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FictionPopular Fiction

The Life Impossible

Review by Matthew Jackson

In his bestselling 2020 novel, The Midnight Library, Matt Haig told the story of a woman, who, after deciding to end her life, finds herself transported to a new metaphysical plane in the form of a magical library. With his new book, Haig sticks to our ordinary world and makes it magical, which makes The Life Impossible an instantly engrossing, page-turning delight.

The Life Impossible begins with an email, a very ordinary thing, from a former student to retired math teacher Grace Winters. The student, now studying math at a university, shares his grief and despair, and Grace responds with kindness, then sets out to soothe the student’s aching soul by telling the story of a life-changing experience that recently happened to her. Her story, attached to the email as a manuscript, forms the rest of the novel.

A widow living a quiet life in England, Grace is surprised to receive word that a friend she hasn’t spoken to in decades has bequeathed her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Intrigued by the mystery of this gift, Grace heads to Ibiza to unravel the saga of how she came to be left the house, and to learn how her old friend died.

What she finds when she arrives is something much more complex than the unexpected inheritance. Grace, it seems, has been chosen for something that her rational math teacher’s mind struggles to understand, let alone embrace. As she draws closer to the secrets of her friend’s life, she comes to realize that Ibiza could change her own life, not just through its natural beauty and charming, energetic residents, but through a supernatural power.

Grace narrates the action not like a novelist, but like a human searching for meaning in the strangeness of her reality. Haig’s attention to detail and pacing never flags, and neither does his commitment to Grace’s voice, which is resonant with her insecurities, fears and confusion over what’s happening to her. This remarkable balance allows Haig to insert humor, heart and a kind of palpable power into the narrative, and it works extremely well. 

Even beyond the novel’s structural charms, of which there are many, The Life Impossible succeeds because of Haig’s ability to treat Grace’s journey not as a straight line, but as a vibrant interconnected web. As in our own lives, things that happened to Grace as a much younger woman ripple down through the decades, with often unexpected bearings on her present and the future she seeks. Though it deploys familiar fantastic elements, this is a book that refuses oversimplification through genre: It’s part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self. Like the bright, yearning human being at its center, it pulses with life, which makes it well worth reading for anyone who wants a hopeful, warm, very human journey that crackles with magic.

Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible is part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one's self, and that makes it well worth reading for anyone seeking a hopeful, warm journey that crackles with magic.
Mystery & SuspenseHistorical Mystery

The Mesmerist

Review by Alice Cary

At one point near the end of Caroline Woods’ lively historical thriller, The Mesmerist, a truly clueless, chauvinistic detective working a murder case announces, “I hardly need the advice of a couple of nosy old crones.” Unbeknownst to him, however, the women he has insulted have already solved the puzzle, and are busy meting out their own form of justice. Set in Minneapolis in 1894, the novel offers a Dickensian plot and cast of characters, prose rife with Victorian details and atmosphere, and even a ghost story, as it exposes the lack of autonomy many women dealt with during the era.

As in her previous novels, The Lunar Housewife (about CIA intervention in 1950s arts and letters) and Fraulein M. (set in 1930s Berlin), Woods transforms real-life aspects of history into an intricately plotted mystery. Her well-drawn, intriguing setting is the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, which Woods notes in her author’s note was “surprisingly progressive for its time, respectful and relatively compassionate toward not only unwed mothers, but also madams and ‘sporting women.’ ” Several of these real women appear as characters alongside Woods’ fictitious young residents who live in the institution.

Among the fictional heroines is May, a 24-year-old who is trying to chisel a respectable life for herself while her child is being raised by her brother and sister-in-law in Chicago. May becomes roommates with a new arrival at Bethany House, a mysterious, seemingly mute, pregnant young woman who goes by the name of Faith. The other residents fear that Faith is a mesmerist— someone able to hypnotize others—an ability that was much discussed at the time given the en vogue spiritualism movement. 

Faith and May gradually form an alliance, only to discover a dangerous web of lies surrounding both Faith’s origins and, increasingly, Bethany House itself. As May delves deeper, this amateur detective finds herself in the midst of plenty of action, including stranglings, gunfire and dripping blood.

Woods nicely develops relationships among her characters while ably illustrating the plight of Bethany House’s inhabitants. The Mesmerist does an admirable job of transforming history into mystery, championing the rights of women and illustrating how many of these same battles continue to be fought today.

Caroline Woods exposes the plight of Victorian women and transforms history into an intricately plotted mystery in The Mesmerist.
Children's & YAMiddle GradeChildren's

The House on Yeet Street

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

It’s summertime, and 13-year-old Aidan Cross is looking forward to lots of fun with his closest friends: handsome athlete Kai, class clown Zephyr and studious Terrance. They’ll ride bikes, go swimming, play D&D and watch movies. And they’ll engage in the group’s favorite pastime, “yeeting crap at the Witch House,” a tumbledown Victorian mansion with “broken and shattered windows . . . like hungry mouths with glass teeth.”

Aidan has something specific in mind for the yeeting session at the beginning of Preston Norton’s The House on Yeet Street. In addition to sticks and stones, he’ll yeet his notebook into the Witch House, where it’ll be safe from prying eyes. “The inside of this notebook was the one place Aidan was allowed to be himself. It was nice to invent a version of him that did and said the things he was afraid to say and do”—like confessing his romantic feelings for Kai. 

But the thrill of a successful yeet turns appallingly sour when his friends announce an impending Witch House sleepover. Aidan is desperate to grab his notebook before someone else does, and he sort of succeeds: His friends don’t find it, but a ghost does. She’s Gabby Caldwell, a teenaged girl who was found dead in the mansion 20 years ago and has been stuck inside since. Gabby wants Aidan to find out what happened to her so she can escape the house. She also wants him to continue the story he’s been writing in his notebook (his first positive review!). 

Aidan and friends spring into action, investigating Gabby’s demise and delving into the Witch House’s disturbing past. They encounter landmines galore, including a terrifying specter stalking them around town, a mean girl stealing and posting Aidan’s notebook online and extreme parental exasperation. Can the group make sense of the supernatural goings-on before the house claims another victim?

Norton, author of Hopepunk (one of BookPage’s Best YA Books of 2022), has crafted an action-packed, compelling coming-of-age tale about coming out and becoming brave, all wrapped up in a supremely creepy horror story rife with ghosts and legend, hilarious dialogue and daring adventures. It’s scary, sometimes sweet, rollicking good fun.

Preston Norton has crafted an action-packed, compelling tale about coming out and becoming brave, wrapped up in a supremely creepy horror story rife with ghosts and legend, hilarious dialogue and daring adventures.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

The Jig Is Up

Review by Jamie Orsini

The Jig Is Up takes readers to the fictional Irish-themed town of Shamrock, Massachusetts, where residents are gearing up to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day—despite the recent murder of an Irish step dancer.

When single mom Kate Buckley receives a text from her younger sister, Colleen, asking for help, she packs up her two daughters and their cat to travel to Shamrock, her hometown. Colleen has a history of impetuous decision making, and Kate fears that this time, her sister is in over her head—or worse, that something’s happened to their aging parents or the bed-and-breakfast that they run. But when Kate and her daughters arrive, Colleen is tight-lipped about her problem. Hours later, Kate and Colleen discover the lifeless body of Deirdre, a champion Irish step dancer and Colleen’s best friend. Kate learns that her sister fought with Deirdre before her death, and Colleen is soon named a person of interest in the case. Believing in her sister’s innocence, Kate sets out to clear Colleen’s name and find the real killer in Shamrock—before they strike again.

The Jig Is Up is a well-crafted cozy mystery that deftly explores complicated family dynamics. Kate is the dependable oldest sibling: She’s an accountant by trade and never stops worrying about her younger siblings, her parents or the B&B. Colleen may prove to be a divisive character; she can be selfish and flighty, and often refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of her situation. Still, Kate and the other Buckleys love and support her, even when her lies threaten their livelihood. Complex relationships like this aren’t always depicted in cozy mysteries, and it’s refreshing to see. And as The Jig Is Up is the first novel in a planned series, there’s plenty of room for Kate, Colleen and the rest of the Buckley clan to grow.

Kate’s daughters, Maeve and Bliz, feature prominently in the story, too. They are authentic, relatable characters who are integral to the plot, especially as their involvement in the local Irish dance show provides Kate with several opportunities to further investigate the murder. Kate’s love for her daughters is palpable, and it underscores the message of the novel: Family is everything.

At times, the mystery of Deidre’s murder does take a back seat to exploring Kate’s relationships with her family, friends and Shamrock itself. However, future installments of the series may very well benefit from the thoughtful world building Mathews has done in this first Irish Bed & Breakfast mystery.

The Jig Is Up is a well-crafted cozy mystery that deftly explores complicated family dynamics while also transporting readers to an adorable Irish-themed town.
NonfictionMemoir

That Librarian

Review by Alice Cary

There Amanda Jones was, living in her hometown of Watson, Louisiana, working as a middle school librarian in the school she once attended—an unremarkable and happy life. Then, everything changed. On a mid-July evening in 2022, Jones gave a short, powerful speech against censorship at her local public library’s board meeting. Four days later, she woke up to an email that included a death threat and accused her of “pedophilia grooming.” That frightening message signified the start of an ongoing social media campaign to destroy her reputation.

Jones was shaken to her core; she slept with a gun under her bed and took a semester’s sabbatical to deal with the turmoil. “What kind of world are we living in that has some of our most devoted community servants living so terrified?” Jones asks in her heartfelt memoir, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America. Along with conveying the sudden terror of her ordeal, Jones shares the urge she felt to strike back. A few days after receiving the email, as she watched a cascade of social media posts and comments assassinate her character, she “wanted to karate chop those responsible in the throat. I don’t think words can adequately express the burning rage I felt.”

Read our interview with Amanda Jones, author of ‘That Librarian.’

Jones is a compelling narrator with a nearly unbelievable story that is a parable for our divided times. In this nightmarish tale of a small-town battle gone viral, she shows immense courage by standing up to her tormentors and refusing to be silenced. Despite her fury, she channeled her emotions into positive action, researching the politics, corruption and financing behind the attacks.

Librarians and readers will especially appreciate the story of her educational journey over the years as they’ll see firsthand how important representation and diversity are in library collections, and what lifesavers such books can provide to patrons of all ages and backgrounds. For all who value books, libraries and the freedom of information, That Librarian is an empowering, triumphant tale.

 

Librarian Amanda Jones recounts her battle to overcome book-banning extremists in her empowering memoir, That Librarian.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

The Dark We Know

Review by Tami Orendain

The back-to-back deaths of two childhood friends push Isadora Chang to leave her hometown for a life in the city—until her own abusive father dies, and she is brought back into the restrictive, judgmental community of Slater. Haunted by memories of her lost friends, Zach and Wren, Isadora is desperate to escape Slater again, but she’s stopped by Mason, the other survivor from their childhood friend group. He shares that he suspects that Zach and Wren’s deaths were actually caused by a sinister supernatural force plaguing the community. Isa faces a crossroads: leave everything behind, or stay and try to stop the force from claiming more lives. 

Wen-yi Lee’s debut novel, The Dark We Know, is a raw, poignant exploration of grief and growing up. Lee paints a picture of ruined innocence: Isa and Mason are dealing with the loss of not only Zach and Wren, but also their shared childhood and the close friendship they once had. While Mason is determined to reinvestigate their past, Isa wants nothing more than to run away. Lee fully explores the messy, complicated experience of grieving, and as Isa and Mason work through their pain, they find there’s no clear path forward: Sometimes healing looks like remembering a happy memory, at other times like having a terrifying nightmare.

The Dark We Know pulls no punches with its incredibly visceral supernatural elements. The novel opens with Isa drawing gruesome portraits of dying people—drawings she has no memory of creating. She’s haunted, literally and emotionally. These horrors center on Slater, an isolated former mining town whose restrictive culture rejects anyone who questions the community’s strict views on religion, sexuality and lifestyle. From Trish, Isa’s older sister who acts more like her mother, to Otto Vandersteen, the mysterious but compelling heir to the family who founded the town, the cast is full of multifaceted characters, each with secrets of their own. Unraveling the mysteries of the town means Isa has to come to terms with being truly vulnerable—and learn how to handle the vulnerability of others, too.

Not for the faint of heart, this book draws a profound connection between supernatural forces and the terrors of grief and dishonesty. Isa and the other characters fight to stay hopeful about the world, even when it’s crumbling around them. Amid intense sadness, they grow and learn how to genuinely lean on each other, creating a story that, despite its dark imagery and heavy subject matter, feels truly resonant and uplifting.

Not for the faint of heart, The Dark We Know draws a profound connection between supernatural forces and the terrors of grief and dishonesty.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Survival Is a Promise

Review by Catherine Hollis

How does one write a biography of a hurricane? And how could any biography capture the life and essence of Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet and community builder? In Alexis Pauline Gumbs, herself a queer Black feminist poet and community activist, Lorde has found the perfect interlocutor. Gumbs’ writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It’s a meeting of two minds.

Gumbs foregrounds Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde in Lorde’s affinity with the natural world. She expounds upon the science of trees, whales, honeybees, particle physics, tectonic plates and more, and then poetically connects these sections to Lorde’s life. But this structure is more than metaphor: Gumbs shows how the poet created literal guides for survival. For example, the destructive force of hurricanes is a recurring theme throughout Lorde’s work. It serves to illuminate her passionate experiences with love and desire, and her rage at racist violence. But it also nods to her Afro Caribbean roots: As a baby, her father survived a deadly hurricane in Barbados. Lorde herself survived the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in Grenada, where she lived toward the end of her life.

Those less familiar with the school of Audre Lorde may know of her work through prose sound bites like “your silence will not protect you” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In this biography, Gumbs shifts focus from Lorde’s feminist essays to her poetry, relying on verses to frame Lorde’s life, from her experience as a “speech-delayed” child in midcentury Harlem to her emergence as a central node in second-wave feminism. The importance of speech and the power of reading shapes Lorde’s experience from the beginning, and her debates about Black and white feminisms and lesbian identity in the 1970s and ’80s continue to inform intersectional and queer feminisms today.

Calling her subject “The Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother Audre Lorde,” Gumbs does not pretend to be an impartial observer, and the biography is all the better for it. Lorde’s body of work continues to nourish generations of poets and activists, particularly Black and queer feminists. While readers from these communities have joyous reason to celebrate the publication of this book, Survival Is a Promise bears an important and hopeful message for us all: Survival is a communal act of care.

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literary and feminist icon.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Tell Me Everything

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth Strout’s 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, brings together Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess, all characters from Strout’s previous novels, following their lives and others’ in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Tell Me Everything traces the interactions between Bob and Lucy, who’ve built a friendship from their weekly walks along the river. (Lucy and her ex-husband, William, left New York for good when COVID-19 cases surged; and Bob is now married to Margaret, a minister.) Bob and Lucy share confidences and old puzzling stories, and after Bob introduces Lucy to Olive Kitteridge, Lucy visits Olive in her apartment, where they trade stories too. Olive plays a supporting role in the novel, but she gives voice to one of the novel’s themes: “Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded.”

Though the point of view dips into and out of many characters, the heart of Tell Me Everything is Bob Burgess. Bob faces late-midlife reckonings with his difficult brother, who blames Bob for a family tragedy; his troubled ex-wife, Pam; and Lucy, the friend who knows his secrets. When Bob, a lawyer, agrees to take on the case of a lonely man charged with murdering his mother (a woman that Bob, Olive and other characters remember from childhood, and not fondly), he lets this case take over his life. This murder mystery runs through the novel, adding a layer of darkness and propelling the action forward.

At the same time, Tell Me Everything is also a novel about all those unrecorded lives that Bob, Lucy, Olive and others share stories about, trying to find meaning and purpose in them. The narrative combines two of Strout’s preoccupations: the reverberating, intergenerational effects of poverty, and the power of connection and empathy, demonstrating how stories can illuminate our worst moments and commemorate our best.

Because it returns to beloved characters from My Name Is Lucy Barton, The Burgess Boys and Olive Kitteridge, and even includes cameos from Strout’s first two novels, Tell Me Everything may be most gratifying for Strout’s longtime fans. But these very human characters, with their specific yet universal questions about others’ lives and their own, are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.

Elizabeth Strout’s longtime fans will be delighted by the return of beloved characters in Tell Me Everything, but these very human characters are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Still Life

Review by Laura Sackton

In her sharp, funny and wonderfully observed debut, Katherine Packert Burke captures the ordinary texture of queer and trans life. Still Life is a surprising and layered portrayal of the quotidian, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals. 

Edith is a trans woman in her late 20s, muddling through life without direction. She’s living in Austin, supposedly working on her second book. In reality, she spends her days cruising dating apps, going to parties and attending protests against increasingly violent anti-trans legislation. Grieving the death of her best friend and sometimes-lover, Val, she’s trapped in a melancholic longing for her past in Boston.

When a college friend invites her to speak to his creative writing students, she reluctantly returns to Boston for a week, where she visits her ex-girlfriend, Tessa, whom she dated before she transitioned. The narrative moves between the turbulent present and the turbulent past. In both timelines, Edith’s life revolves around her tangled relationships with both Tessa and Val. The three women’s friendships shift as they age, move and fall in and out of love. Edith transitions and comes out; Val dies. It is these two world-remaking changes that give the novel its emotional heft. 

There’s not much plot in these 272 pages, but the novel is all the richer for it. Without external events driving the action forward, Burke is able to focus on the strange and singular details of her protagonist’s interior life. Burke writes about grief, transition, gender identity, desire, and queer and trans love with astonishing expansiveness. Edith’s journey is not straightforward or linear. It’s circuitous, sometimes stagnant. She tries to think her way forward, but finds, again and again, that she cannot escape the material world—her physical body.

Still Life is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of queer friendship. Its urgency lies not in what happens to the characters, but in how they feel about what happens to them. Most of all, it’s a novel about navigating that most human of conundrums: change.

Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Still Life

Review by Alice Cary

Reading Still Life makes one immediately wish for children to share it with, since this book is guaranteed to have them shouting in glee, their exclamations growing louder with every turn of the page. At the same time, because readers must pay careful attention to the visual details on each page, enjoying the book is a wonderful exercise in observation, memory and anticipation. 

The fun is not surprising, given that author Alex London has written over 30 books for children and teens. In Still Life, the focus is on a curly-haired artist intent on explaining the concept of still life paintings—especially how predictable they are. “This is a still life,” he begins. “It is a painting of objects sitting still. In a still life, nothing moves.” He stands beside a rather baroque work in progress depicting a strange collection including items like a dollhouse, jam, paper and a flickering candle. 

Caldecott Medalist Paul O. Zelinsky carefully delineates between the painting, which is laden with colorful, intricate details, and the artist’s real world, which is composed of much starker, quicker sketches. This delineation helps readers differentiate between art and “reality” in this delightfully meta picture book. The first sign of trouble appears when a pair of mice climb up the artist’s (real) table, eventually scurrying into the painting and getting into the (painted) jam. Soon a princess, dragon and a knight appear in the painting, prompting the artist to declare, “Dragons? No, nothing like that in this sort of painting. There are no creatures to ruin the tablecloth or stomp through the strawberries. None whatsoever!” Kids will relish the oodles of activity taking place right under the artist’s oblivious nose, especially when he announces, “If you see a note in a still-life painting, please do not read it.” Still Life provides a fabulous, subtle way to teach children they shouldn’t always believe everything they hear, no matter how earnest the proclaimer may be.

London and Zelinsky have fun turning expectations upside down, such as when the princess saves the dragon from the troublesome knight. Still Life is a hilarious hoot, and readers will likely never look at a still life in quite the same way. 

Still Life is a hilarious hoot, and readers will likely never look at a still life painting in quite the same way.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Small Rain

Review by Michael Magras

The early 2020s have been marked by affliction, from the tragedy of COVID-19, to racism and police brutality, to a broad insensitivity toward others’ suffering. On the hopeful side, there have also been demonstrations of considerable love and support. Put that contrast into a novel, and exciting literature is the result. An excellent example is Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel.

Greenwell’s unnamed protagonist, a 40-ish gay poet, has had fraught relationships with family members, among them his estranged father, a lawyer who became rich through medical malpractice cases. But the narrator has found happiness with his partner, L, a university instructor with whom he lives in Iowa.

L and the narrator kept to themselves throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan is forced to change when the narrator develops stomach pain so agonizing that “on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” After initial reluctance, he goes to urgent care, where he hopes to receive a quick diagnosis and return home.

To his horror, they send him to the emergency room for imaging. When a doctor tells him, “I thought I was going to send you home with some antibiotics but you are much more interesting than that,” it’s only the beginning of a long hospital stay that includes invasive tests, endless IV bags and no certain diagnosis.

As in his previous novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Greenwell writes in long, discursive paragraphs that digress with philosophical asides. This book is ostensibly about the narrator’s ailment, but that’s really a construct that allows Greenwell to observe both the ills and the positive aspects of modern society, from insensitive nurses who belatedly answer the narrator’s distress call with “We do have other patients,” to the myopia that patriotism and religion can produce, to welcome gifts of generosity, most notably from a young nurse who treats the narrator as a person rather than a case study. At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.

Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel, Small Rain, follows a poet’s terrifying stay in the ICU, exploring the need for empathy in a fragile world.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

Review by Laura Hubbard

Arthur Parnassus, a survivor of the regressive policies of the Department of Magical Youth (DICOMY), would never have imagined his adult life could be so happy. But even as he enjoys his status as soon-to-be adoptive father to the six magical children who live with him and his boyfriend, Linus, on Marsyas Island, the world is becoming more dangerous for people like Arthur and his charges. In an effort to shine a light on the treatment of magical beings at the hands of DICOMY, Arthur publicly testifies about his past and the issues with the current system of orphanages and segregation of magical children. But it soon becomes clear that the government is less interested in what Arthur has to say than in painting him and the children as dangers that must be subdued to defend “normal” families. After Arthur’s testimony inevitably ends badly, Marsyas is saddled with a new inspector determined to prove that the children must be removed and order restored.

How jazz and Studio Ghibli helped TJ Klune return to Marsyas Island.

On the surface, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s beloved 2020 bestseller The House in the Cerulean Sea, seems to be taking Arthur and Linus’ story in an ominous direction. The threat of DICOMY looms larger, its lieutenants more threatening and its messaging more overtly fascist. Some of this is a matter of perspective: While the first book followed Linus’ journey from a well-meaning outsider to a solid ally, Somewhere Beyond the Sea is told from Arthur’s point of view. The shift in perspective centers Arthur’s struggle to hold on to what is precious in the face of increasingly bigoted attacks and the weight of personal trauma, all the while trying to figure out the “right” way to protest being abused by his own government. Yet despite its darker framing, the novel remains rooted in the joy of its characters as much as in their struggles. From weekly Saturday adventures to Arthur and Linus’ blooming relationship, Somewhere Beyond the Sea never misses an opportunity to show us the love that permeates Marsyas. Indeed, the novel is a triumphant rallying cry that reminds readers that it isn’t enough to believe in the rights of our brethren: We have to fight for their joy, too.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, is a triumphant rallying cry for freedom and joy.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Shame on You

Review by Anna Christensen

Shame, that deep burning sensation that seems to dig all the way down to the core of who we are, is a feeling that journalist Melissa Petro is well acquainted with. In 2012, when she was teaching at a New York City elementary school, she published an op-ed in which she disclosed that she was a former sex worker. Overnight, she became the unwilling cover girl of the New York Post; the tabloid’s cruel, mocking coverage continued until she resigned months later.

It would be fair to think that Petro is uniquely qualified to speak on the subject of shame. But in Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, Petro insists that she is not unique. Shame is a weapon of control that has been deployed to great effect against women and femmes for centuries. Equal parts self-help, memoir and social investigation, Petro’s triumphant debut methodically presents how shame has pervaded almost every aspect of our lives, and offers up ways to free ourselves from it.

Differentiating shame from other emotions, like guilt and humiliation, Petro argues that shame causes us to believe there is something fundamentally flawed in how we are. She interviews a diverse group of women, including trans women and gender nonconforming nonbinary people, to capture a feeling both universal and deeply personal: Shy, a queer Black woman, describes how the early pressure she felt to be “a good, clean, god-​fearing, heterosexual Christian” drove her to be suicidal. Ariel, a disability activist who has a facial disfigurement, shares how being pointed at in public elicits a reaction that she later feels ashamed about. Brazen, a fat woman who has experienced a lifetime of body shaming, found empowerment through sex work and “being paid to have my body worshipped, adored, cared for.”

In Shame on You, Petro invites us to get “quiet and curious” in our efforts to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.

 

In Shame on You, Melissa Petro invites us to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.

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