Book of the Day Roundup: February 24-28, 2025
The Girl Who Flew Away
Lee Dean
Iron Circus Comics
Hardcover $28.00 (400pp)
978-1-63899-139-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A woman seeks direction in her life in the gorgeous graphic novel The Girl Who Flew Away.
In 1976, Greer is pregnant with the child of her married boss, Dick. With few other options, she complies as Dick shuttles her from Pittsburgh to Key West to stay with his old Vietnam War buddy Donald and his wife, Kate. While there, Greer pines for her lost love, Chris, and meets the inhabitants of the area, including Pablo, the family’s gardener. Feeling bored, isolated, and trapped, she retreats to an imaginary world where a girl, Eugenie, enjoys the freedom that Greer so desires.
The book is a literary and visual feast. Topics of women’s independence, race, and class are addressed. Greer is imperfect but sympathetic, and the others, even low-talking Donald, are fleshed out in fascinating terms. Pablo’s halting English results in a deeper understanding of who he is, and lines like “I can live through you, right?” foreshadow future developments in a tantalizing manner.
The artwork is delicate and evokes emotions well. The images include visual touchstones of the 1970s, including old television sets, and the colors emphasize green and orange with arresting nostalgia.
The Girl Who Flew Away is an unforgettable book about a soon-to-be mother finding the strength and wisdom to choose the course of her and her baby’s future.
PETER DABBENE (December 23, 2024)
The Dissenters
Youssef Rakha
Graywolf Press
Softcover $272.00 (272pp)
978-1-64445-319-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Youssef Rakha’s bold novel The Dissenters, a son pieces together his mother’s Egyptian story.
Following his mother’s death, Nour experiences visions of her in their attic. Piecemeal, he writes to his estranged sister, Shimo, about their mother: She first went by the name “Amna” during an unhappy arranged marriage, then by “Nimo” during her university years and subsequent marriage to an eventual political prisoner, and by “Mouna” as a strict religious mother charting a convoluted pathway toward feminist political dissent. When her brother saw the mutilation of her genitalia during her first marriage, she refused to let him look away from this violation, even wiping the resulting blood across his mouth. And near the end of her life, she became fixated on the Jumpers, women who threw themselves to their deaths and whose disparate, individual stories coalesce into symbolic resistance against brutality against women, political corruption and injustice, and violence motivated by religious conflict.
In his letters to Shimo, Nour blends mourning with duty, proclaiming, “It feels like a debt to myself to convince you of how like the mother you resented you really are. How your revolution against her was a version of her revolution.” Jumbling time and experiences by mixing Nour’s consciousness with his mother’s, The Dissenters bustles with candid, sometimes graphic descriptions of women’s desire and sexuality in a social climate where the boundary between religious mores and politics is porous. A sense of urgent political responsibility expands with the repeated insistence that understanding Mouna is significant beyond personal and family concerns; her life also maps the revolutionary history of Egypt’s nationhood from the 1950s to the 2010s.
Unflinching in the portrayal of women’s bodies mobilized in protest, The Dissenters is a complex novel about womanhood, political resistance, and personal history.
ISABELLA ZHOU (December 23, 2024)
Seventeen Spoons
Desert Songs Trilogy
Esther Goldenberg
100 Block by Row House
Softcover $18.99 (432pp)
978-1-955905-83-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A favored son longs to be accepted by his resentful brothers in Seventeen Spoons, the moving second novel of Esther Goldenberg’s epic biblical trilogy.
Joseph, longed for for ages, receives special treatment from his parents, earning his brothers’ ire. They toil as shepherds; he studies with a scribe. Their days are long and hard; he enjoys frequent respite with the women, among whom he learns about Yah, their god. His brothers are laborers, and he a dreamer. His report of a dream in which his brothers bow to him seals his fate. Sold into Egypt to spare his life, he becomes “honored as a dreamer instead of ridiculed as one,” leading to his eventual rescue of the very siblings who once scorned him.
This novel finds new avenues for wonder in the biblical tale. Joseph’s tenderness centers it, and his relationships with women give it particular depth. He cares for Deenah through the ordeal of her slaughtered husband; he accepts his Egyptian wife’s fury when he circumcises their sons, and he doesn’t interfere when she seeks comfort with her maidservant.
God is a somewhat removed presence in this retelling, wherein Jacob’s nighttime wrestling is a more earthbound affair. But the text also extends radical awe to features like the coat of many colors:
From bottom to top, I had transformed into light of every color that blended together with everything. I was all of it, and all of it was me. We were one. The same. Bright and beautiful, dark and beautiful, everywhere and all.
Joseph’s extraordinary empathy and penchant for kindness see the story through to its redemptive end.
A tale of fraternal resentment and the workings of fate, Seventeen Spoons is a powerful novel about Joseph’s entrance into Egypt.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Runaway Blanket
Nancy Deas
Mike Deas, illustrator
Orca Book Publishers
Hardcover $10.95 (22pp)
978-1-4598-3788-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A little boy’s blanket makes a break for it in this runaway hit of a bedtime story. The boy is ready for bed, but his blanket isn’t; it jumps up, packs a pizza into a bag, and slips out a window into the night. But no one believes the boy. A squeaky garden gate alerts everyone to the escape, and they race after the fleeing fabric. The yellow blanket stands out against tranquil nighttime tones in the cozy watercolor illustrations.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 23, 2024)
Moral Treatment
Stephanie Carpenter
Central Michigan University Press
Softcover $19.95 (361pp)
979-899106460-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Stephanie Carpenter’s compelling novel Moral Treatment explores curative and troubling therapies in a Michigan psychiatric hospital alongside the institutionalization of a young patient.
In 1889, seventeen-year-old Amy is certified “insane,” requiring her psychiatric hospitalization. Her history of impulsive, self-harming behavior intensified following her mother’s suicide. Under the care of James, the supervising doctor at a public psychiatric facility, Amy receives the “moral treatment” of “pure food, adequate rest,” and “wholesome influences.” But Amy is resistant to her new environment. She feels abandoned by her family; she even steals a daguerreotype from James’s wife and pretends that the pictured man is her secret friend.
The alternating narrative flows with surety from Amy’s often agitated, claustrophobic perspective to James’s inner thoughts as he struggles to manage patient rounds and administrative duties. James is also perturbed by his ambitious younger colleague, Dr. Ingstrom, who aspires to treat certain mental disorders with surgical methods.
After befriending another patient, Letitia, Amy participates in a therapy program working with vegetable seedlings in the hospital’s large greenhouse. Spring’s arrival after a frozen Michigan winter is contrasted with Amy’s gradual improvement; as she thrives “like a plant,” her perspective broadens to show increasing resilience and concern for others. Meanwhile, combative Letitia, who bears the scars of an earlier operation to remove her ovaries, is transferred to a cage-like ward.
The book’s engrossing setting features box cameras, antimacassars, and the impassioned Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Further historical accuracy is conveyed by the generally unchallenged authority of the doctors to institutionalize, sterilize, and confine women while prescribing addictive doses of morphine.
With luminous complexity, the affecting novel Moral Treatment recounts an era of progressive advancements and clinical abominations in American mental health care.
MEG NOLA (December 23, 2024)
Kathy Young
