Book of the Day Roundup: November 4-8, 2024
Night Train to Odesa
Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War
Jen Stout
Polygon
Hardcover $28.95 (288pp)
978-1-84697-647-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Reporter Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa is a heartbreaking memoir about the Ukrainian people’s fight to survive a relentless war.
Offered a journalism scholarship in Moscow, Stout arrived in Russia during Putin’s regime. When Russia invaded Ukraine and war broke out, she experienced first-hand how state propaganda turned her Russian friends into hostile strangers with upside-down worldviews. With no connections, no money, and no news outlets to publish her reporting, she headed to the border between Romania and Ukraine. Once there, she pitched a story to BBC Radio and began to give voice to the exodus of refugees arriving across the Danube River. Soon after, she crossed the border into Ukraine to report from the front.
Night Train to Odesa chronicles the early stages of Russia’s war against Ukraine through easy-flowing, immersive prose that’s filled with evocative images. Each on-site encounter is rendered in sharp detail, presented in the format of written pantomime. There is a fixer who can get hold of the most rare objects at a moment’s notice; a death-defying daredevil poet who shuttles journalists across army front lines; an anxious hostess who preaches both-siderism while pleading with her guests not to talk about the war; and people picnicking in a city park while ignoring the air raid sirens with sardonic defeatism.
The narrative is as relentless as the war: new people are introduced, familiar individuals are killed, crises and emergencies appear without warning. The ending is open-ended. The war continued while Stout left for the safety of home, recognizing that this was a privilege that Ukrainians did not have. Left on the page is a vague promise to return and never forget.
Relentless in its narrative fortitude, the memoir Night Train to Odesa is filled with detailed reportage from the front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
ERIKA HARLITZ KERN (October 14, 2024)
Latitudes
Encounters with a Changing Planet
Jean McNeil
Barbican Press
Softcover $18.99 (280pp)
978-1-909954-11-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Meditative and sumptuous, Latitudes is Jean McNeil’s brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change.
McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. In this book, she describes her diverse adventures, including touring the cloud forests of Costa Rica, training as a professional safari guide in Kenya, joining a scientific expedition to Greenland, trekking the savannas of Namibia and South Africa, exploring the Falkland Islands, and spending months on the ice fields of Antarctica with a movie crew. Her language is fresh and probing. She marvels as a herd of impala “chevron over the land as they perform faultless arabesques,” observes the “gruff seagulls stutter[ing] outside,” and considers the “scar of bustards in the sky” and the “whisper of the swishing land-sea-grass in the wind.”
McNeil writes often about the transformative power of land, which she describes as “a spirit mentor, an aggrieved giant white bird, an old, old will.” She stresses the impacts of climate change, which she sees as the tragic consequences of humanity’s destruction of the planet for profit. She predicts a future where the emerald grasslands of Kenya are cracked and tarred and the “hardscrabble” town of Ilulissat, Greenland, is a mecca like Paris when much of the planet is too hot to survive. She writes, briefly, of conservation successes in Costa Rica, where 25 percent of the land has been set aside for national parks and natural areas. But her emphasis is on documenting the effects of climate change, not proposing solutions.
Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change.
KRISTEN RABE (October 14, 2024)
Cats & Us
Gareth St John Thomas
Exisle Publishing
Hardcover $19.99 (144pp)
978-1-922539-52-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Cats & Us is a charming collection of mini-essays highlighting human-pet interactions over time and across cultural contexts. Its several-page spreads consider how felines relate to certain subgroups of people, including children, vets, and cat sitters.
Cats can take on a variety of roles, like traditional mousing on farms or serving as a trucker’s companion. From ancient Egypt to the battleship Bismarck, they made themselves comfortable onboard sailing vessels. Today, cats are found working as therapy animals at airports and offering a friendly welcome at churches and pubs.
The book is illustrated with out-of-the-ordinary, cheeky color photographs and a sprinkling of quotations. It compares the behavior of different breeds, gathers sayings and proverbs about felines, looks for the scientific truth behind cat clichés, and acknowledges issues such as the hunting of endangered native wildlife, especially in Australia. It also profiles famous cats, including those owned by presidents and prime ministers. Tuxedo Stan of Halifax, Nova Scotia, made international headlines when he ran for mayor.
“Mystery is an essential trait” of the cat; the endearing and informative Cats & Us will delight animal lovers while preserving that inscrutability. Pet owners will smile with recognition during pieces on naming, routines, playtime, emotions, moving house, and aging.
REBECCA FOSTER (October 14, 2024)
Tales from Muggleswick Wood
Vicky Cowie
Charlie Mackesy, illustrator
Bloomsbury Children’s Books
Hardcover $19.95 (192pp)
978-1-5476-1600-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Vicky Cowie’s sweet fairy tale book Tales from Muggleswick Wood ventures into a magical world of gnomes, pixies, and stink-resistant moles.
A grandmother tells a bedtime story, each dedicated to one of her five grandchildren during her five-night visit to their home. In the first, a girl gathers gargoyle and dragonfly friends on her way to a tea party in Muggleswick Wood. Second, a repugnant beetle can grant a boy a wish. Third, an arrogant businessman fails to heed warnings about a boggart that lives in his new home. Fourth, a grumpy major attempts to chase a mole out of his yard with strong smells, to his wife’s dismay. And finally, fairies hope to ride a kelpie to a ball—but it may or may not dive to the bottom of a lake with them instead.
Rhyming, rhythmic, immersive, and lyrical, the fabulistic prose bounces from “a war zone of soil” that makes “the Major’s blood boil” to “the crook of an oak” that houses “brave gnomely folk” with melodic ease. The cordial girl of the first story and the cheerful, twirling nymph of the last are endearing, while the fiendish boggart’s surprise attachment to the businessman and the major’s failed experiment with poop as mole deterrent add rollicking humor. Though the grandmother tells these stories at bedtime, the children often end up rolling with laughter.
The watercolor and ink illustrations are cheery and quiet, evoking wonder over nature and the magic of make-believe. Picturesque renditions of a leafy, mushroom-filled forest and a cozy fireplace are comforting, while the major’s outstretched arms as he surveys his mole-hill-covered lawn mirrors the hilarity of its tale.
With unexpected humor, Tales from Muggleswick Wood is an enchanting collection of fairy stories for bedtime and beyond.
AIMEE JODOIN (October 14, 2024)
Softie
Stories
Megan Howell
West Virginia University Press
Softcover $19.99 (266pp)
978-1-959000-31-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Megan Howell’s Softie is a series of thirteen short stories which plumb the harrowing struggles and dark corners of womanhood and girlhood as “all hell breaks loose” with regularity.
Firm and unflinching, the stories navigate heavy themes—including teenage pregnancy, abuse, poverty, suicide, and sexual violence—from intimate perspectives, trapping attention within their characters’ hardships. Herein, jaded narrators struggle and rage against the brokenness of their societies and families until reaching their boiling points. Their bleak and unrelenting circumstances are lightened by keen observations, as with “sometimes when he talked, he got so invested that spittle formed in the corner of his mouth.”
These stories know that no one chooses from a slate of limitless options and that people’s behaviors and actions are patterned by their environments, childhoods, and applied systemic pressures. Reflective of this, the narratives are steeped in realities including poverty, racial inequity, and generational trauma—elements only sometimes brought to the fore of the prose, though they are omnipresent in the slow, menacing strictures that hem characters in. Economic pressures face a teacher turned nanny for a man who ages in reverse when he gets upset in “Vacuum Cleaner” and for a divorcee in “The Upstairs People,” pushing them and other women into fraught situations beyond their control. Oppressive, claustrophobic, and bitter tones are present in all but a few stories, as with the outstanding entry “Vacuum Cleaner,” which turns toward magical and absurd realms for a welcome change of pace, helping to balance the book’s atmosphere out.
Cynical, envious, and resentful characters populate the resonant short stories of Softie, in which those who face the darkest parts of themselves can reach catharsis.
SéBASTIEN LUC BUTLER (October 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
