Book of the Day Roundup: August 28-September 1, 2023
Hex Americana
Bree Wolf
Iron Circus Comics
Softcover $15.00 (356pp)
978-1-945820-76-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A young man joins a ghost in a high-stakes car race in the graphic novel Hex Americana.
Ken lives in a world inhabited by gnomes, ghosts, a cyclops, and a two-headed race announcer. He identifies as Yokai American, derived from the mythical Japanese entities. After substituting for another driver in a smaller competition, Ken finds himself driving in the Grand Prix, the biggest race in town. Dante, the spirit of a racer who died in the Grand Prix twenty years before, serves as Ken’s co-pilot and advisor.
Dante believes that his unfinished business with the race is preventing him from “passing on.” But Ken and Dante develop feelings for each other too. Combined with revelations about other people’s actions twenty years before, this creates a complicated situation.
Blending natural and supernatural elements, the book includes a talking wolf and “echoes” that pop up to reveal actions and conversations from long ago; fish-people, a moth-man, and figures from folklore all interact. Meanwhile, down-to-earth Ken manages his relationship with his mother and deals with the wolf’s homophobic sentiments. He also has a second mouth on the back of his head, making him as unusual as anyone else in the story.
The expressive cartoon art devotes proper attention to the featured cars and the kinetic action of the racing sequences, though its moments of comedy and tenderness also stand out.
Hex Americana is an entertaining graphic novel in which a teenager discovers secrets, romance, and a sense of his own racing abilities.
PETER DABBENE (August 25, 2023)
Ark
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Paul Dry Books
Softcover $14.95 (328pp)
978-1-58988-179-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s powerful novel Ark serves as a reminder that “home is where your animals are.”
Arden’s world is on the verge of falling apart. Her family is downsizing to a tiny home they call “the ark”; her best friend, Farah, is moving away to a new state; and her family dog is moving in with her aunt. As the world shifts to “virustime,” Arden discovers that she can help make the world better by taking in homeless dogs, the first being her next-door neighbors’ neglected dog. With the help of her younger brother, she navigates homeschooling and does her best to be strong for her parents, in spite of the brewing pandemic.
Before Farah leaves, she and Arden promise to write letters and keep journals to exchange when they see each other. Arden’s journals make up the book’s content, with its short, titled entries. But as Arden watches her parents struggle with the uncertainty surrounding the ark, she struggles to write Farah back as promised. She thinks that her problems do not measure up to her parents’ or Farah’s; a letter doesn’t seem sufficient.
But as she navigates the “fifth grade contract” established by her father, Arden also grows up and matures, finding her place in her family and determining her purpose. Even her chore of washing dishes teaches her—in that case, that small tasks make a big difference. Indeed, each member of the family has an important role to play. And when a family member’s dog needs help, Arden and Farah work together to save the day, repairing their friendship and inspiring their parents.
In the inspiring novel Ark, a girl helps her parents through COVID-19 while housing homeless animals.
ERIN NESBIT (August 25, 2023)
He Should Have Told the Bees
Amanda Cox
Revell
Softcover $16.99 (336pp)
978-0-8007-4273-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A beekeeper’s reclusive, grieving daughter and a small business owner in search of healing meet over the impending fate of an apiary in Amanda Cox’s delicate Christian novel He Should Have Told the Bees, about reconciling past pains with future hopes.
Beck depended on the safe, circumscribed world that her father, George, allowed her to inhabit after her mother’s abandonment of them. After his death, she fills his responsibilities on their farm despite her panic attacks. Meanwhile, Callie is eager to expand her business making artisan candles and natural products in Chattanooga, but feels limited because of her alcoholic mother’s rehabilitation costs.
When George’s will makes Callie a co-trustee even though she didn’t know him, this fuels intrigue. And as one woman risks losing her home, the other weighs whether or not to take a windfall by selling her share. Both women’s vulnerable tendencies to shield truths about their lives fold into learning to accept help, including from potential love interests and a plucky girl who is summering nearby. Both women also bear the harm of personal rifts that led to insecurities and fears about their unmet needs.
Interspersed with Christian themes of trust, the sufficiency of grace, and the poignancy of discovering freedom from shame surrounding mental health issues and tumultuous childhoods, Beck and Callie’s stories twine with the reassuring hum of the hives and bee knowledge that is subtle in its hints at the structured order that’s contained within mysteries. Despite the women’s initial bewilderment, the truth about them binds them in unanticipated ways, guiding each toward the warm refuge that she seeks.
A thoughtful novel in which women seek release from their damaging family patterns, He Should Have Told the Bees is about welcoming change.
KAREN RIGBY (August 25, 2023)
Clear Creek
Toward a Natural Philosophy
Erik Reece
West Virginia University Press
Softcover $21.99 (280pp)
978-1-952271-90-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Erik Reece’s memoir Clear Creek covers his bucolic second life in the countryside, laying forth a vision of living in and alongside nature.
Reece removed himself to the woods in the style of Henry David Thoreau in Walden—while also rejecting Thoreau’s purist principles, “smug moral superiority,” and efforts to convert others to his lifestyle. He did not believe that city people led lives of quiet desperation; rather, his goal was authenticity, and he hoped to lead a more deliberate life. Thus, he immersed himself in the “wild grapevine, the wild ginger, the wild rushing water” around a home on Clear Creek. There, he sat with his concerns about environmental degradation against a backdrop of pristine woodland and old barns.
An ode to pastoral lifestyles, the book is filled with descriptions of rustic living on a daily basis alongside black-and-white photographs that illuminate its setting in time with Reece’s rich descriptions of singing birds, other wildlife, and plants coming alive after a rain. And in addition to recording birds chirping and leaves crunching underfoot, Reece covers his chores, hikes through the woods, and sightings of neighbors. The book proceeds at the same languid pace, moving through meditations on nature and one’s environmental footprint. Reece’s reflections on inner landscapes compared to outer landscapes and on the active life versus the contemplative life are compelling, as are his profound reflections on humanity’s place in the natural world.
Featuring palpable descriptions of rustic living, the philosophical treatise Clear Creek envisions a sustainable lifestyle that embraces the natural world.
JOSEPH S. PETE (August 25, 2023)
Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief
Jessica Hendry Nelson
University of Georgia Press
Softcover $22.95 (248pp)
978-0-8203-6547-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Jessica Hendry Nelson’s probing memoir-in-essays Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief grapples with divorce, childlessness, sexual orientation, and addiction.
With subjects including Nelson’s origin story (wherein her mother’s point-of-view is prioritized and biblical echoes are incorporated), the breakdown of her marriage, her brother’s cyclical heroin use, her mother’s lung cancer diagnosis, and her niece’s birth, the book ascribes equal weight to bereavement and anticipatory grief. Nelson’s father died following a drunken fall down stairs when she was seventeen; the addictive tendency he passed to his son was a constant source of anxiety. Nelson’s brother’s frequent overdoses had their family living under what her mother dubbed “the specter of death.”
But ancestral legacies (a key topic here) have positive connotations in the book as well. Nelson posits that, in a mystical rather than literal way, she inherited her passion from her father. She also explores her attraction to women in a sensitive manner. Indeed, the book’s central search is for communion—the experience of “onebody.” Sex and death share an uneasy link in “[La Petite Mort],” while the opposite meanings of “cleave” are significant in several essays. The question of whether to become a parent simmers throughout. “Could I make art instead of children?” Nelson asks herself.
The pieces range through time and space. Some are microessays; others include letters or Nelson’s brother’s writings. With titles sourced from Diane Ackerman and Margaret Atwood, the frame of reference is wide. Metaphorical phrases zing: “a pith of rage,” “The world splays open like a pocket mirror,” and “the eclipse of his absence.”
The frank, earnest autobiographical essays of Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief seek to integrate euphoric and sorrowful experiences.
REBECCA FOSTER (August 25, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
