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NonfictionMemoir

Splinters

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Leslie Jamison has been lauded for her essay collections Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams, as well as her memoir The Recovery. In her new memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Jamison focuses on her first years of newly single motherhood and the unraveling of her marriage. An incisive observer, Jamison braids episodes of her past—her close-knit relationship with her mother, her uncertain relationship with her distant father and her years of drinking and recovery—with her present. She recounts scenes from her courtship with “C,” as she calls her ex-husband, their sudden wedding in Las Vegas and the complications of two writers in a relationship. She mourns the loss of this marriage, questioning her part in its end.

Jamison’s descriptions of life with a newborn are spot-on, conveying the glory and tedium of new parenthood, as are her descriptions of the patched together life of a working parent and writer. The difficulties of managing a nationwide book tour with a baby in tow may be less relatable to readers, but writers with children will recognize her struggles to squeeze in writing around the edges of a too-busy life.

Throughout, Jamison returns to the impossible question of “Am I good enough?” as she details post-marriage relationships with men who remain out of reach, and she is searing in conveying the wanting and shame that crowd disparate corners of her life. Still, there is a hole in this story when it comes to the details of the rupture between Jamison and her ex-husband. Of course, these are not episodes that any reader has the right to know, but when the narrative refers to “the unforgivable thing she did” and offers anecdotes about her ex’s continuing fury after they’ve separated, the reader is left wanting to know what happened.

That said, Splinters’ close look at early parenthood, baby love, the uncertainties of relationships and how feelings of inadequacy play out in one woman’s life, rendered in Jamison’s elegant, vivid and often sensuous prose, makes her latest work stand out.

Leslie Jamison is back with a memoir about her first years of parenting and the unraveling of her marriage, rendered in her signature elegant, sensuous prose.
NonfictionSocial Science

Sito

Review by Anne Bartlett

Inexperienced and often impulsive, teenagers can make dumb mistakes that they may spend the rest of their lives trying to rectify. Rene Quiñones was a San Francisco gang member who went to prison, then turned his life around as a violence prevention counselor and business owner. Sadly, his son Luis, nicknamed Sito, didn’t have the time to turn over a new leaf. Because of one poor decision, he was fatally shot in a revenge killing when he was 19 years old.

Author Laurence Ralph, a Princeton University professor who specializes in justice reform issues, is part of Sito’s extended family, and Rene turned to him for counsel after the slaying. Ralph’s moving, thoughtful third book, Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him, explores the tragedy from Ralph’s dual perspective as a grieving, frustrated relative and a juvenile justice scholar.

Sito’s road was rough from the start: His parents loved him but were so busy staying financially afloat and building new families that he felt abandoned. He turned his fear into acting out, “embracing machismo,” Ralph writes, and “putting himself at risk or pushing away the very people he loved and needed.” At 14 years old, he let an acquaintance talk him into straying onto rival gang turf. There, the acquaintance fatally stabbed another teenager.

Sito was arrested for this murder and incarcerated in a juvenile prison for three months before a private investigator found video footage showing that he was innocent—footage that the police and district attorney’s office had all along. Sito was released, but the victim’s family refused to believe he was innocent, and five years after the stabbing, the victim’s brother killed Sito in revenge.

Ralph blends his knowledge of Sito, his own memories of being a terrified boy from an immigrant family and his research into minority teens caught in an ineffectual justice system to create a harrowing account of Sito’s life. He witnesses the family’s tense interactions with police and prosecutors. He worries for his own children. And he shows how the rituals of the African diaspora religion Santeria helped to bring solace and spiritual understanding to Sito’s family.

Not long after Sito’s killing, Rene, still reeling from his loss, sat down with his son’s friends and persuaded them that retaliation was the wrong answer. Ralph, an advocate of restorative justice, dreams of true reconciliation that ends these cycles of violence. But the challenge remains formidable.

Sito is a harrowing, impactful account of a teenager caught in a cycle of violence and the juvenile justice system that failed him.
NonfictionSocial Science

Language City

Review by Annie Harvieux

In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York author Ross Perlin examines a duality of the world’s most linguistically diverse city. Home to over 700 languages, 21st-century New York City is a vital nexus where people from all over the world can find others speaking their mother tongue; but the ever-increasing imperative to speak a dominant language like English or Spanish makes this also the place where these languages go extinct. 

Perlin, who is both a linguist at Columbia University and a co-director and researcher at the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), is committed to researching and preserving the linguistic diversity of the city. “At the heart of linguistics itself,” he writes, “is a radical premise: all languages are cognitively and communicatively equal.” This ethos is evident in his writing and reporting as he first unpacks the history of Indigenous and migrant peoples’ arrivals in (and departures from) what is now known as New York, and then as he collaborates with six contemporary New Yorkers of radically different backgrounds who are completing meaningful projects to share and preserve their endangered languages. Perlin spent years (sometimes over a decade) with each of his collaborators on these ELA projects, and his narrative balances biography and linguistic analysis, letting their lives act as windows into the communities making up the multilingual microcosms of other continents tucked unassumingly into New York. 

Perlin brings the subject of linguistics down from the ivory tower and into the subway car or the corner bodega. He opens up the world of endangered languages to monolingual mainstream Americans by bringing compelling and driven native speakers of those languages to the table, as well as taking care to provide historical and cultural detail. However, the volume of information in the book, including geographic specifics of both New York and the world, can occasionally feel dense despite an approachable tone and clear explanations of concepts.

Language City reinforces the value of endangered language preservation and asks salient questions: What do we lose when we facilitate a monolingual society in both practice and policy? And how can we instead allow diverse languages to create a society that is more equitable, livable and inclusive? 

Language City reveals the New Yorkers working to save their endangered mother tongues, and offers a new way of viewing language.
NonfictionSocial Science

LatinoLand

Review by Alejandro Ramirez

The Latino community doesn’t exist as a monolith. Latin Americans hail from over 20 countries, each with its own unique ethnicity and culture. African, Spanish and Indigenous influences vary wildly but are consistently present in most groups. Labels like Hispanic or Latino don’t snugly fit this growing population, and some people shrug them off entirely.

Lauded author and Washington Post columnist Marie Arana admits early on in LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority that she is “working with a deficit” in her attempt to capture the diverse experience of American Latinos. Yet by embracing the variety of this diaspora—and its people’s conflicting views on race, religion and politics—she comes as close to success as one can get.

The book at first functions as a survey, with brief chapters on Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans and other Latino groups. While these historical accounts might not unearth anything unknown to Latin American scholars, Arana’s punchy writing style is engaging, informative and full of pleasant surprises, like her tale about the first Dominican to settle New York in the 1500s, centuries before a bodega opened in Washington Heights. 

Arana also tackles the plurality of Latino identities from other angles, including the morphing religious affiliations of Hispanic Americans and a thoughtful dismantling of the myth of the “Latino vote.” Short profiles contextualize the broader themes and history lessons; some of the stories related here are harrowing, some amusing, others mundane. The horrors of colonialism, segregation and genocide are everpresent.

LatinoLand features interviews with an impressive swath of Latinos, from undocumented custodians and emboldened activists to federal policymakers and religious leaders—though at times there does seem to be a reliance on higher-educated professionals. While Arana celebrates the diversity of American Latinos and doesn’t push for any kind of assimilation, she also appeals to traditional American values when making the case for Latino acceptance, pointing to their contributions to business, academia and the military. But her most salient argument is that Latinos have contributed so much more to this country than what’s acknowledged in the mainstream; by spotlighting unsung heroes like climate scientist Mario Molina and labor champion Dolores Huerta, she gives them their due. 

As Arana pieces together a vibrant collage of American Latino lives, she communicates her belief that solidarity is possible among this fractured cohort. Perhaps, one thinks, it can emerge from the shared experience of being underestimated and undervalued.

Reporter Marie Arana paints a thoughtful portrait of how Latinos have shaped—and been shaped by—the United States in this punchy cultural history.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Slow Noodles

Review by Amy Scribner

After fleeing Cambodia during the brutal regime of Pol Pot, Chantha Nguon spent decades in increasingly desperate poverty, first in urban Vietnam, then the squalor of Thailand refugee camps and finally in the malarial jungles of Cambodia. Through it all, Nguon relied on the delicious food of her childhood for comfort. In her heartbreaking, exquisitely told memoir, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes, Nguon tells her story with co-author Kim Green.

At the end of each chapter, Nguon shares a recipe; some are delicious and intricate (sour chicken lime soup, village style), others bittersweet (silken rebellion fish fry or as Nguon’s subtitle calls it, “How to Make Unfresh Fish Taste Rather Delicious”). Most of these she learned sitting in her prosperous childhood kitchen, watching her mother and older sister create magical dishes they shared with their less wealthy neighbors.

That generosity got Nguon through her years in exile. She writes of sharing resources when she had so few, and making friends who would find and carry each other again and again. In the Thai refugee camps, where Nguon and others waited years for even an interview, they found a chosen family. “We refugees had nothing,” she writes, “but many of us drew close, and found ways to ease one another’s suffering. . . . Here in camp, we were all poor and full of loss. Often, that united us.”

Throughout Slow Noodles, Nguon returns to that theme: loss and despair giving way to strength. While this is a war memoir, it also is ultimately a story of hope. Despite the decades of horror the Khmer Rouge inflicted on millions of Cambodians, Nguon infuses her memoir with a spirit of persistence and defiance. Even in the face of evil, she continued cooking her childhood dishes, speaking her childhood language and slowly, slowly making her way home again.

“When you have nothing, weakness can destroy you,” Nguon writes. “No one would carry me out of the jungle. I would have to carry myself.”

In her memoir, Slow Noodles, Cambodian writer Chantha Nguon survives the terror of the Khmer Rouge and keeps her family recipes intact.
FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

After Annie

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Annie Brown was the proverbial glue of her family. She picked up her husband, Bill, at a party and they married after their fling led to a pregnancy—the first of many for the Brown family. Annie brought joy to the patients at the nursing home where she worked. She provided accountability for her best friend, Annemarie, when the temptation to revisit addictions flared. Beyond Bill’s trusted life partner, Annie was both role model and caregiver for their daughter and three sons. So when she dies, suddenly, the people around her are not simply bereft—they’re lost. As Bill reflects on his wife’s death, he observes the disjointed way Annie’s loved ones stumble through their grief: “There was some kind of river of loss underneath them all. There was no way to know how to move on.” 

In Anna Quindlen’s latest novel, After Annie, the novelist turns her masterful eye on the lives of the people closest to Annie: Bill, their daughter Ali, and Annemarie. As Quindlen cycles through their perspectives during the first year following Annie’s death, we see the ways the characters circle each other. Ali becomes an adult the moment her mom falls to the floor, absorbing the responsibilities her dad is too shell-shocked to take on. Bill, a plumber, responds to endless calls from the town’s single women. Annemarie initially makes time for Ali but soon drifts away as her addiction surges again. 

Throughout her career, Quindlen’s fiction and nonfiction alike have showcased her attention to detail and ability to weave compelling narratives from the common experiences that comprise life. After Annie follows in the footsteps of Miller’s Valley, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Alternate Side and other Quindlen novels that examine families and the people in their immediate orbits. After Annie is a heartfelt, nuanced portrait of life after loss.

In Anna Quindlen’s latest novel, After Annie, the novelist turns her masterful eye on a family’s life after loss.
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Review by Cat Acree

Far too often, translators’ bylines go missing on book covers and in reviews. The author is seen as the one true artist, whose translators exist in service to them. Jennifer Croft, the International Booker Prize-winning translator of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (and many other authors), has become a leading advocate for changing this perception, encouraging readers to view translated books as acts of co-creation rather than pale shadows of their original text. In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.

As the book begins, the eight translators of world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey have arrived at the author’s home at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval, endangered wood that sprawls across the border of Poland and Belarus. All the translators are initially referred to by their languages of translation (English, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, etc.), and the narrator of these events is Spanish, who insists that the translators are wholly devoted to the author and her original text. “Irena’s works were eternal,” Spanish says, “but our translations were no more enduring than socks.” As they prepare to translate Irena’s new novel, Grey Eminence, they cocoon themselves in her world, fully isolated and committed to her unusual rules. But Irena’s behavior is bizarre. She’s reluctant to give them the manuscript, and after a couple of days, she vanishes. The translators are left scrambling to figure out where she went, and over the course of “seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks,” they race from one clue to the next, terrified and paranoid, getting more and more lost in the proverbial woods.

Croft’s novel employs a beguiling structure that serves to undermine any sense of truth we might try to reap from Spanish’s version of events. Spanish’s book is not a memoir but a work of autofiction, and it has been translated by English, who has illuminated the book with a vicious preface and copious footnotes, often mocking Spanish and offering a peep show of (some of) the changes made in translation. The reader is left to wonder which writer, if any, can be trusted.

Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.

Read our interview with Jennifer Croft on The Extinction of Irena Rey.

In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionGothic Fiction

King Nyx

Review by Arlene McKanic

At one point in Kirsten Bakis’ second novel, King Nyx, Anna Fort, the protagonist and narrator, contemplates the tendency of evil men to wreck the lives of everyone they come upon, especially women and girls. Such men can never have enough money or power, and cruelty is their intention. Anna has spent a good deal of her life reacting to men like this. One was her employer and father-in-law; another a mysterious magnate named Claude Arkel who invites her and her eccentric husband, Charles, to stay as guests on his private island.

On a late autumn day just after World War I, we find Anna and Charles (who are based on real people of the same names) waiting for a boat to take them to the island. All the while, Anna hugs a cage whose cover barely protects the two little parrots inside from the cold. Anna’s obsession with their care hints at the lengths she’ll go to protect the vulnerable, introduces themes of captivity and freedom, and serves as a callback to the titular bird, King Nyx. Despite the mighty moniker, King Nyx is a toy made of tin. To the lonely, impoverished and motherless Anna, the toy—thought of as female despite the name—was a childhood friend and a totem. It will turn out that it still is.

Once on the island, the Forts meet Frank and Stella Bixby, a couple who enjoy a strange, and as we learn, very dark dynamic. The couples take to each other right away. Charles and Frank bond over their mutual weirdness, and Stella and Anna both need a female confidant. Stella is a fantastic creation: She’s quick-witted, mouthy, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and has a heart of gold. Indeed, the injection of humor in some very tense scenes comes courtesy of Stella craving a cigarette or blurting out a bon mot.

Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the first chapter, when two strange women warn of trouble on Arkel’s island while the Forts wait for their boat. Trouble happens quickly, and there are scenes so anxiety-producing that you might want to put the book down and check to see that your windows and doors are secure. King Nyx is a scary good book.

 

Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.
FictionLiterary Fiction

My Beloved Life

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Imagine finding yourself in the company of a stranger. A simple hello organically morphs into hours of conversation, full of resonating and enlightening stories. This is the feeling one gets while reading Amitava Kumar’s latest novel, My Beloved Life. Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, the novel is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.

Born in 1935 in the tiny farming village of Khewali, India, without electricity, money or much else, to a mother who nearly died of a snake bite while pregnant, Jadunath (or Jadu) nevertheless seems destined for big things. Curiosity and a thirst for knowledge lead him away from peasant life to the city of Patna where he eventually becomes a respected professor, a political activist and a loving husband and father. Jadu’s story provides glimpses of life in rural India steeped in superstition and faith, and of India’s struggles for equality and progress from post-independence to the modern day.

In contrast to Jadu’s upbringing, his daughter, Jugnu, is born in the bustling city of Patna in 1965. Raised in a loving home, surrounded by her father’s intellectual circle, Jugnu grows up to be a passionate journalist for CNN in the United States. Jugnu’s perspective adds deeply to our understanding of Jadu beyond his words alone.

The novel feels very intimate as it unfolds in the first person from Jadu and then Jugnu’s perspectives. In the skillful blending of individual experience with extraordinary world events, Kumar’s journalistic background shines through, often making one forget that this is a work of fiction. Additionally, Kumar’s own upbringing in a small town near Patna, and his experiences as an immigrant and professor in the United States, add a very powerful element to his ultimate message that everyone has a story that is worth remembering.

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and mundane, My Beloved Life is storytelling at its best.

Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

This Baby. That Baby.

Review by Lisa Bubert

Somewhere in a big city, there are two different babies having two similar, yet different days. Across a “beep-beep street” and along “two bumpy sidewalks,” this baby and that baby wave at each other “at the very same time.” Both babies go on various adventures—giggling on their grown-ups’ laps, kissing their lovies, reading books, making music and pausing for the several inevitable diaper changes of the day—before going out to the park for a surprise play date that ends with a fun peek-a-boo.

This Baby. That Baby. by Cari Best and Rashin Kheiriyeh is a wonderful addition to your reading list and a great picture book to share with the parents and children in our community. Reminiscent of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes by Mem Fox and Helen Oxenbury, this book celebrates all the ways two different babies experience the same expressions of love: playtime, a good book, snuggling and friendship. One, dressed in a blue onesie, sits on a mother’s lap, while the other wears a little red floppy hat to match a father’s red ball cap. Kheiriyeh’s simple, whimsical illustrations create a nursery atmosphere, which is alluded to by the opening and closing pages showing different mobiles that may hang above a baby’s crib. The rhyme scheme is lovely and balanced, making for an engaging read-aloud book that will be a go-to for any classroom, library or nursery.

Hello, This Baby. That Baby.: Welcome to the shelf!

Rashin Kheiriyeh’s simple, whimsical illustrations and Cari Best’s lovely and balanced rhyme scheme make for an engaging read-aloud book that will be a go-to for any classroom, library or nursery.
Audio

A Grandmother Begins the Story

Review by Jessica Peng

A fiddle and an apple tree. Tunnels under a prairie, filling with rain. A woman who blurs into a purple finch. Michelle Porter’s A Grandmother Begins the Story (9 hours) is most alluring in its details, as Porter pieces together the stories of five generations of Métis women. Porter creates unique individuals in Carter, Allie, Lucie, Genevieve and Mamé, while situating them in the bittersweet history of the Métis people and their homeland.

This full cast audiobook is an utter delight: lively, gritty and sensitive. Although the rapid switches between points of view can be a little confusing, especially given that there are distinct narrators for not only the women but also the grassland, the buffalo and the dogs, listeners who patiently familiarize themselves with each voice will be rewarded. A Grandmother Begins the Story is a rich study of the ties that bind a family, how they stretch, how they shrink and how they withstand the test of time.

Read our review of the print edition of A Grandmother Begins the Story.

Michelle Porter’s A Grandmother Begins the Story pieces together the stories of five generations of Métis women. This full cast audiobook is an utter delight: lively, gritty and sensitive.
RomanceContemporary Romance

Once Persuaded, Twice Shy

Review by Elizabeth Mazer

Confession time: Persuasion is my favorite Austen novel. There’s just something about it that speaks to me. It’s the idea of growing into the person you’re supposed to be, into the love you’re finally ready to have. The fact that love doesn’t come easily or quickly makes it all the sweeter when it finally falls into place.

That sweetness is front and center in Melodie Edwards’ modernization of Persuasion, Once Persuaded, Twice Shy. Our present-day Anne Elliot is the executive director of a theater festival, which allows her, as in the original, to quietly keep the world running from behind the scenes. But her tidy, well-controlled life is thrown into a tailspin when her ex, Ben Wentworth, reappears in her life, eager to show her how completely and entirely he’s moved on. The quaint Canadian town of Niagara-on-the-Lake supplies the two of them with an ample supporting cast of lovable, quirky, exasperating and endearing characters, but it’s the enduring connection between Anne and Ben that’s the real draw. As they find their way back to each other, they also find their way back to the truest versions of themselves, letting go of old hurts and old burdens and old grudges along the way.

Of course, there are elements that get left behind when a story is transposed to a new time or place. (The author wisely addresses this in a letter to readers that gives context to some of her choices.) Will fans of the original miss the things that got lost in translation? They might. I missed the Harvilles, Captain Benwick and the whole boisterous Musgrove clan—even Mary, hypochondriacal misanthrope that she is. But Edwards’ update has plenty of compensations: There’s warmth, humor, Taylor Swift lyrics for every conceivable scenario and a love story that blooms as beautifully today as it did 200 years ago. The plot takes unexpected twists and turns, tied together with beloved tropes. And the grand finale is a happily ever after that certainly persuaded me, and that I believe will persuade you, too.

Once Persuaded, Twice Shy, Melodie Edwards’ modernization of Persuasion, is a sweet and often surprising take on Jane Austen’s classic novel.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Fathomfolk

Review by Laura Hubbard

Tiankawi may be a city half-submerged in water, but like so many cities, it is divided between the haves and the have-nots. The haves, who inhabit Tiankawi’s sweeping spires, are nearly all human. Some of the have-nots are too, but the majority of the city’s dispossessed are of the fathomfolk diaspora: people of the sea who have been forced out of their underwater havens by pollution and human-mediated destruction. Mira straddles both worlds. The first half-siren captain in the border guard, she wants to make a difference in the lives of those who she grew up with—if anyone will let her. Mira’s way of making change is slow and methodical, often relying on her well-connected water dragon boyfriend to help push for better legislation and provide an image of a model minority. Her boyfriend’s sister, Nami, has other plans. Banished to Tiankawi for her rebellious ways, she begins to associate with groups who view violence as necessary for revolution. As she bonds with these new friends, she begins to realize that their methods may be questionable, and soon both Nami and Mira will be forced to grapple with the fallout.

A modern urban fairy tale, Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk pairs futuristic cityscapes with fantastical races and real-world politics. The folk are in many ways climate refugees, feared by their hosts and forced to wear bracelets that suppress their powers and prevent them from harming humans, even in self-defense. While it is tempting to draw parallels between the central struggle for the rights of fathomfolk and the rights of refugees in general, Chan’s focus on the intersectionality of issues within Tiankawi makes it satisfyingly difficult to draw a straight line between our world and hers. Chan shows the divisions among the folk, from species-based class divisions among the sea dragons, kappa and kelpies to a distaste for families of mixed heritage. But she also shows that a society bent on oppressing one group will surely not stop there: Tiankawi’s slums are as full of humans as they are full of folk, and its draconian policies harm everyone. This message, both obscured and amplified by the fantasy elements of the story, makes Fathomfolk a nuanced, powerful and complex parable, one that raises questions that linger far after the novel reaches its conclusion.

Set in a city that’s half aboveground and half underwater, Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk pairs fantastical races and real-world politics.

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