The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler

Posted on February 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I thought this one was good fun, with a perfect ratio of good values blended in. It’s an amateur-sleuth sort of mystery: in 1898 Chicago, Harriet Morrow seeks to improve her lot in life (earning potential and freedom, both) by applying to work as a detective at the Prescott Detective Agency. Female detectives are quite rare, but the Pinkertons had one recently, and why not Harriet? With her unadorned clothing style and men’s hat and shoes, Harriet already turns heads; she may as well pursue a path that feels more natural than the secretarial pool. And she has a household to support: since the death of their parents and Harriet’s coming of age, she cares for her sixteen-year-old brother as well as herself at just twenty-one years.

The Prescott Detective Agency takes her on, but no one seems exactly to expect her to succeed. The case she’s given first is a bit of a dud: her boss doesn’t believe it for a minute, but his elderly next-door neighbor claims her maid has gone missing, and to mollify his wife (who loves the old woman) he asks Harriet to look into it. Surely the maid has merely taken an extra day off, or the old neighbor lady is senile to begin with. But Mrs. Pearl Bartlett turns out to be a firecracker: unconventional, perhaps a bit like Harriet herself, not a bit dim, and very sure of Agnes Wozniak’s disappearance. She also has misheard our protagonist, and misread her large stout frame and men’s hat: she calls Harriet Harry, and the nascent detective finds she likes it.

Unfortunately for Agnes, but rather fortunately for Harriet, the maid does indeed appear to be missing, and quite possibly in real danger. Harriet has herself a case, and a chance to prove herself, although she is very much learning on the job; she has lots of moxie, and a certain amount of natural instinct, but there is much about the work of detection that she’ll need to figure out. Luckily, the Prescott Detective Agency offers one friendly face: Matthew McCabe seems willing to help. Armed with a mentor (and eventually, properly armed), Harriet will learn her new profession, hopefully find the missing maid, earn a proper living for herself… and maybe learn a bit about underground queer Chicago along the way.

The historical aspects to this novel were great fun, even when frustrating, from Harriet’s clothing conundrums (she does not like women’s styles. but doesn’t really want to impersonate a man. but their options are just so practical, comfortable, and natural feeling…) to the infuriating dismissals she faces from pretty much everyone around her. I was especially delighted to lean into not only a historical inner city Chicago, populated by immigrants and the working class, but a queer underground, including their nightclubs and practices and (nearly literal) secret handshakes. I really appreciated Osler’s Author’s Note, where I felt he did a good job of clarifying what came from research and what was just fun to invent. Terminology, for example, can be difficult: folks we might recognize as queer or as lesbian today would have been less likely to use those terms in 1898. A nightclub that hosted both drag queens and drag kings for the same event is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but it works so beautifully here, both for plot and for fun.

I loved the mystery story itself, and absolutely fell for Harriet, the awkward but admirably strong woman at the lead. I loved the history and the queer framing, and especially that intersection. Just a hell of a tale all around; I can’t wait for more Harriet Morrow. Could hardly put it down; nonstop fun; do recommend.

Rating: 8 silver bells.

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guest post: “A Letter to Snow” by Victoria Weeks

Posted on February 7, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I really did have a book review for you, promise (ha!), but The Case of the Missing Maid (which was excellent!) will have to wait for Monday. I wanted you to see this post from a friend of mine that went live yesterday. We are seeing all the possible shades of winter here in central West Virginia, and Vicky (who lives a little over an hour away, in the highlands of the Canaan Valley) and I are headed into a weekend of fatbike racing. After a good variety of snow and snow-adjacent conditions at the last three events, this weekend’s race in Garrett County, Maryland is looking like a real crapshoot, with rain, snow, and ice promised over the next few days. So this lovely brief bit of writing feels entirely apt. Please enjoy.

Thanks, Vicky.

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I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong

Posted on February 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young man wakes up from a coma and returns to the family, and the family sushi restaurant, that he’d left behind, with comical, heart-wrenching, hopeful results.

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Flux) is a funny, bittersweet, heartwarming story about family, love, and making every minute count.

Readers first meet Jack Jr. in what he is slow to realize is a hospital room. He wakes up intubated and gagging. He’s confused about his whereabouts and circumstances, and he asks for his husband. His nurse is thrown into a full panic: Jack Jr. has been in a coma for 23 months and was not expected to regain consciousness.

No one will answer when he asks for his husband. Jack Jr. has missed his 30th birthday and the first 18 months or so of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks into this remarkable recovery, he returns home, not to his Manhattan apartment, but to his father’s home in New Jersey. He goes back to the family business, a struggling Korean-Japanese sushi restaurant, which was once meant to be his life’s work and which he has not seen in 12 years. Jack Jr. has lost everything, and he finds himself in an unfamiliar, masked world. For much of the narrative, the old wounds he was avoiding–that he will now have to face–remain shrouded from the reader.

Jack Jr.’s kind and loving Appa (father) is a passionate sushi chef and workaholic; his Umma (mother) is private, reserved, and fiercely loyal; his especially estranged brother, James, is a recovering alcoholic with a dear wife and a new baby to join the teenaged nephew that Jack Jr. barely knows. Wise, gawky, 16-year-old Juno is perhaps the member of his family that Jack Jr. best connects with. And then there is Emil, formerly Jack Jr.’s nurse, and now potentially poised to become something more. Through these endearing characters, Jack Jr. considers that perhaps “there was more to loving something than smiling at it.”

In Jack Jr.’s first-person voice, these mysterious, painful new challenges are wrenching, but his love for his wacky family, and theirs for him, are unmistakable throughout. Alongside the flavors of carefully prepared nigiri, dak juk, soy, ponzu, and plenty of pork belly, humor and off-kilter love shine brightly in this tale of realizing what’s really important and making the most of one’s own time. The title of I Leave It Up to You refers to a translation of omakase, the Japanese dining tradition of asking for the chef’s choice, and also nods to the novel’s sweet attention to the care of self and others. While recovering from his physical injuries, Jack Jr. must also navigate old fractures with a family he hasn’t seen in years, let go of a relationship with no closure, and remain open to a surprisingly promising future. The story winds up delightfully warm and soothing, for all the bumps along the way.

This review originally ran in the January 31, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 bowls of juk.

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No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene

Posted on January 31, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Astonishingly imaginative, wise, and weird, the essays in this illustrated collection–featuring natural phenomena, children, death, and costuming–have the power to reshape the way one sees the world.


A. Kendra Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) offers a magical, mind-expanding selection of observations in No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. Greene employs a delightful, often childlike wonder in this collection about discovery–where she interacts with others, where humans interact with the rest of the world, and what might be made of all of it. Greene’s perspective is fresh and inventive, open to all possibilities, and the results are surprising and wondrous.

Greene’s essays vary in length and take place around the world. “Wild Chilean Baby Pears” considers a crime: in 1979, a museum visitor stole a specimen of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker from the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. Greene, who has been a museum visitor as well as a museum worker and a teacher, explores this act from several angles; unexpectedly, she empathizes deeply with the thief she calls “Visitor X.” “Until It Pops” details a dress made for the author out of balloons, and her experience of traveling to Chicago for Twist and Shout (the annual balloon twisters’ convention).

Brief and spellbinding, “The Two Times You Meet the Devil” describes encounters on a country road in Argentina and in a bookstore of unnamed location, respectively. “The more I think about it, the more I wonder how many times we have met, crossed paths at least, exchanged a look, and the devil has said nothing.” “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy” is about death, as well as rocks, valleys, turf houses, forgetting, stick-shift cars, whales, kayaks, summer staff, television, and metaphor. “People Lie to Giraffe” is about real giraffes (one in particular) as well as the likeness of a giraffe suggested by a photo of the author’s long arm and pinched fingers. It explores everything encompassed in a child’s imagination, how to make the world, and what it means to tell the truth or tell a story.

Greene is always present, participating in the action and dialogue, postulating philosophies and understandings. Greene is an artist in several media (book arts, photography, illustration), and a teacher as well as a writer; this collection is illuminated by her own illustrations and images. The scope of her essays (26 in total) is mesmerizing, her language glittering, and her ideas exuberant and profound. She says it best herself: “It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world.” As for what we communicate with art: “everything resonant and whole and shining, all at once, perfect, every bell ringing, yes.” Yes.

This review originally ran in the January 27, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 sprays of bougainvillea.

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rerun: Sock by Kim Adrian

Posted on January 27, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Friends, if I continue to have gaps in the week, do y’all like the rerun posts? Or should I just take some Mondays off?

Either way, as I buy myself a second set of electric socks for all my outdoor winter play!, please enjoy this reconsideration of a book I loved some years ago.

Sock! What a treat! I know I just posted some predictions for best books of the year, but we have a new contender. This was a wildly fun, engrossing little volume.

Sock is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, which appeals to me for reasons I assume are obvious now, after this increasingly object-obsessive semester. When I found out about the series, I exercised restraint and purchased only three books: Sock, Hood, and Souvenir.

Kim Adrian’s task here was to write about the sock. What is a sock, what is its job in the world, where did it come from, what is its significance? You know, just the basics. It’s a remarkable ambition in the first place, for any object (others in the series include Burger, Shopping Mall, Eye Chart, Tree, Cigarette Lighter… as well as the less object-like Silence and Doctor). To quote one of the book’s blurbs:

The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary–even banal–objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?’ (Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now.)

I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I didn’t.

So, the sock. Adrian’s table of contents offers an introduction and three sections: “Socks and evolution,” “Socks and desire,” “Socks and industry,” followed by a postscript: “Instructions for darning a sock.” (The back-of-book blurb begins, “Kim Adrian’s Sock is the darndest thing,” and that gave me FITS.) Adrian acknowledges the weirdness of her project. She can’t really account for her interest in socks, except that they are “intimate and essentially domestic,” and the domestic has always appealed to her. She usually writes about personal subjects, she tells us (“personal essays, memoir, that sort of thing”), and figured socks would fit in, because they are personal, in the sense that we wear them against our skin and they smell of us; but in fact this was a wildly wide-ranging research project. To paraphrase Johnson’s blurb, above, this book wanders through human anatomy and evolution, world history, politics, sex, and industry. If Adrian is fixated on domesticity, I am fascinated by trivia, such as (on page 9) the fact that we get our understanding of when humans first began wearing clothing from the study of lice. Textiles are perishable; but the evolution of specialized lice species, and their development into head lice, pubic lice, and body lice respectively, allows archaeologists to track textile development. This fact made me exclaim joyfully aloud, and I got to read the passage to a roomful of brewery employees. We were in a sensory class about the history of yeast species, so it’s all related, after all.

Adrian moves on to human anatomy and our unique position as vertically aligned bipedal creatures, its effect on our sexual practices and the way we walk, balance, the importance of the big toe, and much more. Skeletal structure has much to do with socks. Then there is the history, of course, of socks: from hay stuffed in a shoe-like cage, to woven foot wrappings, to fitted and knitted socks. She touches on the Industrial Revolution, delayed by Queen Elizabeth’s denial of a certain patent, which if granted, Adrian speculates, might have moved that Revolution up by some two centuries, and “what strange wormhole of alternate reality we might have tumbled down” in that case! Next we have sock and foot fetishes (the latter properly not a fetishism but a partialism), and sex; Jung and Freud, and the art of Egon Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist who left the feet off many human subjects but put socks on his trees. Finally, the sock industry takes us into concepts of fast fashion and slow fashion (a sort of throwback movement that depends on surpluses of both time and money). Here Adrian returns to an earlier concern with knitting socks, something she’s tried and not much succeeded at; she has great respect for those who do knit socks. Then the promised primer on darning.

All this in under 120 pages, and every moment of it was a delight to read, in Adrian’s mildly self-deprecating, often humorous, but absolutely serious-about-socks prose.

Some of my personal highlights on this wild ride included learning that Ned Ludd–he of the Luddite Rebellion–was a stocking maker, and started his movement by smashing two stocking frames in Nottingham. Did y’all know that? Also Adrian’s attention to words: ‘mundane’ (as in socks) comes from the French mondaine, or ‘of this world,’ and links us back to ‘pedestrian,’ as in Latin ped, as in foot. And ‘prosaic’ from ‘prose’ comes from Latin provorsus, which is pro– (forward) and vorsus (turned), as in oriented in forward-facing fashion, as in walking. Can’t make this stuff up, folks. Or, did you know that our feet possess even more nerve endings than our genitals?

I feel like I’ve written half as many words now as Adrian put into her whole book, this slim little marvel of trivia and attention to the overlooked. I am reminded of Mark Doty’s devout study of small details, his appreciation that “in still life the familiar is limned with an almost hallucinatory clarity, nothing glanced over or elided, nothing subordinate to the impression of the whole.” In other words, this book was a near-religious experience for me. I can’t wait to read more Object Lessons.

I can’t believe I’m doing it for the third time this year already, but here we are…

Rating: 10 stitches.

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A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay

Posted on January 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Near her 100th birthday, a rural Jamaican woman faces the good works and wrongdoings of her own life and her island’s history in this richly written novel of vivid characters and big themes.

Diana McCaulay’s sixth novel, A House for Miss Pauline, features an indomitable 99-year-old woman in rural Jamaica, trying to reconcile rights and wrongs near the end of a long life. Miss Pauline exhibits a brave honesty that endears her to readers as she wrestles with not only her own actions but centuries of wrongdoings on an island steeped in sugar and slavery. Kingston native McCaulay (Gone to Drift) evokes a rich setting through the food, climate, and other details, such as her characters’ Jamaican patwa, which brings them to vibrant life.

Miss Pauline is less than a month away from her 100th birthday when the stones of her home begin to shiver, shake, whisper, and howl to her. She has lived in the village of Mason Hall in Jamaica’s St. Mary parish all her life, having borne two children with her beloved (long-dead) partner, had many friends and lovers, and been an elder to the town. The village is built largely of stone salvaged from a plantation big house Miss Pauline once discovered and designated for reuse in building her own home and many other structures.

In this literal and symbolic rebuilding, she led her community in reclaiming what had been stolen: land, human lives, freedom. She is certain now that the stones are prompting her to reckon with her own life’s work: community building, but also the unresolved disappearance of a white man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to challenge Miss Pauline for the ownership of her land. A House for Miss Pauline is a deeply captivating story of one complicated, admirable life and the nuanced history of Jamaica. It grapples with how people are connected to place, and how that plays a role in the concept of land ownership and responsibility. “Does the cotton tree judge her for what she did? Surely it has seen worse? How to evaluate crimes, one against the other?”

Miss Pauline turns first to her granddaughter in New York, and then enlists a local teen, Lamont, for help with the mysteries of the Internet and a smartphone. Lamont, who’s alone in life, will play a role beyond research assistant for the near-centenarian, prompting consideration of what constitutes family. In her attempts to establish the future of her home and her land, Miss Pauline will also face surprises about her own history: “Maybe you have to go into the past to make the present right. Maybe the long ago is demanding something of the here and now.” Thoughtful, defiant, and just, the frightened but fierce Miss Pauline is uncowed in the face of youth and change; she’s a hero for readers of all backgrounds.

This review originally ran in the January 17, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 panganat.

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Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Posted on January 20, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This book was an utter delight. I laughed and felt all the way through it and would follow Margo into her next chapters with enthusiasm.

Margo is a nineteen-year-old freshman at a junior college when we first meet her. She’s a bit directionless, studying English because she likes it, waitressing in her spare time. She’s been having an affair with her English professor, out of a sort of passive curiosity, not even because she particularly likes him (“this whole affair had seemed to be kind of his thing”), although she does like him praising her writing. When she finds out she’s pregnant, the professor (married with children) assumes she will have an abortion; so does her mother and her best friend from high school. Initially in contrarian reaction to those assumption, Margo refuses. She finds she wants her baby, and doesn’t care a bit that Mark (the professor, with whom she had sex just five times) doesn’t. After the birth of a son she names Bodhi, in short order, two of Margo’s three roommates move out, leaving her with a massive rent due, and she loses her job. Her mother refuses to babysit. She doesn’t know what to do. She leaves a voicemail for her father: formerly a pro wrestler, and since then a promoter/manager, married with five children, he’s been absent for much of Margo’s life, amiable and distantly loving but not much around (because work, and what Margo calls his real children). But in an unexpected turn, when she calls on him for help, Jinx shows up on Margo’s doorstep. Revealing that he is finally getting a divorce (something Margo’s mother wished and waited for for all these years–but now she’s recently engaged to a youth group leader…), Jinx moves in with Margo, helping to pay rent, caring for Bodhi like a pro, and quite by accident giving her an idea out of left field: Margo sets herself up an OnlyFans account. Things just get wackier from here.

This book is filled with characters. Jinx, the retired wrestler persona, is a study in contrasts: he fills his room with books, a ficus tree, and a sleeping bag, nothing else. He loves cleaning and cooking fancy meals. He is both inspired to violence and a calming, philosophical presence. Margo’s other remaining roommate, Suzie, is a LARP and cosplay enthusiast, and will turn out to be a great friend to Margo after a long stretch of cohabitating without getting to know each other. Everyone the reader meets could be a protagonist unto themselves.

But the reason Liz sent me to this book (with some hesitation) was the narrative voice, the set of points of view in which it’s written, and the literary references and styling. Margo was briefly an English student, remember? The novel is told in a really fun, tricky perspective: it moves between first and third person voices, but actually both are first person, because even when it’s in third person, Margo is there as the *writer* to say, I have to tell this in third person because I need the emotional distance, basically. So it’s a bit sneaky. Even better, there’s a scene from English class in which she makes the smart observation about a story they’ve read, in which the same tricky half-hidden first-posing-as-third-person voice is used. Meta, and clever, and probably not for every reader. I love it.

This is a story that surprises at every turn. It’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, it’s deeply sweet, it can be upsetting; many of its details are sordid, but there remains a sense of stalwart pushing on. It’s a (perhaps) surprisingly wise story. Margo learns all kinds of big lessons: there are no heroes or villains; we’re all just muddling through; love may not conquer all but can do a lot. There’s no changing anyone; “they were like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move…” She grows. “I hadn’t expected infidelity to be about cuddling or drug addiction to be about eating Milky Ways.” Life throws what it throws, and these strong, wacky, loving characters carry on. It’s quite empowering, even if Margo’s predicament is not one we’d quite choose on purpose.

I loved every minute of this adventure. Thanks, Liz.

Rating: 8 tiny gossamer shreds of roast beef.

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The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, trans. by Katy Derbyshire

Posted on January 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A humble café in post-World War II Vienna serves as backdrop for all the large and small dramas of everyday life in this subtly scintillating novel.

The Café with No Name by Austrian writer Robert Seethaler (The Field; The Tobacconist) opens in 1966 Vienna. Robert Simon is 31 years old and about to embark upon the quiet dream of his lifetime. It’s his final day at the market where he’s worked for seven years, as he begins to clean out and shape up a long-empty café across the street. Simon is a solitary, steady, and kind man who was orphaned as a young child during the war and is now a reliable worker who keeps to himself. “For a while he worked as a glass clearer and brush boy in the Prater beer gardens, and perhaps it was there–as he roamed between the tables in search of empty glasses, chicken bones and cigarette stubs in the light of the coloured lanterns–that he first felt a nascent germ of yearning: to do something that would give his life a decisive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.” He realizes this modest ambition with the café on the edge of the bustling market, where Simon serves blue-collar workers like himself. He offers beer, wine, coffee, and raspberry soda; bread with drippings and gherkins; and a place of respite. He is soon joined by a single employee, a loner like himself. Mila, too, finds a home in the café with no name.

Seethaler’s tender novel follows Simon and his café for the 10 years that they operate, until a change in the building’s ownership pushes the small business out again. These years see Simon’s Vienna neighborhood rebuild from postwar austerity, its population and workforce swell and change, and cultural patterns begin to shift. The café is a microcosm of these evolutions.

The Café with No Name does not have a plot filled with action, conflict, and resolution; instead, it focuses on mundane details of life. “Simon couldn’t help smiling at the thought of all the lost souls who came together in his café every day.” An aging prizefighter, two older ladies who drink and chat in the afternoons, the cheese shop proprietor and her painter boyfriend, and Simon’s friend the butcher are among the regulars; they and others experience death and dismemberment, quiet violences, loss, and alcoholism, but also uplifting moments of humanity, friendship, and love. There are, remarkably, no villains in this novel, only people struggling against ordinary human challenges. While Seethaler’s characters face significant difficulties, the story never feels grim, but rather steadfast and even hopeful. Katy Derbyshire translates Seethaler’s prose from the German with calm delivery, charming descriptions, and understated humor. This lovely novel sweetly and simply emphasizes built family, resilience, and rebirth.

This review originally ran in the January 14, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 paintings.

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Highland Outdoors magazine

Posted on January 13, 2025 by pagesofjulia

When I looked, I was a bit surprised to see that I’ve not written before about this high-quality, locally-produced magazine. Highland Outdoors is regional in its focus as “West Virginia’s outdoor magazine,” but its contents will interest those further abroad; I’ve bought gift subscriptions for friends and family in Texas and Washington state who have appreciated it. And while you can buy subscriptions – and I do, to support such a great product – it’s available for free on a number of stands in local businesses, as well as on the website above. I appreciate that free availability and am glad to pay my way to help make that possible.

I love everything about this production. Large-format, glossy, sustainably printed, with well-written and -edited articles and really great photography (the publisher and editor-in-chief is a photographer), this is the first magazine that’s ever inspired me to read even all the ads: I appreciate knowing who the local businesses are who support the mag, and figure some of them might actually interest me, and I appreciate the design that goes into arranging those ads (they tend to be grouped by location, so that businesses in the same town cluster together, and often near an article that refers to that same town, etc.). It’s just a gorgeous product…

and I and my friends love the local/regional nature of the content. It feels really good to sink into a place and a people that you know well, or are trying to know better. It’s a joy to read about (or read words written by) people we know a little, and get to know them better that way. In the words of a friend of mine (also a subscriber), it’s a great insight and way to engage more deeply with our community. I’ve loved reading about strong women like Cassie Smith (league director of WVICL, our state’s NICA chapter) and Vicky Weeks (Leadville finisher and regular competitor of mine). HO covers stories about outdoor sports, conservation, flora and fauna, and the people who help to make this place great or keep it that way. I think my more distant friends and family are pleased to get a glimpse into my life (my place and why I love it) through this lens. I’m grateful we have such a quality rag around here. And I hope you love your home like I do mine.

Rating: 8 whirring wheels.

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The Garden by Nick Newman

Posted on January 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This eerie, thought-provoking novel combines sisterly love and end-of-the-world horrors in an unforgettable pairing.

Nick Newman’s The Garden is a shape-shifting novel, an enigmatic fable that twists slowly into a more sinister dystopian narrative with a surprising turn at the end. The questions it asks and the hard truths its protagonists turn away from will keep readers intrigued.

Evelyn and her younger sister, Lily, have lived in the garden all their lives, more or less. They remember little from before, although in the early years there were parties, their father holding court, their mother overseeing. Then the people went away, and the gates were locked, as were the doors to the bulk of the sprawling house. The sisters live now out of the kitchen, which “still [feels] too large,” and in the garden, where they keep bees and a few aging chickens and grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Their mother’s handwritten almanac directs their daily work, which is getting harder as their bodies grow older, but the garden provides everything they need and nothing is expected to change–until it does.

The sisters haltingly identify the creature that appears in their kitchen, stealing their honey, as a boy. Aside from its sheer novelty, the situation is frightening. The boy is unknown and therefore unsafe, a curiosity and a threat. “You know what boys turn into, don’t you, Sissie?” Lily speculates, “He’s probably poisonous.” But Evelyn considers, “Boys did become men, Lily was right about that, but what her sister actually had in mind, she did not know. A cocoon, perhaps. A chrysalis… Evelyn could not deny a perverse desire to learn firsthand, to feed and water the grub and see what it might grow into.” As they wrestle with this new challenge in their long-immutable garden–perhaps less an Eden than a prison–the sisters find themselves facing new choices and turning against each other in new ways.

Newman’s gifts lie in the quiet accumulation of his novel’s unsettled atmosphere, its changeable nature. The garden provides food, sustenance, and floral beauty; it is also constantly threatened by dust storms capable of burying the known world. Readers know both more and less than Evelyn and Lily do, and knowledge and its absence are increasingly terrifying, especially as the sisters begin to confront long-buried secrets about their own past. The possible and the inexorable collide in this parable of change, which probes the promises and terrors of personal choice and portrays various approaches to possibility. “The vagueness of their mother’s threats had made a blank space… and only now was Evelyn realizing that she and her sister saw that blankness quite differently. It excited Lily. It terrified Evelyn.” The dystopia it represents may be more real than readers originally understand.

This review originally ran in the January 7, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 marigolds.

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