Melissa Brown

Losing a loved one to the chaos of war would be devastating enough, but lingering doubt as to whether a husband were alive or dead could slowly consume a wife. Especially if her last words to him were an ultimatum: Choose his reporting work, or her. In The Wind Is Not a River, Helen and John Easley find themselves caught in the upheaval of World War II, separated emotionally and physically by the lengths to which he will go for a story.

John poses as a lieutenant to sneak into the Japanese-occupied Aleutian Islands, hoping to report about this little-known theatre of the war—which the Americans would prefer the press keep quiet about. His plane goes down on the island of Attu as the novel opens, and instantly the reader is thrust into his fight for survival. The weather is unrelenting and unstable, the only food available is what he and the crash’s only other survivor, young airman Karl, can catch and kill, and discovery by Japanese soldiers is a daily threat.

Helen, at home with her guilt and her ill father, eventually can take the waiting no longer. She, too, lies her way north to Alaska, joining a troupe of USO Swingettes, in a passionate effort to find John.

Canadian writer Brian Payton deftly juxtaposes Helen’s and John’s separate struggles to stay alive and sane against forces that would render them otherwise. Set against a meticulously described Alaskan setting, each harrowing or quietly painful minute is portrayed in realistic detail. John’s ordeal proves miraculous and heartbreaking, told in passages that are sometimes difficult to read due to their intensity of rawness or sorrow. The book arcs poetically across the distance between Helen and John, drawing out the separation that they (and the reader) can hardly bear.

An inventive English chef is kidnapped and forced onto the Flying Rose, a pirate ship helmed by a seemingly mad, but striking, female captain. The premise of Eli Brown’s novel Cinnamon and Gunpowder grabs your attention; his witty wordplay and deft characterizations will keep you turning pages.

God-fearing Owen Wedgwood is appalled by the brutal seafaring ways of the fiery Hannah Mabbot and her crew, and even more by the ultimatum she hands him: To keep his berth and life, he must please her palate with delectable Sunday suppers using a skeletal kitchen of meager and questionable foodstuffs. The novel is his journal, and Brown bestows a dry-witted and intriguing voice on his narrator.

A chef falls under the spell of a female pirate in a rollicking high-seas adventure.

With his employer, Lord Ramsay, dead and his escapes unsuccessful, Wedgwood unwillingly becomes a party to skirmishes against the vengeful privateer Laroche and heists of British ships stuffed with spoils of the opium and tea trades that dominated the early-19th-century era in which the novel is set. Mabbot’s hunt for the Brass Fox, an elusive figure whose interests may or may not be at odds with hers, drives the action.

As each Sunday looms, the captive chef makes do. Mouthwatering descriptions of his triumphs suggest the author himself to be a man of daring appetite. Culinary conversation mingles easily with the vernacular of sailing and Wedgwood’s poignant musings on faith, food and the meaning of life. At the mercy of whatever edibles the crew pillages, Wedgwood manages to create menus to rival a restaurant chef’s. He coaxes braised pheasant, whelks poached in wine lees, sundried tomato puttanesca and even a mango tart glazed with brandy and honey, from his galley. Over these meals, Mabbot and Wedgwood share stories, and a form of trust grows, along with a surprising sympathy.

From the English coast through the Sunda Strait to China, Cinnamon and Gunpowder tells a salty tale in the most entertaining sense of the word. Brown spins an adventure story with the weight of history to it, and plenty of absurdity for comic relief. Much is lost and much is gained as this questing narrative reaches its spectacular crescendo.

Told through the eyes of Trina, a broken yet resilient mother writing to her missing daughter, I’m Staying Here unfolds the little-known story of the town of Curon in Italy’s South Tyrol province, sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland, where Nazism and Mussolini’s fascism collide.

Trina graduates from high school in 1923 with plans to teach just as Mussolini comes to power and outlaws the use of German as a teaching language. At the same time, old plans for a destructive dam resurface. Young and impetuous, Trina pals around with her friends, pines for an idealistic young farmer named Erich and soon joins an underground network of teachers. She marries Erich and settles into his family’s old farmhouse. By the 1930s, they have two children, Michael and Marica.

Like their families and neighbors, Trina and Erich have only known Curon’s idyllic mountains and pastures. But as World War II looms closer, Mussolini’s and Hitler’s ideologies take root in the villagers’ hearts and minds, dividing neighbors who’ve known each other their whole lives. As the war takes Curon’s men, the dam that will swallow up their town begins to take shape.

Through headstrong, opinionated Trina’s narration, author Marco Balzano voices the anger of a people whose story has been overshadowed in history. Though some nuance has been lost in translation from the Italian and the tense shifts confusingly at times, I’m Staying Here reads like a confessional, conveying raw emotion with a forceful, memorable impact. For Trina and Erich, the pain of compounding losses grows, from the deaths of loved ones to their young daughter’s devastating disappearance, while they witness the terrors of war and the dam’s construction.

Balzano writes convincingly of a woman who has been torn apart by the sacrifices and suffering she’s endured, but who stalwartly carries on. In writing to her lost daughter, Trina attempts to let go. And as Trina’s own mother would tell her, “All we can do is move forward.”