SISTERS IN YELLOW, exploring women's wrongs in Women's History Month

SISTERS IN YELLOW
MIEKO KAWAKAMI (tr. Laurel Taylor & Hitomi Yoshio)
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.

All of them are fleeing something. Growing up without a father, Hana’s tired of the pity in her classmates’ eyes, and finds a flashier mother figure in Kimiko. Kimiko is older than Hana's mother but seems much younger, chatting easily about school and boys and wanting a better life. Fate throws them together with two more young women—bruised but not broken by life. Together the four set out to remake their lives, fighting predatory lenders, organized criminals, and plain bad luck as they open a bar called Lemon.

Keeping the business going, and trying to take care of each other, forms the core of this enrapturing novel. It is a story of startling reversals and vivid portraits of the matriarchy of Tokyo nightlife and its adjacent criminal underclasses. From the bar owners to the aging hostesses to the young street touts coaxing people off the street to places like Lemon, everyone wants a chance at renewal, but can everyone get it?

Narrated by Hana in Kawakami’s trademark evocatively poetic style and paced like a noir, Sisters in Yellow will be the literary blockbuster of the season. This epic of friendship and betrayal is the kind of book one longs to return to when away from a world until itself, and a book that makes you think while it produces immensities of feeling. It is a major novel that, like so many of the best recent phenomena—from Donna Tartt to Hanya Yanigahara—explores how we survive (or don't) together.

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My Review: What if someone who liked noir novels thought, "let's make the women the active partners, and add overtly emotional tropes to a fear of abandonment-fueled story?"

Meet Mieko Kawakami.

The emotional stakes are huge. Hana, our PoV character, remembers the events of her teenaged life when she was seen, valued, and trained by Kimiko, an older woman with...situational...morals and a very large store of useful knowlegdge whose origins a sensible person would not pry into. As Hana is a completely neglected child of an emotionally absent mother and no visible father, Kimiko's louche lifestyle carries the allure of being chosen, paid attention to, seen as valuable for once...though her value makes older, more experienced readers shudder a little for what's likely to happen to her as she gains her experience points in the Dungeons and Dragons game of life.

Unlike man-centered noirs, this story is less about the crimes the gruesome twosome at the center of the story commit with their scoobygroup; more about how they, by working in tandem, learn things from each other and by making mistakes entirely new to each of them. We don't often get stories like this from Japanese writers, or at least not translated into English. These are hardscrabble folk, no expectation they'll be taken care of by the system. They're women, so of lesser value in their society no matter what they need from it; they are not likely to get much in any case. It sets the stakes of their efforts to make a living very high indeed. I'm impressed at Author Kawakami's willingness to have her women suffer for their mistakes, as well as fight to get what they need from an indifferent world.

But at least they're all in it together as the Japanese economy contracts post-1980s bubble. They're all grafting hard, grifting when they must, but they have each other's backs.

Oh dear.

No lesson without pain; every birth must have blood. Hana, now an adult, relives her hard growing up of schemes and crimes, when she sees Kimiko's name in the news as a blackmailer; it's no surprise, but it's a painful jolt of relived trauma nonetheless. Hana's insecurity has always led her into money traps. It's no surprise her insecurity is alive and well. of course it's not because her entire life is built on the reality of betrayal from neglectful mothering on to her time with chosen mother figure Kimiko.

It's not on the same craft level as the magisterial Breasts and Eggs. Pages spent explaining things now common knowledge are wasted space and/or padding. The noir/crime aspect of the story, so tonally important, assorts oddly with the flashback structure; is there tension meant to lead us on when it's obvious Hana survived her past reasonably intact?

It's a good read but not a perfect one. I'll recommend you check it out of the library, but do get your head around how young women do very seedy things without being forced by men into them. Celebrate Women's Wrongs this Women's History Month.

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

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending February 15, 2026

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.

FANG FANG's PAGE: SOFT BURIAL: A Novel, the great sweep of History made personal; THE RUNNING FLAME, the intimate violence of one as lens for the pain of billions

THE RUNNING FLAME
FANG FANG (tr. Michael Berry)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 ebook, available now

China Books Review 2025 presents the second annual Award for Outstanding Literature from or on China or the Sinophone World, the Baifang Schell Book Prize, as a finalist!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: “She knew that if she didn’t say her piece, that flame would never be extinguished; even after death, it would continue raging.”

The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she joins a song-and-dance troupe, which allows her to travel and opens her eyes to new people and places. But an unplanned pregnancy brings an abrupt end to all her youthful dreams.

Trapped in a bad marriage, Yingzhi is driven to desperate measures—and eventually a shocking act of violence.

Fang Fang’s explosive short novel inspired widespread social debate in China upon its publication in 2001. In exploring the difficulties of one woman shackled by patriarchal tradition against the backdrop of radical social change, The Running Flame bears witness to widespread experiences of gendered violence and inequality. Fang Fang evocatively captures both the heady feeling of possibility in China’s roaring 1990s and its dark underside, as economic reform unleashed social dislocation in towns and villages. The novel draws loosely from interviews the author conducted with female death row inmates in a Chinese prison.

Equal parts social critique and domestic horror, The Running Flame is a gripping, propulsive narrative that shines a light on the struggles of poor women in China’s countryside.

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My Review: It is a short novel, on the blurry edge between novel and novella in length; definitely complex enough to merit the "novel" label. YingZhi is a woman driven to the end of her endurance, across a long enough period to see changes in the laws that do not touch her...until she finally snaps.

It's notable that her story *is* a story because she does what is, across most cultures, the prerogative of men to do to women. Her snap, in a man, would not merit a novel, novella, or anything more than a tutting notice on a newspaper's "local crimes" section.

While writing this story, I wonder if the estimable Fang Fang, quite a cultural touchstone in Chinese literary circles, thought of that. In one sense, reading this story humanizes...particularizes...the motive that drove her violence while at the same time reinforcing the abnormality of a woman taking violence into her own hands to dole out on a man.

We're trained, culturally, to see women as victims in every narrative. Even this one. YingZhi dares to want a home of her own, dares to seek personal validation in an art that excludes her husband, dares to be a tiny bit her own person...and suffers for it.

We know this story is based on a factual event and that Fang Fang spoke at length with the woman whose snap provided the base of the tale. Does no one anywhere see that this real person's story told from death row, reinforces the transgression she committed as illegal, yet not the endless provocations to it as immoral?

Am I the crazy one? Is this dark, forbidding shadow not bothering anyone else?

I got more and more appalled by YingZhi's awful life of feeling utterly powerless and slighted for wanting to be her own person. As we spend time "listening" to her unburben herself, I got more and more drenched in the fear and outrage at her culturally enforced voicelessness. As a gay man (a loathed minority in China as well), I could relate to YingZhi's inability to bring happiness the way she wanted and needed to experience it into being.

This is a powerful story told in a style that suited my inner ear. It did not, I'm sorry to say, have scope enough to bring others to clarity in the story being told...too short...but as a deep dive into a woman at the precipice of her end, it was excellent, it was honest about its emotional representation, and it was deeply moving.

A half-star off for choosing to shorten, therefore foreshorten, a story with a lot of scope for even further reflection.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SOFT BURIAL: A Novel
FANG FANG (tr. Michael Berry)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

China Books Review 2025 presents the second annual Award for Outstanding Literature from or on China or the Sinophone World, the Baifang Schell Book Prize, as a finalist!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased.

The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered.

Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the “landlord class.”

An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.

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My Review: Your mother was a woman of mystery; so was mine; but I'll bet cash money neither of us had a mother who was a total mystery to herself. Ding Zitao's very identity, her name, her memories...all gone in a process she does not remember but that defines her and forms all her memories ever made after.

Amnesia robs a person of their core, denies them access to their story, causes an insecurity of self that can't be overstated as a devastation. It's not soap-opera-plot simple. It's more akin to dementia, an acquired loss that eats one from the inside out.

This deeply personal violence stands in for what we, in the West, often think of as the Chinese cultural amnesia for what happened during Mao Zedong's rule. (Arrogant of us to assume that we can know this, or that it is the experience of billion people.) The events that gave Ding Zitao the lifelong unmooring from her Self are rooted in the early days of reform in the new People's Republic of China.

In the course of living a long life, Ding Zitao comes through many troublesome personal problems and troubling cultural events. All of the deeds, the ideas, the detritus of relationships and the people that die, a whole and fragmented life goes into the making of an old person. Qinglin, as her son, does what I'd hope was his best to comprehend his old-woman mother's roots. He feels her pain of not knowing herself as his own pain of never fully knowing her. He doesn't...can't...blame her; she had no control over the amnesia that robbed her.

In the course of discovering the roots of what happened to Ding Zitao that made this form of living suicide a better way to be than whatever the alternative was, Qinling confronts China's national past, its cultural reformation, and its procrustean demands in service of ideology...in the fractured, stolen mind of his mother.

We're told this is a story with its roots in a real person known to Fang Fang. Writing and publishing this brutal, honest, unsparing account of the personal damage done in the course of creating the People's Republic of China caused much ferment and discourse inside the country. "To every birth its blood" is an African saying that only sits well with people when the blood is not personalized or particularized; we do not like knowing who exactly did the bleeding, or from where, but that is impossible in this story. As it has made its way around the world it has reminded each reader that the great sweep of history was less the sweep of a broom than a scythe as it happened.

This novel takes its time with you, the reader, spending lingering moments focused on discomfiting facts and events. I'm impressed that Fang Fang was ready and able to be in these moments until they resolved their meanings in their details, while not giving in to prurient pain-gazing for the frisson of safety readers crave.

It got as close to five stars as such an honest account of history can without it being one's own history being told.

Excellent and necessary reading for those whose lives have, or bid fair to, lead them into violent tumultuous change.

THE SLIP, debut novel that feels very assured and is very complex and involving

THE SLIP
LUCAS SCHAEFER
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2025 National Book Critics Circle Award/The John Leonard Prize finalist for debut work!

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE for Fiction!

The Publisher Says: For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.

Austin, It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly-stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.

Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.

More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.

Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.

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My Review: Does the publisher's synopsis sound like A Lot? That's down to the fact that it is. Don't fret, though, there's room for it all in close on five hundred pages. It's told in multiple layers of PoV, it's told across points in time, and it's told at an unfolding pace, not the heady adrenaline rush of a boxing match. (Y'all remember from May's Pearls & Burgoines how I feel about boxing.)

The truth is that "Boxing" isn't quite the same as what I see in the fights here. It's the reasons and techniques and substance of boxing, not the performative violence I'm so repelled by, that are on display. The way young Nathaniel is drawn in to the world of the gym, discovers himself, and makes such a stir as he and David, his Haitian boxing mentor, discover his natural abilities is what it means to be young and find your gift.

Then Nathaniel, all of sixteen, disappears.

To say this was upsetting to me is to understate its impact within the story. It is that dramatic pivot point that many books either lack, or squander the impact of. That almost happens here, which is why the fifth star is partial. There are a welter of viewpoints, some more impactful than others...what's the self-defense hen-class all about anyway?...but the fact is everything does tie in by the end. I think comparisons to Jonathan Franzen are appropriate; I'd say they're not quite all there is, though. Franzen's undeniable way of summing a character up in a phrase is here, but so is John Kennedy Toole's bitter, snarky, unkind edge. I'll say that I encountered these thoughts as I was shifted and rearranged in time, therefore was more than usually alert for new ways of seeing the characters. This is a read that repays your attention and will escape you if you just scan the pages looking for distraction from the world. Attentively read it will be a strong accent on many of the issues we face in the world today.

The gay subject matter in the book is not foregrounded, but foundational all the same. It is not accidental that absolutely nothing in the author's biography is in any way indicative of his own sexuality. He wrote this story well and treated the gay characters well; does that mean anything except he's a good observer, and a sensitive storyteller? ¿Quién sabe? And does it really matter? I'm of the opinion it does not.

The ultimate payoff of the story is down to the much-delayed and very tellingly told investigation into Nathaniel's disappearance that his uncle comes to launch, acting on a strange tip. It becomes a very different story, honestly, as Uncle Bob Alexander does not seem to get too far yet the police still seem to want to stand in the way...but the idea doesn't seem to be to stop him discovering something so much as preventing him from ruining their image.

Quite a lot happens in the last third of the book that tucks odd strands of character development into proper place in ways I wasn't expecting. The trans representation is excellent, sensitive, and as fearlessly written as the white author's Black characters are. In fact, if I were to pick one word to sum up the affect of this debut author's novel, "gonzo" would be my choice: He sees no obstacles in his difficult choices, only climbable walls.

It is hard to spend almost five hundred pages learning about these folks then leave them behind. A better recommendation to get yourself a copy is hard to imagine.

RÍO MUERTO, 2025's first all-five read, though not for the fantasy-averse reader

RÍO MUERTO
RICARDO SILVA ROMERO (tr. Victor Meadowcroft)
World Editions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook editions, available tomorrow

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN Translation Prize! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: On the outskirts of Belén del Chamí, a town that has yet to appear on any map of Colombia, the mute Salomón Palacios is murdered a few steps away from his home. His widow, the courageous and foul-mouthed Hipólita Arenas, completely loses her sanity and confronts the paramilitaries and local politicians, challenging them to also kill her and her two fatherless sons. Yet as Hipólita faces her husband’s murderers on her desperate journey, she finds an unexpected calling to stay alive.

This poetic and hypnotizing novel, told from the perspective of Salomón’s ghost, denounces the brutal killings of innocent citizens and at the same time celebrates the invisible: imagination, memories, hope, and the connection to afterlife.

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My Review: South America's cultural impact is never more delightfully represented, to me at least, than when I read magical-realist works whether in translation or not. A novel narrated by a ghost definitely counts as "magical" in my book (!), so I was prepared for something to get me, to find the chinks in my emotional armor.

Not prepared enough.

That there's a civil war, a narcoterror regime, and immense unrest in Colombia was known to me. How pervasive it was didn't seem to me to be a reason to be surprised until I read the author's explanation that these events are fictionalized, not merely fiction...that "based on a true story" line we see so often hit home hard, because this is a friend's life skinned in fiction but boned by facts.

It's really down to this:

I am telling what I was told to me: that Salomón Palacios was gunned down only a few paces from his home and died and became a nameless thing in the gloom—the closing in—before returning from the dead. That he took an eternity in coming back, for the soul recovers memory in its own time, at its own rhythm, but that he must be out there now, and always will be, because death is the true present and because some murder victims do not depart.

Time passes subjectively, per Einstein; I'm not entirely ready to say velocity's the one governing factor until someone can really explain time fully. Maybe Death really does equal time; after reading this book, I have to be open to the possibility. For one of the few times in my reading life I find myself agreeing with a Pentecostal character: the apocalypse really has begun.

What makes Salomón such a great narrator is his ongoing physiological voicelessness. In life, in death, he makes no auditory impact. His existence as a ghost is in a powerfully evocative way a continuation of his voiceless, ineffectual life. Small gestures of kindness, his eking of a living by doing odd jobs, his very death carry the same burden of being a little guy living a little life that couldn't possibly threaten anyone who gets killed in spite of his death changing nothing.

Well, it unhinges his wife. She goes on a campaign to force his killers to kill her, and their sons, too. The sons have other ideas. Her plan to confront the boss who ordered Salomón's death to force him to martyr her, and her boys, in order to...what, exactly? no one in their town doubts who caused the thugs who did it to pull the triggers...or is she simply and selfishly out to commit suicide to avoid feeling grief for her genuinely loved with all his flaws husband? Insisting the sons she birthed join her in this spectacular suicide-by-provocation motivates Salomón in ghostly form to attempt to communicate love felt, love given to be received, to the maddened Hipólita to cause her to reinvest in life, to use her rage to pick up her boys and get the hell out of there. It would give his death, and his life, meaning.

How can a man voiceless in embodied life, in other words, find a voice now he's bodiless?

Author Silva Romero wrote a story I did not want to inhabit, but I did inhabit as fully as I have most stories I've read, because few kinds of story command my involvement more than grief, love, and power dynamics in emulsion. He chose a story I couldn't not get myself into. He chose a storytelling voice I could not avoid investing my empathy, sympathy, and tearducts into. Salomón loved deeply and mutely showed his love in practical simple deeds; he loved so much he was motivated to reach around the barrier of death. Author Silva Romero, ably served by his translator Victor Meadowcroft, did a fine job evoking a violent time's hideous human cost, as well as human beings' overpowering need to force the world to make those costs make sense.

It's impossible to do that, I say confidently, as I read the story of how it is done. All five stars.

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC, follow-up to his fame-setting novel...worthy successor?

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC
KEVIN WILSON
Ecco Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here comes an exuberant, bighearted novel about two teenage misfits who spectacularly collide one fateful summer, and the art they make that changes their lives forever.

Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.

Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?

A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.

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My Review: Nothing to See Here was a solid 3.5-star read for me. It was entertaining and I got a few moments of real emotional involvement. I didn't think I'd go looking for more of Author Wilson's work but the Universe had other ideas...Ecco offered me the DRC and, being game as well as greedy, I hopped on it like a hen on a junebug.

Frankie Budge is a teenaged girl with a serious boredom problem. She's a Coalfield, Tennessee, girl who's smart enough to be a novelist in training and bored enough to do anything to stave off the screaming meemees. She's got triplet brothers whose lives will clearly end in tears, prison sentences, and severe emotional damage. Her father's left his family for another woman, and her mother...cruises...she lets Frankie be her own weird self because, well, triplet boys on the way to prison require more than a single working mother actually has to give. Yay for Frankie! Then she meets Zeke, a new kid with no friends.

Zeke's dad was a horndog, too. (Is this something Author Wilson knows about from personal experience, one must ask oneself.) Zeke apparently decompensated all over the guy in the middle of his office. Well, that's what his mom says...he can't remember any of it. Oh, and this is important: He's so freaked about the whole nightmare that he's decided to rename himself "Zeke" short for his middle name, Ezekiel. He and his mom are staying in Coalfield, where she was from. And that's how the match met the gas....

Y'all remember the 1980s Satanic Panic era? All that horror, all those lives ruined...well, in her gawky attempt to connect with this boy she likes, Frankie made the error to end all errors...she showed him a Xerox machine her brothers had stolen from the high school's shed. With toner and paper and everything...and she lets Zeke fix it, using the loveliest phrase for a paper jam I've ever heard: "like the machine had done origami"...so thus begins one of the major Satanic panics moved all the way up in time to 1996.

Their use for the photocopier is to make an art project (after Frankie uses it as an excuse to cop her first-ever kiss from a boy who's never kissed a girl either) of a poster—a drawing Zeke does after she writes “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us” on a piece of paper. Then the Xerox comes into play...she comments in her narrative about them being kids from Nowheresville and never having heard of Andy Warhol so they were inventing this new thing together...and, after making a bunch of them, Frankie puts them up all over Coalfield.

Hijinks quite horribly ensue.

The inspiration of some older teens to play off this mysterious and compelling artwork, using it for their own ends, and the horrors that any powerful thing can call forth when it's anonymous and unclaimed, break the entire town. Frankie and Zeke are kids. They're way too scared to face up to the consequences (some truly terrifying) of their innocent actions. And that is where I realized I was a lot more involved with this story than I ever was with the first book of his I read. I circled back and read "On Writing Now Is Not The Time to Panic", Author Wilson's introductory story of how this book has been moving inside him for a long time. He spoke directly from his heart, revealed his genuine grief that finally summoned this book into the world after the decades of growing, and I was utterly changed. A story I'd thought was pretty good became a moving, honest act of love for a past and a life he was no longer living. And that made my pleasure multiply many-fold.

What it means to my old-man self to see someone as young as Author Wilson contend with the doomed promise of nostalgia, to confront the power of a past one can never reach but must always reach for...well, that spoke to me. That made me feel I was heard and understood by a complete stranger who couldn't pick me out in a line-up of Boomers. I am validated by this evidence of my sad, wistful knowledge of the ghost-hand of the past clutching with steel talons in someone young enough to be my child.

Then what the hell happened to that fifth star, it's fair to ask. Welllll...I'm really not sure it's fair to say, he said, glancing at the ever-present truncheons of the Spoiler Stasi. I'm not a big fan of the way the pressure to dredge up her past with Zeke, now going by his first name again, entered Frankie's life, and the things it led her to do were understandable but frankly disturbing to me. I felt she was violating boundaries for selfish reasons. It's not like she needed to do something she did the way she did it...the knowledge could've been gained less invasively...but here we are. I've only docked a quarter-star and I'm pretty sure the sales won't suffer because one no-name blogger was squicked out at some stuff that most of y'all (who never had your boundaries utterly disregarded by a woman) won't notice.

I'm still glad I read the book, you can see. I'm especially delighted by a piece of mother-daughter healing that spoke loudly to me. And you know, that is more than enough of a gift to take the slight sting of imperfection off my eyes.

THE GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO PAGE: THE COLD SUMMER, new mystery series from the author & THE MEASURE OF TIME, sixth Guido Guerrieri procedural

THE MEASURE OF TIME
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (tr. Howard Curtis)
Bitter Lemon Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The latest in the Guido Guerrieri series.

The setting is Bari in Southern Italy. Against his own instincts, defence attorney Guerrieri takes on an appeal against what looks like an unassailable murder conviction. The alleged perpetrator is the son of a former lover. A taught legal thriller and a meditation about the ravages of time.

One spring afternoon, defence attorney Guerrieri is confronted with an unexpected spectre from his past. In her youth, Lorenza had been a beautiful and unpredictable girl with dazzling charm. A changed woman faces him in his office that day. The ensuing years have ravaged her appearance and embittered her mind. As if that weren’t enough, her son Jacopo, a small-time delinquent, stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. Her trial lawyer has died, so, for the appeal, she turns to Guerrieri as her last hope.

Guido is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza’s son, nor does he have fond memories of the way their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. His old friend Carmelo Tancredi, a retired police inspector, and his girlfriend, the charming investigator Annapaola Doria are once again by his side.

A masterful, compassionate novel, striking a balance between a straightforward trial story—some say the purest distillation of human experience—and the sad notes of time as it passes and exhausts itself.

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

Book One review — Book Two review — Book Three review — Book Four review — Book Five review

My Review: Last time we met Avv. Guerrieri, he was feeling his age and feeling Time's Arrow poking him between the shoulders. I think he, and Author Carofiglio, are winding down their association. That feeling is stronger having read this latest entry in the series.

As Guido reacquaints himself with the lyrics of "What a Fool Believes," he works his dogged best to ignore the ancient and life-changing on his side relationship he had with Lorenza while her son languishes in prison for a crime he swears he's innocent of. The trouble is he simply can't. I don't guess we ever can. Meeting someone special from long ago is inevitable, I suppose, but more often than not unsatisfying. It's Lorenza's son's bad luck to have a mother his new lawyer can't get over.

Yet get over her Guido does...it takes a lot out of an old-flamehood to go painstakingly over the present's ugly realities with her. And, lest you forget, Guido's feeling his age in many ways these days. When one does something, even does it well, for a long time there creeps in a staleness and a tedium to make the world just a bit darker all around. That's where Avv. Guerrieri is in his life, doing his dead-level best for Lorenza's sake and to satisfy his bone-deep conviction that everyone deserves the best representation possible. He knows young Iacopo did not get that. But...is he, after all, guilty? Could this just be time-serving, motion-going-through? It's an unnerving truth that Guido doesn't know. He just does not know.

Scary place for a defense lawyer to be.

At any rate, the story is told in vintage Carofiglio style...we are there, we are never kept in the dark about the developments that Guido himself isn't kept in the dark about. I am on record as liking this style of telling a procedural story, especially one that's set in a legal system very unlike the one I'm accustomed to by six decades' reading of mysteries. It's also interesting to me that Author Carofiglio (a lawyer by trade before becoming a writer and a Senator) goes through Avv. Guerrieri's speeches to the judges and, in real-time, gives us his second-guessing internal monologue. That is very much to my taste, and it's still in evidence (!) in this entry in the series.

Where I wasn't quite so enthused, though, was in the number of Lorenza flashbacks Guido indulges in. This woman was extremely formative for his life and his outlook on gender relations! I get it, the need to process that old baggage is deep. I felt, though, that it got in the way of my seeing Lorenza the mother of the accused, as well as Iacopo the accused himself. It was, I suppose the best way to say it is, both overdone and underpresented.

It wasn't a fatal blow to my pleasure in the read since I gave the book four and a quarter stars. I think it was effective at one of its jobs, to wit: Demonstrating Avv. Guido Guerrieri's increasing longing to retire, to find a life outside his living. He's worn a groove in his spirit doing this important, and satisfying, job. This case...its links to a past he doesn't want to dredge up but won't fail to look in the eyes...its unsurprising results...its ending that we saw coming because of course...it's all just another turn of the wheel.

Stopping and alighting are, I suspect, the next things Avv. Guido Guerrieri will do. If so, I'll miss him. But I completely understand.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE COLD SUMMER
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (tr. Howard Curtis)
Bitter Lemon Press
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that’s not the reason why it is still remembered.

On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari.

The police are stymied until a gang member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings and the rules governing organised crime in the area. The story is narrated through the actual testimony of the informant, a trope reminiscent of verbatim theatre which Carofiglio, an ex-anti-mafia judge himself, uses to great effect.

The gangs are stopped but the mystery of the boy’s murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the prosecutors are hard to distinguish from the prosecuted.

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

My Review: The cold summer indeed...very cold for those whose Earthly remains could, thanks to massive bombs killing them, be measured in teaspoons. Author Carofiglio was, during that memorable summer that turned the tide against the Sicilian Mafia and its other regional affiliates, a working prosecutor fairly early in his career. His story, as told here, is one that truly feels like it happened exactly this way despite its being fiction. When one knows the author's history, it does inform the experience of reading the author's words. In this case, I've been on Team Carofiglio since I first discovered the Guerrieri series a decade-plus ago.

In this book's case, it's the second Fenoglio novel written but the first translated into English. In Italian, the first one's called Una mutevole verità or literally "A Changing Truth" but I'd probably call it "Slippery Facts" or something similarly indicative of dishonesty. It's a much shorter work and isn't about Fenoglio so much as about how a man in his position...a "foreigner" to the Barese he works with since he's from Piedmont-Savoy (basically France to the Southern Italians)...can see but not get what he's seeing. This outing, being about a gigantic trauma that shook Italy to its core, makes more sense to have come out first in the series.

The set-up for the story is Author Carofiglio's usual quiet, meandering walk through the detective's days as the crime is committed and he begins to look into the causes and results of it. About midway through, a huge shift happens. In this story, the shift is a break in the wall of silence around organized crime's activities. All it takes is one lousy creep afraid of getting punished for a particularly unpopular crime (child harm is a death sentence in most prisons around the world) to blow open the stalled cases he knows about.

Structurally, the way Author Carofiglio manages the case-breaking event in this book is to spend several chapters on the scumbag's interrogation. This isn't flash-fast, as I imagine you're thinking it might be. Italian crime fighting moves at a different pace and to a different rhythm than the US version. The cast of characters is different because the legal system is organized very differenly, with responsibilities split in different directions. That, for my dollar, is one of the selling points of these books. I am absolutely enrapt in the cast of legal characters and eager to hear more about what they do and why they do it...I suspect Translator Curtis, having worked on a half-dozen or more Carofiglio novels in several series (as well as no series at all), is responsible for the ways some characters discourse explanatorily...as it sharpens the pleasure of being swept up in a very different world. That being something I look for, and forward to, in my reads, I'm happy as Larry while it's going on. YMMV, of course, so don't forget to account for your own tolerance for exposition when choosing these reads.

The reason I'm fond of Fenoglio, and I suspect I'd be fond of Author Carofiglio, is the way his policemen philosophize:

“I like finding out what happened. In so far as it’s possible. I like that people trust me and decide to tell me what they know, even in the most unexpected situations. I like it when what I do – and it does happen – gives a little dignity back to those who’ve lost it. It gives meaning to chaos.”

–and–

The problem is that we like to control everything: a stupid, pointless, unhealthy idea. We need to have the opposite attitude, accept the fact that nobody really has any control over his or her own life: that was what the barman Nicola, from the Caffè Bohème, had said to him once.

One day at a time. He had also added that it’s a good rule not to take anything personally. We think that everything revolves around us: both what other people do and what they don’t do. It’s almost never true. Things happen and that’s it; most other people are uninterested in us, for good or ill.

The quiet musings of Pietro Fenoglio, an intelligent man, as he works his way through the complexities of human venality and evil, demanding a reckoning for those not able to demand one for themselves. I like this pace, this path, and this person's journey. I will say that I found the bad actors all a bit interchangeable. I can't for the life of me remember one's name without looking it up to be sure I'm not misassigning another one's name to him. Nothing made by human hands can ever be perfect, can it. But very damned good, this one's got locked down.

YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST, first novel set in a major, convulsive inflection point

YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST
SUNIL YAPA
Lee Boudreaux Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.

On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor—a boyish, scrappy world traveler who's run away from home—sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down—from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists—are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.

Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States.

In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

A LOVELY SURPRISE GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Doing something, he had discovered, anything, however small, that contributed to your meaningfulness of self and surroundings—well, that was the trick. That was the trick to not feel like shit.
–and–
What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.

Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.

But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.
–and–
...{T}hey learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

What the 1999 WTO Protests taught the reactionaries around the world was that there was nothing they could do to win the hearts of the people. They set about controlling their bodies instead. As Author Yapa put it, "...how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control," and there it is out in the open. The hearts of a few demand that the world obey them, obey their darkness, and submit to external control.

None of the seven PoV characters in this story are without that darkness. They're all on trajectories that will not allow then to remain unbruised and unbattered by life, and more particularly by the awfulness of demanding economic justice from those whose entire way of life, whose whole sense of self, is rooted in and branches from their hoarded wealth. There are those whose one need in this life is to deny others what they want and/or need (preferably both) so they can Win, they can be seen to be Right because they've won! Then there are those whose one need in this life is to take away what it is they've decided is unfairly denied to others:

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know. He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.
–and–
Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

And neither side of this divide sees the grim and angry reality: They're one coin. Heads, tails, maybe they're aesthetically distinct but they're one zero-sum-game playing piece of a coin. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

The central spine of the book, for this reader, is the story of Bishop and Victor...father and son, estranged, and truly, absolutely the same man, the same wounded-by-loss, blinded-by-love man. Just as sad as father-and-son estrangements always are. Just as inevitable as the voice of experience being unable to be the ears of acceptance that a rudderless, shallow-drafted dinghy of a boy needs to find a channel in the rough storms he can't avoid:

“What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?”
–and–
“Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.”

Singing the same song, different verses, and different keys...the minor key of youthful wounds, the major key of adult scars.

What you need to know is that Author Yapa wrote a polyphonic poem, a written kōan to the concept of connection and belonging. What you want to read needs to be story of discovering yourself in many places, seeing your wounds and worlds across gulfs of experience and of time as you seek out the hand, the heart, the warm and welcoming shoulder to shelter and comfort you:

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn’t know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone.
–and–
And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

Good days or bad, that is its name: Love. There are strands to this too-short, too-scattered narrative that seek their love, that clutch their illusions of love; but in this father, whose son is not his flesh and blood but is his, and this son, whose world refuses to stop hurting and whose heart can't make itself heard yet, there is a beautiful, complete love of like-minded men.

If that's a story you need to read, as I did, then get this into your hands at once.

THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE, Rémy Ngamije's debut novel of identity and cultural visibility

THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE
RÉMY NGAMIJE
Scout Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, this “gorgeous, wildly funny and, above all, profoundly moving and humane” (Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here ) coming-of-age tale follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda during the Civil War and make sense of his reality.

Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending.

One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university.

But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived.

From one of Africa’s emerging literary voices comes a lyrical and piquant tale of family, migration, friendship, war, identity, and race following the intersecting lives of Séraphin and a host of eclectic characters from pre- and post-1994 Rwanda, colonial and post-independence Windhoek, Paris and Brussels in the 70s, Nairobi public schools, and the racially charged streets of Cape Town.

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

READ THIS MEMOIR ARTICLE IN LIT HUB!

My Review: What do you get from a wisecracking young African novelist when you turn him loose with a contract? A novel of the prices exacted by immigration on the emigrated persons, be that emigration voluntary or enforced, cannot help but run into the problem of "why am I here again?" for its fat, complacent first-world-native readers. The usual answer is, "where else would you like to be?" Author Ngamije writes sentences like this:

The only certainty is this: everything that is not the end must be the start of something else.

Séra says that his mother said it first; I believe him. I believe whatever Author Ngamije says, actually. I have already said nice things about Author Ngamije's writing when I discussed The Neighbourhood for last year's Caine Prize reviews. He's deployed a lot more of his snappy humor here (a bed so narrow it should have a singles-site profile, East African parents outdoing the Spanish Inquisition in the barbarity of their interrogation, "FOMO, the acronym of doom," a vile w-bomb at 47% being self-described as a "salacious nictation"...though that didn't prevent him from using it three more times), having so much more room to make the case for laughs. Laughs you'll get, for absolute sure and certain. When Therése and Séra meet at a less-than-opportune moment, for example. If you fail to fall about screaming with laughter at how Author Ngamije structures that scene, then you are deficient.

And there is a great deal of uncertainty in the happiness of the parents in this story. There are no swift and sure answers to the eternal eyeroll of the offspring. A stern reminder, however, that your parents didn't become parents without having some kinda past together is fully served in several chapters. The set-up for them being together, a party attended in Paris, is...incomplete at first telling. It seems there was a lot more to being young in that day and time...well. Usually there was some, um, carnal dimension to their partnering up for parenthood:

His torso occupied every inch of his shirt, and his maroon bell-bottom jeans accentuated a prim pair of buttocks and strong thighs.

He was dressed to pull, for sure! And Therése was very much there to be pulled...well, that is half the story, and the other half was told, so you'll find it when you get to it. But the parenting years came next. A thankless task, that, and made more difficult by the implosion of their country. Several flashbacks to that time are all from Séra's child-vision. It's very effective, and still manages to evoke from the adult reader the fear and the determination of the parents to protect their kids. And then they spent the entire rest of their lives ensuring you'd have it better than they do, Séra. So what does he do with his uni life in Cape Town? What all of us did! Party! Make a group of like-minded friends, find something to rag on the world about...the usual twentysomething life. Author Ngamije says smart, funny things in a smartass way, just like Séraphin himself. He's got a helluva mouth on him, does Séra, and he's not afraid to use it.

...{I}f nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, and if everyone is in the same boat just bailing and steering as best they can, then I guess the whole point of life is to make some sort of a start and then work towards some kind of ending, whenever and wherever it might be. Part plagiarism will permit to agree with Shakespeare: "All the world's a staage..." upon which we perform for the eternal audience of one. ... I guess, then, that the point of life is to dive in, hold on, and hope that a flop...is worth the laugh at the very end.

–and–

"She actually likes black people," Séraphin said. "And it isn't because she's traveled a lot. Slavers traveled too and look where that got us."

–and–

"I have a better chance of being Pablo Escobar than being Pablo Neruda."

"You and drug dealers." {She} laughed. "Not a fan of poetry, then?"

"I approach poetry like other people's dogs. With great caution."

The entire group of friends stay hooked in to their affection for each other, such as it is, and they overlook the usual tensions in any group setting...the odd man out, the tolerated-but-unloved, the group boss with the plans everyone goes along with because it's easier than fighting and better than anyone else's ideas anyway. The flirting, the hookups...the breakups and dumpings...it's all there, exactly where it should be, told in texts instead of long calls and short meetings.

There is, of course, the requisite older woman in Séraphin's résumé, and she speaks a truth to him: "There is a point when actions become promises," that I truly wish I knew how to embroider so I could make a pillow-cover out of. I am also moved by immigrant Séra meditating on forgiveness being meaningless without remembering the thing being forgiven. It is a truth I learned much later in my life than he was forced to, but a severely underrated one in the general conversation we as a society should be having with more seriousness than we seem to be doing.

The lighthearted moments, let me hasten to say now, are quite prevalent in the book. More time laughing is spent than Other Things. Don't mistake this for some gloomy, first-novel-MFA-program navel-gazing! You'll know for sure that you're in good, capable hands, that this is a cocktail party you can't quite imagine how you got invited to and not Thanksgiving with your in-laws.

That is also, of course, apparent in some less joy-giving ways. The function of Séraphin's Great Council of Séraphins is clearly to make you aware that you've shifted to the inner workings of the lad's head; the problem is, for this seasoned reader, it was overused. Two or three times would've been effective...many more and it becomes Ben Stiller's 2013 remake of Danny Kaye's 1947 comedic classic The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As much fun as recalling the original was for the first twenty minutes, seeing the shots recreated...well...it got old.

The fragmented construction of the story will put some readers off. The flashbacks aren't slowing the story down, I will protest, they are givning it traction! But many will disagree with me, I fear. Structuring a story in an anti-chronological way does indeed allow us to feel, instead of see, the action as the characters do. It does also require of us that we pay attention to what's underlying the surface story of an immigrant leaving home to leave home to learn how to return home to make a home. It's really just that simple...Thomas Wolfe did it, y'all all lapped it up. Ride the waves, don't shove your feet into them. (Have I ever mentioned that my Young Gentleman Caller is a surfer?)

There is a time in a character's arc that the wise mentor offers a personal story that illuminates a Greater Truth that Our Hero needs to hear. That time came, it lingered a bit too long for comfort, and then it was over. That was, actually, a good thing, because the purpose of it was a deeper one than was expected. The way it happens, the moment it comes, are a little bit deceptive, so kudos to Author Ngamije for that misdirection. I like not knowing everything!

But the classic misdirection, well. Remember how you found out your parent was a person before you were born? Remember the moment you learned what they least wanted you to know but you needed to hear? That moment is a beaut in this book, one of those "...I didn't know you had it in you..." times that come to all adult children. I loved it, and if you're the reader I hope you are for reading my reviews, you'll carry on to the very end for the reward you're offered.

"All arguments can be fixed. Circumstances, not so much."

Formerly tall father stood next to tall son.

"You have to decide whether you want to be right or whether you want to be happy. It is a simple choice."

It may be simple...it is simple...but it is never easy.

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS, Moisés Naím's novel of the world-changing coup d'etat in Venezuela, translated by Daniel Hahn

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS
MOISÉS NAÍM (tr. Daniel Hahn)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Power comes an edge-of-your-seat political thriller about rival spies, dangerous love, and one of history’s most devastating revolutions.

Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a corrupt government, igniting the passions of Venezuela’s poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched to Caracas—one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel Castro’s Cuba—this is a career-defining mission.

Smooth-talking Iván Rincón of Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate needs a rebel ally to secure the future of his own country. His job: support Chávez and the revolution by rallying the militants and neutralizing any opposing agents.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s Cristina Garza will do everything in her power to cut Chávez’s influence short. Her priority: stabilize the greatest oil reserves on the planet by ferreting out and eliminating Cuba’s principal operative.

As Chávez surges to power, Iván’s and Cristina’s paths cross. Soon they’re caught in the fallout of a toxic political time bomb: an intrepid female reporter and unwitting informant, a drug lord and key architect in Chávez’s rise, and Iván and Cristina themselves. With everything at stake, the adversaries find themselves at the center of a game of espionage, seduction, murder, and shifting alliances playing out against the precarious backdrop of a nation in free fall. A thrilling fictional story based on unimaginable real-life events.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM AMAZON PRIME'S FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: Spying? Romancing? Weeelll...not quite as much as I'd been expecting based on the title. What there was of espionage was centered on the mechanics and motivations for spying on one's neighbors. The Americans have this corporately-coveted giant lake of petrochemicals close to them...the Cubans need the fuel...and the Venezuelans need food, medicine, the basics.

No one gets what they expected to get because Hugo Chávez (quite obviously the author's bête noire) steps in the big, fat middle of things out of nowhere and shits all over the players. He's nobody in the hierarchy's opinion. He comes from nowhere. He's got no family pull. He's got a crap education. The author posits that he's a mentally ill striver. As he's dead, and was considered an enemy by the US Government's right-wing intelligence community, I'm inclined to put that down to politically motivated retrospective diagnosis.

Whatever! I didn't mean to get so bogged down in the material I think surrounds the story. The on-the-page story is heavy on Hugo, light on spies, and still manages to be about the reasons spying happens in a way that was very interesting to read. The role of Pablo Escobar and his money in Chávez's rise, the massive betrayals that are inherent in any leader coming to power and seeing the perspective from inside instead of outside, and the hilarious (if terrifying) reality that "we" know about 5% of what is actually going on when "we" are making our decisions, all made the read worth my time to pursue. I'm afraid the prose wasn't lulling me into turning the pages:

"I'm warning you, the president's ambitions are no longer local or regional. He wants international influence. He already has the oil production in his hands. and he'll spend whatever is necessary to make the world pay attention. This black gold will finance his socialist expansion. Hugo's narcissism is global now!"

A spy reporting to her Washington-based boss wouldn't be terribly likely to use an exclam. Or to be so bluntly undiplomatic. She wouldn't be employed for long.

"The moment is approaching for you to serve the revolution. When {the thing happens}, it's essential for Cuba that you, comrade Nicolás Maduro, {do the thing}."

The future {doer of the thing}, as anointed by Fidel, smiled yet said nothing; both men knew he had nothing to say. And there was no need.

So, does the author think Cuba runs the show or does he think Cuba runs the show. I mean, there was no time at which socialism and Cuba and Fidel and Hugo weren't all presented in the dimmest, dankest dungeon-light.

The world spins on, though, and the focus of the story leaves the international stage to light on the two spies in Caracas. They've met, fallen in love, and begun to weave a tissue of lies that looks like a life together if you squint at it just right. Iván, the Cuban scion of a powerful political family, and Cristina, an illegal Mexican immigrant whose life prepared her for a career in espionage with the CIA, fall *whomp* in love. I don't know why, and the author doesn't tell us. They just do.

While they're reassessing their loyalties to their respective agencies, they watch History take its inevitable course. Crappy people and dreadful deeds and a giant choking cloud of misery finally envelop the two, already unsettled in their minds by Love, and cause them to try to...unoficially retire, let's say.

This does not go well.

Betrayal. Back-stabbing from many angles. Lots of terrible things are about to happen to Iván and Cristina, when she decides that she doesn't want to die screaming. She pulls out her trump card, plays it...and that's when the ugly turns mean. The ending of the book involves the worst, least excusable sort of cruelty to both of them. And it's not like there was no way it could happen. It has already, earlier in the book, in slightly different form.

What? It's a spy story! You were expecting the characters to take Pilates together and Iván to knit a baby blanky for their first-born while Cristina solves the mysteries of sourdough? This book's author might have a lot of right-wing axes to grind, but the book has its head on straight when it comes to Realpolitik! Henry Kissinger got nothin' on Author Naím in that regard.

I've given it three-and-three-quarters stars. In my world, that is quite respectable. I don't keep reading books that aren't rewarding me. There are too few eyeblinks left to waste 'em. So, while I'm not yodeling the praises of this gorgeous artifact of genius, I'm here to tell you that I didn't even once think, "you know what? Pearl-Ruling this bad boy now."

Considering my Pearl-Rule pages-to-read count is down to thirty-eight, that should tell you all you need to know.

THE LAST SUMMER OF REASON, a beautiful tale of one rational man's losses to a manic mob mentality

THE LAST SUMMER OF REASON
TAHAR DJAOUT (tr. Marjolijn de Jager)
Introduction by Alek Baylee Toumi
Foreword by Wole Soyinka
Bison Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This elegant, haunting novel takes us deep into the world of bookstore owner Boualem Yekker. He lives in a country being overtaken by the Vigilant Brothers, a radically conservative party that seeks to control every element of life according to the laws of their stringent moral theology: no work of beauty created by human hands should rival the wonders of their god. Once-treasured art and literature are now despised.

Silently holding his ground, Boualem withstands the new regime, using the shop and his personal history as weapons against puritanical forces. Readers are taken into the lush depths of the bookseller's dreams, the memories of his now-empty family life, his passion for literature, then yanked back into the terror and drudgery of his daily routine by the vandalism, assaults, and death warrants that afflict him.

From renowned Algerian author Tahar Djaout we inherit a brutal and startling story that reveals how far an ordinary human being will go to maintain hope.

THIS WAS A BIRTHDAY GIFT (ALBEIT UNWITTING!) FROM A FRIEND. THANKS, YOUR KICKASSNESS!

My Review: First of all, let's clear up something that could cause a lot of people pleasure-robbing confusion: This is not a novel. It is a récit. The narrative is so limited in its focus that there is no sense of a world larger than itself, which makes the reader aware at all times that they are reading a narrative. This is not an insult or a criticism of the technique used, but of the marketing decision to call this a novel. It will disappoint novel-readers who buy it hoping for that immersive, multi-faceted experience of a story.

The Introduction by Toumi and the Foreword by Soyinka are essays fully worthy of reviews of their own. I will not be providing those reviews because I am not a scholar. The context they present is the infuriating context of the murdered Author Djaout's life and times. The facts of his all-too-brief life are on Wikipedia for monoglot English speakers. There is so much that US citizens have simply ignored or willfully shut out of their experience of the world, and as a result we seem to be willing to leap over high precipices to fall into fathomless oceans of rage and hatred, as Djaout warns his readers against. Boualem, his PoV character, is thrown over the edge willy-nilly, but he's got just enough time to form himself into an arrow.

The dive one takes while reading the book is deep, though, so don't think it's not profound and perception-altering to experience Boualem's deep dive into despair as his world, his entire life's work of defining and refining himself as a moral actor in that world, is fractured and flattened by a social earthquake. The depths of despair Boualem plumbs will be familiar to book-lovers watching the steady, pernicious, and malicious attacks on education, intelligence, and erudition we're seeing in the US.

I used up about half a can of Book Darts (may the goddesses please bless my kind friend Stephanie for gifting me this timely top-up of my supply for this past birthday!) marking beautiful passages to quote in my review. The lovely translation done by Translator de Jager is almost too rich a confection to be devoured in a sitting...but I did it. Yes, it was like a breakfast of rich brownies topped with lemon curd and served with a café viennoise, but it was also a heady experience of glorious phrase-making. I was Zooming with my Young Gentleman Caller while I was writing an earlier draft of this review. He said of my Book Darted copy, "I don't dare take it to the airport like that."

"Hmm?"

"It's got more hardware than a Goth biker."

Oh. Well, yes. Permaybehaps I'd better make the point sharper and more targeted:

Books—the closeness of them, their contact, their smell, and their contents—constitute the safest refuge against this world of horror. They are the most pleasant and the most subtle means of traveling to a more compassionate planet. How will Boualem go on living now that they have separated him from his books, his most invigorating nourishment? He is like a plant that has been torn from the soil, separated from liquid and light, its two vital necessities. He has been excluded from the life of books. He has been exiled from all the landmarks of his childhood: values, trampled, symbols corrupted, spaces disfigured and wrecked.

That, my olds, is what's right and what's wrong with this récit. If you ran across the first two sentences in a novel, you'd think, "oo, that's pretty." Put the rest of the para behind it and you're in a récit not a novel, and one that needed a developmental editor's unkind attention. There is so very much of this sort of pretty, pretty phrasemaking that just goes on that little bit too long, that says what's already been said (“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.”–Cicero, b. 106BCE, and a famous enough quote that Author Djaout can reasonably be expected to have read it during his education) in a not hugely fresh way.

That said, one is disinclined to hammer the hell out of the book because it was incomplete and fished out of the author's drawers after his murder. I know, and I can't explain how, that this book would've been absolutely earth-shattering had he lived, and had the chance to work with an editor to bring its many stregths and beauties into a finer, sharper focus. There is about this read the ozone smell and static crackle of greatness. The sadness that follows reading it is rooted in the sense that this promise is undelivered, in fact undeliverable, because Author Tahar Djaout was murdered by the pro-ignorance, anti-beauty forces that ran roughshod over his country.

Do not think the same can not happen here, happen again, happen to the resisters and artists and truth-tellers you're ignoring, skimming, marginalizing today. Vote Blue in November 2020 and allow Author Tahar Djaout's sacrifice of his life to be worthy.

SHUCK, a gay man's roman à clef of 90s Manhattan

SHUCK
DANIEL ALLEN COX
Arsenal Pulp Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: “Set in the late 1990s, Shuck describes with great clarity and verve the last gasp of a gritty Manhattan.”—Bruce LaBruce, film director

Shuck is the intense, dazzling diary of a male hustler in New York who tries to manage his reputation as the city’s porn star du jour when he’s not dumpster diving, tweaking, or trying to get published. A remarkable peep show of a novel about what binds artists and prostitutes, and the collateral damage of what happens when they try to recover what they have lost.

Daniel Allen Cox is a former porn star. This is his first novel.

My Review: In the late 1990s, hustler/street trash Jaeven Marshall gets rescued by remittance man/blocked perfectionsit artist Derek Brathwaite, who grooves on Jaeven's bruised and abused body. The two begin a peculiar and passionate love affair that never involves sex, but truly touches the heart of any romantic in its deep and vital connection. Jaeven uses Derek as a home base, a touchstone, and a security blanket. He rises (!) in the just-then-efflorescing porn world as a porn performer and a model, taking it as his 22-yr-old naif would: His due.

What no one but Derek, and the strange photographer/trick Richard, know is that Jaeven is a writer. A real one, one who writes and who sponges up images...the book is littered with lists Jaeven keeps of the "shit and ephemera" that Manhattan excels at putting in the path of the observant, letting the reader in on Jaeven's private coping mechanism for his rampant ADD (and his inability to break past the surface of anything, too)...so while he's using himself to live and eat and keep moving, he's fueling the creative rage inside himself. Derek, blocked because surfaces are all he knows, uses Jaeven's unpublished writing to break through into an actual creative frenzy, painting at last the gaudy and exciting colors that he's seen but never managed to reach inside to create before. Jaeven's downward track is, well, inevitable: He gets into meth, gets meth-mouth, stops getting calls from his various munificent tricks (except the peculiarly loyal Richard), and even manages to make Derek so angry that he gets thrown back onto the streets he's only just clawed his way up from. In the end, though, as is inevitable in a first novel, the redemption occurs and all is well.

It's a first novel, or I would've been more chary with my stars. I think it's a fun ride through a Manhattan that's been sanitized out of existence. I liked that Manhattan, I trolled it, and I felt at home in it; I'm inclined to spot Mr. Cox some points for that. It's reasonably clear to me that it's also a roman à clef, and that also counts in my ratings. I have no way of knowing how much of it is self-referential, but at a guess I'll say a lot. I like a writer whose take on himself isn't in any way reverential. I like reading about the world that my thirties were spent in. I like a lot the amiably nihilistic, irretrievably broken kid comes out (!) with hope, and therefore a future. It's not perfect, but damn it's good. Read it!

THE IBIS TAPESTRY by Mike Nicol, a not-very-thrilling thriller that's still a good read

THE IBIS TAPESTRY
MIKE NICOL
Vintage Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An audacious departure for the internationally acclaimed South African novelist--a thriller with all the searing immediacy of today's headlines.

Who was Christo Mercer, and why was he brutally stabbed to death in a remote Saharan town? For Robert Poley, an unhappy writer of political thrillers, the welcome distraction posed by this question has become an obsession. With the mysterious delivery of a laptop computer and a cryptic email message, he finds himself slowly entwined in the vagaries that constituted Mercer's life and death. An illegal-arms trader haunted by his nightmares, his past, and his clandestine involvement with a ruthless rebel-- and with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great --Mercer lived on the grand stage of history, yet remained obscured by shadows until his seemingly fated demise. Now, piece by piece, in a complex web of social, political, personal, and fictional disclosures, the intricacies of Mercer's troubled psyche begin to reveal a pattern as corrupt as South Africa's in the aftermath of apartheid--years of judicial inquiry, the Truth Commission, and continued social unrest.

With alchemical bravura, Mike Nicol turns history into fiction and fiction into history, bringing to allegorical life the haunting story of a murder emblematic of South Africa's recent past.

My Review: Well...that piece of publisher puffery isn't, in my opinon, supported by this highly literary and relatively suspenseless, badly miscategorized "thriller." There is nothing thrilling about the narrator's life. The thrilling subject of the narrator's research project is all flashback and invention, barnacled with notes, digressions, irrelevant faux-research-paper citations...it gets tedious.

But what makes this read a good one for me is the thing that I suspect would turn off the mass of American readers: Untranslated Afrikaans words, unexplained geography, facets of South Africa's rich and complex culture that will be unfamiliar. I am a little better versed in these things, as I dated a South African for a good while; but I would hope that avid readers would find it an interesting chance to learn about this amazing place.

Mike Nicol has a considerable reputation as a thriller writer. A novel of his, HORSEMAN, was hugely and internationally acclaimed. As THE IBIS TAPESTRY is the first of his works I've read, I think I'll try it before reaching a conclusion about Mr. Nicol's readerly chemistry with me. Based on this book alone, I don't think I'd be a fan. But there's a lot to be interested in here.

The arms trade is a scourge on the world. South Africa, after an arms-sale embargo was put in place by the UN in 1963, developed a gigantic and sophisticated war-machinery manufacturing sector. Industries require sales and sales require customers and customers are thick on the ground among the hate-fueled warriors infesting Africa. So it's only logical that a well-connected "Englishman" with a serious psychological problem...what we'd call in the here and now PTSD...that fixates him on the world of power players and influence peddlers in his native South Africa. The Marlowe play he obsessively reads, analyzes, revises in his own words is the epitome of England's 16th-century expansionist, imperialist self-image building. It's not too much of a leap to see this man's fascination for our narrator, a writer of thrillers in the airport-book mode. His own life and family have blown up in his face and he badly needs a complex puzzle to work out.

The complexity of the puzzle is a big part of the book's appeal for me. As our narrator moves through the steps of solving his subject's murder, he takes steps that lead him into contact with the underside of South Africa's arms trade, supplying warlords with destructive capacity and to hell with the consequences. The South African arms trade is global, but by focusing on Africa and its warring factions, Nicol manages the tough trick of illuminating the horrors and consequences of war with the minimum of gore. It is the gift of the talented storyteller to make a subtext of violence. I see the gift in Nicol's story of THE IBIS TAPESTRY. But it takes a love of puzzles to get the most from this book's complicated world.