Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin

Sign Up

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

All , Coverage

All Memoir Coverage

AudioMemoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

One of the great enigmas of the music world is at last telling her story at least those parts she wants us to know. Widely publicized at the time it was announced, Aretha: From These Roots is actually more tantalizing than tell-all. Yet if it doesn't deliver a full portrait of one of this era's divas, it offers enough intriguing glimpses of Aretha Franklin to make the read worthwhile and eye-opening.

She is certainly a dichotomy. There is the Aretha who loves staying home where she cooks, crochets, and delights in gardening. The devoted soap opera fan also remains faithful to her favorite teenage movie, the tear-jerking A Summer Place, which starred Sandra Dee. Why, after she found her own fame, Franklin even had a gown designed by the great Jean Louis who'd created wardrobes for Miss Dee.

Which leads us to the other Aretha. Superstars are a special breed, emboldened by ego as well as talent. They also like to control their press. Franklin is determined to put an end to the oft-reported story that her mother abandoned the family. And she rebuffs unflattering tales told elsewhere by Cissy Houston and Gladys Knight. She also emphasizes the significance of her father, Reverend C.L. Franklin. He certainly was understanding. In defiance of the day's conventions, Franklin became an unwed mother at 14 and again at 17. Her father, she stresses, remained supportive.

Though she doesn't always name names, Franklin details a hearty appetite for men. There are flirtations with Sam Cooke, a relationship with Temptations member Dennis Edwards, a romance (and yet another child) with a black entrepreneur, and several failed marriages. She likewise recounts her romance with food including where and when she was introduced to the BLT and Russian dressing.

And yes, she charts her extraordinary career and the soul sound that became a career signature. This book may not give us all the answers, but there is no question that it puts us in the company of a regal presence. Aretha is, after all, the undisputed Queen of Soul.

One of the great enigmas of the music world is at last telling her story at least those parts she wants us to know. Widely publicized at the time it was announced, Aretha: From These Roots is actually more tantalizing than tell-all. Yet if it…

Memoir

Winning (or losing) the genetic lottery

Review by Kate Pritchard

Although Wendy Burden begins her darkly funny memoir, Dead End Gene Pool, by recounting the lives of her ancestors on her father’s side (she’s the great-times-four-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt), the book’s dedication makes it clear where the heart of her story really lies: “For my mother, goddamn it.”

After Burden’s father killed himself when she was six years old, her mother, Leslie, routinely packed her children off to stay with their grandparents for weekends, summers and whenever she wanted them gone. “Burdenland,” as Leslie contemptuously called it, was as outlandish (and alcohol-soaked) as one expects from the extremely rich, and Burden is especially adept at describing its various settings, from the Fifth Avenue apartment with 14 bathrooms to the private island in Florida. But when Leslie remarried, she began to take a more active role in her children’s upbringing. First in a split-level in Virginia, then in a series of cramped houses in suburban London, they endured not just her terrible cooking and lack of any real maternal compassion, but also her disappointment in them. Burden got the worst of it, constantly fending off remarks about her weight and appearance.

 
Her mother looms large in these pages, most often dressed in skintight microskirts or see-through crochet dresses, setting a standard that her daughter could never reach (and deeply resented). Other family members and housekeeping staff—the retired-Nazi chauffeur, the flatulent, absent-minded grandmother—also play memorable parts, and Burden herself is a delightfully strange character, especially as a child, when her fascination with all things morbid was at its peak. (In one episode, she attempts to drive off one of her mother’s suitors by dressing up like Wednesday Addams and trying to cook her pet hamster in a frying pan.)
 

The narrative loses a bit of steam toward the end, when it seems the best stories have already been told. But the last chapter contains enough revelations and scandal to carry the reader through, and the epilogue supplies Burden with, if not closure, at least some measure of reconciliation—not just with her mother, but with all the ghosts of her history. 

Although Wendy Burden begins her darkly funny memoir, Dead End Gene Pool, by recounting the lives of her ancestors on her father’s side (she’s the great-times-four-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt), the book’s dedication makes it clear where the heart of her story really lies: “For my…

NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Taste

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Like il timpano, the enormous layered pasta pie that starred in the 1996 movie Big Night alongside Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci, the latter’s new memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, is a gastronome’s delight. It has piquant surprises tucked inside and will leave readers both sated and wanting more.

When it comes to Tucci, fans always want more. The award-winning actor and bestselling cookbook author was considered a standout guy even before his swoony Negroni tutorial video went viral at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. He’s known for scene-stealing roles in movies like Spotlight and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as in foodie films like Big Night and Julie & Julia. 

And like Julia Child before him, Tucci’s chef skills are as impressive as his boundless passion for eating. Such is the life of a gourmand, which he revels in and reflects on in Taste. The author takes readers on a grand tasting tour, from his childhood in Westchester, New York, to his 1980s New York City acting debut to bigger roles in major movies made around the world, where he always dined with gusto.

Tucci is quite opinionated about food. Well-placed “fuck”s signify outraged incredulity (e.g., an adult “cutting their spaghetti!!!!!!!” or the travesty of turkey in an alfredo) and offer hits of hilarity throughout. There are also dramatic renderings of memorable conversations, like the gasp-inducing time a chef told him, “I make a stock . . . of cheese.” 

He shares serious stories as well, like the pain and grief he and his family felt when his late wife, Kathryn, died in 2009, and their joy and hope when he married Felicity Blunt in 2012. He writes, too, about his recent cancer diagnosis and treatment, a grueling experience during which he had a feeding tube and worried “things would never return to the way they were, when life was edible.”

Thankfully he is now cancer-free, and via the artfully crafted recipes Tucci includes in Taste, readers can join him in celebrating food and drink once again. Under his tutelage, they might even dare to construct and consume their own timpano.

Like the enormous layered pasta pie that starred in the 1996 movie Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s new memoir is a gastronome’s delight.
NonfictionMemoirAnimals

The Speckled Beauty

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Sit down, pull up a chair (or pick a spot under your favorite tree) and smile as Rick Bragg spins his mesmerizing tales of life down South with characteristically wry humor and wisdom. A paean to his terrible good dog, Speck, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People offers a knowing and humane meditation on the devotion of a man to his dog and a dog to his man.

Bragg first found Speck among a pack of strays eating trash in the middle of the road; when he approached the pack, the other dogs scattered, but Speck lingered, and so Bragg took him in. Speck’s mismatched eyes—a light brown left eye and an almost solid blue-black right eye—“did not ruin his face; they just made him look like the pirate he is.” Bragg wasn’t looking for a dog when he found Speck, and even if he had been, this isn’t the one he might have expected. “I had in mind a fat dog,” he writes, “a gentle plodder that only slobbered an acceptable amount and would not chase a car even if the trunk was packed with pork chops.”

Yet, this dog—who chases cars, drinks from the toilet and rounds up jackasses—has a story, and Bragg tells it with all the “exaggeration and adjustment” of a rattling good storyteller. Bragg weaves his own stories of health challenges and his brother’s cancer diagnosis throughout Speck’s journey, as the two take care of each other in the wilds of rural Alabama. Bragg concludes that Speck “just wants some people of his own, and some snacks, because a dog gets used to things like that. . . . And, when the weather turns bad, he wants someone to come let him in, when the thunder shakes the mountain, when the lightning flash reveals that he was just a dog all this time.”

The Speckled Beauty takes its place beside Willie Morris’ My Dog Skip, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ animal narratives and William Faulkner’s dog stories—as well as all those short tales of devoted dogs in Field & Stream—confirming once more Bragg’s enduring artfulness and cracking good ability to spin memorable, affectionate tales.

The Speckled Beauty confirms Rick Bragg’s enduring artfulness and cracking good ability to spin memorable, affectionate tales.
NonfictionMemoir

Smile

Review by Kelly Blewett

“In fairy tale logic, you must trade something for something you desire,” writes Sarah Ruhl. “By this logic, I traded my face for my children. And it was a fair trade.” This is just one of the many arresting sentences in Ruhl’s new memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which details Ruhl’s pregnancy and subsequent experience of facial paralysis, a condition that set in immediately after delivery. The memoir moves from the intimately personal to the nearly universal: motherhood and medicine, soul and body, and the poetic logic that underlies everyday life. A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice, Ruhl excels at putting striking ideas into simple forms that vibrate with power and energy.

Sarah Ruhl recalls passing her time on bed rest by reading the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill.”

Though Ruhl spent years avoiding her face in daily life, on the page she stares at it without flinching. She recalls refraining from looking at her reflection and how she came to rely on gestures and murmuring to communicate what her mouth and eyes could not—excitement, welcome, affirmation, connection. Behind this performance, or maybe because of it, Ruhl began to disassociate from her face, which no longer expressed her essential self. As a playwright, Ruhl works with actors, whose faces are the tools of their trade and who believe that bodily expression and the inner life are intertwined. Reflecting on these relationships, Ruhl wonders whether appearing more aloof and disengaged has, in fact, made her so. 

Meanwhile, life carried on. Ruhl wrote plays and essays, tried acupuncture and meditation and attempted to raise three children under five while remaining herself. Her memoir is wildly funny about the day-to-day realities of mothering. “My children’s temperaments can be summed up in the way that they vomit,” begins one memorable anecdote. In all, this is a beautiful book that expresses the big feelings of life and the daily practices that allow for incremental progress.

A playwright with a searing voice, Sarah Ruhl excels at putting striking ideas into simple forms that vibrate with power and energy.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Concepcion

Review by Priscilla Kipp

A diligent reader might begin this absorbing journey into an immigrant family’s fortunes, made and lost, by seeking the meaning of its title, Concepcion. They would discover that, like the generations revealed in Albert Samaha’s probing account, the answer isn’t simple. Concepcion is the surname of Samaha’s ancestors, the name of one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships, a city in the Philippines and a word that aptly suggests a beginning.

Now nearing the same age as his mother, Lucy, when she first arrived in California, Samaha wants to understand what led her there. If Lucy was initially blinded by the promises of a country that held sway over her comfortable middle-class life in the Philippines, he wonders, how does she feel now? How have his other family members fared within the diaspora in the U.S., and how do they regard their ties to their homeland? Their answers are surprising and complex.

Samaha writes from the perspective of a successful, educated and skeptical American adult, declaring, “I found it easier to see what my elders could not: the height of the climb and the length of the fall.” Applying his skills as an investigative journalist to his family’s far-reaching saga, he filters their experiences as immigrants through the Philippines’ tumultuous history and the effects of their acquired American culture. It’s a deftly executed back-and-forth, and he shares his own enlightenments—and criticisms—as he goes. The role of race in the history of the National Football League and the influence of religion on political preferences are among his targets.

Samaha’s deep dive into Philippine history begins with Magellan’s colonization of the Philippines in the 1500s, flows through the centuries to Ferdinand Marcos’ long, controversial reign as the 10th president of the Philippines, and ends with Rodrigo Duterte’s current iron grip. Japan’s brutal occupation during World War II led to a U.S. takeover (the spoils of victory), and America has loomed large as a land of opportunity ever since. When U.S. immigration rules relaxed in 1965, Filipinos knew where to go.

Now, having benefited from his mother’s years of devotion and hard work, his absent father’s money and the support of their larger family in the Bay Area, Samaha is sensitive to their struggles amid what he sees as the failed promises, economic inequities and racial injustices of their adopted country. From the disadvantages of their lower paying jobs—such as his uncle’s work as an airport baggage handler after abandoning his career as a rock star in the Philippines—to their resilient, steadfast beliefs in democracy’s ideals despite its failings, Samaha plants their stories alongside his own and grows a remarkable family tree.

Journalist Albert Samaha's investigation into his family’s decision to emigrate from the Philippines turns up some surprising and complex answers.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Seeing Ghosts

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Early in her debut memoir, Seeing Ghosts, journalist Kat Chow recalls one of the times her mom made a goofy Dracula face, an exaggerated grin with teeth bared. “When I die,” Chow’s mother told then 9-year-old Chow, “I want you to get me stuffed so I can sit in your apartment and watch you all the time.” This strange request haunted Chow in the years after her mother, Florence, born Bo Moi in 1950s China, died from liver cancer when Chow was 14. Florence’s too-early death informs this memoir, which delves into the quiet devastation of Chow, her two older sisters and their father, and how the family’s grief has shifted over the years. Along the way, Chow carries on a running conversation with Florence, addressing her and asking unanswerable questions.

Chow recounts both her own youth and episodes from the lives of her parents, immigrants who met and married in Connecticut and whom Chow portrays with love and candor. Florence’s playful but odd sense of humor served as an anchor for her three daughters. (She enjoyed hiding around corners, jumping out to scare her kids and then hugging them.) Wing Shek, Chow’s dad, became unable to throw anything away in the years after his wife’s death, and Chow portrays this reality with compassion, as well.

Late in the book, Chow recalls recent family trips to China and Cuba, which she spent searching for truer, more complete versions of the family stories she heard as a young person. For example, in Cuba, Chow looks for traces of her grandfather’s expat life as a restaurant worker in the 1950s. As Chow’s dad likewise searches for his father’s history, he begins to face his own long-lived but unspoken grief, and we see how far the family has come in their years without Florence.

Like the experience of grief itself, Seeing Ghosts is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.

Like the experience of grief itself, Kat Chow’s memoir is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Unbound

Review by Amy Scribner

Before she was the world-famous creator of #MeToo, the movement that sparked a reckoning with the mistreatment of women, especially women of color, Tarana Burke was a community organizer and journalist. Her experience as a reporter will be no surprise to anyone who reads Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, her unflinching, open-hearted, beautifully told account of becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.

Burke was molested by a neighborhood boy in the Bronx when she was 7. Over the years, despite the presence of several loving adults in her life, Burke was repeatedly sexually assaulted. “I was a grown woman before I truly understood the word rape and was able to relate it to my experience,” she writes. “Language like rape, molestation, and abuse were foreign to me as a child. I had no definitions and no context. Nobody around me talked like that.”

In spite of her trauma, Burke writes with humor and gratitude about her experiences. She delves into the rich history of her family, led by a granddaddy who “believed in celebrating Blackness in as many ways as possible” and a mother who was a devout Catholic. In school, Burke was both academically gifted and an agitator who spent time in the principal’s office. A high school leadership program led Burke to Selma, Alabama, where she laid the groundwork for #MeToo after realizing there was an utter lack of programs to support and protect young women as they spoke their truth about sexual abuse.

Burke also writes honestly about her reaction to #MeToo becoming a viral phenomenon on social media in 2017, initially without her knowledge or participation. After spending more than a decade traveling around the country, conducting workshops and speaking on panels about surviving sexual assault, she worried social media would water down or misuse her work.

Ultimately Burke realized that “all the folks who were using the #metoo hashtag, and all the Hollywood actresses who came forward with their allegations, needed the same thing that the little Black girls in Selma, Alabama, needed—space to be seen and heard. They needed empathy and compassion and a path to healing.”

Unbound is not just a thoroughly engrossing read. It’s also an important book that helps us understand the woman who has been so influential as our country struggles to acknowledge women’s trauma.

In the audio edition of ‘Unbound,’ Tarana Burke’s story is rendered all the more potent by her confident voice.

Unbound is Tarana Burke’s unflinching, beautifully told account of founding the #MeToo movement and becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.
NonfictionMusicMemoir

Saga Boy

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Hurtling down the blind curves and treacherous twists and turns of family dysfunction and social displacement, Antonio Michael Downing searches for himself among the cultural clutter of sports, religion and music. Combining staccato prose and singsong storytelling, Downing’s Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming navigates loneliness, uncertainty, fear, hopelessness and hunger.

Downing grew up in Trinidad with his grandmother, Miss Excelly, dreaming of mango season. She taught him two important things: how to sing and “the magic of the Queen’s English.” While his childhood was not idyllic, Downing felt safe with his grandmother and her love. When Miss Excelly died, however, he and his brother were shipped off to Canada to live with an aunt, and thus began a peripatetic lifestyle marked by a lack of security or family love.

Downing was shuttled between aunts in Canada. He never quite fit in at any particular place, though he valiantly threw himself into basketball and music in high school. He eventually recovered his love for language and writing at the University of Waterloo and put together a show with an artist friend who painted scenes from a short story Downing wrote. That experience gave birth to DJ Mic Dainjay, Downing's alter ego that he used as a performer during a time when he was also working at Blackberry as a sales representative. Today he performs music as John Orpheus.

Downing’s heart-wrenching memoir chronicles his saga of trying on and casting off many masks, learning the dimensions of the face through which he sees the world and the world sees him. As he writes, “This is a story about unbelonging, about placeness, about leaving everything behind. This is about metamorphosis: death and rebirth. . . . This is a story about family and forgiveness. About becoming what you always were.”

Combining staccato prose and singsong storytelling, Saga Boy hurtles down the treacherous twists and turns of family dysfunction and social displacement.
NonfictionMemoirArt

Chasing Me to My Grave

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Art can redeem suffering, but it can also reveal brutalities that degrade the human spirit. Art can capture the hopelessness of individuals hemmed in by fences not of their own making, even as it portrays the hopefulness of scaling those barriers and strolling in the expansive paths beyond. In Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, Winfred Rembert recounts to co-author Erin I. Kelly his own gripping, often harrowing stories of growing up in Cuthbert, Georgia, and of turning to painting to represent the atrocities and celebrations of his life.

Rembert opens his memoir by recalling the journey to find his birth mother, who gave him away as a baby. He stole away from Cuthbert and walked up the railroad tracks 40 miles to Leslie, Georgia, where he found his mother but discovered she was none too happy to see him. Back in Cuthbert, Rembert celebrates the bustling juke joints and stores on Hamilton Avenue, depicting flourishing scenes of Black men and women going about their daily lives.

Life turned bleak when Rembert was arrested while fleeing a civil rights demonstration in 1965. He was brutalized and nearly lynched by law enforcement officers and a gang of white men. Eventually Rembert was sent to a chain gang, which he describes as being “like slavery. You have to meet all those demands and keep a sense of yourself as well.” In a stroke of good fortune, Rembert met a young woman named Patsy, whom he eventually married when he was released from prison.

While imprisoned, Rembert developed his artistic skills, and he continued to carve and paint on leather until his death in 2021. His art, which is reproduced throughout the book, depicts the people of Cuthbert, his family and his time on the chain gang. “With my paintings I tried to make a bad situation look good,” Rembert writes. “You can’t make the chain gang look good in any way besides by painting it in art.”

Chasing Me to My Grave is a testament to the ways one man used his art to educate, delight and depict the trauma that arises out of memory.

Winfred Rembert recounts gripping, often harrowing stories of growing up in Georgia, surviving a lynching and discovering art while imprisoned in a chain gang.
NonfictionMemoir

Beautiful Country

Review by Kelly Blewett

From ages 7 to 12, Qian Julie Wang lived as an undocumented immigrant in Brooklyn, New York. Her hunger was regularly so intense that she broke into cold sweats—which, according to her Ma Ma, meant Wang was growing and getting stronger. One classmate referred to Wang’s family not as “low-income” but “no-income.” Her world was simultaneously frightening and normal as she sat listening to scuttling cockroaches with her parents nearby. She describes childhood trenchantly in Beautiful Country, allowing readers to feel her anger, longing, loneliness and fear—and to observe her parents’ desperation.

In Beijing, Wang’s mother was a published professor who spoke Mandarin, the language of intellectuals. But in Brooklyn, her mother lamented, “All these Cantonese assume that if you speak Mandarin you’re a farmer from Fuzhou.” Wang’s mother got a job sewing in a sweatshop, where “there was no day or night; there was only work.”

Wang’s parents regarded her as their best hope for a future, optimistic that she would be suited to this Mei Guo, “beautiful country.” They were right to believe in her. By fourth grade, Wang wrote so well that her teachers suspected plagiarism, and now Wang has written a memoir precise enough to chill her readers. The narrative is full of sharply rendered scenes, such as one in which Wang’s mother suffers in a cold sushi factory before coming home to warm herself in front of a pot of boiling water.

Wang dedicates her memoir to “those who remain in the shadows.” Indeed, Beautiful Country shines light on the childhood that continued to haunt Wang into adulthood, even as her professional accomplishments mounted. She is vulnerable in revealing her uniquely American trauma: a bruised wrist that never quite healed; a hunger that was never quite sated; a feeling that everything, at any moment, could suddenly be taken away. Wang, who is now a civil rights lawyer, is a voice we need. Readers will be grateful for the courage she has displayed in persevering and speaking up.

Qian Julie Wang courageously reveals her uniquely American trauma: a hunger that was never quite sated; a feeling that everything could be taken away.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionYA FictionYAMemoir

The Hold List: The first cut is the deepest

Feature by the editors of BookPage

When you consider all the time, effort and hope that goes into writing a book, it only makes a truly great debut that much more impressive. Here are the debuts we’ll never forget.

The Poppy War

The first installment in R.F. Kuang’s epic military fantasy trilogy is essentially one book that transforms into another. It begins as an iteration of the well-loved “story set in a magical school,” as the orphaned Rin escapes her abusive, impoverished life in southern Nikan by winning a scholarship to the famous military academy of Sinegard. Sure, it’s a bit more blunt and brutal than you’d expect—Rin burns herself with candle wax to stay awake while studying, and schoolyard brawls between students with martial arts training turn bloody fast—but Kuang’s earthy sense of humor lightens the mood. And then Nikan is invaded, and The Poppy War morphs into a grimdark meditation on whether it’s possible to retain your humanity if you can wield the powers of a god. Neither half would work without the other, and Kuang’s mastery of both proves that her career will be endlessly fascinating.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

The Story of Owen

Canadian author E.K. Johnston’s debut asks an irresistible though not previously unasked question—what if dragons were real?—and its answer is the best I’ve ever read. When Canada’s highest paid dragon slayer retires to Siobhan’s small town of Trondheim, Ontario, to train her teenage nephew, Owen, Siobhan never expects to become part of their story, let alone be invited to become the bard who will tell it. Johnston takes world building to new heights, offering explanations of everything from the rise of corporate-contracted dragon slayers to why postmodernists incorrectly blame “the decline of the dracono-bardic tradition on the sudden and soaring popularity of the Beatles.” The dragons are attracted to carbon emissions, so teens take driver’s education to learn “the more banal aspects of safe driving: four-way stops, three-point turns, small dragon evasion, and the like,” and Michigan’s factories attracted so many of the beasts that humans abandoned the state completely. To read this book is to understand why Johnston has become one of the most consistently surprising YA writers working today. 

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

White Teeth

This book came out when I was 10 days old, right at the start of the new millennium. Zadie Smith herself was 25 when her debut landed—young enough to be the voice of a new generation but still old enough to know how silly such a title is. Soon after its release she would become one of the most important authors around. Though I didn’t read it until 20 years after its release, this book still feels as impactful and fresh as it must have felt in 2000. Family dramas were big in literary fiction at the time (e.g., The Corrections, Infinite Jest), but White Teeth, with its ethnic, ideological and thematic diversity, stands out among the pack. From the iconic opening line through each intertwined storyline, Smith tells a story that captures the anxiety and hope of both an older generation entering a new world and young people conquering an old one. 

—Eric, Editorial Intern

The People in the Trees

Sometimes it feels like a debut novelist purges all their best ideas for that first book, using up every resource for their big entrance. After coming out of the gate so hot, they can’t be blamed for not writing another, or for experiencing what we in the book reviewing biz call the “sophomore slump.” I’ll admit that when I read Hanya Yanagihara’s debut back in 2013, I believed that this was the kind of writer she had to be. A novel this complex, profound and imaginative, with writing so visceral and poised—surely this was everything she had, dumped out in the exuberant, chaotic flurry of the new artist. But as proven by her virtuosic follow-up, A Little Life, that was hardly the case. In writing this column, I wondered how well my memory of her first book would hold up, and a return to The People in the Trees has once again left me in awe at her overwhelming descriptions of the Micronesian jungle, her nuanced portrayal of a predatory genius and the fact that this book still, after all these years, has no equal.

 —Cat, Deputy Editor

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

Serial memoirist (and occasional novelist) Alexandra Fuller has lived quite a life—expansive enough to fill five books, and counting. But her first memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is the one that has haunted me the most. Growing up with her white family in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the Rhodesian Bush War, Fuller experienced things that were thrilling, beautiful and dangerous. In the bush of southern Africa, she and her sister learned to shoot guns, kill snakes and avoid landmines and guerrilla fighters. She survived hazards closer to home, as well, such as her mother’s alcoholism and the loss of their family farm to land redistribution after the war. Danger is barely kept at bay throughout this book, and not everyone survives. But the telling is so moving, and the writing so beautiful, you’ll savor even the bitterest parts of this chronicle of a remarkable childhood.

—Christy, Associate Editor

It was love at first sight for the BookPage editors and these five debuts.

NonfictionMemoirEnvironment

Warmth

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

It’s an age-old dilemma. Each generation bears the weight of passing society’s burdens on to the next one, and climate change is no exception. But can the continuing escalation of this issue be prevented, or at least slowed, so that our children and grandchildren aren’t saddled with a disastrous future?

Climate activist Daniel Sherrell ponders the preciousness and fragility of life from the perspective of someone whose life is mostly still ahead of him in his debut book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Although he’s still in his early 30s, Sherrell’s tone is that of an old soul as he reflects on the changing climate in a letter to his unborn child. Referring to climate change as the Problem (with a capital P), he outlines the weather- and natural disaster-related events he has already witnessed in his short lifetime, such as Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Maria and raging wildfires.

Sherrell is a passionate advocate for the climate movement, which he conveys with urgency and honest, raw emotion, expressing an anxiety he feels has infiltrated the essence of his being. He writes with a frightening sense of gravity that will give Generation X and the baby boom generation reason to take a close, hard look at what’s happening and do something.

This is exactly Sherrell’s message. We need to do something—about fossil fuels, corrupt politicians, global food and water security. The list goes on. Warmth is a pleading, informative call to action. As Sherrell writes, “Increasingly, the only viable future seems to be in shoring up the future itself.”

Climate activist Daniel Sherrell ponders the fragility of life from the perspective of someone whose life is still ahead of him in his raw, passionate debut book.

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