Book of the Day Roundup: January 27-31, 2025
Jella Lepman and Her Library of Dreams
The Woman Who Rescued a Generation of Children and Founded the World’s Largest Children’s Library
Katherine Paterson
Sally Deng, illustrator
Chronicle Books
Hardcover $21.99 (112pp)
978-1-4521-8262-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A beautiful love letter to the power of reading, Katherine Paterson’s biography of Jella Lepman covers how she built a massive literary collection for the children of post–World War II Germany.
Lepman endured the death of her World War I veteran husband and a period of poverty before finding work in journalism. A young widow with two teenage children, Lepman fled Nazi Germany shortly after losing her job when the newspaper where she worked was taken over by Adolf Hitler’s party. It was at the suggestion of the US military that she returned on a mission to help make the next generation of Germany better. In her words, “The most important thing is to give the children of Germany a chance.” To do that, she collected and translated the kinds of quality children’s books that the Nazis had banned for more than a decade. The library started as a traveling collection that visited major cities while Lepman tried to convert it into a permanent place for children.
The colorful illustrations include both realistic drawings of Lepman at work and whimsical depictions of the kinds of stories the library helped children access. Photographs—including of children enjoying the library and of Lepman both in her library-building role and after her retirement—sometimes appear alongside the artwork to complement the tale.
Told with beautiful illustrations and prose, Jella Lepman is an uplifting true story about the power of art. Its central messages of using literature to build bridges and of libraries as a place of safety and learning are as relevant as ever. The book delivers them in engaging prose that lays out how challenging Lepman’s mission was and how her force of personality and clever problem-solving helped to achieve her goals.
JEFF FLEISCHER (December 23, 2024)
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine
Deni Ellis Béchard
Milkweed Editions
Softcover $20.00 (424pp)
978-1-57131-148-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
An unflappable AI takes control of the future for humanity’s own good in Deni Ellis Béchard’s extraordinary speculative novel We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine.
Billions wake alone in rooms emanating blue light—spaces designed by an AI convinced that only seclusion is safe. Among them are six interconnected people: Ava, Michael, and Lux, who had hands in designing the virtual worlds that people now roam and bend to their desires; their daughter, Jae, and her child, Jonah, the latter of whom is raised by the machine; and Simon, whose desire robbed Jae of earthly opportunities. Encouraged by the machine, each navigates the possibilities of “this perfect future that is somehow brilliantly continuous with the awful past.”
For Ava, centuries within the machine make space for a new kind of art. For Michael and Jonah, the machine is a trap: “the novelty of its peaceful days and hedonistic worlds won’t hold” them. For Jae, there are tragic visions of flourishing at last. And Simon, who was rescued by no one in the old world, seeks variations of reconciliation in the new.
Exquisitely imagined, this visionary novel troubles through ontological questions about safety, love, and freedom with prescience and depth. Asked “Who will we be … if we stop caring about what’s real?,” the machine responds “You will be happier. What was ever truly real[?]” It’s a question with few easy answers for those who survived the ravages of climate change, the collapse of a nation, unimaginable violence, and the dissolution of dreams. Having once persisted by learning to “be harmless but essential,” they now wander rich vistas within an ever-expanding Dyson sphere, seeking forgiveness when there’s no one left to ask.
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine is a magnificent, reality-bending speculative novel about infinite struggles to make meaning in utter solitude.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Knock at the Sky
Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible
Liz Charlotte Grant
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Softcover $26.99 (272pp)
978-0-8028-8375-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Incorporating a wide range of references to art, science, and religious history, Knock at the Sky is Liz Charlotte Grant’s beautiful, daring, sweeping interpretation of Genesis.
In this mesmerizing discussion of the biblical book, Grant explores connections between vastly different subjects, from Michelangelo to M.C. Escher, and questions assumptions about the inerrancy of scripture: “When we invite paradox, curiosity, and empathy to shape us, this … act of wondering, opens us to mystery.” Astute and searching, Grant discloses that her favorite patriarch is Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, who wrestled with an angel or God.
Each chapter opens with an enigmatic Bible verse and a haunting montage of images. Grant cites a startling variety of stories and sources to illuminate key themes in Genesis. She compares the stirring, inscrutable song of humpback whales to the mystery of God in the creation story. She describes how the Bible resembles a fossil, “made of and by the humans who came before.” She admires the curiosity of astronomer Vera Rubin and compares the dark matter Rubin discovered to the “invisible stuff” of God’s presence. She suggests that John Cage’s perplexing music, which emphasizes listening and silence, is analogous to Abraham’s attention to God’s voice from the clouds. She explores the parallels between Hagar, the enslaved woman who bore Abraham a child, with the outsider fiber artist Judith Scott. She also addresses Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham’s call to sacrifice Issac, and other stories with insights that are evocative and surprising.
Knock at the Sky is an imaginative, inspiring exploration of Genesis. Defying conventional interpretations and searching for deeper links between ideas, Grant shifts from one revelation to the next in a seamless fashion, her prose precise, poetic, and inventive.
KRISTEN RABE (December 23, 2024)
Our Winter Monster
Dennis Mahoney
Hell’s Hundred
Hardcover $26.95 (304pp)
978-1-64129-633-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A couple experiences the futility and horror of trying to outrun their problems in Dennis Mahoney’s horror novel Our Winter Monster.
Holly and Brian rumble toward a ski resort to salvage their scattered partnership. A blizzard is on their tail. Their car loses control on the snowy highway, separating them short of their destination.
The encroaching storm accentuates a score of hazy carnage throughout Pinebuck, New York. Another couple walking in the woods is confronted by the swirling terror of what appears to be an ice monster; a local who believes the phenomenon is a bear finds out the hard way that the truth isn’t quite as simple. The recent disappearance of a couple vacationing in Pinebuck looms. The town’s sheriff, Kendra, tries to piece together the gory facts of a new batch of tragedies.
The novel is slathered in introspection, its surface story haunted by a mysterious event in Holly and Brian’s recent past. A series of flashbacks highlight a catalyst in the trajectory of their relationship, dubbed “the Bad Date.” The coalescence of the blurred snow-demon appears illusory: its presence is noted during moments of crisis and high emotion, as though it is somehow metaphorical, leading to additional eeriness. Holly, Brian, and Kendra are each haunted by traumatic memories that follow them like shadows and propel the claustrophobic action. Horrific scenes of blood-strewn havoc are eased by plaintive scenes of clarity wherein the balance between being in control, forgetting yourself, and the unstoppable burden of change is cast in flurrying light.
With a broken relationship as its psychological bedrock, the horror novel Our Winter Monster is like a nightmare couple’s therapy session you can’t help but spy on.
RYAN PRADO (December 23, 2024)
Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto
Gianni Rodari
Roman Muradov, illustrator
Antony Shugaar, translator
Unruly
Hardcover $29.95 (168pp)
978-1-59270-415-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Gianni Rodari’s madcap allegorical fairy tale Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto, an Italian nonagenarian’s villa is besieged by unwelcome guests.
Baron Lamberto is plagued by twenty-four sicknesses, including arteriosclerosis and Zellweger syndrome; his butler tracks his health. He’s also blessed with twenty-four banks. His life is strange and takes zany, hairpin turns: on the advice of an Egyptian fakir, six strangers chant his name in an attic day and night without knowing why; some question the rationale behind their job (though most appreciate that it pays them well). These attic-dwellers form a chorus throughout the tale. Its suspense increases when the baron’s bankrupt nephew stirs trouble in his life, and then when bandits who all bear the Lamberto surname descend on his home and demand a ransom.
Those against the baron reflect villainy of a hodgepodge nature: there are murder attempts, submachine guns, and an island occupation, but the bandits fail to do much real harm. Allusions to fascism run beneath their hapless bid for control, even as the events in the villa pique the curiosity of those in the nearest town. Still, the baron is unflappable, undermining the bandits’ ability to inspire real fear. His multilingual prowess and the bankers’ stodgy refusals to heed their ransom requests are among the efforts to thwart them.
Cartoon illustrations complement the text, sending up the villa’s eccentric residents, who are earnest about getting information, secrets, or prosperity, with skill. And the ebullient prose savors fun, sometimes specialized diction coupled with situational humor. Subtle gestures to a put-upon ferryman who is tasked with procuring bizarre goods contribute to the book’s whimsical weirdness.
In the illustrated novel Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto, a man’s improbable restoration is moved along by the imaginative hijinks of his visitors.
KAREN RIGBY (December 23, 2024)
Kathy Young