SLANTING TOWARDS THE SEA, saddens me how much trouble is self-inflicted

SLANTING TOWARDS THE SEA
LILILA HILJE
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spanning twenty years and one life-altering summer in Croatia, Slanting Towards the Sea is at once an unforgettable love story and a powerful exploration of what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself.

Ivona divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago. They met as students at the turn of the millennium, when newly democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise. But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguished Ivona’s dreams one after another—and a devastating secret forced her to set him free.

Now Vlaho is remarried and a proud father of two, while Ivona’s life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. Bewildered by life’s disappointments, she finds solace in reconnecting with Vlaho and is welcomed into his family by his spirited wife, Marina. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved.

Set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline, Slanting Towards the Sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love.

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My Review: Writing in her second language has not hindered Author Hilje's ability to craft a story well worth reading. I venture to guess self-sabotage is the leading cause of unhappiness and relationship collapse in the entire world.

The romantic myth is that love, true love, is a wonderful and generative force for good in our personal lives and the world at large.

Baloney.

Ivona truly loves Vlaho, and does an unselfish thing that makes his life better for him. It makes her spiral deeper into her existing sadness. I'm convinced that, had she talked it out with her husband, a lot of their troubles would've gone away, a lot of pain and suffering would've been deferred, and a lot of heartache could've been sidestepped.

But not one single thing would've changed, because nothing about love could've taught Ivona what the real, basic, unseen problem was. Ivona, and the rest of us mere mortals, must always be blind in order to see our way forward into the life we say we want. "It wasn't until years later that I saw her words for what they really meant. If people want to love you, they do, no matter how flawed you are. But if they aren't inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind." Vlaho's life-partner, since he can't have his love, is perforce a practical soul....

It's a tragedy to get what you want, says the old maxim, and it is very true. Then you're required to look deeper for the sources of your unhappiness...Ivona sees hers (with a vicious assist from Vlaho's fully evil mother), but not Vlaho's, as she lets him go; Vlaho sees Ivona's only through the scrim of his own needs and wants. It's hard to be in a relationship that founders. Ivona does the self-defeating thing of clinging to the edges of Vlaho's life, while dedicating herself to her truly toxic parent's care. She is always on hold in this life because she has that core of sadness in her that can't be jollied away. It's central to her sense of herself.

Vlaho finally confronts his core of need when Ivona, after many years spent orbiting him, his wife, their kid (who is Ivona's god-daughter, if that ain't a red flag for emotional crisis what is?) falls for Asier. He's a Spaniard, he's nothing to or about Croatia, he is a blank slate to Ivona...free at last, free at last, I hear Dr. King echoing in my mind. Only, this is change, this is a way for Ivona to be herself and not defined in her orbit around Vlaho! Can he stand it?

Croatia...Dalmatia of old...is barely two decades old as a political polity. Its different parts are united by cultural ties older than any of the countries around it. This backdrop is another character in the novel, in the sense that it imbues and informs the entirety of the story..."Back home, all things slant towards the sea" is a genius sentence, spoken very early on, in that it conveys more and more meanings as the story progresses. Everything is pointing to the sea, the source, the unstoppable unknowable force that rules our planet and our lives. The sea as a metaphor, the sea as a simile, the sea as a simple fact, all come into play.

It is the slanting to the sea that none of us resist, we are simply not able to go gently. I hope the read does for your sensibilities what it did for mine...sharpened and focused the search for happiness.

RETURN TO LATVIA, it's happening again and you're not paying attention

RETURN TO LATVIA
MARINA JARRE (tr. Ann Goldstein)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: ?

The Publisher Says: Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood.

Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.

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

My Review: If you're Jewish and support this administration, you should realize how extremely delusional you are after you read this book. It does not start with Jews, not this time, but it won't stop before it gets to you.

Don't beleve me? Neither did the Jews who smiled smugly as "gypsys" and fegelehs and communists went to the camps.

Hate can not be satisfied. Hate cannot be appeased. Hate cannot be directed.

Stand up to it or be consumed by it.

There is no healing from hate. It deforms and disfigures and eats its fuel as certainly as their targets. It's the same bitter irony: To combat the thing, you must adopt the thing. Controlling evil, paradoxically, requires doing evil, thus scaring the haters into silence.

The lesson of history is the bitter, horrifying truth: Nothing can ever stop hatred. Scare haters into silence, and never, ever stop suspecting the grim, ugly truth is they're still there. Make it too expensive to their own lives to enact hatred like we are seeing roar back to life in the world today. The camps are real. The "news" is reporting on them and y'all aren't out in the streets...those who can be physically...calling attention to them. That is called "complicity".

Future Marina Jarres will write this story again, and again, and again, unless y'all pull your thumbs out and start doing the hard, icky work of combating hatred with hatred. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But if you can read this story and not see how hugely much it costs not to do it...

...

...I've answered my own question. Signed, one your inaction has doomed to the camps unless I get lucky and die first.

THE MARIGOLD COTTAGES MURDER COLLECTIVE...nope

THE MARIGOLD COTTAGES MURDER COLLECTIVE
JO NICHOLS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The perfect summer read, full of charm and heart, written in the vein of The Thursday Murder Club or Only Murders in the Building but with a southern California twist.

Mrs. B, the landlady of The Marigold Cottages is a stubborn idealist who only rents to people she cares about: Sophie, an anxious young playwright with a dark past; Hamilton, an agoraphobe who likes to overshare; Ocean, a queer sculptor raising two kids alone; the perfectionist Lily-Ann; and Nicholas, a finance bro who’s hiding secrets.

The tenants live contentedly in their doll-house bungalows in Santa Barbara, just minutes from the beach, until their peace is shattered when Anthony, a quiet, hulking, but potentially violent ex-con moves in. Three weeks later, a dead body is discovered on the streets of the peaceful neighborhood. Anthony is arrested, and the tenants heave sighs of relief. Until Mrs. B, convinced that he's innocent, marches down to the police station and confesses to the crime herself. The tenants band together and form “The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective” to save their beloved landlady. As clues are unearthed and secrets are revealed, the community of misfits only grows more tight-knit...until a second body is found. Full of eccentricity, humor, community, The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective will keep you hooked until the last page.

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My Review: Mrs. B might care about these people; I didn't. (Didn't care about her, either; kept thinking Mrs. Madrigal had had ECT.)

Ocean was tolerable; Sophie was not; Anthony...what was that about? Like asking a casting director to write you a TV pilot or giving the cinematographer control over the budget, this felt like what happens when there are people deciding things outside their skill set. Much like finance-bro Nicholas, who was hiding secrets I don't remember because I didn't care before or after I knew them.

I give it stars for being seriously lacking in the usual copaganda vibes in cozy mysteries. The police aren't bumbling boobs or mustachio-twirling villains; they're creepy because they are the hulls left after Conformity and Capitalism bash idealism into sludgy slop. They're not solving the real crimes but enforcing Order.

Refreshingly, even bracingly, honest.

PoVs come and go, which will become a trope if this turns into a series. I've already said I didn't like the characters so it wasn't like the tonal shifts took me out of the one character I didn't like's PoV but rather bounced me from insufferable Artiste to dull mom to cipher. I suspect others will feel differently. I see star ratings I simply can't imagine the basis for all over Netgalley and Goodreads.

Like those Osman and Backman and Robinson books, once was enough. Y'all keep lappin' it up; I'll be trawling for something that's not this in the bookstores.

MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY (Mrs. Christie #1), new cozy-mystery series with literary ghost-sleuth

MRS. CHRISTIE AT THE MYSTERY GUILD LIBRARY (Mrs. Christie #1)
AMANDA CHAPMAN
Berkley Books /Berkley Prime Crime (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Book conservator Tory Van Dyne and a woman claiming to be Agatha Christie on holiday from the Great Beyond join forces to catch a killer in this spirited mystery from Amanda Chapman.

Tory Van Dyne is the most down-to-earth member of a decidedly eccentric old-money New York family. For one thing, as book conservator at Manhattan’s Mystery Guild Library, she actually has a job. Plus, she’s left up-town society behind for a quiet life downtown. So she’s not thrilled when she discovers a woman in the library’s Christie Room who calmly introduces herself as Agatha Christie, politely requests a cocktail and announces she’s there to help solve a murder—that has not yet happened.

But as soon as Tory determines that this is just a fairly nutty Christie fangirl, her socialite/actress cousin Nicola gets caught up in the suspicious death of her less-than-lovable talent agent. Nic, as always, looks to Tory for help. Tory, in turn, looks to Mrs. Christie. The woman, whoever or whatever she is, clearly knows her stuff when it comes to crime.

Aided by a found family of unlikely sleuths—including a snarky librarian, an eleven-year-old computer whiz, and an NYPD detective with terrible taste in suits—Tory and the woman claiming to be her very much deceased literary idol begin to unravel the twists and turns of a murderer’s devious mind. Because, in the immortal words of Miss Jane Marple, “murder is never simple.”

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

My Review: Need a puzzle to solve to see summer out? Something with just enough unreality to feel low-stakes and just enough emotional reality to make investing in it worth your time?

Berkley Books' Prime Crime imprint gotcha covered with Amanda Chapman's first offering.

I expected to be politely dismissive of this first in a proposed series by Amy Pershing's alter ego. I haven't read her other cozy series. I don't think I will because there's cozy, then there's so cozy you can't breathe, like an oppressively crowded Victorian living room. That's Cape Cod to me, where her other series is set.

I'll take Manhattan.

It's fun to find the call-outs to Christie's works scattered around, and it's fun...to my surprise...to have Dame Agatha just appear out of nowhere to work with Tory on solving what they know is a murder but are having trouble convincing others has that feel to it. For that matter how Tory becomes convinced that Dame Agatha is who she says she is gets handled the same way: tough and disbelieving attitude at first, then it just is part of reality in the story. In my own experience that's exactly how the unthinkable, the unbelievable, gets trojan-horsed into becoming the way things are. It's very much helped along in this narrative by the fact that Dame Agatha is only seen inside the library setting, not out wandering the Village.

It did not escape my notice that the first-person narrator, Tory, has the unbelievably cush life she has because she's a nepo baby. It's not really made much of, just presented as fact. There's no real pushback, but the situation isn't set up to draw attention to itself...Tory's a woman with a life and a style not available without lucky draws in the birth lottery.

That's all so very cozy as a backdrop. It is meant to offer the reader maximum comfort as rents in the fabric of society get repaired and ma'at is restored as it must be in a series mystery. A concern I felt going in was that the Christie-facing bits would really *require* the reader to know already what that particular story referred to was about, or the reference would fall flat; not at all the case. I found the varying levels of familiarity with Dame Agatha's works never impacted my understanding of the plot in any negative way. It offered a frisson of fun when I got it, but nothing was lost when /i didn't see the story connection for myself because that was dealt with in dialogue.

Tory, as the main character and the first-person narrator, will of necessity need to appeal to you for the read to work.

Later, when I'd had a chance to process our little encounter, I realized it made a kind of weird sense that if my guest was indeed Agatha Christie (which I did not believe for a minute), and if she had indeed decided to visit New York City some fifty years after she'd been airlifted to the Great Beyond (which I also did not believe for a minute), she might indeed choose New York's Mystery Guild Library as a home base.

Not quite the first words in the book, but darn close. This is what you're getting, so if you don't like it already, then horseman, pass by.

Me, I'm all in. And the next one, too. Fair enough play, a fun narrative voice, a premise silly enough to make me smile but never played for laughs at anyone...if only I'd liked the love interest I'd be raving!

THE HIDDEN ISLAND, essay collections by exiled Cuban journalist

THE HIDDEN ISLAND
ABRAHAM JIMÉNEZ ENOA (introduction by Jon Lee Anderson; tr. Lily Meyer)
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The work of one of the most powerful new voices in independent Cuban journalism, The Hidden Island is a searing portrait of life in contemporary Cuba, where the struggles of ordinary citizens collide with the brutal repression of the government.

In this powerful collection of essays, we encounter a memorable and diverse cast of regular Cubans who are trying to survive with few resources and little hope—including a female boxer in a country that has long outlawed women's boxing, a boy who collects money for the country's underground lottery, a male gigolo, and the residents of a neighborhood that is so poor that the government doesn't officially recognize its existence. We also meet the homeless, and vendors who eke out a meager living by selling fruit and vegetables, scraping by in a former socialist paradise.

Jiménez Enoa juxtaposes these ordinary lives against the repressive tactics of the government, or "regime." He describes his “walks” around Villa Marista, the headquarters of the secret police, and the spies, confidantes, informers and regime sympathizers who crush anyone who questions the official narrative, which forces many independent journalists into exile. In a final self-portrait in the book about his own exile, Jiménez Enoa writes that, “to escape from Cuba is to fall into the world, to realize that Cuba is an island that has been hijacked by a political system which ensures that the country remains locked inside the twentieth century.”

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

My Review: Essays by journalists, especially ones that don't get a gentle massaging to flow into each other, can make for somewhat choppy, repetitive reading. Founder of online Cuban resistance magazine, El Estornudo, Author Jiménez Enoa highlights "...fresh perspectives on challenges for independent journalists and reporting on issues rarely covered by {Cuban} state media, including racism in Cuba. In 2020, state security officers strip-searched and handcuffed Jiménez Enoa, interrogated him for five hours, and threatened him and his family over his writings about life in Cuba in his {now-defunct} Washington Post column. The persistent harassment and censorship forced Jiménez to flee to Spain in 2021, where he is currently living in exile."

All that potted biographical information (from Ig Publishing's website) should tell you that this is a book by a man who's living by his principles, is in fact doing the very thing authoritarians hate the most: Talking about them factually, therefore in unflattering terms. As expected, the terms change little; the essays, taken in large doses, thus become repetitive. Space them out, intersperse them with jolly Wodehouse stories or something in that vein.

Make no mistake that Cuba is an authoritarian state; it always was. Its slide into poverty came when the Soviet Union crashed out and Russia, as the successor state, opted not to resume propping up the Cuban economy. Things do not go well for former client states that suddenly lose the support of their masters. There was no plan for a way to transition into a new economic model, so misery resulted, as always when one system collapses and no new ideas are allowed to arise.

Author Jiménez Enoa dared to point this out publicly. The regime did not like having its failures openly discussed and used bullying and intimidation to silence him. That website I've linked to above is his riposte. Not silenced, but rather energized, motivated to say his piece on the biggest stage he could find.

I wonder how many more times this game of repression and rebellion will need to be played out before the real message gets through to the powerful: What you're doing is wrong, and we all know it and see it. You are not going to fool anyone by acting the bully.

All the essays Jiménez Enoa has written about the Cubans he's met...especially the sex-worker guy, who reminds me of John Kilo...show how resilient people are, how many ways they find to keep their lives moving and thriving.

Good people are so often cursed by bad governments, aren't they.

JAGUARS' TOMB, a #WITMonth read whose time came

JAGUARS' TOMB
ANGÉLICA GORODISCHER (tr. Amalia Gladhart)
Vanderbilt University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jaguars' Tomb is a novel in three parts, written by three interconnected characters. Part one, "Hidden Variables" by María Celina Igarzábal, is narrated by Bruno Seguer. Seguer in turn is the author of the second part, "Recounting from Zero" ("Contar desde zero"), in which Evelynne Harrington, author of the third, is a central character. Harrington, finally, is the author of "Uncertainty" ("La incertidumbre"), whose protagonist is the dying Igarzábal. Each of the three parts revolves around the octagonal room that is alternately the jaguars' tomb, the central space of the torture center, and the heart of an abandoned house that hides an adulterous affair.

The novel, by Argentine author Angélica Gorodischer, is both an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, and loss. Among Gorodischer's many novels, Jaguars' Tomb most directly addresses the abductions and disappearances that occurred under the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83. This is the fourth of Gorodischer's books translated into English. The first, Kalpa Imperial—translated by Ursula Le Guin—was selected for the New York Times summer reading list in 2003.

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

My Review: Y'all remember me talking up Kalpa Imperial, right? The link is above for refreshing of memories. This novel, made up of three novellas "by" three writer-characters, is like that collection of SFF stories in the sense that she is using the narrative form to make a bigger point that really means more than than it would if she just sat down and typed out the story.

Oh dear. That sounded like a rush to the exit.

The Dirty War against the Argentine military junta's enemies started almost fifty years ago...officially...but it won't really be over while there are survivors bearing scars. If you're wondering how long that will be...read A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. These are nation-defining scars inflicted in the name of...what, greed? cruelty for its own sake?...these questions are the ones Author Gorodischer treats in these three novellas.

I think a lot of people, hearing that a novel is woven of shorter story-strands, aren't inclined to do more than nod absently that they've heard the description. Add another layer of artifice, fictional authors telling these fictional stories, and *click* out go the lights as brains head upstairs to bed.

Wake up now, drink some of Author Gorodischer's strong, bitter coffee, and think about what could cause so much pain that the story must be wrapped in a big layer cake of artifice in order to bring the impact down to bearable levels. That is the case with these intertwined tales of the horrors of life under a government that kidnaps, tortures, and kills its citizens who are guilty of nothing but disagreeing with the very government that is committing these horrible acts.

Layering, padding, defenses against the mere idea of direct head-on confrontation with the terrible subject...well, yeah, I think that would never be less than a helpful coping strategy. And as the layers are constructed they reveal what they were made to obscure. The very title of the novel is an uneasy nod to the avoided reality. There are many things this technique does well, eg making the empty space the center of the story's arc much as the absence of los desaparecidos is the center of those left behind's lives.

Like any technique, though, every benefit has a cost. Avoidance of difficult topics can end up with the literary equivalent of avoidant personality disorder. The bitterness of self-judgment, the harsh inner gaze that spotlights things not done, the Inquisition-level blaming of everyone especially the self for things not reasonably in their control, all so reasonably justified and so irrational on examination, all here. It's not an easy read though it's written in lovely prose. The depths of loss and rage...these are never easy topics to treat. It's greatly to Author Gorodischer's credit that she does not use her padding as a cop-out, a way of prettifying horrifying behavior.

It is inevitable that splitting the story into three narratives by three different people who are all writing about each other does not create deep investment in each character. While I can see this as a deliberate choice made to reinforce the central absence as painful, it also makes the read more effortful in the moment. I read this book to about the 33% mark during the Biden administration's extraordinary rendition kerfuffle (he'd publicly opposed it in 2007 but it continued as fact if not policy). It felt artificial, a stylistic tic to me then.

Come January 2025 and Kilmar Abrego García's travails, the idea seemed much more immediate, indeed urgent, to grapple with. I found myself unwilling to confront the horrors head-on, needing some space between myself and the topic's hyperreality.

Rather makes Author Gorodischer's case for her technical choice for her.

I'm hoping this desire to see what the behaviors we are tacitly, by silence, condoning today cost an earlier generation of a society that did then what we are doing now cost them in psychic suffering.

SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS REVISED & EXPANDED EDITION The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business...comprehensive title!

SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS REVISED & EXPANDED EDITION The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business
THOMAS ERIKSON
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fully revised and expanded edition of the runaway bestseller, Surrounded by Idiots—now with Text • Charts • Examples • Snark!

Master the four basic behavior types and change the way you communicate!

Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy?

You are not alone. After a disastrous meeting with a highly successful entrepreneur, who was genuinely convinced he was ‘surrounded by idiots,’ communication expert and bestselling author Thomas Erikson dedicated himself to understanding how people function and why we often struggle to connect with certain personality types.

Erikson’s simple yet ground-breaking techniques will help you understand yourself better, hone communication and social skills, handle conflict with confidence, improve dynamics with your boss and team, and get the best out of the people you deal with and manage.

At a moment in time when understanding one another is more important than ever, Thomas Erikson revisits his most popular title, offering an updated and expanded edition that will make you a master of communication.

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

My Review: If anyone reading this has not yet read SURROUNDED BY NARCISSISTS: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind) I recommend you go do that.

Back so soon? Okay, here we go.

I didn't read the original version so cannot comment on whatever might be new in the presentation of the text. I can tell you it's easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to misuse. You are not going to be a mental-health professional after reading this book. I think anyone who feels frustrated and put-upon by the goofballs and simps surrounding them should go get a therapist. To be completely honest I think that anyway...go get a therapist! It will change your life for the better.

Absent that, reading this book is best done with the realization that at least a dozen people are reading it because of you. It behooves all of us to get better at communication with people not like ourselves, but from a place of non-judgmental desire to be better about our affect in this world.

I can hear y'all snickering, it's really quite rude. I already said it's best to read this (and all other books like it) in the full realization that others are reading them to detoxify your affect on them. I really mean that. Communication problems are always mutual. When you simply dislike someone you still need to be able to communicate with them to be effective in any social situation where there are other people...in other words, all of them. Talking to MAGAts or religious nuts is hard, but we all need to do it sometimes. I myownself keep interactions with them as short as possible and avoid eye contact the way an old pal of mine does with Mondays, for the same reason.

This particular iteration of the DISC / Meyers-Briggs system, using colors in place of letters, works as well as these things ever do: Not very, but useful as a quick issue-defusing technique. It's easy to internalize, comes with built-in shorthand, and can help you walk away from difficult conversations without creating more trouble.

It's not, and does not purport or pretend to be, a substitute for the hard work of therapy. Which everyone should do. But since there's no way in hell most lazy slugs will bother, and no way most people can afford it if they were willing (which they're not), and no easy way to find or know how to judge which therapist is the right one for you, we have books like this.

Use it the way he tells you to and you will do no (further) harm.

That alone is worth more than the purchase price.

THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN, written in 1972 and still dividing opinion

THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN
UNO CHIYO (tr. Rebecca Copeland)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A piercingly beautiful and candid novel of love, sex and independence in 1920s Japan by a trailblazing Japanese writer.

She left her home, just a girl, determined to live alone. But wasn’t this the very life her late father had most fervently forbidden?

As an older woman, Kazue looks back on her tumultuous younger years with piercing clarity. Growing up in a tiny Japanese mountain village at the start of the twentieth century, her life was shadowed by the demands and expectations of her troubled, alcoholic father. While she is still a young teenager, her family arranges for her to marry an older cousin; Kazue stays with the boy for only ten days before returning home alone.

This is the beginning of a life of questing independence, which will see Kazue forced to leave her home at eighteen following a love affair, going first to Korea and then to Tokyo. Driven by her impulses and an indomitable spirit of hope, Kazue moves from one relationship to another, hungry for experience. As her sense of identity and voice grows, she takes to writing as a means to live a life on her own terms.

Candidly told and full of stunning imagery, The Story of a Single Woman is an autobiographical novel by one of Japan’s most significant 20th-century writers, a trailblazer who lived and wrote like no-one else.

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

My Review: A short work of autofiction, in Japanese called "watakushi-shōsetsu" which Translator Copeland helpfully renders as "I-novel"; very much like the French récit, with the subject one's self but lightly fictionalized. I like this form because it allows us to focus on the experience of the events without dilution by considering other PoVs.

That's also why it's short. It's easy to see that this technique could become overbearing, solipsistic, even unpleasantly claustrophobic, at any great length.

Considering the era...early twentieth century...when this character, Kazue, lived, and considering it's the life of Chiyo herself, this is a remarkably unconventional narrative. Kazue is married off, but decides that is not for her. She simply...leaves. There are women in 2025 who would not be able to muster that up in themselves; she did it over a hundred years ago. Left, never went back, never yoked herself to another man without her choice, just went about the task of living her own life with whatever company from whatever man she chose. Of course, this being a real life's events, there were men who used her; the unusually frank thing is there were men she discussed that she used, too.

I think a lot of readers are inclined to judge the resolute focus on herself, her inner world, unkindly where, for example, they would not judge Cheever or Updike (to name but two navel-gazing solipsistic men of celebrity) in that way. A woman writing so closely about herself, about how her behaviors feel to her and why she decided to do them, is still "transgressive" but it's another unquestioned privilege for men. Reviewers might tut over the man's unreflective gaze but no one would complain that he left no room in the story for others; feelings. He's a man. No one expects him to.

So here's Author Uno making that choice, and many are the assessments of that as a problem; but it's never formulated as taking a man's freedom or something direct like that. It's a quiet assumption that women must always write about, therefore consider and even center, the feelings of others in their lives as well as in their creative ways.

Interesting to me that privilege is not only pervasive but also invisible until you choose to see it. Judging Author Uno as not giving you what you were never promised in her story is, it seems to me, pretty clearly applying misogynist standards to her. Her life was less destructive to others than her own wastrel father's was, yet I know many judge her behavior in their reviews not dismiss that behavior as a product of her upbringing so to be smiled indulgently upon.

That feels essentially unfair to me. I'm pretty sure I'd've done it too until recently. The world has changed, and it took me with it.

But for all my appreciation of Kazue's candor, I was not convinced that this story should not have been a novel-novel instead of an I-novel. It wasn't always clear to me that we gained enough by that technique to make it worth losing the richness of a novel's scope for settings and emotional responses to events. I'm not quite, then, at all five stars, but no lower than four and a half because, even in the twenty-first century it feels radical to many readers for a woman to be so unapologetically focused on herself and her feelings.

CHILDREN OF THE BOOK: A Memoir of Reading Together, I think I used the read unlike it was intended

CHILDREN OF THE BOOK: A Memoir of Reading Together
ILANA KURSHAN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder for delivery tomorrow

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In Children of the Book, Ilana Kurshan explores the closeness forged when family life unfolds against a backdrop of reading together. Kurshan, a mother of five living in Jerusalem, at first struggles to balance her passion for literature with her responsibilities as a parent. Gradually she learns how to relate to reading not as a solitary pursuit and an escape from the messiness of life, but rather as a way of teaching independence and forging connection. Introducing her children to sacred and secular literature—including the beloved classics of her childhood—helps her become both a better mother and a better reader.

Chief among the books Kurshan reads with her children is the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah, which Jews the world over read in synchrony as part of the liturgical cycle. In the five parts of this memoir, Kurshan explores the surprising resonances between the biblical text and her experiences as a mother and a reader—from the first picture books that create the world through language for little babies, to the moment our children begin reading on their own leaving us behind, atop the mountain, as they enter new lands without us. A testament to the enduring power of shared texts, Children of the Book celebrates the deep pleasures of books.

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My Review: I am anti-religion. It is a vicious, coercive system meant to instill authoritarian values. It's used here for those aims...forcing children to eat is wrong.

"What the hell, old man, why are you rating this more than a single star?"

This is why: "As I tell my daughter, I know the book is not really mine, because nothing I own is truly mine. But I write in the margins because the book is part of a conversation that has been unfolding for generations. I want to add my voice to that conversation, and someday, when she is older, I hope she will, too." I think the author didn't realize it, but in that simple statement, she handed her child the key to the prison.

The reason to teach children to love reading, to love the words that show us the shape of our culture, is to give them exactly that sense of joining a conversation. It is the reason the authoritarians are working so very hard to squash our trust in cultural institutions like libraries, laboratories, and other relativistic systems of judging knowledge. It never works in their favor; they can't compete on the "strength" of their ideas; and people do not like to be ordered around. The demographics are against the religious nuts as overall "belief" is shrinking everywhere, which leads to lunacies like Bible-Belt churches being sold off (suitable for a ministorage conversion is my favorite reuse!) as congregations vanish...a thing I'd've told you was utterly impossible fifty years ago is now happening.

No wonder "They" are so determined to take control of all the structures of Authority and destroy them. "They" are losing, and they know there is only a slim chance that can be slowed down.

So look at that bolded passage above, realize the key is in your hands, and for the sake of a future worth living in, PASS IT ON.

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN, brutally honest recounting of the reality of femicide

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN
PATRÍCIA MELO (tr. Sophie Lewis)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From best-selling Brazilian crime novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression

By turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance―and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

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My Review: You know a book has said something profound, moving, and honest when more about fifteen hundred Goodreads reviews are very positive to four hundred profoundly negative. Goodreads ain't the Land of Woke, yet four times as many people chose to express a positive opinion of this story of violence and murder against women as bothered to bash it.

I'm praising it, too. The way Author Melo weaves magical, intensely sensual words...

Death has been kind to me, I thought. I haven't been run over by a lorry. I haven't fallen to a stray bullet. I have not been hastened toward death—rather, death has only dreamed of me; it has only knocked at my door. Tap, tap, tap. "I'm thinking of coming for you tonight at nightfall," death had said.
–and–
It seemed to be raising a piece of me that had been forgotten, something stifled inside me, a piece that on coming free levered up another, and so on and so on, down to the last lost piece, the furthest fallen, as good as buried—the one called "mother."

...into lovely images as well as wields word-scalpels as she detachedly discusses the murder of women simply for being (or presenting as) women is brutal and effective in conveying the sickness at the heart of femicide.

You never imagine that a guy like this, a Wittgenstein reader and yoga fan, will hit you in the face at a lawyers’ New Year’s Eve party. But the statistics show that it happens a lot. And that lots of men don’t stop at a slap. They’d actually rather kill you.
–and–
The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men come home tired after work and kill us.

It is as Author Melo has Carla say: "It doesn't matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn't matter what you do for a living. It's dangerous being a woman."

From many directions, for reasons and for no reason at all, it is dangerous to be a woman.

That simple, statistically verifiable truth is really all the impetus I think you should need to get and read this book.

I couldn't offer a fifth star, as the subject matter alone merited, because the reading experience was not well-integrated; the tonal shifts were effective but were also overused. The characters aren't really developed because there is so very much to say about the reason we-the-reader are here; but that means, at times, we-the-reader don't get the real horror-movie-esque impact only the documentary, evidentiary disgust and outrage.

A story to admire, to absorb and retain lessons from; not one to follow your spouse or equivalent around, reading bits and snatches to.

August 2025's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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Kukum by Michel Jean (tr. Susan Ouriou)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award in the Translation Category
Longlist, 2025 Dublin Literary Award

A Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean’s great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community.

Kukum recounts the story of Almanda Siméon, an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle, who falls in love with a young Innu man despite their cultural differences and goes on to share her life with the Pekuakami Innu community. They accept her as one of their own: Almanda learns their language, how to live a nomadic existence, and begins to break down the barriers imposed on Indigenous women. Unfolding over the course of a century, the novel details the end of traditional ways of life for the Innu, as Almanda and her family face the loss of their land and confinement to reserves, and the enduring violence of residential schools.

Kukum intimately expresses the importance of Innu ancestral values and the need for freedom nomadic peoples feel to this day.

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My Review: Heartfelt love stokes equally deep incandescent outrage. "My children were born in the woods. My grandchildren grew up on a reserve. The former were educated on the land, the latter in a residential school. When they returned, they spoke French. The white priests forbade them from speaking Innu-aimun and even punished those who did. Another tie had been severed between the generations. They thought that by robbing our children of their language they would make them white. But an Innu who speaks French is still Innu. With yet another wound."

I'd rate it more highly had it not felt...novelistic...and that is not its stated brief. The author's written eight or more novels so I suppose the cadence of fiction is natural to him now.

Arachnide Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks a reasonable $17.99 for a trade paper edition.

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The Unraveling of Julia by Lisa Scottoline

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From a #1 international bestselling author, a gothic, suspenseful tale in which a young widow inherits a Tuscan estate from a mysterious benefactor and finds herself thrust into the crosshairs of a dangerous conspiracy—a “compelling thriller with dashes of romance and excellent twists!” (Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author).

Lately, Julia Pritzker is beginning to think she’s cursed. She’s lost her adoptive parents, then her husband is murdered. When she realizes that her horoscope essentially foretold his death, she begins to spiral. She fears her fate is written in the stars, not held in her own hands.

Then a letter arrives out of the blue, informing her that she has inherited a Tuscan villa and vineyard —but her benefactor is a total stranger named Emilia Rossi. Julia has no information about her biological family, so she wonders if Rossi could be a blood relative. Bewildered, she heads to Tuscany for answers.

There, Julia is horrified to discover that Rossi was a paranoid recluse, who believed herself to be a descendent of Duchess Caterina Sforza, a legendary Renaissance ruler. Stunned by her uncanny resemblance to Rossi, and even to Caterina, Julia is further unnerved when she unearths eerie parallels between them, including an obsession with astrology.

Before long, Julia suspects she’s being followed, and strange things begin to happen. Not even a chance meeting with a handsome Florentine can ease her troubled mind. When events turn deadly, Julia’s harrowing struggle becomes a search for her identity, a race to save her sanity, and ultimately, a question of her very survival.

Twisty, transportive, and haunting—this is suspense with a passport.

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My Review: Sudsy summer fun. Very much in the vein of Gothic mistress...nay, creatrix...Ann Radcliffe and, more especially, The Italian (1797).

In common with what I honestly feel sure is the source material, it's convoluted and overcomplicated; it repays close attention; and gives the frisson of uncertainty and unreality that the character is undergoing to the reader as well.

Grand Central Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $14.99 for an ebook. Entertainment at a reasonable price to my mind.

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My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre (tr. Anna Lehmann)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Edgar loves nothing more than listening to the birds in the trees, the squeaking of moles in nearby chalk quarries, the conversations trickling out of the carpeted offices surrounding his favorite park in the suburbs of Paris. He also listens to the hushed conversations of passersby, strangers who whisper that he is “not all there.”

But what constitutes the supposedly insufficient nature of Edgar’s interior life? Dominique Fabre gives himself over to Edgar’s way of seeing, his sensitivity, his innocence and wisdom, his longings and perceptions, his tentative interpolations into the social fabric of 1960s France, and in each passage we find a stirring answer. Fabre’s lucid, layered, and utterly fresh bildungsroman will take you by surprise and leave an immutable mark on your heart.

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My Review: In under two hundred pages, this story will twang whatever heartstrings you still have and make you realize how seldom you really look at anything.

Before me, I really wonder what there was. Kids often believe that everything begins the moment they’re born, but not your humble servant Edgar. I’m not even sure I could find the place where I lived before without making a mistake, Madame Clarisse Georges. I’m still not all there, but I know how to hide it well. I’m grown up now. I’m still quiet and unassuming too, but I’m not sure that won’t change. Sometimes I want to shorten all this and get right to the train station platform, to the moment we’re going home. I’ll be eleven then.

You're charmed or you're not, but that's a representative of the tone (and Mme Georges is a creep).

All y'all who like Flowers for Algernon but would prefer to smile while reading it, all y'all who like Zazie in the Metro but would prefer not to work that hard, here's us a book. It doesn't really linger in the mind, though, so not An Event...a pleasant Sunday's pleasure read.

Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) only wants $13.99 for an ebook. If you need some sincere sweetness, spend it.

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If You Love It, Let It Kill You: a novel by Hannah Pittard

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A refreshingly irreverent novel about art, desire, domesticity, freedom, and the intricacies of the twenty-first-century female experience, from the acclaimed writer Hannah Pittard.

A novelist learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently—and soon—in her ex-husband’s debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news—she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains—but the morning after baking mac ’n’ cheese from scratch for her nephew’s sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she’s long enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat and a game called Dead Body.

Steeped in the strangeness of contemporary life and suggestive of expansive metaphoric possibilities, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression.

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

My Review: It struck me as desperately sad, not in the least funny, and unpleasantly like walking in on two friends having what we all know is their last fight.

Plenty of zingers if you're into the insult-comedy skits of the Aughties, Conan O'Brien-lite.

Henry Holt and Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) think it's worth $14.99 for an ebook. I'd be frothing mad if I'd paid that for it.

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In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata (tr. Robin Myers)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A MEDITATION ON IN VITRO FERTILIZATION THAT EXPANDS AND COMPLICATES THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT PREGNANCY.

Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In candid, graceful prose, Isabel Zapata gives voice to the strangeness and complexities of conception and motherhood that are rarely discussed publicly. Zapata frankly addresses the misogyny she experienced during fertility treatments, explores the force of grief in imagining possible futures, and confronts the societal expectations around maternity.

In the tradition of Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, In Vitro draws from diary and essay forms to create a new kind of literary companion and open up space for nuanced conversations about pregnancy.

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My Review: The author tells a deeply personal story of the incredible demands motherhood makes. There's a huge added emotional and financial burden pursuing fertility treatments, but none of it is ever easy. Getting treatment for infertility cost Author Zapata a giant emotional fortune just in dealing with misogyny (which surprised and appalled me, given where she was).

I myownself have always felt in my water that parenting (not just mothering) is what comes after birth, the washing feeding teaching consoling raising right parts; after reading this candid memoir I'm more sure than ever that birthing is, or should be, less emphasized by the Cult Of Mother. Read this journey to see if you think it's the right path for you.

Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $16.99 for an ebook. Compared to how much IVF costs, a bargain.

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Black Foam: A Novel by Haji Jabir (tr. Sawad Hussain & Marcia Lynx Qualey)

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From award-winning Eritrean author Haji Jabir comes a profoundly intimate novel about one man’s tireless attempt to find his place in the world.

Dawoud is on the run from his murky past, aiming to discover where he belongs. He tries to assimilate into different groups along his journey through North Africa and Israel, changing his clothes, his religious affiliations, and even his name to fit in, but the safety and peace he seeks remain elusive. It seems prejudice is everywhere, holding him back, when all he really wants is to create a simple life he can call his own. A chameleon, Dawoud—or David, Adal, or Dawit, depending on where and when you meet him—is not lost in this whirl of identities. In fact, he is defined by it.

Dawoud’s journey is circuitous and specific, but the desire to belong is universal. Spellbinding to the final page, Black Foam is both intimate and grand in scale, much like the experiences of the millions of people migrating to find peace and safety in the twenty-first century.

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My Review: I came to this read naïve about how much goes into seeking asylum on the deepest personal level:

He thought about getting up and walking out of the meeting, since his fate was already clear. But then a new idea took hold of him, filling him with energy. He would tell the truth. He would tell his own story, and the European would hear something he’d never heard before. He would tell his own great secret for the sake of his salvation.
Again, he lifted his head. The European’s lips still held the traces of a smirk, but this quickly slid off when he saw David staring into his eyes so firmly it confused him. The European set the pen aside and resettled his thick glasses, then clasped his hands and placed them under his chin, looking keenly at David.
David said: ‘I’m Free Gadli.’
The translator faltered, then dropped into silence and turned to the session’s secretary, who hadn’t written a single letter but was instead staring at David in astonishment. The European was confused as he saw the young men’s expressions but couldn’t understanding what was going on. He angrily ordered his translator to explain. The translator looked at David, as if giving him one last chance to take it back. Then he cleared his throat and translated in a low voice: ‘He says he’s one of the “fruits of the struggle.” ’

How incredibly brave, honest, and hopeless did this practiced dissimulator have to be to tell the whole truth in a desperate final attempt to survive.

Nuance and honesty are rare in the man's world, gifts grudgingly given, currency hoarded until the final moment comes to bet everything. More than three and three-quarter stars might've come had I been given more than the tightest of focuses on him as he wriggles, twists, bulls ahead, and strives against hopelessness. I just wore out.

Amazon Crossing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks you politely for $16.99 to read a trade paper edition. You read that right.

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JEAN-LUC PERSECUTED by C.F. Ramuz (tr. Olivia Baes)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A novel of love, betrayal, madness, and downfall from an iconic Swiss writer of the early 20th century.

Jean-Luc Persecuted follows the ill-fated life of an unhappily married man. When Jean-Luc’s wife pursues an affair and leaves him with their child, Jean-Luc’s behavior becomes more and more erratic. He falls to drinking, behaving recklessly, and squandering his money.

The narrative follows the explosive downfall of a lone man and his unstoppable mental collapse, surrounded by villagers unable to effect real change. This novel, never before translated, exemplifies the earthy, realistic, often allegorical style of iconic Swiss writer Ramuz.

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My Review: A short work...under two hundred pages...by a (male) writer of whom the publisher asserts, "Ramuz pioneered a common Swiss literary identity, writing books about mountaineers, farmers, or villagers engaging in often tragic struggles against catastrophe." Not being Swiss, I can't comment on that; I'll note that Swiss literary identity follows linguistic lines if his eponymous foundation's standards of awards for meritorious Swiss literary work IN FRENCH are to be believed. (Also, we're due another awardee by his foundation this year as they're made every five years. I've never heard of any past winners.)

I'm sure it went over fine a hundred fifteen years ago but it's pretty misogynistic and deeply appalling on any modern level of consideration for its rank abusive character. I rate it as high as I do because it's good to see how far we've come, and it's good to have proof...this was unexceptionable when it came out this century!...that this progress is speeding up.

Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $9.95 for an ebook.

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Someone to Watch Over You by Kumi Kimura (tr. Yuki Tejima)

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An unsettling, poignant debut novella about unusual connections fostered by the covid pandemic, perfect for fans of sharp literary fiction that reflects and confronts our world.

It’s early 2020, and with the world in chaos as covid spreads, two lonely people, both seeking to break with their pasts, meet and start sharing a home.

One is a former security guard who was captured on video knocking down a protester who died soon afterward; the other, a former teacher accused of driving a student to suicide.

In an oppressive atmosphere of tension and fear, the pair avoid direct contact and communicate through notes and their shared presences, close yet distant. Their odd connection, with neither affection nor trust, brings them a kind of privacy and safety they both need—but at what cost?

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My Review: Pushkin Press's Japanese Novellas series is a fantastic way to discover new-to-you literatures without investing many hours in reading a novel. Japanese literary culture likes the novella format. I do too, and this one's the first translated into English from this author.

The two characters are trapped by COVID in a strange town with a stranger for company...a sense of claustrophobia pervades their lives, and interactions are intimate quite quickly despite their brief acquaintance. Each carries a terrible guilt that, as the story meanders along, they work to explain and justify. Satisfyingly direct about emotions, reticent about personal feelings; the ending is fulfilling.

Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $11.99 for an ebook. I would not feel upset had I paid that much for it.

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Mbaqanga Nights by Leonora Meriel

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: 1989.

The African Jazz Pioneers are in full swing. The club is hopping. Glasses and plates are pushed aside as the room dances.

What’s so special?

Look around. The faces are black, brown and white. It’s Durban, South Africa. It’s apartheid. It’s illegal.

When a pair of young music lovers decide to follow their dreams and open a jazz club that will host their favourite musicians, they have little idea of what stark choices they will be facing as the political situation heats up and riots tear through the surrounding townships.

With an epic tale that starts in the depths of a Ukrainian shtetl, and winds its way back and forth across oceans – history and memory serve to create a personal story of individual choice – and the fate of nations.

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

My Review: I hoped to hear more than I did about the nightclub founded by the grandsons of Ukrainian Jewish emigrants to South Africa than the emigrants themselves. Both stories were, in themselves, interesting enough. I would not pick up the emigration one on its own.

Not a bad read, but one that shorted the plot I most wanted to read about. Fans of Jewish-persecution stories will enjoy the parts I found tedious, and possibly the inherited rebellion against segregation/apartheid as well. These are familial Social Justice Warriors.

Granite Cloud (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $4.99 for an ebook. Reasonable return on investment IMO.

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Such Sweet Thunder: A Novel by Vincent O. Carter (foreword by Jesse McCarthy)

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This must-read rediscovery, published in an elegant and unabridged paperback edition with a new foreword, is a literary masterpiece poised to take its rightful place in the American literary canon.

Such Sweet Thunder immerses readers in the life of a precocious infant, Amerigo Jones, and then tells the story of his first 18 years as he becomes aware of the adult world, from racism and crime to falling in love. All the while, in one of the most moving homages to parents ever to appear in literature, Amerigo is protected by Viola and Rutherford, who are loving and, mostly, even-tempered, but also desperately young — teenagers themselves when Amerigo is born — and poor.

When it was finally published in 2003, 40 years after Carter completed it and 20 years after he died, Critics hailed the novel’s “unflinching condemnation of a society that rejects bright, eager Black children” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).

This “colossal work of fiction” (The Kansas City Star) and “vibrant portrait of African-American life” (New York Times) is set in an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices and yet renders with deep appreciation and artistry a time and place enriched by a widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.

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

My Review: A truly magisterial story of Black life and love, family first and last, all set at the dark historical juncture of the 1930s made still darker by racism. No wonder no one would take this on! It's too honest to make white people feel good and virtuous. It's a weirdly lyrical storytelling voice, one that keeps you reading...it's a really dark story, so that carrot leads when reader fatigue sets in.

I'm not five-starring it because it is much too long...650+ pages...and, like Ellison's Invisible Man, overly recursive. It vitiates the kind of pacing that makes the pages fly by. YMMV, of course, and no matter what, you owe yourself a long look at the available ebook sample before you pass it up. It's possible you'll ring like a freshly struck bell at first read.

Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests $13.99 for an ebook. Well worth the spondulix for the right reader.

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The Last Conclave by Glenn Cooper

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A vanished conclave. An empty Sistine Chapel. And a secret buried for eight centuries.

From internationally bestselling author Glenn Cooper comes a gripping Vatican conspiracy thriller that has already topped the charts in Italy.

When Pope John XXIV is found dead in his bed just two years after his election, the world braces for a new conclave. But as the cardinal electors are sealed inside the Sistine Chapel, something unthinkable happens.

Hours pass. No smoke rises. No vote is announced.

And when Vatican Secretary of State Elisabetta Celestino breaks protocol to open the doors—she finds the chapel empty. The cardinals have vanished without a trace.

CNN religion expert Cal Donovan is on-site to cover the conclave, but soon finds himself swept into a global investigation. As panic spreads and theories abound, Cal uncovers a chilling trail leading back to a centuries-old order—one that has waited in the shadows to cleanse the sins of the Church... with blood.

Ancient secrets. Ruthless power. And a final reckoning that will shake the foundations of faith.

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My Review: Lotsa detail on the Conclave and its history, which I loved; a very quick overview of the Cathars (not, please note, a name any one of them would recognize) that felt satisfactory to me; and overall enough hither, thither, and yon-ing to keep you from realizing you've read this before.

Vatican evildoing is something I really enjoy. This iteration was fun for its timing in a papal election year, but pretty fantastical so you can just ride along.

Lascaux Media (non-affiliate Amazon link) asks for $5.99 for an ebook. Seems reasonable if you're into Vatican skulduggery.

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Ciao, Amore, Ciao by Sandro Martini

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This dual-timeline saga based on true events is “vivid and gripping… A terrific read” (Kirkus Reviews).

When journalist Alex Lago discovers an old photograph in his dying father’s possessions, he slowly unravels a secret stretching back to World War II that could topple a political dynasty.

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

My Review: No one anywhere ever has led a blameless life; but sometimes blame is more powerful, more burdensome, harder to forgive, than others. This is the story of one of those times. It moves between timelines of grieving today to acting yesteryear.

I found the switching between the timelines unmotivated by the action, and the evocation of the wrongs of the past pretty exculpatory for what they were.

Black Rose Writing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) sells paperbacks for $24.95.

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The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Prize-winner in three categories of the 2019 Wales Book of the Year Award, The Blue Book of Nebo paints a spellbinding and eerie picture of society’s collapse, and the relationships that persist after everything as we know it disappears.

After nuclear disaster, Rowenna and her young son are among the rare survivors in rural north-west Wales. Left alone in their isolated hillside cottage, after others have died or abandoned the towns and villages, they must learn new skills in order to remain alive. With no electricity or modern technology they must return to the old ways of living off the land, developing new personal resources.

While they become more skilled and stronger, the relationship between mother and son changes in subtle ways, as Dylan must take on adult responsibilities, especially once his baby sister Mona arrives. Despite their close understanding, mother and son have their own secrets, which emerge as in turn they jot down their thoughts and memories in a found notebook. As each reflects on their old life and the events since the disaster which has brought normal, twenty-first century life to an end, The Blue Book of Nebo becomes a collective confidante, representing the future of their people and a new history to live by.

In this prize-winning and best-selling new novel, Manon Steffan Ros not only explores the human capacity to find new strengths when faced with the need to survive, but also the structures and norms of the contemporary world.

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

My Review: Post-apocalyptic stories have been a staple of my reading diet since the early 1970s, when we thought a new Ice Age was looming. *sigh* sounds lovely in fiery 2025, no? This means you'd nest be at the top of your game to hope to impress the old curmudgeon.

Not really happening here. It's a YA for sophisticated high-schoolers who love Greta Thunberg. Well enough executed, but I'm not fourteen anymore; I'd gift it to smart fourteen-year-olds in a heartbeat.

Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) says "$12.95 please" when you check your ebook out. Worth every penny.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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Pan by Michael W. Clune (30%)

Rating: 2.5* of five

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds.

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

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

My Review: I lost patience, and interest, here:

"What are you, the weed police?" she said.
But now the others were looking at me. The long burble of the bong sounded accusingly under Tod's sucking mouth. His eyes, lit from below by the lighter he held at the bowl, shone like wet stone in a face made indefinite by shadow.

I'm too old for this. I hate the feeling of smoking...anything that foul filling my mouth activates the rejection response if you follow me...and the overblown lingering loving gaze on something that nauseates me, well, it's not the first and I strongly suspect won't be the last instance of suchlike nonsense.

Clearly it speaks to others, it's a huge success, but it is Not For Me.

The Penguin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $14.99 for an ebook. If you're 25 or nostalgic for when you were, maybe.

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I'll Look So Hot in a Coffin: And Other Thoughts I Used to Have About My Body (57%) by Carla Sosenko

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate, irreverent memoir about one woman’s experience living with a deformity, and her quest to find freedom and joy in her body.

Carla Sosenko was born with Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome, a rare vascular disorder that resulted in a mass of flesh on her back, legs of different sizes, a hunched posture, and other idiosyncrasies big and small. She spent years trying to hide, but later experimented with reckless exhibitionism in a masochistic quest to be seen. She couldn't stop worrying about how she measured up; she ruminated on the comments other people felt comfortable making about her body.

In this candid and funny memoir, Carla shares what existing in an unconventional body has meant for her self-image, mental health, relationships, and career. She writes of having liposuction at eight years old and obsessively gaming Weight Watchers points. She probes the way the materialistic, looks-obsessed Long Island town of her childhood influenced her psyche. She wrestles with the rise of Ozempic after years of working to reject diet culture. And she tries to parse whether it is in spite of or because of her physical differences that she is a chatty, outgoing social butterfly who chose a high-profile career in media and is obsessed with fashion. Most of all, Carla explores the ways in which she’s felt alone and without not disabled but different; the recipient of pretty privilege, but also fatphobia; too much, but still never enough. We see what it means when she learns to claim her body—and mind and spirit and life—for exactly what they her own.

A clarion call for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider or believed they should take up less space, I'll Look So Hot In a Coffin offers hope, recognition, and a new way to understand ourselves—by celebrating what sets us apart.

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

My Review: A key insight in one's path to healing is that the painful old way was in fact your own choice, and served a genuine need as you perceived it. Carla has that insight a lot, and tells us each time. I got tired of it when the subject was desiring men's attention, wanting their validation, instead of just being horny.

I'm glad I read it because I needed to be reminded how very easy it is to be casually cruel to Othered people. I'm glad I stopped when I realized we were going to fail the Bechdel test on her inner monologue.

The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $14.95 for an ebook.

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Garbage Town (45%) by Ravi Gupta

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: The secrets of Fresh Kills were meant to stay buried.

Raj Patel grew up in the shadow of Fresh Kills, the largest landfill the world has ever seen. At sixteen, he’s watched the Staten Island crime family tighten its grip on his town’s lucrative trash business, but he’s kept his distance from their dirty trade—until now.

When Raj and his friends make a chilling discovery deep within the dump, they embark on a search for answers. But they aren’t the only ones looking for the truth, and their pursuers will stop at nothing to guard their secrets. Faced with an impossible choice—protect themselves or expose what they’ve found—Raj and his friends quickly realize there’s no one left to trust. And the deeper they dig, the higher the stakes. Soon, they’re in way over their heads, and the only way out might be through.

In Garbage Town, Ravi Gupta weaves a heart-pounding mystery with the raw intimacy of a coming-of-age tale. Follow Raj and his friends in this late ’90s adventure as they learn that some secrets can’t be unearthed without a price. This might just be the moment that strips them of their innocence—if they can survive.

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

My Review: Weird tonal whiplash...like Scooby Doo, Where Are You? suddenly had a gun battle and Alan M. shot Shaggy. Pick one, this mashup ain't workin' for me.

Then "You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. (Deuteronomy 28:6)" showed up at 45%...not the first bible verse...so I chose to be blessed going out.

Greenleaf Book Group (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $25.99 for a hardcover, and does not offer an ebook. I suspect you already know what my advice is.

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Wicked Innocents: Case No. 1 (48%) (The Frontenac Sisters: Supernatural Sleuths & Monster Hunters) by S H Livernois

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A little girl spins a hateful web

On Halloween night, Nelly Huggett's mother chases her through the woods, screaming venom, knife in hand. Gillian isn't a nice woman, but this is different.

She is different, strange, not herself. Nelly's father has been acting odd, too, and her brother... So Nelly does what any other precocious ten-year-old would do-she calls supernatural investigators and sisters Hyla and Lizeth Frontenac, in the hopes they might find out what happened to her family. But in the Huggett house, perched on the rugged Maine coast, the sisters discover that nothing is what it seems. Not the Huggetts and certainly not Nelly. Is she just spirited? Misunderstood? Or is she a liar, like everyone says?

She is a dangerous foe, this little girl, with a devious imagination and a dark secret. A dangerous foe whose deception just might ensnare the sisters forever.

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

My Review: It just stopped mattering to me here:

Lizeth smiled sadly. "Maybe Nelly has a Hyla of her own, a friend who's stood by her through everything."
"That's what I'm hoping."

Halfway through the book and they're still just talking about Nelly without knowledge of her; that is a pacing problem for an investigation-based story for me. Whip it up! So I quit.

Boonies Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $15.00 for a trade paperback.

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