Book of the Day Roundup: July 24-28, 2023
Love and Gravity
Always Human, #2
Ari North
Yellow Jacket
Softcover $14.99 (288pp)
978-1-4998-1278-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A young woman debates taking her dream job, though it would mean separating from her girlfriend, in the graphic novel Love and Gravity.
Sunati and Austen are students in a future, spacefaring, Earth-based society. They’re also falling in love with each other. Facing school difficulties caused in part by a condition that prevents body modifications, Austen considers changing her course of study, but she doesn’t want to feel like she’s giving up. Meanwhile, Sunati is confronted with a different choice: whether or not to accept an exciting job offer that would require a year-long stay on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Though these seem like insurmountable problems, there just may be solutions.
Though it takes place in striking settings featuring advanced technology (there are space elevators and deep-space colonization) the story is intimate—grounded in emotions, relationships, and life decisions. Sunati and Austen navigate universal questions about love, career, family, and happiness with wisdom.
The book’s cast is diverse; Austen’s parents have a boyfriend, and a variety of skin and hair colors are on display. Rendered in beautiful pastels, the art shows manga and anime influences, but with its own stylish storytelling tweaks. A “soft focus” appearance to the backgrounds gives the book a pleasing, dreamy quality, while the captions and word balloons, which are color-coded for each character, allow for easy narrative flow.
Love and Gravity is a sweet, futuristic graphic novel in which young women make hard, adult choices in their lives.
PETER DABBENE (June 27, 2023)
My Neglected Gods
Joanne Nelson
Vine Leaves Press
Softcover $14.99 (130pp)
978-3-98832016-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Joanne Nelson’s moving memoir-in-microessays treats her life story as mosaic, made up of glistening shards of memory and quotidian events.
These pieces of no more than a few pages delve into the defining experiences of Nelson’s life: her Catholic upbringing, callings to social work and meditation teaching, childrearing, and aging. Moving out of her home of thirty years prompted Nelson to look back at all that took place in it. As the generations turn, patterns repeat, and reminders of comforting normality sustain her through times of upheaval, including COVID-19.
Nelson’s family’s tendency toward addiction emerges in an understated way. Her mother’s dependency is exposed through a wry reference to “our other sibling, a bottle of Pabst.” Her late brother’s drinking precipitated his death. “Still Life,” which features a circular structure, describes this brother’s sordid lifestyle, “or non-life,” through revealing details from Nelson’s final visit to his house: “barefoot, shirt but no pants … Piled mail. The place hazy with cigarette smoke.”
From her earliest recollection (of being in her stroller) to pandemic precautions, the book alternates between tragic and comic modes and employs multiple techniques to vary its perspective. The rundown of three decades of Nelson’s house’s history intercuts official language from a home inspection form with routine and one-off happenings that defined her communal existence. One sentence discloses the ache of a pregnancy loss; pithy lists hint at amusing mistakes: “Made liver. Once.”
Elsewhere, rhetorical questions, imperative phrases, and direct address (as in “To an Old Dog”) modulate the pace. Though Nelson’s totems—in childhood, a monkey sock puppet and her grandmother’s purse—may have changed, her search for legacies, whether positive or harmful, and ordinary blessings is a connecting thread.
The poignant microessays collected in My Neglected Gods locate epiphanies in the everyday.
REBECCA FOSTER (June 27, 2023)
A Tale of One January
Albert Maltz
Alma Books
Softcover $12.00 (192pp)
978-0-7145-5062-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Albert Maltz’s novel A Tale of One January is about the desire for survival and human connection in the face of fear and death.
Originally published in Great Britain in 1967, the novel is set in Poland in 1945. In it, six people from different nations escape from Auschwitz and end up hiding together. Their group includes two women, Lini and Claire, and four men, Otto, Jurek, Andrej, and Norbert. They hide in a haystack to escape the last two death marches and then make their way through a wintry forest to reach a small town just beyond the Polish border. There, they settle in an abandoned factory. Burgeoning feelings and yearnings develop as they navigate their newfound freedom.
The characterizations are rich with psychological depth. People reveal their personal tragedies in conversation, intensifying the emotional pull of the novel as it progresses. Its pacing is deliberate, and its pivotal scenes resonate with emotion. When Jurek obtains a small mirror from a Polish farmer, the group’s fear and shock over seeing themselves for the first time since before they were imprisoned is palpable.
Evocative, accessible language dominates. When the group arrives in the factory, “the clear air was filled with odours that each of them could smell: the fetid blocks in which they had lived … their own bodies unwashed week after week.” Amid the pain and tragedy they face, there are surprising moments of lightness, and of laughter and sardonic gallows humor. Though there is a sense that the book’s end is predetermined, the group’s dreams for their futures emphasize their will to hope.
Maltz based A Tale of One January on interviews with a Jewish woman whom he met after the war; the novel’s revival is long overdue. It is a necessary addition to Holocaust literature.
MONICA CARTER (June 27, 2023)
A Walk between Raindrops
Amalie Jahn
Bermlord Publications
Hardcover $19.99 (326pp)
978-0-9910713-9-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Amalie Jahn’s heartfelt novel A Walk between Raindrops, estranged sisters attempt to mend their relationship while on a tour of American theme parks.
Elise and her younger, pretty, popular sister Wylla haven’t spoken to each other in six months. Still, they undertake a stomach-swirling, marathon rollercoaster ride together; the winners of this endurance test are to be awarded a road trip to ten additional amusement parks and the chance to win a season pass through a scavenger hunt involving tokens.
Thus the sisters take to the road, with stops in Cedar Point and Dollywood. They finally begin to talk. They travel with Dustin and Chloe, two college students; high schoolers Seamus and Mikal (who is gay); and Travis, a weathered, divorced math teacher who’s addicted to licorice. They form new alliances: Wylla sides with gorgeous, older Dustin, and Elise pairs up with geeky Seamus. But Dustin prefers Chloe, who is closer to his age, and Elise develops feelings for Seamus.
Much like the careening cars at the heart of the story, people’s emotions crest dizzying summits and plummet to lows. Indeed, the fresh and fun theme park settings add levity to a story as it also touches upon serious topics, including mental illness. A recent event left Elise with PTSD, for which she is supposed to be taking medication, but doesn’t. The slow reveal of this ordeal, and hints at the event that caused the rift between the sisters, propels the story forward. Further intrigue is added by the search for the tokens at each amusement park.
A Walk between Raindrops is a satisfying novel about sisters who overcome their strife, one rollercoaster ride at a time.
SUZANNE KAMATA (June 27, 2023)
Bagpipes Beasties and Bogles
Tim Archbold
Kelpies
Softcover $12.95 (32pp)
978-0-86315-911-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Splotches of color are sprayed across scratchy ink lines in this whimsical take on the origin and legacy of bagpipes. Charlie McCandlewick is a nightsweep, but not of the chimney variety; his quarry is the bogle creatures responsible for bumps in the night. With his trusty thistle cloth bag and heather root sweeping brush, Charlie gets to work gathering Gurdles and collecting Croakies before finding a new purpose for these bagged bogles.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
