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.

SOLSTICE, yet another straight-people-unhappy tale with lovely bits about dance

SOLSTICE
CAROL GILLIGAN
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant but restless dancer discovers the true meaning of love and intimacy through the ebbs and flows of her marriage in this exquisitely written novel—from the bestselling author and psychologist whose feminist classic, In a Different Voice, revolutionized our understanding of women’s lives

Boston, 1969. Eve, a dancer whose feelings are expressed through the body and movement, senses an inexplicable distance growing between herself and her husband, Gabe, a journalist and father of her two children. Feeling lost and alone, she begins an affair; Gabe detects it immediately and begins one himself. Yet somehow they find their way back to each other, and when Eve gives birth to a daughter, their marriage becomes vital again.

Years later, when Gabe returns from a reporting trip to the Middle East and Berlin, Eve again perceives something is wrong in her marriage. Gabe no longer seems like the man she once knew. He has always had a darkness she could not fathom—deep psychological scars from his childhood, when Gabe escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport.

Amsterdam, 1991. Newly separated from Gabe, Eve has accepted a fellowship to choreograph a dance inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. When a colleague introduces her to a new translation of the ancient text, Eve begins to redefine the way she thinks about women, men, and relationships—and, perhaps, to see another path back to her marriage.

In this emotionally riveting novel, Carol Gilligan draws on her unsurpassed psychological understanding of women's lives to explore a new vision of love and intimacy. Sweeping across decades and continents, attuned to the rhythms of life and time, Solstice is a provocative and profound portrait of what it takes to truly love another.

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My Review: Plenty of buzz around this tale of a Holocaust survivor haunted by his myriad ghosts, the burgeoning dancer/life force he marries, the challenging marriage they undertake, and lots of Jewish history relevant to the present day.

My interest in straight peoples' intimacy is not large enough to support this latter aspect of the story as my focus. I was a great deal more interested in Eve's story of how dance could explain the myth of Adam and Eve. It was *wonderful* to read Author Gilligan's evocations of dance as an art form. Eve's learning of the deeper meanings, the cultural resonances, the eternal quality of myths with a rabbi's learnèd guidance after she splits from Gabe in 1991 was as involving as anything I've read this year.

It's mired in a relationship novel I don't care about, one that's intended to add another resonant frequency to the myth of Adam and Eve, but that ends up not doing that. If I was supposed to care about Eve and Gabe as a couple, why is Gabe so...amorphous? Their three kids are names, when every couple I have ever known (that has kids) honestly thinks and talks more about their kids than anything else.

Author Gilligan's a psychologist so these are clearly informed choices made with intent, not lacunae of understanding. As they did not make sense to me, I can't say her information came through to me in the novel she wrote. I'll forget these characters in a week, but will carry the passages describing dance with me.

HEARTCORE, Štěpánka Jislová's graphic...in both senses...memoir of coming to terms with her life

HEARTCORE
ŠTĚPÁNKA JISLOVÁ (tr. Martha Kuhlman)
Graphic Mundi (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$29.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Where does love come from?

What is at the core of romantic attachment? Does our upbringing play a part, or is falling in love a magical, uncontrollable process? Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over, or can we break unhealthy cycles and learn new ways to love?

These are the questions asked in Heartcore, an award-winning graphic memoir from comics creator Štěpánka Jislová. In this empowering story of self-discovery, the author reflects on her troubled experiences in dating and love and finally seeks to understand the reasons behind her many toxic relationships. She explores topics such as normative gender roles, online dating and casual sex, alcohol abuse, sexual violence, and the psychology behind interpersonal attachment, all in an engaging graphic-novel format. By confronting her unhealthy behaviors and seeking help to come to terms with her trauma, the author provides an inspiring example of how people can change for the better.

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My Review: Angsty sexual abuse survivor (not depicted on the page) contemplates her manifold struggles with dating, finding what love means to her, dealing with other broken people and their issues...becoming, in other words, a grown-up. It's a messy awkward embarrassing process for us all. It's greatly to her credit that Author Jislová decided to give voice to it.

I found the art suited the subject very well indeed, the color pallette was suitably restrained, and the ideas about finding the ability to be one's messy, ungainly self to and for and in front of others as an act of love inspiring.

So why only four stars? What I wasn't quite so excited by was the sense of clinicalized detachment in her truly interesting dive into her therapy. It was not pervasive, but it was there in the whole story as a strange kind of disconnect. It's natural, in that to write of her experiences of abuse, then patterns of dysfunction requires a remove if not detachment from the pathology, but it sits oddly with the confiding tone she's after in most of the story.

That said, I feel confident in recommending it to y'all as a gift for the new-adult reader (male or female) in your ambit who is permaybehaps perplexed by the whole relationship dynamics thing. It seems to me sufficiently personal to give it standing, and sufficiently authoritative—she's lived to tell the tales with good quality help—to make her words and ideas solid and fertile ground for introspection to begin.

YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD, exploring queer desire's darker corners

YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD
JOHANNA HEDVA
And Other Stories (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available 15 April 2025

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Finalist for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize
An artist of color becomes obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamour of Clarice Lispector and the viscerality of Han Kang.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

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

My Review: The way I know queer folk are, for want of a more accurate and inclusive term, assimilated into the Borg Collective straight peoples' overcultural awareness as real, fully human people is the virulence of the Gawd Squad's attacks on our rights, and our young people (by which I mean everyone born from 1984 on) feel it's okay to write about messed-up, creepy, mean, or even evil queer people. In other words, people. Just plain ol' humans. No need to fancy it up with initialisms that help us find each other but become tiger traps of ghettoization over time.

Here's a novel about a mixed-"race" (a term I hate with all my passion mobilizable...we are all humans none of us are neanderthals or antecessors!!) lesbian at the ragged edge of youth shading into middle age finding out how easy it is to fall into obsessive love when your hypercapitalist life starts to spontaneously deconstruct under the weight of expectation. Becoming fixated on someone like you see yourself being, only moreso, someone refined, and just...better...is justifiable to others and yourownself when the object is from the group at the pinnacle of society's desire hierarchy.

The object is then defined by the terrible, reductive term "muse," one definition of which that I think is relevant here is: A muse represents more than a mere subject or source of inspiration; it embodies the very essence of creative energy and inspiration itself. The muse possesses a unique allure that captivates the artist’s senses, provoking emotions, ideas, and a deep connection that fuels their artistic expression. It is not limited to a passive role but actively participates in the artistic process. They stimulate the artist’s vision, evoking a profound response and encouraging the exploration of new artistic territories. And Hanne, the white woman in her current, sold-out (!) painting series, is not her first "muse" nor her first racialized lust object.

In many ways, our unnamed narrator...called "Johanna" as a proxy for the author, but still explicitly stated not to be the author, so not named...painting Hanne (note how similar the beauteous muse's name is to the author's) for a highly prestigious gallery show is falling into the ugly territory that dogged Nabokov when he wrote the bitter, angry, utterly misunderstood Lolita. Inspired by the conventional white-woman prettiness of Hanne, so distinct from the narrator's own constructed "mixed" identity, she's creating beautiful artworks that are (she tells herself) critical of and interrogating the primacy of whiteness in the construction of a concept of beauty.

The art collectors and institutions who will see the show, however, will most likely buy them because she's painting a pretty picture of a pretty woman whose skin is white.

The deep-seated inner conflict between her Korean father's immigrant economic striving and Asianness and her white artist-mother's centrality to everything she's desired to become as well as escape is brought to crisis point when a Black friend issues a manifesto, calling on artists of color to boycott the white-centered art/beauty industry. If she ignores the call, she's made implacable enemies out of longtime friends, but most likely saved her school-debt-ridden, broke-ass economic life. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of this particular story, however, for all the complex and fascinating issues it raises and grapples with, is a simple sentence fragment: "...it takes hours to paint a portrait, and this is who I wanted to spend hours looking at."

There it is. Has the narrator burned out her exoticizing fascination with the women of color who served as muses before Hanne, or is this loudly, argumentatively toxic assumption of control that is the relegation of a person to the role of "a muse" a form of revenge on whiteness like the paintings are? Or, and this seems likely to be true to me, is the artist painting Hanne finally giving in to hypercapitalism's siren song of money, approval, and fame?

Are any of these untrue, or mutually exclusive? Not in my eyes. They're all likely to form part of the mosaic (another word related to the original Muses) of the core truth of this dark, brave narrative. Queer desire is as murky and incomprehensible as all desire is; made up of dark and angry stuff, bright and uplifting stuff, all rolled into the minds of the lovers...though all too seldom examined, or shared, or even acknowledged. Hanne feels the muse's rage and outrage at being Othered; the narrator the desperation of feeling intensely an unshared emotion.

It ends, as great and passionate loves must, in tears and bitterness.

This is exactly why I loved it as much as I did. The prose earns four and a half stars for economy of imagery, just enough not too much. The messy, angry queer desire slipped that extra half-point on for the full five.