Book of the Day Roundup: December 5-9, 2022
Remainders of the Day
A Bookshop Diary
Shaun Bythell
Godine
Hardcover $27.95 (376pp)
978-1-56792-756-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Intrepid bookseller Shaun Bythell is back with his latest edition of wry tales from the Bookshop, Wigtown, Scotland’s beloved purveyor of used books.
Bookending each entry with notes of online orders and till sales, Bythell makes a yearlong record of the contemporary challenges and joys of being a bookseller. These include Amazon’s inexplicable algorithms and rude customers hiding behind digital anonymity, but also friendships formed, creative new ventures in response to stilted sales, and the thrill of finding a truly special manuscript among boxes of jetsam best suited to pulping.
Visitors from around the world stop in to bookish Wigtown, and Bythell seems to meet most. In his descriptions of those who assist at, sell to, live near, and peruse the shelves of the Bookshop, Bythell could be mistaken for a misanthrope, but he’s a more complicated host than that: whether interacting with readers or books, he’s curious, observant, and appreciative of individual foibles, quirks, and flaws—a careful cataloger of unique qualities. Some may find his takeaways regarding crass browsers and entitled sellers to be scathing, but the criticisms are fair—and the amusements are endless.
Set time aside for Remainders of the Day, the latest delightful volume of Shaun Bythell’s bookseller diaries.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 1, 2022)
Things We Found When the Water Went Down
Tegan Nia Swanson
Catapult
Softcover $22.95 (256pp)
978-1-64622-169-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Tegan Nia Swanson’s mystery novel Things We Found When the Water Went Down, three generations of women seek to protect a damaged world.
In the midst of a blizzard, Marietta is accused of murder and escapes custody almost as fast as she was arrested. With everyone else in town indifferent or hostile to Marietta’s fate, only her teenage daughter Lena knows where she went: the world Below, where the female victims of violence gather. Now, Lena must continue her mother’s mission to preserve what is good about the world Above by sending it Below, even though all she wants is to rejoin Marietta, either in this world or the other.
Set in a desolate town ravaged by environmental catastrophes, Lena cares nothing about finding the real murderer, whose victim perpetrated numerous horrific crimes. The world Above is apocalyptic, buckling under the strain of pollution and overmining. The world Below, while strange and barren, has grown more inviting with every plant, animal, and object Marietta—and, later, Lena—brings down to it.
Lena collects diary entries, interview excerpts, newspaper clippings, and more to clarify the events leading up to the murder. They paint a grim picture of a community drowning in large and small disasters of its own making. The women in Lena’s family are often the only ones willing to fight for change, so they have always been feared for their strange and bold behavior. Even when dead or missing, they remain to haunt the loved ones they left behind, providing strength and a roadmap to a better life—if only Lena can interpret their words in time.
Things We Found When the Water Went Down is an ethereal, mixed media mystery novel about what we lose when the strongest, most vulnerable among us are made to disappear.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (October 27, 2022)
Troll Forest
A Norwegian Tale
Donna Marie Seim
Susan Spellman, illustrator
Peter E. Randall Publisher
Hardcover $24.95 (32pp)
978-1-937721-92-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Inspired by Norwegian folklore, this whimsical story follows a fourteen-year-old boy into an unexpected encounter. After the death of his father, Peter and his mother struggle to run their farm alone; he does jobs for neighbors to earn extra money. Returning from one such project, he encounters a troll family in the forest. When the troll child slips into unexpected danger, Peter is forced to face his fears to save him; the trolls repay his kindness with a generous gift.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 27, 2022)
Between Light and Storm
How We Live with Other Species
Esther Woolfson
Pegasus Books
Hardcover $28.95 (368pp)
978-1-63936-276-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Esther Woolfson’s Between Light and Storm contemplates the eons-long interaction between human beings and animals. It questions what the belief that humans are superior to all other living beings has done to bring on the multiple planetary crises of the twenty-first century.
Displaying poetic eloquence and steely precision, the book first recalls Woolfson’s childhood and time spent caring for injured, abandoned, and lost birds and animals. Woolfson relates that observing such creatures convinced her that they were complex beings that could love, hate, grieve, and enjoy. She regarded their actions as considered and deliberate, and noted that their feelings were as subtle and real as those of humans. Now that science is coming on board with her observations, Woolfson demands to know how the belief in human superiority can be justified, to say nothing of humanity’s cruel behavior toward sentient creatures.
Woolfson brings history, theology, art, and philosophy to bear on her examination of the good and disastrous relationships between humans and animals. A moving example from Northern Jordan is presented as evidence that humans and animals have long been entwined in life and in death: a human and a fox were found buried together, both bodies painted with red ochre in the hope of a shared afterlife. But the book also addresses hard issues: the killing of animals for food, entertainment, sport, fashion, and convenience; gruesome “scientific” experiments performed on living animals; and how keeping animals as pets denies them freedom and the expression of their natural tendencies. Its narrative around these issues is heartbreaking.
Asserting that Earth’s survival is in jeopardy, Between Light and Storm is passionate and powerful in arguing that people’s attitudes and behaviors toward the Earth need to change in significant ways.
KRISTINE MORRIS (October 27, 2022)
Bombay Monsoon
James W. Ziskin
Oceanview Publishing
Hardcover $27.95 (320pp)
978-1-60809-506-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Reminiscent of the 1920s Gatsby era, with undercover alcohol and the hint of danger, James Ziskin’s Bombay Monsoon is a captivating thriller set during a pivotal time in Indian history.
Danny Jacobs is a reporter fresh on the beat covering sprawling Bombay and its surrounding communities. It’s June 17, 1975, just days prior to the start of “The Emergency,” a time when politics upend people’s lives and shatters the country’s fragile peace. Jacobs has an inkling of the coming storm, as his first assignment is to interview a bomber who killed a policeman.
The story follows Jacobs as he tries to understand the country he is working in and the people who call it home. Jacobs is welcomed into the nation’s ex-pat community, finding a new friend in his neighbor Willy Smets. Smets invites Jacobs to a party flush with illegal liquor, where he falls head over heels for his new friend’s gorgeous partner, Sushmita, whose flirtatious ways hint that the infatuation might be returned.
In the book’s three-movement drama, Jacobs is in over his head. The government begins to crack down on movement and his love life becomes a fraught affair. The complications pile up: Jacobs’s servant is arrested for trying to sneak into Willy’s apartment, putting him in the headlights of the country’s corrupt police force. Floundering, Jacobs needs help, which comes from unexpected places. And when deeper truths become clear, Jacobs is forced to choose between helping his newfound country or somehow risking it all for love.
A hero rises to the occasion in Bombay Monsoon, a passionate thriller in which love and danger flourish in a society turned upside down by political decay.
JEREMIAH ROOD (October 27, 2022)
Barbara Hodge
