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.

One of the more ghastly aspects of the American Civil War was that it was really the first time that the young country was confronted with mass death. More than 600,000 people died in the war, a number that people couldn’t really wrap their minds around—and the government offered no rituals or protocols to deal with such carnage. Often, soldiers were simply buried in mass graves on or near the battlefields where they fell. Séances were the rage as bereaved friends and family members tried to contact the dead; even the Lincolns held séances at the White House. Added to this were millions of freed slaves who were desperate to reunite with loved ones, both those separated from them by war and those they were parted from by slavery.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s second novel, Balm, follows a group of refugees who meet in the bustling, reeking and bewildering city of Chicago. There’s Sadie, a young widow who lost her husband in the war and soon discovers she has the terrifying gift of being able to channel the dead. Madge, the fierce “root woman” healer, has come up north from Tennessee. Hemp, an ex-slave, has fled Kentucky to find his wife, Annie, who was sold away before the war—and also to find her daughter, whom he believes he wronged. Of all the characters, Hemp is the one most concerned with doing the right thing. Even as a slave, he waited for a preacher to properly marry him and Annie. When he and Madge meet in Chicago, he can’t give into her blandishments because he is a married man, even though he doesn’t know if Annie is alive.

Perkins-Valdez, author of the acclaimed 2010 novel Wench, has a genius for placing the reader in the postwar welter of a city and the quieter but no less troubled farms of the South. The reader wants the best for these wounded characters, and whatever happiness they find in the end is hard won. Balm doesn’t just apply to Madge’s potions, but to the comfort that comes from human connection.

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

Mazie Phillips-Gordon was a real person. Born in 1897, she ran the ticket booth at New York’s Venice Theater from 1916 to 1938. You may not think that’s such a big achievement, but then you probably haven’t read the Joseph Mitchell New Yorker essay about her that inspired Jami Attenberg’s entertaining new novel, Saint Mazie. In her younger days, Mazie was a good-time girl, drinking with the boys, hanging out with sailors, getting physical with sea captains in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and going to the track. But what a transformation: She eventually became a patroness of sorts to New York’s downtrodden. She doled out cash, food and cigarettes to the city’s homeless and drunks, including former bankers devastated along with millions of others by the Depression. Her largesse earned her the nickname “The Queen of the Bowery.”

Attenberg, whose last book was 2013’s The Middlesteins, structures this fictionalized homage mostly through entries in a diary that Mazie began when she was 10 and continued writing until the late 1930s. (She died in 1964.) Mazie moved to New York from Boston when her older sister, Rosie, and her brother-in-law, Venice Theater owner Louis Gordon, took her and her sister, Jeanie, far from the father who had cheated on their “simp” of a mother. Through these diary entries, we meet the characters who had the biggest influence on Mazie’s life.

The best thing about this novel is Mazie’s brassy, streetwise voice. She can’t understand why Rosie sees only the crime in the streets and not the “shimmering cobblestones in the moonlight” or the “floozies trying to sweet-talk their customers.” The book also includes Studs Terkel-like oral histories from people who knew or were related to Mazie’s acquaintances. Some of these histories are extraneous, but, otherwise, Saint Mazie is a fascinating portrait of early 20th-century New York and of an unlikely champion of the dispossessed.

Michael Magras is a writer living in southern Maine and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, June 2015

For the irrepressible 12-year-old heroine of The Truth According to Us, growing up in the sleepy West Virginia mill town of Macedonia at the height of the Great Depression proves to be anything but depressing.

Fans of Annie Barrows’ bestseller The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, co-written with her aunt, will recognize the author’s affinity for breathing life into her characters. Here we meet young Willa Romeyn; Willa’s charming, albeit mysterious, father, Felix; the ever steady and steely Aunt Jottie; and the family’s summer boarder, the lovely Layla Beck.

Spoiled, sheltered Layla has been exiled to Macedonia by her senator father, who is fed up with her irresponsible behavior and ill-chosen suitors. The Works Progress Administration has hired her to write the town’s history—a literary project that holds far more intrigue, romance and adventure than she imagined. Layla is soon passionately and eloquently recording the tired town’s colorful and often scandalous history, diligently excavating the myriad skeletons buried in the closets of Macedonian high society, including the secrets of her landlords and newfound friends, the Romeyns. 

Despite her best intentions, Layla falls under Felix’s spell. Her adoration does not go unnoticed by the intuitive and envious Willa, who, upon investigating her father’s frequent absences and secretive second life as a “chemical” salesman, is starting to uncover hard truths about the family patriarch. 

Perhaps not surprisingly for the author of a best-selling middle-grade series (Ivy and Bean), Barrows has crafted a luminous coming-of-age tale that is sure to captivate her grown-up audience. Against a lively historical setting, the joys and hardships of the rollicking Romeyn family will keep readers eagerly turning pages.

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

In Sarah McCoy’s new book, two protagonists tell the little-known history of Sarah Brown, daughter of John Brown, the staunch abolitionist who was executed for the attack he led on Harper’s Ferry. Sarah Brown used her natural talent as a painter to embed secret maps of the way north in her landscapes, to be used by runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad. She also used other tools to help slaves escape, including a porcelain doll whose body was used to hide maps and messages.

The doll becomes the link between past and present as chapters alternate between Sarah’s story and that of Eden, a modern-day woman who moves to an old home in a small town called New Charleston—the very home where Sarah found a friendly shelter during the years up to and during Civil War. Unaware of the house’s history as a station on the Underground Railroad, Eden is caught up in her own struggles with infertility, wondering if her marriage will survive the end of her dream to be a mother. After she finds the doll under the kitchen floorboards, Eden begins an investigation that helps her piece together the past and a new life among the citizens of New Charleston.

Sarah’s adventures give a fascinating peek into the personal life of the legendary John Brown and keep the pages turning. The Mapmaker’s Children serves as a reminder of how objects persist, such as Sarah’s doll, and how memories connected with those objects can last through generations.

Of the estimated six million Jews extinguished during the Holocaust, perhaps one-fourth were children. To make this figure somewhat conceivable, imagine if every one of them had, like Anne Frank, left behind a diary—or if that many novelists reconstructed in fiction the horrors these innocents had to face. Something like this imperative motivates National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard’s seventh novel, The Book of Aron, a loosely historical account of the children of the Warsaw ghetto.

The novel begins with the relocation of Aron and his family to Poland’s capital under the pretext of containing a typhus epidemic. Instead, the Germans impoverish the ghetto’s inhabitants via theft and starvation. Shepard deftly shows how the Jews’ accommodating, fatalistic ethos blinds them to the Germans’ monstrosity. An officer assigned to supervise the orphanage in which Aron ends up puts it thus: “The Jews adjust to every situation.” Several pages carry the news that the ghetto has yet again shrunk, like a noose.

Shepard ventures into the delicate subject of how some Jews were complicit in their co-religionists’ destruction. Hannah Arendt argued controversially that the Judenrate, or Jewish councils, helped the Nazis by tabulating Jewish constituents; the Judenrate are shown here stifling rumors about deportation to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Even Aron becomes an informer for the Gestapo. But Shepard underscores how famine makes nonsense of much ordinary morality.

The novel is too grave to admit much stylistic ornamentation. Much of it is dialogue, but not mere patter. There is humor of the blackest sort, jokes about Hitler or the Jewish Police. But the overriding tone is somber and tense and suffocating, like the climate before a storm. Shepard tackles his grim subject without a hint of sentimentality, though it is clear that the subject is not an easy one for him.

Every day’s newspaper shows that children continue to be the tragic pawn in the ideological games of adults, from massacres in Peshawar or Norway to the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. To say “never again” might be wishful thinking, but Shepard’s taut, discomfiting novel at least illuminates what adult atrocities seem to children’s eyes.

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

Teddy Todd, who first appeared in Kate Atkinson’s thrilling Life After Life (2013), served as a British pilot in World War II. As a young man in the throes of a brutal war, he “didn’t expect to see the alchemy of spring, to see the dull brown earth change to bright green and then pale gold.”

Teddy does survive the war, barely. In A God in Ruins, we follow the rest of his life as brother, husband, father and grandfather through the lovely, effortless story-telling of Atkinson (or, as I think of her whenever I glimpse one of her many near-perfect books on my shelves, She Who Can Do No Wrong).

Teddy wanders around Europe for a bit after the liberation, writing mediocre poetry at cafes on the Riviera. “If only he was an artist—paint seemed less demanding than words. He felt sure that Van Gogh’s sunflowers hadn’t given him as much trouble.”

A responsible British lad at heart, Teddy returns home to marry Nancy, literally the girl next door, and get a series of respectable if non-glamorous jobs. They have a volatile daughter, Viola, who lives with her boyfriend on a commune and gives Teddy and Nancy two grandchildren (their names, of course, are Sunny and Moon).

A God in Ruins is not so much a sequel as a companion to Life After Life, in which Teddy’s sister Ursula lives her life over and over. And Teddy’s story more than stands on its own. Atkinson effortlessly toggles to and from Teddy’s childhood, the war, and his daughter’s and grandchildren’s lives in a story so seamless that one barely notices skipping among decades.

And Teddy . . . it is hard to stop thinking about the steadfast yet slightly poetic Teddy. He apparently has that effect on women. When Viola unceremoniously moves him into a retirement home, the women flock to him: “Of course he was still pretty spry then, and competent, and the women belonged to a generation that could be impressed if a man simply knew how to flick a switch on a kettle. He set quite a few frail hearts a-flutter in Fanning Court.” He is a singular character in an extraordinary story.

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

Readers met the Langdon family in Some Luck, the first novel in Jane Smiley’s trilogy about an American family and an Iowa farm. A straightforward, almost old-fashioned novel, it opened in 1920 and covered the following 33 years—one year per chapter—in the lives of Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their six children with tenderness and surprisingly subtle humor. Now, in the more ominously titled Early Warning, Smiley casts an even wider net, as the Langdon children, now grown to adulthood and with children of their own, navigate the immense social changes of the 1960s and ’70s.

When Early Warning opens, Walter, the Langdon patriarch, has died. Only Joe remains to work the land; his brothers and sisters have married and fanned out across the country from San Francisco to Chicago to Washington, D.C. The next generation of Langdons have their own non-rural challenges—twin boys who are vicious rivals, a troubled daughter drawn to the notorious Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple and a risk-taking son who drops out of college to fight in Vietnam. Character traits and personalities jump generations, and events that seemed peripheral in Some Luck circle back to affect the family in later decades. As land values sour and plunge, the Langford family farm is almost a character in itself, mimicking the fortunes of the various siblings. Toward the novel’s end, the appearance of a previously unknown family member provides an important opportunity for intergenerational healing.

Smiley’s narrative captures many of the touchstones of America’s postwar events and social changes: the Cold War, Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, the women’s movement, AIDS—yet the novel rarely feels generic. Like Some Luck, Early Warning focuses on the prosaic as much as the singular, and it is what each of her finely drawn characters does with what is handed to them that makes the novel so engaging. While Early Warning lacks some of the encompassing warmth of its predecessor, the strength of Smiley’s storytelling will keep readers hooked and looking forward to the third and final volume.

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