Book of the Day Roundup: September 16-20, 2024
Alpacas Make Terrible Librarians!!
Kristi Mahoney
Chantelle Thorne, illustrator
Burgen Thorne, illustrator
Gnome Road Publishing
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-957655-28-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A magenta alpaca with contrasting teal eyeshadow stands out against bookish backdrops in this whimsical picture book that sneaks educational animal facts into its colorful chaos. Children will learn that alpacas are sheared once a year, have soft pads on their feet, love to sunbathe, and make terrible librarians, hiding all non-alpaca animal books and clucking when you’re trying to concentrate. Varied fonts and comic book expression marks make this an engaging, energetic read-aloud.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 14, 2024)
The Gray City
Torben Kuhlmann, author, illustrator
David Henry Wilson, translator
NorthSouth Books
Hardcover $22.95 (64pp)
978-0-7358-4554-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Torben Kulhmann’s novel The Gray City, a determined girl seeks out color in a desaturated world.
After moving into a new home, Robin realizes that her new city is absent of all colors but gray. In defiance, she resolves to always wear her bright yellow raincoat. That and a drawing in bright colors lands her in daily detention with Alani, a boy who also rejects the Gray City’s dullness. Alani introduces Robin to his uncle’s band; it indulges in music and color in secret once a week. As Robin continues to seek out hidden color in the city, she and her new friends unravel the conspiracy behind Gray Works, the ruling factory that enforces colorlessness.
Robin is a valiant lead who defies the overwhelming grayness representing “Desirable Social Behavior: Conformity, Obedience, Discipline” (the title of the educational film shown every day in detention). Curious and unwilling to succumb to the pressure to fit in, she follows a rainbow to a library with colorful books containing hidden knowledge, including on how different hues combine to create new colors. Individualism and inquisitiveness prove crucial to challenging the tyranny of Gray Works.
The vast watercolor illustrations are an immersive, splendid accompaniment to Robin’s captivating feats. Even in a city of monotonous gray, the pictures brim with details, conveying the unique texture of different materials (including cloth, wood, and concrete) and hinting at the concealed multicolor world underneath the city. Facial expressions are varied and fluid, revealing multifaceted emotions despite the city’s overwhelming attempts to intimidate its inhabitants into colorlessness.
An imaginative tale encouraging vibrancy and children’s discovery, The Gray City demonstrates how gray is more than just a plain mixture of black and white.
ISABELLA ZHOU (August 14, 2024)
Brunch King
Eats, Beats, and Boozy Drinks
Joey Maggiore
Figure 1 Publishing
Hardcover $32.95 (192pp)
978-1-77327-235-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Joey Maggiore’s energetic cookbook Brunch King features amplified portions and layers of dazzling flavors.
Maggiore’s’ Hash Kitchen restaurant in Arizona serves up big, boozy drinks, decadent versions of brunch standards, and all the edible gold leaf and extravagant garnishes one can handle. This is a cookbook for celebrations, with vibrant flavors and food stylings broken down in seventy recipes for home cooks to try. The bouncy recipe introductions and zippy playlists from the restaurant’s house DJ complete the festive vibe.
No self-respecting brunch is complete without a juicy cocktail, and the Hash Kitchen versions include a bodacious build-your-own Bloody Mary bar approach with recipes for three kinds of base mixes and garnishes aplenty, including corn dogs and brussels sprouts. The resultant outsized beverages, as pictured, resemble parade floats. Mimosas and coffee drinks get the same glitzy treatment, as do the imaginative and nostalgic, neon-colored drinks fashioned by Maggiore to recreate childhood memories, as of slurping the sugary dregs of the breakfast cereal bowl.
All the brunch favorites are here, elevated with extra flavors, homemade sauces, and toppings. Pancakes and waffles are transformed by dessert flavors like carrot cake and bananas foster, and eggs and potatoes are festooned with fusion bits from Southwestern, Asian, Southern, and Italian cuisines, as with birria hash and blackened shrimp over mascarpone-laden polenta. Such exuberant cooking requires some time in the kitchen, and the final chapter includes patient instructions for concocting green chile hollandaise, brisket, and all the bold-flavored building blocks for the ultimate brunch.
For when a special occasion beckons and calories and cardiologists are not a concern, the Brunch King is the go-to cookbook for your next off-the-charts brunch party.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (August 14, 2024)
They Call You Back
A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir
Tim Z. Hernandez
University of Arizona Press
Hardcover $30.00 (272pp)
978-0-8165-5361-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Tim Z. Hernandez’s They Call You Back expands upon his prior documentary novel All They Will Call You, about the deaths of twenty-eight Mexican nationals in a California plane crash.
In January of 1948, a plane carrying Mexican workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California. There were no survivors. The passengers were on their way back to Mexico after laboring in the United States; unidentified in newspaper accounts, they were buried as “deportees” in a mass grave. Upon learning of the tragedy in 2010, Hernandez began a complicated and often circuitous quest, trying to find the workers’ families. The resulting book, All They Will Call You, led to the official acknowledgement and memorialization of the crash victims.
In this book, the continued search for the Los Gatos families is linked to Hernandez’s personal and ancestral complexities. With eloquent self-assessment, he writes about his issues with alcoholism and artistic identity, along with his separation from the mother of his two children. He recounts the economic struggles of his grandparents and parents and the 1995 police-involved death of his uncle. And he elaborates on racial validity and erasure, noting the longstanding minimization of people of color.
The memoir is rich with history, vivifying those who live and work in Mexico and California’s Central Valley. Hernandez’s grandfather was a Korean War veteran with PTSD; he believed that the appearance of a butterfly brought an omen of death. And before boarding the fateful 1948 flight, Alberto Raigoza Carlos could handle “guns, horses, harvests, embroidery, paintbrushes, and just about any task that was put in his way.” Cultural traditions and the speaking of Spanish are contrasted with life in “el Norte,” where assimilation into American society changed family dynamics.
With mystical and factual intensity, the moving memoir They Call You Back is about individual purpose and collective heritage.
MEG NOLA (August 14, 2024)
Before the Mango Ripens
Afabwaje Kurian
Dzanc Books
Hardcover $27.95 (332pp)
978-1-950539-99-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Afabwaje Kurian’s novel Before the Mango Ripens, Nigerians fight against white American missionaries for control over their country’s future.
“Transition [is] afoot in Nigeria” in 1971, just after the nation’s independence. Nigerian “nationals” assume positions of power in churches, schools, and hospitals. In Rabata, however, Reverend Jim refuses to allow Zanya to be a preacher, both because he thinks the locals aren’t ready to lead and because he doubts Zanya’s story that God allowed him to escape unscathed from a fire.
Zanya is further caught between Reverend Jim and the laborers who go on strike when the reverend refuses to pay fair wages. The mounting tension reaches a boiling point when Zanya and the reverend try to bring each other down by exposing each other’s secrets. Meanwhile, in Rabata’s clinic, one physician, Nelson, respects his colleague, Tebeya, though she remains secondary to him despite her demonstrable skills.
While some of Rabata’s missionaries hold liberal views, the locals are aware that regardless of how well-meaning the foreigners may be, it is not their place to decide Nigeria’s path. When Tebeya discovers an unsavory fact about Nelson, she sets out to remove him from his position. And Jummai, a servant for a missionary family and Zanya’s former lover, hatches a plan to escape her squalid surroundings, rebelling against both racial and gender hierarchies.
Despite its two distinct groups of locals and foreigners and its setting amid massive changes, Before the Mango Ripens is a historical novel that avoids predictable oppositions. Its characters’ relationships and internal qualities are complex, its locals speak in indigenous Gbagyi, and its focus is realistic throughout. It depicts an array of individual viewpoints, desires, and motivations, spotlighting the challenges of political self-determination and personal fulfillment with skill.
YELENA FURMAN (August 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
