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FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Catalina

Review by Eric A. Ponce

College is supposed to be the best four years of your life. Throwing a Frisbee on the quad, spending late nights in the library, meeting people from all over the world—in the American imagination, college is a utopia. In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, the titular character goes to Harvard and realizes that college can be a dystopia, too. As an undocumented person in the United States, Catalina Ituralde is forced to live her life quietly, mostly staying home with her two grandparents, who are also undocumented and at risk of deportation. But Catalina can’t avoid attention, or at least she doesn’t want to. An adventurous free spirit, she wants to live life to the fullest. She wants to fall in love and experience all of life’s pleasures and pains.

Every college student dreads graduation: After four years of security, what comes next? The “real” world? For Catalina, in her senior year, this dread is emphasized by an actual existential threat. Her status as a student helps to keep her from being deported, and if she can’t find a sustainable life path to follow after college, she risks being taken from the only world she’s ever known. When a pretty, privileged boy starts to take interest in her, it seems like a way is opening to get everything she wants. Nathaniel—whom Catalina never refers to as “Nathan” or “Nate,” underscoring the disparity of their social statuses—is the son of a famous director and an aspiring anthropologist. Both he and his father have a keen interest in the culture of Latin America, particularly Ecuador, where Catalina and her family have roots. Catalina flirts with Nathaniel, ensuring that he slowly, helplessly falls for her, and she starts to catch feelings too. But when the threat of deportation becomes a reality for her family, Catalina has to take advantage of her budding romance, asking Nathaniel’s father to help her gain public support by collaborating on a documentary. The project puts a strain on Catalina as she is forced to define herself, to speak for her dysfunctional family and to confront what kind of person Harvard has made her.

Written in brilliant, overflowing prose, Catalina is one of the best, most fun-to-read books you will find. You may see a bit of yourself in Catalina, or you may learn how to empathize with someone whose entire life is chaos.

Read our interview with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about Catalina.

In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina Ituralde, an adventurous free spirit and an undocumented student at Harvard, finds college to be a more dystopian experience than the typical American envisioning.
FictionThrillerDebut FictionCrime Fiction

Between This World and the Next

Review by Alden Mudge

Joseph Nightingale, nicknamed Fearless after a moment of heroism during the Bosnian conflict, is a British war photographer who was in Nairobi during the August 1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy. While he was away, his pregnant girlfriend, an award-winning investigative journalist, was killed in an automobile accident. As Praveen Herat’s gripping debut political thriller, Between This World and the Next, opens, Fearless has accepted his old friend, Alyosha Federenko’s invitation to Cambodia, arriving overwhelmed by grief and guilt.

Federenko stashes Fearless at the Naga, a gathering place for the gangs and soldiers of fortune set loose upon the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the chilling pleasures of this book is Herat’s vivid, knowledgeable portrait of this threatening netherworld, from outposts like the Naga to breakaway states like Transnistria, where money is exchanged for advanced weaponry and private armies are assembled to rule in feudal power.

Federenko himself resides at a luxury hotel while he wheels and deals in an attempt to gather money and power to work himself back into the upper echelons of the new Russian elite. Fearless at first forgives the acquisitiveness of a man he knows was born in chaos and poverty. But as events unfold, and people get hurt and killed, Fearless’s worldview of engaged empathy collides with Federenko’s selfish, transactional view of human interactions.

Also at the Naga is Song, a young Cambodian woman enslaved as a cleaner. As children, she and her twin sister were sold into prostitution. Song’s face has since been ravaged by an acid attack, and her soul is deflated by loss of contact with her sister. She cares for the young children who are brought to the Naga by adult predators and whose gruesome abuse is recorded on video. The existence of one of these videos, handed off to Fearless, sets the elaborate plot rolling with increasing velocity.

The final chapters of Between This World and the Next are breathtaking in their descriptive power and imaginative reach, and the novel’s ending is very satisfying. But some threads still dangle and not all questions are answered—which makes one hope for a sequel.

Praveen Herat’s prizewinning debut thriller, Between This World and the Next, paints a vivid, knowledgeable portrait of a threatening political netherworld, including breakaway states like Transnistria.
FictionThrillerLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Bright Objects

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A fatal accident, a cosmic visitor and a mysterious stranger all come together in a small Australian town in Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects.

Young widow Sylvia Knight is recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and left her with serious injuries, both physical and psychological. Profoundly lonely, Sylvia works at the local mortuary, keeps her husband’s grave tidy and puts on a cheerful face for her mother-in-law, Sandy, whom she visits weekly. But she is haunted by sketchy memories of the night of the accident. Although another car was involved, nobody was arrested, but Sylvia believes she knows who was responsible. When word comes through her friend Vince that the police are closing the case, she falls into a deep depression and plans to take her own life. However, the appearance of a rare comet proves a distraction. When the comet’s discoverer, American astronomer Theo St. John, walks into the mortuary one day, Sylvia’s life takes a turn. Sylvia and Theo begin to find connection through shared meals and trips to the observatory to view the comet.

As the comet’s path draws closer to Earth, the mood in town shifts from celebratory to ominous. Joseph Evans, local meditation teacher and the heir of a wealthy family, sees the comet as a divine messenger and begins a series of mystical lectures that attract a cultlike following. He is eager to involve both Sylvia and Sandy, and Sylvia is distressed to see her mother-in-law drawn in by his promises. Conflicted in her feelings towards Theo and still wrestling with suicidal ideation, Sylvia finds her obsession with uncovering her husband’s killer pushing her to the edges of her sanity.

Bright Objects is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.

Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects, is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

Both an art book and a kind of poetic herbarium, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children defies easy classification. That’s for the benefit of readers, though: Untethered to the conventions of traditional genres, writer Jamaica Kincaid is free to create something brand new, and perusing the pages feels like true discovery. Kincaid’s tone shifts from erudite to casual with a buoyancy that will make readers want to follow her thoughts through till the end. In the section that begins “O is for Orange,” Kincaid writes of the many names and etymological roots for oranges, and how the Earth is indifferent to the names we assign its fruits: “The vegetable kingdom persists and will most likely do so when we are no longer here to name and identify it.” The book’s colorful watercolors are by celebrated artist Kara Walker, and they’re treated as equal partners to Kincaid’s prose. In Walker’s hands, the illustration for poppies includes carnivalesque swirls of opium and bagels, a woman in seductive repose and a man hanging his head in despair. This niche but precious volume feels outside of time, and will be a treat to gardeners, children, artists, poets and book lovers alike.

 

Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker’s An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children will be a treat to gardeners, children, artists, poets and book lovers alike.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

Agony Hill

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

Summer, 1965: The weather’s hot, the Vietnam draft is ramping up and there’s a new detective in the sleepy town of Bethany, Vermont. But a mysterious fire and the resulting death of a volatile resident will change this New England burg forever. Sarah Stewart Taylor’s Agony Hill kicks off a historical mystery series set in a time with shocking parallels to the present, and features a vibrant cast of characters led by handsome but haunted Detective Franklin Warren.

Warren, a former Bostonian looking for quiet refuge, has barely unpacked when his new assignment with the state police starts with a bang. Up on Agony Hill, Hugh Weber’s barn just burned down—with Weber inside it. As Warren soon discovers, Weber’s public drunkenness and frequent angry letters to the local newspaper made the New York transplant a Bethany outcast. Weber left behind his much younger wife, Sylvie; the mother of his four (soon to be five) children, Sylvie is a sensitive soul that many misperceive as simple. Does she know more about the fire than she’s telling Warren? What about the mysterious man in the woods on the hill, or Weber’s estranged brother, who’s come to town with an ax to grind? And then there’s the personal tragedy Warren still can’t shake; will this affect his ability to solve a death that may or may not have been homicide?

Taylor, who’s been nominated for an Agatha Award and the Dashiell Hammett Prize, is the author of two mystery series: Sweeney St. George, which is set in New England, and Maggie D’arcy, set on Long Island and in Ireland. Agony Hill is an excellent start to her first historical series. Warren is a thoughtful, complex protagonist, experiencing a new chapter in a tiny town rife with secrets. He is surrounded by fascinating folk, including nosy neighbor (and former spy) Alice Bellows and his fresh-faced colleague “Pinky” Goodrich (so nicknamed for his tendency to blush). Taylor’s strong sense of place and community sets Agony Hill apart, and the mystery of Weber’s fiery demise is resolved in a way that’s both satisfying and thought-provoking.

With Agony Hill, Sarah Stewart Taylor kicks off a thoughtful, thought-provoking historical mystery series set in a time with shocking parallels to the present.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestylesLGBTQ+

A Sense of Shifting

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

A collaboration between writer Coco Romack and photographer Yael Malka, A Sense of Shifting: Queer Artists Reshaping Dance is a triumph of photography, dance and queer culture. Each of the book’s 12 chapters is dedicated to a specific queer dancer or dance company, and together they tell a fairly comprehensive story about the various ways that queer dance is pushing boundaries and destabilizing traditions. In Romack’s words, these dancers “embody expansive and liberatory means of existing.” In a chapter dedicated to San Francisco’s Sundance Stompede, Romack spotlights the annual four-day festival of LGBTQ+ country-western dancers with participant interviews and historical context, while Malka’s photos capture intimate moments of queer love—and plenty of cowboy boots. A chapter on Queer Butoh, a collection of performances presented by Vangeline Theater and the New York Butoh Institute, includes haunting imagery of butoh dancers as well as a cultural examination of the movement’s equally haunting genesis in postwar Japan. There’s a chapter on disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light, which includes dancers who use wheelchairs, and a chapter about the gender-expansive strip party Alejandro’s Night. One word of warning: Reading about these fascinating subjects may result in the purchase of a ticket to see them.

 

The triumphant photo-essay book A Sense of Shifting shows how queer dance is pushing boundaries and destabilizing traditions.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

A Sorceress Comes to Call

Review by Laura Hubbard

A sorceress able to take control of others’ bodies and force them into submission, Evangeline is an unpredictable and often cruel force of nature in her daughter Cordelia’s life. And when Evangeline’s latest “arrangement” with a gentleman falls apart, the pair moves to the house of Evangeline’s next target, a squire named Samuel with a large estate and a too-generous nature. The only obstacle is Hester, the squire’s spinster sister. Hester takes one look at Evangeline and knows that she’s up to no good—and that Cordelia is as much at her mother’s mercy as Hester’s own brother is. Cordelia and Hester must work alongside a cadre of Hester’s closest friends (including Richard, her former lover) to stop Evangeline’s dark plot and rescue Cordelia from a life under her mother’s thumb.

Inspired at least in part by author T. Kingfisher’s love of Regency romance novels, A Sorceress Comes to Call is a delightful combination of the alien-yet-still-familiar worlds of Jane Austen and Bridgerton and the shadowy terror of the unknown. That might seem like an odd combination, but telling a story that takes inspiration from such a well-known setting affords Kingfisher with ready-made world building, giving her flexibility to focus instead on her leading women and the evil that has come to ruin them.

Why T. Kingfisher brought horror to a Regency-esque high society.

To say the two heroines of A Sorceress Comes to Call are unlikely is an extreme understatement. Cordelia is too timid: Left without guidance (and encouraging banter) from Hester, she would likely have continued to cower in her mother’s shadow. Lively and curmudgeonly, the 51-year-old Hester would have been content with her lot in life, bum knee and all, without the threat of Evangeline’s presence. Neither is the image of the “final girl” we’re taught to expect. But through gut-clenching scenes of body horror and moments of heartwarming humor, Kingfisher shows that even the most unlikely of heroines can prevail against the darkness

With both gut-clenching scenes and moments of heartwarming humor, A Sorceress Comes to Call is the Regency-fantasy-horror hybrid only T. Kingfisher could write.
FictionAudioLiterary Fiction

Long Island

Review by Deborah Mason

In Long Island (9.5 hours), Colm Toibin wastes no time before lobbing a hand grenade into the happy, suburban life of Eilis Lacey, the heroine of his critically acclaimed novel Brooklyn. The resulting shock waves push her out of her home in Lindenhurst, New York, and back to her mother’s home in Enniscorthy, Ireland, where she confronts past regrets, present secrets and, perhaps, future happiness.

Oscar-nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley does an excellent job of switching from Eilis’ lilting Irish accent to the distinct Long Island accent of her Italian American in-laws, creating nuanced, complex characters on both sides of the ocean. Moreover, Buckley honors the many pauses and silences Toibin builds into the story, allowing the reader to fill those spaces with the weight of the characters’ hesitance, hope and fear.

Read our review of the print version of ‘Long Island.’

Oscar-nominated Irish actress Jessie Buckley gives nuanced voices to Eilis Lacey’s Irish relatives and Italian American in-laws in the audio version of Long Island, Colm Toibin’s sequel to Brooklyn.
NonfictionTrue Crime

A Devil Went Down to Georgia

Review by Alice Cary

On January 16, 1987, a vibrant, beloved Black woman, 35-year-old Lita McClinton Sullivan, opened the door of her townhouse in a wealthy Atlanta neighborhood to a man who seemed to be delivering flowers. Instead, he gunned her down, killing her with one shot to the head. Later that day, a judge had been scheduled to announce the division of assets in her divorce after 10 years of marriage to white millionaire Jim Sullivan. Nineteen years later, in 2006, Sullivan was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill Lita; his conviction was based largely on the testimony of that hit man, who in 2003 received a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the murder.

Journalist Deb Miller Landau writes a sweeping account of this crime and prolonged road to justice in A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton. Landau first covered the case for Atlanta magazine in 2004. She writes of that story, “what really climbed under my skin was the humanity and depravity of it all. What makes people become who they are? What leads us to the choices we make?” The case continued to haunt her, and after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Landau, who is white, wondered, “How clearly had I seen Lita the first time I wrote this story?”

She revisited McClinton’s parents, now in their late 80s: Her mother, the “still glamorous” Jo Ann, is a former Georgia General Assembly representative; her father, Emory, is a retired engineer who has cancer and dementia. Neither parent approved of Sullivan, a divorced father of four who was 10 years older than their debutante daughter. As one source told Landau, “He was a real sociopath. He could be charming, but he could turn on you like a cobra.”

Landau excels at laying out decades of details, deftly weaving her recent investigations, including her meeting with the hit man, into the long timeline. While she does try to focus on Lita’s perspective, the victim’s long-silenced voice is hard to capture. In contrast, Sullivan’s misdeeds and bizarre behaviors reverberate, including his womanizing and lavish spending that alternated with extreme miserliness, despite the fact that he and Lita had been living in a 17,000 square foot mansion, a historic landmark called Casa Eleda in opulent Palm Beach, Florida.

A Devil Went Down to Georgia chronicles a collision course of race, power, class and, most of all, Sullivan’s narcissism and endless greed. It’s a page-turning saga, as well as a testament to Lita, her devastated family and the determined investigators and lawyers who sought justice for them.

 

A Devil Went Down to Georgia is a page-turning true crime saga about a calculating white millionaire, the vibrant Black wife he murdered and her family’s long pursuit of justice.
NonfictionAudioMedicine

A Fatal Inheritance

Review by Tami Orendain

Lawrence Ingrassia is intimately familiar with the painful, inevitable question many face after losing multiple loved ones to cancer: Why? In his book, A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery (9.5 hours), Ingrassia explores research on hereditary cancer predisposition and introduces families—including his own—who are grappling with what this research could mean for them.

Narrator Roger Wayne gives this topic the care and honesty it deserves. He lends a friendly, personable tone to Ingrassia’s recollections: Happy memories are read with nostalgic tenderness, while painful moments are treated with solemn respect. Historical sections telling the stories of the doctors, scientists and patients involved in the progress of research emphasize the connection between the scientific and the personal.

Listeners will find A Fatal Inheritance to be an effective overview of research on cancer and hereditary predisposition, one that achieves serious investigation while remaining intensely human.

Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘A Fatal Inheritance.’

Listeners will find A Fatal Inheritance to be an effective overview of research on cancer and hereditary predisposition, one that achieves serious investigation while remaining intensely human.
Science Fiction & FantasyAudioFantasy

A Letter to the Luminous Deep

Review by Norah Piehl

Sylvie Cathrall’s debut fantasy, a series opener, offers an aquatic variation on dark academia, unfolding entirely through a series of letters and other documents. Set 1,000 years after a mysterious event called “the Dive” sent almost all of humankind underwater, A Letter to the Luminous Deep (12.5 hours) begins with reclusive E. Cidnosin writing to scholar Henerey Clel about her discovery of an unidentified “elongated fish.” Listeners soon discover, through letters between E.’s sister, Sophy, and Henerey’s brother, Vyerin, that E. and Henerey have disappeared under unexplained circumstances. Part mystery, part slowly building romance, Cathrall’s lyrical fantasy utilizes poignant details and quaint language to conjure an evocative underwater world. The use of different narrators for each letter writer—Claire Morgan, Kit Griffiths, Justin Avoth and Joshua Riley—is an effective way to differentiate the characters, and the novel’s unhurried pacing allows listeners to relish the art of letter writing.

Read our starred review of the print version of A Letter to the Luminous Deep.

Part mystery, part slowly building romance, Sylvie Cathrall's lyrical fantasy, A Letter to the Luminous Deep, utilizes poignant details and quaint language to conjure an evocative underwater world.

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