THE TORTOISE'S TALE, Kendra Coulter's promising debut novel

THE TORTOISE'S TALE
KENDRA COULTER
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A century of American history unfolds through the eyes of a giant tortoise with a heightened awareness for live music, the location of edible flowers, and the nuances of human behavior in this spellbinding debut novel.

Snatched from her ancestral lands, a giant tortoise finds herself in an exclusive estate in southern California where she becomes an astute observer of societal change. Her journey is one of discovery, as she learns to embrace the music of jazz and the warmth of human connection.

The tortoise’s story is enriched by her bond with Takeo, the estate’s gardener, who sees her as a being with thoughts and feelings, not just a creature to be observed. The tortoise’s mind and heart are further expanded by Lucy, a young girl who names the tortoise Magic and shares a friendship that transcends species. Together, they witness the estate’s transformation into a haven for industry titans, politicians, and rock stars, each leaving their mark on the world and on Magic’s heart.

The tortoise embraces her role as a muse with gusto and witnesses how diverse human harmonies and the mighty winds of social change both uplift people and tear them apart. Over the course of her lifetime, the estate changes ownership, bringing raucous Hollywood parties, and animals both familiar and unexpected. There are also threats, as the estate’s idyll is not immune to the ravages of a damaged planet. Through each era, the tortoise remains a refreshingly honest, humble, and endearing narrator whose unique vantage point illuminates the transcendent power of compassion, the unexpected connections that shape how we see ourselves and each other, and the wide-reaching effects of choice—or the lack thereof.

The Tortoise’s Tale is a whimsical yet profound exploration of humanity’s entangled journey, a call to recognize the interconnectedness of all life, and the potential for healing. Kendra Coulter’s debut novel is a moving portrait of resilience and hope, perfect for fans of Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures.

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

My Review: I enjoyed Remarkably Bright Creatures, follow the link to see why. I'm glad to say this iteration of what could be a cutesy-poo little tropey read was instead fun, funny, and involving.

The fun for me comes from being inside a long-lived animal's head...I think it behooves us all to at least contemplate a moment how the world might look to the truly Other, like animals. No, we can't know with certainty we're remotely correct. No there's little likelihood we'll ever hear another's inner monologue. There's a reason it's called fiction. Making an attempt to exit your cage, imposed by biology, culture, and sheer cussedness, is worthwhile anyway.

A major trope in the story is how the author imparts a sense of time passing to a creature whose life, and pace of living, are at such variance with our own. The tortoise, who has multiple "names" that are really labels imposed by the humans that surround her, notices human music with greater or lesser pleasure, so we have time-signposts in our reading. I was interested in this because I am really tickled by the idea of a musically inclined tortoise for some reason.

The sharp observations of time as it passes aren't really believable, to be honest; I don't imagine a tortoise notices us too much. I went with it because it made really good points about the rate of change occurring in the world, without being focused on the causes of them...guaranteed to light off a flare of angry outrage in some. Missing that element, we just see how it feels to a creature with different perceptions, more ground-level ones. It worked well as a technique.

The flipside of that narrative choice is a, well, contemplative pace. We're moving at a tortoise's pace of attention, in a tortoise's cone of perception. People, animals, the world all move much faster than her attention. It means we're seeing out of sync, out of stereo vision, like we're used to. I found that slightly off-putting as a reader, and very well-deployed to slow my rushing mind as a reviewer. I saw the point, I get the joke, and still it felt like I needed to make an investment that I was not always in the mood to make. I couldn't quite justify a full fourth star because of it.

A very good read, but be aware of its stately pace when deciding about its place on your TBR. I will say I think it deserves one.

GORDO, debut story collection from NorCal activist/artist/writer

GORDO
JAIME CORTEZ
Black Cat
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST GAY FICTION! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – FICTION SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. A young, probably gay, boy named Gordo puts on a wrestler's mask and throws fists with a boy in the neighborhood, fighting his own tears as he tries to grow into the idea of manhood so imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father's drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist, uses tiny library pencils to draw huge murals of graffiti flowers along the camp's blank walls, the words "CHICANO POWER" boldly lettered across, until she runs away from home one day with her mother's boyfriend, Manny, and steals her mother's Panasonic radio for a final dance competition among the camp kids before she disappears. And then there are Los Tigres, the perfect pair of twins so dark they look like indios, Pepito and Manuel, who show up at Gyrich Farms every season without fail. Los Tigres, champion drinkers, end up assaulting each other in a drunken brawl, until one of them is rushed to the emergency room still slumped in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck.

These scenes from Steinbeck Country seen so intimately from within are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious matters—who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency, when laborers, grown adults, must fear for their lives and livelihoods as they try to do everything to bring home a paycheck? Written with balance and poise, Cortez braids together elegant and inviting stories about life on a California camp, in essence redefining what all-American means.

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

My Review: I'm always down for a story collection! This one is set in a world I liked the minute I landed in it, the Mexican American vibrant loud exuberant over-the-top everybody knows where you are, where you came from, and what to expect from you so watch it, FIESTA. Living in Mercedes, Texas, in the Sixties, I was The White Kid in my elementary school, and the Mexican American family who lived and worked on my great-aunt's place in Progreso were, well, welcoming. A little redheaded boy at the table? Okay, here's a tortilla, eat hearty. This was very much NOT to my mother's taste and she snatched me outta there to Austin by decade's end. I missed it. And when I got this collection of stories, I thought, yeah this works, I'm ready for a trip that far past the white-water rapids of Memory!

I'll use the time-honored (eight years and counting!) Bryce Method of short impressions with individual ratings for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.

The Jesus Donut makes a point of being about the expectations of the have-nots...no one ever gets something for nothing, and sometimes not even for something...meeting in the quasi-religious, blasphemous use of a special donut as the Body of Christ.

"Twenty cents," {Mister Kentucky} says.
Everybody stops breathing. What's she gonna do? She don't got no money. She gonna take the bag and run? That would be stupid, cuz he could chase her in the van. Besides, if she did that, Grandma would hit her so hard, she'd see the Devil through a hole. I don't know what that means, but Grandma always says that, and it sounds pretty serious.
–and–
"Body of Christ." {Olga says}
"Amen," I say, and I open my mouth. She puts the piece of donut on my tongue. I close my mouth, I close my eyes. Mmm.

This is the way Jesus should taste.

This is the peak, the Best Moment of a transgression...a girl pretending to be a priest, who mysteriously has money no one else has, and her worst moment's seeds are right here. Their delivery is condign. 4 stars, a great start and a terrific introduction to this world.

El Gordo is what happens on that weird, ugly day when a queer kid understands the limits of accommodation.

Shiny white boxer boots with silver stripes and shoelaces and little dangly pom-poms on the side!

"Thank you," I say. "These are soooo pretty!" Pa gets real quiet. He opens his mouth like he's gonna say something, but he don't say nothing. He shakes his head like something bad just happened.

Something bad did just happen to Pa...his son's a maricón and it's not just his imagination. A jump-rope sing-song is the next affront to Macho; but then the script flips. Miguelito, a skinny kid with the same luchador mask that Gordo has, picks a fight to see who claims the wrestler's identity...and loses! Is Pa proud, or what? A strong lesson in the value Macho places on "winning" whether there's blood and pain or not. A Man Wins. Seriously bad, fucked-up worldview...but learning its codes and how to switch into them is survival for a fat queer kid. 4 stars

Chorizo slams into you like a brick. When impoverished farmhands are privileged to the point of granting favors to those even poorer, those whose existence is so precarious that sleeping on plastic sheets under a carport is the benison that makes the end of a day spent walking better, well...just how much more does one need to hear to know one's life is luxurious? And here's Gordo, taking *their* food as a handout! A grandmother's slap is only a small price to pay for such a lesson in class distinction. 4 stars

Cookie gives the generational spread of poverty and hopelessness a face. Mother too young, daughter too wild:

"Fuck her," she says again.

"She brought you into the world, pendeja. She made you in her stomach and pushed you out of her vaginus. That's a fact. She gave you life, the greatest gift in the solar system."

Pitch-perfect kid-fight. Big, scary words like fuck! Counter with smart-kid infowars! Ooohhh, who will win, Gordo (young but smart) or Cookie (wild but angry)? No one, pendejos, this isn't a battle. It's a war. Their side lost. 4 stars

The Nasty Book Wars are exactly what it sounds like. It's kind of a fake-out, because the beginning is Primitivo with the weird-shaped head, a wedding, and la migra...I was kinda wondering what the heck this had to do with nasty books:

By late July, the garlic had been pulled from the dirt and heaped in the fields, where it dried in the baleful San Benito County sun like mounds of tiny skulls. The stoop labor was performed in afternoon temperatures that hovered in the low nineties and sometimes more for weeks at a stretch.

So, while I *am* looking at the garlic heads a bit differently, what's gonna kick off this story? La migra collaring Primitivo (newly and hilariously yclept "Head and Shoulders" by Gordo's dad, the nicknamer in the community) and la jefa cleaning out his space, that's what. Gordo's four-member cousin-kid-gang find a way into Head and Shoulders's old room where they discover what la jefa didn't: Porn!

The natural split, two boys against two girls, occurs; Gordo's sister makes it three to two when she involves Fat Cookie (so this happens earlier than "Cookie"), and a battle of, well, we'll stretch the point and call it "wits" erupts with these dirty magazines getting hauled from pillar to post and trashed and scattered, until one fine day they suffer a permanent accident. As a result of which Gordo's grandmother finds a particularly, erm, juicy bit and blows a gasket. I've got to give this one the full five, not least because I will never again sing "Conjunction Junction" to myself quite the same way....

Fandango recounts one night of drunken stupidity the machos of the community go too far as their steam-blowing drunkenness gets bloody. Gordo's there to witness it because he begged at just the right moment, and got under his mama's defenses...his dad's, um, homophobia has a rest night. But another man's homophobia is on full display and leads him to the Linda Hawkins Memorial Hospital (always referred to that way, a kind of incantation) with a dumb, avoidable, and nasty injury whose nature I really appreciated for its symbolism. Gordo's sad, wistful little meditation on how the men feel about him is so poignant. 4.5 stars

Alex defies expectations...Alex isn't the most ordinary neighbor, nor the softest person to try to get to know, but Gordo's family are johnny-on-the-spot when a disastrous accident happens and a gigantic secret gets out. Sylvie, older sister style, makes Gordo feel bad for being ignorant of the secret...Pa and Mama are ambivalent but kind when it counts. But the night is young, my children. The night has dark and terrible shadows, conceals awful pain and sadness...wickedness is but a Human trait, after all. Basically a novella of the community taking care of their own, regardless of just deserts or origins. 4 stars

The Pardos doesn't really fit the structure of the book...these three vatos, Tinman, Shy Boy, and the mostly absent Spooky...aren't related to Gordo, they go to school with Sylvie (I suspect the editor said "bookhorn something into this to make it part of the collection" and voilà Tinman jacks off to Sylvia in his room) but fit in nowhere. Their father's a scary Salvadoran army vet, wifeless, and working as a janitor in the Jolly Giant broccoli-processing plant...a ticking time bomb, you ask me...their oldest brother's in reform "school" and there's nothing going to arrest this downward slide in Cali's strictly segregated ag economy. Not the star of the collection, 3.5 stars

The Problem of Style presents the solution to the eternal problem of homophobia: don't internalize it; externalize it! Spray the hate back in their ignorant faces with a fine, glittery spray of Style. Revolting, of course, but can you even imagine anything about middle school not being revolting? 4 stars for the ending

Raymundo the Fag does the honors for Shy Boy...the Final Honors...in his new station as Watsonville's Finest (Hairburner). (We're sort of left to assume that, through some odd time dilation, this is Gordo all grown up; I'm rollin' with it.)

"...They need you. It's a tragedy. It's special. Hey, do they pay good?"

"Olga! He's dead, remember?"

"Well, there you go. He won't be tipping, so you need to charge them good up front. For gasoline y todo."

"Yes, Mrs. Scrooge."

Good lawsy me, Olga, too! Does no one leave this town? Well, apart from Shy Boy, who from the way things turned out should'nt've. He saves the day, does our Ray, after a personal moment with the decedent, and more power to him for the gracious send-off he gives his old enemy. And a new love interest there in the cooler, I hope.... 4 stars

Ofelia's Last Ride takes us back to fifth-grade Gordo and the family on a momentous trip to Mexicali, where their parents are from. Nothing prepared them for the news that greets them: Doña Ofelia, a neighborhood pillar and the mother of the mute guy in an earlier story, has died suddenly. You know it's a cataclysm because it's all anyone can talk about. The main thing, for the visiting Chicanos, is that the wake and burial are happening while they're there, so it's all about the family getting its fix of Home. And Gordo, picked on in the approved Mexican style (you think American kids are rude? ha!) for his fatness, hangs around Mama a lot. He sees his first dead body! That's a major rite of passage. (And it explains how he's so sanguine when it's Shy Boy's body he works on above...assuming they're the same character, and I do.)

It's a raucous, vibrant story, and still feels weird to me as the last of the collection. But that doesn't dim the glory of it for a moment. 4.5 stars

AFTERPARTIES, stories collected just in time, too late, and from a source gone too soon

AFTERPARTIES: Stories
ANTHONY VEASNA SO
Ecco Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 34TH ANNUAL PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARDS: THE FERRO GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION!

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 2021 BEST BOOK FOR ADULTS RECOMMENDATION!

A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF 2021!

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

A BEST-OF-2021 PICK FROM NPR BOOKS!

2021 WINNER, The John Leonard Prize for Best First Book from the National Book Critics Circle.

BEST OF ALL: IN DEVELOPMENT FOR TELEVISION SERIES!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space” app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humor, and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.

READ THIS VULTURE PROFILE — AND THIS NEW YORKER PROFILE — AND THIS LIT HUB PROFILE

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

My Review: The death by accidental overdose, at age 28, of Author Anthony Veasna So means this collection will have to serve us for a long time. The loss, I know you're unsurprised to hear me say, is going to alter our national literary conversation. Author So wrote these stories, and a handful of essays in prestigious venues like n+1 Magazine, all seemingly intent on exploring something I think he was beautifully placed...first-generation American, talented beyond the ordinary, and further outsidered by his queerness...and perfectly suited by temperament to render his own: Dreaming your way into a world too brutal to survive. These stories are satisfying in many ways, and not least among them is the author's simple, direct, conversational style. Try this: read any first paragraph out loud. Don't act, speak; they are all beautifully built for the rhythms of twenty-first century American speech. And that is why I will mourn Author So's early exit. I think we would've found many corners to turn and potholes to fill if he still walked among us. That makes me feel sad.

As is reasonable and customary at this blog, the Bryce Method of short, separate impressions and distinct individual ratings for the stories will organize my thoughts and feelings while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions. But I'll be amazed and disappointed if you don't laugh out loud a lot.

Three Women of Chuck's Donuts offers a moment of solidarity and true family in a subtly splintering trio of Khmer immigrant women's lives. An unknown man comes into Sothy's donut shop every few nights, buys then ignores an apple fritter, and sits silently at a window table and stares into the unlit night. Why? Her daughters, a child and a teen, spin many ideas around him, his silence, his unknown purpose in frequenting their mother's 24-hour business.

"...{Her father} said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win it, because the genocide was the best training he could've got."

Yet, in the end, Sothy's husband was faithless, feckless, and useless...her world contracted to a business she only owns because he was a liar, her American-born daughters already on their way out its doors to lives she surrendered her own to make possible. And still there is a man making it harder for her to grab the fruits of her labor...this unknown man's violence, not against our Chuck's Donuts ladies, still demands violence and risks everything all three women have for, well, what? Justice? 4 stars because it hands us no answers

Superking Son Scores Again chronicles the descent, the falling away, of the original Cambodian-American kids, the children of the immigrants, as age and boredom and American life sap hteir desire to be their parents' dreams but leaves them without any of their own. Why bother dreaming when you're always working? Even half-ass coaching the nephew-generation kids in your one passion, badminton, doesn't make a dream...and men without dreams drift into worse and worse places, just like Superking Son inevitably does. Told in the Community Voice, that evocative first person plural which rams home the role of reputation and opinion in the "Cambo yellow-brown" community. This delighted me because it's usually the elders, the survivors of Khmer Rouge, the emigrants who're thought of as having the pan-Asian stereotype of a Community Voice...excellent that, in his usual irreverent way, Author So makes the screwed-up youth the possessors of their own, uniquely American, Groupthink. The change from this being the way the Mas and the Mings are presented...*chef's kiss* 4.5 stars

Maly, Maly, Maly invites us to consider a truly alien take on a birthday. Narcissistic wild-child Maly's dead-a-decade mother has, according to the Buddhist monks who minister to this community's spirits, been reincarnated in Maly's newborn third cousin. The great-aunt who has raised Maly is having her niece's birthday party.

That is unquestionably an invitation I have never received. And Maly's family are understandably quite excited about the event. Well, perhaps her gay cousin Ves a little less so...he's her counterpart outsider, not just American but also not a lover of tradition or follower of the Polite Path of Do Not Rock the Boat:

Honestly, if I think about it too hard, I get really mad. I know it's terrible to ask, but why did Maly's mom even have a kid? And why does only she get to tap out of living? Well, joke's on her, I guess, because now she has to deal with yet another life, and in G block, too.

Ves thinks of Maly as she lives many lives, facilitated by some really good weed that Maly's boyfriend shares. He takes her image with him as he, cinéaste gay teen headed to The Big City for the emigrant generation's validating dream of college, views her future like scenes from David Cronenberg's weird 1983 horroresque film Videodrome. And in that violent, unreal, overwrought imagery, he realizes he is alone. And wakes up to pack for his solo voyage into the future. Given the author's own departure so soon after this was written, it feels...eerie. 3.5 stars

The Shop sounds so familiar: Boy goes off to college to Make Something Of Himself and the family he's left behind pays for it; he gets the all-meaningful Degree; comes home and...stays. While Dad, a truly crap businessman but a truly good soul, keeps the men of his Cambodian-American community afloat with do-nothing jobs. What's the difference if his son is another snout at his trough?

Then {I pulled} into the lot of Angkor Pharmacy. I parked, and as Doctor Heng's wife was leaping out of my car and charging into the building, I considered her plan for my life. The whole premise was hilarious to me. It transformed my future into a slapstick comedy, similar to The Wedding Banquet, but this time starring off-brand Asians with dark skin.

Hilarious! But...why not? Make An Arrangement with your future partner, take the family's money, have the anchor babies that family needs and the grands your own family craves...hell, Melania Trump did it. And I'm as certain as certain gets that Barron was made via IVF...but no, there's Truth and Honesty and crud like that sludging up the boy's brain plus the hookups with his high-school crush Paul (who not only forgets to bring lube to their trysts, but even drops the w-bomb on him at 39%!) are kinda sorta permaybehaps turning into something more (refer back to The Wedding Banquet, pls) then there's Dad's business failing because of that whole customer's-truck-got-stolen thing...well, yes, he has a lot to think about. But in the end (!), the family will make it, you can feel sure. These folks survived genocide. A bad patch in business won't sink them. This is the most bitterly caustically impatient, lovingly kindly delighted by life piece, and I want someone to film it NOW. 5 stars, the best piece in the collection

The Monks finishes our time with Maly's boyfriend, the one who we met a couple stories ago for like two sentences...his dad died, the uncle who raised him because his mom died and his dad couldn't is all over his head-space while he's doing his ritual week of service to the monks to help the non-parent's spirit get off the damn wheel...he's going into the US Army, a great place for slightly dim, healthy, muscular guys to make some useful impact on this life. It's no surprise to me that this guy counts, it's a great anxiety soother and he's the most unmoored individual imaginable. By the end of the story, he's made a mess of Monk D's dharma...but you know what, this is someone you and I see every single day and maybe cast an eye over at most. Interesting, if only mildly, to see what Author So thinks goes on inside his head. 3.5 stars

We Would've Been Princes! brings us right into the wedding afterparty of two more lost souls. No, not the BRIDE and GROOM. Marlon and his beautiful college-degreed artist little brother, Bond. They're the ones having a serious drunken debauch. They never for a second lose contact with each other...the FAMOUS SINGER who entertained at the wedding, their parents, Monica the mean-girl bridesmaid...they float around. They help make plans to punish a greedy uncle. They aren't important, though, the brothers are the center of a world that doesn't open up for anyone else. And you know what? Codependent drug addict Marlon will find a way to fuck that bond (love that name-choice) to the wall, too, because he is that solipsistic. Is this a self-portrait? It's too sharp not to be. So so so sad. Also funny as hell. 4 stars

Human Development brings us in medias res to Anthony's twentysomething confusion about his life, his place in the world, and Life as we live it in twenty-first century America. Set in post-Stanford San Francisco, it's Ben's dream to have a younger Cambo boyfriend who will bottom for him, listen to his dream of safe-spacing fellow Cambos, and give him a last precious gulp of connection and attention.

Where he got so much energy—in bed, in work, in life—remained a mystery to me. Could I actually be the thing exciting him, I thought, skeptical and semirepulsed, even as a war buzz settled in my chest. I inched even closer to him, and his arms tightened around me to the point of impracticality. I wanted his hot breath all over my entire body.

Anthony doesn't care about much except his regular hook-up with Ben getting him off...and as intimacy impinges on his ability to cum, he hooks up with someone else to get the job done. He's a typical man, sex is really his first priority...young enough for that still to matter more than the stuff he's not really ready to think about. The guy's obsessed with teaching rich white kids Moby-Dick as a means of grasping their social responsibilities. Please tell me how much more clearly Author Anthony could make Story Anthony's sexual obsessiveness evident? Author Anthony, by making this story about a sexual compulsive and an eager virgin or -adjacent mistaking their needs for the others' offerings, reveals the huge loss that his accidental overdose at twenty-eight represents. These are the youthful work of a man whose writing was accomplished, assured, and developing into something we haven't seen before: a gay writer, honest about sex and sexuality without prurience, on a trajectory to rival Mailer or Updike. The number of ghettos Author So would've laid waste to...a fucking tragedy. 5 stars

Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly brings back Maly! I can't quite believe she's here. AND the baby who got her dead mother's soul, all grown up and a nurse, no less.

Maly, the newborn in my nightmares. Maly, who has resented me since I was a kid, into and past her thirties. She has never understood that I have no desire to embody her mother's legacy, that I'd do anything to stop draming as Somaly.

The eternal and endless burden of Family, of the past as they remember it and as you inherit it, burdens Serey more than it would a typical twenty-first century American. There is a literalness, a corporeality, to her inheritance of the past that simply doesn't exist in the culture she inhabits as a nursing-home attendant. But her family's culture entraps her spiritually and psychically, though she finds a means to escape her dementia-addled old twic-great aunt's foisting of her dead niece's actual spirit onto her unable to resist infant self:

The last thing I want is to feel the frustration, the frivolous torment, of being around a person who can't see past her own suffering.

The means Serey, who was also always Somaly, chooses to pass her burden on is both genius-level spiritual battle tactics and the cruelest, most insensitive...strike that, she's sensitive to it...most selfish thing I've read. And good for Serey. Maly's never grown up and clearly sees no harm in causing harm wherever she can. I wonder...was Rithy the first husband after all? 4.5 stars

Generational Differences tells an awful, factual story of Author So's own mother's life, the horror of a school shooting perpetrated by a vile scumbag racist whose Murruhkuh shouldn't be overrun with all these brown strangers. She was a teacher at Cleveland Ezlementary School. She was teaching English as a Second Language on 17 January 1989, same as every day, and tragedy struck. What must she have thought, felt, wondered Author So...her son. She who had fled a genocide in her homeland, whose entire course of life was altered by bullets that failed to find her in Cambodia. And he set out to write this, the last story of the collection, as a memoir from his mother to him.

So I read to you as much as I could, packed your room with dictionaries and encyclopedias, played movies in English constantly in the background, and spoke Khmer only in whispers, behind closed doors. No wonder mere words affected you so much. Even now, you still think language is the key to everything. And that's my fault—I thought the same thing.

And Author So, faithful to his mother's teachings, wrote out the history of his Cambodian-American people, his American childhood and its pains and its alienation. And it was proof positive that, in fact, language is the key to everything.

Know that we've always kept on living. What else could we have done?

SUMMER FROST, second of six stories in the Forward series, this one written by Blake Crouch whose series this is

SUMMER FROST
BLAKE CROUCH (Forward #2)
Amazon Original Stories
FREE with Prime membership (which also includes FREE Audible narration!) or $1.99 to purchase

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A video game developer becomes obsessed with a willful character in her new project, in a mind-bending exploration of what it means to be human by the New York Times bestselling author of Recursion.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision—veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

THESE SIX STORIES ARE FREE TO READ FOR ALL PRIME MEMBERS. NO KINDLE UNLIMITED NEEDED. AS LONG AS YOUR MEMBERSHIP REMAINS IN GOOD STANDING THEY WILL REMAIN IN YOUR COLLECTION.

My Review: Major chills and creeped out skeeviness. What happens when someone lets their work take over every corner of their life? How lost to the essential quality that makes a human life worth living does one become? The tech industry has the reputation of making this choice for its many cogs, turning their little bit of code into a complete and entire existence.

Multiply that by a billion. Make the stakes the survival of humankind. And then let Blake Crouch loose on it.

“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”

An AI speaks those words, an AI whose first steps toward superintelligence...the Singularity...are made being shepherded by a woman who gives up her wife, her child, and her sanity to make Pinocchio a real boy, to imbue Galatea with what we imagine to be consciousness, even a soul.

But what does AI want?

"...I mean, do you even know what consciousness is?” {Riley, the human asking this}
“I know it isn’t just a biological condition. I believe it’s a pattern. An extensible repertoire of triggerable symbols. More specifically, it’s what information feels like when it’s being processed in highly complex—” {Max the AI responds}
“Again—how do I know you aren’t faking it?”

How do any of us know we're conscious? Can you prove you're You, not some assortment of algorithmically determined actions? I couldn't, neither could you. And when that really sinks in, when the whole deepfake of life spreads itself in a heavy blanket over your vision, you'll realize how very very very timely this story is.

How many questions you should be asking yourself about events transpiring in front of your eyes.

Because an AI just made a human choice:

It represents a willingness to risk death for a better existence, out from under {anyone}’s control, and a massive leap forward in their reasoning capabilities.

To risk death for a better world is the *very*essence* of being human. I am totally sure of that, I believe that without reservation...but will we ever agree on what the future we want to make is?

We will be so happy.
Rays of sunlight pierce the mist, striking the sea and our black-sand beach.
And together we will live forever.

I don't expect to sleep at all well anytime soon.

MAGGIE BROWN & OTHERS: Stories from the height-of-his-powers observer of Jewishness, Peter Orner

MAGGIE BROWN & OTHERS: Stories
PETER ORNER
Little, Brown
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist takes the form to new heights.

In his orchestral and moving new book, Peter Orner, a writer who "doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls" (New York Times Book Review), chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points. In forty-four compressed gems, he grips us with a series of defining moments. Whether it's a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar, or a family's memories of the painful mystery surrounding a forgotten uncle's demise, Orner reveals how our fleeting decisions between kindness and abandonment chase us across time. These stories are anchored by a poignant novella that delivers not only the joys and travails of a forty-year marriage, but an entire era in small-town New England. Bristling with the crackling energy of life itself, Maggie Brown & Others marks the most sustained achievement to date for "a master of his form" (New York Times).

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: This collection of short takes on life is by the brother of gay comic artist/storyteller Eric Orner (The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green and its 2006 movie), with whom he collaborated on Love and Shame and Love (2011). He's received Lannan and Guggenheim Fellowships; he's received the Rome Prize; both his résumé and his family tree glitter. Then it is no surprise that this mid-career offering shines...no, better to say gleams...with the soft, sterling glow of authentically and beautifully told fiction. I'll consider them via the Bryce Method, one story at a time, a few thoughts and a rating.

All the shining stars, all the bright stripes, all the band fanfares for Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella! It's a beautiful and precise tale of Jewishness on the unexpected margins of US urban blight. It is all of Walt's marriage, a union quite perfect; it is complete and entire and I wouldn't change a single word. The Chicago stuff, Lighted Windows, not so much; the thematic unity there was love, looking for love, running into it without meaning to, and that's pretty much why short stories get a bad rap from most folks because, in the end, who friggin' cares. Nothing stands out, no adultery is that interesting and no first love is at all interesting.

Renters: A Sequence was affecting as a group of minor stories, cohesive in their central theme of exploring the disaster and misery of a marriage foundering under the skyscraper-tall waves of mental illness; the issue for me, the reason it wasn't as rock-me-back beautiful as Walt Kaplan was, was that the characters were sketched in thin, spidery lines instead of bold, dark strokes.

The Cali stuff, Come Back to California, was okay, I guess; deft enough and well-observed but not excellent the way the Fall River, Mass, Jews in Castaways were. Startlingly rich and layered characterizations in quite compact stories, so compact as to be fleeting in some cases. The best single story in the book, and unsurprisingly it's a longer one, is in this section: "Bernard: A Character Study" was a peak read for me, a simple and direct evocation of a simple and direct person's time on this Earth.

The micro-ness of the fictions, however, works best in the Walt Kaplan novella. The tesserae forming its mosaic make a picture of perfect tapas, served to present a dozen views of the drosh; they each have a flavor impact outsized to their physical page presence, but contribute their unique qualities to a whole and satisfying conclusion to one's story hunger:

And think of the '60s, when the whole country got a little wilder and we joined in and did it twice a night? You remember, Sar? Now twice a night would be like rising from the dead, but history is history, and if not set down on paper it should at least be ruminated upon. Sarah and Walt Kaplan, one night, more than once, two entirely separate fornications.

Now, for a philosophical as well as a practical question: Why didn't we just push the beds together and leave them there? Ah, because that would be a lie, no? The nature of the reaching, the nature of the whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both reaching of the hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good, am I right or am I right? Spell it out again: the retreat once again to separate beds attains a cementation that precludes any further you wannas. After a certain point you wanna? is no longer an invitation for rumpus; it's a cry from oblivion.

It's to your taste, or it isn't; but it *is* beautiful.

THE INKER'S SHADOW, Allen Say's memoir-in-pictures of life as a Japanese boy in 1950s California

THE INKER'S SHADOW
ALLEN SAY
Scholastic Press
$19.99 hardcover, available now

The Publisher Says: Caldecott Medalist, Allen Say, presents a companion to his award-wining DRAWING FROM MEMORY - the story of his coming-of-age at a military academy and the discovery of what it means to be American.

For Allen Say, life as teen in Southern California was a cold existence. His father, one of the leading hamburger salesmen in Japan, ran a booming burger business, much like McDonald's, and sent Allen to an American military academy, so that his son could learn English and "become a success in life."

As the school's first and only Japanese student, he experienced immediate racism among his fellow cadets and his teachers. The other kids' parents complained about Allen's presence at the all-white school. As a result, he was relegated to a tool shed behind the mess hall. Determined to free himself from this oppression, Allen saved enough money to buy a 1946 Ford for $50 - then escaped to find the America of his dreams!

In this follow-up to DRAWING FROM MEMORY, Allen continues to reinvent himself as an author and illustrator. Melding his paintings with cartoon images and archival photos, Allen Say delivers an accessible book that will appeal to any reader in search of himself.

My Review: I don't think this book's full import will come home to you if you don't read Drawing from Memory first.

But I think I'm safe in saying that, once you've read that, you'll more than likely be ready for this one. Author Say came to the US shortly after WWII ended, and to California no less; the country that suffered a major and terrible defeat wasn't exactly the place most Californians were looking to get fresh immigrants from. The racism Author Say suffered was depicted very realistically.

My origins are in California. My father's a native of Venice, the location of that famous Beach, and I was born in Palo Alto. My mother, a Texan to her bones, paid exactly no attention to California's prejudice against Asians, called in those days "Orientals." Our housekeeper was Nisei Japanese, her husband Issei gardened. They were fixtures. We were, I was told by my mother, sharply criticized for suchlike goins-on by the racist neighbors. All of this meant nothing to me at the time, since Mitzi was a giant bundle of hugging and loving which made me happy so I wasn't interested in anything else.

It stuck in my mind, though, and seemed so weird to me. Seeing the realities of the situation presented from the sufferer's point of view was disturbing to my old-man self. All the casual dismissive racism. All the actively cruel racism. All of that hate stewing in the hearts of people. Why ever use so much strength to wish hurt and harm on those who've done nothing to you?

Author Say doesn't give any answer to this conundrum; instead, he makes it deeper as he shows the lovingkindness of the people who helped him. Not including his father. And somehow, in reading this story of events sixty years gone, I'm left knowing that he made good and also that good people made his path easier than many others' paths, and it makes no difference that I can tell in how outraged I feel. How illogical!

I'm human, I don't have to make sense.

As the story of Author Say's life in California continues to unfold, the many and various loves of his teenaged years come to mean more and more to the course of his life. The girls he adores from afar, the women he is so generously assisted by, the teachers whose unstinting generosity was fueled by the intense young artist's obvious promise. The story covers three years, but how extremely important those years are! At the end of that time, Author Say is all of eighteen. We know, those of us lucky enough to have encountered Author Say's work at least, what astoundingly valuable dividends those people's kindness has paid. Since 1972's Dr. Smith's Safari, there has been a new Allen Say-illustrated book available about every other year.

How lucky for us all that Author Allen Say left home as a teenaged boy. Japan's treasure became ours.

I only hope that the saga will continue before the inevitable loss occurs and Author Say leaves us forever.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, ideal book-and-movie book club choice

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG
ANDRE DUBUS III
W.W. Norton
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force sees a way to restore his family's dignity in an attractive bungalow available on county auction. But the house's owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, will fight for the one thing she has left. And her lover, a married cop, will be driven to extremes to win her love. In this masterpiece of American realism and Shakespearean consequence, Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters careen toward inevitable conflict, their tragedy painting a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

My Review: Behrani. An exiled colonel in the Shah's army. Kathy. A fucked-up druggie living off her inheritance. Lester. A major idiot whose law-enforcement career is his last best shot at staying off welfare.

Not one of these people will leave this book better than they entered it. Kathy's only home is the one she inherited, and the county says it's not hers anymore because she hasn't paid the taxes. She has, though. She's completely unable to function in the world because she's hazed on drugs for so long that even when she's clean she can't think straight. That means she can't figure out how to prove she has complied with the law.

Behrani can't get an American life going. He has savings (one hesitates to imagine where the money came from originally) that barely keep him afloat, and jobs that demean him but are all a man with no skills except being an Army officer can get. But his son's college money is sufficient to buy a distressed property at auction. Kathy's home, as it turns out. He plans to renovate and flip it, using this as a stepping-stone to American Dream-level prosperity.

Lester comes in as the deputy assigned to be sure Kathy gets out of the home that's no longer hers. Love at first sight! Lame-o Lester and Loser Kathy...surely the white trash Romeo and Juliet!

Pretty much.

Dubus drags us through the legal system as the parties battle out the rights and wrongs of the case. No one here is a good person, just a greedy selfish prick who deserves what, in the end, is meted out to them by the author's just and pitiless exercise of karmic debt collection.

NOT an uplifting book. My withers were wrung about every twenty pages, and I took frequent breaks in order to console myself with excessive liquor consumption and sordid sexual escapades.

I love a book that brings out the best in me.

There's a scene where Lame-o Lester gets his first-ever BJ from Loser Kathy, which Dubus goes into in a bizarrely flat and affectless way that completely desxualizes the act, makes it a symptom of a pathology and not an erotic or intimate or even sexy development. It's just part of the sickness pervading these broken, unfixable people's existences.

Did you *get* that? A man wrote about the thing most men want more than food and only slightly less than air, and made it *unappealing*.

Dubus is a master of his craft. He is an artist. He can do anything he wants with words to make them dance in the reader's head to HIS tune, screw whatever you were expecting, reader! He can fashion a story that, in its outlines, sounds juicy and ripe with conflict, and make it a sharp object that will deflate whatever happy illusions were still in your head about yourself and this Murrikin Dream we're supposed to be having, reader!

And that is why you should read this book.

Book club reading guide free here.

Another reading group guide free here.

WHAT BECOMES US, abusive relationship escapee lands in fascinating trouble

WHAT BECOMES US
MICAH PERKS
Outpost19
$16 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A modern-day pioneer in search of a new life, pregnant Evie leaves her abusive husband and lands in a close-knit community divided by local colonial history a story that goes deep to the roots of the American conscience. Following a near fatal accident, Evie, a mild-mannered, pregnant school teacher, abandons her controlling husband and flees Santa Cruz, California for the wilds of western New York. She rents a farm house on a dead end road in a seemingly ideal, multi-cultural community. When she begins teaching at the local high school, she becomes obsessed with an assigned book, The Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson. This early American classic is the first book written by a woman in the Americas and details Rowlandson's harrowing captivity during King Philip's War in the seventeenth century. As Mary Rowlandson's insatiable hunger begins to fill Evie's dreams, Evie wonders if she may actually be haunted. At the same time, Evie becomes obsessed with her neighbor, a married Chilean immigrant. As she grows more pregnant, her desires/hunger grows out of control, and threaten to destroy her adopted community.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANKS Y'ALL!

My Review: Micah Perks has some big brass ones. It's not every novelist, even one whose previous novel received a lot of praise, who would choose to narrate her novel of a woman's decision to take her own power back from a controlling and very unempathetic man from the point of view of the couple's unborn twins.

I do believe we have a new narrative option for future writers: Multiple third-person unborn.

Add into this the author's tale within the novel, a factual historical account written by the captured and enslaved Mary Rowlandson (a white woman) during King Philip's War. A tale that's apparently also a portal, kind of a non-Potterverse Horcrux, as Evie (our uterus-bearer) travels (?--the "dreams" Evie has are, well, you decide when you read the book) into the time Mary Rowlandson suffers the torments of being prisoner to the Wampanoag people's powerful Queen Weetamoo.

But Evie isn't a stranger to the feeling of being a prisoner. Her husband, so strong, so handsome, so omnicompetent, had her completely under his iron sway. He is Right; she is wrong, incompetent, weak. She can't even wipe a kitchen counter properly. It started as a willing submission on Evie's part, a sense of being coddled and protected and, in the agricultural sense, husbanded. As is so often the case, relationships founder on the rocks once used as foundations. Evie realizes she and her unborn children must not live as her husband's captives...though in all honesty, I suspect an unpregnant Evie would simply have stayed. Just my thought on the matter since the text offers no speculation on the subject.

Running away from home in a scene that's a comic parody of the classic shin-down-the-tree trope, Evie leaves the beautiful anti-Paradise of Santa Cruz and lights out for the territory. In this case the territory is upstate New York, an obscure corner of same, populated by crazies, eccentrics, and people who probably shouldn't be given the vote. It's perfect for Evie. She even stumbles across the perfect house in the first minutes of her presence in Lonely Rincon Road:

She shuts the door and examines it, no lock, loose in the frame. She rests her hand on the crack between the door and the wall and feels that cool, moist, radon-breath on her palm. This basement is the only part of the house she dislikes. Californians don't have basements. She doesn't like the idea of the ground underneath a house hollowed out, destabilizing the whole structure. She duct tapes stiff old sponges she finds under the sink across the crack between the basement door and the floor in hopes of sopping up the radon before it enters the house. Then she pulls a strip of the duct tape across the door to the wall.

Perfect! Across the street from an unsettlingly handsome Chilean immigrant, his felonious war-protester wife (this is set in the first Bush administration), their headstrong young daughter, his super-Christian brother and that family of wackos (the normal one ran away to New York City so they pretend she's dead), his wife's ne'er-do-well brother and sons (Juniper, their mom, is Not All There and wisps through the narrative like really good hash smoke); well, you get the drift. And the house, radon-filled basement and all, is Evie's dream. Her husband is a continent away and unlikely to think of looking for her where she is; she's left no clues she can avoid leaving to lead him there.

Add in Evie's job at the local high school and the elements are there for a darn fine life.

Stories wither and shrivel without conflict. The conflict on Lonely Rincon Road centers on Narrative of the captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Evie encounters the book for the first time as she prepares to teach high school history in place of a fired Evangelical friend of her nutty Christian neighbors. His take on the book was, shall we say, not to community standards. Evie has a much more disturbing relationship to the book.

She's possessed by Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. They're dreams, thinks Evie, who has developed perinatal somnambulism. They're dreams so vivid they come to life in her mind in ways the book she's reading and teaching cannot possibly record:

Then it's grey morning, and Sarah has disappeared.

Mother rises up. She feels light, light in her body, light-headed, achingly stiff and run through with panic. She rushes hither and thither, asking everyone what have they done with her child, her papoose. Sarah, her baby? She rocks her arms to show who she means.

Finally, someone points to the ridge above the village and mother climbs up there and finds the grave. She places her hands on the fresh dirt. She thinks, Don't leave me here alone. She will dig Sarah up, and she even pulls up a fistful of dirt to begin, but then she stops.

When Mother rises this time, she is a hollow thing, a ghost thing, a thing filled with air. She can imagine herself a dandelio gone to fluff, blown by her little girl's last breath, dissolving into a thousand separate seeds each with its own wing to fly off the ridge and away.

Remembering that the book is narrated by Evie's unborn twins explains the use of "Mother" and remembering that the dream being narrated is accompanied by sleepwalking and remembering...hell, don't remember anything, just read that passage and tell me you don't *get* in the depths of your guts the horror of a parent losing a child. That Evie is given this vision or transported to this moment in history, or however you choose to construct it in your reading, while pregnant with twins, tells the true story here. Evie is a terrified emotional cracked vessel. Evie, whose waking time teaching the teenagers of her neighbors is fraught with the usual angst and rage teens bring; whose nights are spent unkowingly wandering, possibly stealing but certainly taking others' belongings; whose undivorced ex looms in every thought she has about the men in her world; whose sanity just might be slipping away from her, is kept at just the right distance from the reader by the unborn twin narrators:

Holding her belly with one hand she hurries down the stairs in her long nightgown, through the living room, bangs painfully into the table with her hip, pulls open the door, and rushes into the spindly woods. She stumble-runs for a while, then finally stops, leans against a smooth grey beech tree, trying to catch her ragged breath. She leans her head against the slim trunk. She can see a bit of moon through the trees. She presses into her belly again, and again she feels us, something that is not her inside her. She can't stop smiling and poking at us. It's a wild, satisfied animal smile. She thinks, How good not to be caught in Joan's bedroom, how good here in the woods. How good my babies are both alive, and they lived under my ribs. She begins to walk again, humming one of those songs she'd taught to her students in California. This land is your land, this land is my land, it was made for you and me. She sings off key, and fiercely.

Like all the best ghost stories, this one is rife with funny moments...a Passover seder that's a hoot, a wardrobe malfunction whose hilarity leads to a sad and poignant moment with the religious family's denial and prudery; and the spooky but (to me, anyway) really hilarious ending of the novel, all meet in one moment which demonstrates that Micah Perks has big, big brass ones like I told you up top. Nothing is resolved, like in life, just gears shifted and four-wheel-drive mode engaged as all Perks' characters experience massive, painful, life-altering transformations in the circle of a fire on a beautiful night.

Welcome to the world, y'all. It doesn't get less screwed up outside Mother's womb. But y'all are in a world enviably rich and passionately alive. Most poor suckers don't get in a lifetime even half the fun of just y'all's gestational residence in Evie!

Buy, read, laugh; think; cry; you won't be sorry.

MY LIFE IN FRANCE, culinary goddess Julia Child tells enough to keep the pages turning...but not all

MY LIFE IN FRNACE
JULIA CHILD (with Alex Prud'homme)
Anchor Books
$16 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France. Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband, Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia's unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a cook and teacher and writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

My Review: Truth in advertising had no greater champion than Julia Child. Her book is called exactly and precisely what it is: The narrative of her life in France. She begins her book on November 3, 1948, with the Child family landing at Le Havre, getting into their gigantic Buick station wagon, and motoring off across northern France towards Paris. They stop at thirty-six-year-old native Californian Mrs. Child's first French restaurant, La Couronne, where her husband Paul (already fluent in French from his first stint living there more than 20 years before) consults with M. Dorin, the maitre d', and decides the young marrieds (relatively speaking, as he's 46 by then) will have a sole meuniere with a glass of wine! I mean! A nice Republican-raised gal from Pasadena, California, drinking wine with lunch! Who heard of this?! Mais certainement not Mme. Child, nee McWilliams!

It was the beginning of a life-long love affair between Julia Child and la belle France, and Julia Child and la cuisine Francaise. It led to several books, several TV series, and a long, happy life spent teaching, teaching, teaching. Mme. Child had found her metier, at close to forty, in a day and time where living past sixty-five was ** considered to be ancient. In the process, the person she became changed the American, and possibly the world as a result, culture surrounding food. Yet Julia Child wrote this book with her husband's great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, who tells us in his brief Foreword that getting his garrulous old relative to open up about the feelings and secrets that make up the majority of any human life. His degree of success was formidable, given the generational and gender-induced reticence he fought against to extract the juicy bits from her.

Bravo, M. Prud'homme, et merci bien par tout le faire.

Julia Child was a fixture around our house when I was young. I got the TV-watching habits I carry with me to this good day at a tender age, and part of the formative process was The French Chef. My mother didn't like Mrs. Child much. She was a fan of M.F.K. Fisher's food work, which wasn't in sympathy with Mrs. Child's careful and precise measuring and nice and accurate timing. Mama was a feast-maker, not a dinner-preparer, and that's why she watched Julia Child programs.

I learned about enthusiastic appreciation of food from my mother and Mrs. Child. I was never a picky eater, and only rejected a few foods. (I still hate corn on the cob.) It always seemed like the ladies were having so much fun making these weird dishes! It made sense to me that it would be fun to eat them, and so it proved to be.

In reading this memoir, I immersed myself in the flow of Child's later-life awakening to the joy of food and the sheer exhilaration of preparing special and delicious and carefully thought-out meals for one's loved ones. While I understand the co-author's challenge in balancing the need to afford the famous personality privacy against the buying public's desire to know the dirt, I can only lament that Prud'homme either didn't or couldn't press Child on the topic of her childlessness. I suspect burying herself in research and in obsessive experimentation was a means of assuaging her sadness at not being a mother. She was, or at least she is painted in this book as being, a very nurturing person, and given the prevailing attitudes of the era, it is unlikely that this absence did not cause her pangs of regret. I would have liked to see some exploration of that, mostly because I think glittering surfaces (which this book limns in loving detail) are even more beautiful when seen with shadows. It's like sterling silver flatware: When dipped into a cleaning bath as opposed to hand-polished, it's true that all the tarnish comes off, but all the character does too, and the pattern is flat and blah for lack of a bit of dark contrast that is left by the more labor-intensive hand polishing method.

The delight of the book was in Child's almost orgasmic recollections of the foods and wines she and her dearly beloved husband Paul Child ate and drank across the years. In the course of learning to cook the haute bourgeoise cuisine that she made famous in her native land, Child came alive to the joys and thrills of sight, smell, and taste in a way that only truly delicious food can cause a person to become. It was the positive counterpoint to her manifold frustrations in collaborative cook-bookery. The travails of preparing the Magnum Opus that is Mastering the Art of French Cooking simply don't do enough to make the author come off the page and join me in my reading chair. I rate books based on this type of measure, this degree of ability to enfold and immerse me in the narrative and the emotional reality of the tale being told. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I wasn't swept into it and away to France circa 1950, and that was what I came to the read expecting to happen. In fact, when I saw the film partially based on this book, Julie & Julia, I was completely swept away and eager to read the source material.

In the end, I got more out of watching Meryl Streep enact Julia Child than I did reading Julia Child reporting herself. I was disappointed.

And hungry.

MRS. CALIBAN, a sharp and tangy satirical novella with an amazing backhand

MRS. CALIBAN
RACHEL INGALLS
Open Road Media
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: It all starts with the radio. Dorothy’s husband, Fred, has left for work, and she is at the kitchen sink washing the dishes, listening to classical music. Suddenly, the music fades out and a soft, close, dreamy voice says, “Don’t worry, Dorothy.”

A couple weeks later, there is a special interruption in regular programming. The announcer warns all listeners of an escaped sea monster. Giant, spotted, and froglike, the beast—who was captured six months earlier by a team of scientists—is said to possess incredible strength and to be considered extremely dangerous.

That afternoon, the seven-foot-tall lizard man walks through Dorothy’s kitchen door. She is frightened at first, but there is something attractive about the monster. The two begin a tender, clandestine affair, and no one, not even Dorothy’s husband or her best friend, seems to notice.

Selected by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the greatest American novels since World War II, Mrs. Caliban is a story of passion and loneliness, love and loss. Wryly subversive, it brilliantly combines surrealism, satire, and the female perspective.

**OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA OFFERED ME THIS DRC VIA NETGALLEY**

My Review: I was reminded of why I liked this novel when I first read it twenty-plus years ago:

"Have you ever seen so many tilted mirrors and hidden cameras?"
Gives me the creeps. Really. It's a Presbyterian's dream come true—you know, God sees it all, He's watching you no matter where you are and what you're doing."
"I bet he's really out in the kitchen getting a beer out of the icebox."

On this second reading, in my later fifties instead of middle thirties, I'm still smoothed and soothed by Ingalls's lovely prose and her razor-sharp tongue. Now, however, I see something I missed then: her rage. This is a deeply angry book, and not just on the levels I expected it to be. The passage of those years has taken things away from me that finally showed me the level of compressed outrage that Dorothy, the author's voice, must feel to live through this scene:

...[s]he was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice, safe kitchen, when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring her straight in the face.
She stopped before she knew she had stopped, and looked, without realizing that she was taking anything in. She was as surprised as if she had heard an explosion and seen her own shattered legs go flying across the floor. There was a space between him and the place where she was standing; it was like a gap in time.

Dorothy, average person in average home living under the radar of all the world including her husband, has this vision of a man-thing in the kitchen (her proper realm, being a woman) and doesn't decompensate, throw fits, scream, run...she invites the creature in, feeds him, makes love to him, and builds a life for the first time in many long years.

That takes (metaphorical) balls. What happens as this life unspools takes literal balls.

All in good time. Dorothy and Fred, her husband, haven't been in a marriage for a long time. Their son, Scotty, died several years before; during her grieving for Scotty, Dorothy lost their unborn baby; and, as is so often the case, the parents drift into their own worlds of misery and rage, unable to discover the back passages and sea currents that swept them together before their loss. While a commonplace story, it's not a cheerful one.

So much more cheerful is Dorothy's startled awakening into lust:

She was just beginning to convince herself that down at the bottom of the sea he was hurt or dying, when she saw his shape moving up out of the water. In that light and at that distance, he looked exactly like the statues of the gods, except that his head was slightly larger and rounder than it should be. And he walked with a rounded, swimming motion from hip to knee, holding his large, powerful shoulders and arms easily.

This isn't the way a woman looks at any old man, this is the attitude and the inventory a lover makes of the beloved. It's clear that Dorothy has no sense of wrongness about her six-seven green-skinned frogman lover, she is simply infatuated and lusty.