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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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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rerun: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (audio)

Posted on December 27, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I know there have been a lot of these lately, friends; please bear with me, and know that I have a backlog of review still to come at the Shelf – I’m not slowly down, just having some funky timing. For whatever it might be worth, I do find it stimulating to revisit old standouts. Happy holidays! Year-in-review and best-of-the-year posts are coming!

Now, please enjoy this rave review from 2012.

Another long review – sorry – but one of the best books I’ve read this year, so consider sticking it out with me. Or, go to the very bottom for my two-sentence review. Many thanks.

Reviewing The Lacuna daunts me. How to capture the enormous world that is this book in a brief (readable) blog post? I have only read three other of her books* (liked The Bean Trees and Animal Dreams; not so much The Poisonwood Bible; all pre-blog, unfortunately) but from what I know, this is by far her best. (Her own website calls it her “most accomplished novel”). It is a Big Thing.

I shall take this one step at a time. Plot summary. A young boy named Harrison William Shepherd is born in 1916 to an American father, a bean-counter for the government in Washington, D.C., and a Mexican mother, Salomé. He spends his childhood mostly in Mexico, with a brief interlude at a military school in the US, and ends up working in his teens for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, first as Diego’s plaster mixer, then as a cook and secretary and Frida’s companion. When Lev Trotsky arrives as a political exile from Soviet Russia, he acts as secretary and cook to him, too, following Trotsky when he splits from the Riveras; he is at Trotsky’s side when he is assassinated. Shepherd (who goes by various names depending on who’s talking) never considers himself exactly an ideological follower of the communist cause, but his sympathies are naturally aligned with those of his famous employers, for whom he has great respect.

Following the assassination, he begins a new life in Asheville, North Carolina, becoming a famous author of novels set in ancient Mexico; but the trauma of Lev Trotsky’s bloody demise, Shepherd’s sexual orientation, and his extremely shy and self-effacing demeanor keep him isolated from an American world that feels foreign. He closely follows international politics through the second World War, the United States’ sudden reversal of regard for Stalin, and the Dies Committee (which contacted Trotsky when Shepherd was with him) becoming the House Unamerican Activities Committee – which eventually begins to investigate Shepherd himself. This turn of events shocks our protagonist, who sees himself as an insignificant and apolitical player, but whose new Jewish-New-Yorker lawyer is alarmed at the skeletons he hides in his closet: to the point, an association with the late Trotsky and the still-active Kahlo and Rivera. The Asheville era in Shepherd’s life yields new and likeable characters in the lawyer, Artie Gold, and Shepherd’s secretary-companion, Appalachian native Violet Brown. (I think Kingsolver had fun with these *colorful* names, ha.) The FBI’s investigation of Shepherd threatens to tear down the precariously balanced, agorophobic life that he has so carefully constructed in Asheville; and here I’ll stop. I liked the ending, despite its considerable sadness.

Violet Brown is an important part of the story in terms of format. The story is told almost entirely in Shepherd’s own voice. As presented, he wrote the first chapter of his memoir and then quit; this chapter opens the book, and then we get Mrs. Brown as “archivist” explaining the reversion to Shepherd’s journals starting at age 14. The rest of the book is pulled from these (fictional) journals, with interjections from our archivist here and there, as well as a number of newspaper and magazine articles (Kingsolver notes which are real articles at the beginning of the book for your reference; my impression without checking each one is that most are real) and assorted samples of Shepherd’s correspondence. It is a very interesting format, raising all kinds of questions about voice and the progression of voice. I wondered, upon that first shift from an already-published 30-year-old author’s writing to a 14-year-old’s journal, whether Kingsolver didn’t trust her audience to start off that way? But I ended up feeling that this shifting voice felt very real; I enjoyed it. Violet’s role in Shepherd’s life was ambiguous quite far into the story, which kept me wondering, in a good way.

Another aspect of format I must mention is the audio version I listened to – narrated by Kingsolver herself, and to great effect. I loved her work here; every character had a voice, an accent, a lilt, a manner of speaking, and these were important in a story peopled by Mexicans with various backgrounds, a cross-bordered Mexican-American confused about where he might belong, an Appalachian-hills woman who worked hard for her education, and a New York Jew. Shepherd’s speech cadence as performed by his creator was remarkable and memorable; it increased my enjoyment of this story. The only drawback to the audio format is that I am always driving, or washing dishes, or in the gym, etc., when I’m listening, and therefore failed to mark down for you any number of remarkable lines I would have liked to share.

I was completely drawn into Shepherd and his world. I found Frida Kahlo compelling, which I think is faithful to her real life. The Mexico Kingsolver paints is so real, so filled with sensory stimulation, and in some ways familiar – the foods I eat, the places I’ve visited – which I think always gets a positive reader reaction. And the linguistic nuance of a boy (and man) who speaks both his languages with an accent, who brings Spanish structures into English, was so authentic, I just ate it up. (Like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of my most favorite books ever.) And then the politics – the evocation of such a complex, rapidly changing, schizophrenic period in our history, through the Bolshevik Revolution, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, Hoovervilles, WWII, Roosevelt’s death, HUAC… it was so very dense. I was reminded of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (which is the more recent work), another novel set in real historical events that successfully evoked a vivid time and place; but The Lacuna built a bigger world, was more literary and flowery, and in my opinion was better (sorry, Stephen).

Part of this book’s fascination for me lay in its explanation of the hatred and fear of communism, Communism, and its various permutations and misunderstandings during an era before my birth. Kingsolver’s characters helped me work through some of my questions about this time and this perplexing, unreasonable fear; Shepherd shares my confusion, and the lawyer Artie Gold does a fair job of helping him think it through (as does Violet Brown, for that matter). Coming near on the heels of A Difficult Woman which I loved so much, and which raised so many questions for me, The Lacuna’s further exploration of the anticommunist era and my reading of it was very timely.

I’m sorry I’ve gone on so long; it’s only out of my enthusiasm for this dense and complex story that brought me so many emotions and questions. In a few words, The Lacuna is beautifully constructed and beautifully written, a story about artists and the power of art, about Frida Kahlo and Lev Trotsky and American anticommunism. I highly recommend it.

Rating: a rare 10 Mexican murals.

*I have since read Flight Behavior and gave it a 10 as well! I have not read Demon Copperhead and don’t believe I will, but yes, I’ve heard.

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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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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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rerun: The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

Posted on November 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From early in my career with Havel Kimmel: please enjoy this review from April of 2013.

Langston Braverman has recently returned to her hometown of Haddington, Indiana. Very close to receiving her PhD she walked out of her oral exams. She is a strange, exceptionally erudite but socially fragile and problematic young woman. She has a dog named Germane: “named not after Germaine Greer, but as in: Germane to this conversation.” (I love that.)

Amos Townsend is Haddington’s pastor, of only a year or two now. He is tormented by the death of a local named Alice; he feels that he should have been able to stop her death, and he is struggling with his faith, which is actually nothing new.

Alice’s two children are left in limbo; their crazy aunt Gail has turned out to be unfit, and their grandmother Beulah is clearly too near death herself to wrangle with two traumatized little girls. Upon Alice’s death, they dispose of their original names, Madeline and Eloise, and state that they are now called Immaculata and Epiphany. They wear costumes from a Renaissance drama from school, that their mother made, all the time. Complete with hats: the tall cone-shaped kind with ribbons streaming off the tops.

Langston’s mother AnnaLee picks up some of the slack, and then insists that Langston step up: she is not in school, not working, and these children need her. Of course, Amos plays a role as well, so that this village will truly raise a child.

Langston and Amos are the stars of this story (along with the striking Immaculata and Epiphany, of course). When they meet, they repel one another like magnets. Despite sharing tastes and interests in reading, philosophy, theology, and (I can’t stress this enough) their particular brands of weird, they repel. And, as is clearly a theme in Kimmel’s work, the cerebral content, the philosophies and theologies that shape this part of the story are complex and thoroughly explored. I think I said this in my last Kimmel review, but: her many references partly pique me to go off and study, and partly exhaust me, making me so glad I don’t have to read Whitehead and Tillich and Frithjof Schuon. It makes me sit back and… wonder… that all these strange, complex, learned thoughts that Langston has are thoughts that Kimmel had to have first, had to conceive to put them in her heroine’s mouth; think of that.

Immaculata and Epiphany see Mary (the Mother of God) in the dogwood tree in their grandmother Beulah’s backyard. Naturally, because that is the kind of world this is. It is very strange and is a kind of beautiful, and again I observe that Kimmel’s gift is to create a midwestern small-town world that is both hopelessly humdrum and depressing and everyday, and also strange and exalted and worthy of examination.

What happens to our exquisitely odd cast of characters should definitely remain a surprise to you, reader. It’s pretty great, though.

I love this author SO MUCH that I am struggling to write reviews; but I will keep reading her. Next up is The Used World, and I am, of course, working to get my hands on her best-known bestselling memoir, A Girl Named Zippy.

I’ll close, as I tend to with Kimmel, with a few lines from the book that particularly caught my eye. Where these have, in the past, been lovely examples of her use of language, these are more concepts that I really liked. There is a book theme here. And the language is great – observe the curry comb, is that an image or what – but it’s the concepts that I like most here:

Amos knew as well as anyone what went into writing a book, having written a master’s thesis, and he considered the process to be akin to having one’s nerves stripped with a curry comb.

Maybe he knows what goes into writing a book as well as anyone… who hasn’t written a book?

The most intractable aspect of his bachelorhood was that Amos was uncomfortable eating without reading; he felt as if he were wasting both time and food.

Me too, Amos. I’m right there with you.

Amos tapped his fingers on his bony knees. “Why do you have a book and I don’t?”

“Because I’m a woman, Amos.”

“Yes, but why do you have a book and I never do in a situation like this?”

AnnaLee put the book down. “I carry a bag. I also have safety pins and emergency money, and a package of those little wet towelettes. We live in Indiana. I could get stopped by a train, I could get bored. I always carry a book.” She went back to reading.

How perfect is that. “We live in Indiana, Amos!” Perhaps it goes without saying that I, too, try to keep a book with me at all times? I fail on safety pins and wet towelettes, though.

I’m sure I’ve failed to do this book justice. But it’s divine.

Rating: 9 ribbons on a hat.

Lovely. I should reread her sometime.

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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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Lines by Sung J. Woo

Posted on November 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: I was sent an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book came to me in an unusual way, and I just happened (entirely by accident, as far as I’m aware with my conscious brain!) to pick it up a few days before its publication date, and finished reading it on the very eve. So, happy birthday to this book just published on Tuesday (October 29, 2024). And a brilliant book it is: deeply beautiful, full of tragedy and pain but also awe and even bliss and the exaltation of quiet, daily acts of love and creation.

Lines contains two parallel stories. A prologue sets the hinging scene: early on a foggy Saturday morning in New York City, two locals walk in opposite directions near the entrance to Washington Square Park. Joshua Kozlov is forty years old, and not thrilled about his daily grind, nor his recent birthday. Abby Kim is twenty-nine, a working artist and a distance cyclist. They bump into each other, a full-on collision, ending in an unintended hug, laughter, coffee, and a lightning-quick rush to marry just two months later. Or, they walk past each other in the fog.

The rest of the novel follows both storylines, “Apart” and “Together,” in chapters that feature parallel events in the lives of two Abbys and two versions of the man called Josh or Joshua. Josh(ua) is an aspiring novelist in both lines, Abby always a painter with a passion for miniatures. They have the same friends and colleagues. They are recognizable but very different versions of themselves. In the first and greatest subversion of my expectations, the “Apart” narrative thread is not an absence of romance, a tragic missed-connection sort of story. Both Abby and Josh have found meaningful love, for one thing, with other partners. They have fulfilling lives in many ways. But they still find each other: searching for a birthday gift for his beloved wife, Josh is drawn to a hand-painted locket of Abby’s. He becomes a patron, and she becomes a muse, as he writes a series of flash fiction pieces based on miniature paintings of scenes from one of Abby’s solo European cycle-tours. They share a deep connection.

The title of Lines, I think, has several meanings. You could think of the two parallel stories as threads, or lines. Josh(ua) writes in lines, of course, and Abby draws with them. The concept implies connection, ties. Like much about the novel, its title is subtle, a whisper.

This book is definitely about possibilities, and multiplicities. What if there were another version of my life, my choices, my loves? It’s about art, inspiration, the balance between creative work for pay and for pure creative joy. It’s about the different kinds of love and commitment that exist in the world, about births and deaths. Neither version of this story is without pain, but there is wonder and sweetness even in the tragic moments. I’m not sure there is a final “right” place for either Abby or Josh(ua) to be, and that’s an artistic choice on Woo’s part that I respect deeply. Simple, clean-cut, black-and-white solutions are easier to write but feel less true.

My copy of Lines (an ARC, of course), came with a glossy, full-color insert featuring the 16 miniature paintings that star in the story – they are Abby’s, in the fictional version, and in real life are credited to Dina Brodsky. Josh tells Abby in the book (in their “Apart” line) that he’s working on a novel about their story, but will swap their ethnicities: he’ll make the female character Belarusian and the man, Korean. Sung J. Woo is Korean-American. Brodsky is a cyclist as well as a painter. This reader, at least, cannot help but be curious about the lines drawn between life and art! Brodsky’s paintings are indeed hypnotic, and I feel happily lost in the layers of ekphrasis: a novel about writing about painting… the images themselves, the writing by Josh, within the writing by Woo. I’m writing this review within minutes of finishing the book, and I’m sure I’m missing so much. But I also know I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

I feel so lucky to have this book come across my desk, and to have opened it almost eight months later, to finish it (quite by accident) on the eve of its publication – what are the chances? It’s nearly as magical as what’s inside.

Check it out. And thank you so much for reaching out, Sung.

Rating: 9 flights.

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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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