THE MADNESS PILL: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, can be a tough read but has a hopeful ending

THE MADNESS PILL: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia
JUSTIN GARSON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking history of the life and work of an unheralded genius: Dr. Solomon Snyder, whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped change the way we think about the causes and treatments of schizophrenia.

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins. Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity—specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness. Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it.

Centered around Solomon Snyder, the psychiatrist who ultimately did identify the madness pill, and the community of doctors and researchers he worked with, THE MADNESS PILL recounts the drug-fueled quest to cure schizophrenia. A wunderkind who started medical school at 19, Snyder worked steadily for decades to replicate the illness, ultimately finding in 1970 that amphetamines could trigger a schizophrenia-like state by flooding the brain with dopamine. Five years later, he went on to discover the dopamine receptor and proved that antipsychotic drugs work by disabling dopamine neurons. Snyder’s dopamine hypothesis inspired a generation of researchers to part ways with psychoanalysis and look for the biological basis of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Using first-hand research and interviews, THE MADNESS PILL is at once a raucous history and insightful portrait of a remarkable scientist who turned psychiatry into a respected science by transforming how mental illness is treated.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I did not think I'd review this book all that politely. The publicists who wrote the synopsis above used two words in particular that felt...off, odd, even a smidge dishonest, in my mental ear: "rollicking" and "raucous." A scientist's life's work decribed in storytelling superlatives, not scientific ones like "groundbreaking" or "paradigm-shifting"? ::side-eye::

One victory for y'all, publicists. This story as told by Author Garson does indeed rollick raucously through Solomon Snyder's life's work in neurochemistry. I'm a big proponent of talk therapy for those able to benefit from it. Those who can benefit include me (happily) when, after a major crisis that was stabilized by antidepressants, aka neurochemicals, I entered another phase of talk therapy that has presented me with ongoing benefits that I remain deeply grateful for.

Schizoaffective disorder and the multitude of brain-chemistry malfunctions related to it is not adequately addressed by talk therapy. Until Solomon Snyder got to pokin' around because there was zero progress towards curing this life-ruining disorder, there was no good outcome for its sufferers on offer anywhere. It's still a horrendously difficult condition to manage even with neurochemical models explaining some root causes of its symptoms, and chemical therapies helping manage some of devastatingly painful results of its symptoms.

Author Garson is chatty in his presentation of the facts uncovered by Sol, as Dr. Snyder seems to be universally referred to after a time, and his collaborators and even enemies. (No one who changes paradigms is going to be without enemies, detractors, and ill-wishers.) The chattiness and the organizing principle of Sol's personality and perspicacity leads to the strange sense that we're getting to know *about* Sol, getting to know how he affected people and worked with them...or didn't...but not to *know* him. The research, the systems of conducting it, aren't glossed over or lingered on. It's very uncomfortable stuff to our twenty-first century eyes. Sol was in the thick of it. He did wonders for people who previously had little to hope for; getting there, he caused harm and suffering. Those who suffer with experimental animals are strongly cautioned not to read this story; those who feel raw about issues of consent are not going to find this subject matter at all easy to contend with.

There truly is no light without shadow.

Light there is, all in despite of the dark tunnel traversed to get to it. I have known eople suffering with schizophrenia who, when medicated, felt worlds better than without these hard-won treatments. Some have not felt the positive effects outweigh the frustrations of the side-effects that come from altering one's brain chemistry long term. My sample size might not be huge but is exactly in line with the results reported, and analyzed, in Author Garson's story. The names of the chemicals, the names of the drugs, the explication of the functions of them...all of that's a lot, and be ready to use Google often. But the reason to keep your attention on the page is that this detailed information is the foundation of the genuine miracle that is the help offered to previously unhelpable sufferers.

I was so buoyed up by this end result that I was able to consider the abusive and unethical (by today's standards) actions committed and/or not opposed at any point in the process as distasteful, but not disqualifying of the results as very much positive. I do not feel that way about, say, watching a Weinstein-produced film now that I know the crimes he committed, or the awfulness of that transphobic conversion-therapy supporter whose wizard books I once enjoyed.

I offer my ethical calibration for your reference only. Your decision about learning the good with the unpleasant in search of help for the mentally ill is not for me to do more than inform. I felt all the way through the read that I'd've been even happier had Author Garson discussed ethics in specific and open terms as we went along but the way he chose to address the issues passed my muster. Barely...more would've been better.

Again I strongly caution those sensitive to animal suffering to avoid this entire topic. It will not reward you commensurate with your own distress.

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
ADAM H. JOHNSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.

How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media's role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitised Israel's war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanised the Palestinian people.

Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonisation of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I read "deep, original data-driven analysis" in the book's synopsis, I realized the read was going to be tendentious, probably ill-sourced, and reflective of the need to marshal supporters of anti-war, pro-Palestine leanings into willingness to take action. That's exactly what I got.

Since I am all those things I find it hard to fault this read for being what it's supposed to be. If you are not all those things, or are anti-all those things, you'll be very unpset by this read. I myownself think you might should read it anyway.

War crimes are committed when there are wars. Both sides commit them. But do not lose sight of the fact that one side started this war. They're looking for you to believe they didn't start it, the other side did by doing something terrible. That terrible something did not suddenly occur in an otherwise peaceful and ordinary world, though. And that terrible something did not involve bombing runs by sophisticated jet aircraft, advanced anti-personnel drone attacks, destruction of thousands of homes, missile attacks on hospitals...in other words, we're being fed false equivalences to disguise a long-term and intentional act of ethnic cleansing, perhaps rising to the standard of genocide set after the Holocaust. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak authoritatively on that. I'll say that my reading of the bloviations from each side of the conflict leads me to think there is a case to answer and a darn compelling body of evidence to compel the case to be brought in the court of public opinion.

That's why this book exists. It's a highly emotional read. It's a highly emotional subject. It's part of an effort to break through the saturation-bombing of the pro-Israel lobby's PR firms.

Are there angels in this conflict, the pure and unsullied victims of hateful demonic criminals?

No.

There are only ordinary human beings who need, but don't have, the basics you and I walk outside our intact homes to access: streets we can use easily, food stores with the planet's abundance piled up for us to choose from, water pipes to quench our thirst, sewer pipes to take our waste away to keep us healthy, hospitals to care for frail bodies' failure points, living parents and children and loved ones who, when they leave our sight, are statistically likely return to us alive and as well as they left.

War is wrong. Always and eternally wrong. It is war that created this oongoing crisis. War is a decision, a set of decisions, made by people who want *something* so much they're willing to trade your life for it. Never theirs, or the wars would be short.

I don't think for a single second that Humankind will ever be free of war. If reading words could stop war there wouldn't still be any of them.

Reading words is a slow process, thinking about them slower still. Changing minds, firing up action in people who don't like doing hard things, that kind of thing that words *can* do, all has to start somewhere.

I ask you, please, for the sake of people you have never met and will never meet: Start the process in yourself now. Pay it forward, to the best of your ability, and know from the beginning that you won't "win" or "succeed" or "finish the job" because the work is never, can never be, complete as long as there are human beings.

But let's make sure the greatest possible number of people live out their "one wild and precious life" as poet Mary Oliver taught us to think of it.

VILLAIN (Hench #2) is Author NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS long-awaited and worth the wait sequel

VILLAIN (Hench #2)
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS
Watch the inimitable Nancy Pearl interview Author Walschots here!
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.

Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.

But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.

It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It took five years, but the sequel I've quietly pined for has arrived. I downloaded the DRC in February, started reading it in late March, and finished a final pre-review skim last night. I treated this read as a reward, an experience to be savored, because Hench was such a completely fresh experience that it made me rethink the messaging of superhero crap, made me consider how subversion can in fact look like participation or even celebration. I liked The Boys because it's taken that idea to its logical end-point; but it came after Hench had prepared me psychologically for its storytelling mode.

The Department of Superheroic Affairs, aka "the Draft," is the organization that's responsible for everything involving superheroes. They do the recruiting, training, and funding...who ever stops to think about the accounting and expenditures that enable superheroes to blow apart entire city blocks? can you even imagine the insurance bills?!...and they create the most compelling backstories for them that they can. It means only certain tropes survive time-testing as superheroes wreak havoc in order to "save" people from supervillains.

Who also have an organizational structure centered around Leviathan, for whom our dear Anna...formerly Electric Eel's hench, now known as the supervillain "The Auditor" (if that yclepture doesn't provoke horripilation you've never filled out an accounting reimbursement justification)...serves as right-hand person. Leviathan, after the end of Hench sees the biggest rival he has (Supercollider) fall to richly deserved intimate betrayal orchestrated by Anna/The Auditor, is too depressed by the newly unchallenging world he lives in to be effective in supervillainy. Anna/The Auditor needs to snap him out of it but, in a truly tropey twist, The Draft hires a new marketing manager. One who is Anna/The Auditor's equal or possibly superior in data analytics and statistical modeling...the secret superpowers that brought Supercollider down. Now Supercollider is permanently damaged, and dies as the Draft's medics are trying to "untangle him from himself," and the Draft's new marketer finds enough dirt to plausibly, if inaccurately, pin responsibility for his death on Leviathan.

Hijinks ensue.

To look into this only-slightly-distorted mirror world is to see 2026 explained without didactic shouting, blaming, and finger-pointing. It's all here, all the guilty parties are lined up for our scorn and contumely to be unloaded on them, and exactly like real life they are everywhere not just on one side. False dichotomies like hero-v-villain aren't allowed to stand; the acts perpetrated are equally awful, are not discernably different in their results. They're not different in their motivations, either; each "side" is only out to do down the other side and then justify the carnage for everyone else later.

It is here that I come fully into my love of Author Natalie's storytelling. The battling sides are not contesting opposing ideas, arguing through competing society-wide organizational plans, they're solely and entirely focused on hurting each other in increasingly horrifying ways. What that means for non-combatants is (yet again) not part of the calculus except insofar as the optics can be used against the other side.

As Leviathan re-awakens to his supervillainous purpose, Anna/The Auditor and her scoobygroup are stretched on practical and emotional levels to achieve Leviathan's purpose and counteract the Draft's new, high-powered team that uses Anna/The Auditor's innovative techniques against them. As in Hench, the emotional costs of violence, loss, betrayal, and fanaticism are personalized while the impersonal systems grind on propelled by the suffering people behind the major players.

I think Author Natalie took her time...I understand she re-wrote this book four times...to very good effect. I got invested again immediately despite the long interval between reads. I was deftly reminded of things necessary to remember instead of infodumped on; I was also shown how time has passed in the storyverse and the changes that has wrought on significant relationships. It's a fine achievement in storytelling craft. The ending is not A Conclusion. There is openness in its action to either another sequel (yes please!) or simply room for you-the-reader to headcanon something you'd like for the characters. It works for soap operas and comic book series, why not for a supervillain's difficult choices and incomplete emotional development?

I recommend the read; it's not utterly necessary to read Hench first, but why wouldn't you want to? It's a series with a lot to say about the world we live in, and what it says I agree with, so I'm recommending it to all y'all, even the superhero/comic book averse.

After all, that described me before this series came my way.

THE TRAITOR, last major novel of Kōbō Abe's to reach Anglophones

THE TRAITOR
KŌBŌ ABE (tr. Mark Gibeau)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.40 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan's military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan's past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe's tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer's most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe's literary mastery from a new angle.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An historical novel from its inception, this read is now itself an historical artifact being sixtyish years old, but is also framed as an historical tale recounted in a period earlier than it was authored. Translator Gibeau is the first to render the historic-historical novel into English. I was initially surprised this was the case; the beginning of the story is that quick to capture one's attention with its immediate postwar framing device. It's a long story, though, with all the pacingissues that can lead to (sadly) being present.

It was an enjoyable read for me, to be sure. I say that despite needing to stop and re-read some of the middle third of the book, where lots of names and dates and cultural touchstones are presented but not explained as they would be in a work of non-fiction. There is an Afterword from Translator Gibeau that provides context and explains some cultural resonances. It's a bit difficult to read that after the confusion of the midsection of the read and relate the information to the proper spots. I found I was curious enough about the Kempetai, for example, to go looking for information on the internet while I was reading.

I'm not really doing a very persuasive job of selling you on the read am I. In truth I think this read is one for the Japanese-culture vultures. I'd love to tell all y'all to get and read it but there would be much throwing of bricks and dropping of gloves if I succeeded and too many of y'all did not want to do that much work. The techniques of surrealist literature aren't overused here, as I sometimes feel they are in his more famous work; but they're present, so the allergic are informed.

The most interesting thing about the read to most people is likely to be the cravenness of the WWII character's motivation for seeking out the truth of the Meiji-era story he discovers, that provides the direct reason for the title. It's a punchy title, isn't it? I was almost put off by its sinplicity because I thought it might be a sign of a reductive storyline. In truth, it's the only possible title for the tale unwound for our pleasure because it provides a powerful pleasure of slow-dawning realization and deepening of the reading experience.

Note to the Spoiler Stasi: you won't spot it until the author wants you to. No I won't say more.

I hope to have piqued the curiosity of enough of y'all to give this not-easy, not-simple, very rewarding effortful read a shot. Please do, it is good exercise for your little grey cells with less than the usual puzzle-like story's obfuscation.

History lessons can be entertaining, and this newly-translated novel from the renowned author of The Woman in the Dunes amply demonstrates. Please give it a try.

SANCTUARY, a talented writer's debut dystopian cli-fi tale of tomorrow's reality

SANCTUARY
JAMES CLEARY
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: “The meek shall inherit the Earth, unless the rich get there first.” That’s the reality of the post-apocalyptic world in this electrifying debut thriller.

The near future…

Climate disasters have crippled the United States. With half the country under water and the other half a dust bowl, civil unrest would soon escalate into something darker, something unstoppable. Billionaire John Brandt anticipated this and channeled his money, power, and influence into being prepared for the great unraveling.

Now Brandt, his family, and his security team must retreat to Sanctuary, their underground bunker—a vast luxury mansion beneath the parched earth of the Nebraskan Great Plains. But they are not alone. Above ground a group of raiders are desperate to survive and will use any means possible to accomplish that goal.

As tensions mount both inside and out, battle lines are drawn—between the haves and the have-nots, between decency and expediency, between life and death. In this game, everyone's a loser.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Eco-thriller beginnings as the planet's climate collapses into chaos, the US follows suit, and the civilization we take for granted vanishes. Dystopian survival story post-collapse nightmare comes for us all. The necessary, we-will-have-it conversation of how much is enough, how will you share your excess, if you won't do it voluntarily we will make you. Thhese three storytelling modes co-exist, with highly permeable boundaries, in debut Author Cleary's book.

It's a melange of ideas that turns at times into a melee. The combatants are all possessed of powerful motivation, survival, and thus give it their all. We-the-reader are given a straightforward narrative that propels the story from inception to ending (if just a bit abrupt in our arrival there) interleaved with journal entries that add emotional textures and act as masses that alter the flow of the story's movement. I did not feel this was quite deft enough in its execution for me to offer that fifth star, but it's a hard tick to pull off. So a quarter-star for the right idea not exactly well executed.

None of the above touches on the emotional punch of this story. The coinage of "grey swan" on analogy with "black-swan event" is particularly deft and effective. A grey-swan event is visible, clearly understood to be coming, and yet somehow still ignorable thus ignored. Very like the characterization of bureaucratic pettifoggers being said to "rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic" as the Depression of 1929-1939 unfolded.

I hope I do not need to belabor this point's relevance to 2026's audiences.

As hunger, true hunger, bites these people in this world, morality shifts. We in the US have not faced hunger of famine proportions in so long it is not even in living memory. Our insulation will be stripped away. It will bring dark, ugly revelations to individual members of the out group. It's a stark truth, attested for many millennia, that starving people will do anything at all to survive. It is built into us as animals. It changes the people in this story: "The dad. The husband. The carpenter…The murderer? Yes…It hadn’t even been that hard."

It's a lot to take in, but it is a distillation that rises from much documentary evidence.

Start preparing now. The Grey Swan is looming.

LIAR'S CREEK, Matt Goldman's Clay Hawkins mystery series book one

LIAR'S CREEK (Clay Hawkins #1)
MATT GOLDMAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winner Matt Goldman comes Liar's Creek, which asks how far we'll go to protect the people we love.

The small town of Riverwood, Minnesota is true to its name, brimming with beautiful scenes of nature. Its rural landscape is threaded with scenic trout streams, which carve their way through limestone bluffs. But beneath its picturesque facade, danger runs rampant.

Clay Hawkins isn’t a stranger to the secrets of his hometown. After twenty years away, Clay has recently returned home from abroad with his twelve-year-old son Braedon, and his relationship with his father Judd, the recently replaced sheriff, is as strained as ever.

Trouble immediately brews for Clay when his beloved uncle, Teddy, disappears. Together, the three generations of Hawkinses must overturn every stone in Riverwood and confront deep familial wounds to find the one person who brings them together. As danger looms, Clay worries that it might be too late to save Teddy—and that the rest of the family might be next.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Goldman clearly invested a lot of mental energy in Clay Hawkins' life trajectory. It's all here: dead mother, grouchy prickly father, adolescent son with all that implies and entails, escapr from then return to Home after a fun, fascinating adulthood elsewhere...it's all here. Coming home has its rewards, these aren't skimped, and its risks. Uncle Teddy, who vanishes without explanation, is going to be found, by Clay, and damned if his family's ugly secrets they do NOT want splashed around will stop Clay from doing it.

Perch that determination on top of his...estranged, unliked...father making a friend of Clay's son, and the differing ways to be a father between the generations add a load of tension between them, among all three of them. The women in the story are all strong, competent people, with their own careers and concerns. They're not little ladies, nor are they ball-busting viragos, they're presented as flawed and imperfect like the stiff-necked men they choose to hang around with.

The mystery's resolved. Copious trout-fishing is done. Football/soccer is discussed. The manly men (and one about to start being a man) all do man-stuff like pointedly not talk, like ignore feelings (their own of course, but each others' too), not talk, lust after women, and not talk. It takes extreme measures to goad them into speech not about sports. When they do talk, shit gets done and in a hurry.

I'm afraid I was not surprised by the big reveal. I really seldom am, and this was not one of those times. I don't fault Author Goldman for that. I fault him a little for apparently losing track of some red-herrings that will stink up the furniture in future installments of the series. There will be future installments because no publisher works this hard to drop a promising premise. I hope the team will make some serious effort to answer young Braedon's quite reasonable questions about his past that he's too young to remember on his own.

A promising debut series that needs a bit of finesse applied as it matures.

FIDELTY, a Belt Revivals series story by forgotten feminist Susan Glaspell

FIDELTY
SUSAN GLASPELL (intro. Sarah Blackwood)
Belt Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do.

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it ... One who defies it ... must be shut out from it."

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It will most certainly shock readers today, will this read; not for the same reasons and not to the same degree as the readers of 1915 were shocked. Nowadays we're watching, or y'all're watching because I sure as shootin' ain't, The Real Housewives of {Flyover Country} to get the equivalent shock value. (I sometimes long for the Hays Code when I read about the antics of these surgically altered weirdos that keep so many so entertained.) I too was shocked by Fidelity: How has Susan Glaspell disappeared from the awareness of 2026's readers?

Born on a rural Iowa homestead (this means something important, y'all follow the link) in 1876, by 1894 she was a paid journalist; she later became a college graduate (in philosophy!) at a time when the number of *men* who graduated college was a vanishingly small slice of the population; she was a staffer, full time and paid, at the Des Moines newspaper; then gave it all up...to become a bestselling novelist and short-story writer.

AFTER that, she fell in love with a married guy. He divorced whoever he was married to in order to put a ring on Susan's finger (and who can blame him?), and their union produced...more bestselling novels, as well as the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill's career, several still-produced plays of her own...y'know, all the usual things a woman can expect to have happen to her when she's born into a nineteenth-century farming family. Her life as a radical socialist free-love advocate would shock and startle many in the US today, let alone then.

So Fidelity is probably more faction, or even a roman à clef if one knew the good folk of Davenport, Iowa, circa 1910 which I do not and, if this story is any guide, am delighted not to have done. I'm no small-town fancier in general, but the beady-eyed, small-minded and judgmental folk of the place evoked in this story made me panther-screechingly furious on the regular.

Equally irksome to my twenty-first century self is the lackluster critical reception of the time, doubtless symptomatic of the era's cultural unreadiness to examine its prudishness and misogyny. (I'm appalled to not these same objectively wrongheaded notions are being trumpeted as in the ascendant again. Well-timed, Belt Publishing!) I suspect some of the resistance then also stemmed from the multiple narrators whose ideas about "fidelity," that inherently coercive concept applied far more to women than men in marriage as we constitute it in the West, being rather transparently intended to counterpoint each other and reinforce the validity of protagonist Ruth's choice to elope with a married man.

Pace University Professor Sarah Blackwood's introduction alone might repay the cost of procuring the book. So much of Author Glaspell's life is footnoted in relation to the Provincetown Players' enduring legacy, despite her 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama meriting more than a simple "oh, by the way" footnote. Professor Blackwood makes a good case for why we should look for, and at, Susan Glaspell as a visionary life-liver and writer.

I don't really think this story of "infidelity" and sexual liberation despite its consequences will ever go out of relevance and ability to illuminate and elucidate how willful and calricious a thing the human heart is. It's more out of fashion in twenty-first century storytelling when its focus is not on the guilt and the transgression angles of attack. It might feel less minatory because there's no emphasis on punishment for the behavior, but to my mind this story is more honest about reality than modern salacious takes on the topic. There are consequences to the choices we make. They aren't always easy to endure. If you knowingly transgress your community's norms be ready to find a new community.

I think a lot of people, married or not, can relate to, resonate with, find fellowship in, that message.