#page-turners

Vox 

by Christina Dalcher

Vox made me angry. I tore through it in 48 hours and felt my rage rise by the page. But oh, the satisfaction in reading a book so infuriating. It stoked all of my justified feminist rage. 

Imagine a world like ours where puritanical values prevail,  - wait, a little too close to home for your taste? Well, in this world, females are relegated to a word count of 100 or less a day. The words are tallied by a nifty and strategically marketable (Look, Mom, it comes in purple!) wristband which electrically zaps the woman at increasing volts with each additional infraction.  And it starts in childhood, so little girls no longer learn to read and write. Naturally, work outside the home is impossible, as is any reading, writing, access to language and computers, and well, you’d be astounded by just how much of our lives incorporates words. It’s a little Handmaid’s TalemeetsAll Rights Reserved.

Our protagonist, Jean, is not only a mother of boys and a girl, but a highly-regarded doctor and expert in aphasia. Restless and stuck at home, when an aphasia-related tragedy rattles the government, who but our doctor can save the day? Add in a forbidden romance, and really, Vox is a veritable politically-charged speculative page-turner.

My one complaint: The book ended too soon; I could have read another 100 pages - or I could, at least, until the government fits me with a wristband.

Dry 

by Neal Shusterman & Jarod Shusterman

Drop everything right now and get this book and a liter of Smart Water.

It is not surprising that Dry is an unblinking-eyes-glued to the page-terror-filled car-crash that you can’t look away from type of read. It does, after all, have Neal Shusterman at its helm. Co-written with his son, Jarrod Shusterman, I suppose is proof that genius may in fact be genetic.

You may remember Shusterman from earlier entries about the incredible and terrifyingly possible world of The Unwind Dystology. If you were a fan of that, you will surely be a fan of this. A little Michael Grant’s Gone Series paired with Emmy Laybourne’s Monument 14 world but wholly Shusterman in eloquence and verisimilitude to our world today.

Dry opens with a sputtering faucet, as the Morrow family tries to fill Kingston’s water bowl. The tap is dry. So begins the “Tap-Out,” a water crisis for all of Southern California. Seemingly not an unsurmountable event- well if it weren’t for all of SoCal becoming a dust bowl in recent years and the Frivolous Water Act draining all swimming pools, fountains and the like.  Because people can survive for a time without transportation, electricity and adults - but every body needs water.

So embarks the tale of three misfits: the stalwart Alyssa, her younger brother Garrett and the survivalist creepy kid next door, Kelton. Three shortly turns into four and then five once a gifted street urchin and preppy spoiled business kid join the mix. This motley collection of characters proves that even the unlikeliest alliances can form during a catastrophe. 

Shifting in narration amongst our rogue troupe while alternately periscoping outside into the unraveling martial law mob landscape compounds the growing tension in the narrative. We learn the sum of all the stories whereas each character only sees from one perspective, and in this case, maybe ignorance is bliss. 

I almost started to reread this book as soon as I turned the final page. It was that good. It made me simultaneously want to stock up on perishables and take shorter showers. But this is the type of book-satisfying hydration that is not just skin deep. It is worthy of book-group discussions about mob mentality, about what lengths people will go to in order to survive, about conservation and climate change. But then, this at the core of all Shusterman novels: a serious question about humanity disguised as a YA page-turner.

And doesn’t that make you a little bit thirsty?

How to Walk Away &Things You Save in a Fire 

by Katherine Center

I have long believed that you have to be in the mood to read a certain type of book. Like with any relationship, the timing must be right, otherwise, you won’t be open to the writing voice/style/ content. Hot tea doesn’t quench every thirst and sushi doesn’t sate every palate. It’s possible Katherine Center’s books are the exception to that rule.

In content, the ironically and aptly titled How to Walk AwayandThings to Save in a Fire, are vastly different. How to Walk Away follows a lovelorn protagonist as she suffers quite immediately from a tragic accident throughout her complicated recovery; Things to Save in a Fire follows a stoic firefighter as she navigates a new bro-filled New England landscape.

In style, Center manages to create reading experiences that are simple without being simplistic and heart-warming without being heart-cloying. In short, they are satisfying reads - well crafted with personal triumph at the center, padded with bits of romance, conflict and existential crisis. The books are well-written, practically paced, bittersweet and fluid and with enough complication to keep the pages turning. And what’s particularly gratifying about these books is that the happy endings are not necessarily what you’d expect.

Things You Save in a Fire will be released August 2019, but you can grab a copy of How to Walk Away now. In fact, I just saw it on sale in Barnes & Noble.

It’s refreshing to know that there are books out there that are enjoyable no matter what the season. Like iced tea - a little sweet, a little tart, but extremely satisfying whenever you are thirsty for something tasty. 

*B3 would like to thank St. Martin’s Press for the ARCs!

The Dream Daughter

by Diane Chamberlain

I have been trying to pin down exactly what is so unique about this genre-crossing piece. As a time travel story, it bleeds from sci-fi into a domestic tale into a historical reexamination. It is a reinvented Time Traveler’s Wife with a mother/ daughter relationship at its center, steeped in the conflicted history of Vietnam.  I read it over the course of a few afternoons, but now, weeks later,  I think I’ve finally teased out what is so insightful and perspective-altering about The Dream Daughter:

Itbegins in the past.

So many time travel stories begin in the present and the characters revisit the past or leap to the future. In this, our protagonist’s present is the past and as a result, we as readers are immersed in an entirely different storytelling perspective.

This is one for which the cover doesn’t feel quite right for some reason, so don’t judge this book by its cover.  It’s deeper, more nuanced and more timeless than the image suggests.

Diane Chamberlain plots twists and reveals across the span of half a century. Surprising, unexpected, and thoroughly enjoyable, The Dream Daughter will appeal to light historical fiction and light sci-fi fans alike.

*B3 would like to thank @stmartinspress for the ARC!

The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

A delightful and sad amuse bouche that defies fictional categorization and does what great literature has the potential to do: transcend. This novel will be described as “unique” because it breaks categorical rules - might it be contemporary fiction? Yes? Magical Realism? Maybe. Time travel? Not exactly, but surreal contemporary? Is that a genre?

Sabrina is throwing her 30th birthday dinner party - and inexplicably, her dinner party is actually her five-person “If I could have dinner with any 5 people” list - both living and dead.  Having completed the novel, I still don’t know the how or the why of it. And I also don’t care. How refreshing to drop into a world where there are just as many questions as answers and the author doesn’t feel the need to over-explain!  It’s storytelling. This is part of the magic!

The Dinner List is a little as if Audrey Hepburn were part of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 interspersed with episodes of Girls watched nostalgically 5 years in the future of its Series Finale. It conjures the kind of sad longing of Euphoria juxtaposed with the mismatched love of every coupled 20-something in New York that will break up by 30.

The Dinner List could easily have been a kitschy concept book, but it delves deeper.  It explores the frustration of having the perfect romantic relationship — albeit one that only exists in a bubble of studio apartment solitude. It touches on the sadness and inevitability of losing friendship due to life choices, because some people just have kids and move to Connecticut. It is bittersweet and complete, a satisfying little package of a book that will leave you a little enlightened and a little sad, and possibly a little empty even on a full stomach.

*Thank you to the publishers for providing B3 with an ARC.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so beautifully written I procrastinate on writing the review to the point of guilt just to eschew not doing the book justice. The Heart’s Invisible Furies is such a book.  

It sat on my stacks for weeks because I didn’t know if the story of an orphan Irish boy would sustain me for so many pages.  But boy, oh Irish boy, was I wrong. This book is everything a literary novel should be: sweeping in scope, intelligent, nuanced, darkly comedic - filled with pathos and estrangement, humor and humanity.

The tale follows Cyril Avery from utero, and proceeds generationally throughout his life.  Born in a conservative Ireland to an unwed young mother who is literally thrown out of her church, the piece threads expertly through Cyril’s entire life: his unlikely adoption into a home where he is treated more like a middle-aged boarder than a child, chance encounters with his birth mother and a series of life-defining - and threatening - struggles along the way, struggles - and threats -  that seem embedded in the fight for Ireland herself to survive.

Moving, generous and finely-crafted, this book made me laugh out loud and audibly sigh. A multifaceted portrait of a desperately evolving man against the never-changing landscape of his intransigent origin country.

*Thank you to the publishers for providing B3 with an ARC.

Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

I did not want to love this book.  Maybe it’s the cover. Maybe it’s the Talented Mr. Ripley tripe. Maybe I want to be the type of reader who exclusively loves Pulitzer-Prize projects that contain a minimum of a dozen words I have to look up and archaic references I’m not old enough to understand. But I guess I’m not that reader. A page-turner is a page-turner, no matter the genre. And I simply could not put this down.  It is guilty pleasure reading at its best: quick, gritty and dangerous, an up-all-night feast that actually leaves you full rather than hung over.

A 36-hour read, Social Creature was the most satisfyingly salacious book I’ve picked up in a while. Meet Louise and Lavinia, young writers on opposite ends of the financial spectrum. In New York. And if we’ve learned anything from Shakespeare and Downtown Abbey, it never ends well for someone named Lavinia.

It’s a book for hot summer nights and cold boxed wine, over-priced mixed drinks followed by late-night leftovers.  Yes, it is tagged as a “Talented Mr. Ripley” for a new age, but what is more fascinating is that it is a “Talented Mr. Ripley” for the new-age-New-York-minute-digitally-depraved-diaspora. You might not have to look up any archaic references, but you may reconsider your friend list on Facebook. #chooseyourfriendswisely #MorePoetry!!!

*Thank you @doubledaybooks for providing B3 with an ARC.

Artemis

by Andy Weir

What’s better than being stranded on Mars and abandoned by your crew with only potatoes to live on?

Anything really.

Anything would be better than that.

But if we are talking in terms of Andy Weir’s brilliant first novel The Martian, what would be better that Andy Weir writing the witty and scientifically credible story of one character? That would be Andy Weir creating a witty and scientifically credible story about a whole city on the moon with an awesome no nonsense female protagonist smuggler. Which he did when he wrote Artemis.

Having loved Weir’s writing voice in The Martian, I scooped up Artemis immediately and summarily devoured it. The protagonist, Jazz, a citizen of Artemis, the moon colony, slaves away as a smuggler to save up enough slugs for a better life. Because moon real estate sounds pricier than New York and San Francisco combined. An integral player in the city’s sordid underbelly, Jazz is roped into a scheme by a wealthy benefactor while desperately dodging the ever-watchful moon cop and a new slew of moon mafia. Which, let’s face it, is kinda challenging in a city that’s literally under a bubble. (Note to self: this could be included in the genre: books that effectively employ domes as a device.) Let’s just say that oxygen is at a premium in zero G.

With a seriously diverse cast of characters, an entirely new take on moon landing and a unique pen pal scenario, Artemis is bound to launch to the bestsellers’ list immediately. Pun intended.

Kudos to Weir for introducing a minority female protagonist who is dynamic, intelligent, flawed, and beautiful -  and incidentally, like a lot of the awesome dynamic, intelligent, flawed and beautiful female characters in my own life.  

Plus, reading Weir is like taking a cool science class as an adult, just in a totally different atmosphere.

*B3 received a galley from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Sourdough 

by Robin Sloan

When everyone says what foods they’d give up if they were forced to, is your response, “But not bread; I could never give up carbs”? Do you find the smell of fresh-baked bread intoxicating and the idea of marrying a baker dangerous? Also, do you kinda believe in magic though you might not admit it when the lights are on? Or did you read Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Bookstore and think it was an extra stroke of genius to have a book that actually glows in the dark? (Did you know that it glows in the dark? You can go try it out; I’ll wait.)

If any of this applies to you, then you are going to want a full helping of Robin Sloan’s newest novel, Sourdough. If the holy loaf on the cover isn’t enticement enough, you’ll fall quickly for the quirky intelligent protagonist, Lois, a recent transplant to the west coast who lives off of nutritive gel and attends meetings of a club of women who share her name. An overworked engineer, she has no time for proper food. One day, a mysterious take-out menu slips under her door and before she knows it, she is eating their “Spicy Spicy” — really their only menu option —  morning, noon and night, and the new food not only satisfies her beleaguered belly, but also changes her entire state of being.

Then, abruptly, the brothers who run the takeout shop get deported, but not before leaving her with the magical and fickle secret sourdough starter that has been in their family forever. So begins Lois’ decent into the world of bread ovens, competitive San Francisco farmers markets and underground genetic food modification. Not to mention an “it’s complicated” relationship with a yeast that is somehow — possibly scientifically, possible magically — very alive.

It’s warm and well-constructed, buoyant and satisfying - and just the right size. Just how I like my sourdough. Oh, and the book is pretty tasty too.

*B3 received a Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. 

The Word Exchange: A Novel

Alena Graedon

I recently remembered a book that I read two years ago. I got it in my head that it was called The Language Exchange. A google search for The Language Exchange does not lead to any books, however, and my failed search struck me as so odd, I started to panic. Had I imagined this book? This book about language and technology? This book in which technology spreads a virus and erases language as we know it? It was part Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Nightmare Number 3” and part my worst fears manifest in a real experience. What if the book didn’t actually exist? Or worse, what if it did exist at one time, but was absorbed into the digital juggernaut and coopted as a takeover plan by the machines themselves?

Turns out, the book I was thinking of is actually called The Word Exchange. So we may be safe.

For now.

I didn’t write about The Word Exchange two years ago because I was abroad at the time, and speaking to kye in Orkney was the only version of blogging we had at our disposal. But the fact that I still remember it now convinces me that it is an excellent fable for our times.

The story, like all good stories, is a love affair with language. Ana, one of the few remaining wordsmiths, is compiling an archive of language while the world has turned their attentions to handheld Memes for communication, for entertainment, for, well, everything your iPhone is doing right now. Suddenly Ana’s father goes missing, leaving only a literary clue behind while the people of the world fall sick with a “word virus.” This concept is so creative and terrifying, I want to simultaneously share this book with the world and lock it securely away from readers’ vulnerable eyes.

If the word-lover premise doesn’t get you, consider it an ineluctable opportunity to learn new vocabulary. I actually liked vocab quizzes in high school and it was teaching me plenty of chestnuts I’d never even heard of before. Keep a dictionary handy.

It’s a little Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, a little All the Birds in the Sky, and a lot of Armageddon via the Tower of Babel.

Because what if, like a file on your computer, your language, your ability to communicate, your very relationship with the world, could be corrupted? What if it is already happening right now? lLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

Should you eat chocolate cake? Maybe not. Is it extremely satisfying when you do? Of course. The Couple Next Door provides your sugar fix. Is it going to provide you nutrition? Probably not. But it is so satisfying you may just want another helping.  

I got this book as part of my Book of the Month trial last night. I finished it this afternoon. Need I say more? 

Quintessential suspense at its best, with all the twists and turns of a classic who-dun-it, The Couple Next Door profiles Anne and Marco, newbie parents who leave their infant sleeping at home while they attend a dinner party next door. Can you guess where this is going? I tried at several turns, but there was always another curve in the road. 

I did the classic “I’ll just finish this chapter” move, but then my eyes would start scanning the next page.  300 pages later…Lapena kept this taut novel pinging until the final sentence. Will there be a sequel? If so, I’ll definitely be reading it.   If not, she wrote a killer ending. 

The Dead Circle by Keith Varney

I was tricked into reading another zombie book. What’s the adage? “Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me for not giving zombie books a chance?”  I read The Dead Circle in 48 hours and spent the next week attempting to reconcile my inability to stomach cannibalism (yes, I went there) with my desire to share the best page-turners with my fellow bibliophiles.

Of all of the books that I’ve read about supernatural post-apocalyptic infestations, this book serves as the most practical guide to how my spouse and I could survive the apocalypse.  And perhaps that’s what makes it the most disturbing zombie selection: it could possibly be recategorized amidst “non-fiction” or “survival guides” sometime in the future.

Until now, I thought a layperson like myself would be among the first to fall in the zombie apocalypse, but this book gives me hope. So many times, the people that survive are strikingly attractive, never need to go to the bathroom, and are facile with a semi-automatic. I am none of these.

The Dead Circle is gruesome, quirky, familiar, and terrifying. Don’t eat while reading. That’s all I’m saying. Probably avoid drinking as well.  

I’ll admit, there was a moment about two-thirds of the way through when I thought, Maybe it’d be better to turn into a zombie so I wouldn’t be eaten by one. That’s a truth I didn’t want face.

I’m not sure if Varney is planning a sequel, but based on the unconventional ending of the first, I’d pick it up tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll keep this title on my nightstand in case I need some undead tips – and I plan on stocking up on bottled water tomorrow.