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Cat Acree

FictionLiterary FictionComic Fiction

A series of small epiphanies

Review by Cat Acree

With the touching and very funny story of Arthur Less, author Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli) takes readers on an around-the-world tour, leaping from Mexico City to Berlin, from Marrakech to Kyoto, in a grand midlife adventure of the heart.

Gay novelist Less—like anyone with such a name—is a hapless, dreamy hero, a man straight out of a James Thurber story. He’s known more for his relationship with a much older, Pulitzer-winning poet than for his own work. Now, his most recent lover is getting married, and in an attempt to avoid the upcoming nuptials, Less has decided to accept every literary invitation on his desk. It just so happens that Less is about to turn 50, and his latest novel will soon be rejected by his publisher.

Dressed in his trademark blue suit, Less adorably butchers the German language, nearly falls in love in Paris, celebrates his birthday in the desert and, somewhere along the way, discovers something new and fragile about the passing of time, about the coming and going of love, and what it means to be the fool of your own narrative. It’s nothing less than wonderful.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the touching and very funny story of Arthur Less, Andrew Sean Greer takes readers from Mexico City to Berlin, from Marrakech to Kyoto, in a grand midlife adventure of the heart.

FictionWorld Fiction

An inescapable hit and run

Review by Cat Acree

The debut novel from Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, is an intense, twisting tale of prejudices ripped open, guilt that cannot be ignored and the inconvenience of having another person’s humanity exposed before you.

Israeli neurosurgeon Eitan Green wakes up next to his wife, cares for his sons, goes to work at the hospital, returns home, ingests food, sleeps. His fingernails grow four centimeters a year. Things continue normally. Such could’ve been the life of Eitan, husband to police officer Liat and father to Yaheli and Itamar. But one night, beneath a moon that he thinks is the most beautiful he has ever seen, Eitan drives his SUV into the desert. He’s feeling stifled. As he’s tearing through the desert, singing along to Janis Joplin, Eitan runs over a man who appears seemingly out of nowhere. It is a black man, an illegal Eritrean immigrant, and Eitan flees, leaving the man to bleed out and die.

But the next day, the dead man’s wife, Sirkit, appears at Eitan’s front door with his dropped wallet in her hand. She is a force unlike anything Eitan has ever known, and she demands he come to a shabby garage in the middle of the night. There, Eitan is forced to tend to Eritreans, some with infected wounds from their journey through the Sudan and Egypt, others with internal diseases. Every night, Eitan steals away to the desert to treat them, and he begins to acknowledge a population that he’d be much more comfortable to ignore. Sirkit’s fingernails, too, grow four centimeters a year.

All the while, Liat investigates the murder of the Eritrean man. Eitan and Liat’s marriage grows brittle beneath the tension of his many secrets, and his double life builds to an explosive moment that is as heart-rending as it is inevitable.

Gundar-Goshen has worked for the Israeli civil rights movement and won Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize for best debut. Waking Lions is her first novel to be published in the U.S., and it is a literary achievement for its page-turning exploration of inconvenient empathy and culpability. Gundar-Goshen’s descriptions of pain and medicine are tender and startling, but perhaps the novel’s greatest strength is the way it considers how we look at each other, the power of our gaze on strangers and on those we love. It’s about seeing and being seen, about pride and power.

This is a brave novel, socially aware and truly unforgettable.

The debut novel from Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, is an intense, twisting tale of prejudices ripped open, guilt that cannot be ignored and the inconvenience of having another person’s humanity exposed before you.

Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYAFantasy

Carve the Mark

Review by Cat Acree

In 2011, 23-year-old Veronica Roth’s debut, Divergent, set the stage for a series that would become a worldwide phenomenon. And while the series is ripe for obsessing, Roth took the story of Tris Prior to a shocking place—a place not every fan wanted to go. This unflinching pursuit of weighted questions carries over to her new duology as Roth considers faith and loyalty within a sci-fi setting. Carve the Mark is set in a solar system where a supreme force called the current flows through all beings, imbuing people with gifts similar to X-Men abilities.

The story opens when Akos and his older brother are kidnapped from their peaceful home in Thuvhe, in the northern part of their icy planet, by Shotet soldiers. The Shotet are an unrecognized nation of scavengers and warriors, and as their prisoner, gentle Akos (a win for Hufflepuff heroes) is trained as a soldier and charged with attending to hard-edged Cyra, the sister of the tyrannical Shotet ruler. Their friendship will change them both, but this is a world bound by fate, where kills are marked on the arms of killers. Loyalty to one’s family is everything, and it seems violence may be the only way to change that.

Roth’s cultural worldbuilding is meticulous and intricate, although explanatory passages slow the novel’s pace. But Roth’s conjuring of religions, belief systems and language differences is well done, and her prose has strengthened with this new series. Diehard Roth fans will be rewarded.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Veronica Roth returns with a new sci-fi series.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

All Our Wrong Todays

Review by Cat Acree

Amid the deluge of unreliable, devious narrators that compose so much of recent fiction, meet Tom Barren. He’s refreshingly truthful, completely forthright—and an abject failure. In the debut novel from Toronto author and screenwriter Elan Mastai, Tom would like to tell you how he screwed up the future.

Tom’s self-effacing memoir opens with a dose of physics, as our apologetic hero does his best to explain just how he got stuck in the “dank, grimy horror” that is our 2016. Tom is from an alternate reality, the kind of utopian future that Americans dreamed of in the 1950s. In this technological paradise, the groundbreaking Goettreider Engine uses the Earth’s rotation to power all of humanity. Below-average Tom might be a disappointment to his genius father, but things are generally pretty good for humankind in his 2016. That is, until—in a fit of rage, guilt and grief—Tom defiantly hops into the time machine his father has built and accidentally halts the creation of the Goettreider Engine.

Mastai’s utopian worldbuilding is complex and imaginative, but some of the book’s most memorable sections are when Tom attempts to navigate our “retrograde” world. Here, his family is different: His mother is still alive, his father is kind, and he has a sharp-witted sister. His love is different, and his failures are different. This isn’t your typical time-travel story where the wrong reality needs to be righted.

An entertaining rom-com of errors, All Our Wrong Todays backflips through paradoxes while exploring provocative questions of grief and the multitudes we contain within ourselves. Ultimately, it’s a story about love—and the stupid things we’ll do for it.

Read more: Elan Mastai on ‘All Our Wrong Todays.’

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the debut novel from Toronto author and screenwriter Elan Mastai, Tom has stumbled into a very different 2016.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Fever Dream

Review by Cat Acree

Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s English-language debut, Fever Dream, snares readers. It’s a page-turner of mounting dread, unfolding entirely through a conversation between a bedridden young woman and the boy who whispers in her ear.

Amanda lies dying in a hospital clinic in rural Argentina. Sitting next to her is David, a boy who asks her—urges her—to remember the events of whatever trauma rendered her terminally ill. At his behest, Amanda recalls meeting David’s mother, a nervous and elegant woman named Carla. Carla tells Amanda a strange story about a very young David, who drinks the same toxic water that kills Carla’s husband’s prized stallion. To spare her son’s life, Carla calls upon a local woman with medicinal and magical abilities. By splitting David’s soul with another child’s, she saves the boy.

But this is only the beginning. Why is Amanda in the hospital? And what has happened to Amanda’s own daughter, Nina? Time and again, Amanda references the “rescue distance,” the variable space between her and Nina, the distance between a mother and any worst-case scenario that may imperil her child. “I spend half the day calculating it,” Amanda says. As she recalls more and more details, Amanda begins to tell the story her own way, trying to make sense of what matters in these events and what does not—and decide which threats are inevitable or imagined.

With the urgency, attention to detail and threat of an abrupt ending that define short stories, the novel builds unease seamlessly through exceptionally well-paced dialogue. The sparseness of Schweblin’s prose, translated by Megan McDowell, anchors this strange conversation and keeps it from becoming disorienting. 

Minimalist yet complex, monochromatic yet textured, Fever Dream is a delicate and marvelously constructed tale, like a bundle of our darkest worries artfully arranged into our own likeness.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook

A mind-bending Argentinian suspense novel.
YA FictionYA

The Hawkweed Prophecy

Review by Cat Acree

There was a prophecy that foretold of the next witch queen. She would be a descendant of one of the Hawkweed sisters, Raven or Charlock. To ensure that her own daughter would become queen, powerful witch Raven ensured her sister would only carry sons, which are unwanted by the coven and destined to die. When Charlock finally becomes pregnant with a girl, Raven switches the baby witch with a human child, in a flash of magic that no one notices.

But Raven never expected the girls to find one another in a wooded glen one day. The two girls—sweet Ember Hawkweed, with her inability to produce even the most meager spell; and troublemaker Poppy Hooper, who has lived her whole life with the strangest occurrences happening around her, from cats shadowing her to spontaneous fire—make an instant connection. But as the truth comes out about Raven’s betrayal, it won’t be easy to make things right, especially when the two girls begin to fall for the same boy, Leo, who feels electricity from Poppy and warmth from Ember.

In this world, created by the acclaimed screenwriter of The Little Prince, magic is a delicate lattice that connects witches in their jealousies, power struggles and insecurities. Everyone in this story is an outsider, from Poppy’s mother who has gone mad from believing that her daughter is not her own, to Leo who lives on the streets. It seems that no one belongs, but their efforts to make sense of a world that doesn’t want them is what connects them all. The love triangle between Poppy, Ember and Leo is but a mere distraction as magic builds, and despite all the spells in the air, it’s the most unbelievable aspect of the story.

Author Irena Brignull tugs heartstrings here and there in The Hawkweed Prophecy, but she excels at tapping into something a little wicked. In the end, the reader isn’t so concerned that Poppy will end up happy, as much as they want to see just how much havoc she can wreak.

Irena Brignull tugs heartstrings here and there in The Hawkweed Prophecy.
Nonfiction

Grunt

Review by Cat Acree

From the digestive system (Gulp) to the body after death (Stiff) to the science of sex (Bonk), Mary Roach’s books have all touched on familiar topics that have been written about over and over again. But Roach, a self-described “goober with a flashlight,” brings a glorious level of glee to each of her subjects as she transforms well-worn topics into fresh learning experiences. At first pass, her latest book is her least universal: Grunt explores the science of the human body at war. After all, everyone has a digestive system, we all experience death, and most of us have had sex or at least considered it—but few of us will ever fight on a battlefield.

As Roach makes clear, Grunt is no Zero Dark Thirty, nor is it about the science of military armaments. She never ignores the bullets and bombs but instead focuses on the unsung heroes of battle. At the fashion design studio of the U.S. Army Natick Labs, Roach learns about the ballistic qualities of silk underpants and why snipers can’t wear zippers. She runs around with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss in combat. She even discusses penis transplants, a particularly timely topic since the first successful procedure occurred just last December.

Grunt has everything Roach fans look for: guffaw-worthy footnotes, questions pursued to hilarious and rewarding ends and connections that we never would’ve considered. Perhaps no one else walks the line of irreverent and considerate as skillfully as Roach does, and with this book, she presents something important, difficult and often ugly, leaving readers with a new appreciation for the bizarre sciences and creative minds that strive to better the lives of soldiers.

Read more: Mary Roach’s quest to find the perfect giveaway item to accompany ‘Grunt.’

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Perhaps no one else walks the line of irreverent and considerate as skillfully as Mary Roach does, and with this book, she presents something important, difficult and often ugly.
Children's & YAPicture Book

A Magical Winter

Review by Cat Acree

The Michigan backyard of wildlife photographers Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick appears to be a busy place, full of deer, doves, turkeys and squirrels. Best known for their 1999 picture book, Stranger in the Woods, the husband-and-wife team transforms their stunning nature photography into beloved children’s books by imagining the sweet, funny dialogue between different woodland creatures.

In their latest book, A Magical Winter, the forest animals anticipate the arrival of another stranger. Against a backdrop of freshly fallen snow, the animals squabble over the mysterious creature until it finally arrives: an all-white, blue-eyed deer that appears to be made of snow. But Mother Doe kindly lets everyone know there’s no reason to worry: “He’s one of my three fawns. He is not made of snow . . . he is not going to melt.” When a white turkey also appears, the animals wonder if their woods are enchanted, which is a good reason to celebrate. They parade and party until spring; after all, parties are more fun when everyone is accepted, regardless of physical differences.

Children will love discovering the magic of this backyard, while dreaming up stories for their own.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Michigan backyard of wildlife photographers Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick appears to be a busy place, full of deer, doves, turkeys and squirrels. Best known for their 1999 picture book, Stranger in the Woods, the husband-and-wife team transforms their stunning nature photography into beloved children’s books by imagining the sweet, funny dialogue between […]
Science Fiction & FantasyMystery & SuspenseFictionSuspenseScience Fiction

A treasure hunt for truthers

Review by Cat Acree

Several years ago, after researching his true crime book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, James Renner was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not uncommon for journalists to suffer such effects after witnessing trauma for a story, and Renner’s 10 years of hunting serial killers and writing about unsolved murders caught up with him. Fiction provided an unexpected safe haven, and his genre-bending time-travel thriller, The Man from Primrose Lane (2012), was a crime he could finally solve. His latest thriller, The Great Forgetting, digs at a much larger mystery, one with more questions, no generic answers and therefore plenty of room for an imaginative author to play. The result is a mix of conspiracy theorist paranoia, alternate history and cross-country adventure.

The story begins with an epilogue—our first clue that nothing is as it should be—which provides several bizarre nuggets of information: Fourteen years after 9/11, the coroner who oversaw and organized the remains of Flight 93 returns to the crash site, where he finds a severed monkey’s paw, clasping a man’s watch that reads, “RIP, Tony Sanders. 1978 to 2012.” And on the monkey’s palm is tattooed a bright red swastika.

In 2015, Jack Felter has returned home to Franklin Mills, Ohio, to help care for his father, who suffers from dementia. Franklin Mills is a place Jack would like to forget—especially his former love interest Sam, who immediately enlists Jack’s help in finding her husband (once Jack’s best friend), Tony Sanders, who has been missing for three years. Tony’s trail leads Jack to an institutionalized teen named Cole, who promises to reveal Tony’s whereabouts if Jack listens to Cole’s story—and begins boiling his water to counteract the pacifying effects of Fluoride. Jack soon learns about the Great Forgetting, a vast conspiracy that conceals the true events of World War II, contradicting everything he knows about history, science, the government and even time itself.

The Great Forgetting explores humanity’s desperation to forget the worst things that happen to us and the worst things we do to each other. It never loses speed as it reveals large-scale histrionics and builds to a zealous reveal. However, in Renner’s attempt to exorcise our prejudices and transform history, he risks alienating his audience, as many readers may find themselves defensive of their living memory, holding tighter to their real history. Perhaps some things can’t be rewritten, even for fiction’s sake.

Several years ago, after researching his true crime book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, James Renner was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not uncommon for journalists to suffer such effects after witnessing trauma for a story, and Renner’s 10 years of hunting serial killers and writing about unsolved murders caught up with him. Fiction provided an unexpected […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Review by Cat Acree

“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” These words can be found in an etching by Francisco Goya of a young man asleep, slumped over a table as a horde of wide-eyed and shadowy creatures bear down upon him. This nightmarish image is reproduced at the beginning of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (or 1,001 nights, that magical number). But Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, his first for adults in seven years, is not so tidy as monster against human. This is a fairy tale for the modern era, A Thousand and One Nights for the age of reality TV, The Odyssey in the time of Disney World.

Rushdie’s jinn are mischievous, lascivious creatures, made of “smokeless fire” and generally disinterested in unfortunate human concerns about right and wrong. But the line between the human and jinn worlds is crossed when the jinnia princess Dunia presents herself at the door of the disgraced 12th-century philosopher Ibn Rushd. Dunia has fallen in love with his mind and so bears his many children, descendants now part human and part jinn, all with the distinguishable trait of lobeless ears.

Leaping centuries forward to the present day, a storm strikes New York City and leaves “strangenesses” in its wake: A gardener finds himself floating a few inches above the ground. An abandoned baby marks the corrupt with boils and rotting flesh. A wormhole opens in a failed graphic novelist’s bedroom. A war of the worlds has begun.

Rushdie spins this action-​packed, illusion-filled, madcap wonder of a tale with a wicked, wise fury. It’s a riot of pop culture and humor, with bursts of insight that stop readers dead, only to zip them up again like a jinn flying across the sky. To tell a story about the jinn is to tell a story about ourselves, and this is why we love myth: The contrast of the fantastical allows us to peer at ourselves from a safe distance.

In this boisterous doomsday legend, reality is no longer a given, and what remains is a brilliant, bawdy world where stories are both the knife and the wound.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this boisterous doomsday legend, reality is no longer a given, and what remains is a brilliant, bawdy world where stories are both the knife and the wound.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

Armada

Review by Cat Acree

It’s hard to follow a debut that immediately became an international phenomenon, was published in 40 countries and is in the works to become a movie (hopefully with the same mind-blowing visual effects Warner Bros. brought to movies like Inception, The Lego Movie and The Matrix). The thing that made Ernest Cline’s first book, Ready Player One, so good was a nearly impossible balance between where-the-hell-did-that-come-from originality and the familiarity of Gen-X pop-culture references. There’s no such balance in his second novel, Armada. Familiarity surpasses originality—intentionally.

High school student Zack Lightman is staring out a classroom window, dreaming of adventure, when he spies the impossible: a prismatic alien spacecraft straight out of his favorite video game. His gamer father, who died in a freak accident years ago, predicted as much in his seemingly incoherent journals about a conspiracy involving the government and the entire sci-fi industry. But now it’s clear his father wasn’t crazy: The government has indeed been preparing for an impending alien war by training gamers as an army of drone-flying soldiers. Over the course of only a few days, Zack finds himself on the frontlines of intergalactic warfare as one of the best gamers around, and therefore Earth’s greatest hope.

Does all this sound a little . . . familiar? Is it ringing of Ender’s Game and The Last Starfighter? Not to give anything away, but of course it does. Science fiction is a genre constructed through reused tropes, which can be manipulated to expand the cultural conversation of genre fiction—but in Armada, even Zack feels uneasy about falling into such a classic sci-fi narrative.

Armada is almost pure action-adventure while winkingly employing a barrage of jokes and clichés from video games and sci-fi movies, television and books. It’s big fun, especially if your idea of fun is sitting around watching your friends play video games while discussing important theories like Sting vs. Mjolnir.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s hard to follow a debut that immediately became an international phenomenon, was published in 40 countries and is in the works to become a movie (hopefully with the same mind-blowing visual effects Warner Bros. brought to movies like Inception, The Lego Movie and The Matrix). The thing that made Ernest Cline’s first book, Ready […]
YA FictionYA

Seeing Off the Johns

Review by Cat Acree

Early in Seeing Off the Johns, author Rene S. Perez II gives us the key word in the story: onus—a burden or responsibility, often an unpleasant one.

Greenton is a small, dead-end town in 1998 Texas where no one expects greatness but some dream of it nonetheless. As the novel opens, the entire town has showed up to bestow well wishes upon their two hometown heroes, John Robison and John Mejia, athletic superstars who are headed to UT Austin. But the Johns never make it to the university—their car flips en route, and the two are killed.

Perhaps the only person in Greenton who didn’t see off the Johns was Concepcion “Chon” Gonzales, who has been waiting nearly his entire life for John Mejia to get out of dodge so he can take a shot at Mejia’s girlfriend, Araceli. As cold and insensitive as it sounds, death has made Chon’s dreams come true, and he finds relief from resentment as he finally pursues his dream girl. But like a child who learns the world doesn’t pause while he sleeps, Chon begins to recognize the crushing unfairness and ugliness of death’s gift. Mejia’s parents’ grief becomes Araceli’s unwanted burden, and the citizens of Greenton turn to her, watching her reaction as if it were a barometer for their own. Chon evolves beyond both his shallow, lustful desire for Araceli and his pursuit of some kind of machismo protector status, and he eventually finds the capacity to connect—with Araceli and his community—and acknowledge the tragedy in the Johns’ passing.

Loss, and our response to it, is no simple thing. This is a searing, mature novel, not just because sexual scenes (which are among the most complex and thoughtful moments in the book) are included, but in the way it handles the innumerable challenges associated with grief and love.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Teen Top Pick, July 2015
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Harder They Fall

Review by Cat Acree

The men of the American Wild West called it the “shining times,” when the law held no sway over any place beyond the Mississippi. The new novel from T.C. Boyle takes this tradition of renegades and focuses on the violence.

Twenty-five-year-old Adam worships one of these survivalist mountain men, even renaming himself after him: Colter. He’s manic, raging and growing his own stash of opium poppies, and he easily falls in with 40-something Sara, a hardcore member of an extremist anti-government movement. Together they are citizen soldiers, making war (not love) and defiantly, desperately searching for something to burn down—and burn they do. Adam is also the son of ex-Marine Sten, the epitome of claustrophobic rage and frustration, who kills someone with his bare hands while on vacation in Costa Rica.

As these three stubborn minds draw together like fire and kindling, violence becomes more than an inherited trait within one family but rather a syndrome of a nation built on revolution and stoicism, distorted by fear and hysteria. It may be a stroke of genius that the characters themselves are maddening in their own right, leaving readers with a pounding pulse not only from suspense but from infuriation.

The bestselling, unbelievably prolific Boyle has described The Harder They Fall as a counterpoint to his historical novel San Miguel (2012), which unfolded through the perspectives of three women who sought refuge and sanctuary on an island off the coast of California. San Miguel was a departure for Boyle, and now the pendulum swings back to high-adrenaline zaniness and pertinacious, destructive misfits. Individualism remains central, but unlike San Miguel, it’s far from contemplative. It is a juggernaut, twisted to its breaking point.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The men of the American Wild West called it the “shining times,” when the law held no sway over any place beyond the Mississippi. The new novel from T.C. Boyle takes this tradition of renegades and focuses on the violence.

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