NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Guest Post by Lauren Mead

ST is concerned about his owner Big Jim when his eyeball falls out and lands in the grass. He should be, considering that Big Jim has just turned into a zombie thanks to a mysterious virus that travels through screens. When it becomes clear that cheering Big Jim up with his favourite beer and a bag of Cheetos isn’t going to help, ST (a domesticated crow) and Dennis (a dog) set out across the wilds of post-apocalyptic Seattle to find a cure.

On his journey, ST encounters hordes of vicious humans who are suffering from the same malady as Big Jim. He braves a deadly market (for doughnuts), the aquarium (for answers) and follows cryptic rumours of the one remaining human who can save them all. ST must set aside his fears to find a way forward in this new, and often frightening world.

I read Hollow Kingdom before COVID-19 was a phrase in my everyday life. I can remember thinking that I was glad there wasn’t some deadly virus on the loose, because gosh, wouldn’t that be awful? At the time, it kind of felt like it would be the end of the world. I’m a germaphobe, so I don’t handle sickness very well on a good day. Throw in a worldwide pandemic and you’ve got a recipe for this girl to never leave her house again. I didn’t, for awhile.

But if ST can face his fears in a zombie-infested world, I can sure as heck set foot outside. It’s funny how horror stories can have the opposite effect of real fear. Instead of making us want to hide, it makes us bolder to know that even if the worst, most terrifying thing were to happen, there would be a way forward. Horror gives us hope.

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton. Grand Central Publishing, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Lauren Mead has been published in The Danforth Review, The MacGuffin, Soliloquies and Forest for the Trees. She also writes for her blog, www.novelshrink.com.

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Guest Post by Karabi Mitra

Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth opens on the shores of a sea lapping at the edges of the Siberian Peninsula. Two young sisters are playing on the beach. It’s a simple enough setting. The older one is trying to get the younger one to come home. You don’t yet know why, but you’re starting to feel unsettled and you can almost feel the oncoming danger. By the end of the chapter, the girls have disappeared.

The chapters that follow are not an investigation into the disappearance. Instead they are stories of various inhabitants located in and around the Kamchatka Peninsula. The disappearance of the girls hangs over each of them, but the stories are about their own lives. A new mother struggling to come to terms with staying at home and giving up her career. A mother whose child similarly disappeared three years ago. And that’s when the patterns start emerging. The complexity of relationships, the underlying beliefs and mistrust towards certain groups of people. Natives are treated in a slightly different way. There is a distrust towards the so-called new people who have migrated to the region. There are superstitions and practices. And you realize that ultimately people are the same, no matter where they are. We’re all dealing with the same issues.

The setting of Disappearing Earth makes you feel as though you’ve dipped your fingers into a faraway world. The descriptions of the volcanoes and open tundras and thermal springs and open fields add an allure to the overall story. You sometimes feel as though you really are at the end of the world. The ending is stunning, and Julia Phillips ties up at the loose ends in a way that makes you close the book with a satisfied hush.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Penguin Random House, April 2020.

Reviewer bio: Karabi Mitra is an avid reader, based in Toronto. She also enjoys writing and has been published in various literary magazines such as Litro Magazine and Volney Road Review.

Guest Post by Natasha Djordjevic

Natalie Jenner’s debut novel, The Jane Austen Society, is a delightful, insightful tribute to the author who brought us so many memorable characters. The story is set at the end of WWII in Chawton, where Jane Austen spent the last part of her life and where she wrote her final three novels. A group of unlikely people become friends and form a society that has a mutual love for Jane Austen. They want to use their love to save her home and make it a museum with items of the era she resided in.

We’re introduced to Adam Berwick, a farmer who is the character we meet first, upon meeting with a stranger looking for Austen, develops an affection of Austen’s works; Dr. Gray, who is grieving over the loss of his wife; Mimi Harrison a Hollywood actress with a soft spot for Austen; Frances Knight, a descendant of Jane Austen’s brother; Evie Snow a housemaid working at the estate and who secretly catalogs the library; Adeline Lewis, an English teacher who has experienced a series of losses; Andrew Forrester, a lawyer handling the estate’s affairs; and Yardley Sinclair, an estate sales expert of Sotheby’s in London.

With an easy pace, a well-executed plot, and its ability to explore themes of grief, loss, identity, love, this is a novel that is sure to delight both Austen fans and newcomers to the author.

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner. St. Martin’s Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: My name is Natasha Djordjevic. My favorite genre to read is Historical Fiction, especially books set in the Tudor times. You can find my blog at poetryofreading.blogspot.com.

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Guest Post by Leah Browning

I Refuse is a novel by Per Petterson about two childhood friends. Tommy and Jim are now adults and have been estranged for many years when they unexpectedly cross paths on a bridge outside Oslo.

Per Petterson, who also grew up in Norway, is a thoughtful and moving writer. Overall, I see this book is a meditation on friendship, not only between the two main characters, but between others as well. There are several instances where a spontaneous act of kindness reverberates through another person’s day or even, in at least one case, an entire lifetime.

The book also focuses on something slipperier: the role of persistence or determination in a person’s life. One of the boys has a harsh, even brutal home life; the other has, in many ways, been luckier. Either could be destroyed by his circumstances.

At the beginning of the book, one of the men has been fishing, but it could have been either one: “As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away. I hadn’t even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars. I turned my back to the road, my frayed navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me. I’d had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mørk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.”

Ambition has pushed one of the men in a strange, sometimes cruel direction. In this time of social distancing, reading about the powerful impact of friends and family members feels especially relevant.

I Refuse by Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett). Graywolf Press, 2015.

Reviewer bio: Leah Browning edits the Apple Valley Review, which publishes short fiction, personal essays, and poetry in spring and fall issues. She occasionally blogs at https://leahbrowning.blogspot.com/.

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Guest Post by Ethan Hayes

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” These are the immortal opening lines of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel filled with so many more beautiful lines. The novel is concerning the generational story of Maconda and its founders, the family of Jose Arcadio Buendia.

I have found the novel to be filled with a wonderful whimsy that has made García Márquez famous. Every line is poetry that flows through the magical story that fills the pages. The main characters are the motley crew of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s family, who range from the dirt-eating Rebeca who wandered into the family to Jose Arcadio, the first-born son of Jose Arcadio Buendia who inherited his strength.

The novel is told in such a wonderful fairy tale style that blends magic into the storied events that plague this family and the town that they founded. One of García Márquez’s best works.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. 1967.

Reviewer bio: My name is Ethan Hayes. I am a writer from Colorado. I like to write fiction and fantasy as well as short prose. You can find my blog at https://ewwhayes.wordpress.com/.

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Guest Post by Dawn Corrigan

As a child I read voraciously, but erratically. When it was time to pick a new Nancy Drew, I made my selection based on the cover art, rather than reading in sequence. I reread old books just as often as seeking new ones. It wasn’t always clear where the books had come from.

Thus I had in my adolescent collection a copy of The Charmed Circle, a 1962 “teenage novel” by Dorothea J. Snow. Somewhere along the way it disappeared, but in 2014, in a fit of nostalgia, I ordered a used copy from Amazon, sorting through more than a dozen “Charmed Circle” titles until I found the right one. Then I stuck it on a shelf and forgot about it. But recently, in my search for comfort food reading, I took it down.

I thought I’d read a little and then quickly fall asleep. Instead, I stayed up past two and finished it. That’s how it was when I was a teenager, too. Sometimes I’d finish it, then immediately flip back to the first page and start again.

Which is funny, because even back then the class stuff annoyed me, and it annoyed me even more this time. For instance, it had not occurred to me previously that our heroine, Lauralee Larkin, is elected Homecoming Queen mainly because her parents are willing to host (and fund) an endless array of pizza parties.

Nonetheless, there’s obviously something about the book I really like, and this time I figured out what: Lauralee tries things that scare her, and never gives up, even when those things don’t work out.

It occurs to me now that reading this book over and over again as a youth may have contributed to my ability to keep trying—to keep submitting my writing, to keep applying for jobs that seem like long shots, even to keep asking guys out (right up through my husband). This tenaciousness in the face of much rejection has served me well. It’s pretty much my only move! Fortunately, it’s the only one I’ve needed.

The Charmed Circle by Dorothea J. Snow. Whitman, 1962.

Reviewer bio: Dawn Corrigan‘s poetry and prose have appeared widely in print and online. She works in the affordable housing industry and lives in Myrtle Grove, FL.

Guest Post by Kathryn Sadakierski

Little Women is a timeless classic and remains relevant during unprecedented days. On the surface, the endearing stories of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March may seem to recount simpler times, but greater complexity underlies what appears to be sentimental. At its heart, Little Women is about family, growing stronger despite distance.

While their father serves as a chaplain in the Civil War, the March daughters, with the loving guidance of their mother, adapt, soldiering on together, each making their own destinies. They support each other through adversities, sharing in triumphs. When Beth falls ill, Amy stays with Aunt March, avoiding catching scarlet fever, but while distanced, she learns about herself, ultimately maturing. Their “castles in the air,” innermost dreams of places far-removed from their Concord home, sustain them, until the Marches realize that the lives they lead are better than anything they could have dreamed, finding beauty even in the bittersweet, as they come of age, surmounting the burdens they once lamented. It is not tangible walls that make up their home, but the love of their family.

Reading Little Women at home during the quarantine came not to be an escape from reality, so much as a telling reflection of it; the novel captures the ebbs and flows of life and time, which, as the Marches saw, are to be cherished. Being at home, away from their father and the promising reaches of the world they had yet to see was difficult for the spirited March girls, but in time, they turned what were once limits into opportunities, each contributing her own gift to the world, from Jo with her imaginative writing, to Beth with her music and compassionate heart. Challenges they overcame shaped them, becoming a source of empowerment. This message of resiliency continues to inspire.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. 1868.

Kathryn Sadakierski is a 20-year-old writer whose work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Dime Show Review, Nine Muses Poetry, iō Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy opens in 1942 but begins in 1936 New York when Claire, aspiring anthropologist, meets Shep, a young British doctor being punished by exile.

They soon marry and depart to his duty station, Port Blair on the Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal. The island serves as a penal colony for political prisoners. Once there, they hire eight-year-old Nalia to care for their mute son, Ty, the “glorious boy” of the title. Nalia possesses “an uncanny ability to intuit whatever Ty wanted or needed—as if the children had their own spiritual language.”

As British hold over the island falters, they hear more of Japan’s rallying cry of “Asia for Asians.” When Rangoon, a neighboring Burmese city, falls, civilians are ordered out of Port Blair with a single standing order: “No local borns or natives.” Because of the connection between Nalia and young Ty, Claire promises to find a means of getting Nalia off-island as soon as she can.

During the departure, however, an earthquake separates Claire from the rest of her family along with Nalia. Not long after, the island falls to the Japanese army as Nalia hides Ty among the tribes Claire began studying. Claire dedicates herself to retrieving her son. Meanwhile Ty becomes more a creature of the jungle than a child of the empire, seeming to straddle the “primitive” and “civilized.”

Glorious Boy documents the awakening of Claire as nations dive into World War II. She learns “that ambition is worthless unless it’s rooted in human understanding” and is astute enough to understand that “prosperity” is often aligned with, almost synonymous with “slavery,” that those who are politically powerful and connected find deference to their desires, and that “colonial rules [prove to be] a tyranny of injustice, not to mention ineptitude.”

Glorious Boy by Aimee Liu. Red Hen Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.

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Guest Post by Christy O’Callaghan

My happy place in life is also my happy place in words—with nature. The book could be the history of a plant or tree or the natural world herself playing a character. That old conflict of man vs. nature is such a large part of our world, even when we’re under stay at home orders during a pandemic. I have a hardy appreciation for those who approach this subject well.  Anthony Doerr is one of them.

If I admire an author, I’ll read all their works. All the Light We Cannot See was terrific and deserves the praise it receives. Last summer, someone recommended The Shell Collector, and that was what hooked me to Doerr’s work. Most recently, I have been escaping into the frozen winters of Alaska and the tropical island days of the Caribbean in About Grace. In each location of the book, nature is not only an element setting a mood outside of the window. She’s a mighty character.

We follow David Winkler, who studies water, especially snow, and the younger Naaliyah, who studies insects and crustaceans. Our third main character has her own agenda. “The wind assumed its voice: moaning against the window, humming around the roof corners; hissing through drafts. It whispered about darkness, about the coming shadows. Let go, it said, let go.”

Doerr evokes the power and cyclical rhythm of nature, seasons, and time. Even with characters who live in reverence of the natural world, they can’t compare with her. She exists not in the service of people but has her own story to tell.

About Grace by Anthony Doerr. Simon & Schuster, October 2015

Reviewer bio: Christy O’Callaghan lives in Upstate, New York.  Her favorite pastimes include anything in the fresh air.  For her blog and writing, go to christyflutterby.com.

Guest Post by Liz Bertsch

My pleasure reading is typically done at night, in bed with my Kindle. Mid-pandemic, however, reading has become less a pleasure and more an exercise in mindfulness as my mind drifts towards panic about my family, the world, and my zany and delightful middle-school students. I begin and then abandon many a book, just like my students, because who has time to waste on a book that doesn’t hold you?  And then James McBride’s Deacon King Kong stumbles into view, and any book bold enough for that title is something I’ll consider.

McBride’s novel centers on a crime that takes place in and around a Brooklyn housing project in 1969 when a drunken and elderly character named Sportcoat pulls out a gun and shoots a 19-year-old drug dealer.  The crime occurs early afternoon, and although the audience for the shooting in the housing project is young drug dealers, older churchgoers, janitors, and undercover police, the crime reverberates in the surrounding quiet Brooklyn neighborhood of mob bosses and organized criminals. McBride’s novel is part Greek tragedy, police procedural, crime thriller, and there is a bit of ghosty stuff thrown in for good luck.

The nicknames of McBride’s characters are hilarious, and while reading, I think of my students who would delight in encountering the character of Sister T.J. Billings affectionally known as Bum Bum, and Hot Sausage, a friend of Sportcoats.  And in a vignette when church folk tell stories of Sportcoat’s many near-death experiences, and describe the time, “He went “fatty boom bang!” I laugh and keep on reading because I care about Sportcoat, and I’m happy.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride. Penguin Random House, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Liz Bertsch teaches in an independent school on the East End of Long Island.  Her essays have appeared in a variety of arts and literary journals.

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Guest Post by Bill Cushing

Although best known for his Dune series, Frank Herbert’s 1982 book The White Plague may be just what the doctor ordered these days.

In a nutshell, Dr. John Roe O’Neill, an American biophysicist visiting Ireland on a research grant, witnesses his wife and twin sons killed from an IRA bombing. To say he “loses it” would be a serious understatement. The first chapter opens with an ancient Irish curse—“May the hearthstone of hell be his bed rest forever”—and Herbert delivers fully on this hex from there.

O’Neill returns to the states, isolated and vengeful, and decides that since a political cause took his wife and children from him, he would reciprocate. Designing a genetic virus that does not affect men but kills females, he adopts the name “The Madman,” releasing his biological scourge on the world by infecting low denomination bills.

Once released, the plague destroys the world in short order, causing whole nations to collapse, even forcing the Vatican to relocate to Philadelphia. As the world descends further into self-isolated tribes killing anyone approaching, Scotland Yard conducts its hunt for “The Madman.”

However, this is not simply the story of investigators trying to locate and capture The Madman. That is there, of course, but there is much more.

Like Thomas Mann’s allegorical Magic Mountain—where he uses a tuberculosis sanitarium as a vehicle for examining European nations on the edge of World War I, Herbert uses this book as a means to study nations and their peculiarities. It also offers the author an opportunity to study people’s reactions to the direst of situations as well as their use and pursuit of power.

At fewer than 500 pages, The White Plague offers a much more restrained analysis of such behavior as is seen in the massive Dune series.

The White Plague by Frank Herbert. 1982.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.

Guest Post by Dawn Corrigan

I’ve been rereading some of my favorite books from childhood, a form of comfort food. I recently reread The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Here are my observations.

I was both annoyed by and somewhat seduced by the Christian Scientist / Science of Mind content in the final chapters, which I don’t remember from my many childhood readings of the book, probably because I didn’t understand the context back then.

I liked Dickon much better this time around—he was a little pious for my taste when I was 10. In fact this time he was my favorite character, though Mary was a close second.

When the focus shifted to Dickon in the middle of the book, I was convinced Mary had a crush on him, and was annoyed when I went to Goodreads and learned that in the 1987 made-for-TV movie, Dickon is killed in WWI and Mary marries Colin. But then I got to the Colin part and realized those movie makers were on to something. Mary’s crush shifts to Colin pretty quickly, signaled by her description of each boy in turn as “beautiful.” After she calls Colin beautiful, Dickon starts to fade into the background. I approve of Mary’s boy craziness but disapprove of her choice, which shows she’s still locked into the caste system. Colin is okay, and I’m glad he gets better, but the better he gets the more of a pompous mansplainer he turns out to be. Dickon only provides information when it is asked for. And it’s always on target, and never overly verbose. Plus: Animal Charmer!

At the end of the book, Dickon disappears altogether, and even Mary fades into the background. As Colin gets well, he looms over everything. The ending is not as good as the beginning because we get more Science of Mind and mansplaining and less plot and garden and fewer delicious secrets.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 1911.

Reviewer bio: Dawn Corrigan‘s poetry and prose have appeared widely in print and online. She works in the affordable housing industry and lives in Myrtle Grove, FL.

Guest Post by M.C. LeBrun

The Foundling is Stacey Halls’s much-anticipated second novel. Like her debut The Familiars, we are placed in a world where patriarchal powers dictate the mores of the day and women must use their wits to regain their autonomy. This is a tale of two mothers situated on either side of the class divide in 18^th century Georgian London but connected by a child, born to one and raised by the other.

Bess Bright, newly delivered of her illegitimate little girl, is passing through the gates of a Foundling home, ushered along in a line of destitute mothers in various states of despair. There is little time for recovery from trauma, heartbreak, and physical pain when a lack of coin means a life on the streets. For the next six years, Bess does all she can to muster together the money she needs to bring her daughter home for good. However, when the time comes, she discovers her child missing, claimed by another who has stolen Bess’s identity.

From the vivid descriptions of Bess’s life on the streets hawking shrimp and sideswiping lecherous hands, we are introduced to Alexandra Callard, an orphan and widow whose vulnerability is more easily disguised by her wealth and power. Agoraphobic and distrustful of the world, Alexandra tightly controls every aspect of her existence and that of her child, Charlotte. Compulsively repressive and lacking in maternal instinct, Alexandra struggles to understand the needs and desires of Charlotte as separate from her own. When Alexandra is finally coerced to permit the presence of a nursemaid in her child’s life, it is then these women’s worlds collide.

An entangled story of juxtaposed dichotomies unfolds: wealth and poverty, power and deprivation, the expressed and suppressed. We the readers are moved from one subjective reality to the other, playing judge to their choices and witnessing the powerlessness of the child at the center of it all. What makes a good mother? Stacey Halls’s finely tuned and richly evocative historical narrative transports us to another era to explore this very modern question.

The Foundling by Stacey Halls. Manilla Press, February 2020

Guest Post by Olga Zilberbourg

I’ve just finished The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. It took me about six weeks to read it—it’s a big book, and I’ve had snippets of time. What I loved about it is the way it moved from being a historical narrative into science fictional territory, creating something of an alternative reality for Zambia’s near future. I don’t really know any other novel that does this movement in quite this way. The story is told by a chorus of voices, each of whom is engaging in their own way, and another fascinating way about this book is the unexpected way they come together at the end. I still need to mull it over.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. Hogarth, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Olga Zilberbourg’s fiction has appeared in Confrontation, World Literature Today, Narrative, Outpost 19’s Golden State 2017 anthology, and others. She co-hosts the weekly San Francisco Writers Workshop.

Guest Post by Christopher Chambers

I discovered Eduardo Halfon in a used bookstore, not so long ago but long enough ago that used bookstores were open and one was able yet to indulge in the decadent past-time of browsing. Halfon’s novel The Polish Boxer caught my eye. I bought it and read it, and then purchased the other two books of his that have been translated into English (all handsomely published by Bellevue Literary Press).

I began Monastery in solitude amid the pandemic. Upon completing it, I experienced the uncanny feeling of when the lights come up after the end of good film and you walk out of the theater into the world, now dark, perhaps raining, and it seems like a strange and different world as you emerge from the world of the film (another of those experiences no longer available to us). We still have books though, and reading as a strategy for survival. I’m slowly emerging from the world of Monastery and I’m in no particular hurry to leave it behind. I’m resisting for the moment reaching for Mourning, the next of his books which awaits on the shelf alongside a selection from the lovely NYRB reprint series, some of which also await reading, some re-reading.

Halfon has said that he’s only writing one book, and everything he publishes is just part of it, as if each book he writes is another chapter. Mourning awaits me, the next chapter of this ongoing book. And I await Mourning, which I suspect will become necessary in the coming weeks and months as we proceed further into this century and all it has in store. Robert Bolaño once said: “The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to (Andrés) Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.” Eduardo Halfon is among that number.

Monastery by Eduardo Halfon. Bellevue Literary Press, February 2014.

Reviewer bio: Christopher Chambers is editor of Midwest Review, and author of Delta 88, a small book of very short fiction. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Guest Post by Ashanté J. Ford

The rawness and compassion of “White Oleander” by Janet Fitch had me turning pages so fast that I was surprised when it was finished. This book read like a favorite album that I can’t stop listening to on repeat. It carried me into the deep despair and depression that comes with being an orphan child, and raised me like I was its own. White Oleander is a book I will never forget.

Fitch captures the bond of a mother and daughter like a photograph, while simultaneously weaving the implications of imperfection into their relationship. This renowned fictional story follows a young girl by the name of Astrid Magnussen into adulthood while she navigates how to grow up and deems her religion as “survival.” This novel captivated me in the same way poetry does. I wanted to listen to the brute advice Astrid’s mother gave and I wanted to fall into lust with every person that gave Astrid hope. Hope was a loose character in this book. It left as soon as it was near and pulled away every single time.

This novel has gained praise from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, and was even adapted into a film after it became a national bestseller in the early 2000s. I applaud this book for its versatility and creativeness. The themes of motherhood were depicted in such a poignant manner—they made me grovel and thank God for the woman that birthed me.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Hachette, September 2006.

Reviewer bio: Ashanté J. Ford is 21 years old. She is in college pursuing her bachelor’s degree in International Relations.

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