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Homeseeking

Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

I’ll Come to You

Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
Rebecca Kauffman’s thoughtful portrayal of family relationships in all their tension and secrets as well as intimacy and wonder in I’ll Come to You resembles the introspective style of authors like Ethan Joella or Ann Napolitano.
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FictionPoetry

6 new collections prove that poetry is the best present

Feature by Julie Hale

These six outstanding volumes of verse will remind readers of the magic of language and the marvels to be found in everyday moments.

A gift to celebrate growing older: Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros

Book jacket image for Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Without Shame is an inspiring celebration of the self. The book’s 50-plus pieces are alive with wit and wordplay, as Cisneros takes stock of the past, reflects on her Mexican American identity and ruminates on the experience of growing older. “I am Venetian, decaying splendidly. / Am magnificent beyond measure,” she writes in “At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor.”

Despite the passing years, Cisneros, now 67, displays an attitude of proud defiance. In “Canto for Women of a Certain Llanto,” she bemoans the humdrum undergarments designed for older women: “Rage, rage. Do not go into that good night / wearing sensible white or beige.” Ignited by flashes of humor, the poems in this buoyant collection find Cisneros accentuating the positive, living without regret and setting an example for us all.

A gift to provide comfort and encouragement: And Yet by Kate Baer

Book jacket image for And Yet by Kate Baer

Kate Baer shares dispatches from the domestic front in her accessible, inviting collection And Yet. In poems that explore gender dynamics and the day-to-day grind of family life, Baer’s voice is that of an intimate, confiding friend.

Across the collection, she takes her own measure as a parent and a wife, toggling between self-acceptance and self-loathing, triumphs and trials. “The weeks are long, and all my son / wants is a new skateboard and a different / mother,” she writes in “Late Summer in a Global Pandemic.” Baer rounds up snippets from horrifying headlines in “Daily Planet”: “Return to school deemed not safe for / Un-vaccinated protests rise as / Hospital beds at capacity in these seven.” To flustered mothers, the internet-weary and anyone bewildered by contemporary life, Baer’s collection will be a balm.

A gift to illuminate the poetry-writing process: Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light by Joy Harjo

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years is a splendid survey of the career of three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Harjo draws from a rich well of family stories and myths in poems that explore the Native American experience and emphasize the importance of place.

In many of her poems, the landscape emits a kind of language, such as in “Are You Still There?”: “hello / is a gentle motion of a western wind / cradling tiny purple flowers.” In “Somewhere,” she writes, “Our roads aren’t nice lines with numbers; they wind like bloodlines / through gossip and stories of the holy in the winds.” Notes on the genesis of each poem can be found at the end of the book.

For Harjo, “history is / everywhere,” and the past is always present. Her vision and versatility are on full display in this majestic retrospective.

A gift to spark new ways of looking at our pasts: Golden Ax by Rio Cortez

The poems in Rio Cortez’s bold new book, Golden Ax, center on a foundational concept—what the author calls “Afropioneerism” or “Afrofrontierism,” in reference to her ancestral connections to Utah and the ways in which Black people have shaped and were shaped by the region.

Throughout this ambitious collection, Cortez tangles with themes of genealogy and religion while evoking the otherworldly landscape of the American West. In “Covered Wagon as Spaceship,” she wonders “whether it’s aliens / that brought Black folks to the canyons . . . how do you come / to be where there are no others, except / science fiction?”

Through poems that probe the often painful connections between past and present, Cortez finds new ways of moving forward.

A gift to stoke a fire: ★ The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi

Book cover for The World Keeps Ending, the World Goes On

A marked attentiveness to craftsmanship and the niceties of language enlivens the poems in Franny Choi’s urgent, stirring The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. A fearless shifter of form, Choi switches moods and modes to tackle such topics as social unrest, climate change and her Korean heritage. In “Toward Grace,” she laments the digital landscape: “Online, blondes chirp tips, spin fidgets, get follows. / Old story: unequal distribution of grace.” Formidable themes like the nature of tragedy and the human capacity for renewal lend a timelessness to her work.

Choi’s collection will awaken and inspire readers. “I want a storm I can dance in. / I want an excuse to change my life,” she writes, and her attitude is contagious.

A gift to transform darkness into light: Balladz by Sharon Olds

Book jacket image for Balladz by Sharon Olds

“Who says the forms of art require joy?” Sharon Olds asks in Balladz. While joy does feature prominently in these poems, Olds’ mood is one of unease and ire as she explores national upheaval, life during quarantine and the need for intimacy. As the collection’s title implies, the ballad is her favored form, a vessel for contemplating the past and celebrating everyday pleasures.

“Amherst Ballad 6” shows the precision of her poetic vision: “The Sill Imbued with Dust – Gave Up / A Maple Wing – of Brussels Lace.” In “Grandmother, with Parakeet,” elderly women have hair “fixed in / small breaking combers, battleship / curls like works of art.” Again and again, Olds surveys the world and, through the filter of her poems, renews it for the reader. Filled with sustaining moments of recognition, Balladz is revelatory.

For a fresh way to spread glad tidings this holiday season, we suggest a collection of poetry.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAPicture BookMysteryLiterary FictionFamily DramaChildren's

Five unlikely friendships in literature

Feature by the editors of BookPage

As the days grow shorter and the nights grow colder, we turn to all things cozy—and we can think of nothing more heartwarming than an unexpected friendship. Here are the platonic pairings that made the BookPage editors feel all snuggly inside.

The Secret Place

In Tana French’s The Secret Place, Detective Stephen Moran gets his chance to join the Murder Squad when 16-year-old Holly Mackey brings him new evidence in an investigation into a murder that took place on the grounds of her boarding school. Stephen heads to Holly’s school to investigate alongside Antoinette Conway, the original detective assigned to the case. Their first interactions are anything but promising, given their diametrically opposed approaches to their work. Stephen masks his ambition behind a friendly, unassuming persona, but Antoinette, who is biracial, has long since given up on playing nice with people determined to hate her due to her gender, racial background or both. As they interrogate Holly and her friends over the course of one long day, a tentative respect begins to grow between the two of them, thanks to their mutual intellect and their common experience of clawing their way up the ranks from working-class backgrounds. It could be the start of a beautiful partnership, and French makes readers as invested in Stephen and Antoinette’s burgeoning friendship as they are in the mystery’s solution.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Frank and the Bad Surprise

I’m going to cut to the chase here. The titular character in Martha Brockenbrough and Jon Lau’s Frank and the Bad Surprise is a cat who lives a good life with his humans, and the bad surprise is a new puppy. The puppy interrupts Frank’s naps, has gross puppy breath and eats Frank’s food, so Frank decides it’s time to move on. “Good luck with that puppy,” he writes in a note to his humans. “You will need it.” There’s so much to love about this illustrated chapter book, from the way Brockenbrough’s wry prose perfectly captures Frank’s feline perspective to the way Lau’s paintings bring Frank’s personality to life. In several images, you’ll swear you can almost hear Frank purring. But the best part is the way Brockenbrough engineers a moving reconciliation between the two former enemies, neatly sidestepping schlock and sentiment and going straight for understated emotional truth. It’s positively the cat’s pajamas.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Lolly Willowes

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, an aging woman breaks away from her grating London family and has a go at independent life in the countryside. After keeping house for her father and brother for over 40 years, Laura Willowes feels liberated in Buckinghamshire—finally free to take long walks in nature and enjoy her own company. Until her nephew visits. Suddenly she is reduced to her old Aunt Lolly self again—put upon and bedeviled—and she becomes so desperate that she calls out for help. Luckily Satan answers, and the novel transforms into a fantastical tale of Lolly’s burgeoning talents as a witch. Along the way, the devil turns out to be a chummy pal: giving Lolly the power to hex her nephew, listening to her complaints about society’s treatment of women. (Satan, as it turns out, is a compassionate and attentive listener.) It’s a darkly humorous novel of a middle-aged woman who is so desperate for autonomy that she’s willing to make a deal—or at least make friends—with the devil.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders’ first (and so far, only) novel brings together some odd characters. In Lincoln in the Bardo, a group of ghosts works together to save Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, from a place between life and death. Here in the bardo, the ghosts know all of one another’s quirks and faults and dreams and regrets. They’ve come to love one another, and as a reader, I found it easy to love them too. The most unlikely best friendship in the bardo is between middle-aged, carnally frustrated Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, a heartbroken young man who took his own life and now bursts involuntarily into poetry about the beauty of the world he left behind. One of Saunders’ most remarkable gifts is his ability to make even unpleasant characters deeply befriendable. He outdoes himself with this book, crafting 166 distinct, compelling voices and interspersing them with excerpts from real and invented historical sources. He fantastically spins a moment in American history into a philosophical exploration of how grief can either isolate or unite us.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Subscriptions

The Kindest Lie

People aren’t all that different, even though it often feels that way, and therein lies one of the key superpowers of the “unlikely friendship” trope: bridging polarized experiences to discover where people actually overlap, where one person’s hand fits snugly into another’s. Nancy Johnson’s debut, The Kindest Lie, is one of the novels that most successfully encompasses both the political optimism of 2008 and the insidious racial divisions that were worsened by the economic stress of the Great Recession. Johnson’s protagonist, Ruth, is a Black chemical engineer who returns to her Rust Belt hometown to seek out the child she placed for adoption when she was 17. Upon her return, Ruth bonds with Midnight, an 11-year-old white boy who is mostly being raised by his grandmother but still hopes for connection with his neglectful, bigoted father. Ruth’s and Midnight’s experiences of race, class and privilege are very different, but they’re both lonely, lost and understandably flawed people, and together they find something akin to belonging in a heartbreaking world.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

You’ve got a friend in me! These books feature platonic pairings that made us feel all warm and snuggly inside.
FictionShort Stories

How It Went

Review by Arlene McKanic

The folks in How It Went, whom Wendell Berry writes about so beautifully, may remind readers of hobbits. They are neither small nor hairy footed, but they are kind and hardworking, and their Shire, the land around Port William, Kentucky, is part of them and they are part of the land. They have names like Jayber Crow, Fatty Moneyworth and Art and Mart Rowanberry. There’s even a couple of ne’er-do-wells called Dingus and Les, but they’re more out of a Paul Henning sitcom than J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium.

Berry’s book is divided into 13 lovingly written chapters. Some are short stories that have previously appeared in such publications as The Sewanee Review, while others are more like vignettes. Together, they create a tale that gently unwinds and doubles back on itself, not so much like a river but more like a flowering vine. 

The protagonist and sometimes narrator is Andy Catlett. Though we learn that he’s looking back on a long life, the book begins on the day World War II ends, when he has just turned 11. Over the course of the book, we see him as a teenager, then an old man, then a boy again and then a young man. 

Berry’s prose—in How It Went and just about everything else he’s written over his long career—is imbued with compassion. People have their dark sides. Men drink too much or harbor long resentments. Some people, like Andy’s grandma, may be unhappy, but discord is never dwelled upon. Even the loss of Andy’s hand in a harvesting machine is handled with Berry’s customary sensitivity: Another writer might’ve cast this incident as gruesome, but Berry focuses less on the accident than on how it affects Andy’s family and his self-image, which is bound up in his ability to work.

For the folks in Port William, work is everything, whether it’s making hay, handling a team of mules or building a barbed wire fence. Work is not only noble and necessary but also beautiful. Berry shares Tolkien’s disdain for industries that despoil the earth. In a hilarious scene, somebody dares to drive a motorized tractor through Andy’s grandfather’s property, and the old man nearly attacks it with his cane.

A book full of such gentleness, wisdom and humility seems preposterous in this day and age. It’s also something of a miracle. We are lucky, in such times, to still have a writer like Wendell Berry.

Taken together, the 13 chapters in Wendell Berry’s How It Went create a tale that gently unwinds and doubles back on itself, not so much like a river but more like a flowering vine.
FictionFamily Drama

Something good and solid from Lynn Steger Strong

Behind the Book by Lynn Steger Strong

In the first few days of January 2019, I was teaching at a residency on an island off the coast of Connecticut. My husband, our two kids and I had driven from Florida to New York on Christmas Day for me to make the gig. Both my husband’s and my families are from Florida, and until recently, my relationship to the holiday has always been beach and warmth and early morning swims. I was both relieved and very sad to be back up north after a week in Florida.

It was freezing on the island, and I was staying in a monastery with faulty heating, small rooms with lumpy beds, crosses on the walls and a shared bathroom down the hall. I went for long pre-dawn runs and taught most of the day. I love teaching but find it draining—the very necessary task of consistently showing up for students, trying to make the workshop space engaging and rigorous, nurturing and safe. 

I had taught at this residency before, and I’d always needed long stretches alone in my room at night, so in November I’d bought myself Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel as a birthday gift. For those who haven’t read it (and you should, immediately), it’s the story of abstract expressionist painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, brilliant artists all, living and working in New York at a thrilling, complicated time (before, during and after World War II), being ground down by poverty during the Great Depression and then later, for some, achieving unfathomable wealth and fame.

“I was looking around for someone to tell me how to be, what to do to make things better, but there was no one there, no rituals or practices or authority figures that I believed in anymore.”

I’d become obsessed with going to see visual art a few years prior, not least because I felt completely ill-equipped to understand it. I loved the feeling of walking through a museum and letting the art pull me toward it. Often, I’d go with a friend who also writes, and we’d walk a long time after, talking about what we’d just seen, about what and how it had acted on us.

Going home to Florida always leaves me sad and anxious for all the ways I have failed to love or show up for my family, for all the parts of that place that I love and hate and miss. Ninth Street Women was solace in the face of that—intimacy, much needed company. Gabriel refers to each woman by her first name, and their lives constantly intermingle and overlap. It felt gossipy and thrilling, the texture of competition, sex, money, art, ambition, class disparities and marital spats. I came to crave it, sitting at dinner with my colleagues and my students, FaceTiming with my kids and pretending the connection had gone out. I thought and dreamt about these women, was both inside of them and watching them—a voyeur, constantly shifting my investments and alliances, thrilled and angry and sad on their behalfs. 

Book jacket image for Flight by Lynn Steger Strong
Read our review of Lynn Steger Strong’s taut domestic drama, ‘Flight.’

Once I left the island, I went back to New York in search of their work, and a new layer was added to this experience: I couldn’t find a good amount of it. I got angry, and so sad, thinking of all that work, which the various museums owned but mostly kept warehoused instead of on display. 

That same trip, I’d been thinking about anger. I’d just finished writing Want, a novel shot through with the fury that had been building in me for a long time. But by the time I read about those women, I was beginning to see the limits to the power of my anger. At first, it had felt so much more active than the sadness I had felt before that, but actually, I realized, it had come to feel just as ineffectual.

It’s difficult to pinpoint how and where novels start, what we pull from our lives and pasts and interests as we build them. I had also, the past few years, been telling stories to my kids on our walks to and from their school. I often asked them to help me start the story, to carry the plot through when I lost steam. Their most consistent bit of advice: kill the mom, because it immediately makes the book more dangerous. (I tried not to take this personally.) 

I’d been thinking about broken systems, too, not just the social safety net, our broken politics, but also the way I felt constantly, embarrassingly, like I was looking around for someone to tell me how to be, what to do to make things better, but there was no one there, no rituals or practices or authority figures that I believed in anymore. In this same vein, I’d been thinking about art and what it was worth, how often I was late for pickup or missed a work email because I was standing there, transfixed by a piece of art, for reasons I could never quite explain. How broke artists (and I) always were. 

From all of this thinking and living emerged the main components of Flight: the holiday, the utility (or not) of art, talk of money, the search for another side to anger, a dead mom creating new pressures and a sense of no one knowing what to do. And from the women in Ninth Street Women, a sense of overlapping and conflicting wants and needs, a deep and desperate desire to do good, underpinned with the terror that you don’t know how. 

Also from Ninth Street Women: I wanted to make a book that felt as it had to me that week on that freezing island, up all night in that lumpy bed: lush and immersive, gossipy and deeply felt. The way it gave me something good and solid felt like sustenance, pleasure, relief.  

How do the fragments of an author’s life coalesce into a book? Lynn Steger Strong reveals the real-life artists and sharp twists of emotion that helped to spark her third novel, Flight.
FictionFamily Drama

Flight

Review by Carole V. Bell

In Lynn Steger Strong’s taut domestic drama, Flight, Christmas is a time of tension and healing for three adult siblings in the wake of their mother’s death.

Helen was a formidable figure by all accounts. Equal parts homemaker, matriarch and intellectual, she stood out in her Florida town and provided the charismatic fulcrum around which her family’s life pivoted. Even after her children had long left the family home behind, she wielded a strong influence. 

For their first holiday after her death, Helen’s fractious family has gathered at the large house in upstate New York that middle child Henry shares with his wife, Alice. The whole group is flailing, because Helen died suddenly—without a will—and now they’re fighting over their mother’s Florida home. 

But money and property are only the start of their issues. No one is at ease in Helen’s absence; everyone is worried and hiding some perceived shortcoming. The youngest sibling, Kate, a stay-at-home mom of three, chose a similar path to Helen’s but entirely lacks her conviction. The jury is still out on Kate’s husband, Josh, who spends the holiday dedicated to the seemingly Sisyphean task of building an igloo for the kids to play in. With money trouble looming, Kate’s focus is firmly trained on the big favor she wants to ask of her brothers.

Lynn Steger Strong's author photo
Read more: Author Lynn Steger Strong reveals the real-life artists and sharp twists of emotion that helped to spark ‘Flight.’

Eldest brother Martin is a professor worried about job stability in the wake of some unbecoming and potentially ruinous behavior. His wife, Tess, is a well-paid and perennially anxious lawyer, who is neither confident with her kids nor comfortable when they’re out of her sight.

Henry is a dedicated artist who does interesting work to document climate change, which no one else inside (or perhaps even outside of) the family understands or values. Alice is a beautiful biracial social worker from a well-to-do family who is grieving her maternal prospects after multiple miscarriages. She dreads being left alone with any of her in-laws.

As a reader, it’s easy to relate to Alice’s trepidation. Though every sibling and spouse in Flight is nuanced and multidimensional, Helen’s clan can be overwhelming. Fortunately, a significant side plot involving one of Alice’s more troubled clients provides a key rallying point for the family as well as some much-needed breathing room. But of course, the myriad fissures, fractures and worries are what make this family drama feel utterly real.

The myriad fissures, fractures and worries of one family at Christmastime make this drama feel utterly real.
NonfictionFictionLiterary FictionHumorHistoryHistorical FictionAmerican History

4 great books to read during Native American Heritage Month

Feature by Julie Hale

Kliph Nesteroff’s We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy is an intriguing look at how Native Americans have influenced the world of comedy. Starting with the Wild West shows of the 1800s, Nesteroff chronicles the presence and impact of Native comedic performers through the decades. His lively narrative draws on in-depth research and interviews with today’s up-and-coming comedians. Entertainment stereotypes and representation in media are but a few of the book’s rich discussion topics.

Set in Nashville in the 1920s, Margaret Verble’s novel When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky tells the story of a Cherokee woman named Two Feathers who performs as a horse-diver at the Glendale Park Zoo. After an accident occurs while Two is performing, strange events take place at the zoo, including sightings of ghosts. Two finds a friend in Clive the zookeeper, and together they try to make sense of the odd goings-on at Glendale Park. An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Verble paints an extraordinary portrait of connection in defiance of racism in this moving novel.

In Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, Nicole Eustace builds a fascinating narrative around a historical incident: the killing of a Seneca hunter by white fur traders in 1722 Pennsylvania. The murder occurred right before a summit between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee and the English colonists, and it heightened tensions between the two sides at a fragile moment. Eustace brings the era and its seminal events to vivid life as she examines Native attitudes toward retribution and reparation. 

Cree Canadian author Michelle Good’s novel Five Little Indians follows a group of First Nation youngsters who must find their way in the world after growing up during the 1960s in a Canadian residential school, a boarding school for First Nation children designed to isolate them from their culture. As adults in Vancouver, British Columbia, Lucy, Howie, Clara, Maisie and Kenny struggle to make lives for themselves and escape painful memories of the past. Clara joins the American Indian Movement, while Lucy dreams of building a future with Kenny. Good explores the repercussions of Canada’s horrific residential school system through the divergent yet unified stories of her characters, crafting a multilayered novel filled with yearning and hope.

These Indigenous stories are perfect for your book club, from a history of Native comedians to the true story of a murder in colonial Pennsylvania.
FictionComing of Age

Now Is Not the Time to Panic

Review by Alden Mudge

In Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson once again deploys his customary humorous, off-center storytelling to artfully delve into deeper matters. Where his previous bestsellers The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here focused directly on weird family dynamics, his latest novel explores issues of adolescent angst, art and even societal madness.

The story is set in the out-of-the-way town of Coalfield, Tennessee, in the blazing hot summer of 1996. Frances Eleanor Budge, “Frankie” as her single mother and triplet older brothers call her, is the teller of this tale. At the beginning of the novel, she is an alienated 16-year-old and aspiring writer. She avidly reads “badass women southern writers” like Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker and Carson McCullers, but in the summer of ’96, Frankie aspires to write a darker version of a Nancy Drew mystery novel—emblematic of the childhood-adult divide she is about to cross.

During a hot day at the town pool, Frankie meets Zeke, another teenage outsider and a talented graphic artist. Zeke’s wealthy parents have sent him to live with his grandmother while they work out their divorce back in Memphis. Frankie and Zeke become inseparable, tentatively exploring a relationship and more assertively collaborating on nerdy artistic projects. 

One project involves a starkly illustrated poster that contains the mysteriously evocative message “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Swearing eternal secrecy about their prank, Frankie and Zeke staple copies of the poster everywhere. The impact is explosive. Fanned by rumors and paranoia, it creates a national stir, resulting in what will later be called the Coalfield Panic of 1996.

For Frankie, the experience is both scary and liberating. She is proud of her work and upset when outsiders claim authorship of her words. Zeke, however, is troubled by the unexpected community response, and he is relieved when others claim the poster as their own. Alarmed by events, Zeke’s parents whisk him away, and for more than two decades, Zeke and Frankie have no contact. Their eventual reunion speaks forcefully about the qualities of loyalty and friendship.

In the end, Wilson’s deceptively transparent prose, with a touch of humor, a dash of satire and a good bit of insight, carries the reader to a humane and satisfying conclusion.

Kevin Wilson’s deceptively transparent prose, with a touch of humor, a dash of satire and a good bit of insight, carries the reader to a humane and satisfying conclusion.
FictionSatire

The Lemon

Review by Thane Tierney

First off, let’s address the elephant—or perhaps in this case, the elephant garlic—in the room: The Lemon is not “The Anthony Bourdain Story.”

Yes, it opens with a chef/food writer/TV host’s on-location death by suicide, which is discovered by his longtime best friend (also a famous chef). And while there are a few other passing similarities to Bourdain’s sudden and unexpected exit, The Lemon reads more like a bawdy Judd-Apatow-meets-Carl-Hiaasen romp than a roman a clef in the manner of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors.

Nothing in The Lemon is quite as it seems, starting with the author. S.E. Boyd is the nom de plume of a trio that includes James Beard Award-winning food writer Kevin Alexander, journalist Joe Keohane and book editor Alessandra Lusardi. It’s evident that they are comfortable moving about in high-end foodie and media circles, given their facility with dropping real-life names into the mix, from The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik to author Malcolm Gladwell. Even Bourdain himself makes a cameo, as if to ensure he is not mistaken for the deceased fictional chef, John Doe. 

Other names have been changed to protect the innocent (or at least to avoid legal consequences). Chef Paolo Cabrini stands in admirably for Bourdain’s restaurateur friend Éric Ripert, T. Kendall Sun-Ramirez is surely the doppelganger of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (The Food Lab), and Mark Fowler of the TV show “Top of the Morning” bears more than a passing resemblance to deposed “Today” host Matt Lauer.

But the four most significant names to note are Nia Greene, John’s longtime producing partner and agent; Paolo Cabrini, John’s aforementioned celebrity chef pal; Katie Horatio, aspiring journalist; and Charlie McCree, a cross between the Lucky Charms leprechaun and the demon spawn of Chucky. They, and their supporting cast, wrestle among themselves to control the narrative surrounding John’s death, because there’s a potential payoff in the post-Doe media tableau.

The dialogue crackles, the zip line plot slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted. Like a perfectly seared slice of foie gras with a dollop of lingonberry jam on an artisanal toast point, The Lemon simply cannot be put down, and when you’ve finished it, you’ll want more.

The zip line plot of S.E. Boyd’s The Lemon slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted.
FictionShort Stories

The Consequences

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Latinx writers and other artists of color have proven and continue to prove that race is not just a means of adding verisimilitude to a work but rather a vital part of any story told within our racialized society. Since his debut collection, Zigzagger, was published in 2003, Manuel Muñoz’s work has been recognized as prime proof of this fact, captivating and moving readers with tales of Latinx tribulation and triumph. In The Consequences, Muñoz adds even more depth and dimension to his writing, delivering a collection of stories that probe deep into the heart of Latinx experiences.

Muñoz sets his stories in 1980s California, seeking contemporary truths through the past and reflecting on where the Latinx community has been and where it’s going. His main concern is love—how we are able to connect with, tolerate and help one another in a world that seeks to alienate us from our communities and ourselves.

In the opening story, “Anyone Can Do It,” Delfina, a headstrong mother whose husband has gone missing with other immigrant workers, ponders the risks of trusting her new neighbors. When she is betrayed, however, she doesn’t shut herself off from her community but rather learns how to create a new identity for herself and her son out of the struggle they must endure. Muñoz never lets his characters off easy, and in the process, he problematizes and expands upon centuries-old archetypes.

Throughout the collection, Muñoz’s use of quotation marks has deep significance. In the second story, “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA,” the only quotation marks appear around a sentence spoken in English, as if all of the Spanish (translated by the author into English) is not said aloud but rather communicated nonverbally. Food, on the other hand, appears frequently throughout the book, not just as a cultural signifier but also to show the impossibility of affection. In the same story, a woman offers the protagonist her cold tacos, trying to gain her trust while on their perilous journey to retrieve their partners from deportation. In these ways, Muñoz shows that the two things Latinx culture is most known for (language and cuisine) are far more complicated than they appear to white readers. Through such textual and symbolic details, Muñoz forges a new Latinx narrative, wherein all aspects of Latinx life are displayed with richness and complexity.

Muñoz brings the reader into a Latinx world rife with meaning, showing what some of us have known all along.

Through his story collection, Manuel Muñoz forges a new Latinx narrative, wherein all aspects of Latinx life are displayed with richness and complexity.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Furrows

Review by Alice Cary

Two words occupy the central focus of Cassandra Williams’ existence: “Where’s Wayne?” While seeking the answer to this question, readers of The Furrows: An Elegy, Namwali Serpell’s mesmerizing and endlessly thought-provoking second novel, should keep the book’s opening lines in mind: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” 

Narrator Cassandra, or Cee, describes how her 7-year-old brother, Wayne, drowned in her care while at the beach when she was 12. His body was never recovered. As an adult looking back on the event, Cee admits that her initial account of the tragedy “must have been incoherent, inconsistent, perhaps self-contradictory.” That statement becomes an understatement as the novel progresses.

True to the subtitle, this elegy laments not only Wayne’s death but also the end of Cee’s life as she knew it, and ultimately the dissolution of her family. Cee’s mother, who remains convinced that Wayne is alive despite Cee’s insistence that he is dead, starts a nonprofit for missing children called Vigil. Eventually, Cee’s father moves away to start a new family. 

As Cee speaks with different therapists, the details of her story begin to vary: Wayne was hit by a car; no, he fell off a carousel. “I’ve been trained my whole life to tell stories to strangers,” Cee reveals, describing how she rearranges her “abacus beads of memories.” She believes she encounters an adult Wayne more than once, and she even has a sizzling affair with a mysterious man who calls himself Wayne Williams. Despite the story’s blurred but precisely chiseled layers of reality, The Furrows remains sharply focused, even when, midway through, this new Wayne suddenly takes over as narrator. 

Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting second novel will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent. Serpell, who was born in Zambia and raised in a Baltimore suburb, is a Harvard professor whose book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Having lost an older sister when she was a teenager, she writes convincingly about undulating waves of grief, with intriguing nods to such literary forebears as Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston and Edgar Allan Poe. 

​​True to her opening lines, Serpell lets readers know exactly how Cee feels as she mourns, as grief “tugs [her] back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless grooves. This is the incomplete, repeated shape of it: sail into the brim of life, sink back into the cave of death, again and again.” Turbulent, poetic and haunting, The Furrows is a stellar achievement.

Namwali Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, The Old Drift, was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting follow-up will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent.
FictionShort Stories

Light Skin Gone to Waste

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Light Skin Gone to Waste, Toni Ann Johnson’s sharply observed linked story collection, follows the lives of psychologist Phil Arrington, his second wife, Velma, and their young daughter, Maddie, as they move from the Bronx to suburban Monroe, New York, in the early 1960s. Educated, sophisticated and striving for something different, the Arringtons are also Black and thus do not receive a warm welcome from their new white neighbors.

As the Arringtons settle in, Phil starts his own practice and Velma opens an antique store in a neighboring town. They join the country club where Phil can play tennis. Though Velma struggles to make friends, it’s Maddie who bears the brunt of the family’s social isolation. She’s one of the only Black children in the neighborhood and at school. In the stories “Claiming Tobias” and “Better,” she endures daily microaggressions regarding her skin color, hair and, as she gets older, body.

In the terrifying “Lucky,” the family travels to West Africa, where Maddie’s parents, eager to experience the nightlife in Dakar, Senegal, leave their young daughter in an unsafe situation with a male babysitter. As Maddie grows up, her father’s infidelities become bolder and her mother’s moods more inconstant, leaving both parents infuriatingly incapable of noticing their daughter’s misery. “The Way We Fell Out of Touch” and “Wings Made of Rocks” offer insights into the adults’ behavior without exonerating them. By the penultimate story, “Make a Space,” readers will be rooting for the teenage Maddie to find a way out of her childhood home.

If Maddie is traumatized by the racism she experiences in small-town New York, she is equally hurt by her parents’ inability to protect her or even, at times, to fully see her. Johnson’s deft handling of generational trauma, colorism and class—along with just the right amount of 1960s and ’70s cultural touchstones, from Tab soda to the Stillman diet to Barry Manilow—makes Light Skin Gone to Waste an engrossing, even groundbreaking read.

Toni Ann Johnson’s deft handling of generational trauma, colorism and class makes Light Skin Gone to Waste an engrossing, even groundbreaking read.
FictionFamily Drama

Signal Fires

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Like Dani Shapiro’s other novels and memoirs (most recently, Inheritance), Signal Fires is at its heart a family story, told in the gorgeous, evocative language she’s known for. 

The novel opens on an August night in 1985 Avalon, a pleasant New York suburb, with three teenagers (“good kids—everyone would say so”) in a car. At the wheel is 15-year-old Theo Wilf, who doesn’t yet have his license, and next to him is Misty Zimmerman, the girl he likes. In the back seat is Sarah, Theo’s 17-year-old sister. What should be a mere summertime joyride becomes a deadly accident, and although Sarah and Theo’s doctor father, Ben, is on the scene only a few minutes later, their family’s reality has already shifted. “Change one thing and everything changes,” Shapiro writes, indicating one of Signal Fires’ preoccupations: how one moment of trauma, added to one secret, will reverberate throughout multiple lives.  

The story shifts to a night in December 2010, when a much older Ben, his children long grown, notices that Waldo Shenkman, a boy who lives across the street, is still up, too late for a kid to be awake. Both are lonely—Benjamin’s wife, Mimi, has advanced dementia, and Waldo has trouble making friends—and the two connect over Waldo’s love of the constellations, which he views on his dad’s iPad. 

Signal Fires’ narrative is a fractured, prismatic one, moving mostly among these characters (Sarah, Theo, Ben, young Waldo and Waldo’s dad, known to the reader as Shenkman) and through time (forward to 2020, back to 2010, further back to 1985, up to 1999 and forward again), unraveling these characters’ mistakes and yearnings. Sarah and Theo have grown up and built successful careers, but both are inwardly roiling, estranged from themselves and from each other. And Shenkman, feeling an imposter in his own life, is alienating his wife and son.

Shapiro keeps the plates spinning, bouncing between time periods while moving the story forward, landing on key moments like New Year’s Eve 1999, a point of change and connection in the Shenkman and Wilf families. The novel’s narrative occasionally moves into a mystical mode, which feels a little out of place, but Signal Fires is mainly a meditation on families—the secrets we keep, the hurts we don’t mean to inflict—and how those secrets and hurts play out over time. And the novel’s action keeps pointing back to suburban Avalon, a place that both families call home for a time, making Signal Fires a bittersweet love letter to the suburbs. 

Signal Fires is mainly a meditation on families—the secrets we keep, the hurts we don’t mean to inflict—and how those secrets and hurts play out over time.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Last Chairlift

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s been seven years since the publication of John Irving’s last novel (Avenue of Mysteries), so for fans who’ve followed him over the course of a career spanning more than half a century, The Last Chairlift will feel like settling into a well-worn pair of slippers. They’ll have plenty of time to savor that comfortable sensation in this 900-page family story that’s packed with emotion, insight and compassion for our flawed humanity.

“My life could be a movie,” writes Adam Brewster, the first-person narrator of the novel, and there’s definitely a cinematic quality to the story. (The novel includes two of Adam’s full-length screenplays, and a character from the film business plays a central role.) Like Irving, Adam was born in 1942, raised in the town of Exeter, New Hampshire, and is a novelist with a “disaster-prone imagination” who writes several bestselling books after graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These are far from the only correlations between creator and protagonist.

The Last Chairlift follows Adam from birth through late middle age, and much of the story is animated by his search for the man who fathered him in Aspen, Colorado, at the real-life Hotel Jerome. Adam is raised by his ski instructor mother, Rachel, and, as he enters his teens, a stepfather, Elliot Barlow. Elliot eventually undergoes a gender transition, and Rachel settles into a long-term relationship with Molly, whom she meets at a New Hampshire ski resort. Two other characters play major roles: Adam’s cousin Nora and her nonspeaking partner, Emily, who perform a standup routine called “Two Dykes, One Who Talks” at a New York City comedy club with the lugubrious name of the Gallows Lounge.

Along with raising questions of sexual identity and gender bias, The Last Chairlift nods prominently to Irving’s earlier novels The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany, and features many of his familiar narrative flourishes: murders, wrestling, spectacular accidents (a lightning strike and an avalanche-caused train derailment, for starters), pointed social commentary on subjects such as the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, and loads of dark humor. Irving has long acknowledged his debt to Charles Dickens, and the novel does have its Dickensian moments, but the work whose spirit hovers most prominently over this story is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a favorite of several characters and a frequent reference point.

“Unrevised, real life is just mess,” Adam writes in one of his screenplays, and Irving has served up a substantial helping of that messiness in this empathetic novel. With Irving celebrating his 80th birthday earlier this year, his publisher has announced that The Last Chairlift will be his last big novel. For all the enjoyment more modest works may bring, this one is a fitting valediction to his distinguished literary career. 

With John Irving celebrating his 80th birthday earlier this year, his publisher has announced that The Last Chairlift will be his last big novel. For all the enjoyment more modest works may bring, this one is a fitting valediction to his distinguished literary career.

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