All About U.S.: A Look at the Lives of 50 Real Kids from Across the United States by Matt Lamothe & Jenny Volvovski, illus. by Matt Lamothe

Posted on September 9, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I loved the look of this large-format illustrated book for kids (and their adults!), and preordered it for a couple of my favorite kids, sisters ages 8 and 12. The book is labeled as serving ages 8-12, so I figured that would be perfect. And naturally I had to take a look first.

I love the concept. From the authors of This Is How We Do It comes this glimpse into the lives of 50 kids, one apiece from the 50 states. Author/illustrator Lamothe and author/designer Volvovski took great pains to closely approximate the demographics of the country as a whole in choosing the kids and families they feature here: sections on Process and Demographics at the end of the book detail those elements, in writing that will skew toward the older end of the book’s projected age range and/or serve adults best. The 50 families in the book match national stats in religion, family type, structure and size, gender identities, school and home types, annual family income, national origin of parents and guardians, sexual orientation of parents and guardians, and more, quite closely. “The biggest demographic discrepancy in the book is the overrepresentation of multiracial kids. However, the race/ethnicity of their parents and guardians more closely matches the demographics of the country. According to Pew, the number of Americans who identify as more than one race almost doubled between 2010 and 2020 [when work began on the book]. As this trend seems likely to continue, we feel it is important to show how multiracial families balance their cultures and traditions.” This struck me as solid reasoning. I’m also comfortable with slight overrepresentation of traditionally underrepresented groups.

The bulk of the book is the kids themselves. Each gets either a single page or a two-page spread (of which most of the space is illustration; my impression is that the written stories are equal in size) in this large-format book. A beautiful, engaging, full-color, detailed illustration accompanies a brief written profile of a child, ages 5-11, in the context of their family and home. Generally, parents’ or guardians’ jobs or interests are mentioned, as well as siblings and pets, but the kid in question gets the most focus, via their hobbies, tastes, favorites foods and toys, activities, etc. I love the charming images as (yes) illustrations of what is described in print. I can easily see the sisters I’m giving this book to enjoying the combination of images with text; I expect the older sis to have an easier time with the reading part.

Clearly the enormous diversity of the kids and families featured here is a big part of the appeal. I really enjoyed how varied these lives appear. There are many skin tones, religions, family structures and styles; there are kids with mental and physical health differences and those who have faced major life challenges. Some are rural and some are urban (a demographic element apparently not tracked). I’m pretty sure that each story includes at least one direct quotation, so that the kids’ voices come through. Across all their differences, they all sound stimulated by the chance to talk about their own lives.

And these are real kids. Near the front of the book is a spread with each child’s illustrated head shot; near the back, a similar spread of photographs of the same kids. A few source images are included there as well, like landscape views, and descriptions of how this research was completed (many hours of video calls, online questionnaires, photographs and video tours). I especially appreciate how detailed are the illustrations, and liked reading that each family was consulted in back-and-forth correspondence on both the illustrations and the text before publication.

I was on the lookout for stereotypes. (I did note the authors’ acknowledgment that no one family could represent an entire state.) With such attention paid to demographic data, I feel good about the overall portrait of the country; but what does it look like to choose a single kid/family to stand for New York or Texas? Heavens. I of course turned first to the two states I know best, Texas and West Virginia. In Texas, Noah lives with a large family who enjoy traveling to Big Bend (yes!) from what might be San Antonio. In West Virginia, Jade raises prize-winning steers at his rural home. These are individual stories, woven into a tapestry with plenty of diversity in it.

All in all, it’s a beautiful book that I think will yield some great conversation, and I feel great about giving it to my young friends.

Rating: 8 windows.

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Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, trans. by Lisa Dillman

Posted on September 6, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Yuri Herrera applies his exceptional gift for succinct, imaginative storytelling to a fictionalized history of Benito Juárez in exile in New Orleans.

By 1853, Benito Juárez had served as judge, deputy, and governor of the state of Oaxaca, but he would not become Mexico’s first indigenous president until after a period of exile. Among other locations, he spent 18 months in exile in New Orleans, a time about which relatively little is known. With Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera (Signs Preceding the End of the World; Kingdom Cons; A Silent Fury; Ten Planets) sheds speculative light on this brief chapter in Juárez’s life. Herrera’s regular English translator, Lisa Dillman, again brings a precise ear for Herrera’s linguistic play to this spellbinding fictionalized history.

Besides Herrera’s contextualizing prologue, the name Benito Juárez almost never appears. Instead, readers accompany an unnamed protagonist, in close third-person perspective, from his arrival in this remarkable “city that served up accidents on a platter” through his departure, by which time “if one day he was dropped there without anyone telling him where he was, he’d know it was New Orleans even with his eyes closed.” Juárez marvels at the heat, the Yellow Jack epidemic, the local culture soaked in music and dance, and the stray dogs. He has seen other cities–“Seville, Gibraltar, New York–all of them rich, but none like this, where you could so clearly see the blood on the gold.” He is dismayed at the enslaved people, referred to as “the captured,” sold in open markets and subjugated, as in the novella’s memorable opening scene. He meets with fellow exiles and political minds, makes new friends, settles in. New Orleans is beautiful and horrifying, and Herrera portrays both aspects simultaneously, with humor and lyricism: “A moment later, the austere innkeeper began mopping up the sanguineous intimacies smeared all over the floor.”

Wordplay and a special attention to language form a persistent feature in Herrera’s work. A fellow expat claims Méjico, but Juárez recognizes it’s been pronounced “not with a Mexican ex but a Spaniard’s jay…. ‘This is the vegetable market,’ Cabañas veed iberically.” Juárez is attuned to new languages, including music and body language, and thinks of language learning as related to his time spent teaching high school physics: “his students began to glimpse a new world in those equations, the same way you see animals in the clouds, except these animals actually existed.” A sense of wonder and play, linguistic curiosity, and a knack for being both morbid and funny, contribute to an absorbingly pleasurable read, even amid the death and tragedy. Herrera offers another brilliant novella steeped in political and historical time and place.

This review originally ran in the August 1, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 high-flown zees.

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The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on September 2, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I am a creature, a girl, life stitched from nothing. I am eerie and frightful. And I’m stronger than all of them. I can’t allow any hunter, or Weaver, or betrayal to defeat me. Believing that is all I have. It’s all that might save me.

I have been a fan of Mandanna’s witchy book and this YA trilogy. I’m jumping back in time here to her debut novel, a YA sci fi with some romance elements, naturally enough a coming-of-age story, with some pretty neat philosophical questions. It’s quite good, but she’s gotten better since.

Eva is an echo, as opposed to a human: she was not born but made to order by the Weavers for a family who requested her. Echoes are sort of spares: Eva is based on her ‘other,’ or her original, a girl named Amarra who lives in Bangalore. Eva lives in a small English village where she is heavily guarded and tutored and trained in how to be Amarra. She reads what Amarra reads, consumes the same music and movies and foods, wears the same clothes. As far as possible from Bangalore to the English countryside, she is supposed to mimic Amarra, to be prepared to be Amarra if something should happen to the valued human girl. But something has gone awry with Eva: she has a personality of her own. She is not as agreeable as Amarra seems to be. She is strong-willed and stubborn, has interests that different from those of her other. She asks too many questions. Even to have taken a name of her own is a serious crime. [Can I just say how remarkable I find it that she’s taken the same name as in Peter Dickinson’s YA novel that I loved so much?!] And then, of course–this would be necessary for the story’s sake–Amarra dies. And Eva is up for the role of a lifetime, that for which she has been designed.

With obvious parallels to The New One, and a classic we’ll discuss shortly, The Lost Girl examines concepts that humanity has considered before; but that’s certainly not a criticism, nor am I alleging unoriginality. (This book predates The New One, for the record.) Rather, I guess I’m observing that the questions Mandanna is playing with here are of perennial interest. What power do we have to design the people or have the babies we want? Is it appropriate or moral to play with technology that would do so? (There are some efforts at work too in pursuit of immortality, that other perennial human preoccupation.) Eva literalizes the idea of a young person coming of age under the constraints of society or family’s expectations; but on some level every young person wrestles with similar bounds, and necessarily rebels against them. Is Amarra a better girl, or just a different one? Does Eva have a right to self-determination? Many people in their world see Eva as less-than, an abomination. What makes someone human, or a person, or deserving of respect? How do we combat prejudice that’s based on ignorance? How are we to navigate grief? (Hint: maybe not by having a copy of our beloved daughter made to spec, and then demanding she live up to impossible ideals.)

Eva is in a difficult spot. She has to be someone she’s not, both for the sake of her literal survival (echoes are destroyed if they can’t do their jobs) and because she genuinely wishes to comfort Amarra’s bereaved family, who seem like decent people. But she isn’t Amarra. And even dead, the ‘other’ looms large. “Maybe that’s what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don’t need us. They echo all by themselves.”

Mandanna, and the system of echoes, and Eva, are all clear on the reference to Frankenstein here. Echoes are firmly forbidden access to the book, which Eva rightly senses is because there’s something there. Who is the monster–the scientist or his creation? What if you let the Creature set his own path?

Eva’s first-person voice is spot on, the rules of this world are well established for most of the novel, the questions it asks are compelling and thoughtfully explored. The characters are complex and sympathetic, the stakes are high, the whole thing is absorbing. There is a romantic subplot, with tension between Amarra’s boyfriend and Eva’s potential (and obviously highly forbidden) love interest. It’s all really well done, and this novel was headed for a higher rating, but it gets a bit out of control towards the end. The action is a bit unwieldy and the rules of the world collapse a bit, for me, in terms of believability. A certain promise is asked to carry an awful lot of weight in the plot denouement, as if promises are more binding than we know them to be in our world, at least, and indeed it seems to come down to a villain keeping their word, which feels doubtful at best. In an invented world like this, Mandanna could have made a rule of some sort about how promises work–they could have been literally binding–but she didn’t, and the importance of the promise didn’t work for me. I suspect I’m seeing Mandanna’s evolution as an author here, and I’m not mad about it and will still be seeking out her work. My rating of 7 is still solid! But it looked even stronger for a while. I think this author has grown a great deal since her debut.

Great premise, and well done through most of the book; fell off a bit at the end. I am still a fan.

Rating: 7 scones.

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reread: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Posted on August 30, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I cannot believe I rated this a mere 7 on first go-round. That’s madness. It’s a brilliant book! I guess this is evidence of how slow I was to enter Murderbot’s world. Now that I’ve read seven Murderbot books, this one was far more accessible for me, and the rating has increased considerably. Liz listens to the audiobook version of this on repeat, and I get that now absolutely (although I’ve still never listened to the audio version).

This time I was all in from minute one, with a background understanding of the rules of Murderbot’s world, the constraints of being a construct, the confusions about what exactly it is, its lovably grumpy attitude toward humans and its preference for entertainment media. I think it’s a fairly unusual portrait of… this kind of life form… that an individual could be sort of lackadaisical, may I say even lazy, toward its *work* and genuinely want to be left alone to watch what you and I would call TV shows. In this first book, Murderbot is for the first time living and working with a group of humans who are open to its (if you will) humanity, and Murderbot does not know what to do with that. Some of the humans more than once call it “shy,” but that’s not entirely it; Murderbot is uncomfortable with being treated like a person that deserves respect and autonomy, because that’s a new experience. And this is compounded by its need to pretend its not such a person, because for its own safety it needs for no one to realize that it’s hacked its governor module and is operating according to its own wishes. So. “Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.” (That voice is hysterically funny.)

I can’t get enough and am now in danger of ripping through the whole series all over again. I’m sure some readers (Liz?) accessed this much more easily on the first read, but boy, is this second one an improvement for this reader.

Rating: 9 little hoppers.

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The Drowned by John Banville

Posted on August 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A recluse discovers an abandoned car and winds up involved in a missing-person case with Strafford and Quirke, who are back at work in this novel of secrets and quiet desperation.

John Banville’s The Drowned transports readers to a dour small town on the 1950s Irish coast, where one tragedy after another makes a small cast of characters reconsider what they know and value in the world they inhabit. In his established style, Banville (The Singularities; Snow; Ancient Light; Holy Orders writing as Benjamin Black) offers a stark series of events in understated tones and with a handful of voices. These include Dublin Detective Inspector Strafford and the brilliant pathologist Quirke.

“He had lived alone for so long, so far away from the world and its endless swarms of people, that when he saw the strange thing standing at a slight list in the middle of the field below the house, for a second he didn’t know what it was.” It turns out to be a luxury motorcar, abandoned, engine still running. The loner who discovers it actively avoids human contact: “Yes, life, so-called, was a birthday party gone wild, with shouting and squabbling, and games he didn’t know the rules of, and one lot ganging up on the other, and knocking each other down and dancing in a ring like savages, the whole mad rampage going on in a haze of dust and noise and horrible, hot stinks.” He approaches, against his better judgment, and winds up involved in a missing-person case, which will draw Strafford to town, even as the detective wrestles with his own relationships: an estranged wife, a much younger girlfriend, and ever-complicating ties to Dr. Quirke. “We have one thing in common, at least,” Quirke quips to Strafford. “Death.” Death is an obvious theme, not only in the two characters’ professional lives but throughout Banville’s troubled setting.

Enriched by Banford’s attention to detail, the narrative grows more compelling in its telling by these and other characters, each suffering more or less alone even when they are married, partnered, or set next to immediate family. “The least of remembered things are the most affecting. That walk, the birdlike turn of her head, those trim ankles.” The Drowned is slow building, sedately paced, and grim, but wickedly absorbing. By the mystery’s denouement, some readers will have guessed the perpetrator’s identity, but it is less that identity and more the psychology of it that is Banville’s final blow. Through these intricacies and its murky sense of foreboding, this inexorable novel will continue to advance Banville’s considerable reputation.

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

Rating: 7 barstools.

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Heartless by H. G. Parry

Posted on August 23, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From memory, I’m going to say the Peter Pan story was sweet and heartwarming, with some good healthy ideas in it about always retaining a lovably childlike (not childish!) spirit and the magic of believing. We fly through the stars and have adventures! We help each other. And even when we have to (sigh) grow up, we can access that magic again through the power of imagination.

Then there was the movie Hook, which had Robin Williams and was therefore great, and (again in my possibly faulty memory) more or less followed those themes. We all have to grow up, but it wouldn’t be healthy to lose all the joy of childhood.

This is not that version of Peter Pan.

H.G. Parry, who I fell for hard with The Magician’s Daughter, takes us on a more realistic and darker journey with Heartless. Now the protagonist is neither a Darling nor a Lost Boy nor Peter himself, but an orphaned child in a Dickensian sort of London named James, who gives himself the fanciful last name Hook when he gets a chance at self-invention. James is a born storyteller, a skill which endears him to the only boy at the orphanage James really cares about, a careless but compelling child named Peter. For Peter, James tells stories: ones his mother told him or read him, ones he’s read himself, ones he’s made up. For Peter he makes up the child-king Peter Pan and his sometimes-antagonist the pirate Captain Hook, who inhabit a magical (and made up) island called Neverland. These tales keep Peter at James’s bedside until the night that Peter leaps off the orphanage’s high roof and flies into the stars: “second to the right, and straight on till morning.” James wants to follow his best and only friend, the boy who did not so much as look back. But when James leaps, he falls to the stone courtyard below.

From here we follow James Hook (his new identity) and his friend Gwendolen Darling (who takes the identity of James’s younger brother, George Hook) in their adulthood. James is forever chasing after Peter. He will eventually find what he’s looking for and find also that it’s not what he was looking for at all. This brief book (141 pages) is Peter Pan, yes, but retold with a different protagonist at its sympathetic center and a decidedly sinister twist; fairies are not sweet but uncaring. Captain Hook, of all people, is the one we feel for. And we are centered on the power not only of imagination but of storytelling – and like all of them, this is a power that can be used for good or ill. “[The fairies] didn’t understand that stories weren’t meant to be lived in forever; they were meant to be shared, passed on, questioned, to mingle with a thousand other tales and poems and experiences and be changed by them. They didn’t understand that stories, too, needed to grow. He hadn’t understood himself until recently.”

A retelling of a classic with rather more realism (especially in the London setting) and more darkness, but also still sweet and wholesome, with Parry’s absolutely lovely style; I’m going back for more from her.

Rating: 8 leaves.

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The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski

Posted on August 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This entrancing debut stars triplet witches who can see the future, but must work together and individually to grasp their own.

Stacy Sivinski’s first novel, The Crescent Moon Tearoom, is a sweet, wise balm of a story about family, change, and coming into oneself.

The Quigley triplets, Anne, Violet, and Beatrix, have always been close. Their beloved mother was a powerful Diviner, able to read the future in various signs. Her daughters put the same skill to use in the Crescent Moon Tearoom, where the three young witches sell magical teas and delectable baked goods and tell fortunes to hordes of Chicago’s women and witches. The tearoom (run out of the family home, itself an endearing character with a will and magic of its own) does a booming business, but all is not well with the Quigley sisters. A challenge comes from the Council of Witches: the younger three must help three older witches discover their Tasks, which is a witch’s very reason for existence and is imperative to complete before a witch passes, or she’s “doomed to linger as a spirit for all eternity.” If they fail, the Council will close their shop. The events entwine with a potential curse on the sisters, threatening to undo everything the sisters love.

Although nearly identical in appearance, the Quigleys are quite different individuals. Their mother used to say, “Violet has her head in the clouds, and Beatrix’s nose is in a book. But [Anne’s] feet are always planted firmly on the ground.” While Violet (the family baker) is volatile and in constant, foot-tapping motion, Beatrix is shy and dreamy. Anne is the caretaker, the brewer of teas, and has secretly been holding back her own magical powers so as not to surpass her sisters. They “had been locked in their web of affection and dependence for so long now. Their bonds had taken shape during childhood and seemed to be coated in bronze.” As they struggle with the ominous Council’s extraordinary demands, their differences are highlighted, even as each sister finds opportunities for new growth.

Sivinski’s droll telling details the lovable Quigleys with all their quirk and charm, each with their own moving emotional arc. Chapters are headed with signs and symbols, as one might find in tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, with brief descriptions of their meaning: a fan suggests flirting with temptation; a bat foreshadows a fruitless endeavor. Each line captivates: “As seers, the Quigleys had long ago accepted that questioning what they saw in the remnants of their customers’ tea was about as useful as trying to wash cherry jelly out of a silk blouse.” With its sweetness, realistic challenges, and satisfying resolution, The Crescent Moon Tearoom is a rare pleasure. Readers will miss the Quigley sisters at this novel’s end.

This review originally ran in the July 26, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 petals.

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Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Posted on August 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Unusually for me, I watched the television series first, and it is a striking series, and obviously colored my imaginings while reading this novel. It might have been desirable (for the usual reasons) to do it in the other order, but gosh, I think this is a rare case of each enriching the other. (Also, it has been long enough that I was still able to find surprises while reading. It pays to be forgetful if you read and reread mysteries.)

This is a brilliant novel. I love everything about it. It feels a touch genre-bendy, with the title and the three different cases intertwined, although it is of course not unheard of to see a PI or detective involved with multiple cases at once. Case Histories introduces three distinct mysteries before we meet Jackson Brodie, a retired military policeman and regular copper now working on his own. He has a grumpy receptionist, a recently remarried ex-wife, and an eight-year-old daughter he’s crazy about. He runs, off and on smokes cigarettes, and listens to moody American female country music stars (Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Allison Moorer). He’s from the north of England but now lives, and the novel is set, in Cambridge, a location with lots to contribute to the story. (I looked it up and confirmed my confusion about location: the TV series is set in Edinburgh. Also an impactful setting, but boy, they threw me off with that one. Cambridge does so much work here though! Was it too challenging to film there?) Jackson has enough to worry about with his divorce and entirely real dental problems–he’s become a regular with a heavy-breathing, magnetic dentist named Sharon, although it’s unclear if she is in on the sexual tension between them–but some earlier traumas are also at work upon our protagonist, that the reader will only find out about late in the book.

I called Jackson the protagonist and I do feel that way (although maybe, again, influenced by the TV show), but there are a few other issues percolating too. Mr. Wyre mourns his younger (and undeniably favorite daughter), murdered in his office while he was briefly away, several years ago. The crime remains unsolved. A woman with a shadowy past makes yet another fresh start. The Land sisters, Julia and Amelia, go through their father’s house after his death and find a clue in the long-ago disappearance of the youngest sister, Olivia. (They consider themselves the two remaining Land sisters of four, even though Sylvia is alive and well, in a convent.) Steve Spencer believes his wife is cheating on him. A wealthy, obnoxious elderly widow named Binky Rain is convinced someone is stealing her cats. A young homeless woman with yellow hair crosses paths repeatedly with multiple characters, asking “Can you help me?” All of these large and small worries, crimes, puzzles will become Jackson’s problem in one way or another. He is long-suffering (and the toothaches don’t help), a bit hapless, but good. His relationship with his daughter Marlee is very sweet.

I think one of the things I love about this book is the layers of personality that the main characters and even some of the less-central ones exhibit. Jackson’s dental troubles, the country music he prefers, his frustrations with his ex, his running (which I think played a larger role on television than it does here), fill him out. The Land sisters are both pathos-ridden and hysterically funny. Marlee is a gem. Jackson’s old buddy Howell remains mostly theoretical, off-screen, but appears for a brief, funny scene in the hospital, where Jackson concedes, “he supposed his daughter would be pretty safe on a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Russian gangsters.” Case Histories is like that: off-kilter, random, funny, emotive in the still-waters sort of way, concerned with profound ills but also basically good folks. Steeped in the kinds of details that make these things work. I can’t wait to read more Jackson Brodie.

Rating: 9 sweets.

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System Collapse by Martha Wells

Posted on August 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Book 7 is, again, the most recent Murderbot book to date, but there are more on the way, we’re told, and thank goodness. This tip from Liz has been (yet again) a big winner. I took a big break between books 6 and 7 – pretty precisely three years, whew! but it wasn’t too bad to jump back in. I won’t say I recalled all the fine points of where we were and who the humans were, but I was close enough to follow along; I think I’m already a little liable, with sci fi in particular, to let some of the details of tech and even plot wash over me as I go with the general atmosphere, themes, and cleverness. The Murderbot Diaries are absolutely character-driven, with style (that is, chiefly, Murderbot’s unique, sarcastic voice and secretly-a-teddy-bear personality) carrying a good portion of the load as well. I’m way more here for Murderbot itself – its inner dialog, its anxieties and values and reluctant but absolute loyalties, its decision making and love for entertainment media – than anything that happens to it. Those events are only here to let Murderbot react and act and be its loveable self.

Murderbot is full of dryly funny observations about how inexplicable humans are. “Humans are great at imagining stuff. That’s why their media is so good.” “Not even humans know why humans do things.” It coins ‘argucussion’ for the argument/discussions its humans have. Upon conflict, one human says to Murderbot, “We should talk about this later,” and its internal narrative responds, “We probably should but we absolutely are not going to, not if I can help it.” Because Murderbot is as avoidant of its own emotions and trauma as any repressed, long-ignored, forced-to-be-self-reliant human. It is a very human SecUnit.

This edition, it is fair, may start a bit more mid-scene than usual even for Martha Wells (and this is a thing she does), and it’s been a while since I last knew where we were. Murderbot and its growing crew of beloved humans (it is reluctant to admit to this, of course, but we know it is true) and ART the sentient spaceship are in a tricky negotiation situation involving mistreated and rightfully suspicious colonists, evil corporation lackeys, and dangerous ancient aliens. There is action and fighting, and mysteriousness. Murderbot spends a fair amount of time pretending to be human, which is at least better than pretending to be a SecUnit that has not hacked its governor module (there’s a little bit of that as well). It has the opportunity to free other SecUnits, too, and that possibility and the other SecUnits’ reactions are promising for future books. I smell a sequel and I can’t wait.

Rating: 8 fictionalized documentaries!

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Michael Idov

Posted on August 9, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of The Collaborators, here’s Michael Idov: The Moment When Things Open Up.

Michael Idov is a novelist, director, and screenwriter. A Latvian-born American raised in Riga under Soviet occupation, he moved to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan. Idov has written for New York magazine and has been the editor-in-chief of GQ Russia. He is the author of Ground Up and Dressed Up for a Riot and has worked on film and TV projects including Londongrad, Deutschland 83, Leto, and The Humorist. He and his wife and screenwriting partner, Lily, divide their time between Los Angeles, Berlin, and Portugal. The Collaborators, coming from Scribner on November 19, 2024, is a lightning-paced espionage thriller.

Does this novel fit the spy thriller genre?

Michael Idov
(photo: Ilya Popenko)

I don’t think the spy thriller is a genre. I think it’s an umbrella milieu, like horror in film. There’s something about the clandestine world that works as a device for boiling down the issues that could be tackled in any genre. From le Carré’s best novels, basically great literature of British manners, to Mick Herron’s social satire, to outright farce and parody, or a post-modernist puzzle box like Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, my favorite novel of his–the spy thriller novel has room for all of that. My goal was never to transcend or put a gloss or a spin on the thing. I love the thing itself and I wanted to do it justice. Any deviations from the formula are just things that naturally come through, dragged in by my own biography and personality, consciously and unconsciously.

Every genre offers both the writer and the reader enough elasticity that at some point the term becomes meaningless, unless it’s a very pure and formulaic example. Which sometimes, when executed well, can also be great. Readers are very savvy. They know the structure. They almost hum along with the melody, even if they’re hearing it for the first time. There is a certain pleasure in seeing every beat hit at the right moment in the right manner.

How much research did you do?

I gave myself two rules. Not being a spy, putting as much of myself into it as I could was the best hope for authenticity and verisimilitude for this book. So the rules were: at no point will any scene take place anywhere I haven’t lived myself. I wouldn’t be describing abstract cities, but specific intersections, streets, cafes. And, at no point will a character speak a language that I don’t speak. If I speak it badly, so will they. That’s why Maya’s French is so shitty, because mine is. There’s a sprinkling of Latvian and German, precisely because that’s the most I could do for the characters. But when it comes to actual research into the intelligence community–I’m lucky to have a few people in the OSINT world (open source intelligence), and this comes through in the character Alan Keegan. I am fascinated by that world, even more so than the “classic” intelligence agencies. I feel like OSINT is a force for good in the world more often than classic intelligence work.

Some things that may feel like genre inventions are taken directly out of reality. My favorite two examples: the opening is very explicitly based on the Ryanair Incident of 2021, when they called in a fake bomb threat to land a plane over Belarus, in Minsk, and yanked an opposition reporter off the plane and let everyone else go. Which led to Belarus becoming even more of a pariah state, and no international airlines fly over it since then. And the other thing that seems like a complete action-movie moment that’s entirely real is, in the fall of 2022 somebody hacked the Russian Uber equivalent, Yandex, and did send like 300 taxis to the same address, creating a traffic snarl that brought the city to a standstill. The moment I read about it, I knew I would use that real event as the climax of a car chase. There’s a huge paper trail around that incident, and people are arguing still whether this was the Ukrainians or some sort of harmless prank.

This goes to my general impetus behind the novel itself. Spy novels tend to come in two flavors: realistic and fantastic. I’m very fond of the term spy-fi that people use to describe things like the Mission Impossible movies. There is room for something that is very realistic and researched and true to the underlying geopolitical situation, but at the same time still finds room for a couple of car chases and a shootout. Because these things do happen! To prove that point, I’ve used the ones that actually have happened.

How do you stay organized for such a complex novel?

Everything has to be plotted out, structurally–as screenwriters rather unpleasantly put it, “beat out” in order to function. I have a 40-page document that’s just the chronology, down to the hour of what happens when, and how long it takes every character to move from point A to point B, and what time it is in every time zone. You have to make sure that there are no whoppers, like oh, it’s the middle of the night in New York, so you can’t describe people going to work. It is a giant Lego set.

That said, I did try to leave room to surprise myself. Oftentimes this happens when you imagine a space in minute detail, and then let your characters go in that space and surprise yourself with what your characters can do there. You build a room and then you make up what happens based on what props you’ve given the characters. Maybe this is where my movie brain took over. Okay, I have a clear view of this, wouldn’t it be cool if X did Y in these rooms.

This novel is expertly paced. What’s the secret?

Just being a fan of the genre. Imagining myself as a reader and not wanting to bore myself. When you really feel for these characters, at some point you develop a feel for when things start to drag: I’ve got maybe two more pages here before something needs to happen–as Raymond Chandler said, when you don’t know what to do, have two people burst in with guns.

This interview originally ran on July 17, 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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