“Beginnings are crystal clear. Endings are too, once they’re final. It’s difficult to tell what part of the middle you’re in, though.”

The restlessness of that sentiment sums up Alison Jean Lester’s memorable protagonist quite well. A mix of “live and let live” and the dos and don’ts from her midcentury upbringing, the heroine of Lillian on Life slides off the page as real, complicated and contradictory.

We meet Lillian—and her insecurities, regrets and triumphs—in late middle age, as she’s solidifying her beliefs about herself and the world. As she mulls over the past decades of her life in episodic chapters, she reveals much—and occasionally conceals more.

In some passages, she straddles the fine line of self-pity; in other instances, she speaks incisively about her experiences of desire, disappointment or loss in ways that seem universal. One memory brings out a wistful softness while the next elicits a hardened life mantra.

Lillian embodies the quest to understand our natures and our lives—both what has happened to us and what we have chosen. The novel captures how our minds trip us up as Lillian meanders through her memories and flashes of poignant feeling in a nonlinear way. Yet for all the wandering, Lester’s narrative flows and holds together as we follow along. We feel Lillian’s disappointments and embarrassments, relate to her naiveté and shake our heads at her justifications. As someone who hears others’ voices rattling in her head long after they are gone, Lillian sifts through her thoughts on her judgmental mother, protective but passive Poppa and her varied lovers.

In Lillian, Lester has created a wry, self-conscious, introspective woman with a memorable voice to match. Like a portrait painted over and over, Lillian bears the evidence of many revisions. Her vulnerability is palpable in every story she relates. Each chapter acts like a signpost on Lillian’s journey to find peace with herself.

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

Kevin Gillooly, the teenage protagonist of Christopher Scotton’s debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, returns with his mother to her Eastern Kentucky hometown of Medgar after the horrific accidental death of his 3-year-old brother. Kevin’s father hopes a summer under the care of Pops, the family’s cantankerous patriarch and the town veterinarian, will restore the devastated Anne. For Kevin, his time in Medgar is not a retreat, but an introduction to the thorny issues of adulthood, as well as the healing power of nature, thanks to his friendship with Buzzy Fink, a local boy who instructs Kevin in the ways of wilderness.

The town knew better days when the nearby coal mines were productive. Now people are selling off their ancestral lands for the latest in coal extraction: mountaintop removal, which destroys the landscape. In a place with more poverty than opportunity, the choice to sell is a tempting one. A small group of townspeople oppose the powerful mining interests, including Pops. As Kevin accompanies Pops on his veterinary rounds into the hills and hollows, he begins to see what happens when a community loses its connection to its history—a connection Kevin has just discovered for himself, thanks to his time on the family homestead.

Among the novel’s many joys are its characters, which add humor, drama and heartbreak to this layered story. Though a few are just this side of stereotypical (the gay hairdresser, the sassy housekeeper, the repugnant mine company boss), they illustrate the way years of common experience and friendship can be tested by change and hardship. This affecting coming-of-age story faithfully portrays environmental concerns alongside rich family histories.

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

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is at once alluring and unexpected. The novel opens with a letter from 83-year-old Etta to her husband, Otto. Etta has left the couple’s farm in Saskatchewan to walk more than 3,000 kilometers to see the ocean. In the letter, Etta tells Otto that she will try to remember to come back, a hint at her failing memory. Otto, hands trembling, decides not to follow.

The setting quickly shifts to the early 1930s, where we meet young Otto and his 16-member family of farmers; Etta, who lives in town with her parents and sister; and Russell, a displaced orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle next door to Otto. From there, the novel—still told partially in letters—alternates between the characters’ early years to Etta’s current-day cross-country journey, revealing how the trio met, what drives them, and how their lives became so intimately interwoven.

Layered alongside Etta’s journey is Otto’s trip across the Atlantic at age 17 to fight during World War II. As Otto serves abroad, Etta looks after Russell, and the two become more reliant on one another. In the present, Otto’s memories of the war come to the forefront as he copes with Etta’s absence.

Emma Hooper’s debut is intelligent, moving and captivating. Inspired by a piece of her own family history, the author examines with creativity the consequences of great love and loss, blurring the lines between memory, illusion and reality. Perfectly crafted and endearing in its unpredictability, Etta and Otto and Russell and James pulls readers along with every page turn.

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

Life may not be going according to plan for Ceinwen Reilly, but she’s determined to find the cinema-worthy thread in her 1980s Lower East Side life. That may be easier said than done, given her retail job at a vintage shop and her shabby Avenue C apartment.

But this Mississippi transplant and film buff finds the romantic in everything, from saving for a particularly stunning pair of earrings to the antics of her two male roommates. So Ceinwen is easily bewitched by her elderly neighbor Miriam’s stories of working as a seamstress in Hollywood, which inspire a search for a long-lost silent film.

Film critic and blogger (“The Self-Styled Siren”) Farran Smith Nehme packs the story with tidbits of classic movie knowledge that are sure to delight cinema lovers. Set against a backdrop of the AIDS epidemic and a down-on-its-luck neighborhood, Missing Reels offers a fresh take on the traditional coming-of-age in New York story.

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Who is Sean Phillips? And how did he end up like this?

That’s the central conceit of John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van, a compact but wide-ranging novel that follows Sean’s development from unpopular teenager to reclusive adult.

Sean is the founder of Focus Games, and while he has several works to his credit, he’s best known for Trace Italian. The concept for the game came to him while he was hospitalized after suffering a gunshot wound as a teen. The noise surrounding Sean—both in his head and coming from an endless stream of doctors, social workers and his well-meaning parents—was difficult to block out. To escape, Sean retreated into himself, envisioning a desolate Midwestern landscape and a treasure that beckons.

Upon leaving the hospital, Sean creates a roleplay-by-mail game, which allows him a livelihood even while he hides his disfigured face from the world. Players select their moves and send Sean directives in letters, carefully considering their options even as they become increasingly entangled in the fictional world of his imagination.

Fans of other game-oriented novels, such as Ready Player One, may be drawn to this intriguing tale, as it too focuses on an enthralling game and how it affects both its players and creator. But the parallels stop there. Perhaps mimicking Trace Italian, first-time novelist and musician Darnielle (Mountain Goats) carries readers through a labyrinthine unveiling of events. As he writes, Darnielle peels back layers to reveal Sean’s character, the game’s play and the storylines that have developed around his game. The result is a tale as complex as the songs for which Darnielle is loved.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One might describe Oregon as a mélange of Haight-Ashbury, Appalachia and Yankee nouveau riche. Valerie Geary’s first novel, Crooked River, follows this interplay between the state’s radicals, rednecks and arrivistes. It begins when a journalist with the WASP-y name of Taylor Bellweather drowns. And the prime suspect is a beekeeper with a beard and a penchant for whiskey.

The beekeeper is father to Sam and Ollie, girls mourning the recent death of their mother. Sam discovers the victim but fears that the police will implicate her father. The police implicate him anyway, because witnesses have him arguing with Taylor in a bar on the night of her disappearance. So Sam sets out like Nancy Drew to prove her father’s innocence.

Given the setting and the crime, Crooked River pays homage to Snow Falling on Cedars. But Geary is not one to labor over language. So while her novel is a swift and beguiling read, it sometimes resembles an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” Given that two youngsters are its narrators, it even flirts with the young adult genre. Not to say that Sam isn’t a compelling character. She is finely drawn, an update on Harper Lee’s Scout. When the local detective tells Sam that it’s not her job to protect her father, Sam makes a fair bid to join the great orphans of literature.

The problem with the back-to-nature ethos of the 1960s is that nature can be primal and nasty. The Summer of Love begat an Autumn of Discontent. Put another way, it’s all fun and games until a girl named Taylor gets whacked.

Geary isn’t explicit about it, but her novel undoes some of the more recent idealizations of that grand Pacific Northwest state. It may, as the current motto goes, “love dreamers,” but there’s a dark earthiness to it still. Or as Sam says, “trees made better friends than people did.”

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Valentine Millimaki, a troubled young sheriff’s deputy, begins spending long hours at the county jail talking from opposite sides of prison bars with a career killer, he doesn’t expect to see a reflection of himself in the murderer’s own complicated past. At 77, John Gload has spent a lifetime working as a gun-for-hire, and is so adept at his craft that he is only now facing the prospect of a prison sentence. Millimaki is an underling in the Copper County sheriff’s department, whose marriage was splintering even before he drew the night shift. The unlikely pair develop a friendship that takes an unexpected turn as an act of violence leaves the two tied together by the secrets they share and the rugged country they love.

It would be too simple to say The Ploughmen centers on the idea of good and evil; it is not so black and white as that. The story is perpetually gray, with pockets of light and dark, not just in its morality but in its scenery. Despite their obvious differences, Millimaki and Gload share a kind of nostalgia for a past Montana, and their futures are connected by their choices.

Zupan is a native Montanan who for 25 years made a living as a carpenter while pursuing his writing. In The Ploughmen, he uses cadence and rich language to pull readers through the narrative, and despite a tendency toward long sentences, he writes with a kind of straightforwardness reminiscent of Kerouac. This memorable debut is at times strikingly beautiful, while at others quite bleak, but it is always poignant.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Newcomers to Caitlin Moran’s candor and upfront feminist sensibility should prepare themselves: How to Build a Girl is an earthy, sometimes outrageous but always funny story about a 1990s teenager from an eccentric family in a Northern England council house who becomes a rock critic.

Overweight, sexually inexperienced and poor, Johanna Morrigan takes stock and finds herself sadly wanting. She decides to re-create herself, first naming herself after Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly, known for her wit and tempestuous living, and then choosing a new look: a swoosh of black eyeliner and a top hat (the latter in homage to Slash, of Guns ‘n’ Roses fame). Terrified that her family is going to lose their benefits and convinced that she can make money as a writer (like Jo in Little Women), she lands a gig as a rock critic, tentatively submitting the occasional record critique but quickly moving up the pop journalism ladder to full-length concert reviews and features. Finally, to her delight, she goes from being a “kissless virgin” to, again in her words, a “Lady Sex Adventurer.”   

Moran writes explicitly about sex and brilliantly about music, especially the ways in which adolescents take refuge, express themselves and sometimes even find reasons to live through the work of the artists they love. But class and poverty also play an enormous role in this novel, to Moran’s credit. Johanna’s family and life in Wolverhampton are depicted with dignity and an understanding of how much is at stake.

Like Jo March, Johanna is cheerful, literate and resourceful, much as one imagines the teenage Moran might have been. (Fans of Moran’s feminist manifesto/memoir, How to Be a Woman, will realize that Johanna’s journey resembles Moran’s own trajectory from council housing to magazine staff by the age of 16.) But after putting in so much work to change her life, Johanna finds she doesn’t much like the results. What do you do, she wonders, when you’ve built yourself up, only to realize you’ve used the wrong materials? This sincerely told and truly funny tale provides a sympathetic and enlightening answer.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Caitlin Moran about How to Build a Girl.

With The Furies, British writer Natalie Haynes has delivered an addictive, dark and suspenseful— yet sensitive—debut about death, obsession and fate.

After a sudden tragedy shatters her happy life as an actress and theater director in London, Alex Morris moves to Edinburgh to teach at a “last-chance” school for troubled teens. When she faces down her most intimidating class, a group of fierce personalities who convene in the school’s basement classroom, she finds common ground with them by teaching classic Greek drama. At first, the students seem interested only in the stories’ sensational plot developments, but as time passes they grow more intent, more fascinated—and more likely to take the tales of revenge, fate and fury to heart.

Haynes explores the twisting relationship between Alex and her students not just through Alex’s narration, but also through the diary entries of her most attentive pupil. The result is a novel of dueling perspectives, a dance of two tragic lives intertwining in ever more fascinating, ever more destructive ways.

The novel generates a whirlwind pace and a psychological tension as it darts between points of view, but the boldest thing about The Furies is the way Haynes explores something universal in a very intimate way. She laces the psychological tragedies at the heart of her plot with a sense of deep vulnerability and humanity in her characters as they explore not just the white heat of tragedy, but the never-ending throb of grief.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.