SADEQA JOHNSON'S PAGE: KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN; THE HOUSE OF EVE

KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN
SADEQA JOHNSON
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, one American woman’s vision in post WWII Germany will tie together three people in an unexpected way.

Lost in the streets and smoldering rubble of Occupied Germany, Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American soldier spots a gaggle of mixed-race children following a nun. Desperate to conceive her own family, she feels compelled to follow them to learn their story.

Ozzie Philips volunteers for the army in 1948, eager to break barriers for Black soldiers. Despite his best efforts, he finds the racism he encountered at home in Philadelphia has followed him overseas. He finds solace in the arms of Jelka, a German woman struggling with the lack of resources and even joy in her destroyed country.

In 1965, Sophia Clark discovers she’s been given an opportunity to integrate a prestigious boarding school in Maryland and leave behind her spiteful parents and the grueling demands. In a chance meeting with a fellow classmate, she discovers a secret that upends her world.

Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms—familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self—can be transcendent.

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

My Review: On a kernel of fact, Author Sadeqa coaxes a mighty oak of a story about the power of determination and the motivation of compassion. Three characters are entwined in a narrative of prejudice endured, triumphally defeated by love, and made into the beautiful thing that is selfhood.

Ethel Gathers has the most nominitively determinative name ever. I understand why Author Sadeqa chose it in place of the rather blander name of the woman who started the Brown Baby Plan, Mabel Grammer. Of course I, a white child of privilege, did not ever hear of this marvelous plan or its tutelary spirit. Being both about Black folks and established by a woman, that information is not startling. I have never been so heartened by the factual roots of a story! It entwines Ozzie, a "colored" man in the post-WWII US Army who merits and desires a promotion into the Intelligence service only to be stymied because, what else, racism shuts doors nominally opened by executive order; Ethel, as her time in 1951 Germany as an Army wife introduces her to the issue central to the story; and Sophia, a biracial teen in 1965 when we meet her.

No points for sussing out the interconnections among them all.

It's not an advanced storytelling technique that draws on into this read, it's the human connection, the fellowship of people who know anger, feel frustration and loss and sadness, and revel in goodness and rightness triumphing. Our older PoV characters proceed into the future while Sophia is mostly looking into her own past as she works to escape her truly awful upbringing. All three threads come together at a powerfully symbolic and racially charged moment in the 1960s.

It's not coyness that leaves me with lamentably vague language there. As you read along you'll see the interconnections forming. I'm not going to reveal them because they're a very big part of the finale of the story, giving it a lot of its oomph. I hate when reviewers do that but...trust me, you want to take this ride innocent of these facts.

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

THE HOUSE OF EVE
SADEQA JOHNSON
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: 1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.

Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.

With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.

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

My Review: Playing the mother card does not earn a story my esteem. The Cult of Mother is, oddly, not the focus of Author Sadeqa's stories...it's about how women, in relation to motherhood, are required to make hard decisions and come to terms with how fathers create mothers but mothers do not create fathers. Many factors haunt Author Sadeqa's mothers in this story of how becoming pregnant is not always, or in all ways, a happy moment for a woman. Leaving aside the permanence of motherhood, the social milieu a child is brought into is almost more important than the love, or lack of it, a mother feels for that child.

In exploring these complexities in a 1950s racist US Author Sadeqa brings struggles and battles to light that can not help but move the reader. It is a sentimental story, it will cause you to well up with tears (or you're a sociopath), it does its romantic-fiction job with verve and gusto. It is not a prose megalith to be held up in future literary seminars, and is not meant to be, but it is effective at its chosen task. It entertains, it informs about the deep emotional ties humans form...willingly or not...to those they might or might not admire.

It's a good read for a dull weekend that will give you a solid satisfying ending for its story.

THE BOY FROM THE SEA, Irish fable-making for this century's needs

THE BOY FROM THE SEA
GARRETT CARR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

NOMINATED for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award...a longlist of twenty will be announced in February 2026, the shortlist of six in April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 'Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr's The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

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

My Review: Funny thing how kindness skips a generation. Declan, the titular "Boy"'s older sibling, wouldn't know kindness if it fucked him. The elder Bonnar couple love their magical gift of a child..."Parents knew you can never tell how a child will turn out, naturally yours or not. They had learned, fundamentally, every child comes in from the sea, washes up against the ankles of their parents, arms outstretched, ready to be shaped by them but with some disposition already in place, deep-set and never quite knowable"...Brendan, named for the Navigator, that famously fostered child. The boy, like mythical Brendan, never has his own place to take root...thanks, Declan...but instead becomes a source of bemusement in the community.

The narrative is from a godlike omniscient third-person PoV...the godlike, or royal, "we." It's a choice that, while conferring the reader with the advantage of being privy to things a more limited PoV would make awkward to show, removes us from the action. Observing from a distance is always going to slow one down when reading about the intimate life of a community. It did here. There are so many small, mean-souled people in Brendan's world. It doesn't relent, either, when we see his "family"...mother Christine's horrifying sister and father, and unwilling sibling Declan...being so unreservedly awful to him. As though being abandoned in a Moses-like way was somehow his fault, or merited (like any infant deserves abandonment).

So quite a melancholy read for me. As I've come to expect from Irish writers, or the ones who get published in the US anyway, the prose has real lyricism. Unexpectedly it breaks into quotidian musings on things like the EU and its fishing quotas..."He still felt guilty about his comportment with Christine later, as he sat in his car outside the fisheries office. He’d never actually apologize but he’d be extra jovial in their next few encounters; this was how we indicated we were sorry for something we’d said or done: by acting oddly the next time we met you"...and the waning control of the church on peoples' inner lives..."A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative of good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it"...and eldercare..."Eunan {Christine's ghastly father} was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements. He was against surprises, he hadn’t allowed a telephone in the house for many years as you never knew when it might ring on you. He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. ‘Get away out of that!’ he’d shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever."

What you're getting in this story is not showy, or fast, or loud. It is just like the sea that dominates this Western Irish town. It is quiet and inner-directed, with wild outbursts of damage and trouble, followed by the calmer gift-giving phase again. It is a lovely, involving visit to a lifeway long since altered by the relentlessness of change grown from within anf imposed from without.

I very much enjoyed the story's two-decade time frame. They were the last years of an Ireland now so completely vanished that one would be hard pressed to see it in modern Ireland. An elegy, albeit an emotionally honest one, to the way the country once was, with characters standing in for ways old and new. A read I expect will launch the writer into world notice because it is so plangently plucking heartstrings all the way through.

I don't mean that as a diss, only a recognition. I'm hip to your tricks, Author Carr, and I see how well you're performing them. That earns you a respectful tip-of-the-cap four stars.