besides the obvious themes of leaving the nest and coming of age, this novel is about pushing boundaries and striving for change while understanding that the people we love may not be able to follow us. It’s about recognizing the beauty in new relationships even when they don’t turn out the way we plan. It’s about the ways we escape who our parents raised us to be—and the ways we’re inevitably drawn back into our histories anyway.

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

O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison’s debut novel is a puzzle with the outside pieces finished. Reading it is like compulsively fitting all those revealing middle pieces together. Annie Black, a happily married 40-something San Francisco businesswoman, delves into her careless youth after her 21-year-old son is injured in a car accident. Spinning a tale of the three drunken months she spent in Europe in 1989, she demonstrates how the past can shape the future.

Disillusioned after her alcoholic father abandons the family for another woman, 19-year-old Annie leaves her meager hometown prospects for Europe, securing an office job in London. There, she quickly develops a drinking problem and, when her married boss, Malcolm, takes a shine to her, she gets entangled in a mess of midlife crises and misplaced desires. Malcolm’s wife—with his encouragement—is sleeping with charismatic photographer Patrick. Malcolm hopes Annie will become his own romantic companion. Annie, however, falls hopelessly for the selfish but charming Patrick. Things come to a peak over a fateful Christmas in Paris. When an old photograph arrives in Annie’s mailbox in 2011, she learns that ripples from this event have fanned out for two decades, and now they threaten her marriage and her son’s life.

Annie’s ruminations on past sins and the nature of memory are thoughtful, even when the reliability of her narration is suspect. She is often extremely unlikable. But for much of the book, she is also very young. She reminds us of the times we’ve been selfish, the times we’ve been foolish, the selves we think we’ve escaped. Skillfully weaving two plots, Ellison unveils the details of each, piece by tantalizing piece. Hard to put down despite its heavy tone, A Small Indiscretion asks a big question: Should Annie be forgiven? Should we be forgiven? Fans of family-themed literary fiction will find it compelling.

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

Brooke Davis’ story of a little girl named Millie Bird turns child abandonment into an adventure. After her father dies and her mother leaves her in the ladies’ underwear department, Millie finds two improbable helpers: Karl, who types out everything he says or feels with his fingers, and Agatha, who writes complaint letters and catalogs her aging body’s daily changes. Karl and Agatha, both in their 80s and widowed, have lived long lives but don’t quite know how to live now. Millie’s predicament gives them a reason to try. 

In Lost & Found, Australian author Davis renders Millie, especially, in careful detail—she’s fragile, yet not completely unhinged by all the upheaval in her life. Millie comes across as a 7-year-old should: curious, experimental, hopeful, afraid but covering with bravado and optimism. From vantage points further on, Karl and Agatha are doing much the same. 

Davis’ vivid imagining of the grieving process as a roller coaster of questions with no easy answers reflects some of her personal struggle, as her mother’s sudden death occurred not long before she began this project. Readers will find themselves pondering difficult questions along with Millie, Karl and Agatha. A literal cross-country journey aids in their individual quests to find out and embrace what it means to still be here after loss.

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

Louisiana’s capital city, Baton Rouge, has its fair share of glamorous and not-so-glamorous stories. M.O. Walsh, author of My Sunshine Away, grew up there, so he captures these contradictions effortlessly in his stunning debut.

Set in 1989, the novel tells the heartbreaking story of Lindy Simpson, the once carefree and spirited track star whose life goes awry after she is attacked on her own street. The mystery unravels from the perspective of Lindy’s childhood neighbor and playmate, now 14, who has been in love with Lindy for as long as he can remember.

While showing the chilling effect the crime has on all of Piney Creek Road, Walsh also raises the question of how a horrific crime can happen in a seemingly idyllic neighborhood. And the answer is, like so many things in Louisiana, that nothing is as ideal as it seems. Kids playing in the street are in constant battle against being smothered by mosquitoes and humidity. Neighborhood cookouts buzz with energy but also the gossip of divorce and family tragedies.

Walsh juxtaposes the beauty and terror of the place in a way that leaves you utterly captivated. It’s a world that seems foreign to outsiders but also resonates with the most universal of sentiments, including the desire to belong, the way memory can both create and fill voids, and how peace often follows the realization that the potential for good is in all of us.

From beginning to end, My Sunshine Away is full of wisdom, wit and wonder.

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

In Welcome to Braggsville, four Berkeley college friends decide to protest a Civil War re-enactment by staging a “performative intervention.” Daron, the white protagonist from small-town Braggsville, Georgia, where the “Patriot Days” celebration is held, reluctantly accompanies his friends to his home: Candice, whom Daron yearns for, an earnest activist who claims to be part-Native American; Charlie, a quiet black teen from Chicago; and Louis, an Asian kid from California with aspirations to be a stand-up comedian.

Daron finds that his time spent in the enclave of "Beserkerly" has made him uncomfortably conscious of his town’s casual racism. When they put their plan in motion, things quickly go from comic to tragic.

It’s the telling that sets this book apart. Madcap, satirical, sometimes profane and uncanny in his descriptions, whether he’s portraying self-conscious academia or a backyard barbecue, T. Geronimo Johnson is both a relentless social critic and a compassionate bystander as he narrates the story through Daron’s eyes. The four friends, who dub themselves “the 4 Little Indians,” are naïve in the beginning—young and idealistic, fresh from the intellectual hothouse of Berkeley, they are convinced that ideas will win the day. When faced with entrenched hatred and fear, however, Daron realizes that ideas don’t carry much weight. He muses, “It had been hard not to feel a smug pride when he brought home this menagerie. . . . but now he felt as if he had driven through town with a fourteen-point buck strapped across his hood. Of course by nightfall everyone would be cold-nosing the back door after a slice.”

Though Johnson enjoys poking fun at the righteous arguments of scholars and militia members alike, his own questions about race and culture resonate throughout the book. Welcome to Braggsville is a deeply pleasurable read for the sheer wonder of Johnson’s prose, but a deeply disturbing read for the truth it reveals about us.

Greek mythology and Bulgarian fairy tales have never felt as modern as they do in Wildalone, Krassi Zourkova’s debut novel. Building on the momentum established by Stephenie Meyer’s ever-popular Twilight franchise, the Bulgarian-born Zourkova introduces fans of supernatural romance to a dark and heady new love triangle involving a gifted musician and two bewitching brothers.

Forsaking her family and her homeland, Thea Slavin leaves Bulgaria to attend Princeton University in the hope of becoming a world-class pianist . . . and of uncovering the truth behind the mysterious death of her older sister several years earlier. Struggling to assimilate into American culture and meet the demands of Ivy League life, Thea finds herself drawn into a sensual relationship with two brothers, Rhys and Jake Estin, each of whom seems to have secrets of his own—and the answers may lie in the myths and legends Thea grew up with and had dismissed as nothing more than stories. As shocking truths are revealed and fantasies made real, Thea must decide how far she will go for love.

Moody and mesmerizing, Wildalone is sure to appeal to lovers of the alpha-male romance. Despite working as a lawyer, Zourkova writes prose that is lush and seductive, whether she’s describing the Princeton campus or her own Bulgarian homeland—not to mention the electric relationship between Thea and her two suitors. An imaginative and ambitious first novel, Wildalone is a dark, sensual fairytale that will leave readers begging for a sequel.

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

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Krassi Zourkova about Wildalone.