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.
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Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
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In 1903, a wildlife photographer ventured into a remote Maine lumber camp to capture the image of a woman nursing an orphaned bear cub alongside her newborn daughter. This true story inspired Tammy Armstrong’s debut novel, Pearly Everlasting, which imagines the life of that girl and that bear, suckled at the same breast and raised as brother and sister in a cabin set deep in the pines.

Pearly Everlasting’s mother is a healer, and her father is a cook in a logging camp in the woods of New Brunswick. Her father finds an orphaned bear cub during “false spring,” brings it home, and raises “Bruno” as the newborn Pearly’s brother. It’s hard to say whether Pearly is part bear, or Bruno is part human; either way, they share a powerful connection. Girl and bear ramble through the forest on endless adventures. But when the camp gets a cruel new supervisor, Heeley Swicker, their innocent life is forced to change. Swicker turns up dead, and Bruno is blamed and sold by Swicker’s nephew to animal traders. Enlisting the help of her friends Songcatcher and Ebony, Pearly sets out on a quest to the “Outside” to rescue him. Afterwards, she and Bruno must find their way homeward alone through ice and snow, meeting good people, bad people and one cranky and dangerous wild bear along the way.

Told in a lyrical voice (it’s no surprise to learn that Armstrong is a poet), Pearly Everlasting is at times hauntingly beautiful, at times sad, yet also laugh-out-loud funny in other moments. There’s a dose of fairy-tale magic in the woodland setting: Old Jack, a spirit from the loggers’ stories, is always lurking in the shadows and threatening Pearly’s world. 

This tender tale of hope and the redeeming nature of human kindness is also about coming home, literally and figuratively. At the end of her journey, Pearly remembers all of those who helped her along her way, and writes to them: “I tell them how the trees have grown so big up here on Greenlaw Mountain the spring light lives inside their boughs and rarely comes out to warm our yard. But by summer, the light climbs down and spills itself wide—a carpet Bruno naps in longer each day. This is how we take our days. This is how we make them stay.”

Told in a poetic voice, Tammy Armstrong’s debut novel, Pearly Everlasting, imagines the life of a girl and a bear raised as brother and sister in a cabin set deep in the pines.
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Intermezzo, Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, tells a story of loss and grieving as two brothers reckon with the death of their father in ways that threaten to fragment their already troubled relationship. 

Peter Koubek is a socially and professionally competent lawyer living in Dublin in his early 30s. Beneath his polished exterior, he is bereft after his father’s death, suicidal and self-medicating with liquor and pills. His brother Ivan, younger by 10 years and once a chess prodigy, is now a loner struggling to maintain his early promise. At a regional chess match, Ivan falls for 36-year-old Margaret, who manages the local art center, and they begin a passionate romance despite their age difference. When Ivan confides in his older brother, Peter’s response is rude and dismissive. He is ashamed to confess to Ivan that his own love life is complicated. Peter is involved with two women: Naomi, a college student and part-time sex worker, and Sylvia, his first love, who suffered a disabling accident that led to their breakup years before. Peter and Ivan have long been locked into a cycle of judgment and disapproval. Now, their exchange crosses a line that it seems neither can come back from. 

As is typical in a Rooney novel, most of the traumas that shaped her characters—the father’s death, Margaret’s difficult separation from her heavily drinking ex-husband, Sylvia’s accident—happened prior to the events of the story. Rooney’s focus is instead on the various ways her characters are trapped inside their pain and if they are even going to emerge emotionally intact, and she brings skills she has honed on dissecting romantic relationships to the brothers’ bond with powerful results. Rooney underscores Peter and Ivan’s differences by changing her style when the focus shifts between them: Ivan’s chapters are told in a conventional third person, while Peter’s are narrated in a dreamy, stylized stream of consciousness that echoes Rooney’s countryman James Joyce. A tight focus on the siblings allows Rooney to delve into ideas about birth order and masculinity, while the careful balance between the novel’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Intermezzo Rooney’s most ambitious novel yet. 

The careful balance between Intermezzo’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Sally Rooney’s fourth novel her most ambitious yet.
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Boy, the sacrifices some people will make to get ahead. It’s understandable to see another person’s shiny baubles and desire similar luxuries—but at what cost? This conflict of ambition provides the dramatic impetus for Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.

Brooke Orr, the novel’s 33-year-old Black protagonist, is a born-and-raised New Yorker who rides the subway every day, even knowing that there is a “lunatic at large who was jabbing unsuspecting commuters with a hypodermic.” One of the adopted children of a white lawyer who runs an organization dedicated to reproductive justice, Brooke studied art history and spent several years teaching at a charter school but left it disillusioned because the school “only cared about STEM.” Brooke wants a more elegantly ornamented life. 

Then, a glimpse of a shiny bauble: In 2014, during the comparatively halcyon days of “Obama’s placid America,” she gets a job at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, dedicated to giving away 83-year-old Asher’s billions. Asher earned his money by taking over an uncle’s office supply store and then expanding into catalogs, real estate and malls. Asher comes to see Brooke as a protégé, in part because she reminds him of his daughter, Linda, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and was killed on 9/11.

Soon, Asher is seeking Brooke’s advice on everything from gifts for his wife to candidates to favor with his riches. And Brooke discovers that she likes riding in Asher’s Bentley and wearing fancy clothes. As one character remarks, however, “Nobody gets something for nothing,” and as Brooke makes more and more uncharacteristic decisions, she learns that lesson all too well.

Entitlement isn’t as deeply felt as Alam’s previous novel, the brilliant Leave the World Behind, but anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in this excellent work.

Anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.
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If you’re in the mood for some spine-tingling stories, cozy up to Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World, a fictitious (or is it?) compendium that is both fascinating and creepy, and made all the more so by Pulitzer Prize-winner Fahmida Azim’s striking illustrations. 

Seema Yasmin, a journalist, professor and physician, has created a fictional narrator named Dr. N, a taxonomist and ontologist who has traveled the world to investigate the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent djinn. Djinn, Dr. N writes, have been “haunting humanity since pre-Islamic times.” They are “shape-shifting beasts who grant wishes, inspire poetry, and snatch away innocent children.” “To the world’s nearly two billion human Muslims,” he writes, “djinn are as real as tax returns and as frightening and captivating as an electrical storm.” 

He submits the fruits of his research to his academic committee, apparently to explain his long and unexplained absence from class, in this volume of stories from around the world that capture the long history and great variety of djinn. Many of these stories are related to human events, such as one concerning a ghostlike horseman who allegedly appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Another terrifying tale of more dubious origins takes place in London, when a woman delivering her husband’s specimen to an IVF clinic spots what she thinks is an abandoned baby in the middle of the road. She stops, of course, but things do not go as she expects.

Djinnology is beautifully designed, with maps, English and Arabic inscriptions and more, gamely selling a high-octane, between-two-worlds vibe. Most of all, Azim’s haunting illustrations in smoky colors perfectly portray this menagerie of spirits. Readers will find themselves looking over their shoulders.

 

In the vibrantly illustrated Djinnology, a fictional scientist travels the world to learn about sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent spirits of Muslim folklore.
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Julie Heffernan is predominantly known as a self-portraitist. Her astounding large-scale oil paintings are baroque, surrealist, highly staged and detailed, and often feature a woman—herself, bare-breasted, surrounded by a riot of flora and fauna. She frequently toys with traditional representations of women in art, depicting herself in big headpieces and bigger skirts, and using titles like “Self-Portrait as Gorgeous Tumor” and “Self-Portrait as Tree House.”

Many of Heffernan’s self-portraits are reproduced in Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost, her first graphic novel and a mesmeric work of autofiction. It is a loose retelling of how she became an artist, leaving a Catholic home where art didn’t exist and meeting people who helped her to discover the world of art history and her own fierce opinion and creative voice. A version of Heffernan recounts these events—often in the form of a one-sided conversation with her mother—while hiking deeper into the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child. We know from the outset that she’s getting herself lost, and as her mind whirls through her memories, examining traumas and questioning everything with a furious intensity, it is clear that she is making a dangerous, terrible choice. She is being a bad mother, and she says so.

Throughout Heffernan’s labyrinthine walk in the woods, we are treated to “revelations,” each centered on a work of classic art. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University, and here she delivers brief lessons on famous paintings such as “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Wildens, which is accompanied by Heffernan’s revelation, “DON’T GIVE UP no matter WHAT!” as she shows how the painting uses two women’s naked bodies to create the shape of a pinwheel, whirling like blades in the center of the scene. The women are about to be raped, but they still have “ACTION! MOTION!! AGENCY!!!”

Much of the illustration for the novel was done in Microsoft Paint, which gives the book a sketchy, glitchy quality, completely in opposition to her oil paintings. Many scenes, as well as some reproductions of her self-portraits, are pixelated, the color appearing to malfunction and separate. Details become difficult to see, and the viewer is forced into the same frustrating brain-fuzziness as Heffernan’s character. 

The varying styles, the collapsing of clarity, the tremendous rage and continual turning-over of past traumas—all these elements combine in Babe in the Woods to illuminate the mysteries of the creative process. It is a staggering work of graphic literature, strange and enraged, carnal and emotional, encompassing the terrific force that keeps an artist moving forward. Reading it doesn’t feel like moving in a straight line, but rather a spiral, and as Heffernan writes, “a spiral always brings us back to a center, no matter how far we travel away from it.”

Julie Heffernan’s first graphic novel, Babe in the Woods, is a mesmeric work of autofiction loosely retelling how she became an artist while following a hike in the Appalachian Mountains with her infant child.
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Countless readers have picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since it was published in 1885, and it’s commonly listed among the great American novels. Though the book is perennially popular, its author, Mark Twain, has been criticized for relying on racist caricatures when writing about Black Americans, particularly the character Jim, an enslaved Black man who travels with Huckleberry Finn in the book.

Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson offers the other side of the story of this American classic. The graphic novel retelling centers on Jim and his quest to reunite with his family after they have been sold away by Huck’s cruel and volatile father. Aided by the audacious Huck, Jim undertakes an epic journey across the antebellum South and Midwest. Interwoven with the narrative are glimpses of the elderly Jim telling his story to a group of his great-grandchildren in the 1930s, and flashes further forward in time to the 1980s and 2020s as his descendants in turn pass on the tale.

Walker and Anderson have collaborated before, on the Eisner Award-winning The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. Walker’s passion for storytelling shines through his prose, with humor and wisdom thoughtfully sprinkled into a narrative that is also realistic about the horrors of slavery. An author’s note explains the linguistic choices he made to humanize Jim while remaining authentic to the time period.

Anderson’s illustrations are distinctive and his attention to detail is impressive: His characters are recognizable at any age. Vibrant color palettes by Isabell Struble will also help readers easily distinguish between the various timelines. The choice to frame the story as being told by an old and bickering Jim and Huck in the 1930s will make readers feel like part of the enthralled in-person audience, and demonstrates the power of oral storytelling in recording Black history.

This phenomenal graphic novel doesn’t set out to replace The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but to add immeasurably valuable context that has historically been left out. Jim’s story deserves to be told, and as Jim’s great-great-great-granddaughter says, “The story won’t tell itself.”

Big Jim and the White Boy is a phenomenal graphic novel retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, adding immeasurably valuable context and celebrating the power of oral storytelling.
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Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.

At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”

Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television.  Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.

“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”

While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.

“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.

While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”

Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”

Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.

Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”

She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”

Read our review of Colored Television.

In the author's biting and hilarious fourth novel, a literary writer pushing the limits of her patience and her pocketbook gives Hollywood a shot.
STARRED REVIEW
September 1, 2024

Best Hispanic and Latinx titles of 2024 (so far)

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) by reading one of these excellent books by Hispanic and Latinx authors.
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Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) by reading one of these excellent books by Hispanic and Latinx authors.
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In Tim Murphy’s Speech Team, high school friends Tip, Natalie, Jennifer and Anthony meet as adults in the wake of the suicide of their friend Pete. The gang came of age in the 1980s and were part of their school’s speech team, which was coached by the abrasive Gary Gold. When it becomes clear that Gold’s criticisms scarred all of them and may have been connected to Pete’s death, they decide to have it out with him. With humor and sensitivity, Murphy writes about the pressures of the past and the challenges of adulthood, working in plenty of ’80s references along the way.

Steven Rowley’s The Editor takes place in New York City during the ’90s. Writer James Smale is thrilled to learn that his novel has been picked up by a big-name publisher and will be edited by Jackie Onassis. Onassis adores James’ manuscript, which was inspired by his troubled family. But James hits a snag prior to publication, as he fears the book will hurt those closest to him. With themes of memory, kinship and the creative process, The Editor is sure to spark lively dialogue among readers.

Set in Los Angeles in 2016, Kate and Danny Tamberelli’s The Road Trip Rewind is a quirky tale of detours taken on the path to love. The filming of Beatrix Noel’s ’90s-inspired screenplay is underway, but she’s dismayed that old flame Rocco Riziero has landed the lead. Their romance was derailed on New Year’s Eve in 1999. When a car accident takes them back in time to that pivotal year, they get another chance at love. An enjoyable trip from start to finish, this atmospheric flashback to the ’90s is a can’t-miss book club pick.

Nathan Hill explores the trials and rewards of marriage in Wellness. Elizabeth and Jack fall in love in the 1990s in Chicago, where they’re part of the bohemian arts community. As the years go by, their countercultural tendencies fall by the wayside as they focus on paying the bills and being good parents. Hill’s richly detailed novel is a moving look at the compromises that are part of adulthood and family life, and offers a range of topics for discussion, including personal evolution, self-fulfillment and the vagaries of long-term relationships.

Take a trip back in time with four novels that revisit the ’80s and ’90s. The Gen Xers in your book club will have a blast.
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With emotionally charged scenes and endearing, authentic characters, these novels weave inspiring stories of growth, faith and love. As they bring new life to forgotten and abandoned structures, two women find healing from their pasts and hope for their futures.

 

Lowcountry Lost

Author of 20 novels, including acclaimed bestseller Under the Magnolias, T.I. Lowe delivers a soul-stirring, unforgettable romance in Lowcountry Lost, pairing a couple’s redemption story with the restoration of a deserted town.

Avalee Elvis is a general contractor and the owner of Lowcountry Lost, a small outfit that renovates abandoned buildings and brings businesses to struggling towns. After Avalee’s whole world crumbled six years ago, flipping houses was what made life livable again, and she’s very excited about their next project: bringing a small dilapidated ghost town in South Carolina back to vibrant life. That is, until she learns that the structural engineer assigned to the project is the man Avalee most wishes she could forget: her ex-husband, Rowan Murray.

In captivating prose, Lowe relays a moving story about grief, healing and enduring love. Avalee struggles with the broken, painful parts within her and is plagued by nightmares about the events that led up to the end of her marriage. Now that she’s finally finding a path she is passionate about and moving forward, her past catches up with her. This time, however, Avalee lets Rowan in, and they face their heartbreaking history together. As they lean on each other instead of pushing each other away, the pain that separates them begins to dissipate.

The atmospheric ghost town and its restoration provide the perfect setting for the story. Founded during the 1800s, the town had been bustling until a road bypassing it was built, leading to its isolation and decline. As Avalee and Rowan team up to restore the town and save the buildings that had been left to waste away, readers will enjoy watching them slowly rekindle what they once had.

 

Between the Sound and Sea

Two-time Christy Book of the Year Award-winning author Amanda Cox’s entrancing Between the Sound and Sea chronicles the restoration of a lighthouse and the journey of an event planner who is looking for a new start.

After a scandal ruins her family’s reputation, Josephina “Joey” Harris is forced to leave behind her event planning business in Copper Creek, Tennessee, and take on a project that entails salvaging a decommissioned lighthouse on an island in North Carolina. Undeterred by the ghost stories associated with the island, Joey sets out to restore the lighthouse to its former glory. In the process, she stumbles upon details about the former lighthouse keeper, Callum McCorvey, and his family, and resolves to uncover the truth behind their mysterious disappearance.

Joey’s enemies-to-lovers story with Finn, whose grandfather owns the lighthouse, is compelling and engaging. Through the characters’ backgrounds and their growing relationship, Cox dispenses wisdom about faith, reconciliation and embracing fresh starts. The stories of other characters, including that of Finn’s grandfather, are rewarding and full of surprises. With extraordinary finesse, Cox develops realistic, empathetic characters that are easy to connect with and root for.

The novel also covers an intriguing, lesser-known part of history about WWII activity in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Descriptions of the war are deftly incorporated into Joey’s investigation of the disappearance of Callum McCorvey, while the period before the war beautifully frames Finn’s grandfather’s childhood and his friendship with Callum’s daughter, Cathleen. With brilliant skill, Cox draws on the restoration of the lighthouse and the main characters’ lives to inspire hope.

 

Read our spring 2024 Christian fiction recommendations.

Acclaimed authors T.I. Lowe and Amanda Cox use the renovation of old buildings to parallel their characters’ pursuit of emotional repair and new beginnings.

Chasing Redbird

Sharon Creech’s Chasing Redbird was the first book I ever read by myself, which was a big deal for me; I am dyslexic and struggled to read when I was younger. I was captivated by the main character, Zinnia Taylor, because she was a misfit, just like me. Zinny has six siblings, and in their chaotic home, she often gets lost in the fray. She prefers to spend time with her Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate who live next door and provide her with a safe haven. When Jessie dies unexpectedly, Zinny withdraws even further from her family. As she wrestles with her grief and guilt, she discovers an abandoned 200-year-old pioneer trail on her family farm and becomes obsessed with restoring it to functionality. Her family thinks she’ll give up, but Zinny has to see this project through. It may be the only way to heal her broken world. Creech treats the topic of grief and family dynamics delicately and beautifully, painting a profound picture that will speak to readers of all ages.

Meagan Vanderhill Cochran, Production Manager


Earthlings

From childhood, we’re trained to take part in society, learning what behavior is praiseworthy, and what behavior is outrageous. By adulthood, most of us conform automatically, but for some, it comes less easily—like Natsuki, the protagonist of Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings. As a child, Natsuki feels like an outsider, and she is relieved when her stuffed hedgehog, Piyyut, reveals to her that she is actually an alien from planet Popinpobopia. Her alien’s perspective lets her see her town for what it is: a “Baby Factory” in which humans serve society by working, getting married and having babies that will grow up to become society’s tools in turn. Natsuki struggles to accept that future, though she longs for the security of being normal. Her isolation increases when a teacher sexually abuses her, and no one believes her when she seeks help. Like Convenience Store Woman, Murata’s other novel that has been translated into English, Earthlings pushes readers—hard—to see the absurdity of what is and isn’t considered acceptable. While the subject matter remains bleak, by the end of the book, Natsuki finds allies, and their acts of defiance take on a kind of euphoric hilarity, despite the severity of the consequences.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor


Kaikeyi

In Vaishnavi Patel’s Kaikeyi, Princess Kaikeyi is the lone daughter in a family with seven sons. After her father banishes her mother, she is left with only the stories of the gods that her mother once shared with her. Now on her own as the sole woman in her family, she is determined for her voice to be heard. However, her world shatters when the king quickly marries her off for the sake of securing an alliance, despite Kaikeyi begging to remain independent. Before she journeys to the kingdom of her betrothed, she discovers a special magic that can influence how she is perceived within relationships. With this newfound spark of confidence, she plows through societal barriers, fighting on the battlefield for her new home and joining her husband’s council, where she resiliently presses the other men in the room to make changes in their kingdom. After years of ruthless judgment and scorn, Kaikeyi and her two sister-wives, Kausalya and Sumitra, start a women’s council for members of the community to seek advice and direction. Kaikeyi is a persistent force throughout the story, never afraid to disrupt the conditions of society. She rubs people the wrong way and inspires others, making her a dynamic character whose persistence and courage will win readers’ hearts.

—Jena Groshek, Sales Coordinator


The Complete Stories

A keen observer of idiosyncratic behavior, the inimitable Flannery O’Connor spun unforgettable, expansive short stories that brim with characters whose feelings of otherness alienate them from society. The most well-known is The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a story that is often readers’ entry point to this Southern writer. The Misfit is “aloose from the Federal Pen” and, with unfailing politeness, executes a family on their way to a vacation in Florida. Complex and contemplative, The Misfit finds “no pleasure [but] in meanness” yet tries to square his crimes with a sense of right and wrong. Other misfits in O’Connor’s stories include Olga in “Good Country People,” an unapologetically surly spinster whose leg was shot off in a hunting accident, and who gets hoodwinked by a Bible salesman. Some of her misfits crave redemption and empowerment—O’Connor was, afterall, a Catholic—while others are unwilling or unable to change. Perhaps the greatest misfit in O’Connor’s stories is the midcentury South itself. A region straining to be better? Or one unwilling to shed the yoke of violence? The Complete Stories is a compendium you can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading, feeling freshly enlightened each time.

—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor

If you've ever felt like the odd one out—the black sheep in your family, or loner in your community—you'll love these four books with protagonists who can't help but stand out.
Review by

Jamie Quatro cultivated a reputation as a provocateur with her two previous books, the story collection I Want to Show You More (2013) and her debut novel, Fire Sermon (2018). She complicates Southern Christian narratives through characters who hold faith in one fist and lust in the other, carrying out sins like adultery while maintaining deep relationships with the divine.

Quatro continues this inquiry with her second novel, Two-Step Devil, a narrative in three acts. The first introduces a 70-year-old man who calls himself the Prophet. Living alone in Alabama in 2014, the Prophet detests organized religion, but the inside of his cabin is covered with paintings of his visions from God. He is also taunted by a figure he calls the Two-Step Devil. One day, at a gas station, the Prophet sees a teenage girl, drugged and zip-tied, being shoved into the backseat of a car. 

After a bumbling rescue, the Prophet helps the girl, Michael, regain her health. Their time together is beautiful, a quiet kinship, but it can’t last. Michael must eventually move on to the next stage of her life, and she narrates the vulnerable second section as if she’s giving a hurried walking tour of Chattanooga, Tennessee, intercut with memories of her childhood sexual assaults and coercion into trafficking.

In the novel’s third section, Two-Step steps into the spotlight—quite literally, as the story is now structured as a play, with the Prophet wasting away upstage. The devil ecstatically monologues at the reader (“Greetings, fleshsacks!”) on the misconceptions in Christian narratives, and goes wildly off-script from scripture.

Two-Step Devil is a bold interrogation—even a condemnation—of rigid adherence to Christian rules, and it’s apparent that it is intended first and foremost to provoke. While it is rousing to see a Christian writer lay claim to their God in this way—challenging their religion to do better, and insisting upon critical thought amid ambivalence rather than blind faith—the story can be tedious and pretentious, as during the devil’s lectures, or gratuitously violent and unsettled, as in Michael’s section. Still, Quatro’s characters are beguiling, and Two-Step Devil is often tender, especially during the Prophet’s section. Quatro’s prose ranks among the best Southern writing: “When God looked down at the planet, he was seeing what people saw when they looked up: darkness, with a few brave lights trembling here and there. The darkness was evil and the lights were God’s children staking a claim.” 

Quatro excels at getting the hairs on your arms to stand on end, if not through narrative suspense, then through the radical nature of her narrative aim: taking on the South’s political obsession with following religious guidelines, its dogged insistence on dogmatic good versus evil, which is completely impotent when a person is caught in the throes of actual evil. Without question, Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South, our patron saint of Southern discomfort.

Jamie Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South—our patron saint of Southern discomfort—and her second novel, Two-Step Devil, is a tender and bold interrogation of rigid adherence to Christian rules.

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