Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations by Cutter Wood

Posted on May 12, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This weird, wonderful exploration considers the social, cultural, and political implications of bodily emissions as well as their science, but shines brightest in its empathetic storytelling.

Cutter Wood (Love and Death in the Sunshine State) offers a spellbinding collection of facts, observations, and musings in Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. In 12 chapters that might be termed “essays” and Wood calls “stories,” he considers mucus, urine, blood, semen, menses, milk, flatulence, breath, feces, vomit, hair, and tears. While readers will certainly gain new and fascinating scientific knowledge, what makes Earthly Materials so special is storytelling: Wood’s compassionate, funny, earnest explorations through unexpected subject matters adjacent to bodily fluids.

At a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he meets impassioned graduate students and views beautiful stellar-like magnifications of mucus, which resemble Hubble Telescope photographs. He discusses the political and financial implications of donating blood and delves into the discomfiting r/NoFap Reddit forum. In the absorbing true-crime case of Formula Mom, a Florida woman is investigated and sentenced to prison for creating a large-scale business that bought and sold infant formula.

Tongue-in-cheek, Wood describes the flatulence customs and practices of the preadolescent male in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. To explore vomit, he joins the Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth and takes its sacrament. These experiences and studies often yield hilarity in Wood’s expert prose: dryly witty, comically verbose, and poignant. Wood finishes with the inexplicable tears of a Wimbledon finalist, in this thought-provoking philosophical study that exemplifies human interconnectedness through the rather surprising lens of bodily fluids and expulsions. Earthly Materials will change the way readers think about the mundane in unanticipated and transcendent ways.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 2025 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: 7 stills in the brambly Appalachian holler.

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The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Posted on May 9, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Former best friends reenter a scene of horror in this clever, terrifying novel about the dangers that lurk in friendships, home, and the self.

The singular Chuck Wendig (Blackbirds and more) brings his trademark blend of humor, profanity, and shrewd observation to the weirdly charismatic The Staircase in the Woods. Chilling, disturbing, and deliciously entertaining, this horror novel stars a group of one-time best friends who reunite as adults across a chasm of time and trauma. Nick is as abrasive as ever, but at least he gets them all back together again. Hamish has traded in his Birkenstocks, jam bands, and extra weight for fitness, church, and family. Lore (formerly Lauren) has achieved professional success, but only through an increasingly belligerent go-it-alone approach. Owen (aka Nailbiter) is barely surviving his mental health woes. And Matty, once their golden boy, hasn’t been seen since that day in the woods in 1998. Five teens went camping, four came back out again. Now, more than 20 years later, they have a chance to try to find out what went wrong–or lose themselves like Matty did.

Four dysfunctional adults walk into a different set of woods, fighting among themselves and against their own demons, and enter a sinister otherworld that may have consumed their friend. Wendig’s narrative emphasizes the strengths and failures of friendship, and the difficulties of both childhood and adulthood. His snark is obscenity laden but also earnest in its compassion. The Staircase in the Woods deals in torture, violence, and abuse, especially within families, portraying how connection to place and the importance of home can cause at least as much pain as comfort. The result is haunting and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 2025 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: 7 cuts.

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The Giver by Lois Lowry

Posted on May 5, 2025 by pagesofjulia

My favorite now-13-year-old* wanted to talk about this book which I, surprisingly, had never read. (I’ve read some Lowry but this one missed me. My favorite was Number the Stars.) So, what do you do? I got a hold of the book.

I’m impressed by this clean-lines novel which feels expansive, but whose ~225 pages zipped by in a single day for me. It absolutely reminds me of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and Jackson’s “The Lottery,” but this longer book (compared to those two short stories) develops its characters further: Le Guin did not name characters, and Jackson gave us the briefest of sketches, mostly to type. Both of those choices serve their stories very well, I think, but The Giver is doing more, going further.

The tale is set in a community where everything runs very much according to system. There is a great emphasis on uniformity and order. All the children born in a single year (always 50 of them) turn one year old, officially, in December; some are great big babies and some are newborn, but by the time they are three, we’re told, it all evens out. There are certain milestones at each year, including, importantly, the Nines receiving their own bicycles. But the big one is the Ceremony of Twelve, where each child is given their lifetime assignment, their job. These assignments are made by the Committee, which spends a lot of time throughout the children’s lives – but especially when they are Elevens – observing them for preferences and talents. After the Ceremony, the Twelves are no longer children, but adults, albeit early in their training.

Our protagonist is Jonas, and we meet him as he’s approaching becoming a Twelve. Somewhat unusually, he has no idea what his assignment will be. Most children understand their own predilections, but Jonas is truly unsure. At the after-dinner ritual where everyone in his family shares and discusses their feelings, he shares his apprehension (he has thought hard about this word, because precision in language is important to Jonas), but his parents assure him the Committee always chooses well. (It is partly through this ritual that the reader learns about families in this community. Always two children, one male and one female, per household. The parents were carefully paired with the same kind of methodical, clinical decision-making as the assignments. Jonas’s father is a Nurturer: he takes care of babies their first year, after they are born to a Birthmother [shades of Handmaid’s Tale] and before they are awarded to an applicant couple. Jonas’s mother works in Law and Justice. His little sister is a Seven.)

And then the Ceremony of Twelve, where Jonas is selected for a very special role, one he’s never heard of before. Jonas is to be his community’s next Receiver of Memory.

From here on out, his life will not resemble that of his friends. He sees little of them, in fact. They enter training to work in various parts of the community, but Jonas is shut away with an old man, the former Receiver, who now requests that Jonas call him the Giver. He transfers memories to Jonas: memories of a time before the community embraced Sameness. It is only when Jonas begins receiving these memories that the reader learns just how much has been missing from his life.

So. It is a bit of a parable, and offers up similar questions to the two classic short stories I mentioned above. But it goes deeper than either, and in its details, feels closer to reality. (“Omelas,” by contrast, with its nameless character-types and invitation for the reader to fill in the details they prefer, is much more strictly a parable or thought experiment.) I absolutely appreciate the thought-provoking nature, and the emotional impact of each reveal. It feels like a truly great place for a middle-school-age class to dwell and discuss, and I can’t wait to hear more about my young friend’s experience both with the book and in the classroom. My copy included some supplemental text at the back, including a ‘guide for discussion and classroom use’ which seems potentially genuinely useful, but most special are the supplements from Lowry: “Ever After” describes the many inspirations for this story which I loved and found revealing, and her Newbery Acceptance Speech was such a treat as well.

Easy to read in one sense, but with Big Themes that require careful consideration. Excellent matter for thoughtful conversation at school or at home. I can’t wait to talk to my friend about it.

Rating: 8 snowflakes.

*She and her sister account for the books at this new tag.

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The Wildelings by Lisa Harding

Posted on May 2, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Lifelong friends splinter and suffer in their first year of college under the spell of a charismatic older student in this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel.

Lisa Harding (Bright Burnings Things; Cloud Girls) will haunt readers with the psychological drama of The Wildelings, a compulsively readable novel in which a woman looks back on her college days and a long-lost friendship.

Jessica is introduced as she begins therapy, newly divorced, in her 40s. The novel’s inciting event, however, is not divorce but a new play by an old acquaintance. Asked by her therapist to write down her memories and “start at the beginning,” Jessica recalls her first year at Dublin’s Wilde College and “The Unholy Quintet: Mark, Linda, Jonathan, Jacques, and me.”

Linda had been Jessica’s best friend since childhood. When the underprivileged, underparented pair achieves surprising slots at the “pretentious arty” college, Jessica is highly ranked for her beauty as well as her acting prowess; Linda, as ever, dwells in the shadows. But just as Jessica enters a charged relationship with the sexy Jacques, Linda finds love with Mark, a magnetic fourth-year playwright and director, after a false start with golden boy Jonathan. The older student’s grasp on the group tightens, especially after Mark casts Jessica in what he claims will be a breakout play. Mark proves treacherously adept at directing the people around him, on and off the stage.

Harding gives Jessica a self-excoriating, incisive, bitter, and evocative first-person voice. The Wildelings‘ inexorable plot is like the proverbial train wreck: shocking, electric, impossible to turn from. Its psychological tumult verges on horror. With this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel, Harding offers pulsing intensity, gut-wrenching emotional upheaval, and high drama in every sense.

This review originally ran in the April 18, 2025 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: 7 freckles.

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Even the Darkest Stars by Heather Fawcett

Posted on April 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I just went ahead and followed Ember and the Ice Dragons with another Fawcett book for younger readers. This one is a bit darker than that; I see that Ember is catagorized as middle-grade where this one is young adult, for what that’s worth.

Even the Darkest Stars is set in a magical-world version of the Himalayas, with yaks and butter tea and very high, very cold mountain climbing. But a parallel world to our own, in which an emperor rules over a huge region, keeping everyone safe from the witches of a bygone time. Our protagonist is Kamzin, a teenaged girl in the village of Azmiri, which is far from the emperor’s Three Cities. Her father is the village Elder; her mother was a great explorer in service to the emperor, but she’s been dead for years. Her older sister Lusha will be the next Elder. She studies astrology. As the younger daughter, Kamzin’s fate is to be the village’s next shaman. She is apprenticed to the current shaman, but is a poor student. Instead, Kamzin has always felt a strong pull to travel, to climb, to run, to map, to explore. When the emperor’s Royal Explorer, the famous River Shara, comes to the backwater of Azmiri, Kamzin knows she must stop at nothing to become a part of whatever has brought him here.

And after some brief intrigue and machinations, we wind up with a race. Lusha, the obnoxious older sister, takes to the road with one of River’s own retinue, aiming to beat the Royal Explorer himself to the top of Raksha – the highest mountain in the world, never climbed by a human, which defeated even Kamzin and Lusha’s late mother. Kamzin succeeds in joining up with the great River Shara, a handsome young man – younger than she’d expected – whom she finds bewitching. Also in their small party is Kamzin’s best friend, Tem, a far more accomplished (though untrained) shaman. And a stowaway: Kamzin’s familiar is a fox (or foxlike critter) named Ragtooth. They share a close bond but also he is apt to bite her. Oh and there are dragons: they are more tangential here than in the last book, but your standard ‘house dragon’ will eat just about anything remotely edible and in response, their bellies put out light. So an alternative to a lantern is to feed your scraps to a dragon. Part pet, part appliance, sometimes a nuisance. It’s quite fun. There’s a lot that is fun in this imaginative world… but also, Kamzin’s world and everyone she loves is in grave danger. It takes a while for the true nature of River’s quest to Raksha to be revealed, but once it is, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

This is a compelling story, populated by mystery, magic, fun creatures, breathtaking landscapes, true friendship, the germ of romance, and a tortured coming-of-age made harder by the possible end of the world. There is also great adventure, death-defying climbs, races for fun and for life-or-death… bit of a Princess Bride list there. My favorite part is that it ends with a clear nod to a sequel, which I’ll have my hands on in a day or so. But yes, also darker than Ember. More bad things happen here, and more is at stake. I may not hand it off to the thirteen-year-old yet. But I am so in for book two.

Rating: 7 sour apples.

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A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane

Posted on April 25, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This poignant coming-of-age novel combines outstanding sports writing and heartfelt expression of the teen experience, set to small-town Pennsylvania basketball.

Marisa (Mac) Crane’s second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is a propulsive, perfectly crafted coming-of-age story centered on basketball and queer sexuality. With razor-honed prose, Crane (I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself) offers authentic descriptions of teen angst and young love as well as exemplary sports writing, and a few memorable sex scenes.

Crane’s protagonist, Mack, is a star point guard and the only one at her small-town Pennsylvania high school who is Division-I bound. Between her junior and senior seasons, her beloved but troubled father dies, and on the heels of this trauma, a new girl transfers to the team: Liv is being scouted by the same schools as Mack, and the two are instantly inseparable. Their on-court chemistry is transcendent; off-court, they share good times but are also nearly immobilized by a desire that both are at great pains to conceal. Mack’s senior year is marked by larger-than-average difficulties: grieving her father, struggling with her distant, disengaged mother, playing hard with drugs and alcohol, and grappling with a sexuality that feels firmly forbidden in her community. The basketball scholarship she’s headed for feels imperative. Her mother sees it as a financial necessity; Mack knows it’s bigger than that. “I needed a future that was all basketball all the time because it was the only future I could imagine for myself. Basketball, I knew, was the only thing keeping me alive.”

Mack’s first-person voice is written from a distance of some years, a voice of wisdom looking back on her high school days. This perspective is one of the novel’s strengths. It is the older, wiser Mack who observes that another player “didn’t notice or appreciate the poetry of her pump fakes–she simply used them for their designated purpose. I guess what I mean is there was no romance.”

Anyone who’s ever been a teenager will relate to Mack’s broader struggles with self-destructive behaviors, desires, and pain. Her particular challenges involve a devotion to craft and the one-and-only ticket out that basketball represents. “Everything outside of that stadium, our problems, our anxieties, our fears, could wait; nothing else mattered but this last play.” The best sports writing evokes not only movement, sensory detail, and skill, but passion, and Crane has a firm grasp on these facets. As Mack’s final season nears its close, her relationship with Liv, her college decision, and more hinge upon a handful of choices and impactful moments. A Sharp Endless Need is unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the April 14, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 photographs.

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Ember and the Ice Dragons by Heather Fawcett

Posted on April 21, 2025 by pagesofjulia

For all the girl scientists, whether human or dragon.

I was deeply sad to have finished the last (so far!) of Heather Fawcett’s adult books, so I dipped into her back catalog of books for younger readers. Alongside Woods & Words, I am so pleased to have this one to pass along to a young person I love. (This one is for an older sister, age 13, as in love with dragons as ever. Woods & Words is for both sisters together.) Heather Fawcett, young adult fantasy, plus dragons for a friend in particular – all wins.

When we meet Ember St. George, she is twelve years old. She has just set her father’s office on fire, accidentally, again. It’s not Ember’s fault – she is a fire dragon, whom her (human, adoptive) father rescued fresh out of the egg, immediately after her biological (dragon) parents were killed by dragon hunters. Lionel St. George, an academic and a magician, cast a spell to turn her into a human girl. She still has her wings, though they are invisible, which can make it awkward to move in crowds. And she sometimes accidentally bursts into flames. She’s afraid of hurting someone, especially Lionel, who is a good and loving father. And so, in the opening pages, she contrives to move from the London university where she has always lived to a research station in Antarctica with an aunt she has never met. [It is believed that sunlight and heat contribute to the spontaneous combustion. Also, fewer people to hurt with the flames in Antarctica.]

This is how, before we’ve known Ember for long, we follow her on an ocean journey and into an unknown environment. At the research station, Ember must attend school for the first time, with a handful of other children. She has always avoided children, finding them strange – she is not precisely one herself, remember, but she must pretend; almost no one knows she is actually a dragon – and has never gone to school. (Instead, her eccentric father lets her read what she pleases, and discusses it with her. Theirs is a world divided into mostly-antagonistic schools of Magic and Science, and Ember most wants to be a biologist.) There is a humorous exchange over a certain novel concept:

“You’re going to go back inside and do your homework.”

Ember was surprised. “Why would I do that?”

Aunt Myra stared. “Haven’t you been doing your homework?”

“No.” Madame Rousseau had told them to read a chapter a day of a strange book about two children who had rhyming conversations with various animals that looked as if they’d been drawn by someone who’d never seen one. It was the most ghastly thing Ember had ever read. She had felt sorry for Madame Rousseau, who couldn’t have seen many books if she thought something like that was worth reading. Ember hadn’t been aware that this ‘homework’ was mandatory. When she didn’t like something her father gave her to read, she simply told him so, and they had a lively debate about it.

In her new home, Ember befriends some unusual penguins, explores the beautiful, icy surrounds (cold does not bother her, for reasons that might be obvious – fire dragon), and makes her first human-child friend, not entirely by choice. The attentions of a mathematical genius, Nisha, perplex Ember at first, but she finds a friend is a nice thing to have. Nisha’s friendship includes another, with a mysterious, pale, quiet boy named Moss, an orphan whose background is unknown.

Next, Ember discovers that Antarctica is home to the Winterglass Hunt, a royal expedition to kill rare ice dragons for their valuable, jewel-like scales. Ember is outraged, and schemes to join the hunt so as to sabotage it from within. She is very lucky to have her friends, who insist upon accompanying her, as it turns out that the many dangers she encounters will require their assistance.

The world of Ember and the Ice Dragons is fascinating and (this being Fawcett) well-constructed with internal logic, which I appreciate. The story is entirely wholesome, with its strong girls and women, solid friendships, and life lessons. Ember’s secret dragonhood, and Moss’s existential mystery, offer meditations on what it is to be different, and what identity can mean.

Both Moss and Nisha felt alone, even though they weren’t – they weren’t the last of the their kind, after all, and Nisha had both her parents. She decided eventually that there must be different kinds of alone, just as there were different species of lantern fish.

Enchanting, absorbing, entertaining, positive, and fun. I swear Fawcett left room for a sequel; my greatest complaint about this book is that there isn’t one yet.

Rating: 8 riddles.

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Woods & Words: The Story of Poet Mary Oliver by Sara Holly Ackerman, illus. by Naoko Stoop

Posted on April 18, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I was sold on this book by my Shelf Awareness colleague’s review. I purchased it for some young friends who I think will enjoy it, but that was partly a reason to enjoy it myself first, before I passed it on.

This is a beautiful book, in its simple storytelling, its lovely sentiments and the values it communicates, and in the charming illustrations, full of plants and animals and sweetly expressive human faces. Rated for ages 4-8, it took only a few minutes to page through once, but will reward multiple and slower readings. I liked looking for the critters tucked away in the illustrations’ crevices, and reading through the words that trip and twist across the pages (outside of the narrative). I love that this story, which can be appreciated for its own sake, also introduces young readers to the life of Mary Oliver, an artist for whom mainstream “success” was not guaranteed. The Author’s Note notes that Mary Oliver’s home life, as a child, was “difficult.” She was a woman, she was queer, and she wrote poems that were defiantly “plain,” diverging from a tradition that makes poems less accessible to us regular people. This is what we love her for; but it presented some barriers in her acceptance by critics.

So, a beautifully rendered illustrated children’s book bringing the life of a great American poet to young people. An utter joy to read and look at, much like Oliver’s poetry. Strongly recommend for the kids in your life, and you will enjoy sharing it with them. More of this, please.

Rating: 9 shingles.

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My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende, trans. by Frances Riddle

Posted on April 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A daring young woman and groundbreaking reporter journeys from San Francisco to Chile in the 1890s to investigate a civil war and her own roots in this stirring novel by the celebrated Isabel Allende.

Isabel Allende brings the experience of more than 20 books to My Name Is Emilia del Valle, a swashbuckling tale of the life and adventures of a young woman born in San Francisco in the 1860s. Emilia’s story is exciting, empowering, and inherently feminist, as she travels from California to her father’s native Chile during that country’s civil war, bucking social norms and going wherever she’s told she can’t.

A young Irish novice named Molly Walsh is about to take vows as a nun when she is seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by a Chilean aristocrat. Devastated, she accepts a marriage proposal instead from a colleague and friend in San Francisco’s Mission District, who will be the devoted stepfather, “Papo,” to her child. Molly remains bitter toward the absent father, del Valle, but Emilia lacks for nothing in the loving household where her mother and Papo teach the Mission District’s children, provide bread to the poor, and support her unusual goals.

Emilia first makes a living by writing sensational dime novels of “murder, jealousy, cruelty, ambition, hatred… you know, Papo, the same as in the Bible or the opera” (under a pen name, of course). Next she decides to become a journalist, launching a newspaper career, soon traveling to New York (where she takes her first lover and otherwise broadens her worldview) and then abroad: Emilia journeys to Chile to cover the civil war as a reporter for San Francisco’s Daily Examiner. Female reporters are vanishingly rare, but as war correspondents, unprecedented; and Emilia del Valle writes under her own name. She is also motivated to fulfill her mother’s lifelong wish to track down her biological father, del Valle. Emilia finds great danger as well as the opportunity to define her identity for herself. The adventures she encounters along the way fill Allende’s pages with violence, love, high society, and human interest.

As she has in previous acclaimed novels, Allende (The House of the Spirits; Inés of My Soul; Maya’s Notebook; The Japanese Lover) applies riveting storytelling to an exploration of history through the lens of a fictional heroine. Allende’s language, and Frances Riddle’s translation, is evocative in its descriptions of Chile’s lovely landscapes, a young woman’s complicated love for her family, and the horrors of the battlefield, with which Emilia will become painfully familiar. This enthralling novel leaves Emilia, still young, in a position of some uncertainty: readers may hope for more from this plucky protagonist in a possible sequel.

This review originally ran in the April 3, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 stitches.

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Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill

Posted on April 11, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Identical triplet girls are linked to tragedies across generations in this evocative first novel set along the swampy Texas Gulf Coast.

Tennessee Hill’s first novel, Girls with Long Shadows, is a dreamy, atmospheric tale of sisterhood and coming-of-age in the fictional town of Longshadow, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nineteen-year-old triplets Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C were orphaned when their mother died in childbirth; their father’s identity remains a mystery. But they have always known family in the form of their loving but distant Gram (“Manatee” to the townsfolk, for her swimming prowess) and their adopted, nearly deaf younger brother, Gull. The whole town looks askance at the girls, spookily identical and associated with their mother’s early death. The family’s golf course, Bayou Bloom, provides respite, and the bayou itself (where Gram takes a daily swim, joined sometimes by one or more of the girls) offers a connection to nature, its fecundity and floods. Then one fateful summer, an act of violence, combining desire and objectification, ruptures the triplets, the family, and the town.

A tautly plotted Southern gothic, Girls with Long Shadows takes a distinctive perspective in Baby B’s elegiac narration. “That weekend something gurgled beneath, rattled us where we stood.” And: “Even before the worst of what that summer would bring was upon us, I began to mourn the girls we had been.” Baby B speaks as “we” as often as “I.” Only a few people other than themselves can tell the girls apart; even the boys they date may not make the effort. And intermittently the perspective shifts to a “Front Porch Chorus,” in which the town speaks collectively, observing the girls from without: “They’re a blur we never bothered to untangle.” This lack of distinction is both a wound for the triplets and an indelible part of their identity. They feel each other’s sensations and know that this is a boon. Without that link, they would be less themselves. In the eyes of the town, however, they are less human for being undifferentiated, more object or mirror. “All those boys touching all of us at the same time, hands on hands on bodies on hands. It wasn’t even that Pete was the one touching me, it was all of them, their inability to leave us be.”

Encompassing a single summer in the dripping, humid South, Hill’s haunting debut deals in lyricism and tragedy as it considers the harm done to young women by the outside gaze.

This review originally ran in the March 31, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bikini tops.

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