PROBABLY RUBY – Lisa Bird-Wilson

“…like a salmon swimming upstream. In her blood to go there. An irresistible pull. Only she didn’t swim away in the first place. That’s why it was so hard to know the way back. She was a little salmon scooped up in a big net.”

Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby (Coteau Books(Canada), 2020 & Hogarth (US) 2022) is a beaded mosaic of intertwined stories that span from 1950 – 2018; the thread has frayed and the beads threaten to spill forth. Ruby Valentine, born to a white teenager and her Métis (French & Cree)  boyfriend and adopted by Alice and Mel, an older white couple with a relationship on the rocks even before the adoption, is at the heart of the collection; the stories whimper and wail with her struggles to find belonging, meaning, and family.

From forced Indigenous adoptions to the horrors of the Indigenous residential schools, the collection is as colorful, broken and loud as Ruby.  It’s a chaotic, far from linear read full of laughter that fills a room and dripping with grief for stolen moments, memories and lives.

Read this book.

THE EAST INDIAN – Brinda Charry

For my birthday, I ordered a mystery box from Chapters Books & Gifts, an indie bookstore out of Seward, Nebraska.  They tossed a couple of ARCS into the package as a fun little bonus, one being Brinda Charry’s The East Indian (Scribner – pub date 9 May 23). This is an ARC I want the final hardback of.  It’s beautiful historical fiction with a POV that has been woefully lacking.  In many ways, the voice Charry gives Tony is akin to the voice Lola Jaye gives Dikembe in The Attic Child, a recent read.  (If you haven’t read that, check out my review.)

Based on historical records, The East Indian tells the story of Tony, a Tamil boy born in East India to a courtesan mother; his real name is eventually replaced with the more palatable to the English “Tony.”   His childhood was beautiful; he was so loved and cherished. When an Englishman with the English East India Company takes up with his mother, he also dotes on the young boy. When Tony’s mother dies, it is Master Day who makes arrangements for him to join another Englishman in London.  And so, Tony’s journey begins, and in 1635, as a child, Tony becomes the first East Indian to reach America.

What follows is a heartbreaking tale of a boy with a lost name in a new land.  While Tony becomes indentured to a tobacco farmer in Jamestown, he still dreams of becoming a “medicine man” and following in the steps of one of the men rumored to have fathered him.  He will serve his time, and then he will make his way home.  Tony is resilient, charming, and observant – and the story is told through his POV as he reflects on his life, opening with him recounting the hanging of a witch on the ship to the Virginia colony – and what a life of adventure it is.

Prior to her death, his mother told Tony that she would like to return as a bird. The bird imagery throughout the novel is a quiet triumph of love even after death.  Also a triumph is the fragile and sometimes fleeting relationship between the three young boys, Sammy, Tony and Dick, who traveled to the colony together.

With Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play Tony saw at the Globe while in London, as a constant hum that hugs and holds the story tight, The East Indian gives the Indian boy a starring role, not just a fleeting moment. Read this book.

THE JASAD HEIR – Sara Hashem

Sara Hashem’s debut, The Jasad Heir (The Scorched Throne #1) (Orbit Book, publication date 7/18/2023) is a slow burn of an enemies to lovers, which takes a backseat to political intrigue, genocide, and the meaning of self.  The novel is chock full of fantasy tropes that bleed into each other – Reluctant Hero, Orphan Hero, Secret Heir, Tournament, Evil Overlord, etc. We also have forbidden magic, destroyed kingdoms, and tests of loyalty versus self-preservation.  The fantasy elements are Egyptian inspired, which makes The Stardust Thief a quick comparison.  (Chelsea Abdullah even writes a blurb for it!)  I was also reminded of Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season series, particularly in the relationship between Arin and Sylvia, which brought Paige and the Warden to mind. As tropey as it is, I do believe it stands apart.  There’s something about Hashem’s story-telling ability that made this un-put-downable, and I’m glad Orbit sent me an ARC.  Is the second book ready yet?

When she was ten, Essiya, the heir to Jasad, watched her kingdom burn, and everything and everyone she loved was destroyed.  Miraculously, she survived.  Despite her magic being tethered inside her by the cuffs placed by her grandparents, she rises from the ashes.  To the world, Essiya is dead.  The woman who finds her is a Jasadi exile and no fan of the royal family. Over the next five years, she does horrific things to Essiya trying to unleash the magic held within.  Over and over, the heir is starved, beaten, and ripped apart until she escapes at fifteen.  The novel opens five years later, when she’s established herself as a chemist’s apprentice named Sylvia in a small town.  She doesn’t speak of Jasad, and no one knows about the magic that bubbles just beneath the surface; she’d be killed if they did.  Then the Nizahl Heir, the son of the man who destroyed her everything, comes into her village and the fragile existence she’s built as Sylvia is destroyed.

The Nizahl Heir can detect magic, and while Sylvia proves a bit more difficult for him, it’s quickly discovered that she is Jasadi.  Instead of killing her, he elects to use her as pawn to draw in factions of Jasadi who roam the kingdoms.  He doesn’t know she’s the heir; he just knows she has magic, and the surviving factions are seeking out all the hidden Jasadi.  They make a deal; Sylvia will help him by serving as Nizahl’s champion in the upcoming tournament, which should draw out these factions for the Nizahl Heir to “handle.” Upon her successful completion, she will be free and neither he nor anyone in the kingdoms will hunt her.

The tournament is not really explained, and I’m not even sure I fully understand why there’s a tournament. It clearly serves the purpose of moving the plot forward, but it’s missing the meat.  I would have loved to have seen more development of the actual tournament and its competitions, as well as the various kingdoms and their respective champions (especially since I believe we shall see at least one of them again).  The competitions very much reminded me of the Triwizard Tournament, and they could have been their own book with enough flesh. 

But the tournament isn’t really the focus; the focus is on Sylvia reconciling herself as Essiya, the rightful queen of a destroyed kingdom.

Read this book.

MAAME – Jessica George

“I love you, Dad. Very much, okay?”

Without meaning to, I’ve been on a reading journey of books about young women in the UK “growing up;” Cassandra in Reverse, The Rachel Incident, and my most recent read, Maame are all “later in life” bildungsromans that make comparisons to Bridget Jones’s Diary a no-brainer – especially when they have humor – albeit different sorts of humor.

Jessica George’s debut, Maame, (St. Martin’s Press 2023) is about Maddie, the youngest in her family and the one everyone relies on.  Maame, which is what her family has always called her, means many things in Twi, but Maddie knows in her case it means “woman,” and she’s been managing her family for years.  With her mother spending half her time in Ghana and her brother trying out the music scene, her father and care of the household become her responsibilities when he is diagnosed with Parkinson’s.  As his caretaker, Maddie’s life takes a different path than what she had imagined; her social growth is stunted while she’s pushed into adulthood.  She is consumed by a loneliness even she can’t name properly, and while she is concerned she may be depressed, she’s been taught by her mother that one shouldn’t talk to strangers about their problems.  And Maddie doesn’t.  Not to anyone.  No one knows how sick her father really is.  No one knows that she cries herself to sleep at night.  She even lies to the doctor about how she hurt her back.

When her mother (an extremely unlikeable character whose primary concern seems to be money (she charges her daughter rent to serve as live-in caregiver to her own father!) and ensuring Maddie goes to church and finds a husband before she’s too old) returns to England, promising to stay for a year, everything changes.  Maddie moves out and relinquishes care of her father to her mother. 

What follows is “New Maddie”trying to make up for all the missed experiences and seeking the key to happiness. While centering on filial responsibility, grief, and mental health, the novel also addresses blatant racism and microaggressions in both Maddie’s personal and work lives.  It also highlights the nervous condition of someone born to immigrant parents who feels little to no connection to the “homeland,” setting much needed boundaries with family, and the struggles of making lasting adult friendships.

Maddie is floundering, but she is learning that she is the sum of all her pieces and what she does with that moving forward is up to her.  

This may not have been the best selection for Father’s Day weekend for a reader who is still reeling from the loss of her dad years ago, but my heightened grief this time of year undoubtedly afforded me a different reading experience, and I’m grateful to George for that – reading should never be just about looking at words on a page (or whatever method you read via); you need to feel them.

Read this book.

THE RACHEL INCIDENT – Caroline O’Donoghue

“The smell of pastry, the chocolate melting on my tongue, the bitter black coffee. I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.”

Set primarily in 2009-2010, Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident (Knopf expected 27 June 2023) is a slice of life work that’s a kick in the teeth for millennials. As an elder millennial (or xennial), I was almost too far removed from my early twenties for this to hit the mark square on the nose.  Almost.  But my connection to Rachel and her experiences (both in love and in the publishing industry) means this was a solid wallop that I won’t soon forget.

I should have disliked this novel.  It has a literary brat pack/Bret Easton Ellis/Donna Tartt taste to it that I typically hate, and slice of life academia novels as well as novels with a writer as a main character aren’t my fav – but The Rachel Incident is gritty, loud, sticky, and absolutely delicious (no chaser required).  Oh, the sweet taste of nostalgia.   I knew Rachel because many of her experiences and stupid decisions, as beautiful and tragic as they were, mirrored my own from the early 2000s.  And that level of connection is a win for a slice of life novel.  (And there’s nothing like getting drunk on cheap booze and singing Bad Romance with a platonic soul mate to heal your whole being.)

Rachel is in her senior year at Uni and working at a bookstore in Cork, Ireland. She meets James, a flamboyant and captivating (and closeted) coworker, and she becomes absolutely smitten with him.  The two become the quickest and closest of friends, and they eventually move in together.  Both James and Rachel are unmoored and floundering, but they steady each other; their friendship and the connection between them is the heartbeat of the novel.

Rachel fantasizes about having sex with her married English instructor, and James feeds and encourages those flights of fancy. Together, they orchestrate a plan to get the instructor to do a book signing at the bookstore they work at.  But Rachel isn’t the one who ends up having sex with him, James is.  What unfolds is a year that will forever change Rachel and James separately as well as Rachel & James, the unit. Life doesn’t slow down, and Rachel must grow up.  So does James, but this isn’t his story – it’s her’s – and it’s an absolute banger.

Read this book.

*A huge thanks to Alfred A. Knopf for the finished copy.

CASSANDRA IN REVERSE – Holly Smale

“Because if things can be broken, then things can be changed; and if things can be changed, then it stands to good and logical reason that they can also be fixed. That’s all I need to know.”

Holly Smale’s Cassandra in Reverse (Mira 2023) was my June Aardvark selection.  It’s a cheeky novel that reminded me of Bridget Jones’s Diary, just make Bridget neurodivergent and add time travel.  The character of Cassandra and how she is developed and presented also recalled Elizabeth from Lessons in Chemistry, a relatively recent read with a female lead also on the spectrum; however, Cassandra’s “differences” are more at the forefront of this novel.

The opening is one of my favorites and immediately hooked me: “Where does a story start? It’s a lie, the first page of a book, because it masquerades as a beginning…And it’s saying that kind of shit that gets me thrown out of the Fentiman Road Book Club.”  Cassandra decides to start her story after she’s been dumped and fired and just before discovering she can time travel.  What follows are her numerous attempts at going back in time, just a few months is all she can do, to keep her man and job (but mostly her boyfriend). There’s a lot of warmth in watching her develop honest and real friendships with her roommate and coworkers. It’s charming and witty, but your heart hurts just a bit for Cassandra because the reader realizes before she does that she’s trying to erase herself. 

As Cassandra is time traveling, the reader sees her avoiding a woman.  Letters are arriving that she just trashes, she flees a woman in a museum, etc. The twist with this woman isn’t really a shocker or the heart of the novel, but I don’t want to spoil it because it does provide more adhesive to a plot that could be a touch hollow.

The novel was billed as a romance, which seems a bit misplaced.  Arguably, it is a love story – just not the type of love story anticipated with a romance tag.  I enjoyed it, but I did get frustrated with Cassandra and the seemingly steady loop. And I hated the ending.  I felt cheated after investing so much time in Cassandra and learning to love her as she learned to love herself.  As much as the opening was a favorite, the ending left me with bad taste for the entire novel.

I’d still recommend it though.

Read this book.

BEASTS OF EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCE – Ruth Emmie Lang

“Only rain, not tears, ran down his cheeks. He wasn’t a real boy after all.  He was a wolf, and he cried like one.”

Ruth Emmie Lang’s Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) is one of my favorite reads of the year so far, and I almost didn’t read it.  You may remember that Lang’s The Wilderwomen was a roaring disappointment for me. I didn’t think the characters had warmth or depth, and I had no connection to the story or those that inhabited the pages.  I had no similar concerns with Lang’s debut; Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstances is a hug of novel, my favorite sort, and it’ll get under your skin and in your heart in the best of ways.

Reminding me of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish, Beasts centers around the most remarkable of characters with the most fascinating of stories. Weylyn was born in a blizzard.  On June 29th.  He’s a bit of magic and a bit untamed, but all heart.  When he’s orphaned, he runs away from child services and becomes part of a wolf pack. Mary meets him when she’s eleven.  Her mother has died and her father is trying his best, but Mary is cloaked in grief.  She runs away with the wolf boy, and he mends her broken heart and she teaches him to read.  But children can’t be raised by wolves, and Mary is returned home and Weylyn is put in foster care.

Each person he encounters, from Mary to his foster sister Lydia to his teacher and eventual foster mother Meg, is forever marked by knowing Weylyn.  He leaves bits of magic where he goes, but he is a nomad and cannot stay in one place long.  He’ll spend his life loving the girl who ran away to join the wolves with him.  And he’ll spend his life trying to find her again.

Read this book.  Howl at the moon, and then read it again.

LONE WOMEN – Victor LaValle

Larry McMurtry meets Stephen King in Victor LaValle’s genre-bending Lone Women (One World 2023), and I couldn’t put it down.

The novel opens with 31-year-old Adelaide Henry fleeing her family’s farm and heading to Montana.  She has a travel bag, a locked steamer trunk, and plans for a fresh start under the Homestead Act.  She’ll settle the plot and earn ownership of her own land, her family’s farm in California a ghost of a memory.  But as much as Adelaide wants to start fresh, the secrets in the steamer trunk bind her to the past and her family.

As a single Black female intent on settling in a harsh landscape with limited provisions, Adelaide quickly learns that she can’t isolate herself from those who’d seek to help.  She makes friends with Grace and her son, Sam, and Grace’s generosity is quite literally a saving grace.  There is one other Black person in the area, Bertie, and she feeds Adelaide’s soul.  Adelaide, Grace, and Bertie are all “lone women,” single women taking advantage of the government’s offer of landownership for taming the land regardless of gender.  But working together, the women are never truly alone; they will support each other by all means possible. 

Not all the residents of the town are as welcoming to the single women, and they are subjected to theft, assault, and shunning.  But that’s the cost of settling land, and they won’t give up.  Adelaide won’t give up.  Even when the secret locked in her trunk threatens to destroy her new life and rip apart the fragile bonds of the relationships she’s building.

Part western and part horror, the novel is firmly a novel of adventure and found family.  I’m not going to tell you what’s in trunk; I’ll let LaValle do that.  But I will say what’s locked up and why it’s locked up aren’t the only “horror” aspects of the novel. 

Read this book.

THE MANY DAUGHTERS OF AFONG MOY – Jamie Ford

“A woman carries her fear inside of her.”

Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy (Atria Books 2022) is an intriguing approach to inherited trauma.  Epigenetic inheritance is at the core of Ford’s novel, and the science as well as case studies are absolutely fascinating.  Set primarily in 2045, but timeline hopping from 1836 forward, the novel follows the women descended from Afong Moy, a historical figure who was exploited and paraded around to the delight of paying Americans.  While Ford’s treatment of Moy and her descendants is entirely fictional, The Chinese Lady was very much real – even if her true story has been lost.  I adore a generational saga, and I fully expected to adore this novel as it took a format I love and applied some interesting science and a bit of the fantastical – but it fell short.

Conceptually, the novel reminds me a bit of Outlander meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dorothy Moy is depressed – the weight of her inherited trauma is pulling her under, and she’s worried her young daughter will face the same fate. Against her toxic partner’s wishes, she begins treatment at an epigenetic center.  The treatments will allow her to face the trauma and essentially rewrite history – at least that’s the goal.

The best parts of the novel are not in 2045 with Dorothy, but in the snippets of history and the phenomenal Moy women.  In 1836, Afong is sent to America against her wishes and is forced to perform – her bound feet and exotic clothing on display to those willing to pay.  The treatment and atrocities she faces are heartbreaking. Her granddaughter, Lai King Moy, ends up orphaned during the bubonic plague that rocked San Francisco’s Chinatown. Her daughter, Zoe, attends Summerhill in England. Summerhill, a real boarding school, has a unique philosophy that allows the students to direct the instruction. There, Zoe finds a love she cannot claim. Her daughter, Faye, is a nurse during WWII.  Faye’s granddaughter and Dorothy’s mother, Greta, develops a dating app that earns her a fortune.  I wanted more of these sections.  Way more.

Love remains always just out of grasp for the women in Afong Moy’s family and tragedy is a constant. Can Dorothy rewrite history and save herself and her daughter from being drowned by the inherited trauma that just keeps getting heavier and heavier? That’s the question that carries the novel, and it’s one I didn’t care for an answer to.   I just wanted more of Moy’s daughters and less of Dorothy’s struggles.

It’s a well-written novel with an interesting premise, but the snippets of history were more fascinating than the epigenetic plotline.  The Author’s Note and Acknowledgements are effortlessly amazing because Ford is a real deal talent, but this one just didn’t do it for me.

LEGENDS & LATTES – Travis Baldree

“It was a weapon… Now, it’s a relic. A decoration. Something from before.”

Y’all.  Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (Tor 2022) is so freaking adorable I can hardly stand it.  Like most cozies, it’s an extremely quick read.  Unlike most cozies, it’s high fantasy. 

The novel opens with Viv, an orc, in her last battle.  She kills the scalvert, takes the scalvert stone from the monster’s head, and leaves without much fanfare.  She feels a bit bad about how she leaves her crew, but goodbyes aren’t her strong suit, and she wouldn’t be able to explain; the stone is rumored to draw good fortune near, and Viv intends to use it in ways they couldn’t understand.

Viv tasted coffee, a gnome creation, on one of her travels.  She decides to open a coffee shop in Thune, a place that has never heard of the hot beverage.  She buys an old livery, finds a hob named Cal that she enlists as her contractor to build the shop she’s envisioned.  She hires Tandri, a succubus, to help run the café. As her business grows and she learns more about the preferences of her customers, she hires Thimble, a ratkin, as the baker.  A direcat takes up residence, intimating as necessary but mostly purring and sipping cream; she even ignores the ratkin.  As the business continues to flourish, the threat of the Madrigal looms.  Viv is expected to pay a percentage of her profits to the local kingpin, but Viv isn’t exactly keen on the idea.

Viv’s shop continues to thrive, the good fortune attributed to the stone she’s hidden in the floor of the livery. She adds a lute player to  provide music, and the menu grows to include cold beverages as well as several of Thimble’s delicious pastries. With the Madigral threat becoming something she can no longer ignore, she calls on her old crew.  They readily come to her aid, supporting her endeavors and new way of life in unexpected ways.

This found family novel is well-written, witty, and an immensely delicious candy read.  It sounds like a purr.  It smells like cinnamon and coffee. It feels like a hug.

Read this book.