Book of the Day Roundup: June 5-9, 2023
Daddy Boy
Emerson Whitney
McSweeney’s
Hardcover $26.00 (184pp)
978-1-952119-52-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In nuanced, swirling prose, Emerson Whitney’s gutsy memoir Daddy Boy takes a complex route through kink, trans identity, and storm chasing to locate their past, present, and future selves.
Switching between Whitney’s often-displaced childhood, early adulthood as the submissive partner to a professional dominatrix, and a breakup that led to a two-week storm-chasing road trip in a van full of strangers, the book treats figures and landscapes as swift, elegant turning points. Passing back and forth across state lines, the van chases down promising storms that dissipate one after another.
The book’s passages brim with images of bruised clouds and a familiar sense of seeking and not finding. The boundaries between the landscape and Whitney’s emotion blur, becoming an impressionistic collage. And while witnessing beauty, Whitney hot wires their experiences to intellectual inquiry, discussing art and academic texts. The connections between masculinity and mastery are considered in depth, along with the freedom from responsibility that’s offered by a submissive’s role.
The story zigzags between times and places; juxtapositions of scenes from Whitney’s childhood and young adulthood pile up and accumulate meaning. Meanwhile, Whitney engages in the shadow work of reconciling the gruff certainty of youth with the wiser uncertainty of maturity—wondering, after a flood of devastating childhood memories, “Does everyone’s childhood wash them like this?” Quick shifts into moment-by-moment scenes slow the story down, as do a number of single-line paragraphs followed by white space to encourage a pause. Great depths are plumbed; memories and explorations of how the “belonging and disbelonging” that Whitney first experienced as a child dissipate and reform thanks to decades of experiences.
Filled with incisive cultural analyses, Daddy Boy is a powerful, vulnerable memoir about deep self-discovery.
MICHELE SHARPE (April 27, 2023)
And Then He Sang a Lullaby
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu
Grove Atlantic
Hardcover $27.00 (304pp)
978-0-8021-6075-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu’s novel And Then He Sang a Lullaby interrogates love, secrecy, and a revolution in Nigeria.
August’s mother died in childbirth; he blames himself. His father is distant and inconsolable, and his sisters push him in school so he can pass down his family name. All pressures considered, August is afraid to accept that he is gay. That fear dominates his encounters with other men. Although he has friends who make him question himself (including June, whom he kisses), August rejects them due to internalized shame. His Catholic background and the tumultuous political environment contribute to his uncertainty and fear.
At August’s opposite is Segun, who sustains physical bullying due to his outward flamboyance. Segun is loud and proud about his identity. His mother is an activist, and he follows her example with gusto. But he has his own troubled history: his ex, Tanko, was avoidant of their relationship, and was later beaten and distanced himself from Segun. Like Tanko, August has trouble asserting himself and defending others. He is a track runner, and some of his friends make fun of boys like Segun.
Segun and August fight over their different approaches to life, even as they form a heartwarming, supportive bond. Their community is fraught with violence and political and sexual intrigue. The novel shifts between their perspectives, revealing how religion, self-repression, colonialism, tradition and nonconventional relationships impact them both. August is pulled between his desire to be a good son, his pining for other men, and his fears of persecution and alienation; this leads to heart-wrenching scenes revealing longing, hesitance, and internalized shame.
In the novel And Then He Sang a Lullaby, a man learns to love and accept himself despite dire circumstances and violent intolerance.
ALEENA ORTIZ (April 27, 2023)
The Memory of Animals
Claire Fuller
Tin House
Hardcover $27.95 (288pp)
978-1-953534-87-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A woman once undone by empathy now finds that it could be her salvation in Claire Fuller’s stunning postapocalyptic novel The Memory of Animals.
In her childhood, Neffy split her time between her father’s Greek island and her mother’s United Kingdom haunts. She met an octopus while snorkeling in the Aegean Sea; it sparked her love of cephalopods and led her to pursue a degree in marine biology. But aquariums are not safe spaces for those who identify too much with restricted beings.
When a pandemic strikes, bringing with it chaos, it finds Neffy with a debt to pay. Multiple, if you ask her. Desperate and in mourning, she signs on for a vaccine trial with a high promised payout.
Neffy’s luck is short: society blinks out just after she takes the virus in. The hospital staff disappears. Neffy languishes for days. When she wakes, it’s to the realization that only a few fellow volunteers remain around her, and their desperation has grown. With their food running out and no news of the world beyond the hospital doors, they hatch a plan for their survival, with possibly immune Neffy tapped to lead their way.
Eerie in its coverage of empty streets and flashes of violence, the novel moves through the immediate challenges in the aftermath of a disaster, though also pausing to let Neffy entertain memories of before: of words she wished she’d said to those she loved; of salt water summers and the comfort of family. Still, though the hospital’s power and water remain on—for now—the sense of urgency is real. Neffy is forced to consider how her world will continue, and who she wants to continue it with.
Sobering and evocative, The Memory of Animals is a novel about who we choose to be when the lights go out.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (April 27, 2023)
Finding Endurance
Shackleton, My Father and a World without End
Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Jonathan Ball Publishers
Softcover $19.95 (272pp)
978-1-915563-02-6
Buy: Amazon
Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, the loss and resurgence of his ship, and memories of growing up in South Africa inform Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s entrancing literary memoir Finding Endurance, about the romantic spirit of adventure and inspiring, myth-making stories.
In 2022, Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance—which sank in the Weddell Sea, though its crew survived—was rediscovered. Bristow-Bovey was buoyed by this news in the wake of COVID-19. His vigorous account of the 1915 voyage (by some reckonings, a “failure” because its goal of a trans-Antarctic crossing was never fulfilled) mixes with memories of his father, whose tale about meeting Shackleton (an impossibility) spurred his boyhood imaginings. Complemented by beautiful elements of nature writing, biography, and the heroics of polar exploration, this book is a tender tribute to family.
Bristow-Bovey is meticulous in recreating Shackleton’s voyage, which has since been hailed as a model of wise leadership through grueling crises. His text dwells on infinite potentials—in charting landscapes, with the sea between ice floes likened to kintsugi; and of life. Narrative suspense divvies up the stages of the Endurance‘s fate: as Shackleton and his crew realize that they’re unable to rescue their ship and must winter on the ice, so, too, does Bristow-Bovey experience loss.
The book’s coverage of Edwardian figures, including Shackleton competitors Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, leads to musings on optimism—highlighted as the quality that set Shackleton apart. It uses to crew diaries to draw ever-widening inferences about interpersonal needs and the methods by which Shackleton’s men staved off despair.
With elegiac considerations of subjects including time, hope, and ice, Finding Endurance is a grace-filled memoir about a father and a resilient Antarctic legend.
KAREN RIGBY (April 27, 2023)
Not Anywhere, Just Not
Ken Sparling
Coach House
Hardcover $17.95 (176pp)
978-1-55245-464-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Ken Sparling’s meditative, quizzical novel Not Anywhere, Just Not, a woman searches for meaning after her husband’s mysterious disappearance.
An aging couple leads a quiet life, referring to themselves as “the boy and the girl.” Then the boy disappears without a word or explanation. In their world, others have disappeared too: some never return; others return years or decades later, with no recollection of where they’ve been.
Left alone, the girl contemplates the boy’s absence and her identity without him. Because the boy always did the shopping and cooking, she’s frightened to go to the grocery store, but forces herself to buy cat food and toilet paper. As the months pass, she spends her days tending to the cat, watching the birds and garbage men come and go, and reading the stacks of journals the boy left behind. The latter are full of stories about Dick and “the little girl he hasn’t seen since he was ten.” Sometimes she looks for the “new god” who lives on Sunnydale Boulevard.
In this cerebral novel, the girl’s life is insular; there is no mention of friends, family, or a career. The narrative mulls over her memories and her isolation: she is falling “like a waterfall with no river below it” and feels “the jagged edge of his shrinking away from her like a knife blade gently scoring her skin.” At times, she wonders if she has disappeared into an alternate universe. The descriptions of loss and grief are lyrical and inventive. Still, some may wish that this girl who has “a closet full of colourful outfits waiting” would snap out of her reverie and act.
Not Anywhere, Just Not is a rhythmic, brooding novel in which a woman whose life was intertwined with her husband’s searches for an identity after his loss.
KRISTEN RABE (April 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
