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Trisha Ping

FictionDebut Fiction

Changing the narrative

Review by Trisha Ping

A resourceful, resilient teen heroine is at the heart of Meghan MacLean Weir’s propulsive debut novel. Demure and obedient, 17-year-old Essie has played the perfect preacher’s daughter for years—she’s the youngest of the brood that makes up “Six for Hicks,” a hit reality TV show starring her family. But now Essie is pregnant, and she won’t name the father. As the novel opens, Essie’s image-first mother is debating whether to arrange an abortion or secret adoption, or somehow try to pass off her grandchild as her own.

Essie, however, has other plans: After all, what gets better ratings than a wedding? Essie already has her eye on a groom: Roarke Richards, an athletic high school senior. The two barely know each other, and Roarke is skeptical—but once he realizes the deal includes enough money to save his parents’ business and pay for his dream college, he’s in. As Roarke and Essie try to sell their sudden wedding as a fairy tale and not a shotgun, the reader (and Roarke) gradually realizes that there’s more to Essie’s story (and her plan) than it first appears.

Weir, a doctor whose first book was a memoir about her pediatric residency, doles out the details of Essie’s past slowly but steadily, gaining a momentum that keeps the pages turning. As a pastor’s daughter, Weir is also adept at using the language of evangelical life, lending an authenticity that takes the book beyond a Duggar-family pastiche. The tentative trust that grows between Essie and Roarke gives The Book of Essie emotional depth, and the questions at its center have a surprising moral weight. Readers will root for Essie through every twist and turn of her story.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A resourceful, resilient teen heroine is at the heart of Meghan MacLean Weir’s propulsive debut novel. Demure and obedient, 17-year-old Essie has played the perfect preacher’s daughter for years—she’s the youngest of the brood that makes up “Six for Hicks,” a hit reality TV show starring her family. But now Essie is pregnant, and she won’t name the father. As the novel opens, Essie’s image-first mother is debating whether to arrange an abortion or secret adoption, or somehow try to pass off her grandchild as her own.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

The center will not hold

Review by Trisha Ping

Fractured family dynamics and the search for a missing fortune are the main threads of this textured debut, set mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, over the course of three decades.

The Comedown centers on the families of two men: Leland Bloom-Mittwoch and his drug dealer, Reggie Marshall. Reggie sees Leland as an unstable client; Leland, however, considers Reggie his best friend. Leland is present the day Reggie is shot, and he flees the scene, distraught, with a briefcase full of money. Over the ensuing years, Leland struggles with addiction and mental illness, wrecks his first marriage, enters into a second and has a damaging affair, while Reggie’s wife, who was once a promising student, is left to raise their two boys in poverty, alone. Through several tantalizing plot twists, the lives of the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall clans remain intertwined in a network of simmering tension, blame and guilt.

First-time author Rebekah Frumkin, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is generous with her characters and their frailties. Each point of view (and there are many) feels distinct; often, the same events are shown through the eyes of different characters, adding dimension. Although some readers might find it disorienting to be launched into another point of view just when they’ve settled into the current one, the novel’s nonlinear, fragmented structure reflects its themes of disconnection and the uneasy mental states of most of the characters.

Messy, meandering and occasionally illuminating, The Comedown is a family saga that recalls real life.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fractured family dynamics and the search for a missing fortune are the main threads of this textured debut, set mostly in Cleveland, Ohio, over the course of three decades.

FictionLiterary FictionFantasy

Circe

Review by Trisha Ping

Madeline Miller’s enthralling second novel may be about a goddess, but it has a lot to say about what it means to be a woman. In Circe, the acclaimed author of The Song of Achilles (which won the Orange Prize in 2012) unfurls the story of the legendary witch from Homer’s Odyssey with lyric intensity.

Circe grows up in the palace of her father, the sun god Helios, listening to stories of the legendary fall of the Titans and conflicts among the gods. Like all immortals, Helios is ruthless, capricious and obsessed with maintaining his status. Circe, a goddess without exceptional beauty or discernible power, is sidelined in his court, unworthy of even being married off. It isn’t until Circe falls in love with a mortal that she realizes she has the ability to bless or harm others through transfiguration—a discovery that causes her to be labeled a threat. Helios exiles her to a remote island; there, she is able to further develop her skills with pharmakeia, the art of using plants and herbs to perform magic.

Though sailors occasionally attempt to seek shelter on her island’s shores, Circe protects herself by transforming any men with bad intentions into pigs. As centuries roll by, key encounters with gods and humans alike punctuate her isolated existence—a meeting with Medea and a shocking midwifery scene are particularly mesmerizing. Eventually, Circe’s connections with others force her to embrace her powers, breach her exile and choose her destiny.

Miller, who studied classics at Brown University and teaches high school Greek and Latin, paints a vivid picture of classical Greece: the mindset of its people, the beauty of its landscapes, the details of daily tasks. The elemental allure of mythology, with its magic and mystery and questions of fate and free will, is presented here with added freshness that comes from seeing this world from a female perspective. Like its heroine, this is a novel to underestimate at your peril.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Madeline Miller for Circe.

The acclaimed author of The Song of Achilles unfurls the story of the legendary witch from Homer’s Odyssey with lyric intensity.
FictionHistorical FictionGothic Fiction

Dolls and dark corners

Review by Trisha Ping

The chill of The Silent Companions sneaks up on you and then settles in like a gray mist on a British moor. Which is no doubt intentional, since Laura Purcell’s third novel follows solidly in the Gothic literary tradition. It’s an unnerving read of a woman’s unraveling.

It’s 1865, and Elsie Bainbridge is en route to her new husband’s estate, The Bridge, in rural England. But it’s not a happy journey: Rupert Bainbridge has suddenly died there, and she’s traveling as a widow, not a bride, with only his cousin Sarah at her side. She’s also pregnant.

When Elsie arrives at The Bridge, things go from bad to worse. The housekeeper is borderline hostile, the servants are frightened of strange things that happen in the nursery, and mysterious 17th-century wooden figures are found in a locked room. These “silent companions” are a link to a Bainbridge ancestor, and Elsie starts to suspect they have a sinister purpose. She begins to believe that Rupert’s death was no accident—are she and her baby the next target?

Readers know more than Elsie does: From page one, her more modern story is intercut with both scenes from the 1630s, when the silent companions joined the household, and chapters from the near future, where a now-mute Elsie is confined to a sanatorium. But plenty of suspense comes from waiting to discover when and how the boom will fall.

Purcell ably summons a pervasive sense of doom and dread, and though few of the story beats will truly surprise genre fans, she conjures some genuinely creative horror elements. The Silent Companions is a shivery treat.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The chill of The Silent Companions sneaks up on you and then settles in like a gray mist on a British moor. Which is no doubt intentional, since Laura Purcell’s third novel follows solidly in the Gothic literary tradition. It’s an unnerving read of a woman’s unraveling.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A funny, morbid quest for answers

Review by Trisha Ping

Tackling life’s biggest question is an ambitious goal for a first novel—but Thomas Pierce, one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 recipients, does it with aplomb. Set in the near future, The Afterlives is a mordantly funny and deeply human look at one man’s quest to find out what happens after we die.

Jim Byrd has firsthand experience with death. His heart stops momentarily when he is only 33, but all he remembers is darkness. Ever since, Jim has wondered what that meant. Soon after, at a local restaurant, two more life-changing events happen: Jim reconnects with a high school girlfriend, Annie, and hears a disembodied voice that might be a ghost. As he and Annie fall in love, Jim draws her into his investigation of the voice, a search that uncovers a century-old love triangle and leads to a mysterious scientist in Little Rock, Arkansas, who might have some answers.

Pierce, a graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program whose short story collection, Hall of Small Mammals, was a literary favorite in 2015, displays a nimble sense of humor and wild creativity in The Afterlives. The near future he conjures here is one believable step from our own, with holograms, called “Grammers,” taking over service jobs and medical devices that can be monitored from your smartphone. The fantastical afterlife elements are grounded in Pierce’s realistic depiction of relationships, from romantic to parental.

“Do you think we’re not supposed to have it? That, to a certain extent, we’re supposed to live in the dark?” Jim asks. Maybe knowledge of life after death is a futile quest, but Pierce’s intelligent debut proves there’s still something to gain from pursuing it.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tackling life’s biggest question is an ambitious goal for a first novel—but Thomas Pierce, one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 recipients, does it with aplomb. Set in the near future, The Afterlives is a mordantly funny and deeply human look at one man’s quest to find out what happens after we die.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The lady of Little House

Review by Trisha Ping

Readers who grew up cherishing the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder will find much to savor in Caroline: Little House, Revisited, the third novel from Sarah Miller. Authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust and researched with letters, memoirs and other family records, Caroline recounts the events of the Little House on the Prairie series through the eyes of Caroline Ingalls, better known as “Ma.”

The story begins as the Ingalls family prepares to depart the “little house in the big woods” in Pepin, Wisconsin, to stake a claim in Kansas. Caroline, who has just discovered she is pregnant with a third child, is less enthusiastic than her husband, Charles, about leaving their extended family and taking their two small daughters—Mary, 5, and Laura, 3—into the region popularly known as “Indian Territory.” But she dutifully stitches and waxes the canvas wagon cover, packs her beloved china shepherdess into her trunk and completes the other myriad practical preparations for the long and difficult journey. When the family reaches their new home, more trials await that will test their bravery and skills.

One of the greatest charms of the Little House series—at least, for this reader—was the meticulous depiction of the chores, pleasures and challenges of everyday pioneer life (pig-bladder balloons!). Caroline follows in this tradition, as Miller explains everything from the intricacies of building a log house to the preparations for a new baby (Caroline carefully stitches a layer of waxed fabric to the inside of her bodice as a type of early brassiere). Life on the frontier had many dangers, and through Caroline’s eyes, the stakes of the story feel higher. In the original series, Laura’s fears could always be calmed by the right word from Ma or Pa. By contrast, Caroline knows that a lapse in judgment can have fatal consequences, and the reader feels this weight. Miller also introduces an adult element through the relationship between Caroline and Charles, which she depicts as a passionate and supportive partnership.

Full of lyrical descriptions of the wild beauty of the Kansas countryside, Caroline is a well-researched and thoughtful look at the inner life of one of America’s most famous frontier women.

 

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

Readers who grew up cherishing the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder will find much to savor in Caroline: Little House, Revisited, the third novel from Sarah Miller. Authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust and researched with letters, memoirs and other family records, Caroline recounts the events of the Little House on the Prairie series through the eyes of Caroline Ingalls, better known as “Ma.”

FictionLiterary Fiction

Watch me disappear

Review by Trisha Ping

Nicole Krauss opens her challenging and illuminating fourth novel, Forest Dark, with a disappearance. Jules Epstein, a wealthy, elderly Manhattanite, returns to his birth city of Tel Aviv on a mysterious mission—and vanishes without a trace. In a parallel storyline, a novelist and mother of two named Nicole travels to Tel Aviv, hoping to disappear into fiction. At home in Brooklyn, she’s in a creative slump and a foundering marriage, and thinks a change of scene might turn things around.

Readers can be forgiven for wondering how much of the fictional Nicole’s storyline is based on Krauss’ own relationship with former husband (and fellow writer) Jonathan Safran Foer, with whom she has two children. But it isn’t long before the absorbing fictional world Krauss has created drowns out any literary gossip. Both Epstein and Nicole encounter enigmatic strangers who seduce them with stories: Epstein discovers he might have ties to the biblical King David, while Nicole is given a suitcase that is said to contain lost manuscripts of Franz Kafka. These revelations place both characters on surprising trajectories.

Though the story at times might feel meandering, Krauss is always in control. The myriad literary allusions and her ruminations on the nature of story and on boundaries of all sorts—including those of reality—deepen the journeys of her two main characters. Like Krauss’ previous books Great House and The History of Love, Forest Dark slowly builds to a powerful emotional crescendo and an ending that feels revelatory.

Haunting and reflective, poetic and wise, this is another masterful work from one of America’s best writers.

 

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

Nicole Krauss opens her challenging and illuminating fourth novel, Forest Dark, with a disappearance. Jules Epstein, a wealthy, elderly Manhattanite, returns to his birth city of Tel Aviv on a mysterious mission—and vanishes without a trace. In a parallel storyline, a novelist and mother of two named Nicole travels to Tel Aviv, hoping to disappear into fiction. At home in Brooklyn, she’s in a creative slump and a foundering marriage, and thinks a change of scene might turn things around.

FictionSuspenseDebut Fiction

Heart of darkness

Review by Trisha Ping

Australian author Sarah Schmidt plunges readers into one of America’s most notorious true crime stories with her fiction debut, See What I Have Done. In August 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found bludgeoned to death by axe in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Who killed the Bordens, and why? Evidence pointed to Andrew’s adult daughter, Lizzie, but she was acquitted. Popular myth never let her quite off the hook (you’ve heard that eerie nursery rhyme). But was she really guilty?

See What I Have Done is interested in this question, but perhaps not as much as some readers might be. Schmidt eschews the “whodunit” format to focus on the warped relationships and deep resentments that hover over the house in Fall River. Told in the voices of Lizzie; her older sister, Emma; the family maid, Bridget; and a mysterious stranger named Benjamin, who comes to town with LIzzie’s sinister Uncle John, the novel turns that August afternoon around and around, examining it in microscopic detail from these four separate angles like a jeweler making an appraisal of a singularly dark gem. Lizzie and Emma have a codependent yet contentious relationship, and neither can stand their stepmother. Bridget can’t get over Mrs. Borden’s refusal to let her go home to Ireland. And Uncle John is holding a grudge against his brother, Andrew.

Schmidt sketches the motivations of her characters with subtle strokes, allowing readers to fill in some notable blanks—what is Uncle John’s deal, anyway?—but she leaves little to the imagination when it comes to their physical bodies. The damage done to the Borden parents is described with visceral relish; the scents of vomit, sweat and blood are almost palpable. Like her fellow Australian Hannah Kent, whose debut novel, Burial Rites, also centered on a real-life 19th-century crime, Schmidt conjures the explosive mix of claustrophobia and frustration that life in a small community with a rigid social structure can engender. See What I Have Done is a chilling summer read.

Australian author Sarah Schmidt plunges readers into one of America’s most notorious true crime stories with her fiction debut, See What I Have Done.

FictionFamily SagaDebut Fiction

The women behind a white-collar criminal

Review by Trisha Ping

Everyone loves the schadenfreude of a riches-to-rags story—except, that is, the people living it. In Brooklyn-based writer Angelica Baker’s ambitious debut, Our Little Racket, three women whose fates are tied to the fortunes of Wall Street legend Bob D’Amico find their lives turned upside down by the financial crash of September 15, 2008.

What Bob—who’s been nicknamed “Silverback” in the press due to his alpha-male dominance—did to cause the downfall of his investment firm, Weiss & Partners, isn’t immediately clear to anyone. Not his 15-year-old daughter, Madison; his beautiful, patrician wife, Isabel; or their longtime nanny, Lily. But whether he is guilty, innocent or somewhere in between, these women know that his disgrace is theirs, and their stratified community in Greenwich, Connecticut, isn’t going to let them forget it. All three are forced to think about their place in that community now: how they got there, what it means to them and what they might give up or whom they might be willing to betray to keep it.

The story is narrated in turns by Lily, Isabel and Madison, as well as Madison’s former best friend, Amanda, and Isabel’s wannabe best friend, Mina. Each sees the community from a unique point of view, which rounds out the portrayal of the place and society in interesting ways, but much of the novel is spent describing their emotions as they wait for Bob to declare his innocence or guilt, for the world to drop its verdict on him, or both. The almost complete interiority of the action and conflict makes for frustrated characters as well as occasionally claustrophobic readers, who are likely to long for a glimpse of the action outside the gilded cage of Greenwich. Still, Baker’s deft hand with metaphor and smooth writing style, along with a strong conclusion that cracks open one of the book’s most mysterious characters, makes Our Little Racket a journey worth taking.

Everyone loves the schadenfreude of a riches-to-rags story—except, that is, the people living it. In Brooklyn-based writer Angelica Baker’s ambitious debut, Our Little Racket, three women whose fates are tied to the fortunes of Wall Street legend Bob D’Amico find their lives turned upside down by the financial crash of September 15, 2008.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

A village and a family under occupation

Review by Trisha Ping

Newbery Honor winner Patricia Reilly Giff explores a lesser-known side of World War II in her latest novel for middle grade readers. Set in the French border region of Alsace, which was passed between Germany and France during the 19th and 20th centuries, Genevieve’s War opens in the summer of 1939. Thirteen-year-old Genevieve has lived with various relatives since her parents’ deaths, and is about to return to the United States after a summer spent on her grandmother’s farm. Though she’s made a close friend in her chatty neighbor and has a crush on the pharmacist’s son, Genevieve hasn’t connected with the taciturn, hardworking Mémé. Nevertheless, when Mémé twists an ankle just before Genevieve’s departure, the teenager impulsively decides to stay to help her grandmother survive the occupation everyone knows is coming.

As the war drags on, Genevieve has plenty of reasons to regret her choice. The German army arrives, commandeering sleeping space in the farm and the family’s horse and cart. She fears for the lives of friends who join the resistance movement, and must question the loyalty of others. Yet over the years, Genevieve and Mémé build a grudging, mutual respect, and Genevieve gains a greater understanding of her father, who lived through a similar occupation and devastating war as a teenager.

Though the novel’s narrow focus doesn’t allow for a full view of the complex history of Alsace in WWII, it does capture small details of the way life changed for the Alsatian people under German occupation: wedding rings worn for a lifetime moved to the right hand, per German custom; children forced to speak German instead of French in school; the sudden mistrust of lifelong neighbors who might be spying for the occupiers. Genevieve’s mistakes, as well as her acts of bravery, will encourage children to imagine what they might do in a similar situation. Genevieve’s War provides an intriguing glimpse into a region’s turbulent past through the eyes of one American girl.

Newbery Honor winner Patricia Reilly Giff explores a lesser-known side of World War II in her latest novel for middle grade readers. Set in the French border region of Alsace, which was passed between Germany and France during the 19th and 20th centuries, Genevieve’s War opens in the summer of 1939.

NonfictionMemoir

Remembering a Russian childhood

Review by Trisha Ping

Anyone who reads the startling fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has to wonder what sort of forces shaped her unusually vivid voice. The titles of her works alone—which include There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In and the bestselling There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby—are tip-offs that the pages within contain something out of the ordinary.


With the U.S. release of her memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, Petrushevskaya explores the eventful, turbulent childhood that shaped her worldview in spare, often darkly humorous vignettes, gracefully translated by Anna Summers. Born in 1938 into a family of Bolsheviks who were among those declared enemies of the state by Stalin, the author grew up in the shadow of exiled or murdered family members and endured a lengthy separation from her own mother, who left Petrushevskaya with relatives in the countryside in order to pursue an education in Moscow. But this was no idyll; Petrushevskaya “sported matchstick limbs and a swollen belly” due to malnourishment, and would go through their neighbors’ trash after dark, hoping to find scraps of food. She begged for money on the streets, had no toys and only one crayon (it was purple). These hardships are recounted without sentiment, but with feeling.

Yet there was joy in her childhood, too—her brilliant, educated grandmother knew the Russian classics by heart and would spend hours recounting them to the young Petrushevskaya, spurring her interest in storytelling. Many memories have a touch of the magic Petrushevskaya includes in her fiction, like a strange encounter with a beautiful lady she finds smoking alone in an isolated cabin. “How did a beauty like her end up in the middle of the woods? . . . She would have adopted me, I am sure, had I stayed in the woods.” 


Though Petrushevskaya’s hardscrabble childhood was hardly unique among Russians of her generation, her perspective on it is decidedly original. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel is a well-crafted glimpse into the past of one of Russia’s most intriguing writers.

Anyone who reads the startling fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has to wonder what sort of forces shaped her unusually vivid voice. The titles of her works alone—which include There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In and the bestselling There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her […]

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