Fatal Games by Mari Hannah

Posted on May 20, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Book four in the DCI Kate Daniels series (following most recently Deadly Deceit) is Fatal Games, for me the most successful to date. I’ve enjoyed each of the previous three books, but always with some reservations, and wishing for a bit more of Daniels’ personal side, feeling she was a bit underdeveloped, perhaps. This time something finally really clicked for me. Don’t get me wrong: the fact that I’m still here for book four means something was working, but this one knocked it out of the park in a new way.

For one thing, I felt that we got into some personal life: not so much that of Kate herself, actually, but especially a few other characters. In fact, I’m beginning to buy that Kate is truly defined by an absence of personal life! (This is not a new message from the author, but maybe it took some convincing.) Secondary characters have more layers: I really like Daniels’ second in command, Hank, who is a real friend as well as professional Watson type. Her ex, Jo, also a professional colleague, is definitely more well rounded. And now we meet Emily, a friend to the rest, who appears mid-crisis: recently widowed, she has just returned to work as a prison psychologist, not the least stressful job to begin with, let alone grieving and struggling to parent a grieving twenty-year-old to boot. When further trauma presents itself – this being a murder-mystery series, friends – Emily does not cope well. Kate is perhaps not showing her best self when she says that her friend is “acting as mad as a box of frogs,” but she’s not exactly wrong, either. One character in particular gave me the creeps; I was not sure if he was going to turn out to be an actual bad guy (in the murder-mystery sense) or ‘just’ a really toxic dude, but ew. Throw in a manipulative psychotic sex offender and a few prison guards of questionable moral standing, and you’ve got a motley crew.

The mystery was properly complex, the cast of characters increasingly compelling, Kate herself showing the usual conflict between wanting to have a life outside work and being incapable of it. It started working for me in this book like it hasn’t before. I could feel her wanting, and trying, and then being consumed once again by the job – which, to be fair, is pretty soul-consuming, and it’s hard to be angry with someone for wanting to solve crimes and save lives… but if you’re her prospective partner, you do want some of her attention. Poor Jo.

The plot, which I’ve not even touched on yet, does involve murdered young girls. There are some truly heinous criminals. And even the law-abiding ones ostensibly on the ‘right’ side can offer some frustrations. It’s a hard-boiled mystery – note that blurb on the front cover that credits Hannah with ‘a dark heart.’ I’m on board like never before.

Rating: 8 gifts.

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Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on May 17, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A little bit of a fairy tale retold, relying more on Mayan mythology, recast in 1920s Mexico: culture, myth, and universal coming-of-age. I found it absorbing and will read more by this author (helped along by the teaser chapters at back of book from one of her other novels!).

We meet Casiopea when she is in her teens. She still thinks often of her father, a sensitive poet who taught her about the stars and named her for a constellation. Since his death, she and her mother have returned to her mother’s family home, where they are very much treated as poor relations, Casiopea doing a lot of scrubbing on her knees while harshly spoken to. Her grandfather is harsh, her aunts dismissive, but it is her cousin Martín who is cruelest. She is well aware of the Cinderella story and would prefer not to be framed this way–“she had decided it would be nonsense to configure herself into a tragic heroine”–but the reader sees it too. Instead, she resist self-pity, aims to never let her tormentors see her cry, and dreams secretly of escaping her small-minded small town and returning to her father’s city of Mérida.

She gets there by the most unexpected of paths: she accidentally releases a god of death, Hun-Kamé, who has been long imprisoned in a chest in her grandfather’s bedroom. With a fragment of his bone imbedded in her thumb, they are bound together. Hun-Kamé, dethroned and locked up by his twin brother, is missing a few key components–eye, ear, finger, and necklace–without which he cannot be. In his weakened state, Hun-Kamé needs the connection with Casiopea to move and live and make a bid for redemption, although this bond will make him increasingly mortal over time. And Casiopea will weaken and die if he does not remove the bone. But in the meantime, she gains a traveling companion, a meaningful quest, an adventure.

As a traveling companion, Hun-Kamé can be irksome; he has a tendency to boss her around, like everyone else in her world does, and servitude and submissiveness have never come easily to Casiopea. She is not afraid to work hard, but does not respond well to peremptory orders. She has to remind herself that this is a god–especially when traveling companion begins to feel like friend, something she’s really never had, and then even like something more. For his part, Hun-Kamé makes an effort to treat his traveling partner with respect. They have something, surprisingly, in common: both know the world mostly only at a remove, she from books, he from a distant deity’s omnipotence.

There is a lot to love about this story, several layers. Casiopea is a fun heroine: plucky, exasperated, curious about the world and yearning for fresh new experiences, yet concerned about breaking free of the rather conservative lessons she’s been taking in for a lifetime. The wider world is in flux: especially the cities she visits, like Mérida, Mexico City, and Tijuana, are full of music, fast dancing, and short-haired women in short dresses, all considered scandalous in the dusty village where Casiopea has spent her Cinderella years. In the company of a god who can pick up rocks off the ground and make them appear as coins, she suddenly has access to (for example) good things to eat, and I really enjoyed the repeated scenes where the mortal teenager is hungry and the god sort of sighs and patiently visits one café or restaurant after another even though food is not really his thing.

So we have a good-hearted, mature, responsible teenager–who is still a teenager–on a very important quest, the implications of which she and we learn only gradually, but also learning about the world, which is filled with cars, nice clothes, appealing snacks, flappers and ballrooms, and oh yes, a handsome god who is becoming part-mortal and therefore increasingly relatable. But also, because we’re drawing on Mayan myth, plenty of blood and monsters and decapitation and the highest of stakes. (Casiopea is as horrified as you are). Romance, mythology, violence, humor, dances and dresses, and family drama: in a fitting parallel, Hun-Kamé’s rival twin chooses as his own mortal champion the bumbling, cruel Martín, who is unlikeable but only human in his own struggles, to face off against Casiopea. It gets harder and harder to see how these characters will fight their way out of a pickle that involves fate and gods and a truly horrifying underworld, but read on til the end.

I love every bit of it, and got lost in this unique world. Can’t wait for more.

Rating: 7 waves.

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The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

Posted on May 13, 2024 by pagesofjulia

“There was a brief lull in the general chatter when the bandit walked into the coffeehouse.” It was not because he was a bandit; this was fairly commonplace. It was because he was extremely attractive. Nevertheless, chatter eventually recommences, until a fight breaks out – waitress, belligerent customer, manager, the beautiful bandit, and then a homelier bandit #2 – smashing the place to bits. It’s an appropriately exciting first chapter, setting up a cast of characters that we will follow well beyond the bounds of the coffeehouse. In fact, the majority of this short, lively book is set in the jungles and on the roads of a kingdom in turmoil.

The waitress is quickly recognized by her shaved head as a nun in the Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. She is clever, resourceful, quick-witted, and highly trained in combat, but also a bit innocent. She follows our bandits (who are lucky no one noticed they appeared on a Wanted poster in the coffeehouse) and part-forces, part-cajoles her way into their gang, otherwise all male; the men are variously intrigued by the idea of a woman cooking for them (she turns out to be a terrible cook) or being available for sex (she sweetly informs them she would have to castrate them afterwards), or annoyed by her presence. Her devotion to the goddess she serves is very strong. As our nun-waitress-bandit and the rest of the gang get to know each other and pursue their banditry, conflicts arise in their approaches to religious fervor, history, and interpersonal relations, but they will find common cause.

At just 158 pages, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water was easy to devour in an evening. It combines playful humor with very real tragedy, political messiness, the truest of friendships and the beginnings of romance. It’s a swashbuckling series of escapades with ideologies, justice, religion, relationship issues, and more. With some twists on gender and sexuality, this thrilling, silly-yet-earnest adventure tale is definitely a readalike for Upright Women Wanted, although it feels a bit more fully realized in its small package. Absolutely recommended, and I’ll take more from Cho.

Rating: 7 jade prayer beads.

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Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Posted on May 10, 2024 by pagesofjulia

On the boundary of Maine’s Penobscot reservation, a solitary man wrestles with questions of truth, family history, and what is owed to the next generation.

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty (Night of the Living Rez) centers on one man navigating issues of family: the death of his father figure, his mother’s lifelong and worsening health conditions, the daughter he knows only from afar and who doesn’t know who he is. In hardscrabble circumstances, surrounded by poverty, alcoholism, and family violence, he wishes to give his daughter a meaningful gift: the truth. Stark and tender, Talty’s debut novel compassionately addresses tough choices in matters of family and love.

Charles Lamosway has grown up on the Penobscot reservation in Maine, but does not have Native American blood. Although very close to his Native stepfather, Frederick, whom he generally refers to as father, his biological parentage meant he had to move off the reservation when he came of age. Frederick purchased land and helped to build the house where Charles lives now, just across the river. Largely isolated with few friends, Charles watches from his porch the family on the other side: Mary, Roger, and their daughter, Elizabeth. Charles is Elizabeth’s biological father, a secret he has kept at Mary’s request. But as he ages, and as his mother Louise’s health worsens, he feels increasingly that Elizabeth, now an adult, must know the truth.

Charles insists, “Maybe her body and mind know something is missing.” This urge becomes a fixation, a bodily need. Elizabeth faces medical problems, and he is convinced she needs the truth–including Louise’s medical history–to survive: “I felt she should know her body was special, and she should know its history, especially the one it would not tell her and the one she could not see. And I decided to tell what I knew, because she deserved to know it.” But it is just possible that what Charles sees as necessary will have an entirely different outcome from what he intends.

Fire Exit is concerned with bodies, with visceral needs not only for food and shelter but for truth. Louise’s failing body and mind are wrapped up with unresolved questions about Frederick’s death. Talty’s tersely poetic, descriptive prose grounds this story in the physical: “Between the river’s flow and the summer breeze rippling hard-to-see leaves and the sound my scraping shoe made on the porch, I heard night silence. I heard the workings of my inner body, the pump of my heart and the expanding of my lungs.” In Maine’s harsh winters, Talty’s characters face elemental as well as human dangers.

This first novel grapples with family issues and hard choices about love and responsibility; blood, culture, and belonging. It is an utterly absorbing story, always firmly rooted in the corporeal; tough, honest, but not bitter.

This review originally ran in the March 28, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 loads of laundry.

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A War of Swallowed Stars by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on May 6, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This review contains spoilers for books that precede it in the series, but is spoiler-free for this book.

This is the third in a trilogy, following A Spark of White Fire and A House of Rage and Sorrow. And it had me pretty rapt, y’all. I was on the edge of my seat throughout, and I cried at the end, but in a good way, which makes me feel glad for the newly-12-year-old I’ve just gifted it to for her birthday. (I teased her that she had to wait because these books are labeled 12 and up!) The world we have come to care about over three books is in great peril, as are the relationships we’ve invested so much in. And it’s not that nobody we love is lost in this book; but it all ends in a way that feels right.

The Celestial Trilogy has featured magical weapons, gods and monsters, murderous family members, and friends where we’d least expect them. Esmae has experienced great and intense trauma, and weathered some very real depression. “I don’t know how to make my way through to the other side of it… I can’t see anything but the dark. I feel like I’ve fallen down a cold, dark hole and I’ll never get out.” Whew. But she has good friends. And she has good on her side. Hang in there, readers.

Mandanna took us through a lot in this series, but the emotional roller coaster has been well-earned, and it pays off in a big way. I can’t wait to hear what my young friend thinks. And you all.

Rating: 8 moments of eye contact.

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Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere

Posted on May 3, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This hard-edged, incisive memoir of gender-fluidity in a desert trailer park offers an essential perspective.

Memoirist Zoë Bossiere writes, “I see a lone, barefooted boy with short blond hair walking along the road in Cactus Country… looking for something despite feeling uncertain it could ever be found.” At age 11, Bossiere moved with their parents to a trailer park on the outskirts of Tucson, Ariz. Before leaving Virginia, Zoë gets a short haircut “like a boy’s.” “I’d thought I might need to go by a new name to pass as a boy in Tucson. But it quickly became apparent I was the only Zoë most people I encountered had ever met… so I kept it.” Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir tells of living as a boy in the desert, struggling with gender, class, and a shortage of options for self-expression, and eventually taking a great leap in leaving for a wider world.

Although Bossiere’s father introduced them as a daughter, they were on the whole able to make a fresh start in Cactus Country, inhabiting a long-held dream of boyhood. The version of masculinity they found in the desert is characterized by stoicism, camaraderie, and violence, as they learned from the trailer park’s revolving cast of boys and men how to perform toughness through acts of cruelty and self-defense. Especially as their body entered puberty, Bossiere struggled with gender expression in a world where they never encountered the concept of transgender, and the only queer role model they met insisted on a gender binary and harbored suspicions about bisexuality. Bossiere for a spell accepted the feminine identity assigned by the outside world, without settling into a self-identity that felt right. After a troubled childhood and young adulthood, it was by studying creative writing that they eventually saw a way out of the Tucson area and into new spaces, geographic and otherwise, including the concept of genderfluidity.

Cactus Country is a wise and wonderfully crafted memoir, treating its characters and subjects with compassion in the face of assaults, addictions, dysfunction, and violence. The desert and Bossiere’s experiences there are stark and severe but also include earnest attempts at connection. They must leave Cactus Country to grow and to find their truest self, but it’s only by returning in memory that their journey begins to feel whole. After a childhood as harsh as the desert sun, they write tenderly about place and a past “where broken boys with sunburned faces could be beautiful, kings worthy of inheriting the place they called their home. A place where a Cactus Country boy would always be a Cactus Country boy.”

Gorgeously written, thoughtful, and tough, this memoir of gender and a hardscrabble coming-of-age in the American Southwest excels at nuance.

This review originally ran in the March 19, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 paloverde beetles.

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A House of Rage and Sorrow by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on April 29, 2024 by pagesofjulia

As I’ve decided will be my regular procedure around here, this review contains spoilers for books that precede it in the series, but is spoiler-free for this book.

Following A Spark of White Fire is A House of Rage and Sorrow, book 2 in the Celestial Trilogy by the author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I love it.

Esmae is still reeling from the loss of her best friend at the end of book one. Also quite painful is the fact that Rama was killed by her twin brother in a duel, as he thought he was fighting Esmae herself: not only did Rama die, but her brother meant to kill her. Esmae’s anger is beyond description. She wants to burn it all down. She is also carefully avoiding a burgeoning romance, because (I judge) she is as angry with herself as with anyone, and doesn’t think she deserves it.

She is also, however, making friends. Surly Sybilla has cracked open and become as loyal to Esmae as to Max; beloved Rama’s sister Radha has appeared on the scene and begins making her way into the group, not without hiccups. There is a small, new, perhaps fragile, but very real family of friends forming around the girl who has always mourned not having a family.

Then again, the political intrigues and betrayals surrounding her flesh and blood keep multiplying, and the revelations and bad news keep coming. Just how much can one teenaged girl go through? A House of Rage and Sorrow ends on a cliffhanger, not unlike book one; but unlike that finish, this time I had the next installment at hand. Stay tuned for book three in this trilogy.

I love that romance keeps developing (and not just for Esmae!) alongside anguish and intrigue, and a very real and believable coming-of-age arc in which Esmae tries (at least a little) to balance her rage against her better wishes for her loved ones and her wider world. I can’t wait to see where we’ll go next.

Rating: 7 lions.

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Nothing’s Ever the Same by Cyn Vargas

Posted on April 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

With a remarkably true-to-life adolescent narrator, this novella charts the large and small traumas that accompany a girl’s coming of age.

Cyn Vargas’s Nothing’s Ever the Same is a starkly honest coming-of-age story told in the disarming voice of its 13-year-old protagonist. Simple but moving, this novella documents events that are traumatic but not unusual, thus marking the kinds of pain that are heartrending, as well as common, for a child approaching young adulthood.

“The first time I saw my mom cry was after my dad’s heart attack,” Itzel begins in the opening chapter, “Angioplasty and Piñatas.” The heart attack comes during preparation for her 13th birthday party. After a brief hospital stay, he comes home and improves quickly. But this event, coming at an important symbolic point in Itzel’s adolescence, is the first of a number of upheavals, as Vargas’s title suggests.

Itzel’s beloved father recovers from his heart attack, but something feels off. “Dad was different, like moving the lamp… the light and shadows hit in a different way that made all that I was used to seem a little strange.” The family suffers one loss and then another. Itzel explores new feelings for her best friend. And then she sees something that will change the course of life for her entire family. “I shut my eyes tight to make it go away like erasing the wrong answer on a test, but I still saw… the wrong answer etched into the paper though the lead was brushed away.” What to do with her new knowledge? Who to blame? As the known routine is uprooted for Itzel and her parents, she has to navigate redefining relationships. While the circumstances of these changes for Itzel are specific and acute, her experience reflects universal elements of being a teenager: disappointment, betrayal, discovery, acceptance, and always, unavoidably, change.

Vargas (On the Way) gives Itzel a straightforward storytelling voice, often naïve but also sharp-eyed. She is clever, thoughtful, and quick to question what she or others have done wrong to bring pain and difficulty to her family. Her father, mother, Tia Amelia, and best friend Fred are characters sketched only briefly in Itzel’s telling, but each has personality and redeeming qualities even when making mistakes. The author behind the narrator commands this story with a quiet compassion. Nothing’s Ever the Same is a work of restraint and understatement, its young narrator capable of stoic relating of events as well as emotional reaction. The effect is deeply moving.

This review originally ran in the March 14, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cups of orange soda.

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Junia, The Book Mule of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson, illus. by David C. Gardner

Posted on April 22, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Well, I was sure I’d been sold on this book by one of my talented colleagues at Shelf Awareness, but I cannot find that review. Somebody sold me on it, and I’d credit them if I could, because it was a solid recommendation.

Junia is an absolute delight. Aimed at readers aged 4-8, it’s a sweet picture book in simple but fun prose, starring the mule Junia that some readers will know from 2019’s successful novel The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Junia and her Book Woman travel the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression as part of that state’s Pack Horse Librarian project, under the WPA. (The books are fiction but strongly rooted in fact; Richardson is a recognized researcher of this unusual bit of history.) The book follows them for a single day of environmental and climactic hardships, including encounters with wildlife and a narrow miss when a bridge washes away. They visit diverse households and communities, delivering reading material and having amiable interactions with readers. The relationship between Junia and her Book Woman is loving; it’s an all-around wholesome story.

There is alliteration, fun onomatopoeia, and perfectly wonderful illustrations that reward a close look: note the identifiable rhododendron, the child with the paper airplane and a book called Flight, and a faraway fire tower that we’ll approach on later pages. The visual style is sort of soft-edged but quite detailed, with a bit of whimsy, and lots of personality for the starring mule. I love the regional, historical focus, and I feel it strikes a lovely balance between entertaining and readable, and educational. The book’s text is followed by an Author’s Note with “real” facts and historical photographs, so the young reader (perhaps with extra help in this section) can get a bit more enrichment out of it, and quite painlessly, I think.

I did buy this book with a particular reader in mind, who is eight years old, and I thought of her several times as I read: I know her dad will tickle her with his own “soft whiskered muzzle” as Junia does to her favorite little readers, and I know they’ll enjoy the farts. This quick read was really fun for me – I’m glad I stepped out of my usual zone to check it out. I guess I’ll try the Book Woman novel next!

Rating: 8 shiny red apples.

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The Witches of Bellinas by J. Nicole Jones

Posted on April 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this atmospheric and suspenseful novel, an exclusive coastal California community is either the best thing to ever happen to an unhappy newlywed, as her husband believes, or a frightening trap.

J. Nicole Jones’s The Witches of Bellinas sets a newlywed couple in a vibrant small community–a lovely wealthy commune, or a cult?–and watches the fallout, in an atmospheric, suspenseful experiment involving witchcraft, love, and dividing loyalties.

Tansy and Guy have been married mere months, although they’ve been together for a decade, when they move from New York City to the hamlet of Bellinas on the coast of northern California. Wealthy, health-oriented, idyllic, and highly exclusive, Bellinas is led by the charismatic Manny, or Father M to his followers, a business mogul turned self-styled guru, and his wife, Mia, a former model. Guy falls easily and head-over-heels into the lush, indulgent lifestyle: surfing, diving for abalone, carousing. Tansy, expected like all the wives to serve her husband’s whims, finds Bellinas a bit suspicious. But the town’s high shine, like its perfect weather, is hard to resist. She so wants things to work out with Guy: “I let the happiness I felt in that moment of renewed closeness grow taller than the forest of disappointments we had collected in the course of years together.” So she goes along. “Everything would be fine. How could it be otherwise? Bellinas was so perfect-looking.”

The Witches of Bellinas is narrated by Tansy in hindsight, from an apparent confinement in the town schoolhouse, after something has gone awry. With her academic background in the classics (a vocation sacrificed for Guy), she flavors her conversations and her narrative with literary references that increase her story’s sense of deep foreboding, frequently comparing herself to Cassandra. The reader must wait, however, to discover the precise nature of the trouble in paradise. Is the creeping dread about the neighboring forest fires? The ocean’s force? The local blend of calming tea? Are the powers at work in Bellinas magical or cult leadership at work?

Jones (Low Country) gives Tansy a strong sense of the wrongs done women at the hands of men, from both her scholarly work and her experience. “The plans of women have been called plots, schemes, murder, but if we do not claim the future as our bodies are claimed by men, then both are gobbled up by husbands and historians.” She writes, it seems, for her life. “Do not discount the truth of the old wives’ tales…. What is this history if not a wife’s tale? A truth revealed by unlikelihoods does not make it less true.”

At the intersection of the supernatural and simple human ugliness, The Witches of Bellinas gives its readers chills and thrills along with a profound sense of wrongs done, but no heroes or villains. This is a novel for anyone who’s wondered if the picturesque might be too good to be true.

This review originally ran in the March 8, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 crackers.

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