Book of the Day Roundup: November 25-29, 2024
The Bishop’s Villa
Sacha Naspini
Clarissa Botsford, translator
Europa Editions
Hardcover $28.00 (192pp)
979-888966052-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In a remote Italian town, an unassuming cobbler is drawn into helping partisans fight against fascists and Nazis in Sacha Naspini’s novel The Bishop’s Villa.
Despite missing several fingers, René is the cobbler of Le Case. He’s in love with his neighbor, Anna, whose partisan son is executed by the authorities. Grief-stricken, Anna joins the partisans, asking René to cover for her. This subterfuge propels him into a dangerous game with the Italian fascists running Le Case and the Nazis who subsequently occupy it.
René is incarcerated in a villa used as a prison for partisans and Jewish families; the villa is also being rented as a residence by a bishop who is aware of its goings-on. With the Allies advancing, the Nazis begin deporting the Jews and destroying the evidence of their crimes. Meanwhile, the partisans prepare to liberate their own from the villa. René has one wish: to find Anna, who he believes is imprisoned with him.
Narrated with immediacy, the book makes palpable its complex themes of collaboration versus resistance. Amid widespread collusion, including by the Church, some are compelled to resist the Nazis, as with a prison guard who becomes René’s friend. And René’s “secret weapon” is sabotaging soldiers’ boots, demonstrating that even small acts of resistance matter. With most of Le Case’s inhabitants refusing to acknowledge the horror in their midst, ideas of collective responsibility and guilt also hang over the story.
A poignant tribute to the memories of victims of the Nazi regime, the historical novel The Bishop’s Villa is set in an Italian seminary that served as a prison during the Holocaust.
YELENA FURMAN (October 14, 2024)
Call Me Carmela
A Dot Meyerhoff Mystery
Ellen Kirschman
Open Road Media
Softcover $21.99 (292pp)
978-1-5040-9575-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Ellen Kirschman’s stunning mystery novel Call Me Carmela, a police psychologist helps a teenager find her birth parents, exposing secrets that endanger everyone involved.
Dot, a contract psychologist with the police department, stops for her usual breakfast at Fran’s Diner. The owner is distraught: Her eighteen-year-old goddaughter Ava is missing after having discovered the name of her birth mother. Ava wants more information, but in response to her prodding, her adoptive parents, Dan and Sharon, go “ballistic.”
When Ava shows up at the diner, Fran asks Dot to mediate. Despite her misgivings, Dot agrees, seeing herself in the brash, insecure teenager. She contacts Ava’s birth mother, Iliana, who is reluctant to discuss the brutal circumstances of Ava’s conception. Still, after mulling it over, Iliana agrees to meet Ava.
Ava presses on with Dot’s support. However, in her indignation for herself and Iliana, she often acts without considering the consequences of her choices. The relationships around Ava implode, with the adults resisting forward movement: Dan returns to destructive habits, and Dot keeps revisiting her decisions with a previous client, a rookie police officer who committed suicide.
The story is tense and realistic, focused on people’s inner conflicts and harmful and self-serving reactions. The short, urgent chapters often end with piquing questions. And Dot puts Ava’s story into greater context by discussing California’s adoption process, her own experiences as a teenager, and her professional responsibilities and ethics.
Call Me Carmela is a thrilling novel in which a police psychologist and an adopted teenager face betrayals and threats while digging into circumstances of the younger’s birth.
LYNNE JENSEN LAMPE (October 14, 2024)
Fly-Fishing with Leonardo da Vinci
David Ladensohn
Terra Firma
Hardcover $29.95 (208pp)
978-1-59534-305-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In a compelling, conversational style that brings together two unlikely subjects, David Ladensohn’s book explores fly fishing alongside the life and legacy of Leonardo da Vinci.
The book follows da Vinci’s life with admiration, including his unlikely rise to prominence despite his humble beginnings. While da Vinci is known for his contributions to Western thought as an artist, inventor, and engineer, Ladensohn argues that the ways da Vinci fixated on the flow and movement of water in rivers were perhaps his greatest obsession. Thus, tracing a day of fly-fishing, Ladensohn fixates on how water moves over a rock in a Colorado trout stream. Through these observations, he comes to see how da Vinci’s explorations of river currents’ motion around objects might also inform where the fish he targets are likely to be hiding. These thoughts become the springboard for a text that is part sporting memoir and fishing guide and part biography.
Filled with vibrant images of idyllic streams, drawings by da Vinci, and fishing concepts, this self-deprecating, jocular text includes lofty, poignant explorations of life and nature, as when Ladensohn expresses joy over catching a fish: “To be attached to a trout by hook and line … is to feel pure wildness.” Concise chapters shift between the central subjects, either looking at a fishing challenge or an aspect of da Vinci’s life, each complementing and building on the other. Ladensohn’s research trips and insights, including seeing famous works in person like da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, add insight into his joyful personal process.
Approachable and inviting, Fly-Fishing with Leonardo da Vinci combines biographical research and memoir elements to deliver charming exploration of water, invention, and lives led by curiosity.
MIKE GOOD (October 14, 2024)
A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space
Peter Selgin
Regal House Publishing
Softcover $19.95 (308pp)
978-1-64603-511-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The malaise of a small New England town in the 1960s is given an undercurrent of the infinite in Peter Selgin’s inspired novel A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space.
Half is a junior high school student with a mentally ill stepbrother, a hat store–owning stepfather, and an alcoholic mother. His perspectives are bounded by Hattertown, Connecticut, a hat industry town with only one active factory left. Prone to curiosity and longing for a career as an astronaut, Half is guided by the specter of his father’s voice commanding him to follow his fears. As a result, he begins to reconsider his place in society, pull away from his crew of friends, and reassess the limitations of his prospects. To boot, Half is drawn in by a mysterious denizen with a sordid past, dubbed the Man in Blue, who lives in a bucolic cottage on the outskirts of town. With his stepbrother in tow, and with the blossoming of a complicated relationship with the strange resident of the cottage, Half faces existential quandaries and adolescent snares that bring his place in his community and beyond into blurred focus.
Its prose equal parts humorous, poignant, and observational, this is a sharp-toned story about small-town upbringings. Half is as rambunctious as he is confused and as inquisitive as he is somewhat damaged. His wish to explore the cosmos seems blunted until the realization that despite the facade of his predicaments, Half’s explorations and epiphanies make him but one articulation of the courageous voyager he pines to become.
In the comforting, truth-filled bildungsroman A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space, a boy is more than where he is from. Outer space may be just outside his door, if he looks with the right eyes.
RYAN PRADO (October 14, 2024)
The Apothecary’s Wife
The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity
Karen Bloom Gevirtz
University of California Press
Hardcover $28.95 (340pp)
978-0-520-40991-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Karen Bloom Gevirtz’s compelling history book The Apothecary’s Wife covers the commodification of medicine and the sidelining of women in medical history.
In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the Scientific Revolution transformed how medicine was practiced in a way that left out people in need. Medications made at home were replaced by prescribed medications with consequences leading into the present. To capture this transformation, the book introduces historical figures including Mary Trye, who practiced medicine under the title of medicatrix, and Joanna Stephens, who had a real cure for kidney stones in the eighteenth century. They and other women were sidelined in the new era of medicine, though, as remedies began to cost money, required a physician’s prescription, and were supplied by apothecaries.
Personal recipe books and medical prescriptions are used to illustrate how medicine changed from work that housewives did at home into a specialized practice. Newspapers, poems, and plays are used to show how the public’s perception of medicine and its practitioners evolved in tandem with these shifts. Lay language is used to elucidate the book’s scientific topics, and touches of whimsy and dry humor enliven it: mansplaining, the book suggests, began early in human history. In addition, an imaginary time-traveling patient is used to illustrate changes to medicine across the centuries, with the book suggesting that such a patient would be shocked to be expected to pay for medications and would be baffled by the change from homemade medications to prescribed treatments.
The Apothecary’s Wife is a stunning history book about the effects of the Scientific Revolution on the practice of medicine.
CAROLINA CIUCCI (October 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
