Ilium by Lea Carpenter

Posted on December 22, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A lonely young woman falls in love and finds herself at the center of a spy mission in this mesmerizing, moving story about different kinds of seduction.

Lea Carpenter’s third novel, Ilium, is a spy story, a romance, a coming-of-age record, and a tale of lost innocence told in an elegiac tone, with something for every reader to get lost in. Its opening chapter introduces a young woman boarding a bus in Central London, watched by a man from “a world far away.” The rest is told from the point of view of the young woman. “There was a private garden near the house where my mother worked,” she begins, describing a childhood of unfulfilled desires. She has grown up dreaming of this locked garden, of having access to exalted spaces, of being someone she is not. “What the garden taught me was that the allocation of keys in life isn’t fair, that luck and happiness are not prone to reason or will.” At age 20, she meets the garden’s new owner, a man 33 years her senior, successful, charismatic, entirely independent, who sweeps her off her feet; they are soon married in Mallorca, and then he asks her for a favor. “All you have to do is listen,” he says.

Carpenter’s narrator (who remains unnamed, a nod to the clean absence of self that is part of what makes her attractive to her new handlers) is coached in her role. She is flown by helicopter to a lavish, elaborately casual estate on the French coast, where she is installed as the guest of a wealthy family at leisure. She poses as an aspiring art dealer; the fine art world does not serve as backdrop to a major plot point, but does provide some lovely details: “The oligarchs’ relationship to Russia’s various intelligence agencies is like the color blocks in a Rothko, a carefully calibrated blur.” The mysterious and charming patriarch of her host family, Edouard, prizes his commissioned series of paintings based on Homer’s Iliad, another of the plot’s minor but rich threads. “You never want an operation to be personal but so many are, ask Achilles.” The young narrator, now a spy, starts off almost laughably naïve, but her observations along the way, related in hindsight, are astute. The qualities that make her valuable to her shadowy new employer–loneliness, emptiness, openness, optimism, a tendency to romance–make her vulnerable to finding friendship where perhaps she should see danger.

Carpenter (Eleven Days; Red, White, Blue) assigns her narrator a winsome voice: innocence wearied by experience, but always clever, and sympathetic to all the players in a complex operation begun long before her birth. Ilium is an espionage thriller in its richly wrought and detailed plot; but its spotlight falls centrally on the narrator herself, whose yearning for a role to play earns her a bigger one than she could have imagined. The dreamy tone of this sparkling, riveting story sets up a memorable counterpoint to its intrigue.

This review originally ran in the November 9, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 color blocks.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

Posted on December 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia


Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now expands on Phaidon’s iconic The Art Book with a collection of images created by 308 artists from 20 countries and territories, accompanied by brief but serious supplementary text. With a thorough introduction by academic art historian and curator Raphael Fonseca, this large-format book is an art object in itself. Each artist is represented by a single important work and brief biographical and artistic context, written in an academic tone. These enormously diverse artists, who span a broad range of media, are organized not chronologically, conceptually, or regionally; instead, an alphabetical presentation results in surprising and thought-provoking juxtapositions. Perfect for art lovers or scholars and essential for academics, this is a simply stunning visual feast for readers at large.

This review originally ran in the October 31, 2023 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 corn tortillas.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on December 15, 2023 by pagesofjulia

It took me a while to get to this one, but I am very pleased to be back in the Stephen King universe. Salem’s Lot is classic horror. King doesn’t get everything right (and this was published in 1975), but there’s not much question that he’s a supremely great writer. His stories are very easy to take in and get lost in. I enjoyed this very much, and I’ll keep working my way through his extensive catalog.

I won’t spend too much time on plot; you can find that elsewhere. My audio version opens with a short foreword or introduction which King reads himself, and it made me feel so good about what I was headed into. In his own voice, I heard the style and easy sentences of a master, and heard him discussing reading and writing as lifetime loves. He describes reading Dracula as a young boy, and then a bunch of secondhand E.C. Comics, and reimagining the vampire story for a contemporary U.S. of A. He confesses that Salem’s Lot, only his second novel, is dated, but he still counts it among his favorites. “Carrie, the book which came before it, seems almost fey by comparison. There is more confidence here, more willingness to be funny.” It only made me more excited about the story to come. Ron McLarty reads the novel itself, and very well I think: I have no comment on his reading either way, which is a good sign.

In Salem’s Lot, the moderately successful novelist Ben Mears returns to the Maine town where he spent just a few years as a boy, but where he had an indelibly frightening experience in a moody old mansion where a famous recluse had hung himself. He meets a nice girl, and settles in to a room in a boarding house to work on a spooky fourth novel. To a mild, idyllic backdrop, Ben courts the girl, Susan Norton, and makes new friends. But the town of Jerusalem’s Lot (or Salem’s Lot, or simply The Lot) isn’t done with mysterious, creepy figures. Ben’s not the only newcomer in town. A beloved dog is found impaled on a cemetery fence. Two young brothers disappear in the night, and one death follows another. A small but tough motley crew forms up: Ben, the writer; Susan, the young woman; Matt, an aging high school English teacher; Mark, a middle-school boy new to town; Father Callahan, the town’s Catholic priest, who will figure in the Dark Tower series; and Dr. Jimmy Cody. Together they will fight an ancient evil. The novel’s prologue serves as a teaser, with an unnamed man and boy on a cross-country trip. This action actually falls chronologically at the end of the book, just before its epilogue–sending me immediately back to the beginning when I finished listening to it.

King absolutely excels at realism, exquisite detail, and a combination of quaint small-town living (as sordid as sweet, but very true to life) with horror. He’s got a social conscience perhaps ahead of his time. His characters feel accurate, and everything flows very naturally; his sentences are that very special kind of smooth and easy that appears effortless but is actually extremely rare and difficult to achieve. It’s masterful and I’m a little bit in awe. On the other hand, there was one element that got under my skin. To protect plot spoilers, I’ll discuss it here briefly in white text (highlight to read): I really liked Susan Norton’s character, and was invested in her development not only as character but as strong young woman coming into control of her own destiny. She was the first of our powerful little team to fall to the big bad vampire, and I quite resented how that worked; after I’d come to see her as a proper strong woman and major player, it felt like she got thrown away like the cheap girl character in a pulpy horror story. Jimmy Cody later falls, too, but I was left with the sense that Susan didn’t get the treatment she deserved. I was left with the taste of misogyny in my mouth and felt sad about it. I respect Stephen King’s efforts, and find him better (in the lyrics of the Drive-By Truckers, who were talking about somebody entirely different) “at worst, no worse than most white men of his generation, north or south”… but it still made me sad. I’ll also recall again that in his introduction he acknowledged that this novel is dated. I hope this is part of what he meant, and that we’re still getting better now.

This issue, for me, was worth noting but did not fatally poison the experience. It’s an outstanding horror novel, and it’s sticking with me, and King is a marvel. I sort of want to go back and read the entire Dark Tower series over again (ha), but there’s so much more King out there, too. I do recommend. There’s not much perfect in this world.

Rating: 8 ice cream sodas.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf author interview: Rachel Lyon

Posted on December 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of Fruit of the Dead, here’s Rachel Lyon: This Is an Ancient Story.

Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. An editor emerita for Epiphany, Lyon has taught creative writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Bennington College, and other institutions. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and two young children. Her second novel, Fruit of the Dead (Scribner, March 5, 2024), is a smart, chilling, richly detailed retelling of the Demeter-Persephone myth in modern times.

Was it the Demeter and Persephone myth that struck you? Or was there a different impetus?

Rachel Lyon
(photo: Pieter M. van Hattem)

The myth actually came in midway through the writing process. I was working on a book about a young woman who becomes entangled with a middle-aged man and all the power dynamics of that. I started thinking about precedents of this story, and landed on the Persephone myth. There were many structural similarities to the book already, so I worked on a pretty massive rewrite with Persephone as a model. There was a version of the book that involved Zeus and other mythological characters, but I ended up sticking pretty close to my original characters, just infusing the myth into the book that I had.

It was the beginning of the #metoo movement, and I was frustrated by a lot of men’s reactions. A lot of “gee, how is this suddenly happening now?” And I was like, it’s not sudden! This is an ancient story. So that’s what I hope people get from the mythological element here, the idea of how ancient this story is.

Why did your story need Spenser and Fern?

I don’t know if I knew that Cory was going to be a caretaker, but babysitting is just one of those jobs that so many young women have. Caretaking became a really central theme as I began to include her mother’s voice. I myself was in the process of starting a family as I was working on the book, so it was inescapable for me on a personal level, writing about caretaking and young children.

I love writing children. I taught elementary school for a couple of years before grad school, and I did a bunch of babysitting myself before I had kids, and I just think kids are so funny. I don’t think they’re always given enough dignity or personality on the page. So I was really interested in taking a stab at that.

And Cory couldn’t really go work for Rolo without any experience. So on a plot level, it had to be something easy that she was going to go do. Rolo uses them as signals: “I’m a dad. I’m a friendly character.”

Did you always know the story would be told in alternating points of view?

No. When I was beginning to incorporate the mythology, I started looking specifically for texts told in Persephone’s perspective, and I couldn’t find any. So my first project was to write a story for her, from her point of view, and to give her some agency. Because honestly, in so many versions, she’s abducted, she’s raped, she’s negotiated over, and she’s saved. She has no agency at all. In a contemporary novel we want our characters to have some agency. I wanted to do that for her, for this conceptual Persephone. But as I continued working on it and I became a parent myself, I felt more and more like I needed to include Demeter’s voice. And it was particularly useful because I was writing this teenaged character who’s not well equipped to make intelligent thoughtful decisions for herself. Without an extra pair of eyes or an extra voice that could look at her from the outside and communicate her to the reader, I felt like it was possible that the reader would not be able to see her from the outside. I needed this character to be a loving, worried, invested, exterior voice.

Tell us more about your research.

I read several versions. I kept coming back to the Homeric hymn to Demeter. It felt manageable–it’s only a few pages long–and it’s very strange. There’s this weird tangent in the middle of Demeter’s hunt where she loses hope, and becomes involved as a caretaker in a family. She’s a wet nurse for this baby. She’s in drag as an old woman, and she ends up dipping this child, anointing him in flames, and his mother rushes in and freaks out at her, and Demeter flies into a rage and reveals herself. She says, “How dare you question me? I’m a goddess!” and the woman of course is like, “Oh god no” and they build a temple to Demeter there… the child ends up half immortal or something. And then Demeter goes on with her hunt. It’s a really weird moment in this retelling, because it has nothing to do with the main plot. I struggled for a while: Do I just elide that moment? Or is it even possible to make the novel work with that bizarre tangent? I was talking to another writer about it and she was like, you gotta try. So I tried. Emer loses it and she becomes involved with another family for a moment before resuming her hunt.

How different was this one from your first novel?

Very different. Everyone says when you write your first novel, you have to teach yourself how to write a novel. I think that’s true. It was true in my experience. I relied pretty heavily on suspense. That book is a will she/won’t she book. Its main thrust comes from the reader wondering if she’ll ever tell this secret. And that’s what keeps you turning the pages. With this one I didn’t really have that. You’re not waiting for something to be revealed, although you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. So I maybe taught myself how to do that with Self-Portrait with Boy, but, no, it’s a totally different book.

Self-Portrait with Boy is based on an incident that occurred in the building that I grew up in when I was a kid. A boy fell off the roof. It was a very sad thing that happened in that community. The book is totally fictional, but I drew on that one event, and then the pastiche, that world that I had grown up in for the book. On that level it’s vaguely autobiographical, aesthetically. This book is not aesthetically autobiographical, but it’s much more personal. I think I got annoyed writing a character who was different from me on so many levels. It wasn’t as interesting to me in the end. You work on a book for so long, and if you can’t get something out of it, I feel like it dies on the page. It felt important for me with my second book to write something I was really struggling with. At the time I started working on this book, that [struggle] was mistakes I made in my youth and substance issues and all this kind of naughty, feminine stuff. I’m hoping that the more I work on these long projects the more personal I can get, because it felt really good to get to work hard with that material and I’d like to continue down that road.

This interview originally ran on November 28, 2023 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.

Filed under: interviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf: Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon

Posted on December 8, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 28, 2023.

Rachel Lyon’s second novel, Fruit of the Dead, is a lushly detailed, mesmerizing retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, set in modern times. This version retains original themes and subject matter, including power struggles, sexual assault, and cycles of growth and decay, while adding fresh commentary on addiction, class dynamics, and late-stage capitalism. Readers absolutely do not need familiarity with the myth to enjoy the novel, but such familiarity will be amply rewarded by Lyon’s subtle, clever references. The result is smart, disturbing, rich with opulent detail, and harrowing (there are several scenes of sexual assault).

The figure of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, appears as Emer Ansel, who runs an agricultural NGO. “We design, provide the seeds, outsource growth to farmers, and export to the hungry in Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, etcetera.” She is a woman of lofty principles but has sunk perhaps too comfortably into her professional role; a colleague accuses her of wearing “white savior drag.” Demeter had a beautiful daughter named Persephone, fathered by Zeus (god of the sky, king of the gods); Emer is single mother to Cory, who’s just turned 18, a wayward teen who has been accepted to zero colleges. Mother and daughter are at serious odds.

To escape the Manhattan apartment they share and forestall an uncertain future, Cory takes a job at her long-beloved summer camp, River Rocks. At a vulnerable moment (among other things, she is high), while caring for Spenser Picazo, a sensitive boy she’s befriended who’s also the summer’s youngest camper, she first encounters Spenser’s father. Rolo Picazo–the reimagined character of Hades, god of the underworld–is a self-made, superstar executive of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. He has made his significant fortune on painkillers and now faces congressional hearings for his role in a pattern of destructive addictions.

Cory finds Rolo compelling, intimidating, by turns magnetic and repulsive. He is a massive man with a forceful personality. “His gaze is hard and hungry. It could consume her, she thinks, if she let it.” She finds herself spirited away in “a licorice melt of a Cabriolet,” accompanied by seven-year-old Spenser and his younger sister, Fern, figuring, “what killer would bring his kids along for the ride?” Rolo has her sign an NDA and transports her to a private island with no cell or wifi service, to serve as new nanny to his two young children. Cory is isolated, insecure. Rolo offers a lavish, seductive lifestyle, and literal intoxication. Emer descends into a wild panic over the disappearance of her barely-of-legal-age daughter, as Cory descends into the pleasurable fuzz of the ruby-colored pills Rolo provides.

Among Fruit of the Dead‘s themes is the specter of hazards faced by women and girls. Banishing frightening thoughts, Cory reminds herself dismissively, “occasional visits by violence are part of the cost of growing up female.” Rolo acts as if anything he desires is his for the taking: by charisma, by money, by force. His threat is looming and omnipresent, beyond its embodiment in one character. While these power struggles are central, Lyon excels at creating complex characters: Spenser and Fern are especially charming, well-rounded children.

In one of Lyon’s inspired storytelling choices, chapters alternate between the perspectives of Cory (in close third person) and Emer (first person), so that readers see Cory receive a text from her mother that she interprets as malicious, and later watch Emer send it with hopes of loving inspiration. These quietly tragic misunderstandings abound. Cory has moments of clarity, with misgivings about her disappearance into Rolo’s empire of painkillers and dissipation, but she loves her young charges. She mostly thinks her mom is a jerk, and what did Cory have going on, anyway? Emer quickly spirals, beset by calamities at work even as she searches for Cory. “How long have I spent hunting her down, daughter of evasion, daughter of evaporation, daughter of god help me.” The “daughter of” refrains lend this retelling an appropriately mythic tone. “Daughter of goofing, daughter of grief,…” “daughter of splendor, daughter of heartbreak, daughter of elusion,…” “daughter of warmth, daughter of sweetness, daughter of mine.” And “daughter of unwelcome surprises.”

Lyon (Self-Portrait with Boy) expertly leads readers to sympathize with both mother and daughter, even as their perspectives differ. This push/pull echoes the Greek myth’s focus on seasonal cycles: Persephone’s return to Demeter heralds springtime, her inevitable return to the underworld forcing growth to start over again. The best efforts of the protective mother can only delay the child’s foray into danger; every reawakening continues the struggle. Fruit of the Dead offers hope, but always with a seed of foreboding.

This compulsively enthralling novel recasts an ancient myth in familiar times to great effect. Disquieting, propulsive, wise, and frightening, Lyon’s imaginative second novel is hard to put down and harder to forget.

Rating: 8 succulents.

Come back Monday for my interview with Lyon.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

“Hymn to Demeter” from The Homeric Hymns, trans. by Susan C. Shelmerdine

Posted on December 4, 2023 by pagesofjulia

I got to read and review a book recently, and interview its author, for a Maximum Shelf. That column won’t be out til maybe next month, and the book – Fruit of the Dead, by Rachel Lyon – not until March. But it sent me back to search out a book I hadn’t opened in years. Lyon’s is a retelling of the Demeter and Persephone myth, and so here I am with the “Hymn to Demeter” from my high school? or college? studies in Susan Shelmerdine’s Homeric Hymns. The bookmark in it was a flyer for my 20th birthday party, and it’s filled with marginal notes in my handwriting.

I really appreciated having not only the hymn but Shelmerdine’s explanatory notes, in footnotes to the hymn itself but also in an introduction to the poem. Both sets of notes provide context in Greek mythology, and explain any places where the meaning may be unclear, or there may be subtext, or the text itself may be in question. As someone with some background in the myths but who’s rusty, I loved having those reminders.

For those who may also need some reminders, Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, who with Zeus had a beautiful daughter, Persephone. With Zeus’s help, Hades, god of the underworld, abducts Persephone to make her his bride. He takes her to the underworld, where Demeter can’t reach her beloved daughter; Demeter mourns, and the impact this has on agriculture means that humankind is in danger of starving. (The gods also lose, in terms of the sacrifices of grain they are owed by humans.) In response, Zeus and Hades make a deal that Persephone may return to her mother; but Hades is tricky and convinces (or forces?) Persephone (who, let us remember, is also a child – and his own niece – whom he has abducted and raped) to eat a pomegranate seed. (In various versions, this is three, or six, or seven seeds.) Because she has eaten in the underworld, she can only return to the land of gods and mortals for a part of the year, and must return to Hades for the other part. (Again, versions tell this variously as an even split of six months each way or of eight above and four below.) Persephone, goddess of the spring, is therefore closely linked to the harvest.

I think I find the tragedy of this story hits harder now that I’m a little older than when I first encountered it.

It’s story and it’s poetry, both lovely and strange, and I love placing it in the larger field of what I’ve learned about these myths from antiquity. It’s got me excited for Fruit all over again; look out for that review to come.

Rating: 7 seeds.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Invisible Woman by Katia Lief

Posted on December 1, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A woman troubled by old crimes and loss reaches out to an old friend, with disastrous consequences in this chilling commentary on gender in society.

With Invisible Woman, Katia Lief (Five Days in Summer; The Money Kill) follows a woman navigating professional life, family, friendship, and societal roles, attempting to reconnect with an old friend whose path diverged from hers decades ago. Their stories are individually compelling, as well as offering questions relevant to the #metoo era.

Joni Ackerman had been a pioneering filmmaker in the 1980s and ’90s, and her best friend and former college roommate, Val, was a promising up-and-coming actor. A secret trauma caused the two young women to grow apart; Joni married, had children, and slowly slid beneath the surface of her husband’s sparkling career in television. The novel opens in 2018, when a fresh film-industry scandal emerges that sends Joni looking for her friend. Joni feels that the time has come to speak out about an old crime, but Val wishes to remain in obscurity, and Joni’s husband, Paul, wants to let sleeping dogs lie. Joni wrestles with her long-lost friendship over a significant divide of time and suffering. Her marriage has been strained for years, and a recent cross-country move has left her isolated. She dives into the novels of Patricia Highsmith, in editions long ago given to her by Val, for comfort and escape, but as real life grows darker and weirder, Highsmith’s gritty psychological thrillers start to feel all too close to reality.

The concerns of Invisible Woman are firmly rooted in #metoo, #timesup, and the historical and continuing challenges of women in the entertainment industry. Joni loves her daughters but grapples with what it’s cost her career to become a mother: early in the novel, she’s invited to appear at a film retrospective in a series called “Lost and Forgotten.” She struggles with personal and family difficulties, and with alcohol. Highsmith was a strong influence on Joni’s highly regarded work in film, but also threatens her tenuous grasp on reality. Readers will root for Lief’s carefully crafted protagonist, even as her decisions become increasingly irrational.

Invisible Woman twists and turns, its escalating dangers alternating with fresh reveals, as momentum builds to a breaking point. Joni is compulsive, troubled, but sympathetic; Val is less central but exerts a force of her own. Characters develop quickly from disagreeable but benign to chilling and dangerous; some readers will find this atmospheric novel engaging and disturbing enough to lose sleep. A literary psychological thriller, cultural study, and heartbreaking story of friendship and loss, Joni’s unforgettable story involves layers of lies and the dangers of self-sublimation. Lief chills, entertains, and challenges.

This review originally ran in the October 27, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 years.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

Posted on November 27, 2023 by pagesofjulia

I am a glutton for punishment, if that’s what this is (it isn’t). I’m a glutton for keeping myself slightly confused? Considering the challenge I generally feel when I read Oyeyemi, a sense of something unfinished and not entirely understood, it seems a little odd that I keep doing this; but the enjoyment frequently makes the unsettled feeling worthwhile. Sometimes more than others – I think Gingerbread (the first I read) was my favorite, with The Icarus Girl least rewarding. I remember feeling very pleased recently by that story collection, although I see I rated it no higher than Icarus, so what does that mean? At any rate. The challenge and (often) frustration I feel seems to still balance against what I’m getting out of these. I have another waiting on the shelf now.

The Opposite House holds together in that I’m always fairly sure what’s going on: a good start. There are two young women in this plot, whose worlds we alternate between. One is more or less a mortal human in a world I recognize as my own; the other, less so. Yemaya Saramagua lives in the somewherehouse. “A somewherehouse is a brittle tower of worn brick and cedar wood, its roof cradled in a net of brushwood… The basement’s back wall holds two doors. One door takes Yemaya straight out into London and the ragged hum of a city after dark. The other door opens out onto the striped flag and cooking-smell cheer of that tattered jester, Lagos–always, this door leads to a place that is floridly day.” Other people (?) live in the somewherehouse, too, seemingly unrelated and not especially in touch with Yemaya (frequently just Aya).

And then there is Maja, who lives in London with her boyfriend, Aaron. She is newly pregnant with the son she has always known she would someday have. She was born in Cuba to Black Cuban academics; her mother is also a Santería priest (rare for a woman). Maja has a younger brother named Tomás, nicknamed “the London baby” because he was born there. (Maja believes “there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. I arrived here just before that age.” She was seven.) She has a best friend, Amy Eleni. Together, this crew navigates Maja’s pregnancy (though few know about it within this novel’s timespan) and other challenges.

Meanwhile, Aya struggles to inhabit her identity as spirit / god alongside the people / gods she relates to in various cultures… in this world, the deities of Yoruba and Santería faiths move around, as their congregants do, which is why she is disjointed, and why the confusion of the other residents of the somewherehouse. This part is a bit squishy for me (not least because I’m not particularly familiar with any faith traditions). The Yoruba gods get crossed with Catholic ones, going underground at some points in cultural & regional history for safety’s sake. Are Maja and Aya linked? Are they… the same woman? I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Maja’s rather more rooted, human life makes more sense to me than Aya’s does, but the uncertainty of the two threads are working for me here, better than they sometimes do.

Lovely; I will certainly keep up with my muddled studies in the Oyeyemi worlds.

Rating: 8 wet flowers.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Here in the Dark by Alexis Soloski

Posted on November 24, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Against the backdrop of New York City’s theater scene, a young woman grapples with the line between life and art in this memorable debut, lush with darkly elegant detail.

Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark is a thrillingly dark psychological drama, set in the least visible part of the spectacle of theater. Vivian Parry, 32-year-old theater critic for an important New York City magazine, carefully rations her vodka and sedatives to keep clear of the grasp of the “therapists I’m occasionally required to see.” She holes up in her Manhattan studio apartment, writing and editing in between shows. Readers quickly understand that Vivian is avoiding an unnamed trauma. In the audience–anonymous, with pen and notebook poised–is the only time she is remotely okay: “When I’m in the dark, at that safe remove from daily life, I feel it all–rage, joy, surprise. Until the houselights come on and break it all apart again, I am alive. I know myself again.”

It’s an act: “I am, of necessity, an imitation of myself–a sharp smile, an acid joke, an abyss where a woman should be. For a decade and more I have allowed myself only this lone role, a minor one: Vivian Parry, actor’s scourge and girl-about-town. I don’t play it particularly well.” Seeking a crucial promotion, she reluctantly agrees to an interview with David Adler, an eager graduate student and a man she belatedly suspects may be acting a part, too. “I consider myself a superlative judge of theater and life and the crucial differences between,” she thinks. “But David Adler has shaken that certainty like a cheap souvenir snow globe.” Following their odd and fateful meeting, Vivian finds herself inexorably caught up in intrigues involving a missing person, a dead body discovered in a park, an abandoned fiancé, Russian gangsters, Internet gambling, and more. The line between performance art and “real” life begins to blur still further. Vivian is heavily reliant on drink and pills; it would be easy to mistake her increasing sense of danger for paranoia, but readers can’t deny the threats slipped under her door.

Soloski, in Vivian’s clever, moody, sardonic voice, envelopes readers in details richly laden with subtext. Seasonal decorations include “cardboard Santas leering from store windows, snowflakes hung like suicides from every lamppost.” A large man has “a chest that would intimidate most barrels.” Of Justine, Vivian’s forceful best (and perhaps only) friend: “There are sentimental tragedies shorter than Justine’s texts.” Vivian’s fragile reality fractures in sleek, stylish prose. Here in the Dark is a carefully wrought, slow-burning psychological thriller: as numb as Vivian keeps herself, the terror surges to a crescendo, her wits and understanding of what is real pitched against an unknown foe.

This riveting first novel offers building momentum and looming horror with an entrancing and troubled protagonist and the most sophisticated of settings. Here in the Dark is frightening, delicious, engrossing, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the October 16, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 thumbnails.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Pleasantville by Attica Locke (audio)

Posted on November 20, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Attica Locke is a very strong mystery writer. I was utterly absorbed by her characters, who felt perfectly real to me, such that I worried about them when I stepped away from the book. It’s a fully-fledged world. I will say that I was a good reader for this one, too, because it’s set in my hometown of Houston, and Locke’s Houston is extremely detailed and true to the original. I loved this aspect of it as much as any other, and that won’t be quite such a nostalgic, moving experience for just any reader; but the strong sense of place and that level of detail will certainly work for anyone who appreciates those strengths.

The plot of Pleasantville is quite complex, again quite detailed, and operates at the intersection of crime, criminal and civil law, and politics, in a particular milieu. This is both a great strength and a potential liability: it asks of the reader a fair degree of attention. If you bring that to this book, you will be amply rewarded. I am still a bit reeling from it, and my admiration of Locke is solidified.

It’s 1996, and a hotly contested mayoral election in Houston is expected to hinge – as they often or always do – on the neighborhood of Pleasantville, an early-established haven for middle-class African Americans 50 years earlier and a continuing close-knit community. Then a teenaged girl disappears off the streets of Pleasantville on election night, and the criminal case clashes strangely with the political drama, and both threaten to swallow whole the man we meet on the first pages: lawyer Jay Porter, whose office has just been burglarized. Porter is still reeling from the loss of his wife to cancer a year earlier. His teenaged daughter and grade-school son are struggling in their own ways. His law practice is on its final legs. He specializes in class-action suits handling issues of environmental racism, like one at work in Pleasantville; he does not want a criminal defense case, but the most powerful players in Pleasantville have other ideas.

There are so many compelling characters in this story that my head almost spins, but it’s all woven together incredibly well, keeping me both engaged and on track (if I put in a bit of effort myself – and I’m happy to). I’m very much still thinking about Jay Porter and hoping his daughter Ellie comes through okay; I can’t wait to get more from Locke. Whew.

Rating: 8 blocks.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »