Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant

Posted on May 30, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Within the high highs and low lows of rural mail delivery, a laid-off white-collar worker builds new relationships with place, with his neighbors, and with himself.

In 2011, Stephen Starring Grant moved his wife and two daughters back to his hometown of Blacksburg, Va. In early 2020, Grant, the family’s primary wage earner, was laid off from his consulting job. He found himself unemployed at the start of the pandemic in a town that had limited employment options, and with a recent cancer diagnosis to boot. Unable to find anything in his field, he took a job as a rural-route carrier for the United States Postal Service. Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home offers his stories and reflections on a year spent in a position he’d never thought much about before.

Grant began with a bit of an ivory-tower complex, as he imagined his intellectual background overprepared him for the simple drudgery of mail delivery (which turned out to be untrue), but he ended with a profound respect for postal and other service workers, and balanced thoughts on class and background. These pages vary in tone, by turns hilarious and thoughtful. Grant describes religious experiences, being threatened at gunpoint, bonding with strangers over their deliveries and finessing their political differences. He discusses types of incompetence (a few months in, he “graduated to the consciously incompetent stage, lost in the burning wasteland of self-awareness that I was really not very good at delivering the mail”) and the intense discomfort involved with learning new things, with great effort and limited success, in adulthood. Musing on the origins and purpose of the USPS, he expresses a nuanced patriotism: “America is the greatest country in the world… America is a steroidal monster… Both versions of America are true.” And, he notes: “Our delivery vehicles were like democracy, the worst of all possible vehicles, except for the alternatives.”

Between indulging in fantasies of delivering the mail with Barack Obama at his side and performing neighborly services like basic car maintenance for favorite people along his route, Grant brought his kids for added help and dropped in on his parents for pancakes. Along the way, he informs the unschooled reader of the process that mail carriers undertake to sort, order, and “case” the mail for delivery, and the hazards: backbreaking labor, the ergonomic disaster of right-hand drive (especially in a left-hand-drive vehicle), extremes of heat and cold, and dog attacks. Via an adventure with unfamiliar blue-collar work, Grant discovered new values, new people, and a new relationship with home. Mailman is a classic memoiristic blend of whimsy, storytelling, and insight.

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

Rating: 7 Slim Jims.

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Etiquette for Lovers and Killers by Anna Fitzgerald Healy

Posted on May 26, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A bored townie in 1960s Down East Maine comes into her own when both romance and a series of murders enter her orbit.

Anna Fitzgerald Healy’s debut novel, Etiquette for Lovers and Killers, is a darkly humorous, lighthearted romp of a mystery set in mid-1960s Down East Maine with an unusual heroine. Billie McCadie is a townie in Eastport, on Passamaquoddy Bay, where “fishermen squatting in trailers” abut “Vanderbilts languishing in mansions.” She’s never felt at home with the other locals, who fail to appreciate her sarcasm or her ambition to study linguistics and work in a museum. “I’ve grown up listening to their sock-hop hopes and Tupperware-party dreams, but my aspirations don’t fit in a casserole dish.” Since the tragic death of her parents, Billie, a “twenty-six-year-old virgin,” lives with her grandparents and works as a seamstress at Primp and Ribbon Alterations. Her great thrill, aside from the novels, dictionaries, and etiquette manuals she loves, is checking her post office box for rejection letters responding to her many employment applications to museums around the country.

But then comes the fateful summer when Avery Webster notices her. Billie receives an envelope containing a love letter to an unknown Gertrude, along with an engagement ring. She is invited to a solstice party at the fabulously wealthy Webster family’s estate, where she discovers a freshly murdered corpse–Gertrude. Avery has the potential to be Billie’s first taste of romance, but the strange communications pile up, along with the bodies, in sleepy, previously crime-free Eastport. And Billie leaps into all of it, because “Who needs a life when you’re busy investigating a murder?”

Billie’s wry narration of these events is peppered with wordplay and the occasional footnote commenting (still in Billie’s voice) upon the etymology of “home,” “love,” and “tuxedo.” Chapters are prefaced with relevant quotations from the book of etiquette that belonged to Billie’s mother, which emphasize that even amid a murder case, a sex scandal, and a budding romance, in 1960s Eastport, one must be mindful of appearances and manners. Billie’s never been in such danger, but she’s also never had as much fun, finally coming into herself, gaining confidence, and learning what she might want from life aside from a museum job: “So what if I’ve ended up in a Highsmith rather than an Austen? I’m the main character, and I need to start acting like it.”

Stylish, playful, and more than a little tongue-in-cheek, Etiquette for Lovers and Killers blends intrigue and romance into a perfect cocktail. Billie herself offers a delightful combination of bookishness, wit, and questionable decision-making that will keep readers on edge until the final pages. Healy’s debut is good, not-so-clean fun.

This review originally ran in the May 19, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 stilettos.

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The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

Posted on May 23, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young Nigerian woman seeks home and belonging in a network of troubled relationships.

Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s The Tiny Things Are Heavier is an expansive first novel about a woman searching for home, love, and belonging. Sommy is a Nigerian immigrant to the United States, a graduate student in literature, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a friend–but all of this leaves her still seeking a sense of identity.

Sommy left for graduate school in Iowa just weeks after her beloved brother Mezie’s suicide attempt. She feels isolated in the cold Midwest and tormented by guilt; Mezie will not take her calls. Eventually Sommy makes a few friends, and deepens and complicates her relationship with her roommate, Bayo, a fellow native of Lagos with a boisterous personality she is slow to appreciate. Then she meets Bryan, a biracial American with a Nigerian father he never knew. She struggles at first to interpret his interest: “She can’t say whether he’s flirting back. If he were a real Nigerian, she would know for sure.”

Their relationship proceeds slowly and then, after a rocky recovery from an early challenge, quickly. Sommy finds Bryan magnetic: handsome, wealthy, and a talented writer. In their second year together, they travel to Nigeria. It’s Sommy’s first time home, and the first time she’s seen or spoken with her brother since his suicide attempt. It’s Bryan’s first time in Nigeria. They search for his father, and Sommy shows Bryan her family, her neighborhood, her home. But a series of events culminating in a shocking tragedy causes Sommy to reassess her most important relationships and to call her core values into question. She is forced to consider yet again what it would mean to find a sense of belonging and home.

Okonkwo makes a wise choice to tell this story through Sommy’s compelling close third-person point of view, which portrays her as anxious and exasperated, strong-willed and intelligent, cynical and devoted. She loves her home even as she works to escape it. “If life, she thinks, its surprises, the slices of deep joy contained, its ruggedness and impliability, its contradictions, the implosion of it, the nonsense of it, were a physical place, it would be Lagos.” In returning, Sommy feels “the loss of a place for which to pine. She had gone home, and home did not feel like home.” Through Sommy’s experiences in Nigeria and in Iowa, Okonkwo asks her readers to reflect upon class, privilege, race, gender, and their interlocking power structures, as well as the importance of place to one’s sense of self. The Tiny Things Are Heavier is thought-provoking and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 13, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bottles.

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Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West by Kelly Ramsey

Posted on May 16, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This beautifully crafted memoir features both dramatic action and deep soul-searching by a woman on an elite wildland firefighting crew.

Kelly Ramsey’s Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West is a memoir of wildland firefighting and gender, but also of trauma, family, and navigating love and life at any age.

Ramsey’s expertly structured narrative shifts in both place and time, beginning with a hazardous fire event in her firefighting career, then moving to where she started that career (the Klamath River and its surrounds in Northern California), then a Kentucky childhood and her parents’ story. She paints a portrait of her mother that is a masterclass in the single-paragraph capsule profile. “Raised in a home where someone might vacuum a spill from the front lawn, my mom grew into an inquisitive, determined woman who was in the right almost as often as she believed she was.” Ramsey’s father was an alcoholic, eventually homeless and lost, whose absence caused the grief she may have been fighting along with the extreme challenges of becoming a wildland firefighter and other, still more self-destructive behaviors. This introspection occurs in flashbacks and fragments alongside the main timeline in which Ramsey, in her late 30s and after a wildly varied life, joined the Rowdy River Hotshots.

Hotshots live in barracks or on the road, sleeping on the ground as often as not, packed into a crew transport with their firefighting gear, working shifts that sometimes stretch to 24 hours in tremendously hazardous conditions. They hand-dig firebreak lines, run chainsaws and carry swamp brush, and hike vertiginous slopes under loads that can exceed 70 pounds, often amid active fire. The only woman on the crew her first season (and the first in nearly a decade), Ramsey was also one of the smallest and one of the oldest. She and “the boys” wrestled individually and collectively with how to treat her difference while integrating her into a crew that was necessarily tightknit: they relied on each other for survival.

Showcasing lovely writing and storytelling, Wildfire Days contains just enough firefighting and fire suppression policy history to contextualize Ramsey’s personal journeys. Ramsey is far from a saintly character, and she portrays her own less flattering moments clearly: worrying over her tendency to smile and people-please; her fear that she aligned herself with her male fellows in singling out the next woman to join the crew. This honesty is refreshing. Not a hero, Ramsey lets readers see her earnest and imperfect strivings. Her growth by the memoir’s end is ongoing, but impressive. “Here was the secret I kept stumbling upon: that our deepest wounds were the fertile soil of our growth. New life tended to spring from bitterest ash.” Tense action, fraught self-examination, pain, triumph, and romance make Wildfire Days propulsive and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 smiles.

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Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations by Cutter Wood

Posted on May 12, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This weird, wonderful exploration considers the social, cultural, and political implications of bodily emissions as well as their science, but shines brightest in its empathetic storytelling.

Cutter Wood (Love and Death in the Sunshine State) offers a spellbinding collection of facts, observations, and musings in Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. In 12 chapters that might be termed “essays” and Wood calls “stories,” he considers mucus, urine, blood, semen, menses, milk, flatulence, breath, feces, vomit, hair, and tears. While readers will certainly gain new and fascinating scientific knowledge, what makes Earthly Materials so special is storytelling: Wood’s compassionate, funny, earnest explorations through unexpected subject matters adjacent to bodily fluids.

At a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he meets impassioned graduate students and views beautiful stellar-like magnifications of mucus, which resemble Hubble Telescope photographs. He discusses the political and financial implications of donating blood and delves into the discomfiting r/NoFap Reddit forum. In the absorbing true-crime case of Formula Mom, a Florida woman is investigated and sentenced to prison for creating a large-scale business that bought and sold infant formula.

Tongue-in-cheek, Wood describes the flatulence customs and practices of the preadolescent male in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. To explore vomit, he joins the Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth and takes its sacrament. These experiences and studies often yield hilarity in Wood’s expert prose: dryly witty, comically verbose, and poignant. Wood finishes with the inexplicable tears of a Wimbledon finalist, in this thought-provoking philosophical study that exemplifies human interconnectedness through the rather surprising lens of bodily fluids and expulsions. Earthly Materials will change the way readers think about the mundane in unanticipated and transcendent ways.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 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 stills in the brambly Appalachian holler.

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The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Posted on May 9, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Former best friends reenter a scene of horror in this clever, terrifying novel about the dangers that lurk in friendships, home, and the self.

The singular Chuck Wendig (Blackbirds and more) brings his trademark blend of humor, profanity, and shrewd observation to the weirdly charismatic The Staircase in the Woods. Chilling, disturbing, and deliciously entertaining, this horror novel stars a group of one-time best friends who reunite as adults across a chasm of time and trauma. Nick is as abrasive as ever, but at least he gets them all back together again. Hamish has traded in his Birkenstocks, jam bands, and extra weight for fitness, church, and family. Lore (formerly Lauren) has achieved professional success, but only through an increasingly belligerent go-it-alone approach. Owen (aka Nailbiter) is barely surviving his mental health woes. And Matty, once their golden boy, hasn’t been seen since that day in the woods in 1998. Five teens went camping, four came back out again. Now, more than 20 years later, they have a chance to try to find out what went wrong–or lose themselves like Matty did.

Four dysfunctional adults walk into a different set of woods, fighting among themselves and against their own demons, and enter a sinister otherworld that may have consumed their friend. Wendig’s narrative emphasizes the strengths and failures of friendship, and the difficulties of both childhood and adulthood. His snark is obscenity laden but also earnest in its compassion. The Staircase in the Woods deals in torture, violence, and abuse, especially within families, portraying how connection to place and the importance of home can cause at least as much pain as comfort. The result is haunting and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 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 cuts.

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The Wildelings by Lisa Harding

Posted on May 2, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Lifelong friends splinter and suffer in their first year of college under the spell of a charismatic older student in this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel.

Lisa Harding (Bright Burnings Things; Cloud Girls) will haunt readers with the psychological drama of The Wildelings, a compulsively readable novel in which a woman looks back on her college days and a long-lost friendship.

Jessica is introduced as she begins therapy, newly divorced, in her 40s. The novel’s inciting event, however, is not divorce but a new play by an old acquaintance. Asked by her therapist to write down her memories and “start at the beginning,” Jessica recalls her first year at Dublin’s Wilde College and “The Unholy Quintet: Mark, Linda, Jonathan, Jacques, and me.”

Linda had been Jessica’s best friend since childhood. When the underprivileged, underparented pair achieves surprising slots at the “pretentious arty” college, Jessica is highly ranked for her beauty as well as her acting prowess; Linda, as ever, dwells in the shadows. But just as Jessica enters a charged relationship with the sexy Jacques, Linda finds love with Mark, a magnetic fourth-year playwright and director, after a false start with golden boy Jonathan. The older student’s grasp on the group tightens, especially after Mark casts Jessica in what he claims will be a breakout play. Mark proves treacherously adept at directing the people around him, on and off the stage.

Harding gives Jessica a self-excoriating, incisive, bitter, and evocative first-person voice. The Wildelings‘ inexorable plot is like the proverbial train wreck: shocking, electric, impossible to turn from. Its psychological tumult verges on horror. With this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel, Harding offers pulsing intensity, gut-wrenching emotional upheaval, and high drama in every sense.

This review originally ran in the April 18, 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 freckles.

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A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane

Posted on April 25, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This poignant coming-of-age novel combines outstanding sports writing and heartfelt expression of the teen experience, set to small-town Pennsylvania basketball.

Marisa (Mac) Crane’s second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is a propulsive, perfectly crafted coming-of-age story centered on basketball and queer sexuality. With razor-honed prose, Crane (I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself) offers authentic descriptions of teen angst and young love as well as exemplary sports writing, and a few memorable sex scenes.

Crane’s protagonist, Mack, is a star point guard and the only one at her small-town Pennsylvania high school who is Division-I bound. Between her junior and senior seasons, her beloved but troubled father dies, and on the heels of this trauma, a new girl transfers to the team: Liv is being scouted by the same schools as Mack, and the two are instantly inseparable. Their on-court chemistry is transcendent; off-court, they share good times but are also nearly immobilized by a desire that both are at great pains to conceal. Mack’s senior year is marked by larger-than-average difficulties: grieving her father, struggling with her distant, disengaged mother, playing hard with drugs and alcohol, and grappling with a sexuality that feels firmly forbidden in her community. The basketball scholarship she’s headed for feels imperative. Her mother sees it as a financial necessity; Mack knows it’s bigger than that. “I needed a future that was all basketball all the time because it was the only future I could imagine for myself. Basketball, I knew, was the only thing keeping me alive.”

Mack’s first-person voice is written from a distance of some years, a voice of wisdom looking back on her high school days. This perspective is one of the novel’s strengths. It is the older, wiser Mack who observes that another player “didn’t notice or appreciate the poetry of her pump fakes–she simply used them for their designated purpose. I guess what I mean is there was no romance.”

Anyone who’s ever been a teenager will relate to Mack’s broader struggles with self-destructive behaviors, desires, and pain. Her particular challenges involve a devotion to craft and the one-and-only ticket out that basketball represents. “Everything outside of that stadium, our problems, our anxieties, our fears, could wait; nothing else mattered but this last play.” The best sports writing evokes not only movement, sensory detail, and skill, but passion, and Crane has a firm grasp on these facets. As Mack’s final season nears its close, her relationship with Liv, her college decision, and more hinge upon a handful of choices and impactful moments. A Sharp Endless Need is unforgettable.

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

Rating: 8 photographs.

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My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende, trans. by Frances Riddle

Posted on April 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A daring young woman and groundbreaking reporter journeys from San Francisco to Chile in the 1890s to investigate a civil war and her own roots in this stirring novel by the celebrated Isabel Allende.

Isabel Allende brings the experience of more than 20 books to My Name Is Emilia del Valle, a swashbuckling tale of the life and adventures of a young woman born in San Francisco in the 1860s. Emilia’s story is exciting, empowering, and inherently feminist, as she travels from California to her father’s native Chile during that country’s civil war, bucking social norms and going wherever she’s told she can’t.

A young Irish novice named Molly Walsh is about to take vows as a nun when she is seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by a Chilean aristocrat. Devastated, she accepts a marriage proposal instead from a colleague and friend in San Francisco’s Mission District, who will be the devoted stepfather, “Papo,” to her child. Molly remains bitter toward the absent father, del Valle, but Emilia lacks for nothing in the loving household where her mother and Papo teach the Mission District’s children, provide bread to the poor, and support her unusual goals.

Emilia first makes a living by writing sensational dime novels of “murder, jealousy, cruelty, ambition, hatred… you know, Papo, the same as in the Bible or the opera” (under a pen name, of course). Next she decides to become a journalist, launching a newspaper career, soon traveling to New York (where she takes her first lover and otherwise broadens her worldview) and then abroad: Emilia journeys to Chile to cover the civil war as a reporter for San Francisco’s Daily Examiner. Female reporters are vanishingly rare, but as war correspondents, unprecedented; and Emilia del Valle writes under her own name. She is also motivated to fulfill her mother’s lifelong wish to track down her biological father, del Valle. Emilia finds great danger as well as the opportunity to define her identity for herself. The adventures she encounters along the way fill Allende’s pages with violence, love, high society, and human interest.

As she has in previous acclaimed novels, Allende (The House of the Spirits; Inés of My Soul; Maya’s Notebook; The Japanese Lover) applies riveting storytelling to an exploration of history through the lens of a fictional heroine. Allende’s language, and Frances Riddle’s translation, is evocative in its descriptions of Chile’s lovely landscapes, a young woman’s complicated love for her family, and the horrors of the battlefield, with which Emilia will become painfully familiar. This enthralling novel leaves Emilia, still young, in a position of some uncertainty: readers may hope for more from this plucky protagonist in a possible sequel.

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

Rating: 7 stitches.

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Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill

Posted on April 11, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Identical triplet girls are linked to tragedies across generations in this evocative first novel set along the swampy Texas Gulf Coast.

Tennessee Hill’s first novel, Girls with Long Shadows, is a dreamy, atmospheric tale of sisterhood and coming-of-age in the fictional town of Longshadow, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nineteen-year-old triplets Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C were orphaned when their mother died in childbirth; their father’s identity remains a mystery. But they have always known family in the form of their loving but distant Gram (“Manatee” to the townsfolk, for her swimming prowess) and their adopted, nearly deaf younger brother, Gull. The whole town looks askance at the girls, spookily identical and associated with their mother’s early death. The family’s golf course, Bayou Bloom, provides respite, and the bayou itself (where Gram takes a daily swim, joined sometimes by one or more of the girls) offers a connection to nature, its fecundity and floods. Then one fateful summer, an act of violence, combining desire and objectification, ruptures the triplets, the family, and the town.

A tautly plotted Southern gothic, Girls with Long Shadows takes a distinctive perspective in Baby B’s elegiac narration. “That weekend something gurgled beneath, rattled us where we stood.” And: “Even before the worst of what that summer would bring was upon us, I began to mourn the girls we had been.” Baby B speaks as “we” as often as “I.” Only a few people other than themselves can tell the girls apart; even the boys they date may not make the effort. And intermittently the perspective shifts to a “Front Porch Chorus,” in which the town speaks collectively, observing the girls from without: “They’re a blur we never bothered to untangle.” This lack of distinction is both a wound for the triplets and an indelible part of their identity. They feel each other’s sensations and know that this is a boon. Without that link, they would be less themselves. In the eyes of the town, however, they are less human for being undifferentiated, more object or mirror. “All those boys touching all of us at the same time, hands on hands on bodies on hands. It wasn’t even that Pete was the one touching me, it was all of them, their inability to leave us be.”

Encompassing a single summer in the dripping, humid South, Hill’s haunting debut deals in lyricism and tragedy as it considers the harm done to young women by the outside gaze.

This review originally ran in the March 31, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bikini tops.

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