BLOOD OF THE DAWN, Peru's violent past made personal

BLOOD OF THE DAWN
CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ (tr. Elizabeth Bryer)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Debut novel by Peruvian author viscerally revisits Peru's recent, traumatic history through the eyes of three women

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as "the time of fear" in Peruvian history, when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in a lucid and brutal prose.

Claudia Salazar Jiménez was born in 1975 in Lima, Peru. She is a critic, a scholar, and an author; she founded PERUFEST, the first Peruvian film festival in New York, where she lives; and she won the 2014 Americas Narrative Prize for this, her debut novel.

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My Review: A nasty proxy war was fought by the US versus the USSR as part of what we in the US are taught to call "the Cold War." How cold is a war whose victims number in the hundreds of thousands in one theater of its coldness, eg Latin America? Are people's families less fractured because no US soldiers (to speak of) were killed? Are those (mostly) men less dead because they weren't casualties of great pitched battles?

One nasty war was the struggle Peruvians fought against Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path in English), a Soviet-backed militia that committed atrocities against ordinary people with seeming success throughout the 1980s. The brutality of the US-backed military's responses to Sendero Luminoso drove some into the rebels' camp, others away from it. In any civil war there are no real winners. This was never more evident than in Peru. Author Salazar Jiménez limns that very clearly by decentering the male (mostly) combatants in favor of three women whose lives are both upended and defined by the conflict.

It's a depressing truth that this book came out in 2016, I read it in 2017, and while I made my notes on it at the time I never wrote them into a review. The biggest part of my failure to review it stems from the stream-of-consciousness narrative vignettes feeling unlinked-up. This is a debut, so it deserves generosity of treatment; however I was very, very irritated by the sense that, if there was a common thread in the background tapestry, I did not see it.

On skimming the story ten years later, I still don't. The PoV women are all enmeshed in the struggles of Peru, none on the government side but Melanie the city-born colonizer-stock photographer is probably closest as photography and its granddaughter filmmaking's very much an outgrowth of bourgeois culture more broadly; her desire to show the world what's happening to her country gets her resoundingly abused by Sendero Luminoso perpetrators. Her narrative voice wasn't distinctive, particularly in (unclear) distinction to Modesta the impoverished country-dwelling Quecha woman's.

That both were raped quite violently (there is no non-violent rape, I'm saying their experiences were even more violent than baseline horror) did not make them more distinguishable in a narrative technique used to emphasize the commonalities of sexualized assault. It served that function. a side-effect of that function is it's more difficult to build specific empathy for that character. As the story progresses, Modesta faces the challenge of carrying then birthing a daughter from her horrifying experience...a daughter she cannot easily or readily bond with. Since I'm more distant emotionally from her by not having a clear sense of her as Modesta but rather as a woman caught in war, it's harder for that horrific truth to make its most intense impact on me-the-reader.

Comrade Marta, the cadre of the Sendero Luminoso, was probably the one easiest to tell apart because she was seeing, participating in, perpetrating, but centrally seeing the violence her group committed as a necessary step to gaining meaningful freedom for the people of Peru. I got why she fell into that way of thinking, but it's always hard to see that path as justified to my bourgeois self. How does killing stop killing? I do not observe that result from those actions anywhere in my own world.

So my rating does not rest primarily on my pleasure in the prose from any angle. I would rate the book two and a half stars were it still 2016 out there. Today we have the US starting bullshit wars to protect a bunch of pedophile rapists from facing the consequences of their crimes instead of simply enriching some scumbags; we have a government so dedicated to white supremacist misogyny as policy instead of more nebulously ideology that voting rights and bodily autonomy are being dismantled as matters of law; we are, in short, more in danger from our government than from any external enemy.

In that sociopolitical milieu this book is four stars of klaxon-sounding warning. Heed these words, understand these threats viscerally by reading this story.

THE PIANO STUDENT, fictionalized gay love story from the scariest part of the 1930s

THE PIANO STUDENT
LEA SINGER (tr. Elisabeth Lauffer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Piano Student centers on an affair between one of the 20th century’s most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s.

As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist hides his illicit love from his wife Wanda, the daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini. The affair is narrated by Kaufmann in the 1980s to another music devotee, who comes to him enchanted by Schumann’s composition Träumerei and awakens memories of the thwarted relationship. Kaufmann is spending his final years playing in small-time Zurich bars, never rivaling his teacher’s musical mastery and rapturously received concerts.

Based on unpublished letters by Horowitz to Kaufmann that author Lea Singer herself discovered in Switzerland, the novel portrays the anguish that the acclaimed musician felt about his never publicly acknowledged homosexuality and the attendant duplicity of his personal life. It's a riveting and sensitive tale of musical perfection, love, and longing denied, with multiple historical layers and insights into artistic creativity.

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My Review: Given the times and the stakes, Horowitz staying closeted was a solid decision to make. If his wife didn't see a golden opportunity in his necessary secret, I'll kiss a pig. But being "out" as we twenty-first centuryans conceptualize it would've been career...possibly literal...suicide.

Suicide's a major part of this work. Do not pick it up if you are in distress, or if ongoing ideation around ending your own life is an issue for you. This review will not be delving more deeply into the topic.

This novel polarizes readers. It's more a stream of consciousness work than a standard narrative. It does not spoon-feed readers, it expects you'll be paying attention to the details well enough to follow or at least be able to figure out who is speaking, whose head you're in, or whose PoV is dominant at that moment. For those not looking for a read of that nature just now, it's best to pass it by.

As a story this is a pretty ordinary one: lovers must hide from the world because the world does not and would not accept their love as valid or acceptable. This moment in history we in the Anglophone world are seeing how much that story resonates with readers and viewers with the wild ascendancy of Heated Rivalry. I do not recall anything like this level of investment or passion for a yearning-romance story since Moonlighting in the 1980s. I hope it does not fizzle like that show did...or this excellent novel has done in the past six years.

I'm certain that the author's choices of narrative complexity were deliberate and considered. The framing device of Robert Donati avoiding the consequences of a decision he made but regretted meeting Nico Kaufmann and exchanging stories is a well-worn one, only rescued from triteness by its stream-of-consciousness presentation. It establishes the psychological safety of baring one's soul to a stranger as the reason we're hearing the stories at all. Considering the pseudonymous author discovered the Kaufmann story in letters buried in an archive the device is very apt, reflective of her own presumptive experience of discovery.

The unbearably sad life of a man who does not control his own destiny isn't a new idea for a story either. Wanda Toscanini Horowitz managed the career of her husband for her benefit, his safety, and their material security. Horowitz did not have any freedom, any latitude, in the course of his musical career—though not one soul could claim much credit for directing his astounding musical gift, how it became world-famous cost him a lifetime of terrible depression, emotional collapses, and caustic unfreedom of living an honest, open love. Kaufmann was the first (we know of) musical protege who was really a lover. Nico's story makes it plain he loved Volodya very much but was ultimately unable to commit to a life on Wanda's terms. Or Volodya's...Nico was too young to consider monogamy a good personal choice, and that was always going to be their downfall as lovers.

It does not prevent their friendship, based in the camaraderie of living double (dishonest) lives, from persisting...Horowitz writes to Nico over the years of his ups and downs. It's a sad truth of life that friendships based in shared trauma can, as this one did, curdle; ultimately the choices of a life lived for an external goal amputate the lingering ties to a life lived for personal happiness incompatible with that goal.

Nico's unexceptional talent and Volodya's era-defining one were doomed to clash. Their moment of lovingkindness and connection was a gift each man treasured. It could not be celebrated in their world, but it can be now.

I'd recommend this passionate love-chronicle to the readers who enjoy, and are in the mood for, putting some effort into living inside a great love's contained world.

THE AND THAT WAS, beautifully illustrated novella-length prose poem

THE AND THAT WAS
MIA TIJAM (illus. Rustom Pujado)
Rosarium Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The and That Was is an archipelago of words: lush and mountainous in parts, civilized veneer in others, almost all of it seemingly born from instances when the forces within could no longer be restrained. The thing about archipelagos is to not view them as chains of islands, but as the space that envelops them.

That is what this collection contains.

The land. The culture. The rustic and the urban, religious and heretical. The fractures. The spaces. The cities without dragons...

The Fairy Tale Reality of the Philippines...

Where the end began and begins again...The wishes that point to what we should have wished. These stories contain–and release. And so do you.

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

My Review: "Stories" and "collection" are slightly misleading descriptors. There are under 150pp in this book; there are very cool illustrations on full pages, elucidating angles of seeing on the, the, uhm vignettes or prose poems they're surrounded by; the sum of these parts is less "collection" than stream-of-consciousness novella.

I don't know anything meaningful about the Filipino culture I was within though apart from as I read. I'm very clear that I'm in a world that's dreamlike, delineated in flashes, and in swirls of awareness.. It's bounded and bordered and depicted by the artwork that, malheureusement, I'm not able to show you (put up downloadable samples, Rosarium! you can watermark them!) for added edge-giving. Illustrator Rustom has either read these stories with great care and deep personal connection resulted or he is the male half of Author Tijam's bicameral mind. The prose is deft and rich:

The child gingerly stood up and warily folowed her out of the bodega, into the afternoon light, and through the dirty-kitchen—a hut beside the main house where the old women chopped ebverrything on a long wooden table and cooked in a kiln banked by dried wood.The old nursemaid led her to the deep-well pump beside it. The child wited silently as Nana Kuring lifted the tin basin that was shaped like a soft drink bottle crown and filled with laundry to hoist it on top of her head while bending to pick up the palo-palo used as the laundry paddle. The old woman began walking towards the gate that led to the road and after a dozen stepsm stopped when she realized that the child wasn't following her. The child was looking up at the windows of the old house, at those shuttered shell windowpanes, and then looked at her. Nana Kuring swung the palo-palo in a forward motion to the child, and the little girl hurried after the old woman.

An entire cultural milieu, images sounds and all, is in this brief not-unique passage.

I found the reading experience satisfying on several levels: curiosity about a culture I do not know, immersion in an unfamiliar sensory world, stimulation of visual language fresh to me. I'm sure it's hard to look stuff up, to see the places you don't have a ready-made image in your head to match, at first anyway. It' really worth making the effort and I recommend this work to you as a rewarding place to start your efforts.

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel, look into some meanings of "genius" before leaping to conclusions

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 17 February 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She's searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Claire Oshetsky is also the author of the novels Poor Deer and Chouette, which was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

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My Review: I'm an Oshetsky fan. Chouette and Poor Deer (review links above) were excellent reads for a lover of storytelling that blends noir and surreal and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. I'm here for the women who, for varying reasons not least including men being obliviously privileged and uniformly clueless, don't get their feet under themselves. Identities are always under construction, never more so than when the identity is most rigidly brandished at the world. Those like "my Drew" as our PoV character, Celia, thinks of her controlling husband, are fragile masks that must constantly be reinforced...at Celia's expense in this case. It's not an uncommon trait, this...I was the raw material from which my mother's controlling abuse drew her rigidity, masked her awfulness from outsiders.

In this tale of obsession, cruelty, and how we create ourselves in response to outside pressures meeting a core of resistance, and how very much pressure that can require. Celia does not seem aware of how deep her well of rage is. Celia, under "my Drew" as lord and master, touches that rage at last...she has the example of her quite spectacularly murdered co-worker to create urgency in her feelings about "my Drew." It is a spiral up, from touching the rage and the hatred in her to dreamimg of murdering him with a nail file to the ear to taking a ride home from an attractive stranger on her commuter train to buying a weapon to taking the initiative to set up a meeting with a man she's never met but deals with on the phone a lot. It's clear the cork's popped on a lifetime of swallowed emotional abuse and neglect and victimization.

And she's only nineteen.

What keeps me Oshetskying every time I can is Celia and her half-siblings who are all Author Claire's brain children. I find new ways to enjoy off-the-beam points of view with each story she writes. Here's Celia in progress: "What Drew didn’t know is that I couldn’t be shamed that way. Not any longer...I would never again let myself be shamed by my body, or its functions, or its urges." Brava, kid! You're only nineteen and light-years ahead of most people's final destinations. It's of a piece with Celia's object of fetishization, the Barbie doll. It requires no huge leap to see how a bizarre doll...collection...stands in for the need to discover safety, and how little actual use it is. How little it takes, a few ounces of plastic molded into a distorted human shape, to buy a sham safety from the very real storms around her, these golems of industrial feminization in their legions pacifying the susceptible intentional victims with their infinite manipulability (plasticity in its original sense.).

Author Claire doesn't say this. That would be rude. Author Claire might be rowdy but she is not rude. Her ability to slit the character envelope with a rapier of witty, unsentimental observation while releasing the evil genius inside Celia to perform the real function of protection is *chef's kiss*. I've seen a few reviews that interpret the title in a more comic-book way, resembling a supervillain; I suppose that's inevitable as this is what most people are familiar with. It is, however, not at all what the story delivers, whereas I see the genius loci in every shred of this story's fabric. Follow the link above after reading Evil Genius to see if you find similar echoes.

It's a rare thing for me to say: I wish I could forget this story entirely so I could read it for the first time all over again. I want to re-meet Doggo. And Celia. (Not Sock Man, though.)

GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME, a modern Canterbury Tale

GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME
RYAN COLLETT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 20 January 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Less meets the year 1300 in this exhilarating and thoughtfully genre-defying literary novel about a man transported through time in a moment of extreme stress, whose modern anxieties are replaced by medieval brutalities

Newly laid off George’s internet bill is in his ex-boyfriend’s name. He’s got a spider-infested apartment, and two of the six dogs he’s walking in London have just escaped. It’s pure undiluted stress that sends him into a spiral, all the way to the year 1300.

When he comes to, George recognizes the same rolling hills of Greenwich Park. But the luxuries and phone service of modernity are nowhere. In their place are locals with a bizarre, slanted speech in awe of his foreign clothes, who swiftly toss him in a dungeon. Despite the barbarity of a medieval world, a servant named Simon helps George acclimate to a simpler, easier existence—until a summons from the King threatens to send his life up in flames.

George Falls Through Time is as much an inward journey as an outward one: an immersive exploration of identity and dislocation that pits present-day sensibilities against a raw and alien backdrop, a strangely perfect canvas for the absurd anxieties of our modern lives. It's a profound meditation on the nature of desire perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and The Ministry of Time.

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

My Review: No one I've ever known is not in need of challenges to become their best self. Of course, like all other circumstances in this life, the challenge can be met, or lost, failed, or left with mixed results. I think the strength of this book is its calling-forth of George's inner winner.

What works less well for me is Simon, the medieval version of George's modern self-abnegating submissive self. At least in George Simon is serving a worthy master, a thing George never found in modern times. Simon doesn't have a PoV so we can't learn why he chooses to be this person to George, this being stream of consciousness, and George is quite understandably overwhelmed by the brain-bending reality he's in the reign of Edward I. George is, howsomever, a *major* whiner, which is a big part of what he works through in the story. What does Simon see in him? I never knew. To the story's credit neither does George, and he's explicitly amazed and humbled by it.

Of course with all time-travel narratives there are practical hurdles to overcome that Author Collett largely sidesteps (a good choice in my opinion) by using the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. It takes a good third of the book for George to think about the *way* he was transported to 1300 instead of the *why* of it. The "how" really makes all the difference. If you don't know how you got somewhere how do you ever figure out how to leave?

And about George...his historical ignorance lands him at a point he knows literally not one thing about, which fact freaks him out. As does the language the locals speak. It's a clever resolution to that giant, existentially threatening fact that earns the book its half-star bump. I'm not quite fully on board with the dragon being what it was, nor with the resolution this provided. That's the missing three-quarters of the fifth star. Both of those opinions are the remaining cavils I have to this funny, often rib-ticklingly so, story of a fish so far out of water he might as well be an octopus on Everest.

George's many mistreatments in modern times, most of which seemed to me to stem from his utter inability to see what people were quite plainly after from him, snap into focus when he's chucked into a medieval dungeon. How his life changes from there is a ride through a decade of the most torturous kind of therapy (pun very much intended) in a short time, with the steadying hand of Simon to hold. Why Simon does not get a PoV is...well, I missed it, so I'll leave it at that. The publisher compares this to Less, a book I deeply disliked; it's an apt comparison. George has a little more reason to feel whinging moaning self-pity, being trapped (?) 700 years in the past at a time he knows nothing about. It's the best thing that's ever happened to him. He needs to be shook. What could shake you more than being gay, alone, ad then finding a partner and a purpose and a core after being moved through time and meeting a dragon? He's the safest time traveler ever because he's too ignorant to cause any paradoxes. He's marginal in his life and marginal in the past; it's not like anyone would much miss him, but here in 1300 he's been through horrors yet found purpose and a shot at lasting, imperfect cobbled-together(!) happiness.

What I wanted but lacked in The Ministry of Time I wanted here too, but there was enough fun sex between George and Simon that I'm more forgiving. Oh yeah...sex...eww-ick homophobes should not even consider this story. At all.

It's a journey of self-discovery in a way I didn't expect, wasn't fully on board with, yet related to and resonated with. A bit like the Franklin's Tale from the other end of the fourteenth century, it's a bit overwrought; a bit overinterested in sex for its plot; but, overall, the message of self-discovery and giving one's self permission to live with purpose, well worth reading.

VILLA OF DELIRIUM, a récit in translation to keep you intrigued this winter weekend

VILLA OF DELIRIUM
ADRIEN GOETZ (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Along the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family in thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa—a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting mythological gods.

The Reinachs—related to other wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis—attempt to recreate "a pure beauty" lost in the 20th century. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the imposing house “an act of delirium, above all an optimistic act, proof that one could reset time as one could reset a clock and resist the outside world." The story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son of a servant from the nearby estate of Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and the two contrasting structures present opposite responses to modernity. The son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins a family pilgrimage to Athens, falls in love with a married woman, and survives the Nazi confiscation of the house and deportation to death camps of Reinach grandchildren.

This is a Greek epic for the modern era.

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

My Review: I've been years without writing up my notes on this read. It's shameful. I'm so sorry not to have warbled about it...in my defense, it was COVID time.

First off I want to encourage you to take the virtual tour of the (real) villa itself. It definitely blurs the lines between reality and fantasy...both the fact there is a real place, built by real pre-war Jewish aesthetes, and the fact the novel (a roman à clef, surely, though I don't have the key) treats its subject as so close to the mythical world it embodies conspire to give the story a powerful impact. Attributed to the fictional creator pf the fictional villa is the epigraph: "The Greeks discovered glory, they discovered beauty, and they brought to this discovery such jubilation, such an overabundance of life, that a sense of youthful contagion can still be felt even after the passage of three or four thousand years."

As a statement of purpose for this novel that one is spot-on. It's a bit Tom Ripley/Line of Beauty/Saltburn-esque in its insertion of a young lad from an impoverished background into a world he could not even have dreamed up, still less entered. He learns vast amounts of cultural information not widely available to boys of his class as he companions, somewhat à la Patroclus, his wealthy young compatriot Adolphe.

Time passes; the education he gets by being whisked out of his dead-end life leads him to, on a trip with Adolphe and his uncle Theodore (benefactor of Achilles), to do something very wrong; in his turn, wrong is done to him by Theodore who dresses it up as redressing the balance. It is not that at all, it is greed. A set of scales falls from Achilles' eyes, and the reader's; being cultured, being educated and deeply humane, does not being a good person.

Time-jumping decades, we meet Achilles in his famous-artist phase. He might not have profited from his bad deed fortyish years before, but his connection to wealth and high culture is solid, and very useful. As it is 1956, the area is abuzz with the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Achilles uses this influx of strangers to mask his return to the now-derelict villa of his childhood. We all know what he has gone to look for: the object purloined by him, then stolen by Theodore.

Greed and the complicated desire to Win, to Beat Them, are deeply enmeshed with the self-justifying desire to be Right, to get the last word. Humans...such irredeemable scum. Recovering an object? No, no more than the madeleine was the object of Swann's memory palace. Recovering a moment once lived with intensity? Okay...recovering lost, doomed first love? Okay...all of these at once, reviving memory's mood board as it was being edited and stuck into place is rather the project of middle age. In Achilles' case it's quite a beautiful reconstruction. Do we trust him? Is he, in the confines of his mind that is this récit, editing, embellishing, altering the raw material of memory, cutting the scenes into the movie he wants to watch?

This is where the story becomes so much more than the sum of its beautiful parts. In any récit, we're not given the momentous clash between narrator and reality because there is only the one person speaking to us. In this story's case that means reckoning with the nature of memory, the pain of identity being formed as it must always be in tension with Other; it is Achilles' story, but of necessity it is only his story of the myriad he comes into consequential contact with. Author and translator let us be in the flow with Achilles, of sacred name, and hurry no revelations to keep us "engaged" by creating an unnatural action. It is meditative, it is dense, and it is going to be obvious to you in twenty pages if it's one for you pursue.

I'm now approaching Achilles' end-age. I see things as he does, in strobe-flashes of intense memory followed by blind black voids of time. I found Achilles and his remarkable life deeply pleasant company, telling me an involving story at an old man's pace.

It was a slow read. It kept calling me back. I was able to pick right back up after literal years away from it because I was that invested in the man. It's a story I think will reward the reader who can just...go with it. I hope you'll read a sample, see if it's for you or not.

JEAN, adolescent heartbreak made tougher by class divide

JEAN
MADELEINE DUNNIGAN
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Seventeen–year–old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with “problems.” Though he is an outcast among these outcasts, he is befriended by Tom, a much wealthier, more popular classmate, and it seems as if Jean’s world might change.

When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. What before seemed odd now brims with promise—the compulsory farming at school, reading poetry aloud, pagan ritual—and Jean thinks he might even pass his exams. But the differences between Tom and Jean—Tom is tuition–paying, Jean is on a scholarship; Tom social, Jean reclusive—create too wide a chasm to cross.

Set over one hot summer, Jean is a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.

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

My Review: Choosing not to use conventional punctuation is the root of many novelists' downfall. As a debut novelist, Author Dunnigan set herself this monumental task, on top of several other monumental tasks in telling the story of a young Queer boy coming alive to sex and sexuality in a highly specific milieu. It is an uneven success at them all. The least successful is the sense of place; it's 1976 in London, but if you want to be transported to 1976 London, this is not your best choice of a read.

Jean is a scholarship boy in a behavioral-problem-student boarding school. It's a sketched in place, apart from some unpleasantly graphic dealings with animals dead and alive. Those are extremely particular environments; with a reader's expectations set on feeling immersed in the world they're not successful. I can't say I was ever more than tangentially aware of the environment. It is not described or, better still, evoked. It's stated this is where the action takes place. It works against the sense of place for the characters, teen boys mind you, to wander around in time as the narrative continues. This is how an older person experiences time...this connects to *that* and whatever happened to him anyway but this jerk can't cut in line! No! get back to your place while I find my damn wallet again did I leave it on the counter? oh good there it is.

Teenagers aren't prone to this yet, every moment is real! alive! pulsing with possibility! especially when you're newly In Love with the most gorgeous exciting amazing boy on the planet who has the sexiest...oh my he's hot. What this does give the reader is the World of Jean, all third person, all interior, all solipsistic as a boy usually is.

Punctuation keeps the stream of consciousness from bursting the banks and making a mess. This story is the mess that punctuation and dialogue tags prevent. It's not bad, as in not incompetent in any way. It's just more work than it needs to be to pick the threads of doomed adolescent heartbreak out of the verbs. As a superannuated version of Jean, I can say Author Dunnigan's chosen a strangely indirect way to deal with adolescent male libido by distancing the reader from it in this stream of consciousness. It's almost sexless sexuality presented in the flashes of memory and the internal asides and other tangential evocations.The way she's chosen to present him to us felt distancing to me because he is not experiencing the moment. He's a teen boy in love, he would be thinking A LOT about sex in direct and physical terms, since he isn't a virgin any more.

I'm still excited by the read. I liked the experience of Jean's rootlessness, his inability to see anything not directly pointed out to him. I think a big part of my desire to keep reading was rooted in my sense that, for all the author's odd choices and off framing that didn't work for me, I got to see the world from the haze of Wrongness that Jean has always felt...that so many like him, limited, ungainly, graceless, feel. It was a big mental leap to be in Jean's skin. He does not think ahead, he is not aware of others as real, he can't fully grasp his choices are in fact his own. Jean does not make choices. Things happen to Jean. The constant tobacco use and the uncontrolled drug use were deeply familiar, very much part of adolescence in the era. In the end, Jean is a boy whose manhood we don't get to see but which is not likely to be much better than his adolescence of betrayals has been.

My recommendation sounds grudging. It really isn't. This is a debut novel that takes a big swing. It is more successful than not; it's only that the presentation isn't going to entice readers who aren't already fans of stream-of-consciousness storytelling. It felt fine to me, and might to you if you're willing to make room for a man being born and broken at the same time.

RED SHIFT, unjustly neglected mismarketed and beautiful

RED SHIFT
ALAN GARNER
HarperCollins Children’s Books
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Collins YA editionA disturbing exploration of the inevitability of life. Under Orion's stars, bluesilver visions torment Tom, Macey and Thomas as they struggle with age-old forces. Distanced from each other in time, and isolated from those they live among, they are yet inextricably bound together by the sacred power of the moon's axe and each seek their own refuge at Mow Cop. Can those they love so intensely keep them clinging to reality? Or is the future evermore destined to reflect the past?

NYRB edition (now O.P.)In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.

Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner’s extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.

My Review: Why didn't I hear about this back in 1973? I'd've lapped it right up with happy warbles and gruntled slurps. But what completely baffles me is how anyone could read this unpunctuated marvel of modernism and say, "YA shelves, next!" or even more utterly inapt, "Fantasy novel incoming!" WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK. are these people thinking? Teens might get absorbed in the time-travel element, and some goodly percentage of them will like the Cormac McCarthy-esque attributionless dialogue, but the fantasy reader is going away very sorely disappointed. Yes, there's a goddess, and heaven knows we're up to our hips in angsty teens. BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT!

*fantods*

Okay, I've been ungently squawked at for spoilery reviews. (Good lord, grow up people! Don't read reviews of books you want to read if you're phobic about it!) There are three stories here. All of them take place in a very very tight geographical locus. They are separated by 1500 years (earliest to middle) and 300 years (middle to modern). The dialogue is all modern English, and still Alan Garner manages to convey a sense of the temporal location of the story...if you're paying attention!

And all the teens are able to experience each other. It's all psychometric in genesis (go look it up if it's new to you), and Garner handles it *beautifully* by not Explaining it, only making sure you know what happens as a result of the time loops.

I'm not sure what else I can say without giving too much of the game away, so let's cut to the chase: I don't like phauntaisee nawvelles and I'm pretty durned hmmmmm about time travel these post-Outlander days. And this novel, this gem of a McCarthy-writes-The Sound and the Fury-with-Virginia-Woolf novel, hooked me, gaffed me through the gills, landed me in the bottom of the boat and (at the very very end) exploded my teensy ickle brain-like thing with wowee.

So why aren't all sorts of people warbling their lungs out about it? Same reason I didn't until today: Never heard of it. I picked it up, idly, unsuspectingly, from a shelf in the house...looked at the "99¢" Day-Glo orange Jamesway sticker on the silver-foil coated jacket, winced, and then

and then

oh some more and then

And now here I am, warbling about a YA time-travel teen-angsty romantic novel. With me on how weird that is? See the thing that doesn't fit the picture, namely me smiling?

Buy. Read. Yes.