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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Maximum Shelf author interview: Rachel Kushner

Posted on June 14, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of Creation Lake, here’s Rachel Kushner: A Woman Up to No Good.

Rachel Kushner is the author of three acclaimed novels, Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, and The Mars Room, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K, and The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020. Creation Lake (Scribner, September 3, 2024) is a captivating novel about an American woman operating as an independent spy in France who finds herself questioning her own worldview.

Where did this novel begin for you?

Rachel Kushner
(photo: Gabby Laurent)

First was the idea of a commune of young Parisians decamping to a remote part of southwestern France, where they struggle to farm on rocky soil, and are watched by the police. This is a milieu that, how shall I put it, is not at all unfamiliar to me, and I always thought would make a great novel.

Next was the area itself, based on real places I know well, that are rich with ancient caves, with traces of life going back half a million years. For a minute I toyed with writing a novel set in prehistoric times. The dialogue would be challenging! It became a kind of joke, a self-taunt, to write cave people into fiction. I ended up setting the book in modern times (roughly 2013), but with one of the characters thinking kind of lavishly about the past.

So I had a setting: rural France, a fictional place based on areas I know intimately. I had a conflict: a group of activists who are on a collision course with French authorities. I had some ideas and themes about nomadism and cave dwellers and subversion.

But who would tell the story, and why?

Then it came to me: Several years back, a young environmental activist I didn’t know personally, but who was connected to people I do know, was entrapped by a woman working undercover for the FBI. He ended up charged with arson and sabotage and got 20 years in federal prison. He served almost nine years before his lawyers were able to prove the entrapment and successfully overturn his conviction. The case, and the idea of this FBI informant, got under my skin and I thought, what kind of person ends up becoming an agent provocateur? Who is this sort of woman, and how does she think? Later, a somewhat similar situation unfolded involving some people I know personally: a guy in their political milieu, who presented himself as this leftist activist, was actually a U.K. undercover cop, surveilling my friends. When he was exposed, publicly, it turned out that he’d been having sexual relationships with women in leftist movements around Europe. It blew up into a major scandal. He was outed and had to disappear into the private sector, spying on people for multinational corporations and the like (he’s probably still doing that now). The U.K. police have now been sued by several of the women that this undercover cop had relationships with. And this undercover cop himself has also sued the police, for “failing to protect him from falling in love.”

I decided to write a novel from the perspective of one of these sorts of spies–invented, not based on either case that I know about. My character has already been kicked into the private sector–where there are no rules, no oversight, and she doesn’t even quite know who her bosses are. She’s a spy and a narc, a woman up to no good, if also caught up in forces that are larger than she is (as we all are).

Do you think of this as a spy novel? What are your influences in that genre?

Not exactly, but it is infused with certain elements of noir, or my own version of noir, which is perhaps a broad category and mostly a mood, which might include spy novels and crime novels, thrillers, heists, assassination plots, international intrigue… but I don’t submit to the genre in the way that a true noir is expected to. I’m too in love with characters, the fun of dialogue, scenes ripe for comedy, and bigger questions about life, to write a straight spy novel. That said, I am a huge fan of the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette and inhaled all of his novels over a summer while trying to first conceive of this book, so his greasy prints are probably all over it, if in a kind of oblique way, because he’s inimitable in the way his blazing dark humor verges on slapstick, while his protagonists are dead serious about weapons, and late-’60s Citroën models, and how to shoot to kill. Often, their plans go haywire, and what’s meant to be a tight, taut job ends up a full-blown fiasco. But I think that through reading him, I probably gave myself a permission that was new to me, to make things happen–to put plans in people’s heads, and guns in their hands, and to send in unwitting political stooges for a showdown.

How important are Bruno’s beliefs to this story?

Bruno is driven by the dilemma of what future we can believe in, when we know that no revolution is coming, and that capitalism is here to stay. His solution is to “leave this world”: to reject civilization and renovate entirely his own consciousness, and what it means to live and to thrive, without waiting for the collapse of the status quo, because he knows, deeply and terribly, that this collapse is not coming. He’s focused on the ancient past, and speculates on life before the written-down, in search of a time before society took “a wrong turn.” Many leftist critiques of capitalism tend to identify that wrong turn at the dawn of agriculture. For Bruno, it’s much earlier. He’s down on the Homo sapiens, altogether! He imagines that once upon a time a rich mélange of different genetic types of humans roamed Europe and Asia. The Neanderthal, long-maligned for having gone extinct, becomes Bruno’s “beautiful loser.” Surely the story isn’t simply that the poor “Thal” (as Bruno thinks of him) “couldn’t hack it.” So what did happen, and what was lost, when that line of humans dwindled to nothing and disappeared? And did they leave any signs for us, for how we might organize life? Bruno’s beliefs become increasingly important to the narrator and narc, as the plot, and book, move toward conclusion. And as the story’s master manipulator, everything comes down to her and what she’s got up her sleeve.

What makes the narrator a compelling protagonist?

She is capable, cunning, dissimulating, overconfident, blunt, blandly beautiful, and a heavy drinker. The novel is entirely from her perspective, and she is free to share with the reader what she keeps hidden from everyone else around her. She was a really good outlet for the crueler (and cruder) edges of my sense of humor. It was like an amazing drug to inhabit her as my alter ego: writing this book in her voice was the most fun I’ve ever had, doing anything.

How is Creation Lake different from your previous novels?

Literary novels, even very fine ones, come at some point in their narrative development to rely on some manner of coincidence. It happens in life, but in a novel it’s cheap. In a novel whose protagonist is a spy, nothing is a coincidence, and the writer has no need of such a crutch, because her protagonist is an agent of destruction who has everything rigged (or so she believes). That was a new euphoria for me. Also, very short chapters, blunt and brief little salvos meant to be spring-loaded. I wanted to feel vaulted by these short chapters, and hopefully the reader does too.

This interview originally ran on May 8, 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: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Posted on June 10, 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 May 8, 2024.

Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room) envelops her readers in an absorbing tale of espionage, philosophy, intrigue, and chaos with her noir fourth novel, Creation Lake.

An unnamed narrator opens these pages with extended quotations from the e-mails of a man named Bruno Lacombe, which she is reading without his knowledge. Bruno’s ideas will form an important thread throughout the novel, although he never appears in the flesh; the epistolary sections offer a perspective on events, a worldview, in juxtaposition to the narrator’s. She begins by reading his e-mails as part of her job, but their meaning will shift. And Bruno’s corporeal absence allows for some question as to his true form.

This narrator, presently using the alias Sadie Smith, is an American woman living in France. A former FBI spy, she was fired after a case she worked as an undercover agent did not bring the trial result the agency desired. Now she performs similar work for shadowy private interests: she takes on a character and infiltrates a group, instigating as well as observing its actions. In the Guyenne region of France, she is to penetrate an organization of anarchist environmental and anti-civilization activists called Le Moulin and learn of their involvement in a recent act of sabotage. The assignment to observe and investigate becomes an assignment to provoke further action, and she may yet be asked for more.

Creation Lake has layers. It is partly a spy novel. “Sadie” gains entry to the Moulinards through her fiancé, Lucien, a wealthy, privileged young man she easily seduced and moved in with following a carefully planned “cold bump” that Lucien thinks was an accidental encounter. She moves through the community she’s been assigned to, playing one character off the other, with readers privy to her inner commentary about both the assigned mission and the personalities of her new acquaintances. Along with her sexual relationship with Lucien (enacted with carefully concealed distaste), she carries on another affair that is more pleasurable but no more honest. She can be funny, cutting, and disarmingly self-critical. Despite holding all the cards–at least in her own view–“Sadie” is not precisely a highly organized personality.

Creation Lake is also in part an exploration of philosophies, as Bruno preaches the virtues and qualities of the Neanderthal and other early relatives and forebears of Homo sapiens. An enigmatic figure, he lives in a cave and extols the virtues of primitivism by e-mail. Kushner’s not-necessarily-reliable narrator brings a certain amount of mystery herself: amoral, even nihilistic, she seemingly cares not a bit about the principles at question in her work, but only about her paycheck and a few simple pleasures. Unmoored by the FBI, she has no leader or cause to follow, barely pausing at collateral violence. Importantly, her role with the Moulinards is that of a sympathetic outsider hired to translate their writings. Rather than a true convert, she is able to ask questions, showing curiosity and a friendly skepticism. This allows her to fully explore the Moulinards’ beliefs, although she is unimpressed by their devotion to principle.

None of these characters is heroic or even especially virtuous; the narrator points out the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of the activists. “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic.’ It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” On the other hand, she may find herself more susceptible to the philosophies of the unseen Bruno than she was equipped for. Bruno apparently writes these e-mails for one audience–the Moulinards–but they will perhaps have their greatest effect on the audience he is apparently unaware of.

With punchy short chapters and bursts of action, the plot builds tension to a boiling point while resisting any convention or formula of the spy novel genre, which it reinvents as much as it inhabits. Kushner’s pacing is inexorable, ratcheting up tensions to propel readers to a surprising ending. Spare, even stark, Creation Lake considers the past and the future of humankind without sentiment, letting the narrator’s unblinking observations stand alone. She is hardworking and apathetic, drinking a bit too much and going through the motions of a job that she has no particularly strong feelings about.

If Kushner’s expansive plot considers no less than the very origin and fate of humanity, “Sadie” considers only her next destination. As focused as she can be on the job at hand, her approach to life is profoundly blurred. Gritty and hard-edged, this is a novel of both cynicism and belief, with a mysterious narrator at its center, adrift but anchoring its plot. There is something dark at work throughout, but Kushner keeps a sense of fun, pleasure, and unexpected humor as well. “Deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.” Taut and propulsive, Creation Lake leaves its readers with plenty to think about once its pages close.

Rating: 7 cans of warm beer.

Come back Friday for my interview with Kushner.

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The West Passage by Jared Pechaček

Posted on June 7, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Wildly imaginative world-building, a spellbinding plot, and profoundly weird characters make this fantasy debut a memorable adventure.

The West Passage by Jared Pechaček introduces a marvelously strange cast of characters struggling against outsized forces in a world both reminiscent of medieval Europe and unlike anything readers will recognize.

Pechaček’s teenaged protagonists are Pell, an apprentice to the Mother of Grey, and Kew, apprentice to the Guardian. One has trained in stories, songs, history, and rituals for births and deaths, the other in protection from the Beast. They live in Grey House, one of the five towers in an enormous palace that can take days to cross. Gargantuan, monstrous Ladies rule over the looming, decaying towers. The Ladies and their roles have changed and shifted slowly over many eras, their origins almost beyond all memory. Upon the deaths of the Mother and the Guardian, both Pell and Kew are thrust into positions they aren’t quite prepared for. Before the Beast rises again, for the first time in an era or more, they must each quest beyond Grey to save the world they know.

Kew departs first, striding fearfully with his books and little else down the West Passage. In just the early pages of his adventure, he meets a sort of trout-person and a creature with rabbit ears, battles with jackals, and rides in a lantern that moves to a whistle. Pell encounters apes and a crazed tutor, befriends a Butler Itinerant riding a hollowman, and collects an unlikely stowaway. Genders are changeable, and Ladies as well as wheelbarrows can hatch from eggs. Political machinations dating back to the “time of songs” are still at work in ways difficult for these protagonists to comprehend. “Was there no transfer of power that did not involve destroying the old? It seemed now that everything he knew about the palace’s history was the merest thread in a tapestry bigger than his mind could encompass.”

Pechaček provides detailed descriptions of otherworldly creatures: “Three corresponding shoulders sprouted beneath them, leading to three arms, though one was severed just above the elbow and capped with chased gold. The parts of her that were not talon-like were the same glassy material as her hands.” The effect is often disorienting but always fascinating, and despite extreme variations from the “real” world, questions about power structures and agency remain relevant. Pell and Kew have been brought up to uphold tradition and ritual, but to save the world, they must grapple with the possibility of change, and of choice.

The West Passage is an absorbing tale of political intrigue, touching comings-of-age, and a mind-bending phantasmagoria.

This review originally ran in the May 3, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 leaves.

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The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee

Posted on June 3, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Sleepers shop for dreams at a very special department store, where dreams may come true not only for customers but for employees as well.

With The Dallergut Dream Department Store, Miye Lee explores the nature and power of dreams, the possibilities created by choosing them, and human nature itself. Whimsical and sweet, this debut novel translated from Korean by Sandy Joosun Lee will leave any reader musing and looking forward to a good night’s rest.

“For centuries, Penny’s hometown has been famous for its sleep products. Now it has evolved into a metropolis…. The locals, including Penny, who grew up here, are used to seeing outsiders roaming around in sleepwear.” Penny is terribly excited to interview at the Dallergut Dream Department Store, the crown jewel in a town devoted to sleepers’ needs. She has studied the mythology and history, but meeting Dallergut himself is intimidating. However, he turns out to be nothing but nice, forgiving her learner’s errors and prioritizing the sale of the right dream to the right customer, even over profits. Penny fangirls over the greatest dreammakers, whom she gets to meet in her new job: Nicholas, who specializes in seasonal dreams; Babynap Rockabye, who creates conception dreams; Maxim, who does surprising work in a dark back-alley studio; and Bancho, who cares for animals.

Penny has so much to learn, from bank deposits to the Eyelid Scale, not to mention the power of precognitive dreams. Purchased dreams are paid for only after they have had an effect on the sleeper, and payments come in the form of emotions experienced, so no one pays in advance or for a dud. Dreammakers can get fabulously rich and famous, but their best reward is helping people (or animals). Nap dreams differ importantly from longer ones. “Bad” dreams may serve a purpose, too. And there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an important link between dreams, in the sense of aspirations and ambitions, and dreams as in the images and sensations that visit sleepers.

Penny is an innocent, wide-eyed disciple of Dallergut and his good works, as well as the celebrity dreammakers. Through her perspective and her refreshing tone, readers encounter an appealing, absorbing, imaginative world with rules for who designs experiences for whom. In her translator’s note, Sandy Joosun Lee calls The Dallergut Dream Department Store “a story that is both fun and deep… unpretentious yet full of life,” and keeps Penny’s observations disarmingly enthusiastic and earnest. The pleasing tale, while simple on its surface, asks questions about self-determination and the mysterious power of nighttime imaginings to impact one’s daily, “real” life. With a Calm Cookie or a Deep Sleep Candy, or just the right dream, all things are possible in Lee’s captivating world.

This review originally ran in the April 19, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cups of forest-scented tea.

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Killing for Keeps by Mari Hannah

Posted on May 31, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Doing another short-short review of this fifth book in the DCI Kate Daniels series.

Pros: compelling plot; compulsively readable. I continue to care about the protagonist even though she frustrates me with her choices! I remain fully invested in Kate’s character arc, and would have immediately dived into book six if I had had it handy. I love secondary character Hank Gormley even more.

Cons: the writing does continue to take me out of the story, only momentarily, but over and over. There continue to be too many ‘things’ where a better noun is almost always available. Some logical leaps don’t feel quite earned for me. (I’m so sorry I did not make note of these for examples. It’s a credit to the book that I wasn’t motivated to go find a pen. Or, I was camping in below-freezing weather and didn’t want to get out of bed.) Each book’s murder mystery plot is electric, but Kate’s romantic difficulties feel stalled and I wish we would get a move on.

What can I say? The pros are absolutely winning and I suspect I’m going to rocket through the next few books as I get a hold of them. But not without qualifications. I wonder if I’ve just been missing the genre; I’m going to try Kate Atkinson next. Any other tips?

Rating: 7 parakeets.

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