Book of the Day Roundup: November 27-December 1, 2023
The Twist-a-Roo
Kathleen Doherty
Kristyna Litten, illustrator
Peachtree
Hardcover $17.99 (32pp)
978-1-68263-497-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Determined not to grow bored through the impending winter, Badger ventures to the people’s town to find some amusement. She retrieves a kaleidoscope—a “twist-a-roo”—and is eager to show her friends, but they are busy making more pragmatic preparations. Badger’s distractions prove potentially perilous as winter sets in around her; a timely visit from friends warms both her burrow and her heart. Bright pinks and yellows jump out from moody teal backdrops that evoke the chill of winter.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 27, 2023)
The Fascination
Essie Fox
Orenda Books
Hardcover $26.99 (300pp)
978-1-914585-52-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Essie Fox’s novel The Fascination is a scintillating cabinet of curiosities.
Theo—whose mother died in childbirth and whose father is, for him, a question mark—grows up love-deprived, hidden on a country estate whose grandeur belies its horrors. Keziah and Matilda, the twin granddaughters of a Bohemian seer, are exploited by their father for his tonic scheme after their fairy tale-telling mother dies. Theo first meets the twins by accident, and the trio are too soon parted; they remember each other ever after, though. In time, Theo’s fortunes change; and the twins are rescued from the carnival by Captain, who hears fairy magic in Matilda’s voice.
Fox’s is a world wherein magic still exists—or is conjured by those who desire it most. Theo is exposed to perverse exhibits when he’s young by a grandfather who both abhors, and wishes to possess, curiosities of nature and deviations from what’s “proper”; Theo’s virtue is unblemished, despite this heritage. And as she blossoms into young adulthood while Matilda remains child-sized, Keziah finds comfort in a childhood story—and among the rejected people who take her in.
Exalting those whom society relegates to the shadows and exposing those who do vulnerable people harm, this is an enchanting story set in an erstwhile world marked by voyeurism, showmanship, and superstition. Herein, surgeons are regarded as vulgar; a cleft lip or dwarfism puts newborns at mortal risk; and violent, exploitative appetites run rampant. Theo and Keziah unite against such forces once they reunite. They also rely on the aide of kindhearted people (including Theo’s once-governess, a man covered in hair, and maligned family friends) as they work to rescue Matilda from a horrific fate.
Love blooms in the engrossing final acts of The Fascination, a historical novel that’s well worth the price of admission.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (October 27, 2023)
Alice B. Toklas Is Missing
Robert Archambeau
Regal House Publishing
Softcover $18.95 (264pp)
978-1-64603-385-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Robert Archambeau’s inventive novel Alice B. Toklas Is Missing, a bizarre kidnapping mystifies the artistic circles of 1920s Paris.
Ida Caine is an aspiring American painter living in Paris with her husband, Teddy. Though Teddy has keen literary ambitions, he doesn’t enjoy writing—or even reading—fiction.
The Caines venture to poet and author Gertrude Stein’s famed salon, where they also meet Gertrude’s “birdlike” lover, Alice B. Toklas. Imposing and obdurate, Gertrude presides over the gathering like a “corpulent barefoot empress in a brown corduroy dress.”
Soon after the salon meeting, Alice is abducted while walking her dog. Gertrude is shocked by the crime and desperate to find her beloved partner; Teddy claims to be a private detective and promises to solve the case. But Teddy has no actual investigatory experience. Instead, he takes a boozy jaunt to Cairo and Algiers with an aviator friend.
Left alone in Paris, Ida befriends the American poet Tom Eliot, better known as T. S. Tom becomes quite fond of intelligent, attractive Ida, and a diffident romance develops. As they investigate Alice’s kidnapping, Tom and Ida are lured into a maze of surrealist subterfuge and explosive cultural anarchy.
The novel explores futurism, surrealism, and other creative movements with kinetic finesse. Amid the celebrated exuberance of 1920s Paris, it reveals the era’s various poseurs; there are those who come to Paris for alcoholic adventures, and there are dedicated artists like Ida, who hope to craft meaningful work. The character roster includes Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Ida and Tom are accompanied on their quest by agitated yet punctilious futurist F. T. Marinetti, while painter and writer Wyndham Lewis assumes villainous menace.
Traveling from macabre Parisian catacombs to the staid Louvre, Alice B. Toklas Is Missing is a spiraling and scintillating mystery.
MEG NOLA (October 27, 2023)
Small Shoes, Great Strides
How Three Brave Girls Opened Doors to School Equality
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
Alex Bostic, illustrator
Carolrhoda Books
Hardcover $19.99 (40pp)
978-1-72841-923-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s excellent book Small Shoes, Great Strides covers how, in November of 1960, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost made history by going to first grade—as the first Black students at a public school in Louisiana.
Told through the girls’ points of view, the book goes through how each felt on that first day of school. It continues through the challenges they faced the rest of the year. For months, they were the only students in school, as all local white families placed hatred ahead of their own children’s education. The girls received numerous death threats, with police stationed outside of their homes for protection.
All three trailblazers were interviewed for the book, resulting in specific details that bring a personal touch, grounding the important history that the girls made. The excellent illustrations have a timeless quality, showing both the girls’ happy days at school and family scenes and the threats of police cars parked outside and a dead bird sent in the mail. The book’s design includes some creative touches as well; for example, the text describing the girls’ first-grade teacher putting paper over the windows to protect the girls is printed on a background that looks like that paper.
Once the main narrative ends, Small Shoes, Great Strides includes a slew of additional material resulting in quality context. That includes a summary of the Brown versus the Board of Education ruling, the story of Norman Rockwell’s iconic school integration painting, more about the US Marshals Service, and updates on what each of the girls accomplished as they grew up. The result is an unmissable story about everyday courage whose notes about the importance of overcoming discrimination remain timely.
JEFF FLEISCHER (October 27, 2023)
Arthur Tress
Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows
James A. Ganz, editor
J. Paul Getty Museum
Hardcover $60.00 (264pp)
978-1-60606-861-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The nascent work and artistic influences of celebrated photographer Arthur Tress are the focus of this book that chronicles his transition from photojournalist to artistic photographer. It includes probing essays by museum curators and numerous photograph prints and contact sheets.
Tress started as a “stock sociology” photographer, cobbling together commissions to document social and environmental problems and folk customs around the world. Among the most memorable images here are his sympathetic, textured portraits of Appalachian artisans and depictions of bleak landscapes ravaged by strip mining. There are glimpses of the unsettling juxtapositions and surrealist imagery of his more mature work in shots of a girl looking glum, posing next to a battered doll head stuck in a leafless bush. These and other blends of portrait and landscape photography are described by curator Mazie M. Harris as the output of an artist aiming to shake up “Americans hyped up on postwar affluence.”
Tress evokes the grittiness of 1960s-1970s New York City in his photographs of polluted inner city open spaces where people play cards and children play. Tress, coming to terms with his own homosexuality, also captured tension-ridden, striking scenes of men cruising in Central Park’s Ramble and drag performers posing in Gothic landscapes.
Later projects evince Tress’s fascination with “visualizing daydreams and nightmares”—an enigmatic world where deserted buildings and eerie landscapes feature jarring images that are sometimes playful, but more often dangerous and beset with menacing shadows. Many images of children in these ambiguous, unsettling settings add to their edginess.
Tress’s own writings bookend this volume, with insights into how his travels and the competitive New York photography world energized and inspired him to create photographs that “we can pray to, that will make us well again, or scare the hell out of us.”
RACHEL JAGARESKI (October 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
