Book of the Day Roundup: July 8-12, 2024
Summer Heat
Defne Suman
Betsy Göksel
Apollo
Hardcover $28.00 (432pp)
978-1-03-590233-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Intergenerational family secrets reemerge in Defne Suman’s devastating novel Summer Heat.
Melike is a Turkish art historian who agrees to guide Petro, a documentarian, through Byzantine churches. But intimacy with Petro challenges Melike’s resolution to cease her extramarital affairs. Bittersweet memories of her grandmother, Safinaz, and absent father, Orhan, resurface, forcing confrontations with inherited wounds.
In Summer Heat, warfare, politics, and cultural conflicts are inextricable from personal histories. Orhan’s political stances were dangerous; in childhood, Melike ended up displaced on a remote island, far from the warmth of Safinaz’s Istanbul hearth. That pain was amplified by her father’s later betrayal.
“Witchy” Safinaz’s past is also fractured by expulsions. Melike guesses that “Safinaz was a Greek girl who had somehow eluded the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923.” As she unfolds the mystery of Safinaz’s convoluted ancestry, its echoing intergenerational effects collapse cycles of historical retribution into family trauma.
Against its explorations of historical and personal violence and subsequent reconstructions of selfhood and nationhood, the novel emphasizes women’s storytelling. Its prose is nonjudgmental, giving Melike ample space to narrate her own discoveries. Her self-depiction is complex, intimate, and embodied in shifting washes of contradictory curiosity, rage, grief, and ecstasy. Petro, her parents, her grandparents, and other relatives challenge her, and the stories of other women are just as significant. For example, along with the centrality of Safinaz’s secrets, key confessions from Melike’s estranged mother, Gulbahar, alter perceptions and judgments. Empathy for the inner voices and buried desires of women is made paramount.
Piecing together a family’s fractured story within the context of history, Summer Heat is a moving novel.
ISABELLA ZHOU (June 10, 2024)
Rare Birds
L.B. Hazelthorn
Allegorie Press
Softcover $19.99 (344pp)
978-0-648-64730-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A woman learns about her frightening family connection to gods and demons in L. B. Hazelthorn’s novel Rare Birds.
Rom knows almost nothing about her grandfather, Jasper, save that he was obsessed with the supernatural—or “nonsense,” as Rom, an archaeology student, puts it. She isn’t thrilled to inherit the old man’s dog, Pixie. But strange events and an even stranger murder indicate that Pixie is not what she seems, leading Rom and her loved ones into an adventure that pits them against fearsome beings who sell dangerous magic for a most terrible price.
Rom and her beloved asexual roommate, Ditto, have little money but still demand a taste of the glittering world of the Roaring Twenties: drinking, parties, and modern music. Their ordinary lives are upended by the arrival of treacherous creatures that Jasper once made horrifying sacrifices to study. With help from others—including Rom’s insufferable but clever stepbrother Morgan—they begin an investigation. Along the way, they deal with uneasy alliances, feuding demons, and devilish bargains to combat forces that no human—not even one as curious and independent-minded as Rom—can hope to understand.
As the full scope of Jasper’s grand ambitions and subsequent misdeeds comes to light, Rom takes risks of her own with fatal consequences. She and her allies can only watch as betrayals and grudges raise the stakes of their quest. They each decide how far they are willing to go—and what they are willing to give up—for family. In the end, Rom is left stunned by the fantastical truth about all that the world contains…and by the depths of her own capacity for cruelty.
Rare Birds is a tense supernatural mystery in which a girl struggles to hold her morals steady as her world spins out of control.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (June 10, 2024)
The Coin
Yasmin Zaher
Catapult
Hardcover $27.00 (240pp)
978-1-64622-210-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Yasmin Zaher’s novel The Coin, an immigrant navigates a bizarre sociopolitical web of glamour, obsession, filth, and tragedy.
After both her parents are killed in a quotidian accident, a wealthy woman leaves Palestine and fitfully attempts to establish a life in New York City. She teaches English in a middle school for underprivileged boys, where she uses unconventional methods to help her students grapple with their intricate, ever-shifting social reality. Adrift in a new and abrasive environment, she attempts to maintain a façade of refined glamour and leave the violence and political turmoil of her childhood behind. Her only friend in the city is her Russian boyfriend Sasha, whose devotion stifles her. She struggles to find companions who understand her strict, distinctive lifestyle.
When her Burberry coat is stolen by an elegant vagrant, the heroine is sucked into an elaborate scheme reselling Birkin bags. Amid this turmoil, she becomes obsessed with cleanliness, going to extremes to remove all traces of filth from her body. As she attempts to hone her body and self-image into her version of perfection, she begins to converse with a coin that she swallowed on the day of her parents’ death. In the book’s triumphant final act, the narrator’s body and mind reach the far edges of displacement as her world implodes and her sense of self erodes into unruly chaos.
In lyrical and corrosive prose, this exquisite novel probes the space between the tragedy of statelessness and the neurotic glow of affluence, proving that in this overlap lies a rich and bewildering landscape of human behavior. Strange and luminous, it weaves an elegant tapestry from disparate threads, touching on class, fashion, lust, grief, and violence with wit and poise.
Funny, unnerving, and decadent, The Coin is at once an intimate character study and a startling portrait of contemporary America.
BELLA MOSES (June 10, 2024)
Goodnight Tokyo
Atsuhiro Yoshida
Haydn Trowel
Europa Editions
Softcover $18.00 (176pp)
979-888966027-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Atsuhiro Yoshida’s novel Goodnight Tokyo delves into the nighttime activities of a disparate group of Tokyoites.
For her latest assignment as a prop procurer for film sets, Mitsuki must secure loquats off-season. Enlisting Matsui’s late-night taxi services, she meets a once-a-year loquat thief, Kanako, who is otherwise on the night shift of a phone consultation service. From here, Goodnight Tokyo expands to cover the trio’s overlapping associates, a diverse ensemble cast in which everyone is searching for something.
Goodnight Tokyo balances mundane and unique details. Beyond the banality of jobs and vocations, characters reveal their idiosyncrasies and desires as they chase after particular items, lost loved ones, missing romantic connections, or livelihoods. For example, behind one of the recurring settings, a dilapidated, overlooked-in-the-daytime antique shop that’s open only at night, is Ibaragi, an eccentric incapable of staying awake beneath the noonday sun who has amassed a “house of curiosities” of renamed junk, based on the rationale that “Whenever something created for a specific purpose wore down … it was liberated from its human-imposed application. Only then was it set free.”
In its focus on the subtle and invisible intimacies among strangers in late-night Tokyo, the novel is restrained. It explores the private losses that motivate people’s seeking. When an aspiring actress, Eiko, recalls her grandmother’s last words (“‘How I wish I had a cola’“) and her mother’s brief rejoinder (“‘Was cola always such a dark color?’“) the economy of the language invests ordinary, repeating objects with poignancy and special emotion. Everyday materiality and detritus become anchors amid amorphous hidden but shared feelings.
A quiet slice-of-night-life novel, Goodnight Tokyo explores the hushed surprises and understated mysteries enmeshed in daily human connectivity.
ISABELLA ZHOU (June 10, 2024)
The Black Bird of Chernobyl
Ann McMan
Bywater Books
Softcover $19.95 (312pp)
978-1-61294-287-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Ann McMan’s romance novel The Black Bird of Chernobyl, a misanthropic mortician meets her match in her new bubbly community outreach colleague.
Lilah runs her family’s mortuary and prefers to stay in the morgue over interacting with other humans. This changes when her father hires Sparkle, an enthusiastic baker and social media manager, to help liven up the business. Sparkle accomplishes the goal of getting the community more involved in funerary practices while annoying Lilah at every encounter. But Lilah is not as immune to Sparkle’s charm as she tells herself.
When a social media post of Lilah looking extra menacing and gothic earns her the nickname Black Bird of Chernobyl along with internet fame, she is invited to give speeches, promote her ecological views on the death industry, and sell the family business. With Sparkle at her side, she navigates interviews and conventions, befuddled at the newfound attention but trying to use it for the best.
Highjinks at a morticians’ convention and mishaps at the funeral home result in comedy, and the other employees at the mortuary are in the book’s colorful backdrop. They include the cranky accountant, who’s in her seventies and keeps a hidden alcohol stash, and handyman brothers with X-rated nicknames. But when Lilah faces death in a more intimate way than ever before, losing someone close to her, it threatens her sense of self and her plans. As a lifelong adherent to the loner lifestyle who is proud of being prickly and detached, Lilah has to decide if the joy that Sparkle brings to her life—and her business—is worth keeping.
At times raunchy and exuberant, The Black Bird of Chernobyl is a playful romance novel that vivifies those who tend to the dead as their life’s work.
JEANA JORGENSEN (June 10, 2024)
Kathy Young
