DETOUR: A Novel, first in a proposed series, ends on a cliffhanger

DETOUR: A Novel (Detour #1)
JEFF RAKE and ROB HART
Random House Worlds (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

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My Review: I'd never heard of the Netflix show Manifest before I picked up this DRC. I'd never heard of the imprint that publishes it, either, and I'm old enough that imprints matter to me. I track them and their subject-matter focuses so I can ask for DRCs I'm happy to read and review. Surprise! There's an entire LitRPG-inspired publishing world, that now subsumes to old movie novelizations and TV-show expansions. This had escaped my attention until now because I've never played these games. I got hooked on Dark Shadows novels and Doctor Who novels back in the day, but found most Star Trek novels pretty hit-or-miss, and gave up on them. So this rediscovery was pleasant because now I've watched Manifest and really like it. I hasten to add that this novel is reminiscent of the TV show's premise but is not directly related to the show you can see on Netflix.

This story started out with a cool-to-me hook: six random people are lightly trained after being plucked from richly deserved obscurity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan. Terrible, tragic explosions on their craft occur; they're brought safely back to Earth but them isolated from each other very stringently, instructed not to attempt to contact each other or to discuss their experiences.

From here we're in the PoV of the six people separately as they experience...oddness, off-kilter alterations in what their memories of Earth tell them should be present in the world around them. It is unsettling to them. The...can't call them changes, that implies violated continuity, can't call them alterations because that implies known agency...discontinuities in their realty versus their memories of reality are strange, undirected by a moral compass, some make things better some worse yet the people are left with a sense that they're suffering from Capgras Syndrome. I suppose you're already assuming the characters ignore, and circumvent, the orders to stay out of contact with their fellow survivors of the trip. Of course this is the case.

The *real* story here is in the returnees' efforts to provide each other with support, you aren't crazy the world is-level support. It's not a space-sci fi story at all; it's a Sliders-meets-Sliding Doors narrative of roads not taken. This ties in to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Hindu, and later Buddhist, concept of Indra's net. This is more fun for me as a reader but might very well cause some disappointment for others. Understanding going in that space travel and hard sci-fi are honored more in their absence as igniting events than bases for the continuing action will help you decide if this is the read for you.

As each character has unique struggles to adapt to their individual changed circumstances they're all, as a unit, required to look at the common underlying altered reality of the world they collectively remember. It's this facet of their experience that most recalls the earlier media franchises I reference in tge paragraph above. It creates among these six people, so randomly assorted and so very different in personality, training, and character, a found family with the most powerful ties imaginable. Their shared bedrock assumptions have been whisked out from under them.

It's in this that the authors choose to emphasize the shared nature of their trauma, and its developing coping mechanisms. The six PoVs are not dealt with chapter-by-chapter, which could easily lead to dilution and confusion among the characters, but with chapters that entertain similar attempts to cope by varying constellations of people. There are chat threads, emails, news articles, and other such media insertions into various parts of the narrative. This is a narrative technique as old as Tristram Shandy yet we still act as though this is somehow new and fresh and surprising. It worked beautifully in Stand on Zanzibar nearly sixty years ago. It still works now. Its worldbuilding is useful; the technique of said worldbuilding functions as commentary on both message and medium.

I was happy enough with the characters' varying arcs in this series-starting volume as they reached obviously temporary resolution points in some way. The story overall, of the gestalt formed by our six folks, ends on a cliffhanger. I'm now going to explain why, despite enjoying the read, I'm only giving it three and a half stars. Nowhere is it said that this is the first in a series of stories because publishers know how much many readers hate starting series that are not completed. Ask George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss why that might be the case; consult with Adam Christopher's novel publisher as to why amputating series before they conclude might result in blowback. (I want more Ray Electromatic stories!) So instead of learning the right lesson from this and publicly committing to the entire series in advance, greed rules and there's a tiny little detail omitted from the sales bunf in the hopes you will get hooked and buy them all as they come out. This is scummy.

I also detest cliffhangers because there is never a narrative reason for them. Ever. It's purely marketing. So, three and a half stars for those dickhead marketing-driven moves draining a lot of my pleasure in reading this iteration of a story whose bones I very much enjoy seeing fleshed out.

CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo, memoir without closure is more interesting!

CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo
BOB KUNZINGER
Madville Publishing LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An experienced adventurer partners with an innocent nineteen-year-old to plan a journey on the most dangerous river in the world.

What starts as one man's dream ends up as another man's nightmare. It was a time when pushing our limits knew no boundaries and being nineteen had no restrictions.

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My Review: Nightmares are, after all, dreams by definition.

When Bob, the author and Joe, the traveler, are dreaming up then planning this extreme journey...testing boundaries in that absurd male way, finding limits by crossing them seldom ends happily...they're consciously planning a story. Its plot is set in their minds, the story-logic will unfold as they intend because stories can be controlled.

Anyone who's ever written any fiction will now be laughing hollowly, their chest devoid of air or the ability to draw it in. They believe the world will obey the rules says the inner terrified parent who knows with bitter certainty that is not the case. Their plans leave room for that, the young ones blithely assure themselves and others. And my inner parent says "you can't plan for the unforseeable" while sweating anxiously, absolutely certain tragedy impends.

And befalls.

This novelistic memoir is the survivor's attempt to discover closure in disaster's aftermath. Bob Kunzinger now needs to make this all make sense, when it does not. He does not fall into the trap of excusing himself, or dismissing his vanished friend's responsibility for undertaking this journey. It's an old man's look back at the event that can not do other than bend his own survivor's life into a weird shape. It feels like therapy on the page, starting with several fantasies of how it should have or might have unfolded differently.

No one now an adult hasn't done that same memory dance. "If only..." is a poison when used indiscriminately, a medicine to poultice hurts if used to direct healing onto a survivor's guilt. I'm not Author Kunzinger, I don't know which this story is for him. For me it was the kind of read I look for in a memoir. It presents no fancy-work of "closure." It is, instead, the account of the testosterone-poisoned late (or arrested, in Joe's case) adolescent exceptionalism of male hubris.

Thinking one can plan for, control, the randomness of the world is the source of much grief. Ask Joe's parents. Testing boundaries and exceeding limits is a function of being a person in growth mode. Failure to cross some of these safely and successfully is called "growth." In coping with the aftermath of the fatal failure of Joe to solo-canoe down the Congo, Bob utterly and irrevocably changes the course of his life. No one, not Bob and certainly not the reader, can say what might have been would've been better or preferable or even possible...was this outcome inevitable, merely inescapable for any one of a myriad of reasons, or an unhappy accident?

Yes. Only without the conditional "or."

That's the source of my high rating for this compact, unresolved story, told by a man whose entire life was altered by his participation in a crazy dream of fame for a feat of endurance accomplished. Only when it wasn't accomplished someone was dead, and Bob Kunzinger has had to live on with his own participation in the fatal event unresolved in the absence of a body, a certainty of that death. In many ways it is more painful not to know how, what, when; imagination fills in the gaps as luridly as possible. Author Kunzinger's written multiple stories in his life after Joe vanished. I'd be amazed if any of them end the way this one does, open-ended and unresolved. It's bad storytelling to leave the ending unresolved.

Life couldn't give a fig about storytelling's rules. Author Kunzinger tells this open-ended story with compassion for the young men who did this stunningly stupid thing without excusing them, or exonerating himself, or blaming Joe or any of the other mental gymnastics I'm morally certain he went through over the years since Joe vanished. It's a really adult reckoning with an adolescent's questionable choices. I found it involving, and infuriating about them then, as well as compassionate for the over-sixty man who can never exonerate the youth who was complicit in this, expiate the harm his actions set in motion, or expunge the act itself from Life's unredactable records.

IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?, Emily Austin had me crying "Uncle"

IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?
EMILY R. AUSTIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five by the skin of its teeth

The Publisher Says: Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

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My Review: Grief is a hugely powerful, astoundingly complex, and very misunderstood emotional state. It is often portrayed as something one "gets over" it "moves on" from, but it isn't. It's your bass thrum throughout life when the loss you're grieving is deep enough; otherwise mourning, the act of displaying grief, will poultice the poison out effectively.

Darcy is living in a new world defined by grief. It blindsides her, happily married as she is to the Dickensianly yclept Joy. The grief that blindsided her is for Ben, the last man in her romantic life, at his early and unexpected death. It's the end of some part of her that never developed, that she wasn't pining after; as I've got cause to know from my own life that does not matter a bit to the emotional core. When you've once been in love you are always somewhere in your being connected. Plus she really hurt Ben as she was leaving him. Add to this Darcy's many pulls and demands as an involved, community-building librarian involved in a PR debacle. She had an emotional collapse—been there, Darcy—as a straw too many got loaded on her people-pleasing back.

As soon as she returns to work, Author Austin piles on some very relatable First-Amendment challenges for Darcy to manage: a library patron accesses porn on the library's computers. This is part of the protected access all citizens share, it was done within an appropriately restricted area, and yet other patrons complaining leads to lunatic, high-control (ie fascist) nutjobs mounting a campaign to shut down, censor, restrict lots more than just online porn viewing.

Here's where I got a bit...done...with the story. I'm down with the community-building librarian facing off against those in the community who want to control others' behavior. I'm delighted by a lesbian coping with her unhappy sense of having unnecessarily hurt a man in the process of self-discovery. I'm thrilled by Darcy being in a loving, supportive partnership that enables her to interrogate her compulsion to please everyone to her own detriment (as women are trained to do. But all at the same time? Yes, I'm aware that Life does not have handy-dandy pause buttons on the events that one's required to deal with. Fiction does have that function. It's detrimental to a story's legibility as an emotional journey to lard in more and more and more in only three-hundred-ish pages. There a reason Jean-Cristophe and Middlemarch and War and Peace took skatey-eight skabillion pages to tell their stories. Readers need time to consolidate their emotional responses into their factual learning of plot events.

More breathing room, please. And get rid of Kyle the c-a-t.

I'm not sorry I read the story, but I wouldn't read it again despite my warm, approving glow at the ending.

THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES and MOTHRA, best Valentines Day read I can imagine

THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES and MOTHRA
SHIN'ICHIRŌ NAKAMURA,TAKEHIKO FUKUNAGA,YOSHIE HOTTA (tr. Jeffrey Angles)
University of Minnesota Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The original story that hatched Mothra, one of the most beloved monsters in the “kaijuverse”—available in English for the first time

Mystical and benevolent, the colossal lepidopteran Mothra has been one of the most beloved kaiju since 1961, when The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was originally published in Japanese. Commissioned by Tōhō Studios from three of Japan’s most prominent postwar literary writers (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta), the novella formed the basis for the now-classic monster film Mothra, with a protagonist second only to Godzilla in number of film appearances by a kaiju. Finally available in its first official English translation, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra will captivate ardent, longtime fans of the films as well as newcomers.

Written just months after the largest political demonstrations Japan had ever seen, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra reflects the rebellious spirit of the time. In this original story, explorers visit a South Pacific island and capture a group of fairies, inciting the fury of the goddess Mothra, who sets out for Japan on a mission of rescue and revenge. Expressing a powerful social stance about Japan’s need to chart its own foreign policy during the Cold War, the novella’s political message was ultimately toned down in the Tōhō Studios film. Through this translation, Anglophone audiences will discover Mothra as a figure of protest fiction intricately reflecting the complex geopolitical situation in early 1960s Japan.

The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is translated into lively prose by Jeffrey Angles, who also wrote an extensive afterword about the novella’s cultural context, the unusual story of its composition, and the development of the 1961 film. Following Angles’s best-selling translation of the original Godzilla novellas, this new work will once again delight kaiju fans everywhere.

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My Review: You remember Mothra. Saturday afternoon after the teens woke up, the monster movies went on as we all stared hungrily at the weirdness onscreen (I was always most interested in the Japanese cars, natch). It was a window into a world whose anxieties never messed with my head (unlike In Cold Blood, Bonnie and Clyde, and their realistic like), but were riveting to my story-starved brain.

This translation is the first time I've ever encountered the stories that brought Mothra to our screens. I don't know that I was ever aware these stories existed as source materials for the film franchise before now. The three authors of this...novella? story cycle?...focus on the stranger who arrives on Mothra's island and what he learns of the culture, the man he tells his story to after he returns to Japan, and finally the geopolitical implications of the island between Japan and a stand-in for the USA. Like Godzilla the story is thinly disguised anti-US messaging intended to inform the ongoing debates in Japan about how much good it will really do to subjugate their political will to the worldwide hegemon. I chose that word for the US position because it sounds as ancient as Mothra's existence, yet like Mothra, is of very recent coinage and was coined in service of another imperial power.

A kid's-eye view was, "cool! Monsters blowin' shit up!" In the stories a much more thoughtful and nuanced argument is presented...the "fairies" are colonized, infantilized people of little individual agency, whose one hope of survival is collective action and a version of the violence inflicted on them. It is in reading Author/Translator Angles' essay around the text that I saw the kaiju phenomenon as the protest literature it is clearly and possibly for the first time...at least with any clarity it was the first time. It's very saddening to me that Mothra's source document was so invisible to my culturally developing self. Had I been in possession of the texts I might've cut ages out of my emotional maturation.

Seeing clearly what makes other cultures upset enough to create protest art around is extremely valuable. Even if you never walked into the TV room when one of these films was on I hope you'll look into the fascinating subject of where Mothra fits into Japan's literary culture just after their catastrophic defeat in WWII and the subsequent social and economic transformations enforced by the US victors. It was ongoing as the idea for this new mythology was being created. It's also the reason, we learn in the translator's essay, there is almost no evocative description of the world. It was to be left to the filmmaker to do the worldbuilding with as little hampering as possible.

What a delight to encounter this story familiar from childhood as an old man, and not only enjoy it again but enjoy it more now than I did then. Thank you, Jeffrey Angles. Thank you, University of Minnesota Press, for this and for everything else Minneapolis is giving the entire country in this winter of our discontent.

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity, necessary reading

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity
MATTHEW COSTA
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$31.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five, because of the learning curve involved

The Publisher Says: Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today’s global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?

In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism’s historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book also traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.

Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Matthew Costa is an Australian political economist. He has been a sessional lecturer and honorary associate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is currently a Director at New South Wales Treasury, and was previously an economic policy advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

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My Review: If you're willing to put in the work, this is a good way to understand how capitalism got organized around the concept of extraction. Author Costa is an academic. It shows. You'll need your dictionary handy. The concepts he's explaining in these sophisticated words are, once you've familiarized yourself with the vocabulary, strikingly simple to assimilate. The end result of the read is to make available to the reader a different, probably new, angle of viewing and interpreting the modern world.

Ideological principles that go unchallenged in spite of their deleterious effects on humanity appear in stark relief when this angle of viewing is assumed. It is an angle I encourage you to investigate for yourself...don't trust me, or anyone else, to give you from On High the One True Vision of the world. Acquire a bit of knowledge from a lot of sources. This source is one whose angle of view you won't find in the huge mass of economic-discussion sources in the mainstream. Once you get your head around the light this book sheds on the system we all live within, you will understand why.

It's worth making the effort. It *is* an effort. I encourage you to fight the innerer Schweinehund, get off your mental pillow, and learn something new as painlessly as is possible. The value of the perspective this book offers you on the world as it is can't be overstated.

THE FINAL PROBLEM, "Sherlock" and "The Woman" go head-to-head

THE FINAL PROBLEM
ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE (tr. Frances Riddle)
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this locked-room mystery set in 1960, a washed-up actor puts his on-camera detective skills to the test when a suspicious death shatters the quiet peace for a group of strangers staying at an isolated Greek island resort. Perfect for fans of Knives Out, Benjamin Stevenson, and Anthony Horowitz.

June, 1960. Rough weather at sea leaves a group of strangers stranded on the idyllic Greek island of Utakos, all guests of the only local hotel. Nothing could prepare them for what happens next: Edith Mander, a quiet British tourist, is found dead inside a beach cabana. What appears at first glance to be a clear suicide reveals possible signs of foul play to Ormond Basil, an out-of-work but still well-known actor who in his glory days portrayed the most celebrated detective of all time. Accustomed to seeing him display Sherlock Holmes' amazing powers of deduction on the big screen, the other guests believe that the actor is the best equipped to uncover the truth.

But when a second body is discovered, there is not a doubt in Basil's mind: a murderer walks among them. What's more, the killer is staging each crime as a performance, leaving complex clues that bear an eerie resemblance to those found in the pages of Conan Doyle stories. This is a criminal who knows every trick in the book and is playing a deadly literary game. As the storm rages, Basil must become the genius detective he has only pretended to be.

This clever, whip-smart, locked-room mystery from internationally bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a love letter to golden-age detective novels. The Final Problem delights in exploring the tension between an investigator and his suspects, as well as a writer and his reader, delivering a revelatory twist that will shock even the sharpest of mystery fans.

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My Review: There is an old-fashioned expression for the story at the heart of this book: "hoist with his own petard." It's meant to convey the sense that there are unfortunate consequences to making yourself the object of your own expertise.Imagine being famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, then investigating a real crime.

Despite being long past the fame. Despite having no training. It's feeding his need for the adrenaline rush of fame, it's reinforcing his bruised ego's sense that he couldn't have been *just* a guy playing a part, speaking lines scripted for him and looking fabulous on camera. He's an actor, sure, but he found that character inside himself. All of this, the mash-up of knowing self-analysis and willing self-delusion, is where this locked-room mystery shines. I knew from the moment "Ormond" (legally and distinctively different from another famous actor or two who played Sherlock Holmes as a career) was introduced that he would be conducting an investigation. It seemed to me his dithering about doing it, in circumstances that could plausibly be used to justify the act in fiction (though in fact nothing like this would result in anything like what happens here), went on too long; what I didn't care for about that was the long, whiny self-evaluation it elicited.

What happens after we get going is a fun locked-room mystery like Dame Agatha so enjoyed creating (many times I thought of Ten Little Indians to give it the period-appropriate title). I'm glad that I wasn't coming to the read expecting more than an entertaining read. After our overlong dithering came our period-appropriate-name dropping, a fourth wall break or twenty, many call outs to literary lights of yesterday and today, and some fairly heavy-handed moralizing during The Big Reveal, all conspired to extinguish the fifth star. Even chunks of the fourth. The truth is the verve and the bravado of the performance of writing was enough to sweeten me back up to a full four stars.

It's not profound. It's nit brilliant. It's good fun, it's got tons of cleverness as its foundations, it's told in stylish sentences. By glory, that is enough...a gracious plenty...in the world of 2026.

THE LAST OF EARTH, Tibetan national survival has been under threat forever

THE LAST OF EARTH
DEEPA ANAPPARA
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line comes a stunning historical novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders—an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer—as they venture into a forbidden kingdom.

1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rap¬idly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians—permitted to cross borders that white men may not—to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet.

Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, fifty-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa.

As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What’s more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape.

A polyphonic novel about the various ways humans try to leave a mark on the world—from the enduring nature of family and friendship to the egomania and obsessions of the colonial enterprise—The Last of Earth confirms Deepa Anappara as one of our greatest and most ambitious storytellers.

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My Review: Tibet closed itself off from the Western powers playing "the Great Game," as it was dismissively described from 1840 onwards, because they saw its awful effects on India, Nepal, Burma, and China. The British took this as a challenge, like Katherine in this story...a mixed-race woman thwarted in desire to join the Royal Geographical Society despite her surveying achievements. They set about circumventing the Tibetans' desire to be left in peace (Katherine by disguising herself to become the first European woman to enter Lhasa) by training Indians like Balram in this story to survey the land for them. These men and one pretender disguise their purpose by the faking the trading of goods into and out of the country, pretending to be religious pilgrims visiting the holy places, and other subterfuges. (When your country covers the headwaters of the main waterways serving multiple billions of people, isolation is an untenable fantasy.)

The novel begins in 1869, a time when Tibet was also fighting the Qing Dynasty for territorial integrity. Its diplomatice relations with Nepal were strained by this series of wars. It is, then, a story of people doing things that are reprehensible and selfish at a time of upheaval engineered by reprehensible and selfish colonial powers. The different PoVs are each checked in with in alternating sections. It's a technique with many advantages, like avoiding awkward and forced joinings of forces, as well as perils, like leaving one PoV at a critical juncture for long enough to vitiate the plot's momentum. Both happen here. It is not as though there is a shortage of story; it's action that takes the hit.

Duty, freedom, self-willed assertions of independence, are all present in micro- and macro-scale facets of the plot. It never gets terribly deep into the whys and wherefores on the personal or the political scales. Like the prose itself, it limns the surfaces and reflects the highlights but leaves off before any deep diving takes place. I was utterly rapt at the descriptive language used for the landscapes, the customs, and the cultures around the characters. I felt distant from them, though, like they were cameras and I was viewing their footage played back after editing into a narrative.

Distanced as I was, I was quite clearly inspired to go poking around into the faxtual history of the time and place. Author Anappara has done this to me before: taken a truly epic story with ramifications reverberant well beyond the slice she chooses for her focus. It's clearly working on me at one level. I am once againg stopping short of a full five-star rating because I'm in too many places, too much is touched on but not explored, for the read to merit that accolade.

It's not like it was a failure of a read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was ready to pick it back up, but I was also ready to put it down to look up the details I wanted to know more about.

THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving

THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving
MICHELLE A. WILLIAMS with Linda Marsa
One World (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The inspiring story of how we overcame a history of infectious disease, poisonous environments, and early death and unlocked an explosion in human potential—and a vision for the work ahead to optimize human flourishing in the twenty-first century

Public health is an unusual discipline—a combination of science, sociology, politics, and logistics—with a simple goal: to create the conditions for human thriving. Despite a century of massive improvements in our health and quality of life, Americans—reeling from our disastrous pandemic response, epidemics of depression and isolation, and a failing healthcare system—are understandably distrustful of public health. But the true history of public health doesn’t just reveal one of the greatest feats in human history—our great escape from early death and infectious disease—it points toward a future of even greater improvements. The cure for everything? It’s all of us, working together for our collective health.

Michelle A. Williams, one of the country’s true innovators in public health, here tells the dramatic hidden history of public health in America: a story of how radicals and renegades—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Alice Hamilton to the activists of ACT UP—and the institutions and infrastructure we built together helped transform our world. As she takes readers through these dramatic stories, she draws out their deeper lessons. In the end, she makes a powerful argument that it is public health that should drive our country’s policies and politics—that if our policies fail to increase the health and well-being of everyone, regardless of race or economic status, we have failed as a society.

Here is a dramatic, sweeping history with a galvanizing vision for how we can address new threats and complete the unfinished business of public health.

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My Review: Public health, in thae definition fronted by Wikipedia, is "the science and art of preventing disease" and I have only one quibble with this as a jumping-off point for studying the subject: the phrase is rightly "art, and science, of preventing disease."

Firstly the art of medicine is best acknowledged as such; secondly the science is a fully separate topic the way I've punctuated it. Both are crucial, essential components of the field we call "public health," along with huge doses of politics and other coalition-building matters. Author Williams has an impressive and extensive CV that demonstrates her knowledge of public health is not solely theoretical. Make no mistake, in a career of fortyish years Author Williams has worked on tough health problems as far afield from academia as Haitian perinatal health.

A wad of notes, a premise that explains her career, a publisher excited to present the book. It's all gone right so far. How about the story she's telling?

I came into adulthood as AIDS was making itself known. I had an anti-vaxxer mother who lied to the schools I attended that of course I'd been vaccinated! I hadn't apart from polio when I was two, my father...polio survivor himself...had it done and her fury was loud and scary to tiny little me, and smallpox, when my doctor just did it and told her afterwards she was an idiot and to pull her head out of her ass (in those words) and remember her little brother's death (he had been her own doctor in childhood). No others, no MMR, no DPT, I got the diseases instead. My interest, then, in the topic is rooted in personal experiences I wouldn't wish on anyone not named Trump.

Author Williams speaks to me directly by speaking of the people, the movers and shakers, the subversive insurgents, the deeply humane empaths and the policy wonks who completely devoted themselves to bettering the lives of their fellow humans. I really expected the read to leave me more admiring than impressed. It left me both. I don't think the prose, largely (I assume) penned by health-focused journalist Linda Marsa, is noteworthy, in either elegance or lack thereof. It is precise, it is selected with an aim in mind to inform, to convey huge swaths of research without making the layperson feel talked down to or left behind. It is a successful effort. It is a hugely important story of one of the most astounding, and undercelebrated, achievements made by individual people moving massive inertial forces by dint of sheer stubborn refusal to give up. These many people who worked to find reasons for catastrophes of preventable deaths on a scale I myownself quail before are celebrated and named. Their contributions are brought to your eyes for what is very often the first time.

I give the book all five stars because I have not read a more succinct, informative treatment of a subject within the history of science that is more pleasantly conversational, less irritatingly superior of tone, or more urgent to grasp. We are witnessing an appalling and potentially lethal dismantling of a system dedicated to public health. It behooves each of us to learn as much as possible about how we achieved the heights before we are cast back into the depths. It will, I expect, create a lot of new advocates for our threatened public health system.

I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR, historical novel of ripples from 1990s seismic shifts

I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
BSRAT MEZGHEBE
Liveright/Well-Read Black Girl Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A radiant, highly anticipated debut from the Well-Read Black Girl Books series, delving into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence.

The year is 1991. Eritrea is on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule and in Washington, D.C.’s tight–knit Eritrean community, change is in the air. Thirteen–year–old Lydia and her family are grappling with what peace—after decades of war—might mean for their future, just as they welcome a new relative into their distant cousin, Berekhet, newly arrived from Ethiopia to attend medical school.

Berekhet encourages Lydia to confront a barrage of new ideas for the first time, about nationhood, family, and what it means to be truly free. Meanwhile, her mother, Elsa, a former rebel fighter, and the family matriarch, Mama Zewdi, contend with regrets and secrets long-buried secrets that the emboldened Lydia is determined to uncover, including the truth about her martyred father. Written with warmth and sharp humor, Bsrat Mezghebe’s mesmerizing debut novel is a loving ode to an immigrant community on the cusp of a new age.

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My Review: I dated an Eritrean immigrant to Texas in the 1980s. I had not heard of Eritrean independence movements before meeting him. Brief as it was (internalized homophobia caused much pain), this connection left me with an acute awareness of how very much the people of a particular place have ideas and emotions about the notion "home" that I can never know I don't know about unless I meet them. As there are only so many ways to meet Othered people on a footing that does not read as exoticizing them, I got more interested in reading about these folks. It's also when I became really serious about making a point to read translated literature.

Lydia, our main PoV character, is oddly enough in the same boat I was vis-à-vis her own family. Elsa gave birth to her in Eritrea but emigrated immediately thereafter; Lydia does not know exactly why, but reckons it has to do with her father's death before she was born. The novel is built around her teenager's need to discover The Truth℠ (as if such a thing exists!) about her parents and thus her own past.

There are chapters from Elsa's PoV, and Elsa's close-as-a-sister, distant cousin, and fellow emigrant from the war zone "Mama" (as Lydia calls her, along with the others in their close-knit community) Zewdi Naizghi. All these women are fully in charge of their survival in the US, relying on themselves and each other; men are relegated to margins and edges of lives they are constructing for themselves. The first rock dropped in this relatively calm pond is Mama Zewdi's borning interest in a man who wants her to come to California to be with him, the second is the arrival from Addis Ababa of eighteen-year-old cousin Berekhet, who's sent there from a need to have doctors for newly-independent Eritrea.

All these volatilities in place and all stemming from the successful struggle for independence, there is a reckoning to be had among these women...with the past, with the demands of life in a new world meeting the needs of the old world's ties and tumult, with the conscious desire to form an identity rooted in one's past but portable into a future of one's own design. It is here I felt debut Author Mezghebe fell into an understandable cognitive dissonance. She definitely needed to set the stage for some Eritrean revelations. The clues she scattered were a bit too obviously clues. I can't cite my examples because I live in quaking terror of the Spoiler Stasi. The fact is they were overly set up as clues; it's a forgivable sin in a debut novel. I can't give her the perfect five her character-building work and her hunger-inducing facility with food description would've merited on its own.

I can happily and very slightly forcefully encourage you to get the story into your head. I was deeply invested in Lydia's borning identity, I was so annoyed at everyone demanding Mama Zewdi's attention, I was so keen to know what was powering Elsa's slightly off actions. I didn't get *as* invested in Berekhet, but I don't think I was meant to.

What I was offered in this read was the interesting idea that the past an immigrant brings to their new country does not necessarily require them to amputate it to become intentionally of their new home; but not reckoning with that past will effectively block any sense of belonging anywhere...including one's own family.

Supporting this debut novelist with your attention will reward you with outsized new ideas about the driving forces behind immigrants' decisions to move to a new country, about the consequential, inescapable role one's personal past plays in the rest of one's life, and about family's meanings and mutabilities.

EVERY MOMENT IS A LIFE: Gaza in the Time of Genocide, the title says it all

EVERY MOMENT IS A LIFE: Gaza in the Time of Genocide
SUSAN ABULHAWA (ed.) with Palestine Writes Literature Festival
Atria Books/One Signal Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 10 February 2026

Rating: 5* of five for existing when so many want it not to

The Publisher Says: Compiled by bestselling author susan abulhawa, an Arabic-English bilingual anthology of essays from eighteen young Palestinian writers trying to survive the genocide in Gaza.

In early 2024, writer and activist susan abulhawa managed to enter Gaza twice through the Rafah crossing. There, at the Culture and Free Thought Association, susan held a series of workshops for young people who had been displaced to tent encampments. The lives of all participants were marked by unrelenting Israeli violence and extraordinary loss—of home, family, safety, education, electricity, and all the structures of life. They’d fled from place to place as Israel’s colonial violence swirled around them, complete with food and water insecurity and constant threat. Still, despite the bitterness of life in tents and the dangers of travel, they came together to share in the refuge of writing and community.

Samya recounts a tender moment with an old man mending shoes in the street, while her cousin Saja hides books in her closet, hoping they and her home will still be there when she returns. Ghassan is haunted by the baby he rescued from the rubble, who for a time became his son. Fatima risks it all retrieve her clothes from a danger zone buzzing with drones and warplanes. Maram’s loving aunt is gone, and chaos inhabits Amr’s mind. Samah, Lubna, Rizq, and Nebal take us by the hand through raining death, trails of tears, classroom shelters, and shared clothes in crowded tents.

Every Moment Is a Life delivers rare, unfiltered portraits of life under genocide, platforming the emerging voices struggling to survive in Gaza today. These essays are raw and real, capturing human moments—buying bread, going to the bathroom, sharing a meal, drinking coffee—all set against the backdrop of history’s first livestreamed ethnic cleansing. With courage, anger, love, agony, and—impossibly—hope, these achingly tender voices from Gaza will stay with us, captured in these pages, forever.

*All proceeds go to the contributors in Gaza and to Palestine Writes Literature Festival

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

My Review: The strongly anti-Israel...not anti-semitic, none of this is directed at Jews only at the State of Israel as a political actor...indictment of the genocide in Gaza is going to make a lot of y'all really mad that anyone dares criticize Israel.

There is zero difference between that criticism and the MAGA scum who insist it's un-American to criticize ICE for its brutality.

That is a hill I will plant my flag on. If criticism is not allowed freedom is not present.

The stories, personal ones, told in these essays are deeply affecting. It is the memory-book of a people beinng erased by power structures that simply do not want to accept their existence. I, and I think many of y'all, believe that is immoral. If you don't, then accept that it is explicitly illegal. If that fails to convince you this activity should stop, the course should be reversed, and improvements made in the lives of Palestinians, I think you should be held up to shame and not allowed to forget your complicity in the same crime that gave birth to Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Enough said.

THE MIDNIGHT TAXI, delightful debut cozy

THE MIDNIGHT TAXI
YOSHA GUNASEKERA
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When the last fare of the night turns up dead in her backseat, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver works off the clock to clear her name in this mystery novel by debut author Yosha Gunasekera.

Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving.

When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.

Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it.

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My Review: The author of this ultimate expression of the locked-room mystery is an attorney with the Innocence Project. As a Sri Lankan New Yorker herself, as well as a former public defender and a lawyer practicing with the poorest citizens, her bona fides on every side of this story are established.

The facts of the case are great, designed to keep the puzzle-solving reader alert. The story, as a mystery tory, gets good marks. Siri's interest in true-crime podcasts reflecting her thwarted desire to be a lawyer. It's also, mirabile dictu, a possible key to resolving the death of her passenger...a rookie error on the author's part but honestly, it's a debut so it's forgiven. I mean, how convenient...a lot like how Siri knows fellow Sri Lankan American public defender Amaya. After the two hit it off when Amaya is a fare, who else would Siri call when the police decide they've got their killer and it's her?

Pick one of those coincidences and kill the other. It could've, even might have, happened in Real Life but fiction has different, more stringent rules. (Also as a future Bronxian I bristled just a bit at being called kind but not nice.) The charm of these women bonding over the racism they manage with humor and more generosity than I would, over their families and their quirks (and dwell on their stunningly scrummy sounding meals!), and share a sense of humor based on their very similar life experiences as South Asian women in a patriarchal racist culture. It felt...inevitable, necessary...that Siri be advised by counsel to keep quiet and then she begins popping off!

It's a gently cozy murder mystery à la the Finlay Donovan series, driven by character interactions and the kind of chemistry a series needs. Expect book two soon, or so I expect anyway. I thought the pacing, crime. discovery, clue searches, and the like was exemplary. I thought the resolution was good, giving me the sense that I *could* have figured it out (I didn't).

The case notes don't include complaints about the fun way to see NYC from an angle not remotely like my old white male one. I'm ruffled by the casual, thoughtless nastiness of some people towards anyone not like them everywhere. It hits a little harder when you see it emanating from the place you think of as home.

All in all, a pleasurable puzzle to chew over, a Valentine to the maddening, delightful NYC I have loved and lived in for decades, and a very suitable launch to a new cozy series from a new voice I hope, plan, and expect to hear more from.

LION CROSS POINT, short novella about the magic moment kidhood ends

LION CROSS POINT
MASATSUGU ONO (tr. Angus Turvill)
Two Lines Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: When 10-year-old Takeru arrives at his mother's home village in the middle of a scorching summer, he's all alone and in possession of terrible memories. Unspeakable things have happened to his mother and his mentally disabled 12-year-old brother.

As Takeru gets to know Mitsuko, his new caretaker, and Saki, his spunky neighbor, he meets more of his mother's old friends, discovering her history and confronting the terrible acts that have left him alone. All the while he begins to see a strange figure that calls himself Bunji—the same name of a delicate young boy who mysteriously vanished one day on the village's coastline at Lion's Cross Point.

At once the moving tale of a young boy forced to confront demons well beyond his age, a sensitive portrayal of a child's point of view, and a spooky Japanese ghost story, Lion's Cross Point is gripping and poignant. Acts of heartless brutality mix with surprising moments of pure kindness, creating this utterly truthful tale of an unforgettable young boy.

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My Review: I'll start with my favorite thing about the read. Its translator has chosen a Zazie in the Metro-type interpretation of the child PoV's speech, extending it to all the people in this very small, very young group. This includes no "ng" dipthongs in English...which made me wonder what the Japanese equivalent must be since the language does not use dipthongs...and lots of elisions like "happy t'see me?" and the like. It's something that will, if the occasional comments I receive on my own usage of this technique are any indicator, make some of y'all really mad. I myownself felt as though I was sitting there, in Ken's car, or when Sasaki buys Takeru (our PoV boy) a soda. As Sasaki does not use the elisive speech pattern we're reinforced that he's really old. "You're a grandpa?" Takeru asks him in surprise. "Certainly am," replies Sasaki; Ken, not anything like as old as Sasaki despite being old enough to have a car and to run around with the kids all over, is a serial elider.

It felt right and welcoming to me. You do you.

The fancier people who surround Takeru's absent mother all speak something rendered as Standard English, like Sasaki; this device lets us know we're in rural Otherland coompared to the sophisticates Takeru's mother prefers to him and his developmentally delayed brother. They live in this village, the one where their mother grew up because some stuff happened and it was wiser and safer her for mother to send her boys to live with her mother. She's never there. She hates it there: "I hated it. Detested it. I wanted to get away as soon as I could." Relatable to many, though why she then sends her boys there...other solutions to the issue that made a change necessary were available.

We're not let in on the cause of this family separation. It becomes obvious during the course of the kids being in this lovely summer idyll, looking for dolphins, going to see them at the titular Lion's Cross Point and adjacent beaches and oceanside fun. Takeru has a relatable moment of real fear when told he can see the dolphins at Lion's Cross Point and won't that be great? He's seized by the sudden terror that he might have to go swimming with the dolphins; on being reassured that he won't, his chest-expanding deep breath of relief made me feel so protective of him.

In a hundred or so pages Author Ono (a translator from English to Japanese himself) and Translator Turvill do nothing, nothing happens, there's no action to speak of; but everything changes, Takeru becomes a youth from the chrysalis of kidhood. And he does it in front of you, though you're never told nor shown just how it happens. Like with real kids, you have to listen, examine what's going on quietly without intruding, and reach your best conclusion. You might be right, you might not, because the inner life of a young person is taking root. It happens in front of you but invisible to you.

The end result, however, leaves you in no doubt that something seismic has shifted. All five of my stars and a gentle push to get it into your cart.

WOLF MOON, the platonic ideal of Antifa in literature

WOLF MOON
JULIO LLAMAZARES (tr. Simon Deefholts, Kathryn Phillips-Miles)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A tense, lyrical novel of life on the run in Franco's Spain that offers a bold, timeless challenge against fascism and authoritarianism.

FOR FANS OF ROGUE MALE: A literary thriller full of action and dramatic landscapes, and the first novel to break the national pact of silence after Francisco Franco’s death.

1937. Having lost the Civil War in Spain, four republican soldiers lead a fugitive existence deep in the Cantabrian mountains. They are on the run, skirmishing with Franco's soldiers, knowing that surrender means execution. Wounded and hungry, the hold-outs are drawn from the safety of the mountains into the villages they once inhabited, not only risking their lives but also the lives of anyone caught helping them. Trapped in the lonely mountains, with their harsh winters and unforgiving summers, it is only a matter of time before the Fascists hunt them down.

Living in caves, barely surviving on scraps provided by the villagers they dare to make contact with, Ángel and his friends are tortured by heat, cold, damp, hunger and above all, fear—fear for themselves, and for those still willing to help them. And if they do survive, what kind of country will there be left to live in?

First published in 1985, Wolf Moon was the first novel to break with the Pacto de Olvido, a political and cultural amnesty in Spain, following Franco's death in 1975, which provided cover for the regime's supporters. Brimming with tension and violence, it is a testament to enduring loyalty: to a cause, to justice, and to brothers-in-arms.

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My Review: Fascism's end is a terrible, trying time: how does a society disfigured from within reckon with the reality that some subset of the population liked this evil, supported it, didn't want it to end while another (probably larger) subset did little or nothing to oppose the way things were? France after WWII, Spain after Franco...they chose to do only a little to reckon with the evils recently departed. It's always interesting to learn about the people who opposed the slide into fascism, as we do here, in the context of reckoning with the way it happened.

A novel about factual events published ten years after Franco's death, this story highlights the tragic terror of night falling across the rural beauty of Spain's Asturias region. Four young Republican soldiers spend nine years resisting Franco's fascist government, abetted by the peasants whose lives are materially worse under this government...until as the Falangistas figure out who's probably doing what to help the men, they're brutalized into acquiescence. That's the end of these Maquis, a name the Deep Space Nine fans are noticing with delight and yes this is where it came from.

Ángel, our narrator, is a schoolteacher. It's how the author gets away with putting in so much beautiful language:

Since we got here I’ve scarcely felt the terrible moaning of the beast in the depths of my stomach, which bayed despairingly so many times in the final months of the war. It was even worse during the five days when we did not eat at all as we fled across the mountains, in the rain, from a more physical beast, more human and bloodthirsty, which pursued us implacably. It is as if the dampness and cold of the cave have penetrated my bones and my soul, imprisoning me here, lying beside the fire day and night with no interest in eating and talking or even peering through the mouth of the cave to look at the hard, overcast sky.

It's evocative. It's lovely, at least it is to me, and it says exactly what you need to know at that point in the plot: they're hunted, they're cold, they frequently have trouble finding food. All without saying that, but talking evocatively about the sensations of it. It's a great technique for keeping a richly satisfying story under 200pp.

As this tale is based on the real experiences of several men it's not necessary for the author to pretend the ending is a surprise. As he was the very first to break the "pact of forgetting" after Franco's death, it was wise for him to stare the law down not try to waffle around it, cutting a bit, refocusing stuff...just put it out there, let the chips fall where they may. (It doesn't hurt that he was only 30ish when it came out, with only two poetry collections before this short novel.)

It's quite the debut, being sad, infuriating, outrageously knowing in that "we're all in on the joke" way that can fall flat, ruining a story's impact on your feelings; this iteration does not. It makes old-man-read-it-before here doff his hairpiece to this talented tyro. Many are the stories flattened and rendered anemic by a misjudged or badly executed tonal choice like this one.

It's a case of biblio-Stockholm Syndrome. Author Llamazares became the moon that lit me over his story's trails, and the brighter suns of later writers on the topic (eg, Javier Cercas' Soldiers of Salamis) merely cause me reader's sunburn.

Get one soonest, because this story will play out again in our lifetimes.

CLUTCH, verb or noun...you decide

CLUTCH
EMILY NEMENS
Zando / Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they go through the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

As undergrads, Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary's medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband's struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she's never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

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

My Review: I wanted to love this story.

I did not love this story. I *made* myself finish it. I was pissed off at these privileged women taking their genuine, and genuinely intractable, problems so utterly seriously. There was no perspective checking; no one said to Gregg, for example, "you can fix this personal issue if you're willing to reframe your worries about it," no one said "Reba, there are other ways to get this thing you want quit fixating on it as a failure."

When you've known each other for decades, you ought to be able to say stuff like that. You ought to be the perspective-checkers in each others' lives, as a privilege of the groups' friendship longevity. It ought to be relatively easy to see the solution your bud's ignoring or unaware she should give more thought to. But all five of these women are self-absorbed so don't make that kind of effort.

I finished all eleventy bajillion pages because I really liked Author Nemes' use of stream-of-consciousness narration, as it gave me the immediacy that saved the story from permanent exile. I might not've liked the women but I sure knew them. I was not at all convinced these women would make the terrible choices they did in their men. Not one of the men was worth the powder it would take to blow him up. That's very unlikely; these are high-powered women, educated, smart; they would not *all* have fallen for the idiotic, nasty men portrayed here.

I've read many versions of this gang o' pals narrative before. I was not sold on the merits of this iteration of that evergreen story. I really wanted to be.

THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies, or "how to reintegrate after surviving a toxic system"

THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies
FRANCESCA FONTANA
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A journalist’s relentless, unsparing interrogation of family ties, the ways we deceive ourselves and others, and how we live with what we’ve done

A stunning debut, perfect for fans of Nicole Chung, Ashley C. Ford, and David Carr's The Night of the Gun

Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only “My life started when you were born.” Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away...

The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation. Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?

In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can’t be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth.

The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.

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

My Review: Confronting your past is a big part of the job of growing up. Learning the realities of your origins can be discomfiting. Myths that take root are rooted in misunderstandings, lies believed, facts spun...it's astounding how much looking for official records can teach you. If, of course, you know where to look...and that the records exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all.

Frankie, as the author chooses to be known in the book, grows up in a very troubled system. Her family is riven by silent elisions, careful misdirections; she comes to develop a full-blown case of OCD that becomes the giant power source for her journalism. Talk about making lemonade from life's lemons!

Lemonade is sour under the sweet, though. I read this book thinking how much expectation Frankie was leaving aside as she told this brutally painful story of the betrayal she felt as she discovered how little truth there was in her family in a reportorial style. Most memoir readers...I think we're past the peak of the memoir craze, it's solidified into a market with expectations...want to experience catharsis, weep buckets, feel the hollow burn of referred rage...not really available here. I thought Frankie's choice to narrate events was more affecting for its restraint. I'm not necessarily going to resonate to messy, splashy, look-at-me pyrotechnics. It's true the narrative switches from first to third person at seemingly unprompted intervals, but I came to realize this was Frankie's way of inserting her self into the narrative at the times it felt safe to her to do so.

For me, then, realizing the roots of Frankie's control in her demonstrated inability to trust anything or anyone in her family of origin made her decision to write the story at all an act of generous-spirited bravery, so the relatively matter-of-fact prose heightened my own experience of the read. It won't be to everyone's taste but I'd encourage you to look at the actual details before dismissing the style: A big, warm, largely absent daddy who tells you "anything you want to know" but in such a self-aggrandizing tone even your kid-self wonders, a mother who's a fogbank, impossible to pin down, so evasive she tells you the reason she's alive at all is you.

No pressure, child, just know your mother's *entire*life*is*your*reponsibility.

How Frankie made it to adulthood and used the gargantuan burdens heaped on her to become Author Fontana is astonishing. By rights no one would criticize her if she just huddled in a corner gibbering quietly to herself to try to make sense of her life. Instead we got this remarkable account of facing up to a past rife with stressors, replete with bad parenting, and lived in an unshareable bubble. How many friends do you have who could hang with you as you process your father's criminal history?

It's the main story, of course. Frankie has, that bloody OCD demands it, to dig in and determine the facts at last. What happened, when, who did he harm, why was it done. I'm always just a bit squicked out by true-crime entertainment. The victim (if alive) realizing strangers are judging them, harshly or not, is...distressing...to me; the family of the perpetrator likewise. It's both justice (if legal results are obtained) and not, re-experiencing traumas and having them made public property. Ask a writer who's had a really bad review how it affects one's emotional well-being to be exposed to every irritating twidgee with a keyboard and an opinion. Now blow it up ten times because it's not anything you asked for.

So I'm in two minds. Brava to Frankie for doing the work; has Author Fontana really thought this through? I dunno, nothing in the story or the later discussions tells me. I don't know how that would be accomplished without *major* spoilers; I get why it isn't done, but it leaves me ambivalent about the story's purpose not necessarily being one I can get all the way behind. Missing star thus explained.

I've seen many indifferent-to-poor memoirs burn up the sales charts. I'd like to see this brave, kind, generous soul join them. She deserves the worldly success.

THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended

THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended
THOMAS RICHARDS
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A clarion call for taking back the American Revolution from the far right, published for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

Who gets to claim the legacy of the American Revolution and the mantle of patriotism that goes along with it? In a sharp, irreverent, deeply informed account of the nation’s founding moment and its enduring legacies, historian Thomas Richards Jr. invites us to see the Revolution not just as a one-time fight for political freedom from Britain but as an ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and social and political independence for all Americans.

A riveting work of narrative history, The Unfinished Business of 1776 shows that the Revolutionary struggle did not end in 1788 when the Constitution was ratified. Across nine dramatic chapters, Richards introduces readers to the vividly drawn characters who kept the Revolution alive for the next century and beyond, including the women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray, the enslaved rebel Gabriel, the economic reformer Solomon Sharp, and the religious visionary Joseph Smith—each pushing for freedoms that extended well beyond the traditional narrative of the Revolution, and each revealing how the unfinished work of 1776 fueled demands for economic, social, and legal equality that lasted well beyond the Revolution itself.

A myth-busting book about the history we think we know, The Unfinished Business of 1776 is the perfect antidote to jingoistic celebrations of America—offering an inclusive vision of our common past.

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

My Review: The author's biography on his publisher's website is below:

Thomas Richards Jr. teaches history at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia and holds a PhD in History from Temple University. The author of Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States and The Unfinished Business of 1776 (The New Press), he lives in Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania, where George Washington once camped.

He's got credentials, he's teaching at a level I wish more PhD-holders would teach at, and he's singin' my song. He wants the left to take back the ideals of the 1776 Revolution from the the reactionaries and right-wingers.

The case studies for his assertion that the Revolution contained the seeds of progressive action are decent; I myownself flinch away from his inclusion of that lunatic religiosifier Smith. He belongs, however; my distaste for him and the people who have used his example to create a polity I abominate, reject, and hold in deep scorn notwithstanding, what he set in motion is part of what's foreseen and protected in the US Constitution.

I had not heard of Judith Sargent Murray, for example, or her advocacy of woman suffrage, and am glad I now know she existed despite her being primarily a poet. In filling the great gaps that exist in my own knowledge like this one, the author does me a great service. I suspect many will be less offended than i was by the pro-religious threads he weaves generously into his analyses.

I would rate this book lower than I do had I not found this passage in the author's epilogue:

Trumpism is also predicated on easily disprovable, often dangerous or malicious lies, unbridled demagoguery, and an open embrace of anti-intellectualism—all of which the Founding Fathers abhorred. The Founders were undoubtedly flawed, but they did not lie egregiously, embrace fanaticism, or celebrate stupidity.

Preach, Brother Richards.

SMITTEN: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last, a neuroscientist's self-help

SMITTEN: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last
TOM BELLAMY
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking exploration of the psychology of infatuation, how to recognize it, and how to move beyond it towards a healthier experience of love.

“Butterflies” in the stomach, intrusive thoughts, fantasies about imaginary scenarios, mood swings from euphoria to despair… aren't these all the familiar hallmarks of new love? Not quite. These are characteristics of the psychological state of “limerence,” also known as obsessive, passionate or addictive love that can become unhealthy.

Millions of people experience limerence at some point in their life. In this book, neuroscientist Tom Bellamy explores advances in neuroscience since the term was coined in the 1970s, and sheds light on this little-understood element of the human experience. Discover:

· what drives limerence
· how to recognize limerence in yourself and others
· how to manage the phases of addiction to another person
· how to move past it to sustain longer, more fulfilling relationships.

With supportive advice about next steps, this book will help readers struggling with unwanted feelings to find emotional equilibrium. Rooted in neuroscience, this book offers practical guidance for those experiencing obsessive love and seeking a path to a healthy relationship.

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

My Review: Living with Limerence is the author's blog of his experience as a sufferer from this recently described sociopsychological issue. It is not a diagnosis; it is not a presently recognized area of formal study; the author does not present himself as a mental-health professional, so is not held to any of the standards of those practitioners. His bio makes all this clear in what it does and does not say:

I’m a neuroscientist, writer and academic. I graduated with a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London in 2001, then worked as a research scientist at the Medical Research Council, and the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, before moving to the University of Nottingham in 2010.

Since then, I’ve run a research group investigating the nuts-and-bolts of how the brain works, and published dozens of papers on esoteric aspects of neurophysiology.

That background gave me a unique perspective on limerence, how to make sense of what’s going on in our traitor brains, and how to reprogram ourselves into leading more purposeful lives.

He is speaking from his own experience with confronting limerence in his life, and relatedly from his academic training in the workings of the brain. He is admirably clear of expression, understands the power of humor as well as the force of public vulnerability, in the discussion of what most of us don't experience when we get a crush or develop an infatuation or fall in (unrequited) love.

It is a study area just waiting for its academics to bring rigor, develop methodologies and establish vocabularies for, and grapple with the implications of, as our world becomes more and more mediated by machines. We're losing crucial social skills to social media and "AI"-centered experiences displacing sitting down to have a conversation with a real human.

Limerence is only going to rise in its prominence because of its intersection with parasocial interactions. Author Bellamy, and his seeming role model in limerence study Dorothy Tennov, come at this ancient but only-recently described feeling from different angles: she was a psychologist attempting to get "Love Studies" on an academic footing while his more function-of-the-brain focus arises from his neurobiology training.

In writing this book and its blog predecessor, Author Bellamy does yeoman work presenting the current state of the science. He is also careful to stress, through reinforcing restatement, the liberating reality check: Limerence is not, in itself, mental illness; it can be an indicator of underlying issues such as those present in attachment theory (q.v.) but are not necessarily full-on symptoms of anything. It is a very helpful reminder not to self-diagnose. However, I'm not entirely comfortable with the self-help half of the read. The author speaks from personal experience of the issue and has conducted polls to determine certain facts from other self-described sufferers, but this is not (nor is it presented as) peer-reviewed science. Yet. I predict it will be, and relatively soon, because the incidences of limerence in my own social circle are not falling....

As with all mental-health and -adjacent issues I encourage you to read all self-help books with the intention of going on to have fuller, more wide-ranging conversations with someone trained and licensed to interact with you on a theraputic footing. It will hurt you not at all to go into those conversations with information you have acquired by reading self-help books. Be ready to discuss the reading's merits with your mental-health as openly as you can. Not every expert can be trusted to address your unique personal needs.

I think my review needs to include this clear-sighted, honest, grounded in experience statement from Author Bellamy:

Limerence fades. Regardless of how spectacular the thrills are at the beginning of a relationship, expecting that euphoric connection to last more than a few months is unrealistic. Quite apart from how exhausting it would become, it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Limerence is the drive to form a pair bond tight enough to result in conception; it has no real role in making it last.

It's true, it's a fact known for thousands of years (in writing; millennia before that, since humans aren't so very different seen as a whole), and it always, always helps to know you are not the first, you are not the only, and you are not alone in the struggles you're having.

I can't be more generous with my stars for the trepidatious responses outlined above, but combined with appropriate professional consultation I think the information presented here in a highly...almost annoyingly...conversational style bids fair to give the reader a giant gift of feeling Seen and understood.