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FictionPopular Fiction

The Same Bright Stars

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Set in the Delaware coastal town where he lives, Ethan Joella’s third novel, The Same Bright Stars, is a gentle story of one man’s attempt to come to terms with his past and his present as he confronts the challenges of middle age.

For nearly 70 years, the Schmidt family—Jack Schmidt and before him, his grandmother and father—has operated a popular restaurant on the beachfront of Rehoboth Beach, the “Nation’s Summer Capital.” Now, as Jack, a bachelor whose entire life for more than 30 years has been devoted to that family business, approaches his 53rd birthday, he must weigh whether or not to accept an offer from DelDine, an aggressive chain that owns several restaurants along the shore, to purchase his business and allow him to retire with financial security, if not true purpose.

Following his protagonist from the eve of Thanksgiving to the following autumn, Joella unobtrusively produces a sympathetic portrait of a man who “hasn’t let himself do anything,” but is ambivalent about trading the only life he’s known for a new, uncertain future. His feelings about a possible sale are complicated by intense loyalty to his staff, some of whom have worked for the restaurant for decades, especially Genevieve, a longtime employee approaching retirement who’s facing a crisis involving her drug-addicted son.

Just as insistently, Jack can’t free himself from the tug of his past. He’s never fully recovered from the loss of his mother when he was 12 years old, and when Kitty, a former romantic partner, returns to town after her divorce to care for her dying mother, his feelings for her are rekindled. But those aren’t the only echoes of Jack’s personal history, and he unexpectedly learns something about a summer romance from his college days that threatens to upend his entire understanding of who he is and how his life has played out.

While The Same Bright Stars is unapologetically realistic in its content and style, and conventional in its structure, Joella adroitly delivers plausible plot twists that evoke empathy for his characters and maintain the story’s momentum to the end. Readers who prefer their fiction mellow and just a touch sentimental will savor the hours they spend in the company of Jack Schmidt and his friends. 

In Ethan Joella’s gentle third novel, Jack Schmidt must weigh a lucrative offer to purchase the family business, a popular restaurant on the beachfront of Rehoboth Beach, against his uncertainty about the future and his loyalty to his staff.
NonfictionTrue Crime

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

Review by Anne Bartlett

The likes of Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and their Prohibition-era gangster pals have been great fodder for movies and TV shows. But they were actually latecomers. By the time the first immigrant Mafioso got off the boat in the 19th century, organized crime was already well-established in the United States.

Fredericka Mandelbaum was the queen of the New York underworld in the 1860s and ’70s—and, as far as we know, she never fired a shot. Her MO was more sophisticated. Margalit Fox’s rollicking new book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss, tells all.

A big lady (upward of 250 pounds) who wore silk dresses and lavish jewelry, this German-Jewish immigrant and mother of four ran a nationwide fencing empire from a phony storefront in the Lower East Side neighborhood then known as “Kleindeutschland” (or Little Germany). She recruited the crooks, fronted the capital and hid or sold the loot after the crimes, which ranged from simple pickpocketing to bank vault extravaganzas.

How did this all come about? As Fox tells it, Mandelbaum’s timing was fortuitous. The agrarian economy, where most goods were custom-made and easily traced, was evolving into an industrial-consumer society, where everything looked alike. Honest cops were overwhelmed—and dishonest ones were on “Marm” Mandelbaum’s payroll.

It was also the first Golden Age of journalism, so Fox, a former New York Times obituary writer with four previous books, is able to draw from contemporary news stories to detail Mandelbaum’s audacious heists, replete with colorfully nicknamed robbers and ethically challenged lawyers. She even gives us a delightful floor plan of Mandelbaum’s lair, which was published in 1913 and revealed a drab store up front and labyrinth of secret rooms in the back. Marm is depicted peering through a hidden window.

Mandelbaum was clever and driven, but she couldn’t hold back the anti-corruption reform movements that battled the Gilded Age’s worst excesses. An upper-crust Manhattan district attorney bypassed the cops and brought in the infamous Pinkerton private detectives. Fox chronicles Mandelbaum’s duel with the private dicks to its surprising end. After decades of books about 1920s bootleggers and the rise and fall of the 20th-century Mafia, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum is a genuinely fresh story of American crime and culture.

Decades before Prohibition-era gangsters controlled New York City, a clever, driven crime boss had the town under her thumb. Margalit Fox tells all in The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum.
RomanceHistorical Romance

The Mistress Experience

Review by Katie Garaby

In The Mistress Experience, the final chapter of Scarlett Peckham’s wildly fun Society of Sirens series, courtesan Thais Magdalene brings the fight for women’s rights to her bedroom and winds up finding her very own happily ever after. 

The infamous Thais fetches a pretty penny for a single night in her bed and sees no customer twice. And so to raise enough money to finally open a women’s institute, she and her fellow activists who make up the Society of Sirens decide to auction off a month-long engagement of her services. Lord Alastair Eden, who bids on Thais by proxy to ensure his privacy, is the lucky winner. Confident in nearly all aspects of his life except for the bedroom, Alastair wants Thais to teach him how to please his future wife. Neither of them expect to develop feelings. (Do they ever?) But Alastair finds bawdy, kind Thais surprisingly charming, and Thais finds much to admire in the shy, proper nobleman. Is their attraction strong enough for them to defy society’s expectations—not to mention their own ideas of what they deserve and where their duty lies? 

Peckham is known for her nontraditional heroines, and has never wasted time trying to fit her leading ladies into a neat and tidy happy ending. (Think open marriages and paramours who live in separate houses.) Thais’ pursuit of a more traditional HEA involving marriage and children might therefore initially come as a surprise to readers. But Peckham stresses that these supposedly conventional choices have always felt out of reach for Thais, who started working in a brothel at 9 and was first auctioned off by age 14. Although Thais hasn’t lacked attention from men, she has lacked kindness, care and being seen for more than what she can offer in the bedroom. Thais and Alastair are perfect foils for each other, and it is such a joy to watch her needle the prudish lord. In one early scene, Alastair cooks for Thais, and it’s so sweet that it’s hard to not be a complete pile of goo by the end. This book is full of similar loving, simple acts of kindness (but is also still so very sexy), and readers will undoubtedly fall hard for both main characters.

The Mistress Experience is a sparkling conclusion to an already dazzling series. I only wish we had more sirens to look forward to.

A romance between a bawdy courtesan and the shy nobleman who wins a month with her, The Mistress Experience is a sparkling conclusion to an already dazzling series.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Presidents and the People

Review by Roger Bishop

Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, Americans have spent much time interpreting its meaning. As Corey Brettschneider, a professor at Brown University who teaches constitutional law and politics, points out in his informative and stimulating The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, “two ingredients—popular sovereignty and a powerful executive—are an odd pair for the same constitutional system.” For many reasons, presidents can be tempted to overreach, but in our democracy, the legitimacy of the government comes from the preamble to the Constitution: “We the people.” The author reminds us that “The Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of constitutional meaning” and “constitutional rights throughout American history are won by citizens prevailing upon the political branches, not by courts proclaiming them out of thin air.”

This carefully researched book explores in detail how presidents in different eras abused their power. The Presidents and the People presents a litany of their misdeeds. When John Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798, he targeted editors of newspapers owned by his political opponents, and at least 126 defendants were prosecuted as a result. The policies of James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson advanced slavery, guaranteed white supremacy after the Civil War and nationalized Jim Crow, respectively. And then there’s Richard Nixon, who ordered his aides to abscond with potentially damning evidence that proved he undermined democracy in the wake of the discovery of the Pentagon Papers. 

But concerned individuals who responded to these presidents’ anti-democratic approaches are, Brettschneider writes, “a testament to the power of citizens to push past authoritarian moments toward democratic ones.” No one of them is more important than Frederick Douglass, who is featured prominently in four separate chapters. His influence on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant was crucial, as was his decision to support the Constitution rather than abandon it as other abolitionists advocated. Others who fought against abuse include journalists William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. 

These Americans stand as beacons of decency and hope, who sought to see the Constitution’s promise of “We the people” secured. Anyone interested in the ups and downs of American history should be inspired by reading about the courageous citizens who challenged powerful leaders and changed the direction of the nation.  

Corey Brettschneider’s carefully researched The Presidents and the People chronicles American heads of state who abused their power, and people who stood up to them.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

The Lion Women of Tehran

Review by Alice Cary

“Writing about Iranian women has been a central theme of my life,” Marjan Kamali says in the author’s note to The Lion Women of Tehran. On the heels of The Stationery Shop and Together Tea, Kamali continues this pursuit with the riveting saga of the friendship between Ellie and Homa, which begins in 1950 in Tehran, when the girls are 7, and continues through 2022. The events of their lives are interwoven with Iran’s recent history, including the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the 1979 Revolution and the violence and brutality of the following fundamentalist regime. Prepare to lose yourself in a historical drama that evokes the sights and sounds of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, with its maze of stalls and bartering merchants, while artfully exploring the labyrinthine complexities of deep friendship—especially jealousy, betrayal and forgiveness.

After Ellie’s father dies suddenly, Ellie and her mother are forced to move to a new neighborhood, where she meets Homa. Ellie’s mother likes to constantly remind her daughter that they are descendants of royalty and is horrified by their new surroundings, as well as Ellie’s new friend: Homa comes from a poor family, and her father is in jail for opposing the monarchy. Ellie, however, loves Homa’s warm, welcoming household, and wishes Homa’s family was her own. Their class difference, along with Ellie’s mom’s disapproval, drives a wedge into the girls’ friendship. At one point, Ellie muses that Homa “would always see me as too privileged, too shallow, too rich.”

Kamali closely examines how the country’s changing regimes have affected women’s rights, bringing the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in police custody (after allegedly violating the mandatory hijab law) into the novel’s conclusion. From an early age, Homa hopes to become a lawyer who crusades for change and women’s freedom, but the government as well as an accidental betrayal by Ellie cruelly sidetrack those plans. Homa notes, “That’s how losses of rights build. They start small. And then soon, the rights are stripped in droves.” Kamali writes deftly of the intersection between personal and political issues. She also excels at exploring the bonds of female friendship, as well as the changing and complex nature of mother-daughter relationships, especially in terms of heritage, family shame and secrets.

Reminiscent of The Kite Runner and My Brilliant Friend, The Lion Women of Tehran is a mesmerizing tale featuring endearing characters who will linger in readers’ hearts. 

Prepare to lose yourself in Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran, a historical drama that evokes the sights and sounds of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar while artfully exploring the labyrinthian complexities of deep friendship.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Lost Story

Review by Laura Hubbard

As teens, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell disappeared into a stretch of West Virginia wilderness known as Red Crow. They reappeared six months later, perfectly healthy and fit save for a series of scars on Rafe’s back. Fifteen years later, the two men are estranged. Rafe is an artistic recluse with no memory of their time away, and Jeremy is a preternaturally gifted missing persons investigator. Rafe knows that Jeremy remembers the truth of what happened, but Jeremy has long refused to reveal a single detail. When a young woman named Emilie Wendell tasks Jeremy with finding her birth sister—who coincidentally also disappeared in Red Crow—Jeremy knows that he’ll need Rafe’s help to find her.

Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story is a gorgeously wrought tale of yearning, grief and hope. Taking heavy inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Shaffer imagines what life would be like after a magical world changes you forever and then sends you home. Would you be Rafe, whose subconscious wants so desperately to return that he tries to drive to Red Crow in his sleep? Or Jeremy, who can remember every moment, but clearly has very strong reasons for not sharing them with Rafe? Or would you be the one left behind, who never knew what happened to your loved ones and could only hope that one day they’d return? The Lost Story gives us a window into all of these perspectives, depicting each with compassion without sacrificing a whit of drama. Layered atop it all, a delicious smattering of meta-narrative keeps the story feeling less like a tragedy and more like the warmhearted fairy tale that it is, reminding us that there is likely a happy ending (at least of sorts) waiting for us at the end of it all.

A spiritual epilogue to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story explores what happens after you return from a magical realm.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Glassmaker

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is an immediate richness to the historical fiction of Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures), one that goes beyond carefully researched details and evocative prose, and into deep emotion. In her 12th book, The Glassmaker, Chevalier weaves a tapestry of character and conflict, change and stability, to create a story that elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental, while never losing sight of the tactile humanity that gives her work such pure, invigorating life.

The glassmaker of the title is Orsola Rosso, a young woman living on the island of Murano just off the coast of Italy next to Venice. When we meet Orsola, the Renaissance is in full swing, and Murano’s reputation as the “Island of Glass” means that her glassmaking family enjoys a stable, happy life. That all changes when Orsola’s father, the heart of the family, dies in an accident in their workshop, leaving his son unprepared to take over the business. With her family’s future in question, Orsola begins a secret glassmaking enterprise of her own, making beads over a burning lamp in a corner of the Rosso kitchen. What begins as a chance to earn some extra money soon turns into something more, as Orsola’s life, and the lives of those around her, are forever changed by her approach to her craft.

Chevalier, too, takes a uniquely impactful approach to her craft. Steeped in detail, The Glassmaker charts the history of Venice and the delicate balance of trade that keeps the glassmakers working. But instead of transpiring over decades, the Rosso family story stretches over centuries, with the same characters aging slowly while the world around them changes dramatically. Venice goes through wars, regime changes, plagues, political upheaval and much more, and all the while Orsola makes beads, and she and her family persevere.

Through her measured, passionate prose, Chevalier sinks us into this strange relationship with time, where the passage of years is as moldable and oozing as molten glass fresh from a furnace. The characters and their lives take on an almost meditative quality, and The Glassmaker becomes a study not just of history, but of what endures history. That makes it a potent, bewitching bright spot in a stellar career.

Tracy Chevalier’s 12th book is potent, bewitching and addictive as it elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

The God of the Woods

Review by Arlene McKanic

The most delicious thing about a mystery like Liz Moore’s spellbinding The God of the Woods is finding out who did it. There’s the thrill of suspecting this character, then suspecting that one a few pages later, then being absolutely sure that the other one did it—only to have your certainty upended when you find out the real culprit. Of course there are red herrings, like the sounds of footsteps in an abandoned slaughterhouse that turn out to be a family of squirrels. (Or were they?)

The story begins in the summer of 1975, at a sleepaway camp in upstate New York operated by the fabulously wealthy Van Laar family. Barbara Van Laar is a camper that year, even though her home’s a short walk from the cabins. Barbara wants to get away from her family, and as you come to know them, you can’t blame her. The only things colder than this lot are possibly freshly dead fish on beds of ice. Then, Barbara goes missing. Fourteen years earlier, her older brother, Bear, also went missing and was never found. Foul play is suspected in both cases.

Though full of nerve-shredding suspense, Moore’s novel is really about families: good families, bad families, birth families and chosen families, rich families and poor families. Living among the frosty Van Laars as a mere ornament has destroyed Barbara’s mother, Alice, in mind and body. Meanwhile, though she is considered an eccentric loner by most people, camp director T.J. Hewitt has a devotion to her blood and chosen kin that is deeper than anyone, including the reader, suspects. And investigator Judyta Luptack’s Polish Catholic family is so conservative that she, a 26-year-old woman who’s making a good living, is scared to move into her own place. Much like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Judy has to put up with condescension and sexism, and there’s even a local serial killer for her to do the quid pro quo business with. But you’ll be turning pages fast enough to forgive the unneeded resemblance. The God of the Woods is a beautifully written, devilishly clever work.

Set in the summer of 1975 at a sleepaway camp in upstate New York, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a devilishly clever work full of nerve-shredding suspense.
NonfictionNatureEssays

The Garden Against Time

Review by Catherine Hollis

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise demands to be read outside: in a garden, if you have one, or a public park, if you don’t. Author Olivia Laing is keenly aware of the differences between these settings. Gardens, she contends, should be a common right for everyone, but are all too often places of exclusion and privilege, a paradise for the few. 

“Paradise,” we learn, is a word derived from Persian for a “walled garden,” and Laing makes a compelling case for gardens as both utopian and earthly settings. She foregrounds The Garden Against Time in her work of restoring a historic garden in Suffolk, England, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and reaches back to the larger history of English gardens and gardening. With wit and generosity, Laing details how the work of weeding and clearing, and the thrill of discovering a half-buried iris bulb emerging from leaf cover, offers solace for heartache. 

Some earthly paradises, such as many of the 18th-century English estates designed by Capability Brown, were built with power and exclusion in mind, creating private Edens for aristocrats. Some were funded by the exploitation and brutality of slavery. Researching the history of Shrubland Hall in Suffolk, for example, Laing unearths a history of the Middleton family, whose fortune derived from the plantation economy in South Carolina. 

Other English gardens celebrate the idea that vegetal beauty is a human right. Laing’s focus on William Morris’ socialist gardens and Derek Jarman’s queer utopian garden, created while the filmmaker was dying of AIDS, movingly document the restorative function of gardening in hard times. In her own work repairing a long-neglected garden, Laing finds solace for the anxieties of the pandemic and family trauma. The Garden Against Time wears its erudition lightly, interweaving garden history with the cyclical work of planning and planting, decay and rebirth. It will inspire readers to get outside, shears in hand, to tend their own gardens, and invite others in. 

In the inspirational The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing restores a long-neglected garden, and makes a case for sharing our outdoor spaces.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Gilded Crown

Review by Nicole Brinkley

Hellevir can raise the dead, but Death demands a price. The gatekeeper of the afterlife makes demands of the rural herbalist for each life she reclaims, wanting a small part of Hellevir’s body as payment.

After Hellevir saves her mother from Death’s embrace, word of her ability spreads. When Princess Sullivain is assassinated, the queen demands Hellevir save the princess’ life—and once revivified, Sullivain demands Hellevir stay by her side. With Hellevir’s family under threat from the Crown if she does not comply, she is forced into the middle of court machinations and must try to find her freedom without literally carving away too much of herself. As assassins continue to come for Sullivain and as Death sets riddles for Hellevir to solve, she’ll have to trust her instincts and abilities before civil war crumbles the kingdom and destroys all the people she holds dear.

Fans of dark fairy tales and political schemes will find much to love in Marianne Gordon’s debut fantasy novel, The Gilded Crown. The only place that dwarfs Gordon’s fully realized main setting of Rochidain, a city where multiple faiths are at odds with one another, is Death’s realm, with its mirrored sky and enigmatic gatekeeper. The whole cast of characters is well-developed and compelling. Rather than foolish, Hellevir’s naiveté concerning city life and her staunch beliefs in the importance of all lives—from small ravens and cats to the princess herself—is endearing and unusually optimistic. Sullivain’s determination to do what is best for her city, despite her guilt over killing innocents to keep the peace, makes her a fascinating foil to Hellevir. Other standouts include Hellevir’s religious mother, Hellevir’s brother and the knight he loves and, of course, Death himself. 

While clearly first in a planned duology, the book’s conclusion will still satisfy readers who prefer standalones. But The Gilded Crown skimps on its romance. Sullivain and Hellevir are soulbound by Hellevir’s multiple resurrections of the princess and supposedly develop feelings for each other in their brief interactions. But the two women do not ultimately spend much time together, which makes Hellevir’s growing obsession with Sullivain at the cost of her family seem a bit unearned. Nevertheless, readers who adored Hannah Whitten’s The Foxglove King and Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller will find The Gilded Crown a lyrical, fantastical addition to their shelves.

Fans of dark fairy tales will find much to love in Marianne Gordon’s The Gilded Crown, which follows a young woman tasked with repeatedly resurrecting a princess.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Bestselling author Ellery Lloyd has become deliciously adept at drawing readers into the world of the wealthy: redolent of privilege and glamour, and tainted by darkness and deceit.

In their third thriller, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, Lloyd (a pseudonym for married British authors Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos) builds upon the contemporary social commentary that marked their previous books, People Like Her and The Club, by homing in on the past. 

In 1930s Paris, Juliette Willoughby is an up-and-coming British surrealist painter who’s fled her moneyed and terrible family, and is now living with her lover, fellow surrealist Oskar Erlich. Tragically, the two died in a fire shortly after their participation alongside Dali, Picasso, Man Ray, et al. in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition (a real event which Lloyd describes in fascinating historical detail). Juliette’s mesmerizing painting Self-Portrait as Sphinx was destroyed by the flames, too.

Or was it? In 1991 Cambridge, art history students Caroline Cooper and Patrick Lambert are encouraged by their advisor to include Self-Portrait as Sphinx in their dissertation research. After all, Juliette’s Egyptologist father curated a collection of art and artifacts that might prove useful, and Patrick’s family has strong ties to the Willoughbys. As the duo grow closer—and more fascinated by the Willoughby family’s strange history, including rumors of a curse—they make some amazing discoveries. Chief among them is Juliette’s journal, the contents of which suggest that the fire that killed her was no accident.

In the present day, Caroline is now the foremost Juliette Willoughby expert and has traveled to Dubai to authenticate Self-Portrait as Sphinx, which seems to have resurfaced after all these years and is about to go on auction. Alas, Patrick—her ex-husband, now a gallery owner—is arrested for murder as decades-old mysteries bubble up to the surface. Is he guilty? Is the formerly lost painting authentic? Was the Willoughby curse real, or just an excuse for horrendous misdeeds? Is there more to Juliette’s story?

Readers will enjoy unraveling the threads of history and mystery alongside Caroline and Patrick as they soak up art-world atmosphere and intrigue across the decades. The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby is a twisty and compelling exploration of power and obsession, secrecy and surrealism, artifice and art.

The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby is a twisty and compelling exploration of power and obsession, secrecy and surrealism, artifice and art.
Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands

Review by Noah Fram

Trains are, for whatever reason, surprisingly common in contemporary genre fiction. Perhaps it is their predictability, with their reliance on firmly laid tracks and regular timetables representing an imposition of order on a chaotic world. But rarely is this made so explicit as in Sarah Brooks’ The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, where a train is the last bastion of civilization in the region that was once Sibera, which has now become a chthonic cauldron of mutated flora and fauna, all of it hostile to humankind.

Brooks never explains why, exactly, Siberia transformed into the riotous Wasteland. She simply asserts that it has, that it is enclosed by a wall and that only one entity dares cross it: the Company, via its Trans-Siberian Express. On its last voyage, there was an accident that resulted in the deaths of three people. The Company, being a sinister avatar of faceless, capitalistic inhumanity, is dedicated to preserving the secrecy around these events, while Marya Petrovna, daughter of the glassmaker who was blamed for the accident, has dedicated herself to piercing that veil. However, none of the train’s crew or its most frequent passengers seem to remember what happened, from its captain and first engineer, Alexei, on down to a bookish professor and the enigmatic Zhang Weiwei, who has spent her entire life on the train.

Part of me felt like I had read this book before, or perhaps seen it on film. The obvious comparison is Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, but I found more commonalities with classic sci-fi like Asimov’s Foundation and Earth and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, mixed with Borges’ more animistic magic and a few dashes of Agatha Christie for good measure. The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands reads more like magical realism than fantasy, forcing the reader to inhabit the same inexplicable universe as the characters themselves. Brooks’ concise prose prioritizes clarity over decoration, and is suffused with casual slang and inside jokes. This steampunk fairy tale may be largely populated with archetypes and borrowed tropes, but Brooks has still made it compelling and novel. Her train through perdition is a worthy addition to the pantheon.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is a compelling steampunk fairy tale that follows a train journey through the dangerous place that was once Siberia.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

Teddy

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Set in Rome in the summer of 1969, Emily Dunlay’s debut novel is a thrilling whirl of suspense, romance and glamour. Born and raised in Dallas in a wealthy, conservative and politically powerful dynasty of Huntleys (imagine Texas’ Kennedys), 35-year-old Teddy has never quite been able to escape her family’s influence. But after a setup turns into a marriage proposal from David Shepard, an American diplomat in Italy, Teddy is ready for her transformation from an old maid into a trophy wife: to step into a glamorous world of fashion and embassy parties, and more importantly, to finally find independence from her family’s name and legacy.

Alas, it’s the ‘60s and even in Italy, it’s still a man’s world. Lonely and desperate, Teddy soon finds herself slipping into some unsavory pursuits. Narrated in the first person, Teddy unravels in a series of flashbacks as our protagonist tries to set the record straight to Italian detectives in the aftermath of an embassy party gone wrong. In her smeared makeup, with a bloody dress stashed under her bed, and clutching one more of too many whiskeys on ice, Teddy is keeping her cool, and trying very hard not to give anything away. 

Dunlay does an exceptional job of keeping the reader guessing about Teddy’s true intentions. Is she to be pitied for her circumstances, or blamed for her inability to stand up for herself? Add to this enigma some fantastic side characters like David, Uncle Hal, Aunt Sister and the Wolf—all equally complex and full of layers. Dunlay also uses the Cold War political tensions of the ‘60s to their full potential for plot twists. 

While this well-executed and cleverly plotted story is a win in itself, there are also overarching explorations of patriarchy, privilege and freedom that will resonate long after the end. Teddy is an instantly arresting and electrifying read that’s not to be missed.

This cleverly plotted story unravels in a series of flashbacks as our protagonist, Teddy, tries to set the record straight to Italian detectives in the aftermath of an embassy party gone wrong.

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