Memoirist McLeod (Mamaskatch) makes his fiction debut with a sublime foray into the complexities of Indigenous life in northern Canada. James, a gay Cree man from northern Alberta, has assimilated in Vancouver and works as a schoolteacher. He lives with a loving partner, with whom he has an open relationship, and has found cultured friends. Still, he still feels out of place after his traditional Cree childhood, even though he lived then in poverty and was beaten and sexually abused by his brother-in-law. When he’s offered the job of principal at an underfunded school on a Dakelh reservation in northern British Columbia, he takes up the challenge to reacclimate yet again (thinking of the salmon who run through rivers into the Pacific and back, he reasons, “If they could migrate and transform themselves like that, with such purpose, why couldn’t he?”). On the reservation, he blends Indigenous skills and language with the standard curriculum. James loves his work, and lives in fear that his anonymous sexual encounters in public places will result in him getting arrested, beaten, or fired. The novel is full of unsparing accounts of the generational trauma inflicted on the Dakelh by Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools, which created a legacy of victims becoming abusers. Despite the adversity faced by James and the Dakelh, however, McLeod writes with great love for the natural world and the strength of its Indigenous people. This is transcendent. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Schmeidler’s entertaining and farcical debut collection features darkly humorous stories about women’s bodies and sexuality. In the aptly named “Sex Was Everywhere,” a sixth grader senses sexual energy in nearly everything she comes across: the scent of deodorant, the taste of mints, even the “heat that gathered under the ceiling of the gym” during rope-climbing exercises. Arriving alongside her sexual awareness is a newfound fear, as she imagines a serial killer lurking wherever she goes. The narrator of “Corpse Pose,” a recently deceased 25-year-old single woman, thinks her mother must be relieved that she is dead, now that she is free from the agony of blind dates, the cost of therapy, and her endless obsession with her body. In “The Future Was Vagina Forward,” a woman lists her vagina for rent on Airbnb and receives myriad questions ranging from her cleaning policies to whether children and pets are allowed (they’re not). Her first guest leaves a rave review, remarking on her vagina’s “soft, warm soundproof curtains.” After consulting a tax lawyer, she begins writing off household expenses. The narrator playfully acknowledges that her vagina is a “metaphor but also a real thing,” and the author skillfully skirts the line here and elsewhere between fabulism and realism. Schmeidler’s offbeat tales are wonderfully bizarre. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

A 20-something Jewish man awaits the end of the world in the reflective if repetitive latest from Joseph (Our Mother, the Mountain). Like everyone else in the world, the unnamed narrator has recently received an alert on his phone about an imminent apocalyptic fire. He remembers how his mother, a professor of Jewish studies, used to tell him about the legend of the Tzadikim Nistarim, which says that each generation in human history includes a group of 36 people tasked with justifying all of existence to God. Stirred to become one of the righteous, the narrator begins keeping a journal to account for his and his family’s lives. He writes about his parents’ differences—his construction worker father, embodying various blue-collar clichés, tells his mother, “We’re gonna miss that brain of yours”—and about his Yiddish-speaking grandfather’s journey to Ellis Island. He also listens repeatedly to morose Townes Van Zandt songs and pines for his girlfriend, who left him to be with her parents after learning of the fire. The narrator’s soul-searching is occasionally moving, especially as he begins to wonder whether there’s actually a God, but Joseph’s tendency to repeat scenes and thoughts in the narrator’s third-person journal that were already covered in first-person makes much of the novel feel redundant. Despite a dramatic premise, this fails to take flight. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

The pensive debut novel from poet Wang (Saturn Peach) brims with delicate imagery and flights of imagination. Narrator Yuè Yuè is studying at a university in Canada after immigrating with her family from China. Her relationship with her handsome, easygoing classmate Johnny, who repeatedly ghosts her, magnifies her anxiety about fitting in. The present-day narrative is splintered with flashbacks to significant events in Yuè Yuè’s childhood involving her younger sister, Emily, who was born in Canada, and their ill mother (details of their mother’s condition and her fate come out later). As children, their mother favors Emily, which stirs deep resentment in Yuè Yuè. Sometimes, she dissociates, and “Little Yuè Yuè” speaks for her. The bulk of this timeline is purposely fuzzy and fragmented, and the novel returns to the present and Yuè Yuè’s fears that Johnny is “turning me into a ghost” without offering much resolution. Still, the language is both poetic (“Grass shines silver in the field, silver apple, bice green, tall and rustling against the salvaged lumber strewn around the farmhouses”) and playful (the sound of footfalls is indicated with the onomatopoetic Chinese word dēng; later, seven-plus pages are filled with repetitions of homonyms such as dèng and děng). Wang convincingly portrays the bifurcation and complexity of her protagonist’s mind. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Josefowicz (Ready, Set, Go) blends family drama with a crime story in her breezy if unbalanced latest. Zinnia Zompa, the novel’s intuitive 13-year-old narrator, grows up in a dysfunctional family of four, and often takes out her angst on her younger sister (“Being mean to Zenobia makes me feel amazing. It fills me with icy joy”). The story opens in 1985 with the murder of Mr. Marfeo, the accountant for her father Skeets’s costume jewelry factory, whose body is found in a Lincoln Mercury identical to one the Zompas had recently reported stolen. The men convicted of the murder are twin brothers who also worked for Skeets. Though the murder sets the stage for the plot, it feels tangential to the real story of Zinnia’s parents’ fraying marriage. When Pauline, her artsy and unfulfilled mom, airs a suspicion she shares with Zinnia about Skeets’s involvement in Marfeo’s killing, he defensively replies, “My fake beads aren’t good enough for you.” Unfortunately, the family’s fears about Skeets’s foul deeds never come to any kind of resolution. Still, Josefowicz provides plenty of rich period detail through the voice of her spunky heroine, who’s dejected, for instance, when she fails to pull off a Dorothy Hamill wedge hairdo. Fiends for 1980s nostalgia ought to seek this out. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Adams’s delightful sophomore novel (after The Reading List) revolves around a garden shared by two London houses and the relationships formed by the tenants who tend to it over several decades. In 2018, 30-something Winston lives alone at No. 79 Eastbourne Road, heartbroken after his lover and roommate, Lewis, moved out. Winston is also troubled by the steady noise of renovation projects next door at No. 77, and develops a grudge against his haughty neighbor Bernice, whom he dubs “The Queen of Sheba.” The garden long ago went to seed, but over the course of their yearlong feud, they begin receiving mysterious letters and photos of previous residents posing in the plot during its prime. Eventually, they forge a plan to resurrect the garden together. A parallel narrative beginning in 1972 follows No. 79 tenants Maya and Prem, who move in as newlyweds, and their brusque neighbor, Alma, who softens after Maya gives birth to her daughter, Hiral, and the women bond over keeping up the garden. (Maya and Alma are pictured together in the photos received by Winston and Bernice.) The simple story is carried along by seamless time shifts and insights into the rewards of unexpected friendship. Gardeners will be especially pleased. Agent: Hayley Steed, Madeleine Milburn Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) underperforms in this oddball fantastical epic about a Venetian glassmaker who ages incredibly slowly from the late 15th century, when she is a child, through the present day, when she’s in her late 60s. Chevalier introduces the conceit in a prologue: “The City of Water runs by its own clock.” Orsola Rosso’s glassmaker family’s profits are threatened in 1486 when her father, Lorenzo, dies in an accident. Orsola finds an unexpected ally in a woman glassmaker from another family who arranges for her to learn how to make glass beads so she can help support the family as her oldest brother Marco struggles to keep the business afloat. After Marco goes missing following a failed deal, a hunky stranger joins the Rosso enterprise as an apprentice, triggering a predictable romantic subplot between him and Orsola that’s unenhanced by clunky prose (“He wore brown breeches tight as a gondolier’s, and she could not take her eyes off the movement of his generous, muscled backside”). Chevalier then jumps to 1574, as Venice confronts the ravages of the plague. As the novel proceeds, historical events become even more compressed—Chevalier summarizes the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century as marking “the fastest, most extreme change ever.” The superficial perspective gives the impression that the time jumps are window dressing for the clichéd story of a woman’s determination to push back against societal constraints. Readers will be left scratching their heads. Agent: Jonny Geller. Curtis Brown U.K. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Two lonely strangers meet while hiking England’s Coast to Coast Walk in the witty latest from Nicholls (Sweet Sorrow). Marnie Walsh, 38, has been wiling away her days as a freelance copy editor, working out of her one-bedroom London flat. Over the years, her friends have started families and left town, but she hasn’t had a relationship since her divorce a decade earlier. Michael Bradshaw, a 42-year-old geography teacher from York, likes being alone, though he finds it hard spending time at home ever since his wife Natasha left him nine months earlier. On weekends, he sets out on long, strenuous hikes. Marnie’s and Michael’s stories converge when a mutual friend invites the two to join a three-day walk on the fells with stays at inns along the way. The two are left alone together by the second day, after the others quit due to heavy rain. While hiking, they develop an easy rapport. Marnie shares why her marriage failed, and Michael divulges that he and his wife were unable to have kids. Marnie is excited to have the time alone with Michael, though unbeknownst to her, he’s planning to meet his ex-wife at a point farther along the trail. Nicholls’s story unfolds rather predictably, but the terrain, the elements his protagonists face, and their engaging banter save the day. Fans of the author’s previous books will get just what they came for. Agent: Grainne Fox, UTA. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

A fatal drunk driving accident and a prison book club set the stage for Wood’s heartwarming if simplistic story of second chances (after The One-in-a-Million Boy). An intoxicated Violet Powell, 22, gets behind the wheel (the reasons why come out later) and kills Lorraine Daigle, a 61-year-old kindergarten teacher. Convicted of vehicular manslaughter and given a nearly two-year sentence, Violet is deeply remorseful and grateful for the prison book club led by Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher and widow. While visiting a bookstore, Harriet runs into an older man who turns out to be Lorraine’s widower, Frank, a retired machinist. In chapters from Frank’s point of view, the reader learns that his new job as handyman for the bookstore has given him a sense of purpose since Lorraine’s death the previous year. Then Violet is released early from prison, and she crosses paths with Harriet and Frank at the shop. The novel improves in the second half with an immersive section on Violet’s job assisting a scientist on researching cognition in parrots, and there are some poignant revelations about how she came to drive drunk that night and about the Daigles’ marriage. Unfortunately, the minor-key plot is fairly predictable. This one’s a bit too formulaic to stay with readers for long. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lombardo (The Most Fun We Ever Had) returns with the pitch-perfect tale of a complicated friendship and the fallout from an extramarital affair. Julia Ames, 57, is a married mother of two living in a Chicago suburb. While grocery shopping for her husband’s 60th birthday dinner, she encounters an older woman named Helen Russo, one of the “small handful of people whom she has truly hoped to never encounter again.” Julia first met Helen 20 years earlier in the botanic garden where she used to take her first child, Ben, when he was three. Back then, in her “pre-Helen energy,” Julia was a “hollow-eyed, socially inept young mom” who cried easily. Helen, a wealthy retired attorney and mother of five, took Julia and Ben under her wing, welcoming them into her charmingly messy “Capital-H Home,” where people were cheerfully discerning about wine and casually referenced their distinguished forebears. Julia, who came from modest means and was estranged from her mother, was enchanted. Lombardo effortlessly flits from Julia’s present-day party preparations and other family occasions—Ben’s wedding, her daughter’s departure for college—to flashbacks of the women’s burgeoning friendship, slowly building to the reason for its dissolution two years after it began: Julia’s affair with Helen’s 29-year-old son, Nathaniel, who had the “biceps of a Renaissance sculpture.” Lombardo is compulsively readable and consistently funny, and it’s impossible to look away as Julia continues to self-sabotage. This domestic drama hits all the right notes. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (June)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink