Book of the Day Roundup: February 10-14, 2025
A Perfect Day to Be Alone
Nanae Aoyama
Jesse Kirkwood, translator
Other Press
Softcover $15.99 (160pp)
978-1-63542-539-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Nanae Aoyama’s droll novella A Perfect Day to Be Alone, an indecisive girl cohabitates with a woman who challenges her preconceptions and directionlessness.
Twenty-year-old Chizu is ill-employed and hard to impress. She wants to be left alone but is terrified of being forgettable. When Yohei, her indifferent boyfriend of two-plus years, fades from her life, she replaces him with a train station attendant, Fujita, who’s just as unreachable. Her mother leaves to teach in China, prodding Chizu to be more ambitious.
Wanting to live in Tokyo but with few good options for doing so, Chizu moves in with Ginko, an offbeat distant relation in her seventies, reasoning that “anywhere would do.” Once this wish is fulfilled, though, her truer craving—for discomfort, even discord, to shake her from the blankness of her days—resurfaces: “I wanted to pound madly on the keys of a piano. Burn all the clothes in my drawers. Toss all my jewelry from the top of some tall building. Smoke ten cigarettes at once.”
The story unfolds like a passive tragedy, inviting ire, empathy, and amusement. Chizu is a trying and pitiable narrator who finds the perfect foil for her practiced apathy in Ginko, who is placid, kind, and patient across the four seasons they spend together. Still, Chizu is uncharitable in her observations of Ginko’s behaviors, relationships, and age, all while posturing indifference to Ginko’s thoughts about her. Feeling unable to rankle her host, Chizu pilfers items from Ginko’s home—one among several bad habits that she nurtures to feel young and alive. She believes herself to be worldly and wise, but Ginko has seen this act before.
A voyeuristic record of a girl’s thorny settling in to someone else’s space, A Perfect Day to Be Alone is a sharp novella about a purposefully delayed coming-of-age.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Cupid on the Loose
John J. Jacobson
Blackstone Publishing
Hardcover $26.99 (320pp)
979-820096055-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Comedy stirs between like-minded writers and meddlesome matchmakers in John J. Jacobson’s romance novel Cupid on the Loose, about Californians who bond over Shakespeare.
Billy is an aspiring novelist with a penchant for old-fashioned love. When he attends a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he meets Kari, a flight attendant who also writes and whose wit and aesthetic taste rival Billy’s own. The jubilant pair meet for dates at coastal sites, theaters, and restaurants. But minor misunderstandings ensue as each tries to pretend they aren’t as smitten as they are. Meanwhile, Billy’s affable grandparents, who raised him, ask him for details about his love life; they want him to find a partnership like theirs.
Lighthearted insights into Billy’s and Kari’s thoughts about each other combine with modern dating concerns, such as how long to wait before responding to text messages. Frustrating advice from their friends leads to unnecessary heartache. An occasional narrator comments on the couple’s story, enhancing their silly plight, and mild intrigue gathers around how they might untangle their problems.
Much of the humor derives from snowballing events: One sequence involves cat allergies and pet surgery; in another, a jailhouse bard chimes in with relationship advice after Billy goes to extremes to gain experience for his writing. Indeed, Billy’s dramatic impulses force his grandmother to intervene with an orchestrated retreat at a lodge; its enchanting grounds inspire stage-worthy confusion and a meet-cute that’s complete with aphrodisiac mints. Told with sometimes hyperbolic panache, this is a fun novel about learning to be honest.
Recalling Shakespearean antics, the romance novel Cupid on the Loose is about a star-crossed couple navigating shenanigans to reach love.
KAREN RIGBY (December 23, 2024)
Astro
Manuel Marsol
Lizzie Davis, translator
Transit Children’s Editions
Hardcover $21.95 (64pp)
979-889338904-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In this poignant picture book about an unlikely friendship that outlives even death, eclectic illustrations follow an astronaut’s arrival to an alien world with strange creatures and colorful, swirling landscapes. One of the world’s inhabitants becomes his fast friend, showing the astronaut all the wonders the planet has to offer. After his friend’s untimely death, the astronaut struggles to come to terms with his loss; eventually, he learns to keep moving forward.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 23, 2024)
The Healing Garden
Cultivate Your Garden to Treat, Feed, and Soothe
Caroline Parker
Lucy Mora, illustrator
Thames & Hudson
Hardcover $34.95 (216pp)
978-1-76076-466-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Caroline Parker’s The Healing Garden is an engaging, beautiful compendium of medicinal and culinary herbs.
The book surprises and inspires as it shares the varied uses and healing properties of forty different herbs and seven “weeds.” Its detailed treatment of calendula (Calendula officinalis) is an example, showing that in addition to producing lovely yellow flowers, the plant has antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, skin-soothing, and regenerating properties. Dried and stored in an airtight container, calendula will last up to two years. And as the plant is self-seeding, a one-time investment in a pack of seeds returns large dividends. A tasty recipe for Calendula Butter Biscuits is included, with the suggestion to try them dipped in melted dark chocolate.
Written with passion and grace, the book evokes memories of the scent of sun-warmed earth and dreams of bountiful harvests. Lucy Mora’s eye-catching illustrations enhance the text with bright splashes of color, aid in plant recognition, and inspire the use of medicinal and culinary herbs to bring beauty and diversity to any garden.
Attractive streamlined charts leave no doubts about when and where to sow; the best growing, harvesting, and storing conditions for each plant; the uses of each plant and its component parts; how to prepare and store harvested plants for medicinal or culinary purposes; and contraindications to their use. Tips are also given for growing in backyards and on balconies and for foraging in fields and forests. Easy-to-follow instructions for making natural remedies, oils, tinctures, and tonics are included alongside recipes for salads, soups, teas, cookies, cakes, and other culinary delights.
Practical and inspiring, The Healing Garden is an illustrated guide to growing and using medicinal and culinary herbs for health and well-being.
KRISTINE MORRIS (December 23, 2024)
Bookstore Romance
Love Speaks Volumes
Judith Rosen
Brandeis University Press
Hardcover $19.95 (120pp)
978-1-68458-254-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Bookstore Romance collects diverse photographs and stories of couples who celebrated their engagements or weddings in a bookstore.
The snappy chapters open by introducing the couples in terms of how they met, why the bookstores they chose were important to them, and details from their proposals or nuptials. Each is illustrated with photographs taken on location. The sites range from the world’s largest outdoor bookstore to a romance-only shop owned by two sisters.
Often, books were vital to the setup or decor of the events: There’s a mock-up romance novel cover with the title “Will You Marry Me?”; there are paper flowers made from book pages. Sometimes, celebrities abetted the moments: Tom Hanks relayed a proposal at the Texas Book Festival, while novelist Ann Patchett transformed her Parnassus Books events director’s engagement party into a surprise wedding. Complications because of COVID-19 restrictions are also named, including canceled destination weddings that had to be reorganized and brides and grooms wearing masks.
A bibliophile’s time capsule and an enduring record of love and literary obsessions, Bookstore Romance is a swoonworthy coffee table book about couples who formalized their relationships in bookstores.
REBECCA FOSTER (December 23, 2024)
Kathy Young
