Wil Greene has spent months stalking Elwood Clarke’s family and obtaining photographic evidence about their Garden of Adam cult. On one stakeout, she even caught the Clarke patriarch sacrificing a rabbit in the woods. Police say Wil’s mom merely skipped town, but Wil suspects the Clarkes are actually behind her disappearance. It would be easier to find out where they’re keeping her mom if Wil was still talking to her former best friend, but Elwood told her that his family did nothing wrong, and Wil doesn’t have space in her life for liars.
But then, on Elwood’s 18th birthday, Wil finds him dying of hypothermia and with nowhere to go. The self-flagellating Clarke heir is on the run from his own parents, who intend to violently sacrifice him to the woods. Wil agrees to help him, but as they dig up secrets about the Clarke family, the town’s dark history and the fate of Wil’s too-inquisitive mother, Wil discovers that something demonic is growing inside of the boy she still loves.
Skyla Arndt’s debut novel takes second-chance romance in a gruesome, horrific direction as together, feisty outcast Wil and soft, sheltered Elwood fight for agency regarding their own fates. Beautifully written, Together We Rot (Viking, $18.99, 9780593526279) shines best in moments where Wil and Elwood stumble back into their old friendship. Their faith in each other, even in moments of visceral body horror, will set readers’ hearts fluttering—though mileage may vary on whether out of love or terror.
A well-balanced cast of teen friends and adult companions—including Wil’s grief-stricken father and tarot-loving eccentric Cherry—flesh out the small town of Pine Point with realism, while the terrifying Garden of Adam cult acts as a mythical stand-in for parents who dictate their children’s lives. Though the villainous group’s comeuppance happens too swiftly as the plot rushes to its end, it is nonetheless satisfying. Fans of twisted, monstrous romantic horror in the vein of Rory Power’s Wilder Girls and Sarah Hollowell’s A Dark and Starless Forest will love Together We Rot.
Skyla Arndt’s debut novel takes second-chance romance in a gruesome, horrific direction as together, feisty outcast Wil and soft, sheltered Elwood fight a terrifying cult for agency regarding their own fates.
When a small kitten named Trim learns that ships allow you to travel across the world, he realizes that’s what he wants to spend his life doing. With the help of the ship’s dog, Penny, Trim manages to get a position on the crew as the ship’s cat.
But life aboard the ship offers its own complications. The parrot, Jack, doesn’t seem to like Trim. Trim can climb up the mast, but it’s harder to climb back down. And there are so many words to describe parts of a ship! Can Trim master life aboard, or will he find himself sinking under the pressure?
The first in the new Adventures of Trim series by Deborah Hopkinson (a longtime BookPage contributor), Trim Sets Sail imagines the life of the most famous ship’s cat in history, who sailed on the HMS Investigator while its captain documented the coastline of Australia in the 1800s. Unlike Hopkinson’s nonfiction deep dives for older kids (Race Against Death, Titanic: Voices from the Disaster), history here acts merely as a backdrop for the fictionalized life of Trim. Hopkinson’s text focuses on the tumultuous emotional life and necessary education that takes place during the first days aboard the ship, while illustrator Kristy Caldwell’s colorful, endearing artwork conveys both the time period and the book’s charming cast of characters.
For kids who are voracious about learning new vocabulary, Trim Sets Sail gives opportunities both to use words they’ve already learned and to master words associated with ships. For instance, Penny points out that the bow of the ship rhymes with bow-wow, while Jack the parrot informs Trim that the starboard side of the ship is its right side. Woven through this delightful education is a sweet story about Trim trying, failing and trying again as he learns that the important thing on a ship is to work with the crew around you.
Trim Sets Sail acts as a perfect introduction to chapter books for kids who love cats, history or oceanic adventures. Pair with Jen Marlin’s Wind Riders series for a one-two punch of daring, big-hearted tales.
Trim Sets Sail acts as a perfect introduction to chapter books for kids who love cats, history or oceanic adventures.
In Undiscovered, a Peruvian journalist and novelist living in Madrid confronts her past, present and future in a meditative work of autofiction. Gabriela Wiener begins with a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to see the Charles Wiener collection of artifacts, noting “that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited.” Her father has just died, and as she grieves, she examines his life, exploring his relationships with her, her mother and his mistress. As she aptly notes, “My penchant for playing detective on family cases has only gotten worse with time.”
Charles Wiener, the author’s great-great-grandfather, was an Austrian-French explorer who traveled extensively in Peru and came close to rediscovering the ruins of Machu Picchu. He is said to have taken 4,000 pre-Columbian artifacts to Europe. Undiscovered insightfully probes his legacy, noting that he was more of a “media man” than a scientist. “Back then,” Wiener writes, “you just had to move some dirt around to call it archaeology.” She is particularly horrified to discover that Charles Wiener purchased, or as she corrects him, stole, an Indigenous child from his mother, taking the boy back to Europe with him.
Wiener freely discusses many aspects of her own life, including her discomfort as a brown-skinned girl around her white paternal grandparents. From time to time, she inserts humor, noting, for instance, that after her grandfather’s death, “my white grandmother became more affectionate toward us and started farting when she walked from one room to another.” She also muses about her relationships as a polyamorous woman. She shares a child with her husband, while her wife and husband also share a child, and she finds herself being unfaithful to both her husband and wife. “I’m at a loss about what to do with my life,” she confesses, interweaving this uncertainty with the effects of her family’s long legacy of racism, desire and colonialism. Long strands from the past entangle her every move.
While Undiscovered often feels more like an essay than a novel, Wiener delivers a no-holds-barred, unflinching discussion. She reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”
Even as it probes the author’s own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”
The Buddha once said, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” This nugget of wisdom, which came to mind while reading comedian Aparna Nancherla’s collection of memoir-type essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome, may help to provide a reflective frame for readers as they peruse its pages.
The American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, Nancherla has spent years toiling as a writer of comedy and a stand-up comic. But she has always felt fraudulent about being “a so-called comedian” and, at age 40, about having achieved a notable measure of success. Nancherla had tried to cope with her lifelong struggle with low self-worth through remedies such as medications, therapy, meditation and more, but she finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome and the constant feeling that she is merely “a shadow” self (even though a therapist tells her “ ‘So what if you’re a fraud? Is that the worst thing? At least you’re getting away with it.’ ”).
Nancherla presents honest, intimate, strikingly astute and well-researched essays about her mental state and overall psychological health, but be prepared for intermittent jolts of sarcastic, dark humor that line the author’s trail of self-exploration through her impostor syndrome, or, as she says, “an identity I’ve embraced without question my entire life.” These humorous insertions sometimes have the effect of distracting the reader from the main thrust of Nancherla’s refreshingly insightful commentaries, which put her mental health in broader context through discussions of the internet and social media; the struggles of people of color and immigrants, especially, to assimilate into and be accepted within American culture and society; and the difficulties, hazards and hard-won successes of a life in stand-up comedy.
Overall, the subject of imposter syndrome, beyond a brief treatment in her first chapter (“Now That I’ve Got You Here”), ends up not being the main focus of Nancherla’s journey: It is her deep dive into her interior life that instead takes center stage. However, in her epilogue (“I Tried”), Nancherla reveals what she has learned, through the process of writing, about the nature of epiphanies and how they intersect with an acceptance of being human. Nancherla’s epilogue realization alone makes this first-time memoir a worthy read. It’s an encouragement to those of us (and our numbers are legion) who are beset or traumatized by mental health woes to never give up trying to be “a lamp unto yourself.”
After trying medications, therapy, meditation and more remedies, Nancherla finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome.
“Like most of the events in my life, the thought of assembling this book came to me accidentally,” Donna Leon notes in the preface to her memoir, Wandering Through Life. Leon, the author of the long-running Guido Brunetti detective series, has perfectly captured that serendipitous nature in the personal essays that make up Wandering Through Life.
The memoir runs mostly chronologically, beginning with her childhood in New Jersey, where she lived on her grandfather’s farm. Leon is conversational and self-deprecating: “My brother and I get our almost total lack of ambition from [our mother]: she just wanted to have fun, to go through life seeing new things, learning about what interested her, going to new places. Because of this, I went through life never having a real job, never having a pension plan, never settling down in one place or at one job, but having an enormous amount of fun.” And “never settling down” is one of the memoir’s themes. The essay “Drugs, Sex, and Rock ’n’ Roll” tells the astonishing story of the years she taught English to helicopter pilot trainees in the Iranian Air Force. She arrived in Iran in 1976 knowing little of the country, and began to live an expat life (lots of tennis) with her American and British coworkers, even as the Iranian Revolution arrived. This is just one episode in a peripatetic life that includes stints in late-Maoist China and Saudi Arabia and decades in Europe, particularly Venice, Italy (where her Guido Brunetti novels are set).
These essays feel like dispatches from a different era and world order, and they’re conversational, breezy and occasionally comic rather than contemplative. Leon’s tone is like that of an older friend who has a deep well of entertaining anecdotes from her storied life, and who has also developed an array of interests, among them opera, Handel and beekeeping. The layered essay “Bees” is a standout, describing her slow journey to gardening and her fascination with bees and their threatened existence. “They pulled me into the mystery of their being,” she writes of the bees. But Guido fans be warned: other than noting how her bee research worked its way into a novel, Wandering Through Life offers little detail about her writing life—Leon may be a prolific novelist, but in this memoir, she turns her focus elsewhere.
Donna Leon may be the author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries, but in this memoir, she turns her focus to her own storied life.
Biographies can intrigue and educate with subject matter alone, but some of the most interesting give both the story of a life and the reason behind the author’s fascination. Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben tells the story of the titular war general, who rose from Prussian obscurity in the 1700s to become a once legendary yet now forgotten leader, and why Eisner Award-winning author Josh Trujillo found his life so interesting.
Ambitious and idealistic, Baron von Steuben quickly rose through the ranks of the Prussian Army through a combination of genius, white lies and good old flirting. However, relationships with Prussian royalty and a reputation as a leader in the army weren’t enough to keep him safe from charges of impropriety, and von Steuben found himself fleeing his home country.
After arriving in America, Benjamin Franklin recruited him to help the Americans organize their untrained rebel army. With the help of young men, some of whom were his lovers, von Steuben shared Prussian army techniques with George Washington, eventually writing the Blue Book guide that laid the foundation for training American soldiers. Yet because of his romantic partners and his immigrant status, it was always a challenge for von Steuben to form a legacy that would be remembered.
Thoughts from Trujillo (and, occasionally, illustrator Levi Hastings) stitch together the gaps in the available information on von Steuben’s life by weaving in compelling modern conversations on queer identity and queer history. They don’t shy away from darkness: The book discusses the fact that von Steuben enslaved people and highlights how his relative wealth and status protected him from what poorer, less powerful queer folk faced.
Hastings ditches the more colorful artwork found in his children’s books in favor of a classy triad color scheme of black, white and blue–quietly patriotic, much like von Steuben himself. The most beautiful piece of art comes at the very end of the book: a single-page spread of von Steuben’s beloved hound, curled up asleep in a bed made of von Steuben’s coat and hat.
Washington’s Gay General examines the same questions of ideology and legacy that permeate the Broadway show Hamilton, and fans of the production will certainly find much to enjoy. For those who are less interested in early American history and simply want to connect with their queer roots, Washington’s Gay General offers an accessible introduction to the life of Baron von Steuben and, through him, the queer people throughout history who have been hiding in plain sight.
Washington’s Gay General examines the same questions of ideology and legacy that permeate Broadway’s Hamilton, and fans of the show will find much to enjoy in this historical graphic novel.
Recently, I wore a silk midi skirt from the Gap that I’ve kept buried in my closet for more than 20 years. I racked up a surprising number of compliments, which felt good. (I just knew that skirt was worth saving.) But much of the time, my clothes are more a source of consternation than contentment. Enter Allison Bornstein, whose approach to personal styling connects the dots between self-knowledge and getting dressed. She notes that many of her clients are going through periods of personal transformation, and a thoughtful wardrobe revision just makes sense as part of the process. In Wear It Well, she explains a process to make culling one’s closet less overwhelming, as well as her “Three-Word Method” to pinpoint a unique sense of style. There are celebrity examples, like Harry Styles—’70s, textured, tailored—and tried-and-true tidbits surface throughout: “Wherever possible, optimize for accessibility and visibility,” she says of organizing one’s closet, adding, “There are ways to do this no matter what kind of space you are working with.” And psst: Turn all your hangers the same direction. Tiny change, big satisfaction.
Allison Bornstein’s approach to personal styling in Wear It Well connects the dots between self-knowledge and getting dressed.
What does it mean to become our best selves? The second novel from Nathan Hill, bestselling author of The Nix, compellingly asserts that this question may be more complex than it seems. Exceptionally introspective and deeply empathetic, Wellness examines the idiosyncrasies of 21st-century human nature through reflecting on the contemporary movement to strive for personal wellbeing.
Elizabeth and Jack meet as first-year college students in 1990s Chicago and fall in love practically at first sight. Twenty years later, middle-aged couple Jack and Elizabeth are living in suburban Park Shore with their 8-year-old son, Toby. Jack is an experimental photographer and adjunct art professor; Elizabeth works as a health care researcher. Through years of analyzing psychological studies, there’s one thing she knows for sure: Happiness tends to follow a U-shaped curve and plummets lowest as one approaches midlife. Unfortunately, she’s also quite certain that, while she and Jack are trendsetters in many ways, they are in this sense stubbornly, frustratingly average.
So begins an epic tale of Jack and Elizabeth’s fervent efforts to recreate the marriage of their youth. They consider separate bedrooms and explore polyamory, but it’s only when they each begin to reexamine their own shoved-aside histories that the crux of their issues comes to the surface.
Wellness is easy to relate to; fitness trackers, toddler tantrums, suburban disputes and even Facebook’s algorithms are just some of the many modern-day experiences that Hill deftly and entertainingly tackles. From life’s most striking moments to its most mundane and overlooked, along with scientific insights dispersed throughout, Hill extracts meaningful lessons. Expansive in both scale and content matter, Wellness is nonetheless a quick and captivating read: a brilliant, touching account of undertaking self-exploration with someone else by your side.
Fitness trackers, toddler tantrums, suburban disputes and even Facebook’s algorithms are just some of the many modern-day experiences that Nathan Hill deftly and entertainingly tackles in Wellness.
As a child, Sophia Galich starred in her sister Layla’s viral horror film, Vermillion, about a demonic entity supposedly haunting the seaside mansion their parents were renovating. In the years following the film’s release, Sophia has grappled with the scars—both psychological and physical—that it left behind, while Layla has spent her time avoiding press and obsessive fans, known as V-heads. Then, Layla suddenly vanishes without a trace.
Now, five years after the film’s release, Sophia has returned to Cashore House under the guise of starring in a documentary about Layla But Sophia knows that Cashore has something to do with Layla’s continued absence, and she has spent the past two years searching for clues and doggedly monitoring the V-heads’ posts on CrimsonDread.net, an online forum dedicated to Vermillion. Whatever happened five years ago was more than just a movie, and the truth behind Layla’s disappearance lies somewhere within the house’s walls.
Katya de Becerra’s third young adult novel, When Ghosts Call Us Home, is a gothic, spiraling ghost story that draws inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. But unlike many authors who have attempted to adapt the 1959 masterpiece, de Becerra sidesteps typical retelling structures and allows her book’s modern context to be bolstered by the original rather than restrictively tied to it.
As Sophia reenacts key scenes from Vermillion and is pulled deeper into the shrouded lore of Cashore, her memories begin to blur and reform. Sophia’s first-person perspective provides the intimacy of diaristic narration while holding true to the hallmarks of the unreliable narrator. As girl and ghost become more closely intertwined, Sophia becomes less trustworthy—both to herself and to the reader. This is unfortunately where the book suffers: de Becerra’s prose is at times overworked and redundant, which leaves little to the imagination and undercuts moments of fear.
Regardless, When Ghosts Call Us Home is a satisfying and imaginative haunted house story that uses its influences to great effect. Fans of books like Marisha Pessl’s Night Film and horror movies like The Ring will undoubtedly make themselves right at home in Cashore House.
Katya de Becerra’s third young adult novel, When Ghosts Call Us Home, is a gothic, spiraling ghost story that draws inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
Tiya Miles’ beautiful new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, opens with a provocative suggestion: Being outdoors—experiencing unfettered, wide, risky and exciting natural environs—can open one up in unique ways that defy gendered expectations.
A professor of history at Harvard whose previous award-winning work has explored interconnections between African American and Native American histories, Miles first became interested in the way the outdoors could propel women and girls toward freedom and a fuller expression of self upon considering that Minty Ross, better known as Harriet Tubman, would have had “a pronounced ecological consciousness.” Her first chapter, “Star Gazers,” takes a close look at Tubman’s youth and the childhoods of two other slave girls, all of whom witnessed the same meteor shower. Miles considers the differing expectations for African American girls (strong field workers or docile house servants), Native American girls (“Indian princesses,” like Sakakawea, who were seen as mythically connected to idealized landscapes, or young adolescents sent to boarding schools for forced assimilation) and white girls, most notably Louisa May Alcott, whose wide-ranging outdoor experiences, Miles posits, made her able to create a gender-deviating character like Josephine March. Miles connects these historical women in what she calls “a newly conjoined cast of historical actors who navigated their social world differently because of their experiences in the outdoor world.”
Alongside miniature portraits of more well-known historical figures, Miles’ leaves space for lesser-known girls, such as the astonishingly accomplished Native girls’ basketball team at Fort Shaw. Through basketball, Miles argues, the girls may have been able to tap into cultural ways of knowing despite boarding-school spaces that were anything but welcoming. Miles also shares her own story of walking across the icy Ohio River and standing in a meadow when she was young, which felt “big, so big, all-encompassing, like my idea of an ocean.” If you, like Miles, were once a girl who found an expansive sense of wonder and possibility in wild spaces, this is a book to savor.
If you, like Tiya Miles, were once a girl who found an expansive sense of wonder in wild spaces, you will love her book about the history of women in the outdoors.
Syrup is poured “on Jeff ’s couch / to make it a little sweeter”; goodbyes are bid at bathtime to “the jam ’twixt my toes”; and a “car runs on turkey baloney, / carrot and broccoli stew.” This is the impish world of Zilot & Other Important Rhymes. In this collection of over 70 poems, author Bob Odenkirk—best known for starring in “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul”—demonstrates a true gift for capturing the delightful idiosyncrasies of children. After all, Zilot originated almost 20 years ago as Old Time Rhymes, a handwritten compilation of poetry Odenkirk and his wife, Naomi Odenkirk, wrote with their young children, Erin Odenkirk (who grew up to illustrate Zilot) and Nate Odenkirk.
Indeed, the whimsy in Zilot feels authentic, in no small part due to Erin’s jovial yet gentle illustrations. Erin uses soft coloring within sketched black outlines to breathe life into characters such as Willy Whimble, who is made memorable by the sheepish expression drawn on his face as he holds up a roasted pea half the size of his body. Erin’s two-page spreads will bring particular delight to readers with their crowded detail and diverse colors: The poem “That Time of Year” is completely transformed by a vibrant, eclectic illustration of the allergy-inducing plants it describes.
A sense of freedom runs throughout these poems, and Bob allows children an expansive exploration of vocabulary through phrases such as “fritter tenaciously” and “fulsome logs” (a description of dog poop). Zilot’s rambunctious energy will electrify readers and inspire them to create their own artworks and lexicons, just as Nate invented the eponymous word zilot—meaning “indoor fort”—as a child. As the back matter states, “You could just call it an ‘indoor fort’ . . . But zilot is better and faster, and it made us all smile.” This joy in playing with language practically leaps off each page in rhymes that may appear stilted until read out loud, which allows their charming rhythms to shine. Such is the case with poems like “Oh Shoelace, My Shoelace!”: “Perhaps I took it too far / when I insisted she kiss it. / Now she’s thrown it away. / All my life I will miss it.”
Mischief dominates these pages, but occasional tenderness and maturity surface in poems such as “A Cat Named Larry,” which touches upon death and grief. Zilot strikes the perfect balance as a gift that will inspire repeated bedtime reading.
“Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad” actor Bob Odenkirk demonstrates a true gift for capturing the delightful idiosyncrasies of children in Zilot & Other Important Rhymes.
In her earliest days of practicing witchcraft, Diana Helmuth gathered a number of recommended supplies—a special dagger called an athame, many candles, a pentacle. She also carried with her a number of expectations. For starters, she would trace the historical origins of modern witchcraft; this would ground her practice in a knowledge of its roots. She expected to find it structured like many organized religions: a set of rules and doctrines, a built-in community and moral framework—and the security of knowing what happens when you die.
But the practice had its own plans for Helmuth. “Witchcraft was quickly revealed to me to not be that kind of path,” she tells BookPage.
In The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft, Helmuth tells the story of dedicating 12 months to learning everything she could about what one fellow witch calls “the crooked path.” Living with her partner and two cats in an apartment in Oakland, California, Helmuth performs solo spellwork at a cardboard-box altar in her office nook (naturally, the cats are intrigued) and participates in Wheel of the Year rituals in the company of fellow witches. She journeys to Stonehenge in search of a connection with her ancestors, and spends a week at a camp for witches in the woods. Her research takes her deep into the tangled beginnings of Wicca, which emerged around the 1940s and was more or less an attempt to package witchcraft into something resembling that familiar box of midcentury Western religion. (Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner remains a widely respected text for aspiring witches.)
“Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me.”
Throughout the year, Helmuth consults a number of witches who also happen to be some of her closest and oldest friends. (Her friend Lauren, a key mentor in the book, nudged Helmuth toward this project in the first place.) Now living on the Washington coast, Helmuth acknowledges that at one point she counted among her friends and acquaintances more witches than people of any other belief system aside from atheism. She attributes this to her northern California upbringing. “That’s where all the hippie buses broke down. And that’s where we came out of the yurt and said, ‘We’re bringing goddess culture back.’ ”
Helmuth has an easy wit—her first book, a beginner’s guide to backpacking, is cheekily titled How to Suffer Outside and is full of both practical advice and hilarious commentary. In a way, the same can be said of The Witching Year. Her wry perspective keeps the narrative deeply entertaining. But it’s also an endeavor with ample heart, rigorous inquiry and an extensive bibliography. Comedic tendencies never eclipse Helmuth’s genuine curiosity about, and respect for, her subject matter.
“I didn’t want to punch down,” she says, “despite the fact that I knew I had massive internal skepticism.” When she forced herself to look closely at the impulse to crack jokes, her personal journey really took off: “Deeply interrogating this urgent need to make fun of something is, occasionally, where the book deviated from a comedy into something far more serious, and I think richer,” she reflects.
Helmuth ultimately found that modern witchcraft in America is largely self-directed and not confined to any set of top-down, codified methods. This could, she admits, feel challenging at times. She found that the practice was “more about the discovery and healing and nourishment of the sacred self. So effectively, it’s therapy. And that work is hard and never done.” She adds, “I don’t actually think it’s particularly enjoyable work.”
The Witching Year contains candid chronicling of the challenging emotional endeavors her practice requires. “There are several parts in the book [when] I was like, ‘I want to get off the ride,’ and I couldn’t,” she says. Ultimately, the year included “really profound moments that absolutely changed my life in good ways and bad ways.” In the book she discusses the delight of feeling deeply interconnected with others: “Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me,” she writes. About communing with the goddess Isis, she reflects, “I had no idea this level of joy was this accessible to me on my own. In Witchcraft, people talk about shadow work, justice, self-help. . . . Rarely do I hear anyone talk about bliss.”
And as a defender of wild spaces and a staunch environmentalist (which many, but not all, witches are), Helmuth gains perspective—but again, maybe not what she expected. To her surprise, the spirituality she’d always sought in the backcountry could be accessed closer to home. “I realized I didn’t have to hike 20 miles into the wilderness to have a deep connection with nature,” she says. “I can go down to the oleander under the freeway overpass and stare at it for 60 seconds and meditate on its perfection.”
Now for the big question: After a year’s journey, does she call herself a witch? Not exactly, she concedes, partly because the term is so loaded. How one answers largely depends on who’s asking. She would like to see modern witchcraft cast as less rebellious and more friendly to the mainstream. The enormous number of books about magic and witchcraft in the marketplace, I point out, suggest that this might be happening. “I do ultimately think it’s a good thing,” she says, “because it’s about self-empowerment. And the more people who are self-empowered, the less miserable they’ll be. And isn’t that just a nicer planet to live on?”
Photo of Diana Helmuth by Rob King
The Witching Year is funny, sympathetic and right on time.
In his sweeping, extensively documented and elegantly written Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights(Liveright, $35, 9781324093107), Dylan C. Penningroth, a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley, gives us a new way to look at Black lives throughout American history. Penningroth explores Black people’s everyday experiences with the law in depth. “The basic premise of this book is that Black people’s lives are worth studying in themselves,” he writes.
Tracing the Black freedom struggle from the last years of slavery through the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods and “the subsequent forty years when battles over the scope and meaning of civil rights broke out again on the national stage,” Penningroth contends that “we cannot understand Black legal lives after slavery without first examining Black legal lives during slavery.” Based on Penningroth’s extraordinary research conducted from records in the basements of county courthouses, we learn how Black people, following the end of the Civil War, dealt with owning property, marriage and divorce, conducting business and church matters and much more. He refutes the idea that Black people knew little about the law. “White people recognized Black rights,” he writes, “because life’s ordinary business could not go on if whites could not make contracts and convey property to Black people.”
We read about the rise of Black property owners from Reconstruction to the depths of Jim Crow. Penningroth notes that “Five years after the Civil War ended, 4.8 percent of the South’s Black families, about 43,000, owned real estate. Over the next fifteen years, that figure steadily rose.” This happened despite virtually no help from the government and the passing of so-called Black Codes that severely restricted the rights of Black people in some Southern states..
The meaning of “civil rights” has changed through the years. In 1866, it meant contract and property rights and the ability to take a case to court. By 1954, the term had come to refer to racial discrimination at work and school and the right to vote. More recently, Penningroth writes, “the grassroots wanted much more than some federal laws protecting their right to vote, to patronize restaurants, and to attend integrated schools. They wanted to remake American democracy from the ground up.”
An important book full of insight into issues and personalities, Before the Movement should be of interest to anyone who wants to better understand American history.
Dylan C. Penningroth’s history of Black Americans’ experiences with U.S. law is sweeping, extensively documented and elegantly written.
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