WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES, New Adult coming-of-age novel

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES
BRIAN ZEPKA
Pennor Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
99¢ ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eighteen-year-old Stetson Delancey never thought breaking up with his boyfriend would turn him invisible.

In Penango County, Pennsylvania, high school couples carve their names into the legendary Ardor Tree, a rite of passage said to grant love that lasts. Stetson and his boyfriend were no exception. But a bitter breakup just before college splinters their future, and in a moment of anger, Stetson does the unthinkable: he hacks their names from the tree.

That’s when everything in his rural hometown goes from boring to bizarre. Shadows flicker where they shouldn’t. Strangers pass by like he’s not even there. And some people stop seeing him altogether.

With just two months left in Penango and his college dream slipping away, Stetson races to uncover the tree’s secrets before he vanishes for good. But when he meets a boy only he can see—a boy who may have secrets of his own—Stetson begins to wonder if breaking free from his hometown means letting go of everything or learning to hold on to what matters.

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES is a queer coming-of-age novel about the unraveling of first love, hometown magic, and how sometimes we can’t uncover the truth about others without confronting the truth about ourselves.

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

My Review: Stetson's a queer kid at the inflection point between ending the perspectiveless wasteland of adolescence and taking on the habituation to and of emotional regulation that we call "young adulthood." At eighteen, he knows when he fucks up there'll be consequences; sometimes he just doesn't much care. This is where we meet him.

What happens to start Stetson on his path to maturity is not revealed until about two-thirds of the way into the story...bye now, fifth star...while he very thoroughly trashes his now-ex boyfriend (of two years, at eighteen) in the vaguest most undefendable terms. It's clear Precious is a Major Drama Queen. He's got his BFF Whitley (I mentally called her the most patient girl in the world because she never snapped on this inconsiderate chud despite how often he simply ghosted her, used her as ears to whine into, etc.) as his captive audience for obsessively overthinking all the weird stuff that's happening to him. It's not 100% clear to me the supernatural implications of Stetson becoming invisible to Murray, the ex, and his sudden ability to "see" the long-missing Xander were real or simply the intense fantastical overdescriptions of Stetson's wounded spirit.

What I want to praise is the evocation of how domestic violence becomes normalized within a relationship. If you screw up, like Stetson did with his big dramatic announcement to Murray, and your partner's response is what Murray's was, you're going to need to consider an exit strategy. Props to Author Zepka for making this a point, though why wait so long to bring it up?

I'm generally positive about the read, though more for teens than readers in my age bracket. As the author's already in the YA market, I'm supposing this is more aimed at "New Adults" (a kind of reader I characterize as "YA with pubic hair"). It's still not on my top-ten list but I'm not the marketed-to reader. I'd prefer a story with much better female representation, the sweet, patient BFF is in short supply in the real world; but that's me being an old guy with multiple axes that need grinding. I'd buy it for my grandkid who's navigating a new relationship territory. If they asked for it.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel, trans awakening story

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel
GRIFFIN HANSBURY
W. W. Norton & Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

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

My Review: There is always a class divide in capitalist societies. There are reinforced, heteronormative binaries; there are intense pressures to conform. In 1984, these things were unquestioned, and enforced by laws prohibiting "crossdressing" and enabling parents to abuse and harm their children physically and psychically to "straighten them out."

There was a lot more, but that's plenty for now, if you weren't there you should be glad you missed the AIDS deaths, the hoo-rah for Reagan shit, the pillaging of Social Security...oh dear, starting to sound familiar? Oh, I forgot: the war on workers, the plant closures, the pension-fund thefts....

None of that shit is foregrounded but it very much makes the attitude (transfem) Sylvia carries, downright truculent, make more sense than it already does. Melanie...Mel...is attracted to Sylvia for her serious edge, her survivor's black humor, her wealth of knowledge Mel wants and needs. Mel wants to become Max. Mel has no way to verbalize that, has no framework to put a new mind into, is reeling from the very existence of someone...someone she knows...holding a slightly skewed mirror to her thus showing that she is real, there are others.

Of course, capitalist patriarchy is not about to let Mel go.

I'm queer but not trans; I've known it since 1966 without knowing what it was or meant, just that it was me. As a male, my path was hugely easier than Mel's or even Sylvia's. I got threatened and bullied in school. No one ever followed through because I'm also large and tall. It was entirely bad enough; these characters would've given anything to be in my so-easy place. I hurt for them now, in this miraculously better world we've wrestled into being that can never be left to just run the right way because "They"...the god squad, the macho pindicks, the scumbag transphobes...will not allow it. Our lives, our happiness, our progress, all threaten "Them" in some inexplicable way.

I still don't get that. I have the one "christian" sister who said to my face (okay, my ear, it was by phone) that gay marriage threatened her church because "what if "They" make us perform a wedding?! It will diminish my marriage!"

I was more patient then and did not simply hang up and never speak to her again. We had a discussion, but I was so sick with rage that I remember little of it except telling her that if someone sued their church to force them to marry a couple queers I'd contribute heavily to their legal defense fund.

Again, this is mild compared to what the characters face in this story.

It's never been easy to be Other. It leads to the emotional and physical violence of being Othered. As the story moves from 1984 to 2019, I felt a lot of the emotional rawness, the highs and the lows, leaching out; the author wanted, like me, to make some points, and in the context of a novel that drains dramatic tension below optimal levels. It doesn't ever recover, though. We get a satisfactory ending where from the jump I was primed by the intensity of the story for a satisfying one. It's not bad, it's not poorly thought out; it just didn't go to the next level. Things like Mel becoming Max don't resonate like the woofers at a concert because we never delve, or even dabble, in the dysphoria inherent in transness pre-transition; we don't get, let's say, the bathroom-usage nightmares that make the pervasiveness of transphobia and its implicit capacity for potential lethality immediate.

So I land on four stars and strongly recommend you give this (after some probing questions, though) to someone trans you know and love. I think they'll really mean the thank you they offer.

THE AQUATICS, brutal violence is, always has been, the world's norm for Others

THE AQUATICS
OSVALDE LEWAT (tr. Maren Baudet-Lackner)
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An extraordinary novel of loyalty, strife, and empowerment from Peabody Award-winning Cameroonian filmmaker Osvalde Lewat.

In the fictional African country of Zambuena, Katmé Abbia enjoys a life of privilege and influence married to Tashun, the powerful prefect of Zambuena's capital. Yet after years spent playing the obedient, demure wife to a husband who has ceased to notice her, Katmé grows increasingly restless. Her one source of connection is Samy, a childhood friend, struggling artist, and gay man—an offense punishable by law in Zambuena. When Katmé discovers that Samy’s new exhibition, funded by herself and Tashun, boldly critiques Zambuena's social and economic inequities, her public, married life is set on a collision course with her one true friendship. As social pressures and political rivals sow life-threatening consequences, Katmé faces an agonizing choice: abandon her friend or destroy her family.

Mixing compassion with clear-eyed fury and a keen sense of the absurd, The Aquatics confronts one of contemporary Africa’s most entrenched societal issues in a story as immersive and inevitable as a quickly rising tide.

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

My Review: Misogyny, homophobia, and christian fundamentalism all travel in one ugly pack, like the social hyenas they are. Cruelly tormenting those they Other while standing in staunch defense of "their own"...so long as those under their control do not act up, resist, or question the leadership's order.

Katmé is that one inside the pack's protection...until she isn't. Her ephemeral status as an insider comes to an end when her true friend, only friend, queer artist Samy attracts her husband's political enemies' attention. She's accustomed to the misogyny, the indifference, even the beatings, as a price to be paid for her "comfortable" lifestyle. In a country viewed internationally as poor in service of its people's rights...read the wiki article, this is only barely a novel...it's not in the least surprising that Katmé is placed in the horrifying position she is. Her life is in danger if she continues to support Samy, her queer friend...his life is in danger because he refuses to accept being second-class, not good enough...and the culture's overlords are fighting over political crap having nothing to do with Samy or Katmé, but they pay the price. I'm reminded of the proverb "when elephants fight, the grass suffers," as an apt summation of this novel's central conceit.

The content warnings are serious, please heed them. Domestic violence is sadly not uncommon anywhere. It is just part of the landscape in Author Lewat's story. I was appalled at the casual tone of the prison rape Samy endures, at the beatings Katmé receives from her husband, from the pervasive sense that none of this would raise a single Cameroonian eyebrow. (Yes, we're calling it by a made-up name, but no one's fooled. It's like Peyton Placewas in the 1950s, a figleaf meant to make reprisals an admission of guilt.) This is a tough novel, meant to be hard to swallow, even hard to chew. It does a great service, one fiction might be the only thing that can do it, of showing Society its own ass in a mirror of gigantic proportions.

The lives of these characters, these people, are appalling. They are a shriek of outrage that the world just looks away; they are a warning lest others succumb to the easeful abdication of morality to those who know nothing of it.

A novel that arrives as a bitter gift in time for all the religious holidays.

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories, outrage...rage...there's more in here than meets the eye

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Julia Sanches & Heather Cleary)
The Feminist Press at CUNY
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize

A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.

“Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.” In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

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

My Review: If and/or when (honestly I'm all but certain it won't happen) the mooted TV series, via Amazon Prime and Spanish-language producers Perro Azul, arrives I will be *amazed* if even a third of rage and fury in these stories make it onto the screen. Since the Feminist Press mentioned this possibility when the book was first published in September 2024, nothing else has appeared on Amazon, The Hollywood Reporter, or even Perro Azul's Spanish-language websites. I expect it's a dead deal...given the truly hair-raising stuff in here, I'd be far more surprised if any production efforts were ever made. This is strong stuff. The *men* in charge of any budgets will not approve this one!

As is reasonable and customary in these parts, these thirteen stories will be dealt with by using the time-honored Bryce Method.

Parsley and Coca Cola details an at-home self-induced effort at aborting an unwanted child..."Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay," she says directly to us, recounting this latest blow from Clotho's shuttle as her life of bad luck...no visible dad, dead mom, now this...takes its own ugly pattern. A lucky break...an older woman who clearly knows the score...means a day or so of nasty pain, some passing of clots, and finally confirmed success.

Not for the squeamish, but I can vouch for its accuracy. 4*

Yuliana brutalizes our eyes with the inner monologue of a drug capo's heiress, the toughest of his children. "We women always speak, think, and act from the memory of our pain," she says to us as she recounts her revenge on the man who killed her high-school bestie via her new, um, protegée's well-honed skills as an angel of vengeance against men who abuse women.

The female of the species, fam. 4.5*

God Forgive Us, a cri de cœur, emitted by an old mestiza spinster who's spent her whole life caring for...and about...her duty, her reputation, after she and another sister murder a girl.

The girl was a machete-wielding robber, so it was self-defense. No legal problems ensue. But how terrible her guilt, how bitter the social dregs! She killed a girl! Because she and her sister thought the violent invader of their home was a boy.

But it was a girl! Her poor mother! 4*

Constanza proves that, when you have no center, nothing is ever going to hold you back. Unsettling. I felt...outrage, anger, contempt, quietly and at myself for how easily I saw her point and how terribly easily snuffing out a life could become a routine matter. It was a wake-up call for the snotty little moralizer inside to see the emotional rightness of tit-for-tat. 4 unsettled stars, and an extra session in therapy requested

God Didn't Come Through like she ever does, mijo. This is the other side of "God Forgive Us," in case you want to practice your lip-pursing action. First mention in the collection, to my surprise, of Santa Muerte...and I now twig to the fact I haven't mentioned the untranslated Spanish yet!

Words here and there are dropped without full context but with plenty of cues, so you're never left at sea. Offshore in a sturdy dinghy, yes; but always in sight of the land that meaning provides. 4.5*

La China takes us inside "Yuliana"'s murder plans, and an account of the action that, while revolting, was not prurient or distastefully lingering.

I'm a little unnerved that it's so easy to put myself into the headspace of these outsiders, to see there's a real "why" behind the awful whats they're doing. I'll need another extra therapy session soon. 4*

The Rose of Sharon is so short it barely counts a percentage point in the read. It is every goddamned thing I despise about religion in one caustic, awful vignette. I still see its vileness in front of my eyes...

Vomit trickled from his mouth, smelling of liquor. I dropped to the floor with tears in my eyes and prayed he would choke. "Dear Lord, let the walls of Jericho fall before my eyes, throw off my shackles and drag this man to the gates of Hell. Give me victory over my enemy, knock down the walls of my prison and the fortresses that cast down my heart."

So very godly, no?

This is not the end, or the ending. Suffice to say myths enacted are always enacted for evil. 4*

Regina is the deets behind "Yuliana"'s inciting incident. Not memorable, feels...hmmm...like a makeweight, a tossed-on bread roll to get the scale where it needs to be.

Plus, it's ever-so precious. 3*

Mariposa de Barrio is what happens when life's a lemon grove, the lemonade's for the owner, all you're gonna get is the empty, fleshless rinds...boil up some sugar and candy that peel, mija! Never mind how much it costs. Bills can get paid all kinda ways, but all of 'em Later. 3.5*

The Smile makes the femicides on La Frontera deeply personal. Somehow even the appalling facts do not feel prurient, since they're not lingered over; I like to think this actually happened, the ending I mean, at least once. 4*

Sequins "Masculinity is like marzipan: fragile as hell, queen," says our transfem narrator. Let me tell you, seeing that observation in a defector from The Boys was a bitch-slap like no other. Then, the price for laughter: murder, femicide again, only this time the details are there. It's brutal to read but what human could do that, all that, to a living person?

An evil one, the evil ones are the killers not ever their victims. Blood does wash away "sins"—the victim's. 4.5*

Playing with Fire is the funniest story here, among some weirdly funny, but not nice, stuff. This one is rip-your-shorts laughing fun.

Professional courtesy is not just between lawyers. 5*

La Huesera, last in line, is more novelette than story.

Fucking brutal. Horrifying. Enraging. La Huesera adressed de profundis:

Even if only part of your ashes...are under my bed, the way I see it, your bones have been gathered. I hope someday I'll get to hear you howling in the night.

Saving the best for last, Author de la Cerda. 5*

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY, what an amazing story collection!

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
KIM FU
Tin House
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

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

My Review: Listen to Author Fu on The Next Chapter for some very interesting insights into her writing.

This collection kicks off May is Short Story Month with a loud, explosive crashing percussive event. This is the best kind of short speculative fiction: Nothing shouts at you, no readily dateable stylistic flourishes that never do what the author imagines they will.

Strap in...we're headin' into the venerable institution of the Bryce Method. Short comments on each story, starting below.

Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 is the best intro to the author and her hobby horses. A world where there is a simulation technology that enables people to see whomever or whatever they desire, someone wants to see their recently dead mother to take a fantastic opportunity to get it right this time BEFORE she dies. An operator denies the application time after time, saying the truth is it's proven to be too addictive... plus the technology could present Mother in a quantum superposition of both alive and dead. The ideas are way richer than you or I would so much as dare to think about, still less explore as deeply as Author Fu does. Bold, fearless, deeply troubling. 5* and a cheer for this being the story that won the short-fiction 2022 Shirley Jackson Award!

Liddy, First to Fly explores the horrors of puberty via body horror...a girl grows wings on her lower kegs, decides she will use them, her world turns upside down in each possible area of her life. The role of friends comes in for some scary but bracing contextual changes. The adolescence of any girl, turned up to eleven on the scay-meter. 4*

Time Cubes truly gave me nightmares without needing to go to sleep first. Alice lives in our not-that-distant future as a "Depressive Insider." Her one fervent desire is to be no longer alive; all else is pale and vague. One day her existence brings her ro someone whose one amazing invention is an anti-aging machine. It has a reverse gear...4* for ineffable weird and eerieness.

#ClimbingNation rings a...fun? engrossing, anyway...change on the "a stranger calls" story when April, a social-media fangirl, attends an Instagram star mountaineer's wake using an old scraped acquaintance as her entrée. The way to be unobtrusive is to be helpful, and inconspicuous. It leads, in this case, to her learning how one accidental death is about to become two. Very Poe-esque. 4* and a solid shivering bow of respect

Sandman ruined forever my ability to listen to "Mister Sandman", previously a favorite...now it feels prurient, almost pornographic. "Please turn on your magic beam" indeed. Since I seldom have trouble getting to sleep, I have no voluptuous response to it, though it is obvious why this would be the case. Terrifying to know how many have reason to find ecstasy in what I just...do. 5 utterly unnerved stars

Twenty Hours "After I killed my wife, I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs." A terrible, horrible, no-good way to combat the quotidian sameness of marriage, a toy that makes another person an object...literally, not merely "objectified"...and manages also to indict capitalism as the vicious, sadistic thing it truly is. 4.5*

The Doll is doll horror *convulsive shudder* plus Babbitty snobbery and class judgment seen through a kid's eyes. Effective iteration of a nothing-new plot. 3.5*

In This Fantasy will drive the Punctuation Prioresses potty. Every-damn-thing is a parenthesis. And that's the point. What does a life so deeply, existentially, killingly boring leave is inhabitant but fantasy lived in parentheses? Sad, saddening, filled with the masked hatred of the trapped. 4*

Scissors is...there's no other word, okay phrase then pedants, than "D/s porn". Two women enact a performance-art version of so many subs' fantasy of being used, passed around. As the first explicitly lesbian story, it stands out; as a story for mainstream audiences in a collection, telling it from the sub's close first-person PoV makes it fluoresce and strobe with intense, focused sexual energy. WILL OFFEND SOME. 5 deeply moved, slightly aroused stars

June Bugs traces Martha and Neil's intense, toxic connection from giddy-up to whoa. The abuse escalates from verbal to physical to emotional as their accidental, impulsive couplehood deteriorates, Martha leaves...Neil follows...and those june bugs! 3.5* for big "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?" energy

Bridezilla is the slightly off-putting third-person close PoV narrative of a woman who, in spite of her chosen man's entire expression of passive selfhood, agrees to marry him...then doesn't go through with it, in the most humiliating possible way. There's a sea monster in there, though for the life of me I could not see how or why. My least favorite story. 3*

Do You Remember Candy? is my worst NIGHTMARE! Something...we never learn what...destroys everyone's (around the world, it seems, though we stay focused on Allie and her daughter Jay) ability to taste food. Can you even *imagine* the response in France? Or...holy mother goddesses...ITALY?! So Allie is one of the few who really care about this, keeping her memories of the glories of eating real food alive as Industry pivots to making goos, glops, and pills to keep people nourished. It becomes a fetish, shared among the few, the embarrassed oddballs, to keep those memories alive. Allie becomes the keeper of this secretive sensuous crowd's fantasies made physical. Her daughter, young when...whatever it was, no one looks into it much after a time...happened and is utterly unmoved by the consuming (!) passion of her elders. Awful, scary reminder that no matter how we feel about things as they are, they become normal. And the past...vanishes. 4.5*

Superb speculative fictions that made me think, squirm, and pray for the future to all those useless gods I don't believe in. Not quite even enough in quality for all five stars.

IF I STOPPED HAUNTING YOU by COLBY WILKENS

IF I STOPPED HAUNTING YOU
COLBY WILKENS
St. Martin's Griffin Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An enemies to lovers romance with a spooky twist where two feuding writers end up on a writers retreat together at a haunted castle in Scotland

It's been months since horror author Penelope Skinner threw a book at Neil Storm. But he was so infuriating, with his sparkling green eyes and his bestselling horror novels that claimed to break Native stereotypes. And now she’s a publishing pariah and hasn’t been able to write a word since. So when her friend invites her on a too-good-to-be-true writers retreat in a supposedly haunted Scottish castle, she seizes the opportunity. Of course, some things really are too good to be true.

Neil wants nothing less than to be trapped in a castle with the frustratingly adorable woman who threw a book at him. She drew blood! Worse still, she unleashed a serious case of self-doubt! Neil is terrified to write another bestselling “book without a soul,” as Pen called it. All Neil wants is to find inspiration, while completely avoiding her.

But as the retreat begins, Pen and Neil are stunned to find themselves trapped in a real-life ghost story. Even more horrifying, they’re stuck together and a truly shocking (extremely hot) almost-kiss has left them rethinking their feelings, and… maybe they shouldn’t have been enemies at all? But if they can’t stop the ghosts pursuing them, they may never have the chance to find out.

Full of spooky chills and even more sexy thrills, If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens is the funny, fast-paced romp romance readers have been waiting for!

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

My Review: Spooky castle...enemies forced into proximity...sparks flying left and right...bingo! #Deathtober read card filled.

One star off for heterosexualizing a perfectly good plot.

Author Wilkens does a fine job of entertaining her readers with a ghost story inside Gothic-novel trappings. Her domestic-violence opening...the woman throws a book at the man hard enough for the injury to bleed, and to leave a scar, and it's...somehow okay...? Like, a woman injuring a man isn't a problem but if he'd done the same to her the howling banshees would be all over it!


I was not thrilled by this.

I just barely got to a three-star rating because Author Wilkens made me chuckle many times *in*spite*of* my existing irritation. That is some serious talent! Causing an irked old curmudgeon to chuckle is a feat!

I really don't know what to tell you about the violence. You know your own tolerance for the abuse passed off as humor trope.

LIVE IT OUT, sapphic second-chance romance told with honesty and beauty

LIVE IT OUT
JENN ALEXANDER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spencer Adams was never expected to be anything more than a high school dropout. She’d been a troubled teen, spending more time at the skate park than in school, at least until her music teacher introduced her to the guitar and music class became her lifeline. Ten years later, she is the guitarist in a band that has become a breakout success, and she wants to use that success to help other teens who have had the same rough start as her. She takes on a volunteer project with local youth as a way of honoring her past, not knowing that it will force her to revisit the one part of her past that she’d hoped to forget.

Faith Siebert has always had high expectations to live up to, and she has tried her best to fulfill those expectations, to be a good daughter, a good student, and a good friend. When she fell for Spencer in high school, she knew her family and friends would never approve. Scared of their reactions, Faith ended things with Spencer, following the path her parents wanted for her, even at the immense personal cost. Of course, it had only been a high school romance, destined for brevity anyway. At least, that’s what she told herself. But when Spencer shows up in her life once again, partnered with Faith on a youth music project, her world is rocked and she is forced to re-examine everything she knows about relationships and herself.

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

My Review: Not much for rock-star romances, me, but I am a vulturous carrion-seeker for the corpses of heartbreaks past on second-chance narratives. Give me a high-school/college breakup undone decades later and I am on it like a Jane Austen bonnet. Add in the fact that the parties are a same-sex couple denied a natural ending by homophobia (internal or external, makes me no never-mind) and stand back while I run to get it. Didn't hurt your foot, did I?

I got what I was expecting in this read. I loved Spencer's complete willingness to use her skills to help kids in the same bad situation she came from to cope, on many levels, with their sense of powerlessness and absence of agency. True, they won't become rock stars but they will learn how to play a musical intrument...a thing that by itself increases one's satisfaction with one's life.

Faith, the One That Got Away for Spencer, believes it will and is surprised when it's Spencer who shows up to do the teaching. Her career as a social worker is so in-character for the girl she was all the way back in high school, it felt on the nose. I like social workers, and deeply admire their sense of purpose. I'm all in for a redemption arc here, as well, because Spencer's going back to her roots as a shelter-raised kid to extend her hand in helpful practicality.

Do I need to say that these women find their way into a relationship? It's a category romance. Of course they do.

In forming that long-delayed, much-desired romantic reconnection, each of them has to come to terms with her own part in their long estrangement, what it cost them both, and how best to use the rubble of the past to build a good solid foundation. Here is where I felt both the happiest, because the women are truly honest with themselves and each other; and here is also where I felt the length of the book worked against it the most clearly. There wasn;t room to go into the families, or the people they were leaving behind. That was less of an issue, though, than the way the women were ready for that hard, hard, hard task of being vulnerable and honest within their strengthening bond. I can't say it's unlikely...the author's a therapist by trade, she knows better than I do...but I can say that even fifty more pages with some conversations outside their bond would've helped me invest in the resolution.

That said, I give the book as it is a recommendation, tinged with a litte note of caution for the ewww-ick homophobes because there is some steam in here. (I just turned the pages faster.) The story builds its couple's bond well, believably if very quickly, and tells hard emotional truths with honest, sensitive truthfulness.
I'm really glad that Jenn Alexander has more work for me to get acquainted with.

DOUGLAS SKELTON's Rebecca Connolly series: THUNDER BAY, THE BLOOD IS STILL, A RATTLE OF BONES

THUNDER BAY (Rebecca Connolly #1)
DOUGLAS SKELTON
Arcade CrimeWise
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Stoirm’s secrets are worth killing for in this gripping thriller for readers of All the Missing Girls and Neon Prey.

When reporter Rebecca Connolly gets a tip that suspected murderer Roddie Drummond will be returning to the island of Stoirm, she smells a story. Though never convicted in the death of his girlfriend Mhairi fifteen years earlier, Drummond is still guilty in the eyes of many islanders, and his return for his mother’s funeral is sure to stir up old resentments, hatreds, possibly even violence. Rebecca has another reason for going to Stoirm. Her own father came from there, but he never went back, and he always refused to speak of it or say what drove him away.

Defying her editor, Rebecca joins forces with local photographer Chazz Wymark to dig into the mystery surrounding Mhairi's death and her unexplained last words, “Thunder Bay”—the secluded spot on the west coast of the island where, according to local lore, the souls of the dead set off into the afterlife. When a string of violent events erupts across the island, Rebecca discovers the power of secrets, and she must decide what to bury, and what to bring into the light.

Longlisted for Bloody Scotland's McIlvanney Prize for best crime book of the year.

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

My Review: Journalists make great sleuths for a series because asking questions and poking into stuff others would prefer to leave alone is literally their job description. They're also, by training, very, very sensitive to being lied to and misdirected. Plus the police know they really need what journalists have...the public's attention...so they tend to understand that cooperation is the best way forward if both sides are to get what they want and need.

This series opener relies on an investigative journalist, Rebecca Connolly, ignoring her editor's instructions to leave a juicy story about a past crime alone. A murder happens, the perp...in everyone's eyes a guilty man...fled his little gossipy island community after the Scottish verdict is handed down (loosely translatable as "not guilty but don't do it again"), leaving all islanders convnced that he absolutely murdered the beautiful, popular girl he was living with. Now, fifteen years later, he's back. Things on the island are changing, luxury vacation destination development is being proposed, opposed, and debated, and here's Roddie coming home to a place that emphatically does not want him.

What unfolds is a corking raking-up of old secrets, including some from Rebecca's family that's from this island. There is an expected amount of anti-social behavior, mostly in the past, but the homophobia and domestic violence here could offend a sensitive reader. It isn't prurient in its use but it is present and neither downlayed nor valorized. Your personal thresholds for this kind of action should be your guide in picking the book up.

The very best thing about this story is the intensity of place in it...the island, the islanders, the outsider (Rebecca) come to stir things up and ask questions about her own family connection to the place...all vividly described and strategically deployed to lure the reader in and cause the readerly radar to see false images and think they're facts. This requires Author Skelton to deploy an unweildy cast of characters and to require the undivided attention of his reader. The late Connolly père backstory, and its deep-past relationship to the story told here, felt like that one-too-manyeth bite of pecan pie with whipped cream...so tasty but just should've stayed on the plate because now it's all a wee bit much. The rhetorical palate-cleansing swig of coffee that is Rebecca's full comprehension of her father's reason for being so closemouthed about his youth on the island wasn't quite enough to keep the fifth star on this stellar debut effort. The big reveal of it was, to be honest, anti-climactic to me because I thought "...really...? this is what you were traumatized by, with all the other stuff going on?"

So, not a perfect read but, as a series-starter, darn good entertainment. Worth your eyeblinks and your gold.

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

THE BLOOD IS STILL (Rebecca Connolly #2)
DOUGLAS SKELTON
Arcade CrimeWise
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Investigative journalist Rebecca Connolly returns in this riveting, immersive thriller from the author of Thunder Bay—for readers of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina

When a man in eighteenth-century Highland dress is found dead on the site of the Battle of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie led his forces to a rout seared into Scottish memory, Rebecca Connolly takes up the case for the Chronicle. A controversial film about the rebellion and battle is being shot nearby, and it has drawn the ire of the right-wing nationalist movement Spirit of the Gael. Is there some link between the murder—the weapon used to impale the man leaves no doubt it was murder—and Spirit of the Gael or the shadowy militant group New Dawn, thought to be associated with them?

Meanwhile, in the working-class part of town, Rebecca's assignment to cover a protest against the placement of a convicted child molester into the community leads her to Mo Burke, the unlikely protest leader. Mo is a formidable woman, but she is also the matriarch of a known crime family and usually prefers to shun the spotlight. What has drawn her out? And what of her two grown sons, who share in the family business? The older one, Nolan, with Ben Affleck good looks, is clearly intrigued by Rebecca, as she is by him, despite her better instincts to steer clear of their dangerous, violent world.

And then another body is found, this one wearing the Redcoat uniform of the victorious British army.

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

My Review: There's a theme developing here...huge casts of characters, this time with lots of Scots Gaelic spellings for many things, people, organizations. Rebecca, our sleuth, stumbles into another community buzzsaw as she covers the protests against a convicted pedophile being housed in a working-class neighborhood that happens to be the turf of a crime family...in its most literal sense. The matriarch, Mo, is an understandably publicity-shy person. She has broken her public silence to lead the protests against the pedophile's housing among her people. Add in a right-wing politico out to woo voters to his vile cause by stoking paranoia (*sigh* in Scotland, too?) to a terrorist organization sowing fear and distrust plus a major motion picture using the touchy site of the Battle of Culloden and we're away!

The narratives are as expected loaded with wonderfully observed and described moments, people, emotions, and places. Possibly a bit harder to take in with equanimity are the anonymous narratives of a survivor of sexual assault. I was put off by them, but as the ending unfolded, I understood why Author Skelton made that particular choice. Be aware that it exists in the narrative, but also that it serves a plot purpose beyond prurience.

Journalism is undergoing a lot of changes in the internet age. Rebecca's job is, she feels, unstable because there have been some executive ownership shifts at her paper. What that means for her future is, clearly, to be determined...along with her interesting taste for local crime-family man Nolan. His mother, redoubtable Mo, isn't at all pleased with her son because he's done with crime and because he's been clear with her that he's not going to back away from fascinating, exciting Rebecca. This conflict is very clearly going to cost all concerned a lot of tears, stress, and heartache. *eager hand-rubbing*

The deaths at Culloden and the ugly truths undergirding their choice of methods and victims are part and parcel of the changes Brexit and the forces underlying it have revealed in Scottish society. The passions that nationalism, or I suppose tribalism is closer to the meaning I want, evokes in people are never more blatant than when History puts on her Mythmaking apron and brews up social poisons of stunning strength. What Author Skelton does with this, as with Mo and her criminal family, is scrape off the filthy film of facile propagandizing (he reserves that for Finbar the politico) for a clear-sighted look at why people adhere to often deeply destructive Causes and ideals. Means are never separable from ends. Ends are never separable from needs. Needs dictate the means at one's disposal. Round and round we go, where we'll stop nobody knows...even up to the moment that death results from in/actions that seem perfectly reasonable on their face.

There's a truly terrible sacrifice demanded by Justice, of course, and it strains everything in Rebecca's journalistic world, as well as in her emotional core. The journalist's liaision she of necessity maintains with the police is costing her dearly, and won't stop in the future. Her enemies have chosen her, as she would prefer not to make enemies at all. But that's what makes the complexity and enmeshment of the reader's intellect in the casuistries Rebecca must purvey, or puncture, or both in turn, so worth the effort.

You won't be surprised that I can't give five stars to a series mystery, given the nature of the beast is to scratch the ma'at rash that murder represents erupting on the body politic. Treading the same ground comes with costs. One of them is breaking new ground, so this four-and-a-half star read is as close to five as I myownself feel I can come.

I will say that the ending is both condign and very sad. It sets us up for some dark future probabilities and honestly I can't wait to see them.

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

A RATTLE OF BONES (Rebecca Connolly #3)
DOUGLAS SKELTON
Arcade CrimeWise
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1752, Seamus a’Ghlynne, James of the Glen, was executed for the murder of government man Colin Campbell. He was almost certainly innocent.

When banners are placed at his gravesite claiming that his namesake, James Stewart, is innocent of murder, reporter Rebecca Connolly smells a story. The young Stewart has been in prison for ten years for the brutal murder of his lover, lawyer and politician Murdo Maxwell, in his Appin home. Rebecca soon discovers that Maxwell believed he was being followed prior to his murder and his phones were tapped.

Why is a Glasgow crime boss so interested in the case? As Rebecca keeps digging, she finds herself in the sights of Inverness crime matriarch Mo Burke, who wants payback for the damage caused to her family in a previous case.

Set against the stunning backdrop of the Scottish Highlands, A Rattle of Bones is a tale of injustice and mystery, and the echo of the past in the present.

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

My Review: First, read this:

              Near Ballachulish, the Scottish Highlands, 1755
The red-coated soldier was a bloodstain against the dull sky and drab scrub on the hill.

It had a name, this desolate lump above the waters, a heathenish Scotch concotion of sounds, but he was damned if he could pronounce it. To him it was little more than a pox-ridden mound of dirt that drew the elements like a hedge whore did corn-faced beard-splitters.

The waters of the lake shivered as chill breeze weaved its way up the hill to find his solitary figure standing post. Private Henry Greenway huddled deeper into his coat, watching the small ferry being rowed across the narrows. He wished he was in his billet, a cup of hot grog in one hand and a mutton pie, warm from the oven, in the other. This was a pointless duty, a punishment for not taking proper care of the Brown Bess he now crooked loosely in one arm. His sergeant would be displeased to see him cradle the gun so carelessly, except there was no one here to bear witness, except the blasted elements and the one he guarded, who was beyond caring, Greenway wagered.

There's no question that scene sets a very clear tone...and it's one that very much resonates through this third entry in the Rebecca Connolly thriller series.

With the new life she lucked into at the end of book two lurching into gear, Rebecca Connolly can truly feel the cold truth of freedom on her neck: No one can say no but no one needs to answer her questions, or give her leads, or so much as consider offering her the chance to do what she most wants to do: fix stuff.

She's got to build her reputation all over again, in a new and different world of newsgathering, and she loves it. When Rebecca's last adventure ended in so much loss, yet so much opportunity being spread before her, this story is the one that unfolds to her horrified fascination. James Stewart, Tanist of Clan Stewart and a wrongfully convicted victim of judicial murder, has a strong resonance with an imprisoned modern-day James Stewart convicted of murdering his politician lover...though to be honest there's pretty much no sensible motive (at least to my mind) for him to have done so, and he insists that he didn't, just as the eighteenth-century James did. Because I am indifferent to spoilers, I wikied up the long-ago story and spent the rest of the book looking for the ways the current story resonated with it. Rebecca, not having my information, gets involved in this fearsomely complex muddle blind to these clues. This situation is, unsurprisingly, one that draws in her old foes from the last book. It was handled in what I found to be a plausible way.

The main character is one I love spending time with, and love sharing troubles with. This outing into the world of crusading journalism is as deeply satisfying as before. Rebecca has a difficult group of folks whose involvement in her current investigative project is central...the mother of a jailed innocent, for example, has every reason not to respond positively to a journalist...but no access to an established powerbase to give her an effective lever to prise open their minds. All she's got is her tenacity and her inability to admit defeat.

These qualities work wonders. They usually do. Afua, the mother of the present-day innocent James Stewart, is a vividly drawn rageball, betrayed and abused by those with power over her and her son's fate. She's inflexible...it's cost her a lot, but when you have no one to turn to you need to be strong...and she's got a mother's outrage at her child's ill treatment fueling her. Watching as she learns to tolerate Rebecca's "interference" in her own chaotic efforts to free her James was frustrating for me. Stiff-necked inflexible people are maddening!

What makes The story satisfying to read is the usual tension between a homophobic culture and the reality of the ease with which anyone Othered can be used to hide real criminals on the one hand, and Author Skelton's clear and unwavering presentation of these gay people as ordinary, average people. It's distressing but refreshing to see the sexual nature of the characters simply be a fact, and only the bad actors and evildoers investing in their Othering for the lowest of motives.

Literally everything about these reads is immersive...landscapes, relationships among the characters, the background concerns of twenty-first century Scotland and of news media outside major cities and underneathe international radar, which is of course where all of us live our real lives. They're present and they're intentional but they aren't competing for your readerly attention. Author Skelton makes the propulsive story much richer by allowing the reader to choose how much thought to devote to these interrelated parts while assuring the main focus is always what we saw on the marquee.

Far and away my favorite of the three reads to date.

THE GAYL JONES PAGE: THE BIRDCATCHER, nominated for a National Book Award & PALMARES, breaking a long silence in the author's art

THE BIRDCATCHER
GAYL JONES
Beacon Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST!

The Publisher Says: Legendary writer Gayl Jones returns with a stunning new novel about Black American artists in exile

Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is publishing again. In the wake of her long-awaited fifth novel, Palmares, The Birdcatcher is another singular achievement, a return to the circles of her National Book Award finalist, The Healing.

Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island.

A study in Black women's creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature—rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

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

My Review: It's very odd to me that Gayl Jones's voice was silent in American English for over a quarter century. This novel was first published in German during 1986—more than thirty-five years ago—and, until Beacon Press decided to take up the baton of being her publishing champions, simply didn't exist in her native country. It's hard not to see this as the fruits of racist-turbocharged sexism.

That said, this read (nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction, the prize to be awarded tomorrow) is a challenge for most readers. It's very complex and demands focus to derive a full picture of what happens in it; this makes a looser, less organized second half much more effort to decode.

Author Gayl has made a beautiful and strange artist's colony on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Ibiza where we meet Amanda Wordlaw (a name that might be familiar to some with previous exposure to Author Gayl), a Black American writer, as she resumes an intimate and borderline transgressive relationship with sculptor Catherine and her husband Ernest. The couple are deeply enmeshed in a psychically and physically violent relationship. Catherine, suffering from depression and other psychiatric ills, periodically makes strange attempts on Ernest's life. After Catherine is institutionalized, Amanda—in flight from a husband and child of her own for unexplained reasons—becomes ever closer to crossing the line into an inappropriate relationship with scientist and strangely calm Ernest. By the time Catherine comes home to continue work on her magnum opus, "The Birdcatcher" of the title...will she or won't she keep trying to kill Ernest? Are her materials-use restriction for Ernest's safety or are they self-imposed? And what the heck's this other artist, a white lady called "Gillette" like the razors, doing in this book? She's just irrelevant to my eyes...and why is Catherine allowed out of her institution? She's very clearly not in any way improved in her quotidian functioning....

This is why I am rating the book four, not five, stars. The second half shifts narrators from Amanda (whose husband has a *very* peculiar, and I suspect metaphorical, um...physiology) and her ponderings to being all over the place. It's not expected, and it means I now need to re-establish my investment in the tale being told as well as bring that level of investment to people I do not quite think are as interesting as Amanda, Catherine, and Ernest.

It was a very interesting note to end on...Catherine's past as a political activist and racism fighter (while never integrated into the story but rather reported to us at the end) was a major missed opportunity to explore but, more than anything else, explains the role of Catherine's obsessive de- and re-construction of the title sculpture. Such a graceful and beautiful metaphor deserved more from Author Gayl's talented pen.

If Palmares is a lyrical, evocative allohistorical exploration of the roots of identity, The Birdcatcher considers the eternal impossibility of knowing another soul, of being fully in touch with one's own soul, when in the toils of a toxic system of racism, misogyny, and the marginalization of creativity as anything except a commercial pursuit. If you're up for doing some very involved thinking about the story you're reading, this is a worthwhile story to invest in. I really ended up surprised at how much more I wanted from these characters, and then how glad I was not to be given it.

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

PALMARES
GAYL JONES
Beacon Press
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The epic rendering of a Black woman’s journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil; the return of a major voice in American literature.

First discovered and edited by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is ready to publish again. Palmares is the first of five new works by Gayl Jones to be published in the next two years, rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

Intricate and compelling, Palmares recounts the journey of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who comes of age on Portuguese plantations and escapes to a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares. Following its destruction, Almeyda embarks on a journey across colonial Brazil to find her husband, lost in battle.

Her story brings to life a world impacted by greed, conquest, and colonial desire. She encounters a mad lexicographer, desperate to avoid military service; a village that praises a god living in a nearby cave; and a medicine woman who offers great magic, at a greater price.

Combining the author’s mastery of language and voice with her unique brand of mythology and magical realism, Jones reimagines the historical novel. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter century, with vibrant settings and unforgettable characters, steeped in the rich oral tradition of its world. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, “[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.” Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.

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

My Review: Lyrical writing, exploring the roots of Identity, in an exoticized "Brazilian" setting that the author herself acknowledges is merely called Brazilian without deeply exploring Brazil or its extremely complex society.

There's been a lot of stick wielded at Author Gayl for this latter decision. She's not even trying to hide her lack of research. The Callaloo interview linked above is, simply, her statement of an author's privilege to invent and create as needed for her art: "...there aren't any facts or stories that one could say really happened."

The flipside of that choice is, of course, the responses of Brazilian people to what comes across to them as appropriation of their culture for the entertainment of others. The loudest complaints are Dandara do Palmares, famously African, replaced by a white character with her name. An unworthy part of me really enjoys seeing this kerfuffle center on a Black woman creator in this context. Another part of me is slightly impatient with Author Gayl for bringing such fully warranted criticism on a story that, at its heart, is about the roots of identity in memory, a notoriously unreliable source of any sort of truth or fact. Then the problems with Spanish words in a Brazilian context...well, it wasn't particularly well-handled to be honest.

So what the heck am I doing giving it four stars?

Because this is a work of fantastical fiction, made by a writer in her own mind, and that to me is a different thing than an historical study, biography, or even conventional historical novel. The author isn't attempting to tell the story of the actual Dandara, but has made the choice to invent an entirely other Brazil that doesn't really resemble the real one. It was a choice. She made it up...and that is an artist's privilege. I'm not hugely interested in ownership arguments, as I see them as the wrong angle to take on the "who tells the stories" argument we, as a culture, need to have. The answer in my view: Bring diverse voices to the table, listen to all the voices you can find, and quit worrying about whose voice is saying things "wrong." That's not relevant to fiction...the story one wants to tell is either true to the spirit of the inspiration or not, but that's not "wrong" it's just something people whose identity is involved should bring up as a data point. I want to read stories, always; I usually prefer them to be true to the source that inspired them, but even that is negotiable.

This has a very direct and personal relationship to me, an older gay man, because so many...so! many!...books about gay men in relationships are written by straight women. They get things wrong. It's really inevitable...a few have done so in ways I found quite startling. But I'm not going to say they were wrong for "appropriating" my identity as a gay man because they didn't. They chose to tell a story about people like me without doing research? Okay...but I'm going to tell on you. What difference it makes is to the people who listen to me, and take my opinions for what they are: More or less informed, experienced in some areas, and where possible backed up by facts. (Opinions are of necessity based on facts as one understands them, but not wholly defined by them.)

Anyway. My point, and I do have one, is that I took on board the upset responses of actual Brazilians to the way Author Gayl used their history as a launching pad for this lyrical and flowing exploration of American Black slave identities, and still found much to admire and enjoy in the way the author told her unique, wholly fictional story.

I can't give it a full five stars, as some have done, because I found the longueurs of stream-of-consciousness writing obtruded into my ability to connect the story just that fraction of time too much for the experience to be fully immersive. It's possible the novel is just that touch too long for its story....Almeyda does not start out fully formed yet we're asked to invest in her as though she has...but, at all events, Palmares made me stay up too late and care enough to do it.

ALL THE QUIET PLACES, debut YA novel by & about First-Nations youth caught in tumultuous times & WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER, CanLit monadnock Howard Norman's YA-themed novel

ALL THE QUIET PLACES
BRIAN THOMAS ISAAC
Brindle & Glass
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Brian Isaac's powerful debut novel All the Quiet Places is the coming-of-age story of Eddie Toma, an Indigenous (Syilx) boy, told through the young narrator's wide-eyed observations of the world around him.

It's 1956, and six-year-old Eddie Toma lives with his mother, Grace, and his little brother, Lewis, near the Salmon River on the far edge of the Okanagan Indian Reserve in the British Columbia Southern Interior. Grace, her friend Isabel, Isabel's husband Ray, and his nephew Gregory cross the border to work as summer farm labourers in Washington state. There Eddie is free to spend long days with Gregory exploring the farm: climbing a hill to watch the sunset and listening to the wind in the grass. The boys learn from Ray's funny and dark stories. But when tragedy strikes, Eddie returns home grief-stricken, confused, and lonely.

Eddie's life is governed by the decisions of the adults around him. Grace is determined to have him learn the ways of the white world by sending him to school in the small community of Falkland. On Eddie's first day of school, as he crosses the reserve boundary at the Salmon River bridge, he leaves behind his world. Grace challenges the Indian Agent and writes futile letters to Ottawa to protest the sparse resources in their community. His father returns to the family after years away only to bring chaos and instability. Isabel and Ray join them in an overcrowded house. Only in his grandmother's company does he find solace and true companionship.

In his teens, Eddie's future seems more secure—he finds a job, and his long-time crush on his white neighbour Eva is finally reciprocated. But every time things look up, circumstances beyond his control crash down around him. The cumulative effects of guilt, grief, and despair threaten everything Eddie has ever known or loved.

All the Quiet Places is the story of what can happen when every adult in a person's life has been affected by colonialism; it tells of the acute separation from culture that can occur even at home in a loved familiar landscape. Its narrative power relies on the unguarded, unsentimental witness provided by Eddie.

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

My Review: This beautifully written debut novel, telling a deeply affecting story of a boy's coming of age amid loss and deprivation, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. I'm a bit surprised that it didn't make the shortlist because it's got the power and the credibility to impress any judging panel. Still...however they chose, the judges chose this story to stay longlisted.

Eddie Toma is a character I recognize...a youth whose rudder isn't calibrated like he's told it's supposed to be. It's an adolescent trait, of course, but the issues Eddie is coping with are his life are those unique to an unvalued Indigenous male. In a settler-colonial society he isn't going to find a lot of validation. What he has, in compensation, is a formidable grandmother who models a moral compass nonpareil. He spends his entire growing-up time torn between the need, like all of us, to figure out what the world is about, and the impoverished person's need to find enough food to fill his hunger. His life in the white-people school in the nearest town is a nightmare of bewilderment...how is he supposed to know about racism? until he started school he'd never even been to the white people who lived across the road's home!...and there is no one to explain anything to him at home or at school.

Except Eva, the white girl who lives across the road...she's kind, and she's weird, and she's got something Eddie can't quite figure out going on in her mind. (That remains true all through the book.) Eva is a beautiful, willful, intelligent girl caught in a place too small to hold her talent, still less her interest. As Eddie and Eva continue to knock their corners together and as Life gives them nasty buffets and blows, they simply get on with getting on. Growing up. Learning and wondering and trying stuff out.

When I think about the way the story unfolds after reading the ending of the book, I feel so much more as though Author Isaac brought his bluntest weapons to the tale's wordsmithing. I was always involved in Eddie's solitary life, weirdly lived among the crowds of people who were Others to Eddie and who in their turn Othered him. I wished, at every failed opportunity to make a connection with someone, that I could go into the pages and hug Eddie. I wished his family had seen him, the "him" that this novel builds, the real him. His mother was challenged at every single step by single motherhood, by racial prejudice, by the judgment and unkindness of the world; her treatment of her sons was only marginally better than their treatment at the world's hands, and it's there that I wanted to go be a White Savior.

It's not, then, the happiest of lives that Eddie and his family live. He loves, I think, almost no one but he crushes on Eva and still can't connect with her. She, in her turn, is both kind and cruel. She's a kid...she's a rebel...she's a privileged white lass whose feelings for an Indigenous lad are titillatingly forbidden, yet came across to me as sincere. As the years progress, Eddie can't make sense of her, can't make sense of his burgeoning feelings for her, can't take in the manifold cruelties he's undergoing on every level except one quiet refuge: His grandmother.

His mother's mother is a calm center of this chaotic bunch. Even her white racist neighbors feel respect for her, though they never express it without nastiness. Eddie loves her, in the best way a deprived and neglected heart like his can love. Only to her can he turn in all his bewilderment and rage, with all his confused longings for nameless-to-him caring and nurturing. From her he absorbs respect for the wild world, and her son Alphonse (whose life doesn't include much voluntary time spent with any kids) leads him by example to knowledge of and connection with his environment. These factors enable Eddie to get through the disasters of most all colonialism-, racism-, and poverty-blighted lives. He is, at base and at heart, only truly, trustingly at home in the wild world.

The ending of the story is, I confess, a bit downbeat for my taste; it's the reason I'm not giving the read all five stars. It makes perfect sense. It is exactly what, I suspect, happened to someone, somewhere in Author Isaac's own past. It is not false; it is just...so very, very sad. I wouldn't recommend this as a read for someone needing a cup of cheer. But I do recommend that you read this tender, loving, cruelly realistic tale of life lived in racism's ugly glare.

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

WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER
HOWARD NORMAN
Mariner Books
$14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books—The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L—in this erotically charged and morally complex story.

Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges—the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.

Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents—including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling—lend intense narrative power to Norman's uncannily layered story.

Wyatt's account of the astonishing—not least to him—events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one.

An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY LIVE AND DIE ON OUR PATRONAGE.

My Review: When an author of Howard Norman's stature uses the epistolary storytelling technique, the chances of disappointment...always higher when this difficult-to-master form is used...shrink back into insignificance. As expected, then, this read was a master class in what and how to make of the epistles in question.

Wyatt's parents aren't alive as we meet him. I got a strong intimation that he, looking back on a whole family's life pretty passionately (if unhappily) lived, didn't feel they were alive before they each committed suicide for mixed-up love of the same woman. If I had to guess (Author Norman doesn't over-explain anything, ever) I'd say Wyatt's life more complicated than most from the very beginning. His letter to his largely unseen daughter, however, is all about putting forward the facts of her paternal family's life as he recalls them. It felt to me as though Author Norman's telling of the tale was direct and honest; so Wyatt, then, wasn't aware even in retrospect of his life's peculiarly high levels of complexity.

In The Highland Book of Platitudes, Marlais, there's an entry that reads, "Not all ghosts earn our memory in equal measure." I think about this sometimes. I think especially about the word "earn," because it implies an ongoing willful effort on the part of the dead, so that if you believe the platitude, you have to believe in the afterlife, don't you? Following that line of thought, there seem to be certain people—call them ghosts—with the ability to insinuate themselves into your life with more belligerence and exactitude than others—it's their employment and expertise.

With all the arousal hormones Wyatt's story begins with, and given the fact that he's writing to his twentyish daughter, this is a story pretty much guaranteed to be about the erotic charge that a messy life provides and more importantly about its costs. Wyatt's unrequited love for a person in his family circle who is not a relative is the stuff of life. I suspect it was deeply relatable to anyone who's ever been part of a blended or a found family. The object of his affections, herself an added person (one whose family isn't a birth family), falls madly in love with someone socially inconvenient: A German émigré, and this story's set during World War II. So there's another level of relatability, as what adult has made it this far without an unrequited love?

My whole life, Marlais, I've had difficulty coming up with the right word to use in a given situation, but at least I know what the right word would have been once I hear it.

The problem this inability brings with it, or perhaps the character trait it points up, is that of passivity. Wyatt is not a doer but a done-to. Nothing that happens in his (passive, epistolary) account of his life to the daughter he doesn't know is as a result of his actions. The one truly, damningly awful thing he's involved in, and for which he is now seeking his daughter's forgiveness, is a result of his inaction, his inability to stand for something.

I realize I've sometimes raced over the years like an ice skater fleeing the devil on a frozen river.
–and–
I refuse any longer to have my life defined by what I haven't told you.

But what he does, this man of inaction, is write the young woman a letter. How typical of him...make an effort but make it ineffectually. What a letter does is enable him to remain inactive yet still offer, as if from behind a wall, an accounting of the young woman in question's heritage. What happens as a result? We never know; Author Norman's story is of Wyatt, not Marlais.

You'll have to decide if that's a deal-maker or -breaker for you. I fall on the line between those poles. I need to feel a story is complete, fulfilling its brief, to really lose myself in it. The musicality of Author Norman's line-by-line creation can draw one along for a good while but there's always that need to have some story pay-off for me. I was not all the way satisfied...I wasn't dissatisfied...there was a strange liminality in this tale of passive inaction's consequences. I would recommend you read the book. I wouldn't recommend it to you, however, of you're in the mood for a propulsive plot-driven thrillride. Does the read repay the effort? It did for me—mostly.

I think Author Norman turned me into Wyatt!

MY BROTHER: A Novel, Scandinavian grimdark not-fantasy with a sting in its tail

MY BROTHER: A Novel
KARIN SMIRNOFF (tr. Anna Paterson)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Swedish publishing phenomenon: a literary noir of extraordinary power follows the discovery of a young woman’s body in the long grass behind the sawmill...

Which part of the story is not for telling?

Jana Kippo has returned to Smalånger to see her twin brother, Bror, still living in the small family farmhouse in the remote north of Sweden.

Within the isolated community, secrets and lies have grown silently, undisturbed for years.

Following the discovery of a young woman's body in the long grass behind the sawmill, the siblings, hooked by a childhood steeped in darkness, need to break free.

But the truth cannot be found in other people's stories. The question is: can it be found anywhere?

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

My Review: First, read this:

We were born just a few minutes apart and are alike in many ways. Especially in how we look. We are thin and gingery, with straggly unpigmented hair. We are so bleakly unremarkable that nobody used to remember either of us as somebody. Only as the twins.

–and–

So the police were looking into her death I said.
Of course they did. What did you expect. A dead woman found in the grass near the sawmill and it turns out she has slept with most of the married men in the village. And a number of others as well. On top of that one of the suspects is a convicted murderer.
Who I asked. Me of course he said.

You're now familiar with the author's voice in this, the first of three novels set it the Arctic Swedish town of Smalånger, where Bror and Jana are from...Jana has left...Bror hasn't bothered, he can drink himself to death in the comfort of what was the family's home. With, now, the company of his twin, as she chooses to come back to, to, help? Anyway, bear witness if not accelerate the crash. To keep herself in food (Bror worries about booze, nothing else) she starts working for the local social services department, which she calls smalångerhomecareservices, thus making herself useful while getting fully up on the local gossip from the people she works with and the ones she's helping to survive whatever time is left to them in a modicum of physical comfort. No one in Smalånger lives in psychic comfort, she discovers early, and often.

My idea of what I was in for was too weak-kneed. I thought I'd get something dark, but not my-eyes-my-poor-eyes dark! A woman suffers a dreadful childhood; returns to the scene of the crime to be there with the brother ("Bror" is Swedish for "brother"; unlike Jana, he has no personal name) whose life was stalled, stopped, and never had any particular reason to start it again. He drifts aimlessley, but reasonably harmlessly...yes, he sleeps with his best friend's wife, but it's not like he was the only one who did; he's drinking himself to death, sure, but when the woman he loved but who was murdered by person or persons unknown, what else is there to do except hang out with her widower and drink?

No, not chuckle one in this book. But there are two more in Swedish and I need to read them now!

What the heck? I need to read them? Yes, while I wouldn't have predicted that I'd get invested in this Nordic grimdark saga of terrible, sad, claustrophobic life in a tiny, remote, and dark (physically) place, that is exactly what happened. What more there is to learn I want to learn it.

It's that kind of a read, y'all. You won't leave the same as you entered.

REAL BAD THINGS, a very accurate title for a twisty story

REAL BAD THINGS
KELLY J. FORD
Thomas & Mercer
$4.99 Kindle edition, available for pre-order; releases Thursday

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017, comes an evocative suspense about the cost of keeping secrets and the dangers of coming home.

Beneath the roiling waters of the Arkansas River lie dead men and buried secrets.

When Jane Mooney’s violent stepfather, Warren, disappeared, most folks in Maud Bottoms, Arkansas, assumed he got drunk and drowned. After all, the river had claimed its share over the years.

When Jane confessed to his murder, she should have gone to jail. That’s what she wanted. But without a body, the police didn’t charge her with the crime. So Jane left for Boston―and took her secrets with her.

Twenty-five years later, the river floods and a body surfaces. Talk of Warren’s murder grips the town. Now in her forties, Jane returns to Maud Bottoms to reckon with her past: to do jail time, to face her revenge-bent mother, to make things right.

But though Jane’s homecoming may enlighten some, it could threaten others. Because in this desolate river valley, some secrets are better left undisturbed.

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

My Review: Like her previous novel Cottonmouths (my review linked above), this book is set in a rural area that could be anywhere but undeniably is the American South. At no point do we feel the curiously unmoored sensation that many crime-centered stories have, that eternal-now anywhereness. It starts from when Jane is released from steerage, I mean the commuter plane, onto the hot tarmac of a regional airport. Her mother's nasty phone message hissing in her newly single, newly homeless ear, "don't even think of running." Why Ma didn't say "again" is beyond me, because Jane's running hasn't stopped since it was "away to Boston, there a lesbian to be."

So now she's coming back to face the music for confessing to her stepfather's murder a quarter century ago. Note: confessing to. Not murdering. And that demented witch of a mother believes her, always has, she's been squatting in this nowhere town stewing in her rage and hate for the abnormal daughter who (she said she believed) murdered the abusive man who probably would've killed Ma by now had he lived.

Ah. Family ties.

Like many women with no options, her Ma had never met a nice guy and this latest one was the most violent yet. And the whole town knew it. Not a soul stepped in to help...except Jane's young love, Georgia Lee. Things go very Beautiful Creatures for a minute...Jane's brother Jason gets pulled in...it's all a major clusterfuck, in fact, and when it all settles down there's no Warren. I mean, he's dead, but there's no body. So, no body = no crime. Confess til ya turn purple, Janey luv, no body = no crime. She does spend a goodly amount of time in juvenile detention. The second that ends, she gets the hell out of Arkansas.

What is really clear while reading this book is the quiet insanity of country life. People are all up in each other's hip pockets, they know what's happening, but not a soul interferes. Wouldn't be proper, if a woman lets a man beat her up that's her lookout. Those kids won't amount to anything anyway, so what they suffer.

It's really like this, folks. This is what the world is. And it's ugly as all get out.

Now that everything changed because there's a body, surfaced after twenty-five years, Jane's home to face the music.

What music? She was a juvenile, she was in state custody until charges were dropped, and now there's *a* body but no one knows if it's that right one. (Lotsa men disappeared from this town over the years. No one seems to've looked into it. Not like they were anybody much.)

So we have ourselves a problem. What's Jane facing? Trial? Still no body...conviction? LOLOL

Her life. Her mother. Her ex, her first true love Georgia Lee. Even the little brother who simply existed throughout this ordeal, offering nothing to Jane. All that and more; vaster than oceans and more deep is the need in Jane for answers rather than lies or silences. The answers she finally gets are deeply unsettling. I could never call the last meeting of Jason and Jane a case of healing by honesty, but it was certainly an explanation of parts of their past that seemed weird and random.

Kelly J. Ford was formed by Arkansas and she has never forgiven it for that. As revenges go, this book is a great step.