Book of the Day Roundup: March 25-29, 2024
Strong Like You
T. L. Simpson
North Star Editions
Softcover $14.99 (224pp)
978-1-63583-094-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In T. L. Simpson’s moving coming-of-age novel Strong Like You, a high school student in Arkansas struggles to understand what happened to his missing father.
When the book begins, Walker’s father is already gone without explanation, the house where he lives with his mother is falling apart, and he needs to meet with the school guidance counselor weekly after punching a football teammate on the first day of school. Still, many of Walker’s best moments come on the football field, where, along with his cousin and closest friend, he excels as a linebacker. His team is putting together its best season in years. As the novel continues, Walker sets out to discover the reason for his father’s disappearance, tracking down the elder’s unsavory associates in an attempt to bring him home.
The book is narrated as if Walker is describing its events to his father. He has a lot to navigate, including his feelings for a new girl at school, his rivalry with the team’s quarterback, and his coach and his mother becoming friendly. On the advice of his counselor, he chronicles his thoughts in a journal; the book includes key entries alongside Walker’s narration. The absence of his father and his attempts to be like him find their way into all aspects of Walker’s life and create myriad complications in his relationships. Even once he learns where his father is and why, the answers create more problems to solve.
Strong Like You is an engaging novel in which a high school football star is forced to confront his ideas of manhood and forge better ones.
JEFF FLEISCHER (February 13, 2024)
The Lady with the Dark Hair
Erin Bartels
Revell
Softcover $17.99 (352pp)
978-0-8007-4166-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Dual storylines connect across time in Erin Bartels’s historical novel The Lady with the Dark Hair, about women who expand their visions of themselves through art.
In midlife, Esther cares for her schizophrenic mother, a reclusive artist. Esther was raised to believe that she descended from a minor impressionist, Francisco Vella. Vella’s enigmatic portraits of a woman are the focus of a family museum, whose continuing viability is uncertain. When Esther encounters a former professor, Perez, he revitalizes her intellectual interests. But as Esther spends time with Perez, she discovers that her knowledge of the Vella art collection is incomplete—and that her desires have grown.
In nineteenth-century France, Viviana is a Catalan servant who meets Vella, a traveling merchant. When her past deeds threaten to derail her, she flees to Paris under the guise of being Vella’s sister. There, she sharpens her newfound artistic talents and meets period icons, including Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. Suspicion about the real artist behind Vella’s signature forms long before the truth occurs to Esther, resulting in winding anticipation.
The women’s alternating storylines emphasize their differences: Esther feels trapped and subdues her desires because of loyalty to her mother. In contrast, Viviana is bold and travels to Gibraltar (a lively, evocative background shaped by armed conflicts), where she makes an effort to train herself and to find her distinctive style. She is not alone among women artists who are underestimated; she perseveres despite challenges. What binds her to Esther most is that she, too, holds the open-ended hope that she can shape her future to her liking.
In the alluring novel The Lady with the Dark Hair, questions about a portrait’s origins inspire a search for personal meaning.
KAREN RIGBY (February 13, 2024)
Rumi
Poet of Joy and Love
Rashin Kheiriyeh
NorthSouth Books
Hardcover $19.95 (40pp)
978-0-7358-4544-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Gold leaf and painterly illustrations with saturated colors are used to follow the life of Rumi, the renowned poet and scholar born in Iran in 1207. Herein, Rumi is imagined as a boy who delights in feeding the birds; a young adult blossoming into a teacher; a lonely man in search of a lost friend; and an elderly writer who has found peace and purpose. The delicate illustrations complement the mystical, dreamlike feeling of this biographical picture book.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (February 13, 2024)
Searching for Dali
Robert Lane
Mason Alley Publishing
Hardcover $24.95 (352pp)
978-1-73229-456-1
Robert Lane’s compelling literary detective novel Searching for Dali unravels the mystery of a missing painting.
Veronica is a multimillionaire whose memories are slipping away. She has “die” penciled into her phone calendar. Her husband, Nick, is missing—and so is her prized, pilfered Salvador Dali painting, The Lost Body. She hires Jake Travis, a veteran and an insurance investigator, to track down the art without getting the police involved so she can return it to Rollins College and hide the theft; she could not care less about finding Nick.
Set down the street from the Salvador Dali Museum in Saint Petersburg, Florida, the book starts from Veronica’s perspective, capturing her dementia: she cannot remember names and puzzles over numbers. It soon becomes Jake’s story as he tracks down the artwork, working through potential suspects as bodies pile up.
The writing is dramatic, punchy, and gripping, riffing with short sentences that sound like jazz. It has evocative phrases like “lived in a winter with no hope of spring” and vintage noir throwbacks like “when death is on the calendar.” It sprinkles in poetic language, as when describing a sunrise “sparkling the bay as if some Liberace god had rolled a pail of diamonds upon the water.” Though too polished to be realistic, the stylized dialogue is snappy and memorable. Clever back-and-forth banter is infused with wry humor, as with an exchange about mustard on Jake’s shirt.
The book leads to a dramatic showdown when Jake confronts the culprit. Some order is restored, but not every loose end is tied up and justice is not served in full. Still, the ending is richer and more impactful as a result.
The literary crime novel Searching for Dali untangles an art theft mystery with panache and real artistry.
JOSEPH S. PETE (February 13, 2024)
Andy Warhol
A Graphic Biography
Michele Botton
Marco Maraggi, illustrator
Frances Lincoln
Hardcover $19.99 (128pp)
978-0-7112-9078-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The life and work of a classic modern artist is recounted in Andy Warhol: A Graphic Biography.
After studying art, design, and commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, twenty-one-year-old Andrew Warhola Jr. moves from Pittsburgh to New York and changes his name to Andy Warhol. He thrives in advertising but is unable to find acceptance from the art world—until he combines silkscreen printing with iconic imagery, as of Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, creating some of pop art’s most recognizable works. After becoming a celebrity and star-maker and associating with singers, writers, photographers, and fellow artists, Warhol continues to produce art until his death in 1987.
Warhol narrates this brisk but intimate introduction to his life and the experiences that inspired his artistic philosophy and distinctive style. Still, the book is billed as “unofficial and unauthorized”; it’s unclear how much of Warhol’s commentary was taken verbatim from interviews and how much was imagined. Its art, narrative, and overall aesthetic are much like Warhol’s work itself, forming a provocative and appealing package that presents as many questions as it does answers.
Andy Warhol: A Graphic Biography distills the enigmatic art icon’s life into a fascinating visual chronicle.
PETER DABBENE (February 13, 2024)
Barbara Hodge
