Fiction Reviews: Week of 12/17/2007

In this elegant and stunning novel, veteran heartstring-puller Hoffman (Here on Earth; Seventh Heaven) examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect. High powered New York attorney Maddy Heller arrives in 1999 London having had an affair with Paul, her sister Allie’s fiancé,; she must now cope with the impending marriage, and with Paul’s terminal illness—which echoes the girls’ mother’s cancer during their childhood. Hoffman then shifts to heady 1966 London and to Frieda Lewis, Paul’s future mother, who falls for a doomed up-and-coming songwriter knowing he will break her heart. The narrative then shifts further back, to 1952 and to Maddy and Allie’s future mother, Lucy Green. A bookish 12-year-old wise beyond her years, Lucy sails with her father and stepmother from New York to London for a wedding. There, she becomes an innocent catalyst to a devastating event involving a love triangle. Hoffman interweaves the three stories, gazing unerringly into forces that cause some people to self-destruct (“There was no such thing as too much for a girl who thought she was second best”) and others to find inner strength to last a lifetime. (Apr.)

Dragomán draws from his eastern bloc upbringing in this brutal, fragmentary novel. Djata is an 11-year-old boy coming to grips with his father’s abduction and internment at a forced labor camp. His mother, preyed upon by secret police officers and venal dignitaries, is powerless to save her husband, and Djata’s paternal grandfather, an unrepentant Party man, blames the internment on Djata’s mother as he spirals into alcoholism and madness. Meanwhile, Djata’s excursions in school, among his friends, at sports and in the countryside, almost without fail, are exercises in nihilism and cruelty. Beaten and threatened by coaches, teachers, construction workers and even complete strangers, children absorb the violence and terror and re-enact it on one another. An unremitting terror drives most of Djata’s life, even when authority figures are not present. Dragomán conveys Djata’s fearful mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skillfully building a totalitarian world simultaneously immersive and repulsive. (Apr.)

Pulitzer finalist Martin (The Bright Forever) returns with a meandering, convoluted tale of an elderly gay man who gets jolted from his lonely life. Sammy Brady’s quiet existence with his basset hound, Stump, gets interrupted by neighbor Arthur after Arthur’s wife dies. Outgoing Arthur places himself in Sammy’s tiny orbit, and the two are soon building a ship-shaped dog house for Stump while Sammy ruminates on a secret he’s not ready to reveal. When a reporter for the local paper shows up to interview Sammy about the unorthodox dog house, the experience jars Sammy; the reporter is a relative of Dewey Finn, Sammy’s childhood friend who mysteriously died on a railroad track. The slow pace picks up when Maddie, Arthur’s granddaughter, arrives. Cal, Sammy’s alienated brother, is soon on the scene, jump-starting a complicated plot that involves the Michigan Militia and a violent antiques collector bent on securing an item Cal’s hiding. Not everyone survives what follows, and Sammy finally reveals the truth about his friend’s long-ago death. Martin crafts eloquent sentences, though he often succumbs to Sammy’s syrupy nostalgia and has trouble propelling a labyrinthine plot. (Apr.)

Shopaholic powerhouse Kinsella delights again with her latest, a winning if unoriginal tale of amnesia striking an ambitious shrew and changing her life for the better. After taking a nasty bump on the head, Lexi Smart awakens in a hospital convinced that it’s 2004 and that she’s just missed her father’s funeral. It’s actually three years later, and she no longer has crooked teeth, frizzy hair and a loser boyfriend. Initially wowed by what she’s become—a gorgeous, cut-throat businesswoman—Lexi soon finds herself attempting to figure out how it happened. As her personality change and lost memory threaten her job, Lexi tries to dredge up some chemistry with her handsome albeit priggish husband, Eric, though the effort is unnecessary with Eric’s colleague Jon, who tells Lexi that she was about to leave Eric for him. Amnesia tales may be old hat, but Kinsella keeps things fresh and frothy with workplace politicking, romantic intrigue and a vibrant (though sometimes caricatured) cast. Though the happy ending won’t come as a surprise, readers will be rooting for Lexi all along. (Mar.)

Former screenwriter Lerner’s debut creatively reanimates Allan Pinkerton, founder of the country’s first detective agency. Pinkerton narrates his adventuresome life and times, beginning in 1856 Chicago, as his Pinkerton National Detective Agency recruits a few good (male) operatives. When attractive, young Kate Warne applies for the job, she unknowingly puts female detectives into the history books. Tentatively at first (due to her “femaleness”), Pinkerton slowly warms to Kate and her sleuthing acumen, particularly after she helps crack a major case and goes on to assist in thwarting a Maryland secessionist plot. As the pair’s success grows, so does a romance, which gets messy since Pinkerton is already married. Meanwhile, Pinkerton’s agency foils an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln, and Pinkerton establishes the nation’s first secret service unit (in service to the Union Army), which takes on increasingly dangerous exploits. Lerner highlights Pinkerton’s progressive politics and distinctive personal history with uncanny accuracy throughout this sharp-witted, romantic channeling of America’s prototype investigative innovator. (Mar.)

When Dahlia Finger—a 29-year-old, pot-smoking, chronically underachieving Jewish-American princess—learns that she has brain cancer, the results are hilarious and heartbreaking in Albert’s superb first novel (following the story collection How This Night Is Different). Opening in the Venice, Calif., cottage to which Dahlia has retreated, at her father’s expense, after unsuccessfully trying to forge a life in New York, chapter one begins with the omniscient narrator’s scathingly Edith Wharton–worthy catalogue of Dahlia’s symptoms and ends with her first grand mal seizure. As Dahlia endures blistering radiation, sits numbly through her support group, smokes medical marijuana (with her crisis-reunited divorced parents) and carries a condescending book called It’s Up to You: Your Cancer To-Do List, Albert masterfully interweaves Dahlia’s battle with flashbacks, most tellingly involving her complexly overbearing Israeli mother, Margalit (“who unceremoniously imploded the family decades earlier”), and contemptuous older brother, against whom Dahlia has never learned to defend herself. Throughout, Albert delivers Dahlia’s laissez-faire attitude toward other people (men especially) and lack of ambition with such exactness as to strip them of cliché and make them grimly vivid. Her brilliant style makes the novel’s central question—should we mourn a wasted life?—shockingly poignant as Dahlia hurtles toward death. (Mar.)

Brightwell’s debut, an uncanny thriller, brings late Victorian London to vivid life. Devon-born housemaid Jane Wilbred has snared her new post with the Bentley family with a letter of reference she forged, omitting any mention of the possibly pertinent fact that her late mother was a notorious murderer. That, however, is trifling compared to the shady games being played both upstairs and downstairs at 32 Cursitor Road while the family matriarch lingers on her deathbed, especially the struggle between mysterious beauty Mina Bentley, wife of younger son Robert, and the wan stranger who claims to be the widow of older brother Henry (drowned recently while sailing home after years in India). Meanwhile, Robert is focused on a battle closer to his heart: winning official recognition for anthropometry, the science of identifying criminals by body measurements. Far from being an arcane digression, Robert’s passion eventually figures into the intricate and surprising plot. The action will keep the reader as intrigued as a parlor maid eavesdropping outside her mistress’s boudoir. (Mar.)

Woodward’s I’ll Go to Bed at Noon and August were Man Booker and Whitbread finalists, respectively. In his warmly comedic latest, Aldous Jones, following the death of his wife, has retired as an art teacher and begun declining into a fetid self-imposed exile on London’s Fernlight Avenue. Daughter Juliette’s exasperated comment on Aldous’s having “failed” when he gave up painting long ago rouses him to visit the National Gallery, where he makes a life-changing reacquaintance with a lusty Rembrandt portrait. Son Julian’s seeming unraveling and Aldous’s short hospital stay following a fall prompt Aldous to visit Julian in Ostend, Belgium; there, a madcap series of encounters ensue with much younger women, one of whom inspires him as the Rembrandt portrait does. Upon returning to London, an inspired Aldous enrolls in a language class, paints madly, travels the city with various odd companions and houses his son James and James’s family, leading to further adventures. Persistent themes of aging, illness and art are seamlessly woven in via Woodward’s slowly paced and beautifully written prose. Aldous is at once endearing, sad and inspiring, and he’s given a vibrant set of foils in the flamboyant supporting cast. His subtle and understated deterioration is funny, haunting and human. (Mar.)

Marcom (Three Apples Fell from Heaven; The Daydreaming Boy) looks at the Guatemalan civil war through the eyes of a former American soldier complicit in the killing of civilians in this circuitous novel. As the unnamed narrator, a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors, drives through Los Angeles and goes through his daily routines, he’s awash in memories, mostly about Marta, an Ixil prostitute whom the narrator both loved and possibly killed. In a florid stream of consciousness, the narrator continually revisits several themes, events and images: black flies, Marta’s brother’s murder, Marta’s torture and death among them. Throughout, Marcom weaves references and imagery from religion, mythology and Guatemalan, Armenian and American history, and indicts the powers-that-be for turning a blind eye toward the slaughter of indigenous people. Though some may find that Marcom overly romanticizes Ixil life and is ham-fisted in her critique of American consumerism, the novel’s evocative imagery and explicit prose can move as well as chill. In the end, though, the book is more demanding than enlightening. (Mar.)

Strange and luminous, this fascinating psychological thriller from Heim (In Awe) tackles questions of identity, illness and trauma. Scott, a writer and drug addict, travels back to Kansas from New York City at the request of his ill mother, Donna, who’s become obsessed with missing children. Scott soon finds out that Donna believes she was kidnapped in her youth by an elderly couple who eventually returned her unharmed. This experience has led her to an odd alliance with a boy who leaves candy on Donna’s front porch. When Donna becomes too ill to continue research for a supposed book on disappeared children, Scott, with help from a friend of Donna’s, goes on the road for answers. Taut and beautifully clear, the writing at times recalls that of Paul Auster, but the plot ends in a place less interesting than where it began. The reader may feel that revealing the mundane truth behind Donna’s childhood experiences betrays the essential mystery of all the lost boys and girls described in the novel. (Mar.)

Set in a near-future Alabama rendered virtually lifeless by a hole in the ozone layer, Braziel’s relentlessly dark debut focuses on Mathew Harrison, a young man who’s never known anything but dust storms, heat, the killing sun and a life of migrant labor. Forbidden to move north (the nearby city of Birmingham is closed), Mat, his father and their peers labor in government-run clay mines that may be nothing more than hideously dangerous make-work. Cut off from communication with the so-called Saved World, the undestroyed part of the country, they’re treated much like the Okies of the dust bowl era. Grown to adulthood in this soul-destroying environment, Mat nonetheless finds joy in his marriage to a local girl, Jennifer. The young couple are among the favored few who have acquired visas, a way out of the hellhole of the dead South. Poetic, grim and hallucinatory, this harrowing work is not for the faint of heart, though it will appeal strongly to anyone who loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Mar.)

Memoirist McKenna’s debut novel—a pastoral, feel-good yarn set in 1974 County Derry—concerns two Irish 40-somethings who meet through a newspaper Lonely Hearts column. Both farmer Jamie McCloone and schoolteacher Lydia Devine have suffered the recent death of a loved one. Jamie’s traumatic childhood at a sweatshop run by the nuns from hell precipitates his dependence on Valium and whiskey. Lydia, meanwhile, grew up under the oppressive thumb of her now-dead rector father and—at age 40, still a virgin who has never tasted alcohol—decides it’s time to live a little. The pair, of course, are grossly mismatched—she prim and buttoned-down, he a rough-edged rustic—which is underscored repeatedly during their lengthy postal courtship. Comic relief comes from Jamie’s neighbors, the McFaddens, who do their best to aid Jamie and lift him from his saturnine moods. McKenna—who’s written a memoir, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress—places a few twists in the narrative, saving the most startling until the close. (Mar.)

Two elaborate tales written in the early 1960s by the Japanese author Mizukami (1919—2004) explore volcanic oedipal urges lurking just below the surface of unlikely love triangles. In “The Temple of the Wild Geese,” set at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains, Jinen, an unhappy, “disfigured” and lonely orphaned novice, develops a filial crush on Satoko, a recent widow and the reverend Jikai’s new common-law wife, which she encourages. When Jikai’s excessive drinking clouds his better judgment, Jinen’s desire is transformed into brutal action. It’s a simple jealousy tale centered on a complex relationship, and Mizukami achieves remarkable psychological depth through detail and stylistic finesse. “Bamboo Dolls of Echizen,” set in 1924, similarly hinges on a maternal relationship gone sour when a young bamboo craftsman takes his father’s prostitute as a wife and insists on treating her as a mother rather than as a proper wife, to the detriment of her health. Readers new to Mizukami’s work will be enthralled by the isolated, rural settings of the northern Hokuriku region of Japan, and by his elegant storytelling. (Mar.)

Kotapish offers in her unnerving debut a frustrating tale of a woman’s struggle to keep her past from overtaking her present. The nameless narrator leads readers through the mazes of her memory, from a childhood spent talking to the ghost of her dead sister, Nancy, through her adult trauma of watching someone get run over by a subway car, and finally to Virginia, where she lives in a ramshackle house. Her cruel mother, Lois, whose sanity is also constantly called into question, becomes the axis on which the narrator’s story spins in disjointed bits. The more the narrator reveals, the less reliable she becomes, calling into question whether Nancy is indeed the ghost of her dead sister or simply the personification of repressed grief and resentment. Within this aching knot of remembrance, Kotapish frequently lets her language and attention meander, stringing random thought together in unseemly pastiches that verbosely wind their way to dead ends. The novel has an overly indulgent feel, though some may appreciate the empowering ending. (Mar.)

The narrator of this stark and elegantly translated novel is a psychiatrist named António Lobo Antunes, returning from vacation to his loathed job at Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lisbon. Over the course of the trip, the narrator’s mind ranges over the monstrosities he encountered in the colonial wars in Angola in the 1970s and in his work; through the layering of memories, he draws parallels between the destruction of the war and the questionable care offered to the mentally ill. The novel is both stylistically and emotionally demanding: the point of view shifts back and forth from first- to third-person as the narrative develops in a plotless associative collage, including a hallucinatory episode in which hospital employees gleefully consume the corpse of a soldier. The novel has a heavy autobiographical element and presents a bleak vision of humanity, except in the narrator’s tender appeals to Joanna, his daughter, to whom much of the novel is addressed. In this early work (first published in Portugal in 1983), Antunes transforms rage into gorgeous, lyrical language. (Mar.)

Many of the characters in these eight short fictions from Krysl (How to Accommodate Men) maintain an awkward, ironic limbo between the desire for political correctness and stultifying class entitlements. In the imaginative title story, Sheila, the upscale middle-aged protagonist who describes herself as “your average liberal colonial” living in environmentally hip Boulder, Colorado, resolves to address her nephew Darin’s death in the World Trade Center attack by inviting Osama bin Laden to dinner. “Think you could backpedal on the Satan thing?” she asks, in one diplomatically witty barb. The longest story by far, “Welcome to the Torture Center, Love,” is set in 1989 at a U.N. refugee camp in civil war–torn Sudan, where Michael Garang, a British-Sudanese doctor, and Annie, a white American from a very rich family, toil under harsh conditions and fall in love. When the warehouse grain is stolen, Garang sets off through enemy territory to secure food, and his absence forces Annie to take a hard look at their relationship. Other stories, such as “Cherry Garcia, Pistachio Cream” and “Heraclitis, Help Me,” explore intense mother-daughter bonds that leave little room for fatherly incursion. Krysl’s fiction resists the usual trajectories of plot, concentrating instead on a relentless, sometimes entertaining and illuminating investigation of personal responsibility. (Mar.)

At the start of Smith’s superb third thriller to feature Ana Grey (after 2003’s Good Morning, Killer), the FBI special agent, who’s still recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder after shooting “a crazed detective on a suicide mission” seven months earlier, learns that the skeletal remains of her missing onetime fiancé, fellow special agent Steve Crawford, have turned up in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Ana later finds out Steve was murdered by members of an anarchist group with a penchant for homemade bombs. After training at the FBI’s undercover school, Ana uses an alias to penetrate the group, which includes a former FBI agent gone bad, Dan Stone. As “Allfather” Stone plots a terrorist act he calls “the Big One,” Ana must burrow through layers of paranoia to discover the precise threat the FBI is dealing with. Ana’s nuanced and coolly observational narrative voice perfectly complements the well-paced action, which builds to a satisfying conclusion that leaves open the next chapter of Ana’s story. 5-city author tour. (Feb.)

Bestseller Grimes’s compelling second novel to feature the enigmatic young woman who calls herself Andi Oliver (after 1999’s Biting the Moon) begins with Andi, who’s still unaware of her real name or her past, adrift in the Dakota badlands. After rescuing an abandoned donkey, Andi makes a temporary home for herself in the small town of Kingdom, where she soon creates a stir by standing up to some local bullies. She really begins to shake things up in the placid community, however, when she takes a job at a pig farm to try to save the cruelly treated animals bred there. After sneaking into the farm’s affiliated assembly-line slaughterhouse, Andi resolves to find a way, within the bounds of the law or not, to call to account the management of both places for violating humane animal treatment laws. While one late plot development stretches credibility, Grimes succeeds in sustaining suspense while graphically portraying the ugliness of animal abuse. (Feb.)

Harlem Renaissance figure Nugent, who died in 1987, was a member of the self-proclaimed “Niggerati” that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and others. His never before published roman à clef, written between 1928 and 1933, is a mess of a novel that’s still a useful first-hand account of Jazz Age identity politics. Book I features the exhilarating atmosphere of Harlem as the arts and intellectual movement catches fire. Unfortunately, the action is filtered through the eyes of Nugent’s alter ego, Stuartt, who despite an intriguing mix of characteristics—he’s a gay black man light-skinned enough to pass as white—is an insufferable narcissist. Shoehorned into the aimless scenes of gin-soaked parties—where Stuartt is always the star—are self-conscious but thought-provoking soliloquies about the age-old conundrum: race shouldn’t matter, but it does. Decidedly more provocative is Book II, in which a more vulnerable Stuartt moves to Greenwich Village and sleeps his way to the top of the Italian underworld. It’s shocking in the manner of pre-Code Hollywood, but the book, with its diffuse narrative and self-aggrandizing protagonist, suffers from its posthumous assembly. (Feb.)

Prolific Spur Award–winner Kelton knocks out the seventh western in his Texas Ranger series, following 2005’s Jericho’s Road. In the 1870s, former Texas Ranger Andy Pickard, now a restless farmer, drops his plow and straps on his guns when the local sheriff is murdered during a jailbreak. The dead sheriff, Tom Blessing, had been a father figure to Andy, who vows revenge for his killing. The escaped outlaw is Luther Cordell, a dangerous bank robber and leader of a small gang of desperate owlhoots. The search is long and arduous, and the posse Andy has assembled melts away until only Andy, now a fully reinstated Ranger, remains in solo pursuit. Cordell, meanwhile, is trying to recover the stolen bank loot he’d hidden when captured. Add in Cordell’s disgusting relatives, two unlucky saloon stick-up artists, some kindly travelers, fancy gunplay and a remarkably surprising conclusion, and Kelton once again turns in an exciting and satisfying western tale. (Feb.)

This razor-sharp debut from Washington—the controversial former editor-in-chief of Vibe’s spinoff magazine, Blaze—offers a searing look at the rap industry. New York City writer Marquis Wise, having done a cover story about the murder of Large, a hip-hop star turned Oscar winner, lands a dream job at the hip-hop magazine Fever. Marq is also fortunate to have Holliday Watkins, a gorgeous lawyer, as his sweetie. In contrast, Marq’s older brother, down-on-his-luck producer Dontay, has a crack habit, too many bills and an inability to forget his idol, Large. The author alternates between Dontay’s dazzling streetwise voice/rap lyrics (“Tall nigga, name of Dontay/ I rap tight like turbans in Bombay”) and Marq’s journalistic account of how things went down when money, drugs and violence overpowered music originally intended to enlighten not frighten. Currently the Associated Press’s entertainment editor, Washington courageously tells it like it is in this roman à clef about one of the most influential American subcultures of our era. (Feb.)

Phenomenal clarity and rapacious movement are only two of the virtues of Millhauser’s new collection, which focuses on the misery wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition. The citizens who build insulated domes over their houses in “The Dome” escalate their ambitions to great literal and figurative heights, but the accomplishment becomes bittersweet. The uncontrollably amused adolescents in the book’s title story, who gather together for laughing sessions, find something ultimately joyless in their mirth. As in earlier works like The Barnum Museum, Millhauser’s tales evolve more like lyrical essays than like stories; the most breathlessly paced sound the most like essays. The painter at the center of “A Precursor of the Cinema” develops from “entirely conventional” works to paintings that blend photographic realism with inexplicable movement, to—something entirely new. Similarly, haute couture dresses grow in “A Change in Fashion” until the people beneath them disappear, and the socioeconomic tension Millhauser induces is as tight as a corset. Though his exaggerated outlook on contemporary life might seem to be at once uncomfortably clinical and fantastical, Millhauser’s stories draw us in all the more powerfully, extending his peculiar domain further than ever. (Feb.)

Historical romance novelist King leaps into deeper historical waters with this captivating take on Lady Macbeth, who tells her side of the story with a forceful, uncompromising daring. Gruadh, the future Lady Macbeth and the daughter of 11th-century Scottish prince Bodhe, survives several kidnappings in her girlhood and, determined to uphold the traditions of fierce Celtic women warriors, learns how to fight. “Rue” meets Macbeth, whose royal blood is nearly as pure as hers, but her father marries her off to the warrior Gillecomgan, of whom she grows fond. Macbeth kills him during Rue’s pregnancy and immediately marries her, as is his right as victor—and there soon prove to be many more compelling reasons for the match. As King Malcolm’s tyranny causes unrest, the Macbeths embark on a bloody campaign to win over their countrymen. Based on historical evidence and recent theories of the era, this is an epic tale written in high-voltage prose. King’s novel will thrill lovers of Shakespeare adaptations and delight anyone who wants to enjoy a ripping tale of love and ambition. (Feb.)

Historical romance queen Elyot shines her light on Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800), who, during her brief life, burned with a passionate intensity. Born to a successful British merchant who abandoned the family, Mary nonetheless enjoyed an education that nurtured her passion for prose, poetry and drama. Elyot convincingly evokes the ambivalence Mary feels at 15 as she struggles with her mother, who pleads that she give up her upcoming acting debut to marry Tom Robinson, the supposed heir of a rich uncle. After doing as she’s told, Mary suffers the first of many romantic disappointments, all the while finding refuge in her poetry and other writings. Tom’s philandering and financial irresponsibility finally return her to the stage, and there the auburn-haired beauty catches the eye of the Prince of Wales. Mary’s daring and anguished existence is truly the stuff of novels—her own writings, particularly her feminist essays, were acclaimed in her lifetime—and Elyot’s telling of her life, in Mary’s voice, honors her legacy. (Feb.)

Dean follows her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, with a humorous collection chronicling struggling actors and actresses, therapy sessions and romantic relationships on the brink of disaster. After a bizarre break-in, the 30-something actor-narrator of “Dan in the Gray Flannel Rat Suit” finds himself on the cusp of fleeing a cruel New York with his wife and child. “The Queen Mother” reveals an actress returning to Louisiana to help coax her dramatic, alcoholic mom to rehab. In “The Afterlife of Lyle Stone,” a Seattle attorney allows a vivid dream to unhinge his waking life, while a group of creative-minded neighbors have their lives shaken up by a Muppet-like puppeteer in “What the Left Hand Is Saying.” Herself a former actress, Dean illuminates the nastiness of the business and the psychic toll of performance, writing about failure and loss with unfailing comic precision: “But gradually I fall under the spell of my own acting, or the rhythm of the act, it doesn’t matter which,” the narrator of “Romance Manual” says of sleeping with a fellow cast member. Readers will certainly forget themselves in these sparkling stories, pausing over small, strange moments that change entire lives. (Feb.)

A South Carolina chimpanzee sanctuary affiliated with a university provides the unusual setting for Wesselmann’s powerful second novel (after 1997’s Trutor & the Balloonist). Dana Armstrong, a primatologist, acquired her understanding of chimpanzees at great personal cost, having been raised along with her younger brother, Zack, with a female chimp as a sibling (they communicated using sign language) until a tragic event ended the experiment. Now she must deal with an even more traumatic event. One day Dana arrives at the sanctuary, where she’s the director, to discover that someone has damaged buildings and released chimpanzees unadapted to the wild. As Dana battles to save the sanctuary, personal and professional jealousies, campus politics, the fate of the chimpanzees and the stirring stories of Dana and her family play out in unforgettable fashion. With empathetic insight, the author precisely observes both human and animal behavior. (Feb.)

Those with an insatiable appetite for conspiracy thrillers involving the discovery of an ancient text with world-shaking implications may enjoy Cutler’s debut, but predictable plotting and routine prose will likely disappoint others. On sabbatical leave in Israel, American archeologist Josh Cohan makes the chance find of a lifetime in a desert cave—a jar containing a scroll that may be an autobiographical narrative by Jesus Christ himself emphasizing his human struggles. After Josh shares the news of his sensational discovery with the Israeli authorities, the scroll becomes the target of a shadowy cabal, the Guardians, which launches assaults on Cohan and those close to him. The novel’s romantic interest, an Israeli antiquarian’s knockout daughter, is abducted twice and threatened with harm straight out of a silent-movie serial. The author’s attempts to preach a message of religious tolerance get lost in plot devices that titillate rather than engage the reader’s emotions. Author tour. (Feb.)

Baumbach’s dark, meandering, self-conscious latest (On the Way to My Father’s Funeral) explores a particularly resilient form of unhappiness. At a New York publishing party, aging writer Jay recognizes “you”—a woman he met 27 years before, slept with ecstatically one night after a wedding and parted from, only to be obsessed with ever since. Now both married, the two end up having an occasional, mutually dissatisfying Wednesday affair at the Plaza Hotel. Deeply ambivalent about his feelings, given to further perfunctory infidelity with others yet enraged by his partner-in-crime’s inability to choose between him, her husband and the other man she dallies with, Jay rehearses many tortured versions of their story, alternating with the POV of “you” (who is also sometimes the reader). The father of film director Noah, Baumbach creates conflicted characters who play out an impenetrable resistance to marital harmony and stasis. The result is a grim hall-of-mirrors of self-perceptions. (Feb.)

No further proof is necessary to show that Bishop—still not widely known beyond literary circles at the time of her death in 1979—has, posthumously in the last three decades, become one of America’s most popular 20th-century poets, but this hefty and handsome volume from the Library of America certainly clinches the deal. Between its covers one can find most of the perfectionist author’s oeuvre, more than enough to confirm Bishop as a master at revealing the complexity of simple, often painful things (“I said to myself: three days/ and you’ll be seven years old./ I was saying it to stop/ the sensation of falling off the round, turning world/ into cold, blue-black space./ But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth”). All the poems gathered in the now-classic Collected Poems are here, as are the unpublished drafts released in 2006’s controversial Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox. The memoir and fiction pieces of Collected Prose are also reprinted, along with a few other pieces of scattered nonfiction, as well as a generous selection of Bishop’s enthralling letters. Bishop’s work is deeply compassionate and necessary reading, and now almost all of it can be found in one place. (Feb)

An admired poet and sometime bestseller in Poland—and an important translator of poetry from English into Polish—Hartwig (now age 85) has also led a memorable life, fighting with the resistance in WWII and taking part in the Solidarity movement. This set of limpid, quotable, often bittersweet lyrics and prose poems makes clear that she could become as acclaimed here as her Nobel Prize compatriots Milosz and Symborska. Countryside landscapes and artifacts from the classical past come to Hartwig as emblems of human endurance, compassion and humility. The same virtues illuminate her poems on public occasions, from 9/11 to the era of Polish martial law: “Lord we aren’t the only nation tormented this way,” she prays, “don’t let us take pride in it.” Later poems speak to the international legacy she favors, especially to the French modernist Apollinaire. For all her topical interest Hartwig is finally a poet of enduring consolation, measured reassurance and scenic clarity, who may also appeal to fans of Mary Oliver. After the poet’s death, one prose poem announces, she “would like to be a statue looking at the sea,” with “darkness behind me.” (Feb.)

McGrath’s poems, like huge accordion folders—can open up wide enough to let almost anything in. Chronicling a year spent partly in and around Miami, partly in the American Northeast, and mostly with the poet’s wife and young sons, this big, ambitious, optimistic volume might also be read as seven short sequences. The “Blueberry Notebook” pays explicit homage to the Pablo Neruda, with odes addressed, like the Chilean’s, to unlikely everyday things—“Ode to the Plantar Fascia”, “Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer.” “Dawn Notebook” mixes haiku about coastal New Jersey (“What is the dune grass/ trying to do—praise the sun/ or go back to sleep?”) with long excerpts from Whitman’s prose. McGrath’s fast-moving verse and prose may strike unfriendly readers as a bit glib, skipping from observation to observation rather than dwelling intensely on any one scene. Yet, for his fans, that speed is part of the point: in these sets of journals in verse and prose, as much as in his earlier, shorter books, McGrath places his own life on a large canvas, emulating “History,” which, he writes “is continuous/ and embraces everything/ without exception.” (Feb.)

Well, we could spend an hour talking about the Hudson River right now,” begins the third entry in the 144 sections of Goldsmith’s outrageous appropriation of New York area radio traffic updates (from WINS), but the anonymous narrator cannot spend such an hour: he has to spend the entire day talking about bridges, tunnels, gridlock, weather conditions, police activity and street-parking rules that apply or not to any interested motorists and commuters as a holiday weekend begins in the Big Apple. Goldsmith, the high-priest of what he has called “uncreative writing,” has pulled other similar stunts—such as a year of radio weather reports (The Weather). A theoretician’s field day, this Goldsmith project also activates narrative and storytelling in an unadorned and absolutely original state. The conversational radio voice (“Well, we’ve talked about what’s not running but, what is running is trains’’) presents New York City as a kind of destination character, with constant appraisals as to how to get inside of or away from it. Gotham evolves in his handling into a sentient, complex figure out of Swift, a giant about whom much is surmised, but little is known. In the end, the only certainties are that its best to travel at 3 a.m., and that alternate side of the street parking rules are axiomatic. (Feb.)

Often as vivid as it is grim, this second collection from Barot (The Darker Fall) offers unrhymed, hard-edged lines that strain with the weight of yearning, elegy, lust and frustration about the difficulty of knowing the self. Scenes from Washington, D.C., Italy and the sea evoke a persistant, if vague, pain. Against that pain Barot’s stanzas and sequences promise only the reward of keen perception: “The coffee will come black inside its cup./ The bread will be made of something clean.” A ghazal adds the further consolation of eros, and the further pain of shame: “I am myself in lace, rubber things, oil.” The drive to immediacy, the tough, clear line, and the traces of what sounds like firsthand experience may remind some readers of Stanley Kunitz. Others may think of Lynda Hull’s chronicles of a difficult life. If the shadow of death falls over the whole collection, Barot at his best keeps up, as well, an accurate light from the visible, audible world: “the dusk with a pink plastic bag/ in the tines of a branch” (Feb.)

Angry and learned, Hill’s seventh book of new poems in 10 years should delight his admirers; its self-contained pentameter stanzas, surprisingly friendly tone and gemlike images also make it the best way into the late work of this poet whom critics such as Harold Bloom have placed in the lineage of Milton and Blake. Hill’s obsessions include the martyrs and poets of the English Renaissance, representations of classical music in poetry and his own advancing age, about which his new poems carry sad jokes. “People keep asking why your lyric mojo/ atrophied at around ninety,” the poet (in truth, aged 75) complains, then adds, “invention reinvents itself/ every so often in the line of death.” Elsewhere he writes about rereading famous works of literary criticism, and memorializes dead friends in fine elegies. In this book, Hill succeeds in mixing personal sentiment with grave pronouncements about morality and history. “There’s an unfinished psalm doing the rounds/ in the vicinity of my skull,” one sequence declares; in one of the book’s multitudinous layers of meaning, Hill may, or may not, be speaking in the voice of the English conqueror Oliver Cromwell, whose military government had fallen apart when Milton wrote the polemic from which Hill’s book takes its name. (Jan.)

Though he won the 1968 poetry Pulitzer, Oppen (1908–1984) remained a cult figure for much of his life. Devotees and experts have long heard about, but rarely seen, the daybooks, journals (mostly from the 1960s) in which the poet recorded and revised reactions to American politics, quotations he favored and apothegms about the art of verse. Cope’s careful edition gathers those journals together with Oppen’s few, and wise, completed essays, among them reviews of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” and a famous “Statement on Poetics” (“We write to find what we believe and what we do not believe”). The results are daunting in their moral seriousness, occasionally hard to assemble given their fragmentation, but finally impressive as a guide to poetry, not only to Oppen’s own. “Young people—even the brilliant young people—tend to address their immediate elders, whether in hatred or in love,” Oppen warns; it is “a long step from there to the dialogue... across a number of centuries which is literature.” (Jan.)

A much-admired academic critic and poet, Longenbach (Draft of a Letter) contributes to this useful new series of pocket-sized writing guides with clear, swift prose that explains how poets have thought about kinds of lines; how the line, or the idea of the line, distinguishes poetry (even prose poetry) from ordinary prose; how reference to dramatic verse (especially Shakespeare’s) can help us think about verse lines on the page; and how the kinds of line he identifies—the end-stopped (punctuated) line, the “parsing” line (which follows a phrase’s syntax), and the “annotating” line (which works against it)—combine to make memorable modern poems. A set of examples from William Carlos Williams demonstrate how Williams’s freewheeling prose let him evolve from less interesting to more powerful versions of free verse. Passages from Marianne Moore, C.D. Wright, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound and Frank Bidart also receive incisive comment. “No particular line,” Longenbach writes, “needs to be championed at the expense of other kinds.” He tries hard—some may think too hard—not to lose any beginners: the result is a short book that could be useful in college and high school courses, while also appealing to general poetry readers. (Jan.)

Waldor’s deliberate, terse, sometimes wise debut shows how many emotions and situations can grow from one small set of stylistic tools. His short poems in slow, clear, clipped free-verse lines, all of which break on the phrase (“the masters failed/ to pass through/ the needles”), include lust, frustration, scenes from Jewish history, a lover’s generosity in bed, a worshipper’s ambivalence towards his God, and a son’s respect for his late father. The best poems (sometimes the shortest) bring two or more of these situations together, as in “Insurance Man” (Waldor’s father’s profession): “Shepherds always/ want a shepherd./ Even the Lord asks.” A poem about a tryst (perhaps a honeymoon) concludes by asking “Are others like me:/ ruthless and brilliant/ before love, and afterwards/ a lamb?” Another standout considers Uriah the Hittite, “loyal/ soldier, husband” from one standpoint, “enemy/ of Israel” from another. Waldor’s interests are finally less prayerful than familial, humane, and loyal to the good people and the simple delights of this world. (Jan.)

The Blackbird sisters, Nora, Libby and Emma, find themselves in the middle of another Main Line society scandal in the breezy seventh entry in Martin’s cozy series (after 2007’s A Crazy Little Thing Called Death). As the annual Chocolate Festival begins in Philadelphia, noted philanthropist Hoyt Cavendish dies. But did he jump or was he pushed? Nora, society reporter for the Philadelphia Intelligencer, investigates after she discovers a mysterious man hiding near the scene and wonders if he could be her long-lost father. Adding to the mess, Libby falls head over heels for the driver of the car that hit her, and wild child Emma is pregnant. Nora uncovers Hoyt’s many enemies, as the devilish do-gooder was “charitable” with funds that didn’t belong to him. The connection to the unexpected homecoming of the Blackbird parents adds another surprising twist. Despite Martin’s trademark wit, events fly past so quickly that readers may feel dizzy. But the long-awaited reunion between the sisters and their parents will satisfy longtime fans. (Mar.)

A serial killer targets respected guildsmen in Knight’s gripping 11th Crowner John mystery (after The Elixir of Life), set in 12th-century Exeter. When Matthew Morcok, a former master saddler, is found mummified above a renovated school, the authorities call on Sir John de Wolfe and coroner’s clerk Thomas de Peyne to stop what is fast becoming “a campaign of terror.” Later victims include a master glazier, who’s strangled, and a candle maker impaled through the eye. John’s work is complicated by the conflict between his shady brother-in-law, Richard de Revelle, and “Nick o’ the Moor,” an outlaw who returned from the Crusades to find his estates expropriated by de Revelle and de Revelle’s cronies. John makes an arduous wintertime journey into Dartmoor to meet Nick, who’s actually a knight, Nicholas de Arundell. Nick’s plight so moves John that he takes the outlaw’s case to England’s “Chief Justiciar” for resolution. The author offers a vivid picture of medieval life with fascinating insights into England’s fledgling legal system. (Feb.)

in Harris’s cozy debut, budding landscaper Paula Holliday turns sleuth after the former documentary filmmaker, a New York City transplant to the suburbs, unearths a box containing “a small dead body” in the neglected, overgrown garden of the Springfield, Conn., house of the recently deceased Peacock sisters, Dorothy and Renata. Sgt. Michael O’Malley, who “looked like he knew his way to the donut shop,” leads the crime investigation, but Paula does her share of detecting, supported by such friends as Lucy Cavanaugh, a fellow filmmaker, and Wanda “Babe” Chinnery, the proprietor of the local diner where all and sundry come to gossip. Harris does a good job developing her characters, their friendships and romances, though the mystery itself borders on the formulaic. Still, the action builds to a satisfying denouement and gardeners will appreciate the author’s insider knowledge. (Feb.)

Moody’s tepid sixth Evan Horne mystery (after 2002’s Looking for Chet Baker) finds the jazz pianist at peace, living in Northern California and reunited with his girlfriend, FBI agent Andie Lawrence. Then Horne learns of the death of his friend and mentor, pianist Calvin Hughes, whose will leaves everything to him. Sorting through Hughes’s belongings in Los Angeles, Horne finds a note and a photo of Hughes next to a baby carriage, inexplicably taped to the bottom of a drawer. Why the cryptic secrecy? And who’s the kid? More interestingly, Horne also finds some aging handwritten sheet music, which might be original compositions of two famous Miles Davis recordings. Tracking down the story of these pieces of ephemera provides the basic plot, but the narrative, padded by two unconnected subplots, never generates enough interest to involve the reader. Jazz fans may enjoy the knowing references to music and jazz history, but mystery buffs will find this novel tone-deaf. (Feb.)

Hensley departs from his Donald Robak legal series (Robak in Black, etc.) with mixed results. After leaving a Chicago hospital with untreatable stomach cancer, Charlie Cannert heads to Florida to find his missing wife, Martha, who went there to look for a place to retire. From his time as a “tunnel rat” in Vietnam to his vigilante crusades against molesters of children and the elderly, Charlie has led a life full of violence. Martha, meanwhile, has wound up after a vicious assault as a “Jane Doe” in a Florida state mental hospital. Still suffering from partial amnesia, Martha later escapes from the hospital and goes in search of Charlie, who by now is helping Florida cop Tom Ryan bring down his wife’s attackers. While the author vividly depicts the depressing world of elderly retirees preyed on by con men and murderers, some stiff dialogue and the slackening of narrative tension near the end undercut the strong premise. Fans will be saddened to learn that Hensley died at age 81 in August 2007. (Feb.)

Best known for her Catherine LeVendeur medieval series (The Witch in the Well, etc.), Newman turns to her hometown of Portland, Ore., for this lackadaisical 1860s historical. The rough young city is growing fast, creating a wealth of opportunities for unscrupulous businessmen. When Horace Stratton, who made his fortune in China, dies on his way back to Portland with his wife, Emily, the daughter of American missionaries in China, Emily must manage her new life alone. After delving into Horace’s business affairs, Emily learns that his fortune came from the abhorrent opium trade. Her reform efforts trigger alarm among the city’s power brokers. As bodies start piling up and her own safety is threatened, Emily struggles to find her place in a society that expects women to stay home and let men take care of things. All the elements are in place for a rich, multilayered story, but weak character development and the heavy-handed portrayal of the era’s sexism make for a disappointing read. Loyal Newman fans may wish for a return to the 12th century. (Feb.)

California-based paralegal Odelia Grey is delightfully large and in charge in Jaffarian’s third entertaining romp (after 2003’s The Curse of the Holy Pail). While Odelia’s wheelchair-bound beau, Greg, stays home nursing a cold, she’s escorted to her 30th high school reunion by attractive widower Devin Frye, a Newport Beach homicide detective with a crush on Odelia. When the night shapes up to be a repeat of Odelia’s most humiliating high school experience, her tormentor, Donny Oliver, unexpectedly ends up dead. The list of suspects includes every person who ever knew Oliver, including his wife. But Odelia’s investigation has barely begun when her stalwart boss, Mike Steele, vanishes right before a major trial. Partnering with a former high school archenemy, Odelia discovers other high school acquaintances with connections to the upcoming trial. Odelia puts her life and love life on the line as she races to thwart a gang of surprisingly enterprising evildoers. The double whammy of an ending will leave fans eager for the next installment. (Feb.)

In Bishop’s bewitching latest Black Jewels adventure (after 2005’s Dreams Made Flesh), a tour of an old house becomes a hellish matter of life and death. Lady Surreal SaDiablo receives an invitation to preview the “silly, spooky” house that Queen Jaenelle Angelline has created to parody myths about the magically gifted Bloods, and she persuades her friend and fellow magic user Warlord Prince Rainier to join her. The only snag is that Jaenelle didn’t send the invitation. Crazed, jealous novelist Jarvis Jenkell has discovered his Blood heritage and developed his own haunted house with the goal of trapping other Bloods and using their travails to inspire his fiction. As Surreal, Rainer and several local children struggle to escape Jenkell’s deadly snare, Jaenelle’s husband, Daemon Sadi, and Sadi’s half-brother, Lucivar, must call upon all their Craft skills to free the trapped. With feverish pacing and terrifying twists, Bishop’s surefire spell craft will leave readers’ hearts pounding. (Mar.)

Stirling’s charming second pastiche of 1930s planetary romances (after 2006’s The Sky People) moves from Venus to Mars, where different Terran factions vie to pick up the pieces of the Tollamune emperor’s shattered realm. Archeologist Jeremy Wainman, sent by the U.S. Aerospace Force to explore the lost city of Rema-Dza, promptly falls in love with Martian mercenary Teyud za-Zhalt; no surprise that she turns out to be heir to the long-vanished Crimson Dynasty, or that they rush off to thwart an attempt to usurp the Ruby Throne. Soon they find themselves fighting a pack of feral airship engines and questing after the invisible crown of the first emperor. Stirling successfully creates a truly alien environment (“Rugs crawled to envelop the feet”), and his flair for the dramatic and obvious affection for the Mars of Burroughs, Brackett and Bradbury almost make up for his inclusion of pirates with eye patches, heavily armored guards riding “fat-tired, self-propelled unicycles” and other moments of near-parody. (Mar.)

An intriguing premise—a group of magicians working secretly within the Catholic Church to combat evil occult forces—gets tepid treatment in Clark’s sluggish dark fantasy debut. In 1874, a blueblood’s spectacularly gruesome death shocks Savannah, Ga. The local clergy soon recognize it as the handiwork of Satanists who have for the past century been ritually sacrificing women around the town to the demon Belial. The stage is set for a showdown between the demon worshippers and a clandestine order of priests and nuns who still respect the beliefs of their pagan forebears and strive to suppress eruptions of ancient evil into the world. While Clark focuses on the experiences of Brigid Rourke, a nun initiated into the magic circle, the book is dominated by the backstories of the clergy and talky discussions of comparative magic that grow increasingly repetitive. In the end, the Satanist cult and its champion demon are too easily vanquished for this tale to thrill with any sense of supernatural horror. (Feb.)

Rip-roaring action and intriguing science and tactics distinguish Nebula-winner Moon’s fifth and final Vatta’s War installment. Now combat-blooded and well on her way to the admiralty, young Kylara Vatta commands 40 far-future spacecraft against ferocious Gammis Turek, a criminal mastermind who has threatened Ky’s home world of Slotter Key, her relatives and the far-flung Vatta economic empire. Ky has the rank she always hoped she’d achieve and now must accept the fearful responsibilities it entails. Weighed down by thoughts of the deaths she has caused—both friend and foe—and the need to protect the people in her command, Ky finds herself making some dangerous decisions. She’s surrounded by a convincing supporting cast, from feisty fruitcake-baking Aunt Grace, who runs Slotter Key’s defenses, to dashing Rafe Dunbarger, acting CEO of InterStellar Communications, who has lost his heart to Ky despite his best efforts at stoicism. This epic volume is a fine and fitting conclusion to Moon’s grand space opera tour de force. (Feb.)

This bare-bones collection of 18 reprints, spanning 40 years of World Fantasy Award–winner Etchison’s career, delves deep into personal terrors. Starting off with “Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly,” a stark account of an unpleasant encounter in a Laundromat, Etchison uses quick strokes of prose, at times overly sparse, to paint eerie scenes of sharp violence and deep unease. There are moments when a controlled burst of staccato sentences serves the story perfectly, as in “The Walking Man,” where desultory bar chitchat takes an abrupt turn for the macabre. Etchison writes a loudmouthed salesman in “The Pitch” as easily as a lost little girl in “Call Home,” though at times his desire to focus only on the moment can loosen his grasp on the individual settings he wants to create. The title story caps off the collection with a brutally exquisite showing of what Etchison does best: creating a tone and wielding it like an edged weapon. (Feb.)

This taut, fast-paced romantic thriller from Cassidy (Are You Afraid? etc.) opens on doll maker Annalise Blakely desperately trying to keep her mother’s business afloat while her best friend, Danika, tries to hook her up with her sexy homicide cop neighbor, Tyler King. Annalise and Tyler do hit it off immediately, but their budding relationship is marred by a killer who strangles women and dresses them up to look like the dolls Annalise designs—making her a prime suspect. Annalise tries to keep her new relationship afloat while rekindling connections to estranged family. Meanwhile, the killer looms and threatens to make her his next doll. Annalise and Tyler have good chemistry, and their romance shines. The doll thing wears thin pretty fast, however, and the killer is a stereotypical nut. (Mar.)

Having lost her husband to cancer, good-natured Geraldine “Gerry” Porter, 58, endures being the chair of the Lincoln Point, Calif., dollhouse committee. Her prickly perfectionist friend, Linda Reed, makes tiny houses that are unassailably historically accurate, but Linda’s delinquent adopted teenage son, Jason, and two troublesome ex-husbands have her real house out of order. When Linda disappears from the annual miniatures fair only to turn up in the middle of the night stranded and disheveled off a highway access road—the same site where the dead body of an unknown woman is subsequently found—Gerry, with the help of her visiting 10-year-old tomboy granddaughter Maddie, begin to second-guess Linda’s odd behavior. They rely on the quirky expertise of Gerry’s roll-with-the-punches bachelor nephew, Skip, a local cop who’s thrilled to get his first homicide call. Further roiling Lincoln Point tempers are a recent robbery at Crane’s Jewelry Store pointing to Jason’s handiwork and the angry factions battling over an upcoming election hinging on proposed development. Gerry proves a resilient, enterprising detective and Maddie a delightful sidekick in this tightly honed mystery, where smalltown personalities get a gentle poke. (Feb.)

Gaffney’s latest gut-grabbing legal thriller turns up the heat on attorney Tom Carpenter by stacking the deck against him and his new client, Hispanic Muslim Juan Gomez, who is accused of being a mass-murdering terrorist. In a nice opening gambit from Gaffney (Diary of a Serial Killer), Carpenter gets the case thrust upon him when Gomez’s appointed public defender fails very publicly to defend Gomez during jury selection, and Carpenter becomes a very vocal witness in the gallery. It’s not far into the trial before Carpenter is threatened in the men’s room of the Phoenix, Ariz., courthouse by a hooded assailant, who claims to want to warn Carpenter of a conspiracy to target him and his family—while holding a gun to his head. When the masked stranger appears to play a role in bolstering the prosecution, Carpenter knows he must find out who he is, what he knows and who, if anyone, is behind his actions. The secondaries are stick figures at best, but Carpenter’s first-person narration carries the story, with plenty of thrills and chuckles along the way. (Feb.)

In late–19th-century New Mexico territory, Rafael McKenzie is searching for a bride to fulfill his dying father’s wish that he marry a woman of “virtue” in order to lay full claim to his inheritance, the Diamond Ranch. Isabella Montgomery has been brought up in a convent and is promised to the no-good Juan Garcia. Determined to preserve Isabella’s goodness and make her his own, Rafael spirits her away. The book’s first half is dominated by their journey to Diamond Ranch, and while the trip is filled with a multitude of innuendos, the pair remains quite formal with each other, and sparks fail to fly. Upon their arrival at the ranch, however, Isabella is introduced to Lucia, Rafael’s distant relative, and her jealousy of Isabella makes for delicious conflict. The romance between Isabella and Rafael itself never transcends its initial formality, but that might be just fine with many blusher fans. (Feb.)

One wouldn’t imagine that Siku, onetime artist for postmodern bloodfest Judge Dredd, would be the ideal choice for a manga-style graphic novel adaptation of the Bible, but not many pages have passed before it becomes clear that the Bible is, in fact, the perfect material for him. This audacious little book doesn’t make much effort to be authoritative and include every last Old Testament begatting or bloody massacre. Instead Siku presents jazzy and irreverent riffs on the good book, leaping brazenly over whole reams of material and scattering behind numerous “Want to Know More” tags directing readers to more explanatory chapter and verse. The action is breezy and flip, drawn in a sharp and Anglicized manga style. The dialogue is not just laced with humorously incongruous Britishisms (“My maths has never been very good!”) but with slangy passages worthy of the CW Network (Cain to Abel, “Whassup, bro?”). Although the book (already a hit in the U.K.) is being released via Doubleday’s Galilee imprint and is clearly targeted at youthful believers, it makes little attempt to sanitize the grottier aspects of the source material, as witnessed in the scene where a crowd of Sodom’s citizens bellow, “Bring out those men so that we can rape them!” (Jan.)

This collection of a failed, forgotten 1958 comic strip only exists today for two reasons: we’re living in the Golden Age of comic reprints, with all kinds of amazing material from the last seven decades coming back into print, and we still don’t know exactly why author Cole killed himself. He’s much better known for creating the wacky and wonderful Plastic Man, but as the lengthy introduction by comic historian R.C. Harvey details, this strip “was the goal toward which [he] had been striving all his professional life.... It is tempting to suppose that [it] must somehow contain the explanation for Cole’s taking his own life.” The comic itself, only four months’ worth, isn’t particularly memorable, although it’s a bit different from the usual family humor. The comedy comes from the contrast between father Chet’s narration and what’s really shown happening. He plays up his family, but the only part of his epic fancies he gets right is that his five-year-old son is a genius. The art is deceptively simple. Chet has the face of a Muppet, but with ’50s design charm. It’s rather refreshing in its jaded take on the American dream, almost postmodern in its approach, as the family stumbles through house-hunting, car-buying and child-raising. (Dec.)

Aimee’s a six-foot-tall cosplaying fangirl who visits Japan, land of her favorite hobbies. There, she visits historical Kyoto, shops, dresses as a geisha, visits a hot spring, goes to Tokyo and shops some more. The cute, cartoony sketches present a travelogue by an out-of-place but observant gaijin who is keen to absorb the intricacies of a new culture. Much of the story has a fairly straightforward “went here, saw this, went there, saw that” pace—few incidents are given any dramatic weight. When her luggage is lost, it’s a two-page incident, with the problem magically solved with no involvement on her part. Similarly, the developments from one of Aimee’s companions being mistaken for a yakuza and being revealed as a narcoleptic are swiftly passed by in a one-page sequence. However, the cute characters cannot help becoming sympathetic, and Aimee missing a chance to go to dinner at a factory that makes her favorite dolls has real disappointment. The book resembles an illustrated travel sketchbook more than a manga, but the otaku subject matter—and endless enthusiasm for the details of Japanese culture—is of built-in interest to readers of the latter. (Dec.)