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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Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River by Zak Podmore

Posted on September 30, 2024 by pagesofjulia


With Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, investigative journalist Zak Podmore tackles a massive, complicated set of questions about western water management and the Glen Canyon Dam, the construction of which created a reservoir called Lake Powell. Arguably the most politically fraught and symbolic dam in the southwestern United States, Glen Canyon has long had its fans and detractors. The Millennium Drought, “an indefinite change in precipitation patterns” in the region, has “done three-quarters of the work toward draining Lake Powell already,” but this leaves numerous challenges: Indigenous people’s water rights, engineering and hydrology puzzles, the ecological implications for long-flooded lands freshly exposed to open air or buried under millions of acre-feet of sedimentation, and more.

Podmore acknowledges his own biases about the dam, which was in place before he was born. But he proceeds with copious and in-depth research into the many and complex issues it poses, considers what he learns with an open mind, and integrates hard science, cultural awareness, and competing viewpoints into an admirably accessible work of creative nonfiction. Podmore avoids binary options and magical thinking, and his study is richer for it. Included are surprisingly hopeful notes, such as the rapid recovery of native plants and ecosystems in newly exposed side canyons: “A canyon one hundred miles away, drowned for half a century, had restored itself in fewer than twenty years.” With narrative style and colorful characters, Podmore (Confluence) has composed a compelling, readable, and entertaining as well as educational text. Life After Dead Pool is superlative: important, insightful, and a pleasure to read.

This review originally ran in the August 30, 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: 8 cans of beans.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Lisa Genova

Posted on September 23, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of More or Less Maddy, here’s Lisa Genova: On Empathy.

Lisa Genova–who’s been hailed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science–is the author of Still Alice (adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore), Left Neglected, and Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, among others. Genova holds a degree in biopsychology from Bates College and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University. Her sixth novel, More or Less Maddy (Gallery/Scout Press, January 14, 2025), features a young woman coming to terms with bipolar disorder.

Why bipolar?

Lisa Genova
(photo: Greg Mentzer)

I’m excited to talk about the distinction between a mental illness and a neurological condition. There’s a stigma attached to the idea of mental illness. I can’t trust you, you’re crazy, you’re dangerous–all of that gets piled on immediately. We would never refer to ALS, autism, or Alzheimer’s as a mental illness. And yet depression, schizophrenia, bipolar–those are also neurological conditions. To distinguish them as mental illness seems to add an unnecessary burden on these folks that this is somehow their fault.

My neuroscience background is my unique lens on fiction and it’s why I write, because these topics are so daunting and overwhelming, and fiction is such a lovely place to help people empathize. I picked bipolar disorder because I had a sense it was everywhere.

Every time I said my next novel was going to be about bipolar disorder, it got the same reaction: a mix of gasps, whispers, and applause. That’s never happened with any other topic I’ve announced. People started DM-ing me on social media: I have a mother, I have a brother, I have a dad. Not necessarily offering to talk to me, although a lot of people did, but others were just thanking me already for this book I hadn’t written yet. I felt an enormous sense of responsibility and opportunity to contribute something meaningful.

Your website identifies you as an “empathy warrior.” Is that what drove you to fiction?

My grandmother had Alzheimer’s. I was 28 when she got the diagnosis. I had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Alzheimer’s was not my area of expertise, but I had the vocabulary. I dove into the research, I read on how the disease was managed from a clinical perspective, but what was missing was, what does it feel like to have this? And how to feel comfortable with her Alzheimer’s. I had a tremendous amount of sympathy for her, and for us, but I did not know how to be with her. If she started talking to plastic baby dolls, I left the room. I let my aunts take over. I felt heartbroken, frustrated, scared, and embarrassed. I felt sympathy, but sympathy actually drives disconnection. Keeps us emotionally separate. I didn’t know how to get to empathy. I didn’t have the understanding or the maturity to just be with her and imagine what it’s like to be her in a room, not recognizing it as her home. Everything I’d been reading about Alzheimer’s was from the outside looking in. The scientists, caregivers, and social workers have valuable points of view, but none of them were the perspective of the person who’s living it. Fiction is where you get a chance to walk in someone else’s shoes, find that human connection, that shared emotional experience. That was the beginning. When Still Alice worked, and I got feedback about how much it helped, there was so much appreciation–I just knew. I love doing this, and now I feel the value in it. I’m going to keep going.

How did you create Maddy?

I begin all my stories by reading as much as I can. I read lots of memoirs and textbooks, and then I go out and talk to people. For this book I sought out the authors of some of those textbooks. I talked to the guy who runs the bipolar treatment center at Mass General. I found a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital. I spoke with psychiatrists from all over. If you have diabetes, there’s a single protocol, no matter where you live in the world. With bipolar that is not the case. You go to 10 doctors, you’re going to get 10 different prescriptions. I’m always trying to tell the truth under imagined circumstances, but one thing I’m very cognizant of is my books are known for being informed. They’re researched, and they’re going to be used as a blueprint. They’re used in medical schools, in OT, PT, speech pathology. I wanted to get the best practices right. My experts are always the people who live with it and their families. I spent a lot of time talking with lots of people. It’s an ongoing conversation, it’s in-depth and really intimate, and I’m grateful that people trust me with their stories.

Bipolar begins young. I wanted Maddy to be a woman. I wanted to consider the expectations of her to live a normal life as a woman, and the limitations that imposes. If this starts just as you’re launching a life, how disrupting and confusing would that be? I wanted her to be a college student, with all those expectations and pressures. In making her a comedian, I wanted her to choose something that was outside the stability of the expected life. Comedy I liked because it’s very public; she’d be in front of people. Comedians sort of live the bipolar experience. If you’re killing it, that’s the highest high. You’re connecting, everybody gets you, there’s a human bond. If you’re bombing, it’s the lowest of lows. It’s a death. Weirdly, that swing is a nice metaphor for what it could feel like to be bipolar. I’m a big comedy fan, so this gave me a lovely excuse. Comedians who are great at what they do, it’s because they’re speaking truth. They’re tapping into a vulnerability in the human condition. If I could write my character’s comedy and that progression toward having something meaningful to say about accepting herself with bipolar, that would be really cool. It was terrifying, too, because I’d never written comedy. I did take a standup comedy writing class and I did a five-minute set.

Did you discover a new calling?

Oh no. Ohhhh, no. Not going to quit my day job.

Do you consider yourself an activist author?

That’s what the “empathy warrior” is about. It’s about humanizing, destigmatizing. These books are an opportunity. If I see someone with dementia, or who might be manic, my reflexive response isn’t, I need to get away from that. My response becomes more, I’m not afraid of you. How can I help?

I advocate for resources for care and for research. In the author’s note of this book I send people to the International Bipolar Foundation for more education, and to donate money if they’d like. I’ve raised millions of dollars for Alzheimer’s care and research. And we’re 15 years out from Still Alice, so I stay as an activist, advocate, empathy warrior. I want my books to be a reason for people to learn more, to contribute, to offer help.

This interview originally ran on August 27, 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: More or Less Maddy by Lisa Genova

Posted on September 20, 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 August 27, 2024.

Harvard-trained neuroscientist Lisa Genova debuted as a novelist with Still Alice (2007), about a woman who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Genova’s later novels Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens, and Every Note Played feature characters with hemi-spatial neglect, autism, Huntington’s disease, and ALS, respectively. Her sixth novel, More or Less Maddy, follows a young woman with bipolar disorder. As ever, Genova brings both an expert understanding of the neuroscience and a masterful eye for compelling characters in an emotionally textured narrative. Maddy’s story is completely absorbing; it may keep readers up all night.

Maddy Banks has had a privileged upbringing in suburban Connecticut. There were some tough times in her early childhood, and her father is a shadowy figure. But since her mother, Amy, remarried, it’s been easy: dinners at the country club, a popular boyfriend, a highly successful older sister, and an easygoing jock of an older brother. In high school, “each day was laid out for her like a matching outfit on a bed, when both her inner and outer worlds felt organized, predictable, happy, and light. Life was handed to her like a potted succulent, small and tidy and requiring little effort to maintain.” But the transition to college has not been smooth: “She remembers herself then… and it’s as if she was a different girl in another lifetime. She can’t pinpoint exactly how, but she doesn’t feel like she used to feel.”

Her first year at NYU is a shock: “The impossible-to-keep-up-with workload, living with a roommate who drove her crazy, having no clue what to major in, still not finding her passion or her tribe, losing [her boyfriend] Adam. Twice.” In her sophomore year, Maddy’s diagnosed at the student health center with depression. The antidepressants she’s prescribed help to set off her first manic episode, a big splashy event that results in her first stay in a mental hospital. Maddy and her family–who are loving, if not always graceful with the challenges they face–are in for a roller coaster.

In her more stable moments, and especially during the hypomania that often precedes full mania, Maddy develops an interest in stand-up comedy. Along with her love for Taylor Swift–and delusions about their friendship, with a budding business and creative relationship–Maddy’s passion for comedy becomes a trigger for her mother: getting excited about comedy, Amy Banks believes, means a manic episode is imminent. But while Maddy does not in fact have a personal relationship with Taylor Swift, she does have a gift and a passion for comedy. In Amy’s country-club world, this is not a reasonable life path. But Maddy wants it to be. It is one of the tricks of bipolar disorder that “real” excitements can be mistaken for illness, making it difficult for Maddy to pursue her legitimate dreams.

Maddy, her family, and readers learn about bipolar disorder together, with accompanying denial, anger, grief, the ups and downs of sorting out medications and side effects, and relapses. It is heartrending to see Maddy’s anguished efforts to come to terms with her disorder and to dissect what is real and healthy from what is delusion. Readers are privy to her self-talk: “It’s okay to feel disappointed and sad.”; “It’s okay to be happy.”; “It’s okay to be giddy.” It is one of the greatest gifts of fiction to allow readers into experiences that are not their own, to find empathy. Genova’s descriptions of Maddy’s episodes are evocative, clear, and relatable: “Before her hypomania ripened to rotten, there was a delicious sweetness to her thoughts and life. She had a massive amount of unearned confidence in her ability to do anything that struck her fancy. She made big dick energy look flaccid by comparison.”

Secondary characters are equally convincing and essential. Amy is capable of actions that frustrate Maddy (and readers), but she also genuinely wants the best for her child. Maddy’s sister, Emily, is almost too perfect–life comes easily for her, and it’s the life of their mother–but she is goodhearted, and that seems to be the life she truly wants. Maddy’s high school boyfriend, Adam, is one example of the gradual realization that things are not always as they appear. He had the right markers–basketball star, handsome, popular–but readers, and Emily, see some red flags in his treatment of Maddy, who goes on to make other exemplary friends and meet other objectionable characters along her rocky path.

It is an important element of Maddy’s development that she chooses to embrace her own unique self–her sense of humor, her interests, her differences–rather than follow the cookie-cutter plan laid out by her upbringing. “When Maddy was growing up, being normal was always the unquestioned goal…. Normal was her default, unexamined way of life. It meant fitting in, blending with the colors, sounds, and shapes around her.” All young people are out to find themselves; Maddy must live her own version of that. She is not defined by her disease, but is rather a complex young woman navigating the expected tumult of coming-of-age with added complications. Her story is affecting, harrowing, beautiful, and enlightening, as well as a great pleasure to read.

Rating: 8 notebooks.

Come back Monday for my interview with Genova.

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Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato

Posted on September 16, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A mother and daughter separated by continents navigate distance and intimacy through the “miraculous blue light” of video calls in this haunting debut.

National Book Award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato makes her authorial debut with Blue Light Hours, a subtle, contemplative story of a mother and daughter divided by 4,000 miles, who come together via screentime and memory. With love, care, quiet humor, and pervasive yearning, this thoughtful story explores the dilemmas of coming of age and leaving home, the tension between separation and connection.

On a full scholarship, the daughter departs her home in Natal, Brazil, “prepared to brave the world, even if it hurt me,” for a liberal arts college in a remote part of Vermont, leaving behind a mother who suffers from insomnia, migraines, and depression. The daughter navigates unfamiliar culture, food, and language, while the mother observes her first Christmas alone. The daughter feels guilt, torn between two very different lives. “I stared into my green tea, wishing someone… had warned me about how hard it would be to leave, how hard to stay.” Both women rely on their Skype calls: “On the shiny blue screen, there was my mother, my friend, the only person who always knew me.”

This story is told in three sections, “Daughter,” “Mother,” and “Reunion,” but “Daughter” occupies the bulk of the book, so that readers see her loneliness and her striving to make a new life work, even as she worries about what she’s left behind. “Daughter” is also the only section told in first-person perspective, while “Mother” identifies that character only as “the mother,” although both protagonists remain nameless. In “Reunion,” the mother travels to New York City and they make Grandma’s chicken soup together, “dipping pieces of bread into their old lives.” A moving passage details the items in the daughter’s bathroom, all the gadgets and conveniences that are unfamiliar to the mother, and the mother’s brief wish for the simpler bathroom of home. “But when she turned the crystal knob on the bathroom door and saw her daughter at the end of the hallway, sifting powdered sugar on French toast with a wand, she couldn’t help but take the wish back. She couldn’t resist thinking that things were perfect just as they were, golden faucets and all, without any gleaming glass between them.”

Blue Light Hours documents with wisdom and tenderness what is gained and lost when one leaves a home to build another, and the less universal experience of putting a 27-hour flight between mother and child. It tells painful, beautiful truths: with independence comes loneliness as well as freedom, and raising a daughter also involves losing her. Dantas Lobato’s careful, lovely prose will linger long after these pages end.

This review originally ran in the August 15, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 electric toothbrushes.

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Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, trans. by Lisa Dillman

Posted on September 6, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Yuri Herrera applies his exceptional gift for succinct, imaginative storytelling to a fictionalized history of Benito Juárez in exile in New Orleans.

By 1853, Benito Juárez had served as judge, deputy, and governor of the state of Oaxaca, but he would not become Mexico’s first indigenous president until after a period of exile. Among other locations, he spent 18 months in exile in New Orleans, a time about which relatively little is known. With Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera (Signs Preceding the End of the World; Kingdom Cons; A Silent Fury; Ten Planets) sheds speculative light on this brief chapter in Juárez’s life. Herrera’s regular English translator, Lisa Dillman, again brings a precise ear for Herrera’s linguistic play to this spellbinding fictionalized history.

Besides Herrera’s contextualizing prologue, the name Benito Juárez almost never appears. Instead, readers accompany an unnamed protagonist, in close third-person perspective, from his arrival in this remarkable “city that served up accidents on a platter” through his departure, by which time “if one day he was dropped there without anyone telling him where he was, he’d know it was New Orleans even with his eyes closed.” Juárez marvels at the heat, the Yellow Jack epidemic, the local culture soaked in music and dance, and the stray dogs. He has seen other cities–“Seville, Gibraltar, New York–all of them rich, but none like this, where you could so clearly see the blood on the gold.” He is dismayed at the enslaved people, referred to as “the captured,” sold in open markets and subjugated, as in the novella’s memorable opening scene. He meets with fellow exiles and political minds, makes new friends, settles in. New Orleans is beautiful and horrifying, and Herrera portrays both aspects simultaneously, with humor and lyricism: “A moment later, the austere innkeeper began mopping up the sanguineous intimacies smeared all over the floor.”

Wordplay and a special attention to language form a persistent feature in Herrera’s work. A fellow expat claims Méjico, but Juárez recognizes it’s been pronounced “not with a Mexican ex but a Spaniard’s jay…. ‘This is the vegetable market,’ Cabañas veed iberically.” Juárez is attuned to new languages, including music and body language, and thinks of language learning as related to his time spent teaching high school physics: “his students began to glimpse a new world in those equations, the same way you see animals in the clouds, except these animals actually existed.” A sense of wonder and play, linguistic curiosity, and a knack for being both morbid and funny, contribute to an absorbingly pleasurable read, even amid the death and tragedy. Herrera offers another brilliant novella steeped in political and historical time and place.

This review originally ran in the August 1, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 high-flown zees.

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The Drowned by John Banville

Posted on August 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A recluse discovers an abandoned car and winds up involved in a missing-person case with Strafford and Quirke, who are back at work in this novel of secrets and quiet desperation.

John Banville’s The Drowned transports readers to a dour small town on the 1950s Irish coast, where one tragedy after another makes a small cast of characters reconsider what they know and value in the world they inhabit. In his established style, Banville (The Singularities; Snow; Ancient Light; Holy Orders writing as Benjamin Black) offers a stark series of events in understated tones and with a handful of voices. These include Dublin Detective Inspector Strafford and the brilliant pathologist Quirke.

“He had lived alone for so long, so far away from the world and its endless swarms of people, that when he saw the strange thing standing at a slight list in the middle of the field below the house, for a second he didn’t know what it was.” It turns out to be a luxury motorcar, abandoned, engine still running. The loner who discovers it actively avoids human contact: “Yes, life, so-called, was a birthday party gone wild, with shouting and squabbling, and games he didn’t know the rules of, and one lot ganging up on the other, and knocking each other down and dancing in a ring like savages, the whole mad rampage going on in a haze of dust and noise and horrible, hot stinks.” He approaches, against his better judgment, and winds up involved in a missing-person case, which will draw Strafford to town, even as the detective wrestles with his own relationships: an estranged wife, a much younger girlfriend, and ever-complicating ties to Dr. Quirke. “We have one thing in common, at least,” Quirke quips to Strafford. “Death.” Death is an obvious theme, not only in the two characters’ professional lives but throughout Banville’s troubled setting.

Enriched by Banford’s attention to detail, the narrative grows more compelling in its telling by these and other characters, each suffering more or less alone even when they are married, partnered, or set next to immediate family. “The least of remembered things are the most affecting. That walk, the birdlike turn of her head, those trim ankles.” The Drowned is slow building, sedately paced, and grim, but wickedly absorbing. By the mystery’s denouement, some readers will have guessed the perpetrator’s identity, but it is less that identity and more the psychology of it that is Banville’s final blow. Through these intricacies and its murky sense of foreboding, this inexorable novel will continue to advance Banville’s considerable reputation.

This review originally ran in the July 29, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 barstools.

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The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski

Posted on August 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This entrancing debut stars triplet witches who can see the future, but must work together and individually to grasp their own.

Stacy Sivinski’s first novel, The Crescent Moon Tearoom, is a sweet, wise balm of a story about family, change, and coming into oneself.

The Quigley triplets, Anne, Violet, and Beatrix, have always been close. Their beloved mother was a powerful Diviner, able to read the future in various signs. Her daughters put the same skill to use in the Crescent Moon Tearoom, where the three young witches sell magical teas and delectable baked goods and tell fortunes to hordes of Chicago’s women and witches. The tearoom (run out of the family home, itself an endearing character with a will and magic of its own) does a booming business, but all is not well with the Quigley sisters. A challenge comes from the Council of Witches: the younger three must help three older witches discover their Tasks, which is a witch’s very reason for existence and is imperative to complete before a witch passes, or she’s “doomed to linger as a spirit for all eternity.” If they fail, the Council will close their shop. The events entwine with a potential curse on the sisters, threatening to undo everything the sisters love.

Although nearly identical in appearance, the Quigleys are quite different individuals. Their mother used to say, “Violet has her head in the clouds, and Beatrix’s nose is in a book. But [Anne’s] feet are always planted firmly on the ground.” While Violet (the family baker) is volatile and in constant, foot-tapping motion, Beatrix is shy and dreamy. Anne is the caretaker, the brewer of teas, and has secretly been holding back her own magical powers so as not to surpass her sisters. They “had been locked in their web of affection and dependence for so long now. Their bonds had taken shape during childhood and seemed to be coated in bronze.” As they struggle with the ominous Council’s extraordinary demands, their differences are highlighted, even as each sister finds opportunities for new growth.

Sivinski’s droll telling details the lovable Quigleys with all their quirk and charm, each with their own moving emotional arc. Chapters are headed with signs and symbols, as one might find in tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, with brief descriptions of their meaning: a fan suggests flirting with temptation; a bat foreshadows a fruitless endeavor. Each line captivates: “As seers, the Quigleys had long ago accepted that questioning what they saw in the remnants of their customers’ tea was about as useful as trying to wash cherry jelly out of a silk blouse.” With its sweetness, realistic challenges, and satisfying resolution, The Crescent Moon Tearoom is a rare pleasure. Readers will miss the Quigley sisters at this novel’s end.

This review originally ran in the July 26, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 petals.

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