It is 1854, and Mexican singer Julia Pastrana is making her way to New Orleans to seek her fortune. Raised by an old nun after being abandoned by her mother, she has a good voice, is a decent dancer and speaks three languages. But her most singular feature is her thick black hair, which covers her entire body. Her strong jaw gives her an even more ape-like appearance.

Invited to join a traveling sideshow, Julia travels from city to city, remaining veiled in public between shows so as not to cause a panic. She’s billed as Troglodyte of Ancient Days, the Ugliest Woman in the World and Mujer Osa (Lady Bear). Audiences around first America and then Europe are captivated—they don’t know whether to be horrified or charmed by this intelligent, well-spoken woman who looks something other than human.

“She was the most extraordinary being that had ever existed on the face of this ridiculous earth,” author Carol Birch writes of Julia, a real-life historical figure. “Everyone said so. They wanted to see her, they wanted to meet her, everyone came, the great, the good, the scared, bewitched, bewildered, the willing and unwilling. And they paid.”

Julia is managed by Theo Lent, a down-on-his luck showman who eventually, improbably, falls in love with her. But even after they marry, he can’t quite get over his shame, writhing with discomfort at what others must think of him, the man who sleeps with an ape.

Orphans of the Carnival is a strange, transfixing novel. The gorgeously written story moves between Julia’s story and 1980s London, where a depressed woman named Rose is stockpiling (one might say hoarding) found objects in her small flat, to the dismay of those who love her. She picks up a small, burned-looking doll that she names Tattoo, whose bittersweet significance is not revealed until the very end of the novel.

“Am I human?” Julia asks a fortune-teller. “It’s possible to be human and not know it,” the woman replies. Orphans of the Carnival is about how we can find humanity in all fellow creatures, which is surely a message worth pondering now more than ever.

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

Martin Cruz Smith, who has been called “the master of the international thriller” by the New York Times, departs from his usual modus operandi to put an old-fashioned romance at the heart of his latest suspense novel.

Cenzo is an Italian fisherman who spends his nights trolling the lagoons of Venice for cuttlefish, sole and sea bass. It’s the waning days of World War II, and Allied bombers often pass over his fishing boat, headed for Turin, Milan or Verona. Venice is still occupied by the Nazis, who seem to be unaware of the hopelessness of their cause and still doggedly pursue their enemies, especially any Jews still in hiding. One morning, it isn’t fish that Cenzo finds in his nets, but a young woman: Giulia, an Italian Jew who is fleeing the German SS squad that killed members of her family.

Cenzo, who has lost both a brother and wife to the war, impulsively decides he must do whatever he can to keep Giulia out of the hands of the Nazis. That decision leads him down a potentially dangerous path, as Venice is in a chaotic state at war’s end. Nazis, Fascists and various partisan groups are lurking around every corner, trying to establish themselves before the end finally arrives.

Smith blends this glimpse into Italy’s past with a charming story of the love that grows between the poor fisherman with little hope for change in his future and a young woman raised in one of Venice’s wealthiest families. Though it lacks the tension levels of his Arkady Renko thrillers, The Girl from Venice is an enlightening look at the chaos of Italy at the end of World War II, enlivened by a romance taken straight from the pages of a fairy tale.

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

Like so many male genius-types, Albert Einstein’s behavior toward at least one woman who supported him was revolting. Fortunately, Marie Benedict’s tragic, crisply told novel isn’t about Albert, but about his Serbian, almost-as-brilliant first wife, Mileva Marić, who narrates it. The two met at Zurich Polytechnic as students in 1896, embarked on a passionate affair and launched a turbulent, 13-year marriage in 1903.

To be blunt, Benedict’s exploration of this unfortunate woman’s life makes you mad, and that’s probably the point. What really burns one up isn’t reading page after page about how ill-used Marić was by her philandering husband, or how thoroughly he derailed her career and life, but the knowledge that this story isn’t entirely a relic of the past. Somewhere in the world—yes, even in the United States of America in the year 2016—there is another young woman like Mileva Marić, whose promising future is crushed by domesticity and an ambitious, selfish partner.

At least, the way this story unfolds in The Other Einstein, Marić has the wisdom to dump Einstein before he dumps her. But even that scene isn’t a moment of feminist triumph. Worn out from years of childbearing and housekeeping, Marić becomes a single mom with few prospects, burdened by the stigma of divorce. 

Benedict does take liberties with her story: The Other Einstein is a novel and not a biography. Her speculations on how much Marić contributed to her husband’s work and what happened to their first child, born before their marriage and lost to history in the real world, are thought-provoking, if unable to be substantiated. There’s no doubt this is a novel that will inspire strong emotion in its readers. And it carries a warning: Hold on to your dreams, and find someone who’ll support them even as you support theirs. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Marie Benedict on The Other Einstein.

Lucy is 16 and in love. There’s nothing but possibility ahead. That is, if she can first break free of a world in which her love is forbidden.

You see, Lucy’s boyfriend is her 30-something high school English teacher, William. Lucy never thought she showed much promise until William’s class. Her older sister, Charlotte, is the smart one of the pair. Lucy is—you guessed it—the pretty one.

But William helps Lucy with her writing, and she begins to recognize her own greatness. And his. So when William proposes they flee their lives in Boston and go off the grid, Lucy is all in. In only two years, her love will no longer be scandalous. Surely she can make it that long without Charlotte and their adopted mother, Iris.

The seams of William and Lucy’s stitched-together existence show quickly. Although he’s found another teaching job, William keeps Lucy far from the school to avoid suspicion. She writes at home, but she longs to get her GED so she can find a job. To William, that’s a warning sign. Why isn’t their relationship enough? Can’t she be patient? She can’t risk outing their love and sending him to prison.

Masterful novelist Caroline Leavitt sets Lucy and William’s story in 1969, when the tension of Vietnam and the Charles Manson murders whirl around them. As Lucy follows the Manson case, she views her relationship through a different lens. Is William everything she thought? Or is there someone more sinister beneath his insistence that she stay home and devoted to him? As in her previous bestselling novels (including Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow), Leavitt engages the reader by avoiding simple answers.

Life isn’t straightforward, and the lives of William, Lucy, Charlotte and Iris carry their own secrets and surprises. Gripping and suspenseful, Cruel Beautiful World will leave the reader pondering who, exactly, these people are—and perhaps, how thoroughly we can understand any individual.

The bored, bourgeois housewife going off the reservation has a long pedigree in literature. Emma Bovary is perhaps the canonical example. It didn't end well for her. And it's not clear that it ends well for the protagonist of Stephanie Bishop's The Other Side of the World.

Said protagonist is Charlotte, wife to an Anglo-Indian egghead named Henry. She follows him to Australia from England to escape the country's dismal winters. Or so she tells herself. But she's no sooner off the boat than she develops a repulsion to the land down under. She seems to mind being a wife and mother even more. Why then did she marry and have children? She knows even less than we. But this was the mid-1960s, when women who had been channeled into traditional roles were beginning to chafe at them.

Rather like Charles Bovary, Henry is nice but dull, romantic but somewhat self-centered. He is too preoccupied with work to notice his wife's wandering eyes. They land on Nicholas, who appreciates Charlotte's aspirations in the visual arts. Her art is the only thing keeping her sane, until it isn't. When Henry's mother in India nears death, he shoves off to Delhi to tend to her. This leaves Charlotte to consider her next, quite surprising move.

The Other Side of the World is as much about a kind of free-floating restlessness as it is about a failing marriage. By virtue of his skin color, Henry doesn't fit in anywhere. Charlotte can't seem to be content anywhere, or with anything. She seems to love her children only in a rather instinctual sense. But she's ready at any moment to abandon them. Henry, meanwhile, is a study in Faust-like futility, laboring over an academic treatise. He longs for India; then he longs for "ordinary suburban boredom.”

This rather suffocating feeling of pointlessness ends up dominating the novel. The Other Side of the World could have been a tired reprise of the Bovary morality tale. Instead it becomes more like Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin or Jhumpa Lahiri. That is, it becomes a powerful manifesto of liberation. Not happiness, just liberation. Happiness is more complicated. Just ask Flaubert's Emma.

Poet and novelist Paulette Jiles’ latest book is once again set in the post-Civil War era, a time that she memorably evoked in previous works like The Color of Lightning. News of the World is a beautifully written story based on a real-life former soldier, Capt. Jefferson Kidd, who traveled the north Texas landscape in the 1870s reading the news—from politics to polar expeditions—to the inhabitants of small towns and frontier outposts who had no access to information outside their own limited environs.

In Wichita Falls, Capt. Kidd is approached by an old friend, Britt Johnson, for a favor. Johanna Leonberger was taken captive by the Kiowa after they killed her parents and sister. After four years with the tribe, she has been recovered. Britt asks the Captain to deliver the 10-year-old to her aunt and uncle outside San Antonio—a 400-mile journey fraught with danger from highwaymen, raiding Kiowa and the unforgiving landscape itself.

Jiles writes with great sensitivity about the bond that develops between the 70-year-old widower who has served in three wars and the girl who has completely forgotten her birth language, her parents, her people, her religion—even how to use a knife and fork. As their journey nears its end, Jiles conveys in sparse language the emotions of each of these perfectly drawn characters, building to a remarkable conclusion that will not soon be forgotten. News of the World is highly recommended historical fiction that brings to life an overlooked period of Texas history.

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

Is Emma Donoghue cultivating a new genre? Call it “emergency motherhood.” Like her 2010 bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s ninth novel features a woman whose existence is bent around the life, health and happiness of a child whose circumstances are desperate.

The Wonder is set in Catholic Ireland, just after the ravages of the potato famine. Little Anna O’Donnell has survived months without food, leading the townspeople to believe she is a miracle. Due to her fame, the diocese where she and her family live assigns a nurse and a nun to watch her around the clock. The nurse is Lib Wright, a British veteran of the Crimean War who was personally trained by Florence Nightingale. The nun is a shadow of a creature called Sister Michael. Anxiously watching and waiting are Anna’s parents.

Lib, a no-nonsense type, assumes something dodgy is going on. After months of nothing but spoonfuls of water, Anna should be dead. Then, under the eyes of Lib and the nun, Anna does begin to die in earnest. This prompts a battle between Lib and Anna’s mother: In Donoghue’s world, those who haven’t given birth—Lib had a baby who died in infancy—just don’t get it. Virginal Sister Michael and the servant girl are compassionate but befuddled. The men are useless. The conflict can only end in catastrophe. Or maybe, to use Tolkien’s word, a eucatastrophe.

Donoghue’s strength is the fierceness with which she approaches her subject matter, and The Wonder sometimes reaches Exorcist-level intensity as Lib and Mrs. O’Donnell contend over Anna’s body and soul. Suspenseful and compelling, the story will keep readers turning pages.

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

Robert Hicks’ sequel to his highly acclaimed Civil War novel The Widow of the South (2005) is a gripping tale of one strong and courageous woman’s quest to find those responsible for the murder of her only child.

Mariah Reddick had been a slave to Carrie McGavock—the widow in Hicks’ previous novel—since their childhoods. Now it’s the summer of 1867, and Mariah, also a widow, has her own small house in Franklin, Tennessee, near the dilapidated plantation where Carrie still lives. Renowned for her skill as a midwife, Mariah is thought of as “the mother of everyone in Franklin.”

Her son, Theopolis, born into slavery but now a respected member of the Colored League and frequent speaker at political rallies, is beaten and then shot at a rally that turns into a riot just after the novel opens. What should she call herself now, Mariah wonders, for it seems there is no word for the mother “left alone by the death of her only child.” She vows to “not go forward quietly,” but to fight to discover who was involved in the death of her son.

Not surprisingly, the white witnesses are not talking, but Mariah gradually speaks to as many blacks as she can find who were there that day, or who knew someone who was there, or who overheard snippets of conversations among the whites at work or in the local bars. She’s aided in her search for justice by George Tole, a lively character, new to town, who becomes an ally and confidant. When Mariah learns an investigative tribunal is coming from Nashville to look into the riot, she is fearful they won’t do anything at all. But she’s determined to at least make her case before them.

The Orphan Mother resonates with readers on many levels—as a compelling novel documenting the violent years of Reconstruction, as a heartfelt story of the inner strengths unearthed by a mother confronted with unspeakable sorrow, and as a memorable testament to friendships between young and old, male and female, black and white. The latter offers perhaps a ray of hope in these times of racial injustice we readers are still experiencing, 150 years after the events of this gripping and timely novel.

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

The depth of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people during and after World War II seems bottomless, never to be fully probed. In Mischling, the culmination of years of research, author Affinity Konar weaves an intensely emotional tale of sisters caught in the horrific experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele.

It’s 1944. Pearl and Stasha Zagorski, yellow-haired, brown-eyed, 12-year-old twins, are ushered through Auschwitz’s forbidding gates with their mother and grandfather. Because they are twins, the girls are singled out and sent to Mengele’s Zoo, along with other multiples and those with genetic mutations. There, Mengele both gives and takes life, affording his special subjects “privileges” such as extra food while injecting them and extracting from them at will. From caging his subjects and performing forced hysterectomies and abortions, to separating twins to study the effects of deprivation on the previously inseparable, the cruelty of the so-called “Angel of Death” is boundless. After months of sleeping next to Stasha in their narrow bunk, Pearl disappears from a concert Mengele arranges. 

Told in alternating chapters, Mischling portrays each girl’s unique expression of her experience. Stasha is the more impulsive and imaginative of the two, while Pearl’s thoughtful approach is more rational and measured. The brokenness they endure and their longing for one another are captured in painful detail, and Konar is unflinching in her portrayal of Mengele’s experiments. Glimmers of light in this darkness are faint but persistent, and the unspeakable horrors are tempered with some grace, namely in Dr. Miri, a Jewish doctor who tries to ease the children’s suffering.

Though Konar’s work is fiction, her research into historical figures and accounts helped form the key characters and episodes within it. Her writing bears a pointed edge, but also has a striking cadence that is often beautiful and poetic. Despite their deplorable circumstances, the twins preserve a 12-year-old’s mix of naïveté and developing awareness. The games, memories and fantasies they share propel Pearl and Stasha onward, to find each other and embrace the world again.

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