Book of the Day Roundup: December 18-22, 2023
Enchanted Forests
The Poetic Construction of a World before Time
Boria Sax
Reaktion Books
Hardcover $35.00 (288pp)
978-1-78914-790-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Boria Sax’s Enchanted Forests spurs the imagination with its wide-ranging examination of literature, folklore, and visual art related to forests and their creatures.
This engaging, scholarly volume summarizes how, throughout history, human beings have conceptualized and portrayed forests in written and visual art. Suggesting that our ideas and mythology about a forest’s “ambiance” are as important as its “biological composition,” the book cites a stunning variety of creative work, ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Sax notes, for instance, that biblical stories portrayed the wilderness as an indeterminate landscape where prophets and saints were tormented or achieved communion with God. In the medieval era, legends about King Arthur and Robin Hood associated the forest with lords, knights, and other royalty, with dramatic accounts of hunting parties pursuing stags. German fairy tales portrayed the forest as a place of both terror and hope, a feminine domain inhabited by witches and other powerful spirits. Early American art, including the works of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School, depicted the wilderness as a pastoral Eden to be subdued and conquered. And although the focus is on Europe and North America, the book also touches on forest images in Asian and African civilizations.
This rich and accessible book considers an astonishing array of ideas. The overall effect is provocative and sometimes overwhelming. For instance, a two-paragraph description of Michael Foucault’s ideas about man’s assertion of power by naming natural objects could easily have merited several pages, as would the discussion of how the folksy image of Paul Bunyan promoted the clearcutting of Great Lakes forests.
Enchanted Forests is a brilliant introduction to the art and literature of the forest, examining how people conceive of the wilderness beyond the edges of civilization.
KRISTEN RABE (October 27, 2023)
Posey’s Problem
A Pony Tale
Kathy Simmers
Simone Kaplan, editor
Marjorie van Heerden, illustrator
Bound to Happen Publishing
Hardcover $19.95 (32pp)
978-1-73535-111-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The unconditional love between pets and their people is honored in this picture book about a resilient champion pony—a tale inspired by a true story. Whenever Posey’s kids get too tall for her, she is passed along to the next child; though she loves all her riders, the constant moving between barns and children begins to wear on her. A family with three young daughters becomes her last stop as she finds three new riders and one forever family.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 27, 2023)
The Last Pool of Darkness
The Connemara Trilogy
Tim Robinson
Milkweed Editions
Softcover $20.00 (384pp)
978-1-57131-374-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Combining detailed descriptions of Connemara’s history, folklore, artistry, geology, and nature, Tim Robinson’s The Last Pool of Darkness is a sprawling, joyful romp along Ireland’s western coastline.
The second volume in a trilogy, the book includes careful descriptions of the Connemara region’s natural features, such as the exposed quartzite along a Cleggan Head promontory; predatory ground beetles on boggy grazing land; deposits of zeolites and coralline algae on rugged beaches; and Omey Island’s choughs (small, red-beaked crows unique to Ireland’s western dunes). An evocative description of the region’s geology addresses the emergence of this wave-washed coast during the Silurian and Ordovician periods, as well as glacial impacts from the latest Ice Age during Pleistocene.
Accessible to locals and enthusiastic travelers, the prose is upbeat, clear, and engaging, if Robinson’s “grain-by-grain hoarding of detail” and prancing shifts between stories require keen attention. Indeed, natural history is only one of his several themes; the book also covers several hundred years of human history and legends. There are accounts of visits to the region by famous writers—including W. B. Yeats and Ludwig Wittgenstein—and rollicking stories about local legends like Festy Mortimer, a fisherman and boat builder who reared a family of ten; the “ample and earth-rooted” Bina McLoughlin, known as the Queen of the Connemara; and Dorothy Cross, the mermaid (and artist) of Mullaghglass. Told in the gossipy tone of a confidante, there are adventure stories about sea captains, balladeers, priests, farmers, and artists, as well as seances, drownings, unsolved murders, the potato blight, and islands that disappear in the mist.
Sweeping and authoritative, The Last Pool of Darkness is an astonishing, immersive view of the people and places of Ireland’s Connemara region.
KRISTEN RABE (October 27, 2023)
The Year My Life Turned Upside Down
Stéphanie Lapointe
Marianne Ferrer, illustrator
Ann Marie Boulanger, translator
Arctis Books
Softcover $18.00 (370pp)
978-1-64690-024-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Told in the form of a fourteen-year-old’s diary, Stéphanie Lapointe’s stimulating bildungsroman The Year My Life Turned Upside Down is about grief and change.
Franny’s mother died in a boating accident years ago. When her father is invited to Kyoto for an inventor’s contest, he sends Franny from Montreal to St. Lorette to stay with relatives who she does not care for. She attends a new school with a strict homeroom teacher, sexist bullies, and an awkward first crush. Through a series of misadventures, she uncovers the truth about her mother’s death—a mystery that dangles, chapter after chapter.
Franny is a tempestuous and self-deprecating girl for the first two-thirds of the story. Her voice is troubled; she often writes in all caps (“I DON’T EVEN HAVE A SUBSTITUTE MOTHER”). Though her outbursts are draining, they are also understandable given her circumstances, and she manages to make friends who help her find some answers. The book’s big reveal is delayed in service of a romantic subplot; in time, Franny is able to listen to her father’s side of the story and repair her relationship with him.
The evocative illustrations of Franny’s romantic frustrations take unexpected turns. For example, just after Franny learns that her favorite new French literature teacher has a girlfriend, she writes, “Franny, you’ve set a record. Being heartbroken for longer than you were in love,” and happy, warm colors, including orange, are used to convey her broken heart and teardrops. The constant contrast between content and color reveals Franny’s vulnerability despite her drawing herself as a robot.
In the pensive novel The Year My Life Turned Upside Down, a grieving teenager pursues the closure that’s eluded her for years.
STEPHANIE MARRIE (October 27, 2023)
Silence, Full Stop.
Karina Shor
Street Noise Books
Softcover $23.99 (272pp)
978-1-951491-25-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Karina Shor’s graphic memoir Silence, Full Stop. covers her self-destructive teenage years in Israel and her repressed trauma.
Shor felt like an outsider from her childhood in Moldova onward. Asked by classmates if she favored the Russians or the Germans, she replied “My mom told me we are Jewish.” She found solace in art. Her family’s move to Israel when she was six led to bigger problems; she survived sexual abuse from a neighbor. As she got older, Shor—while contending with body dysmorphia—lost herself in sex and drugs.
Shor’s circumstances are sometimes grim, but Shor herself is a vibrant, captivating force. Her diary entries and flashbacks pique interest. And when misfortunes strike, or when she’s making bad decisions about drugs or boyfriends, she’s empathetic, generating curiosity about how she’ll escape each situation.
Though grounded in realistic depictions, the art is expressive. It includes visual metaphors, a wide range of colors, and a variety of panel layouts and drawing styles. Its brilliant, hopeful final panel echoes its beginning in a beautiful way. Through the expert alchemy of art and text, the book conveys emotions in a deep, visceral way that one medium or the other alone would not achieve.
Silence, Full Stop. is an outstanding memoir about the difficulties of overcoming abuse.
PETER DABBENE (October 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
