Book of the Day Roundup: February 6-10, 2023
Tell Her Everything
Mirza Waheed
Melville House
Hardcover $26.99 (240pp)
978-1-68589-043-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Mirza Waheed’s novel Tell Her Everything, a father prepares to tell his only daughter the truth about his life.
Kaiser hasn’t seen his daughter Sara since her mother died and he sent her to boarding school. Now that she is grown, he longs for the chance to share his life story with her. In his loneliness, he begins to rehearse what he might say. The tale he relates to imaginary Sara is filled with his love and devotion for her, but that may not be enough to overcome the many mistakes he made, or the distance that has come between them since.
In the safety of his own mind, Kaiser reviews his struggles as an immigrant, a husband, a father, and a doctor. He recalls the pain of losing his wife at a young age and the horrifying ethical dilemma that he spent years justifying to himself. Explaining things to the real Sara is another matter. As Kaiser goes over his life, he imagines how she might respond to his revelations. The further he gets into his story, the more anxiety he betrays about whether or not his beloved daughter can accept his past decisions, flawed as they were.
Kaiser’s mistakes are made all the more tragic by the good intentions behind them. As he tells it, he was an ordinary man caught up in unexpected, extraordinary circumstances, emphasizing the fact that anyone could have made the same decisions and been forced to live with the same regrets. Evil became mundane in his world while love grew distant, and yet he remains compassionate, thoughtful, and ready to engage with both his experiences and Sara’s.
Tell Her Everything is a novel about how the choices we make affect those we love in ways we could never imagine.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (December 27, 2022)
Double the Lies
An Annalee Spain Mystery
Patricia Raybon
Tyndale
Hardcover $26.99 (384pp)
978-1-4964-5842-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Patricia Raybon’s stirring mystery novel Double the Lies, a Black theologian-turned-private detective becomes embroiled in the murder of a white stunt pilot.
Annalee Spain left university teaching behind to become a private detective. It’s a dangerous job for a Black woman in Denver in the 1920s, given that the KKK runs the local police department, waiting for any chance to frame Annalee. When an overheard argument between a white couple leads to murder, Annalee winds up the top suspect, with the lives of everyone close to her threatened. Her past connections (including to an agent of the nascent FBI) lead Annalee to posh Estes Park, with its smuggling rings, dirty development deals, family grudges, and history of bigotry. Annalee has a few days to solve the murder and rescue her kidnapped boyfriend, a local pastor, before she lands in jail.
Double the Lies is the second series title, but those unfamiliar with the first volume will have no trouble following its engrossing plot, which is driven by its first-rate heroine—a feminist who calls on her intimate knowledge of Sherlock Holmes stories and the Bible to power through and make decisions. She’s surrounded by a diverse and surprising team of helpers and an array of suspects who ensure that the killer’s identity stays secret until the end.
The novel’s rich setting teems with speakeasies, run-down boarding houses, pawn shops, barnstorming airfields, and elite mountain lodges, bringing the Colorado of the 1920s to life. Social issues including racism and antisemitism loop through the story, and a touch of romance blends in to make room for future installments.
The fast-paced and powerful mystery novel Double the Lies follows its heroine through vivid settings and has an underlying theme of social injustice.
PAULA MARTINAC (December 27, 2022)
A Darker Wilderness
Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars
Erin Sharkey, editor
Milkweed Editions
Softcover $20.00 (312pp)
978-1-57131-390-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A Darker Wilderness is a remarkable collection of essays regarding generational experiences of the natural world.
These ten essays expand the boundaries of nature writing with emotive narratives from brown, Black, and queer perspectives. They are about what it is like to interact with plants, wildlife, and other people; they muse on the definitions of the natural landscape itself. Most are framed around photographs of people or objects, with one notable exception. Each touchstone’s significance is imparted, helping to bind the essays into the anthology’s thoughtful framework.
Some essays are tender and quiet; others are forceful calls to action; still others uncover natural magic in unsuspecting places. Each is creative and revelatory. Their writers relate family stories and consider how slavery, Jim Crow laws, redlining, USDA policies, and racism kept people from owning land and traveling safely in the rural US.
Naima Penniman’s eloquent, passionate contribution recalibrates fraught relationships with nature, claiming “the spiritual power and physical protection” of forests and agricultural lands while rejecting extractive, discriminatory, and unsustainable policies and practices. The stories of under recognized Black historical figures and artists appear, including those of writer Audre Lorde, Revolutionary War veteran Austin Dabney, polymath and inventor Benjamin Banneker, and Haitian healer, Vodou priest, and revolt leader Francois Mackandal; the ways that nature nourished their bodies and spirits, giving them freedoms denied by society, are covered.
Of note is Ronald C. Greer II’s incandescent “Magic Alley,” which describes a Detroit neighborhood that seemed populated by magical winos and “powder people” in childhood; as an adult, the same description of Greer’s natural world was a gut punch. Elsewhere, Katie Robinson explores how they transformed their paralyzing fear of aliens into a source of love and wonder with grace and immediacy.
A Darker Wilderness is an important, masterful collection of American nature writing.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (December 27, 2022)
By the Rivers of Babylon
Mary Glickman
Open Road Media
Hardcover $34.99 (360pp)
978-1-5040-7885-6
Buy: Amazon
A young couple inherits a house on a romantic Southern island in Mary Glickman’s stunning literary Southern Gothic novel turned murder mystery By the Rivers of Babylon.
Given its “mist over the marsh, trees that look to harbor ghosts from every limb, [and] the flight of blue herons rising like pterodactyls from the sweetgrass,” Joe and Abigail see their move to Sweetgrass Island as an exciting but temporary adventure. Bostonian Abigail aggrandizes Southern charm, and Joe has no choice but to follow his imperious, ego-driven, beautiful wife. With rose-colored glasses, Abigail falls in love with Southern culture. And Billy, a notorious local womanizer, falls in love with her. Their improbable yet inevitable affair precipitates a traumatic rift in the town, where long, interconnected community histories accelerate gossip and amplify hostilities.
Halfway through, the book shifts to an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery, replete with red herrings, double bluffs, and a sheriff among a gathering of suspects who reveals the true killer. It’s at first an odd, unpredictable transition, but the immersive atmosphere and established personalities pull the narrative forward, resulting in a delightful, satisfying tale of community and Southern hospitality.
Glickman is an expert in character portraiture. Glances, body language, colloquialisms, and rich backstories work together to construct the numerous individuals that make up the diverse cast. The narrative moves from one character’s psyche to the next with seamless ingenuity. Unlikely hero and everyman Joe befriends his entrancing neighbors, who teach him to forgive but not forget. Billy is not particularly handsome, intelligent, or funny, but his charisma and charm oozes from the pages alongside the romantic Southern setting, which is vivified in its own right.
By the Rivers of Babylon is an eloquent, passionate literary mystery novel set in a place that’s all “moonlight and magnolia.”
AIMEE JODOIN (December 27, 2022)
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf
Tara Ison
Ig Publishing
Softcover $17.95 (296pp)
978-1-63246-145-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A Parisian Jewish girl is sent into hiding in the piercing Holocaust novel At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf.
Danielle packed her past away to live as Marie-Jeanne, an orphan and a good Catholic girl. In a French hamlet, she goes to church and confession, suppressing dangerous memories of Friday night prayers. Doing so, she’s told, is essential to her survival.
But there are costs to living a lie, and there’s madness in forgetting. Marie-Jeanne parrots the concerns of those looking to “purify” France, but cannot decide what she’s meant to do with loose ends: the open Judaism of her new best friend, Genevieve. Dehumanizing propaganda against Jews and other marginalized groups. The incongruity of outsiders in town, prying for secrets, then sending people away. Is her “cousin,” Luc, a nationalist or a rebel? Are the camps on the border like hotels, or are people dying there? What does it mean to choose a side, particularly when one side hates the girl you were?
Beneath the bucolic scenes of Tara Ison’s novel are foreboding realities. Neighbors turn against neighbors; fascism creeps up; “good” people avert their eyes. Danielle, suspended between worlds, yearns for the safety of the prewar days, but makes concessions to mimic peace; each time she chooses blindness over alarm, her truths slip a bit further from her grasp. Willing to compromise friends, family, and her past for the illusion of safety, she flirts with nothingness. Even at the novel’s gripping end, the question of whether she will be able to rebuild remains.
Tragedies abound in the hidden life of a Jewish girl in the historical novel At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf—and questions about what moral compromises are the acceptable cost of survival.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 27, 2022)
Barbara Hodge
