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.

Like a fast-moving thunderstorm across the Great Plains, The Bones of Paradise wastes little time establishing plot: Two people are found dead in the opening chapter. A white cattle rancher happens upon the fresh grave of a young Native-American woman. J.B. Bennett quickly determines that the woman, Star, has been murdered. But Bennett looks up to see someone he knows pointing a rifle, and feels a bullet pierce his chest. 

A gifted writer, Agee returns here to historical fiction, the genre that served her so well in her award-winning The River Wife. The Bones of Paradise is set in late 19th-century Nebraska in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where some 200 Lakota men, women and children were shot and killed by U.S. cavalry. The tension between the white settlers and the remaining tribal members, who often face discrimination, places a strain on the friendship between Dulcinea Bennett, J.B.’s widow, and Rose, Star’s sister. But the two women are united in their quest to find the killer . . . or killers.

Agee’s fast-paced narrative resembles the expansive prose of Larry McMurtry. Her lyrical writing and attention to detail evoke comparisons to Annie Proulx. There are biblical and Shakespearean echoes here as well: Dulcinea’s two sons recall Cain and Abel, and could somehow be involved in the murder; Dulcinea’s father-in-law, Drum, conjures images of a crazed King Lear. The Bones of Paradise is also a romance, with sparks between Dulcinea and a new hired hand—and of course, there’s that murder mystery. Agee deftly weaves all these plot lines together into a captivating tale of life—and death—in the old American West.

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

Despite the abundance of Massachusetts coastline that serves as a backdrop for Leaving Lucy Pear, readers should be warned that Anna Solomon’s novel has nothing in common with your typical summer beach read.

Solomon’s story begins in 1917, when Beatrice Haven—an unwed, albeit wealthy, young Jewish mother—makes the heartbreaking decision to abandon her infant daughter beneath a pear tree. The baby, named Lucy Pear, is quickly rescued by Emma Murphy, an impoverished Irish Catholic who already has her hands more than full trying to feed, clothe and care for a growing family of her own. Lucy is thrust into a world far removed from that of her birth family, but Solomon avoids clichés proclaiming the nobility and selflessness of the poor. Industrialists have grown rich on profits hewn from the broken bones and spirits of the working class, and Solomon’s nuanced story depicts the catastrophe that results when these two disparate spheres collide—both in the larger world, and through the lens of Lucy’s experience with the two women who love her.

Spanning the Great War and Prohibition and deftly delving into the social issues of the time, Leaving Lucy Pear is the perfect choice for readers who appreciate the rigor and richness of literary fiction.

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

British author Jessie Burton’s sophomore effort juggles two eras: 1960s London and central Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Like The Miniaturist (2014), The Muse focuses on a work of art that influences the lives around it. In this case, the work is a significant Spanish painting with a mysterious provenance that links the lives of three women over four decades. 

The 1960s narrator of The Muse is Odelle Bastien, originally from Trinidad and an aspiring writer trying to find her way in London. Lonely and underemployed in a shoe shop, she finds an unexpected mentor in Marjorie Quick, who not only hires her at the Skelton Institute of Art, but also supports her literary ambitions. 

In the parallel story, art dealer Henry Schloss has settled with his wife and 19-year-old daughter, Olive, in a small Spanish village outside of Malaga in 1936. Half siblings Isaac and Teresa Robles step in as handyman and maid for the wealthy family. Olive is drawn to Isaac, a painter swept up by the country’s revolutionary fervor. An artist herself, Olive has kept her talent a secret from her father. Olive persuades Isaac to present her work as his, and soon after, notable collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim are writing the young Spaniard. 

The two stories come together when Odelle’s boyfriend, Lawrie, shows up at the Skelton with a striking painting that belonged to his mother. The work is promoted by the gallery as a newly uncovered masterpiece by Isaac, but Odelle is disturbed by both Lawrie’s lack of honesty about his family and Marjorie’s panicked reaction to the painting. 

Though the details are intriguing, the plot wobbles a bit, and the otherwise determined Olive’s protests against claiming her work as her own don’t quite ring true. Still, Burton has a sure grasp on how ambition and revenge prove to be great motivators. The Muse proves an enjoyable read, especially for those interested in its inventive blend of art and history.

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

Rae Meadows’ latest novel, I Will Send Rain, plunges her readers into Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl from the very first pages: The Bell family is hunkered down in the two-room dugout Samuel carved out of the earth when he and Annie arrived 19 years earlier. It’s 1934, and Mulehead, Oklahoma, is being hit with its first dust storm—with many to follow. When Samuel and Annie and their children, Birdie, 15, and Fred, 8, emerge, they see the garden, the house, the wheat in the fields buried under feet of dust.

As the drought rolls on, families begin to disappear, defeated by both the lack of rain and the increasingly frequent dust storms. Samuel turns to religion. Convinced that God has a plan, he decides to build a boat—an ark that, like Noah’s, will bring them to safety when the deluge finally arrives. Annie, on the other hand, has given up on God. Irritated by Samuel’s obsession with his boat, she drifts into a flirtatious relationship with the town mayor.

The strength of Meadows’ novel lies with these sympathetic and carefully drawn characters, each one confronting this harsh reality in his or her own way. Regardless of how much readers know about the Dust Bowl, reading this thoroughly engaging and meticulously researched novel will make them feel as if they have experienced it themselves.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, August 2016

Magical realism may most frequently be associated with Latin-American literature, but Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child) has proven that the technique works equally well in novels set in distinctly chillier locales. Her second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, is a spellbinding tale of adventure that blends myth and historical fiction and takes readers into the heart of the untamed wilderness of the Alaskan frontier.

Told through private diary entries, newspaper clippings, government reports, personal letters and more, the patchwork-quilt narrative results in a fully immersive reading experience that draws readers deep into 19th-century Alaska. It’s 1885, and Lieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester has been asked by the U.S. government to travel north along the Wolverine River and survey the surrounding land and its peoples. Along with a small company of soldiers, Allen embarks on a grueling foray into an unforgiving terrain. His reports detail the harsh conditions the group experiences and are firmly grounded in this world; however, his journal and letters to his wife, Sophie, shed a different light on the events, describing encounters with the local indigenous people that have a decidedly supernatural bent. The deeper his team moves into the Alaskan backcountry, the more the wilderness exposes their own primal natures. Meanwhile, feeling stifled by the small-minded community back home, Sophie embarks on her own journey of self-discovery.

Filled with love, loss, grief and joy, To the Bright Edge of the World is a cracking adventure that pulses with emotional power and a brutal kind of beauty. Though the story is filled with tender correspondence between Allen and Sophie, the book itself stands as a love letter from Ivey to her home state: Even at their most harrowing, her descriptions of Alaska’s sweeping wilds are breathtaking and evocative. With rich prose, compelling characters and elegant storytelling, To the Bright Edge of the World brings history and folklore to life in a visceral and utterly beguiling way.

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

In 1835, Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos, aka the Enchanted Isles, prompting the theory of evolution by natural selection. By 1945, the likes of Adolf Hitler had perverted this theory in most horrific fashion. This coincidence of paradise with inferno underlies Allison Amend's absorbing third novel, Enchanted Islands.

Our narrator, Frances, is a Polish-American Jew telling her life story from the perspective of a 1960s nursing home. A native of Duluth, Minnesota, she spends her youth in Chicago and Nebraska, working as a farmhand and teacher.  By middle age, in San Francisco, she marries a spook named Ainslie Conway and follows him to Galapagos, which have strategic importance thanks to their proximity to the Panama Canal. Frances delights in the island's riches. The novel resembles others offering islands as places of escape, including Conrad's Victory or Alex Garland's The Beach.  But as usual in these works, someone shows up to dash the illusion. 

Frances Conway was a real person.  She and Ainslie wrote a memoir, The Enchanted Islands, that elided the cloak-and-dagger stuff.  Amend's spirited rendition of her life reads less like a memoir and more like Jane Austen.  It has acute interpersonal observations and subjective flights of fancy—not Gertrude Bell so much as Gertrude Stein.  Darwin and Hitler also haunt Enchanted Islands.  But the islands aren't enchanted so much as Conway is.

In 1897, Anita Hemmings was a senior at Vassar College alongside some of the best and brightest girls in the country. She was a member of the Glee Club and a fierce debater, but Hemmings also held a secret that should have banned her from admission: She was an African American. In The Gilded Years, Karin Tanabe fictionalizes the story of the real-life Hemmings, who graduated from Vassar more than 40 years before Vassar allowed African Americans to enroll. 

The daughter of a Boston janitor and the descendant of slaves, Hemmings was light complexioned enough to pass as white, and she was even voted class beauty. She kept a distance from her classmates, but in her senior year, Hemmings roomed with wealthy and well-connected Lottie Taylor. As she befriends the adventurous Lottie, Anita finds herself enjoying life as a privileged white woman. But when Lottie becomes infatuated with Anita’s brother, Anita’s secret faces a serious threat. 

A Vassar graduate, Tanabe first learned about Anita Hemmings from an article in the alumni magazine. This engaging novel, set in a time of conflict between old money and new ideas, captures both the bravery and the heartbreak of Anita’s decision. Though the writing at times lacks nuance, the story is a captivating one. Readers won’t soon forget Anita Hemmings or the choices she made.

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

With just one previous book under her belt, author Anton DiSclafani has already made a name for herself as a writer whose female protagonists dare to be different. Her debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, was a titillating coming-of-age tale set in a world of privilege in the 1930s South; it rocketed to the top of summer must-read lists and was one of the most buzzed-about bestsellers of 2013. Three years later, DiSclafani is poised to shake up summer reading once more with her second novel, The After Party.

In 1950s Houston, Texas, the champagne and martinis flow as freely as the oil that has made the River Oaks community so very wealthy. Our guide to the ins and outs of Houston’s social milieu is Cece Buchanan, best friend and confidante to Joan Fortier, the indisputable queen bee of the River Oaks scene. Even though it means standing in her shadow, Cece revels in her place by Joan’s side. She takes pride in being the only person who truly knows secretive Joan . . . or so she believes, until Joan disappears one day without a word. When she reappears a year later, Cece is ready to resume their friendship as though no time has passed. But as Joan’s signature wild behavior begins to morph into something more sinister, Cece won’t rest until she has uncovered whatever Joan is hiding.

The After Party is a scintillating journey into the world of the social elite that penetrates beyond manicured lawns and designer duds to expose the dysfunctions of the upper crust. But don’t dismiss this as a literary “Real Housewives of River Oaks”—DiSclafani delves deeper, thoughtfully exploring topics of female sexuality and empowerment, as well as the delicate dynamics of female friendship. Populated with complex and complicated characters and relationships, The After Party is an engrossing period drama.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with DiSclafani about The After Party.

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

In post-World War II Thirroul, Australia, Annika Lachlan has grown a life that, to her, is perfect. In the years since the war, she and her family have found peace and purpose. But when her husband, Mac, is killed in a tragic accident, she must raise their daughter on her own, as two more grieving people in the postwar world. Annika accepts a job at the Railway Institute’s Library, searching there between the pages for a new meaning for her life.

Local poet Roy McKinnon is also searching for meaning in pages and words; during the war, he was prolific, sorting through the high emotions of the time by penning lines. In the years since it ended, however, he has found himself unable to find his voice and the inspiration that came so easily in the chaotic years. Meanwhile, local doctor Frank Draper just wants things to go back to the way they were before the war, but is haunted by the people he couldn’t help, despite his efforts: survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

The Railwayman’s Wife is a three-pronged story that explores life, grief, and how to cope with the intersection of the two, written in a sweeping, if at times overly lyrical, style that conveys the breadth of emotions the characters feel. Brisbane-based author Ashley Hay has published four nonfiction books and the novel The Body in the Clouds, and The Railwayman’s Wife received the Colin Roderick Award when it was published in Australia. While exploring how three different people experience life after war and loss, The Railwayman’s Wife uses beautiful prose and empathetic characters to tell a story of both hope and heartache.