THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES, even Kirkus likes it!

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

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My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.

Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.

Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.

Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.

The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.

Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT, how I would know I was dead is just that

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT
BEN REEVES
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, grey town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him; he listens, never judges, and most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe and he respects the cycle.

Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe—especially when it feels most impossible—that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.

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

My Review: Remember Meet Joe Black? Or, if you're a reader my age, Salley Vickers' novel Mr. Golightly's Holiday? We're all interested in divine personifications of absolute power...god and death being in Western cosmology the two supreme beings...and we need to tell stories as much as we need to breathe, so it's inevitable that there will always be new and interesting ways to personify them. (And funny ones, if you're irreverent like Sir Terry Pratchett. Author Ben Reeves is staking out a bit of that territory in this story.

Travis is an ordinary guy who also happens to be Death. Literal Death. The Grim Reaper wears jeans and t-shirts. Sure, why not. Travis comforts and guides people into death, so you already know it's not going to be a Pratchetty jollification of a story. Seeing the personification of death as more or less a death doula is, on its face, reductive because Death is permanent, absolute, fundamental, and utterly unknowable like Life is. Reducing a terrifying cosmic power to a guy in jeans and a t-shirt who helps you, guides you with kindness and sympathy, through the emotional landscape of The End, feels like lèse-majesté to me. Like euphemising "he died" into "he has passed away," if feels like emotional dishonesty to me, like a pointless attempt to pre-feel the horrible twisting agony that is grief. (It doesn't work, any more than not saying "Voldemort" did. Any time one uses the passive voice, dishonesty is stinking up the sentence.)
Enough abstraction. The action in this story is heavy, the emotions surrounding death are never otherwise though sadness is not necessarily always foregrounded. Author Reeves chose, rightly in my view, to give Travis a first-person narrative voice in stream of consciousness style. It is how we experience life, so why wouldn't Life's intimate partner use it? It's also effective in conveying the immediacy of Death's role in one's life by distancing our mere mortal PoVs into third-person limited narratives.

I think that won't sit well with some readers, but it very much worked for me. It made the stakes so clear: at the end of life, Death is the main character. He (in this case) looms large, his thoughts and his emotional investment in us are all mortals have in that transition. It was a very interesting take, one I don't recall seeing in a novel before. (A dim, distant tocsin sounds about a short story set during a pogrom in Ukraine—anyone else hear it?)

What made this creative and intelligent Death-centered story so interesting to me was the clear intent to elicit powerful responses in the reader was never shortchanged by pulled punches. I find the central conceit just a bit dimmed down for softening sharp edges; but within that mild criticism of intentional diminishment of robustness, the action isn't kinetic to make the story external. It's a story of the interiority of death, as experienced and related to us by Death.

It's a superior read, told by a talented storyteller, in a creative way that enhances its message of coping with emotion at te end of life.

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel, grief and grieving and loss drown a woman

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel
KIM FU
Zando/Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation

In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.

Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.

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My Review: When something is too good to be true, it is. Nothing is more guaranteed to blind you to that reality than desperation. Eleanor's mother, Lele, has controlled Eleanor's life to the point of a toxic...but comfortable...dependence on Lele for the mechanics of living. Tedious adulting offloaded onto a partner is seldom a good idea, and when the partner is a parent it is catastrophic. Parents die. it's part of the bargain. Eleanor finds Lele's death more than merely unpleasant, more than simply painful: it's her utter undoing. Lele cooked, laundered, managed Eleanor's world. Her inevitable death, far too early it's true, unmoors Eleanor in every way.

Parents expect their children will grieve on their death but continue to live and to manage themselves as one has taught them to do. Lele has not taught Eleanor anything of note, for complicated reasons no doubt but the effect is now all Eleanor has is last instructions: Buy a house.

Ever bought a house? It is complicated, it is intimidating, it is unnervingly legal and permanent and deepy scary. Eleanor is ludicrously ill-suited to the task on every level. It is no wonder she, deeply immersed in her business life of being a therapist, makes practical mistakes with emotional consequences. She can afford this really cool-sounding house in a stunning natural setting? How? That should be so far out of her reach...what's the catch, where's the trigger, what?? But you need to be savvy to the ways of the world to see that from the off, Author Fu writes this description of the realtor who sells her this place: "His thick hair was slicked back, coiffed high off his forehead. He smiled toothily as she approached. He held his hand out for a shake, and a large watch slid out of his jacket sleeve, the band and bezel the same chrome brightness as his car."

Run, Eleanor, run! But of course she doesn't. So she ends up with the whitest elephant of all white elephants. And the unraveling begins.

It's here where I leave Eleanor and her plight to you to discover. I took the trip to tell you if it was one worth taking, and why. It's a modern take on horror, this dread and unmooredness, this sense of waters so much deeper than you thought fro looking at them, this...unease. Eleanor stands in for us on the cusp of a revolution no one wants, on every front. No matter how much AI slop "They" feed us, people don't care about it; no matter how much doubt "They" fling over reality, summers are hotter and winters weirder and more violent; so there's a constant pressure to mistrust your own sense of Reality and leave everything to "Them" to manage.

It's not going well. For us, for Eleanor, for the planet.

The way the story unfolds is intended to build that...wrongness, unease, unhappiness...into the experience the reader and Eleanor exist inside, to make the boil expand so it will finally pop, them be cleaned out. But by whom? At what cost in pain and unpleasant side effects? Can we, in fact, clean up our own mess?

Not if we, like Eleanor, have no real connection to the way "They" are running reality on our behalf.

It's short enough as a read to be a weekend's focused read. It's intense enough as a narrative to support that kind of sustained attention. It's a deeply satisfying immersion into the slow awakening of a grieving soul to the cost of extending childhood far, far too long. It's hard to be alive in a world beset by challenges too big to make a positive difference in by one's self.

Welcome to adulthood. Go out and do the work, no matter how scary or hard, because the alternative is drowning.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT, debut novel of queer loving and grieving and connecting

THE DISAPPOINTMENT
SCOTT BROKER
Catapult (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality—warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal—threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack—a former playwright mourning his failed career—catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly-dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’'s own life.

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

My Review: Why do we accept the cultural pressure to seek only peak experiences? Why accept that added burden on mere humans who are not capable of providing The Pinnacle all the time? Even most of the time. Often any of the time. But they're what we got, they're flawed and imperfect and a lot of trouble.

And so, being human, are we.

Among the smartest things my stepmother ever said to me was "romance is sweet and fun, but relationships are about farts and morning breath." Yuh-huh. If somene's not farting or blowing morning breath at you, they're dying. And I don't mean metaphorically.

Longing for perfection is a curse that takes us out of the tangible and plentiful joys of the moments of our lives. I'm a little salty about the chatbot illusion of intelligence and emotional personhood because it's a complete and utter lie. It reinforces the same thing Jack and Randy are battling in this story. They plan a "getaway" from their lives, a chance to decompress and reconnect with themselves and each other...but that assumes they're not connected and not always compressed, a fallacy that modern culture just *loooves* to sell you.

Verb selected very much advisedly.

It's discovering that feat of misdirection and manipulation that I found in the core of this read. Jack and Randy have bought the cultural crap. They're drifting apart because they've fallen for the illusion and can't find each other in the haze of it. Their griefs...Randy's mother's death, Jack's sense of himself as a failure...aren't the kind you can choose not to process. What The Disappointment does is set the stage for a wacky road trip to nowhere, delivers just that, and has its men lead us into themselves...without miring us in Interiority, in Reflection, in Contemplation. All those are terrific when those emotional registers are the ones you're in the mood for. That was not me at the moment I read this story. As a result I battened on the absurdism of these two in their shared moment of crises (plural deliberate, as is the separateness it implies) being enacted before me. Author Broker invokes Samuel Beckett in the text, appropriate as Jack is mourning his failed life as a playwright and who else would he invoke without lèse-majesté; he's making you think in absurd, if not surreal, terms as love molds itself around their griefs.

Because they share a grief: "My skin hugs closer to my bones, then shivers like a sheet of aluminum when he speaks," can not be spoken of someone one does not have a powerful connection to. Even when the World is doing its usual indifferent thing, even when you're gripped by desire (for someone else), even when you're wild with jealousy over trifles, this kind of connection isn't escapable. You can choose to sever it in practice but it survives, it mutates into...I don't know the word, is there one for a state of interconnection deeper than friendship but tinged with the sadness of dead lust?

Randy and Jack are looking into that nameless abyss. It's led them to a flowering of sexual awareness of each other. Is that going to last? (Scruff might play a big role in this.) I don't think I've read a more surprising, more enlivening, more vigorously honestly grounded, story of the insanely complex world of long-term couplehood.

What I loved was tinged with a little sense of déja-vu, as a lot of the story is assembled from the stuff of life. It can't be avoided and remain an honest tale of how we navigate life. The very end of the book is an "incantation with no resolve"—a resolutionless invitation to go on when you can't go on.

I'll go on.

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS, good YA treatment of grief's realities

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS
SUSIE NADLER
Dutton Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous debut about friendship, grief, and new beginnings set in near-future San Francisco in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and on the cusp of the first human mission to Mars.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

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My Review: Celeste is a spoiled, solipsistic brat, the kind of kid my mother called a typical teenager...utterly sure she is the center, the reason, the ultimate source of others' feelings and actions. How dreary, right parents? Here we go again.

Only partially true. We do spend a bit more time with Celeste taking a widespread tragedy more personally than is ever justified. What drags Celeste into the larger world of adulthood is her determination to make the world give her a reason that she has to experience the horror that is loss and grief. There is, in other words, hope for her yet.

That's the adult reward for reading the story. I put on my YA hat for the rest of the review.

Structurally it's a quest novel that follows the hero's journey, so it taps into the pull this story always exerts. Celeste is shown as the hero to some advantage because she has strong self-confidence, and learns through adversity to trust that she is able and willing to make her own way. She learns, again through adversity, that acting out her negative feelings about others is a losing game. Her spirit-guide, Nicky, is not explored in depth; he is a ghost of some power, whose interactions with Celeste read to me as fantasy but could easily be interpreted as "from beyond" by less jaded readers. Meo, in the here and now, is uninteresting to me; he serves Celeste's desires and offers her companionship on terms that solidify her understanding of boundaries.

I'd like to shoutout the prose, in particular the resonance of the phrasemaking that permeates the story. There's a smart kid out there who will twig to how this style is chosen to do a specific emotional thing that isn't overbearingly, ham-handedly guiding you to Feel This Now. (Spoiler Stasi look away: Keep the first line in your head while reading the end.)

I would give this to an ordinary fifteen-year-old without hesitation. Not really so comfortable to hand to younger people than that, the independence and boundary-setting are just a bit more...mature...than their social development. But for that grand or nibling just getting to the "I want I yearn I long for" age, it can offer some guidance on that journey. It's always best to do this teaching by storytelling.

TERRY DACTYL, trans girl's life from plague to plague

TERRY DACTYL
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.

Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.

Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

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

My Review: It was my world, this one. The AIDS epidemic to COVID...yeah...my adulthood. So no, not the lesbian moms part, and I'm not trans, but it still feels very familiar if not very sweet and happy.

No book about this span is ever not going to center the experience of loss and grief. It was the fabric we cut our lives out of. It takes a lot of moxie to be openly trans, even now when you can imagine your lesbian moms being glad for you that you've found your Self, the real one. Terry never hides her identity. She is herself from giddy-up to whoa. It leads her into the loving embrace of her found family in New York just as AIDS begins scything them with its death sentence for being queer.

Why this is a book made for the run-up to Yule is it's about us who live in loss, who never get to be the happy little homebody, who always yearn for something gone beyond our reach. Its unconjoined nature makes it the right kind of read for a busy and distracted holiday...re-reading a sentence or two is absolutely ordinary in this book's world. What this read offers, in this "festive" season, is the company of someone who survived...without her loved ones. Terry's a survivor in the approving, tough and capable definition; also in the lonely, left-behind definition. As COVID threatens to ravage her world again, she retreats to her home in Seattle.

It's not her home. It's a different place with the same name. I relate...I'm from Los Gatos before Netflix, Austin before Infowars, Manhattan before 9/11. None of my homes are remotely the same as when I was growing into myself there. It was this fellow-feeling that kept me reading the non-linear, mosaic story that followed the vibes of the story not the plan of it.

Certainly an unusual choice to make, going home to weather a storm. I wish I'd been able to spend more time in her moms' company, and wanted some greater theme to emerge from their choices to give Terry's life a more theatrically-defined completeness. I know this story is more the way life is lived: moving from experience to experience while still working out what the hell just happened.

Completely successful on that measure. I'm glad I read the story. But now, please write something from Terry's mothers' point of view, please and thank you, Author Mattilda.

THE FERRYMAN AND HIS WIFE, short and sentimental

THE FERRYMAN AND HIS WIFE
FRODE GRYTTEN (tr. Alison McCullough)
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the spirit of Amor Towles and George Saunders, the renowned, bestselling Norwegian author Frode Grytten takes readers on a quietly epic journey: ferry driver Nils Vik's last route along the fjord, on what he knows will be his last day alive.

Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and knows it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine as voices from his past echo in his mind, and looks around the empty house one last time, before stepping onto his beloved boat.

His dog, dead these many years, leaps aboard with him, and then the other dead begin to emerge—from the woods along the fjord, from each of the ferry stops along the route, from his logbook full of memories and quotations and jotted-down notes about the weather conditions. The people from the past accompany him now, prodding him, showing him what he might have missed before, as he waits for his Marta, his late, remarkable wife, to finally join him on the boat again.

Winner of the prestigious Brage Prize, and considered to be Grytten's long-awaited masterpiece, The Ferryman and His Wife is the story of a quiet, yet utterly profound, life told in reverse. Timeless and absorbing, this is a novel about what we take with us—those moments that might seem insignificant as they happen but prove to be the most meaningful, in the end.

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My Review: Wisdom comes late in life, if it bothers to stop by your place at all.

To be born was to live long enough to discover what air and sea and earth and hate and love are, then to say thank you and goodbye.

Nils Vik, the ferryman of the title, has a good store of wisdom built up, and uses his last day of life to put it in order.

This life is like an item of clothing, the beauty exists on the outside but the warmth is found within.

Aper&çu after aphorism following quotable line, this is a lovely sentimental ruminative summing-up of a small life lived well.

"He loved his wife. I always said they lived like two clapping hands, she was the left hand, he the right."

If the need for a warm toddy on a cold day is upon you, read this book. It is lovey; it is short; it answers that need we all share for feeling seen and valued for ourselves, for our gifts and how we've given them.

"And don’t think I’m about to ask you. About what? Whether or not you were happy – because I know exactly what you’ll say. You’re one of those people who thinks you’re happy where you are, somebody who wants no more than what you already have."

I found the one discordant note, some people traveling in Nils' ferry to exterminate feral dogs, sufficiently off-putting to skip over any possible details I might be offended by and ding a star off the rating.

Its impact was warming overall, and the prose went down well; will I remember it in a week? Not likely; it was an afternoon's pleasant entertainment.

SLEEPLESS NIGHT, grief never really ends...so what do you do with it?

SLEEPLESS NIGHT
MARGRIET DeMOOR (tr. David Doherty)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman gets up in the middle of a wintry night and starts baking a cake while her lover sleeps upstairs. When it's time for her to take the cake out of the oven, we have read a story of romance and death. The narrator of this novel was widowed years ago and is trying to find new passion. But the memory of her deceased husband and a shameful incident still holds her in its grasp. Why did he do it?

Margriet de Moor, the grande dame of Dutch literature, tells a gripping love story about endings and demise, rage and jealousy, knowledge and ambiguity—and the possibility of new beginnings.

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

My Review: When I get a deMoor translation, I hop right on reading it because I know I'll go deep into a fascinating place. First Grey, Then White, Then Blue seduced me into her fan club thirty-plus years ago; then, over the years, a few other tries at getting Anglophones interested in her storytelling have been made. None has riled up the delighted baying and howling I feel she deserves for her beautiful, considered, lapidary work.

Oh...I think I see why others aren't flocking to get her latest. More fools they be.

This story will speak loudest to those among us who have lost a love. Left behind to make sense of the life we now live, our love now unreturned, figuring out how the hell to keep plowing through endless, cheerless, drift-filled days and then...horror of self-sadism...those reflective contemplative unanswerable-questioning nights.

Bake a cake!

In this case a tulbandcake (here translated as a "bundt cake" which, yes, but in a curious way, no):

A tulbandcake showing its candied-fruit interior and cool fluting

Staying busy, trying to keep your thoughts out of the toxic death-spiral of loneliness, resentment, anger, hollowness; that's all so relatable, and more poignant because on this night she's come to her kitchen to escape a man she's trying to find a passion for who is sleeping (she thinks) in her bed. He's been left behind as well...though her abandonment is to the love of her life's suicide some time ago and his to his wife's unwillingness to be married to him. That's it, that's the sum total of his existence in this story; having been him before I'll say it's my considered opinion he's lying awake wondering what the hell he's doing where he is when she's not even willing to be there with him for afters.

That said, the love of her life gave up on her, their brand-new life together, and on Life. That leaves a scar. What this nocturnal awakening is about is that scar. Is she so puckered and warped by it there's no longer a way to lie flat again? Is this hopelessness real or imagined? Can she tell the difference? How can she tell the difference?

Is the cake ready?

Because if it is, it needs to come out and cool down so it can be eaten.

IYKYK.

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.

LESSER RUINS, shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses

LESSER RUINS
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3 very grouchy stars of five

Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses Winner announced 12 March 2025

The Publisher Says: From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

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

My Review: I connected with this sad-sack whiner in his grief for his dead wife, and his beautifully evoked love for coffee.

Apart from that, I loathed him and wanted him to shut his moan-hole.

I live (involuntarily and with poor grace) in proximity to a grievance-led, dementia-addled, old drunk. This is like reading the smart version of him venting his legit sadness and tiresome regrets in the key of "they done me wrong" on endless repeat.

I think this book is better than I perceive it to be, due to my own life's issues and difficulties. It has to be, to have elicited from me the degree of irritated disgust with its protagonist that it did. Had it been simply a poor job of writing or storytelling, I'd simply have Pearl-Ruled it and moved on with my day.

Read the free sample that Kindle offers you, you'll know right away if this resonates with you, and if the resonance is on a frequency you enjoy reverberating to. I very much did not like this read. The reasons I've given suggest to me that others without my life circumstances will feel otherwise.

My rating being an expression of my personal pleasure in the read explains its paltriness. You will most likely, or so I hope, disagree with me.

I'M STILL HERE: A Dog's Purpose Forever, lovely meditation on love, loss, grief, and going on anyway

I'M STILL HERE: A Dog's Purpose Forever
CATHRYN MICHON (illus. Seth Taylor)
Andrews McMeel
$9.99 Kindle edition, available 10 September 2024

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This richly illustrated book reveals a comforting narrative told from the point of view of a loving angel dog, who wants you to know, “I’m still here . . . But I’m also there where all the animals run free, with no pain, waiting for you, watching for you, loving you, and guiding you.”

Losing one’s dog is one of the most difficult experiences we go through and it’s hard to find solace. However, the profound, four-legged narrator of I’m Still Here has nothing but good news for humans. The free verse is equally rhapsodic about the eternal nature of our souls and the amazing sound of crinkly wrappers that means cheese is about to be sliced. This very good dog proclaims that love never dies, that we will meet again, and that if you ever doubted that humans are magnificent creatures, look no further than the humble ball.

There is nothing to fear, because it is this dog’s purpose to pull you (like a bad dog who doesn’t know how to do “leash”) toward joy, and to remind you to relish all the naps and treats life has to offer.

Author Cathryn Michon co-wrote the blockbuster hit film A Dog’s Purpose. Elegant, full-color watercolor paintings by award-winning artist Seth Taylor make this sumptuous volume the perfect gesture of compassion for anyone who has ever said goodbye to a dog (or person) gone too soon, because it’s always too soon. It turns out that the best way to honor those we’ve loved and lost is to be here now, until we meet again.

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

My Review: Not my usual fare. I'm pretty hard-hearted abou grief and grieving, compared to most, because I feel so much of the stuff most people resonate with is mawkish and embarrassing.

Except when it comes to our poochies.

Much emotional investment in many dogs, oceans of tears when I lose them, and a beautifully warm glow that no human's ever induced in me, made this a must-read. It was sentimental, the illustrations gorgeous, and the package came through as beautiful and luxurious even on my tablet. That's good design.

So heartfelt!
Embodying joy.

Good boy!

She's got the right idea!

Precious little pup...makes you want to schmoozle those teeny little ears, no?

I think anyone who's ever loved and lost would love this poultice for that ache.

BRIGHT OBJECTS, shiny start to a promising new career

BRIGHT OBJECTS
RUBY TODD
Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A young widow grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its tumultuous consequences, in a debut novel that blends mystery, astronomy, and romance, perfect for fans of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands.

Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness—until she meets Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible to the naked eye.

As the comet begins to brighten, Sylvia wonders what the apparition might signify. She is soon drawn into the orbit of local mystic Joseph Evans, who believes the comet’s arrival is nothing short of a divine message. Finding herself caught between two conflicting perspectives of this celestial phenomenon, she struggles to define for herself where the reality lies. As the comet grows in the sky, her town slowly descends further and further into a fervor over its impending apex, and Sylvia’s quest to uncover her husband’s killer will push her and those around her to the furthest reaches of their very lives.

A novel about the search for meaning in a bewildering world, the loyalty of love, and the dangerous lengths people go to in pursuit of obsession, Bright Objects is a luminous, masterfully crafted literary thriller.

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

My Review: A debut novel from a very accomplished author, one whose best gift is the deft touch of characterization. I felt very connected to Sylvia from the get-go, her fuddled and bewildered survivor's guilt, her unostentatious revenge-seeking against the one responsible for her loss, and her deep but unwilling fascination with a charismatic local cult leader.

The lovely patterns Author Todd weaves among these strands, spinning her threads from the ever-renewed internal structures of loss, guilt, sadness, and outrage, don't sag or drop. They're sometimes not as harmoniously tinted as a veteran writer might choose...the mother-in-law in particular is rather paler than I'd expected, Theo the astronomer a bit too intense...but these are quibbles. Not a line out of place, not a word (even when a not-American word crops up) wasted or obscured.

The lack of a full fifth star on my rating isn't because of some sense of disappointment. I got what I wanted. The plot...revenge-driven widow struggles to cope with her loss and her survivor guilt will catch me in its web every time...is consistent, is finished with an appropriate, yet unexpected, ending. What bothered me, and this is really a very *me* thing to be tangled up in, was the comet. A comet, one on a path to get this close to Earth, is not going to go undetected for very long. We're motivated, since Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacked Jupiter so very hard in 1994, to go looking for these kinds of objects.

Okay, so that's a half-star lost. A tiny smidgeon of the tarnish on my shiny loving cup of pleasure also traces to Theo and his own warping loss. It's a trope I find painfully Writerly, is the Conjunction of Damaged Souls. Theo's issues were understandably similar to Sylvia's; his response to her darkness was believable. His discovery of her, in Australia, where he happens to be for the confirmation of a career-defining discovery, is what rings false to me. As always I want this kind of other-directed man to exist; I suspect he isn't to be found in a man about to ascend to the heights of his ambitions. I also see the facile characterization of Joseph Evans, and honestly, since he's such a bell-end of a grifter, I just don't care.

Quibbles and crotchets aside, everything Author Todd does in this story fits. The mystery plot, the way it's rooted in the ugliness of revenge, the focus of the two leads on their personal quests, all works as a whole. The manner in which the ending's made manifest felt satisfying to me. I'm struggling with myself not to spoiler it (though I really want to!) because experiencing the event blind is a pleasure enhancer.

Tyro author does a fine job, will most likely do better next time, and very much deserves your treasure and time.

WELCOME TO FOREVER, lovely meditation on what makes you, you

WELCOME TO FOREVER
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution.

For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion.

Fox is a memory editor—one of the best—gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe.

Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over.

As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.

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

My Review: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind only gay it up. I loved that film, and this book, for the same reasons: They show us how extremely integral to our sense of self and buying in to the social construct of reality memory is. If someone doesn't share your memory of something, is your memory wrong? If you can't find a memory in your mind, is it gone? Where'd it go?

After the strokes I had in 2023, these questions are more important than ever to me. They were never unimportant to me but have gained urgency as a result of that crisis. Reading this book with its structural similarity to my own experience of needing others...the kindness of others is literally everything, y'all, practice giving it as well as receiving it....to help me find my sense of myself in the world was satisfyingly resonant.

Questioning one's identity is a thing we're told magically stops for queer people when we come out. (Spoiler alert: It does not.) All the jostles to one's sense of self that a long-term intimate relationship brings are wildly out-of-proportion shocks to many of us. Fox meeting Gabe, meeting him again and again, and still coming up against that shocking wall of The Other as a complete and entire being not knowable to yourself, makes this a wonderful piece of relationship fiction. It's very much also a SFF exploration of overweening tech hubris. It's also a sly jab at the savior complex of the people who look at humanity as a set of problems to be solved. All of these facets are inherent in the story's conflicts, in the quest that Fox sets out on to rediscover and reintegrate himself after trauma.

I'll say that, after the success that was my read of A Fractured Infinity, I went into this sophmore effort hoping for no slump and wishing for an out-of-the-park homer. I got neither. I got the top-quality expansion on the strengths of the first novel, its relationships, and that is way more than enough to get an extra half-star from my stingy self. A full star didn't happen because the first book's film-editing style didn't thrill me this time, either. I honestly expected scene numbers and location directions. I suspect Author Tavares uses shot lists to organize the stories he tells...hoping for his sake this makes the film industry take him up and film both his stories.

This story should be of extra deep interest to readers over 35 because that group has, as a rule, experiences like Fox's and Gabe's to bring to the table. It is straight-people safe, no NSFW smexytimes to shock and/or affront you. The love story, the trajectory of a man constructing and reconstructing his life after a horrible, external trauma, ought to draw in all identities...or so I hope in this polarized world.

Very much a recommended #PrideMonth read for us and for allies all.

THE GUNCLE ABROAD, sequel...with a knowing wink...to a surprise hit

THE GUNCLE ABROAD
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$29.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the nationally bestselling author of The Guncle comes the much-anticipated sequel, in which Patrick O’Hara is called back to his guncle duties…at a big, family wedding in Lake Como, Italy.

Patrick O’Hara is finally in a league of his own…professionally. Inspired by his stint as Grant and Maisie’s caretaker after their mother’s passing, Patrick has "un-stalled" his acting career with sit-com, Guncle Knows Best. Still, some things have had to take a back seat. Looking down both barrels at fifty, Patrick is single and lonely after breaking things off with Emory. But at least he has family, right?

When his brother Greg announces his big, second wedding in Lake Como, Italy, Patrick feels pulled toward Grant and Maisie and flies to Europe to attend the lavish event, only to butt heads with a newfound Launt (Lesbian Aunt), curb his sister Clara from flirting with guests, and desperately restore himself to the favored relative status in the eyes of the kids, as they struggle to adjust to a new normal. But is it Patrick’s job to save the day? Or is simply celebrating love enough to quell the family chaos?

Gracing the page with his signature blend of humor and heart, Steven Rowley delivers the long-awaited sequel to a beloved story, all about the complicated bonds of family, love, and what it takes to rediscover yourself, even at the ripe age of fifty.

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

My Review: Teenagers. Yikes! Maisie's dad is getting remarried to a Very Glamourous Italian, which is NOT a way to a bookish teen girl's heart. Grant is eleven, doesn't really have a lot of interest in the wedding parts, but will—he thinks—definitely prefer his life without an Italian marchesa for a stepmom, since Maisie's churned those waters. The gruesome twosome turn to their truly belovèd Guncle Patrick, their Dad's big brother, for help stopping what they see as impending disaster.

Guncle ("gay uncle" if you need a refresher) has, in agreeing to "help" them, got a plan. The issue with plans is that teenagers, with their fully adult-strength emotions and complete absence of perspective, most often see through plans and get...stroppy...when they feel manipulated.

Clever Guncle...take the kids on a European tour, since he's already finishing up a film role in London, and talk to them...remember "Guncle Rules"? now they're "Love Languages"...while working through their fears about their Dad moving on from their Mom's early death. It will, not coincidentally, help him move on from his recent breakup with Emory, whom I feel sure we've all forgotten from The Guncle. At any rate, it's a welcome distraction from the entertainment business for a successful...again...sitcom...again...star, and a man about to turn the Big Five-Oh. Yep, the guy who found being loudly reminded by his loving niece that he was forty-three tantamount to a hate crime is a half-century old.

Does his wiliness now exceed his willingness to be there for his family? Close-run thing if you ask me.

Well, Rowley's still got his humor vein open. I loved this bit:

“Sequels are either too bloated, too stuffed with B-team actors or characters or Ewoks—things that weren’t good enough for the original. A cash grab to profit off something that was probably a fluke in the first place.”

Cassie glanced at the surrounding patrons, perhaps wishing she could dine with one of them.

“The only time it maybe works—and I mean the only time—is when there wasn’t an ending that was entirely happy, when not everything was tied up in a neat little bow. Otherwise you have to undo someone’s happy ending to create more drama for your characters, and no one likes a happy ending undone. And what stories these days don’t have happy endings?”

Thus Patrick to his long-suffering agent...and Author Rowley tipping his hat to the audience. It's not the first time I've been here, so pay me the respect of telling me you're aware of that fact. I appreciated it, and was simultaneously amused by it. It joins the host of amusing moments that this whirlwind tour of Europe that must be completed in time for the destination wedding on Lake Como...shades of Patrick Dennis and Around the World with Auntie Mame, another sequel that has to undo a happy ending...and you get a fun, funny summertime escape in book form. That is a wonderful lot.

Of course, this is not the first time we've met these characters, so there's a lost sparkle that can't be recreated no matter what one does. In its place is a luster, the warm burnished glow from a fine silver samovar, one that always spills its tea warmed to perfection into your perfectly prepared cup. Sweet...the return and humanization of oldest sister Clara in her latest reinvention of self...bitter, Patrick's jealousy of the marchesa's lesbian sister who woos her way into Maisie and Grant's affections...fun, the comical nightmare rehearsal dinner like something from The Philadelphia Story, only...um...earthier, and honestly de trop. Tropes. Well polished, gleaming tropes that most story-loving readers want to read because they are familiar and dear and relatable. What story about a wedding that deserves one's attention at all doesn't feature some concatenation of mishaps?

The utter charm of how the world rights itself in romantic fiction is a source of delight.

Come be delighted. (But dear GOD, the w-verbing has got to stop!)

AFTERLIGHT, love, loss, and learning as they look from The End

AFTERLIGHT
JAAP ROBBEN (tr. David Doherty)
World Editions
$19.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This moving novel gives voice to the silent grief of the mothers of stillborn children

The young free-spirited florist Frieda grew up in a strictly Catholic environment in the 1960s. When she steps onto a frozen river on a late winter afternoon, little does she know that everything is about to change for her. On the ice, she meets the married Otto. They experience a love that begins stormy and ends with Frieda becoming pregnant—a scandal in the world in which she moves. And so she must never be the mother of her secret child.

For decades she kept her memories of this episode in her life to herself. But the grief for the lost child remains, despite the later marriage, despite the son she still has. At the age of eighty-one, Frieda is suddenly alone again. The silent sorrow returns with force. Only then does she dare to face her story—and to share it.

With Afterlight, inspired by true events, Robben not only pulls back the veil on Frieda’s story but also shines a light on the experiences of countless women between the 1950s and 1980s. The result is an impressive story about buried female trauma, caused by society, organized religion, and the dominant social mores.

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

My Review: I lost my love a lot earlier in life than Frieda did. He needed the level of care that Frieda does as the story begins, not me; nor have I yet reached the point where she is, of needing basic-living help.

Thank goodness the strokes I had in 2023 didn't make that help a lifelong need. But I still had the points of recognition and connection with Frieda from my life's story. I was right there with her as she adjusted to a new place to live that doesn't belong to her; I felt her dislocation as the night's disturbances had her groping around the unfamiliar space to find things she's sure she has, and still needs...only they aren't there and won't be again.

I am also familiar with the awful pains of being Othered by "religious" people, and told by The World that who you are is bad, and wrong, and will always cause their gawd to hate you and doom you to an eternity of punishment. Poor Frieda. I wouldn't say she overcomes that abusive horror in this story. I would say she makes her own way in life with the miracle of love offered her by the now-dead Louis...the one who fully expected he would survive her as she declined and lost more and more of herself. I asked Rob to read this book, and, after hearing what it was about, he looked at me through the computer screen and said, "No." Simple, final. Understandable.

It's a lot to ask: Frieda's happiness was bookended by a lot of pain. It is, though, the kind of pain that older people will relate to. It is a very familiar world that Frieda brings back to us in each time period. We've all been too young for some major life event that happened to us anyway. We've all felt unloved and abandoned...rightly, as in Frieda's case, or wrongly...and many, if not most, of us can relate deeply to loving someone and losing them. A lot of my readers are getting to the place where they, or their parents, are needing help that wasn't needed in the recent past. And all of that is what you and I share with Frieda.

Do you want to read about it for entertainment? Well, I did. I was pleased to have the fellow-feeling of Frieda's journey into the undignified, unpleasant (to me) world of bodily aging; as this is a story set in two timelines, though, I was expecting to be led into the sunnier meadows of the earlier life she led, and its youthful exuberance. Here is where the story fell short of the five stars all stories I read start with for me.

This is not a short book—three hundred-ish pages. There was space to develop the dual timeline, and it wasn't done. What's enjoyable about the way Author Jaap writes Frieda's story is the immediacy of it. He gets the sense of her, at every age, as a woman very much alert to the world around her; and yet unable to reach it, grasp it, without mediation...hearing aids, glasses, nurses, her husband, gawd...and so never fully having her own undiluted experience of anything.

Youthful inexperience prevented her from seeing the man who impregnated her in 1963 with any clarity, led to her downfall by the mediation of a religious upbringing that so starved her for genuine experience that she fell for the most unsubtle of lures. There's the consequences part of that in the book, but the stick gets applied without the carrot in my estimation.

That said, I liked this read. I liked its soft edges on hard realities...its gentle Impressionistic blur is, though, down to poor vision, not to a soft reality. That made it the more poignant to read. It's an enjoyable, relatable story well-told by an author who knows his subject. It's deftly translated...no clunks or clanks, and nothing that my early-learner study of Dutch saw as out of place...which helps.

Good is not the enemy of great when it is enough in itself.

IN EXCESS OF DARK, new horror novella that does it all right

IN EXCESS OF DARK
RED LAGOE
DarkLit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What if every terrible thing imagined came true? Every fleeting, nightmarish thought a reality?

For grief-stricken Karina, her newfound ability to turn her worst daydreams into palpable truths has sent her into a downward spiral of depression and guilt. Coupled with the appearance of an enigmatic shadow figure and visions of her dead family, she grapples to maintain her sanity while desperately attempting to harness her abilities and reunite with her loved ones.

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

My Review: Red Lagoe was introduced to me by Well Read Beard a couple years back. As I bought her books with my very own United States dollars, they went unreviewed...though not unenjoyed. This is not the first book-bullet the Beard has clipped me with, this author and her wild, fearless pursuit of story-logic's final destination (note horror-movie play on words, please), no matter how deeply grim it may be are now part of my regular rotation. I was very pleased to get this as a DRC.

I am not a chirpy soul. I genuinely believe the worst will happen because that is what the evil xian gawd, who clearly does rule the universe, wants for her victims. So as I read along in this book, I kept thinking, is Karina really just me? I tested my hypothesis by handing the Kindle to my Young Gentleman Caller on a flying visit he paid without telling him why I wanted him to read the book. Two hours later he handed it back and commented, "when did you meet this Red person, and Red had better be a she." So yeah...I related to Karina's nightmarish sense of deja vu as the horrors she is experiencing tie right in to her worst, darkest imaginings.

The worst things that can happen to a parent will spiral any one of us into deepest, most depressed misery. Not all of us see dark shapes that can mimic our lost ones. As a reader, I wavered between being sure this was a bad case of delusional grieving, and Karina's toxic mother's low-key emotional manipulations...and a little, uneasy sense that maybe, juuust maaaybe....

And by the ending, I was *still* not sure. To be clear, the ending has a full and satisfying reason for the events of the book...but I was still in that uncertain space until the very end of the read. That is quite a feat for an author to manage, as I started reading before young Author Lagoe was even born...I have seen every trick and ridden every trope before, and she still made me change my mind about what was happening multiple times.

I recommend this short, intense read to anyone whose life has included loss at an extremely deep level and who is willing and ready to process the darker side of it, as well as to those who think religious and supernatural "horror" are really quite silly. This book plays with those notions in a very unsettling, yet more grounded in reality, way that is very believable.

Karina and her disintegration are genuinely unnerving and upsetting, but for all the darkness on parade here, this is in the end a strong woman's discovery of her truest, most powerful self.

At 99¢, this is a great value. Look into it, and Red Lagoe, and I think you will come away glad to buy her work when you need a little challenging reading.

DID YE HEAR MAMMY DIED?: A Memoir, or "How to Laugh Your Way Through Grief"

DID YE HEAR MAMMY DIED?: A Memoir
SÉAMAS O'REILLY
Little, Brown
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles.

After the untimely death of his mother, five-year old Seamas and his ten (TEN!) siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow Seamas and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together.

Along the way, we see Seamas through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time Seamas worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the President of Ireland.

Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired Seamas regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.

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

My Review: First, read this:

Thankfully, he laughs heartily throughout, and his main objections are less of taste or decency and more points of fact he felt I needed hearing. Besides telling me, several more times, to slow down, most of his input cleaves close to the pedantic. Such is the case with my description of the priest who came to bless our 26-foot-long caravan before the 3,200 mile round trip we took to Spain, the year after my mother died. I describe the oddness of the scene, the priest swinging incense around our giant caravan, in full vestments, conducting himself with the stately grace of an altogether more solemn occasion. “He wasn’t in full vestments” Daddy interjects, a hint of mocking laughter in his voice. “He was wearing a sotan” he says, with an incredulity that suggests I’d committed a faux pas equivalent to forgetting my own name.

The fact that I’d misidentified this sotan—an only marginally less formal, long cassock type affair—is sufficient for my father to consider me very badly caught out. He denies outright that he ever killed a mouse with a tiny plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the virgin Mary, and seems particularly aggrieved that I keep saying he knows every priest in Ireland. This he decries as emblematic of my addiction to overstatement—“Séamas, there should be a disclaimer on every page”—before suggesting a figure like 70-80% would be more realistic.

That's from the LitHub piece about Author Séamas reading parts of his memoir to his blinded-by-diabetes Daddy. Because, in the end, you're not going to thank me for ruining the fun of this read by quoting some parts I highlighted to you. I think you're best going into this read, and I really, really hope you *will* go into this read, without too much explicit information.

You already know the bones, the author's one of eleven children...I need a lie-down every time I think about that...raised by a man alone. Modern sensibilities have it that men can't raise children, and that there's such a thing as overpopulation, and dear goddesses below us why the hell didn't she just kick him out of bed?! But to the devil with all that, dive into the absolutely astonishing O'Reilly family's beautifully bizarre world as remembered by the ninth of the eleven souls born to two people whose love was, I am shocked to say, well attested by all and sundry. Especially their children.

The author being gainfully employed, and even a success at his career, and none of his siblings having gone to prison, well I'd say they did very well, those delightfully out-of-step parents. I'd also say, given Séamas's astonishing capacity for reading, that the whole ecosystem of family was a healthy, if really weird, one. Who else had a Daddy whose response to an IRA bombing that shattered some of their remote house's windows was to be, in a word, unconcerned? Larger implications, political ideas, the safety of his family, all came down to "if I panic and go to pieces there is no hope of ever making all of them feel safe again." And he chose their sense of serenity, of faith that the world would be right, over his probable fears and sleeplessness...but he held no brief with hate, or with unkindness of any sort.

What stands out for me, reading this memoir of a man so much younger than myself and from such a widely divergent background, is how included I felt as I read the anecdotes. I was a guest being given the lay of the land. I was the stranger who, accidentally wandering into the ambit of the family, was welcomed with the greatest possible camaraderie and bonhomie. My drink glass was never empty and the snacks were endless, so my new friends were set to make me one of the neighbors and friends whose bemused orbits are noted and needed without breaking the harmony within.

I am so happy I read this memoir of a five-year-old "half-orphan" and his trip through this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver, for that perfect locution) among a family he clearly loves and likes. If I were just slightly more evil, I'd be so jealous of him I'd spoiler all his jokes and tread on his every punchline. But I know when I've been offered a beautiful gift. This is one.

So, Joe O'Reilly...I know you're not going to read my words about your lad Séamas...but you should know that your work, the hard slogging work of being alive when your mate is dead...is the reason we all have a very fine gift in your son. In his gifts, so many that owe their existence and their potency to you.

A glass of cheer to you, sir.

THE GUNCLE, a sweetly sentimental look at family, love, and their powers

THE GUNCLE
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is honestly a bit out of his league.

So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick’s brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of “Guncle Rules” ready to go, Patrick has no idea what to expect, having spent years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old. Quickly realizing that parenting—even if temporary—isn’t solved with treats and jokes, Patrick’s eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility, and the realization that, sometimes, even being larger than life means you’re unfailingly human.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY AFTER MONTHS ON THE WAITING LIST. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! WE'RE HOW THEY LIVE.

My Review: Last year's big beach read was damned near perfect for the job of being gay enough to really show people how this shit works in real life without making straight people squirm. No fewer than 26 (twenty-six!) mass-media straight venues listed it as a must-read! TWENTY-SIX! Ten years ago, I'd've fallen over in a heap; now I'm mightily impressed. And that, mes vieux, is what we call "progress" of the best sort.

But really, can you fault their discernment?

“You’re forty-three!” Maisie bellowed.

“Who are you, the DMV? Lower your voice.”

“That’s almost fifty!” Grant’s eyes grew big.

Patrick took the jab, then closed his eyes and bit his lower lip; the observation was just shy of a hate crime.

–and–

“Canada is harmless and the prime minister is a total snack, so we can do Paw Patrol. But another time, because we have to move beyond brunch and start planning our day. What are you guys thinking, do you have anything on your calendars?”

–and–

Books should be an experience, he thought, not a trophy for having read them.

Really, the most delicious Negroni (Aperol! faugh!) of fun and profundity for the masses! I can absolutely recommend this book to straight women, gay guys over thirty, and the very most adventurous straight men and lesbians.

...wait...that's it? That's the review?

Honestly, it could be. That's what the reviewer does, right? Tell you and those like you if a book is worth reading, and identify that group to the best of their ability. Illustrate with relevant (in the reviewer's opinion) examples, do one's best not to spoiler things for the sensitive fleurs who, inexplicably, still read reviews but don't want to know anything that happens in the artwork in question. But the twenty-six (!) media outlets that yawped about this book in 2021 already did that. (They did not tell you, however, about being assaulted in the sensibilities by twelve {12} w-bombs. It was an invasion of the eye-disease-having winkers. Ick.)

So, let me tell you a little something that is a spoiler, but is also something you really need to know: This is also a book about loving more than you fear being hurt. This is a book about processing loss, making its deforming agonies fit into a shape that will carry you through the rest of a life; this is a book about the unique, unusual pain of losing your mate as a gay man.

Regular readers know that I've had my share of losses, incalculably awful ones, and met them without a lot of inner strength due to my own beginnings among women who judged, and felt comfortable expressing their contempt for, me. I'm not going to rehash the stories, they're spread all over this place, but the fact is I understand Patrick well. He found his Joe...who chose him to be his family...and he had his RG bestie Sara, who also chose him to be her family to the point she married his little brother. His family, then, was born, found, made. He felt it was his...and gawd laughed her evil laugh.

Joe, gone in an instant, his life taken before his body stopped working; Sara, withered and wizened by illness, slowly slowly vanishing, and Patrick losing again...this time with higher stakes, loss built on loss. And Sara? Well. That's the loveliest thing about this book. Sara, whom we meet briefly in flashbacks of her loving bestieship with Patrick, is honestly like Nut the sky goddess and the goddess of Mothers as she was The Mother. Her role is pervasive, her life is not over...never truly will be...but she is, for all that, a space not an object. And that is so exactly like motherhood that it's really a little terrifying....

The word "Guncle" is a portmanteau of "gay" and "uncle" which I trust won't surprise readers of my words. It's a way of refining a relationship that is largely, in the twenty-first century, fungible. I called men "Uncle" who were neither married to my aunts nor related to my parents. It's a standard feature of life now, we claim relationships and make of them things that we're interested in having or being. The family Patrick has built is so deeply rooted that Guncle Patrick is GUP, the Guncle, anything you want because he's still building his identity. As we all should throughout our lives, after Joe's and Sara's deaths, Patrick is reinventing himself in this summer-long story of a clueless gay man taking on the role of grief counselor and rock of support to two kids and, finally, himself.

"Coming of age" is a phrase that, when applied to novels, shows, films, and other cultural detritus, causes my stomach to churn with acid produced by the "flight" part of the famous response. I hated being a teenager and I don't much want to experience that horrible time again in art. Any art. But the simple fact is, we come of middle-age, we come of old-age...we aren't ever Finished Products. That's for characters created to show us their intended side, their best profile. This book's biggest and best gift to the reader of middle or older years is that: Patrick comes of age, again, as he processes his intense and life-altering grief with humor and wit, with stakes far beyond his own self, with clumsy but real love and, finally, respect for the role of loss and sadness, for grief's immense and unending weight.

Lift weights for strength. Do yoga for flexibility. Nourish your body with the tenderest care and attention to its needs. Because it is the vessel that will support your huge burden of grief and sadness, your light and love, your voice as you speak your truth.

Gym bunny GUP did. And Author Steven Rowley led us there without making it a trudge, or selling it short; I didn't just think up that stuff and say it here, I found it all in this light, easy-to-read novel about a man asked to do the impossible. Again: Heal.

COVE, beginning my 2021 reviews on a Cynan-Jones-caused 5-star high

COVE
CYNAN JONES
Catapult
$19.95 hardcover, available now

I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. This is my 2021 Six-Stars-of-Five read.

Rating: 5* 6 stars of five

The Publisher Says: Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return.

THIS WAS A YULE GIFT FROM MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. THANK YOU, MY LOVE.

My Review: Don't ever, ever think you're in a dark place again, is the primary message of this novella-cum-prose poem.

He is holding his hands in the water, rubbing the blood from them, when the hairs on his arms stand up. The sway briefly, like seaweed in the current. Then lie down again.

He looks up. A strange ruffle come across the surface.

The birds had lifted suddenly and gone away. As if there were some signal. They are flecks now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.

He is far enough out for the land to have paled in view.

Our nameless point-of-view man is busy preparing to take his kayak out of the cove near his home. With his experienced preparations, catching a fish for his supper and with the material goods he needs to make the short trip comfortable, there is a heaviness. The foreboding the above passage evokes in me is matched by the fact that he's there to scatter his father's ashes. But the world doesn't have time to mourn for anyone:

There was a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumped. He saw it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.

These passages make me think I live in Author Cynan's head. I see and hear them in realtime. I am deeply unsettled...what is coming must be difficult because these quotidian sensations are so powerful. The ashes, the small moments of daily reality going on despite the huge gaping hole of his father's death...going out of the shelter of this homely cove, noticing its real-world comforts...
...
...
...I've read your books before, Author Cynan, something terrible this way comes.

A moment truly as before-and-after as it is portrayed to be: A lightning strike.

While alone at sea. In a kayak. With a few hours' trip supplies.

Waking up alive, though after how long he doesn't know and with the arm that conducted the current dead (the fern-like pattern of Lichtenberg figures disfiguring his now-useless hand and arm), he inventories his few supplies and begins preparations to survive. It is grueling to read and almost reeks of experience, which I hope is second-hand:

He takes off the buoyancy aid & pulls on the thick sweater, useless arm first. The smell of the sweater triggers something, but it is like a piano key hitting strings that are gone.

That image is both terrifying to me, and gorgeous to read. What a superbly wrought way to describe the sensation of losing a piece of yourself, your experience. Where one expects resonant musical pleasure, there is the presence of silence and not just the absence of sound.

There is a miserable fight, with the good luck of an itchy sunfish rubbing against his kayak and beneficently steering it towards land; there is a moment of aesthetic joy as night luminescent seas trace the presence of his hand; there is so much work and so much pain:

If you disappear you will grow into a myth for them. You will exist only as an absence. If you get back, you will exist as a legend.

That's effective self-talk for a man who's been through some huge change. "They" are the woman pregnant with his child, and the unborn person itself. For, as the sea's many thefts (water, skin) bite ever deeper, he needs this goal to focus on, and needs also his dead father's ghost in his own head reminding him how to do this, how to survive.

An image of fatherhood that I am so unspeakably glad to see in fiction, littered as it is with cheating lying beating abusing men.

The ordeal continues. The night and the day and then there is land...land within sight...with lights...and he MacGyvers up a sail to speed his bonny boat...
...
...into a squall.

All of his life he's had a recurring dream: the car leaves the road. It is never the impact that terrifies him, wakes him. His fear comes the moment he feels the car go.

His life does not pass before his eyes. There is even a point he feels calm. But then he sees the faces of the people he loves. He sees their faces as they see him go.

Here is a man driven to Be There, never to leave, always support and defend, finally driven to his uttermost extreme in search of survival.

And that is where we end.

I close my remarks by noting that this is the book I wish The Old Man and the Sea had been, but was not.