WE WERE THE UNIVERSE, fist novel and second book from Kimberly King Parsons

WE WERE THE UNIVERSE
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

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

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (longlisted for the National Book Award).

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle into her routine—long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother’s phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit’s mind, she’s reminiscing about the band she used to be in—and how they’d go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She’s imagining an impossible threesome with her kid’s pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction—a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.

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My Review: First novel by my 2019 six-stars-of-five delight's author (see link above).

Any novel about grief, grieving, loss, or aging will alienate some readers. It is a requirement of Life that we experience these things. It is not, for some, cathartic to experience them in fiction. I'm not one of those people, but if you are, this is not the read for you.

I'm very much not a member of the Cult of Mother, but motherhood...from both sides, mothered and mothering ("Our spheres are almost entirely our mothers’ doing, for better or worse")...is another central fact of Life for us all. (Yes, choosing not to Mother or being unable to give birth is also in this life-equation.) The way Author Kimberly uses this in her novelistic debut is to explore it while living her own life. When Julie dies, too young, Kit is pregnant. We meet Kit after her daughter turns three, thus not having to deal with the Terrible Twos, an arrangement decidedly superior to the real-life one. In the intense whirl of mothering as a stay-at-home parent, Kit is torn into mother, sister, spouse gobbets by the powerful emotions each of these elicits...requires...of her. It's no surprise that she needs some time off. Don't all mothers? Haven't they needed time off they never got throughout history? I digress.

Kit was a wildchild earlier in her life. That identity never really leaves one, once adopted, it can only be suppressed not expunged. It's clear to me this identity was powerfully rooted because dead-by-overdose Julie ("I cannot fucking believe she's not here, that she's not anywhere") never bothered to suppress it. When her GBFF from days gone by calls on Kit to ditch her life after he suffers setbacks that hurt, she tingles with the old urge to cut loose. It takes spousal support, granted, but it also requires she consider her child's feelings.

This is the single greatest strength of Author Kimberly's stories. Complexity is baked in, not slapped on. It's not the point; it's not handwaved away; it's part of the reality of Kit's life as spouse and mother, so it's in the story. I resonate with this because complexity is what Life is. Part of that complexity in this story is the way the narrative (told from Kit's PoV) is in two timelines, present and revolving like a slide carousel among her memories. Like all adults the world Kit lives in is built on the bumpy earth of memory. At different times the present will pitch one up to see the future from a hill, will spine one around to see the past, or knock one flat to study the ground for a while: "It seems to me these lost pastimes—being a psychonaut and being slutty—are connected. Maybe because they're two things I enjoyed being that I'm not allowed to be anymore. Identities that induced a feeling of security, false as it might have been. My old coping mechanisms have become incompatible with my life choices. 'It's just growing up,' Yes says. 'Easier for some of us than others.'" Unlike books with a different set of timelines that benefit from carefully signposted offramps into the others, this story is about the lived experience of an adult's reckoning process. Look at the title. The memories of life as it was, and as it can never be again, are accurately presented as they happen. Never once did I think "what in tarnation brought that up?"

Speaking of tarnation, Author Kimberly is exiled Texan as am I. It felt so much like going home to the place that made me but doesn't want me to read the memories...it was healing for Kit and it was healing for me to look at the way things were before there was another place to call home. In the course of her escape with her GBFF, which we know will be temporary, her inner monologue gets searingly honest: "Nobody knows me, but they still need me, all of them. Nobody wants a mother too sad to make a sandwich, a wife too crazy to fuck, a friend who sounds insane. They need me in the grocery store, in the bedroom, at brunch. They need me to be available and so I am, or my body is. The body goes around fulfilling my obligations. The body makes grilled cheese and gives blow jobs and gets ready to fly off to god knows where with her brokenhearted best friend."

It is motherhood. It is adulthood, it is caretaking, it is being the one who knows how to fix stuff. This tells the entire history of how one adult is trapped into, trapped by, the needs of others intersecting with the need in one's self to give what one never got. Many are the ones who want to receive this gift, few care to offer it:

It seems to me these lost pastimes—being a psychonaut and being slutty—are connected. Maybe because they're two things I enjoyed being that I'm not allowed to be anymore. Identities that induced a feeling of security, false as it might have been. My old coping mechanisms have become incompatible with my life choices. "It's just growing up," Yes says. "Easier for some of us than others."

Simple truth. Hard to argue with it, and often too easy to use as a weapon against one.

I'm describing a five-star read. I don't have five stars up top. What happened there? The ending. I don't mean, as I usually do when I type those words, that I did not like how the story ended, or felt that it did not end so much as stopped. I am actually stumped. I feel a bit stupid...what just happened here?...and why? So I had to wonder where to go with my pleasure in the read until those last ~75pp.

I realized as I sat with my thoughts that I was *having* thoughts...I was wondering why Kit chose straightness (ugh) why she never opted for...you get the point. No story that makes me think this hard this long after reading it means it needs most of that fifth star in acknowledgment of that power in the storytelling.

COMPOUND FRACTURE, accepting the gulf between what is and what could be is optional

COMPOUND FRACTURE
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
Peachtree Teen (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Bestselling and award-winning author Andrew Joseph White returns with a queer Appalachian thriller, that pulls no punches, for teens who see the failures in our world and are pushing for radical change.

A gut-wrenching story following a trans autistic teen who survives an attempted murder, only to be drawn into the generational struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them.

On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.

The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.

In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidentally kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line—is Miles?

A visceral, unabashedly political page-turner that won’t let you go until you’ve reached the end, Compound Fracture is not for the faint of heart, but it is for every reader who is ready to fight for a better world.

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My Review: If ever a book was well-placed to meet its times, it's this trans YA story of rebellion turned existential.

There are so many stories that feature parents of trans kids that reject and demean their children that it felt very warming for Miles to have befuddled, but loving and willing to learn, parents that I was ready to five-star the reading experience. Even his grandparents weren't rejecting, as so many trans kids experience. The latter were even able to see Miles' outing as the huge emotional violation it was and not blame him for the violence that followed. It was outstanding, and I really hope more trans kids than ever experience that in their lives. Sounds more and more five-starry, right?

Didn't *quite* work out that way....

That's really down to my feeling that the politics were polemical not organic to Miles. Being a socialist firebrand in West Virginia is as risky as being trans; so why was one on display, and why the political one? Given the terrible suffering Miles endures in the course of the book, why was one so impersonal the choice he's depicted as making the one he's going to suffer for? Why fuss about identity politics in the middle of class war, a character asks...I wondered why class warfare does not include bodily autonomy before a political screed.

Miles' exploration of what masculinity means in his milieu is what earned back all but a token bit of a star. This issue is absolutely wonderfully handled. Miles is a man; Miles isn't most of the stereotypically Appalachian/Southern man-coded things, eg violent and aggressive, but is figuring out what that's going to look like. His own dad's experiences in the story, as a victim of male aggression to the point of disability, seemed to me to set the stakes for Miles pretty starkly.

It ends up being a cavil in the face of the story's many strengths. I hope the whole of West Virginia will read it, if only to see what critique from a place of love for a shared home looks like. It's a home that gets huge amounts of criticism from a place of contempt heaped on it from outside.

It's good to have a corrective to the attitude but not the substance of the critics.

BAD INDIANS BOOK CLUB: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds, taking back control of the narrative never went down easier

BAD INDIANS BOOK CLUB: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds
PATTY KRAWEC (foreword by Omar El Akkad)
Broadleaf Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Bad Indians Book Club continues the conversation Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec started in Becoming Kin, inviting readers to question the stories of settler colonialism and discover the rich worlds created by Indigenous voices.

"A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives."—Booklist, starred review

In this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands of history, science, memoir, and fiction to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to inhabit?

When a friend asked what books could help them understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin, gave them a list. This list became a book club and then a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then this book. The writers in Bad Indians Book Club refuse to let dominant stories displace their own and resist the way wemitigoozhiwag—European settlers—craft the prevailing narrative and decide who they are.

In Bad Indians Book Club, we examine works about history, science, and gender as well as fiction, all written from the perspective of "Bad Indians"—marginalized writers whose refusal to comply with dominant narratives opens up new worlds. Interlacing chapters with short stories about Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where the stories of marginalized writers help us imagine other ways of seeing the world. As Krawec did for her friend, she recommends a list of books to fill in the gaps on our own bookshelves and in our understanding.

Becoming Kin, which novelist Omar El Akkad called a "searing spear of light," led readers to talk back to the histories they had received. Now, in Bad Indians Book Club comes a potent challenge to all the stories settler colonialism tells—stories that erase and appropriate, deny and deflect. Following Deer Woman, who is shaped by the profuse artistry of Krawec, we enter the multiple worlds Indigenous and other subaltern stories create. Together we venture to the edges of worlds waiting to be born.

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My Review: The structure of the book makes me think these were written as essays, turned into chapters, and not very thoroughly combed through to make sure reduplicative information was minimized or eliminated.

That said, every chapter is cram-jam full of information new to me, or so distant from my ROM that I needed to dig for it in RAM. I came away very much better informed, educated, and energized. Fortunately, there are footnotes galore to keep me supplied in rabbit-hole bait. Yay. *note to self check data usage*

The character Kwe/Deer Woman as our guide and cicerone is a polarizing addition to the non-fiction nature of the book. Quite sensible in my opinion, as being taught something I'm totally unfamiliar with is always easier for me to contextualize and absorb if there is a person teaching me. I think I might have been okay with just Author Krawec...but this way I felt I was listening in and learning more through it.

In a time that feels to me like it is celebrating smallness, valorizing exclusion, and weaponizing authority structures, reading Bad Indians Book Club gave me the feeling of learning while resisting these things I emphatically do not support. I will warn my fellow biblioholics that this is going to be a TBR-fattening read. Big time.

But worth it to discover new storytelling. I think you will agree.

YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO BE HUMAN, if the title chills you wait'll you read the story

YOU WEREN'T MEANT TO BE HUMAN
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
Saga Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2025!

The Publisher Says: Alien meets Midsommar in this chilling debut adult novel from award-winning author Andrew Joseph White about identity, survival, and transformation amidst an alien invasion in rural West Virginia.

Festering masses of worms and flies have taken root in dark corners across Appalachia. In exchange for unwavering loyalty and fresh corpses, these hives offer a few struggling humans salvation. A fresh start. It’s an offer that none refuse.

Crane is grateful. Among his hive’s followers, Crane has found a chance to transition, to never speak again, to live a life that won’t destroy him. He even met Levi: a handsome ex-Marine and brutal killer who treats him like a real man, mostly. But when Levi gets Crane pregnant—and the hive demands the child’s birth, no matter the cost—Crane’s desperation to make it stop will drive the community that saved him into a devastating spiral that can only end in blood.

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a deeply personal horror; a visceral statement about the lives of marginalized people in a hostile world, echoing the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Eric LaRocca.

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My Review: Is this story literally intended to be about a hive...powerfully coded culturally as an insect-related word...that controls people to their detriment? Are the hives metaphors for the horrors of cishet society demanding conformity of people not like them? Are the hives infestations of the criminal organizations demanding obedience of the Appalachian people in exchange for the smallest amount of human dignity...or else?

Yes.

The answer is none/all/a combination of these and more. This is why I rate the body horror story as highly as I do. Author White is avowedly transmasc. The story could've been his own; he could be Crane; the body horror could be, is, intensely personal. It is laid out in terms of Crane's quest for bodily autonomy, its various phases and faces of denial and deprivation of this great, fundamental freedom. Trading transphobia for misogyny is not trading up. It is still the imposition of ignorance on top of your own knowledge, the unwillingness of the uneducated to do the work of acquiring the information needed to distinguish between discomfort and threat.

The hive isn't precise or even visible, it's a shifting...space...delineated by rotten stinking meat and a control mechanism brutally physical and insidiously psychological. This is the essence of horror to me. The ugly inner workings of systems of control and brutalization for dominance assertion. The denial of the fundamental freedom, autonomy...self-determination...that all Others endure. That is, throughout time and space, the one sin qua non of horror stories. It gives me shivers even conceptualizing it.

What Author White does best in this story is mobilize all the tropes of horror to embody the reality of an authoritarian world. What the alluring promises of it devolve into. What the systems of oppression will resort to in order to accomplish their hidden aims. Are they even hidden, or are we simply discouraged from noticing them? Accused of being paranoid, thereby handily Othered in an uncontestable way?

The way the story ends, I won't say "wraps up" it's too easy, isn't heartening or triumphal or celebratory. It is instructive. It is condign. It does not spare a thought for the offense against "nice"ness it's made you endure. And surprisingly made you...appreciate, since enjoy is a completely wrong stop to pull on Literature's pipe-organ.

I think this read will titillate the horror seeker, educate the knowledge seeker, and validate the entomophobic person's visceral rejection of reeking, rotting things for what they harbor.

RAGNAR JÓNASSON'S PAGE: The Criminologist Helgi Reykdal three-book series

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING CRIME WRITER
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One winter evening bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing.

There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective, Helgi, to crack the case before it's leaked to the press.

As he interviews the people closest to her—a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge—he realises that Elín’s life wasn’t what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than her stories.

As the case of the missing crime writer becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of a very unexpected life . . .

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My Review: Three timelines again: 1965 (investigated by Hulda, whom we see but all is not what it seems), 2005, and book-present, 2012. Dirty deeds done in each. It is now a Ragnar trope. While each one was, in fact, required to resolve the crime Helgi's investigating, the book-present ends on a cliffhanger...but not the one you're expecting. Still, the phobic about such things should know that before committing to the read.

Elín S. Jónsdóttir seemed to me to be Over It All before she disappeared...her 2005 interview (with Kristin, fellow series-readers) was, shall we say, adversarial and quite insinuating. I was left with an impression that this would go somewhere more central than it did...still played its part in a different way. It is not presented anywhere in its entirety, but is broken into chunks...I saw why, but it took time.

I think this might be the thing I enjoy most about Ragnar's storyverse. Everything does always connect up, only sometimes not where you thought it would. Helgi is a listener first and foremost. He comes across to more action-loving procedural readers as a bit passive. He's a thinking machine. (Anybody remember Futrelle's character, or am I the sole survivor?) Only better-looking....

It's a series, and it slots into other series written by Ragnar; the storyverse must needs be left a bit baggy at the knees in individual cases to work the way they must as a unit. One consistent factor that appeals to me is Helgi's explicit love and reverence for Dame Agatha Christie. It is obvious to me that Ragnar wants the Icelandic love of reading and its astonishing book culture to be on display in this series. Fine by me! You go, reader-boy! "That's what books are for: they help you travel to places you wouldn't otherwise be able to visit, journey through worlds that don't exist." I'd have that tattooed on me if I could think of a place to have it where I wouldn't have to explain who "Helgi" was every five minutes.

Lastly, let me just say that I hate Bergthora even more now. And Helgi needs to get that mess sorted by professional means. He's a cop faGawdsake!

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DEATH AT THE SANATORIUM
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1983

At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There, they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested following false testimony from one of the nurses, but subsequently released.

Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician, is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir, rules his death as suicide and assumes that he was guilty of the murder as well. The case is closed.

2012

Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal, a young police officer, has been studying criminology in the UK, but decides to return to Iceland when he is offered a job at the Reykjavik police department—the job which detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from.

He is also a collector of golden age detective stories, and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past, and starts his new job, he decides to try to meet with the original suspects. But soon he finds silence and suspicion at every turn, as he tries to finally solve the mystery from years before.

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My Review: At last we really *meet* Helgi. He does appear in Whiteout, though not very prominently. I say this with all the love in my heart...I like Helgi more than Ari Thór as a lead character. He's still got the bookishness, the clear love of puzzle-solving; he is a bit more of a distinctive character to me because he's explicitly an Agathan. It comes through in this resolution to an unresolved murder ("cold case" just feels on the nose for Icelandic crimes somehow) previously worked by Hulda Hermannsdottir, whose retirement he is enjoying by being brought home to Iceland from the UK to replace her.

One of humanity's great achievements, largely undersung about, is the reduction of TB from pandemic to chronic disease. As John Green reports in his Everything is Tuberculosis, an excellent book and a must-read for those in need of heartening, it's been a partial victory but still a very significant one. This murder took place in a TB asylum in 1983 as its use case was disappearing. In the novel's present day, 2012, the asylum is empty of patients and used as a research facility. As Helgi assumes his duties, he uses retired Hulda's involvement in the unsolved murder as the topic of his dissertation; so now he is in the same country as the scene of the crime, he determines to find out what really happened in 1983. This does mean we spend more time with Hulda. That's not a bad thing for Helgi or we-the-reader. Old wounds are not healed, it would seem, and another murder occurs that needs solving as Helgi's poking around picks up steam.

Vintage Ragnar-style, the setting is spooky and cold and full of bad energy or haunted by ghosts or something like that...it's never really explicit just what it is, which leaves room for we-the-reader to decide what works best. The limited pool of suspects for the original killing is still alive, so no problems of needing a medium to conduct interviews. It might've been safer that way. Helgi goes about studying the crime, the building a case for the new crime, with the same calm, assured demeanor. His doubts, like his very murky personal life...I hate his partner Bergthora a LOT!...are present in the story but not very foregrounded. I appreciate Ragnar offering us a sleuth-centered procedural that does not feel the need to make it indistinguishable from a domestic novel.

It was, if anything, a bit gothic in its TB ward in snowy conditions, an unknown killer stalking the place, whose identity I genuinely never expected to know...I thought this would remain an unsolved case...but when revealed became inevitable and so very sad. There is a brief excursion from 1983 back to 1950, that while necessary is definitely a pacing-killer. Ragnar's books aren't tearaway action plots. In this dual-timeline story, the pace is of necessity slower as there is much to relearn about the old killing. Helgi is a character who listens more than he talks. That won't work well for all readers but does for me.

Why I'm missing a star from the review is simple. There's a kind of coda on the ending that...annoyed me. You'll see, but maybe won't agree with me that it was an unnecessary add-on to a really absorbing, involving read.

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WHITEOUT
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Quentin Bates)
Orenda Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When the body of a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted Icelandic village of Kálfshamarvík, police officer Ari Thór Arason uncovers a startling and terrifying connection to an earlier series of deaths, as the killer remains on the loose...

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík.

Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop?

With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier.

As the dark history and its secrets of the village are unveiled, and the death toll begins to rise, the Siglufjordur detectives must race against the clock to find the killer, before another tragedy takes place.

Dark, chilling and complex, Whiteout is a haunting, atmospheric and stunningly plotted thriller from one of Iceland's bestselling crime writers.

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My Review: Ari Thór is very much the center of the action here; I tell you that because this page is dedicated to the latest series-starrer Helgi Reykdal. He appears in this book, so I'm not just being capricious.

Ari Thór is asked by Tómas, now a superintending detective from Reykjavík, formerly Ari Thór's boss, to be on the team investigating this crime. Helgi, as a UK-trained criminologist, is on it too, in a less visible capacity than Ari Thór. The basic mystery is why the young victim, raised in this now-abandoned village, is there dead in the same place her mother and sister were each found dead not all that long ago.

Family secrets, societal ills, the usual suspects...and speaking of suspects you'll know who committed the crime quite soon, if you're at all experienced in the ways of crime fiction. That said, the real reason to read the story is the wonderfully evocative writing, a setting both familiar...what genre reader hasn't read at least one Icelandic mystery in 2025?...and foreign enough to give one the frisson of difference from one's surroundings. The seasonality is very much a part of the appeal as well. It's close to Yule, and cold...Iceland, remember...and full of little sidebars about rituals (Jólabókaflóð!) and legends that both inform the action and involve the reader. This reader, anyway. I'm not sure if I like Ari Thór as much as Helgi from the later books, but they're both unrepentant bookwyrms: “The usual magnificent tree stood in the center of the Town Hall Square. The people of Siglufjordur were quietly getting ready for the holiday...with evening mass at the old church and then dinner and unwrapping of presents, followed by what in Ari Thór’s mind was one of the most important Christmas Eve traditions of all—the reading of a book well into the night.”

My homie, is Ari Thór. Yours too, I suspect, if you're reading this. I haven't seen Ari Thór since I took up with the more cinnamon-bun-y Helgi, but both are deeply convinced readers, so either is welcome. There's a condign resolution to this tragedy, and there's the satisfying sense of ma'at being served in faraway Iceland that now feels more like a home-from-home than a strange Norse myth of a country.

Starting your acquaintance with Ragnar's world right here is no bad thing. What you don't already know is gently explained to you. The ending might be a bit...pat...for some readers, including me, but be patient and pursue the series. It does make sense. Remember Ragnar is writing in a storyverse that just happens to be set in a real country, and enjoy the tidbits.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel, return to Pointe-Noire in fantasyland

DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of Africa’s greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history

One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.

Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.

Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most-recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.

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My Review: As Pointe-Noire enters my awareness more and more, I realize why Author Mabanckou focuses his storytelling in this fictionalized hometown. He works inside a head that, like all of us, was intensely of a very specific time and place, now gone; he uses it with delicacy to cast its shadows broadly; and he knows it so well to know how it maps onto the world.

Liwa's journey in a fantasy afterlife is aptly compared to Lincoln in the Bardo above. It resembles that story in that it assumes an afterlife, or a between phase between death and nothingness more precisely, in which a soul may wander to seek answers. I myownself found, for one of the few times ever, the use of second-person narration for Liwa's PoV to be very effective. It truly works because it points up the here-but-not-here nature of a dead narrator. However much I doubt this space exists on some immaterial plane, that is not how it is used in this story. Liwa's self is not dead yet, and is surrounded by other not-dead-yet folk (whose narratives are all presented in third person, blessèdly sidestepping that twee trap) who populate his spectral graveyard. He needs to finish something before he can pass into whatever comes next. The other dead folk discourage him, but he does it anyway.

They are right, of course, because he can't prevent his grandmother from feeling her feelings and, as he begins to process his jumbled, violent last memories to solve for himself why he is dead at only twenty-four, the answers are deeply, well, upsetting and traumatizing...as I expect anyone dead at twenty-four would find them, no matter what the reasons were.

It is in the use of a fantasy world, one magical and tailored to Liwa's exact needs, that the story works its universalizing magic. As Liwa moves through his graveyard peers, he listens to their various tales and discovers his own. "Once you've been laid in the earth, time will start to do its work, and for all their good intentions, the people who knew you will gradually forget, till one dry season comes when not a soul ventures forth to your tomb." The truncated youth is only going to fade from others' lives. It is best to let go sooner rather than later; learning too much about your death won't make Death better.

I was very taken with the way this fantasy world was populated by persons previously alive as well as personifications of cultural great ones, like Black Mamba, the big boss of the dead. I totally got Liwa's inability to let go of the need to know what happened to himself, and his disgusted outrage at the facts around his death. It is Author Mabanckou's writing career to bring to light the consequences of blind superstition, greed, and amoral indifference to others' suffering. In this vivid, intense narrative of those consequences for one young purple-trousered ghost/entity, he shakes a well-informed finger in our readerly faces.

Of my three Mabanckou reads, this one is the standout, and the one I'd encourage you all to read.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE, a memoir of home going; & BLACK MOSES, multiple legends remixed

THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling meditation on home-coming and belonging from one of "Africa's greatest writers" (The Guardian) and the Man Booker International Prize finalist and Grand Prize Winner at the 2015 French Voices Awards

Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When he finally came back to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on the Congo's southwestern coast, he found a country that in some ways had changed beyond recognition: The cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture had become a Pentecostal church, and his secondary school has been renamed in honor of a previously despised colonial ruler.

But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture that still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Now a decorated writer and an esteemed professor at UCLA, Mabanckou finds he can only look on as an outsider in the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother, and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to the Republic of the Congo, his work recalls the writing of V. S. Naipaul and André Aciman, offering a startlingly fresh perspective on the pain of exile, the ghosts of memory, and the paths we take back home.

"This is a beautiful book, the past hauntingly reentered, the present truthfully faced, and the translation rises gorgeously to the challenge." —Salman Rushdie

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My Review: "You can't go home again," in the truly deathless formulation of justly neglected writer Thomas Wolfe. It is the reason the memoir exists. Humans need frameworks, limits on their sense of their life. Our brains are pattern-making and storytelling machines. It's a survival tactic..."is that weird shadow a tree in the moonlight or a predator?" kept your ancestors alive. Author Mabanckou, not a lot younger than I am, felt the need to reckon with Home in a story. Well, what do you expect from a prolific novelist and poet who makes his living from teaching UCLA students about literature?

In just about two hundred pages, he tells us the story of his two-week return to Pointe-Noire, left twenty-five years ago so of course much changed. In the course of returning, the emigrant/exile/fugitive from home will notice the many changes time has wrought. I expect almost all of us, whether we left our hometowns or home countries or not, can relate to the "OMG the old {thing} is now {opposite thing}!" internal conversation. Not that many of us use that near-universal experience to relive and explain our upbringing to others. Author Mabanckou tells us of his family, how they moved to the city of Pointe-Noire on the Congolese coast from a small village in pursuit of safety and opportuunity. The manner of family order is something US families could definitely learn from. No child is more attended to, more broadly exposed to the worldviews of others, than those raised as he was in his mother's extended family. The family moved, not just his mother and stepfather, so she was not stranded in a new city, left to her own devices to raise and support her child.

Compare and contrast, y'all.

Thinking back to my childhood, when we hid in the lantana fields near the Agostinho Neto airport and hunted iridescent beetles or fished for minnows from the banks of the River Tchinouka, I replied to my friend, with his "Parisian Negro" arrogance:

"These children aren’t in a paradise of poverty. Here, look at the photo: that tire, those flip-flops…that’s what makes them happy…flip-flops to walk in, the tire they can all climb aboard like a motorbike big enough to carry all their wildest dreams. Every day my nephews and nieces walk out in a long line down the rue du Louboulou. Their childhood knits them together, they wouldn’t swap it for all the world. They drink from a small glass, but it’s their own. Your glass is big, but it’s not yours, and each time you want to drink from it, you have to ask for permission."

Growing up in a time and place where your assumptions are formed in a conversation with the assumptions of others, all of whom possess a stake in your life, is a beginning to be envied, to be emulated; it results in a less monadic, less greedy, less needy life as an adult. Author Mabanckou has lived in Europe and the US for decades, he knows the issues and differences that monadic living brings because he was raised outside them.

Thinking of home as he returns to the place where it was allows him to give us twenty-five separate récits we'll agree to call chapters. In his head with him, we look into his past with a fond eye, seeing ghosts of places and of lives we once fully filled but now can't do more than tell stories to an audience about. It's part of getting old. It's part of defining yourself for yourself. it's part of accepting what some simply can not: Some of us are outsiders by nature. Author Mabanckou, in leaving Pointe-Noire then returning after a life away from it, embraced the outsider role. Many of the best storytellers do.

What struck me forcibly was the absence of any explanation, or hint of a reason, why he did not go home for a quarter-century. I thought it might have to do with the familial expectations that this "rich" relative would be able to (and willing to) give them a lot of material security. The way he navigated expectations and demands is the matter of the second half of the book. It was perhaps more important to Author Mabanckou than to me, but it was not a very involving way to end a very short tale in my opinion.

Hence the lack of a fifth star for this very well-written, very interesting story.

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

BLACK MOSES
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017

It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the institution's corrupt director.

So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles?

Black Moses is a larger-than-life comic tale of a young man obsessed with helping the helpless in an unjust world. It is also a vital new extension of Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

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My Review: Congolese Oliver Twist-cum-Count of Monte Cristo tale of life's many injustices, prejudices, and petty grudges.

It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I' d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. A long name, which in Lingala means: "Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors" as it still inscribed on my birth certificate today.

Moses begins his tale in the truly out-Dickensing Dickens orphanage where tribal violence has landed him. Growing weary of life under the ever-more-crushing thumb of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako (whose first name is the bitterly ironic French for "God's Gift") he makes his escape to the big city of Pointe-Noire (see memoir above for its first appearance here). The reasons Moses, who hates his name, runs away is to escape Dieudonné's revolutionary Marxist-Leninist insistence that people are machines to be programmed, not souls to be nurtured; and thus need no kindness or guidance but just rote training. Where better to demonstrate the effectiveness of this than an orphanage?

Shedding his awful life and assuming a new name, "Black Pepper," does not stop Moses' apparent destiny from hounding him. Throughout this short...under two hundred pages...novel (maybe a novella, but a fairly borderline case if so), he is hounded by Dieudonné and his cadres. It cannot be allowed for someone to resist the Revolution! Isn't it funny how very much the high-control cultures of religion and revolution resemble each other? Almost like they're really the same thing, only in different suits.

The major issue in reading about Moses is that he spends at least half the book in Dieudonné's clutches being tormented, then after escaping (with his twin tormentors, having survived their hazing and gained their respect thereby), we get less of his Pointe-Noire exploits than necessary for us to invest in him as a full character before he unravels psychologically (surprise! not) and we get a cursory account of that causal event. His healing journey takes him through folk medicine to Western psychiatry, both getting deeply disrespectful narrative treatment.

Animal harm is done. Be warned.

The parable in all this appears to me to be the Dickensian nature of the revolution against the horrors of colonialism. We follow the hapless chaff that is Moses/Pepper as the forces of Control use their notable supply of zeal to oppress and destroy what resists their efforts finally succeeds. It is short, so perhaps there was too much story for too few pages...? I'll read Author Mabanckou's writing as translated by Helen Stevenson for a lot longer than this took.

A story that resonates in times gone fascist more than when I first read it in 2017.