It’s a story that never goes out of style: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s chronicle of an inquisitive girl lost in a parallel world of talking animals and pompous royals, is a tale unlike any other—one that celebrates the complexities of language, the singular genius of children and the absurdity that lurks just beneath the surface of reality.

In honor of the novel’s 150th anniversary, we’ve rounded up a trio of new Alice-related titles, all of which prove that Wonderland still has mysteries well worth exploring. 

DECONSTRUCTING 'ALICE'
David Day combines the expertise of an academic with the fervor of a true Alice enthusiast in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded. In a remarkable act of literary excavation, Day exposes the historical references, classical allusions and subtly disguised symbols that he thinks Carroll embedded in the tale of Wonderland as lessons for his protégé, Alice Liddell. Day believes Carroll included these elements to round out the narrow education Alice would’ve received as a female in the Victorian age. It’s an intriguing theory, and he supports it impressively throughout Decoded. The volume includes Carroll’s novel in full, supplemented by Day’s observations as he painstakingly traces the various themes—music and philosophy, mathematics and poetry—that run through Carroll’s narrative, proving along the way that Alice, even as it celebrates the absurd, exhibits airtight logic. Richly illustrated, this is a book Alice addicts will find irresistible. 

A WONDERLAND HANDBOOK
No reader should plunge into Wonderland without taking Martin Gardner along as guide. The celebrated Carroll expert published The Annotated Alice in 1960 to great acclaim and popularity—more than a million copies are currently in print. In the intervening decades, Gardner, who died in 2010, continued to pick at the riddles of Wonderland—the numerical enigmas and verbal brainteasers that make the text so perplexing—and his findings are shared in The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. This comprehensive volume collects all of Gardner’s notes, his correspondence with Carroll critics and his introductions to previous Alice-related works. Filled with breathtaking illustrations by a wide range of artists, including Beatrix Potter and Salvador Dalí, the book offers invaluable insights into the Victorian mores, literary movements and real-life elements that inform Alice’s adventure, including all manner of Carroll arcana (it seems the writer, like the White Rabbit, had a fixation on gloves). For the latest in Alice analysis, Gardner’s your man. 

The Nursery Alice (1890) from The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition.
 

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
As he proved in Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire is a wiz when it comes to taking a fresh angle on a classic tale and spinning it into a fully formed story—one that lives up to its distinguished lineage. In his new book, After Alice, he works his customary magic, using Carroll’s story as a springboard for his own inventive novel. Maguire casts Alice’s friend Ada (who is mentioned briefly in Carroll’s narrative) as a leading character. When Alice disappears down the rabbit hole, Ada pursues her. In Wonderland, she encounters the usual suspects (including the pipe-smoking Caterpillar and unsettling Cheshire Cat), as well as a number of new—and equally eccentric—inhabitants. Meanwhile, back in the rational world, Charles Darwin, Walter Pater and other Victorian-era personages provide a rich contrast to Ada’s surreal adventures. The blend of fact and fiction results in a magical addition to the literature of Wonderland. Maguire and Alice: It’s a pairing Carroll himself would’ve consecrated.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Two events with a lasting effect on American culture are celebrating a centenary in 2016: the founding of Planned Parenthood and Georgia O’Keeffe’s fateful meeting with Alfred Stieglitz. The women at the center of these events are at the heart of two new works of historical fiction.

With the mission of Planned Parenthood being questioned almost as much today as it was at its inception, the timing is eerily apt for Terrible Virtue, Ellen Feldman’s powerful novel about the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger. Sanger, whose personal life was as tumultuous as her political and social convictions, remains a controversial figure, held to current standards of ethical correctness just as she was held to impossible models of femininity during her lifetime. 

Watching her own mother succumb to an early death after bearing 13 children led Sanger to advocate for family planning, despite a limited formal education. Her desire to make a difference in the lives of poor and working-class women led her to Europe, where ideas about contraception were more progressive. After her return to the United States, she opened a clinic in Brooklyn—and was jailed for it.  

Feldman lets Sanger tell her own story, but separates the chapters with sections narrated by Sanger’s two husbands, her sister and her children. The voices of those who suffered under the singularity of Sanger’s purpose offer depth to Feldman’s vision of this complex figure—a reminder of what was gained, but also what was sacrificed.

A different kind of sacrifice was made by Georgia O’Keeffe in Dawn Tripp’s gorgeous novel, Georgia, which focuses on the years O’Keeffe spent with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. 

The love story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz is well known. Their passionate affair and his incredible photographs of her, both clothed and nude, caused a sensation at the time and are still considered seminal in the history of photography. But Tripp suggests that O’Keeffe paid a price for that notoriety. The battle that rose between her and Stieglitz was ultimately about her work as an artist, especially her early abstractions, which she believed were overshadowed by the obvious eroticism of his photographs. O’Keeffe’s iron grip on her legacy and her need to reinvent herself in the Southwest is a key part of this exquisitely told story. 

Like Terrible Virtue, Georgia relies on a first-person narrative, but in this novel, there is no other voice but O’Keeffe’s. Though the novel opens and closes in 1979 in New Mexico, it quickly plunges into the years just before World War I. The arrival of the young art teacher at Stieglitz’s gallery in New York, the expansive family home on the shores of Lake George and O’Keeffe’s first glimpses of what would become the major inspiration for the second half of her life, are all beautifully told. 

Terrible Virtue and Georgia remind us that the ongoing culture wars are nothing new, but that life can be changed for the better with bravery, dedication and vision.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s hard to name a novel more beloved than Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Billed as one of the first feminist love stories, it has inspired countless sighs from lovers of literature over the centuries.

April 21, 2016, marks the 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth, and two timely new releases honor Charlotte and her family’s enduring legacy. Though these two books have very different tones and approaches, their shared affection for the Brontës unites them. 

The setup of Catherine Lowell’s debut novel, The Madwoman Upstairs, is an English major’s fantasy come true. Heroine Samantha Whipple is an awkward bookworm who heads off to Oxford University to read literature—and just happens to be the Brontës’ last living descendent. As she butts heads with her brooding-yet-irresistible tutor, a mysterious package from her deceased father arrives. Suddenly Sam is on a scavenger hunt that promises to lead her to her inheritance: items belonging to the Brontë estate that Sam has always considered nothing but a rumor . . . until now. 

Crammed with myriad allusions to the entire Brontë clan’s canon, Lowell’s novel will appeal not only to Brontë megafans, but also to readers who like a healthy helping of literary criticism alongside their fiction. When Sam isn’t off solving her father’s cryptic clues, she’s arguing with her professor about how to correctly read literature in general—and the Brontës’ works in particular. 

Filled with hyperlexic ripostes and an academic heroine who is the dictionary definition of quirky, this is a story that will please readers of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele is a very different form of tribute. Just a few pages in, Faye’s Jane utters the line, “Reader, I murdered him,” which tells you exactly the kind of book you are in for. A somewhat satirical riff on Jane Eyre, the novel reimagines Brontë’s iconic heroine with not only a will of iron but also the heart of a hot-blooded killer. This Jane embraces her “wicked” side and isn’t afraid to avenge herself against those who do her wrong. (Watch out, teachers at Lowood.)

Readers worried that Jane Steele is simply a retread of Jane Eyre with more blood and gore, à la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, fear not. Just when you think you know what is coming next, Jane Steele takes things in a completely different direction. Faye is also the author of four acclaimed historical mysteries, and she juxtaposes a textured Victorian setting with more modern (and thus, more ambiguous) morality. Jane Steele is equal parts irreverent and refreshing. It’s also, remarkably, no less of a page-turner than the classic to which it pays homage.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What would you do if you discovered a lost masterpiece that revealed the artist’s extreme prejudice? Or survived a war only to find yourself participating in political violence?

Ethical dilemmas and twists and turns of Jewish history are at the core of two new novels by Lauren Belfer and Stewart O’Nan. 

Belfer’s sprawling novel And After the Fire spans two continents and several centuries and concerns a fictional music manuscript. It opens as an American soldier in Weimar grabs some sheet music to take home as a souvenir. After his death decades later, his niece, Susanna Kessler, discovers a cryptic note and what appears to be an unknown Bach cantata: one with lyrics influenced by an anti-Semitic sermon. Susanna must weigh the pros and cons of publicizing a work whose contents, by any standard, are offensive. Her epic search for the manuscript’s original owners leads her from New York’s rare book libraries to present-day Germany. She also encounters two historians who vie for the manuscript—as well as her romantic attentions.

Susanna’s journey is interspersed with the history of the manuscript itself. Originally a gift from Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedrich to his most talented pupil, Sara Itzig Levy, the cantata remained in the Levy family’s hands over many turbulent decades. Though the manuscript is a fiction, Levy is not: The daughter of a prominent Jewish banker, she was the aunt of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn and at the forefront of salon culture during the Enlightenment.

And After the Fire is sprinkled with other real-life historical figures, and Belfer is adept at revealing the complex politics and sentiments, including the religious biases, of 18th-century Europe. The important questions Belfer poses regarding the ethical complexities of art are engrossing, though her characters never come fully to life. 

Stewart O’Nan’s gripping City of Secrets is also a moral thriller, but on a much different scale. It is tightly focused in time and place; the action takes place over the winter of 1946 and follows a handful of post-World War II refugees fighting for the creation of Israel against both Arab attack and Britain’s mandates. Recalling the novels of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, City of Secrets has a taut, noir-like flavor. Like O’Nan’s earlier novels, it features a displaced hero who, despite everything, still believes his life has purpose. 

City of Secrets follows Brand, a Latvian whose mechanical skills allowed him to survive the death camps, though he lost everything else. Brand slipped easily into Jerusalem, his new identity and job provided by the Jewish underground. Spending his days as a taxi driver taking tourists to religious sites, he remains loyal to the members of his Haganah cell, accepting missions that grow ever more dangerous under the cell’s elusive leader, Asher. By the time Brand realizes what’s at stake, it is almost too late. 

These compelling stories use history as a lens to examine issues that are still with us today.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Marriage is a challenge under the best of circumstances—devoting your life to one person for all of eternity, through better or worse, richer or poorer, driving through Midwestern storms and facing your husband’s mistress in a foreign country.

OK, those last two examples aren’t found in most wedding vows. But they are found in two new books that examine the darker corners of marriage. Call it the domestic suspense genre.

In Siracusa, the incomparable Delia Ephron introduces us to couples Michael and Lizzie and Finn and Taylor. The foursome is traveling to Italy together, along with Finn and Taylor’s precocious daughter, Snow. These people, it must be said, have absolutely no business traveling together. 

Michael, a semi-famous playwright who has struggled to recapture the magic of his early professional success, has been cheating on Lizzie with a waitress. Finn and Taylor barely speak other than to argue about Snow, an impressionable preteen who idolizes Michael. Finn and Lizzie, who used to date, still have an undeniable spark. Meanwhile, Michael tries to hide the fact that the woman he’s sleeping with has unexpectedly turned up at their hotel in the rundown Sicilian town of Siracusa.

Add a whole lot of Italian wine to the inevitable illicit sex and bitter secrets, and a recipe for the perfect vacation this is not. When Snow goes missing, the families reach their boiling point, and harsh, irreversible truths emerge. This is a thrilling, perfectly paced and deeply satisfying read by a masterful writer.

Listen to Me is a much quieter—but no less impactful—book by the acclaimed author of Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard. Laced with dreadful anticipation, Listen to Me is a spot-on depiction of the creep factor of road trips, with their desolate rest stops and weird encounters with strangers. 

Mark and Maggie are driving from their Chicago home to his parents’ Virginia farm. Maggie was recently attacked on the street near their home, the butt of a gun to the back of her head leaving her unconscious and with lingering psychological trauma. She finds herself withdrawn from her life as a wife and veterinarian, reading the news online, compulsively seeking the worst in her fellow humans. Mark struggles to be patient with Maggie’s recovery, and to resist the furtive email come-ons from his lovely teaching assistant who seems so, well, normal in comparison to his damaged wife. 

The road trip is meant to help them reconnect. They don’t realize when they hit the road that they’re driving straight into a powerful storm slicing its way through the Midwest. When the couple hits a total blackout in West Virginia, they hunker down for the night in a remote hotel. Mark takes their dog out for a pre-dawn walk, and a parking lot confrontation turns ugly, forcing Maggie to reckon with her own deep-seated fears.

As Pittard writes, evil—sometimes anonymous, sometimes known—not only exists, it thrives. Both books are gorgeously written sketches of marriages gone sour, and reminders that sometimes the scariest bogeymen are the ones in our own minds.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Whatever one may think of politics, one has to concede that elections provide juicy material for works of fiction. Two new novels offer very different portraits of modern politics, yet share common traits, including an insider’s view of the political process and sacrifices required in the quest for power.

The feistier of the two novels is The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear, by Stuart Stevens, a political consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The Dow has plummeted, and the government has divided Google into separate companies. When the incumbent Republican president chooses not to seek re-election, two candidates vie to replace him: Hilda Smith, the sitting vice-president, and Armstrong George, the fire-breathing Colorado governor who—sound familiar?—wants to build a large security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The narrator is J.D. Callahan, Smith’s campaign manager, who hopes a Smith victory will help him become a pundit with his own TV show. First, however, he has to get through the GOP convention, which, coincidentally, is in Callahan’s native New Orleans. His job is complicated, however, by his two half-brothers: one a former felon who wants financial help for his run for public office, and the other a neo-Nazi who owns a strip club and may be responsible for bombs that have imperiled the convention. The humor may be too broad for some readers, but this funny, fast-paced novel offers a perspective that only a seasoned campaign strategist like Stevens could provide.

Jennifer Close’s latest, The Hopefuls, set during the first six years of the Obama administration, is a more somber affair. Beth, our narrator, moves from her beloved New York to D.C. so her husband, Matt, can pursue his dream of entering politics. (Close moved to D.C. with her own husband, who also worked on the Obama campaign.)

Shortly after their arrival, Matt and Beth meet Jimmy Dillon, who works in the White House travel office, and his wife, Ashleigh, a Texas gal who tells Beth minutes after meeting her, “I can just tell we’re going to be best friends.”

The couples grow close, but Matt soon becomes jealous of Jimmy’s more exciting job, with duties that include flying to Hawaii to perform advance work for the Obamas’ vacation and playing golf with the President. After Obama’s re-election, Jimmy moves to Texas with Ashleigh to run for railroad commissioner and asks Matt to manage his campaign. But the campaign puts a strain on both marriages, especially when Jimmy starts spending time alone with Beth. 

Unlike Stevens’ book, The Hopefuls focuses on a retail form of politics: going door-to-door, attending church picnics, canvassing for votes. Yet both novels entertain with keenly observed inner-circle perspectives and shrewd insight into how personal politics can become.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At the scary, broken heart of each of these three novels stands a woman of tremendous courage. It’s a quality she—each of these three very different “shes”—will need in order to face the horrors bent on destroying her. Also marking each heroine is a possibly fatal flaw that draws the monstrous entities in her direction with implacable magnetism. 

A SINISTER FORCE IN THE SCENIC CITY
Cherie Priest is an author who loves the feel of things—tangible objects, especially ones that hold in their heft a heap of history. Her new novel, The Family Plot, has the perfect concept to indulge this enthusiasm: A salvage company from Nashville, Tennessee, is hired by an elderly woman to dismantle and sell off every beautiful thing in her family’s old homestead before the grand house is demolished. And where is this gorgeous edifice, packed to the rafters with so many treasures? Right at the base of Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, site of one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. Dahlia Dutton leads her salvage crew with an appropriately iron hand, but she is dangerously susceptible to the allure of the haunted house she is commissioned to tear apart. The spirits who haunt the place feel her softness toward them, and they respond with diabolical vengeance. It’s an old story. 

The Family Plot delivers a double helping of fun: A prospectus of auction items worthy of Southern Living is served up alongside a tale of gothic suspense woven from the familiar fabric of lost war ballads, flavored with the bitter twang of ingrown family evils and hypocritical Confederate piety. For Priest, as for her vulnerable protagonist, the more traditional the object, the more valuable it’s got to be. 

THEY'RE IN THE BASEMENT
Chattanooga and Tokyo are a world apart in every way. Mariko Koike is one of the biggest names in mystery and horror in her native Japan, and now U.S. readers can share the thrills. Her 1986 classic The Graveyard Apartment, now translated into English for the first time by Deborah Boliver Boehm, is one of the strangest and most terrifying horror novels I’ve ever read, and that’s saying a lot. One reason for the book’s uncanny impact is a cultural one. Japan possesses a vast folklore of supernatural beings, the taxonomy for which is fabulously complex. With acute economy, Koike has distilled this puzzling array of horrible creatures into one great and collective force. That force is concentrating on one hapless family living in a crazy apartment building in a neglected precinct of the capital city, surrounded by a huge graveyard. 

Two factors conspire to make the experience of reading The Graveyard Apartment especially harrowing. The first is a focus on the building’s basement, in which the worst things happen. There is no distancing ourselves from the horror; it could happen to us. The second factor concerns the psychological foundation for the family’s persecution—a painful scenario, all too common, in which a guilty mother heroically and desperately attempts to protect her innocent child. Did the terrible error she and the little girl’s father committed—bringing about both the child’s life and the first wife’s death—somehow lead to these fatal consequences? It is a superbly distressing question, another instance of absolute evil tormenting simple human frailty. 

DON'T LOOK BACK
I have saved the best of the three new books for last, and I’ll say the least about it, mainly to insist to my fellow fans of horror that you must get your hands on this one. The Motion of Puppets is the only novel I know to have fulfilled Robert Aickman’s famous statement about great supernatural tales, that they are the fiction most closely approaching poetry. Keith Donohue (The Stolen Child) has crafted a perfect fable based on the mysterious attraction of the puppet theater. Building upon the archaic superstition (exploited in Toy Story) that puppets have their own emotional lives, the author takes one more magnificent step and ties in the devastating myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Instead of descending to the Underworld, Kay Harper has been magically transformed into a puppet. Her husband, Theo, must try to find her and win her back. Every page of this novel hums with mythic power, pulling on every heartstring.

There’s a delightful variety of heroism, susceptibility and supernatural threat in these three novels. We recommend that you treat yourself to all of them—if it’s a trick you can manage.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In these three inspirational novels, characters return home to face their past, seek forgiveness and renew hope for the future. Sometimes going back is the only way to move forward. 

HEALING IN THE PAST AND PRESENT
In bestselling author Rachel Hauck’s latest novel, The Wedding Shop, veteran Haley Morgan returns home to Heart’s Bend, Tennessee, to heal after her deployment and the end of a destructive relationship. There, she rediscovers a local wedding shop, a place she and her best friend, Tammy, dreamed of restoring to its former glory. Haley decides to fulfill that childhood dream. Her story alternates with one set in the early 1930s, when Cora Scott, the original owner of The Wedding Shop, finds purpose as a working woman. Though Cora longs for a happy ending, she may be overlooking a love that’s right in front of her.

Haley’s trust in God is encouraging and uplifting, and Hauck gives Heart’s Bend an authentic history, providing a charming setting. Hauck switches easily between past and present, bringing two heartfelt journeys to a poignant culmination.

NEVER TOO FAR GONE
In his 12th novel, Long Way Gone, Charles Martin deftly retells the story of the prodigal son. From the remote Colorado mountains to the music-obsessed streets of Nashville, Cooper O’Connor carries his father’s words in his heart and a beloved six-string guitar in his hands. 

After reaching Nashville, Cooper realizes that stardom is not readily achieved. Once he hits rock bottom, Cooper looks back to his father’s words and up to God, both cast aside in his bid for stardom.

Whether portraying a soul-​shattering betrayal or a bittersweet reunion between lovers, Martin sustains a realistic yet hopeful atmosphere. Best of all is the heart-​wrenching relationship between Cooper and his father. 

A PROMISE OF HOME
What at first appears to be a story of childhood love is actually a tale of secrecy, sacrifice and family. Chris Fabry’s The Promise of Jesse Woods details a life-changing summer. In 1972, new to the town of Dogwood, West Virginia, pastor’s son Matt finds common ground with two other outcasts: Jesse Woods, a girl from a poor family, and Dickie Darrel Lee Hancock, a mixed-race boy. Matt forms a particularly quick bond with Jesse, whom he is determined to protect, no matter the personal cost. A serious trauma severs Matt and Jesse’s friendship, and after years of silence, he must return to understand what else was lost that summer.

Matt’s strong voice is rivaled only by Jesse’s resolve, and readers will cheer her fortitude. This poignant story is worth the heartache: Complex and layered, The Promise of Jesse Woods goes beyond a youthful promise to center on a bond renewed by a desire for truth.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.