A Place for Us has been guaranteed a certain amount of prerelease publicity as the first novel under actress, producer and designer Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth. The author, Fatima Farheen Mirza, is a 26-year-old graduate of the highly respected Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The novel concerns itself with the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family living in California. The opening scene is the wedding of eldest daughter Hadia. The bride’s prodigal brother, Amar, has returned after an absence of several years, and the reasons for this absence unfold in ensuing chapters.

Hadia and Amar, along with sister Huda, are the children of Layla and Rafiq, and the interior lives of these characters are explored in continually shifting timelines. Early on, these multiple points of view and the seeming lack of plot make the story confusing, but A Place for Us gains traction when Amar is bullied at school around 9/11. He is also involved in a forbidden romance with Amira Ali, the daughter of a well-respected local family whose eldest son died in a car accident.

Overshadowing all these events are the parameters of a deeply traditional Muslim culture—arranged marriages, the differing set of standards and expectations for men and women, the pressure for academic achievement—and the looming sense of being an “other” in American society.

Immigrant novels often center on conflict and the juxtaposition between Old World values and modern Western culture. In seeking a better life for their children, Layla and Rafiq must contend with this and the effect it has on their family. A Place for Us resonates at the crossroads of culture, character, storytelling and poignancy.

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

Part thriller, part crime novel, part dreamscape, James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin refuses to be contained.

The bears on the Appalachian nature preserve overseen by Rice Moore, the novel’s on-the-run main character, need protection from hunters—much like Rice. He is used to being alone and operating outside the law, having fled from a drug cartel in Arizona. Rice is thankful for a break from the guns and violence of drug-running, but the bear poaching he encounters in his mountain refuge might be more than he can handle—and he finds help in the most unlikely of suspects.

The book begins with Rice’s prison sentence in Arizona and traces his tumultuous journey from confinement to hard-won freedom. Rice is employed to survey and maintain the Appalachian preserve, but the discovery of bear carcasses—as well as the story of the previous caretaker’s tragic departure—trigger in Rice a desire for revenge. In homemade camouflage, Rice spends more and more time on the mountain, watching for bear hunters and becoming like a bear himself. Wonderfully lucid prose in the climactic middle section starkly conveys Rice’s descent into a wild existence: “Hysteria fluttered like a moth in the back of his throat.” When Rice is attacked, the previous caretaker and other mountain people—including an ex-soldier turned criminal, a locksmith, a reclusive beekeeper and hillbilly brothers working their way into a nefarious biker gang—play their parts to bring about old-fashioned justice.

Smart and sophisticated, with animals both wild and domestic acting as metaphors, Bearskin is a gritty, down-home tale told with brute force. Rice is a memorable, reluctant hero for both his community and the animals in his charge.

Read more: James A. McLaughlin shares how he dug in deep to write Bearskin.

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.

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.

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.

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.