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In Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, main character Cindy Stoat is almost 14, an observant and lonely teen in northern Appalachia whose mom has left home for a job without saying when she’s coming back. Parentless, Cindy and her two older brothers, Virgil and Clinton, cobble together a life, eating canned food and bathing once in a while in a nearby retaining pond. That might seem enough for a coming-of-age novel, but an outside event—the disappearance of Jude Vanderjohn, a more glamorous and privileged teen—sets the story in motion. Not long ago, Jude went out with Virgil, and now Virgil feels compelled to help out Jude’s unhinged mother, Bernadette, who can’t accept that her daughter is missing. Cindy tags along with Virgil, and before long she’s found a way out of her own sad house and into Bernadette’s. Because Bernadette’s memory is shot, she accepts Cindy’s growing presence in her house, at least some of the time.

It’s a compelling premise for a suspenseful novel, and short chapters keep the story moving, as Cindy makes a choice that harms others. But Smith isn’t solely interested in plot; she’s a poet as well as a fiction writer (she holds two MFAs, one fiction and another in poetry), and her interest in language shows. “Dark came on earlier,” Cindy remembers, midway through the novel. “The blue light had a glassy depth to it. Bernadette said it was the hours before the moon rose that made the color reverberate in its vaulted bowl over us. The first stars were scrawled in, and Virgil was late getting me.” Marilou Is Everywhere’s language mixes the inventive with the plain, which adds another dimension to the first-person narration, making Cindy’s lonely world more vivid.

Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor in Cindy’s narration. The story comes to a lovely conclusion, allowing Cindy and the novel’s other characters some redemption.

Smith is a writer to watch.

Debut novelist Sarah Elaine Smith handles the darkness in the novel (rural poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug use, neglect) with a light touch, offering plenty of humor.
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From Proust’s “decoction of lime-blossom” to Raymond Chandler’s “I smelled like dead toads” to Hermoine Granger’s Amortentia love potion in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, fragrance has earned a hallowed space in literary fiction. It triggers memory. It invokes longing or revulsion. It fixes a place indelibly in time. And in Erica Bauermeister’s latest novel, The Scent Keeper, it forms the frame upon which the story is painstakingly—and lovingly—hung.

At the outset, Emmeline and her scientist father live a somewhat idyllic, if Spartan, existence on a remote island off Canada’s west coast. He’s invented a mysterious machine, the Nightingale, a kind of olfactory Polaroid camera that captures scent moments on specialized paper. At first, it’s not entirely clear why the duo lives in such isolation; the dad’s explanations to his daughter about their circumstances are gauzily metaphoric, and she finds it perfectly plausible that mermaids have parties that send “gifts”—like clothes, and even a goat—in their direction. But paradise, like childhood, has a fixed term, and one traumatic incident whisks Emmeline off her island into a society that she finds finds both intriguing and terrifying. When the love of her adolescent life abandons her, she sets off into the city, hoping to find either him, her long-lost mother or both.

Nearly a century ago, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse observed that “Our only guide is our homesickness,” and that theme runs like a river through Bauermeister’s story, which we experience not so much through Emmeline’s eyes as through her nose.

Reminiscent of Vianne Rocher from Joanne Harris’ beloved Chocolat, Emmeline is persistent, engaging and a savant in her chosen field. All she has to do is to take her father’s advice: follow her nose, and then get out of its way.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and has a top note of blood orange and kumquat.

From Proust’s “decoction of lime-blossom” to Raymond Chandler’s “I smelled like dead toads” to Hermoine Granger’s Amortentia love potion in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, fragrance has earned a hallowed space in literary fiction. It triggers memory. It invokes longing or revulsion. It fixes a place indelibly in time. And in Erica Bauermeister’s latest novel, The Scent Keeper, it forms the frame upon which the story is painstakingly—and lovingly—hung.

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Poet Ocean Vuong’s highly anticipated debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, takes the form of a letter from a young writer to his illiterate mother. The writer, who goes by the nickname Little Dog and whose life bears a strong resemblance to Vuong’s own, is the first of his family to go to college. The letter is an attempt to share his fragile sense of self with his mother.

Little Dog’s grandmother survived the Vietnam War as a sex worker, and his mother was fathered by an American soldier. After immigrating to the United States and settling in a working-class Connecticut neighborhood, Little Dog became a victim of his mother’s abuse and a witness to his grandmother’s untreated schizophrenia. Without siblings or a father, Little Dog was isolated and lonely, hyperaware of his small size, his lack of English and his origins. 

Vuong’s poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds was one of the most celebrated books of 2016. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, his prose is richly poetic, and his references draw from a wide range of sources, from Roland Barthes to 50 Cent. The novel seems like part memoir, part epic poem, although at times the lyricism feels overly mannered and the associations strained.

The novel finds its heart when Little Dog invites his mother to acknowledge a part of his life he’s never fully shared with her. Little Dog and Trevor met as teenagers when they worked on a tobacco farm, and their attraction was immediate. The depiction of the boys’ affair is graphic yet tender, and the blunt portrayal of Trevor’s opioid addiction alludes to the grim consequences of poverty and violence in their community.

Disarmingly frank, raw in subject matter but polished in style and language, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous reveals the strengths and limitations of human connection and the importance of speaking your truth.

Poet Ocean Vuong’s highly anticipated debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, takes the form of a letter from a young writer to his illiterate mother. The writer, who goes by the nickname Little Dog and whose life bears a strong resemblance to Vuong’s own, is the first of his family to go to college. The letter is an attempt to share his fragile sense of self with his mother.

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Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer relates the travails of a group of privileged New England kids as they navigate an expensive, indulgent and raucous summer in Montauk in their late twenties. (References to Gatsby abound.) They commute from Manhattan for summer weekends at a rambling house referred to as the Hive, which is filled with an ever-shifting set of toned young people and high-end brand names.

These career-driven 20-somethings want an adult summer camp, and they need it. Glynn finds himself deeply lonely in the city, weighed down with anxiety that he’ll die alone. Following a series of frightening events, including a nearly fatal car crash and the death of his family’s matriarch, Glynn’s life seems to be spinning slowly out of control. With thoughts of his own mortality haunting him, Glynn begins to wonder why real and enduring connection has been so elusive.

When feelings for a male friend develop into something more, Glynn finds himself bearing the weight of a secret about his sexual identity. John is not the only member of the group figuring things out. A set of beautiful 20-something girls—Ashley, Perrie and Kirsten—are on their own journeys for love and connection. Ashley, memorably dubbed the Mayor of Montauk, spends the summer longing to find a handsome man she once glimpsed at a bar. Perrie finds a new boyfriend every weekend, while Kirsten flits between two inappropriate men. The other boys in the house, half of whom John refers to as “the finance bros” and half of whom are gay, don’t fare much better.

What endures about this portrait is how deeply human it is to be uncertain, to be driving a hundred miles an hour toward nowhere and longing to have a buddy in the car. This group of friends receive each other in all the Montauk messiness, from early morning runs for coffee to long conversations on the roof. They drink together, philosophize together, go to the beach together, admire each other and watch each other make terrible decisions. While reading this book, you are ultimately grateful that they have each other and are reminded of the precariousness of the emotional inner life that undulates just beneath the surface, even for people who look as though they have it all.

Out East relates the travails of a group of privileged New England kids as they navigate an expensive, indulgent and raucous summer in Montauk in their late twenties.

Erika Swyler’s first novel, The Book of Speculation, mixed historical fiction and fantasy in an appealingly offbeat way, featuring a lonely librarian, circus mermaids and an old family curse. Like her debut, Swyler’s new novel, Light From Other Stars, bends genres as it explores how the past intrudes on the present. But that’s where the similarities end. 

On a cold January morning in 1986, everything changes for Nedda Papas, an 11-year-old science geek and astronaut fangirl. Ten miles from Easter, their small Florida town, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off and explodes. Soon, strange things happen: Electricity surges and fails, ponds freeze and boil, the sky takes on a green glow. At first, Easter’s residents chalk up the weirdness to the Challenger explosion, but Nedda and her dad, Theo—a physicist who’s been laid off from NASA—begin to suspect otherwise. Theo and his wife, Betheen, both grieving a loss, have begun to live separate lives. Theo works obsessively on a project he calls his entropy machine, while Betheen, a frustrated scientist, has devoted herself to her baking business, cutting herself off emotionally from her husband and daughter.

The novel alternates the 11-year-old Nedda’s story with that of the grown Nedda, who’s narrating from aboard the spaceship Chawla. The adult Nedda is part of a crew of four on a long-term mission to an unnamed planet, and the crew has learned that power spikes have affected the ship’s generator. As Nedda and her crewmates work to head off disaster, so does the 11-year-old Nedda, along with Theo and Betheen. 

Although Light From Other Stars includes plenty of science fiction elements, it’s also a coming-of-age story, as the young Nedda gains a new understanding of her parents and then works to rescue them and the rest of her town. Juggling dual timelines, wonderful mid-1980s period details and a large cast of secondary characters, Swyler has set herself an ambitious task. But the novel is well-paced, with a satisfying twist near the end that readers are subtly prepared for but that still feels surprising.

On a cold January morning in 1986, everything changes for Nedda Papas, an 11-year-old science geek and astronaut fangirl. Ten miles from Easter, their small Florida town, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off and explodes. Soon, strange things happen: Electricity surges and fails, ponds freeze and boil, the sky takes on a green glow.

For young Ben and his posse at Bailey Academy, most of the grown-ups in their lives are either dead, dying or dysfunctional. But despite the bleak subject matter of Ann Beattie’s latest novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, Ben’s adolescent angst and ensuing quarter-life crisis is riven with hope and humor.

The story begins when the bucolic bubble encompassing Ben’s posh New Hampshire boarding school is burst by news of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, propelling the students further into the thrall of their Svengali-like teacher Pierre LaVerdere, whose role as their charismatic mentor and in loco parentis is solidified.

Beattie’s novel moves from the abrupt conclusion of Ben and his friends’ boarding school days straight into young adulthood, giving only a cursory mention of their college days. Wealthy and smart, Ben and company were admitted to the likes of Cornell and Stanford, but their elite pedigrees have not prepared them for the indignities of the early aughts. Struggling to hold a steady job and even harder to maintain a relationship, Ben pivots between his devotion to a sex-crazed narcissist and his obsession with an old boarding school crush.

When Ben escapes Manhattan and buys a house in the Hudson Valley’s idyllic Rhinebeck, he finds a kind of family in the warm embrace of his new neighbors, Steve, Ginny and their young daughter, Maude. Beattie’s belief in Ben’s inherent decency is most evident in these passages, as our brooding antihero discovers friendship, camaraderie and a sense of belonging. Alas, without spoiling the ending, LaVerdere arrives back on the scene, delivering a shocking revelation that brings Ben—and readers—into the heart of Beattie’s postmodernist Greek tragedy, where the luck of these self-absorbed scions of the so-called “1 percent” is not nearly as wonderful as one might think.

Beattie serves up an unflinchingly bleak—albeit sometimes laugh-out-loud humorous—serving of millennial malaise. It’s almost entirely character-driven, with plot far less important than dialogue, reflecting Beattie’s keen ear for not only what is said but also what is left unsaid, often with tragic consequences.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Ann Beattie for A Wonderful Stroke of Luck.

For young Ben and his posse at Bailey Academy, most of the grown-ups in their lives are either dead, dying or dysfunctional. But despite the bleak subject matter of Ann Beattie’s latest novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, Ben’s adolescent angst and ensuing quarter-life crisis is riven with hope and humor.

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Set in the American South one generation after the Civil War, The Magnetic Girl is a mystical story about one girl’s journey from a gawky, small-town farmer’s daughter to a well-known, alluring performer.

Lulu Hurst sneaks into her father’s study one evening and finds a book that changes the course of her life. Mrs. Wolf’s The Truth of Mesmeric Influence becomes Lulu’s bible as she learns to hone her natural skills of “captivating” people around her, essentially holding them in a trance. But Lulu keeps more secrets than just her captivating skills; she dropped her brother on his head when he was an infant, and from then on, his development stagnated. Lulu never told her parents about the accident. Her guilt weighs her down, though she believes one day her magnetism can heal her brother.

As she reads and memorizes Mrs. Wolf’s book, Lulu feels as if the author is speaking directly to her. When Lulu’s father confronts her about the missing book, he surprises her by letting her keep it. He then trains his talented daughter to perform “tests” that, through the laws of physics, allow Lulu to appear as if she possesses unparalleled, unnatural strength. She perfects the tests, and her family hosts her first show in the parlor of their home.

Quickly Lulu becomes a sensation and takes her act on the road. As the Magnetic Girl, Lula learns to embrace her physical and mental strength, and she gains confidence as she sees different parts of the world and earns more and more money for her family. When an aging mesmerist calls on her for a visit, Lulu questions her “powers” and wonder about the illusive author of her beloved book.

Author Jessica Handler paints a quaint picture of life in the late 19th century, when electricity was a new phenomenon. Lulu begins as a young woman used to obeying her parents, but through her performances, she begins to see her parents and their shortcomings more clearly. The Magnetic Girl is hypnotic tale about a girl growing into a woman and discovering the truth of her own powers.

Set in the American South one generation after the Civil War, The Magnetic Girl is a mystical story about one girl’s journey from a gawky, small-town farmer’s daughter to a well-known, alluring performer.

In the first chapter of Lights All Night Long, gifted Russian teenager Ilya has just arrived in the U.S. for an academic exchange year. At the Baton Rouge airport, he refuses to speak English to his host family, the good-natured Masons: “As they waited for him to say something, their faces were so wide open, so vulnerable with hope. He knew the expression because he had imagined them having it, when he was vulnerable with hope too. But now Vladimir was in prison, and Ilya hadn’t imagined the guilt these strange, smiling faces would call up in him.”

Vladimir, Ilya’s older brother, confessed to a series of grisly murders in their small Russian hometown, a former gulag whose landscape is still marred by the Soviet Union’s collapse. But Ilya doesn’t believe drug-addicted Vladimir could have done such terrible things. Despite Ilya’s years of hard work in school and months preparing for his year in Louisiana, the polyurethane gleam of America—a place the brothers had dreamed they would take by storm together—is dulled completely for Ilya by the plight of his family left behind. With the exception of the Mason’s eldest daughter, the coltishly gorgeous Sadie, who wears her own secrets like a cloak, nothing in America interests Ilya as much as poring over internet clues each night. Ilya is trying—from a heart-bruising distance—to prove his brother’s innocence.

Lights All Night Long is that rare work of fiction that gathers page-turning momentum from its prose as much as its plot. Fitzpatrick’s writing, accessible yet exquisite, relies on surgically precise metaphors for a lot of heavy emotional lifting. As the increasingly jaded Ilya considers the price he may pay for throwing away a chance for a year in the U.S., “America burst into his brain like something held too long underwater, and with it the same huge hope.” After kissing an American girl, “he could still feel it—that happiness for him was like a dog chained to a stake, that whenever he let it run, he’d be yanked back, but still he let it run for a second and tried not to brace himself for the pull of the chain.”

Darkly beautiful, melancholic but not bleak, Lights All Night Long is storytelling at its finest. Fitzpatrick has written a compelling novel full of intimately portrayed, easy-to-love characters whose spoiled joys and resurgent hopes will linger with readers.

In the first chapter of Lights All Night Long, gifted Russian teenager Ilya has just arrived in the U.S. for an academic exchange year. At the Baton Rouge airport, he refuses to speak English to his host family, the good-natured Masons: “As they waited for him to say something, their faces were so wide open, so vulnerable with hope. He knew the expression because he had imagined them having it, when he was vulnerable with hope too. But now Vladimir was in prison, and Ilya hadn’t imagined the guilt these strange, smiling faces would call up in him.”

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If you are a fan of a certain troubled rock ’n’ roll band from the 1970s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the eponymous character of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel is based on Stevie Nicks. You’d also be forgiven for wondering, wait, did Stevie really marry an Italian prince?  This will send you racing to Wikipedia, where you will learn that no, Stevie did not marry an Italian prince. However, like the marriage of Daisy Jones and her cracked Italian nobleman, Stevie’s one marriage was just as impulsive and just as brief.

Daisy, a talented singer and a gorgeous, drug-addled train wreck, falls in with a band called The Six at a critical juncture. The group’s fame and fortune blow up, and Daisy rides the rocket with them thanks to her passionate duets with their founder and leader, Billy Dunne. Inevitably, Daisy and the married Billy fall in love. They also hate each other’s guts. It’s beautiful.

Readers will feel for Billy though. A recovering druggie and alcoholic, he’s saved from dissipation by his wife, Camila, and their kids. His integrity and lack of cynicism keep the reader from resenting him the way his bandmates sometimes do. At the same time, Reid is adroit enough to make us understand why his white-knuckled virtue gets on people’s nerves.

A multinarrative interview style of storytelling allows Daisy, Billy, the members of The Six and others in their orbit, such as managers, producers, rock critics and loved ones, to recall their memories. They’re being interviewed around 2012 or so, and everyone is now of a certain age, so some of those memories contradict, and many are funny or sorrowful and startlingly candid. Their confessions become even more surprising when we learn the identity of the interviewer.

It’s hard to be good is the message of Reid’s humane, delectable, rollicking novel. But goodness is still worth the trouble.

Daisy, a talented singer and a gorgeous, drug-addled train wreck, falls in with a band called The Six at a critical juncture. The group’s fame and fortune blow up, and Daisy rides the rocket with them thanks to her passionate duets with their founder and leader, Billy Dunne. Inevitably, Daisy and the married Billy fall in love. They also hate each other’s guts. It’s beautiful.

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Set on a remote Scottish island in the 1950s, Angela Readman’s Something Like Breathing tells the story of Lorrie and Sylvie, two girls so different from each other that they might have never exchanged a word if it weren’t for their shared fences.

Their friendship begins shortly after Lorrie’s parents uproot their city life and move into her mother’s childhood home on the island to be closer to Lorrie’s aging grandpa, a local whisky distillery owner. Living next door are Bunny and her daughter, Sylvie, who is Lorrie’s age but is aloof, awkward and mysterious.

Soon, Lorrie becomes Sylvie’s refuge from her overbearing mother, and Sylvie becomes Lorrie’s escape from her despondent parents and the dull island life. But even in such an intimate friendship, Sylvie and Lorrie aren’t anything like the oversharing teenage girls we might imagine. In fact, they never seem to discuss their woes. Lorrie never questions why Bunny is so unbearably strict with Sylvie. Sylvie never brings up her secret gift or Lorrie’s home life or questionable dates. Like breathing, their friendship is at once muted yet so essential to their survival.

Something Like Breathing bounces between Sylvie’s diary entries and Lorrie’s recollections to reveal fascinating characters, multiple layers and a perfect finish.

Set on a remote Scottish island in the 1950s, Angela Readman’s Something Like Breathing tells the story of Lorrie and Sylvie, two girls so different from each other that they might have never exchanged a word if it weren’t for their shared fences.

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A family separated by war and difficult choices maintains an unwavering bond in Eugenia Kim’s thoughtful second novel. Picking up where The Calligrapher’s Daughter ends, The Kinship of Secrets finds Calvin and Najin Cho settled in America with their daughter, Miran, while their younger daughter, Inja, remains in the care of Najin’s extended family in South Korea. The first harrowing glimpses of the Korean War extend their separation longer than expected, causing unimaginable physical hardship on one side and painful emotional turmoil on the other. Najin’s hope to reunite her family is met with disappointment after disappointment as the months turn into years and then decades.

Oceans apart, Inja and Miran grow up, and though their respective lives are dissimilar, their individual desires mirror each other’s. Najin may be physically present in Miran’s life, but she’s also emotionally removed and consumed with worry for Inja. Inja, who was only an infant when her parents and Miran left for America, has no lasting memories of Najin but yearns to know her. When long-kept family secrets are finally revealed, the truth enables both Miran and Inja to connect with each other and with their mother. The sisters mature, morphing into opinionated teenagers and college students, eventually becoming independent young women molded by key events of the 1960s and ’70s.

Covering such a broad span of history is an ambitious undertaking, and The Kinship of Secrets is not without its stumbles. While at times the author’s prose tells more overtly than it shows, she’s able to capture an abundance of feeling. Drawn from her own family history, Kim’s story unfolds with the weight of lived experience.

Through these relationships, The Kinship of Secrets explores the meaning of love and sacrifice and how often they are one and the same.

 

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

A family separated by war and difficult choices maintains an unwavering bond in Eugenia Kim’s thoughtful second novel. Picking up where The Calligrapher’s Daughter ends, The Kinship of Secrets finds Calvin and Najin Cho settled in America with their daughter, Miran, while their younger daughter, Inja, remains in the care of Najin’s extended family in South Korea.

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Singaporean author Sharlene Teo’s debut novel spans from 1968 to 2020, from rural Malaysia to vibrant, modern-day Singapore. Teo’s descriptions of life on the equator come alive; you may feel sweat slicking your back or the sting of a mosquito bite.

With razor-sharp wit and painstaking attention to detail, Teo jumps through time, telling the stories of three women. Years ago, Amisa was a ticket girl at a cinema when a director handpicked her for her chilling beauty. She starred in his cult horror trilogy called Ponti! and played the role of a pontianak. In Malay mythology, pontianaks are vampiric ghosts of women who died while pregnant. Over time, as Amisa’s dreams of fame fizzle, she wallows in her despair and becomes a sort of pontianak herself. Now, Amisa is the mother to Szu, a gawky girl with no friends—until Circe comes along.

Sixteen-year-old Szu’s life is bleak, and Teo paints a painfully true depiction of how it feels to be an angsty teen. With a loveless mother and an absent father, Szu aches for acceptance, and her misery contrasts with the pastel colors of her school’s decor. When Szu and Circe become fast friends at school, they seem in awe of the vast differences in each other’s lives. When Amisa dies, Circle tries to comfort her friend, but the grief is too much for both of them.

When 33-year-old Circe is tasked with managing the marketing campaign for a remake of the Ponti! films, she’s forced to remember her sad friend Szu and her long-ago fascination with the alluring and withering Amisa.

Ponti is full of brilliant prose about the heartbreaking truth of growing up. It’s a novel of friendship, isolation, despair and memories of childhood that haunt us into our adult lives.

Singaporean author Sharlene Teo’s debut novel spans from 1968 to 2020, from rural Malaysia to vibrant, modern-day Singapore. Teo’s descriptions of life on the equator come alive; you may feel sweat slicking your back or the sting of a mosquito bite.

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To start a Walter Mosley novel is like sitting down to a feast. In this case, the tastiest dish is not the protagonist who gives the book its name, but his mother. Lucia Napoli-Jones is such a vivid, vibrant presence in John Woman that when she leaves early in the book, the reader may spend the rest of it, like her son, longing for her return. Earthy, deeply imperfect, possessed of a rollicking Lower East Side way of speaking and living, she is easily Mosley’s best secondary character since Mouse Alexander.

But enough about flamboyant Lucia. John Woman is all about history: its slipperiness, its unknowability and maybe even its ultimate uselessness. John Woman’s autodidactic father teaches him about this, which John in turn teaches to his students after he becomes a college professor.

This is all ironic, for John is trying to outrun his history. First, there’s the uneasy relationship between his parents, both of whom he loves with the helpless passion of a young child even into his 30s. John’s real childhood ended abruptly when he was forced to kill someone in defense of himself and his father. Soon after, he’s raped. He then flees, changing identities until he settles on his unusual moniker, which is in part a reference to his rapist.

As usual, Mosley’s superpower lies in his slantwise take on the world and his characters, of whom there are dozens, and every one is memorable, even if they speak only a line or two. They include John’s bright but fractious students, the weird faculty members of the university where John teaches, a slew of detectives and lawyers and a hooker with a heart of gold. (The trauma of John’s defloration challenges his ability to engage in conventional relationships and kinkless sex.)

All the while, the reader, like John, looks for signs of Lucia. Will we ever see her again? This reviewer won’t tell. I will tell you that this fantastic, surprising, humane and somewhat perverse book is one of Mosley’s best.

 

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

To start a Walter Mosley novel is like sitting down to a feast. In this case, the tastiest dish is not the protagonist who gives the book its name, but his mother. Lucia Napoli-Jones is such a vivid, vibrant presence in John Woman that when she leaves early in the book, the reader may spend the rest of it, like her son, longing for her return. Earthy, deeply imperfect, possessed of a rollicking Lower East Side way of speaking and living, she is easily Mosley’s best secondary character since Mouse Alexander.

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