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Fractured family dynamics and the search for a missing fortune are the main threads of this textured debut, set mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, over the course of three decades.

The Comedown centers on the families of two men: Leland Bloom-Mittwoch and his drug dealer, Reggie Marshall. Reggie sees Leland as an unstable client; Leland, however, considers Reggie his best friend. Leland is present the day Reggie is shot, and he flees the scene, distraught, with a briefcase full of money. Over the ensuing years, Leland struggles with addiction and mental illness, wrecks his first marriage, enters into a second and has a damaging affair, while Reggie’s wife, who was once a promising student, is left to raise their two boys in poverty, alone. Through several tantalizing plot twists, the lives of the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall clans remain intertwined in a network of simmering tension, blame and guilt.

First-time author Rebekah Frumkin, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is generous with her characters and their frailties. Each point of view (and there are many) feels distinct; often, the same events are shown through the eyes of different characters, adding dimension. Although some readers might find it disorienting to be launched into another point of view just when they’ve settled into the current one, the novel’s nonlinear, fragmented structure reflects its themes of disconnection and the uneasy mental states of most of the characters.

Messy, meandering and occasionally illuminating, The Comedown is a family saga that recalls real life.

 

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

Fractured family dynamics and the search for a missing fortune are the main threads of this textured debut, set mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, over the course of three decades.

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The warmth that suffuses Sarah Winman’s new novel is pervasive. Though little more than 200 pages in length, Tin Man is plentiful in love, beauty and acts of human kindness.

Ellis and Michael are preteens when they first meet in working- class Oxford, England. An immediate camaraderie develops as the two boys learn to swim, bike the city streets and avoid the swinging fists of their gruff, uncommunicative fathers. Both boys are close to Ellis’ mother, Dora, a woman who makes sure there is always room for art in the family home. But after Dora’s death, Ellis’ father gives the boy no choice but to put his artistic skills to work as a tin man at the local car plant, removing dents and dings so dexterously that customers cannot feel where the damage was.

From the start, the friendship between Ellis and Michael borders on intimacy, and on a 10-day trip to the south of France, they begin a love affair that ends as quickly as it flares up. Not long after, Ellis meets and marries Annie. The three are inseparable until Michael moves to London, eventually cutting off communication with the couple and disappearing into the city.

This gentle novel is told in two parts. In the first, Ellis, now a middle-aged widower, lives a straitened life, still working at the car plant but dreaming of roads untaken. Recovering from a cycling accident gives him the opportunity to recall his special relationships with Annie and Michael and how they helped define him. The second half is drawn from Michael’s diaries, detailing his life in London as a gay man, his struggles after he is diagnosed with AIDS and his decision to return to Oxford.

Although sometimes lacking in characterization (Annie, in particular, is not fleshed out enough), Winman’s compassionate look at the fluidity of sexual identity, youthful passion and middle-aged regret is rich in emotion and proves that great things do come in small packages.

 

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

The warmth that suffuses Sarah Winman’s new novel is pervasive. Though little more than 200 pages in length, Tin Man is plentiful in love, beauty and acts of human kindness.

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The Optimistic Decade deserves the elusive accolade of “original” for its believable construction and flawless attention to detail. Within the brilliant, multilayered canopy of the novel’s world, Heather Abel’s writing comes across as a sincere and tender channel for a story that must be told.

Rebecca, a college freshman, can’t imagine becoming anything other than a journalist. Her parents have run a liberal newspaper called Our Side Now for decades. When Rebecca’s family decides to shut down production, they send her to her cousin’s summer camp in rural Colorado to be a counselor. At the camp, Rebecca’s horizons broaden until she can barely recognize herself. This could be classified as a coming-of-age tale, but the growth is not limited to the adolescents. The adults experience just as much disruption and turmoil as their younger counterparts, spinning a rippling theme of never-ending expansion of the self.

Abel’s writing easily captures the vivid wilderness of Colorado, and her flashes of description somehow create a sense of nostalgia for multiple eras, as the story and backstory juxtapose the Reagan years with the onset of the Gulf War. As Abel’s characters surmise, perhaps everyone gets one optimistic decade before they can no longer deny that their actions are inconsequential and the future is going to happen whether they like it or not. Each person must choose to keep pushing forward, because a life without purpose is just as dissatisfying as dwelling in worthlessness.

Above all else, this strong, astute debut is a study of love in many forms. To read it is nothing less than a mitzvah.

 

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

The Optimistic Decade deserves the elusive accolade of “original” for its believable construction and flawless attention to detail. Within the brilliant, multilayered canopy of the novel’s world, Heather Abel’s writing comes across as a sincere and tender channel for a story that must be told.

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Readers who experience a quiet thrill upon discovering an exciting new novel are likely to encounter that sensation when they read Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo’s second work of fiction (and her American debut), a fast-paced story of war refugees, militants and others fleeing conflict in modern- day Nigeria.

The book starts when Chike Ameobi, an officer stationed at a “barren army base” in the Niger Delta, deserts rather than participate in a mission he considers barbaric. Accompanying him is Private Yemi Oke, who shares Chike’s distaste for a commanding officer who wants to “string the scalps of his enemies into a belt.”

They begin a journey to Lagos in search of a better life. Along the way, several others join them, including Fineboy, a teenager who had joined the country’s militants to protest foreign countries taking Nigerian oil; 16-year-old Isoken, who is searching for her parents; and Oma, a woman escaping her wealthy husband, an oil industry employee who—as described in one of the novel’s many great lines—treats her like expensive shoes, “to be polished and glossed but, at the end of the day, to be trodden on.”

When they get to Lagos, they live under a bridge along with other impoverished Nigerians until Fineboy discovers an abandoned, furnished flat beneath a decrepit building. They learn that the flat belongs to Colonel Sandayo, Nigeria’s education minister, who is on the run after taking $10 million earmarked for the country’s failing schools.

Welcome to Lagos casts an entertainingly scathing eye on many aspects of Nigerian society, from oil-hungry corporations to ambitious reporters and the rivalries among ethnic groups. If some characters aren’t fully fleshed out, the novel’s breakneck pace and intricate plotting are nevertheless a treat to savor. This is a winning sophomore effort from a writer to watch.

 

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

Readers who experience a quiet thrill upon discovering an exciting new novel are likely to encounter that sensation when they read Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo’s second work of fiction (and her American debut), a fast-paced story of war refugees, militants and others fleeing conflict in modern- day Nigeria.

Rebecca Stone is overwhelmed by motherhood. That’s not unusual for a first-time mother, but Rebecca’s position may be: She’s a poet with a well-to-do husband, and she has the resources to do something about it. At the hospital, she turns to Priscilla Johnson, who helps Rebecca and her newborn son, Jacob, adjust to breastfeeding. Before long, Rebecca insists Priscilla leave the hospital and become Jacob’s nanny.

It’s a near-perfect fit. Rebecca is able to resume her work as a poet—that is, sitting quietly and thinking until the words come. Oblivious to the power dynamics at play between a black woman and her white employer, Rebecca sees Priscilla as a confidante. Then Priscilla gets pregnant and dies during childbirth. Rebecca steps in to adopt her baby, Andrew, and the uneven dynamics of their relationship are now unavoidable.

In That Kind of Mother, Rumaan Alam (Rich and Pretty) delves into the complexities of female friendship and motherhood. Rebecca struggles to figure out whether she and Priscilla’s adult daughter, Cheryl, are friends or relatives. The women meet for regular play dates with their children, and Rebecca is often startled by Cheryl’s directness. Cheryl is quick to note that, no matter what Rebecca claims to think about race, Jacob and Andrew are different in ways big and small. Coconut oil isn’t enough to moisturize Andrew’s skin, for example, and the world will perceive him differently than it does Jacob. Rebecca is forced to reckon with the different worlds that her boys will face.

Alam explores these issues with grace, contrasting the experiences of these two women with those of Rebecca’s idol, Princess Diana. That Kind of Mother is a meditation on race and the challenges and joys of parenting.

 

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

Rebecca Stone is overwhelmed by motherhood. That’s not unusual for a first-time mother, but Rebecca’s position may be: She’s a poet with a well-to-do husband, and she has the resources to do something about it. At the hospital, she turns to Priscilla Johnson, who helps Rebecca and her newborn son, Jacob, adjust to breastfeeding. Before long, Rebecca insists Priscilla leave the hospital and become Jacob’s nanny.

Stephen McCauley’s bittersweet seventh novel gives the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement that there are no second acts in American lives. Because for all their missteps, the angst-ridden characters that populate My Ex-Life seem determined, in their endearingly flawed ways, to make the best of their unique circumstances.

Most of the novel’s action unfolds in the slightly shabby seaside resort of Beauport, just north of Boston. It’s home to Julie Fiske and her restless daughter, Mandy, who’s on the cusp of high school graduation. In the midst of a fractious divorce and pressured by her husband to sell the rambling home they once shared, Julie reaches out to her first ex-husband, David Hedges, a college admissions consultant, in a desperate bid to help her daughter and bring order to the chaos of her life. David left Julie three decades earlier after discovering his true sexual orientation, and he now lives in San Francisco, where he faces his own real estate crisis—an impending eviction.

McCauley seasons the novel with a liberal helping of the anxieties of contemporary American life, chief among them upper-middle-class parents’ apprehension about their children’s futures and aging baby boomers’ regret that life’s brass ring will always be just out of reach. He excels in some wickedly funny scenes that depict Julie’s fumbling efforts to turn her home into an economically productive Airbnb, as well as a tender portrayal of the odd sexual tension that bubbles up during Julie and David’s reunion. They’re the sort of people who know their lives possess all the ingredients for happiness, but who seem to have lost the recipe. For all the idiosyncrasies of McCauley’s creations, it’s likely many readers will see aspects of their own lives reflected in these pages.

 

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

Stephen McCauley’s bittersweet seventh novel gives the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement that there are no second acts in American lives. Because for all their missteps, the angst-ridden characters that populate My Ex-Life seem determined, in their endearingly flawed ways, to make the best of their unique circumstances.

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Do you ever wonder what people who play in string quartets are really like? When they come onstage, they seem so ascetic in their concert blacks. Surely, this quality extends to their personal lives. If they are old enough to be married, they must have tidy, quietly happy unions. I must admit to these prejudices, which I didn’t even know I had. So I was shocked when the chief violinist of an ensemble pulls out a cigarette and lights up in the opening pages of Aja Gabel’s brilliant, groundbreaking novel—and then the violinist boinks one of the judges of an upcoming contest and tries to blackmail him.

The message: People in elegant string quartets are just as messed up as everybody else.

In the case of Gabel’s quartet, they’re probably even more messed up than everybody else. There’s brittle Jana; orphaned, sad Brit; bitter Daniel; and rackety, sweet-natured Henry, the youngest and most talented. The Ensemble follows them from ambitious youth to resigned middle age, through hookups and breakups, marriage and children, lonely hotel rooms and crummy apartments. The four characters may not like each other, but they love each other. They are, to their surprise, a family.

Gabel, a musician herself, knows this world intimately. An alarm rings in B-flat, a note one character particularly hates. Their instruments leave marks on them in the form of bruises, divots, “violin hickies” and bad backs, as well as tendonitis—a mere inconvenience to a civilian but destructive for a string musician’s career. Each chapter relates the point of view of one of the musicians, and each section opens with a list of musical pieces that the reader might listen to while reading.

No other novel is quite like The Ensemble.

 

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

Do you ever wonder what people who play in string quartets are really like? When they come onstage, they seem so ascetic in their concert blacks. Surely, this quality extends to their personal lives. If they are old enough to be married, they must have tidy, quietly happy unions. I must admit to these prejudices, which I didn’t even know I had. So I was shocked when the chief violinist of an ensemble pulls out a cigarette and lights up in the opening pages of Aja Gabel’s brilliant, groundbreaking novel—and then the violinist boinks one of the judges of an upcoming contest and tries to blackmail him.

What do you get when a cantankerous old hoarder in a decrepit mansion collides with a world-weary caregiver who has a reluctant talent for communing with the dead? The answer is Jess Kidd’s imaginative second novel, Mr. Flood’s Last Resort, an enchanting thriller that disarms and delights.

When Maud Drennan is assigned to look after Cathal Flood, all she knows is that he has managed to run off his previous caregivers through a combination of psychological warfare, booby traps and outright hostility. However, Maud is made of stronger stuff than her relatively plain appearance would suggest, and she arrives at Cathal’s doorstep ready for a fight. With dogged determination, Maud slowly enters into an uneasy truce with the inscrutable old man, but she also comes to realize that there is more to Cathal—and his property—than meets the eye.

While the moldering manor house is filled with decades-old detritus and an army of slightly feral cats, it is also a mausoleum of secrets, potentially lethal ones. When Maud learns about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Cathal’s wife—and the house begins to offer up clues regarding a cold case that eerily echoes memories from Maud’s traumatic childhood—she knows it is up to her to uncover who Cathal Flood truly is and to appease the restless spirits that haunt the halls of his home.

Unique and unconventional, Mr. Flood’s Last Resort is an unforgettable mystery that will appeal to fans of Tana French and Sophie Hannah, as it charms and unsettles in equal measure. Kidd (Himself) deftly balances whimsy and humor with a genuine sense of malice and danger. Savvy readers will question who can be trusted, as nothing—not even Maud—is as it initially seems.

 

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

What do you get when a cantankerous old hoarder in a decrepit mansion collides with a world-weary caregiver who has a reluctant talent for communing with the dead? The answer is Jess Kidd’s imaginative second novel, Mr. Flood’s Last Resort, an enchanting thriller that disarms and delights.

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Among the many things the violence of war obliterates, perhaps the most malicious is history. Now in its seventh year, the civil war that has turned Syria into the site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises has also corseted one of the oldest societies on earth into a kind of perpetual infancy. Syria, it sometimes seems, only began to exist seven years ago, as a place defined only by its current calamity.

In many ways, The Map of Salt and Stars is at once a testament to the brutality of the current Syrian conflict and a reverent ode to ancient Arabian history. Syrian-American writer Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has crafted an audacious debut, ambitious and sprawling in both time and space.

The book follows the story of Nour, a Syrian-American girl living in New York. In 2011, after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother decides to move the family back to Homs to be close to their extended family. But Nour’s arrival coincides with Syria’s slide into civil war. Amid grotesque violence, Nour is made a refugee, a traveler through Syria’s neighboring lands.

Almost a thousand years earlier, another girl’s story unfolds. Rawiya, seeking a better life for her mother, disguises herself as a boy and joins a legendary cartographer on a quest to map the known world.

The two stories unfold side by side, split by time but joined by a common geography. Because the modern part of Joukhadar’s narrative carries the urgency of the present tense, but the ancient half reads like an old Arabian fairy tale, the dual story structure is at first jarring. But soon the book finds its pace, and the intertwining tales complement each other in ways a single narrative could not. A swooping bird of prey that threatens to devour the ancient story’s traveling companions finds its modern-day analogy in the form of Syrian fighter planes dropping bombs on besieged cities.

There is a heartfelt quality to the story, evident in the meticulous historical research that must have gone into the creation of the ancient part of the book. The Map of Salt and Stars presents an Arab world in full possession of its immense historical and cultural biography, marred by its modern tragedies but not exclusively defined by them.

 

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

In many ways, The Map of Salt and Stars is at once a testament to the brutality of the current Syrian conflict and a reverent ode to ancient Arabian history. Syrian-American writer Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has crafted an audacious debut, ambitious and sprawling in both time and space.

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BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, May 2018

Much of the action of Rachel Kushner’s brilliant new novel is set in California prisons. She has done her research, and the novel is filled with distressing factual details like death-row inmates sewing sandbags and prison staff using a powerful, probably toxic disinfectant called Cell Block 64. And of course there are the stultifying, dehumanizing prison routines.

But the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape.

The novel’s central character is Romy Hall. We meet her as she is being transported from a Los Angeles jail to Stanville, a prison in California’s agricultural heartland where she is to serve two life sentences. She is 29, born to a cruel mother in a San Francisco neighborhood that bears little resemblance to the high-tech mecca of today. She is the mother of a young son she worries about obsessively. Until she fled a stalker by moving with her son to Los Angeles, she hustled as a lap dancer at a place called the Mars Room in downtown San Francisco. We don’t learn the details until late in the novel, but we know that because of her ineffectual lawyer, she ends up in prison for killing her stalker.

Kushner (Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers) is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Kushner for The Mars Room.

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

Much of the action of Rachel Kushner’s brilliant new novel is set in California prisons. She has done her research, and the novel is filled with distressing factual details like death-row inmates sewing sandbags and prison staff using a powerful, probably toxic disinfectant called Cell Block 64. And of course there are the stultifying, dehumanizing prison routines.

Review by

This prescient, achingly real novel comes on the heels of the latest school massacre in Parkland, Florida, where 17 high school students and teachers died on Valentine’s Day.

How to Be Safe explores the many questions that crop up, clockwork-style, after every all-too-frequent American school shooting: Was the shooter bullied? Whose gun did he use? Why is the shooter always a white male? Would a good guy with a gun have stopped the bad guy? How did everyone miss the red flags? How does the community heal and more forward?

Former English teacher Anna Crawford is still licking her wounds after being suspended from her job when she hears that the unthinkable has happened in her town of Seldom Falls, Pennsylvania: A kid entered the school and mowed down his classmates. In the confusing aftermath, Anna briefly finds herself a person of interest. Everyone knows her complicated history: She is a local girl whose brother has done stints in jail for drug crimes, and her father killed himself when she was 24. Sometimes she says strange things. Sometimes she drinks. Like so many women, she’s been abused and mistreated by men.

Reporters crawl all over the town, flashing Anna’s picture on television screens until police exonerate her. But even after she’s cleared, Anna’s view of Seldom Falls—and its view of her—has changed forever.

Despite its searing subject matter, How to Be Safe is beautifully written. It’s also occasionally funny (a state senator declares, “As of this day, we are declaring an all-out war on violence.”). Author Tom McAllister (The Young Widower’s Handbook) presents a clear indictment of modern America’s sickness: a toxic mix of disappearing jobs and opioids and misogyny and isolation and violence. He’s not afraid to give voice to the issue that so many politicians step around. As he makes clear, there are solutions.

Instead, the town arms its teachers and debates what the inevitable memorial will look like. “Each memorial represents a collective commitment not to remembering, but to whitewashing the memories, to creating a more palatable version of the memory for ourselves to hold on to and repeat and eventually accept as the truth,” Anna says. “The memorials were there to hide failures, not to be critical of them. Every memory is false, and with each subsequent remembering, it becomes even more false.”

This prescient, achingly real novel comes on the heels of the latest school massacre in Parkland, Florida, where 17 high school students and teachers died on Valentine’s Day.

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With its generational clash of cultures, the 1960s have always been fertile ground for fiction. Like The Graduate, The Only Story by British novelist and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes concerns a young man’s affair with an older woman who is suffocating in a loveless, sexless marriage.

Nineteen-year-old Paul, on a summer break from university, is encouraged to join the club by his mother, who is hopeful he’ll make social connections. Susan Macleod is married with two daughters at university, and is keeping up appearances by playing at the stuffy local tennis club. She encourages a reckless affair that consumes and taints much of Paul’s life. As an older man reflecting on it, Paul says it left him “walking wounded.”

It’s Susan, not Paul, who dominates the page. At first it seems absurd that her pent-up civil servant husband, Gordon, can tolerate her relationship with a teenager, referring to him as “your fancy boy.” Gordon even allows Paul to eat dinner with them. Gordon typifies that era’s English middle class and its inability to express emotion. Instead, an inner rage seethes inside him. We gather the extent of this when Paul meets Susan outside a London doctor’s office and discovers she’s nursing a broken jaw.

Susan’s mental and physical decline and its effect on Paul—who is almost Samaritan-like in his inability to leave—are torturous. Susan’s quiet, suburban devastation turns into a full-blown catastrophe as Paul takes on the role of caretaker, being mistaken at one point as his former lover’s grandson.

The skill in Barnes’ writing is a complete lack of sentimentality, his unflinching depiction the equivalent of slowing down to observe a car crash. You can’t help but stare.

With its generational clash of cultures, the 1960s have always been fertile ground for fiction. Like The Graduate, The Only Story by British novelist and Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes concerns a young man’s affair with an older woman who is suffocating in a loveless, sexless marriage.

With the exceedingly rare exception of literary genius, a first novel from even the most gifted short story writer is a risky effort, and not always successful. This is why Jane Delury is deserving of recognition: With immense storytelling gifts and spare but luminous prose, she is one of the few writers whose debut will have readers begging for a second novel.

The Balcony unfolds in 10 nonchronological chapters—each of which could be a perfect short story—that introduce a cast of characters spanning several generations from 1890 to 2009. From great loves and fleeting lust to hunger and genocide, each character’s story is connected to a once lavish estate (including a servants’ cottage, a manor and, of course, a balcony) in the French countryside. Families appear, then reappear in later chapters: “A Place in the Country” introduces the Havres, whose descendants and lasting heartbreak thread throughout several other sections. The actions of a World War II resistance hero affect the lives of his grandsons, whose own children continue to bear the weight of choices made before them.

The Balcony beckons readers to abandon preconceptions about generational legacies, motherhood and the ideal, pastoral French village. Benneville, the fictional setting of Delury’s novel, was nearly destroyed by bombs during World War II and, a generation later, is a hardscrabble, industrial exurb of Paris in the midst of gentrification. As Delury describes, it’s far from charming: “This was not exactly the country—Benneville had grown since Jacques was a boy, moving closer to Paris on a wave of concrete.”

The final chapter of The Balcony is written in a dramatically different freeform style, and some readers will wish for a more satisfying ending without Delury’s sudden embrace of a quirky, unconventional structure. However, this is a small concern, and readers are more likely to lament that the novel has come to a close, leaving them longing for more.

Delury is sure to win the hearts of all those who appreciate a smart, elegantly written story.

 

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

With the exceedingly rare exception of literary genius, a first novel from even the most gifted short story writer is a risky effort, and not always successful. This is why Jane Delury is deserving of recognition: With immense storytelling gifts and spare but luminous prose, she is one of the few writers whose debut will have readers begging for a second novel.

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