Maximum Shelf: Swift River by Essie Chambers

Posted on February 19, 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 January 24, 2024.

Swift River tackles an impressively broad range of issues, including race, class, and body image, within the coming-of-age of Diamond Newberry. Essie Chambers’s first novel, building upon her work in film and television (Descendant, 2022), is set in the decaying New England mill town of Swift River, with meditations on place and the effect of a hometown upon generations of lives. Sixteen-year-old Diamond narrates: “This isn’t a mystery or a legend. It’s a story about leaving. It starts with my body. My body is a map of the world.” Her voice is strong, clear, and confident, interspersed with flashbacks to Diamond’s life at age nine, when her father disappeared. These two timelines are eventually joined by letters from a previously unknown aunt and great-aunt, so that the voices of three women over decades triangulate a story of longing, family connections, and growing into oneself.

“Picture my Pop’s sneakers: worn out and mud-caked from gardening, neatly positioned on the riverbank where the grass meets the sand.” This indelible image, published in the newspaper, haunts Diamond as she mourns her lost father. He was the lone man of color in Swift River. “Pop is the only other brown I know. No one else in town has dark skin like ours, not even Ma, which is what makes our family different.”

Years after the sneakers on the riverbank, in the summer of 1987, Diamond’s Ma, of “pure Irish stock,” is unemployed and dependent on pain pills after a traumatic car accident. Mother and daughter live in extreme poverty, and Diamond has dealt with her grief by eating. Diamond and Ma, like many mothers and daughters, have a complex, push-and-pull relationship, mutually dependent and melding love and disdain. By class, by race, by Diamond’s weight–their household is defined by difference. Ma has a plan to finally get a death certificate for the missing Pop (now that the requisite seven years have passed) and collect his insurance. Diamond, at 16, has forged Ma’s signature and signed herself up for driver’s education classes. She seeks escape. Out of the blue, a letter from an Aunt Lena in Woodville, Georgia, disrupts Diamond’s sense of herself and her heritage, and establishes her first link to any family since her beloved Pop disappeared.

As Diamond and Lena exchange letters, a new version of Swift River unfolds. Diamond learns about the past: “Time is folded in half. Black people live here, they call this town home. They are millworkers and cobblers, carpenters and servants. A ‘Negro’ church sits next to a ‘Negro’ schoolhouse; the mill bell carves up their days… clotheslines stretch across yards like flags marking a Black land… In one night, they’re gone. Those were my people.” Aunt Lena also sends Diamond older, preserved letters from Lena’s Aunt Clara, so that three versions of Swift River emerge through the years. Race is at the heart of their stories, an issue Diamond has had little context for until now. As she grows into herself, and rebels against Ma–including learning to drive, a literalization of her need for movement and self-determination–she finds new family and a new version of the world she thought she knew.

Swift River is an ambitious novel. Diamond and Ma struggle with small-town ostracization and class. The history of Swift River, with its firm racial lines and exodus on the night the Black former residents called “The Leaving,” as well as Pop and Diamond’s personal experiences, offers access to a larger history of race in America. Diamond’s choices about her own body, including food, track her sense of agency and self. The gravity of the novel’s themes is leavened by Diamond’s strengths: she is smart, sings beautifully, and takes initiative in her own life against all odds. At driver’s ed, she makes a new friend, Shelly, a hard-edged girl with problems and hopes of her own. Between the many hardships, Chambers imbues the story with warm compassion, gentle humor, and a care and respect for relationships between women: Diamond and Ma, Diamond and Aunt Lena, Clara and her sister Sweetie. “Who is a person without their people?” Other than the significant absence of one man, this is a story about women.

Chambers’s choice of the epistolary format is inspired, as Lena’s and Clara’s voices emphasize the importance of relationships and connection. Their perspectives on Swift River strengthen the significance of place and displacement. Lena writes to Diamond, “Your hometown makes you and breaks you and makes you again. Daddy said that to me. I wonder if that’s how you’ll feel about Swift River if you ever leave it?” The question of whether to stay or to go is at Swift River‘s heart, as Diamond told readers early on: “It’s a story about leaving.”

Featuring strong characters and a strong sense of place, amid numerous social issues and personal challenges, Chambers’s first novel will appeal to a wide audience and stick with its readers long past its stirring final pages.

Rating: 7 newspapers.

Come back Friday for my interview with Chambers.

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

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

Posted on January 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Alongside her coming-of-age, a teenaged girl must wrestle with when it is appropriate to influence the past and the future in this remarkably imaginative debut.

Scott Alexander Howard’s first novel, The Other Valley, is a lyrical, thought-provoking coming-of-age story that probes the question of self-determination.

“That fall I was sixteen and the course of my life was ready to be determined. My class had reached the apprenticeship level,” at which young people choose a professional path. Odile’s mother has always intended that she try for a conseiller’s post, which is ambitious for a kid from the village’s north end, let alone one as socially outcast as Odile, but she dutifully tries.

Odile lives in a village in a valley bookended by villages in valleys identical to hers, with an important difference: to the east lies her village 20 years in the future. To the west, 20 years in the past. The Conseil governs the rare and tightly controlled visits from one valley to another. Coinciding with her bid for a conseiller position, Odile witnesses a visitor from the east. From what she has seen, she understands what is to come, and has the opportunity to influence events–but the Conseil teaches that she must not. Intervention, it is well understood, leads to catastrophe. “A person… interferes, and then new time rolls over him like a wave, leaving nothing behind. It’s as simple and ruthless as that.”

At the same time, Odile suddenly finds herself part of a group of friends for the first time: a fivesome of boys and girls her age, all struggling with choices about their future lives, including budding romance. She develops concurrent loyalties to the Conseil and to her friends, and these quickly clash. The nature of the valleys implies preordination, but her actions are her own. What if she could save a life? What if she had to sacrifice her own?

Howard’s style is quietly lovely, drawing attention to the starkness of a harsh landscape, a culture with little tolerance for difference, Odile’s loneliness, and her emotional range. “What I felt was a kind of thrilling sadness, something I have since experienced when looking out over other open spaces and lonely boundaries: an emotion that lives on the desolate edge of the known.” Indeed, landscape vistas offer rich commentary on the themes at play in The Other Valley: what may be seen and what is obscured, who is allowed to look. “All I saw were future griefs.” The novel’s tone is somber, but there is hope in the way Odile’s story pushes against the concept of predestination in favor of free will.

The premise is strikingly unusual and provocative; the climax, after a long, subtle build, is electrifying. With beautiful prose, a compelling protagonist, and serious fodder for thought, The Other Valley is a remarkable debut.

This review originally ran in the December 8, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 peach trees.

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

Ilium by Lea Carpenter

Posted on December 22, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A lonely young woman falls in love and finds herself at the center of a spy mission in this mesmerizing, moving story about different kinds of seduction.

Lea Carpenter’s third novel, Ilium, is a spy story, a romance, a coming-of-age record, and a tale of lost innocence told in an elegiac tone, with something for every reader to get lost in. Its opening chapter introduces a young woman boarding a bus in Central London, watched by a man from “a world far away.” The rest is told from the point of view of the young woman. “There was a private garden near the house where my mother worked,” she begins, describing a childhood of unfulfilled desires. She has grown up dreaming of this locked garden, of having access to exalted spaces, of being someone she is not. “What the garden taught me was that the allocation of keys in life isn’t fair, that luck and happiness are not prone to reason or will.” At age 20, she meets the garden’s new owner, a man 33 years her senior, successful, charismatic, entirely independent, who sweeps her off her feet; they are soon married in Mallorca, and then he asks her for a favor. “All you have to do is listen,” he says.

Carpenter’s narrator (who remains unnamed, a nod to the clean absence of self that is part of what makes her attractive to her new handlers) is coached in her role. She is flown by helicopter to a lavish, elaborately casual estate on the French coast, where she is installed as the guest of a wealthy family at leisure. She poses as an aspiring art dealer; the fine art world does not serve as backdrop to a major plot point, but does provide some lovely details: “The oligarchs’ relationship to Russia’s various intelligence agencies is like the color blocks in a Rothko, a carefully calibrated blur.” The mysterious and charming patriarch of her host family, Edouard, prizes his commissioned series of paintings based on Homer’s Iliad, another of the plot’s minor but rich threads. “You never want an operation to be personal but so many are, ask Achilles.” The young narrator, now a spy, starts off almost laughably naïve, but her observations along the way, related in hindsight, are astute. The qualities that make her valuable to her shadowy new employer–loneliness, emptiness, openness, optimism, a tendency to romance–make her vulnerable to finding friendship where perhaps she should see danger.

Carpenter (Eleven Days; Red, White, Blue) assigns her narrator a winsome voice: innocence wearied by experience, but always clever, and sympathetic to all the players in a complex operation begun long before her birth. Ilium is an espionage thriller in its richly wrought and detailed plot; but its spotlight falls centrally on the narrator herself, whose yearning for a role to play earns her a bigger one than she could have imagined. The dreamy tone of this sparkling, riveting story sets up a memorable counterpoint to its intrigue.

This review originally ran in the November 9, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 color blocks.

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

Maximum Shelf: Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon

Posted on December 8, 2023 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 28, 2023.

Rachel Lyon’s second novel, Fruit of the Dead, is a lushly detailed, mesmerizing retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, set in modern times. This version retains original themes and subject matter, including power struggles, sexual assault, and cycles of growth and decay, while adding fresh commentary on addiction, class dynamics, and late-stage capitalism. Readers absolutely do not need familiarity with the myth to enjoy the novel, but such familiarity will be amply rewarded by Lyon’s subtle, clever references. The result is smart, disturbing, rich with opulent detail, and harrowing (there are several scenes of sexual assault).

The figure of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, appears as Emer Ansel, who runs an agricultural NGO. “We design, provide the seeds, outsource growth to farmers, and export to the hungry in Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, etcetera.” She is a woman of lofty principles but has sunk perhaps too comfortably into her professional role; a colleague accuses her of wearing “white savior drag.” Demeter had a beautiful daughter named Persephone, fathered by Zeus (god of the sky, king of the gods); Emer is single mother to Cory, who’s just turned 18, a wayward teen who has been accepted to zero colleges. Mother and daughter are at serious odds.

To escape the Manhattan apartment they share and forestall an uncertain future, Cory takes a job at her long-beloved summer camp, River Rocks. At a vulnerable moment (among other things, she is high), while caring for Spenser Picazo, a sensitive boy she’s befriended who’s also the summer’s youngest camper, she first encounters Spenser’s father. Rolo Picazo–the reimagined character of Hades, god of the underworld–is a self-made, superstar executive of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. He has made his significant fortune on painkillers and now faces congressional hearings for his role in a pattern of destructive addictions.

Cory finds Rolo compelling, intimidating, by turns magnetic and repulsive. He is a massive man with a forceful personality. “His gaze is hard and hungry. It could consume her, she thinks, if she let it.” She finds herself spirited away in “a licorice melt of a Cabriolet,” accompanied by seven-year-old Spenser and his younger sister, Fern, figuring, “what killer would bring his kids along for the ride?” Rolo has her sign an NDA and transports her to a private island with no cell or wifi service, to serve as new nanny to his two young children. Cory is isolated, insecure. Rolo offers a lavish, seductive lifestyle, and literal intoxication. Emer descends into a wild panic over the disappearance of her barely-of-legal-age daughter, as Cory descends into the pleasurable fuzz of the ruby-colored pills Rolo provides.

Among Fruit of the Dead‘s themes is the specter of hazards faced by women and girls. Banishing frightening thoughts, Cory reminds herself dismissively, “occasional visits by violence are part of the cost of growing up female.” Rolo acts as if anything he desires is his for the taking: by charisma, by money, by force. His threat is looming and omnipresent, beyond its embodiment in one character. While these power struggles are central, Lyon excels at creating complex characters: Spenser and Fern are especially charming, well-rounded children.

In one of Lyon’s inspired storytelling choices, chapters alternate between the perspectives of Cory (in close third person) and Emer (first person), so that readers see Cory receive a text from her mother that she interprets as malicious, and later watch Emer send it with hopes of loving inspiration. These quietly tragic misunderstandings abound. Cory has moments of clarity, with misgivings about her disappearance into Rolo’s empire of painkillers and dissipation, but she loves her young charges. She mostly thinks her mom is a jerk, and what did Cory have going on, anyway? Emer quickly spirals, beset by calamities at work even as she searches for Cory. “How long have I spent hunting her down, daughter of evasion, daughter of evaporation, daughter of god help me.” The “daughter of” refrains lend this retelling an appropriately mythic tone. “Daughter of goofing, daughter of grief,…” “daughter of splendor, daughter of heartbreak, daughter of elusion,…” “daughter of warmth, daughter of sweetness, daughter of mine.” And “daughter of unwelcome surprises.”

Lyon (Self-Portrait with Boy) expertly leads readers to sympathize with both mother and daughter, even as their perspectives differ. This push/pull echoes the Greek myth’s focus on seasonal cycles: Persephone’s return to Demeter heralds springtime, her inevitable return to the underworld forcing growth to start over again. The best efforts of the protective mother can only delay the child’s foray into danger; every reawakening continues the struggle. Fruit of the Dead offers hope, but always with a seed of foreboding.

This compulsively enthralling novel recasts an ancient myth in familiar times to great effect. Disquieting, propulsive, wise, and frightening, Lyon’s imaginative second novel is hard to put down and harder to forget.

Rating: 8 succulents.

Come back Monday for my interview with Lyon.

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

The Diver by Samsun Knight

Posted on October 20, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This novel of existential questions features a grieving, perhaps unhinged widow and the paralegal hired to investigate her, who team up in increasingly bizarre efforts to reconcile their lives.

Samsun Knight’s first novel, The Diver, opens with a brief, dramatic scene: “A scuba diver is on a deepwater dive with her husband, one hundred thirty feet below.” They are exploring a shipwreck from the 1800s when their oxygen tank pressure gauges fail. The diver survives, and her husband does not.

Knight presents this brief section in a third-person perspective that provides details of the dive; the rest of the novel features the first-person voice of a young man named Peter. Peter works as a paralegal at an ethically questionable law firm that specializes in intimidation services on behalf of wealthy clients; the diver’s sister-in-law hires them. In this way Peter comes into contact with Marta, the widowed diver. He wants to help her, and he may love her. He also has his own baggage and history of loss, a “sinkhole of family.” Peter’s plot line is a series of mishaps and grotesque, often darkly comic episodes; readers are privy to his first-person narration and can understand his messy life. Marta’s more enigmatic story is, likewise, filled with grim absurdity. The Diver is further peopled with unfeeling art-school classmates, a mother on the verge of breakdown, a profoundly disturbing fortune-teller, and two goons who share a first name. Knight combines psychological suspense with outrageous catastrophes and a bit of a ghost story.

Knight follows Marta by following Peter; she is the novel’s ostensible protagonist, but it is Peter’s minutiae on display. The two characters are drawn together by their misery and their openness to possibility. They speak in disjointed sentences but, Peter thinks, mostly understand one another: “That sense of broken compartments, of trying and failing to fit Marta’s actions into the boxes I’d established for her, had graduated into a full collapse of anxiety.” The price of their odd alliance, however, may be higher than either one realizes.

The story plays with format and includes interspersed snippets of interview transcripts, tarot cards, diagrams, an art-mag essay about Freud’s concept of unheimlich, and more. The overall result is a little off-kilter and occasionally grisly. (Some readers will struggle with scenes involving animal cruelty.) As an examination of the dark sides of relationships, it is disturbing and always imaginative. Marta, for one, resorts to increasingly weird experiments with the occult in her quest to bring her husband back.

How far would a person go for love, grief, hope, or fear? This disquieting novel pushes these questions beyond expected boundaries in its inquiry into terrible, life-changing wrongs. Dealing in mysticism, love, anguish, and unpardonable crimes, The Diver is not a novel for the faint of heart, but it is rewarding in its surprises.

This review originally ran in the September 28, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 bunnies.

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

Search History by Amy Taylor

Posted on October 16, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This wise debut novel explores modern dating themes and pitfalls in on- and offline realms.

Search History, Amy Taylor’s first novel, focuses on Ana, a woman in her late 20s who is navigating the dating world, both online and in real life, following a significant breakup. Ana’s ups and downs center mainly on the new relationship she begins with Evan, a man with a past. But a variety of experiences in her own and other women characters’ romantic lives are more alarming than encouraging when it comes to the modern dating landscape.

After the end of a four-year relationship, Ana starts over by moving from Perth to Melbourne and beginning a new job. Her friends are astonished when she meets Evan at a bar, rather than online. “Have you found him online yet?” a work friend asks anxiously. When Ana replies that she has, her friend sighs with “genuine relief.” Evan seems perfect–perhaps its own red flag–but Ana has found his ex-girlfriend online, too, and rapidly begins an obsession with that other woman’s online presence, a preoccupation that threatens to overshadow her real-life relationship with Evan. Meanwhile, the men Ana and other women encounter via dating apps or in person showcase a variety of tendencies, ranging from troubling to outright threatening. And Ana struggles as well to connect with each of her parents: her passive-aggressive mother back in Perth, who is giving Ana the silent treatment, and her “belligerently optimistic” father in Bali, where he exclaims a lot (in rare phone calls) over breath work and intimacy coaching.

Search History is concerned with relationships, (mis)communication, and fear. Ana is frightened of the strange man running behind her in the dark, of the man taking the drunk woman home from the party, of sending Evan a text that will scare him away. And in its central theme, the novel questions the usefulness of an online dating persona. Ana notes Evan’s eye color from a picture online: “It was a piece of information I should have learned the first time I saw his eyes catch sunlight, not through a screen.” Is she better off Googling her next potential lover? Is that research necessary for her safety? Or should she allow him “to reveal himself to me piece by piece in real life, unburdened by my preconceived assumptions”? Which version of Evan–and of Ana–is the real one?

With its expert pacing, Search History offers frank handling of sexuality and desire, and unvarnished descriptions of sexual violence and harassment (which may be triggering for some readers). Ana is self-aware and funny, lonely and self-questioning. Her first-person narration is stark, vulnerable, and approachable. Taylor presents a clever and often harrowing examination of 21st-century dating.

This review originally ran in the September 25, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 ellipses.

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

Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff

Posted on September 15, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this darkly atmospheric novel set in a futuristic Dublin, a young woman fights for justice in an oppressive society ruled by fear during a zombie-like apocalypse.

Sarah Davis-Goff’s Silent City centers on a young woman faced with impossible choices in a post-apocalyptic version of Dublin. “To me, banshees are heroes. I saw images of banshees growing up at home on the island, women dressed in black, warriors. The ones who fight the skrake. HERE TO PROTECT, the grimy posters said.” Orpen was raised by her two mothers on an island devoid of other humans and, crucially, of skrake: monsters that bite, infect, and kill. The skrake “takes up your body and uses it like a puppet. Fast, vicious, strong, with long sharp teeth, the skrake is like a child’s bad dream.” Following the death of her mothers, Orpen ventures into a world she knows nothing about. She is bent on survival in this terrifying landscape of zombie-like beasts.

In the dystopian city that was once Dublin, she becomes a banshee, a member of the entirely female troops of paramilitary security forces ostensibly meant to protect, but actually used by “management” (entirely male, sinister, self-serving) to forage for supplies and keep other lowly citizens in check. Wallers work night and day, repairing and rebuilding the city’s walls against the skrake; the roles of farmers and breeders are equally humble. Banshees work in pairs: Orpen has found a surreal closeness and loyalty with her partner: “I never saw a woman who wasn’t sometimes beautiful, but Agata always is.”

The zombie apocalypse represents a possibly overdone subgenre, but Davis-Goff (Last Ones Left Alive) takes her readers into fresh territory here. Orpen’s struggles are not merely survivalist; raised with only two human companions and little context for other relationships, she must learn to chart new loyalties, friendships, and partnerships against existential questions of right and wrong. The city claims to provide protection and sustenance but, in fact, uses the banshees to commit atrocities and to exercise control over a subdued population, frightened into total silence lest they excite the skrake. Orpen and the women she serves alongside–all guilty of cruelties under orders–must balance loyalty against justice. “Those who can still feel for another, we feel it. I have to believe we do. I have to believe there are enough of us to change the world.”

Silent City is grim but hopeful, tackling questions of risk, trust, courage, morality, and sacrifice. Davis-Goff’s prose is stark but lovely. A strong feminist voice, austere circumstances, and a resolute sense of integrity make this dystopia memorable and inspiring.

This review originally ran in the August 25, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dreams.

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

Mudflowers by Aley Waterman

Posted on September 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this reflective debut, young artists in Toronto form a love triangle with both transcendent and painful results for all.

Aley Waterman’s sensitive first novel, Mudflowers, follows a young woman exploring intimacy, biological and built families, and art. A love triangle twists and reshapes itself, with both trauma and revelation. “I wanted so badly to love in a good way,” says Sophie, the protagonist and narrator, 27 years old and a Newfoundland native who recently moved to Toronto, where she lives with a misogynistic writer and her best friend since childhood. He is a beautiful man named Alex who is also her on-and-off lover. Sophie sees Maggie reading her poetry at an event and is immediately swept away. Maggie is talented and enigmatic, “with big eyes full of wide highways.” The two become close friends and, sometimes, lovers.

Sophie creates glass mosaics for wealthy patrons, Maggie writes, and Alex works on indie films. They are young artists scraping together livings in a big city, taking drugs amid art events and the bar scene. They slide frankly and openly in and out of sexual relationships. Sophie obsesses over her mother’s death. Alex’s mother left when he was 12, their parallel losses an unspoken understanding. The addition of Maggie to their close relationship, forming a trio, acts as a magnetic force that both imbalances and strengthens the bond. Secrets surface, and the balance shifts again.

Mudflowers follows Sophie to an artist colony at a castle in France and eventually home to Newfoundland. Place is important to this thoughtful protagonist, who is given to contorted philosophic musings. Newfoundland is “the only place I had been to where there is enough space and isolation and distance from the world for people to really be themselves without even thinking about what that meant.” Earlier, she notes that “in cities so many lives are wildly proximate to each other, just divided by a wall here or a door there, but each wall determined some sort of fate, keeping us organized and away from one another.” She wonders: “What if the people who should be most important in life were just separated by a wall, and what if that wall meant those people never met!” Sophie has met the people most important to her, but keeping them together will be another feat.

Sophie’s physical travels are dwarfed by the scale of her cerebral and emotional movements, as she tortuously navigates desire and fear. She is preoccupied with art, how to love, and purposeful attention. “[W]as it how beauty was directed or how it was received that was most important?” she ponders. “How are you supposed to be a real person when you’re also supposed to be the woman inside of someone else’s mind?” She also often considers mothers and their absences: “Maybe we all need more mothers than we have,” she thinks. “Maybe we all need as many mothers as we can get.” Mudflowers is thought-provoking, expansive, and raw.

This review originally ran in the August 22, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 birds.

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

The Last Language by Jennifer duBois

Posted on September 4, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A Harvard-trained linguist enters into an intimate relationship with a nonverbal man in this riveting riddle of a novel.

The Last Language by Jennifer duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes; Cartwheel; The Spectators) is an utterly compelling puzzle of linguistics, perspective, and some version of love. Angela is 27 years old when her husband dies suddenly; she is four months pregnant (a pregnancy she will lose, “because of the stress, possibly”) and has a four-year-old daughter. Just months later, she is kicked out of her Ph.D. program in linguistics at Harvard, following a nasty exchange with her “intellectual rival and personal archnemesis.” With her daughter, Angela moves in with her mother and takes a low-paying job running an experimental therapy for “facilitated communication” to help nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. This questionable opportunity will have profound consequences. Readers gradually become aware that Angela is writing her first-person narrative while incarcerated. She tells of her love affair with a young man who can communicate only through Angela herself. Or, if readers do not believe her account, she has taken egregious advantage of a seriously disabled man.

Angela’s background in linguistics gives her a complex, many-layered perspective on Sam O’Keefe’s ability to communicate and even to think: “if thinking was language, the linguistic determinist would argue, then there was nothing to discover within people who didn’t have it already.” Despite early reservations, she is quickly taken with Sam’s sardonic humor, the life behind his startling eyes, his wit and intelligence–at least according to her account. Angela is very smart and has a thoroughly expert grasp of languages and linguistic theory; she knows what this looks like, but she knows her love for Sam, and his for her, is real. Readers must decide for themselves. This question is at the deeply intriguing heart of The Last Language. Is Angela a deluded predator or among the most misunderstood lovers of all time? DuBois’s choice to give readers only her perspective on this story is critical to the contortions of this gripping psychological drama.

Angela is ardent. She makes poor decisions, but her love is pure. She sprinkles her narrative with linguistic trivia and philosophic musings: she anticipates the arguments of the prosecution in her case and those of the linguistic scholars who would say “a person cannot conceive of what he cannot name.” She writes to Sam, who will never read her account: “In a very real sense, there was no you.” Together, she and Sam read Nabokov: Pale Fire rather than Lolita, but the parallels present themselves. Backed by Angela’s academic scholarship and the philosophy of what constitutes humanity, The Last Language is a smart intellectual riddle and a mystery with the highest of stakes. Readers will find it unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the August 14, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 angles.

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

Ellie’s Story by W. Bruce Cameron

Posted on August 25, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Another one from my young friend. I knew this was a risky book for me, because dogs are my kryptonite, or my Achilles’ heel, if you will. My young friend does not know this. I read the book anyway, but I knew it would hurt me, and it did.

It’s a good book, and I enjoyed it in some ways, but an important part of this review is to say that it hurt me.

Librarians I have known have a shorthand code for a way to talk about whether books will hurt us. We say, does the dog die? This is generally metaphoric – there may not even be a dog – but you get the idea; if ‘the dog dies,’ the story takes a tragic turn that might make readers cry. In this book, the dog does not literally die, but I did still cry. (Note that I am an especially messy reader on the topic of dogs. Your mileage as always may vary. But if you have a soft spot like I do, beware.)

The title dog Ellie narrates her story from birth. Cameron does a good job with this voice: not only a voice of innocence but a canine one, Ellie tells what she sees and hears around her, her comprehension gradually growing, but the reader mostly understands more than she does. (She is, in a strange turn, able to relate human dialog, which we understand but she does not.) A German shepherd puppy, she’s chosen by a police officer out of her litter, and trained to be a search-and-rescue dog. She bonds with this owner/handler, Jakob, but he is injured in a shooting and she’s reassigned to a new handler, Maya. Ellie is an especially talented search-and-rescue dog, and continues to do excellent work with Maya. Ellie’s Story entails several great, heroic events, culminating in one I’m going to call pretty unlikely; but it’s a very impactful tale, emotional and moving (obviously), and with some fun educational info about search-and-rescue dogs built sneakily in. I also like that this edition includes discussion questions and activities both for the family at home (warning: this book has your family signed up for some significant work!) and for the classroom. Solid.

A good book, but risky for some of us. I’ll steer clear of more like it, myself.

Rating: 7 socks.

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »