Book of the Day Roundup: October 16-20, 2023
Mudflowers
Aley Waterman
Rare Machines
Softcover $18.99 (230pp)
978-1-4597-5152-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Aley Waterman’s striking novel Mudflowers, a woman finds love in the aftermath of her mother’s passing.
Sophie, a struggling artist in Toronto, gravitates between two lovers: Alex, whom she has known since childhood, and Maggie, a poet with whom she has instant chemistry. The dynamic between the three is volatile. Maggie finds Sophie and Alex’s past and present relationship unbalancing, and Sophie herself is unsure of who and what she desires. A startling plot twist forces her to confront her uncertainty.
Sophie gains closure, becomes more certain of her desires, and rekindles hope as she grapples with her mother’s passing and finds connections with Maggie and Alex. She begins to live with renewed purpose and passion for her art; she grows closer to the people she cares about.
Sophie narrates, revealing a world that is intimate and intricate, with a constellation of mundane but vibrant details that ground the story in contemporary Canadian culture: the warm ambiance in the queer bars she visits; the lavish costumes at a beach party, after which she and her friends catch the last ferry to the mainland. Flashbacks to Sophie and Alex’s shared childhood in St. John’s are used to create a vibrant setting that complements the emotional arc of the main narrative, in which Sophie moves past sorrow toward tentative joy.
A powerful meditation on grief, betrayal, and how love endures and finds new ways to flourish despite challenges, the book begins at a meandering pace and gains urgency as it progresses. Much is said without conversation; people’s body language, touch, and intimate encounters communicate what words often fail to convey. The character’s conversations blur the lines between speech and thought.
Mudflowers is a timely, contemplative novel about the meaning of family and the various forms that love can take.
CAITLIN CACCIATORE (October 4, 2023)
All That Rises
Alma García
University of Arizona Press
Softcover $19.95 (456pp)
978-0-8165-4915-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Alma García’s novel All That Rises, two families living on the borderland between the US and Mexico share a tangled history.
Rose Marie leaves her husband and three children without explanation. On the same day but a few houses away, Inez knocks on her younger brother Jerry’s door after a fifteen-year absence. The events set off a chain of revelations. Both families adapt, implode, and transform.
Rose Marie’s husband tries to force his children into convenient silence and almost drowns at an amusement park. Jerry relives his childhood in the shadow of his older sister while his wife, Chavela, throws Inez an alcohol-free welcome home party. Caught in their own worlds, each person papers over old wounds, protects secrets, and longs for answers to questions they won’t ask. As Jerry, a history professor and an ex-border patrol agent, says: “the trouble with history…is that by the time you notice it repeating, it’s already happened.”
The characterizations are virtuosic in their display of psychological insight—just as at home in the minds of border agents, maids, and housewives. Tracing the fault lines that divide families and neighborhoods, the book sheds light on the way secrecy is passed down through generations.
The prose is confident, filled with evocative images and poetic parallels: “A handprint smears the window facing Mexico” in the room where Rose Marie’s children play video games and ignore their father; Jerry’s son Marcus finds all of his father’s siblings confessing to being the black sheep of the family. And the often heady story assumes a fierce pace, resulting in an intricate, organic, and moving book.
A serious novel, All That Rises eclipses social and political ideologies and examines how the contradictions of America’s southern border take root in its families.
WILLEM MARX (August 27, 2023)
Mimi & the Gold Baton
Cheryl Olsten
Greenleaf Book Group
Hardcover $17.99 (34pp)
978-1-73395-512-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In this inspiring tale, Mimi is an aspiring “mousetro” who is abandoned by her brothers. They insist that girls cannot be mousetros. Mimi packs her breadstick baton and sets off; she meets a magical maestro who gifts her with a golden baton. Recalling a story about a musical garden, Mimi seeks it out, but the garden is dying and no longer musical. With her golden baton in hand, Mimi conducts music back into the garden—and proves that girls can be mousetros too.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 27, 2023)
Cravings
Garnett Kilberg Cohen
University of Wisconsin Press
Softcover $17.95 (160pp)
978-0-299-34524-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s expansive short story collection, some form of craving—either literal or metaphysical—factors into every person’s tale.
A woman who craved olives as a child is forever cursed to flashback through the trauma of losing her father when she eats one. Elsewhere, a man craves all that he thinks a marriage stands for, though the demands of caring for a mortally sick child test his marriage beyond ethical bounds. And in “Feast,” a woman who’s fond of biblical verses runs a pig farm in a conservative midwestern town; she befriends her cool new neighbor from New York and becomes privy to shocking secrets. Herein, cravings can be one’s own undoing, causing people to lose that which they desire most.
These are slow-savor stories whose multivalent meanings reveal themselves best through multiple readings. Twist endings abound; people’s backstories are rich and immersive; and many of the entries have the heft of novels. The collection’s women are at once complicated, larger than life, and everywomen: they crave love, freedom, and what they are owed in relationships. They are often the more sacrificial parties in their connections. In “Her Life in Parties,” a woman watches her ex-boyfriend live the fulfilled author life she wanted; she “walks out of the party a different person than when she walked in.” In “Breaking News,” a woman yearns for the daughter whom she could have had with an ex, if not for a misunderstanding that led to a tragic decision.
Deep and humane, the short stories collected in Cravings focus on rare moments of vibrant, uncensored selfhood.
ELAINE CHIEW (October 12, 2023)
The Trials of Madame Restell
Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime
Nicholas L. Syrett
The New Press
Hardcover $29.99 (352pp)
978-1-62097-745-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A sobering dispatch from a past marked by familiar prejudices, The Trials of Madame Restell is Nicholas L. Syrett’s consequential biography of a woman who defied changing norms to protect women’s health.
Ann Trow—later known as Madame Restell—was born in England in 1811. She, her husband, and her only child immigrated to the US in 1931; within a year, she was a widow. There were few options for single mothers. Within three years, Ann remarried—to Charles Lohman, a man of growing fortunes who supported her ambition to be a physician at a time when medicine was in flux and women’s horizons were expanding. For those who wanted to prevent pregnancy, address unwanted pregnancies, or otherwise be in command of their own reproductive health: Madame Restell had the answers.
Syrett places Lohman’s work in historical context, with reminders that the medicines and methods that she sold were common knowledge among women in previous generations––employed often, without the moralistic angst that plagued Lohman’s era. He reveals that the mid-century rush of immigrants fed into the xenophobic worries of extant Americans, who didn’t want the birthrates of poor, once-foreign people to outpace their own. Nor did wealthy and middle class American men relish the idea of their wives and daughters having the option to delay or forego motherhood. Thus, even as Lohman’s work made her wealthy, it put her in the crosshairs of men like Anthony Comstock, a puritanical organizer who worked to outlaw material, and procedures, that he deemed obscene. In the decades across which she worked, she was accused of performing illegal abortions and of kidnapping; she was jailed more than once. Still, she persisted.
The Trials of Madame Restell is a respectful, thorough portrait of a brave woman who defied her era’s norms to give women reproductive options.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (October 12, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
