THE CAMINO, Anglophone debut of Dutch-language suspense star

THE CAMINO
ANYA NIEWIERRA (tr.Eileen Stevens)
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5- of five

The Publisher Says: From the Netherlands’s most popular crime writer, a literary thriller following a woman who walks the Camino de Santiago, searching for answers about her husband’s death.

Forty-four-year-old chocolatier Lotte Bonnet has been living happily in South Limburg for years with her husband Emil, a former refugee from Bosnia. But when Emil unexpectedly dies by suicide while walking the Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James, Lotte is devastated.

Shocked and confused, Lotte resolves to follow Emil’s exact path on the Camino one year later, hoping for answers, or at least insights into what could have compelled him to take his own life. While walking the arduous trail through central France, passing idyllic villages and meeting fellow pilgrims, Lotte’s thoughts are also elsewhere, in Sarajevo, as she learns the terrors of a war and shocking secrets about her husband’s identity.

Inspired by the natural beauty that surrounds her, forming new friendships, and possibly a romantic connection on the Camino, Lotte is distracted as the trail grows more treacherous, and as it becomes clear someone is following her, someone who does not want her to know the truth.

Fans of Louise Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache will be delighted by Lotte’s easy charm and enthralled by the revelations on her journey. Anya Niewierra’s blockbuster mystery The Camino has taken Europe by storm and is finally available in English for the first time.

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My Review: I was dazzled.

It wasn't always *comfortable* reading but it was always to-the-point, even when it felt like it might not be. Every detail does indeed serve a purpose. There are dreadful deeds done in the past from the framework of the novel, that are definitely not for the fainthearted. I *strongly* discourage readers whose tolerance doe not extend to child harm not to read this book at all.

I'm not at all clear that the story's a thriller by my own lights. I'd call it an historical mystery/suspense novel that examines recent European history from a grieving woman's perspective; Lotte's decision to go on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage as a means of discovering her late husband Emil's secrets felt...forced...until I sank into the full implications of pilgrimage.

Her discoveries about her husband of a quarter century are, well, intense and not at all expected. It's a truth in any intimate relationship that there are unspoken things; mostly unspoken because they're not really important.

Not this time.

The Spoiler Stasi being among the nastiest of hazards on the internet, I won't detail the discoveries she makes; the CWs will be enough to warn the sensitive. I began my read aware of a few details so I was prepared, but I reiterate for clarity that you must heed the CWs.

The issues that arise as Lotte retraces the Way of St, James in the present are treated in a way that was very suspenseful...I worried for her safety from the time she decided to undertake her parallel pilgrimage, since Emil's suicide was at best suspicious. The bad stuff that happens is very well designed, in that it makes the stakes of her rash decision that much more obvious as each instance of near-miss violence more obviously targeted.

The why that we eventually learn for these events is fully explanatory. It changes the game for Lotte and for the reader as we learn why Emil's secrets and his lies are revealed to Lotte, and why that revelation is so deeply disturbing to the unseen others on her trail following his trail.

If the CWs make you nervous, read the book, because the resolution/revelations are well worth it. If they leave you deeply upset merely reading the words, do not touch the book at all.

It proved to me that Author Niewierra deserves her European fame as a creator of suspenseful stories.

LIVONA CHOW MEIN, amazing how long scumbaggery can go on without causing a revolution

LIVONA CHOW MEIN
ABIGAIL SAVITCH-LEW
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century.

In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong.

Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed.

Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.

A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.

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My Review: As debut novels go, Author Savitch-Lew picked a doozy of a topic...the arson plague that hit New York's working-class and immigrant housing, the war on the communities that were criminally negligent of their duty to provide landlords with their just and fair profits, and had the audacity not to be white or, often enough, to speak English. The communities that were forming and re-forming and growing also were guilty of demanding the landlords obey the laws of New York City! Can you imagine such arrogance? It costs actual money, money that could be profit!, to obey all those idiot safety and health rules!

It's a shameful, revolting tale of greed and racism.

It's also an immigrant descendant's reckoning with US racism and capitalism at their most nakedly unabashed. Ambitiously attempting to use dual timelines to tell different stories in different eras and (fatally for my reading pleasure) suspense-destroying levels of intertwinedness, the result is two good stories about a family dreaming the "American Dream" as evidence of its fictionality mounts in their faces. Had these been presented in sequence, the 1940s then the 1970s, much more could have been wrung from each era's challenges. As it was, the effort to keep the reader in suspense felt misplaced...obviously this situation worked out we've already seen that person in the 1970s!...so I was left sitting there with my teeth in my mouth wondering "why am I here again?"

Because both these stories are trenchant and apt for today's developing social landscape, that's why. I'm not the biggest fan of the execution but I am deeply interested in the Toisanese diaspora now. I liked what I learned if not deriving pleasure from how I learned it.

Social-issues readers (like me) encouraged to get a sample to see if your mileage will vary.

AMERICAN SPIRITS, sapphic suds with a side of sly social commentary

AMERICAN SPIRITS
ANNA DORN
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A love letter to pop music, American Spirits charts an icon’s fall—and an obsessive fangirl’s rise.

Thirty-eight-year-old Blue Velour has finally achieved the critical acclaim she’s long been chasing. Over the last decade, she’s released six studio albums to mixed reviews, landing her somewhere between performance artist and niche legend. But her latest album, Blue’s Beard—a cheeky reference to the subreddit fanatically dedicated to her suspected secret relationship with longtime producer Sasha Harlow—has rocket-launched her reputation. Blue hires nerdy superfan Rose Lutz as her assistant to handle the pressures of the upcoming tour.

When the pandemic shuts down the tour, however, Blue decides to hole up in the redwoods with Sasha to make another album. An aspiring singer herself, Rose is frothing at the mouth to be isolated in a cabin with these two legends, but what begins as a creative retreat spirals into a flurry of chaos and betrayal—culminating in a tragic act that changes their lives forever.

Smart, entertaining, and edgy, American Spirits is a compelling exploration of the dark side of fame.

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My Review: A Star is Born with Lana del Rey as Norman Maine. Let that sink in.

So I was pretty invested early on, I like the idea of a lesbian A Star is Born more than you can probably imagine, and from Author Dorn's very, very capable pen...! Home run ball, meet bat, amirite? Well, I was right. Just...not all the way to the fences for that ball.

I don't see much point in going over the plot, it's accurately summarized in the publisher's synopsis. The flavor of the book is more what I rate this author's work on. I enjoy the line-by-line reading of Author Dorn's work so much, f/ex Blue Velour's description of Ayn Rand as "the original girl boss", that I was carried along on a satisfied cloud of smiles as I absorbed her digs and jabs at the culture of Fame, its corrosive loss of perspective for the famous and the fans, the careful but there delineation of the societal systems that Fame depends on and reinforces as toxic and harmful. I was set to give this story a rave review.

Then came The Twist℠.

The observant among you will note the rating above. That is how much I disliked, and always dislike, this framing device as revealed near the end of the book. No I will not discuss details, no one dares do such a thing while the Spoiler Stasi lurk among us. It is a framing device that is completely ordinary, does not cause others the anger it evokes from me, and will bother very few, if any, of y'all. It's my quirk. I write reviews of books because sometimes someone discovers a new writer when I gush (or excoriate, I know of one case where someone read my line "...I, a charter member of the “Eradicate Ivy Compton-Burnett” Society" in a two-star review and found her newest reading passion), and to help people on the bubble about picking up a new book to gather information about it, and to vent my feelings about writers and writing. I've written a lot of reviews...there are over 2,000 posts on this blog alone...so the reader can get a bead on my personal taste. It's good to know your source's biases. So if you feel I'm being unfair to Author Dorn by not rating this particular book in line with the majority of the story's genuine excellence, understand that my opinion of her writing talent and expertise is as strong as ever...I simply do not like at all the particular twist she, in her authorial capacity, chose to use in this story.

It's not meant to discourage potential readers seeking sapphic melodrama, fame-culture takedowns, or the sheer pleasure of reading her prose, from getting the book. If you've been thinking about Perfume & Pain and wondering when the next dose is going to soothe your craving, don't drop it...just maybe borrow this one from the library first. You might adore what bothers me, and want a copy to keep on your shelves.

I can very much see this reaction. In fact, I hope you feel that way because I want Author Dorn's next book as soon as Simon & Schuster can get it out.

THE BULLET SWALLOWER, La Frontera's reckoning on the page

THE BULLET SWALLOWER
ELIZABETH GONZALEZ JAMES
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He’s good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he’s also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it—with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio’s timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors’ crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that’s epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author’s own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.

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My Review: Inherent in any story set in the western part of the US is racism, is settler colonialism is the trauma of violence...institutionalized all the way to interpersonal. "The past is not so far away as you might think. Nor the future, for that matter. No man lives free from history." This is the beating heart of the story, in fact of the entire setting in real world terms. No one is free from history.

Jaime, in his reckoning with that aperçu's truth, receives...non-corporeal, I guess...divine, malign, either, probably both, but certainly not of consensus reality assistance from the aptly named Remedios. He's made privy to the, well, Akashic records of his family's deeds. I can only imagine the horrible burden of knowing the inalterable and undeniable facts of your very roots in reality.

Are we in fact our relatives' keepers after all? Is that the myth of Cain and Abel's longevity explained? I know Jaime believes the information he now has is true but he does not question what truth it tells. If an entity asserted I was responsible for balancing the scales of an entire lineage, I'd want to see some ID proving the authority of this assertion.

Jaime not being so suspicious and mistrustful, off we go into the blood-soaked deeds and violent cruelties of the past. It's an open question if this results in a better book than a "straight" magical-realist tale, as these limit their violences more than this full-throated shout of rage does.

When it comes to the acceptance of personal accountability for actions rendered unchangeable by time's passage I'm of two minds. We unquestionably live within the blast radius of our predecessors' decisions, actions, inactions. It is not logical to deny this fact. What do we owe the present for the actions of the past? Not nothing, that's absurd and greedy because it's only ever applied to the beneficiaries while the descendants of those who suffered and lost bear the consequences forever. Where is a reasonable balance point?

Jaime's resolution is the source of my missing star. In the final chapter there is a revelation that emphasizes the magical realism throughout the story was baked in from giddy-up to whoa. It vitiates the journey Jaime has been on from my point of view, but it is very much of a piece with the spooky frame we're looking at the picture within.

Solidly four stars, transported me to my kidhood in Mercedes, Texas, and will transport you, too. Needing to be somewhere your family is not for the Yuletide celebrations? Here's a book that's set in a uniquely characterful corner of the US that has a lot to answer for historically. What could be more apt for reading in family-togetherness time?

PARADISE LOGIC, assured debut of surreal, chaotic young-adulthood's identity crisis

PARADISE LOGIC
SOPHIE KEMP
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.

It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.

When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her life: Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

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My Review: As an exploration of obsession, of the cultural freight of misogyny and its patriarchal messaging, this story disturbed me. Paradise's obsessions are so spot-on for a twentysomething, all centering external validation for her exterior qualities and ignoring the void where she, herself..her Self...needs to go. She's following the script her gender presentation hands her, beats her with, from birth. Ariel will love her if she's the perfect girlfriend, of course he will.

Never mind he loves his crack habit more than he even notices her. Never mind she only hared off on this quest to become a girlfriend at all because her fuckbuddy Emil plants the idea in her mind..."When I looked down at Emil’s cell phone I would always see a message that said: LOL JUST RIPPED A FAT 1. And then Emil would respond by saying: 'Mashallah, my brother,' even though Sikh is not the same as Muslim and also Emil was a Filipino atheist"...never mind she loves making art and creating zines more than the airhead Ariel the wannabe, but never will be, Assyriologist. She's so open to the world and its experiences that she loses sight of the shore. No wonder this quest results in her downward spiral into weird Stepford-wife trial drugs and enduring sexual abuse.

Surreal, but rooted in a reality I remember all too well, Reality...or Valerie as she was named by her mother...feels like the right narrator to tell me this story of rootless identity and unformed selfhood in a modern context that feels so malign as to make this a horror story. Her blithe breathless narrative voice even feels like that of other twentysomething seekers I've known, mostly female. She is doing what women have had, have been forced, to do for millennia: muddling through, making the best of it.

In many ways a funny and heartfelt account of figuring yourself out, on most others an addled nightmare of not knowing how, when, and where to set boundaries, the real pleasure of this read is its gonzo narrative voice and its relatable struggles toward real selfhood: “You’re making a commitment. A boyfriend I have heard is a lifelong commitment. Once you have one you’re never the same. You become a girlfriend. This is a fixed identity. I didn’t have one of those yet.”

A read for Yuletide's unmoored, unsettled liminal space, to remind older folks of just how hard it is and how easy to make foolish mistakes in that state; how much patience is a gift and how much a con game.

Parents strongly urged to read; and cautioned it won't be comfortable all the time. It will be funny, though.

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.

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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.

ANOINTED: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World, sets out to do just that

ANOINTED: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World
TOBY STUART
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A leading organizational theorist takes us deep into the realm of humanity’s most powerful invisible force—social status—and how it shapes everything from who we trust and what we value to which ideas and innovations change the world and who gets credit for their success.

Why does an authentic Rembrandt fetch hundreds of millions while a nearly identical painting by his most talented disciple goes for a tiny fraction of that price? What makes a restaurant “hot,” a neighborhood “up-and-coming,” or a technology “the next big thing”? Why do people often choose the same seats in recurrent office meetings? Who is most likely to interrupt someone else mid-sentence? Why do big name lawyers earn so much? Why are health disparities so pronounced? And why, when someone gets a bit ahead in life, does the small advantage so often compound?

The answer to all these questions is social status—invisible hierarchies that influence every aspect of our lives, from our health to our personal relationships and careers to how we behave in social and work settings to the tastes and preferences we form. Without it, we’d be lost and paralyzed when faced with even the simplest decisions. But it comes at a steep status works as a powerful amplifier, turning small initial advantages into insurmountable leads. Inequality is baked into its core.

Through compelling examples from business, economics, literature, art, fashion, and beyond, Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit. And how new technology offers a glimpse of a more equitable future.

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

My Review: Analyzing what inequality *does* is pretty much the most important topic in the vastly-more-polarized world of 2025. Why it does those things is harder to pin down because that makes the researcher confront very touchy topics like racism, sexism, class snobbery...all very germane to the topic but also more fungible due to their seeming inevitability. In a world with slavery going on in it this exact instant yet that fact being unacknowledged, unacknowledgable in fact, how does one tease out the roots of the practice? Never mind that it goes back over five thousand years. That we're sure of.

So what's the evidence we have, mountains and mountains of it, say? That inequality exists, that it does some good things...you specifically and personally have the following choices based on your status is a good way to avoid overload when making decisions...and bad ones like "this thing you need to save your life is not available to people of your status." There are obviously many points along the continuum between those arbitrarily opposed points. The author is more careful in framing his examples than I choose to be in this review. As you'd expect.

The conferred prestige of social worth by being in some specific in-group is a golden passkey to benefits at every level of human endeavor. The author does a cracking job of putting this fact before us in blue-chip language backed by stellar research done in prestigious institutions. What does it mean is permaybehaps not always as clear. Does the author, does the data more importantly, support the common perception that this is unjust?

To whom?

There is a lot of data digested, a lot of analysis done, and at the end of the read...copiously annotated and with a very impressive bibliography...I do not have an answer to give you. There may be no answer to be found in the data.

So, my idea is: look at the data left unexamined. No one can look at everything. Do this same himalaya of work with the other stuff. This book is a terrific curiosity lighter, an excellent introduction to the study of inequality, and not an epitome or summation of it. Nor does the author present it as such. He makes no claims to resolving any debates, he presents case studies...the Rembrandt one he opens with is very trenchant indeed...he leads you through facts that illuminate the issues and then expects you'll do some work.

People who vaguely wonder "why does my boss get a reserved spot near the door?" are well-advised to get this study into their grasp. Status and prestige are very important in your daily life, it behooves you to get a handle on how and (to an extent) why they exist.

The best companion read to this book is Steven Pinker's latest, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. "What everyone knows" is a hugely powerful forever.

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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baloney.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT HUNGER, weirdly satisfying and thoroughly revolting at the same time

WHAT HUNGER
CATHERINE DANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nyugen, as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood, for fans of Jennifer’s Body and Little Fires Everywhere.

It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.

Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.

But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny’s Vietnamese lineage and her mother’s emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

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My Review: Adolescence is a time of Certainty covering terrified confusion, Outrage covering terrified hurt. The cultural Western headiness of slobbering pandering laser-focused attention on the adolescent, a malleable consumer/believer in the making, from all sides ignites the fuel into a solar-intensity conflagration of perspectiveless conviction that, unless *I* like/love/want it, it's a Plot to Ruin My Life.

I get lots of criticism for using Capital Letters in my writing. Here it's done, as it most often is, to highlight an emotional not a rational response evoked or intended by the author (me or other) to be evoked. Perspective needs to be earned and learned the hard way, so this is all perfectly understandable. It's also why so many of us can not stand coming-of-age stories, to the point where I recommend them to those most intensely averse to them in order to watch their manners pumps explode with the effort to say no without screaming at me. (Hiya Kath!)

In this story Ronny's ready-to-ignite rage goes critical in several incidents. The response to that criticality is, in keeping with the title, related to food choices...not unusual for adolescent females, but decidedly NOT the usual eating-disorder narrative I'm heartily sick of reading. It is if anything an inverted use of eating disorders I'm accustomed to. I've known no anthropophagic beings. Plenty of bulimics and anorexics.

What Hunger is a hilariously apt, darkly funny title for a deeply, darkly, eucharistically furious story. It's metaphor gone clear, in scientological jargon, and exteriorized. (Y'all, stick to Wikipedia to look up scientology stuff. DO NOT USE CHAT OR GOOGLE. The consequences are dire.) I'm not always interested in body horror used to explain rage, but this story worked the alchemy I need to get invested in the action. It was indeed gross at times.

Balancing that, and creating what felt to me an exquisite tension, was Ronny's family history of expressing love through gorgeously evoked meals that I damn near passed out from drooling myself into dehydration while reading. What a food vocabulary Author Dang has! It's a pleasure to read someone's upsetting writing when it then soothes me with food.

I'm easy. You might not be.

The most notable dissatisfaction I have is the pacing of the story after Ronny's, um, conversion? discovery? whatever, big change. Action slows to allow for introspection for quite a stretch, and it did not get back to work soon enough for this reader. There are developments that, in their absence of a world-building framework, just sorta...happen...which very seldom works out best for the narrative cohesion or character development. I mean, "ewwwww" is okay if it effloresces out of some Lovecraftian something, not so much done here.

The complexity of the family's internal dynamics are the source of the extra half-star on the three and a half I was planning to award this very good but not outstanding tale. Ronny, like any adolescent, is still molding her responses around her family. She, like the most bearable adolescents I've ever known, is adaptable in her responses still, not hardening into adamant certainty. She has a very touching relationship with her mother and her auntie, both still morphing as she develops.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy the horror bits, or want to experience them getting the good relationship development, but if your stomach is strong this is a contender for your summer reading.

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel, Florida's tryin-to-get-by guys after The Crash

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel
JOE PAN
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Outsiders meets Sons of Anarchy in this gripping debut about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation.

It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.

What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.

Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities. In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.

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My Review: Violent and drug-addled, futureless and betrayed at every turn, the young men in this dreadful life of cat-and-mouse with the law (mostly unseen on the page, a faceless enemy), the rival outlaws, and each other, are dead men walking. There's no hope this side of the grave for any of them. It's a game they can't win. Or even walk away from. If you believe in free will, these guys make the worst choices imaginable...but honestly I came away from the read feeling pretty darn sure they're proof, all of 'em, that free will's an illusion.

Because if it isn't, y'all's controlling god is a rotten, evil entity.

Why read it, why finish it, why keep the misery fresh? Because the philosophical soliloquies coming out of these dead-enders' mouths are just *chef's kiss* and there's quite a number of 'em. Equally fun is the occasional character on the page reading CS Lewis or something equally unsuspected. Kaos and Cueball and Eddy, none of these guys made it out, or if they did it wasn't with everything they walked in carrying. The idea of their lives is to have more. And no one tells them "more" has no end, that's how the addictions they supply and live get their hold.

I think four stars is fair because, if it's not original, it's got honesty and clarity and it respects you as a reader. Joe Pan has put out poetry books before, and it shows. A first novel by a poet doesn't usually come this close to being a good story; it's more usual that there's less plot, more ornament. This is good description, good characterization, solid plotting, and only falls a bit short in the last 10%. I'm not sure how else to end it, though, so the fourth star stays whole.

Never a fan of Florida, I'm pretty sure it's not a far-fetched set of events or an outrageous group of guys, so I'm reinforced in my...less than fond...opinion, just as I'd hoped to be. If you're in the mood for some grit lit, here it is with a Florida twist.

WE ARE EATING THE EARTH: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, klaxon in your ear

WE ARE EATING THE EARTH: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
MICHAEL GRUNWALD
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate the fight to fix our food system.

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, an ingenious phrase coined by Michael Grunwald, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems.

In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it.

Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.

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My Review: If one emerges from this read an ardent capitalist, political "conservative", and a climate-change skeptic, one is defective intellectually and morally.

Honestly I could end the review there because anything else I say will only be repetition of these statements with embellishments.

We are at a crossroads in many areas of our existence as a species. We have access to immense mountains of information and have little training to contextualize and interpret it. We are, for the first time ever, able to see with our own eyes, the entire Earth as it appears from space...a literal god's-eye view...and have done nothing to make that unique in humankind's entire history as a species awareness part of our worldview. We act as though problems are local, or localizable, and have just one cause so need only one solution.

Nothing in Nature supports this delusion. It is debunked in immense bodies of data collected, analyzed, and tested over generations now. Bad-faith arguments made by profit-seeking entities have ruined, to an extent I naïvely thought was actually impossible, the very idea of the data we already have being usable to start patching up the mess we have before us.

Books like this one walk you through the way we know what we know...briskly, but with integrity and expertise balanced by enthusiasm...and what we can in fact do now to make a positive impact on the course we're taking. I could wish for more viewpoints drawn from our Global Southern neighbors, and the women who outside the West perform the vast majority of food growth and harvest. I could wish for a less preaching-to-the-choir bent to the narrative.

But I can't fault Author Grunwald's data sources or synthesis. I can't fault his palpable sense of urgency. I can't help but wish more of y'all would get the message he's putting out: Action is the need and it's an urgent one.

PALM MERIDIAN, Grace Flahive's satisfying lesbian-love in retirement set in 2067

PALM MERIDIAN
GRACE FLAHIVE
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking, big-hearted story of long-lost love, friendship, and a life well-lived, set at a Florida retirement resort for queer women, on the last day of resident Hannah Cardin’s life—for readers of Less and The Wedding People.

It’s 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can’t bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for queer women who want to revel in their twilight years. Inside, Hula-Hoopers shimmy across the grass, fiercely competitive book clubs nearly come to blows, and the roller-ski team races up and down the winding paths. Everywhere you look, these women are living large.

Hannah Cardin has spent ten happy years under these tropical, technicolor skies, but after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she has decided that tomorrow morning she will close her eyes for the very last time. Tonight, however, Hannah and her raucous band of friends are throwing one hell of an end-of-life party. And with less than twenty-four hours left, Hannah is holding out for one final, impossible thing…

Amongst the guest list is Sophie, the love of Hannah’s life. They haven’t spoken since their devastating breakup over forty years ago, but today, Hannah is hoping for the chance to give her greatest love one last try.

As Hannah anxiously awaits Sophie’s arrival, her mind casts back over the highs and lows of her kaleidoscopic life. But when a shocking secret from the past is revealed, Hannah must reconsider if she can say goodbye after all.

Spanning the course of a single day and seventy-odd years, and bursting with irresistible hope, humor, and wisdom, this one-of-a-kind novel celebrates the unexpected moments that make us feel the most alive.

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

My Review: The idea that people born in the 1990s will be retiring to (surviving) Florida in 2067 feels...exuberantly optimistic...but I'll go with it. More especially I'm thrilled at the notion of the right to die being well established in this future, and the existence of queer elder spaces is just ordinary, and hell! sign me up!

Of course I'd be well into supercentenarianhood in 2067, the year the book's set, which ya know what, maybe not so much, thanks anyway.

The point of this story is satisfying to me, the way at the end pf life one wants to take stock and to see what can be fixed among the innumerable errors we've made. Sophie, our PoV character's "one that got away," is invited to Hannah's end of life celebration. We see their relationship in flashbacks, which does not add suspense in the usual way...we know the relationship collapses...but does make Hannah's desire to see Sophie again before she chooses to escape the awfulness of her end-stage cancer more impactful.

It's really moving in a quiet, contemplative way. Wrenching losses remembered, not lived through in real time...choices muffed, but long ago...people loved and cherished for an entire lifetime who only know the event we're reading about and the actors in this present resolution as names, or as their survivor selves. It's poignant, it's moving, and I think it's done very well indeed.

It is not a Big! Dramatic! Finish!

I wouldn't've liked the read had it been so. I did very much wish I'd felt the flashbacks into Sophie and Hannah's early relationship in the 2020s had somehow sowed seeds for their world of 2067. I get just how spoiled a readerly reaction that is, yet as it is the flashbacks don't do more than tell me how awful the two people were in their youth. It isn't all that interesting, that point, and the net result is to take more away from the effect of the read than add to it.

I'm not at all trying to discourage you from reading the book. I hope you will because the imperfect future ahead of us is so hopefully presented in Hannah's story. It's got lots of problems, but when has the world not had problems? Have you not yet had enough of doomscrolling?

If so, come to Palm Meridian, settle in, and be told that the world will muddle through, that we will manage somehow to love and care for each other, and make it work as best we can.

THEM: The best time to pay attention was twenty-five years ago; second-best is now

THEM: Adventures with Extremists
JON RONSON
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Them began as a book about different kinds of extremists, but after Jon had got to know some of them—Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen—he found that they had one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room.

In Them, Jon sets out, with the help of the extremists, to locate that room. The journey is as creepy as it is comic and, along the way, Jon is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California.

Them is a fascinating and entertaining exploration of extremism, in which Jon learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of "them" and "us". Are the extremists on to something? Or has Jon become one of THEM?

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My Review: Twenty-plus years on, this book isn't obsolete.

I've never typed a sadder, more fraught sentence in the entirety of my life. Details are outdated, but that in no way invalidates Author Ronson's analysis (though it chops a half-star off...time for a new edition!)

Alex Jones was utterly exposed as the lunatic bigot he really is in this book long before Sandy Hook blew that closet door off its hinges, and yet this complete careful takedown had no effect on his ability to convince people to invest in his idiocy.

In his experience, detailed in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (q.v.), people have taken old-fashioned social organization with them into the digital age. The conspiracy theorists of today have a long lineage of hatred for the Jews, a long-standing mistrust of Authority (except of course for themselves; after all, they know The Truth℠, everyone else is a sad little dupe of Them), and no longer have to have a public owning of their nutjobbery.

Emotional dysregulation is far easier to run out of control in parasocial interactions with authority, or authoritative, figures. These are ever-more common events in our social lives as more and more time is spent in internet-mediated contact...post-pandemic there is a huge increase in time spent in and effect of parasocial relationships, which is only exacerbating the ongoing radicalization of younger men in Western society.

Author Ronson, trained as a journalist, is very much a careful observer of the people he speaks to; he does not come right out and say "that was a lie" but he very carefully notes what tells an observant listener and/or reader what marks something out as, in fact, a lie. Staying alert to subtext is, after all, a big part of a journalist's brief...another reason why "They" want fewer trained journalists in the world. It's part of a truly unnerving perversion of the truism that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone...phrased best by Mark Twain: "When you set aside mere names & come down to realities, you find that we are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are. His name is The Majority. He is mighty in bulk & strength ... He rules by the right of possessing less money & less brains & more ignorance than the other competitor for the throne, The Minority. Ours is an Absolute Monarchy." (Mark Twain at Large, Arthur L. Scott, p. 96-97.)

The jaws of the trap "They" have spent fifty years building, slowly and carefully, are springing shut. I do not know if there is still time to wedge a stick of sturdy truthtelling in them.

I'm sure gonna give it a whirl.

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

THEM: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal
BEN SASSE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing American Adult, an intimate and urgent assessment of the existential crisis facing our nation.

Something is wrong. We all know it.

American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair?

In Them, bestselling author and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger.

Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships—life’s fundamental pillars—are in statistical freefall.

As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of on a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.

There’s a path forward—but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and real human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.

America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor. Fixing what’s wrong with the country depends on you rebuilding right where you’re planted.

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My Review: I'm allergic to old-fashioned neighborliness, community-building exercises, the idea that living in the same zip code says something fundamental about my connection to people.

In days of yore, that would've marked me out as weird. Now that makes me...for the first time in my adult life...mainstream. And what did Mark Twain say about about agreeing with the majority? "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."

I doubt I can change much, but others? There's hope for them and by extension all of us.

That Author Sasse is a Republican should tell anyone who knows me everything I need to convey by reporting positive agreement with his prescription for what ails the US body politic. (Also, per Wikipedia, Senator Sasse: "{o}n February 13, 2021, ...was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial."} Go former Senator Sasse!)

The anomie and isolation of seemingly the majority of young people is absolutely terrifying. What Author Sasse posits as solutions earn all my four stars. His framing of the problems we face is resolutely inside the educated elite PoV one would expect from a lifelong academic and former Senator. Only in the funhouse mirror of US politics is this man in any way a centrist. He is also not wrong.

Many of the rights and norms Author Sasse identified as under threat in this 2018 book, eg the inalienable rights of all individuals including habeas corpus, and the freedom of conscience and the right to exercise it in private life (the Dobbs decision rises before my appalled eyes),have been explicitly targeted by the current administration. It's been a long, slow process to dumb down and distract people away from the assault on our institutions of trust and collective action. Look at Project 2025's digital ghosts.

A big part of that process has been the demonization and politicization of Others. When someone is Other, they're not protected like you should be, or protected from you like they should be. A long and successful campaign to convince people "They" are a threat to decency and rightness has been waged by the real "Them" the actual political operators of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and so on.

Destroying the people's willingness to see each other as real, decent people who might disagree on things but who nonetheless have a lot in common, or divide and conquer, has been the colonizer's, the fascist's, the authoritarian's cornerstone strategy for millennia. It hasn't stopped working yet.

You, as an individual, have to stop falling for it in order to defeat it.

Read some of Sasse's ideas and try them out.

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

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

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

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

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

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

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE for Fiction!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Nathaniel, all of sixteen, disappears.

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

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

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

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

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

THE FANTASIES OF FUTURE THINGS, a lovely story of discovering your true self

THE FANTASIES OF FUTURE THINGS
DOUG JONES
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A compelling and timely debut novel following two Black men tasked with overseeing the destruction and gentrification of the predominantly Black neighborhoods surrounding Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.

The Fantasies of Future Things follows two Black men working for the real estate development company responsible for the revitalization of Summerhill in Atlanta, Georgia, for the 1996 Olympics. But Summerhill is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and real estate agents Jacob and Daniel know that “revitalization” is code for “gentrification”—which means they will be tasked with displacing people from their own community.

Brooklyn-born Jacob, a recent Morehouse graduate, is armed with the hopes of his parents and has big dreams about the life he should be living. Daniel, a native of Atlanta, is tired, angry, and disillusioned with his career and ready for a change. While different in many ways, Jacob and Daniel are coming to grips with many of the same accepting their sexuality, dealing with the pressures of family, wrestling with the conflicting morality of their jobs, and coping with the daily trauma that comes with being Black in America. As we follow the parallel journeys of these two men, and in the face of towering obstacles, Jacob and Daniel must decide what they are willing to do for themselves and for their communities.

This lacerating, bold, and moving novel deftly explores our need for intimacy and the harm of internalized homophobia, the relationships Black men have with family and each other, and the restrictive masculinity so often required of them.

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

My Review: The 1990s are very recent, right? What do you mean, thirty years ago?! Thirty years ago it was 1966!

I need a lie-down.

So that trauma being delivered to my undeserving psyche, I set about reading this book in an existential crisis mode, which turned out to suit the read down to the ground. Jacob and Daniel are pursuing dreams that they've bought into but did not create, do not trust, and can not break free of. The price of the men getting what they were ambivalently pursuing is the meat of this story.

I'm rootin' for this book to succeed from the off, is my point. I think the exploration of what a man will do to survive versus what does that man need, want, and desire to make his survival into a life is what makes a story one that stands out from the crowd. Jacob's Morehouse degree and the weight of his Brooklyn-originated family's desire for him to continue the bougie life and style they love is at variance with his lived experience working to "gentrify" a living community away from its residents. Daniel's more local experience as a fatherless boy coming to manhood in Atlanta is rooted in a life more like that of the people the two men are displacing. While both men are striving to make lives defining themselves as materially successful, the cost in honesty about themselves, and in the acceptance of the shady tactics of the developers, is bitterly poignant.

Daniel and Jacob are well-rounded characters. They felt to my reading eyes like people I could pick out on a street. I was fully convinced when Daniel got a lead on his father's identity at the choice he made sprang from a real person's heart and mind. Jacob's entanglement with social-worker Sherman and its soul-awakening consequences also felt as though it was something I heard from Jacob's actual lips. I was that enmeshed in this story's reality, and was disappointed when I had to come out of it.

I don't imagine a lot of readers will like the slightly pat resolution. I don't think it was necessarily the best possible way to end this story. I did feel it had the honesty to bring closure to the plot. Would a slightly more open-ended resolution have gained it a full fifth star? Yes. But this is a complete story, one that does a lot of honest and unflinching soul-searching among its characters, and that matters a lot.

Four and a half stars for its loevely sentences, and its loving soul searching truth-telling ways.

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

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

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 3.75* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEARTWOOD: A Novel, A Read with Jenna Pick, takes us with three very strong women to resolutions they did not expect

HEARTWOOD: A Novel (A Read with Jenna Pick)
AMITY GAIGE
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

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

My Review: What I liked about this read, which on its face is not one I would resonate positively with, is that we're not in doubt about Valerie's disappearance. We're reading her letters to her mom as the search for her unfolds. And yet it's a suspense novel...so how does Amity Gaige pull that off?

Deftly.

Honestly I'm still allergic to the Cult of Mother stuff...you'll have noticed an absence of any part of a fifth star...but the beautiful nature descriptions and the bleeding honesty of the toll that living in times celebrating dehumanizing "values" earned all four the story remaining stars. Leaving out the mother-daughter mealymouthing would've earned at least another half, just for Valerie's impressive if misused commitment to helping. Everyone, except herself...and how'd that little poison pill get in there. We do see that realization come to her. Her early-story-days burnout from nursing nursing nursing during COVID's worst passage means she's in need of time to process and consolidate her new emotional world...that won't include the husband she does't love anymore, but who is her logistical support on this trip....

Beverly the Maine warden tasked with finding Valerie before her week's-worth of supplies runs out is, well, standard. She's a salty salt-of-the-earth supercompetent woman who throws herself into a job she's damned good at...to avoid dealing with her mother's steady decline into death. It's not like this is a groundbreaking idea. It is, however, very relatable; Beverly is rewarded and praised for the good work she does when other work must be neglected to do it. Work she does not want to do. "Women's work." Caring for her mother is...just too hard, given the older woman's dereliction of care for her, and effective devolution of care for Bev's sisters onto her too-young shoulders. Finding strangers who are a lot less competent than she is? Easy; and very much needed in the huge spaces that Maine has never "developed."

Lena is retired, lives a dull life of nothing much except chatting about birds to an unknown-in-meatspace mystery soul after her "useful" existence is done with her. She's sharp; she's savvy; she's got online skills that enable her to help Valerie and Beverly; so she does. I liked her best...I am her, I guess that won't surprise anyone that I think she's a good'un. She's estranged from her only child; she's difficult and spiky; and still can't resist doing something useful in despite of her physical disability. Yup. Thass me. The style of storytelling allows one to follow the developments, even Lena's, in the story's real time. It really worked on me.

How it all fits together is the fun of the read. I won't spoiler it because I am boot-quakingly afraid of the Spoiler Stasi. I'll say that misdirection я Amity. I had a firm opinion about where this was going and, when it got to the Big Reveal, I was correct. It gave me a lovely warm glow of satisfaction.

What makes this good Book Club Fiction™ is this mélange of traits, but most especially the dull mother-daughter conflicts. My own mother was awful; I do my goddamnedest to think around and past her gargoyle-statue-shaped lump in my head. But I've had decades of therapy and most of y'all ain't, so stories told about this feel better to you. I think Jenna Bush Hager picked a great iteration of the undistinguished, indistinguishable mass of Book Club Fiction™ to show y'all.

Buy one to say thank you to a talented author with her finger on The Pulse℠, and a celeb who's Book Club Fiction™ taste is solidly on the side of craft mastery instead of glam glitz and suchlike gubbins.

Not at all mad I read it.