YOUR NAME HERE, well...mine was, is yours?

YOUR NAME HERE
HELEN DeWITT & ILYA GRIDNEFF
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman‘s Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start.

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

My Review: A literary landscape infested with "pullulating DaVinci Codeed masses" decried, a celebration of Arabic language and literature "unthinkable fifty, even ten years ago", a six hundred-page high-concept literary jape that does gymnastics sophisticated enough to impress the literati and cow the middlebrow into quiescence...did I get it? does anyone get it?...this will gatekeep the hell out of Literature and that's a shame. It's fun. I know a lot of people will bounce off the idea of first, second (ugh) *and* third-person narratives in thirty pages, still less the nods and winks to multitudes of novels, writers, stories, movements, that form the matter behind this book. It's a lot. It's meant to be a lot. It's not making the read easy for you.

In 2026 you have immense resources, all free to use and instantly available 24/7/365. to follow rabbit holes to look stuff up. I love that fact, I enjoy that experience; that means I enjoy this read. (I'm not calling it a story, it's not one, it's either no story at all or skatey-eight skabillion of them.) If you're worried someone is Judging You for your uneducated, unsophisticated take on Your Name Here, you're right—they are doing that; turn it around. Judge them for being so snobbish. For making this complicated, convoluted read a critical darling...question their motives, impugn their legitimacy to judge what is or is not Literature. Challenge gatekeepers; good ones, who want to protect standards and increase others' knowledge bases, rise to the challenge to say *why*; snobs sneer and walk away.

Both responses are valid and supported...somewhere...in the text.

I'm not hopeful that masses of y'all will be rushing to get your ten-dollar ebooks of this title. I realize what I've said so far is going to break some brains, tire some eyes, and fail to ignite the fuel of fun that lies inside this chunky book. It's a commitment of time and energy. It's arch, the way Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman (two books I deeply enjoyed) were arch: playing very complex games with The Rules℠, like pretending Pynchon and Italo Calvino aren't difficult to read, will always put some readers...intelligent readers, people who love the act of reading as much as anyone can...right off a book.

I'm hopeful you'll give the book a try. Take it slowly, read it in chunks. Stop wherever it changes tense, for example, and come back later. Try, in other words, different ways to relate to reading a novel. This is a novel that can reward you making that effort if anything you read can.

I've been gate-kept out of offering my opinion on this read because so many have praised it immoderately, and so many have slagged it off so intently for the same reasons others have praised it. That makes writing about a book in any kind of helpful (or intended to be helpful) mode an invitation to those who do not agree with one's opinion to get mouthy. That's tiresome and tiring, and I really did not want to get into it.

I read the most fulsome and the most dismissive reviews I could find. It was amazing to me the precise same book I read, described in similar terms to each other, could lead to such very different personal conclusions. It made me feel the work was well worth calling still more attention to, because this dichotomy of opinion can't be solely about craft; it's about the point of the read.

I found it to be a worthwhile use of my shrinking supply of eyeblinks. I can't give it a perfect rating, I was never panting to get back to it or chewing over some insight until long into the night. It's snobby in the same way I am. It's beautiful in the way I resonate to but know others won't. It's too long.

And I would read it again.

LETTERS TO KAFKA, introduction to a life unjustly ignored in Anglophone literature

LETTERS TO KAFKA
CHRISTINE ESTIMA
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Bookends with Mattea Roach interview with Author Estima.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story The Stoker from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

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

My Review: Modeling to a world unwilling to see what principled resistance to authoritarianism looks like, Milena Jesenská could be no more perfect a subject to study in 2025. Christine Estima has done it for us, and presented her findings in an involving, intense novel of Milena's life. The incident igniting her rise to resistance is a simple and practical one: she needs income. Her then-husband can't, in 1919 Vienna, provide for them. Having very recently read Kafka's stories and being moved deeply by them, Milena writes to request permission to translate them into Czech. Her aim is to get income...the result is to become utterly, passionately entwined with Kafka. It was not primarily a physical affair, only two known meetings, but a deep and consuming love.

The story here, however, is Jesenská...the woman, the intellectual, the object of desire for many members of the Vienna Secession. Reading this book of her own words, stitched into the author's gap-filling prose, I was unable to conceive of a good reason this vibrant and impassioned liver of life and lover of justice was so unfamiliar to me. I know the reason...she's a woman, misogyny's polarizing lenses filter those people out...but talk about stupid! Writing Milena Jesenská out of History is a wrong I hope we will see righted more and more. A resister of Nazism, not a Jew but friend to Jews and accomplice to their escape from certain death, person whose life trajectory includes Ravensbrück, is someone to be celebrated loudly and often. Never more than now.

The mind that created cultural touchstones Gregor Samsa and K., that saw Reality in place of consensus reality, said to Milena: "Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead. - FK". A spirit that can elicit this deep and passionate love from one whose life is known by him to be quite short is one worth knowing and celebrating.

MAYA ARAD'S PAGE: HAPPY NEW YEARS; and THE HEBREW TEACHER: Three Novellas

HAPPY NEW YEARS
MAYA ARAD (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, preorder now for delivery tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s, Leah maintains her connection to Israel by writing an annual letter on the Jewish new year to her old friends from a women's teaching college.

Comprising five decades of correspondence, the novel skillfully weaves together Leah's high hopes and deep disappointments as she navigates relationships, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, financial struggles, and professional ups and downs. Leah's relentless optimism and cheerfulness conceal disturbing truths behind her carefully crafted words. As her letters turn increasingly introspective, the secrets and shame that shaped her trajectory unravel.

This is the epistolary novel at its best, inviting the reader to play detective and probe between the lines of Leah's insistently rosy portrayal of her life. Gradually piecing together her true circumstances, we are charmed into forgiving her minor deceptions and richly rewarded with the profound insights that Leah's self-constructed narrative reveals.

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

My Review: What does a lifetime of dissembling hide? What does a multi-decade one-sided relationship require of the one creating it? Leah, sixty years ago, made temporary friendships she mistook for real friendships (or tried to will into real friendships) in Israel before emigrating to the US. The reason she emigrated, like everything else in her life, is behind a scrim of what she wants these "friends" to see.

It's a common enough experience to commit to a relationship that the other party/s are not having, mostly in earlier life; but to continue to make the effort to inform these clearly indifferent people of what she wants them to think is her life...! The effort, the energy put into thinking of what it *should* be, this life she's crafted. I was slightly in awe at the artifice of the story as Author Arad told it.

But really now, is Leah doing anything most all of us do not do? Is the Story of Your Life the real story, or curated by memory to make your mistakes, cruelties, neglectful unkindnesses tolerable to the You doing the thinking? Leah is all of us, I think, at least those of us not doing ourselves the service of going into therapy.

I'm not all the way sure most people will bother to look past a narrative device, the epistolary novel, to look into a deeper crevice of Leah's commonality with us all: what stories is she telling herself to get through her life? Is it a life, or an existence, as she is experiencing it? And how are we all using these same means to be in any way satified by life as we live it? I'm guessing a lot of Leahs are just not ready or willing or able to stop writing their own letters, the literal scripts (in its multiple senses) of artifice and craftsmanship. The bulk of people are the Cleopatras of old, barging down Denial.

So it was that Leah won my sympathy as she lived the life she had to, and showed the life she wanted in letters to people who never cared much. Author Arad weaves the two together all the way through the story but it isn't obvious how until the ending. I know most of y'all wouldn't be bothered by a spoiler, but...well...the noisy ones would, so not this time.

I'll say this much: I was deeply satisfied, fulfilled even, by the resolution. That's saying a lot.

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

THE HEBREW TEACHER: Three Novellas
MAYA ARAD (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR HEBREW FICTION IN TRANSLATION (2024)

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work.

Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media.

In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

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

My Review: There are few things more fraught than women pursuing lives and careers of their own, not subordinate to, lesser than, or determined by, a man's life/career/convenience or a family's needs. Even in Israel, an aggressively egalitarian gender system's mothership, there are traditional religious practitioners who resist this facet of the Sabras' intent when setting the State of Israel up. Maya Arad, in these novellas, probes the roles, minds, and hearts of her "women of a certain age" whose courses in life were set to accomplish things for, well, for others but still for themselves.

What happens is a quiet-seeming, radical takedown of unquestioned, unquestioning, unquestionable "morality." It is a pity that Author Arad is not a household name in the US. Translator Cohen has made her art umistakable by exercising the translator's alchemy on it.

The Hebrew Teacher brings Ilana, whose Zionism stopped being examined in the 70s, into abrupt awareness of what younger assimilated US-raised Jews think and feel. Her new colleague at the college where she's taught Jewish Studies her entire adult life, is...not in sympathy...with her views, nor (to her startlement) is her US-born son.

The shock of realizing how much one has built and then benefited from a mountain of privilege is always existential. Ilana, in Author Arad's capable brain, discovers and processes how deep the divide in what has been her intellectual...and moral...fief for so long really runs.

Costs are exacted. Life's inexorable moving, too-often-wilfully ignored, never ever ceases. 4*

A Visit (Scenes) has family communication at its heart. It is fragmented, as the title suggests; Miriam is, possibly, suppressing or possibly simply ignoring (as we all do in older years) what comes between the moments limned clearly here.

Yoram's deeply estranged relationship to Mother Miriam is not close to unusual for immigrant parents to assimilated/assimilating children. Is Miriam the woman he's made in his mind, one he does not want his son Yonatan in close contact with, or is she simply bearing the brunt of his dissatisfaction?

In the end, this set of interrelated vignettes was not emotionally resonant with me, for no reason I can articulate at all well. 3.5*

Make New Friends is a mantra for immigrant mom Efrat to her socially awkward daughter Libby. I can understand why, since Efrat comes across as someone who never quite belonged; but more than that, Libby is in a new world that's never existed before of internet-mediated socialization and socializing that befuddles, scares, leaves behind most people older than twenty-five.

Immigrant moms are at the most unnervingly invisible-to-them disadvantage: The natural, inevitable rejection of an adolescent for a parent's wisdom and experience is exacerbated by a real cultural gap. Efrat can not possibly know what Libby faces online. It was not part of her life at that time of life, and is not part of her life now.

How does one guide a foreigner one gave birth to? Is it even possible? or is offering love and unquestioning support enough?

Extremely relevant questions in 2025's societal landscape. 4*

OYE, intense debut sapphic novel of adolescence in an immigrant family under HUGE life-stresses

OYE
MELISSA MOGOLLON
The Hogarth Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A coming-of-age comedy. A telenovela-worthy drama. A moving family saga. All in a phone call you won’t want to hang up on…

A young woman reckons with her rowdy, unpredictable family and the revelation of their long-buried history in this wildly inventive debut.

“Yes, hi, Mari. It’s me. I’m over my tantrum and finally calling you back. But you have to promise that you won’t say anything to Mom or Abue about this, okay? They’ll set the house on fire if they find out…”

Luciana is the baby of her large Colombian American family. And despite usually being relegated to the sidelines, she now finds herself the voice of reason in the middle of their unexpected crisis. Her older sister, Mari, is away at college and reduced to a mere listening ear on the other end of their many phone calls, so when South Florida residents are ordered to evacuate before a hurricane, it’s up to Luciana to deal with her eccentric grandmother, Abue, who’s refusing to leave. But the storm isn’t the only danger. Abue, normally glamorous and full of life, is given a crushing medical diagnosis. While she’d prefer to ignore it and focus on upholding her reputation and her looks instead, the news sets Abue on her own personal journey, with Luciana reluctantly along for the ride.

When Abue moves into Luciana’s bedroom, their complicated bond only intensifies. Luciana would rather be skating or sneaking out to meet girls, but Abue’s wild demands and unpredictable antics are a welcome distraction from Luciana’s misguided mother, absent sister, and uncertain future. Forced to step into the role of caretaker, translator, and keeper of the devastating secrets that Abue begins to share, Luciana suddenly finds herself center stage, facing down adulthood—and rising to the occasion.

As Luciana chronicles the events of her upended senior year over the phone, Oye feels like the most entertaining conversation you’ve ever eavesdropped a rollicking, heartfelt, and utterly unique novel by an author as original as she is insightful.

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

My Review: A funny, modern updating of the epistolary novel, with all its strengths and weaknesses intact. The biggest strength for me was Luciana's voice: Raw, unregulated, intensely immersed in a very difficult moment. I have heard criticism from readers about the "foul language" Luciana uses, to all of whom I say, "go read a religious tract if all you want is sweet, uplifting pablum." Luciana's in a car fleeing a bloody hurricane! She's trying to reach her sister! She's left her Abue (Grandma for the monoglots) behind...at the old lady's insistence!

If anyone has a reason to use Language, it's this girl; plus she's talking to her sister! Not an Authority figure. Which brings me to, who says you, the reader, get to be an authority entitled to pass judgment, anyway?

And here I am, passing judgment....

Well, hypocrisy thy name is me, I guess. I disagree with those pursey-lipped objections because I don't agree with them, anywhere, period. To me, this is a feature not a bug: Immediacy and authenticity enhancing the usual epistolary read's sense of becoming privy to another person's intimate communications to someone not you. That style is emotionally more intense, more immediate, than third-person or *shudder* the Satanic Second person narration. That becomes ever more relevant as the hurricane threat is survived and the aftermath begins.

What the story does is deeply unfamiliar and absolutely terrifying to me. It chronicles the emotional reality of a child's bearing the burdens of adulthood, of responsibility for interpreting...on every level that word has in English...the world for the nominal adults around her. I can think of nothing more frightening to read about than that imposition on someone who is also coming to terms with her sapphic love needs. The latter would be enough to stress a kid out, and it certainly has, but add on top the cultural and language interpretation demands...!

This is, to me at least, the very most unnerving of isolations. Luciana is left, by the sister she's leaving these voicemails for, to be in charge of some deeply stressful navigations of her world that I feel sad she has to be burdened with, things that by all rights a teenager should not have to be in charge of. That's conveyed very well by the updated use of the epistolary format.

There are the usual limitations, of course. The fact that this is not a conversation, a la that ur-telephone novel Nicholson Baker's Vox, means that the story is solely the one Luciana sees and feels. We get her character, but are asked to fill in the spaces where the other characters...reduced to names here...need to be. That is inherent in the format, so it does nothing wrong, just leaves more work for the reader. I found that a bit off-putting as time went by; why is Luciana pouring her heart out to Mari anyway, I kept wondering, when there's nothing coming back...and the realization of Luciana's actual, heart-rending isolation came crashing in again.

As an evocation of the absolute intensity of adolescent emotions, passions, and fears, it works. As a novel, it can feel overly dramatic and one-note. That is a risk that the epistolary format carries within itself. I liked the read, but was too overstimulated to love it, as I could never be anywhere but in medias res.

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY, new direction for award-winning Aussie novelist

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY
SULARI GENTILL
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link since their storefront is such a mess to use)
$26.99 hardcover, available today

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In every person's story, there is something to hide...

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.

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

My Review: Hannah Tigone, successful Sydney author, is writing a new book. She's set it in Boston, Massachusetts, and that being an almost literal antipode to Sydney, she needs some help with the local color. Traveling there is out; this is the time of COVID. Google Street View is something you're not quite going to get the "feel" of a place from; the look, yes. Maybe if it were a refresher for a previously visited place...but no. Enter Leo Johnson, Boston-based novelist and strangely excited research/local-color assistant to Hannah. His take, which becomes an intake, on the story is a framing device for a strange (and not entirely successful) hybrid epistolary/story-within-story tale of murders, criminality, race, and reconciliation.

The manner of the story's introduction:

I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim...no framework...just bricks interlocked...no idea what I'm building or if it will stand...no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.

It's all there from the get-go...the beautiful, elegant phrase-making, the sheer bravado of owning up to feeling confused and not being quite up to the task in hand...well! Okay, I know where my money's going on the craps table. We're heading for Misdirection City by way of The Long and Winding Road.

What follows is largely that, only it's split into segments by the nature of its authors-collaborating (increasingly Leo inserts his personal take on the story Hannah sends him, and he doesn't hold back from the get-go). My best example of this is very early in the book, when the dreaded "separated by a common language" issue rears its confusing head.

Australian/Commonwealth-usage note: The word "jumper" does not exist in the US. It appears to mean "sweater" or "sweatshirt" more often than not as used in this book. But believe your local-colorist...it is not extant in US contexts. At all. If you say it to a street-American they will stare at you...a few might ask, in mild bewilderment, if you mean "jumpsuit" which you most emphatically do not:

NOT a normal, unobtrusive street-wear item like a sweater or sweatshirt. Like our Hannah means it to be. It's at this point that I began to trust the framing device, about which review-readers have heard, to deliver on its often overlooked promise: Can authors working together be translated into a satisfying reading experience?

It can. It does. It's going to require a little bit more effort from you, I will be honest; you'll need to use your own little grey cells to make the connections you need to make. I won't go into why that is, because it's not just a spoiler but because it's a feature of the story. If anyone reading this hasn't read The Fan, it's a great next stop on the epistolary-novel-as-suspense trip. There are some very interesting similarities in the framing device...epistolary novels aren't all that often the choice authors make for suspense stories, and that accounts for a lot of it.

What keeps me from running down my street shoving the book into the hands of strangers (I live on the boardwalk in a beach town, so that's not as counterproductive as it first sounds) is the fact that the framing device keeps the pace of the action down. It's a feature of thrillers, which is what this is, to move quickly from scene to scene. In this case that does not happen. It's not a *fatal* flaw, but it's a real one.

It's all the rest of the features of Winifred/Freddie the Aussie in Boston as stand-in for Hannah the Sydney author creating her that kept me going when the pace flagged. It's the intricacies of the story-world (and the sneaky, weird ending!) that caused the most scalp-scratching moments and the most grin-producing realizations.

I'd say that four stars should shine on your path to the bookery of your choice to procure your own copy.

LOVE & SAFFRON: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love, a one-sitting buffet of reading goodness

LOVE & SAFFRON: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love
KIM FAY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$24.00 hardcover, available TODAY!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: When twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter—as well as a gift of saffron—to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. Joan lives in Los Angeles and is just starting out as a writer for the newspaper food pages. Imogen lives on Camano Island outside Seattle, writing a monthly column for a Pacific Northwest magazine, and while she can hunt elk and dig for clams, she’s never tasted fresh garlic—exotic fare in the Northwest of the sixties. As the two women commune through their letters, they build a closeness that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the unexpected in their own lives.

Food and a good life—they can’t be separated. It is a discovery the women share, not only with each other, but with the men in their lives. Because of her correspondence with Joan, Imogen’s decades-long marriage blossoms into something new and exciting, and in turn, Joan learns that true love does not always come in the form we expect it to. Into this beautiful, intimate world comes the ultimate test of Joan and Imogen’s friendship—a test that summons their unconditional trust in each other.

A brief respite from our chaotic world, Love & Saffron is a gem of a novel, a reminder that food and friendship are the antidote to most any heartache, and that human connection will always be worth creating.

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

My Review: First, read this:

We’ve never had mussels before. I’ve always thought of them as freeloaders clinging where they’re not wanted, and you must agree, their beards are unappetizing.
–and–
Our ten days in Paris felt like the blink of an eye. Or a dream. An elegant, buttery, wine-soaked dream.
–and–
When a new experience comes into my life, it doesn’t feel real anymore until I share it with you.

I'll be honest: I asked for this DRC because the subtitle uses the series (or Oxford) comma correctly, which is as promising a start as I can conjure in these degenerate punctuation-heretical times, and the tale is told in epistolary format. I am in the mood for a story of friendship. I am always gruntled by the effective use of epistolary storytelling. And I deeply love reading about people sharing their love of food.

You'll be looking up at that not-quite-four-star rating about now. I can explain.

All of my initial conditions were met, and met fully. I got the epistolary format used well: These are friends by post. There are gaps, lacunae in communicating with each other, and that enables the author to move the pace along in a more natural way. The fact that each letter was a crafted document, a thing one sat down to make and to serve a purpose...evoking in the friend an emotional response...that requires thought. Attention. Serious choice-making. That was evident in the prose (see above).

In Part I, the friendship developed from an initial fan letter that touched Imogen, the recipient, because of its inclusion of a packet of saffron. Now's the time to talk about the 1960s in the USA. As the world is now, a packet of saffron is a welcome gift because it's not cheap. As the world was then, a gift of a narwhal tusk would have about the same impact as saffron. "Whatinahell's that?" Imogen, who can dig clams or hunt an elk, hasn't tasted fresh garlic. In her life. Imagine the impact of SAFFRON! And no, those under 50, this wasn't in the least bit unusual.

I grew up in a household that had WAY more in the way of culinary adventurousness than the average. My parents were older when I was born, we lived near San Francisco, California, which had Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Japanese cuisines and ingredients all over, and my mother loved to experiment with weird, Gourmet-magazine type dishes. (Tuesday dinner, not so much. Feasts, though....) Then my mother and I moved to South Texas, where she hailed from, and I found the goddesses' natural food: Tex-Mex. BUT no one in 1967 Mercedes, Texas, had ever seen a fresh apricot or tasted General Tso's chicken. And that is where I can relate to this story: Joan is possessed of knowledge that Imogen simply doesn't have, or have any way to know she lacks.

So this cultural exchange is one I loved reading about. The historical moment...Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK assassination, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan ("a rrrrrrilllllly big shew!")...was the background of my childhood. They write to each other about it all. They write to each other about their cooking adventures. Single Joan has a lot to offer long-married Imogen because she (figuratively) listens and isn't invested in a particular outcome. What Imogen offers Joan is the simple, invaluable resource of being older, and experienced, and generous with her time, too. In a long novella/short novel, the two forge a perfectly balanced and genuinely moving friendship.

And now about those missing stars.

I am not nit-picking when I say that a book with the delicious recipes in it that this book has (the carne asada!!) needs to hyperlink them somewhere. I don't have a final copy, of course, but the paper copies don't appear to have an index either. (This is as of 6 February 2022, 6pm EST, when I went trolling for reviews last.) Yes yes yes, one can highlight them on the Kindle, but this is an oversight that would make the book even better if it were addressed. There's one quarter star.

Francis, Imongen's husband, blossoming into a passionate foodie during the course of the correspondence is a pleasure, insofar as it's presented to us...but Imogen is reporting it, of course, as it's an epistolary novel between Joan and herself. It's a feature, not a bug; but it left me feeling distanced from Imogen's lived life. I don't think this was a deal-breaker because epistolary...it's in the description...but I do think its impact on Imogen wasn't able to be explored quite as well as would've served the tale told. A quarter-star, and a sigh of regret for a too-short third-person catch-up in Part II.

Joan's life as a secretary at Rexall Drugs was, of course, the kind of job a girl (in the lingo of the time) could expect to get. Imogen encouraging her, boosting her, being there for her as she worked through anxiety and internalized misogyny and pursued her dreams of life in the newspaper world, was just a balm.

But then what? I didn't feel Joan got the spotlight enough as time went by...and that is down, again, to the format chosen to tell the story. But it felt unfinished as it was, with a too-short third-person wrap-up for Joan, too. Not because it wasn't a complete story! Because there was more story I wanted. Another quarter star forgone for expectations raised but not quite met.

When we return to epistolary format in Part III, the magic's worn off...the sweet, nostalgic sense of familiarity at a safe remove isn't there any more. But that isn't a deal-breaker so much as the force of the narrative doesn't have a chance to recover, so the half-star goes because, for the very first time, I noticed myself noticing I wasn't as ensorcelled as I started the read being. (Maybe if the third-person narratives had been diary entries...? I am Monday-morning quarterbacking here, so I'll stop.)

What I'll end on is the sheer pleasure of reading that this one-sitting tale offered. I think any book group that needs to lighten the tone and pick up the pace after a tough read should get this book onto their lists ASAP. I think pandemic-weary people whose lives have shifted into a new configuration through discovering food and cooking would like this for a February Sunday afternoon's pleasure. Most of all, I want to assure anyone thinking "this old man's a nutbar for pushing the read at me with this 3-3/4-star rating" is correct. This old man is, in fact, a nutbar. And one whose purpose it is to tell you what's worth reading.

This is worth reading.