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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Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere

Posted on May 3, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This hard-edged, incisive memoir of gender-fluidity in a desert trailer park offers an essential perspective.

Memoirist Zoë Bossiere writes, “I see a lone, barefooted boy with short blond hair walking along the road in Cactus Country… looking for something despite feeling uncertain it could ever be found.” At age 11, Bossiere moved with their parents to a trailer park on the outskirts of Tucson, Ariz. Before leaving Virginia, Zoë gets a short haircut “like a boy’s.” “I’d thought I might need to go by a new name to pass as a boy in Tucson. But it quickly became apparent I was the only Zoë most people I encountered had ever met… so I kept it.” Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir tells of living as a boy in the desert, struggling with gender, class, and a shortage of options for self-expression, and eventually taking a great leap in leaving for a wider world.

Although Bossiere’s father introduced them as a daughter, they were on the whole able to make a fresh start in Cactus Country, inhabiting a long-held dream of boyhood. The version of masculinity they found in the desert is characterized by stoicism, camaraderie, and violence, as they learned from the trailer park’s revolving cast of boys and men how to perform toughness through acts of cruelty and self-defense. Especially as their body entered puberty, Bossiere struggled with gender expression in a world where they never encountered the concept of transgender, and the only queer role model they met insisted on a gender binary and harbored suspicions about bisexuality. Bossiere for a spell accepted the feminine identity assigned by the outside world, without settling into a self-identity that felt right. After a troubled childhood and young adulthood, it was by studying creative writing that they eventually saw a way out of the Tucson area and into new spaces, geographic and otherwise, including the concept of genderfluidity.

Cactus Country is a wise and wonderfully crafted memoir, treating its characters and subjects with compassion in the face of assaults, addictions, dysfunction, and violence. The desert and Bossiere’s experiences there are stark and severe but also include earnest attempts at connection. They must leave Cactus Country to grow and to find their truest self, but it’s only by returning in memory that their journey begins to feel whole. After a childhood as harsh as the desert sun, they write tenderly about place and a past “where broken boys with sunburned faces could be beautiful, kings worthy of inheriting the place they called their home. A place where a Cactus Country boy would always be a Cactus Country boy.”

Gorgeously written, thoughtful, and tough, this memoir of gender and a hardscrabble coming-of-age in the American Southwest excels at nuance.

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

Rating: 7 paloverde beetles.

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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 Revolver to Carry at Night by Monika Zgustova, trans. by Julie Jones

Posted on April 5, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This slim, immersive novel cleverly examines the interior experiences of Véra Nabokov as she supports her famous husband’s literary career.

With A Revolver to Carry at Night, Monika Zgustova (Dressed for a Dance in the Snow) examines the life of a fictionalized Véra Nabokov, necessarily in relation to the famous husband whose career she helped shape. Zgustova offers snippets of the lives of Véra and Vladimir, including both mundane and life-changing moments, alongside their son, Dmitri; Vladimir’s one-time lover Irina Guadanini; and the Nabokovs’ friend Filippa Rolf. Translated from the Spanish by Julie Jones, this brief but absorbing novel is both terse and expressive.

The novel contains four parts, set in 1977 Montreux; 1937 Cannes; 1964 Boston and New York; and finally Montreux in 1990, following Vladimir Nabokov’s death. These nonchronological sections allow for various perspectives on the same events, like the couple’s first meeting. In Zgustova’s telling, Véra orchestrated the relationship and the marriage from the start. Planning to meet the author at a dance, “[s]he thought that she could only attract a special man like him by doing something original. That’s why she had chosen to wear not a delicate, feminine mask but the head of a wolf.” The image of the wolf that would indeed intrigue him that night will be evoked again later to describe Véra. A Revolver to Carry at Night is told in a close third-person narrative, shifting perspective among Véra, Vladimir, and others, allowing readers to become engrossed in the various characters’ thoughts and feelings.

“She knew that in Russian circles, people said that Véra had coerced Vladimir into marrying her. They may have been right, but… so what? We all create our own lives. If she hadn’t organized it, he wouldn’t have married her, and with a different wife, he would never have become a famous writer.” Véra is “that crazy, marvelous sleepwalker,” “a fragile and vulnerable woman,” ambitious, complex, controlling, and not necessarily likable. “She knew she didn’t have any artistic talent and lacked creative genius… so she decided to realize the work of her life by creating someone whom she could help by fusing with him and becoming part of his creation….” In the absence of her own creative career, she privately takes credit for her contributions to Vladimir’s. “She was proud to leave her own mark, although it was small and anonymous, on world literature.” The titular revolver is a literal object Véra carries as well as a symbol of her insecurity and tough exterior; it is observed that “Véra would always make sure it was loaded.”

Based on events from the Nabokovs’ real lives, A Revolver to Carry at Night offers insight as well as imagination into the life of a strong woman who fought for what she wanted. It is not always flattering, but its subject would appreciate the hard-nosed lack of sentimentality.

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

Rating: 6 black cats.

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The Jinn Daughter by Rania Hanna

Posted on March 18, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A jinn with the power to help souls into death’s final rest struggles to keep her daughter safe in this lively, vivid debut.

Rania Hanna’s first novel, The Jinn Daughter, is a moving, imaginative tale of magic, myth, life and death, and a mother’s love. Appropriately, the power of storytelling is central.

Nadine is a jinn, and serves as Hakawati to her village and community. Every morning, she gathers the pomegranate seeds that have fallen overnight outside her modest cabin: these are the souls of the recently deceased. She presses these seeds into a juice and drinks it to experience the stories of the dead, sometimes with honey to cut the bitterness, sometimes “settling sweet on my tongue.” It is in the telling of these stories that souls might pass from the Waiting Place “to final–and hopefully, peaceful–death.”

This is important and meaningful work, but Nadine’s life is not easy; almost all of her kind were killed or banished when she was very young, her training incomplete, and she is ostracized by the people whose souls she lives to assist into final death. She is nearly alone but for her beloved and cherished daughter, and the equally cherished ghost of that daughter’s father, Illyas. Layala, at 14 years old, is beginning to test the limits of their austere life. Illyas had been a human, and Nadine desperately wants their child to be without magic–safer that way. But jinn, despite their many powers, don’t have control over their children’s destinies.

Layala seeks a more meaningful existence than the quiet life allowed her as her mother’s daughter. Dangers press in from outside, too: the villagers’ animosity toward jinn, and a cascade of secrets from Nadine and Layala’s past, threaten their tenuous safety. They receive death threats from the human villagers, and then a visit from Death herself. Nadine must make unusual alliances and travel further into the realm of death than she ever has, to make a bid for her daughter’s safety. Her recurring prayer: “Keep her safe. Keep her happy. Let her find good love. Let her know peace. Let her know her heart and mind. Let her be.” But Layala may not want the same peace for herself that her mother wishes.

Hanna’s prose sparkles with color and detail, imbued with a mother’s deathless devotion to her child. The Jinn Daughter, drawing upon pre-Islamic Arabic mythology, engages with concepts of grief, loss, acceptance, self-determination, and the will to live. Hanna emphasizes the potential for stories and storytelling to explain life’s mysteries, to communicate, and to survive. Readers will find Nadine’s quest poignant, and Layala’s growth inspirational, in this journey of love, life, and death.

This review originally ran in the February 6, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 clay shards.

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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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You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

Posted on March 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Plot twists and a weirdly relatable serial killer offer readers a wild ride in this darkly comic thriller of grief and murder.

Joanna Wallace’s first novel, You’d Look Better as a Ghost, combines black humor and a realistic portrayal of grief with a serial killer, with whom readers are surprisingly inclined to empathize. This oddball story is both grim and unexpectedly entertaining.

When readers first meet narrator Claire, she is standing awkwardly at her father’s funeral, wondering at the strange behavior of the “serious-looking men in serious black suits… standing seriously too close and staring at me. Are they waiting for me to talk?” She assesses their comments, taking everything literally, contemplating human idiosyncrasies. She’s not all that good with people, and she’s also deeply grieving.

It’s not just grief. Claire has always struggled with the habits of those she calls “ordinary people,” a group she does not identify with. “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” She lives alone outside of London, painting, running on her treadmill, and now wrestling with the loss of her father following a painful battle with early-onset dementia, psych wards, and abusive care homes. Her late father seems to be the one person she’s ever felt close to; flashbacks to childhood sketch a chilly if not disturbing portrait of her mother. Plagued by migraines, Claire gets a doctor’s referral to a bereavement counseling group. “I may not have cried, drunk to excess or wrung my hands in disbelief since Dad died but I’ve definitely become more reckless with my kills.”

Oh, yes: Claire is also a serial killer. She struggles with “ordinary people” to the extent that she often feels the need to end their lives, a process for which she enjoys taking her time. Her new bereavement group offers her potential outlets for her creativity, as well as new challenges.

In Claire’s witty, deadpan voice, You’d Look Better as a Ghost revels in dark humor. A new acquaintance “asks whether I want anything to eat. A slice of chocolate cake. That’s what I really want. But I’m mindful of the fact that I killed this woman’s sister fairly recently and the cake is ridiculously overpriced. So, I order a shortbread biscuit instead. Feels like the decent thing to do.” Claire has some very firm ideas of propriety; for example, pairing wellies with a kilt bothers her considerably more than dismemberment does. But the novel also deals seriously with the protracted grief of losing a loved one to dementia, and the potentially redemptive power of true friendship. Amid much irreverence, its themes are genuinely heartfelt and even sweet. This debut is fresh and unforgettable.

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

Rating: 7 mugs of soup.

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The Divorcées by Rowan Beaird

Posted on March 4, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this sparkling, lushly imagined first novel set on a “divorce ranch” outside 1950s Reno, Nev., women yearning for simple freedoms forge bonds that offer new hope and new dangers.

Rowan Beaird’s first novel, The Divorcées, draws readers into a singular historical time and place: the so-called “divorce ranches” surrounding Reno, Nev., in the 1950s. State laws allowed for quick and painless divorce–an exception at the time–for Nevada residents of just six weeks. In Beaird’s lushly imagined, compassionate novel, Lois has chosen to leave a loveless marriage. She travels, funded grudgingly by her unloving father, from Chicago to Reno, where she is installed at the Golden Yarrow with a handful of women like her, putting in their six weeks before being able to divorce: young to middle-aged, with some financial security but limited options, choosing to leave husbands who have been unfaithful, abusive, or simply disappointing. Among these women, Lois has the unprecedented experience of making friends.

Pressed into the back seat of a ranch vehicle traveling to a local bar or casino, swimming laps in the ranch pool, and over cocktails, she begins to form bonds, eventually with one woman in particular. Greer Lang is beautiful, forceful, magnetic, and she seems to think Lois is special, too. Under the spell of this connection, Lois blossoms into a new version of herself, empowered and titillated. But what will happen when her six weeks are up? Will she retain her new self and her new friend? At what cost?

Lois is more comfortable with life in the films she loves, having excelled at “[s]tories as currency” since she was a child. She lies to make her way through a world that does not value an independent, solitary woman, especially one not drawn to marriage or motherhood. Nights out at cowboy bars and casinos offer a thrilling, glittery freedom she’s never had before. At the Golden Yarrow, though this is not the ranch’s purpose, Lois sees that there just might be another way. “She feels like a tree unknotting itself in the soil and also someone tending to it, trying to buckle its roots and train its branches to grow upward in clean, graceful lines.”

Beaird’s writing is lovely, noting “the unwashed windows and marigolds, this tender detritus of curling magazines and loose powder” in the women’s rooms, the casinos “coated with cigarette ash and slivers of orange peel, stained with spit and spilled gin.” Her protagonist is perceptive: “Perhaps [young girls will] learn something none of the ranch’s guests had until after they were wed, and be better for it.” She sees “the marks of men” on abused women and imagines other possibilities, paths at the ranch “cracking open to her like different branches of a tree.” The Divorcées is tender and compassionate, wise and incisive, and gorgeously rendered, even in heart-rending moments. Lois’s journey of growth and exploration forms a masterful and unforgettable debut.

This review originally ran in the January 16, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 common desert flowers.

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