No Names by Greg Hewett

Posted on March 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This dazzling first novel applies poetry to the overawing power of art, friendship, and the ways in which many forms of love blend into one.

Following five books of poetry, Greg Hewett (Blindsight; darkacre) astonishes with a transcendent first novel about friendship, desire, music, loss, and love in its many forms. No Names is rough-edged, glittering, and brilliant as it spans decades and lives, traveling from a fictional American refinery town to Europe’s capitals, from Copenhagen to a place known simply as the Island, and back again.

Solitary teenager Mike’s world expands when he meets easy, outgoing Pete, with whom he shares a love of literature and especially music, and a nearly instant firm bond. Music, for Mike, is all bound up with sex and violence and epiphany: “It’s like I’m busting out of the prison of myself and giving to the world whatever part of me that’s worth anything.” The two guitarists form a punk band in the late 1970s, and with their two bandmates take off on a rocketing tour of the United States and then Europe that ends in enigma and tragedy.

In 1993, another angst-ridden teen from the same gritty, class-divided hometown discovers a dusty record in his mother’s attic and goes looking for a mostly forgotten punk band. Isaac will pursue the mystery of the No Names until he unearths Mike on a remote island in the Faroes, where the haunted older man has been living as a hermit since the band’s 1978 dissolution: “a mythical musician who, for a time, dwelt here and filled the place with songs.” Mike is supported by a Danish classical pianist named Daniel who had briefly been a friend to the band. On the island, Mike describes to Daniel “a state of ecstasy, or ekstasis–that is, becoming entranced, being brought out of oneself” by the aurora borealis, but these lines could as easily describe their relationship with music, or with one another. Mike, Pete, Daniel, and Isaac, among others, form permutations and re-combinations of friendship, affection, artistic inspiration, love, and desire.

Hewett brings a poet’s ear for language to a complexly layered story that treats sex, drugs, and rock & roll as simultaneously hard-grained and gorgeous. His evocations of music and the power of the muse are tantalizing and apt, as are his lines about the strain of finding oneself, of love and lust and pain. By the time No Names flashes forward to 2018, readers will be spellbound, and as much in love with the novel’s protagonists as they are variously entangled with one another. Hewett’s first novel is scintillating and absolutely unforgettable.

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

Rating: 10 walnuts.

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

Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

Posted on March 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This is book 3 in a series, and this review contains spoilers for the first two books.

What I love about the world of Emily Wilde is, first, the imaginative nature of this world and character. Emily Wilde is an academic scholar in the field of dryadology, or the study of faeries; but if that sounds dreamy, check again. Emily is capable of being lost in thought, yes, but those thoughts are generally dry, serious, and certainly research-based. She has an avid, academic passion for her field of study. She has read it all, and will be affronted to discover any theory or study that she’s unfamiliar with. She has no time for sentiment or romance (in either sense); when we first met her, in book one, she didn’t really have friends, other than her companion Shadow, who is a Black Hound (a fae creature) glamoured to look like a very large, intimidating black dog to regular humans. Emily and Shadow live in a regular-human world with decent access to the fae world, if you know where to look. She lives for her work.

In books one and two, we saw her social life expand somewhat, although not without growing pains. She has made friends, however uncomfortable she may be with that fact, and she has a love: formerly an academic colleague with whom she did not get along (one of those enemies-to-lovers tropes), Wendell has turned out to be a long-lost faerie prince, which explains why he seems so lazily disinclined to academic work. Emily had long suspected he faked his work, and this has been proven correct: he’d been skating by on what he knew of faeries by other means. They have a sweet relationship, clearly based in genuine mutual regard, although only one of them is much capable of romance, and it’s not Emily.

Here in book three, Wendell has been returned to his realm, and become a faerie king, by the surprising work of a mortal – Emily herself – in overthrowing the evil queen, Wendell’s stepmother, who had murdered much of his family as other potential heirs. Faeries, it turns out, are quite murderous types, especially those of Wendell’s realm. So in this installment, Emily navigates becoming a sort of queen consort (they haven’t technically married yet, solely because of her cold feet), living full-time in the faerie world (she likes to study them but they don’t necessarily make her feel comfortable), and seeing dear Shadow become frail in his old age. The part of this she’s most excited about is the opportunity for study; she sees research questions and papers she might write all around her. (“If Wendell’s stepmother has us slain before I have a chance to contribute to the scholarly debate, I will be very disappointed.”) She feels only dread at the glamourous and magical queenly gowns she is given, and likewise the other trappings of court. Luckily for Emily (?), nothing ever goes smoothly in Fae, and there will be problems to solve. With research! of course.

So. First, what I love is the imagination at work in this worldbuilding, which is satisfyingly thorough. The various kinds and functions of faeries, and their intrigues and class divisions, are all fascinating in themselves. Second, what I love is Emily’s character and voice. These books are told as Emily’s journals, complete with the (sometimes slightly awkward, but they do feel believable) explanations for how, in the middle of great danger and adventure, she has come to be writing journals entries. (Answer: writing is how she processes and self-soothes, and, research über alles; these notes could become a paper or conference presentation! Once we get to know Emily, this actually checks out.) Getting to hear these adventures in her own voice emphasizes Emily’s droll character. She never really gets over her sense of awkwardness at how much she loves Wendell; the bits she glosses over (sex) are as telling as those she sinks deeply into (footnotes!) – also, Heather Fawcett has been a YA and middle-grades author prior to this series, so keeping the sex off-screen and vague is probably a comfort zone. These books are just really fun, and wholesome even when they get a bit gruesome. It is comforting to see that even when terrible things happen they can be undone.

I was genuinely very sad when I finished this book, which I fear is the last in an intended trilogy. I need there to be more from this delightful author. I guess I’ll do some YA reading soon.

On the other hand, this book (which ends in a library) does leave room for a sequel. Fawcett! We could have more Emily!

Do recommend.

Rating: 8 ornate, bespoke notebooks.

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

Bad Nature by Ariel Courage

Posted on March 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Bleakly funny, gloomy, and magnetic, this novel’s revenge-fueled, terminal road trip will tender surprising truths.

Ariel Courage presents a provocative, hypnotic excursion with her debut novel, Bad Nature, which offers a road trip, a revenge fantasy, and a snarky sendup of American culture.

Courage’s mesmerizingly repellent protagonist, Hester, is a successful lawyer with money to burn–one form of revenge upon her “impracticable, unprofitable” upbringing–and an antiseptic lifestyle kept up by a personal trainer, a dermatologist, a cosmetic dentist, and other professionals. In her nondescript but designer-decorated Manhattan condo, she has regular, emotionless sex with the “objectively repulsive” building super.

Hester relates early in her narrative: “I was always going to kill my father.” This intention shifts from someday to immediate when, just after her 40th birthday, she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. The oncologist tells her that, without treatment, she has six months to live. With characteristic, practiced detachment, Hester quits her job and leaves Manhattan in her Jaguar E-type, aiming for her long-estranged father’s new home in Death Valley. She will kill him and then herself with the gun in her glove box. Simple.

Hester’s cross-country road trip is beset with trouble. She loses the E-type to theft at a Philadelphia rest stop, and with it, her gun and her mother’s ashes. The first lesson that her wealth–an important feature of her constructed armor–will not solve all her problems comes when she must settle for an insultingly affordable rental car. She picks up a hitchhiker: “what my mother had euphemistically called an urban outdoorsman and what in college I would’ve called a crustpunk.” This young man, John, becomes her unlikely companion on a convoluted and indirect route toward the eventual destination. John is a principled traveler: eschewing consumerism, he photographs Superfund sites, documenting destruction. Stops along the way include Hester’s (only) ex-boyfriend from college and a friend (likewise) from high school, with disappointing if predictable results. Hester gets sicker. The outcome of her larger journey is less easy to guess.

Caustic Hester is aware she has “daddy issues” but “I’d rather pluck his eyeballs out with a fork and eat them jellied on toast than endure five minutes of therapy.” Her first-person voice is deeply sarcastic, darkly funny, and almost entirely self-aware. Bad Nature‘s title offers commentary on Hester’s terminal cancer (and her mother’s), on the violent impulses of her hated father (and her own), on the environmental devastation John is called to witness. Even more than wealth, rigorous self-grooming, and personal aloofness, Hester’s carefully cultivated cynicism is her final weapon, and its potential loss might be the most painful and surprising part of this madcap expedition. Courage delights and challenges with this mashup of emotions, until readers may be surprised, in turn, to care about Hester after all.

This review originally ran in the March 6, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dirty fingernails.

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

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ed. by Ada Limón

Posted on March 7, 2025 by pagesofjulia

First of all, for those who know me, you will appreciate that this title grabbed my attention pretty hard. I like nature; I like poetry with a little more reservation (such that I’ve waited about a year since this book’s publication to pick it up), but I was intrigued. This anthology was put together by Ada Limón, our national poet laureate (still current as I type). It begins with a foreword by Carla Hayden, librarian of Congress (also current as of now), in a lovely single page; Limón’s three-page introduction is even more moving, describing an important tree and a choice. “When I was first asked what I wanted to create for a national poetry project during my tenure as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, I remember staring out the window of my office in the Library of Congress thinking, I just want us all to write poems and save the planet.” She immediately recognizes this impulse as both unlikely and vital. She invites us all to write our own poems alongside those in these pages, exhorts us to do something, to offer something back. “Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.”

It feels appropriate, then, that the collection opens with Carrie Fountain’s “You Belong to the World,” which remains one of my favorites. (Fountain was recently the poet laureate of Texas.) This is followed by 49 more poems by just over 50 poets (there is I think just one collaboration), all American poets and all contemporary, just a handful previously published (and all of those in either The Atlantic or the New Yorker, go figure). They come in a variety of lengths, forms, and styles, and while they all deal with ‘nature,’ they approach that rather broad, abstract subject in different ways. Some describe or love or appreciate (or fear) a specific species or being; some consider fire, water shortages, and other crises; many dwell at the intersection of people with ‘nature’ (although, as Limón and Fountain remind us, those are not separate). Some I find pleasingly literal and narrative (remember I fear poetry at least a little). I have a more difficult time with the further-reaching figurative ones, and some I had to allow to just be sound that washes over. Ah well. Here are my favorite poems of the fifty:
“You Belong to the World,” Carrie Fountain
“When the Fact of the Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside,” Donika Kelly
“Eat,” Joy Harjo
“Letters,” Ilya Kaminsky
“Rabbitbrush,” Molly McCully Brown
“Lighthouse,” Ellen Bass
“Mouth of the Canyon,” Traci Brimhall
“Aerial View,” Jericho Brown (he wants to be a giraffe!)
“Canine Superpowers,” Michael Kleber-Diggs
“Hackberry,” Cecily Parks
“Taking the Magnolia,” Paisley Rekdal (common thread: I like tree poems)
“Darkling I Listen,” Adam Clay
“Remembering a honeymoon hike near Drakes Bay, California, while I cook our dinner at the feet of Colorado’s Front Range,” Camille T. Dungy (I confess I was waiting for a love poem)
“Heliophilia,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Twenty Minutes in the Backyard,” Alberto Ríos
“To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower,” Patricia Smith
“Reasons to Live,” Ruth Awad
and let me give you the last two lines of one poem (Eduardo C. Corral’s “To a Blooming Saguaro”) and the first two lines of the next one (Diane Seuss’s “Nature, Which Cannot be Driven To”):
“My mother is my favorite immigrant. / After her? The sonnet.”
“To drive to it is to drive through it. / Like a stalker, it is in the back seat of the car.”

Well. That’s nearly half of the poems. Not bad, hey?

Even though poetry is scary, join me in giving it a try. It helps to read aloud. Write poems and save the planet. Sit under a tree.

Rating: 7 ears.

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

The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu

Posted on March 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I forget where I came across this first in a series, but I’m glad I gave it a go. Set in a magical post-apocalyptic Edinburgh, The Library of the Dead stars Ropa, a teenaged ghosttalker: she is licensed to visit with the dead, a rare skill, and carry their messages back to the living, for a fee. She can also help (or force) ghosts to move along to “the place with long grass,” where we’re all headed once we find the peace to go. Ropa considers herself unsentimental: this is all about earning a living, which she uses to support not just herself but her younger sister Izwi and her beloved Gran, a more powerful magical practitioner but who these days is mostly reduced to knitting in their cara (caravan, or what we’d call in the US a trailer). Their existence is tenuous, which is why Ropa at first refuses when she meets a ghost who asks for her help but cannot pay.

At Gran’s insistence, Ropa eventually agrees to help Nicola (dead) solve the mystery of her missing young son Oliver (not dead, yet). As she takes a break from paying work to investigate, she’s glad to have the reluctant help of her old friend Jomo, who now works at a library that he doesn’t want to talk about. Jomo is from a better-off family: he’s been able to stay in school, for one thing. Ropa is a serious autodidact, listening to audiobooks as she makes her rounds; she is forever exclaiming that school doesn’t matter and she’s not the least bit sorry, but the reader can tell how much she feels the lack. We also observe what a clever self-study she is, however, as she repeatedly quotes Sun Tzu and summarizes and meditates upon the philosophies of magic she gains new access to…

…because Jomo’s secret new workplace is the library of the dead. When he sneaks Ropa in and they get caught, the consequences are dire – she is initially sentenced to hang from the neck until she is dead, but (in a whirlwind scene) instead gets drafted as a scholar, with the privilege of book borrowing. That, and she makes a new friend, Priya, a far more advanced student of magic. With two friends behind her now, but still very much with her own life (and livelihood) on the line, Ropa follows the cold trail of Oliver’s disappearance to some surprising and disturbing intrigues and evils.

Ropa is a certain kind of heroine: actually quite caring, although she wouldn’t want you to know it, and deeply committed to her family and friends, she rides a bicycle (when it’s not been stolen) and plays the tough, but really just wants to snuggle up on her berth with Izwi and Gran and watch some good telly. She carries a katty (or slingshot – I finally figured out that this is short for catapult!) and a dagger, has a pet fox named River, and she can take a punch. Priya is a delightful addition to her crew who I hope we’ll hear more from. Jomo is perhaps a bit bumbling, but very loyal. Their world is a bit mysterious: they have electrical power, but not running water or sewage; they have cell phones (and can talk to ghosts!) and television, but not climate control. They are ruled by a king. It sounds like there was an event that broke the world, leaving us with a before and an after, but we haven’t yet learned what that was.

The worldbuilding may be less thoroughly detailed than some in some fantasies; but maybe I just haven’t gotten there yet. At any rate, I’m engaged by the strongly-felt characters and their values, the magic, and Gran’s knitting. This is book 1 of 4 and I am ready for more.

Rating: 7 desiccated ears.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

rerun: The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart by Brian Doyle

Posted on February 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I was going to tell you that I’ve been thinking about Brian Doyle lately, but I think that’s always so.

I do think about this essay collection a lot.

Please enjoy this review originally from late 2020 (book published in 2005).

I am back again with another Doyle, different this time but totally recognizably him.

Here are the classic Doyle elements of celebration and beauty, but amid so much pain and loss… and I have to admit, the loss of Doyle himself felt very present for me here. I continue to feel it as a significant loss to this world, both because we will get no more of his transcendent writing, and because he just seems to be the most beautiful, loving, joyful, talented person, and we don’t have enough of those; it still hurts me that we’ve lost him. And that was right under the surface of all of these essays for me, in a way that was less true of Chicago, because that book was fiction rather than nonfiction, and also because it is not quite so explicitly about life and death in the way that The Wet Engine is, so the pain was closer to the surface for me, if that tracks.

The wet engine is the heart, often but not always the human heart, and the reason Doyle focuses here is that one heart that is important to him is in danger. His son Liam (age nine at the time of writing) was born with three chambers in his heart rather than four. He had to have several open-heart surgeries when he was an infant, and so his father learned about how hearts work and he got to know some cardiologists and surgeons. And because this father was Brian Doyle, he also did some meditating on the metaphoric meanings of heart, on all the language we use (heartbreak, heartsick, hearts swelling and leaping and failing, hearts held in hands and worn on sleeves), and on mysticism and miracle and mystery and magic. He also does research: Liam’s doctor, Dr. Dave, is profiled in considerable detail, as is Dr. Dave’s wife, Linda, and his mother, Hope. (It is through Hope that we find ourselves in an internment camp – really, a concentration camp – for Japanese Americans during World War II, in Topaz, Utah. Hope was interned there as a teenager with her family for nearly three years; she graduated from high school there. “No, I am not bitter, she says. No. Bitter is no place to be. But I do not forget.”) Shorter profiles explore other doctors and pioneers in medicine and cardiology from around the world, from the early days of the science through the present (like Dr. Dave’s colleague Hagop Hovaguimian, who can never stop working because too many people need his help). The people who people this book come not only from throughout history but from all over the world, which is frequently fun and which reinforces the feeling of enormous scope that Doyle achieves. “The doctor to my left is from Australia. He speaks Australian, a smiling sunny language which takes me a minute to get the pace and rhythm of, but then we get along swell…”

The Wet Engine is a collection of linked essays that explore these and other topics: the humans involved with hearts and their stories; the nature and power of stories; the language and metaphor and soul of the heart, and its place in our mythologies; the science of the hearts of humans and other species; Liam’s own life story, and Doyle’s navigation of it as Liam’s father. Everywhere of course is Doyle’s distinctive voice and style, made up of long lists and emotional appeals and exuberance and vulnerability. There is also God here, and my regular readers know I don’t spend a lot of time reading about God, but Doyle can get away with anything: the tone of reverence is entirely appropriate here, and his explorations (“God is not a person. God is not an idea. God is the engine. God is the beat. We are distracted by the word God…”) I can easily follow. (Also I am reminded of Amy Leach.) And I appreciate that Doyle doesn’t choose just one religious or spiritual angle of approach, but that he’s interested in holiness in a multitude of traditions.

I think what I love most about this book is that it feels like it includes all the disciplines of study. There is theology, and hard science – medicine, zoology, even botany – history, social justice, the arts – music, and his own literary genius, including some superlative descriptive work and expressions of gratitude and pain. I’m pretty interested in interdisciplinarity these days, and I’m assigning my students readings that do this work, including a short passage from The Wet Engine. (Synchronicity: I’d just given them a Joseph Mitchell essay called “Goodbye, Shirley Temple,” and then read that Hope was interned at that camp with Shirley Temple’s gardener. What?? The world is a mystery.) And all of this in Doyle’s own wild style.

I cried a lot, but it’s such a beautiful, instructive book. At scarcely over 100 pages, it is one that would bear lots of study. Again I rave.

Special recognition to Matt Ferrence for making me aware of this book a few years ago, when he assigned “Joyas Volardores,” the sixth essay, for an MFA residency. That one still stands out. Thanks, Matt.

Rating: 9 knobby knees.

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

Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Posted on February 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

The humble Walkman: “a machine for daydreaming.”

Another solid entry in the Object Lessons series. I enjoyed the examination of technology in culture, and the question of what makes something alarming, hot, obsolete, and cool again.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow organizes Personal Stereo into three sections or chapters: ‘Novelty,’ ‘Norm,’ ‘Nostalgia.’ In the first, we learn about the origin of the Walkman (a term she mostly uses throughout, to mean most iterations of the thing, as Kleenex, Tupperware and Xerox stand in for off-brand versions) in postwar Japan. This means learning a bit about the origins of Sony, where various stories circulate about the Walkman’s genesis (one of Sony’s main characters apparently let it be known that he “quietly encouraged the proliferation” of these various accounts, which add to the product’s mystique). Meanwhile, a German-Brazilian claims at least parallel invention of the same concept, and he was eventually given a settlement from Sony. Complicating the legal issue is the question of whether the personal stereo constituted an invention at all, since it involved more simplification and miniaturization of preexisting technologies – removal of the recording element of a ‘tape recorder’ being key to the Walkman. The simplification bit will be relevant later in Tuhus-Dubrow’s study.

And then there was the Walkman, and the world was enraptured, in love, and enraged. What was very new was having music* personally delivered, right up against one’s earparts, according to one’s choice, in stereo, with what counted at the time as great, hifi quality. Users described the experience as dreamy, druglike. Critics did not like seeing people check out in public. There was the secrecy: what is she listening to? There was the rudeness: put on headphones and you telegraph that you don’t want to be approached! There were safety concerns: headphones were banned in some places while driving or crossing the street. And there was the larger question of social norms, of values, of the meaning of public space. Tuhus-Dubrow compares and contrasts the Walkman to the boombox (more public, loud, annoying, but also more obviously about sharing rather than checking out) and the cassette tape to the record, the CD, and the MP3. And then there is the Walkman vs. the iPod and then the smartphone, where the naysayers’ complaints about the Walkman become tenfold threats. Considering unitasker technologies against the modern smartphone: “A clock (or a record player or a Walkman) is like a charming pastry shop or produce stand, a clothing boutique or Parisian boulangerie. A smartphone is like Walmart.”

[*It wasn’t just music: consumers used their Walkmans as well for audiobooks and transcripts, exercise tapes and work, as Tuhus-Dubrow points out. But music was a big part of the impetus and the main use we all remember and think of, isn’t it?]

In ‘Nostalgia,’ Tuhus-Dubrow considers that word’s origins and the concept, then questions: why this item? (Confession: this reader had not realized there was quite so much modern excitement about the Walkman. I guess I knew the cassette tape was having a moment? For the curious, this book was published in 2017.) What confers value on a thing from the past? Partly, its associations with happy memories or better times; but that works best for those of us who experienced, and appreciated, the thing. There is much to the concept of simplification, that value of the unitasker. As much as the Walkman gave its users a sudden increase in choice, in control – whatever tape I want, wherever I go! – the iPod and then the smartphone have increased that to near infinity, and it turns out that we don’t actually want all the choices at any given moment. Also, one of those obvious-now-that-you-mention-it observations: “Technological nostalgia depends on obsolescence.” Sort of a supply/demand issue.

When the Object Lessons series gets it right, I find these little books so very satisfying. They are short enough (generally around 100 pages, or a little over) to read in a day (as I did). They offer a moderately deep dive into a thing I maybe hadn’t thought very hard about before. In the hands of the right author, even the mundane objects of the world – and this is very much the point of this series – offer opportunities to explore, study, and contemplate surprisingly diverse and often philosophical questions. Personal Stereo was a most worthwhile venture for this reader.

Rating: 7 mix tapes.

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

The Bones Beneath My Skin by TJ Klune

Posted on February 21, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Just out from TJ Klune, The Bones Beneath My Skin is a standalone adult novel with loneliness, yearning, darkness, sweetness, queer love and sex, and discovery of new forms of family. There is a bit of a formula here in terms of the combination of those elements, but I don’t intend any of the negative connotation that often accompanies the idea of a formula. I appreciate that I can turn to Klune for a familiar blend of heartbreak and happy ending with characters who are messy but also the kinds of people I’d like to call friends.

In his Author’s Note, Klune calls this an ‘action movie in book form.’ A former publisher accused this manuscript of being different and weird: “but then, I’m the guy who made a socially anxious vacuum cleaner named Rambo into a main character” (check it out).

Nate Cartwright is on the road. The reader learns gradually: that he is driving the old truck recently inherited from his father, to the cabin recently inherited from his mother, both of whom just died of a murder-suicide after a lengthy estrangement from Nate, who they disowned when they discovered he was gay. He has lost his job and everything else that mattered to his old life in Washington, D.C. (not much); he’s headed to the cabin, lakeside in rural Oregon, without much of a plan but to unplug and regroup. But when he arrives at Herschel Lake, the cabin is not unoccupied. Instead, he finds a huge, intimidating man with a huge gun, accompanied by a tiny, lovely, friendly, extremely strange little girl. The man is Alex. The little girl is Art, short for Artemis Darth Vader. Nate tells her that’s not a real name. She corrects him.

This odd trio joins up. Art and Alex have already bonded firmly as allies, against long odds; Nate is late to the party, but fits in, as a lonely oddball with a tendency toward deeply felt loyalties. In a series of extremely unlikely events, Nate learns that his new… friends?… may not be all that they appear. But still he chooses to go all in.

With hints of Men in Black and ET, Nate, Alex, and Art go rocketing across the country, fleeing shadowy government forces and conspiracy theorists, harboring secrets beyond the theorists’ imagining, wanting only to be safe and together with those they love. Klune’s website calls it “a supernatural road-trip thriller featuring an extraordinary young girl and her two unlikely protectors on the run from cultists and the government.” I love Klune’s rather trademark focus on protecting kids as a central, undeniably wholesome focus, even amid some very adult concerns (and passions). As with other recent novels of his that I’ve enjoyed, this one left me looking for more featuring these flawed but loveable characters. I really loved the ending. Still following this author anywhere.

Rating: 8 slices of bacon.

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

rerun: She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel

Posted on February 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I have never stopped thinking about this masterful character profile / biography / memoir / feat of creative nonfiction by Havel Kimmel, and I’m very pleased to share it with you here, again. There was also a reread post, from when I was doing my MFA, and even as I write these words, I wish I had time for a reread now. (I am, for the record, really enjoying TJ Klune’s latest, so no regrets there, and stay tuned. Here’s to authors we love who keeping writing new work.)

couchThis book follows A Girl Named Zippy, and I adore Kimmel’s explanation in her Preface: that she would definitely never write a sequel to Zippy, but that people kept on asking her if her mother ever got up off the couch; and here we are. This is an extension of that first memoir, then, with the focus being not on the girl called Zippy (Haven Kimmel herself) but on her mother, who in that first volume was a somewhat shapeless woman who mostly inhabited the couch and read a lot, talked on the phone, watched television, and didn’t worry too much about her children. This is told not unlovingly, but as fact. Zippy’s childhood is on balance awfully joyful and fun, and although a critical adult’s eye might point out lots of points of minor neglect, she clearly loves her family very much. This tone is continued in She Got Up Off the Couch. The family and each of its members is still, realistically, flawed, but lovable and well-loved. Kimmel’s brother is now mostly absent, with a family of his own; her sister marries and has two babies; her father finds work as a sheriff’s deputy (or similar job title); but her mother’s is the great change of this second memoir. This was, what, the late 1970’s I suppose, in a tiny Indiana town of a few hundred people. Zippy’s dad, Bob Jarvis, holds the keys: her mother Delonda doesn’t know how to drive. This will work as a fine metaphor (and indeed is part of the literal action), as Delonda calls a phone number on a television commercial to look into going to college. She wrangles a ride into the next town over for an entrance exam, which places her out of fully 40 hours of college credits. Under Bob’s clear disapproval – he says of the woman who takes Delonda to her test, “time was, a woman wouldn’t have gotten in a man’s marriage that way” – she persists in attending classes, studying, reading, talking to new people, and in 23 months, graduates summa cum laude – and continues on to graduate school. Eventually she earns a Master’s degree in English and becomes a high school teacher. This is all a stunning change. Along the way, to get to school and back, she learns how to drive and purchases a vehicle that is, in itself, a good joke.

She Got Up Off the Couch also follows the format of A Girl Named Zippy: chapters jump around, more as connected anecdotes than as clear narrative. Each chapter stands alone admirably as a hilarious or heartfelt – usually both – nugget of tears, joy, preadolescent confusion, and filial love. [In fact, as soon as I finish writing this review I’m off to read my favorite chapter out loud to Husband, if he’ll let me, while he smokes a brisket in the backyard. If you’re curious, it’s called “Treasure,” and is about a hippie college student hiking cross-country who camps out in the Jarvis backyard for a few days. It’s hilarious and heart-wrenching.] It’s a great structure, this anecdotal style. If I ever write my own mother’s biography, which I keep dreaming about, I have something similar in mind. Yes, there are odd characters that the reader of just one chapter would wrinkle her forehead at; but this is true of the whole book, too. Zippy has had an odd and happy life, and that’s exactly why we enjoy reading about it.

Zippy herself, naturally, also grows and changes in this book. Delonda is our star and makes the most life-changing journey. Kimmel writes in her preface, “I will never do anything half so grand or important,” and I know exactly what she means: the decision of Delonda and other women of her time who broke out of where they were told they belonged have done something for the women of my generation that we are now saved from having to do, if that makes any sense. It is something I’ve long felt about my own mother. But I was saying that Zippy continues to grow up: we see more of her engaging and eccentric friends, Rose and Julie Ann, and we meet a new friend, Jeanne Ann. And when she gets a nephew and then a niece, Zippy becomes hopelessly devoted. The blizzard that sweeps through when her niece is long overdue and panics the family is, again, funny and riveting at the same time.

I’ve now read everything that Haven Kimmel has written except for every single one of her blog posts, and that one children’s book. I hope she is getting to work right now on another book – fiction or non, more Haven Kimmel, stat.

I love it. Funny, true, humble, real.

Rating: 9 cherry-red polyester suits.

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

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

Posted on February 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Liz for this one! I’ve had this on my shelf for a few… years? since she recommended it. I really enjoyed it. It was fun, and absurd, and sweet, and funny, and then quite poignant. Unique. I’m pleased.

Lillian comes from a life of not much money, love, or opportunity. She works hard for a scholarship to a fancy private school, where she makes one essential friend: Madison is from the kind of wealth where just almost literally anything is possible. They match each other’s weird, that one year. Then Madison gets busted with coke, and it’s all a bit foregone: Madison’s father pays off Lillian’s mother. Lillian takes the fall. She goes back to her depressed and depressing little life. Madison’s star continues to rise. When we meet Lillian, she’s working a series of shit jobs, pen-palling with Madison, who is now married to a senator, with a perfect little boy “who looked like an expensive teddy bear that had turned human.” Madison sends her $50 and tells her to come on down to Franklin, Tennessee “because she had an interesting job opportunity for me.” Lillian gets on a bus.

Senator Roberts was married before Madison. His ex-wife has just died. And left behind are his elder children, ten-year-old twins named Bessie and Roland. Lillian, who has no prior experience, expertise, or interest in childcare, is to take them on as charges. She has to keep them safe and relatively happy and oh yea, very private and low-key, because Senator Roberts is hoping to become Secretary of State in the near future, and the twins are a little different. They spontaneously combust. They are uninjured by this event, but their clothes burn off, as does everything around them. The Senator doesn’t need this kind of publicity.

And before Lillian can get used to limitless bacon sandwiches on demand (the Roberts estate employs a large staff, including an outstanding if weird chef named Mary), she is reinstalled in the guest house behind the mansion, which has been retrofitted to house small, recalcitrant fire children.

I love absurdism when it is reality-adjacent and also sweet and odd and fun, which this is, although it is also sad stuff. I love a literalization: the two children in Lillian’s care have been hurt by their life so far. They are a little damaged, slow to trust, quick to combust. Lillian is a bit that way, herself, but her combustion isn’t literal, where the twins’ is. Especially late in the story, Nothing to See Here gets to be about what it means to love someone, to choose to love someone and to take care of them. Lillian is not a parent, but she is as smitten and as wrecked as any parent, and as far at sea. “There was so much that I should have been doing, that I could have been doing, but not a fucking thing made sense to me. I just fed them, made them wash their hands, listened to whatever nonsense they wanted to tell me. I took care of them, you know?”

I should find some more Kevin Wilson. Outstanding.

Rating: 8 bounces.

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »