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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Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

Posted on November 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This quirky, funny, pained novel considers the challenge, for any of us, of becoming fully human.

Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story is a funny and pathos-ridden tale of social awkwardness and self-realization; a modern, delayed coming-of-age. Su’s narrative voice is perfectly pitched for her inelegant but deeply sympathetic protagonist.

Vi is a 24-year-old townie and college dropout in a midwestern college town. She works a hotel chain’s front desk next to a too-perfect perky blonde named Rachel. Vi is still suffering from a breakup eight months ago, barely slogging through her days. Her Taiwanese father and white mother are well-meaning and supportive, but they have trouble connecting with Vi, who has always been a loner; her older brother can be a pain, but he cares, even when Vi struggles to. Then, on a night she ventures out for the rare social occasion, she stumbles upon something new in the alley behind a bar during a drag show: a shapeless blob with a mouth and two eyes. She carries it home and, under Vi’s yearning influence, it grows.

The evolving blob, which Vi will come to call Bob (it starts as a malapropism), is the only fantastical detail in a story otherwise rooted in a very familiar world, featuring the casual racism of Vi’s hometown and her awkwardness with social situations. Bob takes in lots of television (and Fruity Pebbles), and after examining the pictures Vi shows him of movie stars like young Hugh Grant and Ryan Gosling, fashions himself into a tall, stunningly handsome white man with a six-pack. Vi presents him as a hookup or boyfriend; the world has trouble assimilating their match. The pairing is, in fact, a strain. “For a while, he seemed happy enough to eat and breathe and exist–the perfect companion. I should’ve anticipated that molding him into a man would trigger something deeper, some sort of existential awakening. Now he’s just like everyone else. He has needs and desires beyond me…. He could leave without me ever knowing why.” The fear of being left, of course, is key to Vi’s difficulties in navigating the world.

What makes Blob special is its mix of heartrending conflict and silly, self-aware humor. Truly cringy scenes balance sweet ones. Rachel performs off and on as a friend–but Vi scarcely knows how to care for her own problems, let alone anyone else’s, and her past attempts at friendship have often ended in unintended cruelty. Su excels with characters who can be significantly flawed but stir the reader’s empathy. Even Bob, despite beginning his life as a blob, has a surprising amount of personality. In the end, discomfiting though it may be, Blob makes incisive observations about life for a 20-something trying to make it on her own. Blobs and humans alike may yet find home.

This review originally ran in the November 8, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 handfuls of cereal.

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Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

Posted on October 28, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A disgraced police detective takes a job as tribal marshal to pursue the mystery of a series of missing women, but has trouble seeing beyond her own lost daughter.

Laurie L. Dove’s atmospheric, frequently grim, and emotionally charged debut, Mask of the Deer Woman, features a former police detective trying to outrun her old life by taking a job as tribal marshal on an Oklahoma reservation. Carrie Starr is half Indigenous, but out of touch with that part of her personal history. Tasked with solving the cold cases of a growing number of missing Indigenous women and girls, she is inclined to focus instead on her own lost daughter.

Marshal Starr is the novel’s protagonist, but Mask of the Deer Woman‘s chapters shift among various characters, beginning with Chenoa Cloud, a college student from the rez who is determined to prove the presence of an endangered beetle on her tribal grounds. Documenting an endangered species promises to earn her funding and a job–a way off the rez for good, and not like the others “who left and never came back, or who couldn’t come back.” Chenoa’s disappearance into the Saliquaw Nation’s backcountry sets the stage for Starr’s arrival. The Bureau of Indian Affairs job is a last resort for Starr, and not one she relishes, but her daughter’s murder and the man she subsequently gunned down ended her career as detective. Trading on her late father’s Saliquaw identity earns her a poorly appointed cinder-block office, a BIA-issued, broken-down Ford Bronco, and the locals’ distrust. She carries a bottle of Jameson in her backpack and under the Bronco’s front seat, and a joint in her shirt pocket. Each missing young woman blurs into her daughter, and she flinches away from “the terrain she’d have to cover in the process. The dark space of whatever was out there. Caves. Old mines. Her own mind.”

Beyond the intoxicants she takes to escape her pain, Starr is knocked off-balance by tales of the Deer Woman. Part monster, part avenging angel, part capricious force of nature, this legend seems to follow the disoriented marshal, although the boundaries between magic, hallucination, and self-medicated grief are unclear. To boot, the rez is at odds with the nearest town, and the tribal council must field a controversial proposal to frack for oil, with associated infrastructure. Political and commercial machinations accompany the missing women and the struggling tribal marshal in a novel of grief, violence, community, empowerment, and pain.

This dark mystery will thrill readers and immerse them in a powerfully portrayed world of great losses and high stakes.

This review originally ran in the October 25, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 blue jay feathers.

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I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander

Posted on October 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

As Eve’s life devolves into crisis, she creates a golem to solve it all, in this lovely, absorbing novel of grief, dark humor, and love and friendship, with a dash of magic.

Beth Kander’s I Made It Out of Clay is a lovely, absorbing novel of grief, dark humor, and love and friendship, with a dash of magic.

In contemporary urban Chicago, as the holiday season approaches, Eve is struggling: she’s about to turn 40 years old, and she’s nowhere near done grieving her beloved father, who died just over a year ago. Eve and her father always loved Christmas–a guilty pleasure in their Jewish family not shared by the surviving members. Layoffs are threatened at work, her best friend has been distant, she’s had some disturbing encounters on the train recently, and she’s begun hallucinating her dearly departed grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who seems to be trying to warn Eve of something. Eve is not close to her mother (overbearing) or her younger sister Rosie (overly perfect), who’s scheduled her wedding for Eve’s 40th birthday weekend. Eve has (foolishly) promised to bring a plus one to Rosie’s wedding, but she’s so far failed to find a date. Unfortunately, her neighbor crush doesn’t seem to get her jokes or her cringeworthy attempts at flirtation.

In desperation, late at night and rather drunk, Eve recalls a story told by her grandmother, ventures into the dank corners of her apartment’s basement, and builds herself a golem out of foundation clay. A golem serves as protector and companion in Jewish tradition, and she feels in dire need of both. The next morning, a hungover Eve wakes up to find a handsome (and very naked) man in her apartment. She is horrified, in disbelief, attracted to him, and a little disgusted with herself. Is Eve’s golem a figment of her imagination? A monstrosity? Or the answer to her fondest wishes? Heading into Rosie’s wedding, all of Eve’s crises–work, friendships, the absence of romance, family strife, civil unrest in the wider world–crash and crescendo together. A golem is either the best or worst idea she’s ever had.

I Made It Out of Clay is a charming rework of a traditional tale. Frequently grim, it explores some of the darker elements of modern life: depression, loneliness, grief, bigotry. But it’s also sweet and very funny, especially in the moments when Eve lets her friends and, eventually, family into her life, and finds that they may have some of their own struggles. Kander gifts her readers with a novel that is often serious and sad, but ultimately uplifting, as Eve learns, “This isn’t the end of anything. It’s just one more beginning, like every damn day can be if we just let it.”

This review originally ran in the October 4, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bagels.

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The Greatest Lie of All by Jillian Cantor

Posted on October 21, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A young actress takes on the role of a glamorous romance author and gets more mystery–and romance–than she’d reckoned for.

The Greatest Lie of All by Jillian Cantor (Half Life; The Hours Count; Margot; The Lost Letter) is a propulsively paced story of intrigue, romance, and suspense starring two women a generation apart navigating family, love, secrets, and art. In one of their several parallels, each uses a professional pseudonym, so that four names delineate these two character arcs.

Readers meet the young, up-and-coming actress Amelia Grant just after the death of her beloved mother, and in the moment when she discovers her actor boyfriend in bed with his costar. At this low, Amelia is primed to accept her biggest role yet: to play the fabulously successful romance author Gloria Diamond in a biopic. Gloria had been Amelia’s mother’s favorite; it feels like a sign and a way to be close to the mother she’s lost, the only person who had called her by her birth name, Annie.

Heartbroken but determined, Amelia travels from Los Angeles to Gloria’s remote Seattle-area home to get to know her subject before filming begins. But “the Gloria Diamond” is distinctly unfriendly, cold, and dismissive. Even as Amelia finds a tentative friendship with Gloria’s son, Will (“cute, in an academic kind of way”), she despairs at ever understanding what makes the older woman tick. Gloria’s career was built on her famous, brief romance with her late husband, Will’s father. But the more Amelia learns, the less convincing that story is. She embarks on an informal investigation fueled by shadowy motives: her desire to play a “true” Gloria Diamond; her curiosity about the nature of love, especially as her mother so appreciated it in Diamond’s fiction; and Will’s reluctant desire to understand his mother. As she pursues the history of the author once known as Mary Forrester–Mare to her friends–Amelia begins to wonder about her own role in the drama unfolding before her.

In chapters that shift between Amelia’s perspective and that of the young Mare, The Greatest Lie of All shines in its plot twists and surprises, and, most of all, its pacing, which accelerates from a slow burn to a heart-thumping momentum. The tension increases, stakes rising as Gloria/Mare and Amelia/Annie must reckon with their pasts to chart their shared present. Danger accompanies every possibility of romance, and family history matters more than it originally appears. Cantor’s experienced hand shows in this classically crafted thriller, which will keep its readers tautly engaged to the final scene.

This review originally ran in the September 24, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 glasses of wine.

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