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.

THE ATTIC CHILD – Lola Jaye

“Until the lions have their own histories, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” – African proverb, quoted by Chinua Achebe in “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review, no. 139

Lola Jaye writes in the author’s note of The Attic Child (William Morrow 2022) that the novel is her “attempt to give a lion a voice.”  That lion is an African child sold to serve as a “companion” to a wealthy English explorer.  While a work of fiction, The Attic Child is a reimaging of a real boy’s story – Ndugu M’Hali, a young African boy who was companion to Henry Morton Stanley until his death at age 12.  The novel is a stolen and lost voice, but it’s also resilience, hope and love.

Dikembe, the youngest of his family, lives a sheltered existence, held tight to the breast of his mother and shielded from the horrors of King Leopold’s II colonization of the Congo until his father is killed for his resistance.  To save him, his mother makes arrangements that he should join an English explorer, Sir Richard Babbington, as a companion.  Dikembe believes it will be for no more than six weeks, and then he can return home to Africa.  His gradual realization that he will never return home to his mother, that his mother is likely dead, is a bone-chilling ache of a read.

As Sir Richard’s companion, Dikembe is renamed Celestine and educated in the ways to be a proper English gentleman. To Sir Richard, he is a prized artifact from the Congo.  He is paraded around at parties, forced to pose in ridiculous photographs, and treated as an example of how the “wild” Africans can be “tamed.” But he’s fed well.  He has the finest of comforts and the best of tutors.  A chasm builds in his heart as he is both Dikembe and Celestine.  Then Sir Richard dies.  The relatives who inherited the home strip Celestine of all the luxuries he’d grown accustomed to.  As the only artifact they couldn’t profit from, they put him to work serving them hand and food.  He’s kicked out of his plush bedroom and locked in the attic, where he hides his only prized possessions they haven’t taken; a doll given to him by his only friend and the bone necklace that had belonged to his father.

Several decades later, Lowra is locked in the same attic where she finds the necklace and doll.  Her mother died when she was small and her father remarried her tutor, but only the tutor returned from the honeymoon.  Left in her stepmother’s care, Lowra was repeatedly abused – beaten, starved, and left for days on end in the dark attic. She finally manages to escape. She’s worked with a psychiatrist and takes medications, but she’s just going through the motions of life – until her stepmother dies and she learns she has inherited the house, as it was her mother’s never her stepmother’s.  Her only concern is for the necklace and doll, which remain in the attic where’d she’d left them when she fled.

Lowra’s true journey to healing begins as she becomes committed to finding out who hid the necklace and doll in the attic that had also been her prison.

Published months before Babel, The Attic Child has a comparable storyline; Celestine and Robin have very similar experiences, both being sold into the companionship of a wealthy Englishman and both rising to a rebellion. Unlike Babel, The Attic Child is solidly historical fiction.  And it is cleverly and beautifully executed, with characters that breathe and sing.  There’s hope and love and a voice.

Read this book.

PART OF YOUR WORLD – Abby Jimenez

“If you have a baby goat, you always lead with ‘I have a baby goat.’”

Brimming with Disney references and its own kind of magic, Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World (Grand Central Publishing 2022) is the sweetest kind of romance.  If you’ve been here for a bit, you know I don’t typically do romance.  But when I do, I want romance that is cleverly written and pulls you into a warm hug; Jimenez does that and then some. Her writing mirrors her own personality, if her social media presence is any indication, and I devoured this novel like spaghetti at the VFW with my closest friends.

The novel is told from alternating first person POVs, with both Alexis’s and Daniel’s sections never ringing hollow or underdeveloped. You will fall in love with both, even without the goat in pajamas and the hard of hearing hunting dog.

A raccoon results in Alexis running into a ditch in the middle of nowhere while she’s returning home following a funeral.  The mayor, who most decidedly does not look like a mayor, offers to tow her out.  They both think they’ll never see each other again, but Alexis is starving and needs a restroom. She finds herself at the VFW where Daniel is drinking with his friends.  The connection between the two is magnetic, animalistic, and freaking adorable.  They fall head over heels in lust tinged with the promise of oh so much more – so much more that Alexis doesn’t think she can allow herself to have.

Alexis is a Montgomery, a legacy in the medical and philanthropic worlds. She’s brilliant, and her family is the type of rich Daniel and the other residents of Wakan couldn’t even imagine.  Freshly out of an emotionally and verbally relationship, Alexis is struggling with the expectations put on her by her family, particularly her father, and the fact everyone wants her to get back with her ex because he is picture perfect, despite the cheating and abusive tendencies. She becomes a halved person, finding herself in Wakan, and buttoning up that self each time she returns to Minneapolis.  She won’t let Daniel in – not all the way; he doesn’t fit in her world – at least the world she’s been raised to inhabit.

The novel hits on common romance tropes, but it’s fresh and fun (while still hitting at some rather serious matters, including domestic violence and disparity in healthcare).  A magical Disney love story for adults (because SEX!), Part of Your World was the hug my heart needed.  And it’s absolutely hilarious. We all need a candy book every now and again.

Read this book – it has a baby goat wearing pajamas.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“There’s blood on every piece of here.”

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon Books 2023) has been compared to The Hunger Games meets Gladiator meets Squid Games, and it will fuck you up.  It’s a gory, bloodbath to the bitter end with a piercing sneer of a look at the US penal system that does not flinch for 359 pages. (I know there are folks who do not wish to believe that our justice system is far from fair and just, and there are folks who believe that criminals deserve every lick of cruel and inhumane treatment they receive within our prisons. Those folks will either not read this novel or read this novel for pure entertainment & enjoyment.  Much like the novel’s spectators who cheer on the death matches, the readers run the risk of being active participants.)

Set in the future, the novel envisions a US where criminals are “given the option” to join CAPE, Criminal Action Penal Entertainment.  As part of CAPE, they join a chain gang and compete in death matches before roaring crowds. Everything is televised, including private moments and the Marches that are just as violent if not more than the death matches.  People cheer on their favorites as CAPE has become America’s favorite live-action sport.  With each victory, the convict moves up the link – hoping to reach “high freed,” which is the promise of the program.  Only one person has ever been high freed, and that person was a plant to prove it could be done.  The majority of those who sign up for CAPE are “low freed,” and die on the battlefield, on a March, or at the hands of their own chain.

The heart of the novel, and what carries the main plot, is Thurwar and Staxxx.  Lovers on the same chain who are beasts on the battlefield, they are crowd favorites.  Thurwar is mere fights away from being high freed, and she’d done it on her own.  But the rules for the new season will change – bringing a devastating blow the chain, Thurwar and Staxxx, all in the name of entertainment. 

The Links play a part and put on a show, embracing a persona that crowds love so that they can receive more sponsorships and earn more blood points.  Like caged animals, they are forced to perform.                            

There are Links on the chains who are innocent.  Links who are not mentally sound.  Links who have been sexually assaulted in prison, starved, kept in solitary for 23 hours of a day, and “Influenced” – a cruel and extremely painful form of torture.  There are Links who were not allowed to talk without being punished.  Links who’ve forgotten their names.  And America watches with glee as they rip each other apart.

In addition to following the Links and giving us their stories before incarceration and before CAPE, the novel also touches on individuals who work for the program, who watch the program, who are protesting the program, and who have had family die in the program. 

Bathed in blood, Chain-Gang All-Stars shines a spotlight on the greedy elite, systemic racism, and mass incarceration.  And instead of the crimes against humanity being committed behind bars, they happen in full view for the paying public.  Both a kick in the gut and jagged edged mirror – this novel leaves a mark.

Read this book.

THE DAVENPORTS – Krystal Marquis

Inspired by the real-life Patterson family, Krystal Marquis’s The Davenports (Dial Books, 2023) is a young adult, Bridgerton-esque romance set in Chicago in 1910.  The Davenports are an extremely wealthy Black family, and that fortune has placed them in a very small section of the American population.  William Davenport, a former slave, built his empire from the dirt up, and his children have lived lives of opulence. Olivia, the eldest daughter, is preparing to “settle down” and make the proper gentleman a proper wife. Helen, the younger daughter, is more comfortable in overalls in the garage than in a dress.  She dreams of taking over the family’s carriage business and expanding to automobiles with her brother, John.  And John finds himself torn between Amy-Rose, a childhood friend who had been the daughter of a maid and who now serves the family, and Ruby Tremaine, daughter of a family friend who is seeking to be Chicago’s first Black mayor.  The novel alternates between Olivia, Helen, Ruby, and Amy-Rose’s POVs.

In an evolving political landscape, Olivia meets civil rights attorney Washington DeWight and realizes the life her parents are mapping out for her with the debonair Jacob Lawrence doesn’t set her soul ablaze like thoughts of DeWight do.  Helen, struggling to fight for a voice in the garage, finds herself forced into a corset, her parents hellbent on making her a lady. Rather unexpectedly, she falls for her sister’s suitor.  Ruby, a childhood friend of similar background, has grown up with Helen and Olivia. Both families believe it a forgone conclusion that John will propose to her, which would be excellent for Mr. Tremaine’s political aspirations.  When the proposal doesn’t come as quickly as Ruby would like, she becomes determined to make John jealous by showing affection to another young man in their circle.  And then there’s Amy-Rose, another childhood friend who grew up with the Davenport children, but the friendship faded as her relationship became more of the employer/employee sort; she’d never be good enough for John, but he still has her heart – even if she has dreams that don’t concern him.

There’s a lot happening in The Davenports, which is the first of the series.  There are love triangles, miscommunication, enemy to lover-lite relationships, the boss’s son tropes, etc.  Despite all the romance, this is truly a young adult novel and there is no spice other than a few stolen kisses and petting. But there is also racism, political demonstrations, classism, the Progressive Era, feminism, etc. It’s a fascinating time in American history, even more fascinating for wealthy Black families.

Bridgerton fans, this may be a series for you to check out.  Young adult historical fiction and romance fans, this is a must.  The Davenports is a delight.

Read this book.