On the surface, Beatriz Perez is a gorgeous 22-year-old society woman gliding through a cycle of parties, gossip and marriage proposals along with the other moneyed elite in 1960s Palm Beach, Florida. But beneath her cool exterior burns a pure, sharp desire for revenge. In Chanel Cleeton’s When We Left Cuba, we learn that Beatriz and her family (including sister Elisa, protagonist of Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana) left Cuba after Fulgencio Batista was overthrown, Fidel Castro took power and her sugar-magnate father’s land was seized by the government. 

The Perezes moved to Palm Beach in hopes of finding a sense of safety, rebuilding the family fortune and, to Beatriz’s unending frustration, marrying off the unwed daughters. She has much bigger plans—like, say, taking down Castro so she can go home to her beloved Cuba. Thanks to her still-privileged social position and her strong bond with Eduardo, a family friend and revolutionary, she’s actually got a chance at doing so. Eduardo introduces her to a CIA agent who sees her as a good bet: She’s fierce and smart, anger has made her reckless, and her social status gives her plausibility.

But there’s a complicating factor. Beatriz and Nicholas—a smart, sexy senator-to-be—meet at a fancy party, and their chemistry is immediate and electric. Alas, he’s engaged, an arrangement orchestrated by two families that want political and financial benefits from the union. Beatriz and Nicholas understand each other on that level and so many others, from the political to the personal to the physical. But amid the aftermath of war and continued upheaval in the U.S. and Cuba, plus divergent views on how best to achieve their goals, being together often feels impossible.

An edifying, entertaining read filled with adventure, suspense, history and romance, When We Left Cuba is a thought-provoking look at the ways in which politics can be intensely personal.

In 1968, the town of Hometown, Australia, is perplexed by Hannah Babel and her survival of Auschwitz, her Jewishness and her books. Tom Hope finds her especially entrancing. Tom’s wife, Trudy, has left him and taken her son, Peter, a boy who is not Tom’s biological child but is in every sense beloved as his own.

Tom, a farmer and tradesman, is smitten with Hannah and also a bit confused by her. This erudite Hungarian woman keeps a pet bird named David and wants to open a bookshop in the less-than-bibliophilic Hometown. Her goal—to sell 25,000 books, the same number of books burned by German students in Berlin in 1933—defines her as potentially mad but also enthralling.

Tom and Hannah find the spark of redemption in each other. Their individual suffering draws them together, yet interrupts their intimacy. The horror of Auschwitz is not something Tom understands; those horrifying events occurred a world away from his life in Australia. Hannah doesn’t want to burden him either, so as their connection grows, she must face the vows she made not to be a wife or mother again.

In The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, Robert Hillman’s observations are astute and thoughtful as he captures the slightest mood shift and nuance of personality. The inner workings of his finely tuned and memorable characters come to life in his open, honest style of writing. In particular, Hannah’s voice carries both the sorrow of the tragedies she’s lived through and a childlike glee when she finds something marvelous. Her pursuit of beauty—despite it all—inspires.

“God lets us love,” a character observes late in the novel. The broken hearted can be healed. Fractures, even of the heart, can be set. As it says in the book of Joel in the Old Testament, the years the locusts have eaten can be restored.

Recent bestselling nonfiction books by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan suggest that psychedelic drugs are poised to once again transform the zeitgeist. Could it be that we’re about to re-enter that buoyant experimental phase in which we look to psychedelics to unlock our spiritual and psychological prisons?

T.C. Boyle’s captivating 17th novel, Outside Looking In, takes the reader back to a similar moment in the early 1960s when LSD emerged from Timothy Leary’s and Richard Alpert’s experimental psychology labs at Harvard to quickly become the fuel for the transcontinental party bus of novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—after which tripping became the coming-of-age ritual of a generation. The novel follows the well documented history of Tim, Dick and a coterie of grad students and followers as they travel—prodded along by frowning academic and legal authorities—from Harvard to Mexico to a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, north of New York City.

At its center is the fictional Loney family. Fitzhugh, “Fitz,” is a psychology grad student who has drawn Leary as his academic adviser; Fitz’s wife, Joanie, dropped out of college to support his career and have their child, Corey, now in his teens. They, especially Fitz, are outsiders at first. But they move into the group’s inner circle and experience the magic of its experiment along with its fraying edges.

Boyle, who apparently had his own days of wild and weird, is insightful and sometimes humorous in depicting the allure and chaos of attempting to live communally under the egocentric leadership of Timothy Leary, expand the individual and group mind through psychedelics, find God or not, and go deep into spiritual and physical love with people who are not necessarily legal partners. The novel vividly conveys what was seductively tactile, profound and sometimes scary about this moment in time.

But in the end, Outside Looking In offers a cautionary tale. A contemporary reader will wonder, for example, why in this communal paradise is it only women who cook and clean? And more importantly, after the party, what comes next?

With a title like Cherokee America, one might expect to read a grand, sweeping epic in the vein of Dances with Wolves or Gone with the Wind. And in the hands of Margaret Verble, who previously penned the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud’s Line, such expectations certainly make sense. But while Verble delivers an impressive, historical saga of Native American life in the mid-19th century, it comes on a much more intimate and narrower scale.

Set shortly after the Civil War in 1875, the novel revolves around Check Singer and her journey from Tennessee to Cherokee land in Oklahoma. The story also follows her extensive family, including her ailing, bedridden husband, Andrew, and their five children—Connell, Hugh, Clifford, Otter and Paul, ranging from school-aged to grown up—as well as their hired help, assorted friends and neighbors. Check’s mission throughout is simply getting through the day with only a modicum of trouble, but with the ready admission that “trouble breeds trouble.”

Trouble, of course, arrives right away when one of the hired hands on her sprawling potato farm, a black man named Puny, learns he is the father of a child through an illicit affair. The child is born “bad sick” and doesn’t have long to live when Check brings it to Puny. The child, after its death, is buried in a potato farm in an attempt to keep it hidden from Puny’s wife, Ezell, a secret that doesn’t last very long.

Puny and one of Check’s boys, Hugh, get into further trouble later at a brothel where Hugh is shot in the leg, prompting an investigation by the sheriff. At the same time, rumors surface of buried Confederate gold somewhere on the property, while racial tensions escalate between the black, white and native peoples in the community. Check balances it all without ever losing her control, providing calm, wisdom and discipline in the face of cultural, societal and physical hurdles.

Cherokee America meanders quite a bit due to its impressive cast and multiple storylines, taking its time to explore each’s feelings and tribulations, but Verble keeps Check at its grounded center. Readers shouldn’t expect to fly through these pages at breakneck speed, but rather enjoy a more leisurely pace that will leave them wholly immersed in Check’s world.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this review incorrectly described Puny as burying the baby in the potato farm. 

BookPage starred review, February 2019

To tell a good tale, you need drama—and in this area, Bowlaway spares no expense. A turn-of-the-20th-century candlepin bowling alley works its way into people’s lives and under their skin in Elizabeth McCracken’s sixth book. 

After she seems to materialize in a cemetery in Salford, Massachusetts, Bertha Truitt opens Truitt’s Alleys (later rechristened Bowlaway), which takes on a life as mysterious as her own. Bertha’s oddities are numerous: bicycling in a split skirt, building an octagonal house named Superba high on a hill, marrying a black doctor named Leviticus Sprague and then letting women bowl in full view of spectators. The whole being of Bertha scandalizes and perplexes. When Bertha is struck down in a bewildering accident that evokes (for this reader, anyhow) a scene from the fantastic but short-lived sitcom “Pushing Daisies,” her death sets the lives of those in her orbit spinning.

“Our subject is love because our subject is bowling,” McCracken’s narrator opines early in the novel. The love in Bowlaway takes many forms: love of a spouse, love of a child, love of self and love of a capricious game. People love the alleys; they hate the alleys; they keep coming back to the alleys. Bowlaway forms the linchpin in the lives of an eccentric cast, from Bertha’s disconsolate widower to Joe Wear, the young watchman who first found Bertha in the cemetery. Joe becomes manager before an unexplained disappearance, but his fate is intertwined with Bertha’s and the bowling alley, no matter how long he stays away from the lanes.

In Bowlaway, McCracken’s prose is well-tooled, hilarious and tender, thoughtful and jocular. Her characters inhabit their world so completely, so bodily, that they could’ve truly existed. Her detailed observations make the bizarre seem plausible, and always enjoyable.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage starred review, February 2019

It’s shocking to imagine that, while remarkably successful in its time, The Wizard of Oz now ranks more than 2,000 slots below Garfield: The Movie in terms of domestic gross revenue. And while MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer insisted that he was in the business of making money rather than magic, bestselling author Elizabeth Letts’ latest novel, Finding Dorothy, uncovers both in abundance on the set of the 1939 film.

In some ways reminiscent of Jerry Stahl’s excellent I, Fatty, Letts’ Finding Dorothy combines exhaustive research with expansive imagination, blending history and speculation into a seamless tapestry. It’s true that Oz author L. Frank Baum’s widow spent time with Judy Garland on set. And it’s from this point of departure—California, not Kansas—that Letts leads us down a parallel pair of yellow brick roads. One traverses the courtship, marriage and adult life of Maud Gage Baum, suffragette’s daughter and modern woman. She became the wife of a dreamer, a man not always financially successful but deeply committed to providing for his family and madly in love with his wife. The second road takes us into the golden age of Hollywood, where fate and opportunity conspire to make Judy Garland a superstar. Maud arrives on set to try to ensure that her husband’s vision is preserved, but she realizes that the more immediate task at hand is to take Dorothy/Judy—their identities in many ways inseparable at this point—under her wing. 

It’s a testament to Letts’ skill that she can capture on the page, without benefit of audio, that same emotion we have all felt sometime over the last 80 years while listening to “Over the Rainbow”: “Maud knew, right then, that Judy had done it. She had captured the magic that Frank had put into his story, sucked it from the air and breathed it back out through her vocal cords. Maud felt in her heart that Frank must have been listening.”

Let’s see some smug, wisecracking Hollywood cat do that.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

England after World War II was a grim place, and the winter of 1947 was one of the nastiest Britain had seen, which is saying something. The major cities, especially London, had been bombed to smithereens by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. There was still rationing of fuel to heat tiny rooms, and even soap and potatoes were scarce. The one bright spot was the upcoming wedding of the heiress presumptive to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Then, as now, the royals gave good value in troubled times.

Jennifer Robson’s latest novel focuses on three women, with a few men and glimpses of royalty on the side. Ann Hughes is an embroiderer at the salon of Norman Hartnell, couturier to the royal ladies and designer of the princess’s wedding gown. Ann considers herself a plain girl that no one would notice. Her roommate and friend Miriam Dassin, another embroiderer, is a French émigré who arrived in London with a recommendation from Christian Dior in hand. She’s also a Jew and a Holocaust survivor, something she reveals but sparingly; this was a time and place when anti-Semitism was casual even after the Nazis had been routed.

Both women live to great old age, and when Ann finally dies, she leaves a box of embroidered flowers to her Canadian granddaughter, Heather. Heather has no idea why she’s received the box, or that Ann worked for Norman Hartnell and helped put together the royal wedding ensemble. Ann never spoke of her life in England or her friendship with Miriam, now a world-famous artist—why?

Robson, bestselling author of Somewhere in France, makes the reader eager to find out Ann’s secret. Ultimately, it’s one of those things you see coming, and yet you hope you’re mistaken. Did Queen Elizabeth know what Ann went through to make her wedding gown? Of course not. Nor does Heather. But Ann does the British thing: stiffens her upper lip and soldiers on.

The Gown is an inspiring story about strength, resilience and creativity.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.