MISLAID, Nell Zink's N.B.A.-longlisted novel from 2015

MISLAID
NELL ZINK
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice—the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper—about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start—she’s a lesbian, he’s gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, this absurdist-humor take on closeted family life is...dated. Nothing dates faster than humor. I decided to read it so I could borrow another Prime Lending title.

The idea of the book did not appeal to 2025 me but I'm pretty sure I can't blame my lack of enthusiasm for the read on that. It is an idea that never gets old: Fish out of water, mistaken identity/dark family secret, male privilege...all present and ready for their close-up, Mr. deMille.

So why wasn't I amused, I mused. I got a lot of pleasure from the author's evocation of place, I resonated to her skewering of idiotic-to-me performative DEI stuff that masquerades as help but is meant to stigmatize and demean, I was wickedly entertained by the silliness of the closet and its Procrustean demands. Sounds like I ought to be warbling, no? So what the hell, old man, is the problem?

It's mean.

It felt to me as though all the laffs it sought were AT the people here, not with them, knowingly winking at the nonsensical antics. It felt like I was invited to sneer and judge. I'm guilty of both those nasty things, but not at hapless victims of circumstance. Mental illness played for humor isn't on nowadays.

In 2015, this was the mode for humor. It was enough that a nebbishy gay poet and a sexually adveturous sapphic-at-heart woman would try to form a stable family, let alone raise kids, when they could not possibly answer one another's needs of any sort. (It's that last bit that bugs me.)

So, well, award nominee or not, nice sense of Appalachian place or not, it's just not a story I'm going to like in 2025. In 2015, I'd've been its biggest booster. In Trump Two, I am not.

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD, second bite of the apple for a story I neglected in 2014

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
BILL HILLMANN
Tortoise Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago’s Far North Side, a few decades ago—a rough-and-tumble place, awash with racial tensions and petty crime.

Joey, the youngest child in a mixed-race family, is pushing his way up through the cracked pavement of a chaotic life: parish festivals and block parties on long summer nights, fistfights in back alleys on boring empty days, long walks up and down Clark Street pocketing envelopes of collection money for his older brother, Lil’ Pat. It’s easy enough to pretend it’s all normal, until he sees Pat murder a man in a neighborhood drugstore. Now he’s haunted by the memory of blood pooling on the green tiles under the flickering fluorescent lights, torn by the conflict between love of family and disgust over what they do—and desperate to survive the insanity without being swept up in it.

This revised second edition of Bill Hillmann’s modern classic features a new introduction by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. It’s a perfect primer for a great book that deserves a place alongside the likes of Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell on the top shelf of Chicago literature.

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

My Review: I read the first edition of this around 2014, and wasn't very impressed. It was too fragmented, too unorganized (not disorganized...there was too little structure to call it that). So Curbside Splendor, the prior publisher, never got a review for that ARC they sent me. Naughty of me, I know, and sorry to their shade for being so thoughtless.

This time round, I'm not sure why, I felt less put off by the read eleven years on. It's still a bit more episodic for my liking, but has more a feel of purpose, of intent behind the disjunctures. I'm not going to nominate it for the awards circuit, in fiction anyway, because it feels a lot more like a roman à clef now, a memoir in a lot of makeup.

I could invest more in the story being told, the decay of a moral code and the complete surrender of decent people to evil blandishments making brummagem promises we, the readers, know for sure and certain will be broken. If it sounds like a dream come true, an answer to all your prayers, and you say "yes", prepare for the worst. The kind of people who make big promises without clear plans and transparent methods intend to use you then throw you into the machine you helped them make.

That's decidedly true here, we see it happen again and again. I wonder if under-sixty me had just not yet grown inured to the terrible cost of stupidity...? It's in your face, it's omnipresent, it is the welkin the suffering stooges cry into.

And I can't even work up schadenfreude. It's happening all over in 2025 and it makes me deeply ill; but I can't laugh at "Them" anymore.

THE MOTHER CODE: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us, including the one you don't look at: Privilege

THE MOTHER CODE: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us
RUTHIE ACKERMAN
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: In this propulsive memoir, an award-winning journalist blends history, science, and cultural criticism, to uncover whether motherhood outside of society's rigid rules and expectations is possible—and whether she fits the mold for what a mother should be.

For so long, Ruthie Ackerman believed that the decision not to have children was a radical act. She'd grown up being told that she came from a long line of women who had abandoned their children. Plus, Ruthie feared she would pass on her half-brother’s rare genetic disorder. Haunted by this generational inheritance, she goes searching in the twists and turns of her DNA to decide once and for all whether she should become a mother. When a geneticist leaves her at a dead end, she chooses to marry a man who doesn’t want children—only to realize that, despite everything, she desperately does. When Ruthie’s strained marriage ends, her quest for a new vision of motherhood begins.

She eventually finds an image of radical motherhood where women have an opportunity to see their role not just as fulfilling but as powerful. This new mother code goes beyond children and focuses on actively working towards stronger communities and happier, less-stressed parents. But by the time Ruthie meets the right partner and is ready to have the baby she so desperately desires, she learns she can't use her own eggs. Now, Ruthie has to evolve this new mother code as she navigates the scientific, philosophical, and intimate questions about what it means to both create–and nurture–a life.

The Mother Code unravels how we’ve come to understand the institution of motherhood, offering a groundbreaking a new a mother code that goes beyond our blood lines and genetics, and instead, pushes us to embrace inheritance as the legacy we want to leave behind for those we love.

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

My Review: More Momaganda. "I changed my mind after most of my life is passed, and Became A Mother extremely expensively and in spite of thinking about it for decades and deciding against it" is a HUGE pile of privilege. It is unexamined in any critical way.

Adopt.

I was not well-treated by my mother, and as a direct result do not belong to the Cult of Mother. One does not dare to speak out about this pervasive cult because (like the Spoiler Stasi) there are great heaving seas of angry partisans who will NOT allow anyone to publicly question Their Choice.

Usually it's religious nuts to the fore, though not always. These people having the overlap in group membership that they do, I don't know how I'll escape another round of insulting nonsense for saying this, but here goes:

Your belief that something is good and right and necessary does not stop its being exploitive, manipulative, and wrong.

A DAUGHTER'S PLACE, voices for the voiceless at last...but what they talk about...!

A DAUGHTER'S PLACE
MARTHA BÁTIZ
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping historical romance inspired by the real-life daughter of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrated author of Don Quixote

Madrid, 1599. Following her mother’s sudden death, fifteen-year-old Isabel goes to live in the family home of her father, the poet and war hero Miguel de Cervantes, a man she has never met. Forced to pose as a maid to conceal her illegitimate status, Isabel must adapt to a new way of life with her jealous cousin and protective aunts while she waits for her father to return from Seville. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Esquivias, Miguel’s pious and faithful wife Catalina similarly awaits his return, blissfully unaware of Isabel’s existence.

As Miguel works on the manuscript that will become his masterpiece, Don Quixote, the years pass and Isabel grows into womanhood, falling in and out love, uncovering family secrets, and yearning for the legitimacy denied her by a rigid and callous society. Capturing two tumultuous decades of Golden Age Spain in rich historical detail, Martha Bátiz paints a compassionate portrait of a family on the precipice of great change and the fiercely independent woman at its centre striving to make a life of her own.

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

My Review: Isabella, Cervantes' bastard daughter, was (intentionally) the shining star of the read. She was resilient enough to accept her circumstances as they were. It's not easy...take it from someone who could not, cratered, and then built back. Her way forward was always to find the bottom then push against her obstacles. I admired that.

Catalina, Cervantes' wife, was a really nasty, pious, pinched bag of judgment, blame, and nastiness. I was quite pleased her god judged her and found her "heart's desire" (read: social ambition/status symbol) to be deniable. Luckily we spend more time seeing the trail of viciousness and destruction she leaves than in her company or I'd be psychotic with rage. Constanza, his niece, is...well...let's say that in a novel that fails the Bechdel test on every level from idea, through execution, to effect on the reader, she is the most egregious offender. No woman in this book is not thinking about a man, usually Cervantes, for more than a couple pages at a stretch.

That's period-appropriate, though in a story told by a professional translator in modern vernacular, it feels a bit...disingenuous...not to toss us a few scenes of either not-period self-awareness or incongruous anger at the oppressive system. Hey ho. Such are the things that lose good work stars in my readerly firmament. It's mildly irritating to me, but a committed feminist without a solid grasp of the early modern world's prejudices might not be as mild-mannered about it.

A big mitigating factor for me was the fact that this story centers women who are, as is so often the case, utterly ignored by History. Centering them would've been better, but the fact that there is no PoV dedicated to Cervantes makes the words they speak (even though they're about him) their own...more than History ever gave them. The bigger mitigating factor is Author Bátiz doing such a stellar job making me feel the passage of literal decades in the past. That takes skill, to convincingly make the time between events feel so intensely present despite the story taking place in the past. If Author Bátiz ever writes a mystery, I want to be first on the DRC list. Her suspense muscles are powerful!

Isabella's journey is a darn good read, deserves the praise it's received, and does the best work available to it by offering voices to women History silenced.

Did they have to talk about men so much?

SALT BONES, Demeter & Persephone on the Mexicali border

SALT BONES
JENNIFER GIVHAN
Mulholland Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life. She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it's too late.

Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

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

My Review: There's Spanish in here.

Everybody still here, this is a retelling of Demeter and Persephone, probably the original mother-myth in Western culture. It is also notable that Demeter's the oldest sister of baby Zeus...that energy surrounding maleness surrounds this entire story.

Are the whiny man-babys gone yet? Good.

The gynergy is strong in this one, folks. All the horror, and there's a lot of it, stems from problems and issues around femaleness in our highly misogynistic culture. Women are, for a wonder, presented as misogynistic as hell in here, and all the monstrous, horrifying behavior is portrayed as affecting women. (Why the fathers aren't ever fussed I'll leave to your imagination.)

Invest in the first quarter to third of the read as your acclimatization, get used to Mal and her pueblo's speech patterns, and (ebook users only) try out the built-in translation feature to get the hang of Spanglish, then cruise through the story that fills in the lines of the old myth in a really fun...not the right word, but "interesting" is so juiceless and "involving so cerebral...unexpected way.

It's a dark reality that Mal's fears and worries are rooted in the ugliness that is femicide, a too-easily-dismissed issue plaguing la frontera. Stories like this one are ways to increase awareness of the precarity of simply existing as a female, or in a female body, in so many parts of the world. And like the real world, some people have privilege, even when bad things happen to and around them. Seeing the author present this as a reality, well...brava for doing it at all, and do it more, please.

The Salton Sea is important enough to the read that I recommend you acquire basic knowledge of it, its existence and origin, before embarking on this fascinating thriller. I found the pace fast. I don't think everyone will. I hope you'll try, though.

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel, Florida's tryin-to-get-by guys after The Crash

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel
JOE PAN
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Outsiders meets Sons of Anarchy in this gripping debut about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation.

It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.

What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.

Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities. In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.

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

My Review: Violent and drug-addled, futureless and betrayed at every turn, the young men in this dreadful life of cat-and-mouse with the law (mostly unseen on the page, a faceless enemy), the rival outlaws, and each other, are dead men walking. There's no hope this side of the grave for any of them. It's a game they can't win. Or even walk away from. If you believe in free will, these guys make the worst choices imaginable...but honestly I came away from the read feeling pretty darn sure they're proof, all of 'em, that free will's an illusion.

Because if it isn't, y'all's controlling god is a rotten, evil entity.

Why read it, why finish it, why keep the misery fresh? Because the philosophical soliloquies coming out of these dead-enders' mouths are just *chef's kiss* and there's quite a number of 'em. Equally fun is the occasional character on the page reading CS Lewis or something equally unsuspected. Kaos and Cueball and Eddy, none of these guys made it out, or if they did it wasn't with everything they walked in carrying. The idea of their lives is to have more. And no one tells them "more" has no end, that's how the addictions they supply and live get their hold.

I think four stars is fair because, if it's not original, it's got honesty and clarity and it respects you as a reader. Joe Pan has put out poetry books before, and it shows. A first novel by a poet doesn't usually come this close to being a good story; it's more usual that there's less plot, more ornament. This is good description, good characterization, solid plotting, and only falls a bit short in the last 10%. I'm not sure how else to end it, though, so the fourth star stays whole.

Never a fan of Florida, I'm pretty sure it's not a far-fetched set of events or an outrageous group of guys, so I'm reinforced in my...less than fond...opinion, just as I'd hoped to be. If you're in the mood for some grit lit, here it is with a Florida twist.

THE CONFESSIONS: A Novel, a lens for Reality's more upsetting lumps

THE CONFESSIONS: A Novel
PAUL BRADLEY CARR
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A high-octane, high-concept thriller for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, and Gillian Flynn from former Silicon Valley journalist turned bookstore owner Paul Bradley Carr.

Millions of letters arrive in the mail.
Murders are uncovered, affairs revealed, family secrets exposed.
These are the first Confessions.
This is our last chance.

LLIAM is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built to make the toughest decisions for its users. Where to work, who to marry, and even who should live or die. But when LLIAM suddenly goes offline with no explanation, the world is thrust into chaos, paralyzed by indecision. Stocks plummet, stores are shuttered, planes sit grounded on runways as humanity scrambles to re-adapt to an uncertain, analog world.

Then the first letters arrive…on every continent, in every language, mysterious envelopes arrive in the mail, exposing people’s darkest secrets, and most shocking crimes. All beginning with the same chilling “We must confess.”

With millions of people suddenly made to confront their past transgressions, and society fast unraveling, CEO Kaitlan Goss must track down the only person who can help undo the resulting violent Maud Brookes, an ex-nun who taught LLIAM what it means to be human.

But when Maud receives a letter herself, revealing Kaitlan’s own unforgivable sin, the two women are forced into a deadly game of deceit as the world teeters on the brink.

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

My Review: I'm not 100% clear on the principle of LLIAM running things, then crashing, and as a consequence of crashing, all the ugly little secrets LLIAM knows being revealed, being presented as "confessions." How so? A confession is something one makes, offers, is corced into offering. This isn't what happens in this story. It comes from outside.

Okay, I've whined about it, and this explains my not-perfect rating.

The rest is all "go" and a wild-ass ride it is. What a weird idea and how fully I buy into the social chaos this event sows. It's a seriously unnerving idea that explores what we do not want to look at: The machine already knows literally everything about is. We're wrapped in a cocoon of denial about it, but one day the inevitable cocoon-rupture will occur. What will happen then?

By following several PoVs, Author Carr affords us the chance to form an overview of social and societal chaos as information reorders the attention economy. I think, if anything, he goes easy on us, but there's very good reason to pull back. It can feel over the top as it is; but there's a top to go over in storytelling, not in reality.

I am not always impressed with the turns of phrase in the story, and above I've expressed my main reservation; but what I hope you'll understand is these aren't pleasure-killers. This is a near-future tech thriller that is well-conceived to get and keep you hooked with its openness to examine the *reasons* this specific story could, and might, occur.

I agree with every one of the publisher's comps. The idea is one I can imagine Crouch or my insta-buy SF author, Adam Roberts...he wrote this in his novel Jack Glass, and it seems to me relevant to this story:

“Do you know where the past and the present intersect?" Jac asked him.

"Where?"

"In your mind, only. It's the only point. Otherwise, the past is further away than the furthest galaxy. We know it, intuitively, because we understand the irrevocability of past action, and sometimes that makes us sad." He looked into Gordius's face, trying to read his expression, but the fellow wouldn't make eye-contact with him. "But it ought not to make us sad. Another name for that irrevocable gap between past and present is—freedom.”

It's a fascinating story, proving again that no tool is not also a weapon. The use of the past as a weapon in the future is never a tired trope since it is the basis of all relationships.

This is the kind of read I seek out to keep my mind from hardening into only one solid shape.