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Book of the Day Roundup: February 19-23, 2024
Playing with Wildfire
Laura Pritchett
Torrey House Press
Softcover $18.95 (250pp)
978-1-948814-89-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Laura Pritchett’s Playing with Wildfire is a rare climate novel of now. It begins in late August, as a megafire started by a visiting hiker sweeps through Colorado along with COVID-19. Prose, poetry, plays, government grant applications, astrological natal charts, obituaries, graffiti, and maps distill the impossible weight of a rural community and planet in distress into a plea to “think of all who have loved this place” and demand radical, restorative action.
A work of great heart and imagination, the novel utilizes multiple forms and perspectives to construct its narrative. As one character states, winking at the meta: “like the pandemic, these megafires present a new type of suffering—both for land and human. The suffering feels like experimentation. Requires new stories told in unique forms and techniques.” There’s also tenacious attention paid to the warts-and-all truth of rural Colorado, preventing abstractions.
The book’s protagonists range from various wild animals escaping the fire to the mountains the fire ravaged; they include emergency services personnel and locals too. All struggle to process the grief and rage of knowing—that these tragedies were predicted and predictable; that their present crises cannot be undone; that proximity, or the lack thereof, is a crucial ingredient for action and empathy; and that their community’s geographical and emotional distance from decision makers, pundits, and lobbyists means no one is likely to listen to their plea that “the planet is burning. We need to get the fires out. Then we can discuss other stuff.”
Fierce, vivid, and closely observed, Playing with Wildfire is an exercise in paying attention. And if “attention is the most basic form of love,” the earth is not the only thing in danger. Love is an endangered ecology too, and there is an inherent mutualism to what’s required for healing.
LETITIA MONTGOMERY-RODGERS (December 27, 2023)
Waiting for Al Gore
Bob Katz
Flexible Press
Softcover $19.00 (276pp)
979-898872132-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Bob Katz’s novel Waiting For Al Gore, a journalist and an environmentalist working in Vermont use one another’s skills and contacts to achieve their own goals.
Lenny is a journalist searching for the story that will earn him a book deal. A lead takes him to Vermont. There, he meets Rachel, an accomplished author and the founder of EarthKare, an organization with “a reputation for picking ideological fights.” Rachel is organizing an environmental conference and needs to rally attendees. She hopes to secure Al Gore as the lead speaker; he is the key to the conference’s success—or so she thinks. In fact, the reappearance of a regional thrush that was thought extinct affects the conference’s outcome more than Rachel’s planning could.
The Vermont setting is described in vibrant terms, with notes of its “fairy-tale beauty” and “swooping valleys, all green and gold, capped by a blue blue sky.” But this serenity and purity also means that the location is remote; it is a struggle to transport attendees to EarthKare’s base camp. Indeed, getting them there, and feeding them all, clashes with the environmentalists’ values, including their desires to lower carbon emissions and nonbiodegradable waste.
The prose has a melancholic tone, though its language is conversational and increasingly direct, securing immersion. The story is told via a split narration, trading time between Lenny and Rachel and including frequent flashbacks. Lenny and Rachel make compromises when it comes to their expectations for the conference; these aid them in attaining their goals, though the successes or failures of individual people seem to have little impact on others.
In the novel Waiting for Al Gore a journalist immerses himself in an environmentalist’s world, where everyone has a dream and an angle.
MARY MCNICHOL (December 27, 2023)
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman
Patrícia Melo
Sophie Lewis, translator
Restless Books
Softcover $19.00 (288pp)
978-1-63206-346-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A Brazilian lawyer is reminded that intimacy is perilous in Patrícia Melo’s searing novel The Simple Art of Killing a Woman.
While researching fatal crimes against women, a lawyer lists the varying slights that caused men to kill their partners, daughters, and neighbors: they were full of themselves, they disobeyed, they chose the wrong outfits. There were unapproved looks at parties; there were career advances that made their husbands feel lesser. It doesn’t take much to push a violent man over the edge, she notes. And no one knows this better than the lawyer herself: her father murdered her mother; her once trusted partner just crossed the line into violence.
Fleeing toward the Amazon, where she experiments with ayahuasca and records the trial of three men accused of the vicious murder of an Indigenous teenager, the lawyer notes that, for women and girls, safety is always illusory at best. “The first thing you learn when you dive into the world of femicide,” she says, “is that dark streets, deserted alleys, and dodgy neighborhoods are not genuinely dangerous places for us. The truth is that there’s nowhere more perilous than our own homes.”
Between chapters appear the death records of murdered women, whose killers make transparent excuses for their executions. These interludes are brief and laid out like poems; they drive home their stark realities with brutal clarity. And they are a discomfiting fit with the lawyer’s fevered forays into her buried memories of the night that taught her, better than any investigation could, to draw a hard line at the first sign of danger.
Women rise defiant against misogynistic forces in the truth-filled novel The Simple Art of Killing a Woman. While the dead cannot be resurrected, lives might be spared with knowledge—and via feminist alliances.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 27, 2023)
South of Sepharad
The 1492 Jewish Expulsion from Spain
Eric Z. Weintraub
History Through Fiction
Softcover $18.95 (334pp)
979-898731911-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Eric Z. Weintraub’s novel South of Sepharad, a Jewish family faces separation and exile from the only home they’ve ever known.
After centuries of rule, the Moors lose control over Spain to the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand. With this change comes a devastating edict: all Jews must leave Spain or convert. Vidal, a Jewish doctor, determines that the best way to protect his family is to emigrate to Morocco. Only Vidal’s eldest daughter Catalina, who converted to marry a Catholic, remains behind in Granada.
Right or wrong, this decision sets them on a path that will push their faith to the breaking point.
Under the Moors, people of all faiths lived together in relative peace. Under the Catholics, the basic tenets that always ruled life in the Jewish quarter—stability, loyalty, and human decency among them—crumble with alarming ease. Far from home on a treacherous journey, Vidal, too, begins to lose his grasp of right and wrong in scenes as crushing as they are inevitable. Meanwhile, Catalina (who is naïve and eager to please) mourns the callous destruction of her old Jewish neighborhood. She also witnesses the arrival of the Inquisitors, brutal men bent on assessing the sincerity of conversos like her.
After so much loss and hardship, no one and nothing could remain unchanged—especially not the outlawed religion that the Catholic monarchs despise and that Vidal depends on. Even those who make it to the comparative safety of Morocco spend lifetimes struggling to look ahead instead of behind, forging new paths for future generations rather than obsessing over the roads not taken.
South of Sepharad is a wrenching novel about how morality changes or stagnates in times of crisis.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (December 27, 2023)
How Dreadful!
Claire Lebourg
Sophie Lewis, translator
Transit Children’s Editions
Hardcover $18.95 (36pp)
978-1-945492-78-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A quirky collection of creatures provide a lesson on self-expression in this tongue-in-cheek picture book about the subjectivity of art. Paty’s exhibition is only three days away, and she has little prepared. She calls on her friends to be her models, but their reactions to their portraits shatter her confidence; beauty is found in the eyes of different beholders on exhibition day. The watercolors are applied with a light touch, giving the book a delicate, painterly feeling befitting its winged protagonist.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
