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Week of Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Today's issue has several outstanding works of engaging nonfiction. In Gather Me, a memoir that's warm, reflective, and full of literary joy, Glory Edim, creator of the online book club Well-Read Black Girl, leads readers on the journey that shaped her as a writer and a person. In Valley So Low, journalist Jared Sullivan provides a detailed and compelling account of the Kingston, Tenn., coal-ash disaster that spread enormous amounts of slurry over the surrounding land and waterways; and in Ghosts of Crook County, Russell Cobb delves into the treacherous history of corruption and desperation surrounding an oil-rich plot of land in Oklahoma. Plus, for young adults, A Constellation of Minor Bears by Jen Ferguson poetically portrays the messiness and exhilaration of love (of all kinds) as two siblings and their best friend hike the Pacific Crest Trail in an adventure stunningly entwined with Indigenous star stories.

In The Writer's Life, novelist Jeff VanderMeer shares what inspired him to reopen the archives of his beloved Southern Reach trilogy and write a surprise fourth installment, Absolution.

--Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

The Best Books This Week

Fiction

Clean

by Alia Trabucco Zerán, transl. by Sophie Hughes

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Clean, by International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán, opens as the narrator introduces herself: "My name is Estela. Can you hear me?" The context of Estela's situation is unclear at first, but readers soon understand that she is alone in a room with a two-way mirror, offering some kind of testimony or confession. She isn't being interrogated, but the entirety of the novel, rendered in a taut translation from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, could be seen as Estela's answer to the question: What happened to "the girl"?

Estela works as a maid for the Jensen family in Santiago, Chile, hired one week before their only daughter, Julia, is born. It is Julia who has died, a fact revealed from the start--"The girl dies. Did you hear this time? The girl dies and she's still dead, no matter where I begin." Estela's voice is sharp and incisive, offering commentary on her role in the house and on each member of the family, whom she describes as "an unhappy little girl, a woman keeping up appearances and a man keeping count: of every minute, every peso, every conquest." There is an eerie calm in her telling, which is full of tension and the certainty of her story's tragic end and undercut by a pacing that feels at once urgent and detached. Trabucco Zerán probes issues of power and class, and by the novel's conclusion, readers must consider the broader forces at play, the ones that ask: Who gets to tell the stories and who is actually listening? Readers will swallow Clean in one breathless gulp and then ruminate on it for days. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Discover: Alia Trabucco Zerán's Clean probes issues of power and class and forces readers to consider the broader forces at play, the ones that ask who gets to tell the stories and who is listening.

Riverhead Books, $29, hardcover, 272p., 9780593850510

Absolution

by Jeff VanderMeer

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In Absolution, the unexpected fourth installment in his acclaimed Southern Reach trilogy, master weird-fiction author Jeff VanderMeer gives fans longtime and new alike an expansive and thrilling look at the world of Area X and its inhabitants--in all their forms. Split into three sections, Absolution tells the stories of three early expeditions into the Forgotten Coast: a team of ill-fated biologists; a Central investigator named Old Jim who, years later, is determined to unravel the mystery of what happened to those biologists; and Lowry, a member of one of the initial teams to enter the area after the border goes down.

Like the other Southern Reach novels, Absolution delights in its intricate eccentricities. Due in particular to its three-part, nesting-doll structure, the novel seems to be posing as a puzzle-box mystery, but the more readers attempt to slot its pieces into place, the more confounded they may become. Ultimately, VanderMeer uses the novel's neo-noir trappings--especially in the second section, in which Old Jim plays detective as he uses misleading archival documents to track down answers--to remind readers that this set of mysteries cannot (or maybe should not) be untangled. While Old Jim's Sisyphean task of interpreting garbled histories and morphing landscapes guides most of the novel, VanderMeer has yet another surprise in store for readers in the third part, which follows the most unlikable and yet perhaps funniest character to have appeared in the series yet. Irreverent and foolish, entertaining and yet horrifying, Lowry and the fever dream of a finale he creates gives even VanderMeer's biggest fans something new to experience. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Discover: Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer's surprise fourth installment in his Southern Reach series, is as mind-bending, disturbing, and darkly funny as ever.

MCD, $30, hardcover, 464p., 9780374616595

Mystery & Thriller

The Puzzle Box

by Danielle Trussoni

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A 19th-century secret lies at the heart of a gripping plot that combines Japanese culture, female samurai, and a puzzle savant with unusual skills in The Puzzle Box, Danielle Trussoni's astounding sequel to The Puzzle Master.

The Puzzle Box brings back Mike Brink, whose brain injury during a high school football game left him with acquired savantism. Now a well-known puzzle creator, Mike sees interlocking patterns in everything.

The imperial family of Japan hires Mike to open the legendary Dragon Puzzle Box, unopened since a blind mechanical master built it in 1868. No one has survived trying to open the box, which is loaded with lethal traps. It can be accessed only once every 12 years, during the first full moon in the Year of the Dragon. No one knows what the box holds, though legend suggests it contains vital secrets. A band of female samurai, underground for decades, also want what's in the box.

Trussoni (Angelopolis; The Fortress) mines extreme suspense through Mike's attempts to open the box, which tests every aspect of his skills. Trussoni continues to explore her complicated character with depth and verve: Mike's genius at puzzle solving led to his solitary existence, and he's reluctant to let many into his inner circle. His closest relationship is with his emotional-support dachshund, Conundrum ("Connie for short"), who accompanies him to Japan.

The Puzzle Box's thrilling plot features fascinating details of Japanese history and culture, a bit of espionage, and the ultimate puzzle-solving challenge. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

Discover: A master at solving puzzles attempts to open a Japanese box that's loaded with lethal traps in this astounding thriller.

Random House, $30, hardcover, 336p., 9780593595329

Leave the Girls Behind

by Jacqueline Bublitz

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The victims of most murderers are obvious: the deceased person and their family and friends, whose pain is never ending. But Jacqueline Bublitz (Before You Knew My Name) showcases a killer's less obvious victims in her emotionally charged second novel, Leave the Girls Behind. These victims are the killer's own family and friends, who may not have known his proclivities and were inadvertently drawn into his web.

Bublitz examines these victims and depicts how their history with the killer affects their present, the kind of people they become, and the kind of people they come to be in relationships with, some of whom may have violence in their veins.

Manhattan bartender Ruth-Ann Baker was seven years old when her best friend Beth Lovely vanished from a playground in Hoben, Conn.; her body was eventually found in a shallow grave. Popular teacher Ethan Oswald was convicted of Beth's murder and died in prison a few years into his sentence. In the ensuing 19 years, Ruth-Ann has become obsessed with Beth's death and believes that Ethan murdered other girls. She's convinced that all their ghosts visit her. When another girl goes missing from Hoben, Ruth-Ann can't help but see startling similarities in their cases, even if Ethan is gone. As she continues her investigation, she finds evidence that Ethan might not have been working alone.

As memories of Ruth-Ann's past surface, her stability unravels. Her pursuit of Ethan's alleged accomplices and the truth of what happened evokes empathy for her and the women she encounters. The ingenious plot of Leave the Girls Behind delivers genuine emotion coupled with intense suspense. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

Discover: A young woman's obsession with a killer and his alleged accomplices forms the foundation of this ingenious novel.

Emily Bestler/Atria, $18.99, paperback, 368p., 9781982199050

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The Last Dragon of the East

by Katrina Kwan

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A young man with a mystical gift is drawn into an adventure out of legend in the stunning, folklore-inspired romantic fantasy The Last Dragon of the East by Chinese Canadian author Katrina Kwan (Knives, Seasoning, and a Dash of Love).

Sai helps his ailing, widowed mother run the family teahouse, but his side hustle is using his ability to see the red strings of fate to help people find their fated soul mates. He has no idea how he came by his ability, nor why his own string is gray and frayed. Then a local doctor sells Sai two dragon scales as a remedy for his mother's illness, and Sai is caught up in the cruel emperor's scheme to capture the last dragon for his own uses. Sai has no hope for his search, but "the green dragon, queen of the bamboo forests and golden wheat fields," soon finds him. The dragon can transform into a beautiful woman, and she holds the other end of Sai's frayed thread. She is his fated mate, but to Sai's distress, she wants nothing to do with him.

Kwan's fantasy world takes inspiration from Chinese mythology. This romantic fairy tale weaves together multiple folktales and is populated by heroes and monsters from legend. At its core lies a tragic story of loss, betrayal, and grief. Fantasy readers who like their novels to contain a strong romantic component will find themselves spirited away by this epic, poetic quest for love and healing. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Discover: A young man with a mystical gift must find a dragon in this romantic, poetic fairy-tale adventure.

Saga Press/S&S, $17.99, paperback, 320p., 9781668051238

Romance

Perfect Fit

by Clare Gilmore

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Clare Gilmore's smart, swoony sophomore rom-com, Perfect Fit, follows fashion start-up CEO Josephine "Josie" Davis as she wrestles with her growing attraction to a handsome consultant and the perennial question of whether and how to balance work, life, and (what might be) love.

Josie has spent her 20s feverishly building Revenant, her Austin, Tex., sustainable clothing brand, and trying to stay out of the spotlight. After an ill-advised kiss in high school that blew up her life in person and on social media, Josie has focused intently on creating a successful company. When her company's new consultant turns out to be Will Grant, her high school best friend's twin brother (see: ill-advised kiss), Josie is forced to confront her inconvenient desire for Will and the distinct possibility that she's invested her entire self-worth into her work. 

Gilmore (Love Interest) highlights the insidious ways a person's self-esteem can become entangled with both productivity and public perception, creating some necessary epiphanies for Josie alongside a sweet slow-burn romance. Josie's "biker gang," fellow cyclists Giovanna and Leonie, and her best friend/right-hand woman, Camila, provide both comic relief and wise female perspectives, while Will proves the perfect book boyfriend: handsome, smart, thoughtful, and impossibly kind, with enough of his own baggage to create a modicum of conflict. Although readers can guess how the love story will unfold, the true "perfect fit" of Josie's story is--satisfyingly--centered on finally designing a life to the measurements she chooses. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: Clare Gilmore's smart, swoony sophomore rom-com considers the challenge of work-life balance as fashion start-up CEO Josie wrestles with her attraction to a handsome consultant.

St. Martin's Griffin, $18, paperback, 352p., 9781250880567

Biography & Memoir

Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me

by Glory Edim

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Long before she created her online book club, Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim found solace and inspiration in literature. In her insightful first memoir, Gather Me, Edim (On Girlhood) traces her life's journey through the books and authors that have shaped her as a writer and a person.

The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Edim adored her father and was devastated when he suddenly moved back to Nigeria after her parents' divorce. She spent much of her childhood caring for her two younger brothers and, when she was older, dealing with her mother's mental illness. But through the conflicts, challenges, and questions about her family and her future, Edim repeatedly turned to books: wise, powerful narratives that helped her see herself more clearly and eventually find her place in the world. Books helped her make sense of her family dynamics while providing an important counter to the prevailing narratives of a white-dominated society.

Edim's memoir reflects on seminal Black texts, as well as texts by white authors such as Louisa May Alcott that she encountered as a student and a young woman. As she kept working to understand herself and find a path forward, her beloved books provided companionship, wisdom, and characters who became Edim's friends. She draws insightful parallels between the books she loves and her own life, and concludes with a letter to her young son, Zikomo, about the influence of stories on a person's identity.

Warm, reflective, and full of literary joy, Gather Me is a dynamic account of one woman building her life on a solid foundation of great books. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: Glory Edim's warm, insightful memoir traces her life's journey through the books and authors that have shaped her.

Ballantine Books, $28, hardcover, 288p., 9780525619796

Political Science

Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe

by Jared Sullivan

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Journalist Jared Sullivan's compelling Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe details the aftermath of the 2008 collapse of a holding pond that contained waste byproduct from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston, Tenn., power station. The catastrophe released "more than a billion gallons of coal-ash slurry--about fifteen hundred times the volume of liquid that flows over Niagara Falls each second," burying some 300 acres of property and swamping nearby waterways. The spill is the "single largest industrial disaster in U.S. history in terms of volume," yet the extent of its damage has been little known outside of the region. Until now.

Sullivan focuses on attorney Jim Scott and the workers he represented in a lawsuit against Jacobs Engineering, the environmental recovery firm hired by TVA to clean up after the disaster. These workers, sometimes called " 'the Expendables,' because that was how Jacobs and TVA had treated them," came home covered in coal ash, a substance they were repeatedly told posed no risk to them. But over the next several years, dozens of people would find their health forever compromised.

Their legal battle finally concluded in 2023 with a settlement for the affected workers, over 50 of whom had already died. Yet the settlement, a mere 12% of Jacobs's annual profit, was woefully inadequate. Despite being full of countless struggles and disappointments, Valley So Low is a necessary and inspiring book, with Sullivan's sensitive retelling of these difficult events putting "the best of humanity and the worst of humanity" on display--all in one heartbreaking case. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Discover: Jared Sullivan's detailed and compelling account of the Kingston, Tenn., coal-ash disaster is a heartbreaking yet inspiring legal drama that reminds readers of the strength of ordinary people.

Knopf, $30, hardcover, 384p., 9780593321119

Social Science

Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land

by Russell Cobb

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Corrupt oil barons and desperate people struggle to possess a plot of oil-rich land in the meticulously researched, vividly told Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land, a work of historical nonfictionby fourth-generation Oklahoman author Russell Cobb (The Great Oklahoma Swindle).

Cobb thoroughly explores the practice of land transfers "from Native hands to the portfolios of white oilmen and their companies" via a single case, that of the allotment granted to a deceased boy named Tommy Atkins. The boy's mother allegedly made a tidy sum by signing the land over to famous early-1900s Tulsa philanthropist and oilman Charles Page, who made much of his fortune from oil drilled on Tommy's land. Cobb digs deeper into the facts of the case and finds "a legal Pandora's box containing vital questions about land ownership, racial identity, and oil wealth." Several trials attempted to decide who owned the rights to Tommy's land. Was it Page, the woman claiming to be Tommy's mother, one of the men who claimed to be Tommy himself, or the Muscogee Nation? Cobb asks the real question: Did Tommy Atkins even exist?

Cobb spent six years researching this book and notes that the historical issues it raises still affect contemporary Oklahoma: "We can only ignore these voices for so long." He introduces readers to swindlers, greed-driven white men, Muscogee citizens caught between opportunists and the law, and a Black woman who peddled liquor and other vices. True-crime and social science readers will find this tangled tale fascinating. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Discover: This well-researched and vividly told account of Oklahoma's oil boom highlights the corruption, opportunism, and racism that birthed the modern oil and gas industry.

Beacon Press, $32.95, hardcover, 304p., 9780807007372

Sports

Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community

by Phoebe Wang

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In her thoughtful first essay collection, Relative to Wind, poet Phoebe Wang reflects on her journey from complete novice to experienced sailor, and the parallels between sailing and the creative life.

A first-generation Chinese Canadian, Wang (Waking Occupations) discovered sailing almost by accident when a roommate invited her out on his "new" boat, purchased secondhand. Intrigued by the entirely new world (and language) she found out on the water, Wang began serving as a crew member for weekly races at the Queen City Yacht Club (QCYC) in Toronto, Ontario. Drawn in by the camaraderie she found aboard and the physical and mental challenges of sailing, Wang began delving into the tradition's complex history, including its precise yet oblique language, like a secret code; its roots in colonial history and exploitation; and the long, mostly oral histories of Queen City and other sailing clubs. She takes readers along as she learns to tie knots and trim sails, pores over old maps to pinpoint QCYC's original location, and relishes the adventure of life on the water.

With an eye for telling details, Wang considers the plentiful metaphors that sailing provides for life and creativity. She captures the banter of her fellow crew members, considers how sailing has shaped her adult identity and fed into her existing sense of self, and explores the contrast between an image of serenity and a more chaotic reality, as both a sailor and a writer. As she contends with challenges nautical and artistic, Wang remains devoted to sailing and writing: she is an accomplished "maker of knots, a trimmer of stories." --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: Chinese Canadian poet Phoebe Wang's first essay collection reflects on her journey to becoming an avid sailor, and the parallels between sailing and the writing life.

Assembly Press, $17.95, paperback, 280p., 9781738009824

Art & Photography

Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings

by Tommy Silk

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When Connecticut-raised New Yorker Tommy Silk embarked on a "harebrained scheme to track down as many landmarks in New York City as possi­ble" and photograph them, a popular Instagram account was born (@LandmarksofNY). Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings gathers Silk's work into a book that would spruce up a coffee table in any ZIP code.

Showcased here are 120-odd photos of New York City buildings and clusters thereof; each image shares the page with a corresponding text that concludes, when applicable, with the year the subject was landmarked. While roughly half of Hidden Landmarks of New York is devoted to Manhattan sites, Silk dutifully represents each of New York's five boroughs. Readers can expect to see houses of worship, historic hubs of abolitionist activity and gay activism, firehouses (yes, including the one from Ghostbusters), and places that famous people called home (Manhattan's Langston Hughes House, Brooklyn's Truman Capote House, the Bronx's Poe Cottage).

Each large-scale, full-color image is so commanding that it would also make a big impression in a smaller format--think souvenir postcard. Likewise, the texts are punchy, often finding Silk unable to repress his zeal for his subject ("Want to feel Swiss in a formerly Polish neighborhood across from a church built for Italians?"). There are snatches of street life in many photos--outdoor diners here, dog walkers there--as if the book is hinting that, dazzling and humbling as the city's architecture is, New Yorkers are what make the city itself. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Discover: A popular Instagram page devoted to New York City landmarks has become a photography book that would spruce up a coffee table in any ZIP code.

Black Dog & Leventhal, $30, hardcover, 288p., 9780762486762

Children's & Young Adult

A Constellation of Minor Bears

by Jen Ferguson

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After a climbing accident led to a permanent injury and splintered their once unbreakable bond, a brother, a sister, and their best friend hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) together in this marvelous contemporary YA novel about love--for others and for the land.

Ever since Hank's (18, white) climbing accident, his half-sister, Molly (17, Metís, "half-white"), has tiptoed around him. The duo's best friend, Tray (18, Metís), has been secretly crushing on Molly--who blames him for Hank's fall--while continuing to burn sweetgrass for Hank's healing. Hank simply wishes both would see that he's "not broken, just changed." The trio decides to hike the PCT together, and over its hundreds of miles, they both prod and soothe each other's mental wounds. Along the way, they "adopt" the sunnily extroverted Brynn, a self-identifying "mid-fat" girl (compared to Molly, who Brynn calls "small fat"). Brynn has wounds of her own and, when the quartet stops in an "only mildly depressing" town, flirting and singing cement momentous new friendships.

A Constellation of Minor Bears by Jen Ferguson (Those Pink Mountain Nights) poetically portrays the messiness and exhilaration of love (of all kinds) against the backdrop of the PCT's breathtaking vistas. The teens' tender hearts are revealed through a lyrical, multi-POV narrative that dips seamlessly into spectacularly funny moments. Tray, to whom it's "important not to pass as a settler," stunningly connects their adventure to Indigenous star stories, to song, to the land. Ferguson roots her novel in current teen struggles, deftly including parental pressure and a fat-positive mindset. A striking story in which accountability coexists with love, and growth is as important as forgiveness. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Discover: A sister, brother, and their best friend hike the Pacific Crest Trail after an accident splintered their unbreakable bond in this marvelous YA story of siblinghood, friendship, and the land.

Heartdrum, $19.99, hardcover, 352p., ages 13-up, 9780063334229

No Rules Tonight: A Graphic Novel

by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada

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In their lauded Banned Book Club, Korean creative team Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada, with illustrator Ko Hyung-Ju, used the graphic novel format to tell Kim's gripping story of book club rebellion under martial law. Kim and Estrada inspiringly continue Kim's autobiographical journey in No Rules Tonight, this time illustrated by Estrada himself.

No Rules Tonight opens in 1984, after Hyun Sook's banned book club was disbanded. The government's draconian curfews have been lifted, but "saying, thinking, watching, writing, or reading anything that the regime didn't approve of could still get me... arrested, beaten, or even killed." Hyun Sook feeds her curiosity and finds companionship through a Masked Folk Dance Team: "I studied Talchum, a thousand-year-old art form that was like band, musical theater, dance, history, and activism all rolled up into one." As winter break approaches, the team prepares for their annual hiking trip. The team's director, however, is unable to accompany them--when he doesn't stand at attention during the daily 5 p.m. playing of the national anthem, he is arrested and imprisoned.

Kim and Estrada highlight a sobering history. Kim is an inclusive storyteller who expands her own experiences through detailed examinations of her family, friends, acquaintances, and school. Her memories of team practices and performances are particularly resonant as she underscores the lifesaving power of art. Estrada displays that energy through full-color pages and comic panels that move, bend, and break, allowing the illustrations--and emotions--to spill out into uncontained full-page bleeds. He adroitly balances the all-too-real fear with humor, connection, and pure joy. --Terry Hong

Discover: Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada continue creatively collaborating to reveal Kim's inspiring experiences in 1980s Korea during a dangerous, totalitarian regime.

Penguin Workshop, $17.99, paperback, 208p., ages 12-up, 9780593521304

Deer Run Home

by Ann Clare LeZotte

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Ann Clare LeZotte (Show Me a Sign) takes inspiration from a real-life court case and her own experiences as a "completely deaf" member of the Deaf community to sensitively explore language deprivation among deaf children in Deer Run Home, a devastating but hopeful middle-grade novel-in-verse.

Twelve-year-old Effie, who's deaf, speaks American Sign Language (ASL), which her family refuses to learn. She and her sister, Deja, live with their mom and stepdad during the Covid-19 pandemic. When Effie starts having bad dreams, Effie's mom--who will only listen if Effie uses her oral voice--reasons that Effie is "acting out." The girls are sent to their dad's trailer, where he claps in Effie's face or points at things to communicate. Her one comfort is Golden Eyes, a lone deer who's been separated from his herd because of the "new, small-box/ too-close-together houses" being built on the deer's land. When schools reopen, Effie is fortunately assigned to her previous ASL interpreter, Miss Kathy. The interpreter notices that Effie is being neglected and convinces Effie's dad to let the girl stay with her for a month. But Miss Kathy senses that something far worse may have happened to Effie. Is Effie ready to unlock those memories?

Deer Run Home is a heartrending novel that deals with the pain and trauma of child sexual abuse and neglect yet remains encouraging in its exploration of resiliency, advocating for oneself, and self-worth. LeZotte deftly contrasts the neglect and abuse Effie experiences at home with the support and compassion she receives at school, and skillfully connects the community's treatment of nature to Effie's family's view of her. Effie, like the displaced deer population, has no sanctuary. A moving, emotionally affecting novel. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader

Discover: This heartrending yet encouraging middle grade novel-in-verse explores language deprivation among deaf children.

Scholastic, $18.99, hardcover, 224p., ages 10-up, 9781339021904

Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes that Dot Our Planet

by Geo Rutherford

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Art educator Geo Rutherford began to make a name for herself on TikTok in October of 2020, when she started posting a yearly "Spooky Lake Month" video series. The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response has resulted in Spooky Lakes the book, a beautifully illustrated work showcasing 25 fascinating and noteworthy lakes from around the globe.

Rutherford highlights lakes from every continent, which include one under ice in Antarctica, another created by a meteorite in Europe, and one accessible only through a hole in the middle of an Australian cow field. She explains the myriad ways lakes develop--volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes, sometimes even humans--as well as the numerous lifeforms they may contain: sharks, jellyfish, nerpa seals, and more. Rutherford also reveals tantalizing tidbits one typically doesn't associate with lakes. For example, when the season becomes warm enough to melt the ice of Roopkund Lake in India, "the solitude of the lake is exposed as untrue" and hundreds of human skeletons are revealed "hidden beneath the snow." (Rutherford notes that "we still don't know why there are so many human remains there.")

Middle-grade readers may be drawn into the extraordinary world of limnology (the study of lakes) through Rutherford's spellbinding details and amazing facts. As part of the book's backmatter, Rutherford includes an author's note (though no map) that explains how she found a "balance between accuracy and artistic interpretation" in her gouache illustrations. This careful intentionality creates an eye-catching array of images in bright colors and lifelike textures that capture the power and atmosphere of each locale. Rutherford's meticulously researched content and harmonious art make a spectacular splash. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Discover: A TikTok sensation takes book form in this beguiling exploration of unusual lakes from around the world.

Abrams Books for Young Readers, $24.99, hardcover, 96p., ages 8-11, 9781419770531

October Stars

The Writer's Life

Jeff VanderMeer: The Weird, Dark Glamour of the Thing

Jeff VanderMeer
(photo: Ditte Valente)

Jeff VanderMeer is the award-winning author of multiple series--including the Ambergris Trilogy, the Borne novels, and the Southern Reach trilogy--as well as standalones such as Hummingbird Salamander. Absolution (MCD, $30) is the surprise fourth novel in the Southern Reach world.

What brought you back to the Southern Reach Trilogy now?

The fact that it's the 10th anniversary of the original book is coincidental. I had the idea way back in 2017. There was all this stuff about the Séance and Science Brigade  that was unable to be unentangled in the first three books. It left a question in my mind, and I always found it fascinating. The idea for the S&SB actually originated when I was in this place called the Coral Castle that was built by this eccentric Latvian who tried to make some of the formations in this Coral Castle attune to things like the equinox and lunar viewings. When I visited it, there was a team of psychics and a team of scientists checking out the place. That always stuck with me.

Then, last year everything clicked around the end of June/July. From August 1 until September 31, all I did was write a lot of it so spontaneously I don't even remember writing things. By the end of December, I had a 150,000-word novel, which has never happened. The gestation period was so long I guess that allowed it to happen. But it was an intense experience of having all these ecstatic visions and literally writing nonstop every day. It was exhausting but exhilarating.

Why did the writing's nesting-doll, triptych structure feel right for this book?

I've always been a big fan of narratives where there's an accumulation of different stories that interweave, and you get this lovely frisson of discovery from the way they're interacting. As someone who writes a lot of surreal stuff and will often wake up from a dream that inspires a novel, I like to have a really structured scaffolding for the book, so it doesn't just drift off into space. When I realized it's in three parts written completely differently that all interlock, that's what allowed me to write the novel. After I looked at what I'd done, I thought it was a little like reading the original trilogy but in one book, although I hadn't intended that.

Like your recent novel Hummingbird Salamander, this book has some noir/detective elements. What appeals to you about that genre?  

The risk when you repurpose a trope or a genre is that you hope you give the reader something new that they like to compensate for the fact that you're defamiliarizing things. In this case, it's a noir cosmic mystery. But what I love about the noir-detective genre is that it's meshed with espionage fiction. The darkest of John le Carré's novels mesh what I would call some sensibility of noir with espionage fiction. I'm a huge fan also of the interiority of le Carré's characters, which I don't know if he gets enough credit for. I love the idea of being all in, beside Old Jim, trying to solve this mystery and trying to untangle the S&SB, knowing that the border is going to come down soon.

Also, noir is known for being dark but not grim, you know? There's the reflection of the neon lights on the streets at night and there's a kind of dark beauty to that. Readers of that genre don't see it as just pessimistic. That's just part of the weird dark glamour of the thing.

In that vein, this novel has a perhaps surprising amount of humor in it. What do you think the role of humor is in a book like this?

I do think the sense of humor I bring to things is something not noticed as much, maybe because of the surrealness of the context. Authority, for example, is meant to be a really humorous book, in a dark way, about bureaucracy. Here and in other books like Borne, it's a really necessary component to avoid monotone and to avoid what I would call an unrealistic view of how even dire events go down. Even nurses in the ER are going to make very dark jokes to center themselves. It's not like they're going to always be serious. There's always a counterpoint.

And that allows me to do something I've never been able to do before, which is use humor to have extremely transgressive themes that, if they were played without humor, wouldn't be as effective and would just be kind of a slog. I got somewhere different with the weird-fiction aspect by using humor. So, it's always very important to me. I try to make it as much of a component of my fiction as possible because it's also part of who I am. 

What's with the plethora of journals and the focus on the archival hunt for answers in this book, in particular, but also in Southern Reach as a whole?

For the Ambergris series, I studied tons of history and historical theory, Byzantine history from different points of views. What I eventually came to is that there's an interesting tension for fiction in competing versions of the same event because even the most objective historian is still bringing a point of view. That was really exciting to me.  

In this book, we get slightly different versions in the three parts. You get this story that you think you're being just told. Then, you realize Old Jim is constructing it by going through the archives about this 20-year-old expedition and bringing in references to characters who will be more pivotal in Part Two. The layering of that can be very powerful. By the time you get to Part Three, the presence of that, the power of that, is still there. It's still influencing events. That's the way things work in the real world, too. I do think there's something powerful about seeing the detritus of the expedition in Absolution condensed down to dead animals in a stone shed. I think those things become powerful symbols for both a striving that's honorable but also the failures of our ability to understand things.

In your book's acknowledgments, you mention Andy Marlowe, your research assistant and the incredible artist behind the divider images. Can you tell us a bit about that partnership?

First, regarding writing Cass and Jim, sometimes the first reader is really invaluable. In this case, without a close friend to bounce the dialogue off of, that relationship would have been not as good. For some reason, I was having a hard time seeing it. My friend was able to inhabit some scenes even as I wrote them, which changed my creative process in a good way.

As for Andy Marlowe, I asked a professor at FSU if they'd recommend someone as an intern because this was the first novel where morning, noon, and night I was writing. If I stopped for a second, I was going to lose the dream, so to speak. It started out as just a regular research thing. I need this, I need that. One of the things I needed was for someone to map the environmental sites that were real-world influences on the novel to cultural and social sites like African American graveyards, Spanish Conquest sites, things like that, because a lot of information is not layered in official records. It's suppressed or just not known. When I asked them to research the CIA's weird experiments in the '70s, I got back a file that included the CIA's research into the fact that some of their psychics were having dreams of alligators in the future, telling them what the future was going to be. Then, I was like, "Could you translate Schubert's Winter Journey lyrics into English for me?" And they were like, "Sure, I know German!" And then later on, more absurdly, I was like, "Andy, can you do alligator versions of the Schubert lyrics?" And Andy was like, "Sure I can do that!" Because Andy is steeped in North Florida. Suddenly, I was like, "Andy, can you take photos of dead things and jars of the strange aquarium?" "Sure." And that was the other thing that I loved and why we'll probably collaborate in the future: every weird thing I asked for, they were like, "Sure, I can do that." It was just such a wonderful thing that happened as a result of doing the novel. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Book Candy

Book Candy

Just in time for Halloween, CrimeReads examines "Terrifying Literary Horror Set in Beautiful, Familiar Places."

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Open Culture's offer: "Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami's Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More."

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Booked Up, the late Larry McMurtry's iconic bookstore in Archer City, Tex., has been sold by Chip and Joanna Gaines to the Archer City Writers Workshop, which will create the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.

Rediscover

Rediscover: Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana, "the elfin novelist, cultural critic, playwright and artist whose crackling prose and lacerating wit captured the ravages of the AIDS crisis, Manhattan's downtown art scene, lurid true crimes and his own search for love," died October 23 at age 74, the New York Times reported. Indiana was the author of more than 10 books of fiction, memoir and criticism, "all of which tackled, in one way or another, a culture careering toward ruin."

Indiana arrived in New York City in 1978 and "began churning out poetry, film reviews and essays for indie presses, hoping to find his way as a playwright and novelist," the Times wrote. In 1985, Indiana became the arts editor of the Village Voice. For the next two and a half years, he upended "the pompous traditions of the form. It was, as he wrote later, a time of terrible emergency, and he used his essays to explore his rage at the government's indifference to the AIDS crisis and at an art world veering from joyous eclecticism to a grimly corporate market ethos."

Indiana disavowed his art criticism after he quit the Voice in 1988. "It had made him a star in a world that he hated--the amped-up, hyper-capitalist art world," the longtime editor Ira Silverberg, once one of Indiana's publishers, said. "He was a Marxist at heart, and he retreated into fiction, which is where he wanted to be anyway."

Indiana was best known for his lightly fictionalized American true-crime trilogy Resentment, Three Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference. Resentment: A Comedy (1997) uses the Los Angeles trial of the Menendez brothers as its backdrop; Three-Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999), explores the life of the serial killer who murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace; and Depraved Indifference (2001) is based on the mother-and-son murderers Sante and Kenneth Kimes.

"In the summer of 2017, the writer Bruce Hainley set out to exhume Mr. Indiana's columns from copies of The Voice that had been stored on microfilm in the library at the University of California, Los Angeles," the Times wrote. "After typing them up, he put them on a hard drive and gave it to Hedi El Kholti, an editor of Semiotext(e), the avant-garde publishing house. Mr. El Kholti then persuaded an extremely ambivalent Mr. Indiana to allow him to publish the collection. Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns 1985-1988, edited by Mr. Hainley, appeared in 2018. Semiotext(e) had earlier published some of Mr. Indiana's out-of-print novels, earning him a new generation of reverent readers."

the #1 novel & the perfect gift

A #1 bestseller on The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times!

"Hannah is in top form here." --The New York Times

"Hannah again shines her light on overlooked women in history." --People Magazine

From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women--at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets--and becomes one of--the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm's way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.

St. Martin's Press: The Women by Kristin Hannah

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