AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, Emily Jane's ruminations on end-stage capitalism and toxic masculinity

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES
EMILY JANE
Hyperion Avenue (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: America’s venture capitalist werewolves meet their match in USA Today bestseller Emily Jane’s third rollicking, genre-defying novel.

“It takes aliens (or an Emily Jane) to help us see our society for the bizarre, sugary, microplastic-poisoned dream it is.” —Edgar Cantero

From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide…

Many full moons ago, a young American boy with ambition in his belly and the moon in his veins followed his destiny west, determined to carve a path to success no matter the carnage.

Two centuries later, a city is captivated by the strange and savage murder of a young woman. Her roommate, Natasha, no longer able to afford their apartment alone—and hounded by both rumors of wolves and a pop-star’s angry fan-swarm—has resorted to living in her car. There’s nothing left for her…except vengeance.

Across town, Shane LaSalle is about to see his wildest dreams come true. He already has a gorgeous apartment and a high paying job in venture capital. Now the partners of Barrington Equity have invited him to board the company’s private jet for an exclusive retreat. But with partnership finally in his reach, Shane realizes he’s losing his taste for just how ruthless and all-consuming the firm is.

Epic and electric, American Werewolves brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the twenty-first century, where devouring the weak is an American birthright as old as the country itself.

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

My Review: I was really amused by On Earth as It Is on Television last year. It made me smile and chuckle in a year when those were not my first choices of response to the world and its shenanigans. I'd hoped for the same experience here.

Mostly got it, though entirely without humor. Toxic masculinity and predatory capitalism are worthy targets for Author Emily Jane's sharply observed snark. Told in two narrative strands, this story of modern-day Shane, an ordinary young man who's just found out he's now a partner in an equity-capital firm; modern-day Natasha, a downwardly mobile woman who is determined to find out how her bizarrely murdered roommate, Marie, died and why no one else seems to care; and, in the nineteenth century, a boy called Bit who wends his way West to make his fortune. There's a horrible animal attack on Shane, to bookend Marie's murder by an unknown creature; it's the first of many such events that Author Emily Jane presents in a dry, unsensationalized framework for us to, ermmm, chew over. Why this character? Why now? What really happened here, who's noticed, and why are we seeing the responses that Emily Jane shows us?

It's just incredible that these people are somehow existing in relation to each other. It does feel stretch-y, like the need of the storytelling trumped the need of the characters; none of them are ever going to be easy in each others' headspace. Which is the point. It just left me with a sad, uneasy emotional aftertaste. I'm clear that the rape-culture and misogyny elements are presented in a highly negative and critical light. I don't know for sure that they're necessary to foreground so much...put it down to my dislike of these themes, not the author's overuse of them in making your decision to read the story or not.

I suspect that, my quibbles above notwithstanding, it will be Author Emily Jane's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-esque urban fantasy elements regarding lycanthropy and its invented factual history that will cause most of y'all to give the read a pass. I get it...the technique can feel off-putting if over- or awkwardly done. I found these elements very well-chosen and did not find them out of place or obtrusive in the author's hands. Werewolves or aliens, from her previous book—makes no odds, each is as unlikely as the other to be objectively verifiably present among us.

Your taste in humor will matter a lot in your experience of the read, so get that sample under your belt. If you run across this: "Veronica tried to convince him that werewolves weren't supposed to cry, until her dad explained that werewolves could cry when they needed to and it didn't make them any less werewolvesy," and do not at least chuckle, this read will flop for you likely quite resoundingly.

Most of the rest of us will, however, get our grin on. I think it's worth the time and treasure it will take to get it read.

ANGEL DOWN is hands-down my favorite WWI novel

ANGEL DOWN
DANIEL KRAUS
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now...the paperback comes out on 12 May 2026 for $18.00! Preorder at this non-affiliate Bookshop.org link.

WINNER OF THE 2026 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION!

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025 selection!

Rating: 4.5* of five

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: The critically acclaimed author of the “crazily enjoyable” (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

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

My Review: I learned early in life that humans are vile, irredeemable homunculi, ruled by hatred, greed, and envy. Church was a solid training ground, thank you Jesus. So the story of the men in this tale wasn't a revelation or a surprise, nor an insulting calumny on humankind. It merely felt like I was hearing from a cheerier, more forgiving soul-sibling of mine.

Did anyone I know read Ducks, Newburyport? That hugely long sentence has a smaller sibling now in Kraus's latest, weird-stop-full-out toccata for literary pipe organ. It's about greed and hate and jealous loathing and fear...it's about humans trying to cope with transcendent realities while in the mire of fantastical pestilential mud. It's what your soul wants and your body resists while you can't even see a yard ahead because you need not to be slaughtered.

Unlike Lucy Ellmann's genius work of transcendence in the quotidian...I'm too intimidated to review it, there's just too much in there I want to read aloud to you!...this sentence is more compressible. It feels like Author Kraus did what Warhol did in Empire...turned on the camera after framing the shot then went away...but the point of this story is not to watch as time passes but watch as feelings, desires, emotions pass. It's a Zen in-joke. It's the kind of technique that some bounce off hard. It's meant to enable you as reader to get inside a flow of experiences of reality without ever feeling you are limited to just one. White space is your resting point; the absence of periods/full stops is your clue to the emotional reality of the Great War these people are utterly mired in, consumed by, entrapped entombed enmeshed inside.

The experiences are all, mental emotional psychical transcendent one and all, all of them are brutal and honest and unsentimentally crudely Earthy. In the midst of a grinding torturous killing machine with no end to the horror pain cruelty waste dehumanization, how else could they be? An angel from God in Her Heaven wounded and suffering? A divine being in need? A war experience that encompasses this! An actual angel laid low and so accessible to the traumatized men in need of a miracle....

So now, this being the case, what do these men do? Why do they hesitate or even reject doing the "obvious" and stopping the War? but a nagging voice insists it’s a miracle, which only pisses him off, he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to start believing in miracles here in hell

Bagger is our PoV. He is not one bit better than he is forced to be. He is canny, savvy to the ways of the world; he has a limited intellect, and if he has a soul, I saw no evidence of it. Arno, his foil, is Lumpenproletariat on legs, though more redeemable in my eyes than Bagger.

So how to explain my four and a half stars, when everything I've said either points all the way up or all the way down? I'm missing one key thing to make it the holotype war-fantasy story to rule them all: Why? Within the story, the why? never comes. I understand it's deliberate, it's a choice not a lapse. I still think a "why"...why Bagger, why now, why angel not demon...anchors a story set in a brutally real setting better than a lingering question does.

Gore, wickedness, horror, and all, it's one of my favorite reads of 2025.

FLUX, a hard-to-believe-it's-a-debut novel about identity, grief, and Otherness

FLUX
JINWOO CHONG
Melville House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his employers have inadvertently discovered time travel and are covering up a string of violent crimes.

Combining elements of neo-noir, speculative fiction, and '80s detective shows, FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ling Ma’s Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters —Bo, Brandon and Blue— who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control.

* After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family.

* 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls.

* 48-year-old Blue participates in a television exposé of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length.

Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves?

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

My Review: Creative uses of the time-travel plot don't grow on trees. This one, with its interesting way of weaving Eighties pop cultural touchstones...not, I hasten to say, specifics...lends the proceedings an air of cyberpunk coolth, removed from the moist, sweaty realities of Life.

I suspect that the air of remove was meant to aid in the project of obscuring a fact that was blindingly obvious to me from the off: These three people are one person, albeit the kind of one-person idea that a time-travel-adjacent story produces. It's a good use of the overdone time-travel trope. I was not, however, in any doubt about the fact. I don't know of my own personal knowledge that one is meant not to see this, though the clues point to that being the author's intent.

If I have a gripe about the storytelling, it's Brandon addressing the hero of Raider in the satanic second person. I hate that. It was acceptable...barely...because it wasn't ambiguous who was being addressed, therefore it never ran afoul of my loathing for having an authorial finger poked in my chest.

As a record of how one man integrates the pain of a past that was marred by loss into a present that is ruled by betrayal, the story fires on all cylinders. As a story about the way we anchor ourselves in the ever-shifting emotional landscape of our life, it stands out from the crowd. As a gentle admonition for men to do the work of coming to terms with the emotional baggage they, we, all carry it is effective in its use of pop-culture tropes and constructs to embody the risks of not doing so.

Ambitious and clever and emotionally literate, it was a fine experiment in telling a story about the cost to a man of failing to connect with his own feelings as well as the roots of his identity as a man. Fathers are routinely absent from sons' lives in every way possible in fiction. It's not new territory broken here, either. It's not much explored, more reported, so there's little emotional heft in this take. I wasn't surprised by this though the structure of the time-travel bits made me think this was a missed opportunity. In a story that focuses on pains from loss, why not get into it?

The fact that the betrayal plot I've alluded to comes from Brandon's job being among the tech scum was *chef's kiss* to me. It enabled Author Chong to deal with the orientalism surrounding a lot of tech-centered fiction. It's largely unreflective, most tech narrative use, simply making characters from East or south Asian backgrounds. Here we delve into that identity and its costs more than usual, adding to the mix the character's queerness. That aspect alone wins Author Chong a major reprieve from chastisement for minor amounts of failure to explore satisfyingly some paths he starts down.

I hope all y'all will give this ambitious, quite successful, debut novel of identity, grieving for selves and lives not lived, and coming to terms with one's actual life through fiction, a whirl.

DEVIL IS FINE, latest from bitter, amazing John Vercher

DEVIL IS FINE
JOHN VERCHER
Celadon Books
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Still reeling from a sudden tragedy, our biracial narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of selling the land immediately and moving on. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is far more complicated than he ever imagined. In a shocking irony, he is now the Black owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.

Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.

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

My Review: The first book I reviwed by Author Vercher was After the Lights Go Out, a tough, unflinching look at the way one biracial man navigates a life whose deck is stacked against him as he determinedly struggles for Better.

Not so our unnamed stream-of-consciousness narrator. He's subsided into a haze of addiction, numbing the rejection of US society, his family of origin, and himself. He does not manage his pain, he tries to outrun it. This is, as anyone who has ever entered therapy knows, pointless and causes far more problems than it solves.

Be that as it may, here we are as the novel opens on the one disaster any parent dreads the most: the death of his son, a teenager, is unsurprisingly a shock to his system. His white mother's father, a stranger to him (for the most part) died and left a landholding...a plantation...to his son. After the unbearable horror of his son's funeral, he discovers he's a landowner for the first time in his life.

When he goes to the property to get the train moving on the process of selling it to be developed, ending at last his lifetime of (largely self-inflicted) poverty, things get weird. Like, "am I hallucinating?" weird. The language used in the synopsis above, "blurs the lines between real and imagined," is very carefully chosen. I like magical realism, and am resolutely a materialist, but the eerie, spooky things that happen in the corner of one's eye, and juuust out of sight, aren't unreal necessarily. After all, if the brain does in fact create reality from the bouncing of photons and the resistance of electrons to merging, there's nothing to say ghost or spirits or other such "hallucinations" are not real.

Our narrator's derangement from this latest helping of grief, added to his borning acknowlefgment of harms he's caused via addiction behaviors, is entirely enough to explain his altered perceptions of the material world. The good news for him is these spirits or whatever are guiding him onto a path of redemption. The bad news is he's going to forego a lot of money.

Redemption, to the degree it is possible, is worth a lot more than money. That our man is on that path at last makes this a very satisfying read indeed.

I was less impressed by the author's approach to stream-of-consciousness storytelling here. I followed, I think, most of the shifts in narrative. The key is "I think". I'm a savvy, experienced old reader, who loves him some Virginia Woolf; and yet I was left wondering if I was following every change. That's not a good sign that the author's got the material entirely under his control. I'm happy to pay it forward and occasionally do a re-visit of a paragraph once in a way, but it happened a lot. That's why this isn't a five-star review.

The story told ends up getting all the stars; the storytelling was a very slight bit less than perfectly aligned wiith it. On balance, though, a strong positive on getting yourself a copy.

Just maybe from the library.

ALL I SEE IS VIOLENCE, a novel whose title is evocative and accurate and deeply sad

ALL I SEE IS VIOLENCE
ANGIE ELITA NEWELL
Greenleaf Book Group Press
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman warrior, a ruthless general, and a single mother―three stories deftly braided into the legacy of a stolen nation

The US government stole the Black Hills from the Sioux, as it stole land from every tribe across North America. Forcibly relocated, American Indians were enslaved under strict land and resource regulations. Indigenous writer Angie Elita Newell brings a poignant retelling of the catastrophic, true story of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn and the social upheaval that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1972 during the height of the American Indian Movement.

Cheyenne warrior Little Wolf fights to maintain her people’s land and heritage as General Custer leads a devastating campaign against American Indians, killing anyone who refuses to relocate to the Red Cloud Agency in South Dakota. A century later, on that same reservation, Little Wolf’s relation Nancy Swiftfox raises four boys with the help of her father-in-law, while facing the economic and social ramifications of this violent legacy.

All I See Is Violence weaves love, loss, and hard truths into a story that needs to be told―a journey through violence to bear witness to all that was taken, to honor what all of our ancestors lived through, and to heal by acknowledging the shadows in order to find the light.

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

My Review: Alternating PoV narratives are hard to pull off. A balancing act among three voices is even harder. What Author Newell sought to do, it seems to me, was done by giving the reader all the points of view that shore up her point: Fight for or against something, whichver you like, and you will still end up reinforcing the violence and the rage our world is swimming in. She does this best by presenting each character's story to us in the same first-person present tense.

To be sure, her Indigenous people's points of view are clearly presented as they are, the victims of an aggressive colonial project that requires them to die. The truth here is that women are not passive victims of this project, but use every tool available at the time they exist to fight against the dual prongs of racism and sexism.

Custer's PoV is, at first, an odd choice given the theme of the book. His perpetration of violence against Indigenous people did nor give me any clues about why he was included...until his (much shorter) sections led me to see that the story was about the violence committed, not about victimhood. Custer was part of an Imperial project, and a believer in it...through cluelessness, sociopathy, or an Eichmannesque just-following-orders soldier's ethos is an open question.

I landed on a four-star rating because I was not entirely convinced by the narrative inclusion of Custer...it jars with my expectations, and more to the point it is not prefigured or required in Little Wolf's contemporaneous narrative parts...and because I very much wanted more of Nancy Littlefox's family relationships. These lacunae were not fatal to my enjoyment of the read, obviously, but noticeably lessened my smooth sailing through it.

Cavils, really, concerning a read I was drawn to, and held within, for several pleasurable hours.

TARRY THIS NIGHT, dystopian cult-plus-incest-plus-climate change near-future nightmare...for teens!

TARRY THIS NIGHT
KRISTYN DUNNION
Arsenal Pulp Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publsher Says: In this dystopian, eerily relevant novel, a civil war is brewing in America. Below ground, a cult led by the deluded and narcissistic Father Ernst is ensconced in an underground bunker, waiting out the conflict. When "The Family" runs out of food, Ruth, coming of age and terrified of serving as Ernst's next wife, must choose between obeying her faith and fighting for survival. In this unsettling modern Lilith tale, spirited women resist their violent, racist culture and, in so doing, become outlaws.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another call-to-arms for the young women of the US. It's dystopian, all right, but in the six years since its publiction it's only bexome more prescient.

The profound evil of religious belief is its de facto division of the world into Us and Them. There's no need to be saved if everyone is, regardless of their behavior and/or diet and/or sex life,right? So it must be that some people aren't saved; therefore they must be wicked for not following the way to salvation, because of course everyone who's good wants to be saved, and if you explain how to be saved and they don't do it, they're Bad...They are Bad, because WE are Good! This being the least talked-about part of religious belief, it's fertile ground for Author Dunnion to poke around to see what kind of struggle-bugs come out of the dark, smelly pit underneath the pile of unexamined Articles of Faith.

The horror of this system is its endless supply of unquestioning followers, perpetuating abuse and calling it love.

That might be the single most evil thing ever done by one human to another.

My issue with this story isn't the story itself, or the worldbuilding the Canadian author does for the US South, but the pacing of the plot. Reading the first half of the book, one is trapped in a slooow-motion car crash, awaiting the inevitable explosion. It all takes far longer to reach ignition than it should to keep readers engaged...it took me six years and a nagging sense of unfinished business to get back to it.

In spite of that serious misgiving, though, I think the experience by the end is one of horrified and outraged identification with the situation and the characters, and should fill a void in your trapped-indoors-by-the-heat summer 2023 reading.

PEDRO & DANIEL, when home is not The Safe Place it should be

PEDRO & DANIEL
FEDERICO EREBIA (illus. Julie Kwon)
Levine Querido
$19.99 hardcover, available 20 June 2023

Rating: 4* of five, doubtless the full five or even more for its target audience

The Publisher Says: Pedro and Daniel are Mexican American brothers growing up in 1970s Ohio. Their mother resents that Pedro is a spitting image of their darker-skinned father; that Daniel likes dolls; that neither boy plays sports. Both are gay and neurodivergent. They are alike, but they are dissimilar in their struggles, their dreams, their approach to life.

Pedro & Daniel is a sweeping and deeply personal novel that spans from childhood, through their teen years, and into adulthood. Theirs is a bond that won’t be broken. Together they endure an abusive home life, coming out, first loves, first jobs, and the AIDS pandemic, in a coming-of-age story unlike any other.

Despite everything, there is much joy in the stories in the book. Their resilience and special bond help the boys face one evil after another. While Pedro suffers more at home, Daniel is particularly susceptible to the malevolence of the outside world.

They are similar: gay, neurodivergent Latinos in love with all things Mexico.

Son tal para cual.
They are cut from the same cloth.

They are different: Pedro is darker-skinned, oppressed, repressed, introverted, and agnostic. Daniel is precocious, carefree, mischievous, religious, and unguarded.


Mismo perro, distinto collar.
Same dog, different collar.

CW: References to domestic violence, child abuse, homophobia, colorism, racism, clergy abuse, suicidality, sex, and death.

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

My Review: The survivor always writes the history. Pedro, the in-book pseudonym for Dr. Federico Erebia, a retired physician, who is also an artist, a woodworker, an author, and an illustrator, here tells the story of the horrifying, abusive family life led by himself and his late brother Daniel. Their boyhood having roughly coincided with my own, and their immigrant parents being much like the immigrant parents I knew in South Texas, the dichos and the interspersed poetry with prose, the cultural touchstones were all bone-deep familiar. What added to my sense of coming home was the young men's comings-out, internal and public, between themselves quietly and subtly; being gay in a deeply religious and brutally homophobic culture, during the peak terror of the AIDS crisis, only added to my anxious sense of identification with them.

What makes this story ideal for its youthful intended market is the absolute honesty and clarity of Author Erebia's prose; he couldn't tell a lie in these words, or even invent too much, because the ring of truth is absent when he does. He also never softens any blow, or pretends what hurt wasn't that bad, or helped grow him up, as other authos have in pursuing similar themes. He never takes the tack that it will all turn out okay; his belovèd brother dies of AIDS.

Love does not conquer all. What Love does is help one bear all that misery hateful bigots heap on you from before you know why they hate you. This is honest and it is helpful to young people to be told the truth. Things can hurt so bad in the moment that no one is surprised that you would consider ending your life. No one who's experienced hatred and rejection, however it's presented, is at all ever going to judge you for that. I do enjoy a story that tells young gay boys and girls all that, as well as implicitly supports the knowledge of no you aren't imagining it; yes, they do mean it; but crucially importantly you can and are wanted by others you haven't met to survive all of it. This story says loud and clear the truth: IT DOES GET BETTER.

Why I only rated it 4 stars of five is I found myself almost chanting the metrical dichos and poetic snippets, in that read-aloud to infants cadence. I don't enjoy that sensation. It's not aimed at me, so I present this as a reason, not an excuse. Others have other ideas about this facet of storytelling, and it works in the rap/hiphop/modern spoken word generation a treat. For me and those of my tastes, exercise caution in your consumption.

WIIJIWAAGANAG: More Than Brothers, a "what-might-have-been" tale of life in a residential school

WIIJIWAAGANAG: More Than Brothers
PETER RAZOR
Makwa Enewed
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Niizh Eshkanag is a member of the first generation of Anishinaabe children required to attend a U.S. government boarding school—schools infamously intended to “kill the Indian and save the man,” or forcibly assimilate Native students into white culture. At the Yardley Indian Boarding School in northern Minnesota, far from his family, Niizh Eshkanag endures abuse from the school staff and is punished for speaking his native language.

After his family moves him to a school that is marginally better, he meets Roger Poznanski, the principal’s white nephew, who arrives to live with his uncle’s family and attend the school. Though Roger is frightened of his Indian classmates at first, Niizh Eshkanag befriends him, and they come to appreciate and respect one another’s differences. When a younger Anishinaabe student runs away into a winter storm after being beaten by a school employee, Niizh Eshkanag and Roger join forces to rescue him, beginning an adventure that change their lives and the way settlers, immigrants and the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes think about each other and their shared future.

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

My Review: There is a lot to be said for reliving one's past...only better. The late Peter Razor (While the Locust Slept, 2002) was a former inmate of the successor institution to the Residential Schools. He had skin in this game and he was not going to sit quiet while the world kept not knowing what really happened to boys like him.

Having written a very powerful memoir (it's Kindleable for under $10!) he turned, as many elders will, to making his past a better place than it actually was. Only difference is, he wrote fiction instead of telling tales. He's aimed the resulting fantasy retelling of the past at young adults, wisely, and was in the process of writing it when he died at 90. His family have completed and edited the book, and retained his use of his native tongue and included for the white people an Ojibwemowin-English glossary at the end of the book. As there is no real issue with understanding most of what is said in either language, I'd say it's a feature more useful for completists who would like to gain a sense of the Ojibwemowin language's bones.

That said, I know many readers find it very difficult to immerse themselves in the story if a not-English language is present. Understand that is where you're headed, then, and decide to come on the trip or not. It is a trip...the two boys, Niizh and Roger, go on a quest to find a younger student who ran away from the school after a beating delivered by a staff member.

The hijinks that ensue aren't belief-stretching, what with white people having collywobbles that this Indian is in company with a white child! shockhorror! and so on and so forth. It's a YA story, aimed that way, so it's no surprise to anyone that the results are all good, the mean people who beat the one child are sad and redeemed of their cruel, cruel ways, that kind of thing.

I did not read this book for its story. I read it for its heart. A man whose early life was truly, tragically scarring wrote a lovely revamp of his experience of the world, extending it to the future with a smile and a tear. "It can be better, it should be this way not how it was...not ever again," says this story in its very existence. And that being a message I agree with completely, and support entirely, I wanted to read the story from someone whose standing to tell it is impeccable.

What Author Razor did not have was a writer's experience. It's not a knock against him. He had no reason to develop such a talent through practice and skill-learning. And exactly how would he have done that? So it's not a question of "come back when you're more practiced at your craft," it's a fact of life: The story, as told, has little suspense and not a lot of finesse.

Those are not reasons to pick it up. Learning what a Native American of the Anishinaabe people thought of his childhood, and what by extension others should learn from those shared feelings, those are reasons to pick up the book. Hearing, in your mind's ear, the cadences of the not-English language, and learning its broad outlines. Understanding the pain and the injustice inflicted on an official Government policy of "kill the Indian, save the man," and reckoning with the diseased thinking that could come up with such flimsy lies to cover the real purpose of assimilation. These are the reasons to pick up the book, and to gift it to early teenagers whose world-views are even now hardening. We can not afford to perpetuate the divisions that capitalism instils to ensure its profits. The world is in a genuine, verging on existential, crisis and we need each and every mind, eye, and hand operating at peak capacity to avoid horrific disaster.

THE DEADLY DREAMS PAGE: NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU, chasing dreams goes bad & AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT, chasing the bad dreams

AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT
JOHN VERCHER
Soho Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A harrowing and spellbinding story about family, the complications of mixed-race relationships, misplaced loyalties, and the price athletes pay to entertain—from the critically acclaimed author of Three-Fifths

Xavier "Scarecrow" Wallace, a mixed-race MMA fighter on the wrong side of thirty, is facing the fight of his life. Xavier is losing his battle with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or pugilistic dementia—a struggle he can no longer deny. Through the fog of memory loss, migraines, and paranoia, Xavier does his best to keep in shape while he waits for the call that will reinstate him after a year-long suspension.

Until then, he watches his diet and trains every day at the Philadelphia gym owned by his cousin-cum-manager, Shot, a retired champion boxer to whom Xavier owes an unpayable debt. Xavier makes ends meet by teaching youth classes at Shot’s gym and by living rent-free in the house of his white father, whom Xavier has been forced to commit to a nursing home because of the progress of his end-stage Alzheimer’s. Dementia has revealed a shocking truth about Sam Wallace, and Xavier finally gains insight into why his Black mother left the family when Xavier was young.

As Xavier battles his aging body and his failing brain, each day is filled with challenges and setbacks. Then Xavier is offered a chance at redemption: a last-minute comeback fight in the largest MMA promotion. If he can get himself back in the game, he’ll be able to clear his name and begin to pay off Shot. But with his memory in shreds and his life crumbling around him, can Xavier hold onto the focus he needs to survive? After the Lights Go Out is a haunting, unflinching look at the aftermath of a career in MMA—as Xavier forgets everything around him, you'll want to remember every single word.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: This is one rough ride of a book. There are people whose road through life is not paved, has many potholes, throws up gravel and clouds of caliche dust as their bald-tired forty-year-old chassis bounces and shakes over to one ditch, down into another. And that is who we're with here. Xavier is not, was never, expecting a limo ride, not even waiting for a cab ride...he's still rollin' but the roll is slow and it's not getting faster.

The bad marriage he came from was made worse by its permanent poison-gift to him. His mother was Black and father white, so he knows something a lot of people don't have to: Not belonging to either side in a war isn't being neutral. That's a gift only those with a clear side, one that can't be denied, are given. He's mixed. He's mixed up, he's mixed it up in fights his whole life. No one wanted him on their team so he used what strength and speed he could find to go one-on-one with other rage-filled testosterone-poisoned Others.

Now nearing forty, he's sure he's got no future. So is everyone else but they never thought he had a present. His efforts to get one more headline bout in Mixed Martial Arts are, as we meet him, wavering in and out of existence in front of eyes that don't connect to his brain right anymore. The voices he hears clearest are the ones in his battered head, they aren't competing with tinnitus. At least they aren't the ones telling him things he doesn't want to hear...his father, foundering under Alzheimer's disease's heavy burdens, doesn't remember him but does remember how to hate, his chances to fight again, more, are steadily melting away and there's nothing else he can do to make a living.

The life of someone always on the margins is, realistically, never going to turn into a happily ever after. Xavier never once thought it would. He chooses his own adventure, like he always has, right up to the last bitter dreg from the cup.

Author Vercher tells this deeply moving, unbearably honest story in direct, immediate prose. He selects the small images...a texting app's continuation icon of dots keeping him on tenterhooks about his future, the feeling of hanging his hand out the window while driving his dad's old car bringing back the times he did the same thing as a kid...that make Xavier real. That keep him, however fleetingly, locked in to the present moment. They work very well, are sharp but still small enough to make them fit right on everyone.

What isn't quite as smooth is the passages where Xavier is learning his mother and father, very late in life from my point of view, are fully human people. What Author Vercher does to make Xavier aware of his mother's full humanity was a scene both a little long as well as underdeveloped. It needed not to feel rushed as Xavier learns Evelyn was a very different person than the mother he had. The issues around dementia were handled very well, in my experienced opinion. When Xavier realizes that disinhibition is part of the course of dementia, it rocks his world. It did not need to be played out in the over-the-top manner that it was. Honestly, the choice to make Xavier's pathology so very foregrounded wore on my patience at times. Every reader has their own crotchets...these are mine.

Perfection not being of this Earth, I can honestly say that your Yule gift cards, spent on this deep and emotionally honest journey, will not be wasted. This second novel tells me that Author Vercher is a gift to the readers who want to get into a story and come out changed.

Bravo, good sir.

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

NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU
SAM LIPSYTE
Simon & Schuster
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.

Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: Coming home to my era of Manhattan living in this story was a pleasure. It has Author Lipsyte's requisite snarky, biting wit. It felt like I was back in the after-hours club post-Save the Robots listening to the coke-fueled motormouthing. Oh my...I've said too much.

But it's true, this is the way it felt, and looked, and even smelled.

What I think makes this a good read, then, is its way of being in harmony with my own memories. It's an evocation of a vanished time and place. So how will it hit someone whose memories aren't like mine?

Right on the funny bone.

Later, we go get a drink at the Jew-Hater's bar.

The merry old pogromist, with his lovely shock of alabaster hair and craggy fascist visage, pours us free shots with our beers. Maybe he means to lubricate his audience.

"The Yids, they cut the penis," he says, casual, as though relaying news of an off-season baseball trade. ... "God makes people perfect. The penis, perfect. Why cut it up? Only the Yid thinks of that."

The bland face of evil, played for a few yuks...if you're going to work as this book's audience, you'll need to see that as humor. Offensive and crass and humorous.

Otherwise this isn't a story I think you'll get into. And you'll need to want to get into it...the blizzard at the end of the book needs to feel like we felt then, a suspended moment of possibility, a confusing intersection of many corners all hidden behind drifts and shockingly cold winds forcing your face away from the way you started out wanting to go. That moment in the narrator's life was one where there were many ways to go. He went too far away from the one he thought he wanted and it took a blizzard to show him where he had to be.

Author Lipsyte won't be going back to the days of wine and roses, as the old saying has it; he's fifty-four now, and this story just couldn't come from anyone not fifty-four. My viewpoint, ten years ahead of him, was different enough to make this fun trip to a time I loved familiar enough. I wouldn't have seen it from this angle but it was still speaking to me.

Over forty-five? Give this a read today. What else is that gift card for if not to try to time travel?

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.