Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin

Sign Up

Get the latest ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

All , , Coverage

All Literary Fiction Coverage

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Western Wind

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Samantha Harvey’s new novel is a carefully paced mystery that takes place during the four days before Lent in the small medieval British village of Oakham. When the town’s wealthiest and most worldly resident, Tom Newman, is reported missing, rumors fly. Was it murder, a suicide or an accidental drowning? The townspeople share their theories in the makeshift confession box of Oakham’s resident priest, John Reve, who balances his own grief with the growing discontent around him. He is not helped by the prying ears and eyes of the local dean, who is determined to uncover village secrets and find the person responsible for Newman’s disappearance—or is he a spy for the local monastery, whose monks would like nothing better than to swallow up Oakham and take the land for their own?

Harvey plots her story in reverse, a chapter per day, beginning on Shrove (Pancake) Tuesday and working back to the previous Saturday. With each day, the reader learns more about the villagers, the clergy and the intriguing Newman, whose continental travels and interests threatened Reve’s established order. Though Oakham is described as a dump of a town populated by outcasts and exiles and cut off from the surrounding countryside by an unbridgeable river, Reve believes in his role as shepherd of his flock, however wayward they may seem.

The Western Wind is filled with the rich details of rural medieval life, but the unique structure of the story gives the novel a fresh and modern sensibility. In addition, Oakham’s remoteness and parochial village church is contrasted with the spiritual changes coming to both England and the rest of Europe, bringing to mind contemporary issues such as Brexit and the refugee crisis.

Harvey, whose previous novels have been nominated for a range of prizes including the Man Booker, has written a densely packed historical novel that never seems dusty or precious, relishing in the psychological intricacies of power and faith but still crackling with suspense and intrigue.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Samantha Harvey’s new novel is a carefully paced mystery that takes place during the four days before Lent in the small medieval British village of Oakham.

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Museum of Modern Love

Review by Annie Peters

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, December 2018

Arky Levin, a 50-year-old film score composer, has reached a strange moment in his life. Recently separated from his wife under disconcerting circumstances and estranged from his only child, Arky finds himself alone in a new apartment in New York and purposefully cut off from friends. This should provide the silence he craves to write his latest film score, but instead he just feels lost. In this frame of mind, he visits the Museum of Modern Art and discovers a performance piece called The Artist Is Present, based on a real 2010 performance by renowned artist Marina Abramović. In this piece, Abramović sits for 75 days at a table as throngs of visitors stand for hours to take turns sitting across from her, still and silent.

Using Abramović’s seven steps for creative projects—awareness, resistance, submission, work, reflection, courage and the gift—as an organizational device for her novel, author Heather Rose details the performance’s almost mystical effect on Arky and an array of other characters as they return to the piece day after day. Other characters include Abramović herself, a young Ph.D. student from Amsterdam, a recent widow from the South, a radio personality and even Abramović’s late mother, each of whom brings his or her own unique experiences and responses to the piece.

Already a winner of several literary prizes in Australia and short-listed for the Australian Literary Society’s 2017 Gold Medal, The Museum of Modern Love is an engaging, multifaceted meditation on the meaning of life and art. Rose sets this exploration in the context of one man’s compelling midlife search for direction as he observes Abramović’s fleeting art, which the novel intriguingly brings back to life. This is a brilliant find for any reader who enjoys grappling with the larger questions of life and literature, and it is an excellent choice for book clubs seeking thought-provoking discussion.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Arky Levin, a 50-year-old film score composer, has reached a strange moment in his life. Recently separated from his wife under disconcerting circumstances and estranged from his only child, Arky finds himself alone in a new apartment in New York and purposefully cut off from friends. This should provide the silence he craves to write his latest film score, but instead he just feels lost.

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Trinity

Review by Leslie Hinson

Author Louisa Hall’s third novel employs an ingenious and creative tactic to paint an image of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” In theater, actors comb through scripts to answer the question, “What are the other characters saying about me?” It is through this Stanislavskian, indirect characterization that Hall’s Oppenheimer is revealed. A scientist who became (some would say) a mass murderer, he was a conflicted man with a varied public image who never seemed to decide how he actually felt about it all. In this staggeringly beautiful novel, he is fragmented, shown only through the eyes of people who are all struggling with their own existences.

Hall brings her seven narrators to life through rich and fascinating backstories. Their accounts span from 1943 until 1966—from two years before the Trinity test (the first detonation of a nuclear weapon) until one year before Oppenheimer’s death. We meet Oppenheimer as a potential communist sympathizer, an aloof physicist, an old friend, a mercurial boss and an insect crushed underfoot. The image Hall paints of him is in watercolor—blurry, overlapping, at odds with itself.

There are more similarities between the narrators than there are differences, despite their various backgrounds and roles in Oppenheimer’s periphery. Each grapples with the cold realization that people are infinitely separate. Shared memories often differ between those who share them. People come together for mere moments, and sometimes a flash of bright light allows us to glimpse each other’s bones.

Oppenheimer was a man obsessed with reading and quotations. Years after the Trinity test, in anticipation of an interview, he scrambled to retrieve his copy of the Bhagavad Gita to provide the famous quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Trinity itself is a name inspired by a John Dunne poem—but two decades after the test, Oppenheimer still could not fully explain his choice.

Hall has not captured Oppenheimer’s character, as to do so would be to lose his very essence. Instead, she brilliantly creates a fertile spot in her reader’s imagination, allowing us to draw conclusions based on our own realities. Trinity is a masterpiece.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author Louisa Hall’s third novel employs an ingenious and creative tactic to paint an image of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” In theater, actors comb through scripts to answer the question, “What are the other characters saying about me?” It is through this Stanislavskian, indirect characterization that Hall’s Oppenheimer is revealed. A scientist who became (some would say) a mass murderer, he was a conflicted man with a varied public image who never seemed to decide how he actually felt about it all. In this staggeringly beautiful novel, he is fragmented, shown only through the eyes of people who are all struggling with their own existences.

FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Friday Black

Review by Tom Eisenbraun

With Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah draws a connective thread through a collection of bleak and absurd short stories set in a satirical reality based on a socially and economically collapsing America.

The book leads with a parody of the present day, in which a chainsaw-wielding mass killer is exonerated for his racially motivated hate crime by a defense attorney who swoons a jury with invectives of “freedom.” Meanwhile, teenager Emmanuel troubles over his representative blackness on a 10-point scale as he takes part in the race riots immediately following the killer’s acquittal. Adjei-Brenyah deftly interweaves these two narratives to draw a parallel between the story’s stark reality and our own, illuminating the state of emergency that is blackness in present-day America.

After the opening story, Adjei- Brenyah pivots to a dystopian future in which the government has poisoned its own water supply. In this future, “emotional truth-clouding” is looked down on in favor of intelligence, pride and truthfulness.

The tales that follow are set along the timeline that stretches between these first two stories, from the near-future capitalist decline to the ensuing societal meltdown, offering up a bleak trajectory for humanity in which pride and profit slowly usurp care. The title story sees the narrator fighting off a zombified consumerist horde in the early hours of Black Friday. Trampling deaths and bite wounds are as normalized as the narrator’s disregard for the little remaining humanity of those infected with the “Friday Black.”

Each of Adjei-Brenya’s characters deals with the numbness that comes after the shock of death wears off—and the pain that arises when that shock doesn’t fade. This is a difficult read and a twisting meditation on a world where love’s gone missing.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah draws a connective thread through a collection of bleak and absurd short stories set in a satirical reality based on a socially and economically collapsing America.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Sugar Land

Review by Jessica Bates

As a lesbian in the 1920s, Miss Dara knows a thing or two about being an outcast. When she falls in love with her best friend, Dara runs from her hometown and everything she knows to work as a kitchen girl at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas.

Dara works herself to the bone, befriending a black inmate named Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed Lead Belly, the soon-to-be famous singer who sings his way to a pardon. Dara lives a lonely life, dodging the aggression of the head cook and burning all the letters from her former lover. Then one day, she receives a marriage proposal from the warden. She decides to settle down with him, despite her heart’s true urgings.

Dara learns to enjoy domesticity and connects with the warden’s two daughters as they grow up. When the warden dies, Dara and her stepdaughters grieve in their own ways. Dara spirals into depression. She binge eats, gains weight and continues to repress her true desire—to be with a woman.

With a lively sense of humor and a great sense of place, tammy lynne stoner’s debut is a Southern novel from a voice that rings true. As Dara navigates these difficult circumstances, she realizes she’s constructed a prison around herself, keeping everyone out. With the help of her stepdaughters, one of whom dresses and presents herself as a man, Dara reclaims her life and comes out to her family.

A novel of exploration, bravery and redemption, with keen insight into race, class, gender identity and social norms, Sugar Land is the story of a woman learning to come home to herself.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As a lesbian in the 1920s, Miss Dara knows a thing or two about being an outcast. When she falls in love with her best friend, Dara runs from her hometown and everything she knows to work as a kitchen girl at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Those Who Knew

Review by Tom Eisenbraun

At the heart of Idra Novey’s poetic second novel, Those Who Knew, is an inherently political story that reveals the nature of toxic masculinity and its effects on the world. While sussing out the manifold fears that drive men’s often destructive pursuit of power, Novey explores the strength of women—which is so often rejected and abused in that pursuit—and troubles over silence in the face of abuse.

A college professor living in an unnamed island nation, Lena is uneasy with her family’s wealth in the aftermath of the country’s former dictatorial regime. Her friend, Olga, who runs a bookstore doubling as a weed shop, is an older survivor of the Terrible Years, when she and her lover were imprisoned and abused. As news breaks of the death of a young woman named Maria P., Lena grows suspicious of the involvement of a rising senator, Victor, with whom she’d been romantically involved in their collegiate years. With nothing to go on but the mysteriously materializing articles of clothing that she is sure belonged to Maria, Lena begins to question her own silence in the years since Victor nearly took Lena’s life in an enraged outburst.

Throughout this meditation on the role of silence, the story weaves together Olga’s daily bookshop log, news reports and interviews, ongoing scenes from Victor’s brother’s autobiographical stage plays and multiple points of view to present a world as richly nuanced as it is lacking in specifics of place and time.

With this novel, Novey provides a depiction of true strength through the community of survivors—those who have withstood tragedies enacted against them by powerful people who ultimately feared their own powerlessness.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At the heart of Idra Novey’s poetic second novel, Those Who Knew, is an inherently political story that reveals the nature of toxic masculinity and its effects on the world. While sussing out the manifold fears that drive men’s often destructive pursuit of power, Novey explores the strength of women—which is so often rejected and abused in that pursuit—and troubles over silence in the face of abuse.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A Ladder to the Sky

Review by Michael Magras

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

It would spoil the pleasure of reading John Boyne’s latest novel to describe most of its plot points, but let’s just say Yorkshire-born Swift is more determined than your average aspiring writer. He has two dreams: to become a celebrated author, and to have a child. And he’ll steal from anyone, starting with 65-year-old German writer Erich Ackermann, whom Swift meets in 1988 when he’s a young waiter in Berlin.

Soon, Ackermann, a gay man with long-suppressed desires, asks the fulsome Swift to accompany him to literary events around the world. Ackermann also shares details of his past, including his membership in the Hitler Youth and a fateful wartime decision regarding a childhood friend.

Swift betrays Ackermann by using his story as the basis for Two Germans, his debut novel. Boyne then presents scenes, most of them told from the perspectives of other characters, that chronicle the extremes Swift pursues to further his career. No one is safe, including Dash Hardy, an older gay writer Swift accompanies to Gore Vidal’s Italian villa; Swift’s wife, Edith, whose literary career is poised to take off just when Swift’s has stalled; and even Swift’s own teenage son.

Boyne sometimes paints in broad strokes, but he compensates with many wonderful touches. Exchanges between Vidal and Swift are deliciously venomous, and the digs at contemporary publishing are spot-on, as when Swift describes a debut novel he dislikes as, “Bridget Jones meets A Clockwork Orange.”

A Ladder to the Sky is an entertaining, if deeply cynical, portrait of the literary world.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Waiting for Eden

Review by Chika Gujarathi

National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman’s latest novel, Waiting for Eden, is narrated by an unnamed soldier who died in the line of duty in Iraq but lingers to tell the story of his friend, Eden, and Eden’s wife, Mary.

Eden earned the nickname “BASE Jump” from his platoon after he leaped from the third deck one night, heavily intoxicated, but somehow landed on his feet. Beyond this incident, however, luck has been a stranger in Eden’s life.

Having enlisted in the military to escape the vapid life of a small Midwestern town, Eden soon encounters another disappointment, this time in his marriage to his high school girlfriend, Mary, as they struggle to have a child. Mary is desperate and willing to do anything to give Eden the child he wants and to keep him from re-enlisting. Mary succeeds in getting pregnant, but Eden figures out that he isn’t the father. Once again, to escape his woes, Eden leaves for Iraq, where his Humvee hits a pressure plate, killing all of his comrades, including his best friend and the father of Mary’s baby.

In the three years since the accident, the formerly 220-pound Eden has been reduced to 70 pounds and is in a vegetative state. On one side of the veil waits Mary and her daughter; on the other waits the narrator.

Ackerman has given us a war story that is packed with love, pain and guilt, but above all, it is a meditation on the legacies we leave behind.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman’s latest novel, Waiting for Eden, is narrated by an unnamed soldier who died in the line of duty in Iraq but lingers to tell the story of his friend, Eden, and Eden’s wife, Mary.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

The Caregiver

Review by Trisha Ping

It’s bittersweet to crack open The Caregiver, Samuel Park’s long-awaited follow-up to his luminous, romantic epic set in Korea, This Burns My Heart (2011). Park died of stomach cancer in 2017, so his second full-length novel is also his last. It’s a tender mother-daughter story that alternates between 1980s Brazil and present-day Los Angeles, two places that Park—who was born in Brazil and lived in Los Angeles for years—knew well.

Mara Alencar left her native Brazil in the 1980s at age 16, fleeing that country’s turmoil. Ten years later, she’s living in Los Angeles in a tiny apartment with two other Brazilian expats and drifting through her days as a caregiver to a cancer-stricken woman in Bel Air. A wealthy 40-something, the divorced and childless Kathryn calls Mara her adopted daughter and jokes about leaving her house to Mara when she dies. Despite this professed affection, Kathryn knows little about the woman who sees to her comfort on a daily basis.

Mara likes it that way. She’s trying to forget her past—and her brave and impetuous mother, Ana, who spurred Mara’s escape to the U.S. thanks to her connections with revolutionaries. Although Mara hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since leaving Brazil, Ana haunts everything Mara does and every choice she makes.

As chapters alternate between Mara’s past in Brazil and her present-day life in California, Park explores what it means to care for someone and the beauty of human resilience and survival. Though the title most obviously refers to Mara, it’s also a callback to Ana, a flawed woman full of fierce affection for her daughter. “I would be loved again and again,” thinks Mara, “and it was because she taught me how.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s bittersweet to crack open The Caregiver, Samuel Park’s long-awaited follow-up to his luminous, romantic epic set in Korea, This Burns My Heart (2011). Park died of stomach cancer in 2017, so his second full-length novel is also his last. It’s a tender mother-daughter story that alternates between 1980s Brazil and present- day Los Angeles, two places that Park—who was born in Brazil and lived in Los Angeles for years—knew well.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Killing Commendatore

Review by Matthew Jackson

Like all of Haruki Murakami’s stories, Killing Commendatore is vast, ambitious and composed of seemingly disparate layers that somehow all find a way to link together. It’s a meditation on loss, an exploration of the nature of art, an ode to the things we find when granted solitude and so much more. Most of all, it’s another brilliant journey through the mind of one of our greatest living storytellers.

Killing Commendatore follows a portrait painter whose wife simply tells him one day that she’s leaving him. In response, he leaves the city, quits painting portraits and holes up in the mountain home of another famous painter, where one day while searching the attic, he discovers a seemingly lost work by the artist. The discovery of the painting—and the scene it depicts—sets in motion a bizarre and fascinating chain of events involving an odd man in a neighboring mansion, a pit in the middle of the woods, the literal manifestation of an idea and much more. One of Murakami’s most effective techniques is his economy of language, which creates a constant juxtaposition of extraordinary events and deceptively simple, unhurried prose. The painter narrates the novel, and Murakami’s depiction of his placid, passive state as the story begins only serves to underline the intensity of his subsequent journey. Like his protagonist, Murakami does not set out to impress or overwhelm, but to understand, and this intention breeds a sense of tremendous empathy with every page.

The real magic of Killing Commendatore, as with the rest of Murakami’s extraordinary body of work, lies in the way he is able to weave together so many emotional, aesthetic and philosophical concerns in such an effective way. It’s a joyously unpredictable novel, cracking itself open one piece at a time like an ancient puzzle box, and Murakami’s careful, masterful style assures the reader that it’s worthwhile to get happily lost inside.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like all of Haruki Murakami’s stories, Killing Commendatore is vast, ambitious and composed of seemingly disparate layers that somehow all find a way to link together. It’s a meditation on loss, an exploration of the nature of art, an ode to the things we find when granted solitude and so much more. Most of all, it’s another brilliant journey through the mind of one of our greatest living storytellers.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Virgil Wander

Review by Langston Collin Wilkins

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, October 2018

Leif Enger’s third novel, Virgil Wander, centers on the eponymous protagonist who lives in the quaint, rustic town of Greenstone, Minnesota. By day, Virgil begrudgingly works as the town clerk, but by night, he is the proprietor of the Empress, a fledgling movie theater that specializes in projecting its exclusive and illegal film collection. During a drive one snowy evening, Virgil’s car skids off the road and crashes into Lake Superior. Luckily, he is a saved by Marcus Jetty, the owner of the local junkyard. Virgil emerges from the accident with a fleeting grasp of language and flickering memories of his former life.

After his near-death experience, Virgil embarks on a journey of rediscovery through interactions with fellow townspeople, each of whom are engaged in their own respective voyages. There’s Rune, the affable Finnish kite-maker who is in town seeking information about his deceased son, Alec Sandstrom, whose death is central to Greenstone lore. Nadine is Alec’s widow, whom Virgil not so secretly pines for. Nadine’s son, Bjorn, seeks to both engage with and escape from his father’s memory. There’s also Jerry Fandeen, the lovable yet untrustworthy handyman trapped in a vulnerable situation. These select few are among the many characters that make up the body and communal soul of the small Minnesota community.

Greenstone and its townspeople share a heartbeat that has been thrown off-cadence by a sense of hopelessness. Struggles may vary from person to person, but they add up to a central thread of suffering that permeates the entire town. However, the story suggests that there is hope in this synergy. Collective precariousness can be transformed into collective uplift.

A book like Virgil Wander, with so many characters and subplots, can make for a convoluted read. But Enger does a truly masterful job of synthesizing these various components into a compelling and easily digestible whole.

Virgil Wander is a fast-paced, humorous and mystical novel about hope, friendship, love and the relationship between a town and its people.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Leif Enger for Virgil Wander.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Leif Enger’s third novel, Virgil Wander, centers on the eponymous protagonist who lives in the quaint, rustic town of Greenstone, Minnesota. By day, Virgil begrudgingly works as the town clerk, but by night, he is the proprietor of the Empress, a fledgling movie theater that specializes in projecting its exclusive and illegal film collection. During a drive one snowy evening, Virgil’s car skids off the road and crashes into Lake Superior. Luckily, he is a saved by Marcus Jetty, the owner of the local junkyard. Virgil emerges from the accident with a fleeting grasp of language and flickering memories of his former life.

FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Flight of the hedge fund manager

Review by Trisha Ping

Uneven and slightly indulgent, Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, Lake Success, nevertheless charms thanks to the author’s trademark warm-hearted humor and practiced satirical eye. Hedge fund manager Barry Cohen hasn’t been a success in work or family life. Though the fund he manages has hit the $2 billion mark, he’s being questioned about insider trading; his younger wife, Seema, is growing less interested in him by the day; and his 3-year-old son, Shiva, is autistic. There’s only one thing for Barry to do: run away.

So he does, tossing his smartphone and black AmEx to the wayside and boarding a Greyhound in his Citibank vest. Maybe, Barry thinks, reuniting with his college girlfriend is the answer to his problems. Juxtaposed with Barry’s picaresque journey is Seema’s more mundane—if life in a luxurious Manhattan apartment can be said to be mundane—set of challenges as she tries to accept Shiva’s limitations and embarks on an affair with a neighbor.

Caught up in the chaos of the 2016 presidential campaign, the fractured country reflects the fractures in Barry’s soul, and as ever, Shteyngart reveals America’s frailties with darkly mocking humor that never swerves into nihilism. He is likewise forgiving of his characters’ many failings. In the case of Barry, that indulgence is occasionally frustrating: Given his many privileges and avoidance of responsibility, the self-pity and lack of self-awareness Barry demonstrates for nearly the entire novel becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, the verve of Shteyngart’s writing keeps the pages turning and makes Lake Success an overall winner for readers.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Uneven and slightly indulgent, Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, Lake Success, nevertheless charms thanks to the author’s trademark warm-hearted humor and practiced satirical eye. Hedge fund manager Barry Cohen hasn’t been a success in work or family life. Though the fund he manages has hit the $2 billion mark, he’s being questioned about insider trading; his younger wife, Seema, is growing less interested in him by the day; and his 3-year-old son, Shiva, is autistic. There’s only one thing for Barry to do: run away.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

A family flung apart

Review by Amy Scribner

Reporters dub the McClouds “the saddest family in Mercy, Oklahoma,” after a tornado ravages the town, leaving the four McCloud kids orphaned. The oldest, Darlene, sets aside her college plans to take care of her younger sisters, Cora and Jane, and brother Tucker, and they settle into a dismal, cramped, government-issued trailer on the outskirts of town. The family is barely scraping by when Tucker vanishes after a vicious fight with Darlene.

“Tucker simply disappeared,” author Abby Geni writes. “He tumbled into the blue like a pebble dropped into a pond—out of sight, the ripples stilling, the surface of the water growing opaque.”

He resurfaces three years later to reclaim 9-year-old Cora. The two take off on an interstate journey that turns into a crime spree as Tucker transforms into an increasingly unhinged ecoterrorist. Darlene, meanwhile, starts a tentative relationship with the policeman assigned to her brother’s case as they track crimes throughout Oklahoma and Texas that could be Tucker’s work: arson at a taxidermy shop, the shooting of the owner of a poultry processing company, and finally, a crime in California so catastrophic that it threatens Cora’s—and Tucker’s—very existence.

Geni, author of the critically acclaimed The Lightkeepers, is an astonishing storyteller who brings the sun-baked plains of Oklahoma to life on every page. The narrative toggles seamlessly between Darlene, a girl forced to grow up overnight, and Cora, a girl torn between her adulation for her long-absent older brother and her increasing awareness of his danger to her. The Wildlands is perfectly of its time, when humans are more alert than ever to our impact on the world around us.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Abby Geni for The Wildlands.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Reporters dub the McClouds “the saddest family in Mercy, Oklahoma,” after a tornado ravages the town, leaving the four McCloud kids orphaned. The oldest, Darlene, sets aside her college plans to take care of her younger sisters, Cora and Jane, and brother Tucker, and they settle into a dismal, cramped, government-issued trailer on the outskirts of town. The family is barely scraping by when Tucker vanishes after a vicious fight with Darlene.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Recent Reviews

All Reviews

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features