Book of the Day Roundup: August 14-18, 2023
The Prumont Method
Trevor J. Houser
Unsolicited Press
Softcover $17.00 (240pp)
978-1-956692-49-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Trevor J. Houser’s inventive literary novel The Prumont Method crisscrosses a country scarred by constant mass shootings, bringing black humor to bear on the present-day dystopia of rampant gun violence.
Former health care marketer and math hobbyist Roger Prumont comes up with a formula for predicting the time and place of the next mass shooting. After his career and marriage implode, he travels the country with his daughter to see if his method works and could save lives. In the process, he questions whether mass murders have become so commonplace that his prognostications are pure luck.
The novel is an excoriating critique of contemporary society. It hums thanks to Roger’s animated voice; down and out, this depressed divorcee bounces from motel to motel, obsessing over mathematical theoreticians and mass killers. His narration mixes antic hyperbole with memorable turns of phrase: he laments copy that he slapped together (“your weight-loss program will see you now”) as it turns up on billboards, prompting him to “want to be lowered into a bear cage slathered in elk blood.” He thinks about lighting himself aflame in a conference room, imagining his melting flesh dripping onto the AV equipment while he scrawls “our prognosis: convenience matters” on the whiteboard.
But the prose is also stylish, with short sentences and unorthodox word choices. And it’s interspersed with recipes for the obscure cocktails that Roger swills as he goes to dark places, despairing over whether it’s all random and pointless, or wondering whether math can impose order over the mounting death tolls. Its final confrontation is well foreshadowed; still, it attains heartwrenching poignancy, even in its inevitability.
A novel filled with gallows humor that’s representative of great creativity, The Prumont Method examines the phenomenon of gun massacres with pathos and profundity.
JOSEPH S. PETE (June 27, 2023)
Oh God, the Sun Goes
David Connor
Melville House
Softcover $17.99 (240pp)
978-1-68589-062-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A bruised hole in the sky prompts an extended, desperate search for answers in David Connor’s surrealistic novel Oh God, the Sun Goes.
“Something happened to metaphysical space,” says a stranger in a bar, “and now the sun is missing.” It’s been absent, the narrator says, for a month. And time is starting to feel fluid; the world around him is less defined than it was before, when the sun’s presence was a certainty, like air, like breathing. Like love.
Certain that the world cannot continue on without the sun, the narrator sets out into the desert, seeking the expertise of an astrophysicist who is certain to have knowledge of its whereabouts. But in Sun City, Arizona, the astrophysicist sleeps with an egg balanced on his forehead. And in the narrator’s pocket is a letter that he cannot read without extreme concentration. And in a town of twelve people, the bees have gone missing too. Elsewhere, a museum memorializes a perhaps visionary developer who wanted to freeze time for retirees in sun cities everywhere—who even dreamed of building a city on the sun itself.
Following the novel’s midpoint acknowledgement of the separation between outward and inward realities, the novel’s dystopian conceit somewhat clears. What seemed a disaster for the planet is revealed to have been a disaster for perhaps just one of its inhabitants, who is so undone by having lost his center that he can’t imagine that the whole world isn’t equally touched. Still, though the answers the narrator seeks are metaphysical ones, the novel’s sense of desperation remains acute. Like a written word that’s fast asleep: the sun still waits for someone to wake it.
The world is upended by an incalculable loss in the dazzling fabulistic novel Oh God, the Sun Goes.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (June 27, 2023)
The Free People’s Village
Sim Kern
Levine Querido
Hardcover $26.99 (400pp)
978-1-64614-266-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A punk rock teacher is embroiled in a major protest movement in Sim Kern’s involving speculative novel The Free People’s Village.
Maddie is an English teacher. She has a crush on Red, who is trans and nonbinary. Red lives in the Lab, a communal living space and music venue owned by Fish, Maddie’s boyfriend. This semi-peaceful coexistence shatters because of an eviction notice to the residents of the Lab, whose home is to be demolished to expand Houston’s Eighth Ward. Thus, Maddie becomes an activist. But when the authorities use violence to shut down a rally, what started as a local initiative becomes national news.
The interpersonal drama between Maddie, Red, and Fish is compelling, but the action arrives when Maddie joins local protests and the Free People’s Village is established. The diverse cast expands to include other residents of the Lab and neighborhood and protesters from near and far.
Maddie struggles with losing her religion, accepting her queerness, and being a white teacher in a majority Black neighborhood. While she’s accustomed to reckoning with her whiteness in diverse spaces, Maddie also has to work through her fears of the concept, and the reality, of putting her life and livelihood on the line for a cause. Her radicalization is gradual, uncomfortable, and necessary. Her realizations about government and community care move her, and the book, from the perspective of a nervous outsider to that of a committed partner.
In addition to discussions of racial and class inequities, environmental justice, and substance abuse, the book also delves into society’s views on sexual assault. The book uses these themes to illustrate complex social intersections; it maintains a delicate balance by not trying to separate the issues.
The Free People’s Village is an enthralling novel that highlights social justice issues.
DONTANá MCPHERSON-JOSEPH (June 27, 2023)
The Madonna Secret
A Novel
Sophie Strand
Bear & Company
Softcover $25.00 (608pp)
978-1-59143-467-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Sensual, earthy, and mystical, Sophie Strand’s novel The Madonna Secret views Jesus via the woman who loved him.
Refreshing in its perspective and stunning in its breaks with church-curated, patriarchal characterizations of Jesus and his mission, the story is told from the viewpoint of Mary Magdalene, whom, herein, Jesus loves and weds. She is fleshed out as an educated woman who was born to wealth, and who became a powerful mystic and healer. The book reframes the couple’s lives, work, and love from a feminist perspective: here, the voices of oppressed women come through loud and clear, and the human body is honored and enjoyed.
The narrative also shreds patriarchal definitions of who Jesus was and the intent of his ministry, as well as the soul-crushing constrictions that a society dominated by men forced upon women. The image of Jesus as a white, bearded, ascetic man with eyes turned to heaven is shattered as the book brings forth a Jesus who is young and virile—a Jewish man with his own drives and desires, who exhibits a boisterous sense of humor. Close to nature, as likely to be found laughing and drinking with friends as teaching about God’s kingdom, he is characterized as a man who loved children and the oppressed and who raged against injustice.
Strand’s synesthesic, multisensory descriptions capture a world in which rich incense cannot compare with the scent of a lover’s skin, and all senses are equal in their ability to awaken ecstasy. And Jewish life under the cruelties of Roman domination is also portrayed in depth. Still, it is emotion that rules in The Madonna Secret, a novel that retells the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene from a feminist perspective.
KRISTINE MORRIS (June 27, 2023)
I Wish I Could Tell You
Jean-François Sénéchal
Catherine Ostiguy, translator, author
Chiaki Okada, illustrator
Nick Frost, translator
Milky Way Picture Books
Hardcover $19.99 (42pp)
978-1-990252-24-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Soft, blended illustrations aid the gentle tone of this children’s book about loss and healing. A young fox recounts the experience of their grandmother’s passing and its aftermath as they write her a letter, organizing and releasing their feelings. Through the little fox, the story explores the confusion, disbelief, sorrow, and acceptance of losing a loved one in a compassionate, accessible way, ending on a reminder to cherish the good memories.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
