Book of the Day Roundup: December 16-20, 2024
Already All the Love
Diana Farid
Shar Tuiasoa, illustrator
Little Bee Books
Hardcover $12.99 (18pp)
978-1-4998-1565-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Colorful hearts and stars spatter the pages of this celebratory picture book that honors the bond between mother and child. A mother dreams about what her child may accomplish or become and never forgets to acknowledge the many wonders they already hold. Like a joyful flower, a beating drum, or a shooting star, she reminds her child that they are already blooming, strong, aglow, and loved with her whole heart. Bright colors and limited text make this an excellent choice for early readers.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 14, 2024)
How Could You
Ren Strapp
Oni Press
Softcover $17.99 (224pp)
978-1-63715-526-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A college student and her friends navigate a complicated web of relationships in the graphic novel How Could You, a fond, realistic view of early adulthood.
Molly is depressed after a breakup email from Olene, who’s away in Europe for a semester. Molly’s friend Lou is fresh from a split with Yona, who’s rooming with Olene in France. Molly and Lou comfort each other while searching for “rebound girlfriends.” Meanwhile, in France, Olene and Yona grow closer. It’s a swirl of emotions, attractions, and questions of love—romantic, platonic, or otherwise. Realizations about sexual identity, friendship, trust, and betrayal all play a role as Molly and the others resolve their feelings about each other and look toward the future, growing toward maturity and self-realization.
The cast is diverse and engaging in this story full of romantic tension, drama, and humor. When Molly decides to cut her hair short after hurt feelings and personal growth, Yona assures her that it, and her heart, will “grow back healthier for sure.” And the art is lively and appealing, with inspired use of color: ribbons of yellow flow along with musical notes to show the reach and impact of a song. Key moments are exaggerated for heightened emotional or comedic effect, as with the huge eyes of two curious friends awaiting someone’s reaction to a biting comment.
How Could You is an entertaining graphic novel about the pleasures and perils of college romances.
PETER DABBENE (October 14, 2024)
Pretty Dead Things
Lilian West
Crooked Lane Books
Hardcover $29.99 (272pp)
979-889242002-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Lilian West’s mystery novel Pretty Dead Things, a bride-to-be works to solve a peculiar cold case buried and forgotten about for decades.
Newly engaged Cora relocates to Hickory Falls, the small town where her fiancé grew up. At an estate sale, she purchases a jar of trinkets containing two wedding rings. Determined to return the rings to their owners, Cora embarks on an investigation that leads her to one of the town’s most prominent families, uncovering a mystery dating back seventy years. In 1953, Clarity had a connection with a married man who left his life to build a new one with her. Their relationship began on a high note but soon unraveled; Clarity disappeared without a trace.
With vibrant descriptions, as of “white wooden folding chairs, four on each side of a narrow grass strip leading up to the oak tree,” the novel is atmospheric. Its dual timelines enrich the story, bridging the connection between the past and the present. Cora’s storyline is the more limited of the two: details about her relationships are sidelined, as is the history of her fiancé’s family in the town, despite its significance to Cora and her story. Accounts of Cora experiencing a tornado for the first time are drawn out and act as fillers in between chapters. But in the past, Clarity’s story is told with full transparency, with revelations about the affair, the feelings of the married man’s daughters, and why the disappearance was swept under the rug. Occasional plot twists keep the suspense high until the final moments.
Pretty Dead Things is an exciting mystery novel in which a family’s secrets are exposed and a small town’s hidden truth comes to light.
DANICA MORRIS (October 14, 2024)
Specters of the Marvelous
Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale
Kimberly J. Lau
Wayne State University Press
Softcover $34.99 (256pp)
978-0-8143-4134-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Spanning literary criticism, social science, and the study of the fairy tale, Kimberly J. Lau’s Specters of the Marvelous foregrounds race in often whitewashed European fairy tales.
Prior to cinema, fairy tales were collected, written, and edited by European literary figures including Giambattista Basile in Italy, Madame d’Aulnoy in France, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in Germany, and Andrew Lang in England. In her compelling rereading of this history, Lau locates race in the tales and their contexts, asserting that even stories that don’t seem to be about race, like “Beauty and the Beast,” contain references to contemporary debates about French attempts to civilize the residents of their colonial holdings.
Anti-Blackness and antisemitism also appear in many classic fairy tales, from Basile’s Tale of Tales, wherein Black slave girls are depicted as lazy and treacherous, to the Grimms’ fairy tales, which contain multiple stories of Jews being greedy and deserving of punishment. Lang’s colored fairy books naturalized the story of British imperialism while asserting the proper domestic role of women in education, since Lang’s wife translated and compiled the bulk of those tales while Lang got the credit. Against this backdrop, fairy tales furthered European notions of race and racism, naturalizing ideas about which bodies are beastly and which are deserving of love and riches.
While the book struggles to condense centuries of European scientific and popular thinking on race and colonialism into its short space, its meticulous citations and far-reaching connections are persuasive demonstrations of the idea that racism and the fairy tale constitute one another, such that conversations about them should remain intertwined.
Specters of the Marvelous is a compelling history of race in literary European fairy tales that argues that one of the genre’s most convincing magic tricks is to make race invisible via the allocation of happy endings.
JEANA JORGENSEN (October 14, 2024)
The Innermost House
A Memoir
Cynthia Blakeley
Bright Leaf
Softcover $22.95 (256pp)
978-1-62534-814-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Cynthia Blakeley’s poignant memoir The Innermost House explores her dysfunctional upbringing and family life in working-class Massachusetts.
Born in 1958, Blakeley grew up along the shores of Cape Cod, a longstanding summer tourist attraction marked by changeling winds, star-filled skies, and beckoning ocean waters edged by “bayberry, beach plums, and goldenrod.” But after the annual Labor Day exodus, only the native “Cape Codders” like Blakeley’s family and neighbors remained in the “off-season’s shivery quietude.” They cleaned out rental cottages, grateful for any groceries left behind. Though close-knit, their aspirations and economic realities were often limited.
The book is eloquent on the subjects of remembrance and healing. Beyond its regional revelations are compelling and faceted portraits of Blakeley’s parents, siblings, and other family members, from her grandmother’s “pale Puritan eyes” and thrifty tenacity to her charismatic mother, Shirley, who was the center of her household. Attractive, resourceful, and generous, Shirley turned down a wartime government job to marry her boyfriend in 1946. Yet despite his extramarital philandering and possessive, abusive behavior, her husband later had Shirley arrested and tried for adultery. Struggling with increasing alcoholism and agoraphobia, Shirley nonetheless remarried, divorced, and managed to support her large family.
Blakeley describes herself as a “scrappy” yet “earnest” child who emerged from conflicted sexual molestation encounters and a chaotic home environment into a broader, more cohesive world. Deep considerations of the subjective fluidity of memory include how strong emotional impressions can alter memories, just as time and experience influence the evolution of perspective. Blakeley makes note of the concept of “forgetting,” memory’s “conjoined twin,” showing how the “curation and co-construction of the past” shapes the present and future.
Brimming with personal and historical details, The Innermost House is a distinctive memoir with a keen sense of place and renewal.
MEG NOLA (October 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
