Book of the Day Roundup: August 5-9, 2024
Transgenesis
Ava Nathaniel Winter
Milkweed Editions
Softcover $16.00 (96pp)
978-1-63955-004-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The good poet’s body slowly leaves one sex for another and she wonders what else, if anything, will change—the Jewishness that influences so much of her world; the Holocaust memories of twelve murdered ancestors; love and sex; fear and courage. The recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, Ava Nathaniel Winter earned an MFA from Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.This collection was selected for the 2023 National Poetry Series by Sean Hill.
CONFESSION
I am no Jew by Orthodox standards.
My mother, born of Irish-Catholic stock,
never converted and neither have I.
We might pray over the Shabbos lights
but rarely bother to bless the bread.My father insists on the Orthodoxy
of our ancestors, but the midrash
of his youth was Fiddler on the Roof,
while in Slupca, the Yizkor book suggests,
Reform had already taken root.Either way, an immigrant baker’s
eighteen-hour workdays
would leave little time for piety,
so I like to imagine our family
washed their hands of ritual
when they left the shtetl.Still, I worry that I dishonor
my father and my father’s father
by questioning the few stories that survive
when twelve of my great-grandmother’s siblings
did not. You want to confess, Rabbi says,
better you should find a priest.He speaks to me from the small screen
where he’s played by Meryl Streep.
MATT SUTHERLAND (June 10, 2024)
Tali and the Toucan
Mira Z. Amiras
Chantelle Thorne, illustrator
Burgen Thorne, illustrator
The Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $18.95 (32pp)
978-1-68555-325-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Emotive illustrations track the transformation of a girl as she moves through her fear and finds resolve. Tali longs to tumble and soar like the other children at gymnastics or the dojo, but fear always stops her from trying. Through a series of dreams, she discovers her courage—and herself. The illustrations artfully capture the shifting, high-stakes sensation of dreams and the all-consuming nature of anxiety in this picture book that validates children’s fears before gently encouraging them to face them.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 10, 2024)
Mississippi Swindle
Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America
Shad White
Steerforth Press
Hardcover $29.95 (272pp)
978-1-58642-386-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Mississippi Swindle is Shad White’s gripping account of the largest public fraud in Mississippi’s history—the misuse of nearly $100 million in federal welfare funds.
Appointed Mississippi’s state auditor in 2018, White led the team that uncovered suspicious activity related to a celebrity wrestler’s stay at a luxury drug treatment program in Malibu. The expenses, authorized as “training” by an educational nonprofit organization, had been funded by taxpayer dollars from a temporary assistance program. White’s team determined that the educational nonprofit—controlled by a well-connected socialite—received a disproportionate amount of welfare funds but reported few measurable results. After a meticulous investigation, auditors determined that over three years, $98 million meant for impoverished families had become the wealthy family’s personal slush fund.
In this disturbing account, White details the machinations of the fraud, including phantom staff rosters, event schedules, and class lists; inflated rent for empty offices; expensive travel; high-paying jobs for friends and family; fake invoices; and money laundering, including the misappropriation of funds for a down payment on the socialite’s home in an exclusive community. The scandal encompassed a wide ring of accomplices and beneficiaries, including retired quarterback Brett Favre, leaders within the Department of Human Services, and the governor. Even a journalist had a hidden agenda.
White’s descriptions of greed and the abuse of power by special interest groups are bold, brave, and commanding, as is the assertion that “the choice was plain. Taxpayers needed to know what happened here. … torpedoes be damned.” His is an engrossing look at political maneuvering behind the scenes, showing how his team negotiated with other state and federal agencies in the investigation and prosecution.
Highlighting an astonishing fraud that misdirected welfare dollars in the poorest state in the country, Mississippi Swindle issues timely warnings to the rest of the nation.
KRISTEN RABE (June 10, 2024)
The Jaguar Mask
Michael J. DeLuca
Stelliform Press
Softcover $21.99 (348pp)
978-1-77809-260-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
An explosive work of magical realism, Michael J. DeLuca’s novel The Jaguar Mask is about surviving amid cycles of corruption.
In Guatemala City, Cristina, an artist stricken by visions, grieves for her mother, Eufemia, who was murdered in her restaurant over an unknown conflict. Felipe keeps his head down driving an unlicensed taxi before being enlisted in a homicide case by a disgraced officer, El Bufo, becoming an unwilling and now incriminated accomplice. Moreover, Felipe and Cristina both have secrets that they are desperate to make sense of. They are drawn together as the country’s political rot builds to an unbearable cacophony and threatens to boil over.
In spite of the dark subject matter, the imagery is dazzling, intense, and surreal, in particular when it comes to Cristina’s point of view: angels and demons stalk her mother’s funeral, jaguars wear human masks, and the world is not as it seems. Around her, the setting is entrenched in a long, bloody history of civil unrest: people are disappeared, there are dangerous gangs with ties to the government, society is stratified, and the land and its people face rampant abuse at the hands of local and foreign powers.
Even so, there are moments of light. Cristina feels deep, painful love for her family, in all of their quirks and missteps: her teenage nephew, Lencho, is a flirtatious heckler; her mother’s cousin, Rosaría, is kind and rueful. She has blunt memories of Eufemia, who was harsh and fearful out of love for her family. Felipe finds a similar love among his activist roommates Luz and Aníbal, who are fierce and stubborn and who fight for the greater good.
The Jaguar Mask is an arresting novel about constant upheavals and fights against oppression in which a few people make a difference.
NATALIE WOLLENZIEN (June 10, 2024)
Cinnamon Beach
Suzanne Kamata
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Softcover $16.95 (248pp)
978-1-954332-51-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Suzanne Kamata’s novel Cinnamon Beach, a man’s death brings together the grieving women in his family for a summer of self-reflection and discovery.
To spread the final portion of Ted’s ashes, his family gathers along the South Carolina shoreline. Ted’s widow, Parisa, mourns as she oversees her growing fashion brand. Ted’s sister, Olivia, arrives burdened by a secret divorce and a sabotaged career. And Sophie, Olivia’s deaf daughter, looks forward to a future working with animals.
Alongside its focus on private family grief, Cinnamon Beach situates itself within contemporary events, making frequent references to COVID-19 and its concurrent political and cultural reckonings. Examining their lasting effects on present interpersonal intimacies, the story attends to race, multiculturalism, and biracial relationships while confronting death in the immediate family. Olivia, a white woman raised in America, remains embittered for being punished for fighting power harassment in academia in Japan. Sophie, whose biracial background often made her feel like an outsider, traverses multiple boundaries, learning American Sign Language alongside a biracial American medical student. Not all of the book’s racial identity themes are equally fleshed out: while Olivia raises questions with a Black musician about racial preferences in dating, their conversation does not go beyond listing the races of their and their children’s past partners, for example. In addition, the cultural and self-explorations among the women at the book’s center are uneven: though Parisa acknowledges her white husband’s occasional awkwardness relating to her Indian cultural upbringing, the sections that she narrates about her recollections, interiority, and grief fall away, becoming overshadowed by Olivia’s and Sophie’s concerns.
A quiet family drama, Cinnamon Beach depicts women coming to terms with death and their own identities in time with contemporary challenges.
ISABELLA ZHOU (June 10, 2024)
Kathy Young
