https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/books/review/new-historical-fiction-novels.html?
During the Dog Days, Escape to the Old Days
These books rewind time, depositing readers in the Cumbrian countryside, coastal Maine, rural Wyoming and beyond
By Alida Becker
May 26, 2023
Summer reading should be completely escapist, sending you to places and times you’re reluctant to leave. The best historical novels do just that, and this season there are plenty to choose from.
The plot of Laura Spence-Ash’s BEYOND THAT, THE SEA (Celadon, 368 pp., $28) is rooted in the home-front upheavals of World War II, but it’s also a timeless exploration of what it means to create a family, of how dreams can die and be reborn in surprising ways. In August 1940, 11-year-old Beatrix Thompson is among a shipload of youthful British refugees whose parents have sent them to safety in New England. Her few years among these welcoming strangers will trigger decades of connections and disruptions involving the two sons of her host family, not to mention two very different maternal figures on either side of the Atlantic. “Some secrets,” Bea concludes, “are weights to be borne. Others are gifts, little bits of warmth, to be revisited again and again.” Sorting through them will be her big challenge.
Charles Frazier is best known for his vivid rendering of the Civil War South in “Cold Mountain.” For his latest novel, THE TRACKERS (Ecco, 324 pp., $30), he paints an equally vibrant portrait of Depression-era America via the extracurricular travels of Val Welch, a perhaps-too-trusting artist at work on a W.P.A.-funded mural in rural Wyoming. An invitation to lodge with a friend of his academic mentor will enmesh him in the domestic drama of a wealthy, politically ambitious art collector whose much younger, much less conventional wife has suddenly gone AWOL. Intent on quietly investigating her compromised past, Val’s host sends him on a mission that will open his eyes to the realities of what happens to “a mass of young people moving like a rain cloud all around the country, hungry and dirty and scared.”
Another decidedly unconventional spouse narrates Susanna Moore’s impeccably detailed depiction of THE LOST WIFE (Knopf, 172 pp., $27). In flight from an abusive marriage in Rhode Island, the woman later known as Sarah Brinton hopes to join a friend in the Minnesota Territory. But on arrival she discovers that the friend has died of cholera, and the Western frontier in 1855 is no place for a woman alone. A marriage of convenience takes her to the Yellow Medicine Indian agency, where her new husband has been appointed resident doctor — and where the violent confrontation between encroaching whites and the increasingly restive Dakota strands her between their two worlds.
Brinda Charry has concocted a fascinating novel called THE EAST INDIAN (Scribner, 272 pp., $28) from the brief mention of a particular indentured servant in the historical records of early-17th-century Virginia. Getting her narrator from his childhood on the Coromandel Coast of India to the New World is a task she attacks with gusto, spicing his tale with references to a play he sees during a brief stint in London before he’s imprisoned on a ship bound for the colonies. Could the minor role of the foreign boy in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” provide a hint that this young man will find a place in the larger English story? Charry sends him through a host of venues to explore the possibilities.
The birth of the British raj and the death of princely India provide a backdrop for the addictively absorbing adventures in Tania James’s LOOT (Knopf, 304 pp., $28), which also invents a lively hero from a footnote to history. This time that footnote is not a person but an automaton, known as Tipu’s Tiger, which may have been a collaboration between an Indian craftsman and a French visitor to the court of the sultan of Mysore. James’s central character is a Muslim woodworker with a knack for carving toys and an insatiable curiosity, talents that will serve him in good stead as he follows his French mentor back to Europe. There he will eventually be reunited with their elaborate faux beast (depicted, with horrifying sound effects, in the act of devouring a British soldier), but in circumstances that require a great deal of subterfuge, the perhaps unattainable good will of an eccentric English aristocrat and the kindling of what could turn out to be a rather profitable romance.
Emilia Hart’s WEYWARD (St. Martin’s, 336 pp., $27.99) doesn’t stray far from the Cumbrian countryside of northern England. Instead, its movement comes from the juxtaposition of three narratives linking the travails of a trio of women whose family history stretches back to the early 17th century. When first met, in 1619, Altha Weyward is on trial for witchcraft, accused of murdering a local farmer with the spells she learned from her mother. Intersecting with her story — and its gradually unfolding revelations about Altha’s actual activities — is an account of the viciously unhappy youth of a World War II-era descendant, an entomologist named Violet, who has been disinherited for reasons as yet unexplained. Also dealt into the mix is the present-day tale of Violet’s pregnant great-niece, Kate, whose attempt to wrest herself from a bad marriage takes her to the derelict cottage she has inexplicably inherited in Violet’s will. All three women will find solace in a powerful connection with nature, but all three will need to combat the life-changing power of some very bad men.
What historical fiction roundup could fail to include the Tudors? And what could be more fun than some subversive Tudoriana? That’s what’s on offer in ALL THE QUEEN’S SPIES (Atria, 392 pp., $27.99), the latest installment in Oliver Clements’s rollicking series of historical thrillers featuring John Dee, the real-life alchemist who was court astronomer to the first Queen Elizabeth, and Francis Walsingham, her constantly conspiring spymaster. This time Clements has concocted a European mission for Dee involving the occult-obsessed (and extremely odd) Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf and a band of seductive ladies employed by France’s queen, Catherine de Medici, to do her clandestine bidding. The action comes to a climax in a forbidding castle in Prague and features an over-the-top guest appearance by the future playwright Christopher Marlowe.
Little is known about Will Somers, who became court jester to Henry VIII at the age of about 20 and held that position for the rest of his life. Which, of course, makes him irresistible to Jeri Westerson, who has already written a series of medieval noir novels. COURTING DRAGONS (Severn House, 210 pp., $30.99) is the first in a new series narrated by Will himself, a sprightly figure with a well-cultivated flair for gossip and a vigorously pansexual appetite. It’s this latter that embroils him in the murder of a Spanish diplomat and a murky blackmail scheme, as well as a possible plot to kidnap Princess Mary. “The court was full of dragons,” Will observes. “Which dragons must I slay to protect Henry? And which to protect myself?”
Alida Becker is a former editor at the Book Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/books/review/new-science-fiction-fantasy-books.html?
The Magic (and Malaise) of Families
New novels by Fonda Lee, Martha Wells, Nick Harkaway, Kelly Link and Emma Törzs.
By Amal El-Mohtar
May 26, 2023
Here are five extraordinary books about families — chosen, imposed or estranged — and the astonishing array of skills required to secure or survive them.
Fonda Lee’s UNTETHERED SKY (Tordotcom, 152 pp., $22.99) combines falconry and ancient Persian mythology into a short, stand-alone fantasy. In Dartha, man-eating monsters called manticores stalk the countryside, insatiable and unstoppable — except by rocs, gigantic birds of prey. The people of Dartha have learned to defend themselves by capturing fledgling rocs and training them in the Royal Mews to hunt manticores reliably. Called ruhkers, these trainers live strange, obsessed lives devoted to rearing their rocs in a ferocious and mutually beneficial partnership.
“Untethered Sky” is the story of Ester, a ruhker, recalling the training of her first roc, Zahra. Having lost her family to a manticore attack, Ester throws herself into her work, developing close, fervent relationships with her roc, her fellow ruhkers — and no one else. Not even the prince who takes an interest in ruhking and decides to market it to a wider audience.
Like a hunt, the book has a tense and stalking pace, circling a distant tragedy before closing in for the kill. At the heart of the story is Ester’s knowledge that she has dedicated her life to a creature whose mind she can’t know and whose love she can’t earn, but whose power she nevertheless depends on for survival every day.
Whereas Lee’s Green Bone Saga was a sprawling trilogy rooted in the intricacies of a contemporary city-state, here she produces gripping action set in vast spaces writ as clean and spare as a dry bone, and the result is tremendous.
Reversing that trajectory, Martha Wells has followed up her best-selling series of Murderbot novellas with a return to full-length, epic fantasy. WITCH KING (Tordotcom, $28.99, 414 pp.), a deeply immersive throwback to a beloved (and for me, foundational) species of 1990s fantasy doorstop, is full of cataclysmic intrigues between mostly immortal families, complete with map and dramatis personae.
The titular Witch King, Kaiisteron, or Kai, wakes from an enchanted sleep to find that he and his best friend, Ziede, have been betrayed and imprisoned by someone close to them. Kai is a demon, able to wield magic and possess the bodies of the living; Ziede is a witch, able to converse with the elemental world. They use their powers to subdue and escape their would-be captor, but discover that Ziede’s wife, Tahren, is missing.
Together — gathering waifs and strays along the way — they embark on a quest to find her and root out the conspiracy that separated them. As they search for answers, Kai remembers his early life fighting necromantic wizards called Hierarchs and rebuilding the world they broke.
Kai is very good at protecting those he has chosen to care for, and part of the pleasure of “Witch King” comes from seeing his keen-edged competence at work, contrasted with moments of profound, bewildered vulnerability. Kai’s timelines play off each other wonderfully: Elements introduced in a dizzying rush of world building become welcome context for the flashbacks, which in turn escalate tension in the present. Wells is working at the height of her powers here, and it’s relaxing to be carried along for a ride in the company of such a phenomenal storyteller.
Intrigues among mostly immortals also abound in Nick Harkaway’s TITANIUM NOIR (Knopf, 236 pp. $28), a funny, voice-y book full of fantastic sentences that, as the youths say, absolutely slap. It’s the kind of writing that reminds you that poetry and detective fiction have a lot in common.
Cal Sounder is a genre staple: a private investigator who is a bit of a loner, a casualty of some woman trouble and an expert in a certain kind of case — only here the certain kind of case involves genetically enhanced superhumans called Titans. In a near-future world, a highly inaccessible drug called Titanium 7 allows patients to recover from illness, injury and aging by turning their body clocks back to prepubescence and running them through adolescent development at speed, leaving them much taller and stronger.
Cal used to date the daughter of the drug’s inventor until a serious accident made the injection necessary to save her life. The experience gave Cal some insight into the wealthy, red-carpet circles of the Titans, only a few thousand of whom exist in the world. Now Cal works as a consultant for the police department on Titan-related criminal investigations. So when a man is found in his apartment with a bullet in his head and all the traits of a Titan — he’s 7-foot-8 and 91 years old, though he looks “about 45 with no habits” — the cops fetch Cal for the case.
An exemplar of its genre, “Titanium Noir” twists and turns between excellent fun and deep melancholy. While Cal fits the profile of the hard-boiled detective, he is sad and kind, and lacks the bitter alcoholic cynicism of the stereotype.
A new collection of Kelly Link short stories, the first since the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Get in Trouble” (2016), is always cause for both celebration and anxiety: Few and far between are the authors whose stories knife you in the ribs so smoothly and expertly that you’re left admiring the workmanship of the handle. Those in WHITE CAT, BLACK DOG (Random House, 260 pp., $27) are no exception.
Though each of the seven stories in this collection is subtitled with a classic fairy tale or ballad, they are not straightforward retellings or reworkings; rather, Link treats them as ingredients from which to build a delicate, threatening feast. These stories have the sticky, tensile strength of spider silk, building webs that draw as much attention to the twigs from which they’re suspended as they do to the dew shimmering on the threads and to the creatures caught and trembling in them.
Standouts for me included fully half the collection: “The White Road” (The Musicians of Bremen); “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” (The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear); “The Lady and the Fox” (Tam Lin); and “Skinder’s Veil” (Snow-White and Rose-Red) all thrilled me. There’s a sense of chiaroscuro to the collection, an echo of the title, certainly — the book opens with a white cat’s hospitality and closes with a black dog’s obstruction — but the more I reflect on the stories, the more I find myself sorting them all into bright and murky, sharp and shadowed.
Emma Törzs’s INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE (William Morrow, 407 pp., $30) is astonishing and pristine, the kind of debut I love to be devastated by, already so assured and sophisticated that it’s difficult to imagine where the author can go from here.
In Törzs’s world, books of magic, all written in human blood, can do incredible things when someone feeds them a drop of blood and reads them aloud. Abe Kalotay collected these books to protect them from falling into the wrong hands, and raised his daughters, Joanna and Esther, as stewards of a beautiful and dangerous library that had to be kept hidden at all costs; in Esther’s infancy, her mother was murdered by powerful people who wanted the books.
But after Abe’s death — his blood drained by a book that wouldn’t let him read it — Joanna and Esther become estranged: Joanna lives in her father’s house, looking after the books, while Esther has spent 10 years moving every Nov. 2 at her parents’ insistence, for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. Joanna can “hear” magic books and detect their presence; Esther is immune to magic.
An ocean away, an organization called the Library hoards these special texts, and a young man named Nicholas is its well-kept secret: His blood, when mixed into ink, allows him to write magic books into being. Heir to a terrible legacy, he is drawn together with the Kalotays to unravel their respective families’ secrets.
Törzs’s precision — her attention to the mundane physicality of bookbinding, for example — makes a well-trodden magic system feel fascinating and original. “Ink Blood Sister Scribe” accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion. It’s simply a delight from start to finish.
Amal El-Mohtar is a Hugo Award-winning writer and co-author, with Max Gladstone, of “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/books/new-audiobooks.html?
From Subatomic Particles to the Cosmos, and Every Bird in Between
Five new audiobooks to download this summer include a breakdown of quantum computing and a tribute to Mary Oliver.
May 26, 2023
If you’d asked me a month ago what quantum theory was, I would have tried to answer only to stop myself once I realized that I didn’t actually know. It’s one of those concepts, like space-time or artificial intelligence, that many of us recognize (from science fiction, from the news) without ever really understanding them. That’s where QUANTUM SUPREMACY: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything (Random House Audio, 10 hours, 41 minutes), by the renowned translator of theoretical physics Michio Kaku, comes in. Named for the theoretical stage at which “a radically new type of computer, called a quantum computer, could decisively outperform an ordinary digital supercomputer on specific tasks,” the audiobook, read with deliberate — if at times robotic — clarity by Feodor Chin, begins with claims, by a handful of companies, that we are already there.
Kaku explains how we’ve come to such an “inflection point,” at which the potential benefits of quantum computing — that is, computing at the subatomic level, without the need for microchips — are increasingly outweighing the risks, like the need for extremely controlled conditions. Kaku spends much of the audiobook recounting the history of computing, bringing listeners back to the Turing machine and the invention of transistors as crucial foundations.
That mind-blowing future is the focus of the final five or so hours of the audiobook, which explores the real-world impacts quantum computing could have: altering our immune systems to avoid cancer and Alzheimer’s, increasing crop yields, ending world hunger. As Kaku puts it, “the familiar laws of common sense are routinely violated at the atomic level”; but his lucid prose and thought process make abundant sense of this technological turning point.
Whereas Kaku’s eyes look mostly ahead, in ON THE ORIGIN OF TIME: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory (Random House Audio, 12 hours, 10 minutes), the cosmologist Thomas Hertog focuses more on the past, specifically Hawking’s groundbreaking 1988 text “A Brief History of Time” and Hertog’s own working relationship with that text and its author. In this scientific intervention, Hertog recounts the moment, in 2002, when Hawking declared: “I have changed my mind. ‘Brief History’ is written from the wrong perspective.” Hertog agreed.
Ethan Kelly reads the audiobook with a confidence that suggests he has just emerged from the same Cambridge University halls where Hawking and Hertog discussed their ideas — this audiobook can make the listener feel smarter than he or she is. We’d been thinking of cosmology all wrong, Hawking and Hertog theorized, from a “God’s-eye view” that obscured the scientist’s essential truth: “We are within the universe, not somehow outside it.”
Some of the deep dives into new, interior viewpoints might lose the average listener, but the heavy stuff is broken up with refreshing anecdotes that illustrate not only the author’s devotion to his mentor but also the extent of Hawking’s brilliance — and sense of humor. “I am dying,” Hawking once typed into the machine that spoke for him, making Hertog suffer through a long pause before he finished: “… for … a … cup … of … tea.”
To help us feel anchored again in our physical world, there are birds. At least, they’ve always served that purpose for Mya-Rose Craig, the author of BIRDGIRL: Looking to the Skies in Search of a Better Future (Macmillan Audio, 9 hours, 30 minutes). The 21-year-old Craig is a prodigy of sorts within the vast (and growing) world of birders. She clocked 325 species in one year alone — when she was 6. While early trips took her around the English countryside from her home outside Bristol, soon she was accompanying her parents to Ecuador, Antarctica and beyond. By 17, she had become the youngest person ever to have seen more than 5,000 bird species.
Much of that is thanks to her parents, who “were already a well-known birding family” when she was born and took her on their birding trips, or twitches, beginning when she was 9 days old. “We made a complicated puzzle, the three of us,” Craig narrates, imbuing her book with genuine pathos. Her mother, the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, struggled with her mental health: Birds were her solace, and they became her husband and daughter’s, too. Woven into the stories of jungle adventures and spotting rare birds are the emotional threads of family life, as well as the challenges of being a prominent birder and conservationist in a field dominated by white men. There were times when it became too much for Craig to bear, but “there was something about birds that made us,” she says, “even just for moments at a time, lift our eyes away from our lives and up to the skies.”
The journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal always loved birding, but, now in retirement, their interest has grown much deeper. Their audiobook, A WING AND A PRAYER: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds (Simon & Schuster Audio, 9 hours, 3 minutes), read by Cassandra Campbell and Stephen Graybill, is the result of a 25,000-mile journey across the Americas in 2021, which they spent documenting the efforts of ornithologists and conservationists to save the world’s birds, almost universally threatened by anthropogenic forces like habitat destruction and climate change.
The Gyllenhaals are skillful storytellers, and the dual narration is a rare and welcome approach for an audiobook that was written in the first-person plural. “In the past 50 years nearly a third of the bird population in North America has withered away,” Graybill reads in the introduction. “That translates to three billion birds of all shapes and sizes.” They relate some of conservation’s “high-profile” success stories, like those of the spotted owl and the bald eagle, as well as lesser-known cases like that of the grasshopper sparrow, “a wisp of a bird” that is one of the most endangered in the United States. As they travel, they encounter birds carrying tiny transistor backpacks and a biologist who has learned to impersonate whooping cranes in order to get closer to them.
Mary Oliver, who died in 2019, is well known for the love and attention she gave the natural world through poetry. “Poems, for her, were a way to praise the world, ‘little alleluias,’ as she put it, a way to say thank you for the beautiful Earth,” the actor and narrator Sophia Bush says at the beginning of WILD AND PRECIOUS: A Celebration of Mary Oliver (Pushkin Industries, 4 hours, 11 minutes). In a rich and textured production, Bush guides the listener through a tribute to Oliver’s legacy, complete with reflections by admirers who knew her beyond her oeuvre. Selections from Oliver’s poetry are presented from recordings Oliver made herself.
What emerges is a vivid picture of her varied impacts on so many different readers, from a rabbi who has found teaching moments in her work to Oliver’s former students at Bennington College. What has stuck with the chef and writer Samin Nosrat is Oliver’s “obsession with paying attention.” The actor Rainn Wilson sees a nonreligious spirituality in the poems, which are “about God in the way that you find a pile of bones on a trail or the way that you hear the wind in a fern.” Even for those deeply familiar with Oliver’s work, this collage of voices helps build a more complete understanding of who she was as a person. As the poet Elizabeth Bradfield remembers, “We talked about whales. We talked about dogs. We never talked about poems. And that was OK.”
Sebastian Modak is a writer and photographer. He was The Times’s 52 Places Traveler in 2019. @sebmodak More about Sebastian Modak
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/books/review/new-romance-novels.html?
When ‘Happily Ever After’ Is Just the Beginning
Our columnist recommends six dreamy new romance novels.
By Olivia Waite
May 26, 2023
This summer I’m thinking about the “ever” part of “happily ever after.” An impossible span, considering that none of us are immortal. Romance novels are often scorned for being unrealistic — too many coincidences, too much wish fulfillment — but the most fantastical thing about the genre is how it thumbs its nose at time.
Allow me to explain using six of this summer’s new books.
First up is KD Casey’s home run of a romance, DIAMOND RING (Carina Press, e-book, $4.99). Alex Angelides and Jake Fischer are ex-teammates and ex-lovers; they found each other and lost a championship, and now they’re playing together again at the tattered end of their careers, hoping for one last chance at anything.
Michael Chabon once called baseball “nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.” That’s the Y.A. version; Casey’s book offers the wearier adult perspective: “Some things you can’t fight. Like time or baseball.” In the blink of a reader’s eye, our leads go from fresh-faced rookies to creaky veterans, and fresh fights become long-cherished grudges.
It knocked the wind out of me. Time is the enemy here, a thief who roughs you up and then jams its hands in your pockets to steal your valuables: youth, strength, achievement. But a romance anticipates its own triumph. In this genre, no matter how much our leads have lost, there’s always something wonderful ahead.
Like any Cinderella story, Adriana Herrera’s historical novel AN ISLAND PRINCESS STARTS A SCANDAL (Canary Street Press, 368 pp., paperback, $18.99) begins with a countdown clock. The Venezuelan heiress Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan has a few brief weeks to live her best Sapphic life in Paris before she must marry a dull man she does not love. She has mortgaged her future to support her spendthrift parents, but she’s determined to live as passionately as she can in this too-brief patch of the present.
Instead of a fairy godmother, Manuela finds a duchess, Cora, who flaunts her business acumen in banks and railway companies — for her, time is money. She lavishes both on Manuela, purchasing a strategic piece of coastline from her in exchange for not only a pile of cash, but also entree into the Paris lesbian community. With one heroine shackled to her past, and the other facing a lonely future, Herrera’s romance stands elegantly balanced on the singular moment when change is possible.
Romance’s anticipation is doubly true in historical fiction, where we know what’s coming for the world as well as for the characters. This adds urgency to questions like, Should Manuela’s land become a section of European-owned railroad track, or the woman-supporting art colony she and her grandmother planned to build? We know historical novels reflect the time of their writing as much as the time in which they’re set, and we usually take that to mean putting modern thoughts into historical heads. But what if it also means taking useful lessons from specific moments in the past? What if we — the collective we — had chosen community over capitalism, or a more authentic happiness over the tracks laid out for us by someone else?
Next up: a pair of vampire romances that could not be more different — except that both use the unreal longevity of supernatural creatures to reflect on the meaning of mortal life.
Piper J. Drake’s new paranormal, WINGS ONCE CURSED & BOUND (Sourcebook Casablanca, 304 pp., paperback, $16.99), is the story of a Thai bird-princess dancer — Peeraphan, or Punch for short — trapped in a pair of cursed shoes, and the ancient vampire, Bennett, who’s trying to break the curse.
Bennett is a wonderfully stodgy, formal vampire with a question of classic heroic angst: How do you let yourself love someone you know is going to die? He thinks of himself as immune to time in a way that Peeraphan isn’t, but that’s not true. Bennett is longer-lived, but dead in daytime. His life span is endless but interrupted, a prolonged nocturnal stutter. Peeraphan’s time is all her own — so who is really time’s victim here?
If Drake’s book is modern and action-centered, like Red Bull and vodka, Samara Breger’s stunning A LONG TIME DEAD (Bywater Books, 412 pp., paperback, $23.95) recalls a vintage wine miraculously salvaged from a shipwreck. It’s also the best Sapphic vampire book since Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 classic, “Carmilla.”
The Victorian sex worker Poppy Cavendish wakes in a cobwebbed manor to find herself a creature out of a nightmare: Her only companion, Roisin, is a traumatized, stern vampire who has firm rules about drinking from humans (never) and sleeping with Poppy (also never, she protests a little too vehemently). Poppy misses drinking ale, she misses her human friends, she misses sex — and, slowly, she learns the reasons behind what Roisin has done, and what kind of monsters really come out at night.
I had to keep putting down “A Long Time Dead” to yell about how sublime and funny it was, to dwell on the way the sleekly poetic style melted down into brutal abstraction when Poppy’s bloodlust took over.
Roisin’s anguish is the reversed image of Bennett’s: “What vital 21-year-old immortal would tie herself to the bony ghost woman that time forgot?” Vampire bodies might not decay, but time still sinks in its teeth; vampire memories here are moth-riddled, undependable things. Time makes immortals parasites upon the human world, dependents and exiles both.
Poppy and Roisin are not the only couple out of sync. Emma Barry’s FUNNY GUY (Montlake, 271 pp., paperback, $16.99), a take on comedic and romantic timing, features a city planner and an improv comedian whose pop-star ex just turned his shortcomings into a hit single.
Sam has a chip on his shoulder and a tendency toward impulsive mistakes; it has made him a star but also kept his childhood scars on full display. His best friend, Bree, is cautious and hesitant, dragging her feet when it comes to telling Sam anything: that she’s in love with him; that she has been offered a spectacular new job in another city.
The problem isn’t reconciling two sets of feelings. No, our couple struggle with finding a shared rhythm, a sense of pace for their relationship that doesn’t feel glacial by Sam’s standards or reckless by Bree’s. It’s a tug of war that would be hard for a less adept writer to pull off, but Barry’s work has always thrived on this kind of interplay. She seems to be feeling her way to a new kind of structure here, one that’s organic and messy but still generates a vital catharsis.
Speaking of new things, I’m delighted to showcase one of the year’s most charming experiments: Felicia Davin’s THE SCANDALOUS LETTERS OF V AND J (Etymon Press, e-book, $6.99). An art student and a disinherited dilettante in 19th-century Paris remake themselves, encounter sinister magical artifacts and have some of the thirstiest sex imaginable. V discovers how to use writing to persuade and compel, while J’s paintings can entrance or even transform the objects and people they depict. Gender is transcendable; bodies are fluid; art is truth, lies, a trap and an escape all at once.
It’s an epistolary novel, with our engaging young leads’ letters and diaries unspooling for our pleasure. It was also serialized, free, with daily snippets emailed out for months. Reading this way felt intimate, transgressive, like I’d started receiving someone else’s much sexier mail by accident — even as it denied the reader total voyeurism by cheekily excising the many erotic doodles J uses to tease and titillate V.
Among romance fans, the phrase “revolutionizing the romance genre” has all the heft of Mardi Gras beads — a cheap accolade thrown round the neck of someone yelling “woo!” on a tabletop while us regulars hunch over the bar and sip our trope cocktails in peace. But many romances also lock main characters’ bodies into a strict and permanent perfectibility; that’s why they give Regency dukes abs from the age of gym memberships and why couples’ cameos in late-series books often feel weirdly static and staged. Davin’s book feels genuinely, shockingly rebellious in its insistence on the beauty of transformation. If overhyped books are plastic necklaces, this serial is a string of natural pearls, each a luminous gem on its own but even more exquisite in sequence.
It’s a love story and a fantasy and a meditation on social power’s uses and abuses. And by its refusal to succumb to mundane physical laws, it underscores one of romance’s greatest magics: It allows us to escape time. Not forever, no. But for long enough.
Abycats' Thoughts 