Book of the Day Roundup: October 6-10, 2025
A Couple
Éliette Abécassis
Johanna McCalmont, translator
Arctis
Softcover $15.00 (198pp)
978-1-64690-049-7
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Éliette Abécassis’s taut and poignant novel uses reverse chronology to explore significant moments in the lives of a Parisian couple.
Jules and Alice meet in the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1955, when Alice is eighteen and Jules is twenty-two. Handsome Jules has a touch of “brilliantine” in his hair, and “expressive” Alice reads a book beneath the park’s sprawling trees. An exchange of intrigued glances leads to love, marriage, the raising of a family, discontented strife, and devoted caretaking in their later years.
At the beginning of the book, Jules is almost ninety and struggling with arthritis and a heart condition. He visits the same park where he met Alice and converses with an engaging elderly woman; they seem to share an immediate connection. They later separate. As the narrative continues, Jules and Alice move from the unsettling effects of advancing age through their respective midlife crises and the births of their children. The intimate and happy early years of the couple’s marriage are detailed along with Jules’s service in the French Algerian War; the final reversal of time returns to their first youthful meeting.
A shifting perspective offers insight into architect Jules’s wide-ranging interests and curious nature and Alice’s journalistic work and passion for feminism. While the book is compact, its impressionistic historical backdrop depicts pivotal events of twentieth-century European life well. Jules and Alice, both Jewish, lost loved ones in the Holocaust; their wedding is elegant and traditional, but they later join the tumultuous 1968 French student riots and support “activist” ideals. These more universal moments alternate with subtle and sensual interactions, heated arguments, infidelities, ironies, and repressed dissatisfaction.
With eloquent and perceptive agility, the novel A Couple captures the emotional intensities of a unique and enduring partnership.
MEG NOLA (August 25, 2025)
The Extremities!
Samantha Kimmey
University of Iowa Press
Softcover $19.00 (320pp)
978-1-68597-024-6
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Chronic pain and psychosomatic maladies jar a reporter in Samantha Kimmey’s brooding novel The Extremities!
While Kim, a journalist, reports on a wildfire whose smoke permeates her coastal town, her hands throb with pain, limiting her ability to type. A doctor suggests that she has carpal tunnel syndrome. Kim seeks other explanations, determined to continue working, though both her boyfriend and her boss believe that she needs a break.
Kim, living with invisible pain, wonders if others doubt her. She adapts by using a voice transcription program, tries occupational therapy and acupuncture, and considers ergonomic approaches. Meanwhile, news covering the wildfire, town meetings about disaster preparedness, and local housing buyouts result in a sense of looming catastrophe, one that Kim admits to herself she wouldn’t mind.
Kim is an unreliable narrator, looking back on her choices and documenting her mysterious disorder into her present. Overthinking and absorbing too much input may well be part of her dilemma. Her private distress pairs with work concerns, leading to hyperbolized, self-made tension. Others give her suggestions, including to use a guided workbook for uncovering trauma and a esoteric machine that has surveillance capabilities but could tell Kim more about herself. Focused episodes track her progression through these techniques, but her isolation only builds.
Throughout, Kim ties too much of her self-worth to her job. A late realization prompts her to consider changing. And the unsettling finale hints at a horrifying fusion between Kim’s mind and the pain she sought to resolve.
A fascinating psychological novel in which visceral chronic pain becomes a woman’s excuse for evading her problems, The Extremities! is about the surprising secrets behind personal ailments.
KAREN RIGBY (August 25, 2025)
The Essential Patricia A. McKillip
Patricia A. McKillip
Tachyon Publications
Hardcover $28.95 (320pp)
978-1-61696-448-1
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Gathering glittering selections from the fantasy great’s cherished oeuvre, The Essential Patricia A. McKillip is a radiant collection of fairy tales and modern fables.
In a dragon’s tower, too many treasure-seeking men talk past the truest treasure before them. Elsewhere, generations of women who can crochet time and defy storms band together to defeat an ancient evil. In another story, a time traveler wishes that she could change a malicious minister’s deadly visions, but is bound by the rules. And in “The Lion and the Lark,” a loyal daughter falls in love with an enchanted nobleman, following the fall of his feathers as they wait out a curse.
The prose throughout is atmospheric, otherworldly, and enchanting. McKillip conjures whole worlds with light trails of evocative terms: a fortune-teller’s tent is “a colorful cave of embroidery, lace, ribbons, flowing cloth” wherein the candle flames weave “a mystery of light and glittering dark”; a “tiny living world within a glass globe” plagues the wizard who stole it from the faerie queen, containing an oak wood, gold light, and trees that “fade to lavender and smoke.” Medieval and fantasy settings are well represented, but there are dashes of the contemporary as well.
A sensory pleasure from beginning to end, The Essential Patricia A. McKillip is a must for fantasy readers.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (August 25, 2025)
The Fib
Pedro Iniguez
Nathan Kwan, illustrator
Gloo Books
Hardcover $19.95 (32pp)
978-1-962351-30-0
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A boy’s little white lie takes on a big green life of its own in this wise picture book about the snowballing consequences of dishonesty. Pepe is self-conscious about bringing the comic book he drew for show-and-tell; at the last minute, he lies, inventing a special pet that comes to life with his words. As he tells more lies to cover his tracks, his pet, the Fib, grows larger and larger, until the only thing left to do is tell the truth.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 25, 2025)
Banished Citizens
A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation
Marla A. Ramírez
Harvard University Press
Hardcover $29.95 (336pp)
978-0-674-29594-0
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In the interbellum, US officials sent about one million people of Mexican descent—citizens or otherwise—across the southern border in a coordinated program. In Banished Citizens, Marla A. Ramírez tells this painful story through historical research and interviews with members of the families affected by this forced migration.
With detailed explanations of how Mexican Americans were abused during the interwar period, the book shows how nineteenth-century naturalization laws created loopholes that local, state, and sometimes federal officials exploited to remove Mexican men from the country, driving away their US-born wives and children based on claims of their reliance on support. The book also explains the irony of states using immigrant labor during war-driven labor shortages, only to turn on those same workers once the situation changed.
After setting up this bigger picture, Ramírez tells the stories of a handful of impacted Mexican American families. Trinidad Rodríguez was still trying to regain her US citizenship in 1969, decades after she and her US citizen mother left the country because her Mexican father was repatriated. Ramona Espinoza explains how she was forced to leave the land of her birth, only to be recruited back to California nine years later to fill a labor shortage. The book uses the specifics of these and other families’ stories to explore the different challenges ethnic Mexicans faced during this fraught period. Its discussions of attempts to limit birthright citizenship and deny the rights of first-and second-generation Americans parallel recent actions taken by the federal government, making the book timely as well as an important history.
Banished Citizens is a moving chronicle of a historical tragedy that echoes in the present day.
JEFF FLEISCHER (August 25, 2025)
Kathy Young
