Book of the Day Roundup: April 24-28, 2023
The Stars of Mount Quixx
The Brindlewatch Quintet
S. M. Beiko
ECW Press
Softcover $16.95 (316pp)
978-1-77041-695-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In S. M. Beiko’s fantasy novel The Stars of Mount Quixx, inner truths and love come to the fore in a remote, unusual countryside setting.
Constance and Ivory are on a summer trip in Mount Quixx, where a mysterious fog has settled and monsters lurk. The sisters have differing life philosophies: Constance is uptight and focused; Ivory is chaotic and honest. In town, they encounter colorful people, like an eccentric hotel host, Ms. Bougainvillea, and flashy Slanner. Ivory is determined to understand the past tragedies of the mountain, including the fire that occurred there fifty years ago. Meanwhile, Constance is annoyed by her sister’s tenacity; she and the residents of Mount Quixx are also fearful about what Ivory’s openness and curiosity will uncover.
When Ivory disappears into the crater at the base of the mountain, Constance sets out to find her. She faces a terrifying creature to do so; both sisters are saved by Derrek, who is giant and spidery. Derrek’s gentle demeanor catches Constance off-guard. Still, she is resistant to Ivory’s proposition that they help Derrek maintain the Mount Quixx observatory.
The mountain’s foreboding sentience is personified via imagery, as of the trees that jut “horizontally like broken teeth.” The alluring monsters that emerge from the fog evoke a sense of cosmic horror with their inhuman countenances and behaviors. Further, there are manifold revelations about Mount Quixx and its inhabitants; these are revealed at a gradual, charming pace. As others’ true intentions and histories come to the fore, Constance and Ivory reflect on their relationship, their quaint hometown, and their suffocating upbringing.
In the fantasy novel The Stars of Mount Quixx, two sisters find the courage to change each other and their community.
ALEENA ORTIZ (April 23, 2023)
We Are a Haunting
Tyriek White
Astra House
Softcover $26.00 (304pp)
978-1-66260-171-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Tyriek White’s elegiac novel We Are a Haunting, a son’s inherited grief binds him to his mother and grandmother as he discovers how to define “home” in New York.
On the brink of expulsion from school in the 2000s, Colly is disillusioned. He’s spent his life in public housing; he moves, only to find himself pulled toward his origins and sharing in the same supernatural gift his foremothers had. He absorbs the care of neighbors and friends in the wake of his father and sister’s emotional drifts. He also sorts through memories of his mother, Key, a doula who died of cancer. She, like her own mother, Audrey, communed with the dead. In the late 1980s, she experienced visions of a stranger who committed suicide. Later, she channeled a woman who died in a fire and helped to birth a boy whom she knew would die.
The multivoiced novel develops each wounded person in terms of their connections to the city. Their stories are linked by rhapsodic longing; they diverge in the degrees to which their ancestral traumas mount. Audrey recounts lore in the South, which bred her stoicism, all while facing her family’s simultaneous losses. Amid the weight of disrepair and hard choices, the cast finds ways to heal their rifts by bearing the stories of others, knowing that pain can be alleviated when it’s shared. There are vigorous details from their lives that evoke deep understanding of their problems. And as Colly is tender in recalling Key in the midst of his own experiences; his bereavement is indelible, and it overlays the book’s cityscapes, both rending and buoying him.
A Black family’s history becomes a salve for its wandering son in the potent novel We Are a Haunting.
KAREN RIGBY (April 24, 2023)
The Red Book of Farewells
Pirkko Saisio
Mia Spangenberg, translator
Two Lines Press
Hardcover $24.95 (312pp)
978-1-949641-46-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Pirkko Saisio’s autobiographical novel The Red Book of Farewells, a Finnish woman navigates being a lesbian in a time when homosexuality was outlawed and when the currents of communism pervaded every aspect of life.
Death opens the book and reappears—via a blood stain on a bedroom floor, a dead seal on an island, and Pirkko’s mother’s funeral. But there is birth as well: Pirkko has a baby girl, Sunday’s Child. Relationships blossom and die: Pirkko experiences first love, but leaves it in favor of Havva, whom she goes on to co-parent with.
Written in poetic stanzas, the narrative jumps around in time: as an adult, Pirkko explores a hostile island with friends; she gives birth to her daughter in 1981; she comes to terms with her attraction to women in the 1970s. Colors permeate her narrative: Pirkko makes love to her first partner in a green room, while multiple chapters titled “the red throne” detail the communist currents of the student theater that she joins.
Dreamlike imagery blurs the lines between memory and fantasy. Pirkko’s first lover is referenced as “the clown-eyed girl”; she brings Pirkko dark blue crocuses. And Havva wears heels that sound like machine guns when they connect with the ground. Pirkko writes farewells to the various places she’s lived and the cafés that she’s frequented; the most poignant farewells are contained in a box of letters that she rediscovers decades later, which were written after she gave birth, when she intended to commit suicide. There is no joy in finding these letters, though: “Pandora’s box is full of snakes.”
The Red Book of Farewells is a moving, uneasy, and artistic novel about growing up queer in a time of conflict.
JEANA JORGENSEN (April 24, 2023)
Searching for Happy Valley
A Modern Quest for Shangri-La
Jane Marshall
Rocky Mountain Books
Softcover $25.00 (280pp)
978-1-77160-573-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Jane Marshall’s remarkable memoir Searching for Happy Valley unveils just what it is that makes a place “happy,” showing why the answer is so important for humanity and the planet.
Marshall—feeling a gap within herself, longing to belong, and wanting the land to claim her (“the earth has the capacity to make us right again”)––traveled to Happy Valleys in Ait Bougemez, Morocco; Alberta, Canada; and Kyimolung, Nepal. In each place she unearthed beauty, ugliness, joy, and suffering. She touched her own wildness too.
Marshall found common characteristics among the Happy Valleys she encountered: they were in isolated, but not “protected,” locations; they were separated, usually by mountains, from the rest of the world and maintained their autonomy; they were inhabited by Indigenous populations in which women had real power; they were home to rare and endangered animals and plants; and they were all vulnerable. And in these places, “removed from the craziness and neuroticism of the materialistic world,” Marshall felt deep peace, even when her accommodations consisted of caves or the simple, rough homes of local people.
But life in such places is not easy, Marshall writes; there, “life is naked and raw,” and death is a constant companion. Such knowledge demands strength, courage, patience, wisdom, and community. In photographs, Marshall is depicted enjoying her time with old friends and being accepted with open arms by new ones, but also trekking along mountain cliffs with only inches between her and the abyss, where a momentary lapse in mindfulness could mean death.
Searching for Happy Valley covers a gripping personal quest with global ramifications, going into the deepest core of what it means to be a human being on this beautiful, tortured, sacred planet.
KRISTINE MORRIS (April 24, 2023)
Mastering the Art of French Murder
An American in Paris Mystery
Colleen Cambridge
Kensington Books
Hardcover $26.00 (273pp)
978-1-4967-3959-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A young American and her friend Julia Child are implicated in a murder in Colleen Cambridge’s vibrant cozy mystery novel Mastering the Art of French Murder.
It’s 1949, and Tabitha misses her former life as a riveter in a Detroit bomber plant. Bored and unsettled, she escapes to Paris, which is still recovering from its German occupation. She secures work as a language tutor while also serving as a live-in cook for her grandfather and his companion, both of whom served in the French Resistance. Her culinary skills are lacking, though, so she gets lessons from her neighbor, Julia Child, a student at Le Cordon Bleu.
When an acquaintance is murdered in Julia’s apartment building, the police inspector in charge of the case focuses his sights on Julia, whose knife was the murder weapon, and then on Tabitha, one of the last people to see the woman alive. But Tabitha, an avid mystery reader and the daughter of a detective, suspects that one of the dead woman’s coworkers may be the real killer. As the tally of clues mounts, Tabitha learns that the death may involve espionage.
Tabitha is a witty and intrepid amateur sleuth. Her occasional hat tips to classic mysteries are delightful. Beyond Julia Child herself, she’s also supported by some standout characters, including the charming elderly Frenchmen in her care. And the City of Light, whose ancient streets Tabitha traverses on her bike as she hunts for the truth, is vivified here, with even its cuisine described in mouthwatering detail.
The first entry in a series, Mastering the Art of French Murder is a delectable historical mystery novel set in romantic postwar Paris.
PAULA MARTINAC (April 24, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
