Book of the Day Roundup: August 7-11, 2023
Only a Trenza Away
A Tale of Trust and Strength
Nadine Fonseca
Camila Carrossine, illustrator
Shadow Mountain Publishing
Hardcover $19.99 (32pp)
978-1-63993-098-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Every night, Xiomara’s father braids her hair before bed. They imagine themselves on fantastic adventures: swinging through jungles; diving in underwater caves; flying to the moon. When Xiomara’s father has to work late, she worries she will not be able to handle her adventures—like starting a new school that year—without him. But in this cozy, comforting tale, her father assures her that the strength and love woven into her braids will always be there—even when he isn’t.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 27, 2023)
Serengotti
Eugen Bacon
Transit Lounge Publishing
Softcover $21.49 (288pp)
978-0-645-56536-2
Buy: Amazon
Set in rural Australia, Eugen Bacon’s novel Serengotti follows a programmer who travels to an isolated African migrant community where little is as it seems.
The novel begins with Ch’anzu having a breakdown—over a drowning marriage, a troubled twin brother. Ch’anzu rages against the injustices that zie experiences as an African Australian, which led to hir exploded job. Caught up in depression, zie gets a call to write a computer program in Serengotti, a small rural community populated by displaced people—mostly migrants from Africa who left war-torn countries as widows, child soldiers, or orphans. They distrust newcomers like Ch’anzu. The place itself, with its mesh of cultures, forces Ch’anzu to face hir grief, potential, and power in new and unexpected ways.
Perhaps prophetic dreams trouble Ch’anzu too. The narrative perspective changes occasionally, resulting in a speculative edge, even as the action stays grounded. Ch’anzu’s voice radiates both power and vulnerability as zie tries to make sense of hir severed connections from hir old life and growing attachment to this new community with its dreams of healing and new life.
The writing pulses across the page, electric with images and style. It moves between interior monologues, straight narrative, and poetic descriptions with ease, incorporating Australian slang, Swahili, Bantu, and even made-up language explanations. The characters occupy a rich linguistic landscape—and there are a lot of them, all drawn with fine detail and precision: a pair of healing twins, Lau and Tau; an ethereal night-runner, Aviana; and Sticky, a former child soldier who claims to have killed a lion.
A twisting plot, a setting rife with potential danger, and a past full of its own skeletons all build to a head in Serengotti, a novel about an African Australian and the migrant community zie comes to call hir own.
CAMILLE-YVETTE WELSCH (June 27, 2023)
Cosmonaut
A Cultural History
Cathleen S. Lewis
University of Florida Press
Hardcover $38.00 (304pp)
978-1-68340-370-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The symbolism of the Soviet space program is examined in Cathleen S. Lewis’s cultural history Cosmonaut.
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to enter space. Though brief, Gagarin’s venture outside of Earth’s atmosphere led to an intensification of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States and added additional heat to the Cold War. The triumph over the United States became a propaganda victory for the Soviet Communist regime, and a new type of hero was born: the cosmonaut.
Initiated by Nikita Khrushchev after he dismantled Josef Stalin’s cult of personality, the Soviet space program spearheaded the change to focus on the collective, not the leader, while at the same time serving as a distraction from the lingering yoke of Stalinism. Space scientists became a group of anonymous laborers; cosmonauts thanked the Soviet people upon their returns. And Lewis notes that the propaganda that surrounded the Soviet space program was in place from the very beginning: the technical malfunctions and botched landing of Gagarin’s flight were covered up. The biographies and professional accomplishments of the cosmonauts were doctored to fit the narrative of the cosmonaut as a Soviet hero.
Lewis brings the disconnect between propaganda and real life to the fore with the exploitation of cosmonauts for political purposes—from the arbitrary selection process leading up to the space flights to cosmonauts’ curated lives under the watchful eye of the Communist party. In this context, the space flight of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to enter space, is revealed to be something other than the feminist accomplishment it is generally regarded to be.
An innovative study of pop culture, memorabilia, propaganda, and hero worship, Cosmonaut brings the Soviet space program to life from inside Soviet society.
ERIKA HARLITZ KERN (June 27, 2023)
Prophet
Sin Blaché
Helen MacDonald
Grove Atlantic
Hardcover $29.00 (480pp)
978-0-8021-6202-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Weaponized nostalgia endangers the world and forces a reckoning between old friends in Sin Blaché and Helen MacDonald’s novel Prophet.
An American-style diner, a bouquet of flowers, and a board game are among the objects that appeared at random near a military base in England. Such a bizarre mystery calls for a bizarre investigator: Rao, an outwardly flippant, traumatized, mentally ill drug addict who can distinguish truth from falsehood at a glance, and who has seen people commit evil in the pursuit of “truth.” He and his handler, Adam, trace the cause of the phenomenon to a Colorado laboratory, where scientists have used an ever-changing substance, dubbed Prophet, to incapacitate people with longing for their fondest memories. Rao and Adam are the key to unlocking Prophet’s secrets—and the secrets of the insidious minds behind it.
Prophet is striking in its originality and its capacity to instill unease, even terror. It evolves over time, with the consequences of its use growing ever more disturbing and incomprehensible. Even Rao, with his abilities as a “human polygraph,” feels control slipping away from him and into Prophet as the chaos spreads. A question arises: whether Prophet is also capable of learning, mercy, and perhaps even love.
Rao displays wild snark, and Adam a nigh-unbreakable deadpan voice, humanizing them as they face what is inhuman. Each would give anything to save the other. With Prophet’s threat growing by the day, they may have to. The book’s final confrontation is horrifying: Adam and Rao battle the objects Prophet has made and face a staggering truth.
Prophet is a chilling speculative thriller in which some suffer, and others profit, from idealizing the past.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (June 27, 2023)
The Orchid Hour
Nancy Bilyeau
Lume Books
Softcover $13.99 (338pp)
978-1-83901-480-2
Buy: Amazon
In Prohibition-era New York, a young widow plunges into a world of vice, gangsters, and political corruption in Nancy Bilyeau’s novel The Orchid Hour.
After she loses her job at the library, Zia’s prospects are bleak. No one wants to hire an Italian American. Worse, people Zia knows keep dying: the deputy mayor and her loving father-in-law are shot in quick succession. Convinced the murders are connected, Zia goes undercover at the Orchid Hour, a new speakeasy that seems to be at the heart of the trouble. What she learns will bring both justice and ruin.
In the process of investigating, Zia breaks away from her conservative family for the first time. The life she finds outside the library is as exhilarating as it is dangerous. As she explores the enticing underworld of speakeasies, celebrities, flapper fashion, and independence, she faces yet another threat: the club’s temperamental yet handsome manager, who makes Zia feel more alive than she has since her husband’s death.
Despite her excitement, Zia’s family-oriented goals—to find her father-in-law’s murderer and to secure her son’s future—never waver. The sequence depicting Zia’s shock over her father-in-law’s murder is surreal and heartbreaking. But she cannot afford to mourn for long. With the reluctant help of a police lieutenant, she pries free every secret that the luxurious, dangerous Orchid Hour has to offer in search of the one answer she needs. When answers do come, they are not what Zia expected or wanted. Nonetheless, they are all she will ever get, so she finds a way to be content with what remains: a newfound understanding of herself and her place in the world.
The Orchid Hour is an enticing mystery novel about the elusiveness of justice during a period of historical turmoil.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (June 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
