Pop This! podcaster Warner (Rise Up and Sing!) presents an animated ode to the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. Using her personal connection with the movie as a springboard to explore its themes and appeal, Warner recounts how watching Dirty Dancing on VHS the year of its release, when she was nine, spurred her sexual awakening and “helped shape my burgeoning feminism.” It’s the film’s feminist sensibility that Warner celebrates the most, lauding the movie’s refusal “to moralize sex as bad” in its depiction of protagonist Baby Houseman’s lust for her dance partner Johnny Castle. According to Warner, the subplot revolving around Baby’s friend Penny’s need for an abortion is similarly forward-thinking, portraying the procedure as “necessary, life-saving healthcare.” Elsewhere, Warner details how Eleanor Bergstein drew on her memories of learning to mambo on vacation in the Catskills as a teenager while writing the screenplay, and offers a song-by-song breakdown of the soundtrack (she calls “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes “flawless” and finds Tom Johnston’s “Where Are You Tonight?” “unexceptional and inoffensive”). Though Warner faults Dirty Dancing for lacking Black and Hispanic characters while heavily featuring Black and Latin music and dance, her tone is mostly laudatory, electrified by the enthusiasm and admiration of a true fan. It’s a fun commentary on an enduring pop culture touchstone. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bailey pulls lightly from Jane Austen’s Persuasion in her impressive debut. Soon after professional tennis player Olivia Taylor leaves her cheating husband, her older sister, Charlotte, guilt trips her into coming to the Hamptons to help clear out her family’s just-sold mansion. Estranged from her father (whom she’s only called William since her mother’s death) for a variety of reasons, Olivia is prepared for a strained few days with her family. She’s unprepared, however, for the bombshell revelation that the mansion’s buyer is Fred Webb, her first love and the man who has broken her heart time and time again. To make matters worse, it seems that Fred has finally found love elsewhere. Bailey keeps the pages turning by toggling between 2003 and 2023, recounting the bumpy road of Olivia’s life—and how her relationship with Fred has played into it. The cutthroat world of pro tennis and the glitz of the Hamptons create a fascinating backdrop for these multilayered characters. Angsty but ultimately heartwarming, this should win Bailey plenty of fans. Agent: Stephanie Kip Rostan, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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

Jane’s Patisserie blogger Dunn, in her tasty debut, offers 100 crowd-pleasing desserts served up with a hefty portion of hand-holding. Easy-to-follow recipes—some new, others culled from Dunn’s blog—range from the straightforward, like chocolate Viennese whirls, to the more complex, including rhubarb crumble cheesecake, which is constructed from a cookie base, two separate fillings, and a topping. Indeed, this collection is an ode to fillings, frostings, and decorations. No-bake salted caramel cheesecake sports an extravagant caramel, pretzel, and popcorn topping, while less elaborate treats include a gin & tonic loaf cake enlivened with a gin-tinged drizzle. Ideas for customizing recipes appear throughout, including a suggestion to amp up millionaire’s shortbread with orange, lemon, or vanilla flavorings. There’s also a chapter devoted to traybakes, an English term for baking bars, like sticky toffee brownies, in a pan, then slicing them. Enlightening ingredient lists and tips for successful preparations (be patient with “scary” techniques like frying doughnuts, the author counsels) provide further guidance for the home cook, though Britishisms, like caster sugar and sponge, may trip up some. With this accessible compendium, Dunn proves a supportive guide to bakers of any skill level. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Family drama, unspoken resentments, and something far more sinister simmer—but never reach a boiling point—in this lackluster ghost story from Thorne (Lute). Black sheep Anna Pace travels to Italy for a family vacation with her parents and adult siblings prepared to deflect and endure their judgments. As an unmarried, unambitious artist in her 30s, there’s no shortage of criticisms for the other Paces to throw her way. Anna weathers her sister’s need for control and her mother’s nagging comments, but as signs of a haunting appear around the villa they’re renting, the vacation devolves into one disaster after another. To make matters worse, when the Pace family looks into the history of the villa, they open some doors better left closed. Thorne paints in broad gothic strokes, incorporating all the major elements of the genre, from the spooky architecture to the blood and romance, but leaving things disappointingly underdeveloped. Anna’s snarky voice initially balances the darker elements but becomes grating as the story goes on. Eventually, her characterization descends into cliché: she’s smart enough to make everyone around her jealous, and though she’s supposedly unattractive, many of the male (and female) side characters lust after her. Seasoned genre fans will be disappointed. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jane Grinberg Literary. (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