Book of the Day Roundup: July 31-August 4, 2023
Disobedient
Elizabeth Fremantle
Pegasus Books
Hardcover $26.95 (368pp)
978-1-63936-415-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Elizabeth Fremantle’s historical novel Disobedient, an artist fights for freedom and restitution.
Rome is buzzing. The talent of young painter Artemisia Gentileschi defies all expectations. The quality of her work has already surpassed that of her father, renowned painter Orazio Gentileschi. But young women in seventeenth-century Italy are expected to become wives and mothers, not artists.
Headstrong and dedicated to her art, Artemisia perseveres. She rebels against her jealous, drunken father, who takes credit for her work. She turns down marriage proposals she is meant to accept.
In the hopes of securing himself a son-in-law, Orazio introduces Artemisia to fellow painter Agostino Tassi. When the two are left alone, Tassi rapes Artemisia to win a wager with a friend. To restore the Gentileschi family honor, Orazio presses charges against Tassi. But the outcome of the trial is far from certain. In a society where women are accused of causing the violence perpetrated against them and are forced to marry their rapists in the name of honor, the personal and artistic freedom Artemisia fought for all her life is at stake.
Based on real-life events, Disobedient is narrated from Artemisia’s perspective. One of the few women of her time to be given an opportunity to work as a painter, Artemisia is still considered one of the most important artists of the Baroque era. Because of her work and her victory in the trial against Tassi, she is also seen as one of the forebears of modern feminism. Still, some of the book’s attitudes toward religion and LGBTQ+ people, and Artemisia’s view of herself as a woman in society, seem anachronistic.
Though it is brisk, at times just skimming the surface of Artemisia’s inner life and art, the historical novel Disobedient honors the artist’s perseverance and fight for artistic freedom.
ERIKA HARLITZ KERN (June 27, 2023)
We Are Light
Gerda Blees
Michele Hutchison, translator
World Editions
Softcover $17.99 (240pp)
978-1-64286-127-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Gerda Blees’s novel We Are Light, a woman’s quiet, bizarre death exposes the tragic gap between ethics and legality.
The leader of the Sound & Love Commune, Melodie manipulates loyalty and obedience from her small group of followers. When she tells them they can survive on light rather than food, they listen, even as Melodie’s sister Elisabeth starves to death before their eyes.
The story of how all of this came to pass, and whether the law has the power to punish Melodie for her lies, comes together link by link, forming a grim, unbreakable chain that binds the commune together, even in death. It’s an unconventional story, told via the settings, objects, and feelings that played a role in it, as with the house where Elisabeth’s death occurred and the cello that Melodie once loved but could never make a career with. Some voices are focused and sure of themselves, while others lapse into stream-of-consciousness style, spilling their feelings with a freedom that they can’t manage in person.
The story itself chimes in at one point to confirm what has become more obvious: it will end with no surprises, no shocking revelations or happy-ever-afters. And yet it remains as hypnotizing as ever, exploring every nook and cranny of the cult members’ damaged psyches.
Even once the critical events are laid out, questions remain about who is guilty, what guilt is, and which actions merit punishment. There are no easy answers, or even easy questions. In the end, all that remains is the eerie, discomfiting realization that common notions of justice, culpability, and innocence are more fragile than they seem to be.
We Are Light is a haunting novel in which obsession, mental illness, and deferred dreams lead to complex, compounding tragedies.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (June 27, 2023)
The Museum of Human History
Rebekah Bergman
Tin House
Softcover $17.95 (300pp)
978-1-953534-91-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
An ensemble cast—their personalities aching, flawed, and vibrant—intersects across time in Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History, a startling novel about memory, desire, and learning to age with grace.
Off the coast of Marks Island, a mysterious red algae blooms. Crystallized, it becomes a ruby rock that the ancient residents of the island treasured and feared. Manipulated, it becomes a powerful drug that can be used to control the aging process—or to subdue native populations. Those in the know are aware of, or suspect, its connection to a substance found in a troubled nation across the sea. But some in the know don’t care about the algae’s bloody history: power, they accept, comes at a cost.
Near Marks Island, those impacted by the algae include a brilliant, beautiful scientist who just wants to feel normal. An entomologist who hopes that his love is contagious. A museum curator who has never felt equal to his ancestors. A list-making woman facing a fatal diagnosis and the dismayed photographer husband at her side. A genocide survivor turned performance artist. Pharmaceutical company villains. Two people in a May-December romance, and an ever-sleeping twin.
Individually, these islanders face impossible choices and unprecedented challenges—disappearing memories; compound losses; shifting internal landscapes. They don’t always make the right choices, and they don’t always recognize how their choices tumble into other people’s lives. As the implications of their blind spots bloom, they become, by turns, bold, mournful, besotted, ambitious, neglectful, passionate, and angry. At all times, they are a hope- and wariness-inducing bunch whose stories have lessons to teach, even when their best-laid plans risk being subsumed by the sea.
A cautionary tale about reckoning with the present, future, and the past, The Museum of Human History is a winsome allegorical novel.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (June 27, 2023)
The Little Green Envelope
Gillian Sze
Claudine Crangle, illustrator
Groundwood
Hardcover $19.99 (32pp)
978-1-77306-681-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Olive longs to visit her friend who recently moved away; a little green envelope, languishing in a desk drawer, also longs to travel like other envelopes, but it has never been quite the right fit. When Olive’s grandfather suggests she write her friend a letter, the little green envelope hopes this is finally its chance to see the world—and to bring joy. Colorful paper cutouts are layered in collage illustrations that complete this love letter to the written word.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 27, 2023)
What Falls Away
Karin Anderson
Torrey House Press
Softcover $18.95 (320pp)
978-1-948814-79-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A disowned daughter returns to her Mormon home to care for her ailing mother in Karin Anderson’s novel What Falls Away.
Cassandra, the only daughter in a family of boys, was raised in a strict religious household. But she hasn’t been back to Utah in forty years. When she was seventeen and pregnant, the community she was raised in cast her out. But now, her oldest brother has beckoned her back. Her help is needed to care for their mother, who has dementia. She’ll have to navigate tense family and community relations again.
On returning to Utah, Cassandra also reunites with the desert landscape that has long been a muse in her successful art career. The kinship she feels to the barren mountains is striking, used in juxtaposition to ideas about her family’s isolation and complex dynamics.
Then Cassandra meets Matthew, an adopted journalist who resembles the father of the child she was forced to give up. Matthew used a DNA test to trace his origins to the region, and his presence ignites hopeful fear in Cassandra, whose memories abound.
Contrasts fuel the sharp, poetic prose, which moves between short sentences and long, vibrant depictions of the Utah scenery. It is emotive, too, matching Cassandra’s experiences. Often, she feels like a heroine who is unknown to herself. Told via alternating timelines, her story commands attention. She recounts the events that led to her eventual departure from Utah, even as Matthew searches for his story. He discovers that he is one of many stray children of a bishop in the community. Themes of patriarchal standards dominate the book.
In the novel What Falls Away, a woman returns to her childhood home and reflects on identity, family, lineage, and healing.
LEAH WEBSTER (June 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
