Book of the Day Roundup: March 17-21, 2025
33 Place Brugmann
Alice Austen
Grove Press
Hardcover $28.00 (368pp)
978-0-8021-6408-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Alice Austen’s engrossing historical novel 33 Place Brugmann, World War II disrupts a close-knit group living in a Brussels apartment building.
In August of 1939, the residents of 33 Place Brugmann are aware of Adolf Hitler’s encroaching domination. For Leo and Sophia and their children, the threat is deadly; faced with the prospect of concentration camps and potential extermination, the Jewish family leaves Belgium. Leo makes shrewd plans to keep his impressive art collection from being confiscated by the Nazis; their son, Julian, joins the Royal Air Force, and their daughter, Esther, becomes a nurse caring for wounded soldiers.
Charlotte, an art student, lives with her father, an architect, in the building. Upon learning that the family left, she feels shock and dismay, deepened by her romantic attraction to Julian. Charlotte’s father, Francois, is still troubled by the trauma he experienced during World War I, including being gassed in the trenches. He is also mystified and disgusted by Hitler’s rise to power.
The perspective alternates between Leo and Sophia’s family, Charlotte and Francois, and various other tenants—faceted viewpoints from within and beyond the apartment house. With a sense of increasing urgency, each character’s need to make decisions and take action within a compressed time frame is made clear. The building itself is also distinctive, from its initial multistoried presence filled with bustling residents and clanking radiators to its later role as a place of secret defiance against the Nazis. While some tenants show surprising valor, others are affected by prolonged food rationing or concerns for self-preservation. Meanwhile, Jews like Julian and Esther contemplate having “nose jobs” or bobbing their long, dark, wavy hair to be less ethnically identifiable.
With eloquent and tense wartime suspense, the novel 33 Place Brugmann is an intricate character study about individuality and communal connection.
MEG NOLA (February 17, 2025)
A Chest Full of Words
Rebecca Gugger
Simon Röthlisberger
Tim Mohr, translator
NorthSouth Books
Hardcover $19.95 (48pp)
978-0-7358-4560-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The power of words gets a literal twist in this quirky picture book. When Oscar finds a chest full of words, he is disappointed—until he realizes they can transform the world around him. He sticks “hairy” on an oak tree, and it sprouts waves of pink hair; a beetle gets “monstrous” before Oscar swiftly adds “adorable.” Before long, the words run dry; Oscar’s search for more brings him to a like-minded gardener who teaches him how to find and respect words.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (February 17, 2025)
The Hymn to Dionysus
Natasha Pulley
Bloomsbury Publishing
Hardcover $29.99 (416pp)
978-1-63973-236-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Natasha Pulley’s novel The Hymn to Dionysus explores a classical struggle between order and chaos through a slow-burn romance that bridges ideologies.
After failing to protect a godly passenger on his legion’s ship, Phaidros, a Theban knight who fought in the Trojan war, lives a muted, mechanical life. Years later, Thebes strains under the weight of a severe drought and a burgeoning succession crisis. When rumor spreads that a god of madness walks among them, Phaidros dreads divine retribution for his failures at sea.
Then Phaidros meets a charming witch, Dionysus, and his hopeless, duty-bound exterior cracks. Phaidros’s relationship with Dionysus leads him to challenge the memory of his late commander, Helios, and his loyalty to the queen of Thebes, both of whom embody the system of honor that gives his life structure. Despite his deep connection to his duty, interacting with Dionysus makes Phaidros feel alive and vibrant. Their blooming romance is as intense and enigmatic as the madness that threatens Thebes.
Dionysus, who blends authentic humanity and incomprehensible divinity, is intoxicating to follow. In some moments, he is a perplexing embodiment of social catharsis who evades understanding by design. In other moments, he’s as grounded and human as anyone else. A moment late in the story explains Dionysus’s origins in detail, unraveling some of this mystery.
The characters are witty and snappy, each embodying a unique ethos that illuminates the world’s structure. However, the political situation in Thebes is somewhat complex, and the bevy of personal and political problems occurring all at once leads to a somewhat obscured central conflict early on.
A tightrope walk between madness and duty, creation and destruction, the fantasy novel The Hymn to Dionysus revisits a classic to explore the idea that love conquers all in more divine terms.
VIOLET GLENN (February 17, 2025)
Permission
The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create
Elissa Altman
Godine
Hardcover $30.00 (232pp)
978-1-56792-763-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Memoirist Elissa Altman’s encouraging writer’s guide is about pushing beyond doubt, fear, repression, and shame to craft stories of relevance and truth.
A teacher of memoir writing, Altman details the integral concept of “ownership” in the creative process. Though people’s lives and histories deserve to be recounted, she says, extenuating influences like family disapproval can inhibit the sharing of details and even veracity. In Altman’s first memoir, she pondered a longstanding family “non-secret secret”: that her grandmother abandoned Altman’s father and his sister for three years. After her grandmother returned, no explanations were given as to why she made the “excruciating” choice to leave her young children. By publicly divulging the incident decades later, Altman damaged her family’s “veneer” and was ostracized by angry relatives.
The book’s tone is welcoming yet exacting as it outlines key elements to writing memoirs of resonance. To access uncensored truths, Altman quotes Cheryl Strayed’s guidance to write “as though all parties are dead.” The book also notes that truth-telling can lead to communal resistance, as with Joyce Maynard’s memoir At Home in the World, which included troubling recollections of J.D. Salinger, outraging fans and critics.
For those concerned that their experiences aren’t “important” or memoir-worthy, Altman asserts, “What story will you write, then, if not yours?” Through finding the quirky moments and humanity in life, or the “magic in the mundane,” all stories can become engaging and connective, she says. And while revenge might be a powerful “tell-all” motivator, it often twists memories into hateful patterns, diffusing “human complexity and possibility.”
Life-affirming and reflective, the writer’s guide Permission explores concepts of creative validity and emergence.
MEG NOLA (February 17, 2025)
The Running Flame
Fang Fang
Michael Berry, translator
Columbia University Press
Softcover $20.00 (208pp)
978-0-231-21500-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Revenge, murder, and gender-based hypocrisy in communist China drive the unsentimental narrative of Fang Fang’s short novel The Running Flame.
Yingzhi lives in a small village in the Chinese countryside. Desiring more than what her village can offer, she searches for a way to live an independent life. Opportunity knocks when she is discovered as a singer and starts making money on her own. Her dreams are derailed, though, when she meets Guiqing and becomes pregnant. The two are forced to marry. Instead of leaving the countryside behind, Yingzhi moves in with her unappreciative parents-in-law.
Guiqing proves to be a good-for-nothing gambler who demands that Yingzhi respect him as if he were the breadwinner. With the encouragement of his parents, the situation between Guiqing and Yingzhi escalates and turns violent. Desperate to flee, Yingzhi returns to her family, but they refuse to welcome her back. When Gingqui shows up at her family’s door, intending to burn down Yingzhi’s childhood home, Yingzhi makes the fateful decision to douse Gingqui with his own gasoline and set him on fire.
Yingzhi narrates, her tone straightforward as she works to set the record straight from prison. She awaits execution for Guiqing’s death. Sans foreshadowing, exposition, and insights into people’s internal states, she records the reprehensible actions and abrasive personalities of others. This results in a narrative with neither heroes nor victims. All bump up against social restrictions and the hypocrisy of the communist party’s rhetoric on gender equality. The afterword includes some historical and political context to background the sparse narrative, though.
In the shocking novel The Running Flame, people fight to carve out lives on their own terms within the overbearing confines of totalitarian structures.
ERIKA HARLITZ KERN (February 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
