Book of the Day Roundup: September 25-29, 2023
House of Caravans
Shilpi Suneja
MIlkweed Editions
Hardcover $26.00 (328pp)
978-1-57131-396-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Shilpi Suneja’s novel House of Caravans depicts the turbulent end of British-ruled India along with the ensuing violence amid the region’s Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Beyond this time of ravaged independence and the 1947 establishment of Pakistan, the narrative follows the Khatri family to the beginning of the next century.
In 1943, Chhote is an impressionable and passionate young man. To protest British imperialism, Chhote throws a small bomb. The device explodes with an orange flash—like a “tiger’s skin”—and Chhote is sent to a Lahore jail. There he is beaten, forced into grueling labor, and half-starved.
While all Indian prisoners are mistreated, Chhote is further penalized due to his relationship with a beautiful Anglo-Indian woman, Nigar. Nigar is the mistress of Lahore’s cruel English police superintendent. Meanwhile, Barre, Chhote’s older brother, is despondent over Chhote’s arrest. He wants to visit Chhote, but he needs money and influence to do so; thus, he opens a tailor shop to make uniforms for British soldiers. Though he loathes the arrogant, racist British, his need to see Chhote is integral.
Against a riveting historical backdrop, House of Caravans shares intricate involvements between family members, friends, and lovers. Following the forced regional division and migration known as the Partition, Muslims and Hindus are pitted against each other. Gandhi’s theories cause additional discord; some Indians follow the Mahatma’s ideals of nationalistic “noncooperation,” while others feel that the “old fool” offers no pragmatic future plan. The novel’s Hindu-Muslim conflict continues when Barre’s daughter has two children, one with a Muslim man and another with her Hindu ex-husband. Yet the book’s underlying focus is how the interconnection of humanity can transcend religious and geographical polarization.
Told with sumptuous language and epic intensity, House of Caravans is a captivating, harrowing historical saga.
MEG NOLA (August 27, 2023)
The Circumference of the World
Lavie Tidhar
Tachyon Publications
Softcover $17.95 (256pp)
978-1-61696-362-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Black holes, new religions, and powerful stories ensnare orbiting beings with their intrigue and potentiality in Lavie Tidhar’s science fiction marvel The Circumference of the World.
In the loneliness of his youth, Eugene Hartley looked into the stars and began his story: “Once there was a man who fell into the eye of God.” The shadows of his childhood followed him to war in the South Pacific. And he became a famed pulp author—a science fiction dilettante, cashing fat checks and partying with Jack Parsons and Robert Heinlein. Still, he felt watched; he could not forget the eye of God.
In a time far past Hartley’s glory days, Delia––a mathematician born on the South Pacific island where Hartley stared into the stars and felt fear, and who shares a name with Hartley’s most elusive heroine—discovers that her husband, Levi, is missing. He was obsessed with a Hartley novel, Lode Stars, that most people believe doesn’t exist; the book is rumored to make those who read it disappear. Thus Delia taps Daniel, a pulp bookseller with selective prosopagnosia, to find Levi. Instead, Daniel encounters a Russian mobster who’s also searching for Lode Stars.
Told in six parts, the book moves between Hartley’s novel fragments, memories, the gossipy letters of science fiction greats, Daniel’s bumbling investigation, and Delia’s paused tale, generating wonder with each turn. It might involve time travel. It might reveal that the universe is a simulacrum, made up of memories from the ancient past. Or its mysteries might be sleight of hand—because Hartley also began a religion on a lark, with Lode Stars as its holy text, and Delia’s wouldn’t be the first brilliant mind to be fooled.
Inquisitive, daring, and rich with possibilities, The Circumference of the World is a speculative masterpiece.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (August 27, 2023)
Educating Elizabeth
A Victorian Romance
Jennifer Moore
Covenant Communications
Softcover $15.99 (224pp)
978-1-5244-2400-8
Buy: Amazon
A headmistress and a wealthy rogue join up for a philanthropic cause in Jennifer Moore’s enthralling Victorian romance novel Educating Elizabeth.
Elizabeth opens a school for underprivileged factory girls in London’s East End with the help of her Blue Orchid Society friends. She’s committed to the students’ welfare, though her reform activism for the poor has raised the ire of certain lords. But her debt prompts her to seek a new patron in Charles, a handsome earl with cavalier manners. Charles agrees to help––on the condition that Elizabeth give speech lessons to Alice, his young Midlands ward.
As Elizabeth expresses her clear excitement over her pupils’ progress, she comes to realize that Charles is kinder than other members of high society. As a pair, they’d test the social divide: Elizabeth is a bright, sensitive teacher with country roots. But her compassion toward Alice nonetheless endears her to Charles. Further, both of them are keeping details about their families from fashionable society. With each other, they make less room for pretense; in time, Charles’s banter gives way to more serious exchanges and expressions of their shared beliefs. Charles keeps surprising Elizabeth, as when he reveals his quaint affection for bird watching. He’s both avid and gentle, and his values concern more than class fripperies.
Indeed, Elizabeth and Charles stand out among their peers. Intrigue builds when the schoolgirls’ hours increase at the factory, thus preventing their attendance. The couple are moved to join with her like-minded friends and find a solution.
An inspiring woman champions a vital cause in Victorian London in Educating Elizabeth, a splendid romance between two people with kindred minds.
KAREN RIGBY (August 27, 2023)
I’m a Fan
Sheena Patel
Graywolf Press
Softcover $17.00 (216pp)
978-1-64445-245-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s edgy novel I’m a Fan is a woman of color and a stalker.
Although she lives with her doting boyfriend, the writer is having an affair with a rich, prominent, emotionally unavailable man who is married. Not only this: he is also entangled with other women, one of whom is a successful social influencer who fills her Instagram grid with expensive candles and organic food displayed in handmade pottery.
The narrator despises her rival for her cultural appropriation and pretension. She mocks the influencer’s followers for expressing grief over the sale of a buttercream sofa or outrage over a burnt dishtowel. Meanwhile, she understands that her lover gets social capital from being seen with her, a brown woman. She wonders if she would be with him if not for his money and connections.
No one is named, and details about the characters are sparse. The narrator refers to her lover as “the man I want to be with,” and her lover’s lover, the social influencer, as “the woman I am obsessed with.” In brief vignettes (sometimes only a paragraph long), she hyper-analyzes her lover’s words, texts, and actions, as well as the social media feeds of the influencer. The lack of specifics about the objects of her obsession makes her ruminations all the more intimate, as if she is sharing secrets about celebrities who would be easy to recognize were their names divulged.
A woman who is aware that social media feeds are façades, but who just can’t help herself, makes ill-advised choices in I’m a Fan, a biting satirical novel.
SUZANNE KAMATA (August 27, 2023)
The Hunger Book
A Memoir from Communist Poland
Agata Izabela Brewer
Mad Creek Books
Softcover $24.95 (256pp)
978-0-8142-5878-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The Hunger Book excavates thoughts on motherhood and addiction from its powerful memories “of hunger and longing in postwar Poland.”
When Agata Izabela Brewer was three years old, communist forces declared martial law in Poland. Raised by a single mother who, in the depths of her addiction, truly wanted to die, Brewer survived violence, privation, misinformation, and radiation from the Chernobyl explosion, all before high school. But these traumas weren’t her whole truth: she had her grandparents’ love. She had foraging excursions in the woods and time on her family’s allotment, among vegetables, bees, and the earth. She had spots of happiness. These became the tools of her survival.
Though Brewer began writing these essays with the intention of centering—and seeking understanding of—her mother, whose final act of insolence was a death sentence, the book finds its footing elsewhere: in stories of how mushrooms support whole ecosystems. In recipes for blood sausage and lard. In accounts of bread making, wherein air-bubble absences are treated as “almost holy. The emptiness doesn’t want to be filled, doesn’t want to become something. It just is.” Meanwhile, catharsis evades her. What was forgotten remains buried. Nightmares awake.
Brewer tills her internal soil throughout, hoping that empathy for her mother can grow there, even as she voices the memories that stunt its growth: creative tortures; multiple suicide attempts; hunger and disappointment. She muses that her mother could not love her; she wonders whether showing her love regardless might have mattered. And she fights to love her own children in a better way, regretting the challenges they face: “at eleven, [my son] already knows that kindness is a political statement that can get us into trouble.”
The Hunger Book is a forthright, tender memoir about intergenerational trauma and the nuances of maternal love.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (August 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
