Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, February 20, 2015


G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers: Kill Her Twice by Stacey Lee

From My Shelf

A New Approach to Clutter

I recently read a book that's been selling like hotcakes: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Ten Speed Press). I'd seen articles about the author, Marie Kondo--the New York Times called her "a kind of Zen nanny"--and heard raves about the book from friends. I love the idea of tidying up, but my method has relied on neat stacks of things and keeping all my black clothes together. But the closet is full, and I sort and re-sort piles until, manically, I toss out six months of New Yorkers, recipes and curling Post-Its. Enter Marie Kondo.

At first, when I read that I'd need a quiet space (no music?!) to evaluate things, because "noise makes it harder to hear the internal dialogue between the owner and [her] belongings," I thought it silly. But, Kondo says, our rational judgment gets in the way of selecting what to discard; we should keep only what brings us joy. We can consider things like those too-tight shoes (but gorgeous and marked down three times!) as contributing to our understanding of ourselves, and they now can be pitched (but first, thanked). I thought, "Okay, worth a try."

Too woo-woo for you? Try this: put every item of clothing you have on the floor. Then start choosing "with love" and look for that spark of joy. Contrast this with opening a drawer and tidying what's in it--you may not discard anything; you'll just straighten. So place the contents on the floor and see what happens. Magic.

It's not just about clothes. Or books. Or photos. Or pots. Ultimately, it's about putting your house in order to discover who you really are, what you really want to do. "What you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life." Balanced? Or buried, physically and mentally, under superfluous things? Start tossing--the floor is right there. --Marilyn Dahl, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers


Sleeping Bear Press: When You Go Into Nature by Sheri M Bestor, Illustrated by Sydney Hanson


Book Candy

Snow Scenes from Literature; Literary Party Themes

Just what people in the North need: Mental Floss pictured "8 beautiful snow scenes from literature."

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Party time: Bustle offered "8 literary party themes to throw a bookish-ly fun bash, because punctuation means it's time to rage."

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Noting that "time travel is huge at the movies," io9 suggested "10 time travel books that need to be movies right now (if not sooner)."

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"Which books are you planning to read next? Show us your TBR pile." the Guardian asked its Twitter followers to share photos of their to-be-read piles. 

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Industrial designer Shaul Cohen's an Armour-Bearer bookcase "incorporates a 3D molded aluminium soldier as the support leg of wooden shelving unit," designboom noted.


Blue Box Press: Forgetting to Remember by MJ Rose


Great Reads

Now in Paper: February

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell (Penguin, $17)
With new research and new angles on The Great Gatsby and its place in history, Sarah Churchwell takes on F. Scott Fitzgerald's mythically proportioned masterpiece in Careless People, an expansive study of biography, history, literary criticism and cultural connections. Her inquiries focus on a double-murder involving a socially ambitious lower-class woman and a respected rector.

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead (Broadway, $15)
Rebecca Mead revisits her love of George Eliot's novel to consider the ways life and art influence and imitate each other. The result is a lively appreciation of one of the greatest novels in the English language. Blending biography, literary criticism and personal memoir, Mead reflects on her own journey to marriage and a blended family, finding the spirit of her experience in Eliot's life.

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld (Penguin, $17)
Husband-and-wife law professors at Yale offer an intriguing explanation for the disproportionate success of certain groups in American society. Three characteristics--a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control--comprise what Chua (author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) and Rubenfeld call the "Triple Package." As impressive a spur to achievement as it may be, the Triple Package is anything but an unalloyed good.

Romance Is My Day Job: A Memoir of Finding Love at Last by Patience Bloom (Plume, $16)
An editor for Harlequin chronicles her search for love in Romance Is My Day Job. Patience endures a series of bad relationships as she moves around the United States, until she lands her job at Harlequin. By the time she turns 40, Bloom--professionally successful, but still single--had concluded, "My life is nothing like these books, not even a little bit."

City of God: Faith in the Streets by Sara Miles (Jericho/Grand Central, $16)
Sara Miles found both God and community inside the walls of the church. But after becoming a lay minister, Miles felt an opposite, irresistible call: to take her faith back to the streets. She grounds her story in the events of Ash Wednesday 2012, when she and several friends carried ashes into San Francisco's Mission neighborhood.

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Doug Most (St. Martin's, $16.99)
As industrial innovation and waves of immigration led to the dramatic growth of New York and Boston in the 19th century, both cities needed to find new ways to move people around. In The Race UndergroundBoston Globe editor Doug Most recounts the remarkable achievements in civil engineering that transformed two cities, along with the political and financial intrigues that accompanied them.

I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck, with Daniel de Visé (Simon & Schuster, $15.99)
When 22-year-old Su Meck was struck on the head by a ceiling fan, her life vanished. Everything she had ever done, everyone she had ever met and everything she knew how to do, including read, write and tie her own shoes, disappeared. In I Forgot to Remember, Meck gives voice to the overwhelming confusion following her traumatic brain injury. 

Glitter and Glue: A Memoir by Kelly Corrigan (Ballantine, $16)
As her parents' only daughter, Kelly Corrigan grew up adoring and being adored by her joyous, optimistic dad. But her relationship with her firm, proud, stoic mother was much more complicated. When Corrigan was in high school, her mother summed up the family dynamic: "Your father's the glitter, but I'm the glue." It would take Corrigan years to realize how much she needed both. 

Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles into the Darkness by Neil Swidey (Broadway, $15)
Neil Swidey tells the unforgettable story of an ambitious engineering project and the disaster that could have been averted. Boston Harbor was an environmental ruin when the state finally mandated a cleanup, so the city built a highly sophisticated waste-treatment plant on Deer Island. When the overdue project was nearly complete, one final task ended in an accident that seems unavoidable in hindsight.

The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America by Edward White (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17)
The Tastemaker is a vividly detailed biography of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most influential American cultural figures of the early 20th century. Working first as a reporter and later as a novelist, Van Vechten promoted his beloved modernist art, along with the causes of many musicians--including African-American jazz musicians he met during his forays into Harlem.

The Guts by Roddy Doyle (Penguin, $16)
Roddy Doyle's often funny, bittersweet and unsentimental follow-up to The Commitments re-introduces Jimmy Rabbitte, now facing his mortality yet still finding joy in the music of his youth and the people he loves. Jimmy runs with his wife's brilliant idea of finding the musicians from old bands and bringing them together to play their resurrected albums.

Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker (Grand Central, $15)
Mercy Snow juxtaposes the good and evil, the haves and the have-nots of a struggling mill town. The people of Titan Falls hate the polluted muck of the Androscoggin River, and they hate the Snow clan. They have to put up with the river, vital to the paper mill operation, but nobody has any use for Mercy Snow and her kin.

The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman (Picador, $16)
In Joshua Max Feldman's loose retelling of the biblical Jonah story, Jonah Jacobstein is a young New York City lawyer on a partnership track, romantically entangled with both his future fianceé and an off-again, on-again girlfriend. Then visions of the city sinking underwater and his fellow citizens walking about naked upend his success and take him on a journey into self-doubt and self-discovery.

Influx by Daniel Suarez (Signet, $9.99)
Daniel Suarez's SF thriller Influx offers an unsettling reason for the apparently stagnant state of technological progress since the 1960s: over the last half-century, an increasingly tyrannical top-secret government bureau has abducted the greatest scientific minds and seized their fledgling breakthroughs. Eccentric physicist Jon Grady learns about the bureau's existence when he's abducted from his lab after inventing a type of anti-gravity machine.

The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer (Picador, $16)
Over dinner one night in a Budapest restaurant, U.S. consul Emmett Kohl confronts his wife, Sophie, with his knowledge of her affair with a CIA spy. Before Sophie can overcome her shock, a gunman enters the restaurant and shoots Emmett dead at the table. The gunman gets away, and Sophie returns to Cairo, where Emmett was stationed before Budapest, to solve his murder.

Marshlands by Matthew Olshan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14)
An aging and beaten prisoner is returned to "the capital," a city now entirely unrecognizable to him. Eventually restored to a semblance of his previous self, the man works in a hospital for marshland refugees. It turns out he spent years as a military doctor with the occupying army of the marshlands, where he committed a startling crime that put him in jail.

The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick (Harper Paperbacks, $14.99)
With the death of Bartholomew Neil's mother, he is suddenly on his own, uncertain of how to pay his bills, get a job, make friends or move on with his life. Somewhat illogically, he begins to write to Richard Gere, his mother's favorite actor, confiding in him about his uncertainty over what the future holds and his struggles with grief counseling.


More...

Philip Levine, 1928-2015

Former U.S. poet laureate Philip Levine, "whose work was vibrantly, angrily and often painfully alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor," died Saturday, the New York Times reported. He was 87. Levine won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth, as well as two National Book Awards (Ashes: Poems New & Old in 1980 and What Work Is in 1991) and two National Book Critics Circle Awards (Ashes and, in 1979, for 7 Years From Somewhere).

In the Times, Dwight Garner observed that Levine's death "is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn't pull his poetry down into brackishness." He also noted that Levine "never shed his outsider sensibility, his awareness of class in American life. 'I am now a kind of archive of people, places and things that no longer exist,' he said. 'I carry them around with me, and if I get them on paper I give them at least some kind of existence.' "

From "Our Valley":

You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Book Review

Fiction

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty

by Amanda Filipacchi


Amanda Filipacchi's three previous novels (Nude Men, Vapor and Love Creeps) secured her reputation as a comic satirist who captures the dreams and frustrations of everywoman while exposing their costs. In The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, she takes on the mixed blessings of female beauty with her signature wit and insight.

The story involves a tight circle of young New Yorkers who call themselves the Knights of Creation. Georgia is an acclaimed novelist wracked by self-doubt; Lily is an extremely unattractive but brilliant composer who uses her talents to seduce the shallow Strad; lovely Penelope makes ugly pottery she cannot sell. But the focus of the story is on Barb, an extraordinarily beautiful, unusually talented costume designer. Two years earlier, her friend Gabriel committed suicide, dazzled by her beauty and sick with love for her. Since then, Barb has hidden inside a fat suit and under a gray wig, determined that anyone new will love her for her inner beauty alone.

There's also a murder subplot, a delusional doorman and a delicious skewering of the shallow, self-serving media. And there's Peter, an anchorman perfect for Barb--except that, unbeknownst to her, he has schemed his way into her life after discovering old photos showing she's drop-dead gorgeous.

Will Barb accept Peter when she learns that he knows she's beautiful? Can she accept herself, beauty and all? The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty has a teeming cast of one-dimensional characters and a wildly improbable plot, but it's a funny and exuberant story that addresses the costs of a social preoccupation while losing none of its fairy-tale charm. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Discover: Filipacchi challenges our obsession with beauty in another playful and beguiling story that is both escapist fiction and social satire.

W.W. Norton, $25.95, hardcover, 9780393243871

The Secrets of Midwives

by Sally Hepworth


Neva Bradley always felt she was destined to be a midwife. Her hippie mother, Grace, and her no-nonsense English grandmother, Felicity (known as "Floss"), have both spent their lives helping women bring their babies into the world. Neva, too, became a midwife and enjoys her work at a Providence, R.I., birthing center, despite Grace's insistence that home births are the best option for mothers. But when Neva gets pregnant unexpectedly, her news will stir sensitive memories--and long-buried secrets--for all three women.

Sally Hepworth (Love Like the French) tells her story by giving voice to Floss, Grace and Neva in alternating chapters. Neva's determination to keep the identity of her baby's father a secret mirrors Floss's longtime refusal to discuss the difficult circumstances of Grace's birth. But all three women must weigh their desire for secrecy against the tight bonds of family, and the potential for healing if those secrets are revealed.

Hepworth's strength lies in articulating the emotional life of her characters, who emerge as three distinct, believable narrators. Floss's recounting of her early midwifery career in England is richly detailed, while the present-day New England setting sometimes feels a bit antiseptic by contrast. The minor characters, especially the men, are less fully fleshed out, but the story moves along at a fast pace that will keep readers engaged.

Perfect for fans of TV's Call the Midwife, this big-hearted family saga is both an honest emotional journey and a well-researched glimpse into the world of midwifery. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: A warmhearted and engaging novel that follows three generations of midwives as they deal with family secrets.

St. Martin's Press, $25.99, hardcover, 9781250051899

Mystery & Thriller

Plague Land

by S.D. Sykes


S.D. Sykes's debut novel, Plague Land, the beginning of a historical mystery series, is a literary whodunit set in the fearful, plague-ridden English countryside of 1350.

Young Oswald de Lacy had intended to be a monk, but at age 17 was summoned back from the monastery upon the deaths of his father and two older brothers. Suddenly managing his family's estates, the new Lord Oswald is already ill at ease when a village girl named Alison Starvecrow is discovered dead. Oswald and his mentor, Brother Peter, who accompanied him home from the monastery, suspect murder; however, Oswald is hesitant to get involved--until Alison's mentally unstable sister vanishes.

Brother Peter urges Oswald to keep investigating Alison's death, but everyone else--from his bitter sister, Clemence, to his scheming neighbor to the illiterate village priest--seems determined to thwart Oswald. The ambitious priest, convinced that a dog-headed man sent by the devil is guilty of the crimes, is whipping the villagers into a frenzy. Oswald soon realizes that if he doesn't solve the Starvecrow sisters' death and disappearance, he may lose everything, including the estate he thought he didn't want.

Atmospheric and brilliant, Plague Land evokes a dark era, where people were quick to believe in the supernatural. Oswald is a thoughtful and intuitive character, in spite of his youth, and Plague Land's haunting denouement is sure to leave readers eager for the next in the series. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Discover: A literary mystery set during the plague that decimated England in 1350.

Pegasus, $25.95, hardcover, 9781605986739

The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney


The Long and Faraway Gone is Lou Berney's third novel, a standalone that deviates dramatically in genre, tone and style from his first two caper novels featuring Shake Bouchon (Gunshot Straight; Whiplash River). By trading exotic locales and Shake's madcap humor for a dark, psychologically suspenseful crime story set in Oklahoma City, Berney proves his writing skills reach long and far.

Wyatt Rivers and Julianna Rosales both experienced trauma during the summer of 1986. Wyatt has spent his life running from that past, while Julianna desperately searches for answers. When his job forces him to return to his hometown 25 years later, Wyatt is pulled back into the violent tragedy he tried so hard to escape. Meanwhile, Julianna learns a recently released felon may be the key to all her questions. She'll go to any length to find out, even if it puts her life at risk.

The dark, ominous tone and convincingly creepy, immoral suspects make The Long and Faraway Gone an intensely spine-chilling mystery. But more than that, it's an emotional dissection of crime and those affected by violent losses. Berney's compassion for each character makes an entire cast of delectably authentic and dimensional people.

Some elements of Berney's style remain the same. Dialogue continues to flow naturally, reflecting character and setting. His strong sense of place feeds vivid imagery. And his subtle, well-placed humor cinches the novel's realism. Readers who haven't discovered Lou Berney yet should take this golden opportunity to get acquainted. Those who have will certainly relish this gem. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Discover: Two people devastated by crime and connected only by geography search for answers and closure a quarter century later.

Morrow, $14.99, paperback, 9780062292438

Dreaming Spies

by Laurie R. King


Since 1994, when Laurie R. King introduced Mary Russell in The Beekeeper's Apprentice, readers have enjoyed Russell's unusual partnership with Sherlock Holmes. Brilliant and idiosyncratic, Russell has proved a worthy match for Holmes both personally and professionally, as the couple has tackled cases on three continents. In Dreaming Spies, King delves into an episode in their lives long shrouded in mystery: a three-week sojourn in Japan in 1924.

On board a ship heading home to England from India, Holmes and Russell meet a young Japanese woman. Haruki Sato comes from a family of acrobats, but her skills go far beyond athleticism. Educated in the U.S., she is a quietly lethal combination of ninja and diplomat. Sato asks Holmes and Russell for their help with a small but dangerous task involving blackmail and forgery.

King uses Holmes and Russell's journey to give readers a crash course in Japanese culture, but since every experience provides information vital to the case, it never feels like overkill. Longtime King fans will appreciate frequent references to previous cases, though the book stands on its own as a compelling adventure.

Although series like this are best enjoyed in order, Dreaming Spies will give new readers a brief but thorough introduction to Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell. Their unusual partnership is, as always, a delight to observe, and King expertly combines rich historical detail, deftly drawn characters and taut suspense. For Holmes fans, mystery lovers and those interested in either Japan or Oxford, this novel is a multilayered and entirely enjoyable journey. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: A mystery rich with historical detail chronicling Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell's journey through Japan.

Bantam, $26, hardcover, 9780345531797

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The Very Best of Kate Elliott

by Kate Elliott


The Very Best of Kate Elliott is a great compilation of shorter works written by science-fiction and fantasy author Kate Elliott (of the Crown of Stars and Spiritwalker series) over a 20-year span. Best known for her stories that feature strong female lead characters who often defy the conventions of their particular world, Elliott writes that at an early age, she made a decision to "to populate my stories with whatever characters I wanted, especially ones who represented people like me." There are women who are willing to take extreme risks and endure tortuous personal suffering to protect the ones they love, twin sisters who face a difficult dilemma and endure a dramatic solution to protect their queendom, women who engage in forbidden sexual pleasure and those who just want to experience the full realm of freedom--a concept held only by the men of their tribe.

Elliott draws on a wealth of mythical and magical lore from around the world to flesh out her characters, who dabble in herbal witchcraft or believe in magic, and her settings, in which readers can find essences of Asia and the Middle East, hints of Medieval Europe and far-off futuristic lands. In this compendium, vibrant details, unusual names and quirky plot twists are evidence of Elliott's active imagination, which sets off on a kaleidoscopic journey into the multilayered realms of these fierce, brave and loyal women, offering new readers and those familiar with Elliott a delightful plunge into fantasy. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Discover: This series of sci-fi and fantasy short stories features unconventional female protagonists.

Tachyon, $15.95, paperback, 9781616961794

The Glittering World

by Robert Levy


Playwright Robert Levy weaves together a sparkling search for identity as several young people travel to a lonely artists' colony in the remote Canadian town of Starling Cove. Chef Michael "Blue" Whitley is seeking answers in the house his grandmother left him, the sale of which would give him the money he needs to save his restaurant in New York City. His best friend, Elisa, is looking for existential affirmation, too, as well as reasons to stay married to her therapist husband, Jason, who may be older but still struggles with his own demons and self-worth. Gabe rounds out the foursome, a street kid they met in the city who hovers near Blue with utter devotion.

The Glittering World is a fairy tale made distressingly real when Blue and Elisa disappear, perhaps at the hands of a supernatural race. The artist community may have disbanded decades ago, but echoes of their society and the events that transpired there continue to shape this world. This isn't the first time Blue has disappeared, his friends discover, and what he returned with is terrifying in its uncompromising reality.

Each character has a section from their respective viewpoints, first Blue, then Elisa, then Jason. Finally, it's Gabe who finds redemption and healing as he moves through the world of the Other Kind--beings beneath the earth that may not be as evil as they seem--and back to the glittering world as we know it. Levy's first novel is confident, brave and beautiful in every way, with resonant warmth and an understanding of the fundamentally singular human experience. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Discover: A thrilling tale of identity, fantasy and transformation.

Gallery, $26, hardcover, 9781476774527

Finn Fancy Necromancy

by Randy Henderson


Finn Gramaraye is having a tough day. Exiled to a formless void 25 years ago for a crime he didn't commit, he is planning to re-enter the human world when suddenly he encounters sabotage by mysterious forces. The worst part is not knowing specifically who has it out for him. It could be the unidentified entities who framed him when he was 15 years old, it could be factions in the world of wizardry, or it could even be someone from his own family.

The Gramarayes are necromancers, gathering magic essence (mana) from deceased magical folk. Dad has gone insane and mom is just a ghost. Finn's eldest brother, Mort, has kept the family business afloat during his exile, and might think Finn, a talented Talker who speaks to the dead, is back to take over. Finn's youngest brother, Petey, is sweet, dumb, incredibly loyal and thinks he's a werewolf, while Finn's older sister, Samantha, is allergic to magic and wants nothing to do with the family or its funeral home.

In addition to figuring out who's trying to frame and exile him yet again, Finn has to contend with conflicted feelings about his high school girlfriend and the girl next door, who's also sweet on him but more likely to smack him than kiss him. Because Finn's been gone since the 1980s, plenty of cultural shifts and unfamiliar references add to his confusion.

Finn Fancy Necromancy is Randy Henderson's first novel, and it's filled with seemingly effortless world-building and solid plotting, plus a fun murder mystery thrown in for good measure. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Discover: A delightfully fun fantasy full of magic, wit, colorfully drawn characters and a ton of 1980s pop-culture references.

Tor, $25.99, hardcover, 9780765378088

Biography & Memoir

My Avant-Garde Education: A Memoir

by Bernard Cooper


Before he concerned himself with Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, there were Brillo boxes and Life magazine editorials. As a boy, art critic Bernard Cooper (Maps to Anywhere) found art on a supermarket shelf. In My Avant-Garde Education, Cooper chronicles his coming-of-age as a member of the new guard and a student at CalArts in its infancy.

In its subject matter and its presentation--numbered sections that form a chronological pastiche akin to a Richard Hamilton collage--Cooper's memoir is solidly "pop." Raised in suburban Los Angeles, he learns to see the local Safeway as a gallery space, and he imparts a similar wonderment to the reader; in Cooper's prose there's an infectious enthusiasm, as if we, too, are on the cusp of a revolution. It's fitting, then, that the most charming parts of the memoir are his descriptions of performances, professors and kooky goings-on that are novel even today: a nude swimming pool on campus, a "happening" in which participants lick strawberry jam off a car, eccentric personas bred in the art world microcosm. His avant-garde education extended beyond the canvas, shaping his identity in galleries, on night drives and beneath the sheets.

At the end of the memoir are several essays. In "Uses of the Ghoulish," Cooper writes that, on his first assignment as a critic for Los Angeles magazine, he was "already torn between the memoirist's impulse to sift through the meanings of subjective experience and the critic's impulse to at least give the impression of objectivity." My Avant-Garde Education's strengths lie at that intersection, the often indistinguishable line between art and self. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer

Discover: An evocative memoir rife with imagery, art world oddity and remembrances of a counter-cultural movement.

W.W. Norton, $26.95, hardcover, 9780393240719

All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors


In 2002, Philip Connors left a plum position at the Wall Street Journal for a New Mexico fire lookout. Fire Season, his account of that experience, was a remarkable reflection on work, nature and the appeal of solitude. It also touched on his own demons, the subject of this powerful memoir, All the Wrong Places.

As a young man in the '90s settling into his first big job but still finding his way, Connors lives with contradiction: the son of a Minnesota pig farmer, he's now a New York journalist. He's out of place as a liberal in the Journal newsroom, he's white in a very black Brooklyn neighborhood, he pursues romance with the wrong women. But his younger brother Dan's suicide in 1996 at age 22, when Philip has newly arrived in New York, is the memoir's emotional core. It has colored Philip's every experience and prompted a search for clues to his brother's state of mind. He talks to Dan's friends, mines family history, recounts stories from his own memory, studies the autopsy report. Six years after his brother's death and just before he starts his fire season, Phil finally hears the wrenching but unprovable story of what may have driven his brother's despair. 

On its surface, All the Wrong Places is the story of a lost young man's search for explanations and stands as a moving account of grief. Through his writing, Connors eventually "finds a place to put it so that it wouldn't eat me alive," recognizing the futility of resolution and the necessity of connection. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Discover: This memoir by the author of the award-winning Fire Season is a lyrical, powerful and often funny account of the aftermath of grief.

W.W. Norton, $25.95, hardcover, 9780393088762

Children's & Young Adult

Listen, Slowly

by Thanhhà Lai


In Listen, Slowly, Newbery Honor author and National Book Award winner Thanhhà Lai (Inside Out and Back Again) describes Vietnam through the eyes of 12-year-old Mai Le, who visits her ancestral home for the first time. In this moving story, Mai accompanies Bà, her paternal grandmother, on a pilgrimage to discover what happened to her husband, deemed MIA during the Vietnam War.

Mai's and Bà's relationship, always close, deepens during this cathartic mission. Mai starts out as a self-involved teen, resentful of leaving her bikini-clad friends in Laguna Beach--and especially wary of leaving her best friend, Montana, famous for stealing other girls' boyfriends, alone with her secret crush. Lai smoothly integrates facts about what happened to the people of Vietnam without discussing the violence: the sights, sounds and smells, the wonderful foods and time-proven remedies (for parasites and acne), and the extraordinary sense of community and hospitality. Readers will identify with Mia's insightful and humorous reactions to alien traditions ("Is there one architect for the whole country?" she wonders) and language barriers, and their appreciation will grow along with Mia's as she comes to value how the neighbors band together to share meals and chores, and their sensitivity to Bà's loss in a nation long accustomed to occupation. The kindness and warmth the villagers show to Bà stand in stark relief to Mai's friendship with Montana.

This is a love story on many levels, between granddaughter and grandmother, grandmother and grandfather, and for the homeland one carries within. Details Lai plants early on add up to a powerful finish. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A beautiful counterpart to Thanhhà Lai's Inside Out and Back Again, in which a 12-year-old sees her ancestral home through her grandmother's eyes.

HarperCollins, $16.99, hardcover, 272p., ages 8-12, 9780062229182

Why'd They Wear That?: Fashion as the Mirror of History

by Sarah Albee


Arranged chronologically and touching on fashion and beauty as reflections of changing societies and times around the world, Sarah Albee's (Bugged: How Insects Changed History) highly visual volume asks readers to consider the role clothing serves and the statement it makes today.

Albee explains how fashion approaches differentiated classes and genders. In 300 B.C., Greek men wore tunics to the knee, women to the ankle. In the 19th century, men's top hats indicated wealth; laborers wore caps. Purple was reserved for royalty (from 900–600 B.C.) because the dye was so rare (made by Phoenicians in the city of Tyre from "snail snot"). Cortés pillaged the Aztecs, and brought back to Spain a red dye made from the cochineal (a legless, wingless female insect), a color adopted for Roman Catholic cardinals' robes and British military redcoats. Lighthearted subtitles disguise painful episodes, as with "Fashion Disasters"--the Mayan ritual of elongating heads by wrapping a young child's forehead between two boards, and bound feet for girls in 13th-century China (an x-ray of such deformed feet drives home the pain girls endured). And for "Dressed to Compress," the author explains that a corset could exert as much as "88 pounds of force on the internal organs." Albee also demonstrates a continuum regarding humans' obsession with youth (from the early 1500s to today), and Goth style (from 410 to today). A "dressed to kill" subtheme charts changing battle armor and "Warrior Wear."

Albee's survey of fashion and its purposes--often the oppression of women and the poor--is striking. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: A thoughtful, visually dynamic survey of fashion and beauty as reflections of changing societies and times around the world.

National Geographic, $19.99, hardcover, 192p., ages 10-up, 9781426319198

One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia

by Miranda Paul, illus. by Elizabeth Zunon


This uplifting picture book by debut author Miranda Paul speaks to the power of one person to make a difference for many.

Isatou Ceesay is a real person who used a plastic bag, after her grandmother's basket broke, to carry her fruit back to her village of Njau in Gambia. She leaves the broken basket to "crumble and mix back in with the dirt." Elizabeth Zunon (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, picture book edition) creates collage compositions with light-filled photographs of forests trimmed into leaf-shapes, and sumptuous fabrics pieced together for Isatou's mbuba (long dress). When Isatou's plastic bag eventually breaks, she discards it, too. But unlike Grandmother's basket, the plastic does not crumble and mix back in with the dirt. Instead, "one plastic bag becomes two. Then ten. Then a hundred." The village goats ingest the bags and die, and mosquitoes collect in the dirty pools of water trapped by the bags. Then Isatou gets an idea: she can cut the bags into plastic strips and crochet them into purses. Zunon dresses the women helping Isatou in fabric collages of glorious colors and patterns, and layered textures of the plastic threads give the compositions a tactile quality. Paul's gentle repetition plays up the transformation of the plastic bags, as one woman chooses a crocheted purse "and shows it to one friend. Then two. Then ten."

Paul dots the text with Wolof phrases, and includes a glossary, along with a timeline and further reading for young people about other entrepreneurs in Uganda, Ghana and Kenya. Inspiring. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: An inspiring true story of a woman who transformed the plastic bags littering her village into a source of beauty.

Millbrook/Lerner, $19.99, hardcover, 32p., ages 6-8, 9781467716086

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Author Buzz

Forgetting to Remember

by M.J. Rose

Dear Reader,

I've always loved reading time travel but it took a 19th century tiny portrait of a man's eye--just a man's eye--framed in small colorful opals to inspire me to write one myself. 

Who was he? Who had painted a portrait of just his eye? Why?

Forgetting to Remember is my answer to those questions.

Setting aside grief from the fallout of the second World War and putting her energy into curating an upcoming show critical to her career as the Keeper of the Metalworks at London's renowned Victoria and Albert Museum, Jeannine Maycroft stumbles upon a unique collection of jewel-framed miniature eye portraits--a brilliant romantic device and clandestine love token of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One piece among the assembly intrigues her more than all the others: a twilight-blue man's eye framed by opals shimmering with enchanting flashes of fiery color. But the beauty is just the beginning. Not only is the painting a self-portrait of one of her favorite Pre-Raphaelite artists, Ashe Lloyd Lewis, but the brooch itself is a portal eight decades into the past.

Despite being cast into an era she was never meant to be in, Jeannine and Ashe develop an immediate and passionate bond, complicated by the undeniable fact that she does not belong in 1867, and the disaster about to destroy her family and reputation in her time.

Striving to live a dual life and dangerously straddling two time periods, Jeannine fights to protect her career and her father from scandal in the present while desperately trying to save her lover's life in the past.

M.J. Rose
https://www.mjrose.com/content/

Buy now and support your local indie bookstore>

AuthorBuzz: Blue Box Press: Forgetting to Remember by M.J. Rose

Publisher: 
Blue Box Press

Pub Date: 
March 26, 2024

ISBN:
9781957568942

List Price: 
$16.99 Paperback

Where It Begins:
A Pucked Novella

by Helena Hunting

Dear Reader,

Falling in love isn't easy. But as a single mom with a teenager, falling in love with a single dad is on par with mountain climbing while wearing Crocs: Dangerous and verging on impossible. 

Where It Begins is the origin story of Skye Hall and Sidney Butterson (such an unfortunate last name), the parents of the heroine in the NYT Bestseller Pucked. It's a laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about finding love where you least expect it.

Helena Hunting
https://helenahunting.com/
https://www.1001darknights.com/authors/collection-ten/helena-hunting-where-it-begins/


Available on Kobo

AuthorBuzz: Where It Begins: A Pucked Novella by Helena Hunting

Publisher: 
1001 Dark Nights Press

Pub Date: 
March 4, 2024

ISBN:
9798885420488

List Price: 
$2.99 e-book

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