Hyacinth Girls by Lauren Frankel

Posted on June 10, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A tricky, smart riddle in novel form about bullying and family secrets.

hyacinth girls

Lauren Frankel’s debut novel, Hyacinth Girls, opens when Rebecca puts Callie’s face, along with a provocative question, on a billboard near the high school. A lengthy flashback explains why, in a gradual uncovering of the past. Callie is not Rebecca’s daughter but the daughter of her late best friend, Joyce. The happenings and drama of Callie’s middle and high school years are more troubling than the average teen experience, and have led to some terrible events that call for a billboard. But what exactly happened, and who is the perpetrator and who the victim, and why? These are questions that take the whole book to unravel, with roles reversing throughout. Rebecca’s voice alternates with Callie’s, but not until late in the book, when the reader’s impressions are already formed. The mixing up of clues and the struggle to sort out loyalties results in an unreliable narrator or two.

The story of Callie and her social circle eventually becomes entangled with that of Joyce and Rebecca, when they were childhood best friends. New and old traumas slowly, coyly come out: bullying, suicide, simple mistakes and basic meanness. Betrayals and lies populate the experiences of both generations. In revealing a complex web of family and community secrets, schoolyard bullies and the nature of trust, Frankel nudges her reader to ask questions like the one Rebecca puts on the billboard: Do you know your children?

Hyacinth Girls is a compelling and powerfully evocative novel of friendship and love, deceit and duplicity, and the rough terrain of being a teenage girl.

This review originally ran in the May 26, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 tattoos.

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Still Life With Insects by Brian Kiteley

Posted on June 8, 2015 by pagesofjulia

The subtle, sublime life of an amateur entomologist, in tiny glimpses.

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Leah Hager Cohen (No Book but the World) selected Brian Kiteley’s first novel, Still Life with Insects (originally published in 1989), for reprinting by Pharos Editions. In her introduction, Cohen gracefully outlines the strengths of this slim, quietly powerful book.

Elwyn Farmer is an amateur entomologist, forever wandering off to peer under dry leaves or dig in riverbanks. Still Life with Insects consists of his journal entries, spanning 40 years: from 1945, when his 43rd birthday has just been celebrated, to 1985, when his vision begins to fade. The entries record his quiet rejoicing in the ephemeral glory of the natural world, the beetles he collects and, through and around them, the details of his fragile life. Following several nervous breakdowns, he tells stories in which grandchildren and tragic death figure at an equal level with the Burying Beetle (Nicrophorus marginatus), or the Asian Stink Bug his family encounters in a Hungarian resort.

Although a bug collector’s field notes may not sound like an imaginative or exhilarating backdrop, Brian Kiteley’s distinctive style plays well to such a challenge. His greatest accomplishment is understatement. In a mere 103 pages, a sensitive, complex man becomes a brittle old man, fully experiencing the passing of time and life. The stories that fill these journal entries, sparse and widely spaced over decades, are necessarily mere vignettes, bare sketches. Still Life with Insects is a deceptively simple story, characterized by restraint, but with many layers of allegory available to the close reader.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the May 19, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 boxes.

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The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger

Posted on June 5, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A hit-and-run fatality overshadows the life of a family and a community in the bush of British Columbia.

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Sarah Leipciger’s debut novel, The Mountain Can Wait, centers on a family’s shared and separate struggles in the wilds of British Columbia. Tom’s wife left him when the kids were small. He hopes he can put in one last good year at work, sell his forest restoration company and provide for his children in his retirement. His son, Curtis, lives a few towns over, a young man on his own. Daughter Erin has begun to pull into herself, in typical teenage fashion. Around this nucleus are colorful characters like Tom’s mother-in-law, angry and estranged, living off the land in a tiny island village; Tom’s new girlfriend, a poet with an independent streak; and the tree planters and other employees of his company. Between hunting and foraging, idle drug use and countless cigarettes, this motley crew sharply evokes their environment in Leipciger’s spare but feeling prose.

The biggest crisis of all is out of sight for much of the story, but bookends everything else that transpires: a hit-and-run that kills a teenaged girl and haunts the driver, who is slow to seek redemption. “She was an instant, the sulfuric flare of a match…. And there was a dull slap.” This overarching tragedy shadows the rest of the action, as characters go on making their plans, unaware of how it will affect their lives.

In language that highlights natural beauty and the challenges of living in the bush, Leipciger explores what a sense of responsibility really entails, the finer points of family dynamics and the strong hold a place can have on a person, from Whistler to the tiny isles around Vancouver Island. Curtis struggles with the family tradition of hunting for their meat; he has trouble killing, even collecting tadpoles. But he will wreak havoc in just trying to survive, let alone impress his father. Tom is still troubled by the sordid details of his wife’s demise, some years after she left. He loves his children, but despairs at knowing them at all.

The Mountain Can Wait concentrates on the difficulties of properly caring for loved ones, and the meaning of community. Set within British Columbia’s stunning and intimidating back country, a mountain goat killed in one shot and a bear only wounded come to the forefront, too. As the title reflects, even the calamities Tom and his clan experience fade against such a backdrop.

This review originally ran in the May 14, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cherries.

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Going Driftless: Life Lessons from the Heartland for Unraveling Times by Stephen J. Lyons

Posted on June 1, 2015 by pagesofjulia

An admiring profile of the successful, low-impact communities in a little-known region of the Midwest.

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Stephen J. Lyons (A View from the Inland Northwest) muses on a remarkable region of the U.S. in Going Driftless: Life Lessons from the Heartland for Unraveling Times. “The Driftless” spans a small area of southwest Wisconsin, northwest Illinois, northeast Iowa and southeast Minnesota. A distinctly unglaciated history defines certain geographic parts, and a network of streams provides variant topography. In these pages, Lyons explores that landscape and the cultural experimentation born there.

The remote hills and valleys of the Driftless are uncharacteristic of the Midwest, and these steeper slopes have sheltered alternative lifestyles for decades, from the back-to-the-landers who arrived in the 1970s to naturalists, traditional and organic farmers, artists, musicians and other singular souls living there today. Over several years, Lyons visits various Driftless communities, chatting with their leaders as well as others encountered by chance. He surveys farming and dairy cooperatives, families living off the grid, small business owners, food co-ops, a Zen monastery and successful planned communities. For example, Lyons outlines the history of Seed Savers Exchange, located near Decorah, Iowa, which curates a collection of more than 20,000 seed varietals from around the world in the public domain. The region attracts those interested in getting back to basics, hoping to build communities.

Going Driftless comprises a series of sketches of people, places and organizations, and steers clear of judgment or conclusion in favor of quiet contemplation. Lyons gently suggests near the book’s end that these unobtrusive lifestyles have something to offer in unstable times.

This review originally ran in the May 12, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 apples.

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Mislaid by Nell Zink

Posted on May 29, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A Southern comedy of errors starring a broken family stretched across social classes.

mislaid

At the start of Nell Zink’s delightfully odd first novel, Mislaid, Peggy is a lesbian teenager in 1960s Virginia heading off to Stillwater College, a remote women’s school, where she plans to sow her oats with all those other young ladies and become a famous playwright. Instead, she begins a strangely lusty affair with one of the few male faculty members, Lee Fleming, a famous poet hidden away at Stillwater by his wealthy and proper Virginia family because he is gay. Their misguided, mismatched affair quickly results in a pregnancy and marriage. After 10 years, Peggy finds herself miserable, acting as servant to Lee’s obnoxiously pretentious literary house guests while he engages in infidelities and general disrespect. She runs away, taking their three-year-old daughter and leaving their nine-year-old son, Byrdie.

Because Lee has also threatened to have her committed, Peggy goes into hiding. She conveniently acquires a birth certificate from a recently deceased African American child to rechristen her white-blonde daughter as Karen Brown, herself as Meg. They squat in a condemned house in abject poverty, making a new life, but the oddest part is that “Karen and Meg Brown” on their paperwork are black. “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people,” writes Zink, but Meg and Karen, white as they are, do pass.

A decade later, when Karen enters the University of Virginia on a minority scholarship as a freshman, Byrdie is a senior there and the two finally meet. The ensuing drama of confused identities drips of both tragedy and hilarity, as family dynamics and literary ambitions propel a broad cast of quirky, complex, lovable characters into odd scenarios. Meg has mixed herself up in some illegal dealings in her years as a single mom and met some interesting folks. Karen’s boyfriend and his family are equally zany and winning. Zink pulls no punches in portraying Virginia’s mores and peculiarities. Mislaid‘s pathos is charmingly funny, and a sentimental streak softens the sarcasm.

With its distinctively Southern setting and bizarre range of sincere men and women making their way in a weird world, Zink’s novel captivates from the very first page. Readers may be tempted to blaze through this slim book in a single sitting. Comic, sympathetic, heartbreaking and outrageous, Mislaid is a wonderful, raucous book with everything of life in it.

This review originally ran in the May 12, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 BLT’s.

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Paris Red by Maureen Gibbon

Posted on May 28, 2015 by pagesofjulia

The model for a famous Manet nude is exquisitely fictionalized as a young woman voracious for experience.

paris red

“That day I am seventeen and I am wearing the boots of a whore.” So begins Maureen Gibbon’s Paris Red, a novel of art, love, sex and survival in 1860s Paris. Victorine, the red-haired narrator, is not a whore herself; the boots were a gift. She works instead as a brunisseuse–silver burnisher–along with her best friend and roommate, Nise. The two sometimes pick up men, though, and this new one, Eugène, is different from the others: he wants them both. Unlike Nise, Victorine pursues experience headlong, wanting to feel it all, and it is she who wins Eugène’s devotion. In the process she puts ambition above friendship, losing Nise, choosing instead a position as Eugène’s model and muse. She purchases oils and pastels for him, poses for sketches and paintings, and luxuriates in the role of his lover.

Paris Red is a sensual, luscious novel, filled with tastes, smells and sounds, as well as colors. Eugène is actually Édouard Manet, strolling the streets under a false name, but Gibbon’s focus here is Victorine, the real historical model for Manet’s Olympia. She finds a home for her passion for color in his studio, and plays model-actor in Eugène’s world, while also learning about–and never losing–herself.

In powerful, vivid prose, Gibbon (Thief) pulls her reader into a sensory Paris that cuts across class lines, painting a strikingly intense and intelligent young woman in Victorine. The overall effect is erotic, but also clever and perceptive, a remarkable glimpse into a moment of art and time. Readers will never view Olympia the same way again.

This review originally ran in the May 8, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 apple fritters.

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The Secret Place by Tana French (audio)

Posted on May 27, 2015 by pagesofjulia

secretI think I will call it a great credit to Tana French that even though this novel took me months to finish, due to my much-reduced audio-listening time, I never lost the thread or lost interest. It can be hard to read a book that slowly, over that much time. But The Secret Place is gripping, compelling, peopled by fine, interesting, and distinctive characters; it lent itself pretty well to this less-than-ideal reading (listening) schedule.

French’s dedicated readers will recognize several characters from earlier novels, although these books do not exactly form a series. The central detective in The Secret Place is Stephen Moran, who has been relegated to the depths of the Cold Cases unit, where he is not particularly happy. Then a gift is dropped in his lap: Holly Mackey, who was but a little girl in Faithful Place, is now 16 years old and boarding at a chi-chi girls’ school called St. Kilda’s. She brings Moran a card stating that the writer knows who killed Chris Harper, found murdered last year on St. Kilda’s grounds.

Moran takes this card to the Murder squad, where he has ambitions, and begins working with Detective Antoinette Conway, a prickly, defensive sort. The two form an unlikely, tentative team, and the rest of the novel covers a single, very long day they spend on campus at St. Kilda’s, solving the case.

Or at least part of it does. The Secret Place is split into two narratives, which alternate chapters: the story of Moran & Conway’s single long day, and the last 18 months or so in the lives of Holly Mackey and her three girlfriends. Holly, Selena, Julia and Becca are very, very close. They all knew Chris Harper, some more closely than they’ve let on to the police; their friendship and their lives are caught up in the case, and Moran knows it. As Moran & Conway work the case, the second narrative brings readers up to date in the girls’ lives.

As an audio production, this is effectively played by two readers, a male reader for Stephen Moran’s story and a female third-person narrator of Holly and her friends’ lives. The latter narrative is ghostly, compelling, and mystical; there are magical elements, although of course this is a realistic story; the magic is simply that of youth.

Moran is a sympathetic character who wants badly to “make it,” to fit in in Murder, to have a partner, to have a friend. He is sensitive and self-conscious, yearning. The girls wield their own self-referential magnetic power, very much evocative of the strange world of teenagerhood. Friendship, its meaning and its powers, are very much the central themes of this story.

In short, Tana French has done it again. Her characters are mesmerizing, both realistic and spell-binding. The plot is twisty: beware thinking you know where she’s headed! I love this stuff. Keep it coming.

Rating: 7 earbuds.

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In the Spider’s Web by Jerome Gold

Posted on May 26, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Striking, deeply honest, and sensitively told, this novel based in real life considers juvenile prisons and all its dramas.

spider

Jerome Gold calls In the Spider’s Web a “nonfiction novel.” In it, he depicts the routines and characters of a prison for juveniles, centering on one young woman in particular. All the events really happened and are drawn from his years working as a rehabilitation counselor at the institution he calls Ash Meadow–some supporting characters are composites, but all the major players are real people; names except his own, places, and some other details are changed to shield identities. As might be expected, the stories Gold relates are often disturbing, but they are beautifully told from a sober and compassionate perspective.

…Click here to read the full review.

This review was published on April 28, 2015 by ForeWord Reviews.

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My rating: 8 points.

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A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm by Dave Goulson

Posted on May 25, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A celebration of biology and the joy of discovery–and a reminder to tread lightly.

buzz
Dave Goulson follows A Sting in the Tale, about his years studying bumblebees, with A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm. In 2003, Goulson purchased a 33-acre property with a decaying farmhouse and barn, and turned it into a private nature reserve; here he describes the multitude of wildlife he shares those acres with. His goal is to celebrate the wonder of the natural world–especially insects, which make up roughly two-thirds of known life on Earth.

Goulson charmingly depicts the mating practices of dance flies and the many butterfly species he sees on his daily run, and elucidates the habits of the famously cannibalistic female mantis with added knowledge gained through his own studies. A Buzz in the Meadow is both a descriptive work and a call to arms, a reminder that all species are precious and necessary, even the tiny ones. Goulson repeatedly states that conservationists should look beyond large and charismatic creatures like whales and tigers; he perhaps overstates that “the extinction of the giant panda… would not have any knock-on consequences. There would perhaps be a tiny bit more bamboo in a forest in China,” but his point is well taken–that insects make up the majority of life and play an outsized role in the interconnectivity of biological systems worldwide. Goulson’s tone is personal, even humorously self-effacing, but clearly expert. A Buzz in the Meadow accessibly presents natural science and gracefully offers an earnest wake-up call to conservation.

This review originally ran in the April 28, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 dormice.

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Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX by Ginny Gilder

Posted on May 22, 2015 by pagesofjulia

The exertions of rowing crew under Title IX, as a means to overcoming one woman’s demons.

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Ginny Gilder made her way from a privileged Upper East Side life in New York City to Yale University in 1975, in the early years of Title IX, which legislated equal educational opportunities for both men and women in all areas, including athletics. Ginny had never been an athlete; her family instead emphasized business success and keeping up appearances. But she was drawn to the grace, beauty and seeming effortlessness of rowing, and against the coach’s instincts, joined the Yale crew. The story she tells in Course Correction of collegiate competition, gender discrimination, the long road to the Olympics and personal growth, also yields Ginny’s eventual healing from the emotional traumas of a well-concealed family history.

In four sections titled Catch, Drive, Release and Recovery–the four parts of a well-executed rowing stroke–Gilder details the corresponding segments of her life. Rowing captures her passion; she drives herself through injuries and health problems to an eventual Olympic medal; she learns to let go; she forms a successful family of her own, despite a damaged past.

Gilder’s prose is earnest, heartfelt, expressive and clearly strongly felt. Her narrative will appeal to sports fans and readers dedicated to memoirs of pain and redemption. Course Correction touches on the injustices that Title IX was designed to correct (including a memorable scene involving a nude protest), and portrays a painful, affecting and impressive athletic career. But it is centrally a story of one woman’s lengthy and hard-won coming-of-age and coming home.

This review originally ran in the April 24, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 ankle bracelets.

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