rerun: Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris, illus. by Charles Vess

Posted on March 21, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I’m still thinking about this one with some longing. Maybe it’s time to dip back in. Can I tempt you, or me?

Fairy tales for grown-ups, allegories, visions and horrors: these gorgeously illustrated linked stories are guaranteed to transport.

With Honeycomb, the prolific Joanne M. Harris (Chocolat; Peaches for Father Francis), who has written fantasy, historical fiction, suspense, cookbooks and more, offers an enchanting collection of darkly delightful, imaginative fairy tales and parables of the modern world. (These stories began as a series on Twitter.) Illustrator Charles Vess (Stardust; Sandman) brings to life Harris’s Silken Folk, “weavers of glamours, spinners of tales… whom some call the Faërie, and some the First, and some the Keepers of Stories,” in richly detailed images.

In the world of Honeycomb, the Sightless Folk (regular humans) unwittingly often share space with the numerous and diverse Silken. “There are many doors between the worlds of the Faërie and the Folk. Some look like doors; or windows; or books. Some are in Dream; others, in Death.” These 100 stories form a whole that is magical, fanciful, enchanting and occasionally nightmarish. Some center on single-appearance characters, and some characters are revisited, but all belong to the same universe. “Dream is a river that runs through Nine Worlds, and Death is only one of them.” In special moments, “all Worlds were linked, like the cells of an intricate honeycomb, making a pattern that stretched beyond even Death; even Dream,” and the stories are likewise linked cells.

Some act as allegories, as in “The Wolves and the Dogs,” in which the Sheep elect a Wolf to protect them because at least he is honest. In “The Traveller,” the titular character passes quickly by many delights in pursuit of his destination, which turns out less impressive than he’d hoped. “Clockwork” is a horrifying tale in which a husband rebuilds his wife piece by piece. “The Bookworm Princess,” on the other hand, ends with deep satisfaction. There is the Clockwork Princess and the watchmaker’s boy; a girl who travels with a clockwork tiger; and a mistrustful puppeteer who manifests what he fears. A recurring farmyard is packed with colorful animal characters–a troublesome piglet, a petulant pullet–and allegory, Orwellian and otherwise. The connecting character is the Lacewing King, whom readers meet at his birth in “The Midwife” and follow for hundreds of years, as the fate of Worlds hangs in the balance. “There are many different ways to reach the River Dream. One is Sleep; one is Desire; but the greatest of all is Story….”

Completely engrossing, exquisitely inventive, brilliantly illustrated and thought-provoking, Honeycomb is a world, or Worlds, to get lost in. “Some of these tales have stings attached. But then, of course, that’s bees for you.”

This review originally ran in the May 3, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 candied cockroaches.

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No Names by Greg Hewett

Posted on March 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This dazzling first novel applies poetry to the overawing power of art, friendship, and the ways in which many forms of love blend into one.

Following five books of poetry, Greg Hewett (Blindsight; darkacre) astonishes with a transcendent first novel about friendship, desire, music, loss, and love in its many forms. No Names is rough-edged, glittering, and brilliant as it spans decades and lives, traveling from a fictional American refinery town to Europe’s capitals, from Copenhagen to a place known simply as the Island, and back again.

Solitary teenager Mike’s world expands when he meets easy, outgoing Pete, with whom he shares a love of literature and especially music, and a nearly instant firm bond. Music, for Mike, is all bound up with sex and violence and epiphany: “It’s like I’m busting out of the prison of myself and giving to the world whatever part of me that’s worth anything.” The two guitarists form a punk band in the late 1970s, and with their two bandmates take off on a rocketing tour of the United States and then Europe that ends in enigma and tragedy.

In 1993, another angst-ridden teen from the same gritty, class-divided hometown discovers a dusty record in his mother’s attic and goes looking for a mostly forgotten punk band. Isaac will pursue the mystery of the No Names until he unearths Mike on a remote island in the Faroes, where the haunted older man has been living as a hermit since the band’s 1978 dissolution: “a mythical musician who, for a time, dwelt here and filled the place with songs.” Mike is supported by a Danish classical pianist named Daniel who had briefly been a friend to the band. On the island, Mike describes to Daniel “a state of ecstasy, or ekstasis–that is, becoming entranced, being brought out of oneself” by the aurora borealis, but these lines could as easily describe their relationship with music, or with one another. Mike, Pete, Daniel, and Isaac, among others, form permutations and re-combinations of friendship, affection, artistic inspiration, love, and desire.

Hewett brings a poet’s ear for language to a complexly layered story that treats sex, drugs, and rock & roll as simultaneously hard-grained and gorgeous. His evocations of music and the power of the muse are tantalizing and apt, as are his lines about the strain of finding oneself, of love and lust and pain. By the time No Names flashes forward to 2018, readers will be spellbound, and as much in love with the novel’s protagonists as they are variously entangled with one another. Hewett’s first novel is scintillating and absolutely unforgettable.

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

Rating: 10 walnuts.

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Bad Nature by Ariel Courage

Posted on March 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Bleakly funny, gloomy, and magnetic, this novel’s revenge-fueled, terminal road trip will tender surprising truths.

Ariel Courage presents a provocative, hypnotic excursion with her debut novel, Bad Nature, which offers a road trip, a revenge fantasy, and a snarky sendup of American culture.

Courage’s mesmerizingly repellent protagonist, Hester, is a successful lawyer with money to burn–one form of revenge upon her “impracticable, unprofitable” upbringing–and an antiseptic lifestyle kept up by a personal trainer, a dermatologist, a cosmetic dentist, and other professionals. In her nondescript but designer-decorated Manhattan condo, she has regular, emotionless sex with the “objectively repulsive” building super.

Hester relates early in her narrative: “I was always going to kill my father.” This intention shifts from someday to immediate when, just after her 40th birthday, she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. The oncologist tells her that, without treatment, she has six months to live. With characteristic, practiced detachment, Hester quits her job and leaves Manhattan in her Jaguar E-type, aiming for her long-estranged father’s new home in Death Valley. She will kill him and then herself with the gun in her glove box. Simple.

Hester’s cross-country road trip is beset with trouble. She loses the E-type to theft at a Philadelphia rest stop, and with it, her gun and her mother’s ashes. The first lesson that her wealth–an important feature of her constructed armor–will not solve all her problems comes when she must settle for an insultingly affordable rental car. She picks up a hitchhiker: “what my mother had euphemistically called an urban outdoorsman and what in college I would’ve called a crustpunk.” This young man, John, becomes her unlikely companion on a convoluted and indirect route toward the eventual destination. John is a principled traveler: eschewing consumerism, he photographs Superfund sites, documenting destruction. Stops along the way include Hester’s (only) ex-boyfriend from college and a friend (likewise) from high school, with disappointing if predictable results. Hester gets sicker. The outcome of her larger journey is less easy to guess.

Caustic Hester is aware she has “daddy issues” but “I’d rather pluck his eyeballs out with a fork and eat them jellied on toast than endure five minutes of therapy.” Her first-person voice is deeply sarcastic, darkly funny, and almost entirely self-aware. Bad Nature‘s title offers commentary on Hester’s terminal cancer (and her mother’s), on the violent impulses of her hated father (and her own), on the environmental devastation John is called to witness. Even more than wealth, rigorous self-grooming, and personal aloofness, Hester’s carefully cultivated cynicism is her final weapon, and its potential loss might be the most painful and surprising part of this madcap expedition. Courage delights and challenges with this mashup of emotions, until readers may be surprised, in turn, to care about Hester after all.

This review originally ran in the March 6, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dirty fingernails.

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I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong

Posted on February 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young man wakes up from a coma and returns to the family, and the family sushi restaurant, that he’d left behind, with comical, heart-wrenching, hopeful results.

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Flux) is a funny, bittersweet, heartwarming story about family, love, and making every minute count.

Readers first meet Jack Jr. in what he is slow to realize is a hospital room. He wakes up intubated and gagging. He’s confused about his whereabouts and circumstances, and he asks for his husband. His nurse is thrown into a full panic: Jack Jr. has been in a coma for 23 months and was not expected to regain consciousness.

No one will answer when he asks for his husband. Jack Jr. has missed his 30th birthday and the first 18 months or so of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks into this remarkable recovery, he returns home, not to his Manhattan apartment, but to his father’s home in New Jersey. He goes back to the family business, a struggling Korean-Japanese sushi restaurant, which was once meant to be his life’s work and which he has not seen in 12 years. Jack Jr. has lost everything, and he finds himself in an unfamiliar, masked world. For much of the narrative, the old wounds he was avoiding–that he will now have to face–remain shrouded from the reader.

Jack Jr.’s kind and loving Appa (father) is a passionate sushi chef and workaholic; his Umma (mother) is private, reserved, and fiercely loyal; his especially estranged brother, James, is a recovering alcoholic with a dear wife and a new baby to join the teenaged nephew that Jack Jr. barely knows. Wise, gawky, 16-year-old Juno is perhaps the member of his family that Jack Jr. best connects with. And then there is Emil, formerly Jack Jr.’s nurse, and now potentially poised to become something more. Through these endearing characters, Jack Jr. considers that perhaps “there was more to loving something than smiling at it.”

In Jack Jr.’s first-person voice, these mysterious, painful new challenges are wrenching, but his love for his wacky family, and theirs for him, are unmistakable throughout. Alongside the flavors of carefully prepared nigiri, dak juk, soy, ponzu, and plenty of pork belly, humor and off-kilter love shine brightly in this tale of realizing what’s really important and making the most of one’s own time. The title of I Leave It Up to You refers to a translation of omakase, the Japanese dining tradition of asking for the chef’s choice, and also nods to the novel’s sweet attention to the care of self and others. While recovering from his physical injuries, Jack Jr. must also navigate old fractures with a family he hasn’t seen in years, let go of a relationship with no closure, and remain open to a surprisingly promising future. The story winds up delightfully warm and soothing, for all the bumps along the way.

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

Rating: 8 bowls of juk.

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No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene

Posted on January 31, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Astonishingly imaginative, wise, and weird, the essays in this illustrated collection–featuring natural phenomena, children, death, and costuming–have the power to reshape the way one sees the world.


A. Kendra Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) offers a magical, mind-expanding selection of observations in No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. Greene employs a delightful, often childlike wonder in this collection about discovery–where she interacts with others, where humans interact with the rest of the world, and what might be made of all of it. Greene’s perspective is fresh and inventive, open to all possibilities, and the results are surprising and wondrous.

Greene’s essays vary in length and take place around the world. “Wild Chilean Baby Pears” considers a crime: in 1979, a museum visitor stole a specimen of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker from the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. Greene, who has been a museum visitor as well as a museum worker and a teacher, explores this act from several angles; unexpectedly, she empathizes deeply with the thief she calls “Visitor X.” “Until It Pops” details a dress made for the author out of balloons, and her experience of traveling to Chicago for Twist and Shout (the annual balloon twisters’ convention).

Brief and spellbinding, “The Two Times You Meet the Devil” describes encounters on a country road in Argentina and in a bookstore of unnamed location, respectively. “The more I think about it, the more I wonder how many times we have met, crossed paths at least, exchanged a look, and the devil has said nothing.” “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy” is about death, as well as rocks, valleys, turf houses, forgetting, stick-shift cars, whales, kayaks, summer staff, television, and metaphor. “People Lie to Giraffe” is about real giraffes (one in particular) as well as the likeness of a giraffe suggested by a photo of the author’s long arm and pinched fingers. It explores everything encompassed in a child’s imagination, how to make the world, and what it means to tell the truth or tell a story.

Greene is always present, participating in the action and dialogue, postulating philosophies and understandings. Greene is an artist in several media (book arts, photography, illustration), and a teacher as well as a writer; this collection is illuminated by her own illustrations and images. The scope of her essays (26 in total) is mesmerizing, her language glittering, and her ideas exuberant and profound. She says it best herself: “It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world.” As for what we communicate with art: “everything resonant and whole and shining, all at once, perfect, every bell ringing, yes.” Yes.

This review originally ran in the January 27, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 sprays of bougainvillea.

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A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay

Posted on January 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Near her 100th birthday, a rural Jamaican woman faces the good works and wrongdoings of her own life and her island’s history in this richly written novel of vivid characters and big themes.

Diana McCaulay’s sixth novel, A House for Miss Pauline, features an indomitable 99-year-old woman in rural Jamaica, trying to reconcile rights and wrongs near the end of a long life. Miss Pauline exhibits a brave honesty that endears her to readers as she wrestles with not only her own actions but centuries of wrongdoings on an island steeped in sugar and slavery. Kingston native McCaulay (Gone to Drift) evokes a rich setting through the food, climate, and other details, such as her characters’ Jamaican patwa, which brings them to vibrant life.

Miss Pauline is less than a month away from her 100th birthday when the stones of her home begin to shiver, shake, whisper, and howl to her. She has lived in the village of Mason Hall in Jamaica’s St. Mary parish all her life, having borne two children with her beloved (long-dead) partner, had many friends and lovers, and been an elder to the town. The village is built largely of stone salvaged from a plantation big house Miss Pauline once discovered and designated for reuse in building her own home and many other structures.

In this literal and symbolic rebuilding, she led her community in reclaiming what had been stolen: land, human lives, freedom. She is certain now that the stones are prompting her to reckon with her own life’s work: community building, but also the unresolved disappearance of a white man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to challenge Miss Pauline for the ownership of her land. A House for Miss Pauline is a deeply captivating story of one complicated, admirable life and the nuanced history of Jamaica. It grapples with how people are connected to place, and how that plays a role in the concept of land ownership and responsibility. “Does the cotton tree judge her for what she did? Surely it has seen worse? How to evaluate crimes, one against the other?”

Miss Pauline turns first to her granddaughter in New York, and then enlists a local teen, Lamont, for help with the mysteries of the Internet and a smartphone. Lamont, who’s alone in life, will play a role beyond research assistant for the near-centenarian, prompting consideration of what constitutes family. In her attempts to establish the future of her home and her land, Miss Pauline will also face surprises about her own history: “Maybe you have to go into the past to make the present right. Maybe the long ago is demanding something of the here and now.” Thoughtful, defiant, and just, the frightened but fierce Miss Pauline is uncowed in the face of youth and change; she’s a hero for readers of all backgrounds.

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

Rating: 7 panganat.

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The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, trans. by Katy Derbyshire

Posted on January 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A humble café in post-World War II Vienna serves as backdrop for all the large and small dramas of everyday life in this subtly scintillating novel.

The Café with No Name by Austrian writer Robert Seethaler (The Field; The Tobacconist) opens in 1966 Vienna. Robert Simon is 31 years old and about to embark upon the quiet dream of his lifetime. It’s his final day at the market where he’s worked for seven years, as he begins to clean out and shape up a long-empty café across the street. Simon is a solitary, steady, and kind man who was orphaned as a young child during the war and is now a reliable worker who keeps to himself. “For a while he worked as a glass clearer and brush boy in the Prater beer gardens, and perhaps it was there–as he roamed between the tables in search of empty glasses, chicken bones and cigarette stubs in the light of the coloured lanterns–that he first felt a nascent germ of yearning: to do something that would give his life a decisive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.” He realizes this modest ambition with the café on the edge of the bustling market, where Simon serves blue-collar workers like himself. He offers beer, wine, coffee, and raspberry soda; bread with drippings and gherkins; and a place of respite. He is soon joined by a single employee, a loner like himself. Mila, too, finds a home in the café with no name.

Seethaler’s tender novel follows Simon and his café for the 10 years that they operate, until a change in the building’s ownership pushes the small business out again. These years see Simon’s Vienna neighborhood rebuild from postwar austerity, its population and workforce swell and change, and cultural patterns begin to shift. The café is a microcosm of these evolutions.

The Café with No Name does not have a plot filled with action, conflict, and resolution; instead, it focuses on mundane details of life. “Simon couldn’t help smiling at the thought of all the lost souls who came together in his café every day.” An aging prizefighter, two older ladies who drink and chat in the afternoons, the cheese shop proprietor and her painter boyfriend, and Simon’s friend the butcher are among the regulars; they and others experience death and dismemberment, quiet violences, loss, and alcoholism, but also uplifting moments of humanity, friendship, and love. There are, remarkably, no villains in this novel, only people struggling against ordinary human challenges. While Seethaler’s characters face significant difficulties, the story never feels grim, but rather steadfast and even hopeful. Katy Derbyshire translates Seethaler’s prose from the German with calm delivery, charming descriptions, and understated humor. This lovely novel sweetly and simply emphasizes built family, resilience, and rebirth.

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

Rating: 7 paintings.

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The Garden by Nick Newman

Posted on January 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This eerie, thought-provoking novel combines sisterly love and end-of-the-world horrors in an unforgettable pairing.

Nick Newman’s The Garden is a shape-shifting novel, an enigmatic fable that twists slowly into a more sinister dystopian narrative with a surprising turn at the end. The questions it asks and the hard truths its protagonists turn away from will keep readers intrigued.

Evelyn and her younger sister, Lily, have lived in the garden all their lives, more or less. They remember little from before, although in the early years there were parties, their father holding court, their mother overseeing. Then the people went away, and the gates were locked, as were the doors to the bulk of the sprawling house. The sisters live now out of the kitchen, which “still [feels] too large,” and in the garden, where they keep bees and a few aging chickens and grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Their mother’s handwritten almanac directs their daily work, which is getting harder as their bodies grow older, but the garden provides everything they need and nothing is expected to change–until it does.

The sisters haltingly identify the creature that appears in their kitchen, stealing their honey, as a boy. Aside from its sheer novelty, the situation is frightening. The boy is unknown and therefore unsafe, a curiosity and a threat. “You know what boys turn into, don’t you, Sissie?” Lily speculates, “He’s probably poisonous.” But Evelyn considers, “Boys did become men, Lily was right about that, but what her sister actually had in mind, she did not know. A cocoon, perhaps. A chrysalis… Evelyn could not deny a perverse desire to learn firsthand, to feed and water the grub and see what it might grow into.” As they wrestle with this new challenge in their long-immutable garden–perhaps less an Eden than a prison–the sisters find themselves facing new choices and turning against each other in new ways.

Newman’s gifts lie in the quiet accumulation of his novel’s unsettled atmosphere, its changeable nature. The garden provides food, sustenance, and floral beauty; it is also constantly threatened by dust storms capable of burying the known world. Readers know both more and less than Evelyn and Lily do, and knowledge and its absence are increasingly terrifying, especially as the sisters begin to confront long-buried secrets about their own past. The possible and the inexorable collide in this parable of change, which probes the promises and terrors of personal choice and portrays various approaches to possibility. “The vagueness of their mother’s threats had made a blank space… and only now was Evelyn realizing that she and her sister saw that blankness quite differently. It excited Lily. It terrified Evelyn.” The dystopia it represents may be more real than readers originally understand.

This review originally ran in the January 7, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 marigolds.

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A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, trans. by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on December 20, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This award-winning novel in its first English translation follows a young woman rooming with a distant septuagenarian relative for a year, and the muted dramas of her coming-of-age.

Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone, winner of Japan’s Akutagawa Prize and translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood, is a slim coming-of-age novel of understated beauty.

A young Japanese woman named Chizu moves to Tokyo when her mother goes to China for work; Chizu is to live with a distant relative she’s never met. “It was raining when I arrived at the house. The walls of my room were lined with cat photos.” Chizu is 20; Ginko is 71. Over the course of a year, they move quietly around each other in a small apartment overlooking a commuter train platform. Chizu is periodically impatient, even cruel, toward the older woman, who placidly knits, embroiders, cooks, and, when solicited, imparts advice. The two women establish a thin bond, and then Chizu moves on. This restrained novel follows the four seasons of their connection.

Chizu is a solitary person, without friendships or much success in relationships, nor is she close to her mother, whose emigration doesn’t affect her much. When she arrives at Ginko’s home, she reflects: “I hadn’t bothered introducing myself properly…. I wasn’t in the habit of going around declaring my name to people like that. Nor was I used to others actually calling me by it.” Her life has been passive: “I’d been told to come, so here I was.” She does not want to go to school and instead takes on a series of part-time jobs. She is curious about falling in love, especially when Ginko’s male companion becomes a regular visitor; she is often invited along on their outings. In this and other ways, Ginko proves the more generous member of their household. Chizu is initially dismissive of Ginko, but notes that she “was turning out to be surprisingly normal,” and that her friendship has something to offer.

These observations are made only very subtly, amid daily run-of-the-mill events, including the tiny dramas of Chizu’s workplaces, her forays into dating, and shared meals at the apartment by the rail line. Kirkwood translates Aoyama’s writing with subdued loveliness: “The train was approaching the bridge over the Yanase River. Its banks were lined with slender cherry trees, their branches still bare…. A watch on my wrist, pumps on my feet, a black handbag at my side. I watched a boy taking a brown dog for a run, the two of them tracing a line across the grey concrete.” A Perfect Day to Be Alone ends with less assured conclusiveness than its title implies, but in the spirit of the whole, it nods quietly toward positive change, or at least forward movement: “The train carried me onwards, to a station where someone was waiting.”

This review originally ran in the December 13, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 Jintan mints.

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Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud, trans. by Cory Stockwell

Posted on December 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Brigitte Giraud’s Prix Goncourt-winning Live Fast is a powerful and concise study of love, loss, and the small decisions and turning points that shape life and death.

Brigitte Giraud, the author of more than a dozen novels, won the 2022 Prix Goncourt for Vivre vite. Published in the U.S. under the title Live Fast, this is Giraud’s first book to be translated from French to English. The highly autobiographical novel examines the 1999 death of the narrator’s 41-year-old husband, Claude, in a motorcycle accident. She writes: “There was only one thing I was truly obsessed with, and I’d kept it secret so as not to frighten those around me… because after two or three years, it would have seemed suspicious if I’d persisted in trying to understand how the accident happened…. My brain had never stopped running wild.”

Brief, taut, and tortured, Live Fast begins as the narrator, Brigitte, sells the house she and Claude had been moving into at the time of his death 20 years earlier. Letting the house go is significant, but she has never let go of her confusion and despair over her loss. “The house is at the heart of what caused the accident,” she insists, then embarks on a list of hypotheticals, such as “If only I hadn’t wanted to sell the apartment,” “if only my mother hadn’t called my brother to tell him we had a garage,” “if only it had rained,” and on and on. These wishes form the novel’s chapter titles, and Brigitte compulsively dissects each point on a diagram about cause and effect that she’s been plotting for years.

In this way, as though she’s conducting an incisive postmortem accounting, Giraud analyzes the events that led up to Claude’s inexplicable death. Their family–Brigitte, Claude, and their eight-year-old son–were moving house. They got the keys early; they had access to a garage; Brigitte’s brother needed to store a motorcycle. Readers are treated to detailed descriptions of the Honda CBR900 Fireblade and Honda’s famed engineer Tadio Baba, as well as what song Claude may have chosen to end his final workday with. Giraud even postulates that had Stephen King died–rather than being seriously injured–when he was struck by a minivan in Maine three days before Claude’s accident, Claude might have been spared.

This is a novel about obsessive, repetitive investigation: “You rewind and then you rewind again. You become a specialist in causal relationships. You hunt down clues…. You want to know all there is to know about human nature, about the individual and collective springs from which events gush forth. You can’t tell if you’re a sociologist, a cop, or a writer. You go mad.” In examining these large and small, exceptional and mundane events, Giraud maps grief and yearning as much as the tragic death of a beloved husband and father. Cory Stockwell’s stark translation blends emotion and analysis in the voice of a woman as bereft as ever. Live Fast is a pained but lucid look at loss in its long term.

This review originally ran in the December 10, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 columns.

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