Book of the Day Roundup: May 12-16, 2025
The Country Under Heaven
Frederic S. Durbin
Melville House
Softcover $20.99 (336pp)
978-1-68589-169-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Dizzying visions haunt the otherwise delicate beauty of Frederic S. Durbin’s supernatural novel The Country Under Heaven.
Since surviving the Battle of Antietam, Ovid experiences the intrusion of premonitory shimmers. As he migrates throughout the untamed West in the 1880s, he is tailed by a looming creature that arrives when his life is imperiled. Soon, a cavalcade of other eldritch beings intervene in his fortunes too. When it seems his luck is running out, the thin boundaries between the real and surreal begin to dissolve, leaving him to try to piece together anomalies from his world and beyond.
Ovid narrates, his voice vivid. He is a sympathetic hero with deep introspective reservoirs of observational wisdom that he summons in elegant, simple, and descriptive nineteenth-century language. His experiences are punctuated by his roundabout philosophies concerning the plight of his visitations and his rich, eloquent explorations of the country he’s traveling.
Enamored of the sprawling flora of the undiscovered territories of the West, Ovid articulates his musings about them and about the people he encounters like a cowboy poet. It’s here where the understated dynamics of the prose become unavoidable, even remarkable, as Ovid reconciles the horrors of his visions and what they’re driving at. The story, in turn, dovetails its symbiosis of Western drama and dark fantasy to moving effect.
A triumphant snapshot of the hellish fallout in the divided US after the Civil War, The Country Under Heaven makes note of the amorphous individual terrors that those involved in the war carried with them forever after. This is a cosmic Western novel that doubles as a psychological treatise on the hidden wonders of radiant and mysterious inner worlds.
RYAN PRADO (April 21, 2025)
Ashimpa
The Mysterious Word
Catarina Sobral
Juliana Barbassa, translator
Transit Children’s Books
Hardcover $19.95 (40pp)
979-889338002-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Bold, bright colors pair with textured pencil lines in this fanciful primer on the parts—and the silliness—of speech. When a researcher discovers a new word—“ashimpa”—everyone has an opinion on what it is. Some are ashimpishly certain it’s an adverb; others insist it’s a noun and search for an ashimpa for their table. Finally, another researcher puts the matter to rest and declares ashimpa a perlimpent, setting the whole sequence in motion again.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 21, 2025)
All That Shimmers
A Twin Birch House Novel
Kady Ambrose
Anqa Press
Softcover $16.95 (345pp)
978-1-966089-00-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Kady Ambrose’s fantasy novel All that Shimmers, an orphaned nursemaid yearns for love against the backdrop of World War I and the influenza epidemic.
Vanessa knows she is fortunate to work as a nursemaid for vacationing families at a hotel. Orphaned girls in her position often meet far worse fates. Still, Vanessa longs for a family of her own. The arrival of wealthy, charismatic Ned and quiet, artistic Avery complicates her situation, as does the discovery of the Enchanted Wood and its magical residents.
In the background, the war rages on in Europe and influenza cases rise. They’re terrible, but distant, realities, at first kept separate from Vanessa’s daydreams of a wedding and family. Then people she knows begin dying, and her friends lose loved ones abroad. Characters once bursting with life catch the flu and fade away. Unflinching examinations of life’s fragility heighten the poignancy of Vanessa and Avery’s sweet moments together.
The book is ingenious in its exploration of life’s complicated layers. The vibrant settings reflect the tension between hope and tragedy: The Enchanted Wood first serves as a safe haven for Vanessa and Avery, until it becomes clear that even sympathetic Fates and nymphs cannot shield mortals from heartache. And stolen kisses, giddy first love, and new friendships happen and matter even as death swirls beyond them. Mirroring these tensions, the prose is both raw and elegant, as when a wise woman warns Vanessa that the “barbs” of society’s upper echelon “come sheathed in velvet.” The bittersweet ending mingles uncertainty, grief, and hope for Vanessa and Avery’s future.
Set at a luxury hotel during World War I, All that Shimmers is a romance novel about discerning what matters in the face of love and loss.
VIVIAN TURNBULL (April 21, 2025)
Sedition
How America’s Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis
Marcus Alexander Gadson
New York University Press
Hardcover $32.00 (272pp)
978-1-4798-2888-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Publishing at a time of constitutional crisis at the federal level, Marcus Alexander Gadson’s book Sedition takes an in-depth look at how earlier violent crises played a key part in shaping and altering the constitutions of individual US states.
Sedition covers six moments in US history—three before the Civil War and three in its aftermath—in which fights over state constitutions turned violent. These conflicts in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Kansas, South Carolina, Arkansas, and the Carolinas demonstrate that “Americans who hate their constitution will do anything to change it.”
Perhaps the most famous of these crises involved “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s, after Congress decided that Kansas would decide by “popular sovereignty” whether to allow enslavement when the territory transitioned to statehood. The conflict featured pro- and antislavery forces invading the state, attacks on some key leaders, and a series of competing constitutions before one was ratified just months before the Civil War.
The other cases are no less fascinating. In Pennsylvania’s “Buckshot War,” parties invoked competing state constitutions to claim victory in the legislative elections. In the case of Arkansas, the state’s postwar attempt to write a new constitution to reenter the Union led to two governors claiming to hold the job and militias in support of each clashing before the president put an end to the fighting. All these situations featured fights over voting rights and who was eligible to vote, foreshadowing future conflicts along those lines.
The book covers each crisis in impressive detail, explaining the context in which it occurred, the various sides and their goals, and how the situation played out. It also asks important questions about what different outcomes would have meant for the state and for the country as a whole.
As frightening as it is informative, Sedition is an important political science book about the precariousness of democracy.
JEFF FLEISCHER (April 21, 2025)
An Island to Myself
The Place of Solitude in an Active Life
Michael N. McGregor
Monkfish Book Publishing
Softcover $22.95 (166pp)
978-1-958972-74-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Michael N. McGregor’s musing memoir An Island to Myself is about using the practice of solitude to develop personal authenticity and enhanced creativity.
In 1985, McGregor, then twenty-seven, quit his job as a magazine editor and undertook five months of travel through Europe with a friend. With the passion and intensity of a young man on a mission, he also pursued a solo sojourn on the Greek island of Patmos, “a speck in a vast sea, six-thousand miles from home.” He hoped solitude and isolation would help him find his way as a writer. He felt cut off from friends and family; because of contemporary technology, he notes, “Almost no one today is ever alone in the way I was then.”
Moving at a contemplative pace, the book explores how the raw beauty of Patmos calmed and claimed McGregor, who developed a much-needed rhythm and pattern to his days. In turn, this fostered his novel writing project and reassured him that the craft was, indeed, in his future.
But all was not tranquil. Candid and conversational, the book reveals the hardships of inclement weather, freezing nights, self-imposed deprivations, and the growing awareness that while solitude can begin with euphoria, “sooner or later something reminds you that you’re really alone, not in just ways you want to be, but in ways you don’t.” Humor also appears, as in stories about happy encounters with friendly dogs and welcoming locals; while skinny-dipping for the first time, McGregor noticed, on the cliff above him, a convent.
An Island to Myself is a satisfying memoir about a transformative search for meaning among the small, often overlooked everyday moments.
KRISTINE MORRIS (April 21, 2025)
Kathy Young
