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.

THREADS OF EMPIRE: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, fascinating light on history

THREADS OF EMPIRE: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets
DOROTHY ARMSTRONG
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$33.00 hardcover, $16.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Carpet specialist Dorothy Armstrong tells the stories surrounding twelve of the world’s most fascinating carpets.

Dorothy Armstrong’s Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world’s 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibers from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.

In Threads of Empire, Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world’s most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world’s powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers’ lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.

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

My Review: My only complaint is this DRC had none of the images the finished book has; I waited to write this review until I saw a finished book, so I could judge for myself how well the author's careful descriptions of these art objects evoked my perception of them.

Very well indeed, as it happens.

Best aspect of the read was the charming-to-me blend of personal anecdote and intensive research. They're blended in a way that evokes the sensation of having a personal chat with that world-renowned subject matter expert who's our personal bestie that we all have. (Or wish we did anyway.)

Flying on her magic carpet of knowledge across huge spans of time and space, Author Armstrong shows us how human creativity and skill are "rewarded" by exploitation and subjugation all too often. The existence of imperialism is not new. It is always, however, driven by greed. The subject of greed shifts over time but it never leaves us.

As the chapters are devoted to specific carpets from different cultures and eras, coveted by imperialists, a chronological organization would not work very well. It's sort of loosely there if you squint just right. I recommend reading the book as presented, however, not trying to do something more "orderly" with its vast erudition on a subject I'd bet not many of us know much about. It might help to space the chapters out, more like stories in a collection. I did that more or less by accident.

It should surprise no one that the majority of the anonymous creators of these artworks were women, and all were from disadvantaged, relatively powerless groups. A recurring theme, this, in Western colonial attitudes.

Feminists, art-history buffs, anti-imperialist readers, and the serious trivia hounds are encouraged to pick one up. Casual lovers of pretty books, well, if carpets are you thing yes; we're not looking at a coffee-table book, though.

Well worth springing for the paper book. I think the ebook must have some of the illustrative images but how they come across will be heavily device dependent. Stick to the half-millennium-old printing technology.

THE MOUNTAIN AND THE WALL, urgent and trenchant and tendentious reading

THE MOUNTAIN AND THE WALL
ALISA GANIEVA (tr. Carol Apollonio; intro. Ronald Meyer)
Deep Vellum Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This remarkable debut novel by a unique young Russian voice portrays the influence of political intolerance and religious violence in the lives of people forced to choose between evils.

The Mountain and the Wall focuses on Shamil, a young local reporter in Makhachkala, and his reactions, or lack thereof, to rumors that the Russian government is building a wall to cut off the Muslim provinces of the Caucasus from the rest of Russia. As unrest spreads and the tension builds, Shamil's life is turned upside down, and he can no longer afford to ignore the violence surrounding him.

With a fine sense for mounting catastrophe, Alisa Ganieva tells the story of the decline of a society torn apart by its inherent extremes.

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

My Review: Wow. The 2025 US needs a writer of this caliber, of this perspicacity, and possessed of this level of moral courage in flensing the rotting whale carcass of our Body Politic. Despite being ten years old (!), this near-future story of a country's takeover by religious extremists with an extremely high-control agenda is fresh as yesterday's op-ed page.

The unnervingly spot-on takedowns of "do as I say not as I do" hypocrisy, of hyperconsumerist end-stage capitalism, and of youthful hedonism's blinding obfuscation of the petty tyrannies and ideological inconsisencies of the new regime *rock*. Author Ganieva saw what was happening in Dagestan, a north Caucasian conflict zone nominally still part of Russia, and puts it all on just over 250 pages of unsparing prose.

Complacent US people ought to read it as soon as possible. The consequences of remaining blind to the end result of the unfolding coup are dire. It's all made perfectly plain here. It's also wryly amusing, at time darkly funny, and a very quick read. Shamil, our intrepid reporter main character, would win a Pulitzer in the US journalism space despite being pretty hapless...though largely not culpable for it, given the system he works within.

The atrocious anti-intellectual and anti-historical religious nuts are the better armed barbarian compadres of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting-killing, science-denying, book-banning idiots in the US. Their biggest head start on our vandals is their well-honed dagger of misogyny, held at the throats of every woman not veiled and submissive.

I do not want to live in their world. Their solution to that is to kill men like me for refusing to pretend they are the god-anointed masters of Earth. Resisting them is the way I stay able to look at myself in the mirror.

I hope you will take the same heart from this brief, inexpensive read.

TEO'S DURUMI, second queer-Korean-culture space opera in The Alliance duology

TEO'S DURUMI (The Alliance #2)
ELAINE U. CHO
Zando | Hillman Grad (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The dazzling sequel to Ocean’s Godori dives back into Elaine U. Cho’s cinematic space opera series, taking Ocean and her crew deep into the cloisters of the Moon and the conflicts of the heart.

Teo Anand, former ne’er-do-well second son of the Anand Tech empire and current solar fugitive, has just crash-landed on the Moon after escaping the latest attempt on his life. But if anyone can help exonerate him, it’s his best friend, bold Korean space pilot Ocean Yoon.

Falsely accused of murdering his family, Teo is running out of both time and options. But loyalties are uncertain in their group of steadfast comrades and tentative new allies, and it’s difficult to know who to trust in the tangled web that awaits them in Artemis, a city on the Moon rich in Korean history and haunted by ghosts from Teo’s and Ocean’s pasts. Further complicating matters are Haven—the pensive medic whose beliefs challenge Ocean’s—and the dashing Phoenix—a space raider who’s come blazing into Teo’s life in more ways than one.

All the while Corvus, the real culprit behind the slaying of the Anands, is sowing a path of destruction that threatens to swallow the solar whole. The crew will wrestle with clashing ideals, flying bullets, and undeniable feelings, as they race toward a stunning final stand.

Teo’s Durumi brings Cho’s space opera duology to an exhilarating close, one that contends with questions of identity and acceptance; grief and redemption; and loyalty and sacrifice, as Teo, Ocean, and the people they love will decide once and for all how to forge their paths into the future.

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

My Review: The ending of Ocean’s Godori, both exciting and amusing, gets one's attention for sure and certain. I enjoyed it enough that I immediately upon receiving this DRC opened it and dove in.

Some of y'all are chuckling....

Literally minutes after the end of the previous book, we're into a new narrative regime. Teo's troubles are now preoccupying Ocean and Teo (and Haven, remember them?) with their awesome scoobygroup of really good people. Permaybehaps it's because I never had a family that included me that I've spent my life making family where I was and the stories I gravitate toward are those of made/found family.

Here's a very good example to follow...people who give their all to a goal they share, negotiate within the framework of making "it" work for all...and pulling for things in their orbit to end up better than they start. It doesn't hurt that their Big Bad, Corvus (really authors let the crow/raven clan alone now!), practically twirls mustachios like a silent-film caricature. Really, my one big eyerolly quibble in the books is Corvus' supervillainy being So Very Overplayed. (Well, that and the KDrama yearning between Ocean and Haven being protracted beyond slow-burn, though that does finally end.) I'm sure some of y'all will find the first third of the book being mostly sitting and talking, plotting and planning, kind of...overlong...but stick with it, or better yet read the books back-to-back with no interruption. That is my best suggestion to avoid any hint of a sense of sag in the story.

Phoenix (who, curiously, comes from a background like Corvus' but is somehow not a lunatic murderous sleaze, and I'm left to wonder why) and Teo are very effectively counterpointing our swoony-yearny-KDrama pair. I'm pleased that they have more than what Joseph Campbell called (in that memorable Bill Moyers series) "the zeal of the organs for each other," but equally pleased they're not shilly-shallying around. Lest I leave someone with the wrong impression, this story is not steamy. It's passionate, just not graphic, more the "fire flickered and died" way.

Multiple PoV storylines are often fraught with pacing issues and there's no exception here; I was expecting it so came into the read prepared. As a result the issues I outlined above emerge from this central one. Polyphonic novels do best when everyone in them heads for different places, where in this novel we are going to crash into the same place as is evident from the get-go. S why not use an omniscient narrator, or close third-person narration? I didn't *get* this choice.

Considered on a craft level, I'm at three stars; considered on an emotional satisfaction level, four-plus; considered on a delivery of what was promised from page on of book one level, four.

Elaine U. Cho can write well and frequently does. I hope she has many more opportunities to do it.

ROBBIE ARNOTT'S PAGE: LIMBERLOST; and THE RAIN HERON—don't miss out on a major talent

LIMBERLOST
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Text Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.

His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.

Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water.

As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron{review below}, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

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

My Review: Dual timelines of Ned's life: the summer he was seventeen, at the end of WWII, as he works himself ragged to earn the money to buy a small boat; and the rueful musings of his old-man self, on that passage: "He suddenly felt very old. Felt the distance between his youth and what he was now. He flexed his wrists, touched his face, wondered if the troubled boy of that summer would recognize the man he'd become."

We all wonder that, Ned; no one moreso than a man whose life spread before him and then happened to him. Summer of that seventeenth year starts in his childhood memories with the appearance out of nowhere of a whale at the mouth of the river nearby. This whale is wreaking havoc, destroying boats and lives, all very dramatic thus certain to appeal to an adolescent and fire his dreams of boat ownership and its promise of escape, of freedom. That is always the illusion, isn't it. Young men urgently need to escape from their lives. Not so much of course, that Ned takes on the care and healing of an injured quoll, a cat-sized marsupial that didn't make it unscathed around Tasmania' settler-colonial farms (in Ned's case, an apple orchard called Limberlost). Ned's squeamish discomfort with killing even the verminous introduced rabbits hes hunting to provide pelts for slouch hats, Aussie soldiers' signature headgear means he commits to returning the quoll to health and its natural home.

Unlike the other stories from Author Arnott, this one has no tint of magical realism. It's a strong historical story, one that moves us into the waning years of an Australian colonial reality that was consciously reshaped beginning in the 1970s. That reshaping, which redressed in small ways moving towards larger ones the horrors that the settler colonials unleashed on Aboriginal Australians and the fauna of the continent, has its other face examined here. Ned has spent his entire existence working, the land that supports human life has received his best and tenderest care; now he must confront the way that looks to his own children: "He realized his recollections might not be as clear as he'd assumed. It was a horrible sensation, feeling that the facts of his life had blurred. He wondered if his past was slipping away?"

As it must, Ned. As it will away from us all.

The beauty of Author Arnott's prose makes this a read to savor for me; its focus on a man in his terminal decline to oblivion rethinking his life appeals to me in its deep familiarity.

I've reworked this review from its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab. I've added links to definitions.

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

THE RAIN HERON
ROBBIE ARNOTT
FSG Originals (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting.

But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.

The Rain Heron is the dizzying, dazzling new novel from the author of Flames.

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

My Review: "So much was ruined, either slowly or in red instants, and nothing was getting better and nobody was doing enough about it. And through the quiet carnage of the world I kept moving." A fascinating story made up of absences, of clothing not worn, of things not happening, of eyes unseeing. A novel centering absences sounds...unsatisfying. I can only advise you to trust Author Arnott, read the story, and see if my rating holds true for you, as well.

“A farmer lived, but not well. If she planted grain, it would not sprout If she grew rice, it would rot. If she tried to raise livestock, they would gasp and choke and die before they’d seen a second dawn (or they were stillborn, often taking their mothers, which the farmer had usually bought with the last of her coins and hope, with them). Success and happiness were foreign to her, and she had forgotten what it was like to go to bed unhungry. All she had was her hunger and her farm—and her farm, as far as she could tell, wanted her to starve.”

When an author creates a mythos for a place that has one well-known to most readers of English-language prose, we call it a retelling. What, then, is the word for Author Arnott's mythmaking for this exceedingly ancient land that Europeans don't know the mythos of, whose history is older than ours by many millennia, and yet it settles onto the mindspace of the people now there seamlessly? "When I first saw the bird burst into its high grotto, when I watched its dance of wet light, I was mesmerised by it. Then it took my eye, and that feeling was replaced by terror, and with the terror came extraordinary pain, as I felt the icicle of its beak pierce the jellied rim of my eyeball."

I don't really know but that's where we are.

“Paddling nearer, they saw that it was the unlucky farmer, dead or unconscious, her body draped over the branches like a nightgown hung out to dry. But more curious than this was what they saw next: a huge heron, the colour of rain, suddenly emerging from the flood in a fast, steep flight, leaving not even a ripple on the water beneath it. With a languid flap of its wings it came to rest in the crown of the oak, standing over the unlucky farmer, as if on guard.

The teenagers brought their boat to a stop. This water-risen heron was unlike any other they’d seen before—any other heron, any other living creature. Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird. Its body was pierced by strands of dusky light, and the tree was clearly visible directly behind its sharp, moist beak.

A ghost, one claimed. A mirage, said another. But before they could get closer the heron hunched its neck, flapped its wings and leapt into the sky. A thick spray of water fell from its wings, far more water than could have been resting on its feathers. Then it disappeared into the remnants of the storm.

Absences and spaces and takings-away and lacks...all make this near-future dystopian in an unflashy, unbombastic unnervingly real way. It could be that, as the 2025 US regime unleashes its evil agenda on the world, this feels too on-the-nose in the way that validates its rightness and essential truth-telling.

Why do they want it?
Who?
The generals or whoever’s in charge.
Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.

Nowhere in the text are there quotation marks or suchlike civilizing indicators. It's an effective technique for a post-apocalyptic story made of takings-away and spaces where things once were or might have been. Its message is "do more with less, things are not what they were, get used to providing things you're used to getting."

The Rain Heron does not come on demand.

I've reposted this review its original in the "Literary Fiction & Short Story Collections" tab.

DUSK, fourth Tasmania-set novel by Tasmanian author extraordinaire Robbie Arnott

DUSK
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

SHORTLISTED for 2026's The Climate Fiction Prize.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of North Woods and The Vaster Wilds, Dusk is a propulsive, moody, and atmospheric take on the Western.

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined.

And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.

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

My Review: Do you remember my review of Flames? The debut novel from this author, I gave it all five stars six years ago. I'm still amazed how few people look at the tabs on the top bar, so it seems most of y'all missed my reviews of Limberlost and The Rain Heron, so I'm reposting them tomorrow as regular-blog posts. I'll carry on warbling about Author Arnott's prose and his evocations of a natural world I wish to hell I saw and felt as keenly as he does when I went outside, eg "They left at dawn, heading north-west, the steam of their horses cutting through the harshly cold air as they rode across frosted paddocks that soon gave way to plains of soft, snow-dusted buttongrass. The sun slanted onto their backs but did not warm them," from this story.

I badly want you to join me in the world of Arnott stans because he really puts in the work to make wonderful stories, in the older and current senses of that word. I think that merits our time and our treasure. The rewards for spending a bit of both in his quiet, unshowy company are many.

So, this latest novel: It's a Western, in the US sense, that follows twin brother and sister as they make a desperate attempt to eke out survival in a world harsher and less tolerant than we privileged computer-users have ever known. Offspring of a pair transported to distant Tasmania for absurdly trivial "crimes" (efforts to remain alive, really), the Renshaw twins had no chance of an "honest" start in life. They were trained up to thievery. Their long-since executed parents left them to fend for themselves and so they have.

Now, though, the life they were bred to lead has finally snapped shut the social trap of antisocial activity. Rob and cheat your neighbors long enough, they'll stop affording you the chance to do it. This is where we meet Iris and Floyd.

The desperation of hunger drives these parasites on the Body Politic to pursue a cockamamie plan to kill for a bounty a puma that's attacking shepherds in Tasmania's wild back-of-beyond meadows. How these very urban people will accomplish this...let's say I was never convinced it was a *good* plan, but everyone needs a plan, and some hope, for how to survive.

The fully risen sun built a morning of cold colour, of ripped clouds, sharp light washing onto wet wool and frosted fields. It afforded the twins a confidence that they hadn’t felt the previous day. With the sun unshielded, the mist absent, the land was robbed of menace. The river was no longer haunting but placid; the twisted trees appeared graceful and stoic in their contortions; the listless shepherds now seemed merely apathetic, rather than mysterious or threatening.

What strikes me in that passage is how one can read it as beautiful sentences; as simile on several levels; as Western-genre foreshadowing of developments. I always love writing that lets me in, that is roomy enough for my imagination to work on the beautiful imagery and its story direction. Like Cormac McCarthy before him, Author Arnott's playing an old instrument in a different way (though not a nihilistic one, I'll hasten to reassure those not fond of ol' Cormac's grimfests).

Iris and Dusk, the female protagonists of this story, and each driven by the actions of men to fight for their very survival against those men simply to sustain their lives. If that's not a metaphor for late-stage capitalism's effects on feminism, I do not know what is. It was not until I finished the book and sat mulling it over that I found this in its substance. Of course, I rest atop a Himalaya of old white male privilege so no tellin' how much faster women will see it...but there it is, Iris needs to survive, Dusk does too, they have to protect those unable to do so for themselves (Floyd's got what I expect is scoliosis and is crippled by it).

Their collision is inevitable. It is primal, cataclysmic. It is the conflict of colonials in a country that they've taken as their own (pumas are placental mammals, not one of which is native to Australia), and Author Arnott makes sure to give us this stonking clue in the form of Lydia's Aboriginal voice. It should be no surprise to anyone that Lydia, the bosslady of a crew of peat-cutters, is our voice given to those still more denied a place than colonializers' women are.

And yet, and yet...read through a US lens, this story's incongruities with actual Tasmanian colonial history (Outback cattle barons become sheep barons and never, for all I know, crudesced into the place) are all in service of Author Arnott's career-long cutting of Tasmania's story-cloth to suit the pattern of story he wants to tell. I myownself think he does a truly wonderful job of it; he tells his wonderful story, simple survival of females in a world colonized and exploited by men, with the enhancements and alterations of a talented imagination.

I'd argue it starts too slowly for its eventual pace, and permaybehaps the ending is "too open" for many readers (though not for me, I like the story to head off into the sunset without me when there's as much to think over as there is here), so I'm not quit at the full-five point.

Damn close, though. It's another exercise in superior storytelling by an established superior storyteller.

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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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