The Lilac People by Milo Todd

Posted on March 31, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A trans man survives with a small chosen family, from Berlin’s lively queer scene in 1932 through the Holocaust and the Allies’ hostility, in this moving historical novel.

With The Lilac People, Milo Todd delves into the nearly lost history of trans people in the Holocaust. Integrating imagined characters with historical research, Todd brings humanity and specificity to atrocities that are still being uncovered. The heartbreaking result honors love and friendship, and ends with hope for one built family of survivors.

The opening pages find Bertie on the outskirts of the German city of Ulm in 1945. He has ridden out the war with his partner, Sofie, “on a little farm that was not theirs,” growing vegetables, raising chickens and one cow. It is an unadorned but not unpleasant life, and they know they are lucky. “The apple blossoms were beginning to show on their three trees at the far edge of their land, pollen spilling out as they blushed.” Then, weeks after the news that the Allies have freed camp prisoners, Bertie finds a body in the garden. Dressed in rags from the camp, the young man is alive, barely. “[The Allies] sent all the pink triangles to jail. And all the black triangles that qualified the same,” he tells Bertie. He wears a black triangle. He is a trans man–like Bertie. This changes everything for Sofie and Bertie, who will be greatly endangered by their choice to hide and protect Karl.

But Bertie finds that he must help, to confront his survivor’s guilt, his failure to protect his own community, and (as a hostile Allied lieutenant accuses) his complicity in Germany’s crimes. Karl’s appearance takes Bertie back to 1932 Berlin, where Bertie assists Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Science and is a member of a vibrant queer and trans community, with a tight-knit group of friends that is lost on the Night of the Long Knives. Karl’s existence brings hope, guilt, and memory. To save Karl and themselves, Bertie and Sofie must leave the farm’s relative safety.

The Lilac People is filled with music, with an emphasis on the queer anthem “The Lilac Song.” Sofie is a pianist who gives Karl piano lessons alongside Bertie’s instruction in “how to transvest,” or pass as a cis man. The song is an important piece of history and means of accessing a pride in community that’s been all but destroyed. Notes from the author detail the research required for this writing, what is true history and what is fiction, and just how limited is the historical record on Germany’s queer and trans communities in this era.

The Lilac People is emotionally wrenching, but also lovely in its details, the humanity of its characters, and the resilience and hope at its end, when a fresh start seems possible. Todd has made an enormous contribution to historical fiction with his own research and this beautiful, touching narrative.

This review originally ran in the March 25, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 seeds.

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Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch

Posted on March 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Two young women on the run offer mesmerizing complexity in this smart, propulsively paced, thought-provoking, and electrifying debut novel.

Hannah Deitch’s first novel, Killer Potential, is a bloody, class-conscious, suspenseful thriller starring two young women caught in a spiral of violence, blame, and bonding. This rocket-fueled debut is a deliciously dark, twisting, entertaining read, so beware the urge to stay up all night finishing it.

The novel’s primary narrator is Evie Gordon, who opens by saying, “I was once a famous murderess…. It isn’t true.” Labeled “Talented and Gifted” from the age of eight, Evie thrived on the simple, clearly outlined goals and rewards of formal education. As a graduate, she foundered and eventually landed in Los Angeles as an SAT tutor to the children of the rich and famous. On a Sunday afternoon, she appears at the Victor mansion as usual, only to find Peter and Dinah Victor very freshly and brutally murdered, and an emaciated, traumatized, and nearly mute woman tied up in a closet. In an adrenaline-fueled haze of terror and confusion, they flee the bloody scene together. The bulk of the novel follows Evie and the woman, Jae, as they go on the run, presumed to be the murderers of the Victors, and commit a series of crimes along the way.

Through Evie and Jae’s fragile, yearning, mistrustful bond, Deitch explores privilege and the divide between the haves and have-nots; sex and sexuality; trust and betrayal; what it means to be a “nice” or “good” person; and ambition and aimlessness. The interplay between them offers a taut psychological drama as backbone to a propulsive thriller of gruesome crime, exhilaration, and deception. Killer Potential is disturbing, fun, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the March 22, 2025 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: 7 powdered doughnuts.

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North Woods by Daniel Mason

Posted on March 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A gift from a dear friend, this novel is different. It could be categorized as a collection of linked shorts, in various formats (formally playful, you might say), including epistolary. The stories that make up North Woods are connected across history by place: together, they track a single location, a small valley in what will become western Massachusetts, from early colonial America until the more-or-less present and into the future. We are used to novels and stories being connected by character or plot. We are familiar with stories that center place heavily – I’m thinking of Rebecca, Housekeeping, The City We Became, The Rope Swing. This one felt a bit more… kaleidoscopic.

They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs.

Fast they ran!

So opens the novel, and it takes several paragraphs until the reference to ‘harquebuses‘ (I had to look it up) gives us a clue as to setting in time. I loved how the fens and meadows, bramble and thickets, bear caves and tree hollows could have been anywhen. The couple who run remain nameless, and we learn very little of their story in their four-page chapter, but we see them stop in a valley: “a clearing, beaver stumps and pale-green seedlings rising from the rich black ash.” “Here,” says the man, and there they stop with their chicken and their squash and corn seeds and fragments of potato. And scene.

Subsequent residents – most of them human – find the log and stone hut built by this original couple, experience joys and hardships there, and add to that structure. A veteran of the American Revolution establishes an apple orchard. His twin daughters, after his death, grow old preserving his legacy and bickering with each other, unto a shocking end. A mountain lion briefly occupies the abandoned dwelling, hoarding her kills. A slave catcher hunts other prey in the area, eventually homing in on the house in the overgrown orchard, but will not find what he seeks. A painter finds a haven there, in a gorgeous valley where he can observe nature and work on landscapes and studies of birds nests, fungus, and trees; he pursues a forbidden love. In his old age, a nurse comes to assist him, and finds a love of her own that will fare no better. (It begins to feel like the home in the valley, at this point with many additions and “improvements,” might be a site of bad luck.) A mystic plies her trade, claiming to drive out a haunting, but has bitten off a bigger haunting than she’s realized. The chestnut blight settles in. A mother struggles to care for her disturbed son, who is schizophrenic, or haunted, or maybe both (?). The son wrestles with his delusions, or, his heightened knowledge of reality; his sister, an academic on the west coast, grapples with her brother’s life’s work. A newlywed couple lives out a fantasy, and a bark beetle expresses its lusts in parallel, in one of the weirder sections of this novel (and that’s saying something). (The chapters that feature nonhuman characters – spores, beetles, panthers – are delightfully immersive, but also somehow inherently creepy, in a way that feels anthropomorphic.) A lonely old woman narrowly avoids a dangerous con artist, a crime writer discovers an ancient grave, a metal detectorist goes seeking evidence, and a graduate student searches for spring ephemerals but encounters a ghost. The world turns.

It was a fascinating experience to sink into this place. There were not many characters or episodes to like or even especially enjoy; there was often a sense of watching something disquieting take place. I definitely loved the consideration of place over time, the natural world, and the different ways we interact with it. I loved the orchardist, the painter, and the graduate student most of all. I do love a zoom in on a procreative beetle. It was a disjointed experience, one I’ll not soon forget, but also don’t feel a firm grasp of. Maybe I need more time out of this book to figure out what it did for me. Maybe this is an instance of the author demonstrated prowess for its own sake. (As ever, your mileage may vary.) If you get into it, please do let me know what you think.

Rating: 7 antlers, turtle shells, and bird eggs.

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rerun: Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris, illus. by Charles Vess

Posted on March 21, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I’m still thinking about this one with some longing. Maybe it’s time to dip back in. Can I tempt you, or me?

Fairy tales for grown-ups, allegories, visions and horrors: these gorgeously illustrated linked stories are guaranteed to transport.

With Honeycomb, the prolific Joanne M. Harris (Chocolat; Peaches for Father Francis), who has written fantasy, historical fiction, suspense, cookbooks and more, offers an enchanting collection of darkly delightful, imaginative fairy tales and parables of the modern world. (These stories began as a series on Twitter.) Illustrator Charles Vess (Stardust; Sandman) brings to life Harris’s Silken Folk, “weavers of glamours, spinners of tales… whom some call the Faërie, and some the First, and some the Keepers of Stories,” in richly detailed images.

In the world of Honeycomb, the Sightless Folk (regular humans) unwittingly often share space with the numerous and diverse Silken. “There are many doors between the worlds of the Faërie and the Folk. Some look like doors; or windows; or books. Some are in Dream; others, in Death.” These 100 stories form a whole that is magical, fanciful, enchanting and occasionally nightmarish. Some center on single-appearance characters, and some characters are revisited, but all belong to the same universe. “Dream is a river that runs through Nine Worlds, and Death is only one of them.” In special moments, “all Worlds were linked, like the cells of an intricate honeycomb, making a pattern that stretched beyond even Death; even Dream,” and the stories are likewise linked cells.

Some act as allegories, as in “The Wolves and the Dogs,” in which the Sheep elect a Wolf to protect them because at least he is honest. In “The Traveller,” the titular character passes quickly by many delights in pursuit of his destination, which turns out less impressive than he’d hoped. “Clockwork” is a horrifying tale in which a husband rebuilds his wife piece by piece. “The Bookworm Princess,” on the other hand, ends with deep satisfaction. There is the Clockwork Princess and the watchmaker’s boy; a girl who travels with a clockwork tiger; and a mistrustful puppeteer who manifests what he fears. A recurring farmyard is packed with colorful animal characters–a troublesome piglet, a petulant pullet–and allegory, Orwellian and otherwise. The connecting character is the Lacewing King, whom readers meet at his birth in “The Midwife” and follow for hundreds of years, as the fate of Worlds hangs in the balance. “There are many different ways to reach the River Dream. One is Sleep; one is Desire; but the greatest of all is Story….”

Completely engrossing, exquisitely inventive, brilliantly illustrated and thought-provoking, Honeycomb is a world, or Worlds, to get lost in. “Some of these tales have stings attached. But then, of course, that’s bees for you.”

This review originally ran in the May 3, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 candied cockroaches.

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No Names by Greg Hewett

Posted on March 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This dazzling first novel applies poetry to the overawing power of art, friendship, and the ways in which many forms of love blend into one.

Following five books of poetry, Greg Hewett (Blindsight; darkacre) astonishes with a transcendent first novel about friendship, desire, music, loss, and love in its many forms. No Names is rough-edged, glittering, and brilliant as it spans decades and lives, traveling from a fictional American refinery town to Europe’s capitals, from Copenhagen to a place known simply as the Island, and back again.

Solitary teenager Mike’s world expands when he meets easy, outgoing Pete, with whom he shares a love of literature and especially music, and a nearly instant firm bond. Music, for Mike, is all bound up with sex and violence and epiphany: “It’s like I’m busting out of the prison of myself and giving to the world whatever part of me that’s worth anything.” The two guitarists form a punk band in the late 1970s, and with their two bandmates take off on a rocketing tour of the United States and then Europe that ends in enigma and tragedy.

In 1993, another angst-ridden teen from the same gritty, class-divided hometown discovers a dusty record in his mother’s attic and goes looking for a mostly forgotten punk band. Isaac will pursue the mystery of the No Names until he unearths Mike on a remote island in the Faroes, where the haunted older man has been living as a hermit since the band’s 1978 dissolution: “a mythical musician who, for a time, dwelt here and filled the place with songs.” Mike is supported by a Danish classical pianist named Daniel who had briefly been a friend to the band. On the island, Mike describes to Daniel “a state of ecstasy, or ekstasis–that is, becoming entranced, being brought out of oneself” by the aurora borealis, but these lines could as easily describe their relationship with music, or with one another. Mike, Pete, Daniel, and Isaac, among others, form permutations and re-combinations of friendship, affection, artistic inspiration, love, and desire.

Hewett brings a poet’s ear for language to a complexly layered story that treats sex, drugs, and rock & roll as simultaneously hard-grained and gorgeous. His evocations of music and the power of the muse are tantalizing and apt, as are his lines about the strain of finding oneself, of love and lust and pain. By the time No Names flashes forward to 2018, readers will be spellbound, and as much in love with the novel’s protagonists as they are variously entangled with one another. Hewett’s first novel is scintillating and absolutely unforgettable.

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

Rating: 10 walnuts.

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Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

Posted on March 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This is book 3 in a series, and this review contains spoilers for the first two books.

What I love about the world of Emily Wilde is, first, the imaginative nature of this world and character. Emily Wilde is an academic scholar in the field of dryadology, or the study of faeries; but if that sounds dreamy, check again. Emily is capable of being lost in thought, yes, but those thoughts are generally dry, serious, and certainly research-based. She has an avid, academic passion for her field of study. She has read it all, and will be affronted to discover any theory or study that she’s unfamiliar with. She has no time for sentiment or romance (in either sense); when we first met her, in book one, she didn’t really have friends, other than her companion Shadow, who is a Black Hound (a fae creature) glamoured to look like a very large, intimidating black dog to regular humans. Emily and Shadow live in a regular-human world with decent access to the fae world, if you know where to look. She lives for her work.

In books one and two, we saw her social life expand somewhat, although not without growing pains. She has made friends, however uncomfortable she may be with that fact, and she has a love: formerly an academic colleague with whom she did not get along (one of those enemies-to-lovers tropes), Wendell has turned out to be a long-lost faerie prince, which explains why he seems so lazily disinclined to academic work. Emily had long suspected he faked his work, and this has been proven correct: he’d been skating by on what he knew of faeries by other means. They have a sweet relationship, clearly based in genuine mutual regard, although only one of them is much capable of romance, and it’s not Emily.

Here in book three, Wendell has been returned to his realm, and become a faerie king, by the surprising work of a mortal – Emily herself – in overthrowing the evil queen, Wendell’s stepmother, who had murdered much of his family as other potential heirs. Faeries, it turns out, are quite murderous types, especially those of Wendell’s realm. So in this installment, Emily navigates becoming a sort of queen consort (they haven’t technically married yet, solely because of her cold feet), living full-time in the faerie world (she likes to study them but they don’t necessarily make her feel comfortable), and seeing dear Shadow become frail in his old age. The part of this she’s most excited about is the opportunity for study; she sees research questions and papers she might write all around her. (“If Wendell’s stepmother has us slain before I have a chance to contribute to the scholarly debate, I will be very disappointed.”) She feels only dread at the glamourous and magical queenly gowns she is given, and likewise the other trappings of court. Luckily for Emily (?), nothing ever goes smoothly in Fae, and there will be problems to solve. With research! of course.

So. First, what I love is the imagination at work in this worldbuilding, which is satisfyingly thorough. The various kinds and functions of faeries, and their intrigues and class divisions, are all fascinating in themselves. Second, what I love is Emily’s character and voice. These books are told as Emily’s journals, complete with the (sometimes slightly awkward, but they do feel believable) explanations for how, in the middle of great danger and adventure, she has come to be writing journals entries. (Answer: writing is how she processes and self-soothes, and, research über alles; these notes could become a paper or conference presentation! Once we get to know Emily, this actually checks out.) Getting to hear these adventures in her own voice emphasizes Emily’s droll character. She never really gets over her sense of awkwardness at how much she loves Wendell; the bits she glosses over (sex) are as telling as those she sinks deeply into (footnotes!) – also, Heather Fawcett has been a YA and middle-grades author prior to this series, so keeping the sex off-screen and vague is probably a comfort zone. These books are just really fun, and wholesome even when they get a bit gruesome. It is comforting to see that even when terrible things happen they can be undone.

I was genuinely very sad when I finished this book, which I fear is the last in an intended trilogy. I need there to be more from this delightful author. I guess I’ll do some YA reading soon.

On the other hand, this book (which ends in a library) does leave room for a sequel. Fawcett! We could have more Emily!

Do recommend.

Rating: 8 ornate, bespoke notebooks.

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Bad Nature by Ariel Courage

Posted on March 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Bleakly funny, gloomy, and magnetic, this novel’s revenge-fueled, terminal road trip will tender surprising truths.

Ariel Courage presents a provocative, hypnotic excursion with her debut novel, Bad Nature, which offers a road trip, a revenge fantasy, and a snarky sendup of American culture.

Courage’s mesmerizingly repellent protagonist, Hester, is a successful lawyer with money to burn–one form of revenge upon her “impracticable, unprofitable” upbringing–and an antiseptic lifestyle kept up by a personal trainer, a dermatologist, a cosmetic dentist, and other professionals. In her nondescript but designer-decorated Manhattan condo, she has regular, emotionless sex with the “objectively repulsive” building super.

Hester relates early in her narrative: “I was always going to kill my father.” This intention shifts from someday to immediate when, just after her 40th birthday, she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. The oncologist tells her that, without treatment, she has six months to live. With characteristic, practiced detachment, Hester quits her job and leaves Manhattan in her Jaguar E-type, aiming for her long-estranged father’s new home in Death Valley. She will kill him and then herself with the gun in her glove box. Simple.

Hester’s cross-country road trip is beset with trouble. She loses the E-type to theft at a Philadelphia rest stop, and with it, her gun and her mother’s ashes. The first lesson that her wealth–an important feature of her constructed armor–will not solve all her problems comes when she must settle for an insultingly affordable rental car. She picks up a hitchhiker: “what my mother had euphemistically called an urban outdoorsman and what in college I would’ve called a crustpunk.” This young man, John, becomes her unlikely companion on a convoluted and indirect route toward the eventual destination. John is a principled traveler: eschewing consumerism, he photographs Superfund sites, documenting destruction. Stops along the way include Hester’s (only) ex-boyfriend from college and a friend (likewise) from high school, with disappointing if predictable results. Hester gets sicker. The outcome of her larger journey is less easy to guess.

Caustic Hester is aware she has “daddy issues” but “I’d rather pluck his eyeballs out with a fork and eat them jellied on toast than endure five minutes of therapy.” Her first-person voice is deeply sarcastic, darkly funny, and almost entirely self-aware. Bad Nature‘s title offers commentary on Hester’s terminal cancer (and her mother’s), on the violent impulses of her hated father (and her own), on the environmental devastation John is called to witness. Even more than wealth, rigorous self-grooming, and personal aloofness, Hester’s carefully cultivated cynicism is her final weapon, and its potential loss might be the most painful and surprising part of this madcap expedition. Courage delights and challenges with this mashup of emotions, until readers may be surprised, in turn, to care about Hester after all.

This review originally ran in the March 6, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dirty fingernails.

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You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ed. by Ada Limón

Posted on March 7, 2025 by pagesofjulia

First of all, for those who know me, you will appreciate that this title grabbed my attention pretty hard. I like nature; I like poetry with a little more reservation (such that I’ve waited about a year since this book’s publication to pick it up), but I was intrigued. This anthology was put together by Ada Limón, our national poet laureate (still current as I type). It begins with a foreword by Carla Hayden, librarian of Congress (also current as of now), in a lovely single page; Limón’s three-page introduction is even more moving, describing an important tree and a choice. “When I was first asked what I wanted to create for a national poetry project during my tenure as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, I remember staring out the window of my office in the Library of Congress thinking, I just want us all to write poems and save the planet.” She immediately recognizes this impulse as both unlikely and vital. She invites us all to write our own poems alongside those in these pages, exhorts us to do something, to offer something back. “Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.”

It feels appropriate, then, that the collection opens with Carrie Fountain’s “You Belong to the World,” which remains one of my favorites. (Fountain was recently the poet laureate of Texas.) This is followed by 49 more poems by just over 50 poets (there is I think just one collaboration), all American poets and all contemporary, just a handful previously published (and all of those in either The Atlantic or the New Yorker, go figure). They come in a variety of lengths, forms, and styles, and while they all deal with ‘nature,’ they approach that rather broad, abstract subject in different ways. Some describe or love or appreciate (or fear) a specific species or being; some consider fire, water shortages, and other crises; many dwell at the intersection of people with ‘nature’ (although, as Limón and Fountain remind us, those are not separate). Some I find pleasingly literal and narrative (remember I fear poetry at least a little). I have a more difficult time with the further-reaching figurative ones, and some I had to allow to just be sound that washes over. Ah well. Here are my favorite poems of the fifty:
“You Belong to the World,” Carrie Fountain
“When the Fact of the Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside,” Donika Kelly
“Eat,” Joy Harjo
“Letters,” Ilya Kaminsky
“Rabbitbrush,” Molly McCully Brown
“Lighthouse,” Ellen Bass
“Mouth of the Canyon,” Traci Brimhall
“Aerial View,” Jericho Brown (he wants to be a giraffe!)
“Canine Superpowers,” Michael Kleber-Diggs
“Hackberry,” Cecily Parks
“Taking the Magnolia,” Paisley Rekdal (common thread: I like tree poems)
“Darkling I Listen,” Adam Clay
“Remembering a honeymoon hike near Drakes Bay, California, while I cook our dinner at the feet of Colorado’s Front Range,” Camille T. Dungy (I confess I was waiting for a love poem)
“Heliophilia,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Twenty Minutes in the Backyard,” Alberto Ríos
“To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower,” Patricia Smith
“Reasons to Live,” Ruth Awad
and let me give you the last two lines of one poem (Eduardo C. Corral’s “To a Blooming Saguaro”) and the first two lines of the next one (Diane Seuss’s “Nature, Which Cannot be Driven To”):
“My mother is my favorite immigrant. / After her? The sonnet.”
“To drive to it is to drive through it. / Like a stalker, it is in the back seat of the car.”

Well. That’s nearly half of the poems. Not bad, hey?

Even though poetry is scary, join me in giving it a try. It helps to read aloud. Write poems and save the planet. Sit under a tree.

Rating: 7 ears.

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The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu

Posted on March 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I forget where I came across this first in a series, but I’m glad I gave it a go. Set in a magical post-apocalyptic Edinburgh, The Library of the Dead stars Ropa, a teenaged ghosttalker: she is licensed to visit with the dead, a rare skill, and carry their messages back to the living, for a fee. She can also help (or force) ghosts to move along to “the place with long grass,” where we’re all headed once we find the peace to go. Ropa considers herself unsentimental: this is all about earning a living, which she uses to support not just herself but her younger sister Izwi and her beloved Gran, a more powerful magical practitioner but who these days is mostly reduced to knitting in their cara (caravan, or what we’d call in the US a trailer). Their existence is tenuous, which is why Ropa at first refuses when she meets a ghost who asks for her help but cannot pay.

At Gran’s insistence, Ropa eventually agrees to help Nicola (dead) solve the mystery of her missing young son Oliver (not dead, yet). As she takes a break from paying work to investigate, she’s glad to have the reluctant help of her old friend Jomo, who now works at a library that he doesn’t want to talk about. Jomo is from a better-off family: he’s been able to stay in school, for one thing. Ropa is a serious autodidact, listening to audiobooks as she makes her rounds; she is forever exclaiming that school doesn’t matter and she’s not the least bit sorry, but the reader can tell how much she feels the lack. We also observe what a clever self-study she is, however, as she repeatedly quotes Sun Tzu and summarizes and meditates upon the philosophies of magic she gains new access to…

…because Jomo’s secret new workplace is the library of the dead. When he sneaks Ropa in and they get caught, the consequences are dire – she is initially sentenced to hang from the neck until she is dead, but (in a whirlwind scene) instead gets drafted as a scholar, with the privilege of book borrowing. That, and she makes a new friend, Priya, a far more advanced student of magic. With two friends behind her now, but still very much with her own life (and livelihood) on the line, Ropa follows the cold trail of Oliver’s disappearance to some surprising and disturbing intrigues and evils.

Ropa is a certain kind of heroine: actually quite caring, although she wouldn’t want you to know it, and deeply committed to her family and friends, she rides a bicycle (when it’s not been stolen) and plays the tough, but really just wants to snuggle up on her berth with Izwi and Gran and watch some good telly. She carries a katty (or slingshot – I finally figured out that this is short for catapult!) and a dagger, has a pet fox named River, and she can take a punch. Priya is a delightful addition to her crew who I hope we’ll hear more from. Jomo is perhaps a bit bumbling, but very loyal. Their world is a bit mysterious: they have electrical power, but not running water or sewage; they have cell phones (and can talk to ghosts!) and television, but not climate control. They are ruled by a king. It sounds like there was an event that broke the world, leaving us with a before and an after, but we haven’t yet learned what that was.

The worldbuilding may be less thoroughly detailed than some in some fantasies; but maybe I just haven’t gotten there yet. At any rate, I’m engaged by the strongly-felt characters and their values, the magic, and Gran’s knitting. This is book 1 of 4 and I am ready for more.

Rating: 7 desiccated ears.

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rerun: The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart by Brian Doyle

Posted on February 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I was going to tell you that I’ve been thinking about Brian Doyle lately, but I think that’s always so.

I do think about this essay collection a lot.

Please enjoy this review originally from late 2020 (book published in 2005).

I am back again with another Doyle, different this time but totally recognizably him.

Here are the classic Doyle elements of celebration and beauty, but amid so much pain and loss… and I have to admit, the loss of Doyle himself felt very present for me here. I continue to feel it as a significant loss to this world, both because we will get no more of his transcendent writing, and because he just seems to be the most beautiful, loving, joyful, talented person, and we don’t have enough of those; it still hurts me that we’ve lost him. And that was right under the surface of all of these essays for me, in a way that was less true of Chicago, because that book was fiction rather than nonfiction, and also because it is not quite so explicitly about life and death in the way that The Wet Engine is, so the pain was closer to the surface for me, if that tracks.

The wet engine is the heart, often but not always the human heart, and the reason Doyle focuses here is that one heart that is important to him is in danger. His son Liam (age nine at the time of writing) was born with three chambers in his heart rather than four. He had to have several open-heart surgeries when he was an infant, and so his father learned about how hearts work and he got to know some cardiologists and surgeons. And because this father was Brian Doyle, he also did some meditating on the metaphoric meanings of heart, on all the language we use (heartbreak, heartsick, hearts swelling and leaping and failing, hearts held in hands and worn on sleeves), and on mysticism and miracle and mystery and magic. He also does research: Liam’s doctor, Dr. Dave, is profiled in considerable detail, as is Dr. Dave’s wife, Linda, and his mother, Hope. (It is through Hope that we find ourselves in an internment camp – really, a concentration camp – for Japanese Americans during World War II, in Topaz, Utah. Hope was interned there as a teenager with her family for nearly three years; she graduated from high school there. “No, I am not bitter, she says. No. Bitter is no place to be. But I do not forget.”) Shorter profiles explore other doctors and pioneers in medicine and cardiology from around the world, from the early days of the science through the present (like Dr. Dave’s colleague Hagop Hovaguimian, who can never stop working because too many people need his help). The people who people this book come not only from throughout history but from all over the world, which is frequently fun and which reinforces the feeling of enormous scope that Doyle achieves. “The doctor to my left is from Australia. He speaks Australian, a smiling sunny language which takes me a minute to get the pace and rhythm of, but then we get along swell…”

The Wet Engine is a collection of linked essays that explore these and other topics: the humans involved with hearts and their stories; the nature and power of stories; the language and metaphor and soul of the heart, and its place in our mythologies; the science of the hearts of humans and other species; Liam’s own life story, and Doyle’s navigation of it as Liam’s father. Everywhere of course is Doyle’s distinctive voice and style, made up of long lists and emotional appeals and exuberance and vulnerability. There is also God here, and my regular readers know I don’t spend a lot of time reading about God, but Doyle can get away with anything: the tone of reverence is entirely appropriate here, and his explorations (“God is not a person. God is not an idea. God is the engine. God is the beat. We are distracted by the word God…”) I can easily follow. (Also I am reminded of Amy Leach.) And I appreciate that Doyle doesn’t choose just one religious or spiritual angle of approach, but that he’s interested in holiness in a multitude of traditions.

I think what I love most about this book is that it feels like it includes all the disciplines of study. There is theology, and hard science – medicine, zoology, even botany – history, social justice, the arts – music, and his own literary genius, including some superlative descriptive work and expressions of gratitude and pain. I’m pretty interested in interdisciplinarity these days, and I’m assigning my students readings that do this work, including a short passage from The Wet Engine. (Synchronicity: I’d just given them a Joseph Mitchell essay called “Goodbye, Shirley Temple,” and then read that Hope was interned at that camp with Shirley Temple’s gardener. What?? The world is a mystery.) And all of this in Doyle’s own wild style.

I cried a lot, but it’s such a beautiful, instructive book. At scarcely over 100 pages, it is one that would bear lots of study. Again I rave.

Special recognition to Matt Ferrence for making me aware of this book a few years ago, when he assigned “Joyas Volardores,” the sixth essay, for an MFA residency. That one still stands out. Thanks, Matt.

Rating: 9 knobby knees.

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