Book of the Day Roundup: April 14-18, 2025
The Harmattan Winds
Sylvain Trudel
Donald Winkler, translator
Archipelago Books
Softcover $19.00 (172pp)
978-1-962770-22-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Sylvian Trudel’s novel The Harmattan Winds is an unusual coming-of-age tale imbued with undercurrents of magic, mystery, and tragedy.
Hugues is an adopted orphan of unknown ethnic origins who falls under the spell of Hakébé, an African immigrant who’s steeped in his homeland’s rituals and beliefs. As the youngsters contend with the racism of their drab Canadian town, they’re drawn into each other’s fantasies of ancestral ghosts and mystical islands. They embark on a series of misadventures that place them and others at risk.
Even as Hugues and Hakébé’s antics cross the line from dangerous to destructive, they command empathy. Hugues narrates; his point of view is funny and hyperbolic. He invests mundane events with world-shattering importance. But as misguided as the boys may be, they’re also touching in their optimism and their desire for belonging in an environment where they experience cultural clashes and alienation.
Absorbed with the act and art of storytelling, the book spins striking conceits out of everyday occurrences: a dinner of vegetables and mashed potatoes is reimagined as a castle wall under assault; a strict family is compared to cowardly scorpions. As Hugues and Hakébé venture into the hinterlands beyond their town, the story underscores the poignancy and recklessness of their endeavor: the boys make do with toy wagons instead of trailers and wear hockey pads for armor. Hugues and Hakébé’s grand schemes seem doomed to go awry as the book builds to a violent, fabulistic conclusion that recasts much of what happened earlier in a melancholy light.
In the powerful novel The Harmattan Winds, young men struggle against their circumstances, seeking connections with and acceptance from others.
HO LIN (February 17, 2025)
A Line You Have Traced
Roisin Dunnett
The Feminist Press
Softcover $17.95 (320pp)
978-1-55861-387-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Across more than a century, three women connected by a narrative persist beyond the brokenness of their worlds in A Line You Have Traced, Roisin Dunnett’s stunning speculative novel.
At the end of World War I, brilliant Bea assists her husband in building their London business—until a rapacious writer invades her married life. Generations later, Kay, a gig-and-gallery worker, frequents queer clubs with her glorious friends, pores over perhaps the last remaining copy of a novel about her great-grandfather, and falls for a science fiction-writing activist, O, who is piqued by her stories of time travelers. And in postapocalyptic London, Ess, a Network acolyte, connects to these past stories by chance.
The three timelines are joined, in part, by themes of upheaval. All living through troubled times, the women resist: Bea, fascism and relegation to “proper” women’s roles; Kay, the persecution of immigrants—and fears of her own irrelevance; and Ess the death keens of a world wherein the rich hoard resources and becoming a parent feels reckless. Bea scribbles revelations in a red notebook; reading them years later, Kay’s sense of reality grows thin. And Ess, archiver of the notebook and the novel, is pulled into a plot to shape past lives by scientists who believe that history is permeable, and that a person can travel through time if they have intimate access a “tiny piece of [its] thinness.”
Its prose urgent, elegant, and alarming, A Line You Have Traced is a startling speculative novel that muses through the implications of action and inaction in the face of injustice. Its science is inextricable from its concepts of how repeated narratives bind people together, reaching across eons to shape futures and obscure elements of the past. Indeed, its women find strength in the stories they share, carrying the novel through to its magnificent, desperate ending.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 17, 2025)
Child of Earth and Starry Heaven
L. Annette Binder
Wandering Aengus Press
Softcover $20.00 (184pp)
979-821851676-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
L. Annette Binder’s sensitive, grounded, and hopeful memoir Child of Earth and Starry Heaven is about the family impact of Alzheimer’s disease.
Binder taps into a range of literary and scientific sources to reflect on her mother Helena’s labyrinthine decline due to Alzheimer’s. From Binder’s reluctance to attend high-school German classes when she was twelve years old to her mother’s comments about what constitutes “hooker” shoes, Binder braids childhood memories and moments throughout Helena’s life with the writing of poets, biologists, philosophers, and novelists on dementia.
The prose is infused with love, exhibiting the grace Binder found in others and for herself. Helena ended up on a memory-care floor where residents had boxes of mementos by their doors, reminding visitors of the lives they led. One was an Antarctic explorer; someone else kept a rabbit figurine in her pocket. Binder describes residents cooing over a baby doll, caring for stuffed animals, and cursing when a beloved Yankees blanket was threatened. These observations underpin her belief that each elder’s intrinsic personhood remained, even if it wasn’t obvious from the outside.
As dementia stole Helena’s memories and personality, Binder was still able to speak with her mother in German and took heart in sharing that act of love. The careful sources throughout are another kind of sharing, emphasizing the universality and timelessness of humanity’s struggle with neurodegenerative diseases. Despite the book’s inevitable ending, there is no sense of tragedy to be found—only kinship.
A thoughtful memoir, Child of Earth and Starry Heaven examines dementia’s fallout with compassion and the clarity of hindsight.
AERIN TOSKAS (February 17, 2025)
Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life
Pamela Reitman
Sibylline Press
Softcover $22.00 (392pp)
978-1-960573-91-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Pamela Reitman’s bittersweet historical novel Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life, the German Jewish artist struggles to express herself and survive in the shadow of the Third Reich.
In 1939 in Berlin, Kristallnacht shatters remaining hopes that Jews can safely live in Germany. Sent away by her parents, Charlotte moves in with her grandparents, who have “trying natures.” They board at a villa in Nice, France, with other Jewish refugees.
Charlotte finds artistic and emotional solace with the villa’s owner and fellow boarders; they encourage Charlotte to show her work and to continue painting. But a sudden, shocking tragedy lays bare a truth that her predatory grandfather is all too eager to share: There’s an extensive line of mental illness and suicides in Charlotte’s maternal line that he says she cannot escape. Despite this, Charlotte resolves to approach “the lives of her family’s suicides in paint. She looked on the act of painting as the making of memory for them.” The result is her masterpiece, Life? Or Theater?, a massive series of watercolors that would earn her posthumous renown.
Reitman’s re-creation of Salomon’s life is composed of two opposing themes: art as a tool to interpret trauma, and the intractable tentacles of family secrets and shame that threaten to choke artistic expression. With flashbacks to formative moments in Charlotte’s younger life—including her unrequited love for an artistic mentor—Reitman achieves a fuller portrait of her subject than the 1939–1943 timeline might otherwise allow. Blending fact with fiction, the novel is a touching synthesis that celebrates Charlotte’s fearless belief that only in art can one defy “the erasure of identity.”
Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life is a powerful historical novel, at turns winsome and wrenching, about a gifted artist caught in the maelstrom of madness and war.
PEGGY KURKOWSKI (February 17, 2025)
The Curious Inheritance of Blakely House
Joanna Davidson Politano
Revell
Softcover $18.99 (416pp)
978-0-8007-4298-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Mechanical mystique abounds in Joanna Davidson Politano’s The Curious Inheritance of Blakely House, a Christian romance novel set against the bleak, beautiful backdrop of early twentieth-century England.
Abandoned by her mother at a young age, Sydney finds refuge among machines and books more than people. From within the safe confines of her caring Aunt Lottie’s curiosity shop, she develops a talent for repairing broken machinery. When a mysterious woman darkens the door of the shop one day with an unusual clock, Sydney is whisked into intrigue over an inheritance—her great-uncle Emmett’s estate, Blakely House.
Isolated on an island near Northumberland, the house holds numerous technological wonders, promising financial stability to Sydney and Aunt Lottie. Sydney, however, is only one of several potential heirs, and Emmett’s most recent will is missing. Conniving, wizard-styled Dane and business-minded Tom have self-interested motivations for wanting the house; they are willing to do whatever it takes to secure the inheritance. Sydney navigates unfamiliar waters to discover all the secrets of the house and of Emmett himself. With the aid of a housekeeper, Angel, and a butler, André, she unlocks both the house and her heart, finding a new sense of purpose.
Throughout, themes of brokenness and repair resonate. Although she possesses multiple strengths, Sydney views herself as fragmented and unwanted. She struggles with feelings of doubt in herself and in the Christian faith of her childhood. Her close perspective sharpens this spiritual tension. Her experiences in the house soon dissolve the barriers she uses to keep the outside world and God at bay. Embracing her own uniqueness, she unearths confidence rooted in faith rediscovered, and love blooms.
In the redemptive historical novel The Curious Inheritance of Blakely House, perceived flaws are turned into strengths when illuminated by the light of grace.
MEAGAN LOGSDON (February 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
