Maximum Shelf author interview: Aaron John Curtis

Posted on November 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of Old School Indian, here’s Aaron John Curtis: The Punch Is Real.

Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Since 2004, Curtis has been quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. His debut novel is Old School Indian, a spirited, funny, and gravely serious story about a man who travels from his longtime home in Miami back to the reservation in New York State where he was raised, to process a serious medical diagnosis. It will be published by Hillman Grad Books/Zando on May 6, 2025.

Abe’s story closely mirrors your own. What are the pros and cons of writing autobiographical fiction?

Aaron John Curtis (photo: Cacá Santoro)

The hard part is trying to disguise people who don’t want to be recognized. [I’ve been told] that if you change someone’s physical description, they never recognize themselves, because no one is aware of their own behavior. So I kept that in mind. But I was lucky in that for all the stories, I got permission. The hard part is some of the stuff goes to some pretty dark places. Hot-topic cold-prose is one thing, but it’s easy to go surface, to just say, this happened. My editor was so good at “drill down here, dig a little deeper,” and you do, and it’s emotional, and you lose that day being sad. That’s hard. At the beginning the hard part was actually doing it. Because I had in my mind if you did autofiction, it didn’t count as a real book, like I wasn’t a real author, it wasn’t legitimate.

Because you didn’t make it up?

Exactly. But this is all true and it’s all made up! It’s this weird mix. My writer’s group was really like, just go for it. Once I had the first draft, I was like, oh, this is how I want to write books from now on.

Why this story now?

I did not realize it at the time, but I had been having symptoms for a few years by the time [my illness] started to present. I was in the mountains of northern California, harvesting pot actually, and I had this mark on my leg. Oh, I’ll get that checked out when I get back to Miami. And because I’d been in the mountains, they thought it was MRSA. They treated it like MRSA, and it started to spread, and it was months of them trying to diagnose it. Dermatologist, rheumatologist, dermatologist, rheumatologist… they lived in the same high-rise… all this is in the book. They would have dinner and call me at like 10 at night, sounding like they were tipsy.

They have that sheet of paperwork where they check off what they’re testing for. That second time they were testing, the doctor checked off the whole sheet. And when we got back the results, they were all negative. They didn’t tell the doctor anything, and she just stared at me and said “you’re fascinating.” And I was like, “yeah, fascinating.”

Just trying to deal with that anxiety–whatever I’d been trying to write before didn’t matter. Just to get through my day to day, work a job, support my wife, and all that stuff–I had to get it out somewhere. And it was going toward the page. At the time I still wasn’t diagnosed; I didn’t know what was going to happen to the protagonist, either. And someone in the writer’s group said, well, what if there was a healer? And I was like, oh my god. A Native healer. Thanks for that trope. In my head, I was like, that’s borderline offensive. But then it was like, oh. Hmm. I know a healer. I’m related to a healer. Okay. Yeah. Imagine what getting him involved would look like.

How did you come up with Dominick as narrator? Seems like he was fun to write.

He’s got a little attitude. In my first draft, the narrator was first person, and was pretty hostile toward the reader. I don’t know if that was anger toward the disease or all these issues that had been on my mind about just being Native in life. I imagined a white reader and I had a lot of anger to take out. [Author] Diana Abu-Jaber kind of runs lead on my writer’s group, and she suggested I do it third person, see what that unlocked. That group is mostly older, middle-aged professionals, and then I had a second writer’s group that was younger and all women of color but for one guy. And they had read the first three chapters in that first person, and then the next were in third person, and they said it lost something. One person said, if I read that first book, I’d be running around telling everyone this is the best book ever. The second book, it was still good, but I wouldn’t have had that same reaction. Oh. Hmm.

But I was really digging what the third person was doing. I don’t know exactly when Dominick started. Maybe it was when I was doing the poetry.

Also, I don’t live on the reservation, I never have, and I wanted someone who’s a little more authentically Mohawk than Abe is. I hoped that would address the fact that I’m not born and raised there.

You operate as both novelist and poet. Which is your home?

The fiction comes a lot more naturally. I noticed, as I was editing the book, I was getting better at doing the poetry. And my original thought was, because Abe is working on it as well, as you read the book, the first set of poems would be kind of bad. And by the end you’d be like “wow, he can really do it now.” By the time we came to the final draft of the book, each poem was as good as I could make it.

Poetry is something I want to do more of, definitely a challenge.

What haven’t I asked?

Did Tóta really do a split when she was 72? Yeah, she did. And [her] punch is real.

This interview originally ran on November 18, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis

Posted on November 22, 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 November 18, 2024.

Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis is an engrossing trip cross-country and through time with an unusual protagonist-and-narrator duo, who together explore family, culture, history, identity, health and healing, community and connection. With serious situations and heartbreaking turns, this debut novel is both thought-provoking and hilarious.

When readers meet Abraham John Jacobs (Abe), he stands half dressed in his great-uncle’s trailer on the reservation where he was born and raised. He’s 43 years old, ill with a yet-undiagnosed malady, and he’s reluctantly agreed to let Uncle Budge try a healing. “If Rheumatologist Weisberg hadn’t canceled his appointment the day before he was supposed to finally get a diagnosis, Abe would probably still be in Miami, trying to decide which Halloween parties to attend.” Budge is an aging former alcoholic with a Butthole Surfers t-shirt stretched across a big belly; his spiritualist mystique fits in between more pedestrian concerns. “Not everythin’ we’re put here to do feels great,” he points out.

Abe has flown in for this visit, or recuperation, minus his wife, Alex, with whom relations aren’t so strong at the moment. The narrator, Dominick Deer Woods (whose identity won’t be clear for some time, and who is given to direct addresses to the reader), acknowledges that “Abraham Jacobs might not sound like an ‘Indian’ name, but you’ve got the hardcore Catholic first name and the surname of what used to be the biggest landowners on Ahkwesáhsne. So if you’re in the know, then you know the name Abraham Jacobs is rez as hell, cuz.” Feisty, bold, and brimming with voice, Dominick enriches this account at every turn.

This latter-day Abe, in Ahkwesáhsne in 2016 with the yet-to-be-diagnosed autoimmune disorder, anchors the novel’s present timeline, which is interspersed with flashbacks to the story of Abe’s life up to this point. Dominick relates Abe’s childhood and teenaged years in less detail, but focuses in earnest when he leaves the rez to attend Syracuse University, where he immediately meets Alex, a larger-than-life, sparkling, Miami-born, blonde musical theater major with whom he will be permanently infatuated. With Alex, Abe moves from Syracuse to Virginia to Miami, enjoys an expansive and mostly fulfilling sex life with a multiplicity of partners of all genders, performs at open mic nights as a budding poet, and eventually marries. Alex has been a regular on the rez for Thanksgiving holidays (a high point for the Ahkwesáhsne Kanien’kehá:ka, who white folks know as Mohawk Indians, and, yes, Dominick gets the irony) for decades. But he will take his time revealing why she’s not here.

At the rez, Abe gets sicker. The lesions on his lower legs look terrible but feel okay; his joints look fine but cause him excruciating pain. His medical team back in Miami is slow with a diagnosis, but when it comes, it’s grim. His faith in Uncle Budge’s healing increases with his pain, desperation, and reluctant observation of the older man’s wisdom. Lying on the carpet to be massaged is one thing; a much harder part of the process involves Abe examining his relationship with his family and the reservation community. The situation with Alex–still at home in Miami while Abe deteriorates up north–continues to decline. Unexpected help may yet be on the way.

Dominick Deer Woods brings intriguing dimensions to this novel. He is “your proud narrator,” while Abe is “our humble protagonist.” He reviews that Abraham Jacobs is “a Native name but that doesn’t make it an Indian name. Dominick Deer Woods, though? You could light a peace pipe with it.” Dominick in these and other respects exists in contrast to Abe. Where Abe is serious, hesitant, and out of touch with Ahkwesáhsne, Dominick is hard-hitting, informed, playful, angry, and very funny. He offers an interplay, a not-quite-literal dialogue, throwing Abe into relief, helping to illustrate and define him. He also offers poetry, and one of the most electrifying descriptions of writing poetry that readers are likely ever to come across.

Abe’s life and Dominick’s smart observations of it present a nuanced investigation of family (by both blood and marriage) and several layers of identity: what it means to be Ahkwesáhsne Kanien’kehá:ka (or, if you must, Mohawk); to be from the rez, on the rez, off the rez; and to navigate American history and modern cultural tropes. Old School Indian is concerned with gaps and distances: between the reservation and Syracuse, between Syracuse and Miami, between Abe and Alex, between Abe and his family back on the rez, between Abe and Dominick. As middle-aged Abe confronts difficult truths about himself, his body, and his relationships, he will consider how he wants to move through the world in large and small ways: in poetry, in love, in health. Dominick observes about a teenaged band that plays on the reservation, “No gig… will be as well-received as this one, since the reality of them will always be chasing listeners’ memories. But they have tonight, and they play and sing like the world is ending tomorrow.” Abe may yet do the same, and he and readers will be better for it.

Rating: 8 gingham sheets.

Come back Monday for my interview with Curtis.

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rerun: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (audio)

Posted on November 18, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Now seems like a fine time to revisit Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent 2010 work, in my 2012 review here. (For later reads, also check out Caste and a corresponding interview I was lucky to get.)

I didn’t really know what this book was about when I picked it up – only that it was well-regarded. I’m so glad it found its way into my hands. Isabel Wilkerson has taken on a large-scale, ambitious subject here, and rendered it beautifully. And the audio reading by Robin Miles is lovely to boot.

The “great migration” in the subtitle refers to the movement of black Americans out of the South and into the northern and western United States in 1915-1975. Wilkerson starts from the very beginning, looking at the experiences of former slaves just after Emancipation in an impoverished region struggling to rebuild with a new order of things. The creation and expansion of Jim Crow laws designed to hold blacks down took time after the end of the Civil War to take effect. In the new caste system, former slaves and their descendants were unable to move up in the world and were in constant fear for their lives if they were to misstep around Southern whites. By 1915, they had begun to move out of the South, in what became a mass migration along lines so distinct that enclaves of blacks from specific towns and states were recreated in new locations.

Wilkerson shifts between two ways of studying the Great Migration. Sometimes she takes a broad view of history, in which she cites her own interviews (she states that she did over 1,200) with migrants and their descendants as well as a number of historical sources, to render the story of the Migration generally. And sometimes she follows the specific personal stories of three individuals who she interviewed at great length over a long period of time, traveling the country with them and becoming part of their lives. (In this respect, the journalist/author becoming part of the family of her subject, I was reminded of Rebecca Skloot’s amazing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) George Swanson Starling moved from Eustis, Florida to New York City, later sending for his wife Inez to join him there. He had to leave Florida suddenly because a friend tipped him off that a lynch mob was coming for him; he had been involved in organizing his fellow citrus pickers to demand higher wages. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney moved with her husband George and their two children, with a third on the way, from Mississippi where they had been sharecroppers. They would eventually end up in Chicago, by way of Milwaukee. And Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was an ambitious surgeon and veteran from Monroe, Louisiana, with his heart set on Los Angeles. Known as Pershing in Monroe, he would resettle as Robert (or Bob, or Doc) in LA and send for his wife and daughters to join him there, where he built a new life in high society with the big house and booming practice he’d always wanted.

I found this shifting back and forth between the broad view and three personal histories extremely effective. Anecdotes from the lives of Southern blacks drove well home the misery of their bottom-rung status there; some of these stories are horrific, but important to show the desperation some migrants felt when they left their homes in the South. National trends played a role – for example, during WWII demand for Florida’s citrus was high while the supply of labor to pick the fruit was low, with everyone off at war, and this imbalance led to George Starling’s ability to demand higher wages. And the history of Chicago’s race relations and residential segregation puts Ida Mae Gladney’s home ownership into the proper perspective. You get the point. The history is well-documented and, I’m convinced, well-researched; and the personal stories make it all, well, personal. I was deeply involved with our three representative individuals by the end of the book and, yes, I cried.

I love that Wilkerson brought such a large-scale, important trend, that has had such huge effects on American history, to life the way she did. I also like that she examined the broad effects of the Great Migration, in terms of the cultures of both white and black residents of the North and the South, and took the time to show that black migrants were really far more like immigrant groups in history than like migrants within their own country. I recommend this book as part of a study of American history – but one need not be an academic to appreciate it. The story of the Great Migration is made accessible here, and I’m glad I know more about it now. This 19-disc audiobook (over 600 pages in print) went by easily. This is how I like to take my history lessons. Check it out.

Rating: 8 train rides north.

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rerun: The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

Posted on November 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From early in my career with Havel Kimmel: please enjoy this review from April of 2013.

Langston Braverman has recently returned to her hometown of Haddington, Indiana. Very close to receiving her PhD she walked out of her oral exams. She is a strange, exceptionally erudite but socially fragile and problematic young woman. She has a dog named Germane: “named not after Germaine Greer, but as in: Germane to this conversation.” (I love that.)

Amos Townsend is Haddington’s pastor, of only a year or two now. He is tormented by the death of a local named Alice; he feels that he should have been able to stop her death, and he is struggling with his faith, which is actually nothing new.

Alice’s two children are left in limbo; their crazy aunt Gail has turned out to be unfit, and their grandmother Beulah is clearly too near death herself to wrangle with two traumatized little girls. Upon Alice’s death, they dispose of their original names, Madeline and Eloise, and state that they are now called Immaculata and Epiphany. They wear costumes from a Renaissance drama from school, that their mother made, all the time. Complete with hats: the tall cone-shaped kind with ribbons streaming off the tops.

Langston’s mother AnnaLee picks up some of the slack, and then insists that Langston step up: she is not in school, not working, and these children need her. Of course, Amos plays a role as well, so that this village will truly raise a child.

Langston and Amos are the stars of this story (along with the striking Immaculata and Epiphany, of course). When they meet, they repel one another like magnets. Despite sharing tastes and interests in reading, philosophy, theology, and (I can’t stress this enough) their particular brands of weird, they repel. And, as is clearly a theme in Kimmel’s work, the cerebral content, the philosophies and theologies that shape this part of the story are complex and thoroughly explored. I think I said this in my last Kimmel review, but: her many references partly pique me to go off and study, and partly exhaust me, making me so glad I don’t have to read Whitehead and Tillich and Frithjof Schuon. It makes me sit back and… wonder… that all these strange, complex, learned thoughts that Langston has are thoughts that Kimmel had to have first, had to conceive to put them in her heroine’s mouth; think of that.

Immaculata and Epiphany see Mary (the Mother of God) in the dogwood tree in their grandmother Beulah’s backyard. Naturally, because that is the kind of world this is. It is very strange and is a kind of beautiful, and again I observe that Kimmel’s gift is to create a midwestern small-town world that is both hopelessly humdrum and depressing and everyday, and also strange and exalted and worthy of examination.

What happens to our exquisitely odd cast of characters should definitely remain a surprise to you, reader. It’s pretty great, though.

I love this author SO MUCH that I am struggling to write reviews; but I will keep reading her. Next up is The Used World, and I am, of course, working to get my hands on her best-known bestselling memoir, A Girl Named Zippy.

I’ll close, as I tend to with Kimmel, with a few lines from the book that particularly caught my eye. Where these have, in the past, been lovely examples of her use of language, these are more concepts that I really liked. There is a book theme here. And the language is great – observe the curry comb, is that an image or what – but it’s the concepts that I like most here:

Amos knew as well as anyone what went into writing a book, having written a master’s thesis, and he considered the process to be akin to having one’s nerves stripped with a curry comb.

Maybe he knows what goes into writing a book as well as anyone… who hasn’t written a book?

The most intractable aspect of his bachelorhood was that Amos was uncomfortable eating without reading; he felt as if he were wasting both time and food.

Me too, Amos. I’m right there with you.

Amos tapped his fingers on his bony knees. “Why do you have a book and I don’t?”

“Because I’m a woman, Amos.”

“Yes, but why do you have a book and I never do in a situation like this?”

AnnaLee put the book down. “I carry a bag. I also have safety pins and emergency money, and a package of those little wet towelettes. We live in Indiana. I could get stopped by a train, I could get bored. I always carry a book.” She went back to reading.

How perfect is that. “We live in Indiana, Amos!” Perhaps it goes without saying that I, too, try to keep a book with me at all times? I fail on safety pins and wet towelettes, though.

I’m sure I’ve failed to do this book justice. But it’s divine.

Rating: 9 ribbons on a hat.

Lovely. I should reread her sometime.

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Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

Posted on November 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This quirky, funny, pained novel considers the challenge, for any of us, of becoming fully human.

Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story is a funny and pathos-ridden tale of social awkwardness and self-realization; a modern, delayed coming-of-age. Su’s narrative voice is perfectly pitched for her inelegant but deeply sympathetic protagonist.

Vi is a 24-year-old townie and college dropout in a midwestern college town. She works a hotel chain’s front desk next to a too-perfect perky blonde named Rachel. Vi is still suffering from a breakup eight months ago, barely slogging through her days. Her Taiwanese father and white mother are well-meaning and supportive, but they have trouble connecting with Vi, who has always been a loner; her older brother can be a pain, but he cares, even when Vi struggles to. Then, on a night she ventures out for the rare social occasion, she stumbles upon something new in the alley behind a bar during a drag show: a shapeless blob with a mouth and two eyes. She carries it home and, under Vi’s yearning influence, it grows.

The evolving blob, which Vi will come to call Bob (it starts as a malapropism), is the only fantastical detail in a story otherwise rooted in a very familiar world, featuring the casual racism of Vi’s hometown and her awkwardness with social situations. Bob takes in lots of television (and Fruity Pebbles), and after examining the pictures Vi shows him of movie stars like young Hugh Grant and Ryan Gosling, fashions himself into a tall, stunningly handsome white man with a six-pack. Vi presents him as a hookup or boyfriend; the world has trouble assimilating their match. The pairing is, in fact, a strain. “For a while, he seemed happy enough to eat and breathe and exist–the perfect companion. I should’ve anticipated that molding him into a man would trigger something deeper, some sort of existential awakening. Now he’s just like everyone else. He has needs and desires beyond me…. He could leave without me ever knowing why.” The fear of being left, of course, is key to Vi’s difficulties in navigating the world.

What makes Blob special is its mix of heartrending conflict and silly, self-aware humor. Truly cringy scenes balance sweet ones. Rachel performs off and on as a friend–but Vi scarcely knows how to care for her own problems, let alone anyone else’s, and her past attempts at friendship have often ended in unintended cruelty. Su excels with characters who can be significantly flawed but stir the reader’s empathy. Even Bob, despite beginning his life as a blob, has a surprising amount of personality. In the end, discomfiting though it may be, Blob makes incisive observations about life for a 20-something trying to make it on her own. Blobs and humans alike may yet find home.

This review originally ran in the November 8, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 handfuls of cereal.

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The Women Who Changed Photography: And How To Master Their Techniques by Gemma Padley

Posted on November 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Gemma Padley’s The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques delivers brief, punchy profiles and incisive assessments of what is revolutionary about these underappreciated photographers. In short chapters, Padley presents 50 women–some well-known, some all but unknown–from all over the world, born from 1799 through 1992. Profiles and portraits are followed by photographs, with Padley’s instruction on how to mimic what is special about the work. This includes technical advice (how to combine and blend portraits; hand-tint a photo; play with angles, color, and flash) and the conceptual (how to use photo stories to raise awareness on an issue). Photographers include Anna Atkins, who “privately published the first book to be illustrated using photography,” and Anne Wardrope, the “first woman in America to photograph her own nude body.” They work in documentary, portraiture, art, photojournalism, and cover war, fashion, conservation, and more. Wide ranging and diverse, with fascinating storytelling, these contents are visually stunning and technically detailed, and will please readers with a variety of interests.

This review originally ran in the November 5, 2024 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 7 apertures.

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rerun: Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt

Posted on November 4, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Please enjoy this time capsule from August of 2012.

I’m so glad I picked this book up (and bought it for the library where I work). It sounded like just the sort of thing I appreciate: a biography of a little-known historical figure who made an important contribution to the world as we know it but was herself forgotten. In this case, the “remarkable woman” of the subtitle is Marie Tharp, whose meticulous study and cartography of the ocean floor established the concept of plate tectonics that science now recognizes as fact, but was at best a blasphemous and ridiculous notion before Tharp came along. Her achievements, however, were minimized by a scientific culture in which women did not belong. This biography is additionally appealing to me for its mood: author Hali Felt takes a whimsical, dreamy, almost fanciful tone at times. She describes her own attraction to Tharp’s story (born in part of Felt’s mother’s, and her own, fascination with maps) and the relationship she felt to her subject. She dreams of Tharp coming to her to explain the mysterious and unspoken parts of her life. This book is nonfiction, but it’s honest, personally related, and warm.

There is also an enigmatic love story of sorts hiding within Soundings: Tharp’s career and life were both tied to a man named Bruce Heezen. Heezen was her coworker, then her technical superior; but they shared a partnership in work, in science, in discovery, and apparently in all things. It is known that they were a couple, although they never married and the details of this side of their relationship are very few.

Felt follows Tharp from her childhood with a science-minded father she adored, through her education in English, music, geology, and mathematics, and to her first job in the oil & gas industry (oh, how familiar to this Texas girl). But she was held back: this was the 1940’s, and women in science were mostly expected to make copies, compute numbers, and brew coffee. Eventually Tharp found her way to New York, to Columbia University and the Lamont Geological Observatory. This is where she would meet and work with Heezen and quietly make history.

The science in this book is very friendly and accessible to a general reading public; the story that Felt set out to tell is more that of a woman’s life and accomplishments despite the limitations of her society, than that of tectonic plates per se. For that matter, Felt shows that it was Marie’s combined backgrounds in art as well as science that made her perfectly suited to play the role she did in history. Her meticulous re-checkings of data and attention to detail were indispensable – but so was her interest in visually representing the data available in a way that would show the general public (not just academics) what she’d discovered. So her achievement was artistic as well as scientific. Soundings does make the science side clear, but doesn’t dwell, and is never dry. Rather, Marie Tharp comes to life: she is a precocious child; an ambitious, able, frustrated student; a dedicated scientist; a life partner; an eccentric aging woman caught up in her own past, campaigning to honor and preserve the legacy of her other half.

Hali Felt was honest about the role she plays in the story she relates. She begins in her Introduction by briefly describing her own attraction to maps, and then follows a chronological format, beginning with Tharp’s childhood and following her life, and eventually her death. And then Felt returns to the story: her discovery of Marie Tharp’s existence, her interest, her decision to follow that interest, her research, her relationships with the living descendents of Tharp and Heezen’s world (the “Tharpophiles”), and in the Acknowledgements at the end, she even hints at the process by which she came to write and publish this book. I found all of these Felt-related details interesting too.

In a word, this is a lovely biography, and the style and tone of it may be my favorite part.

Rating: 9 double-checkings of data.

I remember it fondly.

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Lines by Sung J. Woo

Posted on November 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: I was sent an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book came to me in an unusual way, and I just happened (entirely by accident, as far as I’m aware with my conscious brain!) to pick it up a few days before its publication date, and finished reading it on the very eve. So, happy birthday to this book just published on Tuesday (October 29, 2024). And a brilliant book it is: deeply beautiful, full of tragedy and pain but also awe and even bliss and the exaltation of quiet, daily acts of love and creation.

Lines contains two parallel stories. A prologue sets the hinging scene: early on a foggy Saturday morning in New York City, two locals walk in opposite directions near the entrance to Washington Square Park. Joshua Kozlov is forty years old, and not thrilled about his daily grind, nor his recent birthday. Abby Kim is twenty-nine, a working artist and a distance cyclist. They bump into each other, a full-on collision, ending in an unintended hug, laughter, coffee, and a lightning-quick rush to marry just two months later. Or, they walk past each other in the fog.

The rest of the novel follows both storylines, “Apart” and “Together,” in chapters that feature parallel events in the lives of two Abbys and two versions of the man called Josh or Joshua. Josh(ua) is an aspiring novelist in both lines, Abby always a painter with a passion for miniatures. They have the same friends and colleagues. They are recognizable but very different versions of themselves. In the first and greatest subversion of my expectations, the “Apart” narrative thread is not an absence of romance, a tragic missed-connection sort of story. Both Abby and Josh have found meaningful love, for one thing, with other partners. They have fulfilling lives in many ways. But they still find each other: searching for a birthday gift for his beloved wife, Josh is drawn to a hand-painted locket of Abby’s. He becomes a patron, and she becomes a muse, as he writes a series of flash fiction pieces based on miniature paintings of scenes from one of Abby’s solo European cycle-tours. They share a deep connection.

The title of Lines, I think, has several meanings. You could think of the two parallel stories as threads, or lines. Josh(ua) writes in lines, of course, and Abby draws with them. The concept implies connection, ties. Like much about the novel, its title is subtle, a whisper.

This book is definitely about possibilities, and multiplicities. What if there were another version of my life, my choices, my loves? It’s about art, inspiration, the balance between creative work for pay and for pure creative joy. It’s about the different kinds of love and commitment that exist in the world, about births and deaths. Neither version of this story is without pain, but there is wonder and sweetness even in the tragic moments. I’m not sure there is a final “right” place for either Abby or Josh(ua) to be, and that’s an artistic choice on Woo’s part that I respect deeply. Simple, clean-cut, black-and-white solutions are easier to write but feel less true.

My copy of Lines (an ARC, of course), came with a glossy, full-color insert featuring the 16 miniature paintings that star in the story – they are Abby’s, in the fictional version, and in real life are credited to Dina Brodsky. Josh tells Abby in the book (in their “Apart” line) that he’s working on a novel about their story, but will swap their ethnicities: he’ll make the female character Belarusian and the man, Korean. Sung J. Woo is Korean-American. Brodsky is a cyclist as well as a painter. This reader, at least, cannot help but be curious about the lines drawn between life and art! Brodsky’s paintings are indeed hypnotic, and I feel happily lost in the layers of ekphrasis: a novel about writing about painting… the images themselves, the writing by Josh, within the writing by Woo. I’m writing this review within minutes of finishing the book, and I’m sure I’m missing so much. But I also know I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

I feel so lucky to have this book come across my desk, and to have opened it almost eight months later, to finish it (quite by accident) on the eve of its publication – what are the chances? It’s nearly as magical as what’s inside.

Check it out. And thank you so much for reaching out, Sung.

Rating: 9 flights.

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Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

Posted on October 28, 2024 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 6 blue jay feathers.

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I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander

Posted on October 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 bagels.

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