author interview: Jessica Gross

Posted on August 22, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of Open Wide, here’s Jessica Gross: Playing with Reality.

Shelf Awareness called Jessica Gross’s first novel, Hysteria, “coolly sexy and razor-smart”; it has been optioned for TV development. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lilith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught writing at the New School and Texas Tech University, and lives in West Texas with her husband and her dog–she notes that “we all have the same hair.” Her second novel, Open Wide (Abrams Press), is thought-provoking, darkly funny, and a little terrifying, and has been optioned for film development.

Do you start with the imagery of splitting open, or a concept that you then look for a metaphor to fit?

Jessica Gross
(photo: Macy Tapp)

More the latter. This book has taken me through a personal evolution. At the time I started working on it, I was a single woman living in New York in 2019. Then I met my now-husband and entered a serious relationship for the first time in a long time. I was grappling with the question of what it means to be with someone and maintain your separate personhood, and my own boundary issues and confusions. So it started with mining that difficult psychological terrain personally, and thinking, what can I do with this in a fictional world? And concretize it. So it started with the psychic part, and became the surreal body horror iteration.

Is that a matter of literalizing a universal impulse?

I’ve been very inspired by the writer Marie-Helene Bertino, who I’ve been privileged to know personally. Her work often does this kind of magical realist thing, and she’s talked about it in ways that have influenced my own writing. Why not literally make the world magical, instead of it just feeling magical? That’s been something I’ve had a lot of fun playing with in my own work. It’s just taking a concept to its most extreme version. Often, when I’m revising, it helps me to print out the work. Then I can see it from a distance and in a new way, and cut it up and play around with it, literally, on the paper. It feels like a version of that. I’m going to play with this concept, but from a different angle, and see what happens. And it’s often nothing good for the characters! It’s easier to see their psychological ailments when you make them really concrete.

Why do you suppose it’s fun for us to write, and read, those uncomfortable extremes?

When I taught at the New School, we were reading a story where the characters were completely going at it, and one of my more brilliant students said “Oh! In fiction the characters can do and say things that we’re too scared to do and say in real life.” And that was a great description of one thing that fiction can offer. This catharsis, being able to live through characters what we don’t necessarily have the guts or ability to live through in our real life, is something that plays and novels have offered us since their inception. It’s fun in the same way that reading a book set on the French Riveria while you’re living in Lubbock is fun. You get to be transported to another world, another person, another psyche, and you get to play something out without any repercussions in your actual life or relationships. And maybe there’s a bit of schadenfreude too, that this character is doing something damaging and, oh, what a relief. It’s like waking up from a dream. Whew. None of that was real.

This is a very physical, embodied story. Is it fun to write that stuff, the guts? Is that a consistent interest or feature in your writing?

Yes. I like to root things in the body. I feel like it’s a very effective way to involve the reader in the story, simulate for the reader what’s happening in the story. In my first book, there was a lot of sexual body stuff–which there is some of in this book. But the body horror elements–it’s funny, because I don’t like reading or watching horror. It’s not a genre I’m interested in as much. But doing it myself is obviously very different, because I have total control over the gruesomeness. So it was extremely pleasurable! On the couple of occasions when I forced myself to watch videos of doctors performing surgeries, I was really disgusted. I was then having to search “doctor explaining surgery on human model,” because I just couldn’t handle the actual gore. But it was extremely fun and pleasurable to be able to write about the body in such a visceral way. In this novel, also, I tried something new to me, which was making it very focused on sound. And that’s tough–trying to get anything sensory on the page is a fun challenge, and a way for the story to subsume the reader from different angles that aren’t just intellectual.

What relationship does Open Wide have with Hysteria? Are they in conversation?

They definitely are. One is not an extension of the other–it’s not a sequel–but the narrators of both happen to be a little off their rockers, have psychological struggles that they’re working through. They’re both deep first person. The first one even more–it takes place over about 48 hours, so it’s very much about living the narrator’s life, and incredibly embedded in her psyche. With this one, I wanted a tiny bit more distance, and it takes place over a longer period of time, so it’s not quite as immersive. But they have that stylistic thing in common, and the surrealism. The first one was also surreal; in both of them I’m playing with reality. What’s really happening? And as you noticed, concretizing something that could have just been a metaphor. They have a lot in common, but with different characters and different challenges I set myself from a craft perspective.

What makes Olive so compelling as a protagonist?

Well, it is not a foregone conclusion that someone else would find her compelling! To me, she’s strange in a way that I really enjoy. I feel like she’s very observant, and she’s funny, and just bizarre and messed up in a way that I like. I’m not drawn as much to characters that have everything figured out. I’d rather they be working through something kind of messy, and a little bit spilling all over the place. I’m drawn to people who are working through it, working on their psyches, and willing to let you in. I tend to start with something I’m grappling with my own life and then turn up the volume by 400%. For fun. For exploration.

This interview originally ran in the August 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Filed under: interviews | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Open Wide by Jessica Gross

Posted on August 18, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This mind-bending novel examines the nature of love and the social conventions that govern relationships and asks where limits should be drawn, if at all.

Jessica Gross (Hysteria) staggers and challenges readers with her sophomore novel, Open Wide, starring a socially awkward protagonist who finds love and dives in very, very deeply.

Olive compulsively records all the hours of her life, “collecting sounds the way other people collect stamps.” She records diegetic sounds, which she uses in her work as a radio producer, and conversations, which she plays back–to study what went right or wrong, to soothe or arouse herself. She has long yearned for romance when she meets Theo, a handsome colorectal surgeon. He agrees with Olive’s proffered metaphor: people’s insides look like pink pasta. Olive can’t get enough. She wants to spend every night together. She wants to “climb inside” him.

Alongside their deepening love affair, Olive reveals to readers her relationships with her sisters and mother, through which Gross also explores boundaries (or lack thereof) and obsessive love. “My mother had climbed inside of me. My little self, filled with her bigger one. Her daughter, who was not supposed to be the vessel, but the one contained.” However, Theo is not parent or child to Olive but partner, so their intimacy is different, Olive tells herself.

Olive’s first-person narration of her bizarre story is an inspired choice that makes readers privy to her fears, confusions, passions, and rationalizations. By the final pages, which reveal what has changed in Olive’s surreal world, readers will feel dizzy with her perspective and its consequences. Open Wide is a tense, engrossing examination of the bounds of love.

This review originally ran in the August 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 dog walks.

Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with Gross.

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

Maximum Shelf author interview: Pat Harris

Posted on August 11, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of A Season on the Drink, here’s Pat Harris: People Matter.

Pat Harris is a lifelong Saint Paulite and passionate community champion. His commitment to public service began in 1989 as a VISTA volunteer at Catholic Charities, where he first learned about the Saint Anthony Residence and heard tales of a softball team that won it all. The experience sparked a lifetime of civic engagement and advocacy. Harris’s debut novel, A Season on the Drink (Adventure Publications, September 9, 2025), chronicles the story of Marty Peterson and the Saint Anthony Residence fast-pitch softball team their single, undefeated season, and the flash of inspiration it provided. Harris and his partner, Laura, have four dynamic children, and one enthusiastic canine companion named Ranger.

Tell me about the line between verifiable fact and fiction in this novel based on true history.

Pat Harris
(photo: Michael Murrary)

It’s nearly all true, although obviously you have to bring in some license in order to really show the story. When I was a VISTA volunteer, I spent time at the Saint Anthony Residence and learned some of the struggles that people were going through, but also the hope that existed in that building. It’s kind of the end of the road if you’re a person in the deep levels of alcoholism; that’s where you can go to sort of live out life and continue to be an alcoholic. I spent a lot of time there learning about people, and I heard this story, of this one year where they started playing pickup softball games at this park near the building, and they were kinda good! In the middle of some very intense poverty and alcoholism, they were good softball players. It was anchored by a guy I eventually worked with, Marty Peterson, who played baseball at the University of Minnesota. He was a standout baseball player, but alcoholism turned the tide of his life. As soon as I heard it, I was like, someone’s gotta tell this story. A lot of stars aligned to really change some people’s lives. The Saint Anthony is a very intense place that a lot of people are unaware of, but this one year, something really cool happened.

I spent the better part of many years interviewing people and learning what happened. I compiled all the information, but I wasn’t at the games, so I had to reconstruct them based on interviews and stories. All the members of the team, as far as we can tell, have passed. The staff people have passed. Some of the people in the book are still around.

When Marty got sober and got out of the Saint Anthony Residence, that’s when I met him. I discovered this extraordinary person with a trove of original poetry, who saved a child from a burning building (which is in the book)–an absolutely 100% true story that was on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. My main character, who was a chronic alcoholic and played on this softball team, saved a child from a burning building! You can’t make that up. It had to have been true; I could never have thought of it.

What research did you do?

A lot of it was that I was there. Not for the games–that season happened before I arrived–but the stories were told with great pride. I just spent time there and knew everybody. There were extensive interviews. Marty Peterson’s son and I have become good friends. He tells some amazing stories about his dad, ones of struggle and ones of extraordinary times. A little baseball research here and there, to correlate to what was happening in baseball at the time. The Twins were on the verge of the World Series–they didn’t have a phenomenal season in ’86, but they won the World Series in ’87.

Is this a book about baseball?

This is a book about hope. The game of softball, or baseball, carried some people on this pathway of hope and of perception. Sure, it’s a sports book. But it’s also a book about hope and recovery and alcoholism and poverty and all over the top of it, perception. You’re a bank, or a construction company, or whatever, and you’re playing people who are chronic alcoholics–they’re wearing jeans, and they’re smoking, and half of them are actively intoxicated, perhaps on Lysol or other chemicals, and they’re beating you–badly, sometimes. And competitive juices flow on ball fields, and people get angry. But at the end of these games–hey, you know what, y’all might be at the Saint Anthony Residence, but you’re all right.

This book has a little bit of everything. It’s got sports, it’s got some humor, a lot of sadness, and recovery… and it’s got people that couldn’t get out of those depths. A lot of the team passed onsite, or somewhere not far after exiting the facility.

It’s not singularly a book about sports. It’s about perception and hope, in a true story. This is really emotional for me because people matter. People matter. There are a lot of places that lesson can be taught, and one of them is the ballfield.

What about Marty captured your attention so hard?

I was in my 20s when I met him as a client in the job service program. Marty was one of these guys… this softspoken person that had struggled all his life with the disease of alcoholism. At his core, externally and internally, Marty was a brilliant and good human being. He struggled with this disease; it impacted his family, his job, his ability to be successful in baseball. And he was an extraordinary baseball player. He was kind and decent, and we’d sit in the Union Gospel Mission Thrift Store where he worked, and we’d talk about books and about life and where he was going. He was kind. And then I found out he was a poet! You read his poetry, or the letters his son allowed me to see, and it’s extremely emotional. The gentleman was deep. And, oh yeah, he saved a child from a burning building!

This interview originally ran on July 24, 2025 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.

Filed under: interviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf: A Season on the Drink by Pat Harris

Posted on August 8, 2025 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 July 24, 2025.

In 1986, at the Saint Anthony Residence, a haven for folks two steps away from living on the street in Saint Paul, Minn., a series of events and personalities converged in an unlikely and perhaps unprecedented situation. As described in the opening pages of Pat Harris’s novel A Season on the Drink, two softball teams met on Raymond Field: “The Saint Anthony Residence for chronic alcoholics and the drywall company were tied. It was the final game of the season.” It was just rec-league ball, but the stakes felt much greater than the outcome of the game itself. There was dignity on the line.

Harris’s debut is a remarkable novel whose subject is, on its surface, a softball team made up of chronic alcoholics. Immersion in its storytelling, however, reveals greater depths, focusing on a handful of characters from the team and the Saint Anthony Residence; most central is a man named Marty Peterson. Marty is nearing 50 years old, with a county record including “treatment six or so times, detox 30 or 40,” when he goes to live at the Residence. Quiet, easygoing, cerebral, Marty has long found himself unfit for mainstream life.

He does have a personal history with baseball, however. A strong player in high school, he played a single year at the University of Minnesota, briefly brushing shoulders with greatness in the form of coach Dick Siebert and Herb Brooks. “Herb would eventually take off his Gopher baseball uniform for a checkered sport coat and one of the most iconic gold medals in history. Marty took off his uniform for a shirt he found at Goodwill.” In an extraordinary year at Saint Anthony, he will have an important role to play in forming a team that will go undefeated for its single season.

Based on a true story that touched the author early in his public service career, A Season on the Drink delves into Marty’s personal history through “Marty Interludes” and his original poetry. Harris features a few other characters in detail: Harry Opus, the day manager at Saint Anthony, is a recovering alcoholic and somewhat reluctant team member. Terry Thomas, longtime resident, is “a provocateur… humorous, conniving, and sad,” but a born salesman and Marty’s more gregarious counterpart as player/manager. Allison Boisvert, director of housing for Catholic Charities, aka “the Queen of Housing,” along with community investors Mr. Long and Mr. Ryan and a “charitable mobster” known as “The Padre,” provide financial and moral support; the Queen’s partner, Jim, also a staffer at Saint Anthony, is a steady hand on a team with very few of them. But Marty is the heart, soul, and talent.

In telling the story of these and other lost alcoholics and those who serve them, Harris artfully profiles people, the city of Saint Paul, and alcoholism itself. He also touches on politics, economics, and social services. The existence of the Saint Anthony Residence relies on the skillful marketing by the Queen and other advocates to both ends of the political spectrum. Housing “chronic inebriates” at Saint Anthony costs taxpayers far less than treatment or detox; visible, homeless drunks are bad for business. It is also “a matter of dignity… [which] calls for the basics of life–food, shelter, and maybe something for the soul.” “All were welcome at Saint Anthony”–the residence is a wet house: residents have no obligation to attend meetings or make any attempt to be sober. They may own alcohol but not possess it on the premises. Some leave for parts unknown; some leave in a body bag. There is a regular schedule to each month, from the first when residents collect a check for $47 and are, briefly, funded drinkers, through the mid-month descent into alchemy: profoundly toxic cocktails of cleaning products and rubbing alcohol for the truly committed. “The Saint Anthony Residence was a last stop–a formal determination of the end while living.”

But then there was the spring of 1986. Led by Kirby Puckett and called by Bob Kurtz, the Minnesota Twins are on the Saint Anthony televisions; Marty, Terry, and Harry watch in the latter’s office, and Marty recalls his youth. A baseball glove appears. Marty and Terry knock a ball around over at Raymond Field, and the Queen directs Harry to form a team–she wants to see the residents a little more occupied, beyond alchemical creativity. Terry’s charisma and salesmanship, Harry’s unenthusiastic aid, and most especially Marty’s love for and knowledge of the game coalesce to form “America’s first organized softball team of chronic inebriates.” “The game of baseball was made to make the world feel better. Even in failure, it offered victory.”

By the end of this narrative, fictionalized from Harris’s own conversations with Marty Peterson, a team has formed and stumbled, won, and disbanded. The Saint Anthony Residence is still the bottom of a certain trajectory, but there are fine and shining moments. “Seeing the playing field from the vantage point of the batter’s box is the greatest moment in sports, and Marty was right back in it.” Victory parties are thrown with kegs of root beer.

“If this were a movie, there’d be happy endings, but life stories are not that neat.” With A Season on the Drink, Harris offers somber but loving reflections from this less-than-neat story, and there is no question of the tenderness at its center–“[Marty] just liked playing ball.”

Rating: 8 unusually fresh doughnuts.

Come back Monday for my interview with Harris.

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

The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards

Posted on August 4, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Six estranged friends and colleagues gather at a sumptuous dinner party to find themselves terrorized by old secrets in this gratifying tale of suspense and psychopaths.

The Wasp Trap is an absolutely thrilling, tautly plotted puzzle of a novel by Mark Edwards. This double-locked-room mystery, with all the tension that that implies, presents a cast of well-developed characters facing various hidden challenges.

The first timeline, introduced in the novel’s prologue, takes place in July 1999. A group of recent college graduates are gathered at a country estate outside London by a charismatic psychology professor to work around the clock on a dating website meant to achieve maximum dotcom-era profits. In truth, they also work at developing a test to identify psychopaths (their mentor’s first interest). The estate is well outfitted with “fruit-colored iMacs” and age-appropriate entertainment. For a few months, in these pleasant confines, the group becomes very close. “The lothario. The salesman. The affluent couple, the joker and the local girl. Finally, me, the wordsmith, whose role was to write it all down. If any of us were a psychopath, I already had a good idea who it would be.” The bulk of the novel is narrated by Will, an aspiring writer who often feels trapped on the outside, thwarted in his attempts to connect. He is well-suited to observe the character of his counterparts, but not unbiased.

Twenty-five years later, they gather again, to commemorate the death of their former employer. Two members of the original project have married–they are the only two to have kept in touch, after what seems to have been a rocky and abrupt ending. Now “the affluent couple” hosts their old friends for a lavish dinner party in their high-security Notting Hill townhouse. But immediately the evening shifts from awkward to nightmarish, part home invasion and part sinister game. The group is commanded to reveal a secret from the storied summer of ’99. Each dinner guest denies knowing what information is sought, but each, of course, does harbor secrets. The key to The Wasp Trap‘s deliciously frightening uncertainty lies in the pain and horror of not knowing whom, in a closed environment, one can trust. The once-tight-knit group fractures amid secret and not-so-secret sexual tensions, financial pressures, and old jealousies, especially with a suspected psychopath or two in their midst.

Offering twists and turns and surprises through his novel’s final pages, Edwards executes a highly satisfying thriller with this intriguing blend of terror and nostalgia for youth and freer, more hopeful times.

This review originally ran in the July 22, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cans of Pepsi.

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

No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter’s Quest for the Truth by Artis Henderson

Posted on August 1, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A daughter’s study of her father’s life and death artfully reveals intrigue, astonishing slices of world history, and a loving but flawed man.

In June of 1985, a small private plane, a Piper Cub, crashed on its owner’s property in northern Georgia. The pilot, Lamar Chester, was killed. His only passenger, his five-year-old daughter, AJ, sustained severe injuries but lived. In death, Lamar escaped prosecution as a marijuana smuggler. His widow, hoping to protect her child, removed the young AJ from the life she’d known, isolating them from family and friends who had been involved in the smuggling business. AJ grew up to be Artis Henderson (Unremarried Widow), who spent decades turned away from her father’s story, interpreting her mother’s silence as shame. Her eventual readiness to examine the truth of her father’s life, their brief but loving relationship, and his end has resulted in No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter’s Quest for the Truth, which combines investigation and personal excavation in a searing, moving memoir.

In their few years together, Lamar made a strong impression on his youngest child, one that has been enriched by her later research. She remembers him as a loving and beloved father, and deeply charismatic, although his attitudes toward women in particular appear problematic through a modern lens. Henderson is thoughtful about such judgments, and careful in considering her father’s upbringing as a factor in his life. And a wild life it was, with an early marriage yielding three surviving children and one lost; divorce and remarriage; and a colorful career as a pilot, smuggler, and ostentatious party boy in 1970s Miami. Increasing profits and outward success allowed Lamar to acquire ever-more-impressive possessions, and he became involved in ever-more-risky ventures, until he faced federal prosecution and the plane crash that killed him.

Henderson’s work is both investigatory and personal: “I’m grappling with this story as much as I’m reporting it.” She loved her father, sympathizes with the demons he faced, and remembers a childhood of “uncomplicated happiness. My father made me feel safe and protected.” She trusts that there was a time when, “to him, the line between the good guys and the bad guys was still very clear,” but also realizes that he made choices that endangered his family and, she concludes, led to his own death. No Ordinary Bird is a loving portrait that benefits from the nuance of understanding that, as Lamar liked to say, “you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.” It is both research-based inquiry–involving travel to Miami, Georgia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Iran, and beyond–and also a memoir of family, love, and risk. Henderson excels at the subtlety required by such a story, and her telling is intriguing, painful, and cathartic.

This review originally ran in the July 18, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 bear claws.

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

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine

Posted on July 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

An especially wry, wise, comic style distinguishes this unforgettable tale of national trauma, community, familial love, and forgiveness.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a novel as expansive, funny, and poignant as its title promises. With his signature wit and irreverence, Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History; The Wrong End of the Telescope; An Unnecessary Woman) charts decades of Beiruti history and trauma through the life of his narrator, Raja, a reclusive, aging teacher of French philosophy.

The novel opens and closes in 2023, when Raja shares his apartment with his overbearing but deeply endearing mother, Zalfa. The bulk of its sections jump back in time: to the pre-civil-war 1960s, Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, the banking collapse and Covid-19 epidemic, and Raja’s ill-fated trip to the United States for an artists’ residency in Virginia. (He should have more fully recognized how suspicious the invitation was: he had written a book 25 years earlier, but “I’m not a writer, not really. I wrote a book, that was it. It was an accident.”) Writer or no, Raja is a knowing, purposeful narrator, teasing his reader with what is to come, defending his story’s chronological shifts: “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true. Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks….” Self-aware and self-deprecating, Raja names himself the Gullible, the Imbecile, the Neurotic Clown, the Dimwit. His mother is “Raja the Gullible’s Tormentor.” “Deciphering [her] was a feat that would have surely flummoxed Hercules–my mother as the unthinkably impossible thirteenth task.” They bicker constantly, foul-mouthed but fiercely loving.

In past timelines, the reader learns of Raja’s troubled childhood as a gay younger son, bullied by much of his family, especially Aunt Yasmine, “the wickedest witch of the Middle East.” During the civil war, in his teens, he is held captive for weeks by a schoolmate and soldier with whom he begins a sexual relationship that is part experimentation, part Stockholm syndrome. He describes his accidental path to teaching, 36 years of it; he refers to his students as his “brats,” but his care for them and, even more, theirs for him will become gradually apparent. Amid terrible events, like the port explosion of 2020, Raja’s mother befriends a neighborhood crime boss named Madame Taweel: “Only my mother would find a mentor at eighty-two, let alone the most inappropriate one.” Bawdy, rude, and impossibly sweet, with “a laugh so delightful, so impetuous, so luminous,” Raja’s mother is the indomitable star of this loving, heartwrenching novel.

This review originally ran in the July 14, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cans of tuna.

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

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

Posted on July 25, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Adult daughter and mother, both struggling and bickering, work to come together with magic spells, an impossible dissertation, and lots of love.


“Jamie has never known what to say to her mother. And now–when it matters most of all, when she’s on a rescue mission–she knows even less.”

At the start of Charlie Jane Anders’s Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Jamie’s mother, Serena, is struggling. Since the death of her wife, Mae, six years ago, simultaneous with Serena’s career imploding, Serena has been holed up with her grief in a one-room schoolhouse in the woods. Now Jamie, wrestling with her dissertation on 18th-century literature, has decided enough is enough. In the interest of pulling Serena out of her black hole, Jamie’s finally going to tell her mom her big secret: Jamie is a witch.

But her attempt to teach Serena some nice, wholesome, positivity-based magic misfires, because Serena is prickly, powerful, and pissed at the world. Learning magic proves hazardous, to her and to Jamie. There are also ill effects on Jamie’s partner, Ro, an endlessly patient and lovely person whom Jamie values above all–although she’s yet to tell Ro about her magic. Meanwhile, the college where Jamie studies and teaches is once more threatening to cut her already pitiful stipend, she’s at a sticking point on her dissertation, and her undergraduate students can be terrifying. But she’s just discovered a previously unknown document that might decide the authorship of a novel at the heart of her research. And with Serena’s frighteningly intense powers, it is both scary and tempting to consider what Jamie might do.

As the younger witch attempts to teach her mother the rules of magic (which self-taught Jamie has defined for herself), both women must confront relationships past and present, with each other and with their partners. In flashback sections, Serena’s early years with Mae offer heartbreakingly sweet and thought-provoking reflections on love and childrearing. Jamie’s present life with Ro, a Ph.D. candidate in economics, is nerdy and deeply loving, strongly rooted in intentional reinvention of traditional roles. Serena and Jamie are a prickly and troubled mother/daughter duo, but both are earnestly trying to come together. They will face challenges to their love as well as to their personal safety, as the stakes rise in a world of bigotry and social injustice, but they will also form stronger bonds with each other and other strong women.

Anders (Never Say You Can’t Survive; All the Birds in the Sky) excels at dialogue and the portrayal of relationships both loving and thorny. Her characters face profoundly serious dangers, but there are frequent notes of levity, joy, fun, and intimacy throughout. Lessons in Magic and Disaster features the magic of spells and charms but also that of human connection, and readers will be richer for the experience.

This review originally ran in the July 3, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 slices of chocolate fudge cake.

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

The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Posted on July 11, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Young gang members in 1979 Chicago take public transportation across the city on a single, important day in this shape-shifting, kaleidoscopic novel of big risks and dreams.

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Sacred Smokes; Sacred City) offers a love letter to the city of Chicago via a single-day odyssey in The El, an expansive novel featuring young gang members on a circular journey through an urban landscape. With strong imagery, dreamlike sequences, and gritty considerations of family, love, spicy potato chips, and gun violence, this unusual story will capture and hold the imagination.

On an August day in 1979, teenaged Teddy wakes up early, eats a few buttered tortillas, and gets ready for a momentous event. He will lead 18 fellow members of the Simon City Royals across town via Chicago’s elevated train (the El) to a meeting with another “set” of the gang and many others, where a new alliance formed in prison would be applied on the outside. The new Nation will include old enemies, but Teddy is a team player. It is a day of high stakes, and while they all share trepidations, not everyone shares Teddy’s hopeful outlook. “Jesus, Coyote, Al Capone… I was sure all of us prayed to them equally.”

Teddy narrates as he sets out with his best friend, Mikey. Then the perspective switches to Mikey’s. Teddy remains the protagonist and most common narrator, but a broad variety of players cycle through, providing different angles on the potential impacts of the Nation alliance as well on as the scenes themselves: a fire on an El platform, an attempted murder, various deaths, moments of beauty. Teddy’s Native identity matters because race is a question for the new Nation, spoken of but not exactly on the official agenda. Teddy can see a character he knows to be Coyote, “walnut brown and wiry, wearing a pair of mirrored Aviators,” who “tends to hum in and out of focus.” This character, or force, plays an important role in the day.

The El is utterly intriguing at every turn, shifting pace from high-drama action scenes to contemplative minutes and hours spent rocking in rhythm with public transit and the city itself. Van Alst portrays a strong sense of both time and place as his characters grapple with race, class, and culture in a very particular big city. The novel is about cusps: of the season, the turning of the decade, the gangs’ political shifts, the move away from “skins-only” violence and toward more guns, and comings of age. Van Alst gives us tragedy as well as beauty, and a sharp, loving portrait of a place, with Teddy “riding all the way back toward the neighborhood, window wide open, warm wind howling in, and me in love with everything we could ever be.”

This review originally ran in the June 24, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Jay’s Hot Stuff chips.

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

The Grand Paloma Resort by Cleyvis Natera

Posted on July 4, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Missing children and a category-five hurricane converge in desperate circumstances at an exclusive luxury resort in the Dominican Republic in this heart-wrenching novel.

The Grand Paloma Resort by Cleyvis Natera (Neruda on the Park) is a novel of race, class, secrets, and striving, set within a luxury resort staffed by struggling locals amid the natural beauty of the Dominican Republic.

Sisters Laura and Elena have only each other and the Grand Paloma Resort. Laura has been her sister’s caretaker since they were 14 and four years old, when their mother died. The Grand Paloma has been Laura’s career and lifeline. Through her work, she was able to send Elena to a global academy, meant to secure the younger woman’s future. But Elena persists, in Laura’s eyes, in slacking, taking Ecstasy and partying while working as a babysitter at the resort. In the novel’s opening pages, a young child in Elena’s care–from a family of great wealth and privilege–has been badly injured. It falls to Laura, yet again, to clean up: Elena must be protected from criminal charges, and the resort from bad press.

But this time, despite Laura’s experience in saving the day, a bad situation spirals. Elena thinks she sees a way out by accepting a large sum of money from a tourist in exchange for giving him access to two young local girls. Although she initially believes the girls won’t come to harm, the crisis worsens when the children go missing. All of that–with a frightened Elena and Laura at maximum stress and frustration–coincides with an approaching category-five hurricane. A larger cast of already marginalized resort employees are endangered in a ripple effect, and Laura’s career is at risk. Over the course of seven days, it becomes increasingly clear that these various lives will never be the same.

Natera deftly splices into this narrative the history of the Dominican Republic and the plight of Haitian workers. The Dominican Republic is a beautiful paradise beset by poverty and racial stratification, emphasized all the more when locals intersect with the extraordinary wealth and power of the Grand Paloma’s guests. One of those guests sees it as “a humanitarian crisis so large, so seemingly without end, that there was little to do but look the other way.” At the heart of the novel’s conflict is the question of what each character will do to survive.

With a propulsively paced plot and heart-racingly high stakes, The Grand Paloma Resort interrogates capitalism and exploitation through a community’s concern for two little girls. The result is exhilarating, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

This review originally ran in the June 17, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cocktails, obviously.

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

« Previous Page — Next Page »