Maximum Shelf author interview: Aaron John Curtis

Posted on November 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of Old School Indian, here’s Aaron John Curtis: The Punch Is Real.

Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Since 2004, Curtis has been quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. His debut novel is Old School Indian, a spirited, funny, and gravely serious story about a man who travels from his longtime home in Miami back to the reservation in New York State where he was raised, to process a serious medical diagnosis. It will be published by Hillman Grad Books/Zando on May 6, 2025.

Abe’s story closely mirrors your own. What are the pros and cons of writing autobiographical fiction?

Aaron John Curtis (photo: Cacá Santoro)

The hard part is trying to disguise people who don’t want to be recognized. [I’ve been told] that if you change someone’s physical description, they never recognize themselves, because no one is aware of their own behavior. So I kept that in mind. But I was lucky in that for all the stories, I got permission. The hard part is some of the stuff goes to some pretty dark places. Hot-topic cold-prose is one thing, but it’s easy to go surface, to just say, this happened. My editor was so good at “drill down here, dig a little deeper,” and you do, and it’s emotional, and you lose that day being sad. That’s hard. At the beginning the hard part was actually doing it. Because I had in my mind if you did autofiction, it didn’t count as a real book, like I wasn’t a real author, it wasn’t legitimate.

Because you didn’t make it up?

Exactly. But this is all true and it’s all made up! It’s this weird mix. My writer’s group was really like, just go for it. Once I had the first draft, I was like, oh, this is how I want to write books from now on.

Why this story now?

I did not realize it at the time, but I had been having symptoms for a few years by the time [my illness] started to present. I was in the mountains of northern California, harvesting pot actually, and I had this mark on my leg. Oh, I’ll get that checked out when I get back to Miami. And because I’d been in the mountains, they thought it was MRSA. They treated it like MRSA, and it started to spread, and it was months of them trying to diagnose it. Dermatologist, rheumatologist, dermatologist, rheumatologist… they lived in the same high-rise… all this is in the book. They would have dinner and call me at like 10 at night, sounding like they were tipsy.

They have that sheet of paperwork where they check off what they’re testing for. That second time they were testing, the doctor checked off the whole sheet. And when we got back the results, they were all negative. They didn’t tell the doctor anything, and she just stared at me and said “you’re fascinating.” And I was like, “yeah, fascinating.”

Just trying to deal with that anxiety–whatever I’d been trying to write before didn’t matter. Just to get through my day to day, work a job, support my wife, and all that stuff–I had to get it out somewhere. And it was going toward the page. At the time I still wasn’t diagnosed; I didn’t know what was going to happen to the protagonist, either. And someone in the writer’s group said, well, what if there was a healer? And I was like, oh my god. A Native healer. Thanks for that trope. In my head, I was like, that’s borderline offensive. But then it was like, oh. Hmm. I know a healer. I’m related to a healer. Okay. Yeah. Imagine what getting him involved would look like.

How did you come up with Dominick as narrator? Seems like he was fun to write.

He’s got a little attitude. In my first draft, the narrator was first person, and was pretty hostile toward the reader. I don’t know if that was anger toward the disease or all these issues that had been on my mind about just being Native in life. I imagined a white reader and I had a lot of anger to take out. [Author] Diana Abu-Jaber kind of runs lead on my writer’s group, and she suggested I do it third person, see what that unlocked. That group is mostly older, middle-aged professionals, and then I had a second writer’s group that was younger and all women of color but for one guy. And they had read the first three chapters in that first person, and then the next were in third person, and they said it lost something. One person said, if I read that first book, I’d be running around telling everyone this is the best book ever. The second book, it was still good, but I wouldn’t have had that same reaction. Oh. Hmm.

But I was really digging what the third person was doing. I don’t know exactly when Dominick started. Maybe it was when I was doing the poetry.

Also, I don’t live on the reservation, I never have, and I wanted someone who’s a little more authentically Mohawk than Abe is. I hoped that would address the fact that I’m not born and raised there.

You operate as both novelist and poet. Which is your home?

The fiction comes a lot more naturally. I noticed, as I was editing the book, I was getting better at doing the poetry. And my original thought was, because Abe is working on it as well, as you read the book, the first set of poems would be kind of bad. And by the end you’d be like “wow, he can really do it now.” By the time we came to the final draft of the book, each poem was as good as I could make it.

Poetry is something I want to do more of, definitely a challenge.

What haven’t I asked?

Did Tóta really do a split when she was 72? Yeah, she did. And [her] punch is real.

This interview originally ran on November 18, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis

Posted on November 22, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 18, 2024.

Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis is an engrossing trip cross-country and through time with an unusual protagonist-and-narrator duo, who together explore family, culture, history, identity, health and healing, community and connection. With serious situations and heartbreaking turns, this debut novel is both thought-provoking and hilarious.

When readers meet Abraham John Jacobs (Abe), he stands half dressed in his great-uncle’s trailer on the reservation where he was born and raised. He’s 43 years old, ill with a yet-undiagnosed malady, and he’s reluctantly agreed to let Uncle Budge try a healing. “If Rheumatologist Weisberg hadn’t canceled his appointment the day before he was supposed to finally get a diagnosis, Abe would probably still be in Miami, trying to decide which Halloween parties to attend.” Budge is an aging former alcoholic with a Butthole Surfers t-shirt stretched across a big belly; his spiritualist mystique fits in between more pedestrian concerns. “Not everythin’ we’re put here to do feels great,” he points out.

Abe has flown in for this visit, or recuperation, minus his wife, Alex, with whom relations aren’t so strong at the moment. The narrator, Dominick Deer Woods (whose identity won’t be clear for some time, and who is given to direct addresses to the reader), acknowledges that “Abraham Jacobs might not sound like an ‘Indian’ name, but you’ve got the hardcore Catholic first name and the surname of what used to be the biggest landowners on Ahkwesáhsne. So if you’re in the know, then you know the name Abraham Jacobs is rez as hell, cuz.” Feisty, bold, and brimming with voice, Dominick enriches this account at every turn.

This latter-day Abe, in Ahkwesáhsne in 2016 with the yet-to-be-diagnosed autoimmune disorder, anchors the novel’s present timeline, which is interspersed with flashbacks to the story of Abe’s life up to this point. Dominick relates Abe’s childhood and teenaged years in less detail, but focuses in earnest when he leaves the rez to attend Syracuse University, where he immediately meets Alex, a larger-than-life, sparkling, Miami-born, blonde musical theater major with whom he will be permanently infatuated. With Alex, Abe moves from Syracuse to Virginia to Miami, enjoys an expansive and mostly fulfilling sex life with a multiplicity of partners of all genders, performs at open mic nights as a budding poet, and eventually marries. Alex has been a regular on the rez for Thanksgiving holidays (a high point for the Ahkwesáhsne Kanien’kehá:ka, who white folks know as Mohawk Indians, and, yes, Dominick gets the irony) for decades. But he will take his time revealing why she’s not here.

At the rez, Abe gets sicker. The lesions on his lower legs look terrible but feel okay; his joints look fine but cause him excruciating pain. His medical team back in Miami is slow with a diagnosis, but when it comes, it’s grim. His faith in Uncle Budge’s healing increases with his pain, desperation, and reluctant observation of the older man’s wisdom. Lying on the carpet to be massaged is one thing; a much harder part of the process involves Abe examining his relationship with his family and the reservation community. The situation with Alex–still at home in Miami while Abe deteriorates up north–continues to decline. Unexpected help may yet be on the way.

Dominick Deer Woods brings intriguing dimensions to this novel. He is “your proud narrator,” while Abe is “our humble protagonist.” He reviews that Abraham Jacobs is “a Native name but that doesn’t make it an Indian name. Dominick Deer Woods, though? You could light a peace pipe with it.” Dominick in these and other respects exists in contrast to Abe. Where Abe is serious, hesitant, and out of touch with Ahkwesáhsne, Dominick is hard-hitting, informed, playful, angry, and very funny. He offers an interplay, a not-quite-literal dialogue, throwing Abe into relief, helping to illustrate and define him. He also offers poetry, and one of the most electrifying descriptions of writing poetry that readers are likely ever to come across.

Abe’s life and Dominick’s smart observations of it present a nuanced investigation of family (by both blood and marriage) and several layers of identity: what it means to be Ahkwesáhsne Kanien’kehá:ka (or, if you must, Mohawk); to be from the rez, on the rez, off the rez; and to navigate American history and modern cultural tropes. Old School Indian is concerned with gaps and distances: between the reservation and Syracuse, between Syracuse and Miami, between Abe and Alex, between Abe and his family back on the rez, between Abe and Dominick. As middle-aged Abe confronts difficult truths about himself, his body, and his relationships, he will consider how he wants to move through the world in large and small ways: in poetry, in love, in health. Dominick observes about a teenaged band that plays on the reservation, “No gig… will be as well-received as this one, since the reality of them will always be chasing listeners’ memories. But they have tonight, and they play and sing like the world is ending tomorrow.” Abe may yet do the same, and he and readers will be better for it.

Rating: 8 gingham sheets.

Come back Monday for my interview with Curtis.

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Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

Posted on November 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This quirky, funny, pained novel considers the challenge, for any of us, of becoming fully human.

Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story is a funny and pathos-ridden tale of social awkwardness and self-realization; a modern, delayed coming-of-age. Su’s narrative voice is perfectly pitched for her inelegant but deeply sympathetic protagonist.

Vi is a 24-year-old townie and college dropout in a midwestern college town. She works a hotel chain’s front desk next to a too-perfect perky blonde named Rachel. Vi is still suffering from a breakup eight months ago, barely slogging through her days. Her Taiwanese father and white mother are well-meaning and supportive, but they have trouble connecting with Vi, who has always been a loner; her older brother can be a pain, but he cares, even when Vi struggles to. Then, on a night she ventures out for the rare social occasion, she stumbles upon something new in the alley behind a bar during a drag show: a shapeless blob with a mouth and two eyes. She carries it home and, under Vi’s yearning influence, it grows.

The evolving blob, which Vi will come to call Bob (it starts as a malapropism), is the only fantastical detail in a story otherwise rooted in a very familiar world, featuring the casual racism of Vi’s hometown and her awkwardness with social situations. Bob takes in lots of television (and Fruity Pebbles), and after examining the pictures Vi shows him of movie stars like young Hugh Grant and Ryan Gosling, fashions himself into a tall, stunningly handsome white man with a six-pack. Vi presents him as a hookup or boyfriend; the world has trouble assimilating their match. The pairing is, in fact, a strain. “For a while, he seemed happy enough to eat and breathe and exist–the perfect companion. I should’ve anticipated that molding him into a man would trigger something deeper, some sort of existential awakening. Now he’s just like everyone else. He has needs and desires beyond me…. He could leave without me ever knowing why.” The fear of being left, of course, is key to Vi’s difficulties in navigating the world.

What makes Blob special is its mix of heartrending conflict and silly, self-aware humor. Truly cringy scenes balance sweet ones. Rachel performs off and on as a friend–but Vi scarcely knows how to care for her own problems, let alone anyone else’s, and her past attempts at friendship have often ended in unintended cruelty. Su excels with characters who can be significantly flawed but stir the reader’s empathy. Even Bob, despite beginning his life as a blob, has a surprising amount of personality. In the end, discomfiting though it may be, Blob makes incisive observations about life for a 20-something trying to make it on her own. Blobs and humans alike may yet find home.

This review originally ran in the November 8, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 handfuls of cereal.

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The Women Who Changed Photography: And How To Master Their Techniques by Gemma Padley

Posted on November 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Gemma Padley’s The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques delivers brief, punchy profiles and incisive assessments of what is revolutionary about these underappreciated photographers. In short chapters, Padley presents 50 women–some well-known, some all but unknown–from all over the world, born from 1799 through 1992. Profiles and portraits are followed by photographs, with Padley’s instruction on how to mimic what is special about the work. This includes technical advice (how to combine and blend portraits; hand-tint a photo; play with angles, color, and flash) and the conceptual (how to use photo stories to raise awareness on an issue). Photographers include Anna Atkins, who “privately published the first book to be illustrated using photography,” and Anne Wardrope, the “first woman in America to photograph her own nude body.” They work in documentary, portraiture, art, photojournalism, and cover war, fashion, conservation, and more. Wide ranging and diverse, with fascinating storytelling, these contents are visually stunning and technically detailed, and will please readers with a variety of interests.

This review originally ran in the November 5, 2024 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 7 apertures.

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Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

Posted on October 28, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A disgraced police detective takes a job as tribal marshal to pursue the mystery of a series of missing women, but has trouble seeing beyond her own lost daughter.

Laurie L. Dove’s atmospheric, frequently grim, and emotionally charged debut, Mask of the Deer Woman, features a former police detective trying to outrun her old life by taking a job as tribal marshal on an Oklahoma reservation. Carrie Starr is half Indigenous, but out of touch with that part of her personal history. Tasked with solving the cold cases of a growing number of missing Indigenous women and girls, she is inclined to focus instead on her own lost daughter.

Marshal Starr is the novel’s protagonist, but Mask of the Deer Woman‘s chapters shift among various characters, beginning with Chenoa Cloud, a college student from the rez who is determined to prove the presence of an endangered beetle on her tribal grounds. Documenting an endangered species promises to earn her funding and a job–a way off the rez for good, and not like the others “who left and never came back, or who couldn’t come back.” Chenoa’s disappearance into the Saliquaw Nation’s backcountry sets the stage for Starr’s arrival. The Bureau of Indian Affairs job is a last resort for Starr, and not one she relishes, but her daughter’s murder and the man she subsequently gunned down ended her career as detective. Trading on her late father’s Saliquaw identity earns her a poorly appointed cinder-block office, a BIA-issued, broken-down Ford Bronco, and the locals’ distrust. She carries a bottle of Jameson in her backpack and under the Bronco’s front seat, and a joint in her shirt pocket. Each missing young woman blurs into her daughter, and she flinches away from “the terrain she’d have to cover in the process. The dark space of whatever was out there. Caves. Old mines. Her own mind.”

Beyond the intoxicants she takes to escape her pain, Starr is knocked off-balance by tales of the Deer Woman. Part monster, part avenging angel, part capricious force of nature, this legend seems to follow the disoriented marshal, although the boundaries between magic, hallucination, and self-medicated grief are unclear. To boot, the rez is at odds with the nearest town, and the tribal council must field a controversial proposal to frack for oil, with associated infrastructure. Political and commercial machinations accompany the missing women and the struggling tribal marshal in a novel of grief, violence, community, empowerment, and pain.

This dark mystery will thrill readers and immerse them in a powerfully portrayed world of great losses and high stakes.

This review originally ran in the October 25, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 blue jay feathers.

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I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander

Posted on October 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

As Eve’s life devolves into crisis, she creates a golem to solve it all, in this lovely, absorbing novel of grief, dark humor, and love and friendship, with a dash of magic.

Beth Kander’s I Made It Out of Clay is a lovely, absorbing novel of grief, dark humor, and love and friendship, with a dash of magic.

In contemporary urban Chicago, as the holiday season approaches, Eve is struggling: she’s about to turn 40 years old, and she’s nowhere near done grieving her beloved father, who died just over a year ago. Eve and her father always loved Christmas–a guilty pleasure in their Jewish family not shared by the surviving members. Layoffs are threatened at work, her best friend has been distant, she’s had some disturbing encounters on the train recently, and she’s begun hallucinating her dearly departed grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who seems to be trying to warn Eve of something. Eve is not close to her mother (overbearing) or her younger sister Rosie (overly perfect), who’s scheduled her wedding for Eve’s 40th birthday weekend. Eve has (foolishly) promised to bring a plus one to Rosie’s wedding, but she’s so far failed to find a date. Unfortunately, her neighbor crush doesn’t seem to get her jokes or her cringeworthy attempts at flirtation.

In desperation, late at night and rather drunk, Eve recalls a story told by her grandmother, ventures into the dank corners of her apartment’s basement, and builds herself a golem out of foundation clay. A golem serves as protector and companion in Jewish tradition, and she feels in dire need of both. The next morning, a hungover Eve wakes up to find a handsome (and very naked) man in her apartment. She is horrified, in disbelief, attracted to him, and a little disgusted with herself. Is Eve’s golem a figment of her imagination? A monstrosity? Or the answer to her fondest wishes? Heading into Rosie’s wedding, all of Eve’s crises–work, friendships, the absence of romance, family strife, civil unrest in the wider world–crash and crescendo together. A golem is either the best or worst idea she’s ever had.

I Made It Out of Clay is a charming rework of a traditional tale. Frequently grim, it explores some of the darker elements of modern life: depression, loneliness, grief, bigotry. But it’s also sweet and very funny, especially in the moments when Eve lets her friends and, eventually, family into her life, and finds that they may have some of their own struggles. Kander gifts her readers with a novel that is often serious and sad, but ultimately uplifting, as Eve learns, “This isn’t the end of anything. It’s just one more beginning, like every damn day can be if we just let it.”

This review originally ran in the October 4, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bagels.

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The Greatest Lie of All by Jillian Cantor

Posted on October 21, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A young actress takes on the role of a glamorous romance author and gets more mystery–and romance–than she’d reckoned for.

The Greatest Lie of All by Jillian Cantor (Half Life; The Hours Count; Margot; The Lost Letter) is a propulsively paced story of intrigue, romance, and suspense starring two women a generation apart navigating family, love, secrets, and art. In one of their several parallels, each uses a professional pseudonym, so that four names delineate these two character arcs.

Readers meet the young, up-and-coming actress Amelia Grant just after the death of her beloved mother, and in the moment when she discovers her actor boyfriend in bed with his costar. At this low, Amelia is primed to accept her biggest role yet: to play the fabulously successful romance author Gloria Diamond in a biopic. Gloria had been Amelia’s mother’s favorite; it feels like a sign and a way to be close to the mother she’s lost, the only person who had called her by her birth name, Annie.

Heartbroken but determined, Amelia travels from Los Angeles to Gloria’s remote Seattle-area home to get to know her subject before filming begins. But “the Gloria Diamond” is distinctly unfriendly, cold, and dismissive. Even as Amelia finds a tentative friendship with Gloria’s son, Will (“cute, in an academic kind of way”), she despairs at ever understanding what makes the older woman tick. Gloria’s career was built on her famous, brief romance with her late husband, Will’s father. But the more Amelia learns, the less convincing that story is. She embarks on an informal investigation fueled by shadowy motives: her desire to play a “true” Gloria Diamond; her curiosity about the nature of love, especially as her mother so appreciated it in Diamond’s fiction; and Will’s reluctant desire to understand his mother. As she pursues the history of the author once known as Mary Forrester–Mare to her friends–Amelia begins to wonder about her own role in the drama unfolding before her.

In chapters that shift between Amelia’s perspective and that of the young Mare, The Greatest Lie of All shines in its plot twists and surprises, and, most of all, its pacing, which accelerates from a slow burn to a heart-thumping momentum. The tension increases, stakes rising as Gloria/Mare and Amelia/Annie must reckon with their pasts to chart their shared present. Danger accompanies every possibility of romance, and family history matters more than it originally appears. Cantor’s experienced hand shows in this classically crafted thriller, which will keep its readers tautly engaged to the final scene.

This review originally ran in the September 24, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 glasses of wine.

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author interview: Oliver Radclyffe

Posted on October 18, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of Frighten the Horses, here’s Oliver Radclyffe: Barely a Category.

Oliver Radclyffe‘s work has appeared in the New York Times and Electric Literature. He is the author of Adult Human Male and his memoir, Frighten the Horses, was just published by Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic Press. Radclyffe lives on the Connecticut coast with his four children.

What was different about your two books?

Oliver Radclyffe
(photo: Lev Rose)

Writing this book took me 10 years. I wrote a manuscript in five years about coming out as a lesbian in mid-life. But by the time it was finished, I was already midway through my transition. When I started sending it out to agents, I pitched it as the first of a two-book series; I would write the transition second. The agents said, that’s not going to work.

So I started again from scratch, focusing on my gender and the denial that I had been experiencing. I wrote that book over a three-year period. Got an agent; she started submitting it. We got feedback from editors that they weren’t clear who the book was for. I hadn’t thought about my audience; I needed to distance myself from that to write what I was writing.

While that book was out on first submission, Roxane Gay announced she was opening her imprint. I had this thunderbolt moment: What if I rewrote this for Roxane Gay? I’d done her master class on writing through trauma, I’d seen her interview trans people, I knew who she was publicly, I knew the way she thought and what her values were. I thought, I can tell this story to this woman. I wasn’t thinking Roxane Gay might buy the book, it was just an exercise in how to fine-tune it. I spent another nine months rewriting.

During resubmissions, I had an essay published in Electric Lit which Patrick Davis from Unbound Edition Press read, and he called me up and said, I want to commission you to write a book of essays. At that point I wasn’t sure the memoir was going to be published. So I said okay. We signed the contract, and then Roxane got back to us. There was a minor panic about the timing of publications. Grove said, we can do this, but we need a year’s grace between the two books. That meant I had to write the book in three months. So the difference between the two books? One took me 10 years and one took me three months. It was actually really fun to write to a really tight deadline.

Why tell your story?

For the first draft, the starting point was in 2011, when I needed to read books about people who were discovering their queer identities in midlife. They really didn’t exist, particularly in my situation: married, masquerading as heterosexual, with kids. I was about to blow up my own life, and I desperately wanted to find somebody who’d been through this before. I’m Gen X; I wasn’t going to start going onto Reddit forums. I started looking for books, and they didn’t exist. I’d always wanted to write. That old cliché: write the book you want to read.

When I wrote the second draft, about transitioning, the focus shifted from writing for a queer audience to trying to be a bridge. There were so many books at that point written for trans people, I didn’t feel the need to add to that canon. I was in a unique position to write to cis people because I had been in essentially a cisgendered heterosexual life for so long. When I first started transitioning, I said to all my friends, please don’t hold back on the questions. Anything you want to know, even if you think it might be rude or weird or uncomfortable, ask. That’s what I set out to do, but not in a didactic way.

Legitimately, I am less vulnerable than a lot of trans writers. I’m trans masculine, I’m white, I’m comfortably off, I live in this lovely house in the Connecticut suburbs with my children. I am not in a position of extreme danger and vulnerability. When I made the choice to write about some of the more intimate details, I thought, I’m going to do this because I can. I wanted people to understand that transness is not ideological. It’s incredibly physical. The only way to show this is by going into those details about my body. It’s not something you can think your way out of, or intellectualize your way out of–it’s your body that is leading this journey. I leaned into that. I hope that other trans people do not feel that I have opened a door to invite cis people to ask those questions unsolicited! Because obviously it is curated and controlled by me, the writer. But I did feel it was important to go there.

The timeline in your writing jumps around.

Those jumps weren’t there originally. In the early drafts I didn’t have any backstory, but the real-time narrative really doesn’t make sense without it. An early reader said, you have to take all references to your privilege out of this book. Nobody is going to want to read about the poor little rich girl. I said yeah… I really can’t do that. Because, firstly, none of this story makes sense without referring to my privilege. And secondly, I’ve spent my life pretending to be something that I’m not so that people will like me, and I am not going to do that anymore. I recognize that my privilege is going to put some people off, and that’s okay. The story doesn’t make sense without explaining what I came from and the processes I had to go through to figure out how to live my life as the person I am now, given what I came from.

I love the humor in a story that is often fraught.

That’s the English; we tend to use humor to disguise discomfort and pain. I think it’s in my DNA. It’s a coping mechanism. I remember there were times I used to laugh till I was crying, my stomach was hurting, over things that were so absurd and ridiculous. It’s a much more enjoyable way of releasing emotion than getting angry and throwing plates at the wall. Also, this journey was tricky and difficult, but compared to what some trans people have to go through, it wasn’t devastating or catastrophic. I wasn’t in any danger, crucially, which is unusual. So I felt like this was a book that could be written with a light touch without disrespecting what had actually happened.

I’m so happy at the moment about the quantity of books by trans people that are being published. We are in this amazing period where trans writers, trans artists, trans filmmakers, trans musicians–they’re everywhere. I just went to see the Whitney Biennial and it’s just full of trans artists. It’s incredibly exciting: every one is different, every one is amazing and bringing something different and new to this canon. And that’s important, because this isn’t one experience. Nobody can be a spokesperson for the trans experience because we’re all so different. The more we put out there, the more people can understand the diversity within this category. It’s barely a category, really.

This interview originally ran in the September 20, 2024 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.

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Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe

Posted on October 14, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir, Frighten the Horses, is an arrestingly forthright and open account of self-realization, a portrait of a transgender experience that is beautiful, honest, and raw.

After an absorbing, funny opening scene, Radclyffe rewinds to a less happy time. Readers accompany him on a difficult path as he spent the first four decades of his life trying to live up to expectations. His British upper-class childhood was privileged but disjointed. On brief occasions in boarding school, art school, and while riding motorcycles, he felt like one of the boys, but never felt he truly fit in. He became a housewife of status, then immigrated to the Connecticut suburbs and soon found himself raising four children and a golden retriever puppy. But something had always been off, and the memoir moves back and forth in time to portray Radclyffe’s anxiety and soul-searching. He eventually comes out as lesbian, divorces, and comes out as a transgender man.

These events and discoveries are presented in scenes with color, detail, and dialogue, and Radclyffe’s writing style is smooth, relatable, and effortless to read. With humor and compassion for himself and others, Radclyffe describes his own resistance to and acceptance of his gender and sexuality as he wrestles with the complexities of gender identity, sexual orientation, feminism, class, and family dynamics. This disarming, gorgeously written, and generously vulnerable memoir uses imagery to great effect. In sharing this individual narrative, Radclyffe expands and advances the way trans experiences are represented in literature. Smart and incisive, Frighten the Horses is unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the September 20, 2024 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: 9 steps.

Come back Friday for my interview with Oliver Radclyffe! I’m really excited about this one.

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The Bishop’s Villa by Sacha Naspini, trans. by Clarissa Botsford

Posted on October 7, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this transporting novel based on real events, a shy cobbler in an Italian village during World War II is gradually drawn into quiet acts in the Resistance.

Sacha Naspini (Nives) brings close and poignant attention to true events with his historical novel The Bishop’s Villa, translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

In the fall of 1943, in the sleepy village of Le Case in Tuscany’s Maremma region, a cobbler goes about his daily business. Solitary and quiet by nature, René makes do with just two fingers on his right hand following a childhood accident with a lathe; his nickname in town is Settebello, after the “lucky seven” card in scopa. When the local bishop rents out the seminary and surrounding villa to be used as a prison camp for the region’s Jewish population, Le Case mostly plods on as before. Some local residents speak cruelly of the prisoners; many simply ignore their presence. René mends the shoes brought to him for repair by prison guards. For most townspeople, the war is poverty, deprivation, and the passage of time.

But René’s neighbor Anna, a lifelong friend, has just lost her son, who fought for the Resistance until he was captured and executed by the Wehrmacht. Anna is galvanized; René wants her to stand down. And then Anna vanishes, leaving behind a note for René. She has gone to join the partisans, to “fight for Edoardo and for Italy.” When René learns that Anna might have become imprisoned in the bishop’s villa, he finds that he can no longer fail to act. His subtle sabotage begins with boots. “He chose rusty nails, some so brittle that they crumbled at the first blow. He hammered them in a little crooked, curved inwards as if he were aiming for the heel… the hole in the sole would get wider, like a small surface wound.”

In short chapters, Naspini draws readers into René’s world: first the tightly confined life of the village cobbler, traveling back and forth between home, workshop, and Anna’s apartment, and then to the tighter confines of a cell in the bishop’s villa. Botsford’s translation is terse and atmospheric, punctuated by lyrical or romantic phrasings: wonder is “like a child unable to describe a treasure they’d chanced upon under a stone.” With torture, “you can chew [a man’s] bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

The Bishop’s Villa is absorbing, transporting, beautiful, and grim. Naspini’s Author’s Note makes clear his drive to lay bare a shameful chapter of history; but with this novel he has also written a love story, for without Anna, “René would never have used the tools of his trade to fight his war.” The result is moving and layered.

This review originally ran in the September 12, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 soles.

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