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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Maximum Shelf author interview: Essie Chambers

Posted on February 23, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of Swift River, here’s Essie Chambers: One More River to Cross.

Essie Chambers earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. A former film and television executive, Chambers was a producer on the 2022 documentary Descendant. Her debut novel, Swift River (Simon & Schuster, June 4, 2024), is a complex, place-centered coming-of-age reckoning with race and class.

What was the beginning kernel of this book?

Essie Chambers
(photo: Christine Jean Chambers)

I wanted to write about the experience of being a young person growing up in a small, weird, homogeneous town and being isolated, the only one. The image came out of nowhere, of a bigger-bodied person and her tiny mother walking on the side of the road. I knew that I had to write about these people. That was the powerful, impactful seed. I grew up in a small town; it’s a very isolating thing if you can’t get around. That very first sentence: “The summer after I turn sixteen, I am so fat I can’t ride my bike anymore.” That sentence came with such clarity. They have to walk. She’s a bigger-bodied person; what would it mean for that to be the way she got around?

Why include letters from Lena and Clara?

I grew up writing letters to my elders. I was forced to write thank-you letters, and I came around more willingly with my grandmother; we wrote regularly. I treasure those letters. I got to know a lot about my mom’s family through that correspondence. That form is a beautiful way to talk across generations. I knew the present-day story I wanted to tell. As I built the layers and came to understand how big a role history was going to play, I knew I had to connect the history to Diamond in a personal, meaningful way, to deepen the mystery of the community and what happened to Pop, and to give Clara, a character from another time, a real voice.

With Lena, I wanted Diamond to finally have a way to connect to the Black side of her family, but I wanted to maintain the sense of isolation that Diamond had with her mother; that would be gone if they met face to face. The letters were a way for a seed to be planted, and for me to show the ripples in Diamond’s life.

Inheritance is such a strong theme in this book. We think of inheritance as money; for her inheritance to be stories and letters just felt really powerful.

Your title is the name of the town. Is the book as much about place as it is about Diamond?

It’s absolutely just as much about place. The town is a character. But actually I thought of the title as being the river, rather than the town. River in these mill town communities is so central–it’s power, literally. Life-giving power. Rivers have many meanings across cultures. Crossing a river can mean transitioning from one phase of life to another. In Black culture and traditions and spirituality, river can mean life and rebirth, a place where you get baptized, where you wash away your sins and get renewal. All sorts of spirituals have “river” in their title. I started thinking about one called “One More River to Cross.” The notion was that getting to freedom was all about crossing many rivers. Just when we think we’ve crossed all the rivers there’s one more to cross. Freedom is so elusive. A river is also dangerous and fast and perilous–it’s just so rich.

When Clara is falling in love with Jacques, she talks about not being able to find language for it. It was like the experience of being held by God, when you don’t have language and you don’t have words, and something is holding you and you can’t see it–she likens it to floating on the Swift River, where she just feels held by something divine. What a beautiful feeling that was.

Was there research involved?

A ton, and research led me to the most important part of the book. I knew that I wanted to write about a Black person’s experience growing up as the only person of color in a community. I started thinking about Pop’s experience. I wanted to do more digging about Black people in rural New England. I was shocked at how little was written about them. I’m drawn to these hidden or forgotten histories. I was familiar with the sundown town, where a predominantly white community excludes Black people with laws, harassment, terrorism, or violence–the name comes from signs that were often posted right at the welcome sign, warning Black people that if they were caught after sunset, they might be killed. I had a lot of assumptions about racist violence in the North versus the South; I was surprised to learn that sundown towns were a very Northern phenomenon. It kind of blew my mind open. I found one book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen. A detail jumped out at me: sometimes an exception for one or two Black people was made if they were serving an essential function. If they were domestics or something, they would be allowed to stay. And I thought, Diamond is going to be descended from a person who was allowed to stay after a violent expulsion of the Black community. Boom, that was it. That’s my connection. That gives her roots; that gives me a chance to explore another character who is experiencing a different version of being the only one. It cracked the story wide open for me. That came from my research. I highly recommend that book.

How does your work in film and television translate to writing a novel?

I am a very visual storyteller. I often see a scene first: the image of Diamond and Ma on the side of the road. It’s incredibly exciting. Seeing an image first generates an emotion, and then I get to find the language to channel the emotion. The image gives me confidence that I know what the shape is going to be.

I spent a lot of time telling stories for kids and young adults in TV. I love telling stories about childhood; that moment in life is just so rich. We’ve all felt the pain of living through this very particular developmental stage. The language is “never” and “forever.” The feelings are so big–it’s not necessary for big things to happen in order to feel that pain and create drama. That was very much a mantra in telling this story: big things don’t need to happen in order to be felt in a big way.

Is the perspective of big bodies under-represented? What does this add to Diamond’s story?

I felt like everybody should be able to see themselves in books. I want more, more, more: diversity of story, where weight is not stigma, where weight loss isn’t the goal. Bodies not being represented in a stereotypical way. That really had a massive impact on how I thought about telling Diamond’s story. I didn’t want her to be skinny and happy at the end. I didn’t want weight to define her journey. I just wanted people to feel what it felt like to be in that body. It’s a way that she feels like an outsider, and that’s a universal experience.

This interview originally ran on January 24, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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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.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Yael van der Wouden

Posted on February 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of The Safekeep, here’s Yael van der Wouden: ‘All That’s Left of Them.’

Yael van der Wouden was born in Tel Aviv and currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, a quiet consideration of the aftermath of World War II in the Dutch countryside, will be published by Avid Reader Press in May 2024.

What about this story needed telling?

Yael van der Wouden (photo: Roosmarijn Broersen)

The most common story you hear from Dutch Jewish people of my generation is they grew up not knowing they were Jewish. Around age 20, 25, when their grandparents got older, the story came out: they were Jewish and either had to hide during the war or decide to convert entirely. They were so traumatized by being recognized as Jewish that they just wiped it clean. I have a lot of friends around me who around that age started digging into that history. I think I leaned heavily into that.

My mother is Israeli but her heritage is Bulgarian and Romanian, and my dad is not Jewish. He’s Dutch. My Jewishness is not related to my Dutchness. I grew up within Jewish culture, so a lot of those friends came to me. I was always embarrassed to tell them I can give you the songs, the rituals, but the real, true, in-depth knowledge, I do not have. But I guess when you have nothing, then anything resembling a cultural narrative is a lot.

I spent a lot of my 20s in a turmoil of frustration and anger around how nonexistent Jewish heritage is in the Netherlands. It’s been cannibalized: taken apart and consumed by mainstream Dutch culture. There’s a lot of Yiddish in Dutch, which is very confusing when no one is Jewish but everyone says words you understand. How did this word get here? Mazzel, or punim which means face, or lef which means bravery, heart. There were traces. Empty synagogues, houses with David stars on them but no one lives there anymore… it’s as if–no, it is that an entire community of people has just disappeared overnight. And no one ever asked where they went.

All that’s left of them is the traces of language, and locale. The places where they lived. When I started to notice what was around me and what was not present, I (in very 20s fashion) became very frustrated and angry. It’s a conversation that I’ve been having with myself and with people around me ever since. What needs to happen with that history? What does an apology mean? Who is the apology for? Is it for the person who apologizes, or is it for the person on the other end, who receives it? I don’t want an apology. What kind of acknowledgement do I want? That’s the question that’s been on my mind for a long time.

What’s changed in the Netherlands?

If one person is born into responsibility, and the other person is born into misery, how do you marry the two? In that conversation I was having with myself, it’s more than acknowledgment. “Yes, this happened. Yes, I’m sorry.” What I wanted for these characters is for them to find the next step, which I believe is desire. Desire to have the other person around. Desire to have the other person stay. The other side of the coin.

The Netherlands had one of the highest percentages of deported people during World War II. The narrative is that the Dutch had a great resistance, they helped people hide, but actually a lot of people asked for money to hide people. Only people who had wealth could hide. The Dutch are very big on bureaucracy. So when the German officers and officials asked, where are the Jews and where do they live, the Dutch just said, here they are. That’s why it happened so quickly, across the board. They were very efficient. For me the flip side of not caring that someone is going to be taken away is desiring the person to come back, desiring them to stay. How do we take ignorance and prejudice and flip it into desire? I don’t think that tolerance and acceptance is the solution. I think desire is the solution. I wanted to take Isabel and crack her open and see what would happen if that small life, that small way of thinking, were filled up with desire.

The conversation about Jewish life in the modern-day Netherlands is either about the war, or Israel and Palestine. When the Dutch talk about Jews they talk about those who have died or those who are not there. It’s never about the present, the people who live here and how we are a part of society. It feels invisible–and at the same time, I don’t want my visibility to be connected to death. I want it to be about Passover or Rosh Hashanah, or anything else. When you talk about somebody only in the context of them not being there, you’re emphasizing that they don’t belong in your midst. And that goes back to the idea of desire. Maybe it’s a childish thing. I just want to be desired.

Your book includes some lovely erotic writing.

For me, erotica is about the knife’s edge of voyeurism and participation. As a reader, you want to feel like you are present, but if you are too present then I think the text tries to envelope you, tries to comfort, and I think good erotic writing makes you a little uncomfortable.

Zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in on a body part–ideally you don’t zoom in on a body part that is sexual. An elbow, the tip of the nose. Something unexpected. Then you contrast that with something that is very sexual or very obvious. I think that’s how you create that erotic tension.

People sometimes enter into it with their own discomfort, and rather than treat it earnestly, they make it either as weird as possible or as disgusting as possible. Every body part, all the filthy juices. They will not create something attractive, but lean into an element of disgust. I think you need a little bit of disgust, but it should be a palette. It needs to be a good goulash: the sour, the sweet, the savory. You have to be completely earnest about it or it will not work. You need to fully mean to write something personal and intimate.

What do you feel makes a fascinating protagonist?

Everybody will have a different answer. For me the answer is quite similar to the question of what makes good erotica. I think the answer is contrast. Conflict. My favorite line about protagonists is from E.M. Forster. When he talks about Maurice, he says he wanted to write the most normal, run-of-the-mill guy, and then give him something that upends his worldview. For Maurice, it is that he falls in love with a man. The entire mechanism of him has to change in order to accommodate this thing within him that doesn’t fit within the norm. I think that’s the most fascinating character. Somebody who has their idea of who they are, and then you throw something in the middle that topples that Jenga tower. Those are the most interesting moments in our lives, when you have this idea of who you are and something or somebody comes along and you realize, oh, no–I had no idea who I was.

This interview originally ran on January 17, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Posted on February 12, 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 17, 2024.

Yael van der Wouden’s first novel, The Safekeep, explores the rural Dutch landscape in the years following World War II through the life of a lonely, sheltered woman reluctantly forging new bonds. In what is largely a closed-in, personal story with a solitary protagonist, van der Wouden also examines larger issues in the social context of Dutch postwar society.

The story is set in 1961, in a rural Dutch province that has largely recovered from war, on its surface. Isabel has spent her life tucked away in the house where her family relocated from Amsterdam during the war. An uncle found the place for them, and 11-year-old Isabel took up residence with her mother, younger brother Hendrik and elder brother Louis. Eventually, their mother died and the brothers moved away, but Isabel stayed, believing there was nowhere else for her. She keeps the house meticulously, polishing dishes and micromanaging a series of beleaguered maids. “She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.” She lunches occasionally with Hendrik, less often with Louis. In her lonely, strictly regimented life, the house is Isabel’s constant, the thing she can control, her greatest comfort.

The Safekeep opens in her garden. While digging out late-season vegetables, Isabel finds a shard of broken ceramic, “Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set–her mother’s favourite…. There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother’s plates had ever gone missing.” This beginning offers an early clue that Isabel’s understanding of the house and its contents, of her own personal history, may be flawed.

Further disruptions follow. Hendrik, a steadfast supporter of his solitary sister, nevertheless lives a life she hasn’t come to terms with. He lives with a man; this makes Isabel uncomfortable. Worse, Louis brings yet another young woman, Eva, to a dinner with his siblings. Eva sets Isabel on edge for reasons Isabel does not understand. Additionally, any serious liaison for Louis implies a threat to Isabel, who is permitted to stay in the house only until Louis (its intended inheritor) settles down to start a family. Worse yet, at Louis’s insistence, Eva comes to stay at the house with Isabel while he is on a trip: Isabel is horrified to be made to share her space with a woman she despises.

The tension in the house rises to a nearly unbearable pitch. Isabel habitually suspects her maids of stealing, and now suspects Eva, whose own history is murky, as well. Isabel obsessively inventories china dishes, silverware, and items of décor, counting spoons and watching Eva’s every move. She cleans and displays and relocates the mysterious shard of plate from the garden, imbuing this small object with outsized power. Eva’s presence continues to feel inexplicable. Louis’s return from abroad, to collect Isabel’s unwanted houseguest, is delayed. Tensions continue to build.

Van der Wouden excels in surprises, including changes in tone. The Safekeep remains, almost in its entirety, nearly claustrophobic in its focus on Isabel’s commitment to her family home. “Bound to the house, [Hendrik] said. As if it was a tether and not a shelter. And not her own love, too.” But this tightly bound, insular story of one woman’s struggle finally zooms out, with near dizzying quickness, to engage with larger questions. An old friend of Isabel’s mother is preoccupied with a dish that was given to her “to keep” before the war, by a neighbor who now wants it back. This friend believes it is hers now; the neighbor disagrees. “What does it matter, gifting, keeping? She gave it to me. It was a terrible time. She was gone for years.” As its title hints, van der Wouden’s novel will puzzle over various meanings of safekeeping. Likewise, the sparsely populated story is punctuated by passages of erotic writing that surprise as much by their loveliness as by their departure from the book’s otherwise lonely atmosphere. Not only the story of one family’s struggle or Isabel’s quiet pain, The Safekeep addresses themes of yearning, possession, the difficulties of Dutch recovery from World War II and of same-sex couples’ experiences in a society still regaining its feet.

In the end, like a country recovering from a trauma, Isabel must step outside her space of comfort and familiarity in order to learn and grow. “Isabel tested one [of the frozen canals] with her foot, and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder: a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you.” Van der Wouden communicates and implies much with a minimalist style that is often quietly, shockingly, beautiful. “The shadows lifted as though they’d only been glimpsed under the hem of a skirt–the lift on an arm, secrets of the body that only unfolded for the night.” The Safekeep is a slow-burning, deceptively austere novel, whose subtle, crafty questions and lovely, lyric style will follow the reader long after its conclusion.

Rating: 8 pears.

Come back Friday for my interview with van der Wouden.

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Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

Posted on February 2, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Small-town dramas, sharp humor, strong characters, and a touch of romance spice up a genuinely fun mystery.

With Listen for the Lie, Amy Tintera (Reboot; The Q) offers a sexy, compelling mystery as her adult debut. Entertaining characters act out the intrigues of murder and of small-town life, with dark humor, propulsive pacing, and a properly confounding whodunit.

Lucy Chase has been living a not-particularly-successful life in Los Angeles. When the novel opens, she has just been outed by a true-crime podcast as the overwhelmingly favored suspect in the murder of her best friend five years earlier, in the small Texas town where they both grew up. Now that she’s been fired from her job and her boyfriend is trying to break up with her, she lets her grandmother (her last friend and defender in the world, it seems) talk her into coming home for a visit. Back in Plumpton, Tex., she immediately runs into Ben Owens, the true-crime podcaster who’s on his way to ruining her life. He is obnoxiously sexy, and perhaps less out to get her than she’d originally thought, but Lucy’s hometown offers her no comforts.

One morning, after they left a party together, Savvy was discovered dead in the woods, and Lucy was found nearby, walking down a back road, covered in Savvy’s blood, her skin under Savvy’s nails, and her fingermarks bruised into Savvy’s flesh. Lucy had a head injury; she’s never remembered anything about that night. Her then-husband and her parents, along with the rest of the town, were quick to assume her guilt, but there was insufficient evidence to charge her with Savvy’s murder. Lucy decided to move far away, to L.A., and try to start a new life. Not that it was going well, but being back in Plumpton, with everyone staring her down, sure of her guilt, is worse. Lucy is spirited, witty, and bold; if “innocent people don’t make sarcastic comments,” she’s guilty as can be.

Strangely, Ben, the annoyingly attractive podcaster, is the only one to question why everyone in this town (including Lucy herself) was so quick to assume Lucy’s guilt. The circumstantial evidence is damning, but Ben is able, with amateur detective work, to expose enough secrets to complicate the case considerably. Lucy is as surprised as anyone.

The murder suspect’s amnesia throws a wrench in readers’ ability to guess at Tintera’s plot twists. Even as Lucy wrestles with trauma, balancing guardedness with rare vulnerabilities, she and Savvy reveal a real sense of fun. Plumpton is a thoroughly realized setting, complete with neighborhood personalities and an authentic small-town dynamic. Listen for the Lie is quite sexy, compulsively readable, and laugh-out-loud funny, and Tintera has left herself healthy room for a sequel.

This review originally ran in the January 4, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 wineries.

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The Hunter by Tana French

Posted on January 22, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Tana French is at her best with this character-focused sequel to The Searcher, featuring humor, angst, pathos, and mystery in a tiny Irish village.

In The Hunter, Tana French (The Searcher; The Witch Elm; The Trespasser; and more), building on the success of eight previous novels, delivers the mystery, atmosphere, and feeling her fans have come to expect.

Following the events of The Searcher, French takes her readers back to the tiny Irish townland of Ardnakelty, where former Chicago Police Department detective Cal Hooper has settled to live a quiet, scenic life and repair furniture. He’s already gotten more than he signed up for, including a lovely, levelheaded girlfriend named Lena; a surrogate teenaged daughter, Trey; and a place in the local social circles (and the pub). But when Trey’s long-absent father resurfaces with a get-rich-quick scheme, he threatens the equilibrium of various village relationships, including those Cal holds most dear. The previous novel saw Cal struggle to find his role in a new place; in The Hunter, he knows what he has to lose and, even more importantly, what Trey does.

French is at her best in this novel, showcasing its sharp, scintillating sense of place (Ardnakelty is a character unto itself) and powerful mood of foreboding and that of secrets deeply held. “The overhead bulb isn’t bright enough,” she writes, “and the fringed lampshade gives its light a murky tinge; when the men stay still to listen, it smears deep, tricky shadows into their faces.” Later, she writes: “The mountain is sly. From far off, its low, rounded curves look almost harmless…. It’s a place whose dangers only come into focus when you’re already engaged with them.” This kind of ambience is cut by sudden, surprising bursts of laugh-out-loud humor.

Cal Hooper can be likened to a old western hero, with his staunch personal code; he equally recalls a hard-boiled detective: he’s retired but, despite best efforts, he’s not done investigating. The father-daughter dynamic so delicately established between Cal and Trey–who share no blood and met only two years ago in the previous novel–is heart-wrenching, gorgeously written, and under threat. He trusts her, but she’s “much too young to have something the size of her future in her hands.” Cal and Lena’s relationship is equally engaging, quietly wholesome, and firm. French has never shied away from weighty themes, and here her protagonists wrestle with vulnerability, revenge, and the danger of letting the past determine the future. French masters beautiful descriptions, easy, natural dialogue, a darkly twisting plot, high stakes, and compelling characters. The Hunter is perhaps her finest work–and leaves readers thirsty for more of Cal’s story.

This review originally ran in the December 19, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 jars of jam.

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Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon & Kim Green

Posted on January 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This memoir of food, family, feminism, and Cambodian history, which includes enticing cookbook-quality recipes, is breathtaking in its emotional resonance and lovely writing.

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes tells a story that is, by turns, heart-wrenching, inspiring, harrowing, and mouthwatering. Chantha Nguon’s memoir, written with Kim Green, encompasses both world history and an intimate personal account. Nguon, born the youngest child in a comfortable family in Cambodia’s Battambang, had nine years of soft living and good eating before Pol Pot reset time to Year Zero in the 1970s. Moving first to Saigon, where she weathered the end of the Vietnam War, and then escaping as a refugee into Thailand, Nguon gradually lost everyone she loved, ending with her mother’s death when Nguon was 23. She was a food-focused young child with a mother who took cooking very seriously; she became a young refugee in peril of starvation. For Nguon, rationing or missing entirely the most basic of ingredients is not only a literal life-or-death issue but also symbolically life-altering. With the loss of her family and, to some extent, her culture, she views herself as a repository of recipes, culinary knowledge, memories, pain, and strength.

Food metaphors enrich this book, which sparkles with poignant, deeply lovely writing: “The green-fresh fragrance of young rice is as lovely and fleeting as childhood itself.” Nguon’s mother “taught [her] the art of rebelling as quietly as a whisper of silk.” Twenty-two recipes learned from Nguon’s beloved mother, or developed throughout her own accomplished cooking life, are included, with clear instructions and helpful notes on ingredients (and accompanied by a glossary for potentially unfamiliar terms). These are joined by cleverly figurative recipes, such as the recipe for silken rebellion, which begins: “Find the pockets of freedom available to you. Exploit loopholes.”

By the end of the story, Nguon has transformed into an impressive woman, acting as her husband’s equal (a radical concept, encouraged by her quietly rebellious mother) and a fierce advocate for social change. Nguon, who becomes a staunch feminist, eventually undertakes medical and humanitarian work with AIDS patients and sex workers, fights for education and independence for Cambodian women, and with her husband, founds the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center in rural Cambodia.

Nguon’s titular noodles contribute enormous metaphorical meaning. In her childhood household, slow and proper cooking was prioritized (“my mother despised the flavor of shortcuts”). In Thai refugee camps and in the Cambodian jungle, instant noodles became a prized delicacy. And by the memoir’s end, this thoughtful narrator has integrated these experiences, valuing both the careful preparation of fine foods and the stark relief of basic nutrition. Slow Noodles is a rare gem of a story, gorgeously written, humble and stirring, and packed with tempting recipes.

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

Rating: 9 silk threads.

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