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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baloney.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stand up to it or be consumed by it.

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

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

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

...

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

BIG CHIEF, debut Native American political/corruption story about loyalty and grief

BIG CHIEF
JON HICKEY
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.

Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.

But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.

Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.

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

My Review: I Pearl-Ruled There There. I almost Pearl-Ruled this book. The reason I didn't, in spite of the irksome meandering of the plot, is that I liked Mitch and didn't like the coruscating cloud of people in Orange's book. I think there's a deeper...difference...in these stories than I am accustomed to. The characters in Tommy Orange's novel never felt distinctive or differentiated as I read that first segment. Hickey's characters, Mitch in particular, were more fleshed out, which allowed me to get into the twisty story. But both novels share a similarly alienating absence of interest in building tension for all they're both stories about identity-forming in the crucible of interpersonal conflict.

I am all over stories of power addicts misusing their hits of the drug. It feels evergreen and timely at the same moment of storytelling..."this could be 1888, 1988, 2008, and I'd be in the same rooms among the same people" says my headliner note...so I'm better able to get past the messy, not-obvious-why-they're-happening PoV shifts. I was sometimes a little fuddled about Mack's hold over Mitch, a lawyer who's cynical yet still young enough to believe the law has force of its own. Mack has no such illusions (nor does his political opponent Gloria) so he's, um, pragmatic and elozable. Mitch? Not sure if he's willfully blind to Mack's, um, character traits or simply prefers him to other political animals because Mack's familiar to Mitch. Mitch uses his lawyerly (though not legal) skills to fix events in Mack's favor but he's not crossing his personal ethical boundaries.

I felt immersed in the Passage Rouge Nation. I felt I understood why people love the place. I was on board for the ways and means Mack adopted to effect change, so truly *got* how he lost his moral way. I mistrusted his political opponent/loudly activist Gloria. While believing she was at least half sincere in her desire to reform the world, I felt it was not so much it wouldn't line her pockets. My evil little inner cynic got a good outing among these people.

As to why there are not-quite four full stars, I never fully bought into the plot to retain power Mack set in motion, as it seemed out of proportion thus guaranteed to blow up and cause him worse problems. Mitch saw this, I think, as a failing but he and Mack want the same outcome and share so much history; now how much sense of self does he care to put on the line to achieve a goal? Mitch is a perpetual outsider, which I relate to deeply, as well as a carrier of nasty generational trauma. It was clear to me as I read past the point I nearly tapped out that Author Hickey gets something profound about Mitch. He is among the few who is capable of making his trauma into a source of power.

I think the real reason I found this story so powerfully involving all comes down to my sense of connection to Mitch. Yeah, I'd've liked less muddling through the plot's interesting intertwining strands; I might've enjoyed Mack more had he not possessed what felt like a convenient penchant for making own goals. In the end I allowed this debut novel its imperfections because I feel, and I hope, Author Hickey will be back on our shelves soon with an even more accomplished story for us.

BLACKWATER FALLS, first-in-series Muslim immigrant-themed thriller

BLACKWATER FALLS
AUSMA ZEHANAT KHAN (Inspector Inaya Rahman #1)
Minotaur Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From critically acclaimed author Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blackwater Falls is the first in a timely and powerful crime series, introducing Detective Inaya Rahman.

Girls from immigrant communities have been disappearing for months in the Colorado town of Blackwater Falls, but the local sheriff is slow to act and the fates of the missing girls largely ignored. At last, the calls for justice become too loud to ignore when the body of a star student and refugee—the Syrian teenager Razan Elkader—is positioned deliberately in a mosque.

Detective Inaya Rahman and Lieutenant Waqas Seif of the Denver Police are recruited to solve Razan’s murder, and quickly uncover a link to other missing and murdered girls. But as Inaya gets closer to the truth, Seif finds ways to obstruct the investigation. Inaya may be drawn to him, but she is wary of his motives: he may be covering up the crimes of their boss, whose connections in Blackwater run deep.

Inaya turns to her female colleagues, attorney Areesha Adams and Detective Catalina Hernandez, for help in finding the truth. The three have bonded through their experiences as members of vulnerable groups and now they must work together to expose the conspiracy behind the murders before another girl disappears.

Delving deep into racial tensions, and police corruption and violence, Blackwater Falls examines a series of crimes within the context of contemporary American politics with compassion and searing insight.

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

My Review: Look at that rating above. Now, listen to me: I am heartily sick of reading about men who abuse, rape, and murder girls. It's imagery I don't want in my head...real life provides more than enough examples of this disgusting, evil, inexcusable, reprehensible thinking and behavior.

Now are you more impressed that this story earned four stars from me?

Author Zehanat Khan is a talented wordsmith, and a very adept plotmonger. Her hate crime in this story is so extremely nauseating to me that I seriously thought about just not going forward with the read. A young Muslim immigrant girl's body is found crucified on the doors of a local mosque.

That was it for me. I closed the Kindle and just barely didn't delete the DRC. But, as people I know posted reviews that were equally appalled but full of praise (though sometimes they intended it to be condemnation), I thought I should pick up the read. I'm not pleased I did, but I'm glad I've read it.

I am in sympathy with Author Zehanat Khan's politics so I didn't feel it necessary to whinge about them. Her deeply felt disdain for the evangelical christian congregation in this story is short of the religion-blaming game that so many "christians" indulge in (despite their own "savior"'s injunctions not to judge others). I was pleased by that. I'd've been equally pleased had she indulged in christian bashing, though. The fact that she has Inaya ruminating on the *people* who committed this heinous act is a step up from the run-of-the-mill thriller.

The girl-posse that works together was, I suppose, fan service. It didn't make me feel any warmer towards that gynergy-celebrating stuff. It also led me to wonder if, in her authorial haste not to bash men as a whole, she hadn't rushed the possible romantic stuff she's hinting at between Inaya and Lieutenant Seif. It feels too soon to me. I want to get to know her as a person before thinking there might soon be a part-of-a-couple vibe.

More especially I want to see Inaya grow into her own powers as an investigator. This is a rookie's case. Let her get past this, move into a more confident footing, before saddling her with a man. That isn't what's going to happen, it seems, but it was an issue I felt needed to be addressed in my four-star review...as you're beginning to see, I liked the read but wasn't mad for it. I rated it higher than my first instinct said to rate it because it's very important to make these kinds of crimes public. I don't, as said above, like reading about violence against women. I am rather fond of a fair few women and don't wish to think of this kind of horror being perpetrated on them. But it's not like it doesn't happen, and disproportionately to immigrants and women of color; swallowing down my visceral disgust for the kind of sick fuck who could conceive of this crime as an act to be brought to fruition is necessary.

We need, as a society, to have the horrible, painful conversations that are the only way to get past the us-v-them divides that animate these haters. Books, novels most especially, are the premier way to give us permission to discuss hate and its dreaful consequences. I hope a few of y'all will see that opportunity and seize it.

DID YE HEAR MAMMY DIED?: A Memoir, or "How to Laugh Your Way Through Grief"

DID YE HEAR MAMMY DIED?: A Memoir
SÉAMAS O'REILLY
Little, Brown
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles.

After the untimely death of his mother, five-year old Seamas and his ten (TEN!) siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow Seamas and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together.

Along the way, we see Seamas through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time Seamas worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the President of Ireland.

Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired Seamas regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.

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

My Review: First, read this:

Thankfully, he laughs heartily throughout, and his main objections are less of taste or decency and more points of fact he felt I needed hearing. Besides telling me, several more times, to slow down, most of his input cleaves close to the pedantic. Such is the case with my description of the priest who came to bless our 26-foot-long caravan before the 3,200 mile round trip we took to Spain, the year after my mother died. I describe the oddness of the scene, the priest swinging incense around our giant caravan, in full vestments, conducting himself with the stately grace of an altogether more solemn occasion. “He wasn’t in full vestments” Daddy interjects, a hint of mocking laughter in his voice. “He was wearing a sotan” he says, with an incredulity that suggests I’d committed a faux pas equivalent to forgetting my own name.

The fact that I’d misidentified this sotan—an only marginally less formal, long cassock type affair—is sufficient for my father to consider me very badly caught out. He denies outright that he ever killed a mouse with a tiny plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the virgin Mary, and seems particularly aggrieved that I keep saying he knows every priest in Ireland. This he decries as emblematic of my addiction to overstatement—“Séamas, there should be a disclaimer on every page”—before suggesting a figure like 70-80% would be more realistic.

That's from the LitHub piece about Author Séamas reading parts of his memoir to his blinded-by-diabetes Daddy. Because, in the end, you're not going to thank me for ruining the fun of this read by quoting some parts I highlighted to you. I think you're best going into this read, and I really, really hope you *will* go into this read, without too much explicit information.

You already know the bones, the author's one of eleven children...I need a lie-down every time I think about that...raised by a man alone. Modern sensibilities have it that men can't raise children, and that there's such a thing as overpopulation, and dear goddesses below us why the hell didn't she just kick him out of bed?! But to the devil with all that, dive into the absolutely astonishing O'Reilly family's beautifully bizarre world as remembered by the ninth of the eleven souls born to two people whose love was, I am shocked to say, well attested by all and sundry. Especially their children.

The author being gainfully employed, and even a success at his career, and none of his siblings having gone to prison, well I'd say they did very well, those delightfully out-of-step parents. I'd also say, given Séamas's astonishing capacity for reading, that the whole ecosystem of family was a healthy, if really weird, one. Who else had a Daddy whose response to an IRA bombing that shattered some of their remote house's windows was to be, in a word, unconcerned? Larger implications, political ideas, the safety of his family, all came down to "if I panic and go to pieces there is no hope of ever making all of them feel safe again." And he chose their sense of serenity, of faith that the world would be right, over his probable fears and sleeplessness...but he held no brief with hate, or with unkindness of any sort.

What stands out for me, reading this memoir of a man so much younger than myself and from such a widely divergent background, is how included I felt as I read the anecdotes. I was a guest being given the lay of the land. I was the stranger who, accidentally wandering into the ambit of the family, was welcomed with the greatest possible camaraderie and bonhomie. My drink glass was never empty and the snacks were endless, so my new friends were set to make me one of the neighbors and friends whose bemused orbits are noted and needed without breaking the harmony within.

I am so happy I read this memoir of a five-year-old "half-orphan" and his trip through this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver, for that perfect locution) among a family he clearly loves and likes. If I were just slightly more evil, I'd be so jealous of him I'd spoiler all his jokes and tread on his every punchline. But I know when I've been offered a beautiful gift. This is one.

So, Joe O'Reilly...I know you're not going to read my words about your lad Séamas...but you should know that your work, the hard slogging work of being alive when your mate is dead...is the reason we all have a very fine gift in your son. In his gifts, so many that owe their existence and their potency to you.

A glass of cheer to you, sir.