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.

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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.

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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.

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I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong

Posted on February 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young man wakes up from a coma and returns to the family, and the family sushi restaurant, that he’d left behind, with comical, heart-wrenching, hopeful results.

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Flux) is a funny, bittersweet, heartwarming story about family, love, and making every minute count.

Readers first meet Jack Jr. in what he is slow to realize is a hospital room. He wakes up intubated and gagging. He’s confused about his whereabouts and circumstances, and he asks for his husband. His nurse is thrown into a full panic: Jack Jr. has been in a coma for 23 months and was not expected to regain consciousness.

No one will answer when he asks for his husband. Jack Jr. has missed his 30th birthday and the first 18 months or so of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks into this remarkable recovery, he returns home, not to his Manhattan apartment, but to his father’s home in New Jersey. He goes back to the family business, a struggling Korean-Japanese sushi restaurant, which was once meant to be his life’s work and which he has not seen in 12 years. Jack Jr. has lost everything, and he finds himself in an unfamiliar, masked world. For much of the narrative, the old wounds he was avoiding–that he will now have to face–remain shrouded from the reader.

Jack Jr.’s kind and loving Appa (father) is a passionate sushi chef and workaholic; his Umma (mother) is private, reserved, and fiercely loyal; his especially estranged brother, James, is a recovering alcoholic with a dear wife and a new baby to join the teenaged nephew that Jack Jr. barely knows. Wise, gawky, 16-year-old Juno is perhaps the member of his family that Jack Jr. best connects with. And then there is Emil, formerly Jack Jr.’s nurse, and now potentially poised to become something more. Through these endearing characters, Jack Jr. considers that perhaps “there was more to loving something than smiling at it.”

In Jack Jr.’s first-person voice, these mysterious, painful new challenges are wrenching, but his love for his wacky family, and theirs for him, are unmistakable throughout. Alongside the flavors of carefully prepared nigiri, dak juk, soy, ponzu, and plenty of pork belly, humor and off-kilter love shine brightly in this tale of realizing what’s really important and making the most of one’s own time. The title of I Leave It Up to You refers to a translation of omakase, the Japanese dining tradition of asking for the chef’s choice, and also nods to the novel’s sweet attention to the care of self and others. While recovering from his physical injuries, Jack Jr. must also navigate old fractures with a family he hasn’t seen in years, let go of a relationship with no closure, and remain open to a surprisingly promising future. The story winds up delightfully warm and soothing, for all the bumps along the way.

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

Rating: 8 bowls of juk.

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A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay

Posted on January 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Near her 100th birthday, a rural Jamaican woman faces the good works and wrongdoings of her own life and her island’s history in this richly written novel of vivid characters and big themes.

Diana McCaulay’s sixth novel, A House for Miss Pauline, features an indomitable 99-year-old woman in rural Jamaica, trying to reconcile rights and wrongs near the end of a long life. Miss Pauline exhibits a brave honesty that endears her to readers as she wrestles with not only her own actions but centuries of wrongdoings on an island steeped in sugar and slavery. Kingston native McCaulay (Gone to Drift) evokes a rich setting through the food, climate, and other details, such as her characters’ Jamaican patwa, which brings them to vibrant life.

Miss Pauline is less than a month away from her 100th birthday when the stones of her home begin to shiver, shake, whisper, and howl to her. She has lived in the village of Mason Hall in Jamaica’s St. Mary parish all her life, having borne two children with her beloved (long-dead) partner, had many friends and lovers, and been an elder to the town. The village is built largely of stone salvaged from a plantation big house Miss Pauline once discovered and designated for reuse in building her own home and many other structures.

In this literal and symbolic rebuilding, she led her community in reclaiming what had been stolen: land, human lives, freedom. She is certain now that the stones are prompting her to reckon with her own life’s work: community building, but also the unresolved disappearance of a white man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to challenge Miss Pauline for the ownership of her land. A House for Miss Pauline is a deeply captivating story of one complicated, admirable life and the nuanced history of Jamaica. It grapples with how people are connected to place, and how that plays a role in the concept of land ownership and responsibility. “Does the cotton tree judge her for what she did? Surely it has seen worse? How to evaluate crimes, one against the other?”

Miss Pauline turns first to her granddaughter in New York, and then enlists a local teen, Lamont, for help with the mysteries of the Internet and a smartphone. Lamont, who’s alone in life, will play a role beyond research assistant for the near-centenarian, prompting consideration of what constitutes family. In her attempts to establish the future of her home and her land, Miss Pauline will also face surprises about her own history: “Maybe you have to go into the past to make the present right. Maybe the long ago is demanding something of the here and now.” Thoughtful, defiant, and just, the frightened but fierce Miss Pauline is uncowed in the face of youth and change; she’s a hero for readers of all backgrounds.

This review originally ran in the January 17, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 panganat.

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Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Posted on January 20, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This book was an utter delight. I laughed and felt all the way through it and would follow Margo into her next chapters with enthusiasm.

Margo is a nineteen-year-old freshman at a junior college when we first meet her. She’s a bit directionless, studying English because she likes it, waitressing in her spare time. She’s been having an affair with her English professor, out of a sort of passive curiosity, not even because she particularly likes him (“this whole affair had seemed to be kind of his thing”), although she does like him praising her writing. When she finds out she’s pregnant, the professor (married with children) assumes she will have an abortion; so does her mother and her best friend from high school. Initially in contrarian reaction to those assumption, Margo refuses. She finds she wants her baby, and doesn’t care a bit that Mark (the professor, with whom she had sex just five times) doesn’t. After the birth of a son she names Bodhi, in short order, two of Margo’s three roommates move out, leaving her with a massive rent due, and she loses her job. Her mother refuses to babysit. She doesn’t know what to do. She leaves a voicemail for her father: formerly a pro wrestler, and since then a promoter/manager, married with five children, he’s been absent for much of Margo’s life, amiable and distantly loving but not much around (because work, and what Margo calls his real children). But in an unexpected turn, when she calls on him for help, Jinx shows up on Margo’s doorstep. Revealing that he is finally getting a divorce (something Margo’s mother wished and waited for for all these years–but now she’s recently engaged to a youth group leader…), Jinx moves in with Margo, helping to pay rent, caring for Bodhi like a pro, and quite by accident giving her an idea out of left field: Margo sets herself up an OnlyFans account. Things just get wackier from here.

This book is filled with characters. Jinx, the retired wrestler persona, is a study in contrasts: he fills his room with books, a ficus tree, and a sleeping bag, nothing else. He loves cleaning and cooking fancy meals. He is both inspired to violence and a calming, philosophical presence. Margo’s other remaining roommate, Suzie, is a LARP and cosplay enthusiast, and will turn out to be a great friend to Margo after a long stretch of cohabitating without getting to know each other. Everyone the reader meets could be a protagonist unto themselves.

But the reason Liz sent me to this book (with some hesitation) was the narrative voice, the set of points of view in which it’s written, and the literary references and styling. Margo was briefly an English student, remember? The novel is told in a really fun, tricky perspective: it moves between first and third person voices, but actually both are first person, because even when it’s in third person, Margo is there as the *writer* to say, I have to tell this in third person because I need the emotional distance, basically. So it’s a bit sneaky. Even better, there’s a scene from English class in which she makes the smart observation about a story they’ve read, in which the same tricky half-hidden first-posing-as-third-person voice is used. Meta, and clever, and probably not for every reader. I love it.

This is a story that surprises at every turn. It’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, it’s deeply sweet, it can be upsetting; many of its details are sordid, but there remains a sense of stalwart pushing on. It’s a (perhaps) surprisingly wise story. Margo learns all kinds of big lessons: there are no heroes or villains; we’re all just muddling through; love may not conquer all but can do a lot. There’s no changing anyone; “they were like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move…” She grows. “I hadn’t expected infidelity to be about cuddling or drug addiction to be about eating Milky Ways.” Life throws what it throws, and these strong, wacky, loving characters carry on. It’s quite empowering, even if Margo’s predicament is not one we’d quite choose on purpose.

I loved every minute of this adventure. Thanks, Liz.

Rating: 8 tiny gossamer shreds of roast beef.

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The Garden by Nick Newman

Posted on January 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This eerie, thought-provoking novel combines sisterly love and end-of-the-world horrors in an unforgettable pairing.

Nick Newman’s The Garden is a shape-shifting novel, an enigmatic fable that twists slowly into a more sinister dystopian narrative with a surprising turn at the end. The questions it asks and the hard truths its protagonists turn away from will keep readers intrigued.

Evelyn and her younger sister, Lily, have lived in the garden all their lives, more or less. They remember little from before, although in the early years there were parties, their father holding court, their mother overseeing. Then the people went away, and the gates were locked, as were the doors to the bulk of the sprawling house. The sisters live now out of the kitchen, which “still [feels] too large,” and in the garden, where they keep bees and a few aging chickens and grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Their mother’s handwritten almanac directs their daily work, which is getting harder as their bodies grow older, but the garden provides everything they need and nothing is expected to change–until it does.

The sisters haltingly identify the creature that appears in their kitchen, stealing their honey, as a boy. Aside from its sheer novelty, the situation is frightening. The boy is unknown and therefore unsafe, a curiosity and a threat. “You know what boys turn into, don’t you, Sissie?” Lily speculates, “He’s probably poisonous.” But Evelyn considers, “Boys did become men, Lily was right about that, but what her sister actually had in mind, she did not know. A cocoon, perhaps. A chrysalis… Evelyn could not deny a perverse desire to learn firsthand, to feed and water the grub and see what it might grow into.” As they wrestle with this new challenge in their long-immutable garden–perhaps less an Eden than a prison–the sisters find themselves facing new choices and turning against each other in new ways.

Newman’s gifts lie in the quiet accumulation of his novel’s unsettled atmosphere, its changeable nature. The garden provides food, sustenance, and floral beauty; it is also constantly threatened by dust storms capable of burying the known world. Readers know both more and less than Evelyn and Lily do, and knowledge and its absence are increasingly terrifying, especially as the sisters begin to confront long-buried secrets about their own past. The possible and the inexorable collide in this parable of change, which probes the promises and terrors of personal choice and portrays various approaches to possibility. “The vagueness of their mother’s threats had made a blank space… and only now was Evelyn realizing that she and her sister saw that blankness quite differently. It excited Lily. It terrified Evelyn.” The dystopia it represents may be more real than readers originally understand.

This review originally ran in the January 7, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 marigolds.

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Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud, trans. by Cory Stockwell

Posted on December 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Brigitte Giraud’s Prix Goncourt-winning Live Fast is a powerful and concise study of love, loss, and the small decisions and turning points that shape life and death.

Brigitte Giraud, the author of more than a dozen novels, won the 2022 Prix Goncourt for Vivre vite. Published in the U.S. under the title Live Fast, this is Giraud’s first book to be translated from French to English. The highly autobiographical novel examines the 1999 death of the narrator’s 41-year-old husband, Claude, in a motorcycle accident. She writes: “There was only one thing I was truly obsessed with, and I’d kept it secret so as not to frighten those around me… because after two or three years, it would have seemed suspicious if I’d persisted in trying to understand how the accident happened…. My brain had never stopped running wild.”

Brief, taut, and tortured, Live Fast begins as the narrator, Brigitte, sells the house she and Claude had been moving into at the time of his death 20 years earlier. Letting the house go is significant, but she has never let go of her confusion and despair over her loss. “The house is at the heart of what caused the accident,” she insists, then embarks on a list of hypotheticals, such as “If only I hadn’t wanted to sell the apartment,” “if only my mother hadn’t called my brother to tell him we had a garage,” “if only it had rained,” and on and on. These wishes form the novel’s chapter titles, and Brigitte compulsively dissects each point on a diagram about cause and effect that she’s been plotting for years.

In this way, as though she’s conducting an incisive postmortem accounting, Giraud analyzes the events that led up to Claude’s inexplicable death. Their family–Brigitte, Claude, and their eight-year-old son–were moving house. They got the keys early; they had access to a garage; Brigitte’s brother needed to store a motorcycle. Readers are treated to detailed descriptions of the Honda CBR900 Fireblade and Honda’s famed engineer Tadio Baba, as well as what song Claude may have chosen to end his final workday with. Giraud even postulates that had Stephen King died–rather than being seriously injured–when he was struck by a minivan in Maine three days before Claude’s accident, Claude might have been spared.

This is a novel about obsessive, repetitive investigation: “You rewind and then you rewind again. You become a specialist in causal relationships. You hunt down clues…. You want to know all there is to know about human nature, about the individual and collective springs from which events gush forth. You can’t tell if you’re a sociologist, a cop, or a writer. You go mad.” In examining these large and small, exceptional and mundane events, Giraud maps grief and yearning as much as the tragic death of a beloved husband and father. Cory Stockwell’s stark translation blends emotion and analysis in the voice of a woman as bereft as ever. Live Fast is a pained but lucid look at loss in its long term.

This review originally ran in the December 10, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 columns.

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Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

Posted on December 2, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Here it is: the long-awaited sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea, which I found lovely and transcendent. Somewhere Beyond the Sea continues in that vein in fine form. We pick up Arthur, Linus, and their endearingly and massively weird household with six magical children – originally an orphanage, but now building into a family and a home – more or less where we left them. Linus has left his employment with the Department in Charge of Magical Youth to be with Arthur, and the two men are working on adopting their six charges. Theodore, a wyvern with an obsession with buttons. Talia, a garden gnome, a lovely girl with a lovely beard and a way with plants. Phee, a forest sprite. Sal, the eldest, a shifter who spends some of his time as a Pomeranian and is developing strong leadership skills. Chauncey, a “biologically unique” green blob and bellhop. And Lucy, short for Lucifer, the seven-year-old son of devil, who has his murderous tendencies but also a pretty standard seven-year-old sense of mischief, and a good heart. These pages will add to the mix David, a teenaged yeti, who is slow to trust his new household but also inclined to fit right in. He’d like to submit that fear is not always a bad thing: humans watch scary movies for fun, right? What’s the harm in a little good-natured roar now and then?

Pitted against this evolving family, of course, is the government, in the form of the Departments in Charge of Magical Youth and Adults, who would like to see everyone involved put in their place, under lock and key and with what some less enlightened folks still feel is an appropriate amount of shame. Arthur, himself a former magical youth – he is a phoenix, possibly the last living one of his kind – has come a long way from his trauma at the hands of DICOMY and his defensive isolation with his six orphaned charges. With the love and support of Linus, their dear friend (and island sprite) Zoe, and Zoe’s girlfriend Helen, mayor of the nearby village, Arthur and the children now regularly venture into town and mingle with humans and magical folks there. And when the book opens, Arthur is set to testify before the government about the abuse he suffered as a child and his work with his own children; he is hoping to help build a better world, and through adoption, formalize his family. But the close-knit family is up against some truly formidable villains with all the power in the world.

Like Cerulean, this sequel plays in several registers. The antics of the kids are sweet, silly, hilarious; there is lots of good fun and humor and also wholesome good lessons about mutual love and support. The continuing romance between Arthur and Linus is equally wholesome and feel-good. In inviting David in to their family, the household faces some new challenges in how to build trust and honor the newcomer’s need for distance.

Trust, Arthur knew, was a treasure effortlessly stolen, often without rhyme or reason. And this particular treasure was a fragile thing, a piece of thin glass easily broken. But here was David, surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar place, attempting to pick up his pieces and put them back into a recognizable shape. Whatever else he was, David’s bravery in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds proved yet again what Arthur had always believed: magic existed in many forms, some extraordinary, some simple acts of goodwill and trust, small though they might be.

I think this illustrates some of the book’s larger themes: trust, fragility, vulnerability, bravery, and how these elements can help form family and community. The concept that even those in power – in government or in families – need to have the ability to acknowledge when they have been or done wrong. Arthur must navigate a misstep when he encourages David to be whatever he wants to be, including a “monster”, while having told Lucy that he should be less monstrous. (David’s monstrosity is less threatening. But should Lucy’s right to self-realization be any less?) This is still and again about trust: how Lucy can trust a father whose rules change; how a father or fathers should trust their child’s judgment as they grow and mature. Change requires flexibility; growth can be painful. But this loving family is very strong, perhaps because they challenge each other. And the letting-in of the village has been a good move: under the influence of Arthur and Linus’s household, the human inhabitants have learned greater tolerance, and magical visitors (and their tourist dollars) have begun to transform what was a typically mistrustful community into a more welcoming one. It will take a whole village in the end to defend what’s right.

A beautiful novel about family, trust, community, recovery from abuse and trauma, and systemic ills, all leavened by mischievous humor and filial and romantic love. Same-sex couples abound in the book, and Klune’s Acknowledgements prioritize defending trans people’s rights, but I’d say the metaphor at work in this world – where magical people are hidden away, poorly understood, and discriminated against by a larger population which will benefit from their inclusion – works for any disadvantaged minority. It’s great reading, sweet and funny, with great messaging. I can’t wait for more like it from this fine author.

Rating: 9 fish named Frank.

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Maximum Shelf: Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis

Posted on November 22, 2024 by pagesofjulia

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

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 18, 2024.

Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis is an engrossing trip cross-country and through time with an unusual protagonist-and-narrator duo, who together explore family, culture, history, identity, health and healing, community and connection. With serious situations and heartbreaking turns, this debut novel is both thought-provoking and hilarious.

When readers meet Abraham John Jacobs (Abe), he stands half dressed in his great-uncle’s trailer on the reservation where he was born and raised. He’s 43 years old, ill with a yet-undiagnosed malady, and he’s reluctantly agreed to let Uncle Budge try a healing. “If Rheumatologist Weisberg hadn’t canceled his appointment the day before he was supposed to finally get a diagnosis, Abe would probably still be in Miami, trying to decide which Halloween parties to attend.” Budge is an aging former alcoholic with a Butthole Surfers t-shirt stretched across a big belly; his spiritualist mystique fits in between more pedestrian concerns. “Not everythin’ we’re put here to do feels great,” he points out.

Abe has flown in for this visit, or recuperation, minus his wife, Alex, with whom relations aren’t so strong at the moment. The narrator, Dominick Deer Woods (whose identity won’t be clear for some time, and who is given to direct addresses to the reader), acknowledges that “Abraham Jacobs might not sound like an ‘Indian’ name, but you’ve got the hardcore Catholic first name and the surname of what used to be the biggest landowners on Ahkwesáhsne. So if you’re in the know, then you know the name Abraham Jacobs is rez as hell, cuz.” Feisty, bold, and brimming with voice, Dominick enriches this account at every turn.

This latter-day Abe, in Ahkwesáhsne in 2016 with the yet-to-be-diagnosed autoimmune disorder, anchors the novel’s present timeline, which is interspersed with flashbacks to the story of Abe’s life up to this point. Dominick relates Abe’s childhood and teenaged years in less detail, but focuses in earnest when he leaves the rez to attend Syracuse University, where he immediately meets Alex, a larger-than-life, sparkling, Miami-born, blonde musical theater major with whom he will be permanently infatuated. With Alex, Abe moves from Syracuse to Virginia to Miami, enjoys an expansive and mostly fulfilling sex life with a multiplicity of partners of all genders, performs at open mic nights as a budding poet, and eventually marries. Alex has been a regular on the rez for Thanksgiving holidays (a high point for the Ahkwesáhsne Kanien’kehá:ka, who white folks know as Mohawk Indians, and, yes, Dominick gets the irony) for decades. But he will take his time revealing why she’s not here.

At the rez, Abe gets sicker. The lesions on his lower legs look terrible but feel okay; his joints look fine but cause him excruciating pain. His medical team back in Miami is slow with a diagnosis, but when it comes, it’s grim. His faith in Uncle Budge’s healing increases with his pain, desperation, and reluctant observation of the older man’s wisdom. Lying on the carpet to be massaged is one thing; a much harder part of the process involves Abe examining his relationship with his family and the reservation community. The situation with Alex–still at home in Miami while Abe deteriorates up north–continues to decline. Unexpected help may yet be on the way.

Dominick Deer Woods brings intriguing dimensions to this novel. He is “your proud narrator,” while Abe is “our humble protagonist.” He reviews that Abraham Jacobs is “a Native name but that doesn’t make it an Indian name. Dominick Deer Woods, though? You could light a peace pipe with it.” Dominick in these and other respects exists in contrast to Abe. Where Abe is serious, hesitant, and out of touch with Ahkwesáhsne, Dominick is hard-hitting, informed, playful, angry, and very funny. He offers an interplay, a not-quite-literal dialogue, throwing Abe into relief, helping to illustrate and define him. He also offers poetry, and one of the most electrifying descriptions of writing poetry that readers are likely ever to come across.

Abe’s life and Dominick’s smart observations of it present a nuanced investigation of family (by both blood and marriage) and several layers of identity: what it means to be Ahkwesáhsne Kanien’kehá:ka (or, if you must, Mohawk); to be from the rez, on the rez, off the rez; and to navigate American history and modern cultural tropes. Old School Indian is concerned with gaps and distances: between the reservation and Syracuse, between Syracuse and Miami, between Abe and Alex, between Abe and his family back on the rez, between Abe and Dominick. As middle-aged Abe confronts difficult truths about himself, his body, and his relationships, he will consider how he wants to move through the world in large and small ways: in poetry, in love, in health. Dominick observes about a teenaged band that plays on the reservation, “No gig… will be as well-received as this one, since the reality of them will always be chasing listeners’ memories. But they have tonight, and they play and sing like the world is ending tomorrow.” Abe may yet do the same, and he and readers will be better for it.

Rating: 8 gingham sheets.

Come back Monday for my interview with Curtis.

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