Book of the Day Roundup: May 22-26, 2023
In Sardinia
An Unexpected Journey in Italy
Jeff Biggers
Melville House
Unknown $27.99 (336pp)
978-1-68589-026-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Jeff Biggers’s In Sardinia is a story about becoming enchanted by an Italian island—its history, customs, literature, art, ancient archaeological sites, and heroes and legends too.
Biggers regards Sardinia as one of Italy’s most complex and beguiling regions. Years after his first visit, it continues to hold him. But on his first introduction to the island, he and his family were greeted by a furious mistral; their boat landed on its rocky coast, where the boulders appeared to be sculpted by the gale-force winds.
Curious and willing to be surprised, Biggers (a journalist, historian, and travel writer) ventured along Sardinia’s back roads, encountering places that tourists never see. On one such excursion, the grandson of one of the island’s poet laureates was so eager to show Biggers where Antioco Casula had lived that he abandoned his lunch. The book is alive with such encounters, covering the island’s artists, poets, writers, artisans, shepherds, and innkeepers and the stories they told.
Capturing Sardinia as a rugged, demanding land of astounding natural beauty, Biggers notes that its history is one of family loyalty, secrets, passion, and vengeance. Bronze Age Sardinia was a vital trade partner that possessed rich resources—its silver mines even supplied King Solomon’s legendary city. Biggers traces the island’s strong, vibrant culture (older than the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece, and Etruria) to show how it withstood all attempts to eradicate it. Today, the whole land is called an “open museum,” with thousands of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, Stonehenge-evocative dolmens, burial tombs, and towers dotting the landscape.
In Sardinia is an delightful travelogue that unearths magical stories from beneath island stones.
KRISTINE MORRIS (April 27, 2023)
The Extraordinary Curiosities of Ixworth and Maddox
J. D. Grolic
thissmallplace
Softcover $12.99 (266pp)
978-1-73887-070-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In J. D. Grolic’s charming fantasy novel The Extraordinary Curiosities of Ixworth and Maddox, an eleven-year-old ducks into a London shop to escape the rain and encounters an intriguing new world.
After entering the shop, wherein brownies build magical items for Maddox and Ixworth (the magicians who run it), Chloe becomes fast friends with the owners. She also begins learning magic herself. When Ixworth goes missing, she and Maddox use their powers, facing evil, ancient magic in order to save him.
Spunky and curious, Chloe is an inspirational lead. She has moments of fear—as when she is shadowed by a mysterious figure—but perseveres nonetheless. She is determined to find Ixworth, no matter the danger. And Ixworth and Maddox are an eccentric, entertaining pair, always offering up new curiosities like self-fluffing pillows. Both magicians adore Chloe, giving her much-needed space to feel accepted.
Though several issues are unresolved at the book’s end (including Chloe’s grief over her parents being too busy for her and the tension between her and her best friend, Iris), this is a story with potent lessons on courage, sacrifice, and forgiveness. Maddox tells Chloe that saving his best friend is worth losing his life; Chloe wrestles with betrayal and risks her safety to stop a magic-stealing mask from hurting Maddox. Vibrant descriptions of the London streets help to move the story along, and Chloe’s point-of-view is both humorous (as when her magic goes wrong and turns a tree to ash) and somber.
A determined girl confronts a mysterious disappearance with a splash of magic in The Extraordinary Curiosities of Ixworth and Maddox, a delightful fantasy novel.
VIVIAN TURNBULL (April 27, 2023)
Pirate & Penguin
Mike Allegra
Jenn Harney, illustrator
Page Street Kids
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-64567-712-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A pirate searching for a parrot and a clumsy penguin collide in this lively tale about friendship. When a penguin falls aboard his ship, a lonely pirate mistakes it for a parrot; he paints it, tries to teach it to speak, and feeds it crackers. Frustrated at his parrot’s failures, he drives his new friend away—and learns a valuable lesson about accepting others as they are in Penguin’s absence. Inventive pirate-speak—“pirate-y poopie head!”—and bright colors complement this whimsical story.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 27, 2023)
Land Sickness
Nikolaj Schultz
Polity
Softcover $12.95 (120pp)
978-1-5095-5613-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The climate crisis is a global problem, with every individual playing a role: Nikolaj Schultz confronts this conundrum in his lovely, essay-length book Land Sickness.
In beautiful prose that makes everyday moments seem profound, Schultz describes his life as a series of climate-related decisions. The ventilator he uses to sleep emits carbon dioxide; his trips to the grocery store lead to choices about whether to buy food wrapped in plastic or grown in ways that degrade soil. Despite his concern about climate change, he writes, “it seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them.” These problems lead to sleepless nights spent weighing the impact of his lifestyle against a future that will only become more complicated.
Schultz also covers his travels to the French island of Porquerolles, where consistent waves of tourists looking for an idyllic retreat end up eroding the exact beaches for which people visit. It’s a process of “reverse alchemy”; Schultz observes as it turns “silver to filth.” He is beset at all points by his inability to evade hard choices; at one point, he likens his travels to Dante Alighieri’s, seeing the eternal damage of his decisions. His book blends these real fears with literary turns of phrase, rendering each scene and person encountered in great detail. Each conversation that Schultz has on the island carries the weight of the changing landscape, and each hot evening portends a future in which such humidity is no longer noteworthy.
Land Sickness is an ecological essay that raises important questions about what it means to live in a time of growing catastrophe and to navigate that situation.
JEFF FLEISCHER (April 27, 2023)
Butterflies
Reflections, Tales, and Verse
Hermann Hesse
Kales Press
Hardcover $30.00 (134pp)
979-898595585-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Hermann Hesse wrote iconic, pensive novels, but he was also a butterfly collector. In Butterflies, a charming book for nature and literature lovers, he marvels over the creatures up close.
Excerpts concerning butterflies, selected from Hesse’s complete works, are reminders to take pleasure in fleeting beauty. Hesse’s sensual fascination with the natural world is contagious. We see insects in detail; we see landscapes and characters fully, too, drawn from Hesse’s childhood and time in Switzerland and Sri Lanka. And the book’s short prose passages (immediate and effortless), intermittent poems (that maintain elegant rhymes), and lovely, fitting reproductions of the historical, hand-colored engravings that Hesse loved add up to a gorgeous anthology that makes good use of white space. “The Giant Peacock Moth” is a perfect, moving fable, centering a memory that is still replete with gestures and emotions many years after it took place.
Sharing biographical and entomological insights, Butterflies is a short but satisfying book––leaving audiences feeling as lucky to encounter it as Hesse felt about meeting his winged subjects.
MEREDITH GRAHL COUNTS (April 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
