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.

What would you do if you knew you would have to say a final goodbye to someone you love? When is it the right time to let go, and when should you hold on? Julie Lawson Timmer tackles these questions with fierce emotion in her first novel, Five Days Left. It’s the moving story of a countdown for two characters who never meet in person, but have become friends through a parenting website.

Mara Nichols has a plan to end her life. She has already chosen a date—five days from now, her birthday. The “garage cocktail” will put an end to the suffering she has endured since being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Mara’s husband and 5-year-old daughter, Lakshmi, are unaware of Mara’s plan. Though Mara doesn’t want to leave her family, she also doesn’t want to wait for Huntington’s to take over her body, a progression Timmer describes in brutal prose. Mara’s hands move uncontrollably; she develops a drunken-looking gait; she can no longer drive. All these things solidify Mara’s resolve to take her life.

Scott Coffman also has just five days left—but his countdown involves time spent with his precocious and endearing foster child, Curtis, who is to be returned to his birth mother once she finishes a sentence in prison. But a sudden turn of events causes Scott to consider a future with Curtis. His pregnant wife is reluctant, and Scott finds himself faced with a choice between Curtis’ needs and those of his wife.

Five Days Left presents the kind of ethical dilemma that readers love. The characters are relatable; their choices will be the topic of fierce debate at the next book club. Timmer’s novel is a heartbreaker, but it is also a stirring debut.

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

Poet Gregory Sherl’s first novel, The Future for Curious People, is set in a world much like ours, but with one key difference: A scientific breakthrough has made it possible to see the future of relationships. A simple doctor’s visit and insurance co-pay is all it takes to see if the first-date awkwardness will melt into love or misery, to know if a relationship is worth saving, or even to see if your partner will have an awkward hairstyle 20 years in the future.

Enter Godfrey and Evelyn, two people who are lonely despite their seemingly happy relationships, romantic souls living in a world where they just don’t seem to fit. These are characters defined by their quirks—he wears mittens and has mother (and father) issues, she has a kleptomaniac best friend and a job as a librarian—but their eccentricities work a sort of charm, creating characters that are easy to love, even if they have trouble finding love themselves.

Underneath the sci-fi elements driving the plot, The Future for Curious People is really about love. It plays with our idea of true love, remixing it and even slightly mocking it, but always with a nostalgia that makes the story more sweet than sour. It gently reminds us that knowing the future isn’t the answer, but never judges us for wishing we knew more.

Is destiny real? Do soul mates exist? Is fate immutable? The Future for Curious People toys with these questions without drawing crystal-clear conclusions. In that way, it’s a lot like love itself.

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

The Story of Land and Sea follows three generations of a Revolutionary-era family struggling with life and death, freedom and slavery as they make a life in a small coastal town in North Carolina. Ten-year-old Tabitha is enthralled by her father’s stories of the sea and of his elopement aboard ship with her mother, Helen, whom she never knew. John gave up the sea when Tabitha was born and Helen died, returning to it only when he feels his last hope lies in the healing salt air.

Helen was raised by her own widowed father, Asa, who taught the girl to run their plantation. He bought her a servant girl, Moll, and the two girls grew up as close to friends as a master and her slave can be. But when Helen met John, the pirate-turned-Continental soldier, and fell in love, Asa watched her restraint melt away. Moll, on the other hand, is married against her will to a virtual stranger, but finds solace in her first son, Davy, whom she swears to protect from the hardships of the world.

Though John and Asa share the same losses, they find themselves continuously at odds, each wanting the other to forgive him for unspoken sins. John, whose truest happiness in life was borne on the waves, leaves the sea behind to deal with his grief. Asa, who has resented the sea since it returned to him a daughter who would die soon after, restores a small boat and teaches himself to row, seeking the solace of the salt water that Helen had found years before.

Still only in her 20s, New -Orleans-based Smith received a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before earning her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminar. The Story of Land and Sea is a striking debut novel that reads like poetry and will linger like mythology, as Simpson’s language and metaphors weave threads of magic through each sentence.

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

Nobody has ever taken care of Mia Dennett. Her upwardly mobile parents didn’t do it. Her uptight older sister didn’t do it. So the talented inner-city art teacher has learned to take care of herself. Or so she thinks, until an impulsive one-night stand turns into a nightmare far beyond Mia’s control. But why does her abductor seem so uncertain about his plans for her? Why did he choose to hide her in a remote Minnesota cabin rather than turn her over to the man who hired him? Was it an act of mercy, or something else entirely?

Mary Kubica’s debut novel, The Good Girl, is a high-intensity thriller, a psychological puzzle that will keep readers on their toes with its unique format. Alternating chapters describe Mia’s life before and after the abduction, always circling the questions of what really happened in those snowy woods, and what Mia might do if she’s ever released. If the ever-shifting timeline weren’t enough to keep things interesting, Kubica also uses multiple points of view, telling Mia’s story as seen by her mother and her kidnapper before letting us in on Mia’s own perspective. The combination could be confusing, but Kubica moves the story forward even as she explores her characters’ very different inner lives.

Seeing Mia’s story from so many angles makes it especially satisfying when the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place. Still, Kubica leaves one shocking surprise for the end. Readers will find themselves simultaneously saying, “I never suspected!” and “Oh, of course!” as the ultimate revenge befalls the person who deserves it most.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Mary Kubica for The Good Girl.