Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

Posted on October 28, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A disgraced police detective takes a job as tribal marshal to pursue the mystery of a series of missing women, but has trouble seeing beyond her own lost daughter.

Laurie L. Dove’s atmospheric, frequently grim, and emotionally charged debut, Mask of the Deer Woman, features a former police detective trying to outrun her old life by taking a job as tribal marshal on an Oklahoma reservation. Carrie Starr is half Indigenous, but out of touch with that part of her personal history. Tasked with solving the cold cases of a growing number of missing Indigenous women and girls, she is inclined to focus instead on her own lost daughter.

Marshal Starr is the novel’s protagonist, but Mask of the Deer Woman‘s chapters shift among various characters, beginning with Chenoa Cloud, a college student from the rez who is determined to prove the presence of an endangered beetle on her tribal grounds. Documenting an endangered species promises to earn her funding and a job–a way off the rez for good, and not like the others “who left and never came back, or who couldn’t come back.” Chenoa’s disappearance into the Saliquaw Nation’s backcountry sets the stage for Starr’s arrival. The Bureau of Indian Affairs job is a last resort for Starr, and not one she relishes, but her daughter’s murder and the man she subsequently gunned down ended her career as detective. Trading on her late father’s Saliquaw identity earns her a poorly appointed cinder-block office, a BIA-issued, broken-down Ford Bronco, and the locals’ distrust. She carries a bottle of Jameson in her backpack and under the Bronco’s front seat, and a joint in her shirt pocket. Each missing young woman blurs into her daughter, and she flinches away from “the terrain she’d have to cover in the process. The dark space of whatever was out there. Caves. Old mines. Her own mind.”

Beyond the intoxicants she takes to escape her pain, Starr is knocked off-balance by tales of the Deer Woman. Part monster, part avenging angel, part capricious force of nature, this legend seems to follow the disoriented marshal, although the boundaries between magic, hallucination, and self-medicated grief are unclear. To boot, the rez is at odds with the nearest town, and the tribal council must field a controversial proposal to frack for oil, with associated infrastructure. Political and commercial machinations accompany the missing women and the struggling tribal marshal in a novel of grief, violence, community, empowerment, and pain.

This dark mystery will thrill readers and immerse them in a powerfully portrayed world of great losses and high stakes.

This review originally ran in the October 25, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 blue jay feathers.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander

Posted on October 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

As Eve’s life devolves into crisis, she creates a golem to solve it all, in this lovely, absorbing novel of grief, dark humor, and love and friendship, with a dash of magic.

Beth Kander’s I Made It Out of Clay is a lovely, absorbing novel of grief, dark humor, and love and friendship, with a dash of magic.

In contemporary urban Chicago, as the holiday season approaches, Eve is struggling: she’s about to turn 40 years old, and she’s nowhere near done grieving her beloved father, who died just over a year ago. Eve and her father always loved Christmas–a guilty pleasure in their Jewish family not shared by the surviving members. Layoffs are threatened at work, her best friend has been distant, she’s had some disturbing encounters on the train recently, and she’s begun hallucinating her dearly departed grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who seems to be trying to warn Eve of something. Eve is not close to her mother (overbearing) or her younger sister Rosie (overly perfect), who’s scheduled her wedding for Eve’s 40th birthday weekend. Eve has (foolishly) promised to bring a plus one to Rosie’s wedding, but she’s so far failed to find a date. Unfortunately, her neighbor crush doesn’t seem to get her jokes or her cringeworthy attempts at flirtation.

In desperation, late at night and rather drunk, Eve recalls a story told by her grandmother, ventures into the dank corners of her apartment’s basement, and builds herself a golem out of foundation clay. A golem serves as protector and companion in Jewish tradition, and she feels in dire need of both. The next morning, a hungover Eve wakes up to find a handsome (and very naked) man in her apartment. She is horrified, in disbelief, attracted to him, and a little disgusted with herself. Is Eve’s golem a figment of her imagination? A monstrosity? Or the answer to her fondest wishes? Heading into Rosie’s wedding, all of Eve’s crises–work, friendships, the absence of romance, family strife, civil unrest in the wider world–crash and crescendo together. A golem is either the best or worst idea she’s ever had.

I Made It Out of Clay is a charming rework of a traditional tale. Frequently grim, it explores some of the darker elements of modern life: depression, loneliness, grief, bigotry. But it’s also sweet and very funny, especially in the moments when Eve lets her friends and, eventually, family into her life, and finds that they may have some of their own struggles. Kander gifts her readers with a novel that is often serious and sad, but ultimately uplifting, as Eve learns, “This isn’t the end of anything. It’s just one more beginning, like every damn day can be if we just let it.”

This review originally ran in the October 4, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bagels.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

The Greatest Lie of All by Jillian Cantor

Posted on October 21, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A young actress takes on the role of a glamorous romance author and gets more mystery–and romance–than she’d reckoned for.

The Greatest Lie of All by Jillian Cantor (Half Life; The Hours Count; Margot; The Lost Letter) is a propulsively paced story of intrigue, romance, and suspense starring two women a generation apart navigating family, love, secrets, and art. In one of their several parallels, each uses a professional pseudonym, so that four names delineate these two character arcs.

Readers meet the young, up-and-coming actress Amelia Grant just after the death of her beloved mother, and in the moment when she discovers her actor boyfriend in bed with his costar. At this low, Amelia is primed to accept her biggest role yet: to play the fabulously successful romance author Gloria Diamond in a biopic. Gloria had been Amelia’s mother’s favorite; it feels like a sign and a way to be close to the mother she’s lost, the only person who had called her by her birth name, Annie.

Heartbroken but determined, Amelia travels from Los Angeles to Gloria’s remote Seattle-area home to get to know her subject before filming begins. But “the Gloria Diamond” is distinctly unfriendly, cold, and dismissive. Even as Amelia finds a tentative friendship with Gloria’s son, Will (“cute, in an academic kind of way”), she despairs at ever understanding what makes the older woman tick. Gloria’s career was built on her famous, brief romance with her late husband, Will’s father. But the more Amelia learns, the less convincing that story is. She embarks on an informal investigation fueled by shadowy motives: her desire to play a “true” Gloria Diamond; her curiosity about the nature of love, especially as her mother so appreciated it in Diamond’s fiction; and Will’s reluctant desire to understand his mother. As she pursues the history of the author once known as Mary Forrester–Mare to her friends–Amelia begins to wonder about her own role in the drama unfolding before her.

In chapters that shift between Amelia’s perspective and that of the young Mare, The Greatest Lie of All shines in its plot twists and surprises, and, most of all, its pacing, which accelerates from a slow burn to a heart-thumping momentum. The tension increases, stakes rising as Gloria/Mare and Amelia/Annie must reckon with their pasts to chart their shared present. Danger accompanies every possibility of romance, and family history matters more than it originally appears. Cantor’s experienced hand shows in this classically crafted thriller, which will keep its readers tautly engaged to the final scene.

This review originally ran in the September 24, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 glasses of wine.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe

Posted on October 14, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir, Frighten the Horses, is an arrestingly forthright and open account of self-realization, a portrait of a transgender experience that is beautiful, honest, and raw.

After an absorbing, funny opening scene, Radclyffe rewinds to a less happy time. Readers accompany him on a difficult path as he spent the first four decades of his life trying to live up to expectations. His British upper-class childhood was privileged but disjointed. On brief occasions in boarding school, art school, and while riding motorcycles, he felt like one of the boys, but never felt he truly fit in. He became a housewife of status, then immigrated to the Connecticut suburbs and soon found himself raising four children and a golden retriever puppy. But something had always been off, and the memoir moves back and forth in time to portray Radclyffe’s anxiety and soul-searching. He eventually comes out as lesbian, divorces, and comes out as a transgender man.

These events and discoveries are presented in scenes with color, detail, and dialogue, and Radclyffe’s writing style is smooth, relatable, and effortless to read. With humor and compassion for himself and others, Radclyffe describes his own resistance to and acceptance of his gender and sexuality as he wrestles with the complexities of gender identity, sexual orientation, feminism, class, and family dynamics. This disarming, gorgeously written, and generously vulnerable memoir uses imagery to great effect. In sharing this individual narrative, Radclyffe expands and advances the way trans experiences are represented in literature. Smart and incisive, Frighten the Horses is unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the September 20, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 9 steps.

Come back Friday for my interview with Oliver Radclyffe! I’m really excited about this one.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicans by H. G. Parry

Posted on October 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A sprawling epic by one of my new favorites, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians combines history–the 1770s-1790s Age of Enlightenment in England, France and Saint-Domingue–with fantasy. In this alternate history, magical powers are relatively common, but only permitted in Aristocrats. Commoners with a magical Inheritance must be registered and wear a bracelet that will burn them painfully if they use their forbidden powers. The idea of a more equitable world, “one whose Commoners could use their magic freely, not to steal to feed their children but for their own education and enlightenment,” fires the imagination of several reformers the novel will follow in both England and France; chief among these are real historical figures like William Wilberforce, William Pitt the Younger, and Maximilien Robespierre. The abolition of slavery (the recognizable, historical practice of stealing and trading in African people) is a parallel issue for many of the same men. Meanwhile, in modern-day Haiti, an enslaved woman named Fina learns that she holds extraordinary powers of her own, which she will use to advance the cause that is most important to her and her friends: their freedom to move and speak and act, let alone to use magic. In this world, slaves are spellbound by their so-called owners: fed a certain elixir, they are unable to disobey orders, unable even to move or speak of their own volition.

It is an important facet of this story that characters with great and noble values and aims must confront questions about what means are justified by what ends. There is an introduction of dark magic of a kind that has been outlawed – and supposedly eradicated – for generations. There are questions of sticking to one’s principles in the face of certain defeat, versus compromising in profound ways to achieve interim goals. This intersection, again, of fantasy with real history (and very real human struggles) is exceptionally well done.

In over 500 pages, the reader gets to know Pitt and Wilberforce and their friends in London; Robespierre and his in Paris; and Fina and her fellows, before and after Saint-Domingue’s famous slave rebellion. Parry’s setting and characters may be based on history, but she’s absolutely doing in-depth worldbuilding all the same; she has laid out not only the ‘rules’ of this world in terms of its realities (how magic works, who has it) but the laws to be obeyed or broken (who is permitted magic, how the bracelets work, how the court systems function). The relationships – in particular the friendship between Pitt and Wilberforce, which I found the most compelling of the book – are involved and engrossing. The personalities – especially poor, despicable, manipulated Robespierre – are complex. I found Fina to be the least developed of the lead characters, which is an absolute shame; to be clear, she gets the least screen time (cause or effect, chicken or egg?), but still concerning. (I have a vague impression this is somewhat corrected in book two of the duology.) The historical content feels right, and a few quick googles reinforce that impression, but by no means am I sufficiently up on my Enlightenment history to judge. The fantasy is intricate and satisfying. Parry’s greatest strength is in her characters. It only hit me after I finished reading that there is a shortage of women in this story; I am a bit sad about that, too.

I don’t often get excited about an expansive, wide-ranging saga, but if anyone can keep me page-turning for 500 pages, it’s this author. I’ll be reading book two. I’d be even more stoked for more of Uriah Heep or the Daughter, though.

Rating: 7 birds.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

The Bishop’s Villa by Sacha Naspini, trans. by Clarissa Botsford

Posted on October 7, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this transporting novel based on real events, a shy cobbler in an Italian village during World War II is gradually drawn into quiet acts in the Resistance.

Sacha Naspini (Nives) brings close and poignant attention to true events with his historical novel The Bishop’s Villa, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

In the fall of 1943, in the sleepy village of Le Case in Tuscany’s Maremma region, a cobbler goes about his daily business. Solitary and quiet by nature, René makes do with just two fingers on his right hand following a childhood accident with a lathe; his nickname in town is Settebello, after the “lucky seven” card in scopa. When the local bishop rents out the seminary and surrounding villa to be used as a prison camp for the region’s Jewish population, Le Case mostly plods on as before. Some local residents speak cruelly of the prisoners; many simply ignore their presence. René mends the shoes brought to him for repair by prison guards. For most townspeople, the war is poverty, deprivation, and the passage of time.

But René’s neighbor Anna, a lifelong friend, has just lost her son, who fought for the Resistance until he was captured and executed by the Wehrmacht. Anna is galvanized; René wants her to stand down. And then Anna vanishes, leaving behind a note for René. She has gone to join the partisans, to “fight for Edoardo and for Italy.” When René learns that Anna might have become imprisoned in the bishop’s villa, he finds that he can no longer fail to act. His subtle sabotage begins with boots. “He chose rusty nails, some so brittle that they crumbled at the first blow. He hammered them in a little crooked, curved inwards as if he were aiming for the heel… the hole in the sole would get wider, like a small surface wound.”

In short chapters, Naspini draws readers into René’s world: first the tightly confined life of the village cobbler, traveling back and forth between home, workshop, and Anna’s apartment, and then to the tighter confines of a cell in the bishop’s villa. Botsford’s translation is terse and atmospheric, punctuated by lyrical or romantic phrasings: wonder is “like a child unable to describe a treasure they’d chanced upon under a stone.” With torture, “you can chew [a man’s] bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

The Bishop’s Villa is absorbing, transporting, beautiful, and grim. Naspini’s Author’s Note makes clear his drive to lay bare a shameful chapter of history; but with this novel he has also written a love story, for without Anna, “René would never have used the tools of his trade to fight his war.” The result is moving and layered.

This review originally ran in the September 12, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 soles.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry

Posted on October 4, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A booklover’s dream, this astonishingly great debut novel focuses on family and the power of story in a world of magic, imagination, and serious literary criticism. In Wellington, New Zealand, Rob Sutherland is a hardworking lawyer with a lovely partner, Lydia, and a trying younger brother, Charley, known to his colleagues as Dr. Charles Sutherland. Rob is longsuffering: Charley keeps calling him, often in the middle of the night, to come up to work (Charley teaches at Prince Albert University) and help him catch the characters he’s accidentally released from books so he can put them back. Rob has always had complicated feelings for Charley: he loves his little brother and wants to keep him safe, but he definitely stays annoyed with him much of the time, too. Though four years younger, Charley was a prodigy, who went off to Oxford University the same year that Rob went off to Prince Albert. Rob would have been considered intelligent in most families, but felt overshadowed by a child who read Dickens when he was two years old. One of this novel’s central threads is the challenge of an adult relationship between brothers, with a touch of sibling rivalry, many old wounds, and a persistent bond of love, loyalty, and protectiveness that runs in both directions.

So: Charley is a genius, of the scattered, distant, dreamy type, who keeps accidentally bringing fictional (and nonfictional!) characters out of books. It can get messy. Rob is the exasperated big brother who keeps helping clean up messes – not always in the best of humors. Then the messes get much bigger, beyond anything that Rob or Charley is prepared to deal with – out of their control, and, it eventually becomes clear, outside of Charley’s causing. But Charley, and eventually Rob, do decide that it’s within their responsibility to try to save Wellington, or the world.

This is a story filled with vibrant characters, and that plays with the layers of what ‘character’ can mean. Some are Parry’s (her characters’) interpretations of those written by others, including the title character, Uriah Heep, who comes from David Copperfield and is thus originally Dickens’s, now read by Charley (and Parry). Some are Parry’s originals but, within this book, credited to another (fictional) author. [The indomitable Millie Radcliffe-Dix comes from The Adventures of Millie Radcliffe-Dix, Girl Detective, which unfortunately do not exist in this world I’m out here living in.] And some, like Charley himself, are the inventions of this book. It quickly gets to be a lot, but gosh, in the most fun ways. Again: there was never such a booklover’s book.

The title of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep refers to a character who is not even one of the top five or ten most important in the book – although he is the character at large in the opening scene, when Charley calls Rob in the middle of the night (again). He will reappear periodically. In some ways, Dr. Charles Sutherland is the main character of the book – he has the splashiest powers, and the central conflict rages around him; mysteries wreathe his past; he will have great choices to makes. But it is Rob who narrates the bulk of the book (with a few interludes as exception). In part, I think this is because there is a heavy emphasis, in this world and in this telling, on how one person’s “reading” of another impacts the person being read. Rob’s perspective on Charley matters a great deal. I think Parry’s choice of Rob as narrator is interesting; it shifts the reader’s reading, in similar ways. Whose stories do we matter in? As Dr. Frankenstein tells us: “What you need to understand about protagonists… is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories.” If that’s not a lesson for the real world, I don’t know what is.

I’m still reeling and will enjoy thinking about what this book has shown me as I move through my world and reading. I think it has the potential to be one of those that shifts how I think about it all – which is a big accomplishment. Also, everything Parry writes plunges me deeply and pleasurably into other worlds, which I love. I finished this book and dived directly into another big thick one of hers. Do recommend.

Rating: 9 doors.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River by Zak Podmore

Posted on September 30, 2024 by pagesofjulia


With Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, investigative journalist Zak Podmore tackles a massive, complicated set of questions about western water management and the Glen Canyon Dam, the construction of which created a reservoir called Lake Powell. Arguably the most politically fraught and symbolic dam in the southwestern United States, Glen Canyon has long had its fans and detractors. The Millennium Drought, “an indefinite change in precipitation patterns” in the region, has “done three-quarters of the work toward draining Lake Powell already,” but this leaves numerous challenges: Indigenous people’s water rights, engineering and hydrology puzzles, the ecological implications for long-flooded lands freshly exposed to open air or buried under millions of acre-feet of sedimentation, and more.

Podmore acknowledges his own biases about the dam, which was in place before he was born. But he proceeds with copious and in-depth research into the many and complex issues it poses, considers what he learns with an open mind, and integrates hard science, cultural awareness, and competing viewpoints into an admirably accessible work of creative nonfiction. Podmore avoids binary options and magical thinking, and his study is richer for it. Included are surprisingly hopeful notes, such as the rapid recovery of native plants and ecosystems in newly exposed side canyons: “A canyon one hundred miles away, drowned for half a century, had restored itself in fewer than twenty years.” With narrative style and colorful characters, Podmore (Confluence) has composed a compelling, readable, and entertaining as well as educational text. Life After Dead Pool is superlative: important, insightful, and a pleasure to read.

This review originally ran in the August 30, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 cans of beans.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on September 27, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I really enjoyed Gods of Jade and Shadow, with the caveat for sensitive readers to beware a certain amount of gore and darkness. This one is imaginative, compelling, and surely fulfills its claims to the horror genre; but some of those more horrifying elements started to push my tolerances, which are famously high (though not limitless). I’d thought about putting this in white text, like I do spoilers, but I think it deserves a proper trigger warning: this novel not only deals in sexual contact without consent, but those scenes were heightened – at least in my feelings – by a mind-control element that caused the nonconsenting party to enjoy what was happening, as it was happening (although not before or after). This gave me a unique ‘ick’ I’d perhaps not encountered before. And in considering the book now, I find that part of the experience is overshadowing the rest for me.

It’s a good story, and well executed. I like the setting – beginning in 1950s Mexico City and then moving to a classically disturbing, possibly haunted, gothic mansion in disrepair, high in the misty rural Mexican hills. I like the details, including society’s dos and don’ts and the dresses and accessories of a popular, pretty, privileged young woman, our protagonist, Noémi Taboada. She’s plucky, thinks for herself, is unwilling to settle for a young woman’s few destined roles. These days, she’s thinking she’d like to study anthropology in graduate school. She’s well read, and also loves a party, a nice dress, and a fawning young man (and preferably a new one on a regular schedule). I like her.

Her cousin Catalina is a bit different, more demure, a few years older, enchanted by fairy tales and romance, which is how she ends up married to the enigmatic Virgil Doyle. Married, and spirited away to the yet more enigmatic estate known as High Place, on an abandoned silver mine. Where Noémi is to visit, and perhaps to rescue her.

High Place is bad news, its residents sinister (and dedicated to eugenics, ick again), its history very mysterious. Noémi is up for a lot, but this place may get the best of her. There’s always Francis, a Doyle cousin who might – on and off – be an ally. There’s a creepy old cemetery (of course), and something strange going on with the mushrooms. There are actually some really interesting ideas at play. But, like I said, the special ick I found here challenged me quite a bit.

I’ve left the rating at a 7. It’s a well-done story. But it’s left me feeling not so great. I’m intrigued enough to keep on checking out Moreno-Garcia’s backlist.

Rating: 7 cards.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf: More or Less Maddy by Lisa Genova

Posted on September 20, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on August 27, 2024.

Harvard-trained neuroscientist Lisa Genova debuted as a novelist with Still Alice (2007), about a woman who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Genova’s later novels Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens, and Every Note Played feature characters with hemi-spatial neglect, autism, Huntington’s disease, and ALS, respectively. Her sixth novel, More or Less Maddy, follows a young woman with bipolar disorder. As ever, Genova brings both an expert understanding of the neuroscience and a masterful eye for compelling characters in an emotionally textured narrative. Maddy’s story is completely absorbing; it may keep readers up all night.

Maddy Banks has had a privileged upbringing in suburban Connecticut. There were some tough times in her early childhood, and her father is a shadowy figure. But since her mother, Amy, remarried, it’s been easy: dinners at the country club, a popular boyfriend, a highly successful older sister, and an easygoing jock of an older brother. In high school, “each day was laid out for her like a matching outfit on a bed, when both her inner and outer worlds felt organized, predictable, happy, and light. Life was handed to her like a potted succulent, small and tidy and requiring little effort to maintain.” But the transition to college has not been smooth: “She remembers herself then… and it’s as if she was a different girl in another lifetime. She can’t pinpoint exactly how, but she doesn’t feel like she used to feel.”

Her first year at NYU is a shock: “The impossible-to-keep-up-with workload, living with a roommate who drove her crazy, having no clue what to major in, still not finding her passion or her tribe, losing [her boyfriend] Adam. Twice.” In her sophomore year, Maddy’s diagnosed at the student health center with depression. The antidepressants she’s prescribed help to set off her first manic episode, a big splashy event that results in her first stay in a mental hospital. Maddy and her family–who are loving, if not always graceful with the challenges they face–are in for a roller coaster.

In her more stable moments, and especially during the hypomania that often precedes full mania, Maddy develops an interest in stand-up comedy. Along with her love for Taylor Swift–and delusions about their friendship, with a budding business and creative relationship–Maddy’s passion for comedy becomes a trigger for her mother: getting excited about comedy, Amy Banks believes, means a manic episode is imminent. But while Maddy does not in fact have a personal relationship with Taylor Swift, she does have a gift and a passion for comedy. In Amy’s country-club world, this is not a reasonable life path. But Maddy wants it to be. It is one of the tricks of bipolar disorder that “real” excitements can be mistaken for illness, making it difficult for Maddy to pursue her legitimate dreams.

Maddy, her family, and readers learn about bipolar disorder together, with accompanying denial, anger, grief, the ups and downs of sorting out medications and side effects, and relapses. It is heartrending to see Maddy’s anguished efforts to come to terms with her disorder and to dissect what is real and healthy from what is delusion. Readers are privy to her self-talk: “It’s okay to feel disappointed and sad.”; “It’s okay to be happy.”; “It’s okay to be giddy.” It is one of the greatest gifts of fiction to allow readers into experiences that are not their own, to find empathy. Genova’s descriptions of Maddy’s episodes are evocative, clear, and relatable: “Before her hypomania ripened to rotten, there was a delicious sweetness to her thoughts and life. She had a massive amount of unearned confidence in her ability to do anything that struck her fancy. She made big dick energy look flaccid by comparison.”

Secondary characters are equally convincing and essential. Amy is capable of actions that frustrate Maddy (and readers), but she also genuinely wants the best for her child. Maddy’s sister, Emily, is almost too perfect–life comes easily for her, and it’s the life of their mother–but she is goodhearted, and that seems to be the life she truly wants. Maddy’s high school boyfriend, Adam, is one example of the gradual realization that things are not always as they appear. He had the right markers–basketball star, handsome, popular–but readers, and Emily, see some red flags in his treatment of Maddy, who goes on to make other exemplary friends and meet other objectionable characters along her rocky path.

It is an important element of Maddy’s development that she chooses to embrace her own unique self–her sense of humor, her interests, her differences–rather than follow the cookie-cutter plan laid out by her upbringing. “When Maddy was growing up, being normal was always the unquestioned goal…. Normal was her default, unexamined way of life. It meant fitting in, blending with the colors, sounds, and shapes around her.” All young people are out to find themselves; Maddy must live her own version of that. She is not defined by her disease, but is rather a complex young woman navigating the expected tumult of coming-of-age with added complications. Her story is affecting, harrowing, beautiful, and enlightening, as well as a great pleasure to read.

Rating: 8 notebooks.

Come back Monday for my interview with Genova.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »