Maximum Shelf author interview: Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on November 6, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of A Short Walk Through a Wide World, here’s Douglas Westerbeke: “It Might as Well Be Infinite.”

Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. He began writing with screenplays, and has served for the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award. His first novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, coming from Avid Reader Press on April 9, 2024, is the dazzling story of a woman who must keep moving to outrun a mysterious curse, and a library that seems tailored perfectly to her.

Did reading for the Dublin Literary Award help you write this novel?

Douglas Westerbeke (photo: Roan Westerbeke)

I was reading 50 to 100 novels a year, and some I loved and found really inspiring, and some of them were awful. I thought: I can do better than that. The more you read, the more story ideas you keep having; it snowballs, I guess. I used to write short stories when I was a little kid. My mom always told me, you should write a novel. I said no, I can’t be a novelist, those are real writers! I can’t be like them. The Dublin Literary Committee opened my eyes. It’s achievable. You could be like one of these guys–mostly gals, actually. That’s what inspired me. I thought, I’ll give it a try. It’s hard. I’m not used to working on prose that hard, at a sentence level. That’s where all the work really is, for me anyway. And structure. This one is particularly hard for structure.

What impact did your screenwriting background have on the novel?

I lived in Los Angeles for a while, writing screenplays and sending them out. I did pretty well–four of them got optioned, but they never got produced. I gave up. Well, I shouldn’t say that, because I kept writing. In fact, the day I was going to give up, I had another story idea, about a guy who tries to give up his life as a musical composer.

I had kids, and that slowed things down, and I had cancer, and that really slowed things down. And then the Dublin Literary put me on a different path. Forget that, I’ll try this. My odds were better. Back there it was like a million to one, and this is like 100,000 to one. I thought, those are pretty good odds!

Where did the idea of Aubry’s illness come from?

This all began as a short story idea. It was kind of a comedy. It was an old lady in the same time period–if you put it in the modern day, everybody would just be hanging out in airports, right? Older days, you get to ride trains and ships. Old lady goes to her doctor and says, I’m feeling arthritic, something small like that, and the doctor says, maybe try traveling. Go somewhere warm and dry. And all she hears is “travel.” She just takes off, and she’s so scared of her ailment, she ends up in these dangerous situations traveling around the world. She’s this doddering old fearful lady–the joke is, the cure is worse than the ailment. But then I kept thinking, how am I going to end it? She’ll be on a cruise ship, and it’ll break down in the ocean, they have to anchor, and in the middle of the night she passes away. She was so concerned that what the doctor said was true that she just passes away. And then all of a sudden I was like, this isn’t a comedy anymore!

I thought, maybe she should uncover some great mystery of the world before she goes. She ended up being a nine-year-old girl instead, because now I have so many ideas, I’m not going to get it all with just this little old lady. It’s got to be a whole lifetime.

You are a librarian whose novel, naturally, involves a very special library.

It’s the best place ever to work. I love working there. And working there, you’re doing your stuff, you’re processing the new books, you’re answering questions, you’re doing research, and all the while some book will be sitting on the corner of the desk, and you’re just looking at it the whole day, and it looks really interesting, but you have so much work to do. That’s the life. But then maybe at the end of the day you’ll have some time to yourself, and you’ll open it up. It’s like a treasure trove. Random stuff. I’ve studied an analysis of Shakespeare, I’ve learned how to invest in the stock market, I’ve compiled hundreds of recipes to cook, all because random books kept coming across my desk. And then you start to realize, I’m not reading even the tiniest fraction of the books in this collection. I will never live long enough to read them all. It might as well be infinite.

I was always struck by the impossibility of all this knowledge no one person could ever get. And we have these libraries all over. I mean, I’m in a pretty big library, but even in a small branch I wouldn’t be able to read it all. The idea of the infinite library, I guess, comes from that. But I’m not the first guy. Borges does this all the time. It’s also a riff on him, I suppose.

You are yourself well-traveled. What kind of research was necessary?

I’ve traveled a bit, but almost nothing in this book happens in places I’ve been. I’ve been close to Thailand, or Siam–I was in Malaysia. Doesn’t count! And I certainly wasn’t there in 1900. The whole world is different now, so you really have to research it in the library anyway.

I read all up on the gold rush, and how all these women got rich up there, and I read all about North Africa and people’s experiences, Westerners who got shipwrecked and tried to make their way across the Sahara… the best book I got, I found up in the storage in our library. It was all about the Indian royalty during colonial Britain, and it had all these photographs.

You have the story first. The research is really useful–it helps add color, detail. If you’re way off on an aspect of the story you can correct it. But for the most part, the story I had when I started was the story I ended up with. You want to be sure you’re not doing any blatant anachronisms or anything. I love Braveheart but there’s no historical accuracy whatsoever. But this novel takes place in a lot of obscure little corners of the world, a century ago. All these places no longer exist. And it’s a fantastical story as well, which gives you a lot of wiggle room. You don’t necessarily have to be a nitpicker when it comes to the research, but it does help you to not mess something totally up. You can describe the Arab woman with the copper coins.

What’s next?

I’m working on another with similar themes to this. It’s tricky because it’s modern-day and the characters are two little kids, and I’m trying to write it in their voice. I’m reading a lot of Emma Donoghue.

This interview originally ran on October 12, 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: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on November 3, 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 October 12, 2023.

Douglas Westerbeke’s debut novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, is a wild romping adventure, a poignant tale of relationships and interconnectedness, and a compelling journey of self-discovery. The worldwide (and possibly beyond) travels of Aubry Tourvel have something for every reader, with a momentum that’s impossible to turn away from.

“The paper is clean and white–she hasn’t drawn her first line–so when the drop of blood falls and makes its little red mark on the page, she freezes. Her pencil hovers in her hand. Her heart, like it always does, gives her chest an extra kick.” With these opening lines, readers meet Aubry mid-scene, in a marketplace in Siam. Her illness has returned. First the blood, “And then the pain strikes–a terrible, venomous pain–a weeping pain, like a nail through a rotten tooth.” The first pages are adrenaline-fueled, as Aubry runs for her life.

Aubry recounts her past in fragments to people she meets along the way. In early chapters, she narrates the beginning of this singular illness, this mysterious curse that appeared when she was nine years old in 1885, where her family lived in Belle Époque Paris. She ran, and “Every step made her breath flow easier, made the pain slip a little farther away. She knew this would be her strategy from now on. She would outrun it.” Precocious Aubry quickly intuits the inexplicable rules of her condition: she can never revisit the same place twice, can never retrace her steps, can stay in one place only two to three days, four at the most, before she must move on. And so begins a life of constant travel. From a privileged, spoiled childhood, Aubry becomes resourceful, wary, self-sufficient, standoffish, and eventually a kind–but always watchful–wanderer.

Aubry fashions a spear and becomes adept with it. She travels mainly on foot and by boat, doing odd jobs, fishing and hunting. Her relationships, while often meaningful, last only days. One of her most significant love affairs lasts a whole week, aboard a moving train, until the train breaks down and she must leave her lover behind. A few acquaintances try to travel with Aubry, but it becomes increasingly clear that she is special, able to withstand more than the average human. On foot, she crosses the Himalayas, and the Calanshio Sand Sea in the Libyan desert. She finds libraries filled with wordless books containing only pictorial storytelling–to overcome language barriers–and discovers that these libraries, perhaps a little magic, are for her alone.

The workings of Aubry’s unique, global-scale library are never clear, even to her. There, she finds everything she needs: sustenance, warmth, information. “It comforts her that for every path she’s taken during her many revolutions around the world–for every individual footstep, it seems–there’s a story. Something once happened, a past that is not hers.” This is what library-lovers everywhere have long known, but it is also a device that allows for one of the more magical elements of Aubry’s strange travels. “‘It seems,’ said [one brief acquaintance], ‘that the world you travel through is not the same world we travel through.’ My God, thinks Aubry. My God.”

It is a lonely life. People she meets tend to “romanticize her illness. They imagine an eternal holiday, which is ludicrous, of course. Does anyone really want an eternal holiday? A holiday is a temporary break from the routine, a chance to shake off the dust of habit, to experiment with new foods and customs, but then to return, perhaps borrowing from the outside, perhaps rejecting it–but either way, a return.”

Westerbeke’s imagination is prodigious, and the details with which he fleshes out this absorbing tale are equally abundant. A Short Walk Through a Wide World abounds in the tastes, smells, textures, and sensations of a woman who lives almost from moment to moment. Her haphazard travels, rarely planned, are always in response to a sharp pain or a nosebleed, or worse. She stays just a half-step ahead of the illness which she’s come to personify. “It clung to her back, fingers and toes screwed into her bones, gasping and grinning at all the places she went, a happy demon mounted forever on her shoulders.” She speaks to it, and it responds.

Aubry’s travels arrange themselves into a moving story, often sad, but also filled with joy and fun. Aubry has a special weakness for children, and delights in engaging with them wherever she goes, from a ferry in Siam to a tribe in the Congo. This expansive tale offers new ways of looking at the world–wise, questioning, as rich in emotional depth as it is in detail. The characters she meets are numerous and diverse: New Zealanders rescue her in Siam; an Ottoman fisherman encourages her to gain a meaningful skill; an Indian prince befriends her; a Tibetan nomad invites her to hunt a mysterious beast; a Mexican journalist tracks her down in Alaska. A Short Walk Through a Wide World is utterly engrossing, a world–worlds–to get lost in. In these riveting, swashbuckling adventures, tender meditations on relationships, and philosophical musings about travel and home, every reader will find something to love.

Rating: 9 horned cucumbers.

Come back Monday for my interview with Westerbeke.

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We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein

Posted on October 23, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Thought-provoking, tender, and horrifying, this memorable novel of Jewish lives in the Warsaw Ghetto offers timeless lessons.

Lauren Grodstein’s novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a quietly terrifying immersion in the experience of Jewish occupants of Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto during 1940-42. An English teacher before internment, widower Adam Paskow continues his calling behind the heavily guarded walls. Late one afternoon a man named Ringelblum, who wants Adam to join an archival project, approaches him in his classroom: “It is up to us to write our own history,” he tells Adam. “Deny the Germans the last word.” Adam, Grodstein’s narrator, also writes journal entries for Ringelblum’s project, because “there was no reason not to comply.” Having lost his beloved wife four years earlier and now his livelihood, home, and freedom, Adam stumbles through a new life, sharing an apartment with 10 occupants in two families–all previously strangers to each other. He helps dispense sparse servings of soup at the Aid Society and, via conversation and poetry, teaches English. He slowly sells off his wife’s fine linen sheets, silk pillowcases, and shoes. He transcribes interviews with his students, and the men, women, and children he lives with. New relationships form. He remembers his wife, waits for liberation, and then begins to understand that it may not come.

Prior to the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, Adam was non-practicing (“I had barely remembered I was a Jew”) and married to a wealthy non-Jewish woman; her mother’s rejection of him and her father’s demonstrative tolerance and proclaimed support highlight differences that the younger couple find insignificant. Adam calls himself a coward, but the honesty with which he bears witness is striking. His journal entries vary from the chapters that come between them; the direct first-person narration of the latter takes a more personal tone, but in both cases, Adam shares an unvarnished view of individual characters in all their complexities, never relying on easy labels. Adam, who teaches multiple languages, loves language in general, and Grodstein gives him a beautiful writing voice.

Grodstein (The Explanation for Everything; Our Short History) bases her historical novel upon a few real characters and events. Emanuel Ringelblum did oversee an archival project, which provides the background for this realistic, heartrending glimpse into the lives of Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto. We Must Not Think of Ourselves brings a horrifying chapter of history to readers with intimate, detailed portraits. In his detailed recording of other lives and of his own, Adam reveals that love may be found even in the starkest of situations, and he faces the hardest of choices about sacrifice: Who will you save if you can’t save them all?

This review originally ran in the October 5, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 chicken feet.

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The Diver by Samsun Knight

Posted on October 20, 2023 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 6 bunnies.

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Search History by Amy Taylor

Posted on October 16, 2023 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 ellipses.

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In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning by Grace Elizabeth Hale

Posted on October 9, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A historian with personal connections to its players expertly researches a specific lynching case in this razor-sharp report.

In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning is a story with personal significance for Grace Elizabeth Hale (Making Whiteness), who tackles some of the greatest race-relations demons–historical and continuing–in the United States. In this thoroughly researched account, Hale investigates the 1947 murder of a man named Versie Johnson in rural Jefferson Davis County, Miss. The author’s beloved grandfather served as sheriff at the time, and her mother originally offered this tale as one of righteous heroism: her white grandfather stood up to a mob and refused to release his Black prisoner, who was somehow nevertheless removed to the woods where he died. But Hale learns that her grandfather’s involvement was neither innocent nor heroic.

In her thoughtful narrative, Hale places the death of Versie Johnson in layers of context. She works to find personal information about Johnson, with limited results: one theme of her book is the lack of recorded facts about people judged inconsequential by the record-keepers. She struggles to reconcile very different accounts of Johnson’s alleged crime (rape of a white woman). She studies the history of lynching in the United States, by its various definitions; the history of Jeff Davis County and Mississippi; and a handful of similar cases in nearby counties before 1947. By the end, she reconstructs a passable version of events: possibilities about the life of Versie Johnson and an estimation of her grandfather’s decision-making on the night he was among the group that drove his prisoner from the town’s jail out to the field where a crowd of white locals witnessed Johnson’s murder.

A historian of American culture, Hale began her research for this book as she finished a doctoral dissertation on southern segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. She brings this expertise to a subject about which much information has been lost. “Family trees, genealogies filled with relatives’ names and the dates when they were born and died, depend on archives. And official repositories of documents in turn depend on a society’s ideas about who matters.” Research skills and informed guesses (always clearly indicated) do, however, yield a story. “The past does not have to be ancient to be made of splinters and silence,” Hale writes, and what she reveals is important for a national reckoning as well as Hale’s personal one.

In the Pines is elevated by lovely writing: “Family trees are metaphors. They share with pines both a basic structure and a tendency to flourish only when conditions are right.” It is also marked by incisive thinking about race in history and in the present. Hale’s work is a significant contribution to that larger conversation.

This review originally ran in the September 18, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 unrecorded details.

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Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences by Jedidiah Jenkins

Posted on October 2, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A loving but troubled mother-son relationship takes center stage during a great American road trip in this reflective memoir about family.

In Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences, Jedidiah Jenkins (Like Streams to the Ocean) presents both a literal and psychological voyage–and an investigation into family and tolerance.

Jenkins, nearing his 40th year, is troubled by his relationship with his mother: loving but fractured by her inability to accept his identity as a gay man. In November 2021, following the Covid lockdown, he undertakes a trip with her that he hopes will help them address their disagreements. The same journey will allow reconsideration of an aspect of her life that Jenkins paid little attention to. In the 1970s, his parents, Peter and Barbara Jenkins, walked across the United States, as famously documented in a series of books (including A Walk Across America and The Walk West) and National Geographic articles. As mother and son retrace those steps by car, Jedidiah wishes to learn more about his mother and her worldview; see the countryside and strengthen their relationship; and perhaps, finally, bring her to terms with his identity.

In driving from Tennessee to New Orleans and cross-country to the Oregon coast, Jedidiah (who lives in Los Angeles) and Barbara (whose best friends come from her Nashville Bible study group) struggle with what to listen to in the car–she likes Glenn Beck, and he likes NPR–what to eat, how to pray. Eventually, they will discuss the question that’s been weighing on the son’s mind: “Would you come to my wedding if I married a man?” Barbara’s conservative political and religious beliefs pose an obstacle to the love and acceptance that he craves from her. Their attempt to bridge such a divide feels relevant in polarizing times; the challenges faced by this loving but fundamentally diverging mother and son may resonate with many families.

Jenkins’s prose is unadorned, but his reflections are elemental ones about family and the static and changing aspects of relationships: “a mother’s influence is difficult to excise. It is not like the scorching sun. You cannot shade yourself from it. It is more enveloping and inescapable, like the air you need to survive.” By the memoir’s end, much is unresolved about the lives still in motion, but Jenkins has found his own peace, and learned a bit about the landscapes of his home country and his family background. Mother, Nature, a loving ode, suggests that the questions will continue to present themselves and that the journey toward discovery is worthwhile.

This review originally ran in the September 11, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 baby elephants.

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Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story by Max Marshall

Posted on September 25, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This investigative narrative of fraternity members turned drug dealers–and worse–exposes unsavory aspects of college life.

Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story is Max Marshall’s investigation into the series of arrests and criminal charges related to fraternities at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the individuals involved. A press conference during the College of Charleston’s 2016 summer break caught the attention of Marshall, a journalist, recent college graduate, and fraternity member himself. Mug shot photos showed five fraternity members and three friends. “They looked like guys who put in time at the gym, and maybe at the beach, and definitely at the putting green,” Marshall writes. These eight young men were accused of selling a variety of controlled substances, including Xanax, which, as police chief Greg Mullen put it, seemed to be “a drug of choice right now.” According to authorities, this case was also related to the recent murder of another fraternity member. Intrigued, Marshall follows the story of those eight arrests and the changing cultural identity of Greek organizations in the United States.

Among the Bros focuses on Mikey Schmidt, a Kappa Alpha, to whom Marshall spoke via a series of contraband cell phones as Mikey served 10 years without parole. Age 21 at the time of his arrest, Mikey is one of the flashiest characters in the story Marshall unearths, and he receives the most serious sentence of the group. He and his best friend, Rob Liljeberg III (also a Kappa Alpha), form the backbone of Marshall’s reporting. They put human faces on an investigation into the intersection of Greek life, drug dealing, and criminal activity by a particularly privileged and overwhelmingly white male demographic.

Over the course of four years, Marshall consulted police files, court transcripts, and other documents, and conducted more than 180 interviews with 124 sources. The narrative he presents is sad, deeply disquieting, and often sordid. The fraternity members he interviews all deny using date-rape drugs but allow that others around them do. He meets with one fraternity alumnus who describes mixing gin, Mountain Dew, Xanax, and cocaine–and then tries to sell Marshall his financial planning service. “When I asked an SAE [Sigma Alpha Epsilon] what his friends did the weekend after the Mother Emmanuel killings, he said, ‘Things just aren’t going to stop…. As insensitive as it sounds, it’s still Friday.'” The portrait these anecdotes paint is not flattering, but Marshall remains compassionate, sympathizing with the pull of belonging, and the promise of like-minded friends.

Among the Bros finishes without moral lessons or final conclusions, instead aiming to clearly report events that will disturb most readers. Combining excellent journalism and deftly paced storytelling, this chilling tale lifts a veil on a decadent and troubling lifestyle.

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

Rating: 7 brand names I had to look up.

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Julia by Sandra Newman

Posted on September 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 brings the original’s philosophies, wit, and horror to modern readers with a strikingly reinvented protagonist.

Julia returns the timelessly relevant world of 1984 to readers’ attentions with a female protagonist more clever and feeling, and perhaps more cynical, than George Orwell’s Winston Smith ever was.

Sandra Newman’s retelling matches closely Orwell’s familiar and disquieting original. Big Brother is the leader of the nation of Oceania, at war with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?). Telescreens squawking nonstop propaganda constantly observe every move of the Citizens of Airstrip One, formerly London. Where Orwell offered Julia as colleague, lover, and co-conspirator to his antihero, Winston Smith, here Julia Worthing gets a backstory.

She grew up in Semi-Autonomous Zone 5, previously Kent; had her first affair with a Party member at the age of 14; and won a Hero of the Socialist Family badge for denouncing her mother (a more complex story than it immediately sounds). As an adult, Julia works in the Ministry of Truth’s Fiction Department as a mechanic, repairing and maintaining the machines that design plots for the mind-controlling entertainment of the masses. “She was perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery,” Newman writes, but “about the books that were the end result, she knew little and cared less.”

Julia lives a straightforward, self-serving life, outwardly obedient to Party regulations and a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, but is secretly involved in a number of minor sexual affairs, trading in black-market goods for the simple pleasures of real chocolate. Though fond of Winston in some ways, she has no illusions about the possibilities their narrow world allows them and lives mostly at peace within her limits. Newman’s version does not differ from Orwell’s in these particulars, but it does expand Julia considerably, and appealingly, as a character increasingly wrestling with not only the contradictions between lived experience and the Party’s narrative but also questions of right and wrong. “Anything was possible when one was never told the truth.”

Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) offers a tragic and harrowing story in lovely, evocative prose, revealing all the ugliness and beautiful possibility of a world hopelessly scarred by hate and manipulation and yet, somehow, still capable of hope. Julia is double-, triple-, and quadruple-crossed: “All was false. It was known to be false, but everyone lied about the lies, until no one knew where the lies began and ended.” Electrically memorable, Julia is as startling and incendiary as 1984 ever was, with dark humor and pathos commenting on perennially timely questions.

This review originally ran in the August 31, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 questions.

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Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff

Posted on September 15, 2023 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 dreams.

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