We came, we read, we gushed. Here’s a recap of the titles that left us especially warm and swoony last month.
Night Watch: A Novel by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf). Reviewed by Kristin H. Macomber. “There are dozens of passages in Night Watch that deliver moments so vivid, so full of sensory awareness, that they demand both immediate rereading and the folding down of the appropriate page’s corner so they can be revisited. Read this book for those passages. Read it to learn a history you didn’t know you didn’t know. Read it with a device nearby to look up things like Marsh Tacky, a gorgeous creature I’d never heard of...Actually, just read this remarkable novel to be enriched in your understanding of an era that has been so very much forgotten. ‘The past is the present unrecognized,’ writes Phillips. Read Night Watch to be enlightened.”
The Heart of It All: A Novel by Christian Kiefer (Melville House). Reviewed by Anne Eliot Feldman. “Kiefer’s expertly drawn characters rarely lose sight of ‘the fierce terror of life’s essential fragility, not only brittle but actively aflame.’ While most are ‘surviving paycheck to paycheck, on loan, on credit, on faith,’ it is their human frailties that move us to the core. Mary Lou wonders if the career path she chose might’ve been far less ambitious than she was capable of achieving. She and others like her put in long hours at tedious jobs they hate but need. Anthony’s hyper-awareness of being a 19-year-old Black man in an all-white community is palpable when he takes an innocent stroll at night while Tom’s daughter, Janey, walks nearby. Tom and Sarah, for their part, persist in a difficult marriage.”
Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco). Reviewed by John P. Loonam. “As the neighborhood grows more prosperous, the characters age and develop. They outgrow the dance. They leave the neighborhood for high school. Many of the white boys find their way to New York City’s elite schools — both private and public — and the center of their lives moves from Dean Street to Manhattan and beyond. The dancers become computer geeks, graffiti artists, booksellers, and, yes, novelists. One even becomes the Wheeze. Aging itself is indicted, made criminal as characters carry the scars of their predatory childhood. They fall victim to nostalgia in their search for redemption.”
Night Side of the River: Ghost Stories by Jeanette Winterson (Atlantic Monthly Press). Reviewed by Tara Laskowski. “There’s an art to putting a story collection together, though what it looks like varies depending on who you talk to. Some say to put the best story first. Others say put a zinger at the end. I’ve heard the third story can be the most crucial because if a reader is going chronologically, that might be the one that makes them decide to keep reading or move on. And of course, a good collection has a thematic element, a thread that runs through the stories or otherwise ties them together. All that said, it’s rare to find a collection whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When it does happen, it’s magic. Absolute magic. In Jeanette Winterson’s Night Side of the River, this magic is front and center.”
Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves, edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White (University of Georgia Press). Reviewed by Drew Gallagher. “The degree of carnage experienced during the Civil War had never before been seen on American shores, and the subsequent need to inter hundreds of thousands of bodies was overwhelming. In Final Resting Places, some of the most accomplished historians of our time reflect on the importance of the Confederate and Union cemeteries that eventually emerged and explore how monuments to the fallen have become cultural flashpoints in our struggle to come to terms with the war’s root causes and legacy. It’s the Civil War book you didn’t know you needed until you read it.”
Distant Sons: A Novel by Tim Johnston (Algonquin Books). Reviewed by Mark Gamin. “Indeed, all the characters in Distant Sons are well drawn, with memorable detail. This isn’t the kind of page-turner in which keeping track of who’s who is difficult. Surely it cannot be easy to craft multiple mysteries using not only the same characters but continuing plotlines…Yet Johnston pulls it off: The awed reader eventually figures out that he’s been planning what turns out to be a large, intricate literary operation from the start. But is this the final volume in a trilogy or the third in a longer series?”
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl (Spiegel & Grau). Reviewed by Julie Dunlap. “The prose is most lush and poignant in summer. On ‘thick days and thicker nights,’ pavement gets so hot that rainfall sizzles into vapor. But there are so many voices in her trees, flowers, and berry bushes — trilling frogs, humming bees, warbling bluebirds, and shrieking crow fledglings — that Renkl dubs this ‘the singing season.’”
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