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.

It’s late in the 19th century, and literary works are often plundered by so-called “bookaneers.” These literary pirates swoop in, abscond with a manuscript and sell it to the highest bidder. The stories should be property of the reader, not the writer, the bookaneers argue. And they’ll stop at nothing to ensure it.

In The Last Bookaneer, bookseller Mr. Fergins recounts to railway waiter and enthusiastic reader Mr. Cotton the fascinating exploits of these bookish pirates. Fergins first encountered such a man, Wild Bill, when the bookaneer slipped a pirated manuscript into Fergins’ hands. The next day, a patron picked up the book and left Fergins with entirely too much money.

His curiosity piqued, Fergins eagerly follows the money trail of Bill’s subsequent requests. Before long, it leads Fergins to one of the greatest bookaneers of the age, Pen Davenport, who has his eye on his biggest mark yet: Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island. The ailing writer is sequestered in Samoa, and so the pair of pirates set sail in hopes of retrieving treasure. But Davenport’s nemesis is close at hand and time is running out: A new copyright treaty is set to go into effect on July 1, 1890, and manuscripts will no longer be fair game.

The Last Bookaneer is a rollicking romp in which the publishing industry is depicted as a business as scintillating as mining for gold. Equal parts adventure on the South Seas and literary fiction set in civilized and cerebral England, this story is chock full of sly remarks skewering the publishing industry. The questions of intellectual property faced in the 1890s are just as complex and engaging as those we encounter in today’s technological world. As in his previous work (The Dante Club, The Last Dickens), Matthew Pearl seamlessly braids fact and fiction into an imaginative yarn that will enthrall bibliophiles and adventure fans alike.

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

Historical novels that use real people, eras and achievements as a springboard can sometimes become overworked lessons of the history on which they’re treading. Other times, they can be inspired, original works that remind us of both the importance of history and the timeless concerns of our own humanity. Thankfully, The Architect’s Apprentice is the latter.

Set in a glorious age for the Ottoman Empire, Elif Shafak’s latest novel spans decades and follows the interwoven lives of the still-admired chief Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, Jahan, the Indian boy who would become his apprentice, and Chota, Jahan’s beloved white elephant who becomes part of the Sultan’s menagerie. Together, they are destined for greatness, and the construction of some of the most beautiful Ottoman structures in history. But their intertwined lives will also breed envy, tragedy, lies and countless surprises, as Jahan grows into a man headed for a destiny he might never have imagined.

Right away, Shafak’s prose delivers such a clear sense of place and time that you feel immersed in this lush segment of history in a warm and intriguing way. There’s a sense of magic to the way her words move from page to page, but also a sense of practicality, like an architect imagining every brick in a palace. Some novelists see their world so clearly that they can weave a sense of comfort, a sense that you’re in good hands, around the reader from page one, and Shafak is one such writer.

The Architect’s Apprentice succeeds because of that sense of being in good hands, but also because of Shafak’s passionate, far-reaching contemplations layered within the story. More than anything perhaps, this novel is a story of love, of finding it, losing it and feeling how it can twist and mold you into something else, even if that’s not for the better. It’s a powerful, dazzling novel, rooted in history but also in a sense of eternal human considerations, and it’s another triumph for Shafak.

Set in upstate New York just after the Civil War, Jeffrey Lent’s latest book is a bit puzzling. To be blunt, it ends just when things are getting really interesting. It’s not that things haven’t been interesting from the beginning: By page three we’ve been witness to a double murder. The murderer’s name is Malcolm Hopeton, and he’s returned from the war only to find that half of his farm has been sold out from under him and his wife is canoodling with his hired man—the type who, in the old days, would have been called a cur. In his fury, Malcolm even injures his hired boy, Harlan Davis, who has witnessed the whole tawdry mess. As for Malcolm, he resigns himself to the gallows. But will he hang, after all?

In between the murder and the book’s non-ending, Harlan heals up and goes to work for young widower August Swartout; Harlan’s sister, Becca, is already keeping house for him. The book then turns its focus from a spectacular crime of passion to the quieter rhythms of the labor that goes into running a farm. Most of the people we meet follow a Quakerish/Shakerish religion that values honesty, humility, hard work and an overall, austere decency. Observing that hard work and decency is where the novel’s real pleasure lies.

Lent, whose 2000 debut novel In the Fall was a bestseller, is known for his breathtaking and detailed descriptions of the land and nature. His characters’ speech is so rich and lyrical that it reminds the reader of J.M. Synge’s western Irishmen. One lingers over dialogue discussing the qualities of mules, the castration of pigs, the harvesting of oats and the making of jam, bread and pickles. Most impressive is the smallest person’s determination to be and do good in the face of calamity. And though he may dread having to tell the whole truth about his boss’ late wife and her paramour, no one wants to do good more than Harlan Davis.

Maybe A Slant of Light doesn’t deliver the resolution one might want from a modern police procedural, but its other virtues more than make up for it.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, April 2015

A search for an elusive sea monster at the height of World War II sounds like the plot of a genre-mashup movie. But in At the Water’s Edge, the latest novel from Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen, what starts out as a lark on the part of rich, entitled friends turns into a quest that is at times frightening, liberating and even comical.

Bored and wealthy Ellis schemes to find and photograph the Loch Ness Monster in an attempt to one-up his dismissive father, who was ultimately discredited in his own infamous attempt. He and his best friend, Hank, drag Ellis’ wife, Maddie, along—and her journey to uncover truths about herself, her marriage and the kind of life she wants to lead provides the novel’s heart.

Glad simply to be alive after encountering German U-boats during their Atlantic crossing, Maddie isn’t willing to participate in the boys’ foolish scheme—and she soon starts to wonder whether the true monster might be closer to home. Ellis and Hank certainly possess money and the breeding that often goes along with it, but as their search proves futile, Ellis displays increasing disdain for Maddie and the people of the Scottish village where they’ve sheltered. As Ellis’ desperation mounts, Maddie fears for the safety of herself and her newfound friends, including the brooding, handsome proprietor of the village inn.

Gruen skillfully weaves in historical reference points, making Maddie’s story seem larger than that individual focus. The author conveys the lure of the Scottish Highlands, and its storied lore and mystery help create her novel’s riveting, ethereal atmosphere. Maddie’s growing self-awareness is presented in stark—and welcome—contrast to her husband’s spiral into conceit and self-deception.

At the Water’s Edge captivates with its drama, intrigue and glimpses of both the dark and light of humanity. As Jane Austen once wrote, “with due exceptions, woman feels for woman very promptly and compassionately.” For all her faults, Maddie’s tragic history and her courage in the face of her present predicament will win readers to her side.

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