Genetic engineering and mutations are a staple of fiction; think The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World or, more recently, Jurassic Park. Ramona Ausubel’s sparkling novel The Last Animal focuses on a young scientist’s impulsive attempt to revive an extinct species and the impact this has on her children, who are traumatized by the accidental death of their father.
Graduate student Jane is the only female member of a scientific team working in the Arctic Circle, searching for traces of the wooly mammoth and hoping to reignite an ecosystem that could possibly reverse the effects of global warming. She is accompanied (begrudgingly) by her two teenage daughters, the fiery, sarcastic Eve and sweetly obedient Vera. The girls crave routine and stability, and they are fiercely protective of their mother as well as each other.
Eve and Vera’s accidental discovery of a perfectly preserved baby mammoth in the Siberian permafrost brings a flurry of excitement. But once back at the University of California, Berkeley, Jane is still washing pipettes in the lab while research grants are handed out to her male colleagues. At a departmental fundraiser, Jane has a chance encounter with a glamorous woman named Helen, who has a palatial estate and home zoo in Italy, complete with giraffes and an elephant. This leads to Jane implanting a genetically modified embryo, based on the baby mammoth’s DNA, into Helen’s elephant. The next thing you know, Jane and her daughters are flying to Lake Como to meet an animal that’s been extinct for hundreds of years.
The Last Animal whizzes around the planet—from the steppes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to a remote alpine village—with a dizzying, almost madcap speed, but at the novel’s heart are the deep ties between mother and daughters, sister and sister, human and animal. Though Jane, Eve and Vera are grieving, they never lose their sense of adventure and love of scientific discovery. Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.
Ramona Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.
Aisha Abdel Gawad mixes family drama with a coming-of-age narrative in her debut novel, resulting in a gripping, intimate portrait of a Muslim family in the post-9/11 United States.
Amira and Lina are twin sisters living in Brooklyn who will soon graduate from high school, but their celebration is cut short by life-changing news: Their brother, Sami, is being released from prison. At the same time, during the holy month of Ramadan, their Muslim neighborhood is experiencing hateful attacks. As their brother readjusts to society and the twins teeter on the precipice of adulthood, they all find that, although family and faith tie us together, such bonds can also be used to restrict and smother.
Between Two Moons is narrated primarily by Amira, the more bookish twin. She is ready for a fresh start, and college promises a profound reinvention. Unfortunately, freeing herself from the chains of family, specifically her two siblings, is far easier said than done. Although Lina looks up to Amira, Amira has always felt overshadowed by her freewheeling twin, who aspires to be a model.
Meanwhile, Sami remains cloaked in mystery; the twins have never known the reason he went to prison, and their adolescent memories of him are defined by his rage and destruction. However, when Sami returns, he doesn’t go back to making drug deals on the corner or getting into screaming matches with their parents, a shift that initially makes the twins uneasy. But soon, the family learns to be together again: Sami works with their dad at his butcher shop, and the five of them take a trip to Coney Island in a heartwarming scene of unity.
Such rosy moments are fleeting, as Islamophobia casts a long shadow over the story. Characters frequently make jokes or references to the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons, but this comes from their collective pain, the torture they have experienced under the threat of hate. Some characters find ways to resist this malice, such as Faraj, Amira’s love interest and a community organizer who tries to teach Amira about bringing people together. Meanwhile, Sami devotes himself to his faith, developing a “third eye” mark on his forehead from praying.
By the end of Between Two Moons, it is unclear whether these efforts make any tangible change, but that isn’t really the point. Coming together, feeling for one another no matter what each of us have been through—this is what Abdel Gawad’s novel advocates for. There is no more powerful message.
In Aisha Abdel Gawad’s powerful novel, although family and faith tie its characters together, such bonds can also be used to restrict and smother.
What happens when dreams don’t pan out? That’s the question that Malcolm and Jess Gephardt both face after years of marriage in Mary Beth Keane’s engrossing fourth novel.
Like her bestselling 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, The Half Moon is set in the fictional town of Gillam, New York, modeled after Keane’s hometown of Pearl River. While the events of Ask Again, Yes spans 40 years, The Half Moon focuses on a week or so in the Gephardts’ lives, exploring how events of the past have led to their discontent and an ultimate reckoning.
Malcolm’s lifelong dream has been to own the Half Moon, the bar where he’s worked for years. He finally does, although menacing creditors are knocking at his door, and he doesn’t have the cash to transform it the way he’d like—years of futile fertility treatments have exhausted the couple’s savings. Early in the book, he muses that “middle age was looming and he could already see the headline that would arrive with it: that a person could be extraordinarily good at something and still fail at it.” And he is good—a gregarious guy who’s got the charm to manage any situation.
Jess is a lawyer, although her heart isn’t really in her career—or anything, for that matter. After moving out and away from Malcolm, she is trying to figure out next steps. In flashbacks, we learn that she has been increasingly attracted to Neil, a divorced lawyer who is the primary caregiver of his three young children and has recently moved to Gillam. In a struggle that seems quite real, Jess desperately tries to stave off these stirrings, wondering if it’s “possible to dance at the edge of a precipice and keep dancing for the rest of your life.”
Then a blizzard descends on Gillam, paralyzing the lives of its residents and emphasizing the feelings of entrapment felt by not only Malcolm and Jess but also a host of other wonderfully portrayed characters who work in and frequent the bar. As the story unfolds, the many fascinating behind-the-scenes details about running a bar range from heartbreaking to humorous. It’s a masterful setup, laid out in a careful, intriguing way. The disappearance of one of the bar’s patrons during the storm, lends a sense of urgency to the plot and adds a layer of impending doom that plays out in both emotional and physical terms.
Keane’s down-to-earth characters in Gillam are reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s wonderfully authentic Baltimore personalities. They’ll tug your heartstrings as they try to make their way through this world with steps forward, back and sideways.
Mary Beth Keane’s down-to-earth characters in Gillam are reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s wonderfully authentic Baltimore personalities.
T.C. Boyle has never been afraid to torment his characters or draw from real life, and he does both in Blue Skies, putting his cast through just about every climate-related calamity to make the contours of the crisis so prominent that no one could miss them.
He begins this bicoastal adventure—the action toggles between Florida and California—with, of all things, jewelry. But it’s “living jewelry,” a Burmese python purchased by influencer Cat to wear around her neck. Boyle, the unparalleled stylist, describes Cat’s thought process in gorgeous prose: She thinks snakes are beautiful, “as if somebody had dipped a brush in acrylics and traced the lines that radiated in a widening V from their mouths to draw reticulate patterns across their backs and down their sides.”
Plenty of descriptions as unforgettable as that one follow as Boyle introduces multiple characters and complications, from the self-inflicted to the unforeseen. Cat’s ambition is to gain online followers and show off her Florida beachfront home. She lives there with her Tesla-driving fiancé, Todd, whose job involves drinking and partying to promote a rum brand. To Cat’s chagrin, it also involves a lot of time away from home.
Across the country in California are other members of Cat’s family. Her brother, Cooper, is an entomologist, disparaged as “Bug Boy” by classmates when he was growing up but who now conducts field research to study ticks and other arachnids. Their mother, Ottilie, is so deeply impacted by Cooper’s warnings about harming the planet that she begins cooking with crickets, making everything from cricket cobbler to cricket-infused cookies and brownies.
The disappearance of Cat’s snake is only the mildest of calamities to befall this group. Ever the maximalist, Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change. If anything, there’s too much incident. Fewer would have made his point more effective.
But wealth is better than poverty, and Boyle doles out ample riches. The pace never lets up, and he blends many other timely themes into his narrative, from aversion to parenthood to the ruthlessness of the media. Blue Skies may not be top-flight Boyle, but it’s Boyle at his most urgent. “What good was beachfront property if there was no beach?” Ottilie asks. As Boyle warns us, take the planet for granted, and don’t be surprised if, like a snake, its luxuries slither away.
Ever the maximalist, T.C. Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change in his novel Blue Skies.
Mary Beth Keane grew up around bars. “Most of my uncles owned bars or worked in them,” she says. Which is why, when the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, Keane found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. But besides socializing with her husband and two sons, the best she could do was drive around Pearl River, New York—the town where she grew up and now lives—hoping to spot a friend to chat with from afar.
To compensate, Keane immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the novel’s center. The wonderfully unpretentious, gifted writer explains this by phone from Bozeman, Montana, where she’s researching her next novel. (Its Western setting will herald a marked change from her beloved 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, and The Half Moon, both of which are set in Gillam, a fictionalized version of Pearl River.)
In the novel, Malcolm Gephardt has worked at the Half Moon for years, and now he finally owns the place, with dreams to update and transform it. Unfortunately, creditors are at his heels, his marriage is on the rocks, and in the midst of a blizzard, a patron goes missing—setting the stage for plenty of riveting internal and external drama.
“This is a COVID book,” Keane says, “even though it doesn’t seem that way.” The pandemic is never mentioned, and there are no masks in sight. But Keane poured her loneliness and isolation right into Malcolm’s character, and the winter storm that paralyzes the town for a week or so accentuates the fact that a number of her characters feel trapped in their lives.
When asked about the impetus for The Half Moon, Keane explains that, at age 45, she’s starting to see couples get divorced and then, 18 months or so later, share Facebook posts showing “a whole new set of people and a new life,” she says. “I was thinking about to what degree we can change our lives once we reach a certain point. . . . I’m a very working-class child, and I grew up in a very Catholic community, and I don’t know whether it’s just me and the way I was raised, [but] I literally do not know how to do that.”
Not that she wants to, she adds quickly. “I’m very happy with my life. But part of being a writer is observing and watching other people, and I guess I just like thinking about things that I can’t imagine.” A friend of Keane’s recently commented that her books “are an argument for staying together, over and over,” which surprised the author. “Although it’s so obvious when I think about it now,” she says.
In The Half Moon, however, the odds of an intact marriage seem low. Malcolm’s wife, Jess, a lawyer, has been dreaming of having a child, but after years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, she has moved into the arms of someone else. Keane writes that Jess is weighed down by “Hormones. Grief. Boredom. The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.” Jess and Malcolm have had bitter disagreements over the financing of the bar, which she recognizes is his “baby,” his lifelong dream.
“Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
In crafting Jess and Malcolm’s rocky marriage, Keane had no idea what would happen between the couple, and she reported to her editors that she had “tried every [outcome] you could possibly suggest,” including some wildly dramatic ones. Such is the “jigsaw” style of Keane’s creative process. “It seems like a piecemeal, haphazard way to write, but that’s the way I do it,” she says.
In a 2019 essay for the New York Times, she describes growing up without books and how her earliest literary influence as a kid in the late 1980s was the Reader’s Digest column “Drama in Real Life.” In a way, Keane says, her upbringing was freeing, especially when it came to choosing books at the library. “Boy, did I learn a lot from those Danielle Steel books,” she says, laughing. She wrote her first stories on the back of paper plates, then read them aloud to her mom. Her first clue that she might have a talent came after writing a fourth-grade essay about a baked potato. Later, at age 13, she wrote a short story for a school literary magazine about a girl whose sister had committed suicide; it was so convincing that her mother began getting condolences from friends who said they didn’t realize that she had an older child.
“I knew [early on] that it didn’t have to be true; it just had to be good,” Keane says. “So I always leaned toward fiction. I felt in my gut that I was better at writing than I was at other things.” As she grew older, her childhood reading habits allowed her to remain free from the burden experienced by many writers who try to measure up to certain literary reputations. “I really don’t care what everyone thinks is good or not. I just read for myself. And I think that is a gift that not every writer has.”
“As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
While Keane was at Barnard College, novelist Mary Gordon told her, “You have a subject.” At the time, however, Keane had no clue what it was. “Suddenly,” she says, “I was with people who’d been all over the world, and they had read everything. They were writing about things like anorexia, bulimia, sex—things that just seemed beyond me. But what was interesting to me then, and I think still is, is work and what people do for a living.”
Keane is the daughter of two Irish immigrants; her mother had various jobs, and her father was a “sandhog,” a New York City tunnel worker. For Ask Again, Yes, Keane interviewed members of the New York Police Department to collect accurate details for her police officer characters, but with The Half Moon, she simply turned to family, gleaning insider bar knowledge about things like jukebox earnings, free swag from breweries, beverage distribution and state liquor licensing authorities. Her cousins tended to be more helpful than her uncles. “Irish people, they clam right up if they think you’re asking too many questions, especially since I’m a writer,” Keane says. With a laugh, she adds, “Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
The novel’s fictional bar takes its name from the ship that English explorer Henry Hudson sailed on his 1609 voyage to discover a Northwest Passage; a variety of places and products in the Hudson Valley share the Half Moon name. The moniker is apt, since readers will wonder whether Malcolm and Jess’ marriage is waxing or waning. “I also like that the name isn’t overtly Irish,” Keane admits. “It sort of bothers me when everyone describes [my work] as ‘Irish people’ and ‘an Irish novel.’”
The hallmark of a classic Keane character isn’t their background or heritage, but rather their inability to articulate what’s bothering them. “I’m more familiar with and more sympathetic to people who would sooner either tamp it way down and pretend it’s not there—or throw a beer bottle against a wall,” she says. Malcolm, for instance, can charm customers with his gift of gab for hours, but at home, he’s not so much of a talker. In fact, one of his truest, most memorable forms of self-expression comes when he throws a cup of coffee at someone’s car. “These are my people, I guess,” Keane says. “As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
Keane has spent a lifetime observing people in fiction and real life, and in both cases, she likes to keep things simple. “We’re just a disaster from beginning to end,” she says with a laugh. “Nobody gets any smarter. It’s just that kids look up to us. But I want to say all the time, ‘I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to drag you along with me, and we’re going to do our best. You know, try to be kind to the people you love. And that’s about it.’”
Photo of Mary Beth Keane by Martin Hickey
When the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, author Mary Beth Keane (Ask Again, Yes) found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. To compensate, she immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the story’s center.
From the outside, the Gardners of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, have a life anyone would envy. But as Adrienne Brodeur (Wild Game) reveals in her thoughtful first novel, a shiny exterior often conceals secrets and deceptions no admiring outsider could imagine.
Set during the spring and summer of 2016, Little Monsters focuses on Adam Gardner, the family patriarch, and his two adult children, Ken and Abby. Adam is a prominent marine biologist who’s dangerously stoking a manic phase of his bipolar disorder to discover the secret of whale communication he is certain will earn him scientific immortality. Ken, on the verge of a move into the major leagues of real estate development, is plotting a congressional campaign in the next election cycle, but there are worrisome cracks in the foundation of his marriage to Jenny, the daughter of a prominent Boston family. And Abby, a talented but underappreciated painter, looks forward to the exposure a profile in a major art magazine will bring, while dealing with the early stages of pregnancy. All of this is complicated by the arrival of Steph Murphy, a Boston cop and young mother who’s spending the summer on the Cape and inching closer to the Gardner family for a reason they can’t grasp.
As the gorgeous seaside summer rolls on, Ken and Abby plan a party to celebrate Adam’s 70th birthday. The siblings see it as a way to honor their father’s life and achievements, while he perceives it as another signpost on his inexorable slide into professional irrelevance. In this process, shards of the Gardners’ past—ones that carry them back more than three decades to the sudden death of Ken and Abby’s mother shortly after Abby’s birth, its impact on the children’s relationship growing up and the echoes of that tragedy into the present—emerge in unpredictable and even dangerous ways to reopen old wounds and inflict new ones.
Brodeur effectively juggles these interlocking perspectives in chapters that shift seamlessly among the viewpoints of the Gardners, Jenny and Steph, sustaining the novel’s tension until a climactic scene at Adam’s elegant birthday party. Brodeur, who grew up and still has a home on Cape Cod, makes effective use of her familiarity with the captivating qualities of that setting, its natural beauty and wildlife, to lend texture to the story. William Faulkner’s reminder that “the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past” is one that applies with considerable emotional force to this quietly engaging novel.
William Faulkner’s reminder that “the past isn't dead. It’s not even past" applies with considerable emotional force to Wild Game author Adrienne Brodeur’s quietly engaging first novel.
A Los Angeles dive bar packed with personalities. A sibling dynamic that runs the gamut from nourishing to obliterating. A mysterious woman who promises to be a kind of guru to a narrator on the brink of self-destruction. All this and more can be found in Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel, an exploded view of a conflicted young woman’s brain that delivers page after page of witty, often heartbreaking narration.
The unnamed protagonist of All-Night Pharmacy is a teenage girl just out of high school who’s swept up in the life and adventures of her older sister, Debbie, a stripper and party girl who encourages her younger sibling to go out and live, no matter the consequences. But in between swallowing random pills and taking shots at a local bar called Salvation, the narrator begins to wonder if Debbie is anything more than a master manipulator and chaos agent. When their clash of personalities turns bloody, Debbie disappears, but this is only the beginning of the narrator’s search for meaning and understanding.
With her sister gone, the narrator turns to Sasha, a charming and spellbinding woman who offers spiritual and psychic guidance—an appealing offer for the narrator, whose life has become a wormhole of pills, bad decisions and confusion about her sister’s disappearance. Together Sasha and the narrator embark on a sexual, psychological and emotional awakening.
The tensions of the narrator’s life and the persistent sense of searching that permeates her brain make All-Night Pharmacy hum with energy from the very first page, imbuing Madievsky’s narrative with a sense of darkly comic unpredictability that never overwhelms the emotional beats of her character’s journey. Along the way, the novel touches on the scar tissue of growing up in the former Soviet Union, the trauma of European Jews in the 20th century and the calculated risks that come with opioid addiction and selling drugs. Madievsky is also a poet, and her knack for crafting imagery is on full display, merging the mundane and the profound to ensure her novel is thrilling all the way down to a sentence level.
Madievsky displays tremendous storytelling range, capturing all that is bitter and hilarious, heartbreaking and enlightening, wise and foolish within the well-developed mind of a single central character.
Debut novelist Ruth Madievsky displays tremendous storytelling range, capturing all that is bitter and hilarious, heartbreaking and enlightening, wise and foolish within the well-developed mind of a single central character.
Thirty-somethings Lewis and Wren fall in love in a promising meet cute as he endures a bad date with someone else and she watches and eavesdrops upon it all unfolding. Idealistic Lewis is an aspiring actor and playwright turned teacher, and careful Wren, born to a teenage single mother, works in finance for stability and security. In due course, Wren and Lewis get married, and like any couple, they share and grow together while keeping some thoughts to themselves.
The “normal” trajectory of their relationship is interrupted by a startling diagnosis: A Carcharodon carcharias mutation has befallen Lewis, causing him to transform into a great white shark before their first anniversary. As her new husband morphs more and more rapidly, Wren buys scuba equipment and installs an aboveground pool. Lewis eats cans of tuna and boiled shrimp around the clock while still trying to teach and write for as long as he can.
The knowledge of their imminent separation forces decisions and conversations they didn’t plan to tackle so early in their marriage. As Shark Heart winds through both their pasts (Wren’s especially), poignant and meaningful moments abound as they search their memories and experiences to help them navigate an uncertain future.
Debut novelist Emily Habeck has crafted a story that is surprisingly moving, oddly heartwarming and deeply contemplative beyond its tragicomic premise. Habeck, who has a background in theater and theology, has a real dramatic flair, capturing her characters’ conflicts and buried longings in the face of undesired transformation. The “ever illusory margin between human and animal” is a key element of the novel’s world, one where people can become pregnant with birds or turn into zebras or Komodo dragons.
The short chapters and stylistic changes (some sections are formatted with only dialogue, while others are just a few sentences) do occasionally distract, but the depth of visceral emotion helps offset any affectation. Interspersed with Wren and Lewis’ story is the history of Wren’s mother, Angela, revealing much about who Wren is and why this parting with Lewis is so hard for her.
This story of love and connection—between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and friends that are like family—vividly explores both the fragility and tenacity of humanity. Shark Heart’s questions are universal: How do we let go of the ones we love? How do we move on after loss? And how do we—can we—open ourselves up to joy again? Like Wren, we survive, exist and begin again in the “terrifying and sublime journey” that is life.
Debut novelist Emily Habeck has crafted a story that is surprisingly moving, oddly heartwarming and deeply contemplative beyond its tragicomic premise: a new husband’s transformation into a great white shark.
Time travel narratives are so ubiquitous in our culture that we all must have, at some point, considered what it would be like to go back in time. Not just to remember, but to actually go back—to observe our parents when they were young, to take fresh note of textures and colors and shapes and situations and emotions we didn’t notice or understand when we were children. In Edan Lepucki’s novel Time’s Mouth, a grandmother and granddaughter share this ability, which is as much an affliction as it is a blessing.
Born in 1938, Sharon begins to “transport” when she’s a teenager, shortly after the death of her despised, abusive father. She leaves home, takes on the name Ursa and moves into a creaky mansion hidden away in a redwood forest. There she comes to govern a weird hippie commune populated by broken women, each given the honorific of “mama,” and their children.
The children’s lives swing between a sort of indentured servitude and a not-so-benign neglect. With the exception of Ursa’s son, Ray, none of the children are allowed to go to school or see a doctor, lest their existence be discovered. But Ray’s privilege is Ursa’s mistake. His knowledge of the outside world lets him see how twisted this village of mamas is. He and his secret girlfriend, Cherry, escape, but Cherry leaves him when their daughter, Opal, is just a baby. Inevitably, Opal, who inherits her grandmother’s fantastic gift, wants to know why.
This gift is tangled up with each woman’s experiences of motherhood and daughterhood, going back generations. Ursa leaves behind her own mother who refused to protect her, then later transports to reclaim Ray, and Opal uses her powers to learn more about her own absent mother. But even mothers who are present aren’t necessarily good enough, as is seen in the commune’s derelict mamas.
Ursa is Latin for “bear,” and mama bears are famous for being fiercely protective of their cubs. But Lepucki’s Ursa is more fierce than protective. She is, to be blunt, a psychopath. She has no use for the nonservile; her love is conditional, if not transactional; and if she’s thwarted, she reacts with mind-bending violence.
The bestselling author of Woman No. 17 and California, Lepucki displays a real talent for giving readers a new perspective—whether on the passions of motherhood in particular, or on the nature of parenthood in general—and emphasizes the power of real love (and a bit of New Agey therapy) to heal.
In her third novel, Edan Lepucki displays a real talent for giving readers a new perspective—whether on the passions of motherhood in particular, or on the nature of parenthood in general—and emphasizes the power of real love (and a bit of New Agey therapy) to heal.
Yara is a young wife, mother of two girls, a teacher and graphic designer at a North Carolina college, and one day she comes to a startling conclusion: “Everything in her life had been a succession of things that she hadn’t really wanted to do.” Following her bestselling 2019 debut, A Woman Is No Man, Etaf Rum returns with an introspective second novel, Evil Eye. Both books tell universally appealing, tightly focused stories about Palestinian American women and explore multigenerational issues of inherited trauma, misogyny, the difficulty of balancing career and motherhood, and what makes a fulfilling marriage and a well-lived life.
The daughter of extraordinarily protective Palestinian immigrants, Yara had a sheltered childhood in Brooklyn and often watched longingly through a window as her brothers were allowed to do whatever they pleased. Now, living in a North Carolina college town with her workaholic husband, Yara realizes she still doesn’t have the freedom she has long craved—to travel, be creative and shape her own life. In the art class that she teaches, she bristles at expectations to “center whiteness as the custodian of high art.” No, Yara thinks, “she had not worked this hard over the years—rushing through her degrees while raising two kids and maintaining a home and standing up to her mother-in-law and trying to succeed in a world that did not value her contributions—so she could stand in front of a classroom and perpetrate the very injustices that had colored her entire life.”
Yara is a volcano waiting to explode, and she finally does, calling out a colleague on their racism in an incredibly well-told scene. There’s immediate fallout, with Yara put on probation and assigned to receive therapy. Rum excels at writing internal dialogue and keeping readers immersed in Yara’s fight for freedom, friendship and, ultimately, a purpose in life. Though resistant to her forced therapy, Yara eventually begins journaling at her therapist’s suggestion, and she finds herself carefully examining not only her life but that of her mother and beloved grandmother, Teti, giving readers an intriguing glimpse of how trauma, aspirations and cultural expectations have shaped each woman, and how political events have ongoing personal ramifications for legions of Palestinian and Palestinian American families.
Rum’s observations about the intersections of Arab and Southern traditions and their similarities in art, history, media and food are particularly strong. Yara gradually befriends a gay man, Silas, who lends support as she slowly but boldly becomes the person she yearns to be. Just like A Woman Is No Man, Evil Eye has the power to reach readers of all ages and cultures, who will undoubtedly cheer Yara on as she forges a new path.
Just like A Woman Is No Man, Evil Eye has the power to reach readers of all ages and cultures, who will undoubtedly cheer Yara on as she forges a new path.
Happiness Falls is proof that a thriller doesn’t have to feature private eyes, secret agents, ticking time bombs and exotic locales to keep the reader spellbound. Angie Kim’s suspenseful second novel after Miracle Creek follows a family that lives in a quiet and even bucolic neighborhood near Washington, D.C. They try to stay out of trouble. But trouble comes to them.
The mom, Hannah, is Korean American and an academic. She’s married to Adam, who’s white and a stay-at-home dad. His last name is Parson, hers is Park, and their three kids bear a portmanteau of the two: Parkson. Mia and John, 20 years old, are fraternal twins. The youngest child, 14-year-old Eugene, is diagnosed with autism and mosaic Angelman syndrome (AS), “which means he can’t talk, has motor difficulties, and . . . has an unusually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter.” One day, Eugene comes home upset, pushes his sister out of the way and runs up to his room, where he jumps and vocalizes for hours. Later, Mia finds blood beneath his fingernails. Their dad, who took Eugene to the park that day, is nowhere to be found.
At first the Parksons believe that Adam got lost, and he’ll return. But as the hours drag on and he doesn’t show up, analytical Mia goes into Sherlock mode. (Or Vulcan mode—the Parksons are huge Trekkies.) As narrator, Mia devotes pages to possible scenarios, and adds footnotes to nearly every chapter. The family realizes that waiting 48 hours before calling the police about a missing person is a dangerous myth, and soon the cops are involved. The lead officer’s name is, of course, Janus. On the one hand, she wants to help the Parksons. On the other hand, she’s all but sure that Eugene killed his father and can’t wait to clap the traumatized boy in handcuffs.
Calling a book unputdownable is a cliche, but it has been a while since this reviewer fought off sleep just so she could read one or two more pages. Did Eugene actually kill his father? Why? Is he as noncommunicative as everyone thinks he is? Not only will these and other questions swirl around your brain, but you’ll also come to love the Parksons, especially tetchy, brilliant Mia. You love them for the fierceness of their love for each other, and for their determination, which becomes your own, to get to the bottom of this.
Angie Kim’s suspenseful follow-up to Miracle Creek follows a family that lives in a quiet and even bucolic neighborhood near Washington, D.C. They try to stay out of trouble. But trouble comes to them.
Etaf Rum barely remembers the exchange, but as a child, she apparently used to jokingly threaten to write a novel about her mother. At least that’s what her sisters tell her, and as the oldest of nine children of Palestinian immigrants living in Brooklyn, Rum no doubt had plenty of family stories to tell. “I was an avid reader,” she says, “and I think that storytelling came to me as second nature.”
Despite these early inclinations, the wild success of Rum’s novel, A Woman Is No Man (2019), is still astounding. For readers, Rum seemed to appear out of nowhere, like a meteor lighting up the sky. “To think that I penned a New York Times bestselling novel with no experience—even talking to you now, it still blows my mind,” Rum says, speaking by phone from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. A Woman Is No Man chronicles several generations of Palestinian American women, all of whom are forced to marry a man of their family’s choosing, live by his and his family’s rules, and undergo verbal and physical abuse—until one young woman finds a way to break the cycle.
“Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”
“I thought I was writing a story for underrepresented Arab women,” Rum says, “[but] the story has touched women across cultures. The universality of the message has stunned me. Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”
These readers have been eagerly awaiting Rum’s second novel, Evil Eye, which begins with mention of a family curse. Protagonist Yara’s grandmother peers into leftover Turkish coffee grounds to read the fortune of her daughter, Meriem, who is about to marry and immigrate to the United States. The novel then flashes forward several decades, to when Yara is experiencing serious job trouble while teaching at a North Carolina college, and Meriem suggests that this predicament is a continuation of the old curse. It’s an opening scene reminiscent of Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, and it sets the stage for the way fear, curses and superstition permeate Yara’s story.
“Fear that something bad will happen, that you have to worry about someone or something robbing you of that goodness—it’s such a human trait,” Rum says, noting that this is the root of habits like knocking on wood or hanging an evil eye at an entrance. On a recent trip to Greece, she was amazed by the number of evil eyes she saw. “When I say they were everywhere,” she says, “I mean everywhere. Like every store. I thought it was an Arab thing, but I think the Greeks have definitely won this one.”
“Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma.”
In many ways, Evil Eye is a continuation of A Woman Is No Man, although the writing processes were vastly different. The plot of Rum’s debut came “in a flash” as a result of processing “repressed emotions” with therapy and journaling. “Instantaneously, overnight it seemed, I wanted to write a novel,” she says. “I had this urge to write about the Arab American experience, or at least one aspect of it. I drew very heavily on my own upbringing and my own experiences as a Palestinian woman. I had to capture these feelings and maybe make someone feel seen.”
Not only did Rum write quickly, but the novel was also published quickly, making the whole experience feel like a “miracle” and leaving her with a startling revelation: “Up until that point, I was living a life that I thought was of my own choosing, but really wasn’t,” she says. “I think I went through a sort of awakening. I found my voice, and I found out who I was.” As a result, she ended up divorcing her husband, much to her family’s shock and dismay. “I cannot want courage and freedom and bravery for these characters and yet, in my own life, be living in this sort of denial,” she says.
There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.
Ironically, Rum did not want her second novel to be autobiographical, but she soon realized, “I’m a sheltered artist who grew up in a sheltered world, so I can’t escape the fact that some of the novel is autobiographical.” Like Yara, Rum grew up with highly protective parents and was given none of the freedoms that the men in her family enjoyed.
“Their future is so uncertain,” she says of her Palestinian family. “And even though they live in America, that trauma is still there for my mom and dad; it’s present with them every day. They conduct their life out of fear and wanting to protect their family. Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma. That feeling of displacement—it’s even more than that, because it’s almost as if you’re actually displaced from your own body. You’re constantly running, you’re constantly searching, you’re constantly trying to improve. And I think that’s inherited and acquired. Even now, as a mother of my own kids, I sometimes catch myself and say, ‘Relax. No one’s coming to hurt you or to take away your home.’ But how do you relax when you’re raised on fear?”
In Evil Eye, the author notes similarities between Arab culture and life in the American South, “a place [Yara knows] about only from her favorite southern writers: Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. From their books she’d gathered that southern culture was not so unlike her own: full of loud and large close-knit families where women married young and had many children, focused on conservative values with an emphasis on religion or tradition, with an adherence to recipes that were passed down through generations. Even the obsession with tea at every possible social gathering—though southerners preferred it iced while Arabs served it boiling—felt like a point of connection. The similarities filled her with both comfort and dread.” Indeed, a simmering culture clash becomes a flashpoint in the novel when a colleague makes an offensive remark, causing Yara to explode in a way that has serious career consequences.
While depicting her culture in fiction, Rum remains wary of perpetuating stereotypes, especially because there are so few American writers of Arab or Palestinian descent. “Unfortunately, my stories are very dark, and that just happens to coincide with the world I come from. I’m sure there are many Palestinian communities and families that do not live in such a stereotypical world. I wish I could write about those worlds, but I’m not there yet.”
After initially feeling like an outsider when she moved to North Carolina, Rum has now established a robust sense of community. She has remarried, and she and her husband own both a pizza shop and a coffee shop called Books and Beans. “Now I feel like this place is home,” she says. As for her next project, she’s ready for a change of pace and is considering a screenplay or a children’s book. “There are a lot of ideas popping up in my head,” she says, “but I think that the literary adult trauma novels are for now complete.”
Bestselling Palestinian American author Etaf Rum was utterly transformed by the characters in her debut, A Woman Is No Man. With her second novel, she begins to process the aftermath.
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There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.
