new books april 2014

Astonish Me

By Maggie Shipstead
272 pages; Knopf

January 1975, Toronto. Joan Joyce, a lackluster member of the corps de ballet, sits in the getaway car, one hand poised to turn the key in the ignition, the other ready to switch on the headlights. After a fling in Paris with the world's most famous ballet dancer, Arslan Rusakov, she has been chosen—by Arslan himself—to help him defect from the Soviet Union. He exits through the stage door, bolts for the car in full costume, and climbs into the backseat, and Joan smuggles him across the border, to New York City. Arslan epitomizes the physicality and star power Joan will never have, which makes her desire for him all the more potent, and poignant. Their ensuing relationship changes her "sensation of being alive," but doesn't alter her career trajectory.

Maggie Shipstead's thrilling second book, Astonish Me (Knopf), is an homage to, and exposé of, the exhilarating, punishing world of ballet; it's also a searing rumination on insecurity, secrecy, and friendship. The story line takes its inspiration from a real-life pas de deux: Mikhail Baryshnikov's passionate affair with American socialite Christina Berlin.

Shipstead juxtaposes the rigorous discipline of ballet with the recklessness of sexual desire. After becoming pregnant, Joan leaves New York, marries her childhood admirer, and moves to California, where she teaches dance. One of her most promising students is her young son, Harry, and as the years pass, his talent becomes a daily reminder of Joan's former life, ultimately forcing her to confront the decisions she's made and reckon with all she's left behind.

Though not a dancer herself, Shipstead nails the details of being perpetually en pointe: the adrenaline rush after a performance, the intimate atmosphere of the dressing room, the nagging feelings of inadequacy, the erotically charged and emotionally cruel competitiveness, and the inability to shake perfectionism long after retirement. Like a brilliant choreographer, she has masterminded a breathtaking work of art.
— Sophie Flack
new books april 2014

March: Book One

By John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell
128 pages; Top Shelf Productions

It's not often that a congressman stars in his own autobiographical comic book, but that's exactly the role Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) plays in the graphic memoir March: Book One (Top Shelf Productions). Written with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, the project was inspired by a 1958 comic book that chronicled Martin Luther King Jr.'s role in a seminal civil rights boycott—and helped spur young Lewis to join the movement himself.

March is both an important first-person account for any student of the era and a riveting chronicle of Lewis's extraordinary life. An Alabama sharecropper's son—a boy preacher whose first flock was made up of his family's chickens—he spoke alongside King at the March on Washington when he was only 23. Less than two years later, in 1965, he co-led a group of peaceful protesters from Selma, Alabama, toward the state capitol of Montgomery. En route, he and others were severely beaten in the violence that became known as Bloody Sunday. This first book of three centers on a series of events Lewis recalls on the occasion of President Obama's 2009 inauguration, and it powerfully illustrates how much perseverance is needed to achieve fundamental social change. In this memoir, Lewis—an elder in our midst—speaks for all of those who paved the way and ensures that their legacy will live on.
— Daniel Squadron
new books april 2014

The Other Language

By Francesca Marciano
304 pages; Pantheon

The Heroines of Francesca Marciano's The Other Language (Pantheon) take the kind of risks most of us have been conditioned to avoid. They reconnect with lost lovers, migrate to faraway lands, and forge liaisons beyond the bounds of their race, culture, and class. If they work, they generally gravitate toward artsy professions like writing and filmmaking—nothing associated with job security.

Marciano is an apt guide to these exotic lives, having lived on three continents and pursued serial careers as a filmmaker, a screenwriter, and a novelist. Not all of her protagonists endear themselves to the reader—some are whiners; others, liars—but she engages us so intimately with them, we do not tire even of their foibles. (They, on the other hand, often grow weary of one another.)

The title story establishes the cosmopolitan, faintly nostalgic atmosphere that permeates Marciano's prose. Emma, an Italian teen on a family holiday in Greece, devoutly hopes that by mastering English and strengthening her swimming skills she will one day attract Jack, a beguiling British boy vacationing at the same beach. Yet she discovers, first as an adolescent and then as an adult, that fluency in a language doesn't guarantee her yearnings will be heard, much less understood.

Frustrated communication, whether the consequence of a Skype encounter or a tête-à-tête, is a recurrent theme, as is the quest for the elusive person or place that allows one to feel at home. In Marciano's nuanced emotional universe, a foreigner is likely to consider herself an outsider no matter how long she's lived elsewhere—especially if she still dreams in her mother tongue.
— Amy Fine Collins
new books april 2014

Frog Music

By Emma Donoghue
352 pages; HarperCollins

Based on a real, unsolved crime, Frog Music (Little, Brown) opens with a blast of bullets shattering the night quiet. Emma Donoghue's eighth novel, her first since 2010's eerily quirky best-seller Room, is a riveting literary thriller revolving around a brief, unlikely friendship that ends with one woman dead and the other transformed. In 1870s San Francisco, professional frog hunter Jenny Bonnet is slain just inches from Blanche Beunon, a French burlesque dancer and prostitute. The story alternates between the weeks leading up to the shooting, when the women become acquainted after Jenny nearly runs over Blanche while riding a bicycle, and the immediate aftermath, during which Blanche discovers that her infant son has disappeared. For three frantic days, she searches for her baby, seeks justice for Jenny, and lives in terror of becoming the killer's next victim. Donoghue brilliantly conjures the chaos of a boomtown in the grip of both a heat wave and a smallpox epidemic; her cast of colorful lowlifes includes the freeloading Arthur and his sycophantic best friend, Ernest. But it's Blanche and Jenny who hold our attention. The insouciant Jenny dresses and picks fights like a man and remains an enigma until her death, when shocking details of her life emerge. Blanche is equally complicated, simultaneously passionate and calculating. Performing a lewd dance, "a surge of heat goes through her.... Every dip, sway, pout, wiggle, grind, she converts into greenbacks in her head. That gives extra vim to her movements; burnishes the shine of her eyes." Long driven by vanity and selfishness, in a crisis Blanche awakens to nobler instincts. Frog Music begins with a mystery: Who killed Jenny? But it enthralls with two other questions: Who was Jenny? Who will Blanche become?
— Karen Holt
new books april 2014

Boy, Snow, Bird

By Helen Oyeyemi
320 pages; Riverhead

When Boy Novak arrives in the sleepy New England town of Flax Hill in the winter of 1953, she's on the run from her abusive father, a rat catcher on Manhattan's Lower East Side. After slowly settling in to her new community, 22-year-old Boy marries Arturo, a widower, and becomes the stepmother to his beautiful raven-haired daughter, Snow Whitman, adored by everyone in town. When Boy gives birth to her own little girl, Bird, the baby is noticeably dark-skinned—revealing that Arturo's family, assumed by Flax Hill's residents to be white, are actually light-skinned African Americans. To avoid the inevitable comparisons between the half sisters, Boy sends Snow away to be raised by her aunt.

In Boy, Snow, Bird (Riverhead), Helen Oyeyemi spins a surreal retelling of the Snow White story, embedding West African folklore into the familiar plot line to consider what beauty means to its beholder—and to those who behold it in the mirror.

The novel is narrated first by Boy, then by the precocious and sharp-tongued Bird, and then again by Boy—who, in reflecting on the state of black-white relations in the 1960s, says, "It's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness." Oyeyemi's superbly inventive novel examines the thorniness of race and the poisonous ways in which vanity and envy can permeate and distort perception.
— Abbe Wright
new books april 2014

The Opposite of Loneliness

By Marina Keegan
240 pages; Scribner

Marina Keegan graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012 with everything to live for. She was an essayist and fiction writer who'd already been published. She'd landed a position at The New Yorker and was set to begin work in June. She'd even co-written a musical that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival. She was an idealist and activist who, in her final article for the Yale Daily News, had reveled in being young and having so much time ahead of her, and in the sense of belonging she felt with her fellow students: "It's not quite love, and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team." In other words, "the opposite of loneliness."

Just days after graduation, Keegan's boyfriend was driving them to her father's birthday celebration when he lost control of the car; Keegan didn't survive the crash. The Opposite of Loneliness (Scribner) is a posthumous collection of her fiction and nonfiction pieces, and it sparkles with talent, humanity, and youth. The prose, polished but thoroughly unselfconscious, is heartbreaking evidence of what could have been.
— Leigh Haber

The Blazing World

By Siri Hustvedt
368 pages; Simon & Schuster

Harriet Burden, an artist long ignored by critics, finally takes matters into her own hands by posing as a man in this playfully diabolic tour de force by the acclaimed author of What I Loved.
— Abbe Wright

Every Day Is for the Thief

By Teju Cole
176 pages; Random House

The author of Open City releases his first book—first published in Nigeria in 2007—in the US, which a young, unnamed doctor revisits his birthplace of Lagos, Nigeria, after many years away and discovers how profoundly the city, riddled with corruption and poverty, has changed from the place he loved as a boy.
— Abbe Wright

Bedrock Faith

By Eric Charles May
432 pages; Akashic Books

After finding God while serving a 14-year prison sentence, Stew Pot returns to his former South Side, Chicago, neighborhood; moves back in with his mother; and anoints himself moral judge of the community with mixed and at times disastrous results.
— Abbe Wright
new books april 2014

Visible City

By Tova Mirvis
256 pages; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In a glittering novel about fate, fantasy, and the anonymity of urban life, a lonely New York City woman uses her son's toy binoculars to spy on couples whose intimacy she craves.
— Abbe Wright

Redeployment

By Phil Klay
304 pages; Penguin

A stunning, often brutal collection of stories that critically examine the complexities of war and the wounds inflicted both on the front lines and at home, written by a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq.
— Abbe Wright

Palmerino

By Melissa Pritchard
191 pages; Bellevue Literary Press

From the author of The Odditorium comes a richly imagined, sensuous tale of a British writer holding court in Italy, flouting Victorian mores via her writing and her sexuality.
— Abbe Wright

The Silver Lining: An Insightful Guide to the Realities of Breast Cancer

By Hollye Jacobs, RN, MS, MSW
288 pages; Atria Books

After her diagnosis, a nurse chronicles her experiences on "isolation island"—and shares the lifelines that were her salvation—in this lovingly illustrated volume that is both a memoir and an instruction manual.
— Abbe Wright

You Should Have Known

By Jean Hanff Korelitz
448 pages; Grand Central Publishing

A provocative thriller in which a family therapist who's written the book on how to avoid romantic mistakes finds that she may have missed some warning signs about her own husband and determines to reinvent her life.
— Abbe Wright

Savage Girl

By Jean Zimmerman
416 pages; Viking

From the author of The Orphanmaster comes a fablelike novel in which a girl reputedly raised by wolves in 19th-century Nevada is adopted by an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan family and forced to assimilate, until her suitors begin turning up dead.
— Abbe Wright

Sleep Donation

By Karen Russell
Atavist Books

A fabulist novella (available solely as a digital download) in which an insomnia epidemic prompts such dramatic solutions as Night World camps, Sleep Drives, and lullaby-singing songbirds.
— Abbe Wright