Book of the Day Roundup: February 3-7, 2025
Heaven and Hell
The Trilogy about the Boy
Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Philip Roughton, translator
Biblioasis
Softcover $17.95 (215pp)
978-1-77196-651-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A kindred relationship is severed by a winter storm in Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novel Heaven and Hell, about grave losses and lucent beginnings.
In a place “built of cod bones,” Bárður and an orphaned boy are outliers among their tough Icelandic fishing crew. They find as much sustenance in books as they do in warm meals after long days at sea. But when Bárður, focused on memorizing lines of Paradise Lost before a predawn trip, forgets his waterproof gear, a blizzard claims his life. The boy is bereft. He sets out into the storm the same night to return the borrowed Milton to its owner. He has loose plans of joining his friend after.
The boy’s dangerous trek overland through the snow lands him in different circumstances than expected, though. In a parlor converted to a café by a peculiar heiress, he is offered comfort. Having lost so many in his life, he now has the opportunity for a true community—if he’s willing to leave Bárður behind.
The novel is lyrical in detailing hardscrabble life along polar sea shores, where everyone has lost someone, yet the fishing boats keep launching. Legions of the lost are pictured beneath the waters, “waiting for God to … fish them up with his net of stars.” The boy, a shy soul, all but loses his voice with his friend gone, admitting “I just don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I am. And I’m not entirely sure that I’ll be given time to figure it out.” Bibliophiles are few in his land, but their company is his best refuge.
A poetic soul sets out on a quest to honor his lost friend in the aching, trilogy-opening novel Heaven and Hell.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Marcel with a Splash
Julia Sørensen
Shelley Tanaka, translator
Groundwood Books
Hardcover $19.99 (48pp)
978-1-77306-983-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Inspired by Julia Sørensen’s experiences as the mother of a child with Down syndrome, this heartfelt picture book addresses the difficulties and celebrates the joys of raising children with special needs. Marcel’s parents are both “sad and happy” about his diagnosis, but Marcel doesn’t know any different; “he eats, he sleeps, he smiles” just like any other child. Meeting an adult with Down syndrome helps Marcel and his parents understand and embrace his differences.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 23, 2024)
Darkenbloom
Eva Menasse
Charlotte Collins, translator
Scribe US
Softcover $19.00 (480pp)
978-1-964992-04-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Eva Menasse’s historical novel Darkenbloom, the wartime secrets of a small Austrian town are compromised by the urgent demands of the present.
The book begins in 1989 in the Austrian village of Darkenbloom. Though it’s no longer dominated by counts, countesses, and the majestic presence of Darkenbloom Castle, the town is still a place of traditions, festivals, and “winding streets and whitewashed houses.” Modern buildings encroach upon the quaint landscape; the impending opening of the Austria-Hungary border and fall of the Berlin Wall are foreboding; and there is lingering anguish from World War II and the Soviet occupation that elder “Darkenbloomers” all remember but rarely discuss.
Darkenbloom’s complex residents include Rehberg, the town historian and travel agent; Resi, the tenacious hotel manager; and Antal, the enterprising grocer. Their personal histories intertwine with Darkenbloom’s legacy of violence, antisemitism, and exclusion. Beyond the town’s dirndl-clad maidens, lush vineyards, and postcard scenes lurk wartime gang rapes, murders, and acts of duplicity.
As investigative visitors and younger residents question Darkenbloom’s longstanding secrecy, the book conveys a sense of the brutalities and pressures endured by those who lived through World War II. Sterkowitz, the town’s caring physician, was assigned by the Nazis to replace an exploited Jewish doctor. Raped as a young woman, Resi forced herself to marry her assailant. And after local boys were conscripted into the Hitler Youth, the German occupation was followed by Russian soldiers rampaging “all over the region like swine.” Such disturbing events are tempered by rich, omniscient knowledge of the characters, whose quirky humor and humanity amid an impeccable backdrop of clandestine forests and “undulating, dappled” mountain views captivate.
Heralding the expansive disruptions of social change, the intricate novel Darkenbloom muses through an Austrian town’s troubled past.
MEG NOLA (December 23, 2024)
The Edge of the Silver Sea
Alex Mullarky
Kelpies
Softcover $9.99 (280pp)
978-1-78250-917-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Alex Mullarky’s novel The Edge of the Silver Sea, a city girl uprooted by her parents’ dreams tries to find her way home.
Upon Blair’s first glimpse of her new home, Roscoe, from the ferry, she is stunned by its terrain, which consumes as much of her attention as the people and creatures who inhabit it. Still, isolated by the island’s lack of cell service and frustrated by her parents’ lack of understanding, Blair makes a wish. And in Roscoe, wishes are dangerous: The fey realm clings to the island like mist. Ignoring her city instincts, Blair agrees to complete three tasks for the deer guardian Cailleach in return for her wish being granted.
Blair also explores lochs, rivers, bogs, and bays with Alasdair, a local boy who surveys the island’s deer each summer. Despite her putting him off at first with her passionate activism, their friendship grows. Alasdair’s knowledge of ecology and myths proves invaluable.
As Blair works on the tasks, she learns more about the island’s history, patching together family lore and folklore alike. Each piece reveals hidden facets of Roscoe’s residents, making her susceptible to the place’s magic. Alasdair’s parents and an elderly artist add to the cast that prompts Blair to reevaluate; she becomes conflicted about wanting to leave.
Ultimately, The Edge of the Silver Sea is an exploration of the power of place—a story about how a home is built amid a community. Against the beautiful Scottish landscape and its charismatic beasties (mythical and otherwise), Blair holds her own. The helplessness she feels at being cut off from her activist community manifests in frustrating fights with her parents, but her curiosity and love for the natural world peek through as she comes to terms with her new home.
AERIN TOSKAS (December 23, 2024)
The Edge of Water
Olufunke Grace Bankole
Tin House Books
Softcover $17.95 (272pp)
978-1-963108-05-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Shifting between Nigeria and the US, Olufunke Grace Bankole’s novel The Edge of Water is about the separation and reunion of mothers and daughters.
Esther details her experience of motherhood through letters to her daughter Amina, who immigrates to New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina. She gets there with Esther’s help, despite a prophecy from Iyanifa forbidding Amina from leaving Nigeria. Intercutting the women’s tales are the voices of Joseph, Esther’s first love, and American-born Laila, who yearns for her maternal predecessors in Nigeria.
In this confessional novel, relationships between women in Nigeria and the diaspora are portrayed with brutal honesty. With justified rage, Esther refuses to pardon her mother for facilitating her forced marriage to her rapist. Divorcing him and relocating herself and Amina to safety, Esther is a strong-willed, if acerbic, single mother. Nonetheless, Amina reveals the inadvertent hypocrisy with which Esther upholds oppression. She beats Oyin, Amina’s half-sister, after discovering her premarital sex and despairs over Amina’s inability to find a marriage partner.
Amina’s longing for America is juxtaposed to her contested perception of her motherland’s limitations. Oyin criticizes her entitlement, and Esther, though resenting her disregard for traditional maternal authority, admits, “This is a yoke you have shaken.” The geographical and emotional complexities of immigration magnify channels of interpersonal, technological, and mystical communication. Gossip ostracizes Esther but also brings news of Amina, whose messages home are scant. Phones fail during environmental disasters but also reconnect individuals from Nigeria. Laila latches onto her mother’s surviving personal artifacts; Iyanifa’s interposed prophesying on scattered shells reaches into past and future lives.
The Edge of Water is an aching novel about lost connections and misunderstandings in which Nigerian women attempt to reconcile with each other and their experiences.
ISABELLA ZHOU (December 23, 2024)
Kathy Young
