Book of the Day Roundup: April 10-14, 2023
Global
Eoin Colfer
Andrew Donkin
Giovanni Rigano, illustrator
Sourcebooks Young Readers
Softcover $14.99 (144pp)
978-1-72826-219-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Climate change impacts the lives of two young people in the remarkable graphic novel Global.
Twelve-year-old Sami lives with his grandfather, Solomon, in a village near the Bay of Bengal. Each day they are forced to travel farther to catch fish and to seek higher ground for housing, away from rising water levels. With no relief in sight, Sami embarks on a dangerous quest to change their luck by finding a family knife, lost somewhere on the seafloor.
Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Yuki lives with her mother and her dog Lockjaw in northern Canada. Yuki is determined to get a photograph of a “grolar bear,” the offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly, in order to prevent local authorities from killing the creatures. She heads into the wilderness with Lockjaw and finds herself in her own struggle for survival.
The book moves between the teenagers’ story lines in alternating chapters, tying the two together in a novel way at its end. Sami and Yuki are brave and compassionate heroes who face surprising hazards with ingenuity.
The writing and art include convincing, immersive details to flesh out the characters’ lives and the dangers they face, from the hazardous tactics of ocean fishing to the hunting habits of bears. Cliffhangers appear at the ends of the chapters, resulting in constant forward momentum.
Full of information, emotion, excitement, and entertainment, the graphic novel Global puts a human face to the problem of climate change.
PETER DABBENE (April 5, 2023)
Patterns of Orbit
Stories
Chloe N. Clark
Baobab Press
Softcover $16.95 (166pp)
978-1-936097-47-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Patterns of Orbit is Chloe N. Clark’s inimitable collection of short stories and flash fiction, in which mysterious events abound.
Herein, lakeside waves churn and tear up docks; a food scientist creates fruit that tastes of another planet; a witch sucks darkness out of bodies; and an epidemic in a space station disintegrates dead bodies to dust. In an exquisite story about Trauma Redemption Therapy, one’s traumatic memory can be removed by implanting it in someone else.
Several stories take place in space or are about astronauts. In the opening story, an AI absorbs the dreams of 2,000 humans sent into space. Elsewhere, a Mars colony leaves no trace of their intrusion, not even burying their dead. And in one tale, an alien presence, Shadows, abducts an astrophysicist; his twin sister uses a blood-tracer to locate him in the forest.
Faint, dreamlike, pleasurable connections exist between the tales, some of which mention characters from others. A man and a woman meet at an art exhibit talking about shadows captured in astronauts’ photographs—perhaps the same shadows from earlier stories. And despite the to-ing and fro-ing from space, there is a sense of psyches in stasis, lives lived in orbits. A paranoid man thinks that someone is shadowing him, but perhaps it’s only his father’s ghost or his own traumatic childhood. An astronaut wonders about the point of circumnavigation as she rotates through the stars. Space, indefinable and yet ubiquitous, feels distant when it is “a collection of darkness and shadows.” And the poetry of the lines will steal up on audiences with its beauty.
Patterns of Orbit gathers well-crafted stories that move through the darkness of space, delivering interstellar insights about searching for lost loved ones. They are about what’s uncanny in the universe and about humanity’s unknowability, isolation, and existence.
ELAINE CHIEW (February 27, 2023)
Anangokaa
Cameron Alam
Blackwater Press
Softcover $19.99 (312pp)
978-1-73577-478-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Cameron Alam’s lyrical historical novel Anangokaa, orphaned Scottish siblings struggle to survive in a harsh Canadian climate.
In 1804, the MacCallum family joins other Scottish people in emigrating to the planned Baldoon settlement in northern Canada. When they arrive, they find their promised land inundated by spring floods. Disease soon follows, along with hunger, harsh weather, and internecine disputes. Fourteen-year-old Flora is forever altered by her brush with mortal illness and the death of her parents; her eighteen-year-old brother, Hugh, becomes the head of their family—and the settlement’s link to the nearby Ojibwe communities.
Flora narrates, questioning her changing body and emotions. She also observes other settlers’ behaviors and disputes her culture’s integrity when its violence is excused. She mourns for those whom she lost in silence. When Flora is assaulted by an acknowledged sexual predator in Baldoon, her silence deepens, setting her apart from the other women. Later, her friendship with an Ojibwe man who calls her “Anangokaa,” meaning “many stars” in tribute to her disease-scarred face, sets her further beyond the settlement’s pale.
The prose is often musical, making use of imagery as of a “night dusty with stars” to convey the magnificence of the Canadian wilderness. The community is fleshed out via conversations that cover personal conflicts: Hugh’s curiosity about the Ojibwe people clashes with other settlers’ bigotry against them, and the resultant arguments serve as a microcosm of the competing aims of surviving, which means accepting advice from the Ojibwe, and of colonizing, which means exterminating or supplanting the Ojibwe.
The historical novel Anangokaa embeds the experiences of Upper Canada’s early Scottish immigrants in the story of an enigmatic girl who comes of age in a foreign wilderness.
MICHELE SHARPE (February 27, 2023)
When Little Owl Met Little Rabbit
Przemysław Wechterowicz
Emilia Dziubak, illustrator
Floris Books
Hardcover $17.95 (40pp)
978-1-78250-774-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Two baby creatures on quite different sleep schedules hear stories of each other long before they’re able to meet. When they finally encounter each other beneath a moonlit sky, their connection is instant. Their nocturnal and diurnal rhythms may hold them physically apart, but gifts here and there—and a wish upon a star—keep their friendship bright. Glowing illustrations with lively natural details and sprays of stars ensure continual engagement in this cozy, dreamy tale.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 27, 2023)
The Butter House
Sarah Gerard
Conium Press
Softcover $12.00 (64pp)
978-1-942387-19-0
Buy: Amazon
In Sarah Gerard’s spare and elegant novella The Butter House, a woman seeks solace and contemplates her future while she settles into a new home with her boyfriend and two cats.
The woman and her boyfriend leave Brooklyn for an “idyllic” town in the semitropics where he has a one-year assignment to observe and document white ibis for the state’s wildlife agency. The couple considers having a family someday; for now, the woman studies, rests, and wonders how she can use her graduate degree in psychology. While her boyfriend spends his days observing tropical birds, she frets over their pet cats, as well as the stray cats in the neighborhood, whose habits she tracks while feeding them plates of kibble, rotisserie chicken, and salmon skin. She also cultivates a garden in the untended, “in need of love” backyard.
There are occasional touches upon the couple’s relationship: she flits around their rented bungalow like a “nesting bird” and admires her boyfriend’s “tendency to follow hope, foreign to her.” But the book’s focus is on the woman’s close observations of the cats, which she sometimes worries are mere “props” on the set of her life, and her efforts to bring the garden to life. Its prose is poetic, haunting, and pensive. As the girlfriend digs into the resistant earth and coaxes life from what is dying, she finds healing and a tranquil purpose, “a hidden grammar beneath consciousness, older than any language.” Quiet and wounded, she discovers a sense of “peace with her cosmic insignificance” and realizes that she is less “human, more being.”
Meditative, wise, and worth revisiting, The Butter House is a novella about finding meaning in one’s connections with animals and in the cultivation of a garden.
KRISTEN RABE (April 5, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
