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Published on April 17, 2017 14:31

Bookstore Sales Fell Again in February

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Bookstore sales dropped 3.0% in February 2017, compared to the same month in 2016, according to preliminary estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Sales this February were $744 million, down from $767 million a year ago.

The February decline follows a 3.7% drop in bookstore sales in January. The two-month losing streak has led to a 3.6% decline in bookstore sales so far in 2017. Rrevenue over the period has fallen to $2.23 billion, down from $2.32 billion in the comparable period in 2016.

Sales for the entire retail sector in February rose 1.4%, and sales for the first two months of 2017 were up 3.4% over 2016.

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Published on April 17, 2017 12:29

New Literary Agent Alert: Joanna MacKenzie of the Nelson Literary Agency

This content was originally published by Cris Freese on 17 April 2017 | 10:00 am.
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Reminder: New literary agents (with this spotlight featuring Joanna MacKenzie of the Nelson Literary Agency) are golden opportunities for new writers because each one is a literary agent who is likely building his or her client list.

About Joanna: Joanna joined the Nelson Literary Agency at the start of 2017 following a tenure at a Chicago-based literary agency where she successfully placed numerous manuscripts that have gone on to become critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling novels. She represents a wide-range of writers, from YA (Kristen Simmons) and romance (Shana Galen) to mysteries and thrillers (John Galligan). Joanna loves working with authors who embrace the full publishing process (read: love revisions) and is committed to the stories her clients want to tell both with the words they put on paper, as well as with the careers the build. At the Nelson Literary Agency, Joanna is looking to expand her list in both adult and YA.

She is Seeking: Joanna is looking for literary-leaning projects with commercial potential and epic reads that beat with a universal heart (think The Secret History or The Namesake or Geek Love). In particular, she’s drawn to smart and timely women’s fiction as well as absorbing, character-driven mysteries and thrillers –Tana French is a particular favorite. She has a weird obsession with, what she calls, “child in jeopardy lit” and can’t get enough kick-ass mom heroines—she’d love to find the next Heather Gudenkauff. On the YA side, she’s interested in coming of age stories that possess a confident voice and characters she can’t stop thinking about (Morgan Matson is on her forever shelf).

How to Submit: Send a query via email to queryjoanna@nelsonagency.com. Please remember:

In the subject line, write QUERY and the title of your project. This will help ensure that your query isn’t accidentally deleted or caught in our spam filter.
In the body of your email, include a one-page query letter and the first ten pages of your manuscript.
No attachments Because of virus concerns, emails with attachments are deleted unread.

Screen Shot 2016-08-08 at 2.57.50 PM

The biggest literary agent database anywhere
is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the
most recent updated edition online at a discount.

Freese-Headshot If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.

Bush Nostalgia Is Overrated, but His Book of Paintings Is Not

This content was originally published by JONATHAN ALTER on 17 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Their value lay only in their presidential provenance. In the Amazon TV series “Alpha House” (disclosure: I was a producer), Garry Trudeau makes sport of a fictional Republican senator carefully hanging his treasured bathtub-feet “Bush” as if it were a masterpiece. This while former President Jimmy Carter was selling one of his paintings at a Carter Center charity auction for $750,000.

In the introduction to his new coffee-table book of oil paintings, Bush readily — perhaps pre-emptively — admits that he’s a “novice.” Three years after leaving the White House, he set out to adopt the pastime of Winston Churchill, who painted to relieve the “Black Dog” of depression. But age 66 is awfully late to achieve proficiency, especially for a man with a famously short attention span. Bush recalls playfully informing his first art instructor, Gail Norfleet, of his objectives. “Gail, there’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body,” he told her. “Your job is to liberate him.”

Norfleet and Bush’s other talented tutors fell short of that ideal, but they did liberate an inner Bush we — and maybe he — never knew existed: An evocative and surprisingly adept artist who has dramatically improved his technique while also doing penance for one of the greatest disasters in American history.

After staring at the haunting close-up portraits of wounded warriors and reading the searing accounts of their suffering, I’m beginning to understand why this beautifully published book went to No. 1 on The Times’s nonfiction best-seller list. It’s not that people are suddenly nostalgic for Bush; historians consistently rank him near the bottom in their lists of American presidents and — despite lasting achievements on treating AIDS globally and a prescription drug benefit for Medicare — he will very likely remain there, even if he rises past President Trump some day. (Trump hasn’t gotten us into a $1 trillion war or presided over an economic meltdown — so far.) And it’s not just that Trump has set the bar of character and decency so low that Bush barely needs to lift his cowboy boot to step over it. His charming family, warm relationship with the Obamas, and welcome defense of the press and other threatened democratic institutions aren’t sufficient explanations, either.

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Lt. Col. Kent Graham Solheim, U.S. Army.

Credit

President George W. Bush

A better answer might lie in the words of Marine Corps Sgt. Andy Hatcher, who enlisted a month before 9/11 and was ambushed on Thanksgiving Day 2004 in the Second Battle of Falluja. Hatcher lost his right foot and most of the hearing in his right ear. He also suffered traumatic brain injury, though a less severe form of that signature wound of the Iraq War than afflicted other veterans. “My father is a Vietnam vet,” Hatcher said. “He was treated incredibly differently than I was.”

The success of “Portraits of Courage” (with the proceeds to help vets) is something more than just another “Thank you for your service.” It testifies to our genuine, bipartisan determination to do it better this time — to support healing in all of its forms, even from the president who most made that healing necessary. It reflects our fascination with how leaders process pain and regret. And whether or not we backed Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (as I wrongly did), commemorating the more than 40,000 brave Americans who left a piece of themselves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan seems a fitting if tiny step toward bridging the civilian-military divide. Bush writes of the veterans he met that “looking them in the eye and saluting them as their commander in chief” was the greatest honor of his presidency and that he will continue to actively honor them for the rest of his life. This was not something that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon did much of with Vietnam veterans after leaving office.

Presidents who send soldiers into battle cannot easily confess that it was in vain. In his memoir “Decision Points,” Bush concedes that American forces were withdrawn too quickly but not that responding to 9/11 by attacking a dictator who had nothing to do with it was a colossal error. He can’t admit that he has little to show for his dream of democratizing the Middle East, beyond continuing chaos.

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Sgt. Leslie Zimmerman, U.S. Army.

Credit

President George W. Bush

And yet, bearing unflinching witness to the horrific consequences of historic folly should always be welcome. Atonement is not accountability, much less redemption, but it’s a start. Bush mostly avoids Veterans Day-style platitudes and sugarcoats nothing, not even stories about a veteran who wounded a fellow soldier with friendly fire and one shot by an Afghan security guard who was supposed to be an ally.

The former president met the 96 men and two women he painted in military hospitals and at the Warrior 100K mountain bike rides and Warrior Open golf outings sponsored by the Bush Institute. Their inspiring stories of recovery — most would not have survived in earlier wars — cannot soften the horrors they endured. Bush’s colorful brush strokes (he painted from photographs) capture the faces of soldiers like Army Capt. Jae Barclay, who underwent 30 surgeries after his vehicle struck an I.E.D. in Afghanistan; Lt. Col. Kent Solheim, whose right leg was amputated amid 34 surgeries, after which he returned for two more deployments; and Master Sgt. Israel del Toro Jr., “DT,” whom Bush first met when he was in a medically induced coma after his Humvee was hit by a bomb that severed his fingers and nose and severely burned 80 percent of his body. He was given little chance of survival, and when he beat those odds, doctors told him he would never walk or breathe on his own. After more than 100 surgeries, DT represented the United States in cycling and powerlifting at the 2016 Invictus Games and won the gold medal in the shot put.

The wounded warriors who don’t like Bush and haven’t recovered well were unlikely to have become friendly enough with him to have their portraits painted. But most of his subjects suffered nightmares, depression and “PTS.” (He leaves “disorder” off the end of post-traumatic stress, presumably because the clinical distinction between PTS and PTSD can be fuzzy.) The stories are gruesome but also occasionally amusing. Lt. Col. Ken Dwyer told Bush and the golf legend Lee Trevino how he took his prosthetic eye out of its socket and presented it to an umpire at his son’s baseball game with the comment: “Here, you seem to need this a lot more than I do.”

The only weak part of this book is the ingratiating foreword by Gen. Peter Pace, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “President Bush asked tough questions — and continued to ask them until he had all the information he needed,” Pace writes. This is precisely what Bush did not do — on incomplete plans for the postwar occupation, insufficient American troop levels, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army (one of the factors that led to ISIS) and many other matters. “Once he made a decision, he would resource it properly,” Pace claims. Tell that to the men who were killed or wounded because of unconscionable delays in obtaining proper body armor. Pace is right about one thing: The book is a “message of love” from a former president to the troops.

In 2003, I argued that Iraq was the right war with the wrong commander in chief. I had it nearly backward. It was the wrong war — for which history will forever blame Bush — but with the right commander in chief, at least for the noble if narrow purpose of creatively honoring veterans through art. Contra Ike, these portraits — an unexpected asterisk to the Bush legacy — would not have been burned, even if the artist had never been president.

The post Bush Nostalgia Is Overrated, but His Book of Paintings Is Not appeared first on Art of Conversation.

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Published on April 17, 2017 10:26

PRH Partners with Save the Children on Reading Campaign

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Penguin Random House has launched #ProjectReadathon Million Minutes, a campaign aimed at encouraging children to read in communities throughout North America. The effort will be executed in partnership with the Save the Children organization.

During the week leading up to UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day (and the U.K.'s World Book Night) on April 23, all readers visiting a specially-created reading platform, ReadWell.PenguinRandomHouse.com, will be allowed to read free excerpts from Penguin Random House books and authors.

Time spent on each page will be timed, and the number of minutes participants devote to reading the excerpts will, according to the publisher, trigger donations of up to 300,000 of books to children in need in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

The more participants read, the bigger a contribution they can make to the campaign; reading a 20-minute excerpt, for instance, precipitates a donation of five books, while an hour spent reading unlocks a donation of 20 books from Penguin Random House to Save the Children. Additional partners for the campaign include Charity Miles and Tab for a Cause.

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Published on April 17, 2017 09:25

2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 17

This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 17 April 2017 | 11:11 am.
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Today is a special day for so many reasons, but one in the poetic realm is that today is International Haiku Poetry Day. It always falls on April 17, because of National Poetry Month and the 17 syllables in many (though not all) haiku. This year is extra special because the year is ’17 as well.

For today’s prompt, write a dance poem. The poem can be about the process of dancing or just somehow incorporate or reference dancing in the poem. There are so many styles of dance out there and even more occasions for dancing: school dances, daddy-daughter dances, wedding dances, people who dance when they are happy, people who dance when they are sad, people who dance in large groups, and those who dance alone. And, of course, there are so who just won’t dance for anything.

*****

Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a Dance Poem:

“on dancing”

dancing is dancing
whether beneath the moon

in a summer swoon
in june & perchance

as part of a romance
that began with a glance

& ends with a dance
a soft cheek on shoulder

slowly getting older
& bolder dance

into the dark public park
where others avoid

you make your mark
as if on a lark

& back to the streets
on twitterpated feet

under electric lights
& feeling all right

& this is your night
for taking sweet chances

on an innocent romance
that ends with a dance

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He is very good at dancing when no one is watching, just as he’s a very talented singer when no one is listening.

Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.

*****

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April 16, 2017

The Legacy of David Letterman, Icon of the Grizzled Generation

This content was originally published by TOM CARSON on 10 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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This arc says a great deal about not only Letterman himself, but his once impish, now grizzled generation’s shifting role in American life. Linking both is TV’s ascent from the potluck, more or less disreputable mass entertainment it still was in the early 1980s to our primary cultural — and, thanks to cable, artistic — arena, at least for a while. Well before Letterman’s retirement, social media had transformed the landscape all over again, and Fallon was the one who understood the uses of Twitter.

Zinoman, who is this newspaper’s comedy reviewer, seems to have all those dimensions at his fingertips. However, he’s too lively a writer to get bogged down in show-offy theorizing. His big-picture commentary is so compressed and fluid that you often scarcely notice how casually he’s able to switch from micro to macro and back inside a single paragraph. As celebrity biographers go, he’s humane but not easily fooled (Zinoman interviewed Letterman, as well as many others associated with his shows). As a critic, he’s especially sharp and engaging when he’s breaking down Letterman’s trademark predilections, from the goofball love of peculiar locutions and nonsensically stressed clichés that evoked a sort of demented neo-Americana to how unerringly “his comedic instinct was to mock and belittle whatever world he inhabited.”

The latter impulse stayed constant even when the primary world Letterman inhabited on “Late Show” was his own curmudgeonly, dissatisfied brain. But it also predated his fame. As early as middle school, he was equating self-expression with media constructs, enlisting a classmate to stage sham talk shows on a mock set in the friend’s basement. (Shades of Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy.”) By the time he got to college at Ball State University in Indiana, though, his invariable M.O. as a campus-radio disc jockey was to burlesque the conventions and/or pretensions of whatever format he was assigned, including introducing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with a breezy “You know the de Lune sisters. There was Claire, there was Mabel.” That particular bit of irreverence promptly got him canned, though not for long.

Then followed a few scruffy years on local TV, including his celebrated stint as a smart-aleck weatherman, before he nerved himself to head to Los Angeles in 1975. Once there, he did stand-up at the Comedy Store, appeared on game shows, shot a failed pilot for one of his own, and spent a few unhappy weeks on Mary Tyler Moore’s flop variety series, “Mary.” Then he got booked on “The Tonight Show” at a time when Johnny Carson’s benediction was pure gold. Letterman’s own “The David Letterman Show” debuted on NBC in 1980, and though it didn’t last long — the morning time slot was all wrong for him — it provided the template for everything he was to do in late night.

By then, he’d already found an invaluable accomplice: the writer and comedian Merrill Markoe, his girlfriend for the better part of a decade and the decisive creative influence on both “The David Letterman Show” and “Late Night.” (“Without her, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Letterman told an interviewer after their breakup.) But Zinoman gives almost equal credit to the veteran director Hal Gurnee, who grasped right away that television wasn’t only Letterman’s medium; it was his subject. Now that “meta” is the conceptual given of so much TV comedy, it’s easy to forget how inventive Gurnee’s visual equivalents of putting everything inside air quotes actually were. The same is true of Letterman’s longtime musical sidekick, Paul Shaffer, whose parody version of Vegas smarm defined “Late Night” as pure showbiz and pure anti-showbiz simultaneously.

Zinoman isn’t wrong to spend over twice as many pages on Letterman’s “Late Night” years — lasting just over a decade, from 1982 to 1993 — as his much longer stint hosting “Late Show” (1993-2015). After all, “Late Night” arguably changed the face of television, while its much plusher CBS sequel mostly just changed the face of its host. Not always for the better, either; as Zinoman observes, “Letterman increasingly played the horny creep” with female guests as he aged. He got a comeuppance of sorts when a 2009 blackmail threat forced him to pre-emptively admit he’d cheated on his wife with more than one of the show’s staffers. By then, however, he was such a famously odd duck that Steve Martin congratulated him on the air for humanizing himself.

Interestingly, even on “Late Night,” Letterman had much less investment in staying quirkily cutting-edge than his writers did, particularly once alumni of The Harvard Lampoon and “Saturday Night Live” began dominating the writers’ room and pushing for more audacity. Emulating and eventually succeeding Johnny Carson remained his goal, one he fell short of once Jay Leno inherited “The Tonight Show” instead. Despite Zinoman’s Generation X birth date, he knows his television history well enough to argue that Letterman was as much a throwback to midcentury TV as a postmodern iconoclast, modulating from Steve Allen’s style (waggish, superior and happily ridiculous) to Jack Paar’s (neurotic, confessional, tormented). Yet Letterman’s true originality may be that only a Midwestern boomer who was every bit as easily unnerved as he was nervy could have combined the two. Or, at any rate, turned them into chapters of the same generational odyssey.

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Published on April 16, 2017 13:57

Tom Raworth obituary | Books

This content was originally published by Geoff Ward on 16 April 2017 | 12:26 pm.
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A leading figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s, Tom Raworth, who has died aged 78, brought the radicalism of the Beat, New York and Black Mountain schools in postwar American poetry to bear on British writing. Ditching closed form and metre, capital letters and punctuation, he wrote with a quickfire lyricism that elevated snapshot and spontaneity over the grand projects of high modernism.

The following lines:

the place was empty the stairs

had marks of old carpet the

aircraft’s trail dispersed into cloud

he entered the car at the lights and gave me an apple

come from Raworth’s first book, The Relation Ship (1966), which took its title from a poem by the Black Mountaineer Robert Creeley, his friend for decades and a poet with comparable leanings towards minimalism and a jazz-like, happily wandering attentiveness to what living and observing feel like.

Raworth was a wanderer in other ways, living in Mexico, Spain and the US, where he gave countless readings and was better known than in the UK. He performed everywhere from China to Macedonia, and in 1991 was the first European writer in 30 years to be invited to read at the University of Cape Town. Publishing more than 40 books of poetry, Raworth drew on surrealism, film and pop art but was in no way indebted or imitative. His work challenged the idea that the concept of nationhood could ever be adequate to human aspiration, need and curiosity.

Raworth was born in Bexleyheath, south-east London. His father, Thomas, was editor of the Jesuit magazine the Month. His mother, Mary (nee Moore), had lived in the same Dublin house as the playwright Seán O’Casey, and was imprisoned at the time of the Easter Rising. (Raworth acquired an Irish passport at the age of 52.) Leaving school at the age of 15, “I had a variety of jobs,” he recalled, “including insurance clerk, builder’s labourer, packer, assistant transport manager and continental telephonist. In 1959 I taught myself how to set type and to print.”

In 1965 he and the artist Barry Hall founded Goliard Press, which along with Raworth’s own work published the first writing by the US poet Charles Olson in the UK before Jonathan Cape acquired the firm two years later. Olson paid an unexpected visit, arriving at Heathrow and, unsure about English geography, instructing a cabbie to take him to Colchester, where Raworth was ensconced at the University of Essex.

He began by studying Spanish as a mature student for a BA but switched to the master’s programme and in 1970 was awarded an MA in literary translation. Raworth frequently relied on the university world to keep body and soul together, but remained instinctively detached from its more pedantic and hierarchical aspects. University Days reads, in its entirety, “this poem has been removed for further study”. This poem is however outdone in laconic brevity by some of the single-word poems in Raworth’s collection Moving (1971), whose miniatures alternate at speed between a machine-like clatter and a curious poignancy:

now here comes thought thought

is laughing at language language

doesn’t see the joke the joke

wonders why it takes so long

This is Raworth’s signature style, whereby the poem, acutely self-aware, is also egoless, reaching out to the reader to ask to be completed.

Raworth’s beginnings as a printer and book designer never left him, and the books came in all shapes and sizes. The jewel-like Common Sense (1976) measures only 5 inches in height, whereas the long poem Writing, published only a year later, is too large to fit on a conventional bookshelf. Some of the collections were livres d’artiste while others were mimeographed and stapled by the author.

Increased recognition brought Raworth prizes including the Cholmondeley award, the Philip Whalen memorial award and the Antonio Delfini prize for lifetime achievement. But the restless experimentation never let up, as he produced the vast cycle of 13-liners Eternal Sections (1993). In public performance he almost always read at breakneck speed, calling into question the ways in which sense is made on the page or conjured in the air between reader and writer. By this time, too, he had begun to construct collages of found materials scissored into grid-shapes, which were exhibited internationally.

Raworth had been one of the first patients to survive open-heart surgery in the 1950s, and suffered lifelong poor health. He was a highly empathetic man, generous, lightning-fast in conversation. Though his poetry would strike some as rarefied or baffling, he was a master of common decency as well as uncommon phrasings, showing great kindness to younger scribblers, myself included. He and I corresponded regularly when he was based in San Francisco, before his return to the UK in 1977. When I noted in one letter that I was having trouble obtaining a copy of one of his books, he typed the whole thing out and airmailed it by return. To me and many others he was the outstanding and most valued poet of his generation.

He is survived by his wife, Val (nee Murphy), whom he married in 1959, and by their sons, Lloyd, Benedict, Bruno and Aram, and grandchildren, Cato, Matilda, Florence and Eddie. A daughter, Lisa, predeceased him in 1996.

• Thomas Moore Raworth, poet, born 19 July 1938; died 8 February 2017

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Published on April 16, 2017 12:57

A Heroine Comes of Age With Her Pistol-Packing Father

This content was originally published by PETE HAMILL on 11 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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“The first time,” he says. “Now slide the bolt.”

Loo’s mother, Lily, died accidentally in a lake in distant Wisconsin before the young Loo could truly remember her. That loss provides an emotional anchor for Tinti’s story — and also for Loo herself, who still disappears at least once a day into the bathroom where Hawley has created an improvised shrine to his dead wife. As father and daughter moved around the unfamiliar American countryside, often abruptly, he always took the elements of the shrine with him to the next place. Photographs, a grocery list, the scrawled remnants of a dream. Like visible fragments of memory. The shrine and the guns establish a sense of home, a sense of continuity as Loo grows up. She may not recover her mother, but eventually she will master the holy art of shooting.

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The story is bound together by memory as a kind of highlight film. Which is to say, by memory as it actually is and not as a neat, banal narrative or a huge baroque melodrama. Loo’s memories, and her father’s, are often triggered by subtle moments: a snatch of song, the rumble of fireworks, the aroma of food, sudden ripples of offstage laughter. And yes, pictures in a cramped bathroom. Sometimes the sun gleams in those images. But more often they are streaked by deep, threatening shadows. In this portrait, those shadows also obscure the true nature of Samuel Hawley.

The reason: Hawley is an outlaw. Not a gangster, because he retains no membership in a gang. Hawley is a freelancer, using his skill with guns to enforce criminal assignments: picking up certain very valuable cargo, usually in states where he does not live, and delivering it for a fee to the master planners. He steals cars to get around. He does what is necessary to survive his assignment. Hurting strangers. Killing, if that is necessary. He has a few freelance criminal friends, loners shaped by jails and violence. They often work together. In civilian life, Hawley poses as a fisherman or a house painter. He carefully hides his true identity from his daughter.

But he also pays a price. The 12 lives of the novel’s title are represented by 12 bullet wounds in his body, a kind of stations-of-the-cross marker for the scars Hawley has suffered in the living of his shadow life. His body has been punctured by too many bullets, along with the interior wound of losing his wife, and his great fear of harm coming to his daughter. Hawley’s love for Loo is tender and pure, a reprieve from an otherwise sinful existence. It makes Hawley an admirable father, and the novel more than a case for the humanity of gun nuts.

As his own story moves on, Hawley begins to self-medicate against physical pain or mental agony. He teaches his daughter to roll cigarettes for him. And he chooses alcohol as his own most useful medicine. The alcoholic blur pushes away the sharp edges in his mind. It doesn’t matter where father and daughter are. San Francisco. Oklahoma. Massachusetts. What matters is to sleep at night. And for Loo to go to a regular school and make friends. And so they do, in Olympus as in their other homes. But when Hawley digs for clams at the shore, he always has his back to the sea while he watches the people.

The story has a few other important characters. One is Loo’s maternal grandmother, Mabel Ridge, who is severe and wintry, as if convinced that Hawley and Loo are responsible for Lily’s death. There’s an insecure boy named Marshall Hicks, who once got fresh with Loo. Her response: She broke one of his fingers. Later, they fall in love. When Hawley is away, Marshall comes to sleep with Loo. Now they are seeing each other more clearly, as evoked by Tinti’s keen eye:

“Marshall sat up and looked around Loo’s room, his eyes resting on each piece of furniture and item on her bureau. A bowl of shells, a strip of Skee-Ball tickets from the county fair, a pile of comic books, novels and astronomy guides, some half-melted candles from a power outage, a wad of balled-up tissues from her last cold, a small batch of cormorant feathers that she’d found and kept, because she liked their iridescent black color. Loo watched him puzzle over each object. It was as if he was measuring her life.”

There are surprises too. And diversions. And mysteries. There is an extended scene with Hawley’s long absent father, who vanishes again when it ends: A vision? A delusion? We don’t know, but we read on, carried by Tinti’s seductive prose. She has a deep feeling for the passage of time and its effect on character. And when it’s appropriate, she can use her vivid language to express the ripping depth of human pain.

As this strikingly symphonic novel enters its last movement, the final bars remind us that of all the painful wounds that humans can endure, the worst are self-inflicted. The evidence is there in the scar tissue that pebbles the body of Samuel Hawley, and there too in the less visible scars on his heart.

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Published on April 16, 2017 09:54

New Y.A. Novels Tackle Crime and Its Consequences

This content was originally published by JEN DOLL on 12 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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There’s a serious twist. Her dad’s been on death row for five years for killing his best friend after a poker game gone wrong. He’s maintained his innocence — “Black man wrongly convicted on shady circumstantial evidence, officialdom’s long, hard stance on admitting no wrongdoing whatsoever because, hey, reasons,” Nikki explains, and now, mysterious new information has led to his release. But the joy is marred by an understanding that things will never be the same. Nikki realizes it’s up to her — along with her friends and maybe her crush, a boy with ties to a casino fortune — to figure out what’s going on.

Giles, a founding member of We Need Diverse Books and two-time Edgar Award finalist, is in top form, weaving together the threads of his whodunit-and-why and resonantly depicting his characters’ home and school lives. As a poker genius Nikki may be a singular sort of teenager, but she’s grounded in desires and motivations that make her story as moving as it is thrilling.

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THE MURDERER’S APE
Written and illustrated by Jakob Wegelius
Translated by Peter Graves
588 pp. Delacorte Press. $17.99.
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)

This may be the most charming book I’ve read all year. Its narrator, Sally Jones (“Human beings have two names, a first name and a surname, but I’m a gorilla and I just have the one name — Sally Jones,” she explains), is a gorilla who understands everything humans say, though she can’t herself speak. She can, however, write: The book begins with her pulling out a vintage typewriter she’s mended (Sally Jones is also a master fixer of things) in order to put her story down and, she hopes, overcome her nightmares.

A lot has happened. Sally Jones’s best friend, the Chief, a man named Henry Koskela, was framed for a murder and sentenced to 25 years. In an effort to restore his reputation and reunite with her friend, Sally Jones embarks on a journey across the world: She’s in and out of homes and ships and even palaces, having adventures and relationships that are good and bad and complicated. (The Chief gives her the typewriter, so we know these two will find their way back to each other, but that doesn’t take away from the fun.)

Wegelius, a Swedish writer and illustrator, peppers his work with delightful drawings, and though the book is lengthy, its heart and mystery keep you turning pages. It’s a challenge to build a story around a protagonist who can’t speak, and Wegelius does this skillfully, emphasizing qualities that make us human — though not everyone demonstrates them — and that are possessed by Sally Jones, “a very good and fine person,” as the Chief aptly puts it.

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A LIST OF CAGES
By Robin Roe
310 pp. Disney-Hyperion. $17.99.
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)

Adam Blake is the sort of kid everybody likes, gregarious and smiling, even if he’s clumsy. “You’re sort of unbreakable,” his girlfriend tells him. A high school senior, he’s finally gotten the right treatment for his A.D.H.D., and he and his friends are cool yet mostly pretty nice.

Helping the school therapist, Adam encounters his former foster brother, Julian, now a freshman. Julian’s parents died in a car accident, and after his time with the Blakes an uncle took him in, cutting off ties with his foster family. Shy and dyslexic, Julian struggles at school, bullied by peers and teachers. Adam reaches out to Julian, inviting him to hang out and to sit with the seniors at lunch. Julian re-emerges from his shell, but he’s keeping terrifying secrets about what’s happening in his uncle’s home.

This is Roe’s first young adult novel, and it’s impressive. Julian’s and Adam’s perspectives alternate, and the plot chugs steadily forward, moments of beauty and humor interspersed with scenes of abuse and violence. Roe runs a mentoring program for at-risk teens; it’s clear she brings firsthand experience to the subject. While the crimes she portrays are truly vile (and make for difficult reading), their evil can’t stand up to the goodness in her protagonists, and the lesson that every kindness matters — and that we always have the choice to be kind.

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DREAMLAND BURNING
By Jennifer Latham
371 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $18.99.
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)

Seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase is just starting her summer when a skeleton is found on her property. A crime buff, Rowan can’t resist checking it out. “The dead always have stories to tell. They just need the living to listen,” she explains.

The story this skeleton tells is critical. In Tulsa, Okla., beginning on May 31, 1921, the city’s affluent African-American section — Greenwood, known as “black Wall Street” — was looted and burned to the ground by white rioters. Historians estimate that 300 people were killed, most of them black. Yet no white people faced charges, and as Latham writes in a note, “For more than 50 years, references to the riot were scrubbed from history books.”

Latham hopes to remedy that omission with “Dreamland Burning,” which follows two biracial characters: Rowan, whose mom is black and dad is white, and Will Tillman, born to an Osage mother and a white father in the early 1900s. While Rowan tries to uncover the meaning of the skeleton — and experiences contemporary racism — Will sets the stage for the 1921 massacre, himself both victim and perpetrator of discrimination, though one who represents the possibility of understanding and change. Of course the skeleton and Will are linked, but how exactly will keep readers hanging in.

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CITY OF SAINTS AND THIEVES
By Natalie C. Anderson
401 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $18.9
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)

Tina, or “Tiny Girl,” lives with vengeance in her heart. After escaping as refugees from war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, she and her mom thought they’d found safety in Kenya, and in her mom’s job as a maid to the powerful Greyhill family. Except that her mom had an affair with Roland Greyhill, and then was found murdered in his office.

Now living on the streets, Tina has become one of the best thieves in Sangui City, but she wants more: justice for her mother, and blood from the man she’s sure killed her, Roland Greyhill. She breaks into the office where her mom died looking for the information she needs — but her friend Michael, Greyhill’s son, appears.

“City of Saints and Thieves” is a twisty-turny, chock-full-of-secrets, so-exciting-you-have-to-force-yourself-to-take-breaks-and-breathe kind of novel. Anderson has worked for refugee relief agencies, and her novel has a clearly authentic foundation. Of course, the teenagers figuring out how to survive in this world in which adults so frequently fail them are the stars of the story, street-smart and savvy and searching. If occasionally Tina’s narrative voice seems a bit elevated for a girl who’s been living with a gang, her emotional journey feels compelling and true.

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