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Sarah McCraw Crow

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Farewell Tour

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Stephanie Clifford’s second novel, The Farewell Tour, is both a dual-timeline redemption story and an epic journey through a half-century of country music. 

At 57, country music star Lillian Waters—or Water Lil, as she’s known to her fans—is drinking too much and feeling her age, and she’s unable to write any new songs. Even worse, she keeps alienating almost everyone in her life. In short, Lillian’s washed up. When a doctor gives her more bad news—her voice is deteriorating due to polyps—she decides to hit the road one last time for a farewell summer tour. 

Lillian’s manager, Stanley, puts together a ragtag band of backup musicians and books some county fairs, but the tour gets off to a comically bad start. To try to salvage it, Lillian calls on her old friend Charlie Hagerty, a session musician and songwriter, and he agrees to join. 

The Farewell Tour alternates between the summer of 1980 (the novel’s present) and a retrospective sweep of Lillian’s life as told by the woman herself, beginning with her Depression-era childhood on a subsistence farm. Like real-life midcentury country legends Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Lillian overcomes a hardscrabble background and abusive early years, though she’s the daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers in Washington rather than from Appalachia or the Deep South. Obsessed with the country music that she first hears as a girl, Lillian sets out to beat the long odds, learning to play the guitar, writing her own songs and performing on radio stations. Over and over, she faces sexism and misogyny in her quest to make it big. But at the center of this epic story is a quiet mystery, a childhood episode that Lillian can’t quite let herself remember.

Full of marvelous period details about World War II-era Tacoma, Washington, and its proto-country music scene, as well as glitzy 1970s Nashville, Tennessee, The Farewell Tour covers a huge amount of ground, with a correspondingly large number of supporting characters, a sometimes dizzying array. Music fans will appreciate the references to real 20th-century country stars and industry players. Lillian herself is an appealing mix: determined and hard charging, blustery and often unable to get out of her own way. Like a country ballad, The Farewell Tour offers a bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships and heartfelt songs.

Like a country music ballad, The Farewell Tour offers a bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships and heartfelt songs.
FictionHistorical FictionGothic Fiction

Weyward

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

As Emilia Hart’s debut novel opens, it’s 2019, and 29-year-old Kate Ayres is plotting her escape from both London and her abusive boyfriend. She’s recently learned she has a secret place to run to: Her great-aunt Violet, an eccentric entomologist whom Kate barely remembers, has died and bequeathed her niece Weyward Cottage in the remote village of Crows Beck, Cumbria. 

The story then drops back to 1942, when 16-year-old Violet Ayres is confined to the grounds of her father’s Cumbrian estate, Orton Hall, and looked after by a governess and nanny. Violet’s father won’t let her visit the nearby village of Crows Beck or go off to school, though Violet doesn’t know why. He disapproves of the way the girl spends so much time outside, climbing trees and rescuing animals, and he warns that Violet is beginning to turn out like her mother, who died when Violet was a toddler. 

Interspersed among Kate’s and Violet’s stories is the first-person account of Altha, a young woman from Crows Beck who is being tried for witchcraft in 1619.

These three timelines—2019, 1942 and 1619—braid together the quests of Weyward’s women, keeping the tension high as each character faces danger and difficult decisions. As Kate and Violet begin to understand their connections to other women of Weyward Cottage and to the natural world, each also begins to rely on her own strength.

Featuring beautiful descriptions of the plants, animals and insects of rural Cumbria, Weyward also makes good use of objects, such as family pieces passed down through generations. And as befits a gothic story, the novel includes plenty of tropes—the madwoman in the attic, an anxious main character, a dark and crumbling mansion, even a servant named Miss Poole (an apparent nod to Jane Eyre). Most of the novel’s men are portrayed as unremittingly villainous, and some readers will wish for a little more complexity there. Still, Weyward is a satisfying, well-plotted historical page turner and a welcome addition to the feminist field of “witcherature.” It’s perfect for fans of Sarah Penner’s The Lost Apothecary.

Weyward is a welcome addition to the feminist field of “witcherature,” perfect for fans of Sarah Penner’s The Lost Apothecary.
FictionHistorical Fiction

In Memoriam

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are best friends and sixth-formers at the English public school Preshute College, an Eton-like boarding school. It’s 1914, and the Great War has begun killing their schoolmates. The school newspaper, The Preshutian, lists the names of dead and wounded older friends. Meanwhile, outside of school, young women hand white feathers to young men in civilian clothes to shame them into enlisting. 

Gaunt and Ellwood banter, tease, deal with hazing and get drunk with their classmates, but they also harbor secret worries: Gaunt is German and Ellwood is Jewish, marking them as outsiders, more vulnerable in an England at war. What’s more, they can’t admit that their bond is more than friendship— “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Pressured by his mother and sister, Gaunt enlists even though he’s not yet 19, and suddenly he finds himself at the Belgian front, a far-too-young leader thrust into trench warfare. Soon after, Ellwood, starry-eyed with the idea of honor, enlists too, despite Gaunt’s letters urging him against the idea. What follows is an epic war story that depicts the unremitting savagery, trauma and stupidity of World War I. At the same time, In Memoriam tracks an epic love story, as Gaunt and Ellwood sort out their feelings, not knowing if they’ll ever see each other again as their classmates continue to die awful, senseless deaths. 

Author Alice Winn so deeply inhabits her characters, their vanishing prep-school world, the end of empire and the arrival of brutal modern war that it’s hard to believe this is her first novel. In Memoriam feels like an old-fashioned door stopper, with a huge cast of background characters, almost all of them young men (Gaunt’s sister is the only significant female character), and some surprising, even melodramatic plot points as it follows the historical trajectory of the war and its aftermath. The story’s points of view toggle between Gaunt and Ellwood, though the novel’s heart belongs to sardonic, tender Gaunt.

Winn draws on real life not only for war details but also for Ellwood’s character, who seems loosely based on real-life English war poet Siegfried Sassoon. He writes his own poems and quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Rupert Brooke. These verses—along with fictional letters and newspaper articles, especially The Preshutian’s somber roll call of the dead and wounded—underline the impossibilities of both war and life as a gay man in early 20th-century England. 

In Memoriam is a gorgeous novel, both a meditation on the futility and trauma of a war that sent a generation of young men to their deaths and a gripping love-in-wartime story, with a bittersweet yet hopeful conclusion.

In Memoriam is a gorgeous novel, both a gripping love-in-wartime story and a meditation on the futility and trauma of World War I.
NonfictionFilmEssaysArts & Culture

Monsters

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her engaging Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, memoirist and critic Claire Dederer wrestles with a complicated, sometimes slippery subject: What do we do with art—movies, novels, songs, paintings—we once loved, and sometimes still love, from men we now consider monsters? “I started keeping a list,” she writes. “Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop.” The book grew out of an essay Dederer wrote in 2017 for The Paris Review that went viral in the early days of #MeToo. Here Dederer considers the subject more thoroughly in a series of connected essays from a number of angles, walking readers through her thinking and experiences as a reader, viewer, parent, friend and longtime critic.

Dederer’s definition of an art monster is straightforward: “They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing.” As she asks who qualifies as an art monster, and whether female artists can be monsters, Dederer reminds us how our 20th-century concept of “genius” was bound up with masculinity, and often with brutal behavior toward women (with Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso as prime examples).

But what Dederer really wants to get at has to do with our responses to these men and their art; she wants to tell the story of the audience. Reconsidering Woody Allen’s movies, particularly Manhattan, in light of his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, for example, she notes how her male critic friends have continued to see his movies as works of genius, while she and other women have responded quite differently.

One striking chapter looks at our responses to renowned artists Richard Wagner, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, noting the way we shrug off their antisemitic and racist comments because it was a different time. “One of the great problems faced by audiences is named the Past. The Past is a vast terrible place where they didn’t know better. Where monstrous behaviors were accepted,” Dederer writes. Referencing a range of sources, she argues nimbly that these artists did in fact know better.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Monsters is neither rant nor sermon. Dederer is not only an incisive researcher and writer, she’s also conversational, approachable and funny. The book seamlessly incorporates bits of memoir—Dederer’s life in the Pacific Northwest, her experiences as a critic and a woman, her failures—that have informed her critical thinking. Yes, Monsters is a worthy addition to contemporary literary criticism, but more than that, it’s a very enjoyable book about a thorny, elusive subject.

An enjoyable book about a thorny, elusive subject, Monsters is an incisive work of literary criticism about art created by men we now consider monsters.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Early in his freshman year at Yale in 1973, Nate Reminger encounters his classmate Farrell Covington: “Farrell wasn’t simply my cultural opposite, a blinding sun god to counter my pale, Jewish, brown-haired, generous-nosed eagerness. He was a genetic accident, a green-eyed, six-foot-three-inch, broad-shouldered gift, and yes, there were dimples when he smiled.” Farrell, also a freshman, lives in a swanky townhouse with a butler, and he speaks as if he’s in a Cole Porter production, with a voice like a person who’s “been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” 

Farrell happens to be the scion of the very conservative, very Catholic, immeasurably wealthy Covington family of Wichita, Kansas. And narrator Nate, who knows he’s gay but never had so much as a kiss, is shocked when Farrell declares that he may be in love with Nate. This opening section of Paul Rudnick’s novel Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is especially strong, offering a mini coming-of-age story that’s filled with new friends and well-grounded in both place (the Yale campus and New Haven, Connecticut) and time (the early 1970s).

After a whirlwind freshman-year romance, Nate and Farrell are separated when Farrell’s flinty homophobic father blackmails his son into leaving Yale and promising to never see Nate again. It’s no spoiler to say that Nate and Farrell do indeed see each other again; the novel follows them for almost 50 years. Nate narrates the forces that keep the two apart and Farrell’s ingenious measures to bring them together, along with the ups and downs of late 20th-century gay life—the vibrant downtown club and disco scene of the ’70s, and the AIDS crisis and its effect on both Hollywood and New York’s theater world. But while Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is heartfelt, it’s rarely somber. It’s a good-natured romp through the decades, with a large cast and plenty of clever quips and throwaway lines.

Rudnick is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter, and here he draws on his own life, sometimes to comic effect. (Rudnick wrote the play I Hate Hamlet and the screenplay for the movie Sister Act, while Nate writes the play Enter Hamlet and the screenplay Habit Forming.) Because it covers so much time and summarizes much of the action, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style occasionally feels more like the outline for a novel than a novel itself. Still, it’s a warmhearted, funny story with unexpected twists and to-die-for settings, a sweet recounting of a 50-year romance.

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is a warmhearted, funny story with unexpected twists and to-die-for settings, a sweet recounting of a 50-year romance.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In her debut memoir in essays, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, poet Jane Wong offers a nonlinear narrative of her life and her family’s lives. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1980s, when they were in their early 20s, and settled on the Jersey Shore to run a Chinese restaurant. “This is the story of lost enterprises,” Wong writes about Atlantic City in the elegiac title essay. “Of boarded-up pizza joints, lonely stuffed animals sans tipsy game operators, echoing parking lots with floating trash, and neon lights toppled over like sand castles.”

Those lost enterprises also refer to Wong’s father’s gambling addiction, which led to the downfall of the family restaurant, and his eventual disappearance from their lives. His experience is part of a larger story that also develops throughout the memoir: that of big gambling companies preying on Asian Americans, allowing gambling to take hold of vulnerable communities. These strands of systemic injustice are braided with Wong’s own memories of her childhood. “Here is one scene, on a shore of many: on the way back to Caesar’s Palace, my mother sits on a boardwalk bench, the dune grass behind her like the back of a throne,” she writes. “From her purse: stolen bread rolls from the Palace Buffet. She chews out all her anger on those bread rolls.”

In the gorgeous essay “Root Canal Street,” Wong links the cruelly casual racism she experienced in middle school and high school, her parents’ upbringing in rural Maoist China and trips with her mother to see unlicensed dentists in Chinatown, arranged by a friend of a friend whom they paid in baked goods. “A cornucopia for crowns: crispy almond biscuits; pineapple buns with golden cracks like some fantastical goose egg . . . egg tarts with their pools of custard glory; and chewy winter melon cakes with sesame seeds.” 

Wong writes with anger and clarity about men who have abused her and the racism she’s endured throughout her life, including at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But mostly this memoir is a story of family as Wong recalls her absent father, her intrepid and resilient mother, her brother and her grandparents. Interspersed between the book’s longer essays are sections devoted to Wongmom.com, an imaginary website where you could type a question or worry, and Wong’s mother would offer a reassuring answer. (And for those wondering about the book’s evocative title: Yes, the memoir includes a Bruce sighting.)

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is experimental in form and dense with beautiful sensory images, particularly of food. In her own indelible way, Wong records her coming of age and finding her place in her family, in poetry and in the world.

Poet Jane Wong’s experimental memoir is dense with beautiful sensory images about coming of age in Atlantic City and contending with her father’s gambling addiction.
NonfictionScienceMemoirArts & Culture

Life on Other Planets

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

“I started my life with one thing: science. Astronomy, to be specific. And I dove into it,” writes Aomawa Shields in the introduction to her memoir, Life on Other Planets. “Then I found something else I liked: the arts. Acting, to be specific. So I dove into that instead. Neither one by itself felt fully right.” 

Beginning with her initial glimmers of love for the stars and planets as a preteen, Shields tells her story chronologically, with writing that is immediate, sometimes poetic. In a scene rich in detail, she recounts the snowy winter night when, as a high school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, she first glimpsed Jupiter and its moons through a telescope. “That I could measure something in space, just by looking—this was the shattered ceiling of the Earth, ascending up and through the atmosphere into nothing,” she writes. At MIT and then the University of Wisconsin, Shields steeped herself in astronomy. But the pull of acting, which she discovered in high school playing the role of Truvy in Steel Magnolias, never faded, and she eventually put her work in STEM on hold to pursue an M.F.A. in acting at UCLA.

Shields’ nonlinear path through science, acting, the arts and back to astronomy (she returned to graduate school at age 35 and is now a tenured professor of astronomy and physics at UC Irvine) makes up the rest of the memoir’s narrative. Yes, she faced a bevy of struggles: As a Black woman, Shields was buffeted by racism in graduate school, as well as by self-doubt and impostor syndrome. She’s also candid about the sometimes-difficult balance of marriage, family and work, and her worry about whether she’s “Black enough” in certain settings. Throughout, Shields is an illuminating guide to her own idiosyncratic journey, seamlessly unpacking complicated concepts about stars and planets.

In Life on Other Planets, Shields has written an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging her scientific and artistic pursuits. Along the way, she also gives us glimpses of the wonder she’s found while studying the cosmos.

Astrobiologist Aomawa Shields’ Life on Other Planets is an inspiring memoir about charting her own path and merging the two worlds of science and art.
FictionComing of Age

The Rachel Incident

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Caroline O’Donoghue, the bestselling author of the YA fantasy novel All Our Hidden Gifts, has published several books for adults in the U.K. but makes her American adult debut with The Rachel Incident, a dual-timeline narrative that’s mostly set during Rachel Murray’s last year of university in Cork, Ireland.

In 2009, Rachel is living at home with her parents and working part time in a bookshop when she meets James Devlin, who’s just been hired as a bookseller. Rachel and James charm each other, begin a sudden bantering friendship—she’s fairly sure James is gay; he insists he’s not—and soon she’s moved out of her suburban family home and into his ramshackle downtown house. 

When Rachel falls for her married English professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, both Rachel’s and James’ lives become entangled with Dr. Byrne and his wife, Deenie, who works in publishing. To Rachel, the older couple’s well-kept house and professional lives signify modern adulthood. 

This is only the beginning of Rachel’s tumultuous year, one of haphazard and sometimes terrible decisions, heartbreaking first love and frequent despair—and all as the Great Recession squeezes everyone she knows. Rachel and James work on his sitcom screenplay based on their life together, and they dream, plan and save in order to leave conservative Ireland for London and a more fabulous life. 

Counterpointing and narrating this chaotic year is the voice of an older Rachel, now in her early 30s, a journalist in London who’s pregnant with her first child. She’s still friends with James (mostly via texting), who’s now a comedy writer for a late-night TV talk show in New York City. The present-day Rachel has news for James that she’s not sure how to share.

In both timelines, but especially the earlier one, Rachel’s first-person voice and wonderfully off-kilter observations make her a character you want to settle in with. By turns comic and bittersweet, this is a tender tale of platonic and first love, as well as a sharp look at such issues as homosexuality and abortion in the more repressive Ireland of pre-repeal days. The Rachel Incident will likely draw comparisons to Sally Rooney’s work, but there’s more than a hint of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones here: a bright and funny voice in a novel that wears its heart on its sleeve.

The Rachel Incident will likely draw comparisons to Sally Rooney’s work, but there’s more than a hint of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones here: a bright and funny voice in a novel that wears its heart on its sleeve.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

The Rye Bread Marriage

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

For Michaele Weissman, the attraction to John MeIngailis was instantaneous: “He was tall and slender, with blond hair and a shaggy mustache. His face was angular. Nordic. With slate-blue eyes. He spoke English with a barely discernible accent. I thought he was gorgeous.” Yet even after 40 years of marriage, Weissman is mystified by her husband’s moods, their fights and his obsession with all things Latvian.

Weissman and MeIngailis are quite different, or so she thinks: She’s eight years younger, Jewish, American and a journalist, while MeIngailis, who escaped Latvia with his family as a child during WWII, is an MIT scientist, ardently attached to his native folklore and his refugee community. His devotion to Latvian rye bread (a dark, chewy, sourdough) perplexes her. “You wake up married to a rye-bread-loving stranger, and slowly you realize that your husband doesn’t want to be like you. . . . in fact he wants you to be like him!” she writes in an early chapter. “From this nexus of unresolvable difference the decades-long battle is engaged. . . . in time you realize this whirling dervish of mixed emotion, of love and fury, of compatibility, attraction, tenderness and contention: this is your life and your marriage.”

The Rye Bread Marriage: How I Found Happiness With a Partner I’ll Never Understand offers multiple stories: of Weissman’s growth as she seeks to understand MeIngailis’ eccentricities and her own; of their marriage, parenthood and stepparenthood; and of Latvian rye bread and its singular place in Latvian history and culture. This voicey, often funny memoir is comprised of 125 chapters of varying length, some just a page, some even shorter. Here’s the entirety of chapter 41, “Marriage: Second Definition”: “Marriage: An intimate relationship existing on a continuum between love and hate, with partners perpetually suspended between the two.” Some of the chapters form short, lyrical essays; some are more journalistic. The memoir really shines when Weissman recounts research visits to Latvia and Germany (where MeIngailis’ family took refuge at the end of the war) that led her to a deeper understanding of MeIngailis’ family history and the trauma of war and exile, as well as Latvian history and its unique bread.

The Rye Bread Marriage brings to mind two other quirky, memorable memoirs: Julie Klam’s The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters, and Amy Kraus Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. “How I Found Happiness with a Partner I’ll Never Understand” may be its subtitle, but by the time we reach the book’s lovely, life-affirming ending, it is clear that both partners do understand one another.

Even after 40 years of marriage, Michaele Weissman is mystified by her husband’s moods, their fights and his fixation on all things Latvian—but she still loves him.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Tom Lake

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Ann Patchett once again proves herself a master of the family narrative in Tom Lake, which, like her previous novels The Dutch House and Commonwealth, spans decades yet still feels intimate, offering well-drawn characters and finely paced revelations.

The novel opens in the middle of things: “That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability.” We soon learn that we’re at the beginning of a story told by narrator Lara Nelson—or more precisely, her backstory, which takes place in early 1980s New Hampshire. 

Tom Lake is a dual-timeline novel, moving seamlessly between the pivotal summer of 1984 and present-day scenes set amid the late spring of 2020, the first COVID-19 pandemic spring, when Lara and husband Joe’s three 20-something daughters have come home to the family cherry orchard in northern Michigan. Seasonal workers can’t get to the farm, so while Lara and daughters Emily, Maisie and Nell spend long days picking cherries, Lara agrees to recount her long-ago romance with movie star Peter Duke. In 1984, 24-year-old Lara is cast as Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at a summer-stock theater in Tom Lake, Michigan, and she finds herself deep in a whirlwind romance with charismatic fellow cast member Peter. He goes on to become a famous actor, while Lara goes on to become a farmer, wife and mom. 

Lara tells her story episodically, keeping her daughters (and us) waiting for more. The novel’s evocation of a mid-’80s summer-stock theater, its big and small dramas, feels both well inhabited and fresh, seen through the perspectives of both the younger Lara, who’s propelled into ingenue roles through some lucky breaks, and the older Lara, who keeps some details to herself. Through Lara’s give-and-take with her daughters, we get to know characters both present and past, and through Lara’s interiority and commentary, we also take in the Nelson family’s dynamics and the pleasures of a long marriage, as well as the regrets and might-have-beens.

The two timelines converge beautifully, and the revelations, when they come, feel both surprising and inevitable. Sometimes elegiac in tone, the novel threads the themes of Our Town and, to a lesser degree, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard throughout: the passage of time, the inevitability of loss and death, and the beauty of an ordinary family and an ordinary life, wondrous and too brief. And as with Our Town’s community of Grover’s Corners, Tom Lake’s main settings of northern Michigan and New Hampshire feel timeless and archetypal, even a little fairy tale-ish. (If you’re an Our Town fan, you’ll also enjoy the novel’s references to other productions of the play, some of them nonfictional.) Tom Lake is a gorgeously layered novel, a meditation on love, family and the choices we make.

Tom Lake is a gorgeously layered novel from Ann Patchett that meditates on love, family and the choices we make.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Vaster Wilds

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

After Matrix, her vivid feminist novel starring a medieval nun, Lauren Groff returns with another historical novel, The Vaster Wilds, about a young Colonial-era woman’s journey out of a sick and starving Jamestown, Virginia.

As the novel opens, the girl (the narrative refers to this teenage main character only as “the girl”) has fled the Jamestown fort for the wilderness, aiming north to find a French colony that she’s heard about. She’s managed to steal a few key items—an ax, a pewter cup, two coverlets, leather boots, gloves—and now she runs through the late-winter night, aware of danger from wild animals, the Jamestown men sent out to find her and “the people of this place,” her phrase for Native Americans.

The novel’s omniscient narration recounts the girl’s journey in language that’s by turns earthy and visceral (she suffers repeated bouts of “hot liquid shits” after eating whatever she can gather), and poetic and visionary. Groff closely follows the girl’s intrepid, remarkable efforts to stay alive—building fires, hunting for food, creating makeshift shelters. As the girl travels, she remembers scraps of her past: her childhood in the London poorhouse where she was called Lamentations; the years with her wealthy mistress, who named her Zed; the hair-raising voyage across the Atlantic Ocean; and days spent with the mistress’s mentally disabled little daughter, Bess, the one person who ever loved and was loved by the girl. The girl is illiterate, but she knows her Bible, and her existential questions about the world run deep as she walks and ponders. The narration also lets us in on the stories of the few people the girl passes, like a hermit who fled his colony years before, and two Native American girls.

The Vaster Wilds is propelled by the girl’s struggle to survive, but also by her interiority and what her memories reveal about her previous life in London and that dreadful year in the Jamestown colony. Groff romanticizes neither English colonists nor Native Americans, and the brutality that the girl remembers and encounters can make for hard reading. But there’s also natural beauty at almost every turn, and the novel’s descriptions of rivers, ice storms, waterfalls and vistas are gorgeous and haunting, sometimes almost hallucinatory.

Though brief (272 pages), The Vaster Wilds is a layered, dense novel, one that can be read as an allegory about the follies of the American experiment and humans’ planetary depredations. While it’s often a dark story with only slivers of hope, Groff’s inimitable style and language makes it a memorable, immersive reading experience.

While The Vaster Wilds is often a dark story with only slivers of hope, Lauren Groff’s inimitable style and language make it a memorable, immersive novel.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Exit Interview

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Kristi Coulter (Nothing Good Can Come From This) details her 12 grueling years as an Amazon executive in Exit Interview, her funny, candid memoir. In 2006, Coulter felt stalled in her work and life. She had earned an MFA in writing at the University of Michigan, but now worked in management, marketing DVDs in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I’m thirty-five and can’t remember the last time I changed or learned in any big way. I’m bored with my job and my town, but also—especially—with myself.” When she spotted an opportunity at the then still-newish Amazon, she went for it, getting hired to manage the team that merchandised books and media. Soon, she and her husband, John, had begun a new West Coast life.

Coulter takes us along on her wild Amazon ride, from her first days at a company where desks were made of plywood scraps, where there were pointedly no perks like free food or on-site child care and where the crises came fast and frequently, to the moment years later when she knew she’d had enough. Early on, she notices that there was “something lumpy about Amazon’s demographics. When I’m in a room with people beneath me in seniority . . . a solid third of them are women. But when I’m with my peers or senior leaders, men usually outnumber women at least three to one.” Working seven days a week, Coulter found that the feeling of failure rarely left her, and she needed three or more glasses of wine every night to calm down from the day’s stresses. Coulter adds depth to the narrative by braiding the story of her Amazon years with her slow journey to sobriety, which changed her sense of herself and her life. Nevertheless, over the next 10 years, she rose through multiple departments, including Amazon Publishing and Amazon Go.

Coulter is a delightful, funny guide, giving us an insider’s view of Amazon’s quirks and toxicities, and she’s alert to the personalities and characters around her (including glimpses of Jeff Bezos and his management style). Occasionally, the memoir uses alternative forms, like the chapter “Events in the History of Female Employment” that mixes memoir and women’s history to funny and infuriating effect.

An engaging, well-paced, and thoughtful memoir, Exit Interview takes a cleareyed look at women in corporate America, particularly tech, noting how far from parity they remain in those worlds.

Exit Interview is a cleareyed look at women in corporate America, particularly tech, noting how far from parity they remain in those worlds.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

People Collide

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Isle McElroy’s second novel, People Collide, is a body-swapping, Kafkaesque story that explores gender, identity and how well we can know one another.

On a fall afternoon, Eli arrives at his wife Elizabeth’s classroom at the end of the school day and can’t understand why Elizabeth’s boss is suddenly calling him Elizabeth. Slowly, Eli comes to understand that he is somehow inhabiting Elizabeth’s body, even as his memories and thoughts remain his own. And, just as mysterious, he discovers that Elizabeth has disappeared.

Both Eli and Elizabeth are writers, though Elizabeth is the more ambitious, accomplished one—and she’s been awarded a teaching fellowship in Bulgaria. Eli has tagged along for a year of expat life, adjusting to their too-small studio apartment and the moody southern Bulgarian city, and trying to write. So even before “The Incident,” as he calls it, Eli and Elizabeth are unsettled, foreigners in a foreign place. As Eli copes with this strange new reality and struggles to credibly inhabit Elizabeth’s body, he searches for his lost wife. Misunderstandings abound; their handful of friends, along with Eli’s mother and Elizabeth’s parents, all think that Eli has abandoned Elizabeth, though it’s Elizabeth (in Eli’s body) who has left.

People Collide asks questions about gender, desire, marriage and family dynamics as it offers mysteries for Eli to solve. Where has Elizabeth gone? Is she still in Europe? And is she, in fact, in Eli’s body, as he is in hers? And if Eli-as-Elizabeth finds Elizabeth-as-Eli, what happens then? It’s not a spoiler to say that Eli does find Elizabeth, and McElroy’s language in describing the couple’s encounters is inventive and sometimes funny.

Later sections of the novel move into Elizabeth’s point of view, and then into the perspective of Johanna, Elizabeth’s mother, who sees 28-year-old Elizabeth and Eli as not-quite-adults. These late sections are quite moving, as Eli and Elizabeth slowly come to a changed understanding of themselves, one another and their parents. People Collide is a distinctive and atmospheric novel.

People Collide is an inventive and atmospheric body-swapping novel that raises questions about gender, desire, marriage and family dynamics.

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