Book of the Day Roundup: April 29-May 3, 2024
Otherworldly Antarctica
Ice, Rock, and Wind at the Polar Extreme
Edmund Stump
University of Chicago Press
Hardcover $28.00 (176pp)
978-0-226-82990-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In captivating words, photographs, and illustrations, geologist Edmund Stump’s book Otherworldly Antarctica covers the “stark and utterly pristine” continent where winter never leaves.
Stump spent thirteen field seasons mapping and photographing the Transantarctic Mountains. Later, he returned as a wistful tourist for one last wonder-filled visit to the land of ice, rock, and snow. His shots of fantastic forms, patterns, textures, and a startling palette of colors convey the spare beauty and timelessness of the bedazzling country that few will ever have the opportunity to see firsthand. These fascinating landscape photographs are paired with accessible, absorbing descriptions of the properties of ice and snow, scientific concepts, and the history of Antarctic exploration.
Stump is meditative, even spiritual, in his descriptions of his favorite place. He evinces special love for sastrug (wind-carved patterns on snow) and for the delicate “galaxy of bubbles, intricate and intermingling” that bloom overnight on the ground when pools of meltwater freeze and refreeze. His memorable photographs of crevasses contain stunning hues from the palest powder blue to midnight black; icebergs and glacier tongues form exquisite sculptures as they blend into the sea. And there’s a thrilling peek along the rim of Mt. Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano.
A few photographs contain images of Stump’s scientist colleagues, resulting in a sense of scale; this deepens the embodiment of Antarctica’s perfect stillness and shifting perceptions of dimension and depth. Elsewhere, Marlene Hill Donnelly counterbalances this spatial shift by superimposing people, buildings, and giraffes onto her colorful reproductions of some photographs.
Otherworldly Antarctica is a fascinating armchair travel book, approaching the remotest place on Earth with a knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and artistic guide. It will be a standout in collections about polar exploration or landscape photography.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (February 13, 2024)
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest
Charlie J. Stephens
Torrey House Press
Softcover $16.95 (176pp)
978-1-948814-98-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In prose drenched with awe, Charlie J. Stephens’s tender novel A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest takes a child’s perspective on the pains of being poor in rural Oregon.
For eight-year-old Smokey, poverty is part of the landscape, just like the hazardous mushroom canning factory and the migrant tent camp outside town. Smokey’s mother, loving but elusive, copes by welcoming abusive boyfriends into their home, leaving Smokey straining to be noticed. Both mother and child are hungry for affection; neither is quite able to fill the other’s need.
Smokey’s loneliness is magnified by the fact that they are biracial and blooming into queerness. Strangers struggle to gender them. Bullies, including adults, notice their difference and punish it. For Smokey, masculinity is a funhouse mirror. They grapple with the perceived dissonance of both fearing men and wanting to become one. It’s a low background hum that colors their life, as do the ghosts of sexual assault and intergenerational trauma.
Claustrophobic interiors (Smokey’s “bedroom” is a closet) contrast with the lush wilderness that, like safety, is often just out of reach. Smokey takes comfort in the borderlands of these frontiers and finds refuge in nonhuman features—in a backyard fig tree, in a family of raccoons.
For all the cruelty Smokey witnesses, empathy, too, thumps through the lines. Characters are extended grace even as they make mistakes. Beauty is noticed and remarked upon. There is value in this painful landscape for those patient enough to see it: “Sit still for longer than you think you’re capable and this old world will present itself to you.”
Knowing that children like Smokey are cast as furniture in the house of adult desires, immobile and without needs, the novel A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest begs us to take them seriously.
LUKE SUTHERLAND (February 13, 2024)
The Queen of Steeplechase Park
David Ciminello
Forest Avenue Press
Softcover $20.00 (470pp)
978-1-942436-61-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In David Ciminello’s hilarious novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park, an Italian American girl’s personality is as big as her heart—and her appetite.
In 1930s New Jersey, Bella makes sure everyone knows her name. Her beauty, wit, and incredible talent in the kitchen elevate her to queen status in her close-knit Italian Catholic neighborhood, where conversations are laced with flamboyant humor and people address each other by their full names, letting out ardent refrains of “holy cannoli!” But Bella’s insecurities drive her to pull away from those who care for her. Raising her younger brother in a home with a catatonic mother and an abusive father, Bella balances school, chores, and her social life.
Then Bella falls in love with gorgeous Francis and becomes pregnant at fifteen. A series of tragedies and fateful decisions follow: she’s coerced into giving away her baby, is sterilized without her consent, and runs away to join a sideshow. Bella ends up burlesque dancing on Coney Island, where her found family of circus performers propels her to seek redemption.
Bella is a loud, brash, and lovable heroine. On Coney Island, her bold nature reasserts itself. She shows deep loyalty to her queer outcast friends too. But her hopeless romanticism is a reminder that she is still a teenager.
Humor interchanges with heartbreak as Bella grows wise beyond her years. She begs for her lost baby with palpable desperation and claws her way back into lost friendships. She fears that Francis will no longer want her when he learns about her pregnancy, her sterilization, and her promiscuity, but their passionate love is the constant, thrumming heartbeat of the book.
A girl heals with the powers of dancing and Italian meatballs in The Queen of Steeplechase Park, a heartrending, humorous novel about friendship amid despair.
AIMEE JODOIN (April 25, 2024)
The Secret Library
Kekla Magoon
Candlewick
Hardcover $18.99 (384pp)
978-1-5362-3088-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
National Book Award Finalist Kekla Magoon’s The Secret Library is a spellbinding tale of self-determination and family history.
Eleven-year-old Dally seeks a new escapade after the death of her grandfather, who inspired her adventurous spirit. But when her demanding single mother won’t let her join the adventure club because its schedule conflicts with her economics tutoring—lessons Dally needs in order to someday take over the family business—Dally rebels. She retrieves an envelope that her grandfather left her and that her mother intended to save until her twenty-first year. To her surprise, she finds a map in it that leads to a hidden library. The enchanted books within contain long-held secrets about Dally and her family; they allow her to travel to the precise moments those secrets were born.
As Dally flows through each adventure—finding her housekeeper’s candy stash, learning how her parents actually met, and steering a pirate outing with an ancestor—she begins to unearth her family’s buried origins. Fantastical worlds and paced curveballs perpetuate the story’s vigor and complement the vivacious narration. Dally’s adolescent intricacies are empowered in the storytelling, which values her thoughts, feelings, and opinions. And the diverse supporting cast enhances the complexities of Dally’s genealogy—as well as the story’s themes.
The book handles substantial concepts in an effortless manner. It introduces the emotional overwhelm that accompanies grief and racial identity, and its depictions of racial and gender constructs are nuanced. Dally’s biracial identity (Black and white) is configured through modern context and the ancestral past—a Kindred-esque approach to examining the stolen history of Black Americans. Smatterings of black-and-white art reinforce the whimsical nature of this masterpiece.
The Secret Library is a gratifying, adventure-filled novel that’s sure to stand out in middle grade collections.
BROOKE SHANNON (April 25, 2024)
Aloha Everything
Kaylin Melia George
Mae Waite, illustrator
Red Comet Press
Hardcover $19.99 (40pp)
978-1-63655-112-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
This breathtaking picture book depicts the beauty and indomitable history of the islands of Hawai’i and the Polynesian people through the storytelling vehicle of hula. Through hula, a girl learns about the creation of the islands, about her ancestors’ journeys across the sea, and about the heroes and romance of her culture’s mythology, developing a deep appreciation for her land and her people. Brilliant colors and striking details breathe life into lightning-scattered seas, rivers of lava, and a host of plants and animals.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 25, 2024)
Kathy Young
