In the Vanishers’ Palace by Aliette de Bodard

Posted on July 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This fantasy novel(la) comes billed as a reimagined, queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Perhaps I’m just working at a great distance from that original, but it didn’t recall it strongly for me. There is definitely a young girl kept captive in a palace by a being that’s understood to be a monster, and their relationship changes. The palace itself may have some powers. I see the parallels, but would never have thought of Beauty if I hadn’t been told to.

All of which is neither here nor there and has no bearing, for me, on enjoyment of the book. (Novella? At almost 200 pages, it might be pushing novella-length – these things are so tricky to define! – but it felt that contained, to me.)

Yên and her mother live in a somber village in a post-apocalyptic world, in which creatures called the Vanishers have (yes) vanished, but their legacy lingers: mysterious viruses, illnesses, and spirits, dangers lurking everywhere. Yên has failed as a scholar; her mother has value to the village as a healer, but as her mother’s just-mediocre assistant, Yên’s future is not assured. It does not surprise her to be sold away to pay off the village’s debts, to a frightening dragon: everyone expects she will be tortured to death by her new master, Vu Côn, but it turns out that Vu Côn (who can shape-shift between human and dragon forms) has other needs. She is the mother of intelligent, willful twins. And Yên, who had been teacher to her village’s children (apparently this was not judged a value??!), finds herself with new pupils.

Vu Côn and her children live in an abandoned Vanishers’ palace, a place of disconcerting, Escheresque, physically impossible dimensions and movements. The twins, Thông and Liên, possess powerful magic, and being nonhuman, as well as the children of her master, they give Yên different challenges than she’s faced with the village children. But they are children, nonetheless, clever and respectful of their new teacher (if headstrong), and she does care for them. Her feelings for Vu Côn are more complicated, blending desire with fear and resentment, and it appears this conflict is mutual.

The dragon’s eyes were a light grey, the color of storm clouds gathering. She was looking at Yên with an expression that was half-irritation, half-hunger, as if she would gobble Yên whole, given half a chance.

And what scared Yên most? This might, in the end, be just what she longed for.

Yên is dissatisfied living in the frightening Vanishers’ palace. She misses her mother and fears for her mother’s safety in their village; she misses home and knows it is unavailable to her, as the village elders who sold her away would never allow her return. She doesn’t know where to turn. And the readers understand before Yên does that there are deeper, darker secrets in the Vanishers’ palace than she’s yet discovered. But there are opportunities, too.

It’s a curious fantasy world, offering familiar elements (as they do) of our human desires and conflicts, but always with a twist – shape-shifting dragons, sure, but also, for example: Vu Côn has a magnetic sex appeal for our protagonist, but where I’m accustomed to seeing this expressed as heat, Yên experiences Vu Côn’s dragon-body as cold, wet, briny, and very sexy in these elements. That’s a new one for me, and I don’t find it easily accessible: “sea salt and cold, tight air, and a faint aftertaste like algae,” “wet cold creeping up her skin like fingers” – slimy, even! It’s an interesting twist, and one where I have to just trust in Yên’s tastes for Yên. But that’s what fiction asks of us, in different ways, right?

This was a fascinating adventure for me, in the ways that it did and did not fit into my expectations. And in the end, it calls upon some useful universals: big thinking about right and wrong, the way we relate to lover, friend, family, and community, the yearning for self-actualization and belonging. Dragons? Sure. I find Aliette de Bodard a lively imagination and I liked this punchy tale.

Rating: 7 strokes.

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The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey

Posted on July 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Told in the voice of a magpie, with humor and wisdom, this unflinching portrait of nature picks at the thin veil between the elemental violence and drama of both human and animal worlds.

Catherine Chidgey (Pet; Remote Sympathy) offers a singular combination of compassion, desperation, dark humor, and slow-building terror with The Axeman’s Carnival, set in rural high-country New Zealand. The story is told through the unusual perspective of a magpie fallen from the nest and rescued by a woman named Marnie, who lives on Wilderness Road with her husband, Rob, a sheep farmer and competitive axeman. They’re “under a lot of pressure,” a refrain that contributes to a general sense of foreboding: a drought threatens their livelihood; Marnie mourns a lost pregnancy; she is isolated from the world beyond their farm. An ominous thread runs through their lives in ways that readers gradually become aware of.

The narrator shares memories of being in the eggshell, occupying the nest with his sister and brothers. “She lifted me into her pillowed palm” and a relationship begins. Marnie releases the magpie to his flock, but he chooses to return to the woman he adores; she names him Tama, and posts his pictures to the Internet, which gains Tama a following. The sheep station suffers setbacks, and Rob’s temper and drinking become increasingly menacing, even as he trains for the annual competition where he hopes to win his 10th golden axe, which will offer both the affirmation he craves and a badly needed monetary prize. Tama’s Internet fame presents a financial opportunity for the family, but also puts them in the public eye, with new risks. Tama’s view of events is curious, in both senses of the word; “that was how houses worked,” he repeatedly notes, with each strange or sinister observation.

Magpies are very smart birds. Tama relates the story with humor and wisdom. He mimics human speech and understands it well enough to communicate, and the reader benefits from his viewpoint as he describes events, with grim foreshadowing. “When I think about what happened later, I remember that day,” he says, of various small violences. “Rob honed an axe with his honing stone…. He ran the blade through the hair on his forearm to test the sharpness, and we watched his crime show about shapely murdered women with torn-off clothes who’d let their attackers in their front doors.” Rob’s temper, his taste for crime shows and murdered women, his axes and admirable strength, his jealousy and Marnie’s fear, all contribute to the reader’s trepidation of what is to come. But The Axeman’s Carnival has tricks up its sleeve, and Tama himself should not be underestimated.

This review originally ran in the June 18, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cashews.

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The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright

Posted on July 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A disgruntled PI and a plot as wildly complicated as the history of the American South itself combine in this spectacular, darkly funny mystery.

Snowden Wright (American Pop; Play Pretty Blues) immerses his readers in a gritty, troubled small-town Mississippi with The Queen City Detective Agency, and introduces an indomitable protagonist.

It’s the 1980s and the country is about to reinaugurate Ronald Reagan when a small-time felon called Turnip does “a Greg Louganis off the roof” of the county courthouse in Meridian, Miss. Turnip was implicated in the murder, allegedly by hire, of a successful local real estate developer, and rumored to be involved with a mythical criminal syndicate called the Dixie Mafia that may or may not actually exist. Turnip’s suspicious death (by rooftop dive, or was it by poison?) and the murder he may or may not have helped arrange wind up entangled with cockfighting rings, domestic violence, child brides, centuries-old institutional racism and class discrimination, and much more.

Enter Clementine Baldwin (that’s Clem or Ms. Baldwin to you) of Queen City Detective Agency in Meridian, a decaying railroad town that was once the second-largest in the state. “Clem loathed this place and its vitiated nostalgia, redolent of an era when that idiot Atticus Finch thought he could win a rigged game, when you needed a tool to open a can of beer…. At least the beer cans had gotten better.” A disillusioned former cop, Clem is also a Black woman in a city, state, and nation that respects neither. She’d rather just be called a private investigator than a lady PI. For her second-in-command, she went looking for a prop: “completely useless in most circumstances, but, in hers, as handy as locking hubs on a muddy day. In other words, the prop had to be a white man. The guy needed to have hominy for gray matter….” But instead she found Dixon Hicks, “whose name said it all,” a prop who turned out to be a good partner and even a good friend.

Clem is a quintessential hard-boiled detective with entirely legitimate beefs with the world around her. She drinks too much, but who wouldn’t? Partnered with the genuinely, surprisingly good Dixon, she is a smart, courageous, flawed heroine, with plenty of dark humor and a storied past. Wright’s prose is clever and delightfully funny even while handling serious social ills. The Queen City Detective Agency is a remarkable work of Southern noir, featuring crackpot characters both silly and sinister, a longstanding history of greed and white privilege, and an unforgettable private investigator. Readers will be anxious for more featuring Ms. Baldwin.

This review originally ran in the June 14, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 rocks.

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The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations by Amy Leach

Posted on July 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Playful, celebratory, wise, impertinent, Amy Leach turns her lyricism and wit on a fundamentalist upbringing and the wealth of experiences beyond.

Amy Leach’s third book, The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations, upholds the singular spirit of Things That Are and The Everybody Ensemble with a deepening of personal and spiritual subject matter. Whimsical, frank, funny, shrewd, and ever unpredictable, Leach’s phrasing and concepts continue to surprise, delight, and edify.

Where her previous works explored the world with curiosity, awe, an endearing silliness, and joy, The Salt of the Universe picks up with a new focus on Leach’s upbringing and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in which she was raised. “Now, in this book, I will let my soul speak for itself… I figure I’ve heard about five thousand sermons in my life, and now… I have something to say too.” What she has to say will be familiar in tone to her established readers, but fresh in its more personal angle.

Leach remains the master of the list, especially lists of the unexpected. Look out for how Walmart has taught her to find items she was not searching for, including “inflatable bathtub neck pillows and tropical Popsicles and Guinness Baltimore Blonde and misty-scented candles and Minions whistles.” Her subjects include not only gods but music and poetry; babies generally and her own two children in particular; snake grass and daffodils; brown dwarf stars and muons; an “interior Texas” and an outdoor heart and everything in between; the wide, wide world, both the small and the large; and the wonder and wondrousness of all forms of art, life, and love. In examining her relationship with Adventism and religion in general, Leach can be drolly tongue-in-cheek, and though earnest, never unfun.

This is a serious investigation into how to live, while coming from a religion that outlaws pickles and dancing. “We know not to read Shakespeare, or Boethius, but what are we to think of Snoop Dogg or Chubby Checker?… It is so hard to be stranded in the twenty-first century with only God as our guide.” Leach has split from Adventism, rejecting the prohibitions on spicy foods, literature, and, yes, pickles (though she still refrains from eating meat), but retains her sense of marvel and reverence at the vast and varied world–the tubax, dancing robots, sloths, Edith Wharton, Bob Dylan. “The apocalypse can’t be had for the hankering but the concerto sometimes can.” She does not profess to prescribe, but will still inspire. Sincerely inquisitive and wildly, fancifully imaginative, Leach’s perspective is a gift. The Salt of the Universe may be life-changing, even life-saving.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 unsuitable subordinates.

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Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld, trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Posted on July 5, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This engrossing first novel illuminates an experience of hearing loss that is both frightening and beautiful, filled with surprising imagery.

Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears is a strange, haunting story of sensory presence and absence, language and loss, relationships and choices. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, this first novel follows a young woman whose limited hearing has left her always straddling the experiences of the hearing and the deaf. Her progressive hearing loss eventually poses a choice between a cochlear implant and profound deafness. In a world she finds increasingly incomprehensible, Louise navigates work (in the French governmental bureaucracy, processing first birth and then death certificates), friendship (with the eccentric Anna, who views Louise’s deafness as poetic), and a romantic relationship with a hearing man. She is accompanied as well by a dog, a soldier, and a botanist who deals in “miraginary” plants; these three characters are hallucinations or creations of Louise’s imagination who offer valuable advice.

“When someone can’t make use of a particular sense anymore, the cortex reorganizes so that area of the brain is repurposed by the senses that person still has.” Because her world contains less and less sound, Louise’s vision is vibrant. Jellyfish is bursting with sensory descriptions, including sounds heard and missed, “the warmth of timbres, this soft sheen of wind, of color, of all sound’s snags and snarls.” Visual details are evocative and often surprising: “eyes as blank as an ice floe after an orca had gone by with a penguin in its mouth.” The effect of this unusual perspective is riveting.

Louise ponders large, philosophical questions of whether she will still be herself if she agrees to an implant. With an implant, she’s told, she won’t hear like she did before, but a psychologist also asserts, “Your brain will have forgotten what ‘before’ means.” She wonders if she needs sound to activate memory and whether “[s]ilence set free words and images held captive by language.” She investigates the experiences of those “uprooted from their language” and creates for herself a “sound herbarium.” In Zuckerman’s translation, Louise’s voice on the page is by turns stark, stoic, and dramatic. As those around her pressure her to take the implant or to embrace deafness, Louise reveals a strong personality: fiercely obstinate and attached to her vivid interior world.

A curious, thought-provoking, intensely mind-bending exploration of the loss of a sense and the potential richness as well as struggle of life with an invisible disability. Imaginative and spellbinding, Jellyfish Have No Ears is unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 24, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 poppies.

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The Twilight Garden by Sara Nisha Adams

Posted on July 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Reading List comes a pleasingly similar, sweet novel of unexpected connections. In a shared garden in London, two sets of neighbors in two timelines (2018-19 and the 1970s and 80s) navigate conflict, build community, share love and struggles, and grow flowers, food, and strong bonds. It’s an optimistic story, which I perhaps don’t get enough of in my life.

I’m thinking of both this and Adams’ first novel as sort of meet-cute, enemies-to-friends stories, with rom-com sweetness but where the relationships that form are not romantic. Rather, neighbors and community members come together, across diversity in age, gender, sexuality, and race, and form deep and meaningful friendships and built families, caring for each other in profound but not romantic ways. There are romances among the cast of characters, but not in the relationships whose trajectory defines the novel. I’m thinking of these as non-romantic love stories, a genre I’ve not thought about before but am trying to define here.

We first meet two neighbors in contemporary London. Winston is a young Indian immigrant who has lived in his rental home for some years with his partner, Lewis, although their relationship seems to be drawing to a close. He’s lonely, disconnected, and a bit depressed, although his work in a nearby convenience store offers a wholesome and healthy dose of community connection. “He was always chatting to customers in the shop, but when it came to the neighbors on his road, he barely knew faces, let alone names.”

Bernice has just moved in next door, newly divorced, with her ten-year-old son Seb. She is white, well-off, privileged, uptight. Because chapters alternate between their perspectives, the reader knows that each is suffering their own private pains, but to one another, Winston and Bernice are each the nightmare neighbor. Their conflict centers around a shared garden, which Winston has treated as a private sanctuary and Bernice views as a death trap for her son. This garden, now in disrepair, transports readers back to the earlier timeline and two additional protagonists.

Maya first moved in (to what is now Winston’s home) with her husband Prem when they were newly arrived from India. They were soon joined by a daughter, Hiral. Next door (in what is now Bernice and Seb’s home) an older woman named Alma lived in the house she’d been raised in. Initially prickly, and permanently ornery, Alma becomes a dear friend to Maya’s family, a relationship that began in the garden. Alma is a very serious gardener and a bit of a control freak, but Maya encourages her to accept help from their community, and they wind up very much a neighborhood hub for food, fellowship, work, mutual support. In Winston and Bernice’s time, mysterious missives inspire the feuding neighbors to attempt reawakening the rich shared garden of years past, and the bonds of community come, slowly, along with it.

This story is deeply sweet, perhaps approaching what my mother would call ‘precious,’ but never getting there. There are no bad guys, although there are some bad behaviors; instead, these are humans who suffer and sometimes handle it poorly, but feel badly about it and try harder next time. The loves (familial, friendly, and romantic) are real and deep. I cried several times. It felt wholesome and good. There is tremendous diversity here in several senses, and closeness is possible across all those lines when humans reach out and make efforts, or when there is real need. It’s a lovely, hopeful version of the world, and I’m here for more of it.

Rating: 9 banana leaves.

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Gallows Drop by Mari Hannah

Posted on June 28, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Back on the fence about this series, but I keep coming back for more. Hannah is doing something right.

Pros: page-turner. I stay riveted, engaged and invested. I was drawn in, in this book in particular, by the possibility that we were finally going to get into the heart of Kate’s biggest issue in her personal and private lives: her conflicted relationship with her own sexuality and her attempt to live a closeted life at work while maintaining a same-sex relationship with (no less) a colleague. That conflict feels like the shoe that’s been waiting to drop for this whole series, and the specter of resolving it was a major pull – as well as the mystery plot being a solid one. (I don’t think I’ve ever had beef with the mystery itself in any of these books.)

More ambivalent: the central conflict about Kate’s coming out, and the solidifying of her relationship with Jo, threatened to be a bit on the nose, especially in combination with the mystery plot and the potential relevance of gay identity in that storyline. “Suddenly she couldn’t differentiate between her own situation and that of —–. If she found out that his death was connected to his homosexuality it would open up a wound she’d been hiding for years. A bleeding open wound she’d been trying and failing to live with. The reason she’d thrown away all that was good in her life.” Not only on-the-nose, but awfully thoroughly spelled out for my tastes. Let the reader do a little work!

Cons: dialog and sentence-level writing continue to distract me. Speaking of thoroughly spelled out, would a cop really need to say, “I’ll call you later, if I can. Service is patchy here. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.” In the 2010s, you have to explain what patchy service means? Or in describing scraps of debris on the ground: “Some kind of confectionary wrapper… and what looks suspiciously like a cannabis joint.” No humor, no irony: “what looks suspiciously like a cannabis joint.” Nobody talks like that. There was also a continued emphasis on ‘stuff’ when ANY noun would do more and better.

The resolution of the plot puzzle felt a bit chaotic. Not quite a deus ex machina, but multiple (and unrelated) unhinged characters running roughshod. Upon finishing the book I was left a little muddled as to who did what to whom, because it all dissolved into mayhem. And fair enough, because that’s the way the world goes sometimes, but this was not Hannah’s cleanest finish. And speaking of the finish: literally the last line of this novel thrusts us upon the hugest cliffhanger I’ve seen in a while, and quite a fantastical one to boot. I don’t think I’m happy with this move.

Despite all this, my experience in reading was that I really enjoyed the book, in some mammoth sessions. And started the next one immediately. So, not sure where this leaves us. It’s not a love/hate relationship, but certainly a love/not-love relationship that I am in with the DCI Kate Daniels series.

Help.

Rating: 6 gobs of spit.

EDIT: The next book in this series, Without a Trace, was distressingly bad. I cannot review it here and am not sure where to turn next. Warning.

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The Wheel of the Year: An Illustrated Guide to Nature’s Rhythms by Fiona Cook, illus. by Jessica Roux

Posted on June 24, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This beautiful book sold itself as soon as I walked into the art shop where it lived near the front door on display. I was absolutely ready for a treatment of cycles in the natural world as celebrated by human cultures, with gorgeously rendered art and suggested activities. I bought it in January, and all year have been reading the relevant sections at the appropriate times; I’m reviewing this book just after summer solstice, so haven’t made it all the way through yet, but I feel confident in my impressions.

The Wheel of the Year is geared toward younger readers with its introductory notes on safety (“always have an adult around… when you’re using the stove, oven, or knives”), but its offerings are for anybody. “Magic is real,” we are told. We are looking to find and recognize magic, and “just because something can be explained by science doesn’t mean it’s not also magical.” “The Earth and the Sun do a dance that turns the Wheel of the Year… there’s a rhythm to the seasons, and forming a relationship with your home and its inhabitants is true magic.” It’s definitely directed at kids (“Can you convince your grown-up to join you in sleeping outside, too?”), but works just as well for us young-at-heart, and I’m going to say it’s fun to think about convincing “my grown-up” to do any of this with me.

Following some brief remarks to this effect, we’re taking through the wheel of the year with its eight spokes: two equinoxes, two solstices, and four interstitial markers: beltane, lúnasa, samhain, and imbolc. The wheel is essentially pagan, “used by people who follow a nature-based spiritual path.” This guide surveys a number of cultures from around the world and different points in history, noting commonalities in how people recognize certain times of the year. As I began reading, I turned ahead to the moment in time I was living: imbolc, in early February, when various people observe Candelaria, Brigid’s Day, Carnival, the Lunar New Year, Groundhog Day, and more. I read about ways to get out and observe the changing world, how to make maple syrup, seasonal rituals and items for the imbolc altar, craft projects, and more. The glossary is pleasingly wide-ranging, with terms like cosmos and crepuscular, mycelium and solidarity.

The summer solstice is another rich one, and perhaps unsurprisingly, longer than some chapters. I love the positive messaging about being oneself: “Life, in its many forms, is expressing itself fearlessly in the world around you. Animals and plants wear their brightest colors, whether in fur, feather, fruit, or flower. You can do the same!” (Details follow.) I love the activities, rituals – each date has a ritual bath on offer; for midsummer we consider rose petals and coconut milk – and items to collect for an altar. It’s just lovely, wholesome stuff, celebrating and respecting the world around us.

I feel like my life has been improved by paying a little closer attention to moon phases, seasonal change, and solstices and equinoxes. A book like this is such a perfect fit, and such a genuine pleasure to read and touch and look at, with its large hardback format and beautiful art on thick pages. Check out those endpapers:

Highly recommend.

Rating: 9 tulips.

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Summer Solstice by Nina MacLaughlin

Posted on June 21, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Summer is the saturated season. The color floods back in. Each dip is another shot at being reborn, into summer where the world’s blood runs green.

For the summer solstice last night, I had my usual, traditional backyard fire. The traditions – my traditions – are accumulating: this time I had friends and food and drink around the fire as well. And I had a chapter from The Wheel of the Year to read (review forthcoming; it is wonderful), and I had a Nina MacLaughlin essay-book.

Six months ago I read her Winter Solstice, and now the summer one. It is the loveliest kind of homework to wake up and see what timely read I have for the day.

This little book barely clears 50 pages for the essay portion itself: perfectly sized for a same-day read, which is what I did. Now, this means I missed the advice to get up and wash one’s face in the solstice dew at dawn (also admittedly the summer solstice dawn is quite early for me). It is basically a lengthy meditation on summer and its resonances, for MacLaughlin and beyond; she has a number of works cited, mostly other works of literature (poetry, music) to which she refers, as jumping-off points for further musing. This won’t feel like ‘research’ so much in the traditional and dry-sounding way you might be thinking (although it *does* count as research!); more of a mining of other minds and cultural markers for how we think about summer, and midsummer or the solstice in particular. She does begin in early June, building into summer that way. MacLaughlin’s summer involves much swimming and waters, as well as fire, and sweat and sun and shade and fireflies (or lightning bugs) and a few other things we may hold, culturally, in common around here (several mentions are made of hot dogs). At least compared to my memory of Winter Solstice, I think there was less study of other cultural and historical handlings of the event. That could be my memory. Or it could be that Summer predated Winter by several years (ha) and the concept developed a bit in that time. This one does still offer an addendum of “Plant Matter,” featuring a few prominent plants and herbs associated with the summer solstice. I like that part.

I was not entirely surprised, in the Afterword, at MacLaughlin’s confession that she prefers winter. Again, perhaps it was just (or partly) the few years between books, but Winter Solstice felt fuller and richer to me. (Or maybe it was the hot mulled wine that accompanied that one, for this reader.) I am a summer person, myself, but her work on winter enriched that time for me considerably. There is still, here, the sensuality that I appreciated so much.

I would eat up more like this. I wonder if MacLaughlin would do the equinoxes, and maybe samhain and lúnasa and more…

The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA by Jesse Katz

Posted on June 17, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Street gangs and street vendors in L.A.’s MacArthur Park, a pair of botched murders, and a number of criminal trials shed light on social ills in this sensitive study.

Jesse Katz (The Opposite Field), longtime Los Angeles journalist, tackles a true story featuring a daunting number of characters and spanning years and tragedies in The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA. With admirable clarity and compassion, Katz unravels a complex narrative that has no easy answers.

In the MacArthur Park neighborhood of L.A. in 2007, a teenaged gang member under orders fired five shots at a street vendor, in retaliation for the vendor refusing to pay “rent” to the gang. The intended victim was badly wounded by four bullets; the fifth bullet struck and killed a nearby 23-day-old infant. The shooter, Giovanni Macedo, was in turn the victim of a botched murder attempt at the hands of fellow members of his gang, the Columbia Lil Cycos, as punishment for his error. Giovanni eventually testified and helped put many gang members behind bars, receiving a sentence of 51 years for his crimes.

Katz’s thorough account details Giovanni’s personal and family history; the history of MacArthur Park; the cultural and economic predicament of L.A.’s immigrant street vendors; the background of the Columbia Lil Cycos, the larger 18th Street alliance, and the Mexican Mafia; the lives of Giovanni’s victims; and California’s law enforcement, judicial, and prison systems. It’s a sprawling story, but riveting and propulsive in this telling. The Rent Collectors deftly probes systemic ills. A large population of undocumented immigrant street vendors is squeezed between L.A. enforcement and street gangs: “MacArthur Park strained under the exigencies of that shadow population, a virtually permanent subclass left to invent its own opportunities, to improvise its own survival.”

Giovanni’s family background leaves him with a shortage of options and a desperate desire to belong to something bigger than himself. Immigration, legal, and prison systems fail, frustratingly often, to reward behaviors society deems “good” or to address adequately the “bad.” Giovanni is the protagonist of this story, drawing near a parole hearing at the time of this book’s publication; Katz portrays him with sensitivity and an eye to the complexities that led to his crimes. Giovanni is an imperfect symbol of redemption, but Katz shows that the marginalized teen was at the mercy of inexorable and deeply problematic societal forces. Abstaining from painting heroes or villains, Katz offers instead a plethora of thoughtful, nuanced profiles and a zoomed-out view of immigrant L.A., its street vendors, its gangs, and its intricacies. The result is relentless, multi-faceted, and incisive.

This review originally ran in the May 10, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pairs of earrings.

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