Book of the Day Roundup: September 23-27, 2024
Suki Cat: Astronaut
Grace Habib
Nosy Crow
Hardcover $9.99 (8pp)
979-888777089-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A new board book series blasts off with a colorful, interactive journey to the moon. With her box of dress-up clothes and accessories, Suki Cat can be anyone; today, she is an astronaut. Children can help Suki and her mouse companion on their out-of-this-world adventure by using the push, pull, and turn sliders throughout the book. The rhyming text makes this an approachable read-aloud for young children and early readers alike.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 14, 2024)
Djinns
Fatma Aydemir
Jon Cho-Polizzi, translator
University of Wisconsin Press
Softcover $17.95 (296pp)
978-0-299-34924-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Tragedy strikes a dysfunctional Turkish German family in Fatma Aydemir’s searing novel Djinns.
Hüseyin worked hard his entire life so he could bring his family back to his homeland in style. He dies only a week after accomplishing this dream, leaving his widow and four children to consider the seeming futility of his life’s work and the high cost of assimilation. Their personal traumas make the difficulties of existing as Turkish immigrants in xenophobic Germany intolerable.
Each of the story’s six sections is devoted to a different family member, revealing their painful rifts and the secrets they keep. The eldest daughter, Sevda, fears and resents her mother Emine for her cold disapproval, while her sister Peri, having experienced mental health problems herself, feels a measure of sympathy for their mother’s struggles and suffering. The story closes with Emine’s section, allowing her the chance to unburden herself of that which has haunted the family since its beginnings. The family members are variously selfish, sympathetic, fascinating, and frustrating, and all of them—from the parents to lonely Ümit, the youngest child—are held hostage by circumstances they believe themselves powerless to change.
The children see the consequences of their parents’ mistakes but can do little to avoid the same missteps, no matter how much they rebel against the choking traditions that have added to their misery. The final line, as crushing as death itself, reveals a truth learned too late: a successful legacy is not measured by where a person lives or how well they obey rules, but in the memories they leave with loved ones.
Djinns is a devastating multigenerational saga in which an immigrant family struggles to find acceptance in a world where no one and no place will take them as they are.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (August 14, 2024)
Necrology
The Dirty #1
Meg Ripley
Creature Publishing
Softcover $20.00 (386pp)
978-1-951971-14-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Meg Ripley’s subversive, thrilling novel Necrology, a wise girl raised on the wonders of the wilds is forced to contend with those who would see her kind extinguished.
In an alternate version of America, magic pulses through the population, wielded either by Dirty women who are forbidden from practicing it or by Freeman, who sit in seats of power and loathe what the Dirty represent. An old truce between the group frays when a Freeman leader, coveting a woman he cannot have, is violent and receives violence in return. Eight-year-old Rabbit is at the center of the turmoil that ensues: the adopted daughter of Whitetail, who swallowed her vicious sister to delay war, she is encouraged to denounce Whitetail and the Dirty in public, ensuring the elder’s execution.
Taken from her forest home to an industrialized city, Rabbit proves a challenge to her captors. Though she witnessed Whitetail commit an unforgivable act, she maintains her belief in the goodness of the Dirty magic that formed her. Men may want to reshape the world in their image, but she resists being their tool, knowing that “if you don’t believe there is good in magic, power in women’s own decisions, then you will never see the future that should be.”
Necrology is a life-giving novel that employs its own intoxicating vocabulary, embracing the dual meanings of words like “dirty,” which men use as an aspersion and which women claim with pride. Its mythology includes the necrology, a stone that contains the history of Dirty women; summonings of twin incarnations and the specters of the dead; and behind it all, the wild, which endows those who honor it with magic. The first book in a series, its gripping ending fires the first supernatural shot in a war to come—one that will determine whether women will be free.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (August 14, 2024)
On the National Language
The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues
B.A. Van Sise
Schiffer Publishing
Hardcover $50.00 (176pp)
978-0-7643-6814-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In a dazzling interplay of words and images, B. A. Van Sise’s On the National Language conjures the richness of North America’s endangered languages, some of which are spoken by only a handful of elders. There are cultural summaries, representative words, and evocative photographs of the one hundred speakers, as well as poetry and bits of memoir.
Some examples are from diaspora communities, but most are Indigenous, revitalized after colonial censure and residential school policies. They survived after being “tucked up in corners, hidden under blankets, rolled up in tongues.” Van Sise describes an exciting cultural programming renaissance that’s reaching new speakers and some tricky linguistics detective work that resurrects languages that went generations without being spoken. The book shimmies from Alaskan Russian to South Californian Tongva to Georgia’s Afro-Seminole Creole, showcasing the diversity of amazing words and concepts among different traditions. And the accompanying portraits reflect cultural pride and evoke multiple meanings for the selected terms. Most striking is the shoreside portrait depicting et’uquitur (“he reached a deep spot in the water”) with a mighty whale fluke piercing the water just behind the Cup’ig speaker.
This creative and important collection of words you never knew you really needed is best summed up by the Bukhari word amonati—“something you hold and keep safe for someone else.”
RACHEL JAGARESKI (August 14, 2024)
The Hungry and the Haunted
Stories
Rilla Askew
Belle Point Press
Softcover $17.95 (160pp)
978-1-960215-17-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The intimate short stories of Rilla Askew’s The Hungry and the Haunted illuminate lives touched by grief, guilt, and social change.
Set in Oklahoma and the American Southwest during the 1970s and told across multiple perspectives, these diverse stories follow outcasts and travelers whose lives and relationships are defined by their settings. The tumult of the era is handled with depth as people grapple with their personal and shared histories, attempting to build new lives from the rubble of grief and tragedy. And particular focus is placed on Southwestern Indigenous people and teenage girls on the outskirts of society.
In one story, an elderly man reckons with his past and his role in the destruction of Indigenous culture. In “Tahlequah Triptych,” a family’s stories are retold across three generations; it’s a compelling exploration of the interconnectedness of a place and its people. Elsewhere, young, grieving women attempt to sever their connections to their pasts, but instead find that they are tethered beyond understanding to their family and terrestrial roots.
The characterizations are rich; they focus on how people contend with the specters of their pasts. Throughout, complicated backstories and deep wounds are addressed with care and delicacy. The prose rides the line between lush and restrained, making careful use of descriptive and metaphorical language to root the stories in their places and times. Subtle details and specificity flesh out this multifaceted portrait of Oklahoma further, preserving a precarious sense of it at a political and social crossroads.
The challenging, beautiful short stories collected in The Hungry and the Haunted cover fraught histories that play out in individual lives and linger into the present.
BELLA MOSES (August 14, 2024)
Kathy Young
