Book of the Day Roundup: June 24-28, 2024
Patterns, Patterns Everywhere
Kellie Menendez
The Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $19.95 (40pp)
978-1-68555-660-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A new perspective is just one delight to be gained from this stunning picture book about the patterns—accidental and otherwise—that can be found all around us. Colorful watercolor illustrations include everything from Gustav Klimt paintings to constellations to coral reefs. A checkerboard tablecloth laid with striped napkins and bees humming around a textured log are just two of the examples in the delicate, detailed illustrations, and children are encouraged to go out and find their own examples too.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 25, 2024)
Forgotten on Sunday
Valérie Perrin
Hildegarde Serle
Europa Editions
Hardcover $28.00 (304pp)
979-888966018-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A determined, empathetic woman works to preserve the stories that others dismiss in Valérie Perrin’s scintillating novel Forgotten on Sunday.
Orphaned as a toddler and raised by her grandparents, Justine could be cynical at twenty-one. Instead, she sees possibilities all around her—including in the stories of lonely retirees. Currently, she’s recording Hélène’s only outwardly ordinary story about the war, first love, and motherhood. “I’m always being told that when an old person dies a library burns to the ground,” Justine says. “I’m saving a little of the ashes.”
There’s fire at the novel’s core, and magic lurking beneath its bones. Herein, birds follow people throughout their lives, like omens, familiars, or protectors; women hide their gifts to protect their handsome husbands’ egos; and there’s power in not knowing your lover’s name. More enduring than the story’s Nazis are the barkeeps who defy them; more compassionate than the retirees’ missing family members is the mysterious caller whose lies lure them to visit. Even Justine’s story holds horrifying and expansive secrets: about her brother, Jules’s, parentage; behind the silences in her home.
Perrin’s signature gift of transmuting quotidian circumstances into transcendent truths is everywhere apparent. Hélène, afflicted with dyslexia, licks words on a blackboard expecting to be poisoned; she finds her true salvation through Lucien, who teaches her Braille, opening the universe to her. Herein, betrayals are deeper, love more lasting, and vengeance more vicious than those who eschew Sunday visits imagine. And such passion, Justine reveals, is visible to all who are curious enough to truly look.
A wise woman acts on the belief that telling one life story can illuminate the world in the tender, heartbreaking, and delight-filled novel Forgotten on Sunday.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (April 25, 2024)
Behind the White House Curtain
A Senior Journalist’s Story of Covering the President—and Why It Matters
Steven L Herman
The Kent State University Press
Hardcover $29.99 (248pp)
978-1-60635-477-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
As the senior White House correspondent for the nonpartisan Voice of America news network, Steven L Herman had the difficult assignment of covering the Donald Trump administration while it routinely attacked VOA for its commitment to the news. He shares those experiences, and covers his career more generally, in his engaging memoir Behind the White House Curtain.
First, Herman takes readers through what it’s like to work as a White House correspondent, sharing behind-the-scenes details about logistics and daily experiences. He explains how pool duty works, what it’s like to fly on Air Force One, and the technology that correspondents use to file stories while covering presidential visits abroad.
Herman then shifts into his own story, sharing experiences from throughout his journalism career. He describes starting his work while still a teenager in Las Vegas, covering the Nevada nuclear test site in the 1970s. He discusses the challenge of reporting on the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. These on-the-ground anecdotes highlight the importance of reporters giving the public verified information.
The book’s final section returns to more recent events, including detailing the specific challenges of covering Donald Trump’s administration. That includes the administration’s complaints about VOA’s nonpartisan and independent nature—and its attempts in 2020 to turn the network into a propaganda outlet for the administration itself by attacking and replacing its leadership. Herman explains the difficulty of reporting under such conditions. This work concludes with a consideration of the risks to the country represented by the politicization of information.
At a time when serious journalism must compete with partisan outlets, social media rife with misinformation, and bad actors who treat truth as an opponent, Behind the White House Curtain is a potent reminder of the importance of journalists taking the work seriously and trying to inform the public.
JEFF FLEISCHER (April 25, 2024)
Love in the Time of Self-Publishing
How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success
Christine M. Larson
Princeton University Press
Hardcover $29.95 (280pp)
978-0-691-21740-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Christine M. Larson’s Love in the Time of Self-Publishing uses the romance writing realm as a case study for how informal labor networks and mutual aid improve conditions for isolated workers.
Guided by a survey of thousands of romance writers, eighty interviews, archival research, and romance events, this book chronicles the rise and fall of the Romance Writers of America (RWA). Founded in 1980 when romance authors needed a support network, RWA was a space wherein they could share information and advocate for one another with publishers. They established an “open-elite” network: prospective romance writers could connect with published veterans, and the support went both ways.
This book blends the narratives of several romance authors and editors to tell the story of the RWA. It is mostly chronological and makes use of different anecdotes to open each chapter. These are the focal point for the book’s analyses of topics including the ethics of care, issues of marginalization, and self-publishing and ebooks.
The birth of the RWA is described by its founding members, and its eventual collapse by those who were forced out. Larson shows that the factors that brought about the RWA’s success were also the seeds of its downfall. Her book functions as both an exemplar and a cautionary tale for informal labor networks, extrapolating a paradoxical lesson for other isolated workers to consider within their fields. Potential futures for the RWA are also outlined—informed by Larson’s extensive analysis.
An insightful work of literary criticism, Love in the Time of Self-Publishing shows how an informal labor network of romance writers impacted the greater literary and publishing world.
JULIA DILLMAN (April 25, 2024)
The Eyes Are the Best Part
Monika Kim
Erewhon Books
Hardcover $27.00 (288pp)
978-1-64566-123-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Monika Kim’s bold, brutal novel The Eyes Are the Best Part sears with feminine rage and unflinching body horror.
Ji-won is not the perfect first-generation American daughter. She is friendless, average in academics, and lacks the intuitive emotional intelligence of her little sister, Ji-hyun, a quality that their mother claims makes the youngest more Korean. Reeling from the abrupt departure of Ji-won’s father, the women teeter on financial and emotional ruin. In an attempt to cheer up her mother, Ji-won eats a fish eye for the first time—a symbol of good luck. But it awakens an unnatural appetite within her, fueling her mental unraveling. She is left with one obsession: bright blue eyeballs.
Though her coping methods are gruesome, Ji-won has reasons to be angry. Her mother’s new boyfriend is a piggish white man who crashes into their lives with a fetishistic desire for Asian women. Her grades at college are slipping. The possessiveness of her pseudofeminist classmate becomes menacing. Again and again, misogyny and racism pursue her. And all this rage needs somewhere to land.
The world’s assumption that Ji-won is docile makes for good cover as she gives in to her violent impulses, directing them at men in her family and outside of it. In a moment of self-aware disgust, she asks, “Is this what it takes to make our fathers return to us?” Not all of the twists are shocking, but the intensity of Ji-won’s perspective carries the story to satisfying ends, cutting to her red-hot center and daring voyeurs to look away.
The novel The Eyes Are the Best Part bites a chunk out of the horrors of being young and marginalized, licking its lips all the while.
LUKE SUTHERLAND (June 10, 2024)
Kathy Young
