Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.
The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for this book?
Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.
I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.
At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river.
There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.
“I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.”
I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What sort of research did you do? Was it tough to integrate these facts so seamlessly into the narrative?
I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me. But then I’d get someone whose profession was connected with these issues, and we’d talk for hours.
Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care.
And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.
Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write?
Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.
“I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write.
Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.
Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.
Also, my hope is that someone comes to me at a signing and says, “I named my treasured child for your character, Kismet.” I’d be so delighted. So far, besides Pallas’ crow, the only thing I know of named Kismet is a giant candy store on the way to Duluth.
Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”
This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.
The book club scenes in the novel are marvelous! Are you in a book club?
I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.
“As a Diné person who has worked in forensics for 16 years, I saw death,” Ramona Emerson says. “I saw death all the time.”
She speaks by phone from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explaining how her Navajo heritage and work as a forensic photographer and videographer informed the creation of Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. Emerson’s first mystery starring Rita, Shutter, was a surprise hit that garnered numerous accolades and awards, including a spot on the National Book Award longlist.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone to read it, to tell you the truth,” she admits. Emerson, who is also a documentary filmmaker, adds, “I’ve never had anyone be interested in what I was doing.”
Indeed, there has been great anticipation for Exposure, the second book in her projected trilogy. Rita is summoned to photograph a horrific crime scene in the opening chapter: the murder of a retired police detective, his wife and six of their children. The oldest son, a teenager, is a suspect, but the ghost of one of his murdered sisters leads Rita to believe he is innocent.
“. . . you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done.”
Rita’s ability to see and hear the spirits of the dead is both a gift and a curse: The constant din of their voices becomes physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Navajo tradition, however, makes it taboo to talk about death, so Emerson had serious concerns about how her character might be received. “You don’t talk about people once they have died. You have a four-day mourning period and it’s done,” she explains. “So, my biggest fear about writing Shutter was that I was going to have some sort of Navajo backlash.” Instead, she happily discovered, many Native readers thanked her for openly discussing the subject.
“There are Navajo Nation police officers who see death—and nurses, doctors and forensic workers,” Emerson says. “Pathologists, scientists, all these people who work with life and death. And we do our jobs because that’s what we’re trained to do, and we’re good at it. And so, this second book is about this idea of Rita realizing that she has a spiritual side that she’s not tending to.”
“It’s a really big part of your work-life balance,” she continues. “Like, you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done. And a lot of what I write about in Exposure was Rita’s own healing, embracing the ideas of Navajo traditional culture, and why it’s there to protect you.”
Emerson has experienced a few paranormal events—although quite different from her character’s encounters. Once, while teaching a summer film workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she and two others heard a strange noise in an editing room where they had been having odd technical problems with the equipment. They all turned around and watched a coffee mug move on the table, all by itself. “We saged that editing room out so fast!” says Emerson. In addition, on the same campus, she felt something grab her behind the bleachers in the black-box theater, where she and others were filming a production. “I thought maybe I just stumbled and there was something behind the curtain. But about 30 minutes later, when I got in my car, I had three huge scratches on my arm.”
Emerson has also had her own share of nightmares from difficult cases. In fact, Emerson’s late grandmother was so worried about her granddaughter that she took her to see a medicine man about a year and a half into the job. And in Exposure, Rita’s grandmother travels from the Navajo Nation town of Tohatchi—where Emerson herself grew up—to bring a medicine man to help Rita when her job becomes overwhelming.
Like Rita’s grandmother, Emerson’s grandmother played a pivotal role in her life. “She taught me to read and she was a big reader,” Emerson recalls. “She was real big on stories. She bought me my first video camera. She took me to the movies, even if she didn’t want to watch them. She just supported that idea of being a storyteller. I wrote these little stories and she always read them.” Although she died in 2001, Emerson notes, “She’s still a big part of my life. I always think about her.”
Despite her abiding interest in stories, Emerson never set out to write crime fiction, and her path to becoming a novelist has been particularly long and winding. Surprisingly, writing has never come easily to her. “It’s hard for me to sit in one place and do one thing for a long period of time,” Emerson says. Instead, her life’s dream was to make movies, and her initial attraction to film involved a touch of forensics, almost as though foreshadowing her future career.
Growing up in Tohatchi, there wasn’t much to do, so she and her friends watched VHS tapes that they rented from a man in a trailer “with like a hundred crazy strange movies in there.” That included a horror film, Faces of Death, about a pathologist who presents a variety of gruesome deaths. Once the adults left the house, Emerson recalls, “we’d go and get all of that horrible, horrible stuff that we weren’t supposed to watch, and we’d watch it right away.” Harkening back to Navajo taboos about discussing death, she adds, “So when we watched Faces of Death and didn’t explode, we figured that it’s all just a bunch of hooey.”
“When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”
Later, when her mother took her to see Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues in a theater, Emerson was transfixed, and decided she wanted to make her own films. After studying film at the University of New Mexico, she had trouble finding a job, which is how she ended up as a forensic photographer. She blindly called a man whose audiovisual company had police contracts. “He was kind of a mean, gruff, walrus-looking guy, and his name was like 10th on the Yellow Pages list.” Eventually, she says, she did photography as well as video work for him, “because I was the only one who could put up with him. He was so mean.”
In addition to photographing crime scenes, part of her work was making what she calls “day in the life” documentaries to show how peoples’ lives had been compromised by injuries. “My job,” she explains, “was to get the worst stuff on camera and make sure companies settled cases before they got to a jury. Because they knew if the jury saw my video, they would give them way too much money.” She adds, “I would have dreams about these people for months. I think the live people were the ones that stayed with me more than the dead people.”
However, she says that in both her forensics work and her fiction, focusing carefully on the details of dead bodies helps humanize victims. “I would always think, ‘Oh my God, this is so horrible. This is somebody’s daughter. This is somebody’s mom.’ That’s where my mind always went. And so, by talking about the details, and everything that you could possibly say about who they are and what happened to them kind of honors them in a way.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Emerson’s prose is so immediate, her descriptions so vivid. “When you’re doing a documentary and you want people to understand who a person is, you film their room, you film their hands,” she explains. “You show how dirty their fingernails are. You look at their shoes, where they live, what the town is like, all of that stuff. I think I just attack stories the same way as I would attack a visual story.” She adds, “When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”
Plus, she says, “I think people don’t realize how long you’re there [photographing crime scenes]. On TV, it’s like everybody’s in and out in 10 minutes, but when you have a big murder scene or you’ve got something like that first scene in Exposure where there’s a whole family, that could take two or three days of processing. You take thousands of photographs, pictures of every little thing, even if you don’t think it matters. You spend a lot of time out in the boonies by yourself photographing really weird things, or in strange positions, underneath vehicles. So, I think just giving readers the breadth of how many photographs Rita takes gives people a real idea of how hard it is to do the work physically.”
Emerson’s years of forensic work had a bonus of giving her access to her boss’s cameras and editing equipment. She began making her own movies as well, and she and her husband, Kelly Byars (also a filmmaker), formed a production company called Reel Indian Pictures. Byars is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and heritage is a primary focus for both. Their documentaries include The Mayor of Shiprock, about a group of young Navajos who meet each week to improve their small community in Shiprock, New Mexico.
Emerson also enrolled in a creative writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, obtaining her master’s degree in 2015. While there, she began writing stories about her grandmother, and was also writing about some of her forensic cases as background for a possible documentary about Navajos who work in forensics. The resulting pages were what she describes as “a weird collection of research and stories”—and she couldn’t figure out how to unify the hodgepodge.
At the same time, Emerson enrolled in a 16-week CSI course offered by the Albuquerque Police Department, hoping to learn more about forensic science and technical procedures. The topic of the first session was a terrible case involving a woman who jumped off a highway bridge, with accompanying graphic photos. “I think half of our class didn’t come back after that,” she recalls. “It was brutal. But I went home and wrote about that case.”
“. . . it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”
When she presented the chapter to her MFA class, her mentor, novelist Sherman Alexie, responded, “I’m so disturbed. I’m sickened by that chapter. But I want you to make that your first chapter. And add six to 10 pages more, because I also want to know every detail.” Emerson took his advice. “Once I did that, everything else started to fall into place. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” Suddenly, her musings and observations coalesced into a first draft of her debut novel, Shutter.
All told, however, the writing process took 10 years—quite different from the almost rapid-fire way she wrote its follow-up. “I really had 10 years to lament over every page of that first book,” she says. “This time, I just had to move on.” One thing that helped was that she was also working on a docuseries (Crossing the Line) about border town violence and death in several communities surrounding the Navajo Nation, including Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico—both of which are crime scene locations in Exposure. “It was easy for me to research both things at the same time,” Emerson explains. “And it just kind of fell into place.” She adds that she has witnessed policing from the perspective of officers, the court system and lawyers, but also notes, “It’s a different kind of experience for people of color. Policing is about enforcing white laws on brown bodies. I think a lot of people think police protect them, but brown and Black people don’t believe that police are there to protect them. And I think that’s probably why I speak about that a lot in my stories, and about corruption.”
Just as Rita Todacheene speaks for the crime victims who can no longer voice their stories, Emerson works to champion Native women in both her books and films. “I really feel like there’s not another group of women who are more underrepresented than Native women,” she says. “They’re never talked about; they’re never given a chance. And that’s why I feel the thing I have to do is give them power or give them a voice. Now, because of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, Native women are more visible. But it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”
Emerson is already hard at work on the third book about Rita—although fans are likely to clamor for more after that, even though her story began as a planned trilogy. “I may take a break after the third book and write a different book,” Emerson says. “But I have a feeling that somebody is going to try to resurrect Rita at some point, and it’ll be tough to keep her down as a character.”
Photo of Ramona Emerson by Ungelbah Davila Shivers.
For the forensic photographer-turned-mystery novelist, humanizing the victims of violent crimes is more than just a profession: It’s a calling.
A seemingly doomed wedding is the focal point of Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red, a propulsive novel that further justifies this Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s acclaim. Time and time again, with just a few words of perfectly placed description—like “the layaway bridal gown hung like an apparition on the outside of the closet door”—Erdrich lends Shakespearean tones to her carefully drawn scenes.
Kismet Poe is a likable, confused teenager who desperately hopes that college will rescue her from the suffocating boredom she feels in Tabor, North Dakota, in 2008. Impulsively, she agrees to marry Gary Geist, a handsome young man who will eventually inherit two giant sugar beet farms. Quarterback Gary, however, is haunted by a tragedy involving his football teammates, the details of which are gradually and tantalizingly revealed. Kismet also remains attracted to another boyfriend, Hugo Dumach—a lovable, smart, homeschooled boy who “long[s] to challenge Gary to a duel.” He works in his mother’s bookstore, but plans to head to the oil fields to earn enough money to win Kismet over. In the meantime, Hugo and Kismet read and discuss Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as they try to resolve their romantic predicament. “Whatever Emma would do,” Kismet concludes, “I should do the opposite.”
Erdrich is a masterful literary juggler, commanding a richly drawn cast of characters whose encounters overflow with humor and pathos, as well as a variety of compelling storylines. Kismet’s father goes missing, for instance, and seems to have embezzled the church renovation fund. Her mother, Crystal, makes “bread from scratch not because it was artisanal but because it was cheaper.” Crystal and Kismet “had come to know on some level that they were the real Americans—the rattled, scratching, always-in-debt Americans.” These, of course, are the people who populate Erdrich’s many novels.
The title refers to the Red River of the North, which snakes its way through the Red River Valley. This is very much a novel about the land and the people who have farmed it and fought to control it. Erdrich comments on the greed of agribusiness, noting that “this nutritionless white killer,” sugar, “is depleting the earth’s finest cropland.” Yet the book is also, as one character describes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “about what’s most important . . . this kind of love between a parent and a child.”
With The Mighty Red, Erdrich takes on monumental themes in what just might be a new American classic.
Following a teen love triangle in a North Dakota community dominated by sugar beet farming, Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic.
Nadia Ahmed’s The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything is not only a charming Halloween tale, but also an excellent year-round story about facing one’s fears. Young Finn is scared of many things, including tree branches, butterflies, the color orange and flying. On Halloween, he stays home in his attic—noisy humans also make him anxious—while his older brother and sister have a grand time careening through the air. However, when they fail to bring back Finn his favorite Halloween treat (chocolate bats), he swears that he will fly to get his own next year.
Ahmed’s prose perfectly captures Finn’s trepidation in just a handful of words that will resonate with young readers: “When Finn is afraid, his stomach swoops, his hands sweat, and he can’t move.” Happily, Finn’s gradual self-regulated program of exposure therapy works! He starts out small, simply touching a leafless branch “for one whole minute.”
Ahmed’s whimsical illustrations are mostly in black and white at the start, except for flashes of that dreaded orange. Despite this limited palette, the pages are wonderfully appealing, never scary or dull. Finn is a simply drawn ghost, but somehow his spirit—pardon the pun—and resolution shine through on every page. As he tackles his fears one by one, color gradually enters his world. The final spread is a glorious ode to Halloween orange, as well as other small splashes of the rainbow. Ghoulishly great, The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything will inspire readers sidelined by their own jitters.
The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Everything is a ghoulishly great Halloween story as well as an inspirational guide for readers sidelined by their own jitters.
Be careful what you wish for. That’s definitely true for Hannah, the seventh grader whose journal constitutes Remy Lai’s Read at Your Own Risk. Hannah and her friends search for a diversion while “some boring author” comes to their school assembly to “talk about his spooky books, which I bet aren’t even spooky.” Instead of attending, they decide to venture into the school attic and play a Ouija board-style game they call “Spirit of the Coin.” After their session, however, Hannah quickly discovers that she is haunted by an evil spirit, who continues to terrify her, and even writes in her journal in red ink.
The journal format will definitely appeal to middle grade readers, making the story all the more intimate and seemingly real. Nonetheless, be forewarned: As the cover filled with skulls and dripping with blood would suggest, this book is not for the squeamish. While many readers will revel in its thrills and chills, others may be completely terrified, especially by the frequent blood splatters, horrific dental details and the hospitalization of the narrator’s young brother.
Those whom those details don’t scare off may easily find themselves reading it more than once, looking for clues about the evil spirit. Read at Your Own Risk is a dynamic display of scary storytelling and compelling, haunting graphics that challenges readers to create their own journals. Lai leans into the mysterious as she wields her craft, noting, “Telling a story is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Only the storyteller has the box and knows what the whole picture looks like.”
Read at Your Own Risk is a dynamic display of scary storytelling and compelling, haunting graphics that challenges readers to create their own journals.
John the Skeleton is a wonderfully quirky story about a life-size model skeleton who “retires” from his schoolroom job as an anatomy model to live with an elderly couple on their farm in Estonia. He quickly becomes a part of the family, which includes two young grandchildren who frequently visit. There’s nothing scary or ghoulish here; instead, John’s presence allows Gramps and Grams to begin coming to terms with their eventual deaths. With 64 pages, plenty of illustrations and very short chapters, the book works equally well as a read-aloud for sophisticated younger readers or as a chapter book for solo readers.
The understated humor in Estonian writer Triinu Laan’s prose—as well as Adam Cullen’s translation—is ever present. Gramps makes wooden phalanges for John’s missing finger bones, and gives John his old musty coat “with two medals still pinned to it: one for donating blood and the other for being a good tractor driver.” The family includes John in all of their adventures. They help John make snow angels, and John even takes a bath with the grandkids.
Marja-Liisa Plats’ black-and-white illustrations, often accentuated by well-placed shades of fuchsia (a blushing face, a sled amid the snow), are full of whimsy. Her linework is perfect for this scruffy, lovable couple and their farmhouse world, including their outdoor summer kitchen. One of the book’s many delights is that John never reacts in any way; his entire “personality” is simply what this family imagines it to be. Nonetheless, he comforts them greatly, especially when Gramps and Grams begin to show signs of confusion.
There are particularly touching scenes at the end, when the book confronts death. John the Skeleton is an endearing story that helps normalize death while highlighting the enduring power of love.
John the Skeleton is an endearing book that helps normalize death while highlighting the enduring power of love.
With Vikki VanSickle’s compelling rhyming couplets and Jensine Eckwall’s lush, moody illustrations, Into the Goblin Market has all the makings of a modern classic, while giving a delightful nod to European fairy tales. The book is a tribute to Christina Rosetti’s 1859 poem, “Goblin Market,” about sisters Laura and Lizzie. VanSickle has used the original to create a similar tale about two young sisters who seem to live alone in a fairy tale-like world “on a farm, not far from here.” Millie is quiet and bookish, while Mina, with a head full of wild, curly hair, is daring and always ready for adventure. One night, Mina sneaks away to the Goblin Market, even though Millie has warned her, “The Goblin Market isn’t safe. / It’s a tricky, wicked place.”
When Millie awakes and sees that Mina has disappeared, she consults her library and takes several items that end up providing invaluable protection. Eckwall’s intricate, woodcut-inspired art vividly conveys the magic and danger that awaits. Occasional red accents in these black-and-white ink drawings highlight objects such as the hooded cape Millie wears as she sets off, looking just like Red Riding Hood—and, indeed, a shaggy black wolf is the first thing she encounters.
Once she enters the market, “Everywhere that Millie looked / was like a nightmare from her books.” There are strange sights galore, including a multitude of goblins and an evil-looking witch, but there’s no sign of Mina, whom Millie knows is in trouble. The pages are definitely a feast for the imagination (although the very young may find them frightening).
Both sisters use their wits admirably to escape the many dangers, and there’s a wonderful surprise at the end, just when all seems to be lost. Into the Goblin Market is a delicious treat for those yearning for a bit of frightful adventure.
A tribute to the work of Victorian poet Christina Rosetti, Into the Goblin Market is a delicious treat for those yearning for a bit of frightful adventure.
Godfather Death is a lively retelling of a Grimm fairy tale about a poor fisherman looking for a godfather for his newborn son. The fisherman rejects God’s offer because he doesn’t feel God treats people fairly, especially since the fisherman and his family live in such poverty. He is smart enough to also reject the devil’s offer—but when Death comes along, he believes he has finally found an honest man. After the christening, Death lets the fisherman in on a scheme that makes him a rich man, but ultimately backfires in a tragic way.
As the fisherman’s captivating quest unfolds, Sally Nicholls weaves in plenty of humor: Christening guests stare at Death—a skeleton with his silver scythe and long black cloak—as “everyone tried very hard to be polite to the baby’s godfather.” When this skeleton figure eats food, “everyone wondered where it went.”
Julia Sarda illustrates the tale in a limited palette of orange, mustard yellow, dark green and black, imbuing the book with an intriguing, stylized vibe reminiscent of old fairy tales. Her eye-catching illustrations will help readers understand that this is a tale meant to impart wisdom. Note that, like the original, the ending is abrupt and not at all happy. Nonetheless, Godfather Death is a memorable story that’s bound to encourage interesting discussions about life, death and honesty.
Based on a Grimm fairy tale, Godfather Death is a memorable story that’s bound to encourage interesting discussions about life, death and honesty.
“The air was still cold as I readied myself to begin another morning in my paper suit.” Those words come from Rita Todacheene as she narrates Exposure, Ramona Emerson’s second book in her projected trilogy of mysteries starring the Navajo forensic photographer. The first, Shutter, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and from the very first page, Exposure is equally—if not more—electrifying than the first, allowing both fans and newcomers to jump right in.
It’s winter in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Emerson uses the season to great effect, with shivering investigators and frozen bodies, which the double entendre of her perfect title nods to. Rita has been summoned to a particularly brutal crime scene, where a retired police detective, his wife and six of their seven children have been murdered, with the oldest son being questioned as a suspect. Earlier in the night, she had been awakened by the ghost of one of the dead, a little girl who announces, “We’re waiting for you.” It’s a chilling, explosive start, and this unsettling young voice gives Rita surprising insights into the murders.
Be forewarned: Emerson’s crime scenes are viscerally authentic—she worked as a forensic photographer herself—although Rita’s empathy and compassion are always at the forefront, and there’s even occasional humor to be found from the ghosts. As in Shutter, Rita’s paranormal gifts continue to not only aid her police work, but also help her unmask often uncomfortable truths, including police corruption. However, the long hours, unbearable sights, endless voices are pushing Rita over the edge. She laments, “The dead were everywhere, and I couldn’t unsee them. Their souls gathered inside me.” Rita also faces big life changes: Someone she loves dies, and an intriguing new character appears. Rita’s beloved grandmother and a medicine man, Mr. Bitsilly, soon come to her aid. As Mr. Bitsilly realizes, “Something has her soul in its grasp. It could be one thing or a lot of things, but it will kill her if we let it stay.”
Emerson, a Diné writer and filmmaker who hails from Rita’s own hometown of Tohatchi in the Navajo Nation, masterfully commands these tightly wound plot strands, varying the tension and pacing with comforting moments with Rita’s beloved elderly neighbor, Mrs. Santillanes. Lots of lives—and souls—are on the line in the evocative Exposure, and Emerson adroitly takes on a variety of weighty themes. Rita Todacheene is a gritty, believable character with a heart that is equal parts steel and soul. Readers will immediately be clamoring for more.
Exposure is equally—if not more—electrifying than Ramona Emerson’s debut, the National Book Award-longlisted Shutter.
If you’re in the mood for some spine-tingling stories, cozy up to Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories From the Muslim World, a fictitious (or is it?) compendium that is both fascinating and creepy, and made all the more so by Pulitzer Prize-winner Fahmida Azim’s striking illustrations.
Seema Yasmin, a journalist, professor and physician, has created a fictional narrator named Dr. N, a taxonomist and ontologist who has traveled the world to investigate the sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent djinn. Djinn, Dr. N writes, have been “haunting humanity since pre-Islamic times.” They are “shape-shifting beasts who grant wishes, inspire poetry, and snatch away innocent children.” “To the world’s nearly two billion human Muslims,” he writes, “djinn are as real as tax returns and as frightening and captivating as an electrical storm.”
He submits the fruits of his research to his academic committee, apparently to explain his long and unexplained absence from class, in this volume of stories from around the world that capture the long history and great variety of djinn. Many of these stories are related to human events, such as one concerning a ghostlike horseman who allegedly appeared in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Another terrifying tale of more dubious origins takes place in London, when a woman delivering her husband’s specimen to an IVF clinic spots what she thinks is an abandoned baby in the middle of the road. She stops, of course, but things do not go as she expects.
Djinnology is beautifully designed, with maps, English and Arabic inscriptions and more, gamely selling a high-octane, between-two-worlds vibe. Most of all, Azim’s haunting illustrations in smoky colors perfectly portray this menagerie of spirits. Readers will find themselves looking over their shoulders.
In the vibrantly illustrated Djinnology, a fictional scientist travels the world to learn about sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent spirits of Muslim folklore.
“I don’t think people realize how many librarians are being attacked,” Amanda Jones says from her home in Watson, Louisiana. “I used to think it was just a Southern thing. But I have friends in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maine, California and New York who have experienced this.”
Jones, the author of That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, seems an unlikely candidate to be caught in the crosshairs of a culture war. She grew up in a conservative Christian household in the deep red state of Louisiana. She lives in the same two-stoplight town where she grew up, right next door to her parents and her childhood home, and she works as a school librarian just a few miles down the road, in the middle school she once attended.
Her life changed on July 19, 2022, when she attended a board meeting at Livingston parish’s public library. Book content was on the agenda, which sent alarm bells ringing for Jones, who had been following censorship news across the country and in her parish. These conversations, she knew, “almost always targeted LGBTQIA+ stories.” Jones has taught queer kids who later took their own lives. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less,” she writes. At the meeting, one library board member, Erin Sandefur, made objections to some young adult and children’s content, although, as Jones writes, “She never really articulated what her concern was, just that there was a concern to be had.”
“If people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of.”
Jones, who was a 2021 School Library Journal National Librarian of the Year, was the first of about 30 to counter those concerns and speak up against censorship of queer stories, reciting a speech she wrote beforehand that included the words,“All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves, in our PUBLIC library collection.” Her speech was so on point, in fact, that she later received an email singing its praises from none other than Terry Szuplat, one of former President Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters.
But her high didn’t last. Four days after the board meeting, Jones opened an email that said, “Amanda, you are indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophilia grooming. Your evil agenda is getting print + national coverage. . . . We know where you work + live. . . . you have a LARGE target on your back. Click, click . . . see you soon. . .” Jones’ heart began pounding; she was completely in shock.
Then, her phone blew up with texts from friends and family sharing two Facebook posts: The group Citizens for a New Louisiana posted a photo of her making her speech at the board meeting, the caption accusing her of fighting to include “sexually erotic and pornographic materials” in libraries. Another post by local man Ryan Thames shared a photo from her professional website and accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.”
The posts caught on like wildfire as people from her own community shared them on multiple platforms. Then they went national. Users “embraced comments laced with hate, and grew wild with speculation”: they called her a groomer and a pedophile and threatened violence. “I had worked so hard to build up a good reputation for myself,” she recalls. “It was so surreal, to go from such a community high, where you’re kind of beloved, and then in an instant, they’re like, ‘Oh, she’s that awful person.’” The posts, comments and threats kept coming.
Jones lived in a constant state of terror; she got a taser, pepper spray and security cameras. She slept with a gun under her bed. Word of the controversy began to spread, and before long, journalists took notice. One day Jones saw her face in the NBC news app. “This is really happening,” she writes of her thinking. “I’m an actual national news headline.”
She began thinking of her tormentors in Harry Potter terms, as her dementors. Channeling her inner Nancy Drew, Jones discovered that she was far from their only target. Her investigations revealed correlations between their outlandish online posts about libraries and librarians and various far-right campaign contributions. One of the ringleaders, she explains, is a leader of a dark money nonprofit. “I think he’s paid to do that. That’s his job: to stir up nonsense for politicians.”
The slanderous accusations are ongoing, at both a local and national level, many trumpeted by the group Moms for Liberty. Jones has suffered mental and physical repercussions, including panic attacks and hair loss, and ultimately took a semester’s leave of absence from her job to recover. “Even to this day,” she says, “if I get an email and I don’t know who is sending it, my heart starts racing, and that causes my adrenaline to spike.”
She eventually channeled her favorite childhood author, asking herself, “What would Judy Blume do?” The answer, she realized, was to fight back. She took her dementors to court. The judge ultimately ruled that they could get away with their disinformation attack because she was a “public figure.” Nonetheless, as Jones writes, “These people set out to destroy me, but they woke something up inside me that I hope never dies. The court labeled me a public figure and their lawyers called me an activist when I was just a school librarian. I figure, if people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of—grit and perseverance.”
Jones has long known that perseverance pays off: She had originally planned to become an elementary school teacher, like her mother, but during her third year of college, reading the first three Harry Potter books steered her in a different direction, reminding her how much she loved reading. She began taking library science graduate courses, graduating in 2001 as a certified teacher and school librarian. Coincidentally, the librarian at her hometown middle school was taking a year’s sabbatical, so Jones filled in. When the librarian returned, Jones took a job as an English language arts teacher, knowing she wanted to stay at her beloved school. Eventually (14 years later!), when the librarian retired, Jones claimed her dream position.
As traumatizing as the online attacks have been, Jones has also received a tremendous amount of support, often from former students. She’s received well wishes from legions of people she doesn’t know, including numerous authors. She had the word “moxie” tattooed on her left wrist after Newbery Award winner Erin Entrada Kelly applauded her efforts, tweeting, “This is moxie. Sending my love and support to you, Amanda. I’m so proud you’re from my home state.” A few people, however, disappointed Jones, including some colleagues and several people she thought were her friends. But her family has provided constant support, and her conservative mother has accompanied her to library board meetings. After one meeting, during which a trans woman spoke about how books had saved her life, Jones’ mother commented, “You know, I think books can save lives.” “I’m like, ‘Mom,’” Jones recalls, “‘I’ve been telling you this for years.’”
“I hope I’m always evolving and learning,” Jones says. “The biggest struggle is wanting to defend myself publicly. Like when a lady told me a couple of weeks ago at a library board meeting that I needed to read Romans, I just said, ‘Ma’am, I’ve read the Bible twice. Thank you.’ You can’t argue with them. It’s pointless.”
There have been some glimmers of joy. She gets giddy about technical stuff, like seeing the copyright in her book. Jones says, “Not even in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would have my own ISBN in my own book, you know?”
“It’s odd to me,” she muses, “how big of a voice I had. It shows me that anybody can make a wave. I heard author Kekla Magoon say at a conference last year in New Hampshire that we’re like raindrops. If it’s just one, you might not notice it. But when we all collectively start falling, people start to listen. I’m hoping that by speaking out and writing this book that other people will speak up, and then more people will start to listen, and people will wake up to what’s happening to our libraries before it’s too late, before they’re all destroyed.”
The Zebra’s Great Escape is a delightful, action-filled saga packed into picture book format—which its creators use to their full advantage. Katherine Rundell’s text brims with heart and humorous details, while Sara Ogilvie’s illustrations feature explosions of color that nicely contrast with the black-and-white zebras at the center of this adventure.
An exuberant girl nicknamed Mink befriends a zebra who suddenly appears one day. “Mink was not usually gentle,” Rundell writes. “She liked doing things fast and wild. But it was with all the gentleness in the world that she reached out and laid a hand on the zebra’s fur.” The zebra, Gabriel, communicates through swirling streams of color, and explains that he needs help finding his parents, who have been kidnapped by an evil “Collector” named Mr. Spit.
Mink discovers that she can also communicate via color with her elderly pet dog, Rainbow (aptly named). He is loath to help “the barcode-horse,” but Mink begs, noting, “Daddy says, when people ask you for help, they’re actually doing a magnificent thing—they’re giving you the chance to change the world for the better!” Rainbow is persuaded, with the help of a small bribe, to send a message to all the animals in the city, and off our heroes go, to confront the evil Collector and free an entire alphabet of animals in dire straits.
The picture book combines an appealing old-fashioned feel with modern flair, in moments such as when oblivious adults, busy staring at their phones, don’t notice a girl riding a galloping zebra through the streets. Ogilvie’s lively illustrations bring Rundell’s delicious prose to life. Mink is so full of zest that she practically leaps off the page, while the dastardly Mr. Spit resembles Captain Hook with his long, thin mustache, jutting chin and fancy attire. The color orange pervades the book—in Gabriel’s fiery communications, in Mink’s polka-dotted shirt, in the burning rage that surrounds the evil Mr. Spit. It’s nicely offset by numerous pages bathed in blue: cozy bedtime scenes, the animals running to freedom and spirited celebrations at the end.
Don’t miss The Zebra’s Great Escape, a kaleidoscopic celebration of communication and the rewards of helping one another.
Sara Ogilvie’s lively illustrations bring the spirit of Katherine Rundell’s delicious prose to life in The Zebra’s Great Escape, which features a protagonist so full of zest that she practically leaps off the page.
“I didn’t know anything about Gustav Klimt except that he liked naked ladies,” notes Billy Boyle, the narrator of ThePhantom Patrol, the 19th entry in James R. Benn’s series of action-packed World War II mysteries. Billy has become involved with efforts to return the priceless sketch, a study for Klimt’s painting Water Serpents II, to its rightful owner after it was appropriated from a Jewish family in Vienna.
Billy, a former Boston cop, is a detective on the staff of his “Uncle Ike”—none other than the famed General Eisenhower. Billy’s “older cousin of some sort” makes a brief appearance, commenting, “even a fella from Abilene can appreciate fine artwork.” (Newcomers to the series can easily jump in; Benn succinctly fills readers in with relevant bits of backstory.) Billy’s also trying to track down a violent network of Nazi art smugglers, and it turns out even bigger trouble is brewing: It’s the winter of 1944 and France has been liberated, so these thugs have little to lose. Just a few pages in, the bullets start to fly and the bodies begin to fall in Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Billy eventually finds himself in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, traipsing through snow and cut off from communications.
Benn excels at making history work in his favor. For instance, he includes J.D. Salinger and actor David Niven as fairly major characters—both of whom did indeed serve during WWII. Benn nimbly traverses between moments of absolute horror (the scene of a murdered family at their farmhouse, and the massacre of American GIs) to numerous lighthearted moments, understanding how desperately they were needed for those who endured war’s horrors. Niven, for instance, comments about a German posing as an American: “I should have known . . . The chap never asked for an autograph.”
Fans of The Monuments Men and The Curse of Pietro Houdini will relish ThePhantom Patrol, and newcomers to Billy Boyle’s investigations will be immediately intrigued and ready for more. The book’s art-related plot will appeal to a wide variety of readers, as will Benn’s snappy but detail-rich prose. History buffs, military enthusiasts, art lovers and thrill-seekers alike will all be enthralled with this enticing blend of high-stakes action and old-fashioned detective work.
Billy Boyle breaks up a Nazi art smuggling ring in James R. Benn’s enthralling The Phantom Patrol, which will delight history buffs, art lovers and thrill-seekers alike.
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