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FictionLiterary Fiction

Mother Doll

Review by Sydney Hankin

Zhenia’s life is, admittedly, not going as planned. Having aspired to be an actor in Los Angeles, she now works as a medical translator for Russian-speaking patients, struggling to salvage what’s left of her marriage after breaking the news of a surprise pregnancy to her husband. So when a psychic named Paul calls to say that Zhenia’s deceased great-grandmother Irina wants Zhenia to listen to her life story and write it down, Zhenia hesitates only briefly; she has little reason to say no. Irina’s spirit seeks forgiveness from Zhenia, though she knows it will be challenging to obtain. They are both painfully aware of the generational pain stemming from Irina’s abandonment of Zhenia’s adored, and currently dying, grandmother Vera, when Vera was a young child. 

Through Zhenia’s listening sessions, author Katya Apekina makes the concept of ancestral connection fascinatingly tangible. Paul is able to connect Zhenia with Irina by venturing into a post-death communal “cloud” of regret, where Irina and others reside until absolved by the living. With Paul as an intermediary, Irina tells Zhenia tales of growing up in early 1900s Russia.

Apekina isn’t new to literary fiction; her first novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews and other outlets. But Mother Doll marks her triumphant first foray into fabulism. While Irina’s story is largely distinct and chronological, Zhenia’s life unfolds only in connection to her great-grandmother’s, producing parallel narratives that are impressively inseparable. Even as more details about Irina’s life surface, the reader remains grounded in Zhenia’s experiences, her dry humor lending a lightness to otherwise profound subject matter.

For those who enjoy diving into the metaphorical, Mother Doll holds a deep wisdom. Apekina’s writing is witty and compellingly relatable, leading to a fast-paced reading experience. She hits on something beautifully innate: Who are we if not the histories of our ancestors?

In Mother Doll, Katya Apekina hits on something beautifully innate: Who are we if not the histories of our ancestors?
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

The Last Zookeeper

Review by Lisa Bubert

A flood has returned to the Earth. This time it’s not a man but a robot who is there to save all the animals and ferry them to a new world. Large, sturdy and able to traverse any distance, watery or not, the robot cares for the animals, feeding bamboo to the pandas and fish to the tigers. But the robot knows it needs more to sustain this world for the animals. The robot builds a large boat for all the animals—a callback to Noah’s Ark—and carries them through vast stormy seas until they find another robot friend to whisk everyone by air to a new island teeming with life and opportunity. 

Aaron Becker’s The Last Zookeeper is beautifully drawn with spare pencil lines and watercolor washes, and provides a conversation starter for older children who may be wondering about their role to play in a world that needs everyone’s help in order to survive. 

The Last Zookeeper is beautifully drawn with spare pencil lines and watercolor washes, and provides a conversation starter for older children who may be wondering about their role to play in a world that needs everyone’s help in order to survive.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

A Grave Robbery

Review by Elyse Discher

Veronica Speedwell, Deanna Raybourn’s lepidopterist turned sleuth, returns for the ninth time with all of her signature wit, wry observations and keen detective work.

A Grave Robbery finds Veronica and her lover, Stoker, faced with a strange and unsettling case on their home shores of England. When their patron, a collector of natural wonders and (occasionally) unnatural curiosities, acquires a lifelike wax model, he assigns Stoker the task of inserting a clockwork mechanism into his “Sleeping Beauty” so that she will appear to breathe. Much to their horror, Stoker and Veronica discover that the model is not a waxwork at all, but a meticulously preserved cadaver: a young woman who was pregnant at the time of her death. The pair embark on a quest to discover Beauty’s true identity, ascertain the means of her demise and determine if foul play could have been involved.

As with the other novels in her series, Raybourn revels in the minutiae of the Victorian era, this time providing readers with an ever-fascinating study of the period’s rituals—and technological advances—regarding mourning and the preservation of the dead. Nods to Mary Shelley as well as Burke and Hare compliment the macabre subject matter, which lends a darker spin to the proceedings this time around.

Longtime readers of the series will be pleased, and perhaps relieved, to find Veronica and Stoker in lockstep in this installment, with any romantic conflict set aside for the time being. As in prior books, their relationship offers a delightful counterpoint to the tension of the central mystery. An abundance of secondary characters, including fan favorites like J.J. Butterworth and Lady Rose, make frequent appearances (which may overwhelm readers who haven’t started from book one). Raybourn also introduces a young mortician named Plumbtree, who may become a series regular from hereon.

Fans of the Veronica Speedwell series certainly won’t be disappointed with this latest, more gothic mystery—and they’ll be thrilled to see Veronica and Stoker happily in love.

Fans of the Veronica Speedwell mysteries certainly won’t be disappointed with this latest, more gothic installment—and they’ll be thrilled to see Veronica and Stoker happily in love.
RomanceHistorical Romance

The Phoenix Bride

Review by Katie Garaby

The Phoenix Bride, Natasha Siegel’s stunning sophomore novel, is a breathtakingly beautiful novel about forbidden love in 17th-century London.

The year is 1666, one year after the bubonic plague wreaked havoc on London. Young widow Cecilia Thorowgood lost her husband, who was a childhood friend and a love match, to the disease. Without financial means of her own, Cecilia finds herself trapped in her sister’s home, deep in the throes of a paralyzing depression and hounded by a slew of doctors who try to cure it with scalpels and leeches. When Cecilia shows no signs of improvement, her sister decides to take the risk of hiring a foreign doctor. David Mendes is not only Portuguese, but also Jewish. He and his father recently immigrated to England, where they can publicly practice their faith. Their new home is a marked improvement from Portugal, but antisemitism still runs rampant. However, David and Cecilia form a friendship despite the social barriers between them, born out of their grief over the loss of loved ones. Cecilia deeply mourns her husband, and David has yet to move on from the death of Manuel, a friend whom he loved secretly for years. As the two begin to heal, they realize the love they have for each other is beyond anything they could have imagined. But is it enough to help them overcome seemingly insurmountable societal odds?

This book will break you open with its beautiful writing, and readers will find themselves wringing their hands, wondering how on earth David and Cecilia could ever be together. Siegel does not soften history to make it easier for her characters to find love, a popular tactic in other queer historical romances. Instead, she finds subtle ways for her characters to bend the rules while not outright disregarding them, allowing them to find their own happily ever after even though traditional markers like marriage remain out of reach. David and Cecilia’s victory feels realistic and hard won, pushing readers to reconsider what an HEA looks like. And while Seigel handles many heavy subjects in The Phoenix Bride such as grief, trauma, antisemitism and biphobia, the romance doesn’t feel weighed down by these issues. Cecilia is a darkly funny heroine and while David is a more serious foil for her, they have a charming ease with each other that creates lighter moments to balance the weightier aspects of the story.

The Phoenix Bride is a gorgeous romance about healing from trauma, making peace with grief and finding love where it doesn’t seem possible. This glorious follow-up to her debut, Solomon’s Crown, firmly establishes Seigel as a writer to watch.

Natasha Siegel’s beautifully written The Phoenix Bride pushes readers to reconsider what happily ever after looks like.
NonfictionNature

Twelve Trees

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Daniel Lewis’ informative, engrossing, often poetic Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future is a veritable wonderland of fascinating facts.

Did you know that “a mature redwood adds, on average, a ton of wood to its mass every year”? Or that the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) was founded in Arizona in 1937, and there are 100-plus tree ring labs worldwide? Or that, contrary to its unassuming appearance, “a pine needle is akin to a skyscraper, bustling with movement and life,” including air- and water-movement systems not unlike HVAC and plumbing?

Twelve Trees is also an engagingly written experiential memoir of the author’s quest to learn more about the trees he views as crucial to human life—past, present and future. From California (where he’s senior curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library and teaches at Caltech) to Easter Island, central Africa to Amazonian Peru and beyond, Lewis leads readers on an awe-inspiring tour of a dozen trees that, he writes, “have been on long journeys, have many accomplices as well as enemies, and need our help to survive.”

After all, trees “populate our daily lives. They’ve been part of our sight lines and metaphors, our byways, our contexts.” They record our history: At the LTRR, the author learned how bristlecone pine rings bear evidence of drought, flood and fire, thus providing data that scientists and scholars can use to analyze and predict such events. And they can be vital to culture, health and government all at once. In India, the sandalwood tree’s wood is used in important ceremonies; its oil has “helped millions through both folk and modern medicine”; and it is the subject of numerous laws regarding trade, harvesting, poaching and preservation.

Lewis is fiercely protective of and endlessly enthusiastic about the precious leafy entities—eucalyptus, ebony, baobab, olive and more—that enrich our lives and support our very existence. Twelve Trees offers extensive insight into the ways in which humans and trees are interconnected, for better or worse, and urges readers to remember that the “salvation of trees can be the salvation of humans.”

 

Written with boundless enthusiasm by Daniel Lewis, Twelve Trees offers extensive insight into the ways in which humans and trees are interconnected.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEssays

You Get What You Pay For

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Morgan Parker, acclaimed poet and winner of a 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection Magical Negro, marries memoir with cultural critique in an unsparing, intimate and provocative book of essays, You Get What You Pay For, which infuses the titular idiom with the perspective of her wronged race. “Becoming a person,” she writes in the first essay, “forming an identity, had been a sham assignment from the start—for an African American person, there is a multistep process of backtracking and reinterpreting hundreds of years of American history, peeling apart film from adhesive to hold under the light and make out a cloudy reflection.”

Parker was named after a minor character in “The Cosby Show,” who, in her single appearance, comically eats olives despite knowing she’s allergic to them. Parker writes: “I come from . . . self-destructive impulses, swallowing what I shouldn’t, becoming a punchline.” Later, writing for the feminist platform Lenny Letter, she attended Cosby’s trial for sexual assault. “I’m one of maybe three Black women in the room . . . wrestling with that familiar triple-consciousness chicken or egg. Am I Black today or a woman? Where do I pledge allegiance? Which injustices should I fight first?”

Parker tells of her depression, anxiety and self-hatred, which she describes as “something palpable, something ugly and inadequate and all wrong.” She interrogates the relationships between Black people and treatment for mental illness, citing her father’s assertion that “Black people don’t go to therapy.” Eventually, she did. When a white therapist admitted she knew nothing about the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death, Parker moved on. With time, she began to link her mental illness to that of her ancestors’ experience as slaves and the century-and-a-half of racism that has followed, “finally com[ing] to understand [self-hatred] as extension of the white supremacist ideologies permeating and governing the nation of which I am a citizen.”

The 22 essays in You Get What You Pay For cycle through Parker’s urgent concerns about white supremacy, police brutality, her often tenuous mental health and her ongoing search for love. She handles these heavy issues with incisive humor and a poet’s eye for detail. The “you” in that titular idiom becomes “we.”

Morgan Parker examines how racism and intergenerational trauma can affect mental health in her provocative, incisively humorous debut essay collection.
NonfictionMemoir

The Manicurist’s Daughter

Review by Vanessa Willoughby

To playwright and performer Susan Lieu, the woman she called M&aacute was “more mystery than mother.” In her deeply moving debut memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter, Lieu excavates her family history and the painful narratives she’s stubbornly preserved over the years to answer the questions that emerged after her mother’s shocking death in 1996: How can you heal from intergenerational trauma if your family denies its existence?

When Lieu was 11, her family structure collapsed. Lieu’s mother, a dynamic 38-year-old Vietnamese refugee and successful nail salon owner in the Bay Area, went to a plastic surgery clinic for an operation that included an abdominoplasty, or “tummy tuck.” During the procedure, she lost oxygen to her brain, and 14 minutes passed before the surgeon called 911. She spent five days in a coma before flatlining. The surgeon, a white man who didn’t carry liability insurance, had been placed on probation four years before operating on Lieu’s mother, and remained on probation for years after her death. He specifically marketed his services to the Bay Area’s Vietnamese population.

Avoiding displays of grief, Lieu’s family refused to acknowledge the death of her mother, just as they refused to talk about their exodus from Vietnam. The emotional distance between Lieu and her father, who had suddenly become a widower with four children at 42, steadily grew as the years passed. As Lieu navigated adulthood, she struggled to make sense of her mother’s death, and her role as a daughter.

Lieu’s narrative provides a touching tribute to her mother and a probing investigation of destructive beauty standards. With considerable nuance and vulnerability, Lieu carefully deconstructs her own image of her mother as a victim without agency. Her journey to find closure is as vulnerable as an open vein, but eventually leads to a place of acceptance and forgiveness. To feel is to heal, and Lieu’s willingness to embrace emotional honesty, no matter how uncomfortable, is at the heart of The Manicurist’s Daughter.

In her deeply moving memoir, Susan Lieu tries to find closure after her mother’s untimely death.
NonfictionMemoirLifestylesAging

How to Be Old

Review by Susannah Felts

In her 60s, Lyn Slater, a professor of social work, became internet-famous for her fashion sense. In her memoir, How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly From the Accidental Icon, she tells the story of riding that wave for a decade before deciding it was time for a move out of NYC and a life in writing. Now we can add Slater’s memoir to our essential texts that rethink aging in an image-centric world. Of her social media success, she writes, “Is it really about fashion embracing older consumers, or is it about valuing those individuals who have the capacity to adapt, remain relevant, and be comfortable with experimentation, reinvention, and an interest in culture and the world they live in? These are the folks who know what to make of a lucky accident when one happens to them. Perhaps it’s really not about age but about feeling starved by superficiality.” Mic drop.

In her memoir, "accidental icon" and fashion influencer Lyn Slater rethinks aging in an image-centric world.
NonfictionMemoir

If You Can’t Take the Heat

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Memoirs are expected to be intimate, laying the groundwork for an author’s backstory and how they got to where they are currently. But it is less common for a personal account to be rendered in a way that’s hilarious, clever, profound and poignant at the same time, particularly one with food as its focus.

Geraldine DeRuiter’s If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury provides all these elements and more. As the James Beard Award-winning blogger who penned a viral response to celebrity chef Mario Batali’s ill-advised #MeToo “apology” (in which he shared a recipe for cinnamon rolls), DeRuiter is no stranger to writing about culinary escapades. In this meaty series of essays, she travels from her childhood encounters with food to the present day, with many experiences in between that are as entertaining as her gifted voice and knack for description.

Subjects that she covers include religion, teendom, dating and marriage, all the while sharing life lessons that will resonate with many readers. The result is a memoir that is raw, revealing and relatable, with particular attention given to challenges women face in patriarchal society. For example, in a chapter hilariously titled “The Only Thing in My Oven,” she defends her decision not to have children and smartly draws parallels between what others call “maternal instinct” with her desire, since, childhood, to bake. As she explains, “I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one. And there’s a long diatribe here that I could go on about, but simply: parenthood should always be a choice. But baking didn’t feel like a decision. It was a calling.”

Her articulations are sincere and nostalgic, particularly in the story of how she learned about her past and ancestral roots, and how she has processed (and is still processing) what she has discovered. She doesn’t shy away from grappling with childhood trauma, but If You Can’t Take the Heat is by no means depressing. Quite the opposite. DeRuiter’s divulging is comforting and significant to both women and those who have made a similar culinary journey. Readers will find this witty series of vignettes humorous and enlightening.

Geraldine DeRuiter braids her love of food with feminist critique in her hilarious, relatable memoir If You Can’t Take the Heat.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Unclaimed

Review by Erica Ciccarone

As many as 114,000 Americans who die each year are unclaimed by relatives. Their remains are buried without ceremony, often in mass graves, unwitnessed by anyone who knew them. What circumstances conspire for human beings to meet this end? And what do their deaths say about how we treat the living? Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans unearth some of their stories, unpacking questions both existential and practical in their groundbreaking The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels.

The authors spent eight years investigating the bureaucratic hurdles, legislative failings and social ruptures that contribute to 1,600 unclaimed people in Los Angeles each year. Los Angeles County law stipulates that only next-of-kin can claim remains, but 1 in 4 adult Americans report being estranged from close family members. When relatives can be located, the costs associated with claiming remains are often too steep for them to bear; other times, they have no interest in claiming at all. What’s more, “bureaucratic apathy” and a muddled system relies on three separate departments to investigate the unclaimed.

The Unclaimed follows the stories of four Angelenos who went unclaimed for very different reasons: a reclusive elderly woman whose few surviving family members refused to claim her; a middle-aged woman beloved by her church family who, by law, could not claim and bury her; a veteran who slipped through the cracks; and a quiet man whose assets granted him a funeral that no one attended. Prickett and Timmermans also portray the death investigators who try to locate relatives with varying degrees of success; these civil servants are frustrated and exhausted, their departments understaffed and under-resourced. And the portraits the authors paint of the two civil servants who inter the unclaimed at the Boyle Heights cemetery—the “potter’s field” of L.A.—are extremely moving. Relying on 231 interviews, direct observation of death investigations, extensive research into 600 deaths, attendance of dozens of funerals and cremations, and more, Prickett and Timmermans humanize the dead with aching specificity, granting these few the honor that so many others deserve.

“If you die and no one calls out for you, did your life have meaning?” the authors ask. As the subtitle of the book suggests, there is hope, because more and more people are answering that call. In 2017, a pastor began organizing a memorial service for the unclaimed that draws droves of witnesses; veterans congregate to send off their siblings in arms; a nonprofit buries unclaimed infants in a special cemetery. The writing in this last third of the book sometimes veers into sentimentality, naming conclusions that readers can recognize themselves. But on the whole, The Unclaimed is a gripping and compassionate account that leaves us with a feeling of social and personal responsibility for our kin, our community and ourselves.

Gripping and groundbreaking, The Unclaimed investigates the Americans who are abandoned in death and what they tell us about how we treat the living.

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