A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
he small town of Halley’s Landing is unexceptional in most respects. Its main attractions are the site of a supposed touchdown by its namesake comet, an old canal, and a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation every eighth of August. But the eclectic inhabitants of Halley’s Landing are the town’s real hallmarks.
In An Eighth of August by Dawn Turner Trice, family matriarch Cora Riley Hoskins welcomes family and friends to her large three-story house every year for the homecoming celebration. It’s a party marked by good food, thanksgiving, and town events. Some years are more memorable than others, and a select few are not to be forgotten, no matter how painful.
Set in 1986, the story weaves together a chorus of narrative voices, including the head-strong Flossie Jo Penticott and her spindly sister-in-law Thelma Gray. There’s also wayward Pepper, loyal Uncle Herbert, confused Sweet Alma, and saucy May Ruth. Together they tell the story of a family coming to terms with a tragic event and the healing power of forgiveness.
Trice, author of Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven, probes deeply into the question of what makes a family. She blurs the color line with the inclusion of a white British woman running away from her own family traumas into an African-American family.
The novel flashes back to 1973, when Sweet Alma was a pregnant teenager, disappointing her mother’s dreams. It retells the choices made by Flossie Jo to keep her daughter respectable and recalls the family tragedy of 1985. But the novel is also the story of May Ruth and her journey from a married woman with a child to a drinking bird-watcher saved by Cora.
Because the story does not focus on one main character, the novel continuously evolves as the central tale unfolds. Each contributor gives it an added depth and sense of community. Trice’s writing style and chapter headings keep readers from getting lost in the various narratives.
An enjoyable novel with a cacophony of voices, An Eighth of August is a sometimes humorous, insightful tale of family, community, and homecoming. Already compared to Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place, Trice has cemented her reputation as an able chronicler of the African-American experience.
Amber Stephens is a freelance writer in Columbus, Ohio.
he small town of Halley's Landing is unexceptional in most respects. Its main attractions are the site of a supposed touchdown by its namesake comet, an old canal, and a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation every eighth of August. But the eclectic inhabitants of Halley's…
In The Candy House, Jennifer Egan revisits some of the characters from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit From the Good Squad. But The Candy House is less a sequel than a continuation of themes, offering a bold imagining of the lures and drawbacks of technology through a lively assortment of narrative styles.
Bix Bouton, a minor character in Goon Squad, emerges in The Candy House as a staggeringly brilliant tech guru whose casual interest in animal consciousness leads to the creation of his social media company, Mandala. Bix’s groundbreaking product, Own Your Unconscious, allows users to externalize their consciousness to a cubelike device. Taking the concept a step further, his invention Collective Consciousness offers the option of uploading memories to an online database, where they can be shared. This hugely seductive innovation inspires a backlash movement, in which “eluders” wipe their digital footprints or even hide behind false avatars.
From Bix’s life-altering inventions, the novel spirals outward in subsequent chapters, tracking families and friends over decades, digging deeply into the emotional and psychological effects of their private memories being made public. The novel even takes a dystopian turn through the story of Lily, a former spy whose brain has been infiltrated by a government-implanted “weevil.” But for the most part, Egan keeps the novel moving through relatable territory, as universal access to personal memories proves, unsurprisingly, to be as disruptive as it is tantalizing.
Egan’s bold appropriation of narrative styles, like the use of first-person plural and chapters written in tweets and text messages, gives the novel a glittering, kaleidoscopic quality. But Egan’s empathetic interest in human behavior is what drives The Candy House, making it more than just a literary experiment. As Bix’s son Greg points out, you don’t need access to Collective Consciousness to fully experience another person’s memories, thoughts and perceptions; fiction can do the same thing.
A startling novel written by an author at the top of her game, The Candy House never loses sight of fiction’s superpowers.
Jennifer Egan’s empathetic interest in human behavior is what drives The Candy House, making her companion novel to A Visit From the Goon Squad more than just a literary experiment!.
Poet and former attorney Tara M. Stringfellow makes her fiction debut with Memphis, drawing inspiration from her own family history to craft a wonder of a novel. Stringfellow’s grandfather was the first Black homicide detective in Memphis, Tennessee, and her grandmother was the first Black nurse at Mount Zion Baptist Hospital. Through her poignant and heartfelt prose, Stringfellow honors the spirit of her city as she brings three generations of a Black matriarchal family—and their resilience, determination and endless capacity for love and joy—into the spotlight.
The novel begins in 1995, when Miriam North, her children in tow, flees her husband’s violent outbursts and returns to her ancestral home in Memphis, a change that offers the possibility of spiritually reuniting with Miriam’s maternal roots. The North women have lived in the historically Black neighborhood of Douglass for generations, and despite the devastating scars left by segregation, anti-Black terrorism and domestic violence, these women are unconquerable.
Miriam’s stubborn and loyal sister, August, runs a hair salon attached to the North house, and Miriam’s oldest daughter, Joan, is an exceptionally talented artist with a close bond with her younger sister, Mya. Over the course of the novel, the voices of Miriam, August and Joan intertwine, later incorporating the additional voice of Miriam and August’s mother, Hazel, an activist and adept quilter. Together their stories span nearly 70 years in a nonlinear narrative that reveals the impact and eternality of ancestry.
Stringfellow’s intricately developed details are unrivaled, and the simplest moments make the North family instinctively relatable. It’s not the parties, calamities or deaths that hold a reader’s attention in Memphis, but rather a walk to buy butter pecan ice cream on a Friday afternoon, or a quiet afternoon spent with Joan and her sketchbook. With honesty and genuine affection, Stringfellow captures each of her characters’ unique personalities while preserving their uncanny familial resemblances. Furthermore, Memphis establishes a new standard for the role of a setting in a novel; Memphis is celebrated not only as a place but also as a people, a culture and, most importantly, a community.
Stringfellow has created an irresistible family in the Norths, who are sure to be beloved by readers for the ways in which they persevere.
First-time novelist Tara M. Stringfellow celebrates the city of Memphis as not only a place but also a people, a culture and, most importantly, a community.
e’re used to reading about lonely women whose lives revolve around the quest for a man. Literary tradition has long dictated that lonely fictional men, on the other hand, be cynically heroic, adventurous, living large lives, and taking large risks because they have nothing to lose.
In Blue Ridge, T.
R. Pearson challenges that tradition with a vengeance, giving us two lonely men who wander, lost as six-week-old puppies, through the wastelands of their own lives. It’s not that Ray Tatum and his cousin Paul Tatum don’t hold jobs or occupy reasonably respectable homes. They do. It’s their private, unspectacular tragedies that make them interesting the way they’re haunted by past failure, the way they can’t get a break from women, and their total failure at heroism.
Paul is an actuary, a job not ordinarily freighted with heroic opportunity. He likes tidy corners and straight sofa cushions. He can’t even win the loyalty of the dog he adopted from the pound. Ray’s job as deputy sheriff is theoretically more stimulating, but Ray is doomed to sacrifice justice to small town politics. It’s tempting to say that Blue Ridge is a seedy, white man’s Waiting to Exhale minus the happy ending.
Shaking up this stagnant psychic terrain is Kit, a super competent, beautiful, African-American forest ranger who threatens to steal the whole show with her low tolerance for small town nonsense. Kit is the kind of lady who can break up with her boyfriend long distance and throttle a redneck racist at the same time pay phone in one hand, windpipe in the other. The wreck she’ll make of Ray’s heart is such a foregone conclusion it hurts. Stylistically, Blue Ridge is a tour de force. Playing on reader expectation, Pearson pens two completely separate story lines (two subplots, if you will) that are brought together only in the last three pages of the book. This means the novel’s brilliant cohesion is in debt not to the plot, but to the subtle ways the two men’s lives run parallel.
Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.
e're used to reading about lonely women whose lives revolve around the quest for a man. Literary tradition has long dictated that lonely fictional men, on the other hand, be cynically heroic, adventurous, living large lives, and taking large risks because they have nothing to…
In her second novel, Rachel Barenbaum (A Bend in the Stars) presents a 450-page epic spanning Philadelphia, Berlin, Moscow and the doomed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. At times, the novel is experimental, mixing imaginative science fiction with history, family drama, romance and political intrigue in a narrative structure as complex as the science in its backdrop. The story could’ve easily been told in graphic form (and indeed, comics play a large part in the story) and would make quite a film.
Atomic Anna moves among three generations of Soviet and American women, beginning at the moment when the Chernobyl reactor misfires on April 26, 1986. Scientist Anna Berkova, who seems to be asleep at the scene of the disaster, is caught in a time-travel ripple that sends her hurtling into the future. Anna’s genius-level scientific knowledge allows her to recognize the future world’s capabilities for devising a way of reversing time and remedying the man-made disaster in Chernobyl, but she is also given a horrifying look into the future.
In a parallel storyline—and there are many—Anna’s daughter, Molly, is on an odyssey through time, sent by Anna to 1950s Philadelphia as part of the exodus of Russian Jews fleeing the repressive Soviet system. Molly has no scientific abilities but is a born artist, and in a graphic series titled “Atomic Anna,” she tells a story based on the experiences of her mother and other researchers working on the nuclear program. Molly becomes a “wasted child” of the ’60s, falling prey to alcohol and drug abuse. She eventually gives birth to a gifted daughter, Raisa, who inherits her grandmother’s enormous scientific genius.
Anna is a constant presence throughout the book. She constructs an actual time machine that enables her to journey between lives and decades in a frantic race to stop destruction and hold the generations of her family together. As her female descendants careen through time and space and across continents, deep and abiding love for family connections sustains them all.
Atomic Anna ultimately offers a utopian vision of salvation, but it does require slow and careful reading to get there. Big chunks of the novel fit together and then split apart. Hold on tight, as the space-time ride is challenging.
In light of recent events, namely Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and occupation of the infamous Chernobyl nuclear site, there will be some evaluation of Atomic Anna for its “timeliness.” But readers should keep in mind the words of 19th-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne that, long ago, provided a template for reading Barenbaum’s innovative book. Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables (1851) famously set up the distinction between “novels,” which depict probable true events from the “ordinary” human experience, and “romances,” which “present the truth under circumstances . . . of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” Romances were Hawthorne’s aim, as his stories intended to reveal universal truths through crafted circumstances and an intensified atmosphere—often symbolic, and always beyond the ordinary.
Just as the romance of epic literature is timeless, Atomic Anna’s demonstration of what may be learned about the human heart is also outside of time, and certainly beyond the ordinary.
Hold on tight, as the space-time ride in Rachel Barenbaum’s second novel is far beyond the ordinary.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang, a Texas-based Chinese American writer, holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Wyoming, and she is now a prose editor at The Adroit Journal. Her first novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, reveals storytelling skills both vast and specific, bringing shadowy history to light while also displaying a remarkable talent for sensory detail.
Zhang was inspired to write this incredible story after receiving a request from her father, a man of boundless curiosity who has explored nearly every inch of his adopted country. Once Zhang completed the book, her father returned to the site where the novel’s finale occurs.
In 2014, my father was driving through the Pacific Northwest for work. One evening, while making his way through Idaho, he passed a small town called Pierce. His headlights caught a historical marker on the side of the road. He saw, in those lights, the words “Chinese Hanging Tree.” The marker detailed an event in 1885 when five Chinese men were hanged by white vigilantes for the alleged murder of a local white store owner.
My father carried that story with him all the way back to Texas. During one of my visits home, he told me about the marker and asked if I could write it into a story so he could figure out what really happened. His research online had yielded few results, he lamented.
I took the request as a joke. My father has always entertained many curiosities. He’s an Aquarius, a perpetual fixer, a man who reads books about the universe and math and string theory for fun. When he was a child, my father had the kind of mischievous and inquisitive energy that eventually matured into a certain genius. He refused to sit and ride the bus, preferring to hang off the back and balance on the bumper. He played clever pranks on his parents. In high school, he joined the high jump team—back when the conventional jumping form was to do so headfirst.
When my parents immigrated to Oxford, Mississippi, for graduate school in the early 1990s, there was no room for that kind of man. They lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in the married graduate student housing section on the Ole Miss campus, just down the way from the fraternities. They attended classes and worked multiple jobs that paid as little as $2 an hour. And they tried to raise me. Our tenure in America and the fulfillment of their American dream—all of that would be hopeless without a job following my parents’ graduation, the responsibility for which rested on my father’s shoulders. At one point, he flew out to San Jose, California, for the trial period of a job that had the potential to turn into a permanent position. My mother and I waited in Oxford, hoping that this would be the one. He called and spoke about the weather, how the job was going, the mountains that braced the city. I was always worried he wouldn’t make it back home.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang
In the end, my father got that job. His company moved us to Austin, where we upgraded to a nice two-bedroom apartment right across from the Barton Creek Mall. When my mother and I visited him at his office, my father proudly showed us the break room, where we could grab handfuls of free coffee creamer and play pool. He looks unstoppable, I remember thinking as I watched my father hold court in that break room.
A few years later, that same company let my father go in a series of layoffs. I came home from school one day and was confused to see him already there. “Your dad got laid off today,” he told me, smiling wide. It was a maniacal kind of smile; there was no joy behind it. Over the next two years, my father would stay rooted at the computer, scrolling through job sites and updating his resume. When the phone rang occasionally, he would leap up to take calls from recruiters. I always felt an oppressive hope during these calls—maybe this would be the one. But things never worked out for him, whether it was because he lacked the skill set, or the English, to make the final rounds.
With our finances and my college attendance on the line, my father accepted a job at Time Warner Cable as a field technician. He spent his days driving around Austin and climbing poles, helping old ladies with their cable boxes, fixing wires and signals. It wasn’t the job he dreamed of having with his engineering degree, but it was something.
My parents moved out of Austin years ago, but I remain here. When they come visit me, my father always speaks about the city with a familiarity that can only come from having crawled every inch of it, for better or worse. Your dad did a job there, he tells me about Montopolis, Anderson Lane, Travis Heights. The gated neighborhoods of West Austin. The now-gentrified pockets of East Austin. I wonder if he is telling me, or reminding himself.
“His stories are not simply just thought experiments; they are reminders that no matter where he is, he is always thinking about us.”
Today my father has a different job, one that takes him all over the United States—places that most folks only ever pass through to reach their final destinations. His job is to seek out these forgotten, overlooked places in order to determine where the signal for his company’s radios falters.
It sounds lonely and excruciating to me, and I often worry about his safety out in these primarily rural areas, but my father loves it. His job has allowed his curiosities to grow, unrestricted by the walls of a cubicle. He makes pit stops to inspect strange roadside attractions, takes pictures of the mountains in Oregon, orders beers at steakhouses in Virginia. He shares these artifacts and stories with me and my mother, leading us down long, meandering thought experiments of what really happened and wouldn’t it be funny if. When he is out there, driving through the endless fields, hills and forests, I know that there is all the room in the world for the kind of man he is, the one who was put aside in my family’s desperation for a stable foothold in America.
It was this exploration that led him to that historical marker in Pierce. Just another pit stop. Another curiosity along the way. My father asked me to write out the story of what happened, and I did. It turned into my debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky. I took the story he told me and worked my way backward to an imagined beginning. What I didn’t realize was that the story was not really about what happened in Pierce. It turned out to be about a girl named Daiyu who is kidnapped from her home in China and shipped across the ocean to America before making her way back home through the American West.
This journey is not without struggle, as you can imagine. Faced with the threat of bad men and women, anti-Chinese racism and the question of fate, Daiyu pushes forward, traversing strange landscapes and lonely days. Her journey takes her to places I have never wandered, but places I imagine my father has and will. Perhaps unconsciously, I am thinking of him when I think of her.
•••
Right before the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents decided that they would start traveling more for pleasure. They went to Rome—the first trip abroad they’ve ever taken in their 30 years in America, not counting all the trips back to China to care for their parents. We were never able to travel much during the years when my father didn’t have a job, but for the first time, they could imagine Paris, London, Washington, D.C. They wanted to visit New York City, having worked there as a delivery runner and a hostess during their grad school years. This time, they would experience it as tourists, not two people trying to survive.
When the pandemic hit, all of those dreams disappeared. Instead, my mother began accompanying my father on his work trips. It’s a good deal: When my father is done with his job assignment, he turns into a tour guide of sorts, taking my mother to the roadside attractions, national forests and waterfalls he finds on Google Maps. My mother is a good adventure partner. They wander together, propelled by my father’s curiosities.
“My father overcomes hills, skips down valleys, cuts through the trees.”
Last summer, my father got another job assignment in Bend, Oregon. My mother went with him, and after the job finished, they drove over to Idaho, to Pierce. I had begged them not to—I was afraid that they would be attacked, given what was in the news lately. But my parents went anyway. They walked through the town, all 0.82 square miles of it, and documented their journey, sending me videos and pictures of the historical markers, the inns, the fire department, the old courthouse. They walked to the woods nearby, back to the historical marker that started it all.
In the videos, taken by my mother, my father walks ahead, charting the course for the Chinese Hanging Tree. The forest floor is lush and verdant. The pines shoot upward. My father overcomes hills, skips down valleys, cuts through the trees. He is wearing a pale blue polo and baseball cap. His hands are at his waist. When they reach the site of the hanging, my parents stop. The camera points upward, to the ceiling of branches and leaves, and what little sky can manage its way through. It catches my father in this shot: He is looking around, breathing hard.
“It’s just here,” he murmurs. There is no sentimentality in his voice, no grand gesture of reunion. Just acknowledgment and the respect of observation. The true pleasure of his exploration, I realize as I watch the video, is in sharing it with those he loves. His stories are not simply just thought experiments; they are reminders that no matter where he is, he is always thinking about us. In a way, Four Treasures of the Sky is my attempt to tell him a story, too.
The camera points back down, this time stopping at my father. “Now that we’ve seen it,” he says, “we can go.” He turns, plodding his way through the brush, making his way toward whatever curiosity comes next.
Zhang’s author photos by Mary Inhea Kang
Jenny Tinghui Zhang makes her debut with Four Treasures of the Sky, a spirited tale of Chinese calligraphy and one girl’s journey of self-acceptance in late 19th-century America, inspired by a request from her father.
ust when you’re sitting waist deep in oyster shells and about to give up hope of finding that elusive gem, voila!, you open one more and there it is a pearl, long envisioned in your mind’s eye, yet breathtaking in its startling simplicity when you actually see it.
From the vivid imagination of Terry Kay, author of To Dance with the White Dog, comes a tale woven around a single element, much like a pearl forms around a grain of sand, and becomes something rare, lustrous, and painfully beautiful. Taking Lottie HomeM is woven around a sensual and mesmerizing young girl, Lottie Barton. Kay tells us in his author’s note that Lottie was a minor figure in one of his early, unpublished manuscripts, but upon rereading it at the beginning of 1999 he realized he had found his grain of sand in the character of Lottie. But while this enigmatic young woman is at the heart of the book, it is her effect on others that propels the narrative forward. The people, particularly the men who come to know her, are moved and changed to such a degree that they alter the course of their lives to encompass her into their respective worlds. There is Ben Phelps, a young, serious-minded baseball player when he first meets her in 1904 on a train heading out of Augusta, Georgia. There is Foster Lanier, an older, former ball player who is torn by his desperate need for Lottie and his vow to return her to her home. And there are others. Kay entrances us with a story that grows outward, like a widening circle that keeps us wondering where and how it will all end. Taking Lottie HomeM is a novel about the early years of baseball, about traveling carnivals and cabin farms in the hills, about crushed dreams and persevering hope, about small town gossip and small town goodness, about lust and longing, and most of all, about love in its varied forms.
If there was ever a doubt that Terry Kay had another novel in him to equal To Dance with the White Dog, Taking Lottie HomeM should dispel that doubt and renew his reputation as a writer in whose skillful hands the simple becomes the surprisingly sublime.
Linda Stankard writes from her home in Cookeville, Tennessee.
ust when you're sitting waist deep in oyster shells and about to give up hope of finding that elusive gem, voila!, you open one more and there it is a pearl, long envisioned in your mind's eye, yet breathtaking in its startling simplicity when you…
A fly-by-night kind of guy Frequently American heroes take the form of vigilantes outside the legal system. Batman certainly fits the mold. He is a loner, obsessed with vengeance and justice, and as popular culture has grown darker so has the world of the Batman. Few fictional villains of any kind rank near the Joker on a scale of heartless malevolence. Watson-Guptill has produced a striking collection of Batman artwork, Batman Masterpieces: Portraits of the Dark Knight and His World by Ruth Morrison. This is not a greatest hits anthology. The book comprises oversize reproductions of the paintings originally reproduced in a DC Comics/Fleer Master series set of collector cards gorgeous, melodramatic paintings beyond the scope of comic books. They present a fragmented narrative, the pieces of which had to be collected and assembled by card-buyers.
Batman Masterpieces features original sketches and extensive remarks by the artists on how they envisioned the many incarnations of an American cultural icon.
A fly-by-night kind of guy Frequently American heroes take the form of vigilantes outside the legal system. Batman certainly fits the mold. He is a loner, obsessed with vengeance and justice, and as popular culture has grown darker so has the world of the Batman.…
No one in the tony town of Fox Glen reads for pleasure. Students dissect literature like a lab animal, as high school student Carley Wells says, and adults skim respected works in a literary version of keeping up with the Joneses.
But when Carley writes in an English assignment that she’s never met a book she liked, her parents decide to "fix" their daughter and display their own commitment to the arts by commissioning a book designed to her specifications–one she’s sure to love, not just like. The irony is great; Carley’s mom Gretchen is the type of person who buys books to decorate with, not to read.
Besides, Carley isn’t as ignorant as her parents and teachers believe. Although she misuses her SAT words and hates to read, Carley rewrites stories constantly. If an exchange with her best friend, Hunter Cay, doesn’t go as she’d like, she’ll re-imagine it later in a game she calls "Aftermemory." By contrast, Hunter is so deeply enchanted by words that his daydreams are populated by writer crushes. It’s Hunter’s love of reading and a desire to pull him out of his self-loathing, drunken state that eventually convince Carley to give the author her parents hire, failed novelist Bree McEnroy, a chance.
When Carley finally says what she means, without relying on Aftermemory to rewrite her script, she recognizes the appealing attributes of words. And when Carley points out that the characters, not the literary devices Bree uses to mask her insecurities, are the point of stories, Carley is essentially explaining this story. It’s not about books or reading, after all, but about people and relationships. Isn’t that what the best stories show us?
In her debut novel, author Tanya Egan Gibson crafts a tale filled with nuanced characters. Though it’s populated by teenagers, like the best literature, How to Buy a Love of Reading transcends age classifications to appeal to teens and adults alike.
Carla Jean Whitley writes and reads in Birmingham, Alabama.
No one in the tony town of Fox Glen reads for pleasure. Students dissect literature like a lab animal, as high school student Carley Wells says, and adults skim respected works in a literary version of keeping up with the Joneses.
Life in a box Journey to Cubeville (Andrews McMeel, $19.95, 0836271750), the misadventures of Dilbert, uber-computer geek, is an ode to workers the world over. Scott Adams’s humor may not be for everyone; if you’ve never had a problem boss or a hopelessly clueless co-worker then you might not get Dilbert. For the rest of us, life according to this cult cartoon is dead on. While Journey to Cubeville deals mostly with the quotidian frustration of dealing with pointy headed higher-ups and antagonistic underlings, work is not everything. Adams also covers such hot topics as dating, mutual funds, and the sports memorabilia business. As usual, our hero is aided by his associates Wally and Alice, as well as the animal sidekicks (who really run the show) the Machiavellian pair of Catbert and Dogbert. A note of caution: Don’t read Cubeville in public if you’re embarrassed about laughing out loud.
Life in a box Journey to Cubeville (Andrews McMeel, $19.95, 0836271750), the misadventures of Dilbert, uber-computer geek, is an ode to workers the world over. Scott Adams's humor may not be for everyone; if you've never had a problem boss or a hopelessly clueless co-worker…
I am ready for Catherine Chung to become a household name, and I know that day is coming. Both of Chung’s novels, Forgotten Country (2012) and The Tenth Muse (2019), tell stories of female mathematicians questioning family roles and chasing down secrets. I fell especially hard for her second novel, not just because Chung is a strong storyteller (and indeed she is) but because of her narrative’s clean, chronological structure, which embodies the precision and beauty of math itself. Over the course of the novel, protagonist Katherine reflects on her childhood as the daughter of a Chinese immigrant and a white American veteran of World War II. She reckons with her place in a male-dominated field, hedges her dreams against her relationship with an charismatic older professor, attempts to solve the famed Riemann hypothesis, meets real-life scientists and mathematicians and, in the search for her family’s true history, follows the clues in an equation-filled diary. It’s quite a journey, and Chung unfurls these questions and mysteries with all the formal elegance and unequivocal truth of a perfectly balanced equation.
—Cat, Deputy Editor
The Promise Girls
One of Marie Bostwick’s novels had been on my TBR list for so long that I’d forgotten when or how it had gotten there when I finally started reading it sometime in mid-2021. By chapter five, I had downloaded the rest of Bostwick’s novels, and a new fan was born. Although I’ve loved them all, my favorite is The Promise Girls. The three Promise sisters were groomed to be artistic prodigies by their overbearing mother, Minerva. During a live televised performance, pianist sister Joanie intentionally blundered her signature piece, and Minerva slapped the girl. In the subsequent uproar, child protective services split up the family, and each sister closeted her creative pursuits and difficult childhood without much reflection. Decades later, sister Meg’s journey back from a near-fatal car crash leads all three Promise sisters to reexamine their conclusions about their upbringing and artistic abilities. Bostwick creates worlds where we can trust that, with the support of loved ones and a healthy dose of creativity, good people will prevail. Her stories have been a wonderful refuge to me during this long and arduous pandemic, and I know that many readers would find similar comfort in them.
—Sharon, Controller
Elsewhere
Gabrielle Zevin is best known for her 2015 bestseller, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, but her literary talents didn’t start there. In Zevin’s 2005 speculative novel, Elsewhere, 15-year-old Liz has been killed in a hit-and-run accident, and she wakes up on a cruise ship called the S.S. Nile that’s bound for the afterlife. When the ship arrives in Elsewhere, a place uncannily similar to Earth, Liz learns that she will age backward until infancy. Then she’ll be released into a river and sent back to Earth, where she will begin a new life. Utterly distraught, Liz spends most of her time at the Observation Decks, where one “eternim” buys her five minutes of Earth-viewing time. On the brighter side, she’s taken in by her grandmother Betty, now 34, who died before Liz was born and currently works as a seamstress in Elsewhere. As Liz comes to grips with living her new life in reverse, Zevin executes a premise that’s unique and fully realized. You won’t be able to keep Elsewhere to yourself.
I’m someone who loves to look up at the night sky, so Erika Swyler’s second novel, Light From Other Stars, stole my heart. It’s beautifully written, easy to get lost in and powerfully heartfelt. With a light-handed approach, Swyler skillfully toes the line between factual science and science fiction to tell the story of Nedda Papas, jumping between her childhood in 1980s Easter, Florida, and her adventures aboard the spaceship Chawla decades later. Nedda’s childhood scenes introduce her father, Theo Papas, a former NASA scientist who’s reeling from the death of his infant son. When Theo creates an experiment that alters the life of everyone in Easter, Nedda and her mother form an unlikely alliance, and Nedda’s recollections of these earlier events help her solve a dire problem aboard the Chawla. Throughout this tale of time and loss, Swyler explores how people (and our perceptions of them) change, how relationships evolve, what happens to us when we die and just how far we’ll go to hold on to the ones we love.
—Meagan, Brand & Production Designer
We Sang You Home
When I worked in an independent bookstore, a trend I noticed and loved was baby showers to which guests were encouraged to bring a book as a gift for the impending arrival. It’s never too early to start building a home library and sharing books with children! Board books are especially perfect for placing in the hands of the newest readers, because the thick cardboard pages are much harder to tear and can hold up to many readings (or nibblings). I loved sending folks out the door with Richard Van Camp and Julie Flett’s We Sang You Home, a spare, poetic meditation whose first-person plural narration encompasses many kinds of families and could be read by any caregiver, not just a birthing parent. I’ve read this book countless times and still choke up at author Van Camp’s beautiful benediction: “Thank you for joining us / Thank you for choosing us / Thank you for becoming / the best of all of us.” What an extraordinary way to welcome a tiny new person to the world.
—Stephanie, Associate Editor
We love it when a great book or hardworking author cultivates a huge following, but we also love cheering for an underdog. Here are five books that we believe are deserving of the fireworks and fanfare typically reserved for the biggest blockbusters.
Nearly everyone in the tiny mountain town of Queduro, New Mexico wishes Rose Devonic would find someplace else to live. A headstrong loner, Rose just couldn’t seem to fit in; but it wasn’t because she didn’t try. In her latest book, Remember Me, Laura Hendrie documents a young woman’s fascinating journey toward finding a place in life and the love and acceptance she has craved for so long.
Rose grew up in Queduro and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Even after her entire family died in a tragic auto accident, Rose hung around, living in her car during the summers and in a lonely cabin at a mostly abandoned motel during the long, cold winters. Like most people in town, Rose makes her living selling her embroidery work to the summer tourists. But she has never shared the passion or felt the pride most other locals consider necessary to be a truly successful trade-embroiderer. She knows there has to be something more to life than threads and needles.
When her mentor, motel owner Birdie Pinkston, is struck down by a debilitating stroke, Rose jumps in to take care of her old friend and former embroidery teacher. But Birdie’s sister Alice, who is beginning to exhibit the preliminary stages of Alzheimer’s disease, comes onto the scene determined to sell the Ten Tribes Motel and drag Birdie off on an African safari. In the ensuing upset, Rose has her hands full just trying to keep everyone from ending up in the loony bin.
Laura Hendrie weaves the threads of her story, alternating the voices of Rose and Frank, to create a masterful story. Her previous novel, Stygo, won numerous awards, including the prestigious Mountains and Plains Regional Bookseller’s Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Nearly everyone in the tiny mountain town of Queduro, New Mexico wishes Rose Devonic would find someplace else to live. A headstrong loner, Rose just couldn't seem to fit in; but it wasn't because she didn't try. In her latest book, Remember Me, Laura Hendrie…
Philip Tate is one of the lucky ones. At 45, he has everything good looks, a devoted family, a distinguished medical career. But something is wrong. Something has prompted him to return to the most secret, thrilling act of his adolescence housebreaking. He has no intention of stealing anything. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. So why would he do it? Why would he risk everything to commit a truly irrational act? Herein lies the heart of John L’Heureux’s wry, witty, and engaging new novel.
The story begins with a cozy but dreadful dinner party to celebrate Philip’s appointment as the new Chair of Psychology at the prestigious university medical school where he works. Looking around the room at his handsome, affluent friends, Philip is struck with the overwhelming urge to escape his straitjacket life and run away screaming.
The moment passes, but not for long. Later that night, after Philip’s smart and beautiful wife Maggie has once again passed out from too much alcohol and too many pills, he slips out of bed and goes for a drive. He ends up at the home of Hal Kizer, a new psychiatrist at the medical school, and his beautiful young wife Dixie. With his heart pounding, Philip finds the key, turns the lock, and steps inside.
It is a foolish risk, and Dixie catches him. However, she is bitterly unhappy in her own marriage, and the unexpected encounter leads Philip to a one-night fling, not criminal prosecution.
Wracked by guilt, he eventually confesses his infidelity to Maggie. Her addictions worsen, and begin to attract the attention of the couple’s two beautiful and intelligent children, Cole and Emma. Yet, as the family gets closer, Philip and Maggie realize that their perfect children are far more complicated than they had ever imagined.
Through realistic dialogue and careful characterization, L’Heureux brings this troubled family to life. He also provides a colorful cast of supporting characters, including the wife of one of Philip’s older colleagues, who serves her husband cold cereal for dinner every night but helps keep Maggie afloat with her warmth and compassion.
Readers will find themselves pulling for the Tates as they struggle to put their lives back together. Having Everything is a fascinating exploration of what happens when having it all isn’t nearly enough.
Beth Duris works for The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.
Philip Tate is one of the lucky ones. At 45, he has everything good looks, a devoted family, a distinguished medical career. But something is wrong. Something has prompted him to return to the most secret, thrilling act of his adolescence housebreaking. He has no…
Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.
Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
