In Booth’s whimsical if half-baked debut, a beloved children’s author enlists a fan to help her finish a book. Libby Weeks, 40, is writing the highly anticipated conclusion to her popular fantasy series, published under the pseudonym F.T. Goldhero, when she’s diagnosed with early dementia. Flailing, Libby turns to Peanut Bixton, a devoted and prolific fan she meets on the internet, who turns out to be an 11-year-old girl. Like the protagonist of Libby’s series, Peanut is adopted and searching for her real parents. Peanut points out that there are plenty of other eerie similarities between her town in Colorado and the world in Libby’s books, such as a mysterious stranger who gives her a ride home one day, and who resembles Libby’s villain. As Libby’s dementia worsens and she misses deadlines, her publisher turns up the pressure, while Peanut learns about her origins. Booth leaves a few plot threads unresolved, such as a campaign to uncover Goldhero’s identity, and hints of fantastical ties between Peanut’s life and Libby’s work fail to bear fruit. Still, Booth ably evokes the logic of a child’s imagination in her portrayal of Peanut. Here’s hoping the author’s next effort will realize her potential. Agent: Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the mesmerizing, outré debut novel from poet Leung (Imagine Us, The Swarm), New Yorkers adapt to deadly acid rain and ghosts long for their old lives. It’s set in an alternate present, where the rain destroys buildings in New York City and causes fatal burns. As the city goes into lockdown, Mira, the Korean American narrator, leaves her girlfriend, Mal, in Queens to move back into her mom’s Manhattan apartment. There, Mira launches a ham radio show called How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, offering relationship advice and hoping to reach Mal through encoded messages, in which she pleads for forgiveness. Intercut with Mira’s narrative are threads featuring other residents in her apartment building, including those living and dead, human and insect. Among them are Mira’s mom’s friend Lucinda, who accidentally conjures a ghost but fails to help others contact the spirits of their dearly departed, and the ghost of a cockroach, who ruminates on his late, noncommittal lover. Meanwhile, Mira starts sleeping with a headless man named Sad, who pines for his dead fiancée. Amid the strangeness of these stories, a picture of genuine longing and unsettling pain comes through powerfully. This is a wildly original, disorienting rumination on love amid chaos. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

Retired Navy admiral Stravridis (co-author of 2034 and 2054 with Elliot Ackerman) delivers a satisfying novel about a Naval officer during WWII. Raised in the Florida Keys, Scott Bradley James is taught sailing lore by his fisherman father, whose boat, Bella, is docked right alongside Ernest Hemingway’s Pilar. Scott goes on to attend the Naval Academy, where he makes his mark as a boxer. After graduating from the academy in 1941, Ensign Bradley is assigned to the battleship USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor. There, he begins a relationship with a beautiful half-Hawaiian college student, Kai Wallace. With his ship incapacitated during the Japanese attack on December 7th, Scott is next assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and the destroyer USS Fletcher, playing a vital role in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the Battle of Midway, and the disaster at Tassafaronga. He gains experience as a surface warfare officer, even as his obsession with promotion and medals might cost him Kai’s love. The author immerses the reader in the world of the Navy and cannily mixes fictional characters with real ones such as Admiral “Bull” Halsey and Commander Wade McClusky. This well-told tale is worthy of The Caine Mutiny and In Harm’s Way. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

Brock (The River Witch) delivers an evocative Southern yarn of long-held secrets. In summer 1932, Georgia’s Cumberland Island comes to life in 1932 with an annual party at the grand mansion owned by the philanthropist Carnegie family. Joanna Burton, a socialite from Asheville, N.C., is in town to attend the party with her fiancé, wealthy islander Ellis Piedmont, and her beauty and selfish airs fuel the jealousy and anger of local artist Cleo Woodbine, who’s in love with Ellis. By the end of the night, two boys have accidentally drowned, including Ellis. In chapters set in 1959 from Cleo’s point of view, shortly after Joanna has died from a stroke, Brock gradually reveals how the women’s rivalry contributed to the fatal accident. A parallel narrative follows Joanna’s daughter, Frances Flood, who returns to the island to learn more about her late mother’s life and retrieve her heirloom pearls. Brock’s insightful writing brings her characters to life, highlighting Cleo’s regret and Frances’s curiosity, and the pitch-perfect plotting will move readers quickly through the tale. It’s an adroit work of Southern fiction. Agent: Danielle Egan Miller, Browne & Miller Literary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

The characters in this nuanced if slight collection from Wood (The Godless Boys) are loosely connected by themes of motherhood and the tensions brought about by having children. The narrator of “A/A/A/A,” separated from her husband, agrees to accompany her friend Marissa to Paris for the day, without telling her husband what she’s up to. Her secrecy leads her to ruminate about the limits of a parent’s obligations, prompting Marissa to respond, “We all want to leave. No one wants to stay. But they’re the grand love affair in the end. The kids.” In “Lesley, in Therapy,” the title character cuts her maternity leave short while dealing with postpartum depression. Her nanny, an older Jamaican woman, tells Lesley she’s “better off at work than wanting to dash the baby’s brains out on the kitchen counter.” In “Flatten the Curve,” set during the Covid-19 pandemic, Deborah navigates lockdown with her family and develops a crush on her neighbor, the father of her daughter’s best friend. Hints of consequential drama suffuse most of the stories, and the characters are deliciously complex, but too often the entries end abruptly. Ultimately, this one’s a bit underwhelming. Agent: Sarah Fuentes, United Talent Agency. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lonely men drift toward disaster in this spirited and drug-fueled collection from Maloney (Red-Headed Pilgrim) set in and around Portland, Ore. The spare opener, “Ghost,” evokes Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son; the lovesick 40-year-old narrator meets a saintly bartender, hitches a ride on the back of a stranger’s bike to a Halloween party, snorts coke, “watche[s] a thousand white butterflies migrate across a memory from my childhood,” then weeps for his life. The narrator of the title story recalls his glory days selling cocaine in high school (“I was the Pablo Escobar of Beaverton”), and his long-running fascination with classmate Gina. When Gina, at 17, calls the narrator looking for weed, he pushes coke on her and then holds her all night. Years later, in the present, he hears Gina almost died from a heroin overdose and remembers how he once “rooted for her in the dark like a child after a night of bad dreams.” In “End Times, Charleston Avenue,” set during the Covid-19 lockdown, a couple hosts a rowdy “backyard social distance hangout.” The next morning, during the hungover narrator’s remote work shift, he hopes there isn’t vomit in his beard. Maloney is at his best with the gut-punch endings, which convey the characters’ desire for transcendence from their dingy lives. Though often sobering, these stories are great fun. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Erdrich (The Night Watchman) follows the folks of the Red River Valley of North Dakota—the original home to the Ojibwe, the Dakota, and the Metis—in a captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. Crystal hauls sugar beets on the Geist family farm and counts her pennies while her partner, Martin, a failed actor who moonlights as a traveling arts teacher, spends money on impractical delights like salsa dancing. They share a daughter, Kismet, 18, who’s reviled at her high school for being a goth until Geist scion Gary falls in love with her. Kismet initially rejects Gary, but she’s softened by his persistence and agrees to marry him, a prospect Crystal opposes. Then there’s Kismet’s other suitor, Hugo, a bookish romantic who makes her laugh. At 16, Hugo plans to earn money in the fracking oil fields and save enough to steal Kismet away. The plot thickens when Martin disappears along with the local Catholic church’s renovation fund and when reports surface of a bank robber named the Cutie Pie Bandit, who earns their name for being disguised as characters like Rasputin. Threaded throughout the book are references to a tragic accident that ultimately resolves in a satisfying conclusion. Along the way, Erdrich digs deep into the effects of crop farming, pesticides, and the destruction of topsoil on the characters’ livelihoods. Erdrich excels at the slow simmer, and once again she delivers a deliciously seductive masterwork. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the pulsing latest from Baltasar (Boulder), a Barcelona lesbian attempts to forge a new life in the Catalan countryside. The unnamed narrator, 24, is disillusioned by her sociology research job at a university (“Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime”), and hopes to sate her feeling of emptiness by getting pregnant (“It wasn’t the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body”). After a one-night stand fails to leave her pregnant, the narrator quits her job and cycles through a series of service gigs, then flees the city before becoming too accustomed to poor-paying and soulless work. She settles in an isolated farmhouse in the hills, where she’s invigorated by the harsh winter and caring for the farm’s animals, and she embarks on a friendship with a nearby shepherd. She stays for a year, having sex with the shepherd for money, until a sudden discovery disrupts her newfound peace. Baltasar’s unsettling and poignant descriptions offer a slim yet profound meditation on finding what it takes for one to feel alive. This is striking. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

Larison (Whiskey When We’re Dry) spins a provocative if tedious story of survival decades after an ecological collapse. After Maren, 12, and Kushim, nine, discover their parents are missing, they set off from their remote fishing village with their older sister, Leerit, to find the extended family who abandoned them. A parallel narrative follows their mother, Lilah, forced into slavery by her abductors, who killed their father in the struggle. Lilah toils for wool producer Cyrus to meet the new quota set by the emperor, who’s promised to transport their city’s residents to a land of plenty aboard an ark.. Cyrus, however, would rather spend time studying the scrolls with fragments of ancient stories (readers will recognize faint biblical echoes and canonical poetry). After Kushim is attacked and grievously injured by a bear, the siblings are split up, with imperial forces rushing Kushim to the city for care, and Leerit leaving Maren with sheep herders to join a band of guerrillas against the emperor. The pacing tends to drag under the weight of so many plot threads, but Larison fascinates with his core themes, showing how stories are used for societal control. Those willing to go the distance will find a thoughtful twist on climate fiction. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/09/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dey Street editor Montague debuts with a delightful if uneven story of a 70-year-old woman exploring her queer identity. Magda Eklund, a psychiatrist in New York City, refuses to come to terms with the death of her best friend, Sara, reacting to the news by throwing herself into her work. After Sara’s widower off-loads Sara’s possessions and her ashes on Magda, she stumbles upon Sara’s plans for a road trip to celebrate Magda’s 70th birthday. Magda decides to take the trip on her own, with Sara’s ashes in tow, hoping to make peace with the unrequited love she felt for Sara. Her journey eventually brings her to a Texas women’s retreat, where she meets Judy, a lesbian in her 60s going through a messy divorce. It takes a while for the novel to find its footing, but Magda is a companionable heroine and her travels are portrayed evocatively, as she manages to hunt down Sara’s childhood home in New Orleans and finds closure at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in New Mexico, which Sara had always wanted to visit. This earnest road novel has plenty of appeal. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink