Book of the Day Roundup: May 8-12, 2023
When You’re Older
Sofie Laguna
Judy Watson
Allen & Unwin Children
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-76029-134-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Brilliant colors and dreamlike illustrations complement this touching tale of brotherly love. An older brother watches his younger brother sleeping in his crib, imagining all the adventures they will go on when he’s older. Delicate lines of flowers and blades of grass pair with wide brushstrokes of imposing icebergs and frothy waves as the boy imagines future adventures, such as riding their bikes through the jungle or finding new lands across treacherous seas—all with their trusty patchwork quilt along for the ride.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 27, 2023)
In Vitro
On Longing and Transformation
Isabel Zapata
Robin Myers, translator
Coffee House Press
Softcover $16.95 (160pp)
978-1-56689-675-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Mexican poet Isabel Zapata probes the enduring mysteries of pregnancy and birth in In Vitro, a memoir in fragments that travels from fertility treatment through to the early weeks of pandemic-time motherhood.
“I want to shatter the vow of silence that isolates the painful parts of motherhood,” Zapata writes. Her yearning to become a mother was “a wound” that required extraordinary and expensive measures; “I seek my fortune in a petri dish.” It was a gendered, judgmental process: doctors’ automatic assumption was that her hormonal problem was to blame and their infertility had nothing to do with her partner.
The clinical language of a gynecological history—late menstruation, polycystic ovary syndrome, eighteen years on the pill, and infertility—and the embryo transfer process contrasts with Zapata’s mystical thinking. Giving over to whimsy, she imagines potential babies’ personalities and addresses her future child. Zapata even considered the possibility that her mother’s ghost might be reincarnated in her daughter.
The book’s microessays integrate family stories, history, and artistic explorations: Zapata’s mother intuited her own pregnancies within a day of conception because her toothpaste tasted different. The first in vitro baby was born in 1978, and there have been 8–10 million since. In 2015, Mexican artist Paola Livas memorialized her egg donation in an exhibit about the ghost children that could have been hers. Zapata imagines a fetus as a jellyfish and delivery as a tsunami.
Zapata’s daughter Aurelia’s birth is covered late in the book. After the “exercise in patience” that IVF and pregnancy represented, the birth, recounted via impressionistic memories, is more of an “exercise in hallucination.” Just six weeks later, Mexico recorded its first COVID-19 death. That hint of global menace puts Zapata’s discrete medical struggle into perspective.
A resolute account of a personal metamorphosis, In Vitro alchemizes tender experiences into enchanting vignettes.
REBECCA FOSTER (April 27, 2023)
The Sorrows of Others
Ada Zhang
A Public Space
Softcover $18.00 (160pp)
978-1-73637-096-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Ada Zhang’s short story collection The Sorrows of Others, people of all ages confront personal and cultural losses.
Throughout the book, Chinese and Chinese American people face an age-old problem: loneliness in the company of others. Whether contemplating their relationships with spouses, roommates, former friends, or parents, each character is faced with difficult decisions regarding where to live, whom to live with, how to deal with the painful past, and whom to forgive.
Cultural and generational differences play a vital role in how these characters interpret and navigate the world. Nowhere is this more stark than in “Knowing,” in which a woman discovers a harrowing connection between her old math tutor, who survived China’s Cultural Revolution, and her distant mother. “The Subject” deals with a similar topic as an art student who’s struggling to find herself learns more than she cares to know about her elderly roommate.
Acknowledging that there are many ways to be alone, or to find solace and connection with others, the collection reveals that a solution that works for one person might bring misery to another. In “The Sorrows of Others,” an arranged marriage gives a longtime widower an unconventional sense of comfort; in “Any Good Wife,” a similar marriage forces its husband and wife to go through the motions of a happy relationship in the hopes of forgetting past sorrows.
Across years and continents, people relive the decisions that brought them to their current states; they mourn opportunities that will never appear again. The specificity of their cultural experiences fuses with the universality of their grief, resulting in resonant scenes amid their ordinary, remarkable lives.
By turns poignant and tragic, The Sorrows of Others is a tender short story collection in which loneliness and isolation shape lives.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (April 27, 2023)
Everything Is Ori
Paul Serge Forest
David Warriner, translator
QC Fiction
Softcover $29.95 (438pp)
978-1-77186-317-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
New arrivals and fresh discoveries rock a wealthy family’s dependable existence in Paul Serge Forest’s novel Everything Is Ori.
The Lelarges own a successful fishery business that has only continued to grow in profits and prestige since the family patriarch died. Still, the Lelarge clan has much less control over their lives than they would like to believe. After a very public display of mass food poisoning threatens their future, strange events spell doom for their dysfunctional dynasty and turn their entire world on its ear.
Everyone’s fate hinges on Laurie Lelarge, whose parents’ exaggerated fears regarding her alleged shrimp allergy fuel her own interest in shellfish. She retreats into her own world while the adults around her become caught up in their all-too-human vices, including sex, greed, and drugs. Meanwhile, Mori, a mysterious visitor from Japan, arrives with vices, secrets, and delusions of his own that he plans to use to bend nature to his will—with Laurie’s unwitting assistance. As the adults in her life stumble and fall, Laurie’s only refuges are her books and her bizarre relationship with Mori.
Sly, understated humor pokes fun at people’s foibles and at narrative conventions. These characters often deserve the mockery they receive, yet there is an undeniable sense of grand tragedy about their collective downfall. Later, there’s a haunting exploration of the price of Mori and Laurie’s work that shows just how much the world has changed since their first meeting. Those who survived the shift may feel better for it, but with further upheavals on the horizon, the question of who benefits—and who deserves to benefit—from this new dimension of human consciousness may never be settled.
Everything Is Ori is a mind-bending, offbeat exploration of the worth and true nature of human life.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (April 27, 2023)
Queen in Comics
Sophie Blitman
Emmanuel Marie
NBM Publishing
Hardcover $27.99 (176pp)
978-1-68112-311-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The tale of the legendary rock band Queen is given pictorial treatment in the handsome graphic novel Queen in Comics.
Queen maintained a perennial presence on the pop charts in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, but their path to success was not easy. From Freddie Mercury’s childhood in Zanzibar to the aftermath of his death at forty-five, the book covers the band’s setbacks and triumphs, including creative differences, business decisions, and the complication of distinctive individual personalities. There are fascinating insights about outside musical partnerships and the creation of specific songs, as well as Mercury’s revelation of his sexual identity. Still, the book’s most lasting impression is that of the friendships that kept the band together for so long.
The book’s chapters feature a variety of creative formats; their art styles range from cartoonish to realistic, and their visual storytelling remaining strong throughout. Each chapter is followed by brief recaps, in text and photographs, of the events covered in the preceding pages. Some repetitiveness results; still, this is a comprehensive picture of the band members and their stories.
Queen in Comics is a revealing and inspiring graphic introduction to a legacy rock band that continues to entertain the world.
PETER DABBENE (April 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
