Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

Posted on July 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

With an atmosphere that is sexy, enchanting, and unsettling, Rumaan Alam’s expert fourth novel probes concepts of privilege, wealth, value, and morality.

Rumaan Alam (That Kind of Mother; Leave the World Behind) offers a slow-burning, insidiously creepy study of money and culture in his quietly distressing novel, Entitlement.

Native Manhattanite Brooke, at 33, feels hopeful about her new job at a charitable foundation, following nine unhappy years spent teaching at a charter school. “People heard the Bronx and thought lead paint, asthma, trucks, and whores at Hunts Point,” but it wasn’t funding that was the issue, exactly. She’s not professionally ambitious so much as she yearns for a little more than she has. The new job is initially just that–until she forms a special bond with the octogenarian billionaire, the famously self-made Asher Jaffee, whose money she disburses. Brooke embraces his advice to “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.” As she sinks into the sumptuous life Asher invites her into, Brooke becomes increasingly confident in the demands she makes of the world, sure that she is doing good and doing well. With Alam’s signature tone of building foreboding, however, the reader becomes less and less sure.

Money is at the heart of Entitlement: what money can and cannot buy; how to give away Asher’s; where Brooke can find more for herself. Her financial status is, if not perfectly secure, not uncomfortable (even if nothing like her dear friend Kim, whose trust fund runs to the unspecified millions). Meanwhile, race is a more understated part of her story. Brooke, a Black woman with a white mother and a white brother (she’s adopted), “spent most of her time with white people, who never discussed the allegiance of race, because they did not need to.” Moreover, “Brooke didn’t care to defend the fact that she felt more loyalty to an old white man than a Black woman her age.”

Her difficulties with priorities and identity are most apparent in conversations with a robust cast of family and friends, and with the woman whose humble but humming community dance school Brooke would like to fund: the older Black woman is self-assured, yet resists Brooke’s help in a way she doesn’t comprehend. “Brooke didn’t know how to phrase it. Would the money not make them happier? Wasn’t that how money worked?”

Entitlement explores the difference between “wants” and “needs” through Brooke’s contrast to the dance school proprietor, who insists she does not need Asher Jaffee’s money. Alam is ever adept and incisive with the subtle examination of interpersonal as well as systemic issues: race, class, ambition, avarice. Entitlement provides a deceptively silky backdrop for the kinds of thrillingly uncomfortable questions at which Alam excels.

This review originally ran in the July 11, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 heels.

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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 Twilight Garden by Sara Nisha Adams

Posted on July 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Reading List comes a pleasingly similar, sweet novel of unexpected connections. In a shared garden in London, two sets of neighbors in two timelines (2018-19 and the 1970s and 80s) navigate conflict, build community, share love and struggles, and grow flowers, food, and strong bonds. It’s an optimistic story, which I perhaps don’t get enough of in my life.

I’m thinking of both this and Adams’ first novel as sort of meet-cute, enemies-to-friends stories, with rom-com sweetness but where the relationships that form are not romantic. Rather, neighbors and community members come together, across diversity in age, gender, sexuality, and race, and form deep and meaningful friendships and built families, caring for each other in profound but not romantic ways. There are romances among the cast of characters, but not in the relationships whose trajectory defines the novel. I’m thinking of these as non-romantic love stories, a genre I’ve not thought about before but am trying to define here.

We first meet two neighbors in contemporary London. Winston is a young Indian immigrant who has lived in his rental home for some years with his partner, Lewis, although their relationship seems to be drawing to a close. He’s lonely, disconnected, and a bit depressed, although his work in a nearby convenience store offers a wholesome and healthy dose of community connection. “He was always chatting to customers in the shop, but when it came to the neighbors on his road, he barely knew faces, let alone names.”

Bernice has just moved in next door, newly divorced, with her ten-year-old son Seb. She is white, well-off, privileged, uptight. Because chapters alternate between their perspectives, the reader knows that each is suffering their own private pains, but to one another, Winston and Bernice are each the nightmare neighbor. Their conflict centers around a shared garden, which Winston has treated as a private sanctuary and Bernice views as a death trap for her son. This garden, now in disrepair, transports readers back to the earlier timeline and two additional protagonists.

Maya first moved in (to what is now Winston’s home) with her husband Prem when they were newly arrived from India. They were soon joined by a daughter, Hiral. Next door (in what is now Bernice and Seb’s home) an older woman named Alma lived in the house she’d been raised in. Initially prickly, and permanently ornery, Alma becomes a dear friend to Maya’s family, a relationship that began in the garden. Alma is a very serious gardener and a bit of a control freak, but Maya encourages her to accept help from their community, and they wind up very much a neighborhood hub for food, fellowship, work, mutual support. In Winston and Bernice’s time, mysterious missives inspire the feuding neighbors to attempt reawakening the rich shared garden of years past, and the bonds of community come, slowly, along with it.

This story is deeply sweet, perhaps approaching what my mother would call ‘precious,’ but never getting there. There are no bad guys, although there are some bad behaviors; instead, these are humans who suffer and sometimes handle it poorly, but feel badly about it and try harder next time. The loves (familial, friendly, and romantic) are real and deep. I cried several times. It felt wholesome and good. There is tremendous diversity here in several senses, and closeness is possible across all those lines when humans reach out and make efforts, or when there is real need. It’s a lovely, hopeful version of the world, and I’m here for more of it.

Rating: 9 banana leaves.

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Maximum Shelf: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Posted on June 10, 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 May 8, 2024.

Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room) envelops her readers in an absorbing tale of espionage, philosophy, intrigue, and chaos with her noir fourth novel, Creation Lake.

An unnamed narrator opens these pages with extended quotations from the e-mails of a man named Bruno Lacombe, which she is reading without his knowledge. Bruno’s ideas will form an important thread throughout the novel, although he never appears in the flesh; the epistolary sections offer a perspective on events, a worldview, in juxtaposition to the narrator’s. She begins by reading his e-mails as part of her job, but their meaning will shift. And Bruno’s corporeal absence allows for some question as to his true form.

This narrator, presently using the alias Sadie Smith, is an American woman living in France. A former FBI spy, she was fired after a case she worked as an undercover agent did not bring the trial result the agency desired. Now she performs similar work for shadowy private interests: she takes on a character and infiltrates a group, instigating as well as observing its actions. In the Guyenne region of France, she is to penetrate an organization of anarchist environmental and anti-civilization activists called Le Moulin and learn of their involvement in a recent act of sabotage. The assignment to observe and investigate becomes an assignment to provoke further action, and she may yet be asked for more.

Creation Lake has layers. It is partly a spy novel. “Sadie” gains entry to the Moulinards through her fiancé, Lucien, a wealthy, privileged young man she easily seduced and moved in with following a carefully planned “cold bump” that Lucien thinks was an accidental encounter. She moves through the community she’s been assigned to, playing one character off the other, with readers privy to her inner commentary about both the assigned mission and the personalities of her new acquaintances. Along with her sexual relationship with Lucien (enacted with carefully concealed distaste), she carries on another affair that is more pleasurable but no more honest. She can be funny, cutting, and disarmingly self-critical. Despite holding all the cards–at least in her own view–“Sadie” is not precisely a highly organized personality.

Creation Lake is also in part an exploration of philosophies, as Bruno preaches the virtues and qualities of the Neanderthal and other early relatives and forebears of Homo sapiens. An enigmatic figure, he lives in a cave and extols the virtues of primitivism by e-mail. Kushner’s not-necessarily-reliable narrator brings a certain amount of mystery herself: amoral, even nihilistic, she seemingly cares not a bit about the principles at question in her work, but only about her paycheck and a few simple pleasures. Unmoored by the FBI, she has no leader or cause to follow, barely pausing at collateral violence. Importantly, her role with the Moulinards is that of a sympathetic outsider hired to translate their writings. Rather than a true convert, she is able to ask questions, showing curiosity and a friendly skepticism. This allows her to fully explore the Moulinards’ beliefs, although she is unimpressed by their devotion to principle.

None of these characters is heroic or even especially virtuous; the narrator points out the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of the activists. “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic.’ It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” On the other hand, she may find herself more susceptible to the philosophies of the unseen Bruno than she was equipped for. Bruno apparently writes these e-mails for one audience–the Moulinards–but they will perhaps have their greatest effect on the audience he is apparently unaware of.

With punchy short chapters and bursts of action, the plot builds tension to a boiling point while resisting any convention or formula of the spy novel genre, which it reinvents as much as it inhabits. Kushner’s pacing is inexorable, ratcheting up tensions to propel readers to a surprising ending. Spare, even stark, Creation Lake considers the past and the future of humankind without sentiment, letting the narrator’s unblinking observations stand alone. She is hardworking and apathetic, drinking a bit too much and going through the motions of a job that she has no particularly strong feelings about.

If Kushner’s expansive plot considers no less than the very origin and fate of humanity, “Sadie” considers only her next destination. As focused as she can be on the job at hand, her approach to life is profoundly blurred. Gritty and hard-edged, this is a novel of both cynicism and belief, with a mysterious narrator at its center, adrift but anchoring its plot. There is something dark at work throughout, but Kushner keeps a sense of fun, pleasure, and unexpected humor as well. “Deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.” Taut and propulsive, Creation Lake leaves its readers with plenty to think about once its pages close.

Rating: 7 cans of warm beer.

Come back Friday for my interview with Kushner.

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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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Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Posted on May 10, 2024 by pagesofjulia

On the boundary of Maine’s Penobscot reservation, a solitary man wrestles with questions of truth, family history, and what is owed to the next generation.

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty (Night of the Living Rez) centers on one man navigating issues of family: the death of his father figure, his mother’s lifelong and worsening health conditions, the daughter he knows only from afar and who doesn’t know who he is. In hardscrabble circumstances, surrounded by poverty, alcoholism, and family violence, he wishes to give his daughter a meaningful gift: the truth. Stark and tender, Talty’s debut novel compassionately addresses tough choices in matters of family and love.

Charles Lamosway has grown up on the Penobscot reservation in Maine, but does not have Native American blood. Although very close to his Native stepfather, Frederick, whom he generally refers to as father, his biological parentage meant he had to move off the reservation when he came of age. Frederick purchased land and helped to build the house where Charles lives now, just across the river. Largely isolated with few friends, Charles watches from his porch the family on the other side: Mary, Roger, and their daughter, Elizabeth. Charles is Elizabeth’s biological father, a secret he has kept at Mary’s request. But as he ages, and as his mother Louise’s health worsens, he feels increasingly that Elizabeth, now an adult, must know the truth.

Charles insists, “Maybe her body and mind know something is missing.” This urge becomes a fixation, a bodily need. Elizabeth faces medical problems, and he is convinced she needs the truth–including Louise’s medical history–to survive: “I felt she should know her body was special, and she should know its history, especially the one it would not tell her and the one she could not see. And I decided to tell what I knew, because she deserved to know it.” But it is just possible that what Charles sees as necessary will have an entirely different outcome from what he intends.

Fire Exit is concerned with bodies, with visceral needs not only for food and shelter but for truth. Louise’s failing body and mind are wrapped up with unresolved questions about Frederick’s death. Talty’s tersely poetic, descriptive prose grounds this story in the physical: “Between the river’s flow and the summer breeze rippling hard-to-see leaves and the sound my scraping shoe made on the porch, I heard night silence. I heard the workings of my inner body, the pump of my heart and the expanding of my lungs.” In Maine’s harsh winters, Talty’s characters face elemental as well as human dangers.

This first novel grapples with family issues and hard choices about love and responsibility; blood, culture, and belonging. It is an utterly absorbing story, always firmly rooted in the corporeal; tough, honest, but not bitter.

This review originally ran in the March 28, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 loads of laundry.

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Nothing’s Ever the Same by Cyn Vargas

Posted on April 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

With a remarkably true-to-life adolescent narrator, this novella charts the large and small traumas that accompany a girl’s coming of age.

Cyn Vargas’s Nothing’s Ever the Same is a starkly honest coming-of-age story told in the disarming voice of its 13-year-old protagonist. Simple but moving, this novella documents events that are traumatic but not unusual, thus marking the kinds of pain that are heartrending, as well as common, for a child approaching young adulthood.

“The first time I saw my mom cry was after my dad’s heart attack,” Itzel begins in the opening chapter, “Angioplasty and Piñatas.” The heart attack comes during preparation for her 13th birthday party. After a brief hospital stay, he comes home and improves quickly. But this event, coming at an important symbolic point in Itzel’s adolescence, is the first of a number of upheavals, as Vargas’s title suggests.

Itzel’s beloved father recovers from his heart attack, but something feels off. “Dad was different, like moving the lamp… the light and shadows hit in a different way that made all that I was used to seem a little strange.” The family suffers one loss and then another. Itzel explores new feelings for her best friend. And then she sees something that will change the course of life for her entire family. “I shut my eyes tight to make it go away like erasing the wrong answer on a test, but I still saw… the wrong answer etched into the paper though the lead was brushed away.” What to do with her new knowledge? Who to blame? As the known routine is uprooted for Itzel and her parents, she has to navigate redefining relationships. While the circumstances of these changes for Itzel are specific and acute, her experience reflects universal elements of being a teenager: disappointment, betrayal, discovery, acceptance, and always, unavoidably, change.

Vargas (On the Way) gives Itzel a straightforward storytelling voice, often naïve but also sharp-eyed. She is clever, thoughtful, and quick to question what she or others have done wrong to bring pain and difficulty to her family. Her father, mother, Tia Amelia, and best friend Fred are characters sketched only briefly in Itzel’s telling, but each has personality and redeeming qualities even when making mistakes. The author behind the narrator commands this story with a quiet compassion. Nothing’s Ever the Same is a work of restraint and understatement, its young narrator capable of stoic relating of events as well as emotional reaction. The effect is deeply moving.

This review originally ran in the March 14, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cups of orange soda.

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The Witches of Bellinas by J. Nicole Jones

Posted on April 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this atmospheric and suspenseful novel, an exclusive coastal California community is either the best thing to ever happen to an unhappy newlywed, as her husband believes, or a frightening trap.

J. Nicole Jones’s The Witches of Bellinas sets a newlywed couple in a vibrant small community–a lovely wealthy commune, or a cult?–and watches the fallout, in an atmospheric, suspenseful experiment involving witchcraft, love, and dividing loyalties.

Tansy and Guy have been married mere months, although they’ve been together for a decade, when they move from New York City to the hamlet of Bellinas on the coast of northern California. Wealthy, health-oriented, idyllic, and highly exclusive, Bellinas is led by the charismatic Manny, or Father M to his followers, a business mogul turned self-styled guru, and his wife, Mia, a former model. Guy falls easily and head-over-heels into the lush, indulgent lifestyle: surfing, diving for abalone, carousing. Tansy, expected like all the wives to serve her husband’s whims, finds Bellinas a bit suspicious. But the town’s high shine, like its perfect weather, is hard to resist. She so wants things to work out with Guy: “I let the happiness I felt in that moment of renewed closeness grow taller than the forest of disappointments we had collected in the course of years together.” So she goes along. “Everything would be fine. How could it be otherwise? Bellinas was so perfect-looking.”

The Witches of Bellinas is narrated by Tansy in hindsight, from an apparent confinement in the town schoolhouse, after something has gone awry. With her academic background in the classics (a vocation sacrificed for Guy), she flavors her conversations and her narrative with literary references that increase her story’s sense of deep foreboding, frequently comparing herself to Cassandra. The reader must wait, however, to discover the precise nature of the trouble in paradise. Is the creeping dread about the neighboring forest fires? The ocean’s force? The local blend of calming tea? Are the powers at work in Bellinas magical or cult leadership at work?

Jones (Low Country) gives Tansy a strong sense of the wrongs done women at the hands of men, from both her scholarly work and her experience. “The plans of women have been called plots, schemes, murder, but if we do not claim the future as our bodies are claimed by men, then both are gobbled up by husbands and historians.” She writes, it seems, for her life. “Do not discount the truth of the old wives’ tales…. What is this history if not a wife’s tale? A truth revealed by unlikelihoods does not make it less true.”

At the intersection of the supernatural and simple human ugliness, The Witches of Bellinas gives its readers chills and thrills along with a profound sense of wrongs done, but no heroes or villains. This is a novel for anyone who’s wondered if the picturesque might be too good to be true.

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

Rating: 6 crackers.

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Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy

Posted on April 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A friendship between a widow and a mouse brings outward ripples of positivity in this surprising, compassionate comfort read.

Simon Van Booy’s Sipsworth is a delightfully funny, poignant, surprising novel about an octogenarian widow who has all but given up when she finds an unusual reason to reinvest in life. The story takes place over two weeks, in private spaces, and features events that on the surface appear small in scale, but have far-ranging consequences and meaning for its human and nonhuman protagonists, with whom readers cannot help but fall in love.

Helen Cartwright had lived abroad for six decades when she returned to the English village in which she was born and raised. Her beloved husband and cherished son have both died, and she now lives alone, sad, reclusive, in a pensioner’s cottage. “Life for her was finished. She knew that and had accepted it. Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle–as though even for death there is a queue.”

“Then early one morning, something happens.” Helen brings in a neighbor’s rubbish, to go through it on her own time; something reminded her of her son. She has inadvertently also brought in a tenant: a mouse, which initially repulses her. On an inexplicable impulse, she begins to feed it, to keep it safe, and her choice to care for something beyond herself will lead her to leave the house, to interact with people (librarian, hardware storekeeper), and to the terrible realization that if she dies now, the mouse will starve in the enclosure she has designed. “For the first time in many years, against her better judgment,” Helen is “not dying.” Unexpectedly, the accidental company of the mouse she calls Sipsworth forces Helen to rediscover the world and a reason to live.

Helen begins by caring for Sipsworth in material ways (food, water, shelter) but winds up caring in broader ways. She talks to him, in remarkably confessional terms. They learn to trust one another. But it is not until a true emergency that the lessons of “a lost wish… granted” become clear. And it is only late in the book that a vital truth of Helen’s own life is revealed.

Van Booy (Father’s Day; The Presence of Absence; The Sadness of Beautiful Things) tells Helen’s story in unadorned prose that however frequently offers lovely images and metaphor. Sipsworth features unassuming, deeply likable characters in an essentially quiet, simple tale. Sweet but not saccharine, tender, loving, and funny, this story of unlikely friendship and late-life new beginnings will charm any reader who has ever loved or lost.

This review originally ran in the February 29, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 unsalted cashews.

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A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest by Charlie J. Stephens

Posted on March 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In a town beset by poverty and violence, an unusual child turns to the natural world for comfort in this novel of suffering and tenderness.

A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest is a heart-wrenching first novel by Charlie J. Stephens that incorporates moments of beauty in a traumatizing coming-of-age tale. In the 1980s, eight-year-old Smokey Washington lives with their mother in Moss River, Oregon, a small town beset by poverty, violence, and a shortage of options for improving one’s lot, but surrounded by vibrant natural life. As Smokey’s situation worsens, they turn increasingly toward that outside world, seeking solace in dirt, deer, and trees. The tragedies that befall Smokey and their family and neighbors will disturb even jaded and strong-stomached readers, but notes of stark truth and tenderness filter through. A will to live pervades these pages from beginning to end.

Moss River is inundated with violence against women and children, from the opening scene (“Stop TJ, you’re hurting me”) through a PBS special about the death of a mother gazelle (“It’s just the rules of nature”), and throughout Smokey’s childhood. Smokey’s mom dates a series of men who hurt her and hurt Smokey, a child who engages with animals and the outdoors more than with people, and who doesn’t fall into a gender binary. With a friend, Smokey wonders, at the sound of a gunshot, “which of the men we know might have shot the gun and who he might have shot. We worried about our moms with their bruises and their need….”

Stephens gives the child narrator a wise, inquisitive voice that feels perfectly suited to Smokey’s age and distinctive personality. Through Smokey’s point of view, readers follow an increasingly grim story, dreading the multiplying wounds that begin to feel inevitable. While Mom tries to care for Smokey, she cannot always protect them; nevertheless, she is a woman with moments of startling, defiant strength.

Smokey’s descriptions and perspective are insightful, often surprising, and lovely. Mom drinks steaming coffee and smokes Lucky Strikes; Smokey wonders if “evaporating the things she loves is her most practiced spell.” Smokey sees her as a crow in her black jacket; for themself, they hope to grow up and become a deer. In a world with few apparent escape routes, the woods hold great appeal. “I want to spend more time low to the ground…. I want my animal body. I want to get it back.”

A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest offers a harrowing and wholly realistic story of suffering, but also a message about resiliency, the healing power of nature, and simple survival. “Being alive can sometimes feel like a miracle, even as you let it go.” Stephens’s debut will shock its readers with love, pain, and fresh perspective.

This review originally ran in the February 2, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 darting eyes.

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