Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran

Posted on July 8, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A singularly weird and drug-fueled private eye, not for the faint-hearted.

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Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway gives us a refreshingly bizarre twist on the classic private investigator. Readers of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead will recognize Claire’s copious and indiscriminate drug use (she never fails to check a medicine cabinet and pocket the contents; she seeks dealers like she seeks clues) and her generally hard-bitten lifestyle. Similarly unconventional is her somewhat metaphysical style of detection, guided in part by a controversial dead French detective who speaks to Claire through his book.

When Claire’s ex-boyfriend Paul is murdered, and several of his valuable guitars go missing, his wife, Lydia, hires Claire to look into things. A simultaneous case involves a diminishing herd of miniature horses up in Marin County: Claire suspects they may be committing suicide. The action shifts from contemporary San Francisco, where Claire hunts Paul’s guitars and his killer, to the Brooklyn of Claire’s adolescence, where she and two friends once investigated a missing girl. One of those friends will later go missing herself; and the whispers of the missing Tracy, the dead Paul and the possibly suicidal miniature horses haunt Claire as she tries to keep it together and solve a murder through the haze of various uppers and downers.

Strange, distinctive characters are one of Gran’s greatest strengths, coupled with a strong sense of place and a gritty atmosphere of depravity and mysticism. Dark, classic PI adventures with an unprecedented zaniness mixed in make Claire DeWitt a rare reading experience.

This review originally ran in the June 25, 2013 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: 8 bumps.

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The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Posted on June 26, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The latest international exploits, daring escapes and rescues of Taylor Stevens’s heroine for hire.

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In The Doll, Taylor Stevens (The Informationist) brings mercenary Vanessa Michael Munroe back to eager readers for another round of full-speed international intrigue. At the start, Munroe is tranquilized, kidnapped and forced to deliver a Hollywood starlet overseas as part of a human trafficking ring. Munroe’s boyfriend, Bradford, and the associates at his security firm are hot on the case, but the task of rescuing Munroe is complicated because all the other people she loves most in the world have also been kidnapped as collateral against her cooperation. Additionally, “the doll” turns out to be a spitfire with past trauma of her own, determined to give Munroe a run for her money.

With her near-savant linguistic skills, almost obsessive love of and skill with weapons and androgynous appearance, Munroe is a formidable tool in the hands of the “Doll Maker,” the mastermind behind the trafficking trade. But he hasn’t figured on her unpredictability. Even faced with difficult decisions and with her loved ones held hostage, Munroe might be capable of anything.

Stevens again crafts a lightning-swift plot that races across continents and inflicts extreme trauma upon characters she’s taught us to care about. Intelligent action and pacing are a bonus, and other characters like those on Bradford’s team are engaging and provide banter; but it’s Munroe herself who stars, with her wondrous and myriad abilities and her surprisingly soft heart.

This review originally ran in the June 11, 2013 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 borders crossed.

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Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father by Alysia Abbott

Posted on June 20, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A daughter’s tender memoir of her father’s life as a single gay man in 1970s Haight-Ashbury.

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When Alysia Abbott was two years old, her mother was killed in a car accident. Her father, Steve, moved her across the country to raise her alone as a gay man and single father in 1970s San Francisco–a pioneer in several senses. Alysia’s childhood and teen years took place against the backdrop of a magical Haight-Ashbury district filled with creative, adventurous people like her father (a poet and political activist), recreational drugs and minimal supervision.

Their father-daughter relationship was loving but rocky. When Steve develops AIDS and his health begins to plummet, he calls 20-year-old Alysia home from her studies in Paris and New York City to nurse him, a full-circle caretaking demand that she resents at the time.

Fairyland is foremost a daughter’s memoir of a much-loved parent. She continues to become acquainted with him through her research, most notably in reading copious notebooks filled with his poetry and journal entries. She colorfully renders an iconic epoch in San Francisco, together with the city’s gay culture and politics, and the early days of the nationwide gay rights movement. Alongside beautiful characterizations (often morphing into eulogies), Alysia paints a stark image of the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan administration’s non-response to it. As a personal story and as a portrayal of an era, Fairyland is powerful, loving, authentic, and contains Steve’s artistic legacy in its lyricism. It acknowledges Steve’s impact on Alysia–and both their shortcomings–with gratitude and grace.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2013 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: 9 brightly colored t-shirts.

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You Are One of Them by Elliot Holt

Posted on June 19, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A haunting debut novel that combines a young girl’s coming-of-age, a lost friendship and the chill of the Cold War.

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Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them opens in 1980s Washington, D.C. Sarah Zuckerman is a troubled child, haunted by those who have left her behind. Her mother, obsessed with the threat of nuclear war, never leaves the house; her father has moved back to England and remarried. When Jenny Jones moves in across the street, Sarah is enchanted: the Joneses are a perfect American family, loving and happy, and Jenny is the perfect best friend. It’s Sarah’s idea to write a letter to the Soviet premier, asking for peace, but it’s Jenny’s letter that gets published and answered with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. After the Joneses return, world-famous Jenny doesn’t have time for Sarah any more. Then Jenny is killed in a plane crash, her body never recovered.

Ten years later, as Sarah graduates from college, she gets a letter from a Russian woman who suggests she may know something about Jenny’s eventual fate. Their correspondence prompts Sarah to move to Moscow, and as she makes new friends in this strange foreign city, it seems that everyone has possible ties to the KGB. Could Jenny really be among these mysterious Russian women? And how far is Sarah willing to go to reclaim her friendship?

You Are One of Them is part thriller, part elegy, part study of place, as Moscow comes alive and Holt explores themes of lost and missing loves, within its echoes of the real-life story of Samantha Smith and the broader mystique and paranoia of the nuclear era.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2013 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 conspiracy theories.

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Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy by Peter Carlson

Posted on June 12, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Adventure, suspense, and a dash of romance make for a highly readable–and absolutely true–Civil War story.

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Peter Carlson’s Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy opens with the capture of its titular subjects near Vicksburg in 1863, then rewinds to show how they landed in such a predicament. Albert Richardson, an enterprising journalist for the New York Tribune, had decided to travel south as an undercover correspondent, and naturally chose his best friend and fellow newspaperman Junius Browne to accompany him. The stakes were high if they were discovered–the Tribune was reviled as a liberal abolitionist paper–but the two young men were game for adventure. After their capture, they spent nearly two years in a series of Confederate prisons before escaping, half-starved and freezing, to trek overland toward Union lines in December 1864.

Despite the serious and frequently tragic nature of Albert and Junius’s story, the book’s title signals the often playful tone that Carlson (K Blows Top) employs. The descriptions of Confederate prisons like Libby, Castle Thunder and Salisbury are horrific, but there is also the occasional scene of mirth–as when prisoners put on a variety show to celebrate the 4th of July. Besides Junius and Albert, the other colorful personalities in Carlson’s history include a larger-than-life “Union pilot” skilled at guiding refugees over the mountains to freedom, and a beautiful young Southern horsewoman who rescues them during a perilous moment. With eccentric and likeable characters like these, Carlson’s history successfully masquerades as an entertaining adventure story.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the June 4, 2013 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 weary months.

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Out of Their Minds: The Incredible and (Sometimes) Sad Story of Ramón and Cornelio by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

Posted on May 29, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A bizarre and entertaining tale of two Mexican norteño musicians guided by God–and the price they pay for their fame.

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Luis Humberto Crosthwaite’s Out of Their Minds, a novel first published in Spanish in 2001, is a motley collection of fictional interviews, dreams, dialogues and sketches. It’s centered on Ramón and Cornelio, a couple of bored kids in Tijuana with a bajo sexto and an accordion. Then God speaks to Cornelio, offering to write his songs for him, and the duo known as los Relampagos de Agosto (a sly reference to Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s satiric The Lightning of August?) takes off.

Greeted onstage by screaming women throwing underwear, their world explodes in undreamed-of decadence and groupies. Fast forward a few years, though, and Ramón and Cornelio’s lives are sadly riddled with drugs and superficiality. Unsurprisingly, the two lifelong friends no longer see eye to eye, and the rock-and-roll lifestyle has dimmed their fire. Where they used to lie awake at night and discuss the perfect girlfriend (she must have pretty feet), now their wives have left them and Ramón talks to his accordion instead.

In the ever-shifting perspective of this strange world, where God worries about producing fresh material (“he doesn’t want to be judged as a repetitive God, with few ideas”) while a friend of Cornelio dies over and over again, the duo’s career arc clearly references the Beatles–but places them in Mexico’s norteño music scene. Wry, lyrical and frequently funny, the story of Ramón and Cornelio is indeed incredible and sometimes sad; but the music plays on and we continue to revel in it.

This review originally ran in the May 24, 2013 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: 6 blurry nights.

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Yellowstone, Land of Wonders: Promenade in North America’s National Park by Jules Leclercq

Posted on May 15, 2013 by pagesofjulia

An unprecedented English translation of a travel narrative from the early years of Yellowstone National Park.

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In 1883, a well-traveled French lawyer, writer and judge named Jules Leclercq explored the newly designated Yellowstone National Park on horseback. Three years later, he published a book praising the area’s strange and wondrous marvels–but the book is not simply a lovely appreciation of natural scenery. Leclercq also researched the history of the region and its people in order to write a scholarly study, a snapshot of a place in time. And yet there has never been a complete English-language translation of his original text until Janet Chapple and Suzanne Cane’s Yellowstone, Land of Wonders.

Leclercq is most fascinated by Yellowstone’s geysers: “The mind is so occupied with the extraordinary geological phenomena bursting upon one at every step,” he writes, “that one views the scenery only abstractedly.” He does, however, turn his pen to Yellowstone Lake and Falls; he considers the latter far superior to Niagara. He also includes a chapter on the park’s wildlife, and warns that whole species will be exterminated if hunting continues unchecked.

Leclercq’s narrative is imperfect. He sometimes quotes without attribution from contemporary sources and gets geological details wrong. But Chapple and Cane meticulously keep readers informed on such points. Their translation and editing–with copious notes–is thorough in confirming and expanding Leclercq’s points, offering commentary not just on Yellowstone but on the author and his era. The result has more than just historical value; as Leclercq concludes (and as is still true today), “All this grandeur inspires grave and religious thoughts.”

This review originally ran in the May 10, 2013 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: 6 geysers.

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In the City of Bikes by Pete Jordan

Posted on May 13, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A history of Amsterdam’s love affair with the bicycle contained within an American cyclist’s memoir.

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After the close of his first memoir, Dishwasher, Pete Jordan moved to Amsterdam for a semester to study urban planning, with a focus on his passion: bicycles. He never left.

Jordan’s decision to move was rather capricious–he knew almost nothing about Amsterdam–but he found a city packed with bicycles and rich with cycling history. In the City of Bikes is the story of his journey from itinerant dishwasher to settled family man, as well as a thoroughly researched history of the bicycle in Amsterdam. Beginning with the early bikes of the 1800s and cycling’s golden age in the 1890s, when the safety bicycle hit the streets, Jordan moves on to the tire shortages and (in this case, bicycle-related) atrocities of the city’s Nazi occupation before concluding with his own place in modern cycle-crazy Amsterdam.

Joining Jordan are his new wife, Amy Joy, and their son, Ferris, a passenger and later pilot of Amsterdam bicycles since his conception. When Amy Joy becomes proprietor of a local bike shop, the Jordans have truly found their home in the Dutch capital. Considering his reason for going in the first place, Jordan is especially well suited and qualified to tell this story, and he lives up to expectations with a meticulous detailing of Amsterdam’s bikes. Full of personal anecdote, self-deprecating humor, local lore and a history of cycling that positively bursts with enthusiasm, In the City of Bikes is both a memoir and an ode to bicycles.

This review originally ran in the May 3, 2013 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 tire-powered light generators.

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Bonus photo I couldn’t resist, of me in the early 2000’s, cycling in Bruges – but it may as well be Amsterdam, and I did ride there too – on a Dutch-style bike. (Hoping this gives me extra reviewer-cred!)

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Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married by Nancy Rubin Stuart

Posted on April 25, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Parallel profiles of two wives on opposite sides of the American Revolution.

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Margaret “Peggy” Shippen Arnold and Lucy Flucker Knox have traditionally been treated as historical footnotes in relation to their more famous husbands, Benedict Arnold and Henry Knox. Nancy Rubin Stuart (The Muse of the Revolution) remedies this neglect in Defiant Brides, a double biography that examines these two women as individuals as well as influential players in the American Revolution.

Peggy was a beautiful blonde belle of Philadelphia society, from a family that favored the British. Lucy was from a well-to-do, firmly Loyalist Boston family. The Shippens reluctantly admitted the political expediency of Peggy’s marriage to military hero Benedict Arnold; the Fluckers disowned Lucy for the sin of matrimony with patriot Henry Knox. Lucy supported her husband’s military and political careers in relative poverty and socialized with George and Martha Washington, even as she fretted over Knox’s long absences and missed the opulence of her youth. Peggy staunchly championed her husband through his treason and banishment and their subsequent financial difficulties in England and Canada; her part in Arnold’s betrayal at West Point, and her own possible role as a spy, remain controversial.

Stuart’s thoughtful research and consideration brings each woman forward into her own spotlight, reflecting on the flaws and strengths that Peggy and Lucy brought to their marriages and to the events of their time. Defiant Brides is an effortless read and a fresh perspective on the American Revolution, featuring two women who defied their parents to marry into a conflict that shaped a nation.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the April 23, 2013 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 degrees of loyalty.

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Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side by Rayya Elias

Posted on April 24, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A visceral exploration of sex and drugs in 1980s New York City.

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Rayya Elias was born in Syria in 1960 but fled with her family to Detroit at age seven. Too young to appreciate her family’s culture fully, she doesn’t fit into her new environment, either, and suffers a rocky youth in Detroit before escaping to New York City with her newfound passions: rock ‘n’ roll, hairstyling and drugs. The Lower East Side in the early 1980s was a sparkling playground for a young woman trying to find herself, and Elias becomes sought after both as a hairdresser and as a new wave musician.

It will take her years to identify as a lesbian, but the affairs with women that began back in Detroit blossom into full passion (and dysfunction) in New York–and, for a short time, in a shared London apartment with a married woman and her husband. Her drug abuse also blossoms into an addiction to cocaine and heroin, a problem that will take countless stints in rehab and detox facilities–and jail–to conquer. By the end of her story, Elias is clean, back in New York and pursuing healthy musical creativity.

Far from being just another story of addition and redemption, Harley Loco (a nickname the author earned in jail) is unusual in its rawness and feeling. Elias perfectly evokes New York City in the 1980s and ’90s, complete with sour odors and pain. Her personality–hard-edged and unrepentant, yet tender and vulnerable–is thoroughly bared and, in the end, irresistibly likable.

This review originally ran in the April 19, 2013 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 second chances.

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