Smugglers who help Central Americans traverse Mexico and cross into the U.S. are not the “slick haired... kingpins” portrayed in popular media but are usually themselves poor migrants who got waylaid and caught up in the trade, according to this outstanding, luminously written account. Drawing on seven years spent embedded with people smugglers in Mexico, anthropologist De León (The Land of Open Graves) depicts a hardscrabble world of almost mythically impossible proportions: terrorized by corrupt Mexican cops, fearful of being returned back to the brutal conditions of their home countries, and constantly at risk of violence from gangs, the smugglers serve as guides to desperate souls who’d “rather die on the train tracks in Mexico than be murdered on a street corner” back home. De León’s elegant prose brings pulsing life to this benighted underworld, observing it with a sharp eye and a noirish sensibility (“It is impossible to avoid him. It is unhealthy to run from him,” he quips about a gang leaderwho perches as “the guardian at the gate... the troll under the bridge” at a waypoint along the notorious La Bestia train route). His fluid storytelling builds to a gut-wrenching finish as De León reflects on the heartless reception his ethnographic work with smugglers receives from academic audiences, contrasting it with his own emotional fallout after the death of Roberto, a carefree, lively young smuggler he’d befriended. It’s a knockout. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this piercing study, Dunbar (Black Regions of the Imagination), an English professor at Vassar College, explores how the Jim Crow–era fiction of Black women authors envisioned what it would look like to feel fulfilled “outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.” Examining Ann Petry’s sympathetic representation of sex work in her 1946 novel The Street, Dunbar argues that brothel madame Mrs. Hedges’s refusal to conform with “socially condoned forms of labor” serves to refute the cultural norms of whiteness. According to Dunbar, Dorothy West’s 1948 novel The Living Is Easy imagines the female-led household as an empowering alternative to heterosexual marriage by following protagonist Cleo Judson’s quest to convince her sisters to move in with her without their husbands. Elsewhere, Dunbar suggests that Alice Childress’s 1956 short story collection Like One of the Family “illustrates how American power structures saw the presumption of dignity among Black domestic workers as a threat,” and explores how Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1953 novel Maud Martha pushes back against the racist conflation of Black people and animals. The sharp analysis illuminates how mid-century Black writers challenged white conceptions of the good life, and Dunbar concludes with a moving tribute to Breonna Taylor that doubles as a reminder that “Black women cannot wait for utopic conditions to find their satisfaction.” Edifying and incisive, this impresses. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

This uneven Christmas-killer whodunit from Eisner winner Tynion (the Something Is Killing the Children series) and Hixson (the Children of the Woods series) centers on Michael, a gay comic writer burnt out on superheroes,who finally decides to tackle a self-publishing project featuring his true passion: serial killers. He meets with Randall Olsen—a gay man imprisoned more than 50 years ago for killings committed by a masked Santa known as the Deviant Killer. Randall hopes he’ll be portrayed as wrongly imprisoned, but Michael doesn’t pick up on his hints. Instead, they talk about queer life in the 1970s versus today, and Michael finds himself seen and understood by Randall in a way that unsettles those around him—especially the detective with the scars to prove that the Deviant Killer was real. The detective’s suspicions grow as a copycat killer begins to wreak havoc. Tynion again proves his chops at scripting authentic queer characters, but while themes of homophobia, trauma, and LGBTQ intergenerational community adorn the plot, the conceit still lands as less than original. Still, Hixson’s a fantastic artist, and his page design and frantic lines set this apart from other Christmas-killer fare. Readers will hope the next volume better lives up to the series’ potential. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Baldacci seamlessly blends a twisty whodunit and a propulsive action plot in his enjoyable third thriller featuring Homeland Security fixer Travis Devine (after The Edge). Devine’s work with the U.S. Office of Special Projects has put him in the crosshairs of an assassin who manages, undetected, to slip a threatening note into his coat pocket, signed simply “The Girl On the Train.” Worried about his safety, Devine’s handlers give him a new assignment: tracking down affluent businessman Danny Glass, who’s been charged with racketeering, human trafficking, and drug smuggling. Glass’s sister and brother-in-law recently overdosed on fentanyl, leaving behind their 12-year-old daughter, Betsy. Glass has applied to become the girl’s legal guardian, a step possibly meant to keep her from sharing incriminating information about him. Devine sets out to befriend Betsy in hopes she’ll disclose what she knows, only to learn that she believes her parents, whom she insists were not addicts, may have been murdered. Baldacci nimbly balances the detective story with Devine’s anxieties about his potential assassination, and the precocious, intrepid Betsy is a hugely memorable supporting character. This keeps the series going strong. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Kim makes her English-language debut with the tantalizing story of a Korean hired bride and the company that employs her. Noh Inji, 29, works as a wife at New Marriage, a secret division of a matchmaking service that allows clients to live as if they’re married while providing the option to terminate the relationship without having to go through a real divorce. After the end of her fourth marriage contract, to music producer Han Jeong-won, she’s set up on a date outside of her company’s client pool with a man named Om Tae-seong. When Inji rejects Tae-seong, he keeps pursuing her—even after she enters into a rematch marriage with Jeong-won. Tae-seong’s disruptions ring alarm bells at New Marriage, and they dispatch a team of agents to scare him off. While happy to be rid of her stalker, Inji can’t shake the guilt she feels about Tae-seong’s fate, and she asks Jeong-won to help her find him. The investigation takes her deep into New Marriage’s secrets, and as she learns unsettling details about its operations, she reflects on her lingering grief over a childhood friend’s suicide. Kim’s layered and well-constructed novel is packed with intrigue and surprising twists. Readers will be on the edge of their seats until the final page. Agents: Jackie Yang, Eric Yang Agency; Emily Randle, Randle Editorial. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Nature conservationist Huband’s beautifully written debut interweaves reflections on her physical and mental health struggles with musings on the natural world. In 2011, Huband moved to Shetland, Scotland, for her husband’s work as a pilot. There, she became pregnant with the couple’s second child and experienced immobilizing pain, leading to a diagnosis of inflammatory arthritis. Worn down by the pain and feeling trapped, Huband began taking walks to clear her head. During one, she noticed the corpses of two seabirds, leading her to volunteer for the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds to monitor such deaths. That work required her to take long walks on the beach, and Huband’s encounters with the local flora and fauna sent her down research rabbit holes about subjects including shark eggs, witchcraft, and plastics pollution. Eventually, she put together a wish list of items she hoped to come across on her walks, including the sea bean of the title, “a type of drift seed that sometimes washes ashore in a cold northern climate where they cannot naturally grow.” Huband’s knack for metaphor extends beyond the sea bean—a colony of terns becomes “a swirling cloud of white that takes on a maleficent form.” Such rapturous language, combined with Huband’s infectious curiosity about the world around her, make this sing. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

“Legions of citizen culture warriors,” from “parents’ rights”–obsessed “PTA moms” to “abortion snitches” and “DIY poll watchers,” are a modern-day threat to American democracy that has deep roots in the past, according to this eye-opening account. Law scholars Michaels (Constitutional Coup) and Noll attest that American history is full of vigilante behavior, much of it legally sanctioned, and draw links between Jim Crow-era vigilantism and modern-day white nationalist militias patrolling the southern border. They explain how the Supreme Court enshrined vigilantism’s semi-legality in a series of late-19th-century decisions that effectively “privatized” anti-Black violence, allowing individual white people to deprive Black Americans of their rights in ways that governments no longer could. Elsewhere the authors track the Republican Party’s recent slide toward vigilantism, contrasting the “beatification” of Kyle Rittenhouse following his 2020 slaying of two anti-police protesters with the party’s more mixed 1984 reception of “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz, who became a right-wing cause célèbre for shooting four Black teens but was denounced by Ronald Reagan. Michaels and Noll conclude by recommending that blue states go on the legal offensive, crafting laws to fight back against red state overreach. Throughout, they make chillingly clear the stakes: “With each passing campaign of harassment... the chances increase that vigilantes... will be on the inside.” It’s a stark assessment of America’s darker political currents. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

For this earnest and nuanced collection, Das (The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar) brings together 10 writers to imagine artists, both human and non-, grappling with futuristic challenges, including generative AI and other “nascent technocapitalist singularities.” In “The Limner Wrings His Hands,” Vajra Chandrasekera conjures a large language model–like “monster” trained on Persian and other classics. Samit Basu’s “The Art Crowd” takes a satirical view of technology, authoritarian politics, and the Indian art world; the story features a publicity agent (“reality controller”) and her new virtual client, Cosmos Apsara, whose shtick is falling asleep with animals while fans watch. Three-time Nebula award winner Aliette de Bodard, in “Autumn’s Red Bird,” uses spaceships in love as a platform to explore grief and renewal through art. In “Encore,” by Wole Talabi, twin artificial intelligences (“Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020”) create art for the inhabitants of the planet Sunjata who “recently networked their consciousness together using a bioengineered version of a spore network.” The volume also includes photographs of artist Diana Scherer’s mesmerizing, living textiles and a lively interview with Neil Clarke, the publisher and editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, who discusses how the sci-fi journal roots out AI-generated submissions. Though some of the stories have an Edgar Allan Poe weariness about them, the collection as a whole offers plenty of hope. Fans of near-future sci-fi should check it out. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Foreign Policy editor Abadi debuts with an insightful if dispiriting study of the contrasting ways Germany and the U.S. have addressed climate change. Many more Germans than Americans believe in man-made global warming, and yet, despite the Green party being propelled into the national government in 2020, Germany has so far failed to implement a sweeping anti–climate change agenda, Abadi notes. In contrast, the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act will significantly reduce carbon emissions, despite it being “riddled” with concessions to big oil and to the country’s robust demographic of climate change skeptics. The lesson Abadi draws from these differing outcomes is that incrementalism trumps radicalism, a position he bolsters with an intriguing overview of how the past decade of climate radicalism in Germany (with activists gluing themselves to street intersections and throwing food on works of art) has alienated the German public and led to government backtracking. But Abadi’s emphasis on the necessity of a tempered approach and compromise transitions unsatisfyingly into an argument that the movement should concede before it even gets to the bargaining table—that focusing the movement’s demands on adapting to global warming, rather than stopping it, is a winning move. “The truth,” he writes, “is that the best that democratic political systems can accomplish may never amount to what is required of them.” It’s a hard pill to swallow. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian Moran (Governing Bodies) offers a mixed-bag account of postpartum depression’s mid-20th-century emergence as a distinct disease and the decades of advocacy for PPD awareness that followed. Moran explains that the “baby blues” first became a pop culture talking-point in the 1940s and ’50s, but that the era’s heavy reliance on psychoanalysis meant blame was placed on women’s “neuroses.” Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the ’70s, feminists pushed to reframe postpartum distress as being caused by social ills like maternal isolation, uneven division of domestic labor, and medical sexism. The ’80s were the “decade of depression” and the disease was once again thought of as a mental illness, this time one caused by chemical imbalance; by the ’90s, therapy was routinely recommended for postpartum women. The aughts saw a wave of high-profile celebrities—such as Princess Diana—discussing their experiences with PPD, and the 2010s launched a PPD blogging boom. Moran delves deeply into the condition’s medical history—she gives a thorough blow-by-blow of PPD’s long-running difficulties getting its own DSM entry—while staying somewhat vague on the science (she mentions various biological explanations for PPD but doesn’t go into detail) and sticking to the obvious in her cultural analysis (“In the postwar era, it was not unusual for Americans with the means to seek pleasure and happiness in consumer goods”). While informative, this never quite finds its footing. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink