Book of the Day Roundup: April 8-12, 2024
The Schlemiel Kids Save the Moon
Audrey Barbakoff
Rotem Teplow, illustrator
The Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $17.95 (32pp)
978-1-68555-603-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In a lakeside shtetl filled with very silly souls, a family walking at night spots the moon upon the water. The parents worry for the heavenly body’s safety, even as their children bemoan adult misunderstandings. Soon other villagers and the rabbi are involved. As each adult rescue mission fails, the children concoct a plan to convince Chelm’s “wise” residents that the moon is okay after all. Smatterings of Yiddish, warm illustrations, and a diverse cast make this picture book a multicultural winner.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 13, 2024)
The Jinn Daughter
Rania Hanna
Hoopoe
Softcover $17.95 (274pp)
978-1-64903-363-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Death is owed a debt, and a mother and daughter face underworld threats, in Rania Hanna’s lush fantasy novel The Jinn Daughter.
Nadine, a jinn, consumes the souls of the dead, which take the form of pomegranate seeds. She tells their stories, thus helping them to reach their destination. This ritual task, however, didn’t extend to her dead husband Illyas: she keeps him in a purgatorial state as an act of mercy. Meanwhile, their half-jinn teenage daughter, Layala, is taunted by the townspeople, in love—and unaware of the full story of her heritage.
Told with powerful maternal concern, the novel unfolds through Nadine’s observations and magic use of a clay bird that allows her to see what’s happening with Layala. Threats necessitate that she seek shelter with Layala’s grandfather, a sheik. When the seeds stop appearing and death pays a visit to call in a favor, Nadine senses an upset in the balance between worlds; ghouls have been unleashed.
Interspersed with fables that reveal some of Nadine’s past and the stories of the dead, this is a vibrant novel. Nadine sets about resolving her problems in a fascinating way, facing conundrums. Meanwhile, her mother-daughter differences with Layala seem irreconcilable. Nadine feels ferocious desperation to reverse fate, leading to misdeeds, while Layala herself is determined to accept her role; in time, Nadine comes to the realization that children have to be allowed to grow into their own choices.
There’s a difference between love and manipulation in the provocative fantasy novel The Jinn Daughter, in which a mother goes to great lengths to rescue her child from death.
KAREN RIGBY (February 13, 2024)
Grey Dog
Elliott Gish
ECW Press
Softcover $18.95 (404pp)
978-1-77041-732-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Elliott Gish’s gothic horror novel Grey Dog, an unmarried teacher is pitted against a forest-dwelling monster.
In 1901, Ada is thirty years old and a reluctant teacher. She takes up a new posting in small-town Lowry Bridge. The locals appear friendly at the outset—bar Mrs. Kinsley, a purported witch, and a woodsy student’s reclusive father. And even as she befriends Agatha, the preacher’s wife, Ada avoids revealing too much about her troubled past.
As she gets to know the locals, Ada recognizes that there is plenty of history to mine in the tension between them. Her hosts are generous but shy, and they are at odds with Mrs. Kinsley. Her investigation into their lives leads her to identify more with people’s darker tendencies than their kinder ones, though. And the deeper Ada integrates into the community, the more she hears a voice from the forest calling her name.
Ada’s story is relayed through her journal entries, beginning with her arrival in Lowry Bridge and ending with her haunting departure a year later. The long early period in which Ada navigates teaching in a new town gives way to creepy, mysterious elements in the book’s second half, wherein crickets and dead birds fall from the sky, though only Ada sees them. The trauma of her removal from her last posting begins to hijack her thoughts and behaviors. The feminine ideals that she adores in others falter in her, and her visions grow more grotesque and personal. Her odd behavior is isolating. Twisted visions and forbidden longings leach into Ada’s mind until she can no longer resist the urge to follow the voice into the unknown.
Grey Dog is a slow-burn feminist horror novel with a lush setting and an explosive payoff.
AIMEE JODOIN (February 13, 2024)
Traces of Enayat
Iman Mersal
Robin Moger, translator
Transit Books
Softcover $18.95 (214pp)
978-1-945492-84-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Iman Mersal’s biography explores the troubled, unfulfilled life of Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat.
In 1963, twenty-six-year-old Enayat al-Zayyat committed suicide using sleeping pills. Enayat had finished one novel and was working on another; she was also involved in divorce proceedings and a custody battle for her son. Enayat had been given the pills during her treatment for depression and panic attacks.
Enayat’s novel Love and Silence was published after her death and inspired radio and movie adaptations. Even so, her literary reputation remained somewhat marginalized. After discovering Love and Silence in 1993, Mersal began a gradual quest to learn more about the novel’s talented, tragic author. She pieced together facts from obituaries, newspaper and magazine articles, and Enayat’s journals. She also met with surviving family members and interviewed Enayat’s closest friends. Traveling to Egypt from Canada, Mersal retraced Enayat’s final years, moving from her home in Dokki to the tomb that holds her remains. Throughout her purposeful obsession, Mersal felt like Enayat’s ghost was following her “in earnest.” But Mersal, too, began to experience psychological stress and was often diverted from her work by family and career obligations.
The book’s historical backdrop is intriguing, placing particular focus on the progression of Egyptian women’s rights. In her fiction, Enayat noted that women were “men’s possessions.” Her divorce petition required her to provide supporting witnesses; Quran-based law mandated that women witnesses testify together so that “if one errs…the other may remind her.” A decade later, the release of the passionate film I Want a Solution persuaded then-president Anwar Sadat to reform Egypt’s restrictive, sexist divorce code.
Traces of Enayat is a haunting biography that rescues a compelling legacy from a fragmented story of loss.
MEG NOLA (February 13, 2024)
Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit
Nadine Sander-Green
House of Anansi
Softcover $18.99 (320pp)
978-1-4870-1129-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Nadine Sander-Green’s insightful literary novel Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, a college graduate searches for identity in her work and relationships in the harsh, cold landscape of the Yukon.
Millicent, fresh out of journalism school, takes a job in Whitehorse writing for a local newspaper. It’s a town where people wrestle with their individual doubts and epiphanies as they struggle to fight off isolation. At the newspaper, Millicent works with a fellow reporter, Bryce, to cover the premier elections; after work, she finds comfort in the familiar (her former classmate, Sophie, is her new roommate).
When Millicent is given more freedom to choose her topics, she decides to write an article about a local man, Pascal—a filmmaker who lives on a school bus, choosing to forsake modern comforts and live a life free of distractions. Soon, a passionate relationship develops between them, causing concern among Millicent’s friends, who fear that she is losing herself in the relationship. Indeed, Pascal is not who he appears to be; if Millicent hopes to find herself again, it may have to be beyond the bounds of their relationship.
The prose embodies the Yukon landscape, where the river winks “silver reflecting the sun. Behind the town and the clay cliffs was an endless stretch of boreal forest. …The quiet was enormous, as if the vast expanse of land had swallowed the city’s noise.”
Before Millicent meets Pascal, the story is slow-moving, covering her interactions with her coworkers, Sophie, and election candidates. The central relationship helps to ground it. Millicent makes poor choices as the book progresses, but she also evolves, arriving at revelations as she faces compelling conflicts in a variety of circumstances.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit is a provocative coming-of-age story in which a budding journalist reckons with love, isolation, and issues of personal identity.
N.T. MCQUEEN (February 13, 2024)
Barbara Hodge
