The Bishop’s Villa by Sacha Naspini, trans. by Clarissa Botsford

Posted on October 7, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this transporting novel based on real events, a shy cobbler in an Italian village during World War II is gradually drawn into quiet acts in the Resistance.

Sacha Naspini (Nives) brings close and poignant attention to true events with his historical novel The Bishop’s Villa, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

In the fall of 1943, in the sleepy village of Le Case in Tuscany’s Maremma region, a cobbler goes about his daily business. Solitary and quiet by nature, René makes do with just two fingers on his right hand following a childhood accident with a lathe; his nickname in town is Settebello, after the “lucky seven” card in scopa. When the local bishop rents out the seminary and surrounding villa to be used as a prison camp for the region’s Jewish population, Le Case mostly plods on as before. Some local residents speak cruelly of the prisoners; many simply ignore their presence. René mends the shoes brought to him for repair by prison guards. For most townspeople, the war is poverty, deprivation, and the passage of time.

But René’s neighbor Anna, a lifelong friend, has just lost her son, who fought for the Resistance until he was captured and executed by the Wehrmacht. Anna is galvanized; René wants her to stand down. And then Anna vanishes, leaving behind a note for René. She has gone to join the partisans, to “fight for Edoardo and for Italy.” When René learns that Anna might have become imprisoned in the bishop’s villa, he finds that he can no longer fail to act. His subtle sabotage begins with boots. “He chose rusty nails, some so brittle that they crumbled at the first blow. He hammered them in a little crooked, curved inwards as if he were aiming for the heel… the hole in the sole would get wider, like a small surface wound.”

In short chapters, Naspini draws readers into René’s world: first the tightly confined life of the village cobbler, traveling back and forth between home, workshop, and Anna’s apartment, and then to the tighter confines of a cell in the bishop’s villa. Botsford’s translation is terse and atmospheric, punctuated by lyrical or romantic phrasings: wonder is “like a child unable to describe a treasure they’d chanced upon under a stone.” With torture, “you can chew [a man’s] bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

The Bishop’s Villa is absorbing, transporting, beautiful, and grim. Naspini’s Author’s Note makes clear his drive to lay bare a shameful chapter of history; but with this novel he has also written a love story, for without Anna, “René would never have used the tools of his trade to fight his war.” The result is moving and layered.

This review originally ran in the September 12, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 soles.

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The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry

Posted on October 4, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A booklover’s dream, this astonishingly great debut novel focuses on family and the power of story in a world of magic, imagination, and serious literary criticism. In Wellington, New Zealand, Rob Sutherland is a hardworking lawyer with a lovely partner, Lydia, and a trying younger brother, Charley, known to his colleagues as Dr. Charles Sutherland. Rob is longsuffering: Charley keeps calling him, often in the middle of the night, to come up to work (Charley teaches at Prince Albert University) and help him catch the characters he’s accidentally released from books so he can put them back. Rob has always had complicated feelings for Charley: he loves his little brother and wants to keep him safe, but he definitely stays annoyed with him much of the time, too. Though four years younger, Charley was a prodigy, who went off to Oxford University the same year that Rob went off to Prince Albert. Rob would have been considered intelligent in most families, but felt overshadowed by a child who read Dickens when he was two years old. One of this novel’s central threads is the challenge of an adult relationship between brothers, with a touch of sibling rivalry, many old wounds, and a persistent bond of love, loyalty, and protectiveness that runs in both directions.

So: Charley is a genius, of the scattered, distant, dreamy type, who keeps accidentally bringing fictional (and nonfictional!) characters out of books. It can get messy. Rob is the exasperated big brother who keeps helping clean up messes – not always in the best of humors. Then the messes get much bigger, beyond anything that Rob or Charley is prepared to deal with – out of their control, and, it eventually becomes clear, outside of Charley’s causing. But Charley, and eventually Rob, do decide that it’s within their responsibility to try to save Wellington, or the world.

This is a story filled with vibrant characters, and that plays with the layers of what ‘character’ can mean. Some are Parry’s (her characters’) interpretations of those written by others, including the title character, Uriah Heep, who comes from David Copperfield and is thus originally Dickens’s, now read by Charley (and Parry). Some are Parry’s originals but, within this book, credited to another (fictional) author. [The indomitable Millie Radcliffe-Dix comes from The Adventures of Millie Radcliffe-Dix, Girl Detective, which unfortunately do not exist in this world I’m out here living in.] And some, like Charley himself, are the inventions of this book. It quickly gets to be a lot, but gosh, in the most fun ways. Again: there was never such a booklover’s book.

The title of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep refers to a character who is not even one of the top five or ten most important in the book – although he is the character at large in the opening scene, when Charley calls Rob in the middle of the night (again). He will reappear periodically. In some ways, Dr. Charles Sutherland is the main character of the book – he has the splashiest powers, and the central conflict rages around him; mysteries wreathe his past; he will have great choices to makes. But it is Rob who narrates the bulk of the book (with a few interludes as exception). In part, I think this is because there is a heavy emphasis, in this world and in this telling, on how one person’s “reading” of another impacts the person being read. Rob’s perspective on Charley matters a great deal. I think Parry’s choice of Rob as narrator is interesting; it shifts the reader’s reading, in similar ways. Whose stories do we matter in? As Dr. Frankenstein tells us: “What you need to understand about protagonists… is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories.” If that’s not a lesson for the real world, I don’t know what is.

I’m still reeling and will enjoy thinking about what this book has shown me as I move through my world and reading. I think it has the potential to be one of those that shifts how I think about it all – which is a big accomplishment. Also, everything Parry writes plunges me deeply and pleasurably into other worlds, which I love. I finished this book and dived directly into another big thick one of hers. Do recommend.

Rating: 9 doors.

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Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River by Zak Podmore

Posted on September 30, 2024 by pagesofjulia


With Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, investigative journalist Zak Podmore tackles a massive, complicated set of questions about western water management and the Glen Canyon Dam, the construction of which created a reservoir called Lake Powell. Arguably the most politically fraught and symbolic dam in the southwestern United States, Glen Canyon has long had its fans and detractors. The Millennium Drought, “an indefinite change in precipitation patterns” in the region, has “done three-quarters of the work toward draining Lake Powell already,” but this leaves numerous challenges: Indigenous people’s water rights, engineering and hydrology puzzles, the ecological implications for long-flooded lands freshly exposed to open air or buried under millions of acre-feet of sedimentation, and more.

Podmore acknowledges his own biases about the dam, which was in place before he was born. But he proceeds with copious and in-depth research into the many and complex issues it poses, considers what he learns with an open mind, and integrates hard science, cultural awareness, and competing viewpoints into an admirably accessible work of creative nonfiction. Podmore avoids binary options and magical thinking, and his study is richer for it. Included are surprisingly hopeful notes, such as the rapid recovery of native plants and ecosystems in newly exposed side canyons: “A canyon one hundred miles away, drowned for half a century, had restored itself in fewer than twenty years.” With narrative style and colorful characters, Podmore (Confluence) has composed a compelling, readable, and entertaining as well as educational text. Life After Dead Pool is superlative: important, insightful, and a pleasure to read.

This review originally ran in the August 30, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 cans of beans.

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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on September 27, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I really enjoyed Gods of Jade and Shadow, with the caveat for sensitive readers to beware a certain amount of gore and darkness. This one is imaginative, compelling, and surely fulfills its claims to the horror genre; but some of those more horrifying elements started to push my tolerances, which are famously high (though not limitless). I’d thought about putting this in white text, like I do spoilers, but I think it deserves a proper trigger warning: this novel not only deals in sexual contact without consent, but those scenes were heightened – at least in my feelings – by a mind-control element that caused the nonconsenting party to enjoy what was happening, as it was happening (although not before or after). This gave me a unique ‘ick’ I’d perhaps not encountered before. And in considering the book now, I find that part of the experience is overshadowing the rest for me.

It’s a good story, and well executed. I like the setting – beginning in 1950s Mexico City and then moving to a classically disturbing, possibly haunted, gothic mansion in disrepair, high in the misty rural Mexican hills. I like the details, including society’s dos and don’ts and the dresses and accessories of a popular, pretty, privileged young woman, our protagonist, Noémi Taboada. She’s plucky, thinks for herself, is unwilling to settle for a young woman’s few destined roles. These days, she’s thinking she’d like to study anthropology in graduate school. She’s well read, and also loves a party, a nice dress, and a fawning young man (and preferably a new one on a regular schedule). I like her.

Her cousin Catalina is a bit different, more demure, a few years older, enchanted by fairy tales and romance, which is how she ends up married to the enigmatic Virgil Doyle. Married, and spirited away to the yet more enigmatic estate known as High Place, on an abandoned silver mine. Where Noémi is to visit, and perhaps to rescue her.

High Place is bad news, its residents sinister (and dedicated to eugenics, ick again), its history very mysterious. Noémi is up for a lot, but this place may get the best of her. There’s always Francis, a Doyle cousin who might – on and off – be an ally. There’s a creepy old cemetery (of course), and something strange going on with the mushrooms. There are actually some really interesting ideas at play. But, like I said, the special ick I found here challenged me quite a bit.

I’ve left the rating at a 7. It’s a well-done story. But it’s left me feeling not so great. I’m intrigued enough to keep on checking out Moreno-Garcia’s backlist.

Rating: 7 cards.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Lisa Genova

Posted on September 23, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of More or Less Maddy, here’s Lisa Genova: On Empathy.

Lisa Genova–who’s been hailed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science–is the author of Still Alice (adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore), Left Neglected, and Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, among others. Genova holds a degree in biopsychology from Bates College and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University. Her sixth novel, More or Less Maddy (Gallery/Scout Press, January 14, 2025), features a young woman coming to terms with bipolar disorder.

Why bipolar?

Lisa Genova
(photo: Greg Mentzer)

I’m excited to talk about the distinction between a mental illness and a neurological condition. There’s a stigma attached to the idea of mental illness. I can’t trust you, you’re crazy, you’re dangerous–all of that gets piled on immediately. We would never refer to ALS, autism, or Alzheimer’s as a mental illness. And yet depression, schizophrenia, bipolar–those are also neurological conditions. To distinguish them as mental illness seems to add an unnecessary burden on these folks that this is somehow their fault.

My neuroscience background is my unique lens on fiction and it’s why I write, because these topics are so daunting and overwhelming, and fiction is such a lovely place to help people empathize. I picked bipolar disorder because I had a sense it was everywhere.

Every time I said my next novel was going to be about bipolar disorder, it got the same reaction: a mix of gasps, whispers, and applause. That’s never happened with any other topic I’ve announced. People started DM-ing me on social media: I have a mother, I have a brother, I have a dad. Not necessarily offering to talk to me, although a lot of people did, but others were just thanking me already for this book I hadn’t written yet. I felt an enormous sense of responsibility and opportunity to contribute something meaningful.

Your website identifies you as an “empathy warrior.” Is that what drove you to fiction?

My grandmother had Alzheimer’s. I was 28 when she got the diagnosis. I had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Alzheimer’s was not my area of expertise, but I had the vocabulary. I dove into the research, I read on how the disease was managed from a clinical perspective, but what was missing was, what does it feel like to have this? And how to feel comfortable with her Alzheimer’s. I had a tremendous amount of sympathy for her, and for us, but I did not know how to be with her. If she started talking to plastic baby dolls, I left the room. I let my aunts take over. I felt heartbroken, frustrated, scared, and embarrassed. I felt sympathy, but sympathy actually drives disconnection. Keeps us emotionally separate. I didn’t know how to get to empathy. I didn’t have the understanding or the maturity to just be with her and imagine what it’s like to be her in a room, not recognizing it as her home. Everything I’d been reading about Alzheimer’s was from the outside looking in. The scientists, caregivers, and social workers have valuable points of view, but none of them were the perspective of the person who’s living it. Fiction is where you get a chance to walk in someone else’s shoes, find that human connection, that shared emotional experience. That was the beginning. When Still Alice worked, and I got feedback about how much it helped, there was so much appreciation–I just knew. I love doing this, and now I feel the value in it. I’m going to keep going.

How did you create Maddy?

I begin all my stories by reading as much as I can. I read lots of memoirs and textbooks, and then I go out and talk to people. For this book I sought out the authors of some of those textbooks. I talked to the guy who runs the bipolar treatment center at Mass General. I found a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital. I spoke with psychiatrists from all over. If you have diabetes, there’s a single protocol, no matter where you live in the world. With bipolar that is not the case. You go to 10 doctors, you’re going to get 10 different prescriptions. I’m always trying to tell the truth under imagined circumstances, but one thing I’m very cognizant of is my books are known for being informed. They’re researched, and they’re going to be used as a blueprint. They’re used in medical schools, in OT, PT, speech pathology. I wanted to get the best practices right. My experts are always the people who live with it and their families. I spent a lot of time talking with lots of people. It’s an ongoing conversation, it’s in-depth and really intimate, and I’m grateful that people trust me with their stories.

Bipolar begins young. I wanted Maddy to be a woman. I wanted to consider the expectations of her to live a normal life as a woman, and the limitations that imposes. If this starts just as you’re launching a life, how disrupting and confusing would that be? I wanted her to be a college student, with all those expectations and pressures. In making her a comedian, I wanted her to choose something that was outside the stability of the expected life. Comedy I liked because it’s very public; she’d be in front of people. Comedians sort of live the bipolar experience. If you’re killing it, that’s the highest high. You’re connecting, everybody gets you, there’s a human bond. If you’re bombing, it’s the lowest of lows. It’s a death. Weirdly, that swing is a nice metaphor for what it could feel like to be bipolar. I’m a big comedy fan, so this gave me a lovely excuse. Comedians who are great at what they do, it’s because they’re speaking truth. They’re tapping into a vulnerability in the human condition. If I could write my character’s comedy and that progression toward having something meaningful to say about accepting herself with bipolar, that would be really cool. It was terrifying, too, because I’d never written comedy. I did take a standup comedy writing class and I did a five-minute set.

Did you discover a new calling?

Oh no. Ohhhh, no. Not going to quit my day job.

Do you consider yourself an activist author?

That’s what the “empathy warrior” is about. It’s about humanizing, destigmatizing. These books are an opportunity. If I see someone with dementia, or who might be manic, my reflexive response isn’t, I need to get away from that. My response becomes more, I’m not afraid of you. How can I help?

I advocate for resources for care and for research. In the author’s note of this book I send people to the International Bipolar Foundation for more education, and to donate money if they’d like. I’ve raised millions of dollars for Alzheimer’s care and research. And we’re 15 years out from Still Alice, so I stay as an activist, advocate, empathy warrior. I want my books to be a reason for people to learn more, to contribute, to offer help.

This interview originally ran on August 27, 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: More or Less Maddy by Lisa Genova

Posted on September 20, 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 August 27, 2024.

Harvard-trained neuroscientist Lisa Genova debuted as a novelist with Still Alice (2007), about a woman who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Genova’s later novels Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens, and Every Note Played feature characters with hemi-spatial neglect, autism, Huntington’s disease, and ALS, respectively. Her sixth novel, More or Less Maddy, follows a young woman with bipolar disorder. As ever, Genova brings both an expert understanding of the neuroscience and a masterful eye for compelling characters in an emotionally textured narrative. Maddy’s story is completely absorbing; it may keep readers up all night.

Maddy Banks has had a privileged upbringing in suburban Connecticut. There were some tough times in her early childhood, and her father is a shadowy figure. But since her mother, Amy, remarried, it’s been easy: dinners at the country club, a popular boyfriend, a highly successful older sister, and an easygoing jock of an older brother. In high school, “each day was laid out for her like a matching outfit on a bed, when both her inner and outer worlds felt organized, predictable, happy, and light. Life was handed to her like a potted succulent, small and tidy and requiring little effort to maintain.” But the transition to college has not been smooth: “She remembers herself then… and it’s as if she was a different girl in another lifetime. She can’t pinpoint exactly how, but she doesn’t feel like she used to feel.”

Her first year at NYU is a shock: “The impossible-to-keep-up-with workload, living with a roommate who drove her crazy, having no clue what to major in, still not finding her passion or her tribe, losing [her boyfriend] Adam. Twice.” In her sophomore year, Maddy’s diagnosed at the student health center with depression. The antidepressants she’s prescribed help to set off her first manic episode, a big splashy event that results in her first stay in a mental hospital. Maddy and her family–who are loving, if not always graceful with the challenges they face–are in for a roller coaster.

In her more stable moments, and especially during the hypomania that often precedes full mania, Maddy develops an interest in stand-up comedy. Along with her love for Taylor Swift–and delusions about their friendship, with a budding business and creative relationship–Maddy’s passion for comedy becomes a trigger for her mother: getting excited about comedy, Amy Banks believes, means a manic episode is imminent. But while Maddy does not in fact have a personal relationship with Taylor Swift, she does have a gift and a passion for comedy. In Amy’s country-club world, this is not a reasonable life path. But Maddy wants it to be. It is one of the tricks of bipolar disorder that “real” excitements can be mistaken for illness, making it difficult for Maddy to pursue her legitimate dreams.

Maddy, her family, and readers learn about bipolar disorder together, with accompanying denial, anger, grief, the ups and downs of sorting out medications and side effects, and relapses. It is heartrending to see Maddy’s anguished efforts to come to terms with her disorder and to dissect what is real and healthy from what is delusion. Readers are privy to her self-talk: “It’s okay to feel disappointed and sad.”; “It’s okay to be happy.”; “It’s okay to be giddy.” It is one of the greatest gifts of fiction to allow readers into experiences that are not their own, to find empathy. Genova’s descriptions of Maddy’s episodes are evocative, clear, and relatable: “Before her hypomania ripened to rotten, there was a delicious sweetness to her thoughts and life. She had a massive amount of unearned confidence in her ability to do anything that struck her fancy. She made big dick energy look flaccid by comparison.”

Secondary characters are equally convincing and essential. Amy is capable of actions that frustrate Maddy (and readers), but she also genuinely wants the best for her child. Maddy’s sister, Emily, is almost too perfect–life comes easily for her, and it’s the life of their mother–but she is goodhearted, and that seems to be the life she truly wants. Maddy’s high school boyfriend, Adam, is one example of the gradual realization that things are not always as they appear. He had the right markers–basketball star, handsome, popular–but readers, and Emily, see some red flags in his treatment of Maddy, who goes on to make other exemplary friends and meet other objectionable characters along her rocky path.

It is an important element of Maddy’s development that she chooses to embrace her own unique self–her sense of humor, her interests, her differences–rather than follow the cookie-cutter plan laid out by her upbringing. “When Maddy was growing up, being normal was always the unquestioned goal…. Normal was her default, unexamined way of life. It meant fitting in, blending with the colors, sounds, and shapes around her.” All young people are out to find themselves; Maddy must live her own version of that. She is not defined by her disease, but is rather a complex young woman navigating the expected tumult of coming-of-age with added complications. Her story is affecting, harrowing, beautiful, and enlightening, as well as a great pleasure to read.

Rating: 8 notebooks.

Come back Monday for my interview with Genova.

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Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato

Posted on September 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A mother and daughter separated by continents navigate distance and intimacy through the “miraculous blue light” of video calls in this haunting debut.

National Book Award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato makes her authorial debut with Blue Light Hours, a subtle, contemplative story of a mother and daughter divided by 4,000 miles, who come together via screentime and memory. With love, care, quiet humor, and pervasive yearning, this thoughtful story explores the dilemmas of coming of age and leaving home, the tension between separation and connection.

On a full scholarship, the daughter departs her home in Natal, Brazil, “prepared to brave the world, even if it hurt me,” for a liberal arts college in a remote part of Vermont, leaving behind a mother who suffers from insomnia, migraines, and depression. The daughter navigates unfamiliar culture, food, and language, while the mother observes her first Christmas alone. The daughter feels guilt, torn between two very different lives. “I stared into my green tea, wishing someone… had warned me about how hard it would be to leave, how hard to stay.” Both women rely on their Skype calls: “On the shiny blue screen, there was my mother, my friend, the only person who always knew me.”

This story is told in three sections, “Daughter,” “Mother,” and “Reunion,” but “Daughter” occupies the bulk of the book, so that readers see her loneliness and her striving to make a new life work, even as she worries about what she’s left behind. “Daughter” is also the only section told in first-person perspective, while “Mother” identifies that character only as “the mother,” although both protagonists remain nameless. In “Reunion,” the mother travels to New York City and they make Grandma’s chicken soup together, “dipping pieces of bread into their old lives.” A moving passage details the items in the daughter’s bathroom, all the gadgets and conveniences that are unfamiliar to the mother, and the mother’s brief wish for the simpler bathroom of home. “But when she turned the crystal knob on the bathroom door and saw her daughter at the end of the hallway, sifting powdered sugar on French toast with a wand, she couldn’t help but take the wish back. She couldn’t resist thinking that things were perfect just as they were, golden faucets and all, without any gleaming glass between them.”

Blue Light Hours documents with wisdom and tenderness what is gained and lost when one leaves a home to build another, and the less universal experience of putting a 27-hour flight between mother and child. It tells painful, beautiful truths: with independence comes loneliness as well as freedom, and raising a daughter also involves losing her. Dantas Lobato’s careful, lovely prose will linger long after these pages end.

This review originally ran in the August 15, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 electric toothbrushes.

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reread: the Murderbot series by Martha Wells

Posted on September 13, 2024 by pagesofjulia

After my recent reread of All Systems Red, the first book in the series, I screamed through books 2-7 in less than two weeks. (Yes, that means I read System Collapse twice in under a month.) I’m not going to review them individually because I scarcely experienced them as such on this go. Also: not so much plot summary as praise.

I enjoyed these books the first time around, but found exponentially more pleasure in them this time around. First, having some background with the series allowed me to sink in more quickly and spend less time getting my footing. And second, I read books 2-7 back to back (with a few titles between 1 and 2), so they became a single narrative. As I mentioned just recently in re-reviewing All Systems Red, I am less a natural or ‘native’ reader of sci fi, and needed a little more time to adjust than some readers (Liz?) might. And Martha Wells has a tendency to begin her stories “in scene,” which is often advice writers get – begin already amid the action – and I think it can work very well, and does for Wells, but there is a risk or a cost in that it requires your reader to get on board rapidly. It’s only in this reread that I realize what a poor job this reader did of it the first time. Familiarity has been of great benefit to me here.

I also had the chance to see that Wells is very good at reminding her series readers of what’s happened before (or, less ideally, introducing a reader who’s begun mid-series to what is happening). This is very tricky: over-explain and you’ve taken the reader out of the book; under-explain and they’re lost. I think she has a deft hand at the quick aside that does that job neatly. (It helps that these books are billed as Murderbot’s diaries, so that it can address the reader directly and say things like “remember when this happened before?” pretty naturally.) I found on this read that each book builds really nicely on what’s come before, not just in plot elements and characters but in terms of worldbuilding. I don’t think I appreciated that the first time. I’m certain I missed a lot. I also just found it that much more pleasurable to immerse myself in Murderbot’s narrative voice, which is the greatest strength, I think, of the series: wry, deeply sarcastic, self-critical, wise, tortured, hilarious.

This revisiting was incredibly rewarding and delicious. I absolutely see why Liz keeps cycling through. I think I will do the same. I wonder how much more depth I’ll see on a third round.

These books are wise and insightful about social concepts and relationships. They are pathos-ridden and also very funny. Murderbot is a unique, odd, and surprisingly human creation; I could live in its head for much longer than these seven books, very happily. I strongly recommend the series to anybody who likes a good story and marvels at the weirdness of human behaviors. And if it doesn’t gel perfectly the first time, it might be worth a second attempt. If you love it the first time, it gets even better. Amazing.

Rating: 9 channels.

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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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