THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE – Katherine Arden

“Will you tell her?” asked the mare.

“Everything?” the demon said. “Of bears and sorcerers, spells made of sapphires and a witch that lost her daughter? No, of course not. I shall tell her as little as possible.  And hope that’s enough.”

One of my favorite courses at UNC was one devoted to Russian fairytales; there’s a familiarity and a warmth of a crackling fire in the stories that tried to bite back the cold, and I loved those stories. When I learned that Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale (Del Rey 2017) took those fairytales, in particular that of Morozko (Frost), and breathed life into them through Vasilisa, a young girl with a second sight to see the stories aren’t just stories, I knew it would be something special. And it is.  The first of the trilogy, The Bear and the Nightingale is a gorgeously told bit of magic.

Vasilisa’s mother, Marina, lives to see her born, as she had promised, but no more. The child is cared for by her older siblings and Dunya, the nurse who’d raised Marina, but she grows up half-feral, a child of the woods touched by a magic that frightens those in the village.  Her father heads to Moscow to find a wife to help make his daughter respectable.  The choice is not his, and a political pairing is made.  The woman who becomes Vasilisa’s stepmother is a blood relative to Marina, but she has nothing of her strength and courage.  Like Vasilisa, she has the second sight.  Only she is afraid and tormented by what she sees and seeks comfort in the church.  She, along with the new priest, forbids talk and worship of the old gods.  Vasilisa watches her friends weaken and fade without the offerings.  The horses grow temperamental, the fire grows cold, the people go hungry.  Meanwhile, the Bear is gathering strength to break the binds his brother, Frost, had placed him under so many years ago.

Frost has been looking for Vasilisa for years.  He’d thought the witch’s bloodlines had ended and was delighted to learn they hadn’t. Bear is also waiting to claim her, but Frost will find her first. Together, they can stop Bear, but at what cost? 

Vasilisa is not the snow maiden from the story of Frost; she is not a bird to be kept in a cage, and she will run wild and free on a stallion named Nightingale with the blue-eyed demon by her side.

Read this book. 

THE OGRESS AND THE ORPPHANS – Kelly Barnhill

“But it’s best you know this now, at the beginning of this book. Every story has a villain, after all. And every villain has a story.”

Kelly Barnhill is an absolute gift to literature, and not just children’s lit.  She’s another one of my “heart hug” authors, but her hugs come in the form of fairytales and smell like freshly baked cookies.  I adored The Girl Who Drank the Moon and became even more smitten with her first adult offering, When Women were Dragons.  The Ogress and the Orphans (Algonquin Young Readers 2022) is geared toward 9–11-year-olds, but one is never too old for fairytales.  There are some folks who hate this book and call it “preachy” – those folks tend to be the ones who support book banning and want higher fences instead of longer tables, and this book’s message just hit a little too close to home; heaven forbid someone become a better person from reading.

The novel has an ogress, fifteen orphans, a dragon, and a town that used to be oh-so-lovely until the library burned. Stories are whispered from the oak beams used to build the homes, but people have forgotten how to listen. Stories hum from the stone from which the town derived its name, Stone-in-the-Glen, but people forgot about the stone and covered it with trash.  When the library burned, Myron, who runs the orphanage with his beloved wife, saved as many books as he could, and his body is forever marked from that night, but the orphans have books and stories and the best of hearts making each scar worth it.  The mayor is a sparkly man the whole town fell in love with.  He arrived not long after the fires and saved them from the dragon.  They didn’t know he was the dragon wearing a sparkly man suit, and under his control, the town became a miserable place with miserable people who didn’t trust each or take care of each other.  And this is story of how an ogress who just wanted to find a community, a murder of crows, a blind dog, and fifteen orphans saved the town with the magic of books and baked goods.

As beautiful as this novel is and as much as I love Barnhill’s writing style, the novel is not as tight as it could be, and it starts to drag without much action after the first half before spiraling quickly to an action-packed conclusion – I’d have loved a huge chunk removed and more flesh on that last quarter.  That said, it’s still a fantastic read about the power of stories and the hearts of those who listen to them.

Read this book.

THE BOOK WOMAN OF TROUBLESOME CREEK – Kim Michele Richardson

“How many times had the hunger pangs tempted him? Set his belly afire for the wanting? Yet, his love for words and books was stronger.”

Kim Michele Richardson’s The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (Sourcebooks 2019) is historical fiction set in the 1930s in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky – deep in the heart of Appalachia. The novel centers around two points of US history that I was unaware of until rumors of plagiarism brought this novel and another one, one written by a more well-known author, to my attention.  (The fact I’m reviewing this one and not the other tells you where I fall in that discussion.) The Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration program that delivered books to remote regions of the Appalachian Mountains between 1935-1943. The program often employed women, called Book Women, who would traverse rough terrain on horse or mule back, encountering dangerous animals (and people), to bring books to their patrons.  These Book Women brought books to over 100,000 people.  This novel follows one such woman, Cussy Mary Carter, who initially rode as a single woman and then again as a widow.  (Married women could not work at the time.)

Cussy is unique in another way in that she’s one of Kentucky’s “Blue People.”  Cussy and her family are based on the Fugate family of Troublesome Creek.  Martin Fugate came to Kentucky from France in the 1820s and local legend says he was blue.  He married and four of his children were blue.  This blueness continued to be passed down, and in the 1960s, it was finally discovered that the Fugate family had a genetic condition called methemoglobiemia, which is passed through a recessive gene that flourished due to incest within the region. Richardson plays with the timeline a bit as it relates to the medical discovery as she has Cussy serve as the subject that helps uncover the root of the blueness and the cure.

A person with skin the color of a blueberry wasn’t within the realm of understanding for most, and the superstitions and discriminatory nature of those in Troublesome Creek made life quite difficult for both the real Fugates and the fictional Carters. Cussy’s father is a miner, and his goal is to see her married to someone who will take care of her after he is gone. Cussy has no desire to wed, and the only men who express interest in marrying a despised “blue” are those intrigued by the promise of land and the promise of her very attractive but still blue body.

While the heart of the story remains with books and the bridge they build between “a blue” and the residents of Troublesome Creek, the novel is peppered with tragedy after tragedy.  But Cussy, through Richardson’s writing, focuses more on the books and the good and glosses over the bad.  For example, more time is spent discussing the pineapple Lifesaver candy a starving student gives her in thanks for the books that won’t keep him fed or alive than is spent discussing her rape, assault, and subsequent abortion or the numerous deaths.  It’s a choice, but I do wish we’d seen some of these things fleshed out a bit more.

The story-telling element is extremely simple.  There are some hiccups – repetitiveness, inconsistent dialect, and some small plot holes – but these hiccups aren’t that damning, and the simple style makes it a palatable, quick read.

Read this book.

ALL THE LITTLE BIRD-HEARTS – Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

“I would not have knowingly allowed even the image of a bird into my home, however beautiful. But I lived for and loved a bird-heart that summer; I only knew it afterwards.”

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts (Algonquin Books 2023), my tenth read of the 2023 Booker longlist, is a peculiar and unsettling read.  Set in 1988, our protagonist, Sunday Forrester, is autistic.  We’d barely scratched the surface of our understanding of autism and the full spectrum in the 1980s, and Sunday is undiagnosed. This is the second book on the longlist with a character with undiagnosed autism, and it’s interesting to compare the two.  How to Build a Boat featured a young, neurodivergent boy, and All the Little Bird-Hearts focuses on a woman with a teenage daughter.  I do not believe the author of How to Build a Boat is autistic, whereas Lloyd-Barlow is.  And while I loved How to Build a Boat, it was very much outside looking in.  All the Little Bird-Hearts is raw in its authenticity, and it lets the reader inside Sunday’s mind.  It’s a peculiar read because of the unsettling, psychological thriller aspect.  I was on edge while reading the novel.  There are certainly witty moments as well as extremely devastating ones, but from the first line there is a hint of bad things coming.  And how Lloyd-Barlow carries that hint throughout the entire novel is brilliant but makes for a very unsettling read.

Sunday hasn’t had the easiest life.  Her sister died when she was young, and her parents blamed her and died soon after. Sunday lives in the same house she grew up in, and she works the same job she had as a teenager at the greenhouse on the farm run by her ex-husband’s family.  She recognizes that her mind works differently, and there is a lot of masking in her life, but she largely keeps her circles small and avoids triggers – at least until Vita and Rollo move in next door, and then there is a summer of noises and brightly colored foods and clothes. Sunday is smitten by Vita, wanting to be in her light, and relishing the love and attention Vita puts on her. Vita doesn’t treat her differently.  She isn’t offended by her bluntness or preference for silence; she includes Sunday the way Sunday is.  But her attentions soon turn to Sunday’s teenage daughter, and Vita’s brightness draws Dolly like a flame.  And Sunday can just watch it unfold, wondering if she’s jealous of Vita or Dolly, as Vita attempts to claim Sunday’s daughter as her own.

I didn’t have much sympathy for Dolly.  I understand that she is a self-absorbed teenager, but she is just so mean to her mom. My favorite relationship, and one I wish there had been a bit more of, was that between Sunday and her deaf coworker, David.  But that storyline wasn’t what this was – this was Sunday and Vita’s story, or rather the story of the summer Sunday’s life changed forever.

Read this novel.

Booker count: 10 of 13

FOUR TREASURES OF THE SKY – Jenny Tinghui Zhang

“There is something about her that can be rewritten over and over again.”

Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky (Flatiron Books 2022) is a novel that I had to have when it was released, and a novel that’s sat on my physical TBR since.  When curating my “ten before the end,” I pulled several selections from the older TBR (I have multiple stacks), and this cover, with the face in the waves and the shades of blue was an easy selection. I just didn’t expect it to be one of the more heartbreaking reads of the year.

Daiyu is named for a tragic heroine who dies of heartache when her beloved marries another.  “They named me after a tragedy,’ I would complain to my grandmother.”  “No, dear Daiyu, they named you after a poet.”  And the novel brims with both tragedy and poetry – gorgeous writing that whispers in your ear like a lover and pulls you close only to cut your heart to shreds and leave you still bleeding out by the novel’s closing.

Daiyu is forced to rewrite herself over and over. When her parents are imprisoned, her grandmother cuts her hair and tells her to disappear into the city as a boy.  She becomes Feng.  As Feng, she works for a calligraphy teacher, learning lessons after her chores are done.  She is smitten with the art and has a natural talent. As Feng, she is kidnapped at a fish market and trafficked to the United States, where, at 13, she is sold to a brothel that operates as a Chinese laundry during the day.  She becomes Peony. She escapes with a young boy who, like every other man in her life, will let her down.  But she leaves him behind, becoming Jason Li and making a home in Pierce, Idaho with two Chinese grocers and a Chinese violinist who was born and raised in Pierce. As anti-Chinese sentiment grows, even existing as boy becomes dangerous.

Struggling with her identity, Daiyu must reconcile the parts in her.  She must find her name to claim her story, and this novel is that reclamation.  Daiyu, like her namesake, is a beautiful and tragic character, one so tenderly depicted yet in sharp and bold strokes.  And while the ending of the novel shattered me, leaving me whimpering for a page that was surely missing, for a happily after all that I wanted for her so much, I knew it hurt more because of how historically accurate it is.

Read this novel.

FAMILY LORE – Elizabeth Acevedo

“I knew there was no safe home in the world for the violence I felt in my body in that moment.”

Clap When You Land, Elizabeth Acevedo’s young adult novel in verse, was pure magic.  When Acevedo’s first adult novel, Family Lore (Ecco 2023) was published, I wondered if Acevedo would be able to sprinkle some of that magic on it.  Admittedly, the first half didn’t spark, and I’ll confess to having some doubts early on.  For me, the novel was a bit The Fortunes of Jaded Women meets The Divine Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (Interestingly enough, all three of these novels are BOTM books!), and I was worried I’d be disappointed in it as I was with The Fortunes.  But the second half ignited the pages, bringing that magic and finding me unable to put it down.

The novel follows the Marte women, blending past and present, weaving in and out of deeply guarded secrets and desires, and traveling from Santo Domingo to New York City. The novel is framed around Flor.  Flor can predict the future, primarily when a person will die.  When she decides to plan her own wake, her family readily accommodates her but moves in worried silence.  Has she seen her own death?

Flor’s sister Pastora can read a person for truth – that is her gift – and she will not ask Flor about the wake and what she’s seen.  She is afraid of what the truth will be.  She, along with the other sisters, Matilde and Camila, begin to prepare for this family gathering – Flor’s living wake.  Matilde’s magic is one of movement; she could move heavens and earth on the dance floor.  Her curse is one of a barren womb and a philandering husband who has impregnated a much younger woman. Camila is the youngest and was raised as if an only child – but she’s the one who inherited their father’s understanding of herbs.  The family’s lives, magic and madness are forever intertwined.

Flor’s daughter, Ona, and Pastora’s daughter, Yadi, cousins as close as sisters, join their mothers and aunts in preparations.  Ona’s magic is in her vagina, the siren song between her legs a powerful testament to the strength and control of woman.  But it’s failing her as all her attempts to get pregnant have been unsuccessful.  Yadi’s power is in food, and her concoctions feed the mind, body and soul.  While some people inherit family jewels, Yadi’s inheritance became a taste for limes and those limes completely turned her life around.

This is novel of sisters, daughters, and mothers – of family built on sisterhood.  Of the secrets we hold for each other, the spaces we make for each other, and the choices we make for each other.

Read this novel.

STOLEN – Ann- Helén Laestadius

“The reindeer were biekka oapmi, belonging to the wind.”

Ann- Helén Laestadius’s Stolen (translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, Scribner 2023 – originally published by Romanus & Selling in 2021) came to my attention in January when Fredrick Backman recommended it. I made a mental note to check it out and promptly forgot. This summer, Backman mentioned it again.  This time I didn’t forget, and I purchased the trade paperback with the beautiful wintry spine. It made my “ten before the end” list, and while this book is likely best read with a blanket of snow on the ground and a brutal chill in the air, I live in North Carolina.  Despite lacking in snow, Stolen is one of my top reads of 2023.

The novel opens with nine-year-old Elsa, the daughter of a Sámi  reindeer herder, skiing down to the corral by herself.  She wanted to surprise the rest of her family by having the herd fed by the time they arrived.  Instead, she stumbles onto a crime; a young man from the neighboring village, a man she knows, has just murdered a calf, her calf with her mark.  He cuts off the calf’s ear to remove evidence of the mark and is planning on taking the calf when he sees Elsa.  He threatens her and her family before fleeing.  Elsa pockets the dropped ear of her beloved reindeer, Nastegallu, and never tells.

Ten years later, the moment at the corral and the secret she’d kept still haunts her.  There have been well over a hundred police reports about reindeer being slaughtered, but the police view this attack on the Sami livelihood as “theft of property” and not a priority – each case is closed without charges.  But Elsa isn’t 9 anymore. She begins to speak out, facing threats and slurs and more dead reindeer.  Despite being a woman, she will stand next to the men to defend her herd, her family, and her way of life.  And she will use the voice that refused to name the culprit when she was nine.

When I say this feels like Beartown you may think me crazy, but it does.  And if you loved Benji, you’ll love Lasse.  And this novel will claim your heart and your tears, especially the ending.

Read this book.

THE END OF WORLD IS A CUL DE SAC – Louise Kennedy

I called Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses a “weeping wound of a novel about womanhood, love, and family” in my 3/30/2023 review, and her collection of stories, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (Riverhead 2023, expected 12/5/2023; first published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2021) is a series of festering wounds that one can’t resist picking at, even when it hurts.

The fifteen-story collection is populated by women you can’t forget. They are raw and broken, bitter and beautiful as they juggle the broken bits of the lives they thought they’d led. From cheating spouses to abortion to infertility to cancer, these women bare their teeth to the world – half feral in their survival.

My favorite of the collection is either “What the Birds Heard,” “Wolf Point,” or “Beyond Carthage” – it’s too hard to pick one as they all leave mark – a welt, a bruise, a split of skin, a taste of metal in your mouth.

Read this collection.

*A huge thanks to Riverhead for sending this advanced copy to me!

ALI AND NINO – Kurban Said

Next installment of Tommi Reads the World – the last of the As.

Country: Azerbaijan
Title: Ali and Nino, A Love Story
Author: Kurban Said
Language: German
Translator: Jenia Graman
Publisher: E. P. Tal (1937), First published in the US by The Overlook Press (1999)

“I, your Nino, I too am a tiny piece of this Europe that you hate, and here in Tiflis I feel it more than ever. I love you, and you love me.  But I love woods and meadows, and you love hills and stones and sand. And that’s why I am afraid of you, afraid of your love and your world.”

“Other people will probably say I stay at home because I do not want to leave Nino’s dark eyes. Maybe.  Maybe these people will even be right. For to me those dark eyes are my native earth, the call of home to the son a stranger tries to lead astray. I will defend the dark eyes of my homeland from the invisible danger.”

Published in Vienna in 1937, Ali and Nino was forgotten during WWII and fell out of print. Jenia Graman found a copy in a used bookstore in postwar Berlin and translated it in 1970. The history of the novel and its authorship is its own story.  Kurban Said is a pseudonym, and there has been a bit of speculation and even claims made as to authorship, but nothing has been confirmed. Despite not knowing for sure the identity of the author, I elected to include it in my “Tommi Reads the World” challenge because it is set in Azerbaijan, and because the most likely author is Lev Nussimbaum (a Jewish man born in Baku who converted to Islam – he adopted the name Essad Bey after he converted) along with the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, an Austrian with whom Nussimbaum had a very intense friendship with – the romantics will say they were writing their own love story with Ali and Nino.

The novel follows Ali, an Islamic boy “of the sand” with a lion’s heart. He loves the desert.  He loves his culture. He loves his people.  He loves his home. But he also loves Nino, a beautiful Georgian Christian, who craves trees and meadows, and who has European tastes.  Against all odds, their relationship grows.  Ali is willing to give up certain traditions for Nino, and Nino is also willing to give up some of her own dreams for him.  But she will not convert.  Ali’s family doesn’t really protest the match – they are men who don’t believe women have souls or opinions, and they believe she would have beautiful children.  Ali is a bit disgusted at how they discuss his future wife, but that is the constant battle that rages within him as he tries to position who he is and his beliefs with his love for Nino.  Nino’s family takes a little bit of convincing – ultimately, they agree, thanks to an Armenian who convinces them that the merging of Ali and Nino will have far reaching positive implications.

But a Russian Revolution and world war come to Azerbaijan, and Ali will fight for his home.  While the novel is written as a love story, and it has been compared to Romeo and Juliet, and the novel itself even draws that comparison between Ali and Nino, I’d argue that the true love story is between Ali and his home.

Ali and Nino is a slim novel with an epic story.  It is heartbreaking and infuriating, and also really funny.  Both Ali and Nino are quick witted with delightful senses of humor, and there are scenes, even during very tumultuous and chaotic times, that had me laughing out loud.  I am very glad that the novel was rediscovered and that it continues to be published.

Read this book.

HOW TO SAY BABYLON – Safiya Sinclair

“With echoes of Educated” is not a selling point for me; I, in a very unpopular opinion, found that book overhyped with a narrator I neither trusted nor liked.  Other than some fuzzy timelines and a focus on the power of learning, I’m pleased to say Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster 2023) is authentic, genuine, and full of a roaring heart – in short, it’s nothing like Educated.

Safiya Sinclair is a poet.  While it may have taken Derek Walcott to make her believe it, she was a poet long before he said it.  What she does with words, how she molds them, strings them, hums them, is an artform.  This is her mother’s doing, lit with the fire of her father’s anger and power become her own.  The memoir chronicles her rigid Rastafarian upbringing with a father who became increasingly more controlling the older she got, and a mother whose spark dulled with each passing year.  Sinclair found solace in words.  No.  That’s not right. Sinclair found rebellion in words. Rage in words.  Freedom in words.  Her father sought to lock her in a cage; her mother gave her the gift of words to escape. 

Sinclair is unflinching in her portrayal of a father whose voice was like warm honey or the sharp blade of a machete, unflinching in her portrayal of a mother who sacrificed her to his wrath, unflinching in her portrayal of a country that eagerly lapped her blood. It’s raw, unfiltered, and broken – like her.

How to Say Babylon is the story of a woman healing her inner child, standing strong next to memories that could destroy, finding forgiveness for a love that was never severed and a past that cannot be excused, listening to the water that defined her younger years, and knowing where her heart beats loudest. Even still.

Read this book.