Book of the Day Roundup: June 26-30, 2023
Becoming Delilah
Sara Marchant
Fairlight Books
Softcover $15.95 (256pp)
978-1-914148-26-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Sara Marchant’s novel Becoming Delilah, a pragmatic woman flees the trauma of her old life to build a new one.
On a quiet, windswept island, beautiful Delilah, née Dolores, works to restore a cottage that was purchased for her by her married boyfriend and benefactor. She was orphaned by domestic violence and raised by a vengeful, fearful grandmother—pieces of a past story that’s related in chapters that alternate with present-set ones until both converge.
This is the story of a woman forever being perceived—perceived as beautiful by predatory men, perceived as pitiful by those who know about her awful origins. The narrative unpacks the ways in which such constant perception defines her life, wondering how, if at all, it can be overcome.
Delilah finds solace in manual work. When she moves into her cottage, she has plenty of it. Taught by her grandmother to be practical in every way, Delilah sands, paints, destroys, and replaces until a home is made. Then, she begins to work on her true passion, the garden. The novel focuses on the comfort of working with one’s hands and the capacity of such efforts to heal–or, at the very least, to lessen pain. With the island’s widowed sheriff, Delilah finds physical comfort and gardening guidance; with Anton, an exiled chef, Delilah finds other, more complex emotions.
The prose is like Delilah herself: not showy, but methodical and mesmerizing. The descriptions of her work operate with a quiet beauty that soothes. Delilah’s desire to always return to the work is thus infectious, but it breeds a haunting question: what happens when the work is finished?
Becoming Delilah is a meditative novel about trauma, healing, and what comes next.
SEB FLATAU (April 27, 2023)
Crooked Plow
Itamar Vieira Junior
Johnny Lorenz, translator
Verso Fiction
Softcover $288.00 (288pp)
978-1-83976-640-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Crooked Plow is a work of magical realism in which sisters fight to survive and improve conditions on the land they love.
As children in Brazil, Bibiana and Belonísia discover their grandmother’s knife, resulting in Belonísia cutting off her tongue and becoming mute. This accident deepens the sisters’ lifelong bond: Bibiana becomes Belonísia’s helper in communicating with others. Yet Belonísia’s injury does not lessen her strength, and she eventually helps her family obtain a kind of justice.
Despite the fact that the girls’ father is a respected healer with the ability to summon the spirits, his family is destitute. This reflects the nation’s legacy of Portuguese colonialism: Black residents in Água Negra are “tenant farmers,” forced to work for plantation owners without compensation and living in houses built of mud because they are forbidden to use bricks. At the same time, Bibiana and Belonísia feel inextricable ties to the land and their community. Bibiana marries a community activist who organizes the farmers to demand fairer working conditions. When these efforts lead to tragedy, Belonísia, aided by an encantada (sacred spirit), performs an act of redemptive violence for the wrongs done to her sister and her people.
Each of the novel’s three parts has a different narrator, including Bibiana, Belonísia, and an encantada. These respective narrators lead to rich interiority; the characterizations are deep, and the novel is layered in its rendering of events. The sometimes nonchronological narration goes back in time to reveal people’s secrets, building suspense as it moves toward its unsettling, fitting conclusion.
Crooked Plow is a powerful novel set among a Black Brazilian farming community living on the edge of existence, whose people are resilient against historical forces and the individuals who oppress them.
YELENA FURMAN (June 22, 2023)
Wild Poppies
Haya Saleh
Marcia Lynx Qualey, translator
Levine Querido
Hardcover $17.99 (176pp)
978-1-64614-201-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Syrian refugees fight to survive in Haya Saleh’s moving novel Wild Poppies, about how brotherhood endures wartime.
Omar is fifteen. His father was martyred in a bombing. Omar and his remaining family shelter at his aunt’s home. Left in charge as the eldest son, Omar waits in line for water rations at a refugee camp. His brother, Sufyan, is headstrong and evasive; his periodic disappearances raise questions. As deprivations mount, including food, medicine, and money shortages, Omar recalls his father’s hunting and Sufyan’s shooting prowess. He watches his brother slip away with strangers. Their mother warns them about lurking dangers, and news programs show that armed gangs are recruiting people.
After this tense opening, Sufyan recounts incidents from his perspective. The dual narration reveals each brother’s motivations: both believe that they’re acting for the good of their family. Both let misunderstandings strain their love. Sufyan does not realize how naïve he is; he believes himself to be adult. His involvement with religious men who promise to help him if he agrees to bring his friends to an education center signals his slow indoctrination. When it’s evident that the boys are being trained to fight against “infidels,” Sufyan plots his escape. A public execution and another bombing further heighten the brothers’ struggle to reunite.
This poignant novel is astute in showing how the brothers’ hardships steer them toward harm. Still, the boys are clear-eyed in detailing their experiences, and they learn to set their moral boundaries in time with their experiences. As they continue to experience losses because of the volatility around them, their family’s courage becomes a matter of necessity.
Set during the Syrian War, the striking novel Wild Poppies is about the persistence of a family’s bonds.
KAREN RIGBY (April 27, 2023)
An Astronomer in Love
Antoine Laurain
Louise Rogers Lalaurie, translator
Megan Jones, translator
Gallic Books
Hardcover $18.95 (288pp)
978-1-913547-46-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The fates of a girl who loves the stars, a real estate agent, an envoy for the king, and a taxidermist are plied by the goddess of love in Antoine Laurain’s scintillating, era-crossing romance novel An Astronomer in Love.
Venus does not often cross the sun—twice a lifetime, if you’re quite lucky. In 1760, Guillaume (an astronomer who almost became a priest) thus feels blessed by the opportunity to chart this rare passage and estimate, on behalf of the French Academy and at the request of the king, Venus’s distance from Earth. His voyage takes him across the Indian Ocean, where he faces down gales and confronts his deep loneliness head-on. He learns to fish, swim, and catalog shells. He begins his scientific tome. And when a storm prevents his first viewing opportunity, he learns to handle disappointment too, digging in for an eight-year wait—his last opportunity to fulfill his charge.
Two-and-a-half-hundred years later, a real estate agent, Xavier, is called upon to retrieve a locked box from an apartment that he recently sold. Inside, he finds Guillaume’s brass telescope, which he sets up on his balcony to bond with his son. But peering through it, he begins to hope for a second connection—with the woman across the way, who looks as lonesome as Xavier feels, and whose apartment houses a stuffed zebra.
True to form, Laurain’s latest love story is an unusual one, snagging attention with its sensuous references, historical knowledge, and taste for serendipity. There are pink pearls and iron rains; there are guns shot toward the sun. Its most bombastic events are forwarded with shrugging self-awareness, disarming disbelief; its tragedies are cutting, and its triumphs are irresistible.
Cinematic and enchanting, the romance novel An Astronomer in Love arranges piquant, connected matches for two couples who live hundreds of years apart.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (June 22, 2023)
Gay Poems for Red States
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
University Press of Kentucky
Softcover $19.95 (120pp)
978-0-8131-9812-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.’s poetry collection is a celebration of the awkwardness of growing up queer and poor.
These autobiographical, narrative poems focus on Carver’s coming-of-age in rural Kentucky. They track his religious anxieties, the area’s homophobia, and acts toward finding acceptance wherever he could, often from teachers. Some poems also depict Carver’s relationships with important people in his life, including his brother, his father, and the man who became his husband.
Although the content of the collection is often grim, it is treated with beauty and humor. “Cornmeal and Water Pancakes” is about a family too poor to afford pancake ingredients, whose mother decides to recreate the dish with the titular ingredients: “[Mother] loved the cornmeal and water / with her hands until / it agreed to stay together…. / [it] agreed against all laws of physics / to softly brown.” Rejoicing in the moment, the poem switches to a lyrical register with the unexpected redefinition of “love”; its tone becomes lighthearted as it addresses the impossibility of the dish.
The collection makes effective use of formal poetic devices, and its entries reward close reading. In “Creek,” a poem about living in a trailer, Carver writes, “hog bacon was the kind we killed ourselves. / I killed myself / to leave the holler / and bought pink store pork.” The repeated “killed” juxtaposition makes the second use surprising and dangerous. This emotion is compounded by the enjambment, which turns the phrase “I killed myself” claustrophobic compared to the long line that preceded it. By choosing store-bought pork, Carver is conforming to society, thereby “killing” his self-identity.
The poems collected in Gay Poems for Red States center a poor, queer Southern youth who’s struggling to survive; they seek moments of solace.
GEORGE HAJJAR (April 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
