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Amy Scribner

Fiction

Two novels inspired by Jane Austen brighten up the spring reading season

Feature by Amy Scribner

Centuries after she published Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen continues to influence pop culture and inspire spinoffs. Clueless, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club, novels from Jennifer Weiner and so many others pay homage in ways overt and subtle to the queen of smart British novels. And every new season brings more new Austen adaptations. These two are extra special—one for Janeite traditionalists, the other for readers looking for something totally different.

★ The Other Bennet Sister

Janice Hadlow’s absolutely magical The Other Bennet Sister invites us into the world of one of the less celebrated sisters from Pride and Prejudice, Mary. The middle child, Mary is plain, bookish and completely outshone by her beautiful older sisters, Jane and Lizzy, and her lively younger sisters, Lydia and Kitty. One by one, the other Bennet sisters are married and settled. Yet Mary struggles to find her place in a world oriented around the belief that marriage—not knowledge—is the only path to happiness for women.

The sisters are “all read well enough and knew enough history and geography not to look absolutely foolish in company. Anything more was not only unnecessary, but probably unwise.” Education is not included in Mrs. Bennet’s list of wifely qualities, and she has “no desire to add to her daughters’ disadvantages by burdening them with a reputation for cleverness.”

Mrs. Bennet is borderline abusive to her least charming daughter, and Mary withers in a family that neither supports her thirst for knowledge nor shows her any affection. After her father’s death turns the family estate over to a male cousin, Mary finds herself without a secure home or future. She lands with her aunt and uncle in London where, in the bustling city, she takes the first tentative steps toward choosing her own life trajectory.

Hadlow is a former journalist, having run two of the BBC’s major television channels. It is a marvel that The Other Bennet Sister is her first novel. Her writing is elegant and wry, the story wise and engrossing. I had to keep reminding myself I wasn’t actually reading Austen.

Sansei and Sensibility

Karen Tei Yamashita’s story collection, Sansei and Sensibility, is an equally compelling—if slightly less literal—ode to Austen. A National Book Award finalist for I Hotel, Yamashita is a clever and spare writer. In many of her touching, surreal short stories, she uses Austen as a springboard into tales featuring Japanese Americans in California. (Sansei is a term that means people of Japanese descent born and raised in the Americas.)

“Emi” is a hilarious take on the matchmaking-gone-wrong premise of Emma. In “Giri & Garman,” we see the dashing Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice reincarnated as Darcy Kabuto II, “captain of the football team, class vice president, and voted best looking, which meant he looked like he was the son of Toshiro Mifune.” (Mifune was a dashing Japanese movie star who appeared in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.)

But the most powerful entry is “KonMarimasu,” Yamashita’s meditation on the phenomenon of Japanese tidying guru Marie Kondo and how it relates to Japanese Americans’ experiences in World War II internment camps, where families’ few possessions were treasured and, later, passed down. Yamashita writes, “Kondo might say that this stuff in your family archive and this stuff in all these internment museums were parted with to launch them on a new journey. You cogitate the joy spark thing, and you think about simple furniture made from wood scraps, the pink crocheted dress, the sen nin bari, the green high school sweater, the jug of sake, and the waffle iron you know your family smuggled into camp.”

Yamashita’s writing echoes the pain and strength of the Japanese American experience. A potent mashup of Austen and Japanese American culture, Sansei and Sensibility is both entertaining and profound.

These Austen adaptations are extra special—one for Janeite traditionalists, the other for readers looking for something totally different.
NonfictionParentingMemoir

These books score a perfect 10 on the romp-ometer

Feature by Amy Scribner & Jessica Wakeman & Linda M. Castellitto

Looking for a heaping dose of full-throttle fun? These three books can help.

Gatecrasher 

Society journalism—that is, the gossip pages—doesn’t carry the same gravitas as other areas of journalism. That might change with Gatecrasher. Author Ben Widdicombe, a former gossip reporter, shares lessons about the world’s wealthiest people gleaned from attending Academy Awards parties, lunches at Elaine’s and weddings at Mar-a-Lago for the past two decades.

Widdicombe worked at three of the biggest outlets in gossip: Page Six (New York Post), Rush & Malloy (New York Daily News) and TMZ. Gatecrasher could have been just a dishy memoir about the sex tapes, prison sentences and infidelities of A-listers and the upper crust. And yes, there is plenty of dirt in these pages. However, Gatecrasher’s strength is in its thoughtful cultural critique of celebrity and wealth, and the media’s symbiotic relationship to both. Widdicombe delivers some uncomfortable home truths about American cultural appetites. Take, for instance, his assertion that Paris Hilton is the “most culturally influential person in twenty-first-century America.” Surely that’s incorrect. It must be Beyoncé or Bob Dylan or Oprah or . . . well, anyone but a hotel heiress who made a sex tape.

Yet it makes perfect sense when Widdicombe spells it out: Hilton’s shameless willingness to cash in on being a wealthy person paved the way for everything from “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” to the Trumps. “A gossip culturalist understands how the trashy stuff connects to the bigger picture, and that we ignore it at our peril,” he writes.

Whether you’re a student of US Weekly or cultural studies, Gatecrasher manages to be fun, frothy and just the #inspo you need to topple the bourgeoisie.

—Jessica Wakeman

 

The Hungover Games

British writer Sophie Heawood was living her dream, working as a journalist covering the entertainment industry in LA. She wrote breezy celebrity profiles, went out every night and came home to her tiny Sunset Boulevard apartment.

Then she unexpectedly became pregnant by a man who emphatically did not want to be a father. In the hilarious and intimate The Hungover Games, she chronicles her bumpy journey from woman-about-town to single parent.

Heawood relies on her group of friends (whom she calls her “holy congregation”) and her loving yet judgmental parents as she returns to London to have her baby. She finds a funky house in a neighborhood affectionately known as Piss Alley, a home with “a bench where you could sit and inhale some of East London’s less aggressive pollution, because there was a house three doors down that had managed to plant a tree.”

Like so many new mothers, Heawood is flooded with love, hormones and responsibility. She’s a fantastically funny and unapologetic writer and is candid about the weirdly overlapping bouts of joy and boredom that come with parenting. In a just-between-us tone, she shares her birth story, the “ghost that sat on my shoulder” of the baby’s father who couldn’t commit and what it’s like to venture out in the dating world while still nursing a baby.

The Hungover Games is by and about a single mom, but Heawood’s story of finding love where you least expect it is universal.

—Amy Scribner 

Action Park

Do you think helmets are for wimps and seat belts are for suckers? Is following rules something other people do? If your answer is “Hell, yeah!” then you would’ve loved Action Park, a 35-acre New Jersey amusement park that provided dangerous entertainment for 20 crowded, wild summers beginning in 1978. Gene Mulvihill was the charismatic, impulsive, creative, law-avoiding, retail magnate, millionaire founder, and Andy Mulvihill, who wrote Action Park with journalist Jake Rossen, is his son.

When Andy was 13, his dad came up with a way to monetize his Vernon Valley/Great Gorge ski property in the warm months: He was going to be “the Walt Disney of New Jersey.” The Alpine Slide was the park’s main attraction in its debut 1978 summer, and people flocked to the mountain to try it. Speeding 2,700 feet down a winding track, riders perched in a small cart with a steering rod and iffy brakes. There were no helmets, and thrill-seekers were likely to fly off the track into the woods.

Was it dangerous? Definitely. Did people love it? Absolutely. The park hosted about a million people per year over its two decades, which saw the introduction of additional high-risk attractions like the Speed Slide (100-foot drop + 45 mph = actual enema) and the Wave Pool (25 water rescues daily). Andy recalls his years at the park—during which he went from laborer to reluctant ride tester to lifeguard to manager—with a mix of fondness and frustration, pride and disbelief. It’s indeed amazing that Gene essentially did whatever he wanted for nearly 20 years. Not even countless injuries and six deaths at the park, plus a 1980s indictment for insurance fraud, could put him out of business for long.

Action Park is a fascinating up-close portrait of an eccentric father and gonzo businessman who angered loads of people and was beloved by even more. And it’s a nostalgic chronicle of a place that was horrible or wonderful, depending on your perspective—“a place that, by all rights, should never have existed.”

—Linda M. Castellitto 

Looking for a heaping dose of full-throttle fun? These three books can help.
FictionSatire

The Every

Review by Amy Scribner

In the opening chapters of Dave Eggers’ latest chilling novel, we get a glimpse at a dystopian future in which privacy is a thing of the past and humankind is completely in the thrall of technology. True connection and meaningful communication are withering away. Even the secretary of state tweets dancing rainbow emoji from the official U.S. Department of State account.

At the center of this new world order is the Every, a megacorporation that has acquired Amazon, all the major search engines and social media platforms, and thousands of other companies. Enter Delaney Wells, a young idealist (is there any other kind?) whose parents lost their small-town Idaho store to the Every and now must work for the Every’s Whole Foods-esque grocery service. Delaney believes the Every is “not only a monopoly but also the most reckless and dangerous corporate entity ever conjured—and an existential threat to all that was untamed and interesting about the human species.”

Delaney’s goal is to tear down the Every from the inside. She gets a job at its headquarters and enters an otherworldly corporate culture where everyone dresses the same, steals each others’ ideas and pledges cultlike allegiance to the Every. Delaney begins proposing increasingly outlandish ideas: How about an app that listens to your conversations, tracks the participants’ vital signs and assesses the quality of the interaction? Or artificial intelligence that measures art so we no longer need to decide for ourselves whether “The Last Supper” is beautiful? Or an app called HappyNow? that tells you whether you’re happy with your recent purchases?

To Delaney’s horror, the more ridiculous her pitches, the more enthusiasm they generate, both within the Every and among consumers. She realizes her plan to turn public opinion against the monolithic company has just one flaw: Consumers no longer care about privacy or free will.

Eggers has long established his almost supernatural storytelling skills, and this new book is positively mesmerizing and wholly original. The Every, a companion book to The Circle, will likely scare the bejesus out of readers. The vivid future he depicts feels fantastical but just realistic enough to make you want to unplug your smart speaker and toss your fitness watch.

Unplug your Alexa and toss your Apple Watch. The Every, a companion book to The Circle, will likely scare the bejesus out of you.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Unbound

Review by Amy Scribner

Before she was the world-famous creator of #MeToo, the movement that sparked a reckoning with the mistreatment of women, especially women of color, Tarana Burke was a community organizer and journalist. Her experience as a reporter will be no surprise to anyone who reads Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, her unflinching, open-hearted, beautifully told account of becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.

Burke was molested by a neighborhood boy in the Bronx when she was 7. Over the years, despite the presence of several loving adults in her life, Burke was repeatedly sexually assaulted. “I was a grown woman before I truly understood the word rape and was able to relate it to my experience,” she writes. “Language like rape, molestation, and abuse were foreign to me as a child. I had no definitions and no context. Nobody around me talked like that.”

In spite of her trauma, Burke writes with humor and gratitude about her experiences. She delves into the rich history of her family, led by a granddaddy who “believed in celebrating Blackness in as many ways as possible” and a mother who was a devout Catholic. In school, Burke was both academically gifted and an agitator who spent time in the principal’s office. A high school leadership program led Burke to Selma, Alabama, where she laid the groundwork for #MeToo after realizing there was an utter lack of programs to support and protect young women as they spoke their truth about sexual abuse.

Burke also writes honestly about her reaction to #MeToo becoming a viral phenomenon on social media in 2017, initially without her knowledge or participation. After spending more than a decade traveling around the country, conducting workshops and speaking on panels about surviving sexual assault, she worried social media would water down or misuse her work.

Ultimately Burke realized that “all the folks who were using the #metoo hashtag, and all the Hollywood actresses who came forward with their allegations, needed the same thing that the little Black girls in Selma, Alabama, needed—space to be seen and heard. They needed empathy and compassion and a path to healing.”

Unbound is not just a thoroughly engrossing read. It’s also an important book that helps us understand the woman who has been so influential as our country struggles to acknowledge women’s trauma.

In the audio edition of ‘Unbound,’ Tarana Burke’s story is rendered all the more potent by her confident voice.

Unbound is Tarana Burke’s unflinching, beautifully told account of founding the #MeToo movement and becoming one of the most consequential activists in America.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Turnout

Review by Amy Scribner

Early in The Turnout, the beautifully dark suspense novel from bestselling author Megan Abbott (Dare Me), readers will sense that all is not right in the Durant School of Dance, a prestigious yet moldering ballet studio.

It’s “Nutcracker” season, and the holiday staple brings in the bulk of the annual revenue for the school, which is run by the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, and Dara’s husband, Charlie. Emotions are running high in the days leading up to the announcement of who will play Clara—the most coveted role but also the one that makes the dancer the target of cruel jealousy from both students and parents.

Marie, who had been living with Dara and Charlie ever since the sudden death of the sisters’ parents, has recently set up camp in the attic above the studio. A fire from her space heater leaves part of the studio in ruins, and a possibly shady contractor comes on board to help with renovations. The future of the studio is in jeopardy, forcing the sisters to revisit their traumatic childhood as they decide whether the Durant School is worth saving.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Megan Abbott on her fixation with ballet.

The Turnout submerses readers in the obsessive, toxic world of competitive ballet. Abbott perfectly describes the unique smells and atmosphere of a dance studio: a mix of sweat, vomit and hormones. She unsettlingly juxtaposes a sport that requires astonishing levels of discipline with the sugary sweet story of “The Nutcracker.” “Consider the exquisite torture of all those little girls never allowed to eat dancing as costumed Sugar Plums, as fat Bonbons gushing cherry slicks. Tutus like ribbon candy, boys spinning great hoops of peppermint, and everywhere black slathers of licorice and marzipan glistening like snow.”

Abbott layers dread and darkness as readers learn about the harrowing family home that shaped Dara and Marie and pulled Charlie into their lives. Virtually no one is who they seem, and Abbott keeps the twists coming until the final pages. The Turnout is the kind of gripping, unnerving page turner we have come to expect from an author who does noir better than almost anyone.

Early in The Turnout, the beautifully dark suspense novel from bestselling author Megan Abbott, readers will sense that all is not right in the Durant School of Dance.

NonfictionSocial Science

The Quiet Zone

Review by Amy Scribner

Green Bank, West Virginia, is known as the quietest town in America. It’s a lushly forested place where a government-owned observatory requires unimaginable levels of quiet, and therefore where locals are asked to eschew cell phones, microwaves and Wi-Fi.

Since the Green Bank Observatory was built in 1957, scientists there have quite literally listened to the universe through equipment that only works when it’s not competing with the electronic noise of modern society. Employees at the observatory have spent decades mitigating radio frequency noise, outfitting the Dollar General’s automated front door with conductive lead paint to block electromagnetic radiation and once even replacing a malfunctioning electric blanket in a local home. 

While some locals sneak in forbidden electric gadgets, Green Bank is a haven for those who seek unusual peace and quiet. When journalist Stephen Kurczy started visiting regularly in 2017, he quickly realized it’s an eclectic group. The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence is his fascinating, deeply reported and slightly eerie look at an unusual corner of America.

“Had I walked into a dream?” Kurczy wonders. “An elderly man was cohabitating with bears down the road from the world-famous clown doctor Patch Adams and just a few miles from a hippie enclave, all of them sharing a patch of Appalachia with world-renowned astronomers and secretive government operatives. The area seemed tinged with magical realism, with an impossible menagerie of eccentrics congregating in the forest.”

How had so many disparate groups found their way to the same town in West Virginia? The truth is, many of them came there to be left alone. In repeated trips to Green Bank, Kurczy gets to know these various groups, from the white nationalists who attempted to build their headquarters there to a group of electrosensitives who become ill from even the slightest electromagnetic radiation and who moved to Green Bank in a desperate attempt to quell their sickness.

Ultimately, Kurczy realizes Green Bank is not as silent as the media portrays it, but he brings to life other facets of this town that are even more intriguing. Kurczy becomes embedded in the community, and with compassion and a journalist’s eye he delivers a compelling portrait of a town where people struggle with the same issues as the rest of America, just a little more quietly.

The Quiet Zone is Stephen Kurczy’s fascinating, deeply reported and slightly eerie look at a town in West Virginia with no cell phones, microwaves or Wi-Fi.
NonfictionEssaysBlack History

Carry On

Review by Amy Scribner

When longtime Georgia Congressman John Lewis died from pancreatic cancer in 2020, President Obama said, “He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to its highest ideals.” This lovely book offers Lewis’ meditations on everything from love to public service and affirms that he indeed represented the best of our nation.

Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation is divided into short sections in which Lewis shares hard-earned wisdom from his years on the front lines of the civil rights battle. The son of a sharecropper, Lewis joined Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders as they protested segregation across the South. For someone who faced injustice, police brutality and racism, Lewis remained remarkably optimistic. “Yes, we were jailed, arrested, firebombed, bloodied,” he writes in a chapter on activism. “But we never felt hate, and even though it can be hard to hold back our anger, it is worth the effort because it works in the end. We changed America, and now the time has come for more change.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Actor Don Cheadle narrates the audiobook edition of Carry On.

Lewis devotes much of the book to the current expression of our nation’s racism. He compares the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin to the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and urges his fellow Americans to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement.

There are lighter chapters, too, in which Lewis writes about art, sports, clothes and books. He loved comic books as a kid, and a favorite hobby as an adult was frequenting flea markets searching for old books. These chapters read like someone shooting the breeze with an old friend. He recalls telling Congressman Elijah Cummings, for whom he was often mistaken, that he was going to get a tattoo on the back of his head so people would stop confusing them.

Carry On is a bittersweet book, coming so soon on the heels of Lewis’ death, but a beautiful reminder of finding hope and joy in the simplest things. “Happiness is being at home after a long day, playing with and feeding my cats,” Lewis writes. “I’m a happy person.”

This lovely book offers John Lewis’ meditations on everything from love to public service. It’s a beautiful reminder that he represented the best of our nation.
FictionFamily Drama

Golden Girl

Review by Amy Scribner

Golden Girl is Elin Hilderbrand’s 27th novel, an especially astonishing number considering that she explores the same rich terrain of Nantucket and the surrounding areas in almost every one of her books. A reader might be wary of the author becoming formulaic, but Golden Girl is surprising, delightful and—dare I say?—quirky.

Vivi Howe is a Nantucket-based novelist who has found significant commercial success even as critical acclaim eludes her. “Vivi had legions of loyal readers, but she’d never quite captured the interest of the serious reviewers,” Hilderbrand writes. “They had called her first novel, The Dune Daughters, ‘three hundred pages of word salad.’” Vivi is on the verge of tasting the adoration of critics for the first time when she’s struck and killed by a car while jogging.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season

Killing off the main character just a few pages into a book is somewhat unorthodox, but it’s just the first of many interesting choices Hilderbrand makes. The next twist is that Vivi’s Hermès scarf-wearing guardian angel grants her a 75-day window to watch the aftermath from a perch above. Vivi is also allowed to use three “nudges” to influence the outcome of events.

The remainder of Golden Girl explores what happens to the family and friends left behind, as fragile bonds are tested and long-buried secrets come to light. Vivi’s three children deal with grief in different yet equally destructive ways, while her ex-husband questions his decision to leave Vivi for a much younger woman years before.

The book is filled with Hilderbrand’s trademark gorgeous scenes and delicious dialogue. But Golden Girl also explores the author’s own place in the literary pantheon, often with a wink and a nod to the reader. In one scene, as Vivi is watching an interaction and wondering whether to use a nudge, she says, “I’m the novelist here. . . . Let’s give it another couple of chapters.”

Like Vivi, Hilderbrand is commercially successful but doesn’t always get her due as an immensely talented writer. Golden Girl will help change that. It is funny and heartbreaking, and even though it’s in some ways a departure for Hilderbrand, the novel still offers plenty of that Nantucket air to keep you turning pages.

Killing off the main character a few pages into a book is somewhat unorthodox, but it’s just the first of many interesting choices Elin Hilderbrand makes.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba

Review by Amy Scribner

Through her popular historical novels, bestselling author Chanel Cleeton offers a fresh glimpse into Cuba’s tumultuous past. Her latest, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, is set on the eve of the Spanish-American War, as the island country is ravaged by conflict between Cuban revolutionaries and the Spanish military.

The story unfolds through the eyes of three women: Evangelina Cisneros, a beautiful socialite who finds herself in the infamous Recogidas prison after rebuffing the advances of a Spanish military official; Marina Perez, who along with her husband is aiding the revolutionaries while living in deplorable conditions at a reconcentration camp; and Grace Harrington, a cub reporter trying to make her mark at William Randolph Hearst’s New York newspaper.

The women all come from wealthy families yet have chosen their own paths as they seek more than the comfort provided by their privilege. This is a recurring theme in Cleeton’s work: women turning their lives upside down to fight for what they believe in. For Evangelina and Marina, they’re fighting for the dream of a liberated Cuba. For Grace, it’s a career as a serious journalist in an era when few women (aside from Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells) could imagine working for a newspaper. Their fates intersect when Hearst places Grace on the Cuba beat, reporting from the front lines.

The heart of The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba is ostensibly Evangelina, who is the title character and based on a real person. And indeed, her story is fascinating. She was briefly the most famous woman in New York after a daring rescue landed her stateside to advocate for Cuban independence. But Cleeton’s examination of the state of journalism at the turn of the century is an equally compelling part of this engrossing book. The battle of Hearst versus Joseph Pulitzer for the biggest circulation is fascinating. Both of their newspapers used the discord in Cuba to bolster their sales and arguably influenced the conflict more than was appropriate for a supposedly neutral press.

Cleeton delivers a sweeping story of love and courage, as well as a sobering reminder of the power and responsibility of the media.

Chanel Cleeton delivers a sweeping story of love and courage, as well as a sobering reminder of the power and responsibility of the media.
NonfictionPop CultureMemoir

The Beauty of Living Twice

Review by Amy Scribner

It’s impossible to overstate just how famous Sharon Stone was in the 1990s. After the phenomenon of 1992’s Basic Instinct, the legendary beauty earned further acclaim for roles in Casino and The Muse and became one of the highest paid actors on the planet. As a result, her every move was scrutinized. She would have broken the internet—if that had been a thing back in 1996—when she wore a black turtleneck from the Gap to the Oscars.

In Stone’s generous new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, she writes about it all, starting with her loving but fraught childhood in blue-collar Pennsylvania, where her family laughed hard and fought loudly. “They did a horrible, beautiful, awful, amazing job with us,” she writes of her parents. “They gave us their best. They gave us everything. All of it. The full Irish.”

Stone also reveals in this memoir that she and her sister were sexually abused by her maternal grandfather. That portion of the book is understandably vague and brief, but it’s clear this betrayal impacted the family irrevocably.

In fact, The Beauty of Living Twice alternates between vague summarization and incredibly personal recollections. Stone writes in detail about the massive stroke she suffered in 2001, which left her in financial and physical ruin that took years to recover from. She dishes on her experiences with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood and her philanthropic efforts around the world. But she only briefly talks about her experience of adopting three sons, one of whom became the subject of an acrimonious custody dispute with her ex-husband Phil Bronstein.

Overall, the book reads like an oral history, as if someone were typing furiously while Stone reminisced about her exceptional life. (“Remind me to tell you about James Brown,” she writes late in the book. She does not, unfortunately, tell us about James Brown.) Somehow, this old Hollywood narrative style works, and Stone delivers a bighearted, wonderfully rambling story full of wisdom and humor.

It’s impossible to overstate just how famous Sharon Stone was in the 1990s, and in her generous new memoir, she writes about it all.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Women of Chateau Lafayette

Review by Amy Scribner

The Château de Chavaniac, a beautiful stone castle in the remote reaches of the mountains of Auvergne, is the birthplace of the Marquis de Lafayette, a man who played an integral role in the French Revolution and who famously helped the American colonies win their independence from British rule. In The Women of Chateau Lafayette, the marquis is a mere supporting figure as author Stephanie Dray’s novel instead follows three women over three eras of the château’s history.

First there’s Adrienne Lafayette, the marquis’ wife. History has all but forgotten her role as adviser and strategist to her husband, but she put her life and family at risk in pursuit of liberty for all of France. Then during World War I, Beatrice Astor Chanler, a millionaire’s wife and former actor, uses the family fortune to restore the crumbling château, transforming it into a sanctuary for sick and orphaned children. Finally there’s Marthe Simone, one of those orphans, who grows up at the château and works there as a teacher as the Nazis occupy France. Marthe uses her gift as a talented artist to falsify paperwork and protect Jewish children at the manor.

Dray is a bestselling historical novelist who has previously written about Eliza Hamilton and Patsy Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. Her ability to create engaging narratives from history, incorporating rich details and fully drawn characters, is downright magical. Adrienne and Beatrice are both based on real women whose stories come vividly to life here, while Marthe is a composite character inspired by the manor’s female resistance fighters, an artist-in-residence and other figures from the château’s history.

In The Women of Chateau Lafayette, we move among the extravagance of Marie Antoinette’s royal court, the brutality of trench warfare in World War I and the misery of a French countryside slowly starving under Nazi rule. It’s an epic, gripping novel, a powerful depiction of the way brutal conflicts based on prejudice and greed tend to repeat time and again. And through it all, Dray poignantly reminds us of the undervalued contributions of women throughout history.

“I had freed my family by force of will,” says Adrienne. “Not only my family, but those who had been arrested for our sake. I had done it without sacrificing any principle or doing violence. It was not the sort of victory for which people built stone monuments, but I hoped it might still, someday, be remembered.”

Throughout her epic, gripping novel, Stephanie Dray reminds us of the undervalued contributions of women throughout history.
FictionComic Fiction

It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake

Review by Amy Scribner

Noni Blake is in a rut. Her teaching job doesn’t fulfill her. A nine-year relationship has come to its sad but inevitable end. She hates her hair and probably drinks too much. Noni decides what she needs is to shake things up.

Her first instinct is to revisit old flames, the ones who got away. But hooking up with the men and women from her past doesn’t give her what she’s seeking, and Noni realizes she needs something else. She needs a pleasure quest.

“I would never tolerate the things I say to myself if someone else was saying them,” Noni realizes. “I disregard my feelings. I don’t value my desires. I don’t nurture myself. I’m mean. Holy shit. Pleasure isn’t a person. It’s personal. And I need to work out what it looks like to me.”

With an unexpected windfall from the sale of her house, Noni embarks on a six-month sabbatical in Europe. She frequents London pubs with old friends. She buys lingerie in Amsterdam. She visits a retreat center nestled in the Scottish mountains. She reads and walks and thinks. And in Edinburgh, she decides to get a tattoo. The tattooist’s name is Beau, but Noni calls him “the Viking” for his gorgeous face and solid frame. (Picture Jason Momoa; I know I did.) Noni’s pleasure quest did not include plans to meet a beautiful Scottish man, but she finds herself drawn to the Viking. As she gets to know him better, Noni realizes the plans she has made for her life may be at odds with her heart.

It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake is, well, pure pleasure. An Australian playwright and novelist who previously published a young adult novel titled Beautiful Mess, Claire Christian is a deliciously fun writer, letting us peek into Noni’s mind as she learns to listen to her own voice. Amid gorgeous European landscapes, Noni and the people she encounters are wholly likable, even when making questionable decisions.

Sexy and joyful, this is the story of a woman grappling with the idea that it’s OK to seek—even prioritize—pleasure.

Noni Blake is in a rut. Her teaching job doesn’t fulfill her. A nine-year relationship has come to its sad but inevitable end. She hates her hair and probably drinks too much. Noni decides what she needs is to shake things up.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Let’s Get Back to the Party

Review by Amy Scribner

In 2016, Sebastian Mote is living a solitary suburban life as a high school art history teacher. Newly single, he throws himself into his work, serving as adviser to his northern Virginia school’s newly formed LGBTQ social group. In Let’s Get Back to the Party, we flash between the hot, sticky months of summer 2016, when Sebastian marvels at the ease with which the younger generation proclaims their sexuality, and memories of his adolescence, when as an insecure boy he found solace in the beauty of paintings and sculpture. His only friend was skinny, quiet Oscar Burnham, another boy questioning his sexual identity. They furtively explored their feelings, but when Oscar’s family moved away, he left Sebastian behind, no letters, no calls.

At a wedding in which Sebastian is his friend’s plus-one, he catches a glimpse of Oscar. A stilted conversation ensues, and Oscar spends the entire reception scrolling through a gay hookup app. Stung, Sebastian realizes he still feels abandoned by Oscar all these years later.

Their lives become entwined again as each grapples with what it means to be a middle-aged gay man, bookended by the generation that bore the brunt of the AIDS epidemic and by the kids who have come of age in a more open-minded America. Oscar and Sebastian are each pulled into a platonic yet complicated relationship with someone of another generation: Sebastian with a younger student and Oscar with an older writer made famous for his sexual exploits in 1970s New York.

Zak Salih’s first novel is a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now. He imbues Sebastian and Oscar with complexity and flaws, two men unsure about the path their life is meant to take. Salih offers a cleareyed exploration of the sometimes fine line between friendship and romance, and how past slights can rear their heads in the most unexpected ways.

Set shortly after the Supreme Court’s historic marriage equality ruling and during the year of a divisive presidential election and the Pulse nightclub massacre, Let’s Get Back to the Party is a raw and captivating debut.

Zak Salih’s first novel is a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now.

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