Witchcraft by Sole Otero, trans. by Andrea Rosenberg

Posted on September 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This graphic novel follows an unusual household over several centuries in Buenos Aires, Argentina, through various characters whose lives are impacted, if not ruined, by three enigmatic sisters.

Argentinean comics artist Sole Otero (Mothballs) offers a tale that meanders through historical and speculative fiction with Witchcraft, a graphic novel that spans centuries in Buenos Aires. In Otero’s evolving but recognizable visual style, the opening scene emerges spookily from the fog, as a ship arrives in Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre in 1768. (One of a series of footnotes explains that this was the original name of Buenos Aires, given by the conqueror Pedro de Mendoza.) Readers see three women disembark with their goat, taking with them the three-year-old son of another passenger, to the latter’s wails of despair. From these early, atmospheric pages, a sense of unease is established and maintained.

The following sections of the narrative undertake large jumps in time. In more or less present-day Buenos Aires, a man tells his friend a scarcely credible story of nude women dancing around entranced nude men, with a goat and a chalk circle and “this super creepy music.” In an earlier, historical setting, a Mapuche woman goes to work at a grand estate for three sisters who are both feared and respected in their local village, to a horrifying end. In modern times, a reclusive woman exchanges e-mails with a similarly lonely man, the veterinarian who came on a house call to look at her sick cat; he tells strange, disturbing tales about his family and the elderly goat they want him to save. A nunnery sends an allegedly evil orphan girl to live with three sisters who normally adopt only boys. From these and other narrative threads, populated by spirits, witch hunts, pleas and losses, readers begin to piece together the fractured story of the María sisters and their unusual, perhaps supernatural, habits.

Otero’s style of illustration varies somewhat between sections, but is often distorted or off-kilter, and highly detailed; in full color, her characters’ facial expressions and contortions advance the unnerving atmosphere of the larger story. Page spreads may include carefully spaced panels or no panels at all; text style likewise shifts, with infrequent footnotes to help readers along. This results in a sinister, mysterious, and deeply compelling reading experience. Translated by Andrea Rosenberg (who also translated Otero’s Mothballs), Witchcraft blends horror, dark magic and dark humor, rage and righteousness. This disjointed, sometimes discomfiting, entertaining story addresses colonial power and indigenous resistance alongside ritual, sex, and sacrifice in an eerie, phantasmagoric package not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the August 18, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 trees climbed.

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

Posted on April 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 stitches.

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The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, trans. by Katy Derbyshire

Posted on January 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A humble café in post-World War II Vienna serves as backdrop for all the large and small dramas of everyday life in this subtly scintillating novel.

The Café with No Name by Austrian writer Robert Seethaler (The Field; The Tobacconist) opens in 1966 Vienna. Robert Simon is 31 years old and about to embark upon the quiet dream of his lifetime. It’s his final day at the market where he’s worked for seven years, as he begins to clean out and shape up a long-empty café across the street. Simon is a solitary, steady, and kind man who was orphaned as a young child during the war and is now a reliable worker who keeps to himself. “For a while he worked as a glass clearer and brush boy in the Prater beer gardens, and perhaps it was there–as he roamed between the tables in search of empty glasses, chicken bones and cigarette stubs in the light of the coloured lanterns–that he first felt a nascent germ of yearning: to do something that would give his life a decisive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.” He realizes this modest ambition with the café on the edge of the bustling market, where Simon serves blue-collar workers like himself. He offers beer, wine, coffee, and raspberry soda; bread with drippings and gherkins; and a place of respite. He is soon joined by a single employee, a loner like himself. Mila, too, finds a home in the café with no name.

Seethaler’s tender novel follows Simon and his café for the 10 years that they operate, until a change in the building’s ownership pushes the small business out again. These years see Simon’s Vienna neighborhood rebuild from postwar austerity, its population and workforce swell and change, and cultural patterns begin to shift. The café is a microcosm of these evolutions.

The Café with No Name does not have a plot filled with action, conflict, and resolution; instead, it focuses on mundane details of life. “Simon couldn’t help smiling at the thought of all the lost souls who came together in his café every day.” An aging prizefighter, two older ladies who drink and chat in the afternoons, the cheese shop proprietor and her painter boyfriend, and Simon’s friend the butcher are among the regulars; they and others experience death and dismemberment, quiet violences, loss, and alcoholism, but also uplifting moments of humanity, friendship, and love. There are, remarkably, no villains in this novel, only people struggling against ordinary human challenges. While Seethaler’s characters face significant difficulties, the story never feels grim, but rather steadfast and even hopeful. Katy Derbyshire translates Seethaler’s prose from the German with calm delivery, charming descriptions, and understated humor. This lovely novel sweetly and simply emphasizes built family, resilience, and rebirth.

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

Rating: 7 paintings.

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A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, trans. by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on December 20, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This award-winning novel in its first English translation follows a young woman rooming with a distant septuagenarian relative for a year, and the muted dramas of her coming-of-age.

Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone, winner of Japan’s Akutagawa Prize and translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood, is a slim coming-of-age novel of understated beauty.

A young Japanese woman named Chizu moves to Tokyo when her mother goes to China for work; Chizu is to live with a distant relative she’s never met. “It was raining when I arrived at the house. The walls of my room were lined with cat photos.” Chizu is 20; Ginko is 71. Over the course of a year, they move quietly around each other in a small apartment overlooking a commuter train platform. Chizu is periodically impatient, even cruel, toward the older woman, who placidly knits, embroiders, cooks, and, when solicited, imparts advice. The two women establish a thin bond, and then Chizu moves on. This restrained novel follows the four seasons of their connection.

Chizu is a solitary person, without friendships or much success in relationships, nor is she close to her mother, whose emigration doesn’t affect her much. When she arrives at Ginko’s home, she reflects: “I hadn’t bothered introducing myself properly…. I wasn’t in the habit of going around declaring my name to people like that. Nor was I used to others actually calling me by it.” Her life has been passive: “I’d been told to come, so here I was.” She does not want to go to school and instead takes on a series of part-time jobs. She is curious about falling in love, especially when Ginko’s male companion becomes a regular visitor; she is often invited along on their outings. In this and other ways, Ginko proves the more generous member of their household. Chizu is initially dismissive of Ginko, but notes that she “was turning out to be surprisingly normal,” and that her friendship has something to offer.

These observations are made only very subtly, amid daily run-of-the-mill events, including the tiny dramas of Chizu’s workplaces, her forays into dating, and shared meals at the apartment by the rail line. Kirkwood translates Aoyama’s writing with subdued loveliness: “The train was approaching the bridge over the Yanase River. Its banks were lined with slender cherry trees, their branches still bare…. A watch on my wrist, pumps on my feet, a black handbag at my side. I watched a boy taking a brown dog for a run, the two of them tracing a line across the grey concrete.” A Perfect Day to Be Alone ends with less assured conclusiveness than its title implies, but in the spirit of the whole, it nods quietly toward positive change, or at least forward movement: “The train carried me onwards, to a station where someone was waiting.”

This review originally ran in the December 13, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 Jintan mints.

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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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The Bishop’s Villa by Sacha Naspini, trans. by Clarissa Botsford

Posted on October 7, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this transporting novel based on real events, a shy cobbler in an Italian village during World War II is gradually drawn into quiet acts in the Resistance.

Sacha Naspini (Nives) brings close and poignant attention to true events with his historical novel The Bishop’s Villa, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

In the fall of 1943, in the sleepy village of Le Case in Tuscany’s Maremma region, a cobbler goes about his daily business. Solitary and quiet by nature, René makes do with just two fingers on his right hand following a childhood accident with a lathe; his nickname in town is Settebello, after the “lucky seven” card in scopa. When the local bishop rents out the seminary and surrounding villa to be used as a prison camp for the region’s Jewish population, Le Case mostly plods on as before. Some local residents speak cruelly of the prisoners; many simply ignore their presence. René mends the shoes brought to him for repair by prison guards. For most townspeople, the war is poverty, deprivation, and the passage of time.

But René’s neighbor Anna, a lifelong friend, has just lost her son, who fought for the Resistance until he was captured and executed by the Wehrmacht. Anna is galvanized; René wants her to stand down. And then Anna vanishes, leaving behind a note for René. She has gone to join the partisans, to “fight for Edoardo and for Italy.” When René learns that Anna might have become imprisoned in the bishop’s villa, he finds that he can no longer fail to act. His subtle sabotage begins with boots. “He chose rusty nails, some so brittle that they crumbled at the first blow. He hammered them in a little crooked, curved inwards as if he were aiming for the heel… the hole in the sole would get wider, like a small surface wound.”

In short chapters, Naspini draws readers into René’s world: first the tightly confined life of the village cobbler, traveling back and forth between home, workshop, and Anna’s apartment, and then to the tighter confines of a cell in the bishop’s villa. Botsford’s translation is terse and atmospheric, punctuated by lyrical or romantic phrasings: wonder is “like a child unable to describe a treasure they’d chanced upon under a stone.” With torture, “you can chew [a man’s] bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

The Bishop’s Villa is absorbing, transporting, beautiful, and grim. Naspini’s Author’s Note makes clear his drive to lay bare a shameful chapter of history; but with this novel he has also written a love story, for without Anna, “René would never have used the tools of his trade to fight his war.” The result is moving and layered.

This review originally ran in the September 12, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 soles.

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Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld, trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Posted on July 5, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This engrossing first novel illuminates an experience of hearing loss that is both frightening and beautiful, filled with surprising imagery.

Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears is a strange, haunting story of sensory presence and absence, language and loss, relationships and choices. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, this first novel follows a young woman whose limited hearing has left her always straddling the experiences of the hearing and the deaf. Her progressive hearing loss eventually poses a choice between a cochlear implant and profound deafness. In a world she finds increasingly incomprehensible, Louise navigates work (in the French governmental bureaucracy, processing first birth and then death certificates), friendship (with the eccentric Anna, who views Louise’s deafness as poetic), and a romantic relationship with a hearing man. She is accompanied as well by a dog, a soldier, and a botanist who deals in “miraginary” plants; these three characters are hallucinations or creations of Louise’s imagination who offer valuable advice.

“When someone can’t make use of a particular sense anymore, the cortex reorganizes so that area of the brain is repurposed by the senses that person still has.” Because her world contains less and less sound, Louise’s vision is vibrant. Jellyfish is bursting with sensory descriptions, including sounds heard and missed, “the warmth of timbres, this soft sheen of wind, of color, of all sound’s snags and snarls.” Visual details are evocative and often surprising: “eyes as blank as an ice floe after an orca had gone by with a penguin in its mouth.” The effect of this unusual perspective is riveting.

Louise ponders large, philosophical questions of whether she will still be herself if she agrees to an implant. With an implant, she’s told, she won’t hear like she did before, but a psychologist also asserts, “Your brain will have forgotten what ‘before’ means.” She wonders if she needs sound to activate memory and whether “[s]ilence set free words and images held captive by language.” She investigates the experiences of those “uprooted from their language” and creates for herself a “sound herbarium.” In Zuckerman’s translation, Louise’s voice on the page is by turns stark, stoic, and dramatic. As those around her pressure her to take the implant or to embrace deafness, Louise reveals a strong personality: fiercely obstinate and attached to her vivid interior world.

A curious, thought-provoking, intensely mind-bending exploration of the loss of a sense and the potential richness as well as struggle of life with an invisible disability. Imaginative and spellbinding, Jellyfish Have No Ears is unforgettable.

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

Rating: 7 poppies.

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The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee

Posted on June 3, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Sleepers shop for dreams at a very special department store, where dreams may come true not only for customers but for employees as well.

With The Dallergut Dream Department Store, Miye Lee explores the nature and power of dreams, the possibilities created by choosing them, and human nature itself. Whimsical and sweet, this debut novel translated from Korean by Sandy Joosun Lee will leave any reader musing and looking forward to a good night’s rest.

“For centuries, Penny’s hometown has been famous for its sleep products. Now it has evolved into a metropolis…. The locals, including Penny, who grew up here, are used to seeing outsiders roaming around in sleepwear.” Penny is terribly excited to interview at the Dallergut Dream Department Store, the crown jewel in a town devoted to sleepers’ needs. She has studied the mythology and history, but meeting Dallergut himself is intimidating. However, he turns out to be nothing but nice, forgiving her learner’s errors and prioritizing the sale of the right dream to the right customer, even over profits. Penny fangirls over the greatest dreammakers, whom she gets to meet in her new job: Nicholas, who specializes in seasonal dreams; Babynap Rockabye, who creates conception dreams; Maxim, who does surprising work in a dark back-alley studio; and Bancho, who cares for animals.

Penny has so much to learn, from bank deposits to the Eyelid Scale, not to mention the power of precognitive dreams. Purchased dreams are paid for only after they have had an effect on the sleeper, and payments come in the form of emotions experienced, so no one pays in advance or for a dud. Dreammakers can get fabulously rich and famous, but their best reward is helping people (or animals). Nap dreams differ importantly from longer ones. “Bad” dreams may serve a purpose, too. And there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an important link between dreams, in the sense of aspirations and ambitions, and dreams as in the images and sensations that visit sleepers.

Penny is an innocent, wide-eyed disciple of Dallergut and his good works, as well as the celebrity dreammakers. Through her perspective and her refreshing tone, readers encounter an appealing, absorbing, imaginative world with rules for who designs experiences for whom. In her translator’s note, Sandy Joosun Lee calls The Dallergut Dream Department Store “a story that is both fun and deep… unpretentious yet full of life,” and keeps Penny’s observations disarmingly enthusiastic and earnest. The pleasing tale, while simple on its surface, asks questions about self-determination and the mysterious power of nighttime imaginings to impact one’s daily, “real” life. With a Calm Cookie or a Deep Sleep Candy, or just the right dream, all things are possible in Lee’s captivating world.

This review originally ran in the April 19, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cups of forest-scented tea.

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Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm, trans. by Saskia Vogel

Posted on October 7, 2022 by pagesofjulia

In mesmerizing, allegorical storytelling, nine maids at a mountain hotel consider the violence the world offers them when one suddenly disappears.

Johanne Lykke Holm’s first novel in English, Strega, is a fever dream meditation on girlhood, female friendships and unnamed dangers.

Rafaela is 19 years old when she leaves her parents’ home and travels into the mountains to work as a maid at an old hotel, with eight other girls her age. They clean and polish and set tables for every meal; they wash sheets and dress in clean uniforms, but no guests arrive. Lounging together, sharing cigarettes and liqueurs and candies, they are immediately close. Their matronly bosses are strict, even punitive, but their days still feel relaxed and without energy, emphasizing the pointlessness of their work. The hotel was once a shocking red, fading to pink against the forests; the strangely sinister neighboring nuns call it Il Rosso. Rafa calls it “a morgue beneath the trees.” When listless summer turns to fall, the hotel throws a party, and one of the nine girls disappears.

The remaining eight girls search for her; her parents appear to claim her possessions; the barren season at the hotel stretches on. In one of Strega‘s figurative turns, the missing girl–presumed murdered–comes to stand in for female victims of unspecified violence. At the beginning, Rafa confides, “I knew a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene. I had yet to understand that I was already living inside the crime scene, that the crime scene was not the bed but the body, that the crime had already taken place.” Near its end, “We can only find a way out of this crime scene by constructing one of our own.”

Holm’s prose, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, is hypnotic, dreamlike and favors repetition in phrasing and images: “Our hands would repeat the same movements… our hands always repeated the same movements.” Strega is saturated with red: “We watched a red light rise from the grass and take the form of a hand. I knew it was the blame and the distribution of blame”; “Women are drawn to all things earthly. Bitter soda and red herbs, a lipstick in a bitter red shade. And death, of course.” These short, declarative sentences offer surprising lyricism, so that each line demands the reader’s attention.

The novel is short and spare, but unwavering in its intensity. Strega is riveting: surreal, ominous, somehow both vague and sharp in its observations about the harms that girls submit to when they become women.

This review originally ran in the September 27, 2022 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 aspergilla.

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The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi, trans. by Elena Pala

Posted on December 20, 2021 by pagesofjulia

This family saga set in Italy, with one life at its center, is moving, literary, philosophical and multi-layered.

The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi (Quiet Chaos; The Force of the Past), translated from the Italian by Elena Pala, is a shape-shifting, multigenerational novel of family, love, loss, joy, change and pain.

When readers meet Marco Carrera, the year is 1999 and he is a 40-year-old ophthalmologist in Rome, about to meet destiny in the form of a psychoanalyst breaking his confidentiality oath. From here, chapters jump back and forth in time from 1960 to 2030. Readers meet the great love of Marco’s life, visit his childhood, witness his marriage and divorce. When he is just a boy, Marco stops growing, remaining small and childlike well into his teenage years: his mother nicknames him “the hummingbird” for his stature, a moniker that will echo into his adulthood. He becomes a father and eventually a grandfather, so that four generations of his family flash kaleidoscopically across these pages; Marco is ever at the novel’s center, however, even as he is accused of holding still through life’s storms. “You can keep still as time flows around you, you can stop it flowing, sometimes you can turn back time, even–just like a hummingbird, you can fly backwards and retrieve lost time.” The novel mimics this movement with its nearly stop-action chronology.

Some chapters take a straight narrative form, others are transcribed conversations, letters, postcards or e-mails. Elena Pala’s translation from the Italian feels perfectly suited to this twisting, many-faceted form, as different voices take the lead. The pieced-together story moves between Rome and a Tuscan coastal town where the Carreras have a vacation home; its characters travel much farther (Spain, Germany, the United States), but Marco’s orbit is limited. Rather, as he keeps still, his family and friends revolve around him.

In these various forms, across time and space, Veronesi refers to numerous other literary voices (a Samuel Beckett epigraph sets the tone) and concepts from ophthalmology, psychotherapy, architecture and design, among other disparate fields. The Hummingbird is clearly an intellectual exercise, but can also be read more simply as a story about a single, deceptively ordinary life: Marco might appear unremarkable at first glance, but he has lived remarkable tragedies and triumphs, which will define him. He is affected by his experiences as if by ocean waves, his life a series of natural forces, or natural disaster. Packed with pathos, humor and tragedy, the novel’s finish is both a quiet goodbye and a crescendo, the only fitting end to such an unobtrusive but resounding life.

This review originally ran in the December 2, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 appointments.

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