The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Posted on October 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Delightful, unpredictable, and often harrowing, this mother-daughter tale of growing and learning will keep any reader riveted.

With The White Hot, Quiara Alegría Hudes (My Broken Language; Pulitzer Prize-winner for the play Water by the Spoonful) offers an expansive, surprising coming-of-age story about both a mother and a daughter. The novel opens on Noelle’s 18th birthday, when she receives an envelope. “It wasn’t the handwriting that dinged memory’s bell so much as the pen’s feral indentations.” Since she was 10, when her mother disappeared, Noelle has lived with her father, stepmother, and two half-brothers in New Jersey. Readers have just met the teenager when the voice shifts. “Dear Noelle… I am not going to send this,” the letter begins. What at first masquerades as an interlude quickly takes over the book. Breathlessly, alongside Noelle, readers take in April Soto’s story.

“That awful day began with your classroom art show.” At age 26, April is weary. Her 10-year-old daughter is precocious, an artistic and academic genius, and disturbingly observant of her mother’s shortcomings. Their household comprises four generations of Soto women: Abuela Omara (who emigrated from Puerto Rico), Mamá Suset, April, and Noelle, “not a speck of dust–or man–in sight.” April is undone by her child’s gimlet eye, her own unrealized potential, her lack of options, and daily drudgery, and in the wake of a scene at the dinner table, she simply walks away from their Philadelphia home.

What follows is an epic and astonishing journey of self-discovery. April muses on the influence of Hermann Hesse, Charles Mingus, sex as revelation, violences witnessed and perpetrated; she undertakes a wilderness trek (profoundly unprepared in sandals and sequins), and experiences painful, blissful realizations via blisters and hunger. She tells her child she knows her leaving was a betrayal, but hopes she has also offered choice. By book’s end, the briefest return to Noelle’s own 20s presents a full-circle perspective of the parallels in these two lives, and the significant differences.

April’s narrative is astounding and vibrant. In her best and worst moments, she describes being cracked open, experiencing epiphanies: “She felt an un-looming, a separation into threads, some of which rose and drifted through nearby windows whose unseen inhabitants shimmered inside her, too.” These, as well as the mundane, yield stunning, lightning-bolt prose: “Within this deluge, the frog and the oak, the tuba and congregants were not discrete phenomena but native to each other, and I to them. That I of all creatures should be tapped for a glimpse? A bewilderment.” The White Hot is wide-ranging, thought-provoking, tender, and raw–unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the September 23, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 olives.

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

Her One Regret by Donna Freitas

Posted on September 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young mother confesses regret in this satisfying, dynamic mystery that is also a rousing conversation starter about an experience of motherhood still treated as taboo.

Donna Freitas’s Her One Regret explores what one of her characters calls “the last taboo of motherhood.” At once a rocket-paced crime tale of suspense and a thoughtful examination of cultural dictates about motherhood, this novel of women’s lives and relationships excels as both entertainment and a call to difficult but necessary conversations.

In a brief introductory section, readers meet Lucy in the parking lot of a supermarket in Narragansett Beach. On a gorgeous, early fall afternoon, she loads groceries alongside her nine-month-old daughter, Emma. Then begins Part I: “The First 48 Hours.” Lucy has vanished; Emma is found, alone, crying, but perfectly fine, in the parking lot. The small Rhode Island community is horrified, united in a search for the missing mother. But then it is revealed that Lucy had recently confided in her best friend, Michelle, that she regretted having Emma. She had fantasized about staging her own disappearance. The community and the nation erupt in harsh judgment. Is Lucy a kidnapping victim, or on the run? Is she a monster? What do we make of a woman who regrets motherhood?

The rest of Freitas’s narrative jumps between the lives of four local women. Lucy is seen mostly in memory, or as a symbol. Michelle is devastated by her best friend’s disappearance, in love with her own role as mother, but galvanized to defend her friend. Lucy had tried to tell Michelle what she was suffering, but “Michelle did the thing everybody does with mothers: dismiss their feelings as not real. Michelle gaslit Lucy, kept gaslighting her. She hadn’t meant to.” Diana, a retired detective, is drawn to Lucy’s case and its similarities and differences from other vanished women. And then there is Julia, whose baby is the same age as Emma: “Julia keeps waiting for the moment she’ll feel bonded to her son, that miracle other women talk about when connection and unbelievable love will flood her person and overcome the dread, the sadness, the resistance. But it never happens.” Julia, an artist who can no longer bring herself to create, sees herself in Lucy, shares the fantasy of escape, and now watches as the world on social media condemns her parallel self. Her desperation feels like an emergency no one around her will acknowledge.

Freitas (Consent; The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano) relates these lives and quiet–or in Lucy’s case, suddenly very public–struggles with nuance and compassion. Her One Regret is purposefully thought-provoking and a riveting mystery–a masterpiece of duality, not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the September 5, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 sketches.

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

Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire by Don Martin

Posted on September 5, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This lovely book came to me from a Shelf Awareness review. I was hopeful that it will be right for one of my young friends next, especially with the Appalachian connection. And I think I was right!

The town of Foxfire, deep in the dark woods in a holler, is cursed. Following the withdrawal of the coal companies, struggling, the townspeople had made some deals with a traveling peddler who calls himself Earl. It started out innocently enough, but Earl’s prices were untraditional: one’s ability to see the color blue for fair weather. The hearing in one’s left ear for his horse to be healthy. A man’s jaw for some good canned vegetables. When the town pushes back against their tormentor, he takes his revenge. The bridge that connects the town to the rest of the world is destroyed, and attempts to rebuild it always fail. Animals sicken, food rots, the earth will no longer yield produce. The people seem doomed to despair and slow deaths, able neither to provide for themselves nor to leave.

Someone in Foxfire sends out a message.

And then the reader meets Verity Vox, a young witch in training, awaiting her next assignment. Her familiar, Jack-Be-Nimble (generally known as Jack), who normally appears as a black cat (sometimes a kitten) and sometimes as a black bull, a jaguar, a black rat, a crow (etc.), finds the message: “We’re cursed. Send help!” And Verity Vox goes to Foxfire.

Verity is young and still learning. Part of any witch’s training involves moving around: she can only stay in a place for one year, and then she must follow the signs to the next place she can help. Her powers and talents have come naturally to her; she is accustomed to easy success, and to being welcomed wherever she goes. People are glad to have her assistance. In Foxfire, however, things are different. The town got burned hard by the last magical being from whom they accepted ostensible help. And these hills can be a little insular. For the first time, her advances are unwelcome. Verity is perplexed; but she only wants to help, she keeps repeating. Her first reluctant customer (so to speak) keeps asking what she owes Verity, and Verity is baffled. Mistrust, it seems, is an unfamiliar concept.

So, Verity and the town have much to learn about each other. And then there is the pressing mystery of Earl – who he is, from where he draws his power, what it would take to rid Foxfire of his malice once and for all. Magic can do a lot, but there are still rules. For example, “tea… eluded even the most powerful of witches. It simply could not be rushed and every attempt to do so resulted in a brew that was bitter, bland, or box turtles.” Verity is very powerful. But there is much she doesn’t know yet about the world, and Earl is an unprecedented challenge, and the more she gets to know the people of Foxfire, the more she wants to improve their lot. There is a point where she thinks she will be able to offer them an escape, a literal exit from the place, and is surprised to learn that they don’t want to leave their home. More lessons to learn for our young witch protagonist, but she remains determined. “What was magic after all but having the gall to believe you could tell the world around you how it ought to be and then watching as it did as it was told?”

This is a beautiful story about learning and growing up, facing challenges, relationships formed with people and with place. The connection to Appalachia feels very special to me, and I have been telling everyone I know about it. The book is recommended for grade levels 10-12, although I see no reason not to give it to kids a little younger than that, and obviously it has enormous appeal for some of us adults, as well. Will be on the lookout for more from this author!

Rating: 8 candles.

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

Open Wide by Jessica Gross

Posted on August 18, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This mind-bending novel examines the nature of love and the social conventions that govern relationships and asks where limits should be drawn, if at all.

Jessica Gross (Hysteria) staggers and challenges readers with her sophomore novel, Open Wide, starring a socially awkward protagonist who finds love and dives in very, very deeply.

Olive compulsively records all the hours of her life, “collecting sounds the way other people collect stamps.” She records diegetic sounds, which she uses in her work as a radio producer, and conversations, which she plays back–to study what went right or wrong, to soothe or arouse herself. She has long yearned for romance when she meets Theo, a handsome colorectal surgeon. He agrees with Olive’s proffered metaphor: people’s insides look like pink pasta. Olive can’t get enough. She wants to spend every night together. She wants to “climb inside” him.

Alongside their deepening love affair, Olive reveals to readers her relationships with her sisters and mother, through which Gross also explores boundaries (or lack thereof) and obsessive love. “My mother had climbed inside of me. My little self, filled with her bigger one. Her daughter, who was not supposed to be the vessel, but the one contained.” However, Theo is not parent or child to Olive but partner, so their intimacy is different, Olive tells herself.

Olive’s first-person narration of her bizarre story is an inspired choice that makes readers privy to her fears, confusions, passions, and rationalizations. By the final pages, which reveal what has changed in Olive’s surreal world, readers will feel dizzy with her perspective and its consequences. Open Wide is a tense, engrossing examination of the bounds of love.

This review originally ran in the August 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 dog walks.

Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with Gross.

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

Maximum Shelf: A Season on the Drink by Pat Harris

Posted on August 8, 2025 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 July 24, 2025.

In 1986, at the Saint Anthony Residence, a haven for folks two steps away from living on the street in Saint Paul, Minn., a series of events and personalities converged in an unlikely and perhaps unprecedented situation. As described in the opening pages of Pat Harris’s novel A Season on the Drink, two softball teams met on Raymond Field: “The Saint Anthony Residence for chronic alcoholics and the drywall company were tied. It was the final game of the season.” It was just rec-league ball, but the stakes felt much greater than the outcome of the game itself. There was dignity on the line.

Harris’s debut is a remarkable novel whose subject is, on its surface, a softball team made up of chronic alcoholics. Immersion in its storytelling, however, reveals greater depths, focusing on a handful of characters from the team and the Saint Anthony Residence; most central is a man named Marty Peterson. Marty is nearing 50 years old, with a county record including “treatment six or so times, detox 30 or 40,” when he goes to live at the Residence. Quiet, easygoing, cerebral, Marty has long found himself unfit for mainstream life.

He does have a personal history with baseball, however. A strong player in high school, he played a single year at the University of Minnesota, briefly brushing shoulders with greatness in the form of coach Dick Siebert and Herb Brooks. “Herb would eventually take off his Gopher baseball uniform for a checkered sport coat and one of the most iconic gold medals in history. Marty took off his uniform for a shirt he found at Goodwill.” In an extraordinary year at Saint Anthony, he will have an important role to play in forming a team that will go undefeated for its single season.

Based on a true story that touched the author early in his public service career, A Season on the Drink delves into Marty’s personal history through “Marty Interludes” and his original poetry. Harris features a few other characters in detail: Harry Opus, the day manager at Saint Anthony, is a recovering alcoholic and somewhat reluctant team member. Terry Thomas, longtime resident, is “a provocateur… humorous, conniving, and sad,” but a born salesman and Marty’s more gregarious counterpart as player/manager. Allison Boisvert, director of housing for Catholic Charities, aka “the Queen of Housing,” along with community investors Mr. Long and Mr. Ryan and a “charitable mobster” known as “The Padre,” provide financial and moral support; the Queen’s partner, Jim, also a staffer at Saint Anthony, is a steady hand on a team with very few of them. But Marty is the heart, soul, and talent.

In telling the story of these and other lost alcoholics and those who serve them, Harris artfully profiles people, the city of Saint Paul, and alcoholism itself. He also touches on politics, economics, and social services. The existence of the Saint Anthony Residence relies on the skillful marketing by the Queen and other advocates to both ends of the political spectrum. Housing “chronic inebriates” at Saint Anthony costs taxpayers far less than treatment or detox; visible, homeless drunks are bad for business. It is also “a matter of dignity… [which] calls for the basics of life–food, shelter, and maybe something for the soul.” “All were welcome at Saint Anthony”–the residence is a wet house: residents have no obligation to attend meetings or make any attempt to be sober. They may own alcohol but not possess it on the premises. Some leave for parts unknown; some leave in a body bag. There is a regular schedule to each month, from the first when residents collect a check for $47 and are, briefly, funded drinkers, through the mid-month descent into alchemy: profoundly toxic cocktails of cleaning products and rubbing alcohol for the truly committed. “The Saint Anthony Residence was a last stop–a formal determination of the end while living.”

But then there was the spring of 1986. Led by Kirby Puckett and called by Bob Kurtz, the Minnesota Twins are on the Saint Anthony televisions; Marty, Terry, and Harry watch in the latter’s office, and Marty recalls his youth. A baseball glove appears. Marty and Terry knock a ball around over at Raymond Field, and the Queen directs Harry to form a team–she wants to see the residents a little more occupied, beyond alchemical creativity. Terry’s charisma and salesmanship, Harry’s unenthusiastic aid, and most especially Marty’s love for and knowledge of the game coalesce to form “America’s first organized softball team of chronic inebriates.” “The game of baseball was made to make the world feel better. Even in failure, it offered victory.”

By the end of this narrative, fictionalized from Harris’s own conversations with Marty Peterson, a team has formed and stumbled, won, and disbanded. The Saint Anthony Residence is still the bottom of a certain trajectory, but there are fine and shining moments. “Seeing the playing field from the vantage point of the batter’s box is the greatest moment in sports, and Marty was right back in it.” Victory parties are thrown with kegs of root beer.

“If this were a movie, there’d be happy endings, but life stories are not that neat.” With A Season on the Drink, Harris offers somber but loving reflections from this less-than-neat story, and there is no question of the tenderness at its center–“[Marty] just liked playing ball.”

Rating: 8 unusually fresh doughnuts.

Come back Monday for my interview with Harris.

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

The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards

Posted on August 4, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Six estranged friends and colleagues gather at a sumptuous dinner party to find themselves terrorized by old secrets in this gratifying tale of suspense and psychopaths.

The Wasp Trap is an absolutely thrilling, tautly plotted puzzle of a novel by Mark Edwards. This double-locked-room mystery, with all the tension that that implies, presents a cast of well-developed characters facing various hidden challenges.

The first timeline, introduced in the novel’s prologue, takes place in July 1999. A group of recent college graduates are gathered at a country estate outside London by a charismatic psychology professor to work around the clock on a dating website meant to achieve maximum dotcom-era profits. In truth, they also work at developing a test to identify psychopaths (their mentor’s first interest). The estate is well outfitted with “fruit-colored iMacs” and age-appropriate entertainment. For a few months, in these pleasant confines, the group becomes very close. “The lothario. The salesman. The affluent couple, the joker and the local girl. Finally, me, the wordsmith, whose role was to write it all down. If any of us were a psychopath, I already had a good idea who it would be.” The bulk of the novel is narrated by Will, an aspiring writer who often feels trapped on the outside, thwarted in his attempts to connect. He is well-suited to observe the character of his counterparts, but not unbiased.

Twenty-five years later, they gather again, to commemorate the death of their former employer. Two members of the original project have married–they are the only two to have kept in touch, after what seems to have been a rocky and abrupt ending. Now “the affluent couple” hosts their old friends for a lavish dinner party in their high-security Notting Hill townhouse. But immediately the evening shifts from awkward to nightmarish, part home invasion and part sinister game. The group is commanded to reveal a secret from the storied summer of ’99. Each dinner guest denies knowing what information is sought, but each, of course, does harbor secrets. The key to The Wasp Trap‘s deliciously frightening uncertainty lies in the pain and horror of not knowing whom, in a closed environment, one can trust. The once-tight-knit group fractures amid secret and not-so-secret sexual tensions, financial pressures, and old jealousies, especially with a suspected psychopath or two in their midst.

Offering twists and turns and surprises through his novel’s final pages, Edwards executes a highly satisfying thriller with this intriguing blend of terror and nostalgia for youth and freer, more hopeful times.

This review originally ran in the July 22, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cans of Pepsi.

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

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine

Posted on July 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

An especially wry, wise, comic style distinguishes this unforgettable tale of national trauma, community, familial love, and forgiveness.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a novel as expansive, funny, and poignant as its title promises. With his signature wit and irreverence, Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History; The Wrong End of the Telescope; An Unnecessary Woman) charts decades of Beiruti history and trauma through the life of his narrator, Raja, a reclusive, aging teacher of French philosophy.

The novel opens and closes in 2023, when Raja shares his apartment with his overbearing but deeply endearing mother, Zalfa. The bulk of its sections jump back in time: to the pre-civil-war 1960s, Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, the banking collapse and Covid-19 epidemic, and Raja’s ill-fated trip to the United States for an artists’ residency in Virginia. (He should have more fully recognized how suspicious the invitation was: he had written a book 25 years earlier, but “I’m not a writer, not really. I wrote a book, that was it. It was an accident.”) Writer or no, Raja is a knowing, purposeful narrator, teasing his reader with what is to come, defending his story’s chronological shifts: “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true. Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks….” Self-aware and self-deprecating, Raja names himself the Gullible, the Imbecile, the Neurotic Clown, the Dimwit. His mother is “Raja the Gullible’s Tormentor.” “Deciphering [her] was a feat that would have surely flummoxed Hercules–my mother as the unthinkably impossible thirteenth task.” They bicker constantly, foul-mouthed but fiercely loving.

In past timelines, the reader learns of Raja’s troubled childhood as a gay younger son, bullied by much of his family, especially Aunt Yasmine, “the wickedest witch of the Middle East.” During the civil war, in his teens, he is held captive for weeks by a schoolmate and soldier with whom he begins a sexual relationship that is part experimentation, part Stockholm syndrome. He describes his accidental path to teaching, 36 years of it; he refers to his students as his “brats,” but his care for them and, even more, theirs for him will become gradually apparent. Amid terrible events, like the port explosion of 2020, Raja’s mother befriends a neighborhood crime boss named Madame Taweel: “Only my mother would find a mentor at eighty-two, let alone the most inappropriate one.” Bawdy, rude, and impossibly sweet, with “a laugh so delightful, so impetuous, so luminous,” Raja’s mother is the indomitable star of this loving, heartwrenching novel.

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

Rating: 7 cans of tuna.

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

The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Posted on July 11, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Young gang members in 1979 Chicago take public transportation across the city on a single, important day in this shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic novel of big risks and dreams.

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Sacred Smokes; Sacred City) offers a love letter to the city of Chicago via a single-day odyssey in The El, an expansive novel featuring young gang members on a circular journey through an urban landscape. With strong imagery, dreamlike sequences, and gritty considerations of family, love, spicy potato chips, and gun violence, this unusual story will capture and hold the imagination.

On an August day in 1979, teenaged Teddy wakes up early, eats a few buttered tortillas, and gets ready for a momentous event. He will lead 18 fellow members of the Simon City Royals across town via Chicago’s elevated train (the El) to a meeting with another “set” of the gang and many others, where a new alliance formed in prison would be applied on the outside. The new Nation will include old enemies, but Teddy is a team player. It is a day of high stakes, and while they all share trepidations, not everyone shares Teddy’s hopeful outlook. “Jesus, Coyote, Al Capone… I was sure all of us prayed to them equally.”

Teddy narrates as he sets out with his best friend, Mikey. Then the perspective switches to Mikey’s. Teddy remains the protagonist and most common narrator, but a broad variety of players cycle through, providing different angles on the potential impacts of the Nation alliance as well on as the scenes themselves: a fire on an El platform, an attempted murder, various deaths, moments of beauty. Teddy’s Native identity matters because race is a question for the new Nation, spoken of but not exactly on the official agenda. Teddy can see a character he knows to be Coyote, “walnut brown and wiry, wearing a pair of mirrored Aviators,” who “tends to hum in and out of focus.” This character, or force, plays an important role in the day.

The El is utterly intriguing at every turn, shifting pace from high-drama action scenes to contemplative minutes and hours spent rocking in rhythm with public transit and the city itself. Van Alst portrays a strong sense of both time and place as his characters grapple with race, class, and culture in a very particular big city. The novel is about cusps: of the season, the turning of the decade, the gangs’ political shifts, the move away from “skins-only” violence and toward more guns, and comings of age. Van Alst gives us tragedy as well as beauty, and a sharp, loving portrait of a place, with Teddy “riding all the way back toward the neighborhood, window wide open, warm wind howling in, and me in love with everything we could ever be.”

This review originally ran in the June 24, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Jay’s Hot Stuff chips.

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

The Grand Paloma Resort by Cleyvis Natera

Posted on July 4, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Missing children and a category-five hurricane converge in desperate circumstances at an exclusive luxury resort in the Dominican Republic in this heart-wrenching novel.

The Grand Paloma Resort by Cleyvis Natera (Neruda on the Park) is a novel of race, class, secrets, and striving, set within a luxury resort staffed by struggling locals amid the natural beauty of the Dominican Republic.

Sisters Laura and Elena have only each other and the Grand Paloma Resort. Laura has been her sister’s caretaker since they were 14 and four years old, when their mother died. The Grand Paloma has been Laura’s career and lifeline. Through her work, she was able to send Elena to a global academy, meant to secure the younger woman’s future. But Elena persists, in Laura’s eyes, in slacking, taking Ecstasy and partying while working as a babysitter at the resort. In the novel’s opening pages, a young child in Elena’s care–from a family of great wealth and privilege–has been badly injured. It falls to Laura, yet again, to clean up: Elena must be protected from criminal charges, and the resort from bad press.

But this time, despite Laura’s experience in saving the day, a bad situation spirals. Elena thinks she sees a way out by accepting a large sum of money from a tourist in exchange for giving him access to two young local girls. Although she initially believes the girls won’t come to harm, the crisis worsens when the children go missing. All of that–with a frightened Elena and Laura at maximum stress and frustration–coincides with an approaching category-five hurricane. A larger cast of already marginalized resort employees are endangered in a ripple effect, and Laura’s career is at risk. Over the course of seven days, it becomes increasingly clear that these various lives will never be the same.

Natera deftly splices into this narrative the history of the Dominican Republic and the plight of Haitian workers. The Dominican Republic is a beautiful paradise beset by poverty and racial stratification, emphasized all the more when locals intersect with the extraordinary wealth and power of the Grand Paloma’s guests. One of those guests sees it as “a humanitarian crisis so large, so seemingly without end, that there was little to do but look the other way.” At the heart of the novel’s conflict is the question of what each character will do to survive.

With a propulsively paced plot and heart-racingly high stakes, The Grand Paloma Resort interrogates capitalism and exploitation through a community’s concern for two little girls. The result is exhilarating, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

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

Rating: 7 cocktails, obviously.

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

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Posted on June 27, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Trouble the Saints is bewitching, mesmerizing. It begins mid-scene, a move that is always risky but can have big rewards: the writer asks the reader to wade through a little confusion in favor of action and immediacy, trusting her to wrangle the context clues and have patience with the pace at which details and secrets unfold. It’s well done here. There are cards, and dreams, and magic hands – saints’ hands – and a violent backstory for a protagonist who is however strongly committed to her own concept of justice. The reader finds out as she does how she’s been betrayed – and by the one she loves the most.

Phyllis, or Pea or Sweet Pea to those she is close to, is a paid assassin for a Russian mobster in early 1940s New York City. She is known as Victor’s knife, or Victor’s angel – because she only agrees to kill when the victim deserves to die. She is also a ‘high yellow’ woman of color passing for white in a pretty high-stakes setting. Her years-ago lover, Dev, is a Hindu man guided by karma and reincarnation; he could not abide Pea’s work. His current partner is also one of Pea’s dearest friends, the singer/dancer/entertainment manager Tamara, who is Black enough to suffer the full weight of prejudice and discrimination when Pea can sometimes skirt it. So: violence, organized crime, race and racism and colorism, oh and Hitler’s on the rise, and also Pea’s immaculate skill with her knives is owing to her saints’ hands, which manifest in different ways for different individuals. Dev can sense threats with his. Tamara doesn’t have the hands, but she is an oracle: with her great-aunt’s cards she can read fortunes, or the future, or both – the rules are revealed slowly, to us as well as to these characters. There are others, with different backgrounds, skin tones, and degrees of magic or understanding. Danger and hauntings are everywhere, but there is also romance and the kind of connection that transcends that label.

Trouble the Saints is an astonishing book that keeps surprising, not least with its changes in perspective. These subjects range widely and never feel overambitious for the remarkable Alaya Dawn Johnson, who imbues even the gruesome with poetry. She’s a new name to me but one I’ll be looking for. It took me a day or two to recover, and I’m still thinking about love, friendship, and what we carry on with us. Whew.

Rating: 8 letters.

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »