Book of the Day Roundup: October 14-18, 2024
The Kitchen
A Chastity Riley Investigation
Simone Buchholz
Rachel Ward, translator
Orenda Books
Softcover $16.99 (276pp)
978-1-916788-07-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A troubled prosecutor reconsiders her definition of justice in Simone Buchholz’s thriller The Kitchen.
During a sweltering Hamburg summer, garbage bags filled with body parts keep turning up in the bay. Riley, the public prosecutor, has enough to worry about: a sex trafficking case has her ready to spit fire, and her best friend was just raped. But Riley can’t refuse to investigate a case like this. At first, there seems to be no relationship between the victims, but when the connection reveals itself, Riley has to make important decisions about whether the system she works within is doing its job … and, if not, what she should do about it.
Chain-smoking Riley and her colleagues navigate the extremes of Hamburg society, from drug- and bug-infested apartment complexes filled with hot-tempered men to extravagant mansions inhabited by cold-blooded parents who care most about their reputations. The brief chapters result in a staccato pace, and interstitial spaces are made grisly by all they do not say.
Even as a serial killer stalks her city, Riley has personal problems on her mind: she struggles to patch up her casual relationship with her roguish next-door neighbor and sometimes-boyfriend and helps her friend find a healthy way to cope with the trauma of the assault. Riley’s dark, irreverent sense of humor takes the edge off the disturbing subject matter, while her precise observations keep her and the story grounded in what matters most: the people it is her job to seek justice for. The deeper she goes into the case, however, the more she realizes that she might not be working on the side of justice after all.
Part of a series, The Kitchen is a vengeance-fueled thriller in which women take power back from anyone and everyone who denies their autonomy.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (August 14, 2024)
Esma Farouk, Lost in the Souk
Lisa Boersen
Hasna Elbaamrani
Annelies Vandenbosch, illustrator
Floris Books
Hardcover $18.95 (32pp)
978-1-78250-885-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Esma and her family are headed to Morocco to visit her grandparents, but she is most excited about visiting the souk: a massive market with spices, fresh food, and performers. Distracted by some charming snakes, Esma loses track of her mother and aunt; with the help of a troupe of acrobats, a fortune teller, and a mischievous monkey, Esma and her family are reunited. The illustrations artfully capture the lively atmosphere of a Marrakesh market with saturated colors and dynamic characters.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 14, 2024)
Into the Great Wide Ocean
Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth
Sönke Johnsen
Marlin Peterson, illustrator
Princeton University Press
Hardcover $24.95 (224pp)
978-0-691-18174-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Biology professor Sönke Johnsen’s Into the Great Wide Ocean is a compelling work of oceanography that reveals the greatest unexplored areas on Earth.
Covering the open ocean—the most abundant source of life on the planet—and species ranging from fantastical jellyfish to rare, elusive deep-sea fish, this is an erudite guide to unexplored depths. The ocean’s diverse life is vivified in part by the book’s illustrations, as of an underwater worm creeping downward, of tentacled pteropods, and of alien-esque blue sea dragons; these reflect the diversity of water-based lifeforms.
Thanks to Johnsen’s clear prose and enchanting imagery, the open ocean is brought to life. Divided into sections reflecting how underwater life exists and thrives, as in relation to gravity and under pressure, the book demystifies, even humanizes, sea life. An exploration of bioluminescent animals who “hoard their light, and will only glow when touched” is juxtaposed to one of coral who never move from one place, “sending their potential young up and off into the world” despite the dangers. And the prose is intelligent and filled with wonder: it both employs complex scientific terms with context, as where it explains organismal transparency in water animals, and is delightful, as where it meditates on “the final wonderful thing about larvae.” In areas where it becomes more scientific and its illustrations are more sparse, the book is drier, but each time a new animal appears, the pace picks back up.
Into the Great Wide Ocean is a wonderful science text that’s focused on unseen areas of the world, honoring the ocean and the fascinating creatures who populate it.
CHLOE CLARK (August 14, 2024)
[non]disclosure
Renée D. Bondy
Second Story Press
Softcover $22.95 (184pp)
978-1-77260-392-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Renée D. Bondy’s historical novel about clerical sexual abuse, [non]disclosure, a survivor finds the courage to tell her story.
As a girl at a Catholic school, the unnamed narrator is taught that the reward for confession is no less than Jesus. When she tells her parents about their priest’s sexually abusive behavior toward her, they tell the bishop; he has the priest transferred for his “miscommunication.” Later, while caring for her friend, Neil, and many others who are sick with AIDS, she keeps quiet about her abuse. But then a news report about the priest unearths her memories. With help, she confronts him in her own words—in court.
The narrator’s quiet wariness sets the book’s tone and runs counter to the order emphasized in school scenes, which are dominated by a disciplinarian nun. The narrator’s home life is also overshadowed by her happy-go-lucky sister. Later, a feisty nurse and her punk-rock partner make space for the narrator to cultivate the courage to express herself, showing how circumstances can either hinder or help survivors to come forward.
Indeed, the book is atmospheric when it comes to conveying the ambiance of the narrator’s church, school, and home environments. Her maintained anonymity and later, protective atmospheres make it easier for her to share her truths while still concealing more private details. Still, some information slips through, as about the taste she associates with worship, her close attention to photographs, and her first dinner out with Neil. She is a compelling lead. Beyond her are descriptions of the culture of secrets that made her vulnerable; such reflections begin many of the book’s chapters.
Dedicated to survivors at large, the novel [non]disclosure follows a survivor as she advocates for fellow abuse survivors in an intimate way.
MARI CARLSON (August 14, 2024)
The Propagandist
Cécile Desprairies
Natasha Lehrer, translator
New Vessel Press
Softcover $17.95 (208pp)
978-1-954404-26-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Cécile Desprairies’s disquieting historical novel The Propagandist, a woman reflects on her mother’s experiences as a World War II collaborator.
Coline, Lucie’s youngest daughter, contrasts her mother’s duplicitous past with her later life as a discontented “bourgeois housewife.” For beautiful and intelligent Lucie, the German occupation of Paris was like a “fairy-tale,” filled with embassy parties and excitement. Lucie, her friends, and her family cooperated with the Nazis, celebrating the roundup of France’s “domineering” Jewish population and gaining what the Jews lost: apartments, furniture, gold watches, and career opportunities.
Lucie married Friedrich, a German medical student whose interest in genetic research mirrored Hitler’s racial obsessions. While Lucie studied law and biology, she also worked as a Vichy government propagandist, producing posters and other materials that linked French sentiments with Nazi dogma. But after the Allies liberated Paris, numerous collaborators were imprisoned and even executed. When Friedrich died under suspicious circumstances, Lucie was overwhelmed with grief.
Coline discusses her mother with ironic detachment. Rather than outright condemning her, she invites broader judgment through the meticulous arrangement of facts. She details how Friedrich regarded Jews as akin to “laboratory mice” or invasive “tubercular bacilli,” and how even after Lucie’s marriage to Coline’s father, Lucie still yearned for Friedrich and their fascist dreams. As an expert at personal transformation, Lucie also reworked her own image while helping her “clan” of collaborators assume new postwar identities.
The novel has a serpentine tension, with adaptable yet controlling Lucie as its most pernicious and fascinating character. Extending from the 1940s to the early 2000s, the story implies that the actions of some French wartime collaborators were obfuscated, ignored, or dismissed.
The chilling novel The Propagandist reveals a twisted legacy of wartime rationalization and collusion.
MEG NOLA (August 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
