Book of the Day Roundup: February 17-21, 2025
Ibis
Justin Haynes
The Overlook Press
Hardcover $28.00 (352pp)
978-1-4197-7277-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A fishing village plagued by ghosts and omens unites to protect a refugee girl in Justin Haynes’s potent novel Ibis.
The site of a vicious sugar plantation centuries ago, New Felicity, Trinidad, is a nexus for Venezuelan refugees. Ibises gathering on Catherine the Disemboweler’s former house signal ill fortune to the town’s inhabitants. Soon, a reporter interested in Venezuela-Trinidad tensions arrives, threatening unwarranted international attention on Milagros, a rescued refugee girl. Years later, Milagros, now a writer herself, returns to Venezuela seeking her lost mother’s whereabouts.
The New Felicity community narrates with nonchalant understatements, using deadpan humor to cope with border-transgressing violence and malicious hauntings dating from the days of slavery. Immersion in the tense but tight-knit New Felicity community is facilitated through slang and vernacular speech patterns, such as “white white,” passed down from enslaved predecessors. Milagros’s sections jumble private griefs with her professional journalistic mission tied to the ongoing refugee crisis. Her air of investigative inquiry is undercut with maternal longing and frustration.
Brutalized bodies abound in Ibis: Mangled corpses float in the waters, a plantation owner whips a slave for no reason other than to show absolute power, and a gang leader’s henchman witnesses his brother’s head being used as a soccer ball as part of his initiation. The vengeful curses and impassioned pleas of wronged women are powerful voices of reckoning for racial and gender-based injustices; Milagros’s mother and Hany, a slave woman, voice fierce determination and selflessness when protecting their daughters from rape and violation. Though themselves guilty of utilitarian violence, New Felicity’s villagers unite in compassionate defense of Milagros.
The consequences of colonialism, sexual slavery, and human trafficking are ongoing in Ibis, a novel about the origins and aftershocks of the international refugee crisis in Venezuela and Trinidad.
ISABELLA ZHOU (December 23, 2024)
Night Walk
Jason Cockcroft
Candlewick Press
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-5362-3961-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A grandfather takes his grandson on a nighttime walk to honor his late grandmother in this ethereal picture book about grief and remembrance. With their orange and yellow hats and red backpacks, a grandfather and his grandson set out into the inky blues and purples of a pre-dawn forest to find his late grandma’s favorite place. Along the way, they recall many treasured moments with Grandma before finally arriving at the place she loved the most—a special site they now share.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 23, 2024)
A Fool’s Kabbalah
Steve Stern
Melville House
Softcover $19.95 (304pp)
978-1-68589-165-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Steve Stern’s A Fool’s Kabbalah is a crushing, startling novel about intellectual and spiritual defiance in the face of unbearable cruelties.
On a scholarly scavenging expedition through Europe, famed kabbalist Gershom Scholem gathers the textual detritus of his ruined community. With each stop to gather such scattered light, his belief he’ll be able to refill the broken vessels of Jewish lore diminishes. Each recalcitrant city and skeletal town he enters is cause for deeper grief—or greater nihilism.
In Gershom’s not-so-distant past, Menke, his shtetl’s jokester, returns home to care for his mother, bringing with him desperate news of what’s happening to Jews beyond their town. Few believe him, though. By the time his neighbors realize “their peril, the borders were closed, visas were no longer available.” When Gershom arrives in the same place later, “the negative space they’d once inhabited [threatens] to swallow him up.” From the town’s remnants he rescues a mysterious volume, once used by the rabbi to call forth the messiah; the incantations on its pages can’t reach him, though.
Set before and after a time when “cruelty was now a virtue, kindness a sin” and written in the cynical poetry of the sages, the novel is variously heartbreaking and dazzling. Menke’s fate seems certain from the first; whether Gershom will be able to recover from the horror of the ashes remains in question. And while Menke hopes to draw comedy from the tragedy he’s living through, Gershom, overwhelmed, loses his ability to see evidence of occult miracles at work. Delicate waifs and innocence crumble in the face of banal brutalities—but still, some light creeps through.
A Fool’s Kabbalah is a powerful historical novel about the kinds of communal wounds that even mystics struggle to soothe.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Bread and Milk
Karolina Ramqvist
Saskia Vogel, translator
Coach House Books
Softcover $18.95 (208pp)
978-1-55245-489-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A tantalizing smorgasbord of culinary memories, Karolina Ramqvist’s memoir discusses family and community love in terms of shared dishes.
Ramqvist’s earliest recollections speak to her enduring love of food: “when I ate something delicious, everything seemed to come alive, inside me and out,” she writes. Her prose has an insatiable quality as it sifts through hearty reminiscences, as of her methodical, out-of-body, rash-inducing consumption of thirteen tangerines; the simultaneous intimacy and distance of cooking for others; and the Rorschach challenge of interpreting the shape of each first bite into a peach.
Elsewhere, there’s a lengthy meditation on a disappointing day spent reconstructing her grandmother’s rice pudding—“less a dish and more a material representation of the basis of my entire existence”—to teach her daughter about the great-grandparents she never met. Ramqvist also recalls learning about her absent father via stories of his restaurant orders. The text weighs personal foibles against inherited traits and lifelong desires with wisdom; sometimes self-conscious, Ramqvist observes that she turned to cooking and baking because it was “quotidian and straightforward and served an unassailable function”–a certainty in an uncertain world.
Bread and Milk is a delight-filled memoir–a multicourse helping of food-based memories seasoned to perfection with keen introspection.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Good Luck to Us All
A Graphic Memoir of Sorts
Karen Vermeulen
Catalyst Press
Softcover $19.95 (240pp)
978-1-960803-10-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Karen Vermeulen’s graphic memoir Good Luck to Us All is a funny, honest account of an “imperfect” life marked by foibles and follies.
An unwanted pregnancy, a bad relationship, an unruly cat, and aging are among the problems addressed in Vermeulen’s personality-laden book. It is often laugh-out-loud funny in tracing her life as a single woman in Cape Town, South Africa. Vermeulen’s cat, Sir Henry Baba Ganoush the Bohemian, is a charming sidekick in the conversational, unpredictable narrative.
The witty, unframed illustrations pair with varying font sizes to complement the book’s punch lines. The characters’ faces are expressive and exaggerated, helping to distill situations in a few glimpses. There’s an insightful examination of the word “brave,” which has backhanded meanings in the context of complimenting women. And on the advantages of having Sir Henry versus children, the book notes, “He’s not going to … get mixed up with the wrong crowd or get into drugs” alongside a hilarious drawing of a miscreant cat on two legs, arms folded, with “awful tattoos.”
Good Luck to Us All is an amusing graphic memoir about being single in the modern world.
PETER DABBENE (December 23, 2024)
Kathy Young
