The Works Progress Administration of the 1930s and ’40s was a savior for American artists. Those meager checks alleviated financial concerns enough that the artists could pay rent and spend their off-hours drinking, cavorting and exploring their artistic passions.

For Alizée Benoit, that driving passion is abstract painting. And the opinionated Alizée—French by birth, all-American by spirit—isn’t one to keep her head down at work. As her interest in abstraction grows, Alizée persuades Eleanor Roosevelt to allow WPA artists room to break from realism. 

In the present day, Alizée’s great-niece, Dani Abrams, works in an auction house. One day, several squares of an abstract painting arrive, tucked into envelopes that were taped to the back of paintings that may be works by Alizée’s friends. Dani is certain these squares are part of her mysterious aunt’s oeuvre, and she dives into research, in direct defiance of her boss’ wishes. The only member of a Jewish family to escape Europe, Alizée disappeared in 1940, and Dani can’t help but wonder if something nefarious occurred.

In The Muralist, novelist B.A. Shapiro deftly layers American art history, the facts of World War II and the fictitious stories of Alizée and Dani. As was the case with her previous book, the bestseller The Art Forger, Shapiro’s understanding of art is clear. Also like that 2012 tale, The Muralist is a compelling mystery. But even though The Art Forger  was a smashing success, readers should be prepared for something different here: The Muralist elevates Shapiro to an even higher plane and is sure to be a crowning touch in an already celebrated career.

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

If James Joyce can devote an entire novel to one day in the life of the people of Dublin, why can’t Homer Hickam devote a novel to the delivery of Albert the alligator to Florida? Especially when that journey treats readers to labor strikes, car chases, hijinks on the high seas, Hollywood movies and a fateful hurricane—not to mention cameo appearances by literary competitors John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Add to this a rooster perched imperturbably on Albert’s head, and you have the makings of an intentionally improbable, bizarre trip through Southern Americana that is a tall tale blend of fact and fiction.

Homer Hickam Sr., father to the author, is a coal miner from West Virginia. His wife, Elsie, is an aspiring writer and friend to God’s scalier creations. They decide that Albert should be restored to his proper habitat and embark on a journey south. Along the way, they are derailed by the unlikeliest of misadventures, but ones that bring the estranged couple closer together.

Carrying Albert Home is set in the early 20th century, when the coal mines of Appalachia were a focal point of American radicalism, when Mother Jones prowled the hills and mine workers fought pitched battles with the owners of company towns. America’s various Red Scares and concessions by capitalists and governments alike have erased much of this history, but Hickam reminds us that there was once a formidable and violent opposition to capital in the US of A.

But that’s about as serious as Hickam gets. The novel is mostly a lark or a farce, an amalgam of fact and an almost Walter Mitty-esque degree of fancy, evoking (because of the deadly yet indispensable animal) Life of Pi and (because of the trope of life as journey) Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, it might appeal most to younger readers, for whom the recurring joke that nearly every character seems to think Albert is a crocodile, only to be mildly corrected by Homer, will never get old.

The poignant parts for adults, however, will be the interstitial chapters, reminiscent of Hemingway’s In Our Time, when Hickam writes about the real Homer and Elsie, his late parents. In these spare and sad vignettes of two beloved real-life characters, Hickam provides epiphanies that at times approach those of Joyce, that clairvoyant of the dead.

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

In novels like Year of Wonders, People of the Book and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March, Geraldine Brooks has demonstrated an ability to transform history into compelling, distinctive fiction. That talent is undiminished in The Secret Chord, a vivid re-creation of the life of King David.

Anyone even passingly familiar with the Hebrew Bible’s account of David’s life in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles knows the highlights: the slaying of Goliath, the unifying of the Israelites after the death of King Saul and his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, the mother of King Solomon. But the achievement of Brooks’ narrative, channeled principally through the perceptive eye and voice of the prophet Natan, is to create a David who is much more than the traditional brave warrior, powerful ruler and singer of psalms.

Marked by fratricide, attempted parricide, bloody hand-to-hand combat and ceaseless political intrigue, the energy of Brooks’ novel rarely flags. “Whatever it takes. What was necessary,” was David’s guiding principle as Natan describes it, and that credo is reflected in both the decisiveness and ruthlessness of Brooks’ character. David’s path to power and his rule were notable for great achievements and great sadness. Especially poignant is the fourfold retribution he endures after Natan, through a parable, forces him to face his duplicity in dispatching Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, to certain death in battle. 

One aspect of Brooks’ novel that likely will spark controversy is her frank claim that the deep affection between David and Jonathan, Saul’s son, was anything but platonic, and was what Natan calls “a love so strong that it flouted ancient rule.” The biblical evidence supporting this view has been vigorously debated, and Brooks’ assertion hardly will resolve those arguments.

But none of this would matter if Brooks were not so adept at deploying the skills of the novelist to explore the traditional concerns of serious fiction, like character and motivation. She does so in language resonant of biblical diction and imagery, while approaching that time with the benefit of modern psychological insight. The Secret Chord may send some readers back to the biblical account of David’s life, and when they return to it, they will see that story with fresh eyes. 

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

Clare Clark’s novel of the dislocations that befall an aristocratic English family during and right after World War I is beautifully written and enjoyable, but the reader has to wonder if it would have been published had we not been living in the age of “Downton Abbey.” Of course it might have, as the popular TV show has plenty of collateral ancestors of its own: Think Brideshead Revisited and those nice books by Nancy Mitford. Still, the full name of one of the characters of We That Are Left includes the name Crawford. It’s not Crawley, but it’s close enough for jazz, as they say.

Other parallels include the noble title and the great old estate that comes with it, both slated to be passed on to a distant cousin—though in this case there are very interesting twists. There’s the feckless head of the family who has, like his fathers before him, mismanaged the place to the point that the death duty taxation will make it unsustainable. There’s the sister who becomes a wartime nurse and the sister who may be good, but is not at all nice. One nod to Brideshead is that part of the story is seen through the eyes of an outsider. That would be Oskar, an Anglo-German math and science prodigy who’s in love first with one sibling, then the other.

But Clark’s novel does its forebears proud, for We That Are Left is engrossing. As in her acclaimed debut, The Great Stink, the characters are vivid and her feel for place is equally superb; the reader experiences the sourness of a London fog, the chill of English rain, the play of light on hair and skin and stone. Clark also seems to know every inch of Cambridge University as well as the arcana of the British system of higher learning. Her sense of humor is as dry as the Queen’s gin and tonic: Consider the banter between one of the sisters and her creepy, aging suitor/boss, or disenchanted Oskar’s fixation on the pimple growing on his former crush’s chin during a soirée.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a tale of the British upper crust without tangled, tormented, transgressive love affairs and buried family secrets. Clark joins a long line of writers who show us that the myth of the British stiff upper lip is indeed just that.

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

Tom Piazza’s new novel is a crisply told tale of race relations in Philadelphia a few years before the Civil War, one that brings into sharp relief the tensions that beset Northern society even as it was about to go to war to rid the nation of slavery.

When minstrel show performer and entrepreneur James Douglass encounters Henry Sims, playing his banjo for appreciative listeners on a Philadelphia street, he’s more concerned with the boost the talented young escaped slave will give his foundering show and the legal and practical obstacles to presenting him on stage than he is with the irony of inviting a black man to participate in a performance that holds those of his race up to ridicule. As Piazza portrays it, minstrel shows were among the era’s most popular entertainments, performed before audiences whose bigotry was every bit as entrenched as the most benighted Southerners.

It’s only when James comes face-to-face with the vicious slave hunter Tull Burton, relentlessly tracking Henry from his escaped home in Virginia, that he understands the high stakes in the game he has naively undertaken. The narrative of this fast-paced novel goes up a notch as James finds himself struggling to conceal Henry from discovery by his fellow performers while attempting to keep him out of Burton’s hands.

Piazza is never heavy-handed in dealing with the obvious moral ambiguities inherent in James’ decision to participate in minstrel shows, even as his protagonist eventually understands he and his colleagues were “complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see.” Not until James witnesses the depth of Burton’s malevolence is he impelled to action that will redeem him while giving Henry a chance at freedom. 

Readers familiar with Solomon Northup’s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, may discern faint echoes of that story in A Free State. But apart from a couple of graphic scenes of Burton’s brutality and glimpses of the casual cruelty of the slave owners, Piazza is more interested in telling a story that will have thoughtful readers slipping into James’ shoes and asking themselves: What would I have done?

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

The passage that hooked this reviewer came early in Ivan Doig’s delightful sprawl of a novel. It was that song about “great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts,” sung on a bus by obnoxious little boys off to summer camp. Having not heard that song in years and years, it simply warmed my heart. How could this book not be a keeper?

Last Bus to Wisdom is told by an orphan. He’s Donal Cameron, a Montana boy who is 11 years old in 1951. The flinty grandmother who raised him after his parents were killed needs an operation. This means Donny needs to go live with Gram’s somewhat estranged sister in Wisconsin. To do this he has to go Greyhound or, as they said back in the day, ride the dog bus. Having ridden the dog bus fairly frequently over the years, this reviewer braced herself for a horror story. Instead, Doig treats the reader to a panoply of folk who may or may not be down on their luck, but are still decent—most of them—for all that. Donny even runs into the not-yet-famous Jack Kerouac at one point. But that comes later.

Donny’s stay with his aunt Kate and her German-born husband, Herman, is a mixed blessing. Kate, so sweet of voice and broad of girth that the boy believes for a time that she’s the singer Kate Smith, is actually a muumuu-wearing termagant. But he’s saved by Herman, or, more precisely, the two save each other. Herman is just as put upon by “the Kate” as Donny; a man-child and a child-man, they end up on the lam together, eventually arriving in Wisdom, Montana. On the way, there are hobos and pow-wows and rodeos, the sights and sounds of the West and all kinds of good and bad luck.

Doig, the author of 16 books about the West, died earlier this year. In his final novel, he has great fun with both his characters and their slangy, inventive and often ribald ways of speech: “Holy wow!” is one of Donny’s favorite phrases. The other one can’t be repeated in a family publication. Last Bus to Wisdom is a big-hearted, joyfully meandering work by a master.

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

Atmospheric, moody and evocative—these words describe Alice Hoffman’s latest achievement, The Marriage of Opposites. And that is no accident, because they also accurately describe the 19th-century artistic movement known as Impressionism, founded by Camille Pissarro, the third son Rachel Pomié bore to her second husband, Frédérick. (Altogether, Rachel had nine children, an accomplishment for any heroine, but Rachel is a strong character.)

Hoffman tells the story of the painter’s life through the drama of his mother’s concerns. The story takes place first on the island of St. Thomas, where Rachel is caught up in the drama of her scandalous second marriage and the troubles facing her best friend, Jestine. Later, the family (or some of it) returns to their home country of France, a long-held dream for these French-Jewish exiles. 

One would think that after 30-odd books, Hoffman might have exhausted her glossary, but The Marriage of Opposites is a treasure trove of expression, color on color and emotion on emotion. Fittingly for a book about an artist, color is never far from the spotlight. Pissarro is “greedy for all the color in the world,” and remembers November on the island, when “the dusk sifted down like black powder.” Nature claims its fair share of the vocabulary—trees and birds and hills—and Hoffman seems always up to the task of freshly describing the latest artistic excitement.

Doing justice to the individuals in her tale is harder to accomplish—being real people, they must be unmistakably specific, sometimes in off-putting ways. Still, somehow Hoffman manages this as well, spinning a fresh tale of human error and achievement. This subject has found the right author at the right time, and no one who reads this story will forget it.

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

If someone were to recommend a funny novel about the London Blitz, you might think either that the person was joking or that such a book could only be tasteless and disrespectful. In some cases you’d be right, but in the case of Crooked Heart, British author Lissa Evans’ American debut, you’d be in for a pleasant surprise. Evans has written an amusing tale about morally compromised characters that, in the midst of its comedy, asks whether morally wrong actions are justified in a time of unspeakable horror. 

In the novel’s prologue, children are being evacuated from London, including from 10-year-old Noel Bostock’s area of Hampstead. Noel lives with his godmother, Mattie, a former suffragette who has been jailed five times and who resists the advice to send Noel away because, as she puts it, since when has she ever listened to the government? But when Mattie dies in the bombing, Noel is sent to live in the suburbs with Vera “Vee” Sedge, a 36-year-old widow. Cash-strapped Vee isn’t a woman with a heart of gold. She’s a con artist who spots a moneymaking opportunity when Noel, “the limping creature” with a polio-damaged leg, moves in: She borrows a collection box from a Sunday School, covers up the writing on the side, takes Noel door to door and pretends to raise funds for such charities as the Spitfire Fund and Dunkirk Widows and Orphans.

That Noel accompanies her in this scheme is one of many unexpected twists in Crooked Heart. He and Vee aren’t the only confidence tricksters in the book. Another is Donald, Vee’s son, whose heart murmur has not only rendered him unfit for service but also provided yet another way to make money. 

It doesn’t spoil the story to reveal that everyone’s plans go awry. The unforeseen consequences give the book its narrative momentum. The tension flags at times, especially in sections focusing on Donald, but Crooked Heart is still an entertaining and poignant English comedy of bad manners.

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

Janis Cooke Newman, author of Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln, once again brings history to life with her sophomore novel, A Master Plan for Rescue. Here, Newman explores New York City as World War II percolates across the Atlantic. Her remarkable novel is filled with stories within stories that recall the superhero serials that its gifted 12-year-old, Jack Quinlan, wholeheartedly believes in. 

Like Anthony Doerr in All the Light We Cannot See, Newman renders this time with subtle magic and cinematic grace notes, and intertwines the lives of two very different protagonists. Jack meets a young Jewish immigrant who is capable of fixing any machine, but unable to save what’s most important to him—and who has his own story to tell. The two band together with a group of eclectic sidekicks to develop a plan to save Jewish lives across the ocean.

Newman folds an array of narrative voices into one another throughout this finely polished novel. The leaps made from one protagonist’s tale to another build a grand story about deception, truth and storytelling—all while maintaining a perfect balance of plot and ideas. Newman crafts characters and period details that show an enormous amount of research without ever feeling overwhelming. Messages are often sent in secret—whether it be from a serial inspired “code-o-graph” or from a rooftop pigeon coop—but what is clear is that as filled with heartbreak as A Master Plan for Rescue is, it is also gorgeously hopeful.

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