Book Review: Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt

Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt (Algonquin Books; 384 pages; $14.95).

            Fear of communism and nuclear war permeated the psyches of millions of Americans in the 1950s.  Public and private concerns were heightened by Senator Joseph McCarthy when he proclaimed that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the United States government.  Many writers and entertainers were accused of sympathizing with Communists and thus were blacklisted.  His accusations were later disproved, but that did not stop his fervor from spreading.

In her tenth and best novel, Is This Tomorrow, expert storyteller Caroline Leavitt capitalizes on these anxieties.  “You can’t trust these Communists,” one of Leavitt’s minor characters maintains.  “They couldn’t tell the truth if they wanted to….You kids think it’s funny, but any second a missile could come down on us,” he insists.  “And we wouldn’t even see it or be prepared.  One minute we’re here talking in this nice neighborhood, and two seconds later, boom, we’re ash.”  In his eyes, the Russians “hide explosives” and could be anywhere, even in his own neighborhood, “and we wouldn’t even know it.”

The era in which Leavitt sets her story is perfect for her setting.  Father Knows Best gently reminds American kids who is boss in the household.  Echoes of “just wait until your father gets home” are heard all across the United States as the mother keeps house and raises the children and the father brings home the bacon.  Doors are left unlocked.  Sunday is the Lord’s day.  The post-war economy is booming, and so is the birthrate.  Everything seems idyllic, but appearances often deceive, as we all know.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is at its frostiest with no signs of thaw.  Nuclear annihilation is a real and daily threat as school kids are taught to duck and cover and worried fathers build bomb shelters.  New phrases such as Red Scare and Yellow Menace become part of the everyday lexicon.  Americans view those who are different, who do not conform, who look different, who sound different, and who worship differently with contempt.  Anyone deemed not like everyone else was considered deviant.

Life seems peachy for Americans, but ugliness and fear lurk just under the surface.  This juxtaposition is at the heart of Leavitt’s taut, atmospheric, and humane tale.  Blending a coming-of-age saga with history and mystery, Leavitt creates a tense and suspenseful atmosphere when a neighborhood boy goes missing.

Is This Tomorrow is told from three different and varied perspectives: Ava, divorcee, working mother, and the head of the only Jewish family on the block; Lewis, her son; and Rose, her son’s best friend and sister to Jimmy, the youth who vanishes.  Although Jimmy is not a narrator, his disappearance looms over the novel; his presence and his absence are powerfully palpable.

Because Ava is different from the other neighborhood parents, she is suspect.  Ava locks her doors when all the other doors are unlocked; she works when the rest of the mothers do not have jobs outside the home.  She does not dress like the other mothers and she has had a string of boyfriends. The neighbors see her as a floozy.  These things do not necessarily damn her, though.  Other parents believe she may have had an inappropriate relationship with her son’s best friend.  Ava denies it but admits she knew Jimmy had a crush on her.  He was at Ava’s the day he went missing.

Jimmy’s disappearance profoundly changes the lives of all of Leavitt’s main characters.  Jimmy’s departure leaves Ava, Lewis, and Rose stuck and unable to go forward.  The calendar turns and they grow older, but they are still stuck in the moment Jimmy faded away forever.  They have too many loose ends in their lives, and the burning desire to know what happened drives them.

Caroline Leavitt

Rose, Jimmy’s sister, becomes a teacher but never forgets her family tragedy as she desperately pleads with the principal to put a fence around the playground so school kids will not wander off.  Lewis withdraws from his mother and searches for his father, who once wanted custody of Lewis but has since vanished himself.  Ava feels alone and bakes pies that she sells to a local restaurant but has never forgotten Jimmy and the day he seemed to evaporate into thin air.

Leavitt hooks you in the first chapter when young Jimmy goes missing and does not let you go until the very last page.  I was riveted.  Leavitt provides readers with timely and weighty issues such as missing children, difference, and paranoia.

With expert pacing, the author takes her time revealing secrets.  This master storyteller is meticulous and wise as she teases out every detail but still keeps you guessing.  Is This Tomorrow is atmospheric and taut and has everything you could ever want in a book: compelling, fully realized characters; an intense, dramatic, and compelling plot; and the perfect, evocative setting.  Everything comes together superbly in Leavitt’s skilled hands.

The title is taken from a propaganda comic book that came out in 1947 and warned of the dangers of a Communist takeover.  An estimated four million Americans purchased the educational comic, no doubt contributing to the fear and paranoia of the 1950s.  In Is This Tomorrow, Leavitt brings this era to life and illustrates how fear of the unknown and fear of difference transformed a country, a community, and a people.  Although her book is set primarily in a time very different from our own age, Is This Tomorrow is a cautionary tale for us in the Twenty-First Century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (William Morrow Paperbacks; 304 pages; $14.99).

            For thousands of years, the Wabanaki Indians traveled extensively by canoe, portaging from one body of water to another.  They had to decide which possessions were necessary and which were not needed on their journeys.  The Wabanakis “learned to travel light” and to make logical decisions about “what to keep and what to discard.”  The canoes were essential; little else, though, was deemed indispensable.

Molly Ayer, a Penobscot youth and one of the main characters in Christina Baker Kline’s emotional page turner Orphan Train, knows the concept of portaging all too well.  At 17, she is months away from aging out of the foster care system.  In nine years, Molly “has been in over a dozen foster homes, some for as little as a week.”

As Kline illustrates, life has been difficult for Molly, who has “been spanked with a spatula, slapped across the face, made to sleep on an unheated sun porch in the winter, and taught to roll a joint by a foster father.”  If that is not enough to make your heart go out to Molly, consider this: she got her first tattoo at 16 from a 23-year-old man in exchange for her virginity.

People make assumptions about Molly.  She has streaks in her hair, a number of piercings, and tattoos.  She comes across as tough-as-nails and extremely apathetic.  But it’s all for show.  Molly is hurting crying out for help.

Molly gets in big trouble when she steals a beat-up and old copy of Jane Eyre from the library and must do 50 hours of community service.  Because it’s “better than juvie,” she agrees to help an “old lady” clean out her attic.

As Molly sees it, Vivian Daly, a wealthy widow, has led a full and fulfilling life with everything she could ever want.  Interestingly, Molly is guilty of making the same kind of assumptions about Vivian as people make about her.

In reality, Vivian has a tragic past: she was an Irish immigrant and orphan sent by train from New York to Minnesota to be adopted by Midwestern families.  In some cases, the families fed, clothed, and educated the children until they reached 18 and mutual love and affection developed.  This was not Vivian’s experience.  Going from house to house, from family to family, Vivian endures hardship, hatred, and abuse.  Everything was stripped from her, even her name.

For Vivian, it was a “pitiful kind of childhood, to know that no one loves you or is taking care of you, to always be on the outside looking in.”  It really was not a childhood at all, as she knew “too much” and had seen “people at their worst, at their most desperate and selfish.”  This knowledge made Vivian cautious.  Vivian learned “to pretend, to smile and nod, [and] to display [an] empathy” that she did not feel.  Broken inside, she was little more than an indentured servant, hoping and praying for the day her time would be up and she would be free.

Molly learns that she and Vivian are more alike than she knows when her American History teacher gives his students an assignment: interview someone about his or her own portage, the moments in life “when they’ve had to take a journey, literal or metaphorical.”  He urges them to create with an oral history of those they are to interview and ask: “What did you choose to bring with you to the next place?  What did you leave behind?  What insights did you gain about what’s important?”  Molly seeks out Vivian, who tells the young girl about the orphan train, a secret she has kept hidden for years.

Kline makes clear that both Molly and Vivian have undertaken a number of portages throughout their lives.  Their journeys have shaped their personalities and made them skeptical, guarded, and afraid.  Although Vivian seems done with portages, Molly is not and must undergo another in the novel: “She’s a turtle carrying its shell.  Jane Eyre, staggering across the heath.  A Penobscot under the weight of a canoe.”

In Orphan Train, Kline employs a dual narrative format as she takes us from contemporary Maine to a Minnesota in the midst of depression and war.  The author gives us Molly’s perspective in the third person but shifts points of view for Vivian to first person.  This marked change underscores the importance of Vivian’s narrative and gives her story more bearing.

Orphan Train is a historical gem, shedding much-needed light on an almost-forgotten period in American history when East Coast orphans were packed up and put on trains headed to the Midwest from 1854 to 1929.  Kline not only entertains us and captivates us with such a well-told story but she also informs and educates us, and I applaud her for that.

Solemnity and heartbreak intersperse the pages of this novel, yet Kline also infuses Orphan Train with inspiration and hope.  While Molly and Vivian undertake both literal and physical portages, Kline forces us to ponder our own lives: what we take, what we leave behind, and those things that are of utmost importance.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline is the She Reads May Book Club Selection.  For giveaways, interviews, discussion, and more reviews, please visit She Reads.

Christina Baker Kline

 

 

Book Review: Dear Lucy by Julie Sarkissian

Dear Lucy by Julie Sarkissian (Simon & Schuster; 352 pages; $25).

           I have never felt fiercely protective of a character before, but the urge to shield Lucy, the main speaker in Julie Sarkissian’s quirky, unique, and weirdly beautiful debut, Dear Lucy, overtook me. And there’s a good reason why: Lucy is developmentally delayed and has issues with behavior and language yet she is filled with determination and love. Lucy is limited, yes, but she looks at the world with wonder and sees it as full of possibility. Lucy is extraordinary and she certainly becomes special to us as her eyes are open to the beauty around her.

“It is time to get the eggs. Time for my best thing,” Lucy says. “I get the eggs for our breakfast. They are alive. When you eat something that is alive you take the life for yourself. You can’t think of it as taking life from another thing, you think of it as giving life to yourself.” This sentiment comes from Lucy’s friend, Samantha. “Samantha knows” because “there is something growing inside of her too.” Samantha, a pregnant teenager, is also one of the narrators in Dear Lucy. She does not want her baby; instead, she plans on giving the child up for adoption.

Sarkissian sets Dear Lucy on an isolated and rather mysterious farm. The setting makes the story dark and desolate and allows a sense of menace to loom over the entire novel. Mister and Missus, owners of the farm, only add to the story’s doom-and-gloom environment. Missus functions as Sarkissian’s third and final narrator.

The author could have told her tale solely from Lucy’s perspective, but then we would not have so many different windows and perceptions of the story, making Dear Lucy richer and more satisfying. Sarkissian writes each narrator in Dear Lucy with vulnerability, though some characters are more defenseless than others. Weakness is sometimes overt, like with Lucy and Samantha; other times, helplessness can be hidden, as it is with Missus, who feels inadequate for not giving her husband a son.

Dear Lucy gives up its secrets slowly yet pleasingly, building mystery and suspense. Especially when Sarkissian reveals the reason why Lucy is on the farm. Lucy gets a thought into her head and cannot let it go. Because she is so single-minded, she can be willful and even prone to violence. Her impulses rule her, leading me to wonder if perhaps her hypothalamus is to blame for her behavior. Lucy’s mother could not handle her daughter any longer and put her in the care of Mister and Missus.

Lucy believes her stay on the farm is temporary and believes her Mum mum will return for her, as she promised. She must listen to Mister and Missus always so they will allow her to stay on the farm, where “Mum mum will know where to find” her. Lucy takes this literally and is loath to even get in a car or go on foot off the farm. She longs for her mother and yearns to be called “Dear Lucy” as Mum mum wraps Lucy in her arms protectively and lovingly.

The farm becomes a haven of sorts for Lucy as she waits for Mum mum. She develops an attachment to Samantha and to the chickens from whom she collects the eggs. Lucy is so happy when Samantha gives birth and decides to keep the son she delivers, but her world comes crashing down when Samantha’s baby is taken from her. Samantha begs Lucy for help.

Lucy then sets out on an adventure like no other, a journey that takes her farther away from the farm than she has ever been. She worries Mum mum will not be able to find her again, but Lucy presses on. She is not alone on her mission. Jennifer, a talking chicken, accompanies her and tells Lucy what to do. Jennifer is everything that Lucy is not: tough, smart, mature, and wise. For me, the chicken was a part of Lucy’s psyche that appeared right when she needed it the most.

Dear Lucy is told in three distinctive and gorgeous voices. Sarkissian’s imagination, originality, and amazing talent captivated me and would not let me go. Eerie and atmospheric, Dear Lucy reads like southern gothic, unsettling and intriguing and at the same time urging the reader and Lucy onward.

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Book Review: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 336 pages; $24).

Fourteen year old Lorca listens intently to a conversation between her mother, Nancy, and her Aunt Lou.  “What is the best thing you’ve ever eaten?” her aunt asks.  “Masgouf,” Nancy answers, “from an Iraqi restaurant that’s closed now.”  Nancy proclaims masgouf, the national dish of Iraq, “heaven.”

In Jessica Soffer’s lush, flavorful debut, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, food evokes memories of what is lost and of what can never be again. Like masgouf, for instance, or “carp, typically from the Euphrates or Tigris, pulled out of the water, grilled on the banks and prepared with lemon and tamarind and tomatoes.”  However, Islamic leaders placed a fatwah on the fish because of all the dead bodies in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.  As Soffer laments, “Baghdad is not what it once was. All the Jews are gone. Their experience of eating masgouf as they once did is very much over.”

In Soffer’s skilled hands, recipes and food become symbols in Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.  Lorca, starved for her mother’s affection, calls her mother a “cold war” and an “enigma, fickle, unknowable, like a giant fish.”  Nancy is not like most mothers; instead, she only loves Lorca in “fits and spurts,” “warm in flickers and then very cold.”

Only one thing makes Nancy, a chef, happy, and that is food.  Lorca prepares a myriad of dishes in hopes of garnering her mother’s attention.  Nothing works.  When Lorca was 6, she burned her hands while making a birthday cake for her mother.  Lorca imagines “that if my mother had just taken out the ice pack, tucked it into a towel, and held me on her lap, rocking me, whispering in my hair, cooling my fingers, things would have been different.”  But Nancy did none of those things.

Lorca’s yearning for her mother is only lessened through acts of self-harm.  So she does them again and again and again.  Her urge to injure herself is “constant…like a band of moths stuck between the screen and the window” but in her “chest instead.”  Lorca welcomes the sweet agony of pain.  Caught in a dangerous downward spiral, Lorca has been suspended from school for self-cutting when Soffer opens the story.

The masgouf gives Lorca renewed hope.  If she can learn how to prepare masgouf, then perhaps the dish will bring her and her mother closer together.  “Bukra fil mish mish,” she hopes (“Tomorrow, apricots may bloom).  Her mother’s wistful recollection of the masgouf compels Lorca to seek out the husband and wife who once owned the Iraqi restaurant.

It is here that Soffer introduces her other main character, Victoria.  Like Lorca, Victoria is hungry for companionship.  She is a widowed Jew from Iraq, whose husband, Joseph, recently passed away.  Joseph’s death left a hole in Victoria’s heart; she grieves for him and also for the daughter they gave up for adoption many years ago.  Victoria agrees to teach Lorca, an almost-orphan, cooking lessons.  Before long, recipes and food bridge the gap between their different generations and different cultures.  Both characters strongly believe that they share a deeper connection.

Soffer tells her tale in the alternating voices of Lorca and Victoria, incredibly well-drawn and vivid narrators.  But Soffer knows the best dishes come from a mix of ingredients so she changes it up a bit by incorporating Joseph’s point of view.  Joseph’s voice provides a new and unexpected window into the story and into the characters.  Soffer further amazes by creating interesting minor characters and subplots that further enhance the novel.  One of the strengths of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is the way Soffer effectively puts us into the heads of her main characters.

Food is supposed to provide sustenance and can be a comfort.  Sometimes, though, the body craves things other than nutrients.  We all need love, attention, and companionship.  There is such longing within the pages of Soffer’s story—longing for affection, for the past, for a different present, and for a future than can never be again.  Like food, life can be sweet and sometimes life can be sour.  Sometimes you burn the meatloaf or the shakrlama and sometimes it comes out perfect.  Sometimes we have to make do with the ingredients at hand.

Writing is part of Soffer’s family history. Her grandfather was a scribe in Baghdad, her father was a sculptor and painter, and Soffer is a novelist.  Interestingly, “Soffer,” means “scribe” in Arabic.  Soffer is a born and gifted storyteller whose debut is good enough to eat.

Book Review: The Third Son by Julie Wu

The Third Son by Julie Wu (Algonquin Books; 320 pages; $24.95).

Rocky Balboa had an anthem, and so did Daniel LaRusso.  Saburo, the irresistible protagonist in Julie Wu’s dazzling first novel, The Third Son, does not have an anthem, nor does he have a championship title, trophy, or belt.  But Saburo is just as much an unlikely and humble hero as Rocky and the Karate Kid are.  With a strong will, a big heart, and an indefatigable spirit, Saburo fights to survive and thrive in the midst of a family that deems him unimportant and a country drowning in violence, tumult, and autocracy.

A rich and evocative epic, The Third Son centers on Saburo, a tender and good-hearted underdog who drives Wu’s commanding historical novel.  Wu introduces Saburo when he is eight years old, in 1943, weeks before the Japanese begin bombing Taiwan.  As Saburo recalls in his own distinctive voice, “We all understood Japanese.  Taiwan had been a Japanese colony since 1895.”  The official language of Taiwan is Japanese, and even his family’s last name, Togo, is Japanese.  “But in our heads and in our home,” Saburo explains, “we spoke and were Taiwanese, descendants of the Mainland Chinese….”

Saburo’s life, like Taiwan itself, is complex.  He is the third son, “different, somehow,” from his elder brothers Kazuo and Jiro.  Saburo does not have a mind for his studies or sports.  Instead, it is ” far more interesting” for Saburo, “despite the real and everpresent threat of being struck by” his teacher, “to study the sky outside.”  The third son of the Togo family loves “the sky, its boundless, lovely blue, the translucent ruffled pattern of clouds stretching across it.”

Because his face is forever turned toward the skies, he spots the Japanese planes on the horizon before the air raid sirens sound.  While fleeing Japanese bombers, Saburo meets a young girl, Yoshiko, and is instantly smitten.  After their initial encounter, she suddenly vanishes; her disappearance breaks his young, tender heart.

Wu creates a pattern with the loss of Yoshiko.  Nothing comes easily to Saburo; life, for him, is a struggle.  Throughout The Third Son, Saburo must fight.  He must fight for food, because the majority of food in his household goes to his brothers and not to him.  He must fight to live when sickness threatens to overcome him.  Saburo must even fight to learn and so cherishes reading The Earth, a book his cousin gives him.

Saburo is “fed as much” from his “growing knowledge of the stratosphere, the ionosphere, and the aurora borealis as from the berries and mushrooms and silvery fish” that he collects from the land around him.   “Reading the book” is a “balm” for Saburo, as he witnesses “all the changes in the world outside.”  But even that is taken from him.

As the third son, Saburo must also fight for an education.  His older brothers are given instruction, but not Saburo.  He learns English on his own and studies to be an electrician.  His world is shaken, though, when he sees Yoshiko, after years of trying to find her, in the company of his oldest brother.  If he wants her in his life, then Saburo must fight for love.

As the years pass, and Saburo wrangles for position in his family and in his country, he comes to see that his future is not in Taiwan.  “Saburo,” his cousin tells him, “you have only have one life.  Fight for it.”  This is all the impetus Saburo needs to try to find a place in America, yet he must also fight to study and work in the United States.  That could be the biggest challenge of all.

As Saburo battles his naysayers and fights for a better life, we cannot help but cheer on this beloved underdog.  He maintains a great deal of persistence and perseverance despite the obstacles Wu throws in his path.  Because we watch him grow to be a good and just man, we develop a strong bond with Saburo; he becomes important to us.  Wu forces us to connect emotionally with this character, and the link lasts well beyond finishing the story.

The Third Son is a rich debut featuring a character who I came to see as family.  Saburo is a very special narrator, one who resonates and one who will steal your heart.  Wu’s story is perfect for fans of Samuel Park, Jamie Ford, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Lisa See.  Saburo has so much to teach us about life and about living.

Debut novelist Julie Wu

It’s May–What Should I Read?

May is here, and everything’s coming up books!  And that is indeed a wonderful thing.  There’s lots of variety, meaning there should be something for everyone this month.

Titles To Pick Up Now

Dear Lucy by the extraordinarily talented Julie Sarkissian is available now.  I loved Sarkissian’s debut and feel fiercely protective of her main character, Lucy, who is developmentally delayed.  If you are a fan of Gothic tales, this will be perfect for you.  I spotlighted the book and interviewed Sarkissian.  Book review is coming soon.

I go down the stairs quiet like I am something without any weight. I open the door in the dark and the cold sucks my skin towards it. It is the morning but there is no sun yet, just white light around the edges. It is the time to get the eggs. Time for my best thing. The eggs they shine with their white and I do not need the light to find them. The foxes need no light either. I am a little like the fox, he is a little like me.—From Dear Lucy

Dear Lucy is a very unique book, one that you will be sorry you missed.

 

Another recently-released debut that I am enjoying is  Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley.  Check out my spotlight on the novel.  

A mother and her daughters drive for days without sleep until they crash their car in rural Oklahoma. The mother, Amaranth, is desperate to get away from someone she’s convinced will follow them wherever they go–her husband. The girls, Amity and Sorrow, can’t imagine what the world holds outside their father’s polygamous compound. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of Bradley, a farmer grieving the loss of his wife. At first unwelcoming to these strange, prayerful women, Bradley’s abiding tolerance gets the best of him, and they become a new kind of family. An unforgettable story of belief and redemption, AMITY & SORROW is about the influence of community and learning to stand on your own.

Riley’s tale is gripping, even from the first page when she introduces readers to sisters who are tied together at the wrist.  Amity & Sorrow is an unflinching, timely, and intriguing look at a fundamentalist cult and a mother who will do anything to save her daughters.

 

Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children, returns with a new novel called The Woman Upstairs.  

Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the “woman upstairs,” a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents–dashing Skandar, a half-Muslim Professor of Ethical History born in Beirut, and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist–have come to America for Skandar to teach at Harvard.  But one afternoon, Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who punch, push and call him a “terrorist,” and Nora is quickly drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family. Soon she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her boundaries–until Sirena’s own ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.  Written with intimacy and piercing emotion, this urgently dispatched story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill–and the devastating cost–of giving in to one’s passions. The Woman Upstairs is a masterly story of America today, of being a woman and of the exhilarations of love.

I’m so proud of debut novelist Julie Wu.  Her dazzling historical epic, The Third Son, was featured in May’s O, The Oprah Magazine and chosen as one of Amazon’s best books of May.  The Third Son is a rich debut featuring a character who I came to see as family.  Saburo is a very special character, one who will steal your heart.  Wu’s story is perfect for fans of Samuel Park, Jamie Ford, Janice Y.K. Lee, and Lisa See.  I spotlighted the book and interviewed Wu.  A review is coming soon.

It’s 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, Saburo is in no hurry to get home to the taunting and abuse he suffers at the hands of his parents and older brother. In the forest he meets Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise.  Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.

Set in a tumultuous and violent period of Taiwanese history—as the Chinese Nationalist Army lays claim to the island and one autocracy replaces another—The Third Son tells the story of lives governed by the inheritance of family and the legacy of culture, and of a young man determined to free himself from both.  In Saburo, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character, a gentle soul forced to fight for everything he’s ever wanted: food, an education, and his first love, Yoshiko. A sparkling, evocative debut, it will have readers cheering for this young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.

 

Coming Soon

On May 7, Bloomsbury USA will publish the latest novel from bestselling author Gail Godwin.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen’s decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II.At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died.A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories.Flora, her late mother’s twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin’s memorable novel of growing up, The Finishing School. With its house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can’t undo.It will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

Caroline’s Leavitt’s tenth novel, Is This Tomorrow, comes out May 7 from Algonquin Books.

 

In 1956, when divorced working-mom Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a Boston suburb, the neighborhood is less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood in the era of the Cold War, bomb scares, and paranoia seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son.Lewis never recovers from the disappearance of his childhood friend. By the time he reaches his twenties, he s living a directionless life, a failure in love, estranged from his mother. Rose is now a schoolteacher in another city, watching over children as she was never able to watch over her own brother. Ava is building a new life for herself in a new decade. When the mystery of Jimmy s disappearance is unexpectedly solved, all three must try to reclaim what they have lost.

 

 

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra will be released on May 7 by Hogarth.  A resilient doctor risks everything to save the life of a hunted child, in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together.  In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.  For the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

Also on May 7 comes Daniel Wallace’s latest yarn, The Kings and Queens of Roam, from Touchstone.

 

From the celebrated author of Big Fish, an imaginative, moving novel about two sisters and the dark legacy and magical town that entwine them.  Helen and Rachel McCallister, who live in a town called Roam, are as different as sisters can be: Helen older, bitter, and conniving; Rachel beautiful, naïve – and blind. When their parents die an untimely death, Rachel has to rely on Helen for everything, but Helen embraces her role in all the wrong ways, convincing Rachel that the world is a dark and dangerous place she couldn’t possibly survive on her own … or so Helen believes, until Rachel makes a surprising choice that turns both their worlds upside down.  In this new novel, Southern literary master Daniel Wallace returns to the tradition of tall-tales and folklore made memorable in his bestselling Big Fish. The Kings and Queens of Roam is a wildly inventive, beautifully written, and big-hearted tale of family and the ties that bind

 

Unbridled Books will publish River of Dust by Virginia Pye on May 14.  On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers. Grace, his young ingénue wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, where visions of her stolen child and lost husband begin to beckon to her from across the plains. The foreign couple’s savvy and dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again. With their Christian beliefs sorely tested, their concept of fate expanded, and their physical health rapidly deteriorating, the Reverend and Grace may finally discover an understanding between them that is greater than the vast distance they have come.

 

On May 14, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, hits shelves from Knopf.  From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.  As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.   Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.   Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most powerful and astonishing novel yet.

 

Patricia Beard’s A Certain Summer will be ready for your beach bag on May 21.  The publisher is Gallery Books.  “Nothing ever changes at Wauregan.” That mystique is the tradition of the idyllic island colony off the shore of Long Island, the comforting tradition that its summer dwellers have lived by for over half a century. But in the summer of 1948, after a world war has claimed countless men—even those who came home—the time has come to deal with history’s indelible scars.  Helen Wadsworth’s husband, Arthur, was declared missing in action during an OSS operation in France, but the official explanation was mysteriously nebulous. Now raising a teenage son who longs to know the truth about his father, Helen turns to Frank Hartman—her husband’s best friend and his partner on the mission when he disappeared. Frank, however, seems more intent on filling the void in Helen’s life that Arthur’s absence has left. As Helen’s affection for Frank grows, so does her guilt, especially when Peter Gavin, a handsome Marine who was brutally tortured by the Japanese and has returned with a faithful war dog, unexpectedly stirs new desires. With her heart pulled in multiple directions, Helen doesn’t know whom to trust—especially when a shocking discovery forever alters her perception of both love and war.  Part mystery, part love story, and part insider’s view of a very private world, A Certain Summer resonates in the heart long after the last page is turned.

Also published on May 21 is We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo from Reagan Arthur.  Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.

But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her–from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee–while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

 

 

Riverhead releases what may well be another bestseller for author Khaled Hosseini on May 21, And the Mountains Echoed.  Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.

Who doesn’t love a good thriller?  While I was no fan of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, I am looking forward to the release of Inferno, out May 14 from Knopf Doubleday.  As The Lost Symbol showed me, Robert Langdon works best in Europe, and not in America.

In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.  
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante’s Inferno.  Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.

Paperback Releases

If you didn’t catch these amazing reads last year, they are either now available in paperback or are coming out this month.  Don’t miss them!

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers is out now from Little, Brown.  Powers was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction for his tale of the Iraq War.

The Yellow Birds is unlike other Iraq War novels.  Powers actually fought in combat so he knows his stuff.  This is fiction, but there are kernels of truth within these pages.  He drives home the point that the War in Iraq has irrevocably changed a whole generation and our country will not ever be the same.  The Yellow Birds is penetrating, poignant, and deeply personal for Powers.  I can’t stop thinking about Bartle and Murph.  This is the debut of the year.  –Bookmagnet’s review

 

 

 

Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars comes out in paperback May 7 from Vintage.

Hig is an “old man at forty” who lost his wife and their unborn child to the flu.  Hig’s narrative is unconventional as Heller uses flashbacks and sometimes strange streams of consciousness to tell us his story.  After the flu struck, encephalitis felled Hig.  “Two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105,” Hig explains, “I know it cooked my brains.”  There is no pattern to Hig’s thoughts.  They are often jumbled and mish-mashed, often without segue from one thought to the next.  He begins many of his sentences with “and” or “so” and most of his thoughts are fragments.  What Hig has lived through and what he has lost speak to us from the page.  Heller uses a very powerful device, and Hig just would not be Hig without it.–Bookmagnet’s review

 

 

 

 

On May 7, Vintage releases Maggie Shipstead’s debut, Seating Arrangements, in paperback.  

Seating Arrangments is THE read of the summer, but this is no fluff piece.  Shipstead constructs a many-layered story in the same way a baker creates a layered wedding cake or a designer sews a wedding gown.  There are layers upon layers, and we must peel them back chapter by chapter. There are debut novels, and then there are debut novels.  Messy, disorganized jumbles lacking cohesion.  Unrealized characters with nothing to drive them.  Settings that fall flat.  A plot that isn’t.  This is not one of those debut novels.  –Bookmagnet’s review

 

 

 

 

Lance Weller’s electrifying and shocking debut Wilderness comes out May 14 from Bloomsbury USA.

I interviewed Weller and he had this to say about coming up with the story:

“Abel Truman came to me well before I had any notion whatsoever that Wilderness would become what it ended up becoming.  I wanted to try and write a really excellent dog story and, to that end, started writing a short story about an old man and his dog and what became of them.  Before I really knew it, they were living on the Washington State coast and the old man was an American Civil War veteran and I was beyond the point where it was a short story by a good number of pages.”

–From my interview with Weller

 

Mariner Books will publish Jennifer Miller’s smart debut The Year of the Gadfly May 28.  

Foreshadowing is just one of the plot devices in which Miller shows off her skills.  Traveling to the school with her mother, Iris notices that “the mountainous peaks resembled teeth.  The road stretched between them like a black tongue.  And here we were, in our small vehicle, speeding toward that awful mouth.”  One cannot help but wonder if the school will swallow Iris…I recommend The Year of the Gadfly to fans of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Amber Dermont’s The Starboard Sea, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  Miller’s story is intelligent, sharp, and eye-opening.  Miller shines as she describes the pain of adolescence and aptly compares high school to the political dealings of a Third World nation.  “In high school,” Miller warns, “you never knew who was your enemy and who was your friend.”  Keep that warning in mind as you readThe Year of the Gadfly.  As in Miller’s novel, our enemies sometimes disguise themselves as our friends.  Iris should be vigilant.  —Bookmagnet’s review

Blog Tour: From the Kitchen of Half Truth Book Review

From the Kitchen of Half Truth by Maria Goodin (Sourcebooks Landmark; 352 pages; $14.99).

When I was a little girl, my grandfather regaled me with stories while I listened, rapt, and ate up every word he said.  I truly believed he had single-handedly captured Hitler, been a cowboy who fought Indians, and buried a wicked witch in his backyard (there was even a cement marker to indicate her final resting place).  Imagine my surprise when I discovered Hitler committed suicide or that my grandfather, nicknamed “Cowboy,” was not a real cowboy or that the marker was simply ornamental.   I recovered but continue to take his beloved yarns with a grain of salt, as he loves nothing more than to invent stories.  The tall tales of my granddaddy cannot compare with the whoppers that Valerie May tells her daughter Meg, the main character of Maria Goodin’s delightful novel, From the Kitchen of Half Truth.

Born prematurely, a little “underdone,” Meg was smaller than other babies.  Her grandfather placed her “at the end of the garden next to the hedgerow” where she received “full sun in the morning and plenty of shade in the afternoon.”  To no avail.  It didn’t work.

So Meg’s mother and grandfather jointly agreed to move the baby “closer to the garden sprinkler.”  But Meg stayed the same.  The family doctor advised them to feed bicarbonate of soda to the infant, as it was “a good raising agent” and then “leave her in the warm water heater closet overnight.” That, too, failed.

Meg’s grandmother suggested that her daughter talk to the baby, just as she would a plant.  After an initial reluctance, Valerie decides to tell her baby a story.  “For the first time ever,” Meg reveals, “I gave my mother a gummy smile, and by the end of the story she swears I had grown an entire inch.”

These are all Valerie’s words, Meg quickly points out to us in the novel’s first pages; they are not Meg’s memories.  Meg, now 21, cannot recall anything from the first five years of her life.   All Meg has are her mother’s memories, “which in fact are not memories at all but ridiculous fantasies that reflect her obsession with food and cooking” and prevent Meg from understanding her own childhood.  Raised on fantasies, Meg’s entire childhood is a farce.

Why can’t Meg just ask her mother to tell her the truth, you ask.  Well, it’s not that easy.  Valerie has not been forthcoming when it comes to truth and fiction in the past, and she is unlikely to divulge any information to Meg now that is dying of cancer.  Meg cannot ask her father either, a French chef who died an ugly and tragic death involving a pastry mixer in a “quest in create the finest cherry tart and name it after” Meg’s mother.

All Meg wants is to know her own history and her own family history—with no outlandish fantasies whatsoever.  This desire leads her to study genetics.  Valerie does not understand what attracts her daughter to the study of DNA.  “But you know who you are, darling,” Valerie says.  To which Meg replies, rather unhappily, “But I don’t.  Thanks to you, I don’t have a clue who I am.”

Valerie’s time is quickly running out, and Meg leaves school to spend time with her mother.  This should be the perfect time for mother to tell her daughter the truth, but Valerie still clings to her myths.  Meg slowly, and with the help of her mother’s gardener, begins to understand that fantasies, like ancient creation stories and myths, sometimes serve a higher purpose and wonders about her mother’s rationale.

Sometimes people escape into fantasy to get away from reality.  Slowly, Goodin reveals to us that is the case here.  And we understand why Valerie cannot tell Meg the truth.  Meg, guided by disturbing dreams and clues to the past, must uncover the facts on her own.

I devoured this wonderfully quirky romp of a novel in one sitting, partly because Meg’s enchanting voice narrates Goodin’s tale and partly because of Goodin’s clever and witty turns of phrase guaranteed to elicit a laugh or three.  Goodin also makes good use of her minor characters.  When I think of the myriad ways in which Goodin could have written this novel, alternating the narrative among the points of view of Meg, Valerie, the family doctor, Meg’s boyfriend, the gardener, the gardener’s dog, and Valerie’s best friend, I think she made the best choice.  Meg is an ideal narrator—likeable, relatable, charismatic, strong, and charming—and this reader ate her up.

One of the many strengths of In the Kitchen of Half Truth is the brilliant way in which Goodin weaves together memory and identity and shows how the two are closely intertwined.  When Meg doesn’t remember part of her past, then she cannot know who she truly is.  If she does not know where she has been, then she cannot know where she is going.  At the end of the book you are sure Meg is going to have a whole different life.  She’s stronger, happier, and ready to accept whatever life has in store for her.

Part mystery, part contemporary fiction, part daughter’s quest, From the Kitchen of Half Truth is for readers of The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard and Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, two recent fiction releases that explore mothers and daughters and the bonds they share.

Throughout In the Kitchen of Half Truth, Goodin highlights the power of stories and of storytelling.  Fiction, no matter how outlandish, holds enormous power over all of us.  And that’s a good thing, nay, that’s a wonderful thing.  Stories will never die as long as we keep them alive.

FROM THE KITCHEN OF HALF TRUTH – BLOG TOUR

April 1 – Luxury Reading

April 2 – Laura’s Reviews

April 4 – A Bookish Affair

April 5 – Mrs. Condit Reads Books

April 6 – Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

April 8 – Cocktails and Books

April 9 – Library of Clean Reads

April 10  - Broken Teepee

April 11 – Dew on the Kudzu

April 12 – Raging Bibliomania

April 15 - Daystarz

April 16 – Chick Lit Plus

April 17 – Peeking Between the Pages

April 22 – Books and Needlepoint

April 23 – Write Meg

April 26 – Bookmagnet

Blog Tour: The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley (Ecco Books; 432 pages; $15.99).

 

Rhonda Riley

“My husband was not one of us,” Evelyn Hope reluctantly reveals.  “He remains, after decades, a mystery to me.  Inexplicable.  Yet, in many ways, and on most days, he was an ordinary man.”  So begins Rhonda Riley’s unusual, unique, and nuanced debut, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope.  Riley immediately arouses the curiosity of readers and also hooks them.  For a few hours, nothing else matters.

Or that is how it was for me, at least.  I still cannot get Adam and Evelyn Hope out of my head, and that is a testament to Riley’s epic love story.  Riley fuses historical fiction with elements of mystery and the supernatural in The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope to create a story that crosses genres and beguiles until the very last page.

The tale is actually one big flashback.  After years and years of keeping the truth close to her chest, an elderly Evelyn finally opens up about her husband.  She can no longer keep silent after seeing a photo of her youngest daughter, Sarah, whose formerly Caucasian features have metamorphosed into Asian characteristics.  Evelyn knows the photo has not been altered; Sarah is Adam’s daughter, after all.

This is Adam’s story (the novel was originally titled Adam Hope: A Geography), but it is also Evelyn’s, for she is “the one left to do the telling.”  In her sage and sure voice, Evelyn attempts to explain the unexplained.

At 17, Evelyn is sent to work on her deceased aunt and uncle’s farm in North Carolina, where the soil consists of deep and hard red clay.  In the days just after World War II, Evelyn labors from sun-up to sundown but senses a change coming, though she has no idea how profound the change will be or in what guise the transformation will take.

One rainy day, Evelyn comes upon a puddle, which she thinks is full of nothing but water and mud.  She is beyond surprised to discover the body of a man there, a man who is very much alive, though strange and slightly misshapen.  Mud and scars cover the man’s body.  He must be a solider, she thinks, but far from the battlefield.  After she takes the man inside and cares for him, miraculously, he heals.  The kicker is that he also changes form.  To Evelyn’s disbelief, the man grows to strongly resemble her; the two could be twins, in fact.

Evelyn does not question.  To her, “Addie” is a gift.  “To have her come up literally from the land I loved seemed natural, a fit to my heart’s logic.  The land’s response to my love.  So when fate gave me Addie, I let her be given.”

We know Addie is special, and she continues to astound us, especially when Evelyn decides she is ready for marriage and children.  Addie changes form once again to become “Adam Hope.”  Riley creates a character, unlike all others, who literally takes on the image of others.  When Riley delves into the unknown, she takes us with her.

Riley also imagines a very tangible sense of fear.  Instinctively, Evelyn knows there are those who would not understand Adam in the way she does.  No one can know who or what Adam is or where he truly comes from.  The situation has the potential to become volatile, and both Evelyn and Adam know this.  Yet Adam counters:  “Do you know who you are, Evelyn?  Who all of you are?  Where do you come from?  You don’t know any more than I do.”

Clearly, Adam is from the land and of the land: he can be molded like clay.  Riley uses this unconventional character to give us a geography of a body and of love, land, and family.  Adam and Evelyn begin an idyllic life together; everything seems perfect and no one challenges who or what Adam is.  He communes with horses, people, and nature in a way that is reminiscent of how Edgar Sawtelle communicates with dogs.

Adam Hope pulls you in like a magnet and entices you to stay a while.  Before long, you are entranced by his beautiful music, his way with all creatures, and, above all, by Riley’s captivating and clear language.

Uncertainty, fear, and calamity soon mar the landscape of the couple’s happy home and force them to flee.  I could not help but draw comparisons to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden.  Yet, Adam and Evelyn get lucky and find a new kind of Eden and a new home, at least until tragedy strikes their family again.

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope explores the notion of the self versus the other; the familiar versus the strange; intimacy versus distance; and the known versus the unknown.  Riley takes us to places we have never been before in her animated and charismatic debut perfect for fans of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

This novel was sold at auction, with several publishers placing bids to nab Riley’s story.  It’s easy to understand why.  The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is a beautifully and ingeniously told tale.  Adam Hope is an understated yet formidable character, a man who is otherworldly but never alien, astonishing and ethereal but never inconceivable. Riley gently reminds us that unconditional love and acceptance matter more than difference. 

Rhonda’s Tour Stops

Monday, April 22nd: Bookmagnet’s Blog

Tuesday, April 23rd: Kritters Ramblings

Wednesday, April 24th: A Chick Who Reads

Thursday, April 25th: Sara’s Organized Chaos

Monday, April 29th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Monday, May 6th: A Night’s Dream of Books

Tuesday, May 7th: Giraffe Days

Thursday, May 9th: Book Snob

Thursday, May 9th: Tiffany’s Bookshelf

Tuesday, May 14th: Bibliophiliac

I am giving away a brand new copy of The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope.  Giveaway ends Friday, April 26, at 5 pm ET.  I will use random.org to choose a winner.  Good luck!   

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Book Review: The Movement of Stars by Amy Brill

The Movement of Stars by Amy Brill (Riverhead Books; 400 pages; $27.95).

“For when I cannot observe, it is as if the great beauty and order and Truth of the Heavens does dissolve and I sense only my own wretchedly small place,” Hannah Gardner Price, the intrepid and unforgettable heroine of The Movement of Stars, Amy Brill’s magnificent debut, writes.  Hannah is constrained by both her Quaker faith and by her sex in 1840s Nantucket, an era and a locale that come to vivid life in Brill’s hands.  More than anything else in the world, the young Quaker woman yearns to discover a comet.

Maria Mitchell, the first female astronomer in America, inspired Brill to write The Movement of Stars.  For Brill, this novel is a fifteen-year odyssey and one that is close to her heart.  Although Brill started out hoping to write a biography of Mitchell, the astronomer grew to become “a leaping-off place for the journey of a character” of Brill’s own creation: Hannah Gardner Price.  Hannah and Mitchell may share many things, but Hannah is an invention of Brill’s imagination and the driving force behind The Movement of Stars.

As Brill illustrates, Hannah loves living on the island on Nantucket.  “Her sand and shallows, salt and sawgrass, were as much a part of her as the tribal tattoos that marked the whalers from South Pacific islands far distant.  Whenever she was off-island, Hannah felt diminished, invisible as stars veiled by the bright clamor of the city.”

Hannah’s feet may be firmly planted on Nantucket soil, where she is bound by religion and gender, but she is a wanderer at heart, whose face is forever turned towards the heavens.  And it is easy to understand why.  Her father “would decide her future, because it was his right.”  She may as well, she thinks, “be a servant.”

“Rooted in place,” Hannah thinks she can “feel the Earth spinning on its axis, while she remained stuck in place, pinned to its surface by the invisible, unseen force of gravity itself.”  The rigid rules of the Quakers suffocate Brill’s unconventional protagonist, triggering Hannah’s feelings of powerlessness when it comes to charting the course of her own future.

In contrast to Hannah and her position, the stars are immense, significant, and commanding, which is part of their allure.  Since nothing changes in her own life, she looks for variations in the night sky.  Her future is set; her place in society and in Nantucket itself appears static, while the stars keep moving.  How Hannah envies them.

The heavens allow Hannah to transcend the smallness of her existence and may be a way to navigate the path of her own life.

If only she can discover a comet, that is.  With the detection come prestige and a gold medal from the king of Denmark.  No woman has ever found a comet before, and Hannah longs to be the first.

When a series of revelations and catastrophes rock Hannah’s world, she must decide who she is and what she wants.   It is a dark-skinned sailor from the Azores who truly helps her find her true North.  Isaac Martin’s character works as an effective catalyst to force Hannah to question and challenge everything that is known and comfortable to her.  Without him, she may never have sought a new orbit.  Hannah may be Isaac’s teacher, but he teaches her, as well.  He is much more than just a love interest in Brill’s novel.

Especially when he illuminates something that is astonishing to Hannah.  They are alike—he is limited by his race just as her world is compressed by her faith and womanhood.  “We are not so different,” Hannah thinks of Isaac and herself.  “Neither one of us is welcome here [in Nantucket].

In addition to producing richly drawn and fully realized characters, Brill’s Nantucket setting makes the years fall away as she transports readers to the picturesque island.  I have never been to Nantucket but I could see the conflagration that threatened the town; I could smell the salty air; I could hear the sounds of bells; I could taste the gravy Hannah mopped up with her biscuit.  That’s why fans of historical fiction will love this expertly-researched story just as I do.

Brill writes her debut with precision, lyricism, and clarity.  The Movement of Stars is a gorgeous and moving story amplified by the author’s handsome prose and stunning use of metaphor.  Brill describes Isaac in this way: “Grease stains shaped like continents mapped his hands and his forearms.”  Isaac says his body is “like an old ship now…cracking and creaking.”  When Hannah looks out over a bluff, she feels “like a surveyor at the boundary of the New World.”  Passages such as these make The Movement of Stars engaging and utterly absorbing.

Hannah Gardner Price is unafraid to reach for the stars.  Brill triumphs when she gives us a character to root for and to applaud, a heroine who, in her extraordinary courage, defies the standards of her day, a fiery woman who radiates with willpower and intelligence.  Like the comet she discovers, Hannah is a trail-blazer, one who readers will never forget.

North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson

North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson (Zondervan; 255 pages; $16.99).

            Shannon Huffman Polson’s sobering yet sentimental memoir North of Hope is an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery for the author.  On June 25, 2005, the writer’s father and stepmother were declared dead after a bear attacked them in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  A wave of grief and anger enveloped Polson.

Each day, she “came home from work and stretched out on the couch, flattened like roadkill.” Polson eloquently illustrates the deep sorrow she felt; her misery is palpable.

The memoirist envied “cultures that have mourning traditions,” those who wear black or who tear their clothing.  “Why had our culture done away with all that?” she asked.  “To spare the majority the discomfort that each of us must one day face?  And by doing so robbing every one of us of the space to grieve and neutering society’s ability to mourn with the bereaved, our chance to appreciate life more for knowing death?”  Polson felt cheated.  It occurred to her “that grief is something imposed, but that grieving is something that must be learned and, like anything of consequence, would reveal its realities slowly, over a lifetime.”

But Polson does not have a lifetime; she must grapple with her anguish somehow so she can “make it through the shadowed valley and someday come out the other side.”

One year after the horrible tragedy, Polson and two companions, one of whom is her adopted brother, set off on a daring expedition to trace their father and stepmother’s route.  The Arctic was a place her dad loved, a magical place that “worked its way under his skin” and “became a part of him.”  Polson embarks on the expedition to “find” her father, “to know him,” and to “glimpse some of the magic” he and his wife had experienced on their trip.

Polson writes, “Throughout humankind’s long history, the idea of journey has carried with it expectations of adventure, of wildlife, of challenge, of conquest.”  As the writer and those who accompany her undertake this arduous and dangerous Arctic journey, we go along with them.  Polson ably navigates her narrative with flashbacks and incredible descriptions of Alaska’s wildlife.  Their adventure is both beautiful and perilous, especially when the group spots a pair of grizzlies.  The bears fill Polson with wonder, but they also repulse her as she thinks what one did to her family.

By turns sobering and inspirational, North of Hope is a meditation on grief and family and a daughter’s love letter to her deceased father.  Polson’s memoir is also a quiet yet powerful treatise on environmental changes and the effects of global warming and development in the Arctic.  If you enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, then you will love North of Hope.  Polson does for Alaska’s Arctic what Strayed did for the Pacific Crest Trail.

Although Polson structures her account around the Requiem Mass, North of Hope is rousing, as these funeral hymns lead her to a river and help her find her way forward.

Shannon Huffman Polson