Book of the Day Roundup: August 25-29, 2025
Cammy Sitting Shiva
Cary Gitter
Crooked Lane Books
Hardcover $19.99 (320pp)
979-889242254-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Cary Gitter’s Cammy Sitting Shiva is a poignant, often humorous novel about learning through loss.
Cammy is trying to figure out her life. Her playwriting class is the last in a string of courses intended to further her stymied writing career. She does just enough temporary work to pay the rent and contemplates how she messed up her latest relationship. But the news that her father passed away throws her into a tailspin. During the shiva period, Cammy flits between people and places from her past and present, desperate to figure out how she feels about the loss of her father and to navigate the difficulties of returning to her hometown.
Cammy’s mother, with whom she has a strained relationship, and the local rabbi are disappointed with Cammy’s inappropriate behavior during shiva and her frequent absence. Cammy clings to old friends from the small New Jersey town where she grew up, hoping they can offer some solace. But both Fran, her childhood friend, and Nick, the boy she adored in high school, fail to offer the stability she seeks.
The story is amusing, as with descriptions of a writing workshop as a place to “drink cheap wine.” Cammy’s hometown is characterized as being “sardined among dozens of other similarly sized towns”—it’s a nondescript backdrop for her messy struggle to find a path forward. Overexplanations of aspects of Jewish tradition and cultural stereotypes, as of the “Jewish stomach,” weigh down some scenes, though. Still, Cammy’s search for solace through her friends, family, and acquaintances is engaging. In the end, her frenetic behavior calms, and a surprising visit with an unlikely person directs her toward personal resolution.
In the heartfelt novel Cammy Sitting Shiva, a woman negotiates a family tragedy, moving toward a more meaningful existence.
CAROLINE GOLDBERG IGRA (June 22, 2025)
The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole
Cecilia Heikkilä
Floris Books
Hardcover $19.99 (44pp)
978-1-78250-953-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Equal parts cozy and spooky, this autumnal picture book demonstrates the importance of openness among friends—and the monstrous consequences of hidden resentments. When the weather turns cold and the crowds abandon the headlands, Fox and Mole are left with only each other for company. Considerate Fox always hosts their evening readings, while thoughtless Mole eats all Fox’s food and interrupts the story. Fiction becomes reality as Fox’s silent frustrations transform them into a monster straight out of a storybook.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 22, 2025)
Whispers of Shadowbrook House
Rebecca Anderson
Shadow Mountain
Softcover $17.99 (272pp)
978-1-63993-388-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Rebecca Anderson’s romance novel Whispers of Shadowbrook House is a haunting yet hopeful story of redemption and love.
Pearl, a governess, loves Shadowbrook House, the manor that became her home after she was orphaned. Pearl also loves Maxwell, the brilliant but sick little boy put in her care by reclusive Mr. Ravenscroft. Their simple life is complicated by the arrival of an embittered heir, Oliver, who is intent on selling Shadowbrook and the painful childhood memories it contains. Oliver and Pearl are drawn together as they care for Maxwell, but decades of secrets and loss threaten their budding romance.
Shadowbrook House has a mind of its own. Whispers and haunting music pour from its walls. Hidden passages and family secrets abound. These gothic elements result in an intriguing otherworldly feel. The plot remains grounded in human struggles, though, with the house’s mysteries often functioning as manifestations of people’s inner turmoil. Oliver tries to deny the music he hears, just as he rejects the idea of making a new life within Shadowbrook’s walls. The arrival of an extravagant mystic, Madame Genevieve, and her small dog adds levity as she helps reluctant Oliver, Pearl, and Mr. Ravenscroft accept the ghosts of their pasts.
The poetic prose and ever-present fear of Max’s illness heightens the poignancy of tender moments between characters. In one emotional scene, “the notes of the music soar … brittle and aching” as Oliver remembers his mother. After near tragedy, a sweet epilogue, narrated in the present to mirror the prologue, at last reveals hope for happiness.
In the lovely romance novel Whispers of Shadowbrook House, a kind governess and a brooding heir find love within a haunted nineteenth-century manor.
VIVIAN TURNBULL (June 22, 2025)
Happy New Years
Maya Arad
Jessica Cohen, translator
New Vessel Press
Softcover $18.95 (370pp)
978-1-954404-34-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Maya Arad’s epistolary novel Happy New Years, an Israeli immigrant writes annual Rosh Hashanah letters to her friends back home, masking the reality of her life in the US.
From 1966 to 2016, Leah writes to women from her teacher’s college days. Her missives brim with optimism and life-affirming quotations. Ending up in Massachusetts due to the promise of a nonexistent teaching job, Leah nevertheless makes a life for herself: She marries, divorces, moves to Silicon Valley with her children, and forges a career in real estate while having an active love life.
Postscripts to Leah’s closest friend, Mira, form the truest picture: Leah is obsessed with her physical appearance, makes disastrous decisions about men and finances, and has problems with one of her sons. While she takes responsibility for her failures, her final letter reveals the trauma she’s carried for decades. Refusing to be “ashamed anymore,” she tells Mira the truth, including about her friendships with the other women.
The dominant narrative voice is Leah’s; the exceptions are a preface written by the posthumous publisher of her letters, an afterword penned by family members, and snippets of other characters’ quoted speeches in the letters. Occasionally, the epistolary conceit becomes cloying, but Leah’s voice is compelling on the whole, vacillating between self-delusion and self-awareness. The gulf between the cheerful letters and the dark addenda sustains tension, while the social and political changes in the US and Israel over fifty years form the larger backdrop to Leah’s personal changes.
A poignant novel, Happy New Years is about a woman who, despite her flaws, attempts to stake her place in the world.
YELENA FURMAN (June 22, 2025)
Schattenfroh
Michael Lentz
Max Lawton, translator
Deep Vellum Publishing
Softcover $29.95 (1001pp)
978-1-64605-382-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
An inestimable novel of ideas, Michael Lentz’s monumental book Schattenfroh follows the consciousness of a trapped man as he thinks through his existence, his relationship to his father, and centuries of German culture.
“One calls this writing”: So begins the torrent of words, ideas, and literary, historical, philosophical, religious, and artistic allusions that make up Schattenfroh. Locked in a lightless room, sleepless Nobody, wearing a face mask that will explode if he touches it, is bidden to recognize himself by an identity-shifting captor, Schattenfroh (a neologism of the German words for shadow and joy). A tidal wave of intrusive thoughts and erudite reflections ensues, encompassing subjects from Martin Luther and Nobody’s cruel father to Hitler’s legacy and the crucifixion of Jesus. Transcribed by the mysterious face mask, these thoughts create a book within a book.
Elegant in its thematic layerings, massive in scope, and replete with baffling linguistic skill, this is a literary landmark. Its ambition and experimentation are indisputable. In place of chapters, more arcane elements pause the flood of language. Seventy handwritten pages—a listing of the 3,100 people killed during an Allied bombing of the German town of Düren—grind the novel to a halt. Midway through, Schattenfroh pauses to include a bibliography of 165 books. These postmodern elements are part and parcel of the novel. At one point, two men approach Nobody and hand him a paper on which it is written that two men approach Nobody and hand him a paper. Such flourishes generate a certain inscrutability, yet the sinuous prose captures each idea and draws it into the text’s compelling, rhythmic tapestry.
A novel of titanic ambition, Schattenfroh draws on the esoteric, overlooked corners of human history to trace the thoughts of one man wrestling with existence.
WILLEM MARX (June 22, 2025)
Kathy Young
