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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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.

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Village in the Dark by Iris Yamashita

Posted on January 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Characters from all walks of life come together in this madcap second entry in a mystery series set in Alaska starring strong female leads.

Screenwriter and author Iris Yamashita (City Under One Roof) presents the second installment in a series featuring Detective Cara Kennedy. Village in the Dark is an alternately moody and wacky mystery set in Anchorage and rural Alaska.

The previous year, Cara buried the remains of her husband and son, recovered some time after they disappeared on a family camping trip. As Village in the Dark opens, Cara stands by their gravesites, watching the exhumation she’s requested in order further to investigate their deaths. She’s been placed on long-term disability from the Anchorage Police Department after a failed psych evaluation, so her inquiries will be a bit trickier than usual, even without the personal element. But she’s found pictures of her late loved ones on a gangster’s cell phone, along with other people who keep turning up dead.

Chapters from Cara’s point of view alternate with those of Ellie, hotelier and busybody at Point Mettier, “the city under one roof”: all 205 residents stacked in a single high-rise building in the Alaskan backcountry. Ellie “always had the best interests of the townsfolk in mind whether they appreciated it or not.” A bit later, these points of view are joined by that of a young woman named Mia, who grew up in the sealed-off community of Unity, where women and children have banded together in avoidance of the men who have abused them. Mia has just recently, in adulthood, joined “Man’s World” (the “world outside the village”), where she’s encountered even more trouble than her mother and “aunties” warned her about. Cara and Ellie, who’ve met before (in City Under One Roof) and do not particularly get along, are now bonded by loss, and must work together to keep their communities safe. Mia’s involvement is slower to become clear.

Village in the Dark offers a mystery with both steadily increasing tension and body count, plus plenty of tragedy–not only death, but abuse, neglect, and societal ills. These are balanced with comic elements and moments of zaniness, as when Ellie leads “one of the stranger posses in the history of posses. An innkeeper, a storekeeper, a Japanese lounge singer, and a cancer-ridden geezer.” These characters are just the beginning in Point Mettier, a town with an attitude nearly as suspicious and insular as that of Unity. Long-lost family members reappear and disappear; Cara hesitantly explores new romance; murders will be committed and possibly solved, and Yamashita leaves her readers well set up for the next episode in Cara’s Alaskan adventures.

This review originally ran in the December 4, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 cigarettes.

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Dear Sister: A Memoir of Secrets, Survival, and Unbreakable Bonds by Michelle Horton

Posted on January 5, 2024 by pagesofjulia

The heartbreaking story of a woman incarcerated for killing her abuser, told by her sister, highlights systemic wrongs and the resilience of a family in trauma.

Dear Sister: A Memoir of Secrets, Survival, and Unbreakable Bonds is a harrowing story, a call to action, and a love letter between sisters.

In their 20s, Michelle Horton and her sister, Nikki, were very close, working together to raise Nikki’s two children and Horton’s son. Horton thought she knew everything about her sister’s life, and so was entirely caught off guard by the emergency call. Her niece and nephew’s father was dead. Nikki had killed him. He had been abusing her horrifically for years, and many members of the community had known it, had been working actively to get Nikki out. Horton was told to come and pick up her sister’s children, ages two and four, immediately.

In the months and years that followed, Horton’s life was consumed by the work of single-parenting three children while raising money for her sister’s legal defense, becoming an amateur expert on criminal law and the psychology of abuse, and advocating for survivors’ rights. The high-profile 2019 case of Nikki Addimando resulted in her conviction of second-degree murder and a sentence of 19 years to life in prison. Despite extensive evidence, the judge concluded that Nikki was not a victim of abuse.

Horton’s narrative (with supporting evidence) is available elsewhere, but she additionally brings to her memoir a close, personal account of Nikki’s trauma and that of the three children involved, the deep connection between sisters, and the continuing failure of the legal system adequately to handle abuse victims when they appear as criminal defendants. Horton delves into the sisters’ childhood, including earlier instances of abuse, and the culture in which so many–including the author–failed to recognize the signs of Nikki’s suffering. Keeping silent about her abuse did not serve Nikki in the end, but Horton observes that other victims will not be encouraged by Nikki’s experience to speak up.

The stories Horton relates are heartbreaking. She does not shy away from graphic descriptions of the brutal abuse Nikki experienced, which some readers will find difficult to read. These details do not feel gratuitous, but rather central to the painful but necessary account Horton offers. Her concern extends beyond her own family, to other victims of intimate partner violence who enter the justice system as criminals. Dear Sister is not only Horton’s story and Nikki’s story, but also an urgent appeal for reform. Heartfelt, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful, this memoir is an important part of an ongoing conversation, and a tribute to sisterhood.

This review originally ran in the November 20, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 half-tubes of toothpaste.

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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.

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Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

Posted on December 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia


Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now expands on Phaidon’s iconic The Art Book with a collection of images created by 308 artists from 20 countries and territories, accompanied by brief but serious supplementary text. With a thorough introduction by academic art historian and curator Raphael Fonseca, this large-format book is an art object in itself. Each artist is represented by a single important work and brief biographical and artistic context, written in an academic tone. These enormously diverse artists, who span a broad range of media, are organized not chronologically, conceptually, or regionally; instead, an alphabetical presentation results in surprising and thought-provoking juxtapositions. Perfect for art lovers or scholars and essential for academics, this is a simply stunning visual feast for readers at large.

This review originally ran in the October 31, 2023 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 corn tortillas.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Rachel Lyon

Posted on December 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of Fruit of the Dead, here’s Rachel Lyon: This Is an Ancient Story.

Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. An editor emerita for Epiphany, Lyon has taught creative writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Bennington College, and other institutions. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and two young children. Her second novel, Fruit of the Dead (Scribner, March 5, 2024), is a smart, chilling, richly detailed retelling of the Demeter-Persephone myth in modern times.

Was it the Demeter and Persephone myth that struck you? Or was there a different impetus?

Rachel Lyon
(photo: Pieter M. van Hattem)

The myth actually came in midway through the writing process. I was working on a book about a young woman who becomes entangled with a middle-aged man and all the power dynamics of that. I started thinking about precedents of this story, and landed on the Persephone myth. There were many structural similarities to the book already, so I worked on a pretty massive rewrite with Persephone as a model. There was a version of the book that involved Zeus and other mythological characters, but I ended up sticking pretty close to my original characters, just infusing the myth into the book that I had.

It was the beginning of the #metoo movement, and I was frustrated by a lot of men’s reactions. A lot of “gee, how is this suddenly happening now?” And I was like, it’s not sudden! This is an ancient story. So that’s what I hope people get from the mythological element here, the idea of how ancient this story is.

Why did your story need Spenser and Fern?

I don’t know if I knew that Cory was going to be a caretaker, but babysitting is just one of those jobs that so many young women have. Caretaking became a really central theme as I began to include her mother’s voice. I myself was in the process of starting a family as I was working on the book, so it was inescapable for me on a personal level, writing about caretaking and young children.

I love writing children. I taught elementary school for a couple of years before grad school, and I did a bunch of babysitting myself before I had kids, and I just think kids are so funny. I don’t think they’re always given enough dignity or personality on the page. So I was really interested in taking a stab at that.

And Cory couldn’t really go work for Rolo without any experience. So on a plot level, it had to be something easy that she was going to go do. Rolo uses them as signals: “I’m a dad. I’m a friendly character.”

Did you always know the story would be told in alternating points of view?

No. When I was beginning to incorporate the mythology, I started looking specifically for texts told in Persephone’s perspective, and I couldn’t find any. So my first project was to write a story for her, from her point of view, and to give her some agency. Because honestly, in so many versions, she’s abducted, she’s raped, she’s negotiated over, and she’s saved. She has no agency at all. In a contemporary novel we want our characters to have some agency. I wanted to do that for her, for this conceptual Persephone. But as I continued working on it and I became a parent myself, I felt more and more like I needed to include Demeter’s voice. And it was particularly useful because I was writing this teenaged character who’s not well equipped to make intelligent thoughtful decisions for herself. Without an extra pair of eyes or an extra voice that could look at her from the outside and communicate her to the reader, I felt like it was possible that the reader would not be able to see her from the outside. I needed this character to be a loving, worried, invested, exterior voice.

Tell us more about your research.

I read several versions. I kept coming back to the Homeric hymn to Demeter. It felt manageable–it’s only a few pages long–and it’s very strange. There’s this weird tangent in the middle of Demeter’s hunt where she loses hope, and becomes involved as a caretaker in a family. She’s a wet nurse for this baby. She’s in drag as an old woman, and she ends up dipping this child, anointing him in flames, and his mother rushes in and freaks out at her, and Demeter flies into a rage and reveals herself. She says, “How dare you question me? I’m a goddess!” and the woman of course is like, “Oh god no” and they build a temple to Demeter there… the child ends up half immortal or something. And then Demeter goes on with her hunt. It’s a really weird moment in this retelling, because it has nothing to do with the main plot. I struggled for a while: Do I just elide that moment? Or is it even possible to make the novel work with that bizarre tangent? I was talking to another writer about it and she was like, you gotta try. So I tried. Emer loses it and she becomes involved with another family for a moment before resuming her hunt.

How different was this one from your first novel?

Very different. Everyone says when you write your first novel, you have to teach yourself how to write a novel. I think that’s true. It was true in my experience. I relied pretty heavily on suspense. That book is a will she/won’t she book. Its main thrust comes from the reader wondering if she’ll ever tell this secret. And that’s what keeps you turning the pages. With this one I didn’t really have that. You’re not waiting for something to be revealed, although you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. So I maybe taught myself how to do that with Self-Portrait with Boy, but, no, it’s a totally different book.

Self-Portrait with Boy is based on an incident that occurred in the building that I grew up in when I was a kid. A boy fell off the roof. It was a very sad thing that happened in that community. The book is totally fictional, but I drew on that one event, and then the pastiche, that world that I had grown up in for the book. On that level it’s vaguely autobiographical, aesthetically. This book is not aesthetically autobiographical, but it’s much more personal. I think I got annoyed writing a character who was different from me on so many levels. It wasn’t as interesting to me in the end. You work on a book for so long, and if you can’t get something out of it, I feel like it dies on the page. It felt important for me with my second book to write something I was really struggling with. At the time I started working on this book, that [struggle] was mistakes I made in my youth and substance issues and all this kind of naughty, feminine stuff. I’m hoping that the more I work on these long projects the more personal I can get, because it felt really good to get to work hard with that material and I’d like to continue down that road.

This interview originally ran on November 28, 2023 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: 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.

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Invisible Woman by Katia Lief

Posted on December 1, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A woman troubled by old crimes and loss reaches out to an old friend, with disastrous consequences in this chilling commentary on gender in society.

With Invisible Woman, Katia Lief (Five Days in Summer; The Money Kill) follows a woman navigating professional life, family, friendship, and societal roles, attempting to reconnect with an old friend whose path diverged from hers decades ago. Their stories are individually compelling, as well as offering questions relevant to the #metoo era.

Joni Ackerman had been a pioneering filmmaker in the 1980s and ’90s, and her best friend and former college roommate, Val, was a promising up-and-coming actor. A secret trauma caused the two young women to grow apart; Joni married, had children, and slowly slid beneath the surface of her husband’s sparkling career in television. The novel opens in 2018, when a fresh film-industry scandal emerges that sends Joni looking for her friend. Joni feels that the time has come to speak out about an old crime, but Val wishes to remain in obscurity, and Joni’s husband, Paul, wants to let sleeping dogs lie. Joni wrestles with her long-lost friendship over a significant divide of time and suffering. Her marriage has been strained for years, and a recent cross-country move has left her isolated. She dives into the novels of Patricia Highsmith, in editions long ago given to her by Val, for comfort and escape, but as real life grows darker and weirder, Highsmith’s gritty psychological thrillers start to feel all too close to reality.

The concerns of Invisible Woman are firmly rooted in #metoo, #timesup, and the historical and continuing challenges of women in the entertainment industry. Joni loves her daughters but grapples with what it’s cost her career to become a mother: early in the novel, she’s invited to appear at a film retrospective in a series called “Lost and Forgotten.” She struggles with personal and family difficulties, and with alcohol. Highsmith was a strong influence on Joni’s highly regarded work in film, but also threatens her tenuous grasp on reality. Readers will root for Lief’s carefully crafted protagonist, even as her decisions become increasingly irrational.

Invisible Woman twists and turns, its escalating dangers alternating with fresh reveals, as momentum builds to a breaking point. Joni is compulsive, troubled, but sympathetic; Val is less central but exerts a force of her own. Characters develop quickly from disagreeable but benign to chilling and dangerous; some readers will find this atmospheric novel engaging and disturbing enough to lose sleep. A literary psychological thriller, cultural study, and heartbreaking story of friendship and loss, Joni’s unforgettable story involves layers of lies and the dangers of self-sublimation. Lief chills, entertains, and challenges.

This review originally ran in the October 27, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 years.

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