The Trackers by Charles Frazier

Posted on June 26, 2023 by pagesofjulia

I never read any Frazier before, although I’ve been aware of his well-received Cold Mountain. I liked what I saw in teasers about this recently-published historical novel: set in the Depression and centered around an artist named Val Welch who’s been hired to paint a mural in the post office of small-town Dawes, Wyoming. An old art school mentor helped him get this New Deal commission: “Hutch was the right kind of idealist for the times. He believed public art could be like a pebble thrown into a still pond, a small influence but spreading in all directions.” Val is back-and-forth between idealism and cynicism, but he does take art seriously, and earnestly wants to do a proper job of this mural. There is a public education aspect to the job, as locals wander in while he paints. He tells them,

The mural is going to express waves of history always swelling and cresting and breaking and rising again, and all the images will be slightly tilted forward, leaning into the future.

I was twenty-seven, so take that into consideration.

The locals are not always charmed. They keep telling him the joke that WPA really stands for We Piddle About (and he doesn’t even work for the WPA). But he still feels it’s important work.

In a nutshell, this is the book I was hoping to read: art, community, historical time and place. But the book Frazier wrote is a little different from that. We first meet Val Welch as he’s traveling west, from home in Virginia to Dawes; we see some of the country through his eyes, and we arrive with him at Long Shot, the ranch owned by the extremely wealthy John Long (old friend to Val’s mentor Hutch) and Long’s wife, Eve. Long Shot is opulent, and Long very pleased with himself. He’s hoping to go into politics. His right-hand man Faro is a hard-handed old cowboy, around whom rumors congregate. Eve is a beauty, much younger than her blowhard husband, with stories to tell about being a childhood tramp following the harvest cycle around the country and leading a successful cowboy band. She can offer hard edges, a movie star’s glamour, and whatever story her current audience is apt to find most engaging. It’s implied that her personal history is changeable at the least. Val is easily drawn into the odd family of Long, Eve and Faro. When Eve runs away, Long hires him (at an extraordinary wage) to track her. Val steps away from his mural with an alacrity that surprised me.

The rest of the novel is not about art, but about the intrigue and spiderwebs of Long and Eve’s marriage, Eve’s alleged first husband Jake, and the characters Val meets in Seattle, San Francisco, and a Florida backwater while trying to track down a woman no one understands. The Trackers refers in its title to Val’s efforts, obviously (and a few others who jump in on the game in the book’s present), but also to a couple of figures in Val’s mural. The mural trackers fall off the page pretty quickly, though, which is a metaphor for the mural and the public art thread in general. The tracking-of-Eve storyline is well executed, technically and in its craft elements, and Frazier writes beautifully and compellingly in descriptive details, characterization, and dialog; it’s not at all surprising that his books have won awards. The mystery of Eve is suspenseful and well paced. But as a thread, the beautiful, deceptive woman and her various bumble-headed male admirers didn’t do a lot for me. I was much more interested in the public art / historical angle. That’s not a great criticism of Frazier: he wrote a different book than the one I’d hoped to read, and it’s not his fault that I got a different impression from wherever I read about this book. I will make a slight criticism in that his female lead feels like a Hemingway woman to me. She doesn’t pass the Bechdel test but seems a male fantasy; does she have an interior life that’s not in relationship to the men around her and how they react to her? Her clothing, her literal onstage performances, the way she smokes a cigarette, are all about the male gaze. I find this disappointing.

It kept me reading, but I missed the book I wished I were reading. And I thought Eve was a missed opportunity. Passes technical muster, but not impressive to this reader.

Rating: 6 glasses of champagne.

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Hedge by Jane Delury

Posted on June 23, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this profound novel about love, loss, and choices, a summer’s exciting work and exhilarating affair will reverberate through the lives of a deeply likeable protagonist and her family for years.

Hedge by Jane Delury (The Balcony) is a roller coaster of a novel about family, creation, love, and shifting priorities, lush with detail and delicately rendered. Readers will be thinking of Delury’s protagonist long after these pages close.

Maud is a garden historian, “with her odd mix of botany, archaeology, history, and practical gardening skills,” and she loves her work. Originally from California, she was well suited to England, both London (where she finished her education) and the countryside, but reluctantly returned to the United States for her husband Peter’s career. When Hedge opens, Maud is at work on a restoration project in New York’s Hudson Valley. It is beautiful, stimulating work, and she is likewise stimulated by the company of Gabriel, a handsome, intriguing archeologist at work on the same site. Her two daughters, Ella and Louise, are about to join her for the rest of the summer. Peter remains in California: the couple has separated “both geographically and maritally,” and Maud plans to make this separation permanent and legal, but their girls don’t know this yet. On the cusp of an affair with Gabriel, she feels enlivened, awakened by his attention, her own physicality, the thrill of discovering flower beds from the Civil War era and the turning of the earth. She allows herself to dream of what a new life could look like for her as well as for the scotch roses, lilac, clematis, and honeysuckle she plants. But when the girls arrive from California, 13-year-old Ella suffers a trauma that snowballs into life-changing events for all involved.

The idyll in New York ends suddenly, and Maud’s next months and years are spent dealing with hard choices between undesirable outcomes. She wrestles to balance meaningful work and practicalities; lustful, soulful connection, and the mundane compromises of marriage; her own needs and those of her children. “You could comfort yourself with statistics, tell yourself that a twenty-year relationship was a good run. After all, when marriage was invented, no one lived this long. But it was still a jagged gash through your life, even if it was what you wanted.” Delury’s prose is finely detailed, saturated with color and feeling; Maud’s passion for her work is as substantial and sympathetic as her love for her daughters. Both a quiet domestic tale and a novel of surprising suspense, Hedge cycles from hopeful to harrowing and back again. Maud is nurturing and steely, riveting and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 8, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 slices of pepperoni.

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When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

Posted on June 19, 2023 by pagesofjulia

While it takes its time getting to the ‘thriller’ part, this novel does pack a punch once the thrills begin. Told in two points of view, a romance builds alongside the terror.

Following a nasty divorce, Sydney has recently moved from Seattle back home to the fictional Gifford Place neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Her mother’s health has taken a turn for the worse, and it is a relief anyway to return to her childhood home, a handsome brownstone building where Sydney’s lifelong best friend Drea also lives in an apartment. The neighborhood is changing quickly, though: gentrification is coming hard for Gifford Place, a traditionally Black neighborhood, and neighbors Sydney’s known all her life are disappearing right and left, along with the businesses she frequents, and being replaced by white residents. The book opens with a brownstone tour emphasizing only the neighborhood’s distant white history, which Sydney interrupts to interject a truer version, before leaving frustrated for comfort food at her favorite bodega. The tour guide’s snotty advice that Sydney should start her own tour gets her thinking, though.

With the annual block party approaching, Sydney works on her research for the tour. Meanwhile, a new white resident, Theo, struggles in a failing relationship with his absolutely toxic racist girlfriend Kim. She is one of several of Sydney’s new white neighbors who move well beyond micro- into macro-aggressions and overt racism, while hapless Theo appears to be having the first eye-opening of his life all at once. I’m leery of this device. Theo volunteers to be Sydney’s assistant in tour research, offering us a rather too obvious didactic opportunity: Sydney explains history to Theo who also, on his own, researches patterns of white flight, redlining, real estate scams, and the reaches of slavery beyond Confederate borders. Gasp, northern bankers benefit from cotton planting too! This is a bit transparent for my tastes. Where has Theo been hiding all these years that he’s so ready for his awakening but has just never been exposed to truth before? [I thought it was a good detail, on the other hand, that Theo is white but also comes from poverty and crime. I felt this offered a subtler and therefore perhaps more clever avenue to explore why poor white people, though facing certain disadvantages, still experience an absence of the obstacles that face Black people of any socioeconomic background.] There are however some fun moments, like when they come up with a safe word (‘Howdy Doody’ – Theo’s idea) for when he gets into his “little white feelings.”

This is the weakest part of the novel, for its didactic feel and slower pacing. Then we move into a quickening of the dangers. Theo and Sydney uncover the dirt, historical and contemporary, the widespread conspiracy to take over Gifford Park for great profits and throw longtime residents out on their asses or to an undisclosed location. Banks, hospitals, real estate agencies, medical research facilities, tech scams and plain intimidation–is it a conspiracy theory if it’s all true? Where have Gifford Park’s disappeared residents been going, anyway? Why would Mr. Perkins take off in the final days before the big block party? Sydney’s past traumas make it difficult to trust her new friend, who is admittedly slow to some punches. (It is funny, if also sad, when he figures it out: “Not being able to call the police when you need help really sucks, I’m learning.”) Once the action shifts into gear, When No One Is Watching rockets along. Horror, fight scenes, sex, drama, and relevant social issues: it’s haunting but also fun. If a few plot threads get dropped along the way, so be it.

Possibly Cole got a bit ambitious with the combination of capital-I Issues and thriller intrigue. It was rough in spots. But she also accomplished a lot, and kept me engaged (if occasionally a little impatient), and I’d encourage more efforts like this one.

Rating: 7 loosies.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Jesmyn Ward

Posted on June 16, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of Let Us Descend, here’s Jesmyn Ward: Finding Those Erased by History.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received a MacArthur Genius Grant and a Stegner Fellowship. She has won two National Book Awards, in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing; and in 2011 for Salvage the Bones. She is professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. Her fourth novel, Let Us Descend, begins on a rice plantation in the Carolinas, and is narrated by an inspiring enslaved young woman in transcendent prose.

What freedoms and challenges do the historical setting present?

Jesmyn Ward (photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

It offered me a freedom to write from a time and place where I was less constrained by the present moment. That is, I didn’t feel pressured to write about current politics or manners or modes of behavior or even geography, as the world of the novel had its own.

It was beyond difficult to write about a person who has little to no physical agency for much of the novel. That reality is so far removed from my own that it was nearly impossible for me to draft a beginning. I wrote that beginning over and over for years because I could not figure out how to inhabit Annis; I was flailing because I couldn’t understand where the narrative was supposed to go. It took me a long time to figure out that Annis would have other kinds of agency–emotional, imaginative, and spiritual–and that these would carry her through the story. Once I began putting words on the page, living with Annis’s voice, she led me.

Where did this novel begin?

I heard an episode of WWOZ’s Tripod called “Sighting the Sites of the New Orleans Slave Trade.” In it, historian Erin Greenwald tells journalist Laine Kaplan-Levinson that there were only two plaques in New Orleans that accounted for the slave trade, and one of them was in the wrong location.

I felt a hot blush in my chest and had to fight back tears when I heard this. It was devastating to know that so many enslaved people had been sent for sale to the lower south, had endured barbaric conditions and treatment, and then had their experiences erased. It was painful to know that I moved through this landscape, a landscape that had soaked up their sorrow and pain like a sponge, and I was blind to it. It seemed immensely unjust. I immediately asked myself: What if I write about it? What will happen if I bring it to life through a character, a woman? This is how I first began to get glimpses of Annis.

How much research was required?

I knew next to nothing about the domestic slave trade. It was embarrassing to realize that my high school and college education had failed me so miserably in that aspect. It made me wonder about active erasure, about how the active suppression of knowledge can make it possible for a well-known rapper to say slavery was a choice, 150 years later. For folks on Black Twitter to talk about slavery and say: I am not my ancestor–couldn’t be me. We have these ill-informed reactions to American slavery because we don’t know anything about it beyond what we see in pop culture. We are not educated about it.

I read general books about American slavery: The Half Has Never Been Told, They Were Her Property and The Great Stain. I read books about Louisiana: The Sugar Masters, Slavery’s Metropolis and The Free People of Color of New Orleans. I read about slave pens in Soul by Soul. I read about maroons in Slavery’s Exiles, and I read slave narratives, too, the most helpful one being Six Women’s Slave Narratives. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the books that were most helpful to me.

As I wrote I discovered there was still more research I needed to do. I read about African-American slave medicine, the amazons of Dahomey, flora and fauna of the southeast United States, and more, driven by panic and anxiety. The last thing I wanted was to kick an academic out of the story when I got some fact or bit of ephemera wrong.

I’m sure I made mistakes, but I tried really hard not to. I hope I read enough to render the world real and present for the reader, to crowd them into Annis’s reality, to make it impossible for them to look away.

Does this offer an allegory for present times?

I think at its heart that this novel is about someone struggling with grief. I can strip away all the material circumstances of Annis’s enslavement, and underneath the brutality and cruelty of the forced work and punishment and dehumanization, I see a person who is swimming through grief. She has lost so many loved ones, so she is navigating mourning and the strange reality of the slave markets and the lower south at the same time. She is all longing and bewilderment and grit. I think many of us can identify with those emotions, especially post-2020, as we maneuver our way through this new reality, so many of us saddled with loss.

Annis enters adulthood because she has fought to survive a very American crucible. I believe that in a way, Annis saves herself in telling stories, in remembering, in creating community and relationship with those she meets on her way, in empathizing, in living. I like to think that she gives us a blueprint for how to survive and thrive in the present moment.

Is this a triumphant story?

I believe it is a triumphant story for Annis, for the character, but I also think it is a triumphant story for all the enslaved and maroons in the world of the story. In allowing the reader to inhabit this world, we empathize with them, we feel with them as they live and love and resist and persist. I hope this novel contributes to the conversation that writers of African descent have been having in books like The Water Dancer or The Underground Railroad, and that it does its part to enable readers to witness and to understand enslaved people anew.

How has novel-writing changed for you?

I find my motivation for writing novels changing. In the beginning, I wanted to write about people who could be part of my community or family because I wanted to make us visible. I wanted readers to love us and bleed with us and cry and laugh with us. I still want all that, but in the last two novels, I’ve discovered that it is also important to me to find those erased by history and to write them into the present, into common knowledge. I want readers to know about kids like Richie, sent to Parchman Prison at 12 and 13. I want readers to know that teens like Annis existed: that she and others like her walked from the upper south to the lower south, that they encountered demeaning horror after demeaning horror, and yet they persisted. They lived in spite of all that was done to them.

I intend to write a YA/middle grade book next, and my next few novel ideas revolve around characters who live through moments of upheaval, when the world is turned on its head and the logic of everyday life does not apply. I’m really interested in how people cope in those moments, in how they hold onto themselves in those moments, in how they navigate realities that defy their expectations and their experiences.

I believe Let Us Descend could count as the first flower of that motivation as well.

This interview originally ran on May 17, 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: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on June 12, 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 May 17, 2023.

Two-time National Book Award-winner for Fiction Jesmyn Ward (Men We Reaped; Navigate Your Stars; The Fire This Time; Sing, Unburied, Sing; Salvage the Bones) takes a different direction with her fourth novel, Let Us Descend: it’s her first historical narrative. Beautifully written and heartrending, Ward’s story sensitively handles grief, love, and recovery. On a rice plantation in the Carolinas, an enslaved teenager named Annis narrates as she works alongside her beloved mother. Mama is a source of comfort and strength even as her finger bones are “blades in sheaths.” Annis says, “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand.” This steely woman teaches Annis lessons of combat learned from her own mother, one of thousands of warrior wives to an African king, tasked with both protection and elephant hunting. “In this world, you your own weapon,” she tells her daughter, and Annis will need to be.

Annis’s father is the plantation owner who owns her and her mother. Annis has half-sisters in the big house. “My sire’s house hulks; its insides pinned by creaks,” and her “sallow sisters” have a tutor to read to them, to teach them the texts of ancient Greece, about bees and wasps and Dante’s Inferno: “The tutor is telling a story of a man, an ancient Italian, who is walking down into hell. The hell he travels has levels like my father’s house.” Let Us Descend‘s title is a nod to Dante, and a cue to the reader to notice hells, descents, and journeys south. Annis listens and learns. Through her natural gifts, her own interest, and with her mother’s help, she becomes skilled in foraging: herbs, mushrooms, medicinal plants, and simple foods. She learns to befriend the bees she hears her sisters’ tutor speak of.

Then Annis’s father chooses to sell her mother south. The “Georgia Man” takes her away in a line of stolen people for the long walk to market. Annis falls into a near-fatal grief at being left without the most important person in her life, until a kind friend pulls her back to the surface. But soon, Annis and Safi, her friend-turned-lover, are sent on the same walk with the Georgia Man. From the plantation where she was born, Annis makes a death march to a New Orleans slave market and is sold to a cruel lady whose Louisiana sugar plantation marks a further descent, into a new level of hell. Others will uplift her along the way, but she never shakes the excruciating grief for her mother.

Along the way she gains and loses friends, and meets a spirit: Aza controls the storms and winds, and has stolen the name of Annis’s maternal grandmother, the warrior Mama Aza. “Aza’s hair a living thing: scudded clouds, the setting sun lighting them on fire. She leans forward and a breeze blows from her. Feels like the slap of a freshly washed linen on my face, snapping in a cool wind.” The spirit seeks her own identity and self-importance in relation to others, and has locked onto Annis’s maternal line as a way to achieve this: she models herself after the grandmother Annis never knew, and her use of the name Aza represents both connection and theft. That Annis refers to enslaved people like herself as “stolen” adds a layer to Aza’s use of the name.

Less centered around plot and character than Ward’s previous novels, Annis’s story is more elemental and thematic, dealing primarily with grief, forces of nature and human evil, villains and allies. The spirits she meets–chiefly Aza, but others as well–are closely associated with natural forces. “Another spirit, white and cold as snow, walks the edge of the river; it hungers for warmth, for breath, for blood, for fear, and it, too, glances against the enslaved stolen and feeds. Another spirit slithers from rooftop to rooftop before twining about wrought iron balconies outside plaçage women’s bedrooms, where it hums, telling the bound women to portion out poison in pinches over the years, to revolt, revolt, revolt.” These spirits can help but also harm, offer but also take away; they may represent another form of attempted ownership, as Aza has taken Mama Aza’s name. In a magical-realism twist, Annis finds these spirits widen her world beyond her immediate suffering to other timelines and possibilities.

Just as Ward’s title refers to Dante’s story of a descent into ever-deeper levels of hell, her hero makes a parallel, nonconsensual descent into the deeper South, into pain and suffering and sorrow, and into the worsening and worst of humanity. The novel moves with Annis from the Carolinas to Louisiana, and in story, back to Africa, where Mama Aza established the fighting spirit she would pass on.

Ward gives Annis’s voice a raw strength and musicality. After she is imprisoned in an underground cell by a particularly sadistic plantation owner, Aza tells her, “When you were up north, your sorrow choked your song. Swallowed it down. Even so, it hummed. But the walk changed it. The further you went, the more it rose until the woman put you down in the earth. Then it shrieked.” Attention to descriptive detail emphasizes Annis’s close relationship to place, and the importance of the land itself (not least in supplementing the enslaved people’s painfully meager allotted diet). “The water reaches in every direction, duckweed bright and green, floating on the murky wet. Cypress, fresh with rain, shimmers.”

As much pain, struggle, torture as there is in these pages, there are also various forms of love, and great strength, power, and personal reclamation. Let Us Descend ends with surprising hope. “How the whitewash of starlight would buoy them along. How they dance with the rocking deck. How them sing.” With this novel, Ward’s talent continues to deepen and glow.

Rating: 6 broad, glossy leaves.

Come back Friday for my interview with Ward.

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A History of Burning by Janika Oza

Posted on June 9, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Janika Oza’s A History of Burning is a stunning multigenerational saga that follows a family and a community who move during the years 1898 to 1992 from India to Kenya to Uganda, to Canada and the U.K., and beyond. In nearly a dozen voices, Oza’s debut novel illuminates immigration patterns and pain alongside familial joys and sorrows.

Readers first meet 13-year-old Pirbhai in Gujarat, India; he is, as the oldest son, fierce with the need to provide for his family. In exchange for a coin and the promise of opportunity, he unwittingly sells himself into labor on the railroad the British are building in East Africa. Pirbhai builds a family and a community with other Indian Africans; his children and grandchildren feel buoyed by the strong ties but sometimes limited by the strictures of tradition and duty. After Ugandan independence, anti-Asian sentiment drives them out of the only country they have known. Pirbhai’s son, Vinod, thinks there must be a “third possibility–not African, not Indian, but something beyond borders, an identity forged over decades of scattering apart and, miraculously, finding repair.” Each generation struggles in a new place, the tight-knit family always navigating change and searching for a place to call their own. Oza’s gorgeous prose is lush with detail–colors, flavors, emotions–and saturated with loveliness and pain, “the messy, the beautiful, the wild improbable light.” A History of Burning admirably charts how–by the time Pirbhai’s descendants plant seeds in Canadian soil–history, both personal and collective, is formed from the stories we tell and the silences we allow to remain.

This review originally ran in the May 5, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 matunda.

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At the Edge of the Woods by Kathryn Bromwich

Posted on June 5, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A woman reinvents herself in solitude but finds the tension with humanity remains in this finely textured novel set in the Italian Alps.

Kathryn Bromwich’s first novel, At the Edge of the Woods, both chills and charms with its fable-like story of a woman beginning a new life alone in a cabin outside a small Italian village.

“In the mornings, when my thoughts have not yet arranged themselves into their familiar malevolent shapes and the day is still unformed, I wake up before dawn… and walk deep into the woods while my eyes adjust to the velvety darkness.” First-person narrator Laura Mantovani is determined to simplify and forget: she revels in her close attention to her daily walks, her observations of nature, her humble fare, and austere human contacts. She supports her modest lifestyle with translations of medical texts for the village apothecary and tutoring a few well-off children; in the evenings, she reads widely. She briefly takes a lover, before retreating into still deeper solitude and communion with the natural world. Readers wonder what she has escaped from–until a contact from her past life turns up on the doorstep. Glimpses of another life are revealed in flashbacks, before Laura’s narrative returns to the deceptive quiet of the Italian mountaintop woods.

Bromwich’s prose is sedately paced, erudite, and textured in its observations of nature. Laura has a sly sense of humor and a deep distrust of humankind. As her story advances, her relationship to reality shifts and slides. She has visions. “The woods seem to have taken on unusual colors–not just deeper but slightly off. Certain tree trunks appear a lurid purple; tangerine and teal leaves wave in the breeze.” She sinks into the nonhuman world in ways that strengthen her and give her confidence: “I seem to have passed over into–somewhere I am no longer beholden to the chains and responsibilities of man, but to the perfect harmony of the natural world, where everything has its place, and no rock or broken twig is without purpose.” The village down the mountain from her, where she treks for supplies–with decreasing frequency, as the forest provides all she needs–shifts as well, from a point of support to something rather more sinister. The villagers call her strega (witch), because an independent woman alone is otherwise too much to grasp. Laura has created a new life for herself, a world in which her needs make sense in new ways, but human society still looms. “If you are there, in front of their eyes–fading, yes, but not invisible, not quite yet–it is more difficult for them to turn you into a monster with their words after you are gone.” In the end, she may find herself in as much danger as ever.

At the Edge of the Woods is wise, ethereal, haunting, filled with both beauty and horror. Brief but thoughtful, lush in its descriptions, this is a novel of introspection.

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

Rating: 7 rude jokes for potatoes.

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A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Posted on June 2, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Another perfect recommendation from Liz, A Deadly Education is narrated by El, short for Galadriel, a wizard-in-training at the Scholomance. Her world looks much like ours, but you and I would qualify as ‘mundanes’ – people who don’t see or believe in magic. El is in school to learn spells and tricks and control, and as an independent wizard kid, possibly to earn an invitation to join an enclave. Wizards banded together in enclaves are much safer than indies like El, whose mother raised her in a yurt on a (mundane) commune in the Welsh countryside. But her mother Gwen is much beloved, a talented healer and source of all things good, while El’s affinity or tendency is toward large-scale destruction, as in mass murder. She is not a bad person: in fact she has spent her nearly three years in school working hard to keep her affinity in check, hiding the true extent of her powers, and making no friends with her eternally sour attitude. The tension within El between her natural affinity (murderous) and her value system (protective and good) is one of the central conflicts of this story.

Now the school itself: the Scholomance is full of terrors, like mals (short for maleficaria), monsters of all sorts; they live in the in-between spaces so that it’s dangerous to go anywhere alone, even to the bathroom, which is hard on a loner like El. Each year the massive, circular, magical space rotates and ratchets around so that the freshman dorms move down to become sophomore dorms, etc., and everyone gets closer to graduation, which is a euphemism for the seniors being dumped into a space filled with mals where they’ll have to fight their way out to real-world survival. Many of them won’t make it. Thus are your four years at the Scholomance taken up with working to form alliances to help you through graduation, unless you were lucky to come in an enclave kid from the start, with privileges and protections built in.

This accounts for several other intriguing conflicts within the novel: class and classism are up for debate within the enclave system. School in general is filled with petty jealousies and social politics, in ways recognizable to those of us who attended mundane high schools, and with the essential addition of life-or-death machinations re: mals and magic. There are plenty of larger questions about right and wrong and personal agency and what ends justify what means, but none of this is overtly or pedantically the point of the story: this is a page-turning, deliciously readable story of one awkward, socially ill-adjusted, fundamentally sweet but somehow also deadly teenager. El wants to secure her safe place in the world, but she really doesn’t want to hurt anybody. (Well, sometimes. She has a bit of a temper, and she does take a lot of abuse.) She also really wants friends, although she wouldn’t be quick to admit it.

It’s a great story, with some great secondary characters, including those cautiously interested in working with El, and the enigmatic oaf who wants to protect her. By the final chapters (which include some great action/battle sequences to boot) I was hooked and cheering. The last six words of the novel (!) contain a bombshell, and I cannot wait to start book two of this trilogy. Strongly recommend this one for awesome female lead characters, intrigue and world-building, fun magic, and poignant human drama.

Rating: 8 argonet teeth.

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Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire by Clare Frank

Posted on May 29, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This exceptional memoir shows wide emotional range in spanning the complexities of firefighting and fire prevention in California and the American West, gender issues, family, work, love, and loss.

Clare Frank’s Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire is a heart-racing, heartfelt story that will make readers laugh, cry, and consider what matters most in life. The author is an indomitable character, from self-supporting teen through a decades-long career in California firefighting (beginning in 1982, when women were few and generally viewed askance), with impressive achievements in her career and personal life. Frank’s memoir is packed not only with adrenaline but with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and creativity. Beware the impulse to race through these 300-plus pages in a single sitting.

After talking her unorthodox parents into emancipating her at 16, Frank becomes a firefighter at 17 (faced with an age requirement of 18, she simply leaves her birthdate blank on the employment form). Despite being “the youngest, shortest, and lightest person in an academy for the brawniest of professions,” she is indefatigable: stubborn, hardworking, short-fused, and tenacious, earning nicknames like Flipper, Tiger, and Poindexter–as well as degrees in fire administration, law, and creative writing–along the way. Frank rises through the firefighting ranks in her 33-year career (with a five-year doctor-mandated medical break), finishing with the lofty position of State Chief of Fire Protection, six ranks above captain, the highest she once thought she would be willing to attain. She works on structure fires and wildfires, in small firehouses and large ones, in the field and in positions of leadership, on labor and legal issues, prevention, forestry, and more, across the behemoth California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, aka Cal Fire (the largest fire department in the state).

While she does meditate on firefighting’s gender issues, her response to the question for much of her career is encapsulated in an anecdote: “While I pulled hose through tangled manzanita, the reporter jammed a microphone in my face and yelled, ‘What’s it feel like to be a female on the line?’ I yelled back, ‘The same as it feels for the guys, except I have chee-chees.’ ” She hoped that if she ignored what made her different, everyone else would as well–a strategy that worked frequently but not always.

Frank is a renegade overachiever in all areas: athletic, career, and (after a late return to the classroom) academic. Her writing is not merely serviceable, but thoughtfully constructed; her memoir’s sections are labeled for stages of fire development: ignition, sustained heat, free burn, growth, full development, and decay. Fire is present in every aspect of Frank’s life and work, including writing, but this always feels natural rather than effortful. By the end of this memorable book, readers will reconsider fire policy as well as family, risk, and hard work. With thrilling momentum and a heat of its own, Burnt is a sensation and an inspiration.

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

Rating: 9 bird’s nests.

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Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters by Richard Hack

Posted on May 26, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This was a most weird experience. I brought this book home when it was weeded from a library where I used to work, in probably 2010 or 2011. It has therefore made several cross-country moves with me. Why was I so invested in a banged-up copy of a Howard Hughes biography? I guess I was just that interested in learning more about this mysterious figure; but it does feel like an odd choice. Its publication date is now more than 20 years past, and it reads like it could be older still. Hughes is a fairly off-putting guy, to put it very mildly, and our biographer doesn’t benefit from soft-pedaling his criticisms. It frankly gave me the creeps throughout. But Hughes is such a profoundly bizarre man, and this is such a shocking story, that I couldn’t put it down, nor really stop talking or thinking about it. So what does that mean for my review? As a book, it’s got some problems. But I couldn’t walk away. It might earn back some points for that.

Richard Hack is noted in his bio to be an investigative writer largely covering Hollywood and the media. I found his telling to be salacious, sensational, decidedly creepy in its interest in Hughes’s relationships with women and (in particular) teenaged girls. The subject of this biography had deeply problematic relationships with women. That doesn’t mean the author had to join him there. Hack consistently characterizes young women as bimbos or manipulators, uses their first names (in contrast to the last names of their male counterparts), and notes that when Hughes was looking for a wife, one of his interests was “still a minor so of no use now.” That’s not Hughes’s voice, but our author’s. Another teenager is characterized as “the untouched plain; the virgin forest; the next unscaled mountain to conquer for the explorer Hughes.” Again, Hack’s own assessment. I apologize that you just read that and assume you feel as sick as I did. (Also, an aside: Hack insists more than once that Hughes was not impotent. It feels like the lady doth protest too much [and might possibly be projecting].)

A friend of mine encountered a podcast, just when I was reading this biography, which credited Hughes as being an ‘engineering genius.’ I can’t confirm or deny that impression, because this biography was far more interested in madness, sex, and bad behavior than it was in engineering. The book ends with a Hughes quotation: “I’m not nearly as interested in people as I should be, I guess. What I am tremendously interested in… is science.” This line, particularly as final mic-drop moment, did not fit at all with the story I’d been absorbed in for nearly 400 pages. Hack hadn’t much set up our subject as being a man of science. (I am exercising all my restraint to not make a “hack” joke here.)

Each chapter is opened by a Hughes quotation, a number of which are demeaning of women or blatantly and horrifically racist. None of these are handled within the text of the chapter – it’s just a hate bomb, followed by the continued story of Hughes’s life. It feels irresponsible, if not ugly, to drop these nuggets and then walk away without comment.

In short, the writing of this biography had me alternately creeped out and angry. Yes, the book’s 2001 copyright date was a long time ago by some measures. But I knew a lot of people even in 2001 who knew better than some of Hack’s gaffes.

I have some appreciation for the vivid telling of Hughes’s story in this work of creative nonfiction: Hack frequently gives us the play-by-play, including dialog and interior thoughts, in scene. This is fun to read, novelistic, but it raises some questions. The book ends with massively copious source notes, and it’s possible that Hack’s claims about dialogs, thoughts, and small-scale actions are well supported by evidence; but the absence of footnotes or endnotes leaves me wondering where speculation meets documented conclusion. I regret this.

I struggled very much with the telling of this story. But the story itself? Whew. Howard Hughes was many things, as claimed here and elsewhere. He was one of the richest men in the world, arguably the first American billionaire, and in a combination of personal contributions and those of his companies, massively changed aviation and motion-picture-making. He remains an important figure in the history and economy of my hometown of Houston (I have ridden my bike past his gravesite, and fun fact, my former father-in-law worked for Hughes Tool for over 50 years); I didn’t realize til this reading how many pies he had a hand in. He was not self-made (though he did massively increase his personal wealth) but born wealthy, spoiled, and privileged, and was raised in eccentric fashion, probably contributing to his later eccentricity and (I’m going to say it) insanity. It is not for me to diagnose him, but the behaviors described in this biography read as completely unhinged. He was reclusive, paranoid, a strange combination of germaphobe and filthy, a drug abuser and decidedly an abuser of people. I knew he was more or less nuts in popular opinion, but what shocked me most in these pages was not how nutty he was – I have personally known some cases – but how much he got away with. His wealth and fame surrounded him with people who did what he asked even when those asks were unreasonable, abusive, and counter to his own basic physical needs. I was surprised at how far down the rabbit hole he was allowed to travel. According to this telling, there was just one moment when Hughes’s handlers considered having him committed. The ability to keep earning money off his follies seems to have quickly defeated the thought.

I had an obviously conflicted time reading this book, but I couldn’t have put it down, either. For this I’m giving it a very conflicted rating. I’m a little tempted to go find another, better biography of Hughes for comparison and contrast, but I think I’ve spent enough time in the company of a pretty toxic character.

Strange times.

Rating: 6-and-a-half Hershey bars with almonds.

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