The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (audio)

Posted on November 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

I am doing the unfortunate thing where I’ve waited too long since I listened to this one. In my defense, it was a whirlwind two-week road trip that allowed me to listen to several (!) audiobooks.

Another recommendation by Liz, this one’s pretty mind-bending. Harry August narrates the story of his lives himself, beginning with the first time, when he lived unremarkably. He was born in a train station washroom in 1919, and was then adopted but didn’t know it; his adoptive mother died when he was young, and his adoptive father remained distant; he served in World War II and then returned to the estate where his father had served as a sort of maintenance man, which role Harry takes over until his own death in old age. Ho hum. Then… it all starts over again. In his second life, he does not handle well the knowledge that this has all happened once before. In his third life, he uses what he knows of the war (for example) to his advantage, staying away from high-casualty battles and the like. With each life, he gains a little better understanding of what he’s experiencing. But he struggles to make meaning of it all, even as he meets others like himself: ouroborans, they call themselves, or kalachakras. Until, that is, he meets one man in particular, a fellow ouroboran who will become perhaps his greatest friend and nemesis.

I’ve already said too much, and will let you discover Harry’s many lives and acquaintances for yourself from here.

It’s quite a thought-provoking concept, and a new twist on time travel and the tricky question of the butterfly effect. (Would you kill Hitler? What if he’s only replaced by something worse?) The novel is not plot-driven, precisely, and it’s not character-driven at all. Harry has remarkable drive to learn, understand, and explain; this intrigues me about him, but he’s a bit short on actual personality (and has more of it than anyone else in the book). So, a concept-driven novel, which is a change. I found it perfectly absorbing, one to get lost in, and to occasionally pause and ponder. I will say, there weren’t characters I liked, and that can make it a little tough to hook in. I was very intrigued, but often bemused too.

The audiobook was a strong production on the whole. Peter Kenny does a wide range of voices, which are often pleasing, but I must say his American accents are not convincing.

It will be interested to see how this one sticks with me.

Rating: 7 beakers.

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Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

Posted on November 13, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This very sweet story of witches, female friendship, intrigue, and coming of age was recommended by Liz. It’s a fun combination of some pedestrian features of regular life – government bureaucracy, for example – with witchcraft and magic. We first meet a group of young girls on the cusp of being inducted into the adult witch’s world of the coven; then we flash forward to find them navigating that adult world in very different ways. Witches can be people of color and queer people, struggling with what that means for any of us in the real, mundane world, as well as the parallel prejudices and oversights of witches (who might be magic but are also just people). Niamh is mourning her late fiancé and just wants to keep her veterinarian practice going smoothly, but she also can’t turn down a young warlock (or witch) in need. Elle has all but renounced her powers, enjoying her cookie-cutter life as wife and mother, until her teenaged daughter shows signs that she’s got powers of her own. Leonie runs an important intersectional coven, with the support of her beloved girlfriend Chinara, but Chinara wants a baby and Leonie’s not sure she’s ready. And Helena… well, her role as High Priestess of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven may be her logical due. Or it may be just a bit much for her. A dire prophecy appears on the horizon, and these four old friends will be hard pressed to handle it each in her own way, to say nothing of how they relate to one another.

It’s really a clever, charming, smart, modern story. These four very different women are just muddling through life as any of us does, magical powers notwithstanding. They parent, find romance, make hard choices, try to do good, and maintain important old friendships – or let them go when they no longer serve. They have to wrestle with bigotry, and they fight for what’s right. They are sweet and strong. And this novel is the first in a trilogy! Thanks for the recommendation, Liz.

Rating: 7 kittens.

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The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk

Posted on November 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

An exceptional boy in a loving, if odd, family, surrounded by automatons, must adventure into historical Constantinople to save his father in this debut novel of love and whimsy.

Sean Lusk’s debut novel, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, is a strange, spellbinding, imaginative work of magical realism set in 1700s London and Constantinople, exploring Pinocchio-esque questions about what is real, and the many forms of love. It contains no shortage of tragedy, but always retains a charming sense of wonder.

In London in 1754, Abel Cloudesley anxiously paces outside the birthing chamber where his beloved wife, Alice, labors. Zachary Cloudesley’s life begins with his mother’s death; Abel will be a loving father, but at first the experience is clouded by grief.

Abel is a clockmaker, but clocks are only the beginning of his artistry: he creates clockwork creatures, automatons that move and communicate like the real-life animals and humans they mimic. In Abel’s workshop, Zachary suffers a life-changing injury, resulting in the treasured son being sent away to be raised in the safety of his eccentric great-aunt Frances’s home in the country. Zachary’s no-nonsense nurse, Mrs. Morley, and the staunchly feminist Frances round out an unusual family for a very unusual boy. Zachary is a genius, precocious in everything, a great reader and nature lover. He also knows things–the past, the future–that he should not be able to know. When Abel is sent away to distant Constantinople on an odd and dangerous mission, seven-year-old Zachary says, “You should not go, Papa. You know that, don’t you?” Abel knows, but sail he does.

Years later, a teenaged Zachary will set out to rescue his father–believed to be long dead–from imprisonment in the Ottoman court. Zachary is still a deeply intelligent young man, but his studies have been conducted from the English countryside, and these travels will be eye-opening. Readers will delight in following the devoted son as he learns about a broader world, encounters romance, and seeks family. Through these pages are woven the clockwork wonders that have gotten Abel into this mess, and may yet get him out.

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley is enchanting. Abel and Zachary are sensitive, compelling characters; Mrs. Morley and Aunt Franny are stalwart and impressive female heroes in two very different styles; Mrs. Morley’s daughter (raised alongside Zachary nearly as a sister) offers her own development and young romance; and Abel’s gifted employee Tom, an indispensable friend to the family, is not quite what he appears.

Lusk’s engrossing novel wraps a coming-of-age narrative in a historical setting, with lovable characters and dreamlike twists. Don’t miss Lusk’s memorable, sweet, original debut.

This review originally ran in the October 12, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 peacock feathers.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on November 6, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of A Short Walk Through a Wide World, here’s Douglas Westerbeke: “It Might as Well Be Infinite.”

Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. He began writing with screenplays, and has served for the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award. His first novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, coming from Avid Reader Press on April 9, 2024, is the dazzling story of a woman who must keep moving to outrun a mysterious curse, and a library that seems tailored perfectly to her.

Did reading for the Dublin Literary Award help you write this novel?

Douglas Westerbeke (photo: Roan Westerbeke)

I was reading 50 to 100 novels a year, and some I loved and found really inspiring, and some of them were awful. I thought: I can do better than that. The more you read, the more story ideas you keep having; it snowballs, I guess. I used to write short stories when I was a little kid. My mom always told me, you should write a novel. I said no, I can’t be a novelist, those are real writers! I can’t be like them. The Dublin Literary Committee opened my eyes. It’s achievable. You could be like one of these guys–mostly gals, actually. That’s what inspired me. I thought, I’ll give it a try. It’s hard. I’m not used to working on prose that hard, at a sentence level. That’s where all the work really is, for me anyway. And structure. This one is particularly hard for structure.

What impact did your screenwriting background have on the novel?

I lived in Los Angeles for a while, writing screenplays and sending them out. I did pretty well–four of them got optioned, but they never got produced. I gave up. Well, I shouldn’t say that, because I kept writing. In fact, the day I was going to give up, I had another story idea, about a guy who tries to give up his life as a musical composer.

I had kids, and that slowed things down, and I had cancer, and that really slowed things down. And then the Dublin Literary put me on a different path. Forget that, I’ll try this. My odds were better. Back there it was like a million to one, and this is like 100,000 to one. I thought, those are pretty good odds!

Where did the idea of Aubry’s illness come from?

This all began as a short story idea. It was kind of a comedy. It was an old lady in the same time period–if you put it in the modern day, everybody would just be hanging out in airports, right? Older days, you get to ride trains and ships. Old lady goes to her doctor and says, I’m feeling arthritic, something small like that, and the doctor says, maybe try traveling. Go somewhere warm and dry. And all she hears is “travel.” She just takes off, and she’s so scared of her ailment, she ends up in these dangerous situations traveling around the world. She’s this doddering old fearful lady–the joke is, the cure is worse than the ailment. But then I kept thinking, how am I going to end it? She’ll be on a cruise ship, and it’ll break down in the ocean, they have to anchor, and in the middle of the night she passes away. She was so concerned that what the doctor said was true that she just passes away. And then all of a sudden I was like, this isn’t a comedy anymore!

I thought, maybe she should uncover some great mystery of the world before she goes. She ended up being a nine-year-old girl instead, because now I have so many ideas, I’m not going to get it all with just this little old lady. It’s got to be a whole lifetime.

You are a librarian whose novel, naturally, involves a very special library.

It’s the best place ever to work. I love working there. And working there, you’re doing your stuff, you’re processing the new books, you’re answering questions, you’re doing research, and all the while some book will be sitting on the corner of the desk, and you’re just looking at it the whole day, and it looks really interesting, but you have so much work to do. That’s the life. But then maybe at the end of the day you’ll have some time to yourself, and you’ll open it up. It’s like a treasure trove. Random stuff. I’ve studied an analysis of Shakespeare, I’ve learned how to invest in the stock market, I’ve compiled hundreds of recipes to cook, all because random books kept coming across my desk. And then you start to realize, I’m not reading even the tiniest fraction of the books in this collection. I will never live long enough to read them all. It might as well be infinite.

I was always struck by the impossibility of all this knowledge no one person could ever get. And we have these libraries all over. I mean, I’m in a pretty big library, but even in a small branch I wouldn’t be able to read it all. The idea of the infinite library, I guess, comes from that. But I’m not the first guy. Borges does this all the time. It’s also a riff on him, I suppose.

You are yourself well-traveled. What kind of research was necessary?

I’ve traveled a bit, but almost nothing in this book happens in places I’ve been. I’ve been close to Thailand, or Siam–I was in Malaysia. Doesn’t count! And I certainly wasn’t there in 1900. The whole world is different now, so you really have to research it in the library anyway.

I read all up on the gold rush, and how all these women got rich up there, and I read all about North Africa and people’s experiences, Westerners who got shipwrecked and tried to make their way across the Sahara… the best book I got, I found up in the storage in our library. It was all about the Indian royalty during colonial Britain, and it had all these photographs.

You have the story first. The research is really useful–it helps add color, detail. If you’re way off on an aspect of the story you can correct it. But for the most part, the story I had when I started was the story I ended up with. You want to be sure you’re not doing any blatant anachronisms or anything. I love Braveheart but there’s no historical accuracy whatsoever. But this novel takes place in a lot of obscure little corners of the world, a century ago. All these places no longer exist. And it’s a fantastical story as well, which gives you a lot of wiggle room. You don’t necessarily have to be a nitpicker when it comes to the research, but it does help you to not mess something totally up. You can describe the Arab woman with the copper coins.

What’s next?

I’m working on another with similar themes to this. It’s tricky because it’s modern-day and the characters are two little kids, and I’m trying to write it in their voice. I’m reading a lot of Emma Donoghue.

This interview originally ran on October 12, 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.

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Maximum Shelf: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on November 3, 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 October 12, 2023.

Douglas Westerbeke’s debut novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, is a wild romping adventure, a poignant tale of relationships and interconnectedness, and a compelling journey of self-discovery. The worldwide (and possibly beyond) travels of Aubry Tourvel have something for every reader, with a momentum that’s impossible to turn away from.

“The paper is clean and white–she hasn’t drawn her first line–so when the drop of blood falls and makes its little red mark on the page, she freezes. Her pencil hovers in her hand. Her heart, like it always does, gives her chest an extra kick.” With these opening lines, readers meet Aubry mid-scene, in a marketplace in Siam. Her illness has returned. First the blood, “And then the pain strikes–a terrible, venomous pain–a weeping pain, like a nail through a rotten tooth.” The first pages are adrenaline-fueled, as Aubry runs for her life.

Aubry recounts her past in fragments to people she meets along the way. In early chapters, she narrates the beginning of this singular illness, this mysterious curse that appeared when she was nine years old in 1885, where her family lived in Belle Époque Paris. She ran, and “Every step made her breath flow easier, made the pain slip a little farther away. She knew this would be her strategy from now on. She would outrun it.” Precocious Aubry quickly intuits the inexplicable rules of her condition: she can never revisit the same place twice, can never retrace her steps, can stay in one place only two to three days, four at the most, before she must move on. And so begins a life of constant travel. From a privileged, spoiled childhood, Aubry becomes resourceful, wary, self-sufficient, standoffish, and eventually a kind–but always watchful–wanderer.

Aubry fashions a spear and becomes adept with it. She travels mainly on foot and by boat, doing odd jobs, fishing and hunting. Her relationships, while often meaningful, last only days. One of her most significant love affairs lasts a whole week, aboard a moving train, until the train breaks down and she must leave her lover behind. A few acquaintances try to travel with Aubry, but it becomes increasingly clear that she is special, able to withstand more than the average human. On foot, she crosses the Himalayas, and the Calanshio Sand Sea in the Libyan desert. She finds libraries filled with wordless books containing only pictorial storytelling–to overcome language barriers–and discovers that these libraries, perhaps a little magic, are for her alone.

The workings of Aubry’s unique, global-scale library are never clear, even to her. There, she finds everything she needs: sustenance, warmth, information. “It comforts her that for every path she’s taken during her many revolutions around the world–for every individual footstep, it seems–there’s a story. Something once happened, a past that is not hers.” This is what library-lovers everywhere have long known, but it is also a device that allows for one of the more magical elements of Aubry’s strange travels. “‘It seems,’ said [one brief acquaintance], ‘that the world you travel through is not the same world we travel through.’ My God, thinks Aubry. My God.”

It is a lonely life. People she meets tend to “romanticize her illness. They imagine an eternal holiday, which is ludicrous, of course. Does anyone really want an eternal holiday? A holiday is a temporary break from the routine, a chance to shake off the dust of habit, to experiment with new foods and customs, but then to return, perhaps borrowing from the outside, perhaps rejecting it–but either way, a return.”

Westerbeke’s imagination is prodigious, and the details with which he fleshes out this absorbing tale are equally abundant. A Short Walk Through a Wide World abounds in the tastes, smells, textures, and sensations of a woman who lives almost from moment to moment. Her haphazard travels, rarely planned, are always in response to a sharp pain or a nosebleed, or worse. She stays just a half-step ahead of the illness which she’s come to personify. “It clung to her back, fingers and toes screwed into her bones, gasping and grinning at all the places she went, a happy demon mounted forever on her shoulders.” She speaks to it, and it responds.

Aubry’s travels arrange themselves into a moving story, often sad, but also filled with joy and fun. Aubry has a special weakness for children, and delights in engaging with them wherever she goes, from a ferry in Siam to a tribe in the Congo. This expansive tale offers new ways of looking at the world–wise, questioning, as rich in emotional depth as it is in detail. The characters she meets are numerous and diverse: New Zealanders rescue her in Siam; an Ottoman fisherman encourages her to gain a meaningful skill; an Indian prince befriends her; a Tibetan nomad invites her to hunt a mysterious beast; a Mexican journalist tracks her down in Alaska. A Short Walk Through a Wide World is utterly engrossing, a world–worlds–to get lost in. In these riveting, swashbuckling adventures, tender meditations on relationships, and philosophical musings about travel and home, every reader will find something to love.

Rating: 9 horned cucumbers.

Come back Monday for my interview with Westerbeke.

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“How Long ’til Black Future Month?” (essay) by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on October 30, 2023 by pagesofjulia

After reviewing the story collection on Friday, I felt the need to go find the essay which gave the collection its name. I’ve decided to just repost it here for your pleasure rather than muddying it with my own words. I think it’s important. Please take the time to visit Jemisin’s site for…

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How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on October 27, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This book took me on such journeys and brought me so much joy and enjoyment and laughter and more difficult but also rewarding feelings; I have long felt that Jemisin is a rare master, but this may be the pinnacle. I love this book. I was once mildly disappointed with novella-length versions of her world; but here she clearly perfected the short story. And I was so pleased with the wide variety of worlds we got to dip into. Every story is unmistakably Jemisin, but each is also so different. They range in the impressions they give of settings in time and in space, from recognizably referring to our world to being fairly far afield; some are set in the worlds of her novels, some stand alone, and a few closely answer another author’s work (more on that in a minute). Some, similarly, seem to fit into a timeline of our own world, while others stand apart. But they all have the flavor. I went back to immediately reread one story in particular as soon as I finished the book, and that’s a rare move.

How Long opens with an author’s introduction in which she shares her coming-of-age as a writer, her growth as a short story writer, and the struggle of being a Black woman in fantasy and science fiction, among other things. “The stories contained in this volume are more than just tales in themselves; they are also a chronicle of my development as a writer and as an activist.” For this reader, at least, it felt right to come to this collection after having read all the novels (I haven’t read all her work as published in various places, but I’ve read all the books); I felt familiar with the writer now offering a look back across those years. Such a treat. Also, I hope she lives to write many books for a long, long time more.

The first story in the collection is “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” which is quite explicitly a response to Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” This was, again, a real treat for me; I’ve read “Omelas” for a couple of classes in which I was a student and also taught it for several years, so I’ve looked pretty closely at its concepts as well as its sentences, and that was an excellent preparation to appreciate Jemisin’s strong response in both its concepts and its sentences. To match the voice and style of another writer is not ‘mere’ imitation but a serious accomplishment in itself, and this story does that well. Jemisin has a fiery answer to Le Guin’s troubled false utopia; her Um-Helat is not “that barbaric America” nor “Omelas, a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child.” She’s got a different idea, and exhorts the reader to come along, “get to work.” (The direct address comes from Le Guin, but Jemisin grasps it firmly.) I was so delighted with this opening story, I could hardly stand it.

Other favorites include “Red Dirt Witch,” “L’Alchimista,” “The Effluent Engine,” “The Evaluators,” “Henosis,” and “The Elevator Dancer” – is Orwell just this much in our society, or in my head (recently Julia), or is this an explicit play on 1984? To emphasize the range of these stories, I will attempt a few one-line description/summaries:

  • “Red Dirt Witch”: The White Lady threatens Emmaline’s family, but she knows the red dirt of Alabama, and the magic it holds, too well to go down easily.
  • “L’Alchimista”: As a professional chef, Franca has fallen far, but she can’t resist a challenge; when a mysterious stranger shows up at her little kitchen in Milan, she will discover her art holds even greater power than she knew.
  • “The Effluent Engine”: In historical New Orleans, a Haitian spy looks for technological advantage and finds also love. (Jemisin’s website calls it “a swashbuckling adventure-romance set in 1800s New Orleans with secret societies, derringers, and bustles.” Love!)
  • “The Evaluators”: Human contact with alien species is highly regulated; why is this one trade contract being rushed? Danger! (Strong hints of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series.)
  • “Henosis”: In out-of-order chapters, a famous author is kidnapped by his biggest fan.
  • “The Elevator Dancer”: Security guard secretly, shamefully, watches a subversive act of dance.

Bonus: many of these stories are available elsewhere, linked from Jemisin’s site, if you’d care to go hunting that way.

This book has left my mind changed, and I’ve stepped away and back to it. Strongly recommend.

Rating: 10 frava roots.

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We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein

Posted on October 23, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Thought-provoking, tender, and horrifying, this memorable novel of Jewish lives in the Warsaw Ghetto offers timeless lessons.

Lauren Grodstein’s novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a quietly terrifying immersion in the experience of Jewish occupants of Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto during 1940-42. An English teacher before internment, widower Adam Paskow continues his calling behind the heavily guarded walls. Late one afternoon a man named Ringelblum, who wants Adam to join an archival project, approaches him in his classroom: “It is up to us to write our own history,” he tells Adam. “Deny the Germans the last word.” Adam, Grodstein’s narrator, also writes journal entries for Ringelblum’s project, because “there was no reason not to comply.” Having lost his beloved wife four years earlier and now his livelihood, home, and freedom, Adam stumbles through a new life, sharing an apartment with 10 occupants in two families–all previously strangers to each other. He helps dispense sparse servings of soup at the Aid Society and, via conversation and poetry, teaches English. He slowly sells off his wife’s fine linen sheets, silk pillowcases, and shoes. He transcribes interviews with his students, and the men, women, and children he lives with. New relationships form. He remembers his wife, waits for liberation, and then begins to understand that it may not come.

Prior to the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, Adam was non-practicing (“I had barely remembered I was a Jew”) and married to a wealthy non-Jewish woman; her mother’s rejection of him and her father’s demonstrative tolerance and proclaimed support highlight differences that the younger couple find insignificant. Adam calls himself a coward, but the honesty with which he bears witness is striking. His journal entries vary from the chapters that come between them; the direct first-person narration of the latter takes a more personal tone, but in both cases, Adam shares an unvarnished view of individual characters in all their complexities, never relying on easy labels. Adam, who teaches multiple languages, loves language in general, and Grodstein gives him a beautiful writing voice.

Grodstein (The Explanation for Everything; Our Short History) bases her historical novel upon a few real characters and events. Emanuel Ringelblum did oversee an archival project, which provides the background for this realistic, heartrending glimpse into the lives of Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto. We Must Not Think of Ourselves brings a horrifying chapter of history to readers with intimate, detailed portraits. In his detailed recording of other lives and of his own, Adam reveals that love may be found even in the starkest of situations, and he faces the hardest of choices about sacrifice: Who will you save if you can’t save them all?

This review originally ran in the October 5, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 chicken feet.

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The Diver by Samsun Knight

Posted on October 20, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This novel of existential questions features a grieving, perhaps unhinged widow and the paralegal hired to investigate her, who team up in increasingly bizarre efforts to reconcile their lives.

Samsun Knight’s first novel, The Diver, opens with a brief, dramatic scene: “A scuba diver is on a deepwater dive with her husband, one hundred thirty feet below.” They are exploring a shipwreck from the 1800s when their oxygen tank pressure gauges fail. The diver survives, and her husband does not.

Knight presents this brief section in a third-person perspective that provides details of the dive; the rest of the novel features the first-person voice of a young man named Peter. Peter works as a paralegal at an ethically questionable law firm that specializes in intimidation services on behalf of wealthy clients; the diver’s sister-in-law hires them. In this way Peter comes into contact with Marta, the widowed diver. He wants to help her, and he may love her. He also has his own baggage and history of loss, a “sinkhole of family.” Peter’s plot line is a series of mishaps and grotesque, often darkly comic episodes; readers are privy to his first-person narration and can understand his messy life. Marta’s more enigmatic story is, likewise, filled with grim absurdity. The Diver is further peopled with unfeeling art-school classmates, a mother on the verge of breakdown, a profoundly disturbing fortune-teller, and two goons who share a first name. Knight combines psychological suspense with outrageous catastrophes and a bit of a ghost story.

Knight follows Marta by following Peter; she is the novel’s ostensible protagonist, but it is Peter’s minutiae on display. The two characters are drawn together by their misery and their openness to possibility. They speak in disjointed sentences but, Peter thinks, mostly understand one another: “That sense of broken compartments, of trying and failing to fit Marta’s actions into the boxes I’d established for her, had graduated into a full collapse of anxiety.” The price of their odd alliance, however, may be higher than either one realizes.

The story plays with format and includes interspersed snippets of interview transcripts, tarot cards, diagrams, an art-mag essay about Freud’s concept of unheimlich, and more. The overall result is a little off-kilter and occasionally grisly. (Some readers will struggle with scenes involving animal cruelty.) As an examination of the dark sides of relationships, it is disturbing and always imaginative. Marta, for one, resorts to increasingly weird experiments with the occult in her quest to bring her husband back.

How far would a person go for love, grief, hope, or fear? This disquieting novel pushes these questions beyond expected boundaries in its inquiry into terrible, life-changing wrongs. Dealing in mysticism, love, anguish, and unpardonable crimes, The Diver is not a novel for the faint of heart, but it is rewarding in its surprises.

This review originally ran in the September 28, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 bunnies.

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Search History by Amy Taylor

Posted on October 16, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This wise debut novel explores modern dating themes and pitfalls in on- and offline realms.

Search History, Amy Taylor’s first novel, focuses on Ana, a woman in her late 20s who is navigating the dating world, both online and in real life, following a significant breakup. Ana’s ups and downs center mainly on the new relationship she begins with Evan, a man with a past. But a variety of experiences in her own and other women characters’ romantic lives are more alarming than encouraging when it comes to the modern dating landscape.

After the end of a four-year relationship, Ana starts over by moving from Perth to Melbourne and beginning a new job. Her friends are astonished when she meets Evan at a bar, rather than online. “Have you found him online yet?” a work friend asks anxiously. When Ana replies that she has, her friend sighs with “genuine relief.” Evan seems perfect–perhaps its own red flag–but Ana has found his ex-girlfriend online, too, and rapidly begins an obsession with that other woman’s online presence, a preoccupation that threatens to overshadow her real-life relationship with Evan. Meanwhile, the men Ana and other women encounter via dating apps or in person showcase a variety of tendencies, ranging from troubling to outright threatening. And Ana struggles as well to connect with each of her parents: her passive-aggressive mother back in Perth, who is giving Ana the silent treatment, and her “belligerently optimistic” father in Bali, where he exclaims a lot (in rare phone calls) over breath work and intimacy coaching.

Search History is concerned with relationships, (mis)communication, and fear. Ana is frightened of the strange man running behind her in the dark, of the man taking the drunk woman home from the party, of sending Evan a text that will scare him away. And in its central theme, the novel questions the usefulness of an online dating persona. Ana notes Evan’s eye color from a picture online: “It was a piece of information I should have learned the first time I saw his eyes catch sunlight, not through a screen.” Is she better off Googling her next potential lover? Is that research necessary for her safety? Or should she allow him “to reveal himself to me piece by piece in real life, unburdened by my preconceived assumptions”? Which version of Evan–and of Ana–is the real one?

With its expert pacing, Search History offers frank handling of sexuality and desire, and unvarnished descriptions of sexual violence and harassment (which may be triggering for some readers). Ana is self-aware and funny, lonely and self-questioning. Her first-person narration is stark, vulnerable, and approachable. Taylor presents a clever and often harrowing examination of 21st-century dating.

This review originally ran in the September 25, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 ellipses.

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