The Jinn Daughter by Rania Hanna

Posted on March 18, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A jinn with the power to help souls into death’s final rest struggles to keep her daughter safe in this lively, vivid debut.

Rania Hanna’s first novel, The Jinn Daughter, is a moving, imaginative tale of magic, myth, life and death, and a mother’s love. Appropriately, the power of storytelling is central.

Nadine is a jinn, and serves as Hakawati to her village and community. Every morning, she gathers the pomegranate seeds that have fallen overnight outside her modest cabin: these are the souls of the recently deceased. She presses these seeds into a juice and drinks it to experience the stories of the dead, sometimes with honey to cut the bitterness, sometimes “settling sweet on my tongue.” It is in the telling of these stories that souls might pass from the Waiting Place “to final–and hopefully, peaceful–death.”

This is important and meaningful work, but Nadine’s life is not easy; almost all of her kind were killed or banished when she was very young, her training incomplete, and she is ostracized by the people whose souls she lives to assist into final death. She is nearly alone but for her beloved and cherished daughter, and the equally cherished ghost of that daughter’s father, Illyas. Layala, at 14 years old, is beginning to test the limits of their austere life. Illyas had been a human, and Nadine desperately wants their child to be without magic–safer that way. But jinn, despite their many powers, don’t have control over their children’s destinies.

Layala seeks a more meaningful existence than the quiet life allowed her as her mother’s daughter. Dangers press in from outside, too: the villagers’ animosity toward jinn, and a cascade of secrets from Nadine and Layala’s past, threaten their tenuous safety. They receive death threats from the human villagers, and then a visit from Death herself. Nadine must make unusual alliances and travel further into the realm of death than she ever has, to make a bid for her daughter’s safety. Her recurring prayer: “Keep her safe. Keep her happy. Let her find good love. Let her know peace. Let her know her heart and mind. Let her be.” But Layala may not want the same peace for herself that her mother wishes.

Hanna’s prose sparkles with color and detail, imbued with a mother’s deathless devotion to her child. The Jinn Daughter, drawing upon pre-Islamic Arabic mythology, engages with concepts of grief, loss, acceptance, self-determination, and the will to live. Hanna emphasizes the potential for stories and storytelling to explain life’s mysteries, to communicate, and to survive. Readers will find Nadine’s quest poignant, and Layala’s growth inspirational, in this journey of love, life, and death.

This review originally ran in the February 6, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 clay shards.

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A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest by Charlie J. Stephens

Posted on March 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In a town beset by poverty and violence, an unusual child turns to the natural world for comfort in this novel of suffering and tenderness.

A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest is a heart-wrenching first novel by Charlie J. Stephens that incorporates moments of beauty in a traumatizing coming-of-age tale. In the 1980s, eight-year-old Smokey Washington lives with their mother in Moss River, Oregon, a small town beset by poverty, violence, and a shortage of options for improving one’s lot, but surrounded by vibrant natural life. As Smokey’s situation worsens, they turn increasingly toward that outside world, seeking solace in dirt, deer, and trees. The tragedies that befall Smokey and their family and neighbors will disturb even jaded and strong-stomached readers, but notes of stark truth and tenderness filter through. A will to live pervades these pages from beginning to end.

Moss River is inundated with violence against women and children, from the opening scene (“Stop TJ, you’re hurting me”) through a PBS special about the death of a mother gazelle (“It’s just the rules of nature”), and throughout Smokey’s childhood. Smokey’s mom dates a series of men who hurt her and hurt Smokey, a child who engages with animals and the outdoors more than with people, and who doesn’t fall into a gender binary. With a friend, Smokey wonders, at the sound of a gunshot, “which of the men we know might have shot the gun and who he might have shot. We worried about our moms with their bruises and their need….”

Stephens gives the child narrator a wise, inquisitive voice that feels perfectly suited to Smokey’s age and distinctive personality. Through Smokey’s point of view, readers follow an increasingly grim story, dreading the multiplying wounds that begin to feel inevitable. While Mom tries to care for Smokey, she cannot always protect them; nevertheless, she is a woman with moments of startling, defiant strength.

Smokey’s descriptions and perspective are insightful, often surprising, and lovely. Mom drinks steaming coffee and smokes Lucky Strikes; Smokey wonders if “evaporating the things she loves is her most practiced spell.” Smokey sees her as a crow in her black jacket; for themself, they hope to grow up and become a deer. In a world with few apparent escape routes, the woods hold great appeal. “I want to spend more time low to the ground…. I want my animal body. I want to get it back.”

A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest offers a harrowing and wholly realistic story of suffering, but also a message about resiliency, the healing power of nature, and simple survival. “Being alive can sometimes feel like a miracle, even as you let it go.” Stephens’s debut will shock its readers with love, pain, and fresh perspective.

This review originally ran in the February 2, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 darting eyes.

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You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

Posted on March 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Plot twists and a weirdly relatable serial killer offer readers a wild ride in this darkly comic thriller of grief and murder.

Joanna Wallace’s first novel, You’d Look Better as a Ghost, combines black humor and a realistic portrayal of grief with a serial killer, with whom readers are surprisingly inclined to empathize. This oddball story is both grim and unexpectedly entertaining.

When readers first meet narrator Claire, she is standing awkwardly at her father’s funeral, wondering at the strange behavior of the “serious-looking men in serious black suits… standing seriously too close and staring at me. Are they waiting for me to talk?” She assesses their comments, taking everything literally, contemplating human idiosyncrasies. She’s not all that good with people, and she’s also deeply grieving.

It’s not just grief. Claire has always struggled with the habits of those she calls “ordinary people,” a group she does not identify with. “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” She lives alone outside of London, painting, running on her treadmill, and now wrestling with the loss of her father following a painful battle with early-onset dementia, psych wards, and abusive care homes. Her late father seems to be the one person she’s ever felt close to; flashbacks to childhood sketch a chilly if not disturbing portrait of her mother. Plagued by migraines, Claire gets a doctor’s referral to a bereavement counseling group. “I may not have cried, drunk to excess or wrung my hands in disbelief since Dad died but I’ve definitely become more reckless with my kills.”

Oh, yes: Claire is also a serial killer. She struggles with “ordinary people” to the extent that she often feels the need to end their lives, a process for which she enjoys taking her time. Her new bereavement group offers her potential outlets for her creativity, as well as new challenges.

In Claire’s witty, deadpan voice, You’d Look Better as a Ghost revels in dark humor. A new acquaintance “asks whether I want anything to eat. A slice of chocolate cake. That’s what I really want. But I’m mindful of the fact that I killed this woman’s sister fairly recently and the cake is ridiculously overpriced. So, I order a shortbread biscuit instead. Feels like the decent thing to do.” Claire has some very firm ideas of propriety; for example, pairing wellies with a kilt bothers her considerably more than dismemberment does. But the novel also deals seriously with the protracted grief of losing a loved one to dementia, and the potentially redemptive power of true friendship. Amid much irreverence, its themes are genuinely heartfelt and even sweet. This debut is fresh and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the January 29, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 mugs of soup.

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Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Posted on March 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

My biggest question about this book is, is this the beginning of a series? Because it was so short and maybe a little bit rushed but also left us absolutely on the edge of a sequel, and I’m interested in finding out more.

Upright Women Wanted is under 200 pages, set in an alternative American Southwest under a totalitarian regime with strict control of information and vigilante troops of bandit-sheriffs running small towns. Esther has just run away from home to escape a forced marriage to the former fiancé of her best friend, following that best friend’s execution (by Esther’s father) for possession of resistance literature. The dead best friend was also her secret partner. Esther stows away in a Librarian’s book wagon, hoping the Librarians can straighten her out, in more ways than one, but they will instead open a wider and far more dangerous world than she’d previously imagined. And it might just be a good thing.

Some of the character development and romance goes by a bit more quickly than might have been most satisfying. If queer librarian resisters, spies, and assassins on horseback sound exciting, you should check this one out. That said, there might not be much more than you just saw in the preview. But again, it’s a short little novel, and pretty action packed, and I’m prepared to be excited about book two. Is there a book two??

Rating: 7 synth-pouches of wine.

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The Divorcées by Rowan Beaird

Posted on March 4, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this sparkling, lushly imagined first novel set on a “divorce ranch” outside 1950s Reno, Nev., women yearning for simple freedoms forge bonds that offer new hope and new dangers.

Rowan Beaird’s first novel, The Divorcées, draws readers into a singular historical time and place: the so-called “divorce ranches” surrounding Reno, Nev., in the 1950s. State laws allowed for quick and painless divorce–an exception at the time–for Nevada residents of just six weeks. In Beaird’s lushly imagined, compassionate novel, Lois has chosen to leave a loveless marriage. She travels, funded grudgingly by her unloving father, from Chicago to Reno, where she is installed at the Golden Yarrow with a handful of women like her, putting in their six weeks before being able to divorce: young to middle-aged, with some financial security but limited options, choosing to leave husbands who have been unfaithful, abusive, or simply disappointing. Among these women, Lois has the unprecedented experience of making friends.

Pressed into the back seat of a ranch vehicle traveling to a local bar or casino, swimming laps in the ranch pool, and over cocktails, she begins to form bonds, eventually with one woman in particular. Greer Lang is beautiful, forceful, magnetic, and she seems to think Lois is special, too. Under the spell of this connection, Lois blossoms into a new version of herself, empowered and titillated. But what will happen when her six weeks are up? Will she retain her new self and her new friend? At what cost?

Lois is more comfortable with life in the films she loves, having excelled at “[s]tories as currency” since she was a child. She lies to make her way through a world that does not value an independent, solitary woman, especially one not drawn to marriage or motherhood. Nights out at cowboy bars and casinos offer a thrilling, glittery freedom she’s never had before. At the Golden Yarrow, though this is not the ranch’s purpose, Lois sees that there just might be another way. “She feels like a tree unknotting itself in the soil and also someone tending to it, trying to buckle its roots and train its branches to grow upward in clean, graceful lines.”

Beaird’s writing is lovely, noting “the unwashed windows and marigolds, this tender detritus of curling magazines and loose powder” in the women’s rooms, the casinos “coated with cigarette ash and slivers of orange peel, stained with spit and spilled gin.” Her protagonist is perceptive: “Perhaps [young girls will] learn something none of the ranch’s guests had until after they were wed, and be better for it.” She sees “the marks of men” on abused women and imagines other possibilities, paths at the ranch “cracking open to her like different branches of a tree.” The Divorcées is tender and compassionate, wise and incisive, and gorgeously rendered, even in heart-rending moments. Lois’s journey of growth and exploration forms a masterful and unforgettable debut.

This review originally ran in the January 16, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 common desert flowers.

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The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Posted on March 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

There’s a little bit of everything in this unusual fantasy novel for older kids or young adults (or any of us, obviously). Sweet, heartwarming, and surprisingly bloody, The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea offers mermaids, pirates, and young love. Imagine a bit of Treasure Island, but gender-bending and with a greater emphasis on political workings and class divisions. And magic.

We open with a murder on a pirate ship, then shift to high tea in a house of wealth and privilege. In the first scene, a teenaged boy named Florian earns his keep, having gambled on a life of piracy to save him and his brother from a life of deprivation and scant survival on the streets of the Imperial capital city. In the second, a girl named Evelyn chafes at the bounds of her household, where she enjoys status but not the love of her parents, who plan to send her away to be married to a man none of the family has ever met. Evelyn winds up on the same ship as Florian, where loyalties are split between factions supporting the Empire (who have colonized almost all of the known world, to the discontent of many) and the Pirate Supreme, who serves the Sea. “The Pirate Supreme’s forces were the only thing standing in the way of complete Imperial rule on the open sea. If pirates could still disrupt the merchants, still stymie the trade routes, then the Imperialists could not claim full control. Every robbery, every kidnapping, every galleon destroyed was a protest against the Emperor.” Some loyalties have yet to reveal themselves. And oh, Florian is also Flora, whose pronouns and identity as ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ shift throughout the story. “Both, maybe, but not neither.” “Both were equally true to her” (or him); “neither told the whole story.” Florian is Black and Evelyn is something like Japanese, although these seem to be descriptive details rather than identities that affect status or prejudice in their world.

Flora has lived life on the margins, making hard choices, fighting for life in the most basic ways. Evelyn has suffered a different kind of privation, unloved and lacking agency, but has never imagined the kinds of challenges Flora has faced. The two have much to learn from each other. And I haven’t even mentioned the effects of mermaid blood or its price on the open market, the scarcity of witches in Imperial colonies, or the far-seeing powers of a conscious Sea.

Delightful, weird, fanciful, queer coming-of-age with murder and magic. Violence, rather than sex, may recommend a readership in their teens more than their tweens, depending on blood tolerance, but the themes are solid: finding oneself, living one’s truth, navigating ethical puzzles, being a good friend. And it’s a page-turner to boot.

Rating: 7 haircuts.

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Posted on February 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.

Definitely one of the best of the year, Braiding Sweetgrass is a big serious one that I fear I won’t do justice. In good company, it reminds me of Pieces of White Shell and Soil. The good news is, many more thoughtful than I have also written rave reviews. It’s not a new one (original publication 2013) and the praise has been coming for years.

This is a beautifully written book, with poetry and metaphor and gentle, thoughtful articulations of big, important ideas. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a highly trained scientist – a botanist and a college professor; she is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, with a background in thinking about the world in very different ways from the standard, Western, materialist, human-centered culture that many of us (including me) are more familiar with. Part of her life story has been the reconciling of those two parts of herself, or the training of them to work in concert, when one did not always welcome the other. But it’s to our great advantage that she’s been working so hard at that intersection, and sharing it here. I’ll characterize that work as the integration of a sense of interconnectedness, and the idea that other-than-human entities hold their own identities and importance aside from what they offer to humans, with modern “hard” science.

I love the structure of this book, which progresses through Kimmerer’s life and perspectives on the natural world and humans’ relationship with it, always with sweetgrass as an organizing principle. The preface, whose first line introduces this review, succinctly describes the importance of sweetgrass to the culture Kimmerer comes from. The braid “is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story–old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” There follow five sections–“Planting Sweetgrass,” “Tending Sweetgrass,” “Picking Sweetgrass,” and braiding and burning it–each composed of individual essays. The first essay, “Skywoman Falling,” begins with an origin story of North America as Turtle Island, starting with “a great turtle” that holds the earth on his shell, an origin story that holds significance for me; the first few pages of this book won me over completely. And I remained captivated throughout.

Any book about the natural world and human relationships and responsibilities these days is bound to contain some bad news; I find myself shrinking back from some of this reading, while I’m also still drawn toward it, because of the pain I feel at that bad news. But Kimmerer has some real wisdom to offer about the choice between despair and joy, the question of whether we can view hard truths and still find good parts too. “What could such a vision create other than woe and tears?… it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” Thank you, Sweetgrass, for that gift.

Gifts are an important topic throughout, too. The Native American culture of gift-giving, the importance of reciprocity, and the emphasis on giving with a faith that things will come back around applies not only to interhuman relationships but the ones with the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants too. The difference between a capitalist, materialist, consumerist culture and one of gifts and reciprocity is profound. An essay titled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” in part about language (and the near-extinction of the Anishinaabe languages Kimmerer might have learned to speak as a child, “had history been different,” and which she now studies as an adult), is also about some of these cultural concepts, and the fact that language shapes the concepts we’re even capable of comprehending. Like some of the best books in the world, Sweetgrass is about paying attention, and the importance of the choice of what we attend to.

Individual essays tell stories from Kimmerer’s family life (from childhood through motherhood), from the different communities in which she’s lived, from her experiences as a student and as a teacher. They take place in different parts of Turtle Island, including New York state and the Oregon rainforests, and integrate some pretty serious science with traditional storytelling and Kimmerer’s own. There is so much to learn here, and I love science made accessible by story. I won’t begin to try to tell you what all is available here; I really want you to discover it yourself.

This book might just change the way you look at the world. I hope it does. Please give it a chance.

Rating: 9 raindrops.

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Maximum Shelf: Swift River by Essie Chambers

Posted on February 19, 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 January 24, 2024.

Swift River tackles an impressively broad range of issues, including race, class, and body image, within the coming-of-age of Diamond Newberry. Essie Chambers’s first novel, building upon her work in film and television (Descendant, 2022), is set in the decaying New England mill town of Swift River, with meditations on place and the effect of a hometown upon generations of lives. Sixteen-year-old Diamond narrates: “This isn’t a mystery or a legend. It’s a story about leaving. It starts with my body. My body is a map of the world.” Her voice is strong, clear, and confident, interspersed with flashbacks to Diamond’s life at age nine, when her father disappeared. These two timelines are eventually joined by letters from a previously unknown aunt and great-aunt, so that the voices of three women over decades triangulate a story of longing, family connections, and growing into oneself.

“Picture my Pop’s sneakers: worn out and mud-caked from gardening, neatly positioned on the riverbank where the grass meets the sand.” This indelible image, published in the newspaper, haunts Diamond as she mourns her lost father. He was the lone man of color in Swift River. “Pop is the only other brown I know. No one else in town has dark skin like ours, not even Ma, which is what makes our family different.”

Years after the sneakers on the riverbank, in the summer of 1987, Diamond’s Ma, of “pure Irish stock,” is unemployed and dependent on pain pills after a traumatic car accident. Mother and daughter live in extreme poverty, and Diamond has dealt with her grief by eating. Diamond and Ma, like many mothers and daughters, have a complex, push-and-pull relationship, mutually dependent and melding love and disdain. By class, by race, by Diamond’s weight–their household is defined by difference. Ma has a plan to finally get a death certificate for the missing Pop (now that the requisite seven years have passed) and collect his insurance. Diamond, at 16, has forged Ma’s signature and signed herself up for driver’s education classes. She seeks escape. Out of the blue, a letter from an Aunt Lena in Woodville, Georgia, disrupts Diamond’s sense of herself and her heritage, and establishes her first link to any family since her beloved Pop disappeared.

As Diamond and Lena exchange letters, a new version of Swift River unfolds. Diamond learns about the past: “Time is folded in half. Black people live here, they call this town home. They are millworkers and cobblers, carpenters and servants. A ‘Negro’ church sits next to a ‘Negro’ schoolhouse; the mill bell carves up their days… clotheslines stretch across yards like flags marking a Black land… In one night, they’re gone. Those were my people.” Aunt Lena also sends Diamond older, preserved letters from Lena’s Aunt Clara, so that three versions of Swift River emerge through the years. Race is at the heart of their stories, an issue Diamond has had little context for until now. As she grows into herself, and rebels against Ma–including learning to drive, a literalization of her need for movement and self-determination–she finds new family and a new version of the world she thought she knew.

Swift River is an ambitious novel. Diamond and Ma struggle with small-town ostracization and class. The history of Swift River, with its firm racial lines and exodus on the night the Black former residents called “The Leaving,” as well as Pop and Diamond’s personal experiences, offers access to a larger history of race in America. Diamond’s choices about her own body, including food, track her sense of agency and self. The gravity of the novel’s themes is leavened by Diamond’s strengths: she is smart, sings beautifully, and takes initiative in her own life against all odds. At driver’s ed, she makes a new friend, Shelly, a hard-edged girl with problems and hopes of her own. Between the many hardships, Chambers imbues the story with warm compassion, gentle humor, and a care and respect for relationships between women: Diamond and Ma, Diamond and Aunt Lena, Clara and her sister Sweetie. “Who is a person without their people?” Other than the significant absence of one man, this is a story about women.

Chambers’s choice of the epistolary format is inspired, as Lena’s and Clara’s voices emphasize the importance of relationships and connection. Their perspectives on Swift River strengthen the significance of place and displacement. Lena writes to Diamond, “Your hometown makes you and breaks you and makes you again. Daddy said that to me. I wonder if that’s how you’ll feel about Swift River if you ever leave it?” The question of whether to stay or to go is at Swift River‘s heart, as Diamond told readers early on: “It’s a story about leaving.”

Featuring strong characters and a strong sense of place, amid numerous social issues and personal challenges, Chambers’s first novel will appeal to a wide audience and stick with its readers long past its stirring final pages.

Rating: 7 newspapers.

Come back Friday for my interview with Chambers.

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Maximum Shelf: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Posted on February 12, 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 January 17, 2024.

Yael van der Wouden’s first novel, The Safekeep, explores the rural Dutch landscape in the years following World War II through the life of a lonely, sheltered woman reluctantly forging new bonds. In what is largely a closed-in, personal story with a solitary protagonist, van der Wouden also examines larger issues in the social context of Dutch postwar society.

The story is set in 1961, in a rural Dutch province that has largely recovered from war, on its surface. Isabel has spent her life tucked away in the house where her family relocated from Amsterdam during the war. An uncle found the place for them, and 11-year-old Isabel took up residence with her mother, younger brother Hendrik and elder brother Louis. Eventually, their mother died and the brothers moved away, but Isabel stayed, believing there was nowhere else for her. She keeps the house meticulously, polishing dishes and micromanaging a series of beleaguered maids. “She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.” She lunches occasionally with Hendrik, less often with Louis. In her lonely, strictly regimented life, the house is Isabel’s constant, the thing she can control, her greatest comfort.

The Safekeep opens in her garden. While digging out late-season vegetables, Isabel finds a shard of broken ceramic, “Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set–her mother’s favourite…. There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother’s plates had ever gone missing.” This beginning offers an early clue that Isabel’s understanding of the house and its contents, of her own personal history, may be flawed.

Further disruptions follow. Hendrik, a steadfast supporter of his solitary sister, nevertheless lives a life she hasn’t come to terms with. He lives with a man; this makes Isabel uncomfortable. Worse, Louis brings yet another young woman, Eva, to a dinner with his siblings. Eva sets Isabel on edge for reasons Isabel does not understand. Additionally, any serious liaison for Louis implies a threat to Isabel, who is permitted to stay in the house only until Louis (its intended inheritor) settles down to start a family. Worse yet, at Louis’s insistence, Eva comes to stay at the house with Isabel while he is on a trip: Isabel is horrified to be made to share her space with a woman she despises.

The tension in the house rises to a nearly unbearable pitch. Isabel habitually suspects her maids of stealing, and now suspects Eva, whose own history is murky, as well. Isabel obsessively inventories china dishes, silverware, and items of décor, counting spoons and watching Eva’s every move. She cleans and displays and relocates the mysterious shard of plate from the garden, imbuing this small object with outsized power. Eva’s presence continues to feel inexplicable. Louis’s return from abroad, to collect Isabel’s unwanted houseguest, is delayed. Tensions continue to build.

Van der Wouden excels in surprises, including changes in tone. The Safekeep remains, almost in its entirety, nearly claustrophobic in its focus on Isabel’s commitment to her family home. “Bound to the house, [Hendrik] said. As if it was a tether and not a shelter. And not her own love, too.” But this tightly bound, insular story of one woman’s struggle finally zooms out, with near dizzying quickness, to engage with larger questions. An old friend of Isabel’s mother is preoccupied with a dish that was given to her “to keep” before the war, by a neighbor who now wants it back. This friend believes it is hers now; the neighbor disagrees. “What does it matter, gifting, keeping? She gave it to me. It was a terrible time. She was gone for years.” As its title hints, van der Wouden’s novel will puzzle over various meanings of safekeeping. Likewise, the sparsely populated story is punctuated by passages of erotic writing that surprise as much by their loveliness as by their departure from the book’s otherwise lonely atmosphere. Not only the story of one family’s struggle or Isabel’s quiet pain, The Safekeep addresses themes of yearning, possession, the difficulties of Dutch recovery from World War II and of same-sex couples’ experiences in a society still regaining its feet.

In the end, like a country recovering from a trauma, Isabel must step outside her space of comfort and familiarity in order to learn and grow. “Isabel tested one [of the frozen canals] with her foot, and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder: a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you.” Van der Wouden communicates and implies much with a minimalist style that is often quietly, shockingly, beautiful. “The shadows lifted as though they’d only been glimpsed under the hem of a skirt–the lift on an arm, secrets of the body that only unfolded for the night.” The Safekeep is a slow-burning, deceptively austere novel, whose subtle, crafty questions and lovely, lyric style will follow the reader long after its conclusion.

Rating: 8 pears.

Come back Friday for my interview with van der Wouden.

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The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Posted on February 9, 2024 by pagesofjulia

**Spoiler-Free!**

Following A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves wraps up the Scholomance series. I am very pleased with this conclusion and the whole series. For spoilers’ sake, this review includes practically no plot summary.

As a series finale, The Golden Enclaves takes on a lot, and involves a ton of action, ranging very widely in the ‘true’ geographic world as well as in the void and the magical spaces that populate Novik’s imagined world. A number of characters take great steps; this is indeed a coming-of-age for El, who has graduated from the Scholomance and achieved some real victories, but only to step out into a larger world where the monsters are decided not all neatly taken care of. She’s suffering some losses, not least in realizing the limits of her powers: she is one of the most powerful wizards ever, but there are still limits. We see her take less advantage of the friendships and alliances we’ve seen her form up til now, but also find news ones and/or revive some that have lain dormant.

I love about this whole series that it offers commentary on class divisions and the ethics of who gets to be safe and cared for in the world. Those themes are strengthened here, and complicated. There is a very pointed conflict of interests that she calls a trolley problem, of the highest order; El must face that she cannot (so to speak) save them all, that every choice has a cost. In the face of this frustration, she wavers, considers giving up. We have learned that El is incredibly strong and strong-willed; she doesn’t give up easily. But we have also never seen her tested like this.

I love the characters, including one or two who are still ‘rising’, coming to center stage. I love El herself so dearly; she struggles so hard with this book, even after having accepted help and friendship, and her struggles often yield some good snarky humor and fun amid the pathos. Novik has enormous world-building power, which was evidenced at the series’ start but is still at play here, because our understanding of the world (and El’s understanding of it!) must expand considerably in this book. I’d recommend her to anyone.

Rating: 8 bricks.

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