About a Book

In the first book of his Stains of Time series, E.Christopher Clark pulls in magical realism, a hearty dose of nineties’ nostalgia, and family drama to tell Veronica’s story. Pregnant at sixteen, Veronica marries the baby’s father to appease a father who might never be happy with her, but really won’t be happy with her if she follows her heart and dates women as she wants to. Clark kindly answered About a Book’s questions about The Piano of Death , the series as it stands now, and his plans for its future. About a Book : How/when did you conceive of The Piano of Death ? Clark : The book that people can read today really started to come together in September 2011. I met with my friend, the actor/director Crystal Lisbon…to plan a benefit for the arts organization she was starting. Another friend of Crystal’s, the musician Mary Casiello [joined us for that meeting]. We were trying to put together an evening of theater and music, and I was tasked with writing the scrip...

Maybe one day soon a headline will read, “Out of Netflix Content, More People Turn to Books for Relief.” If you’re already ready for some literary escapism, check out these five books I read and loved in 2019. Hopefully they help you in this difficult time: The Storm King , Brendan Duffy. This book has many things that would make me not choose it as a Top Five: a straight male hero; not many strong female leads; privileged men acting out their privilege. Alas, it sucked me in with a short, strong opening chapter that set the tone and the mystery for the rest of the book. Duffy’s writing is a bit dramatic at times, but that’s also what kept the pages quickly turning. You can check out my review here . The Soul of an Octopus , Sy Montgomery. Montgomery ’s beautiful work in The Soul of an Octopus gives us hope about the connectivity between living creatures. Introducing the reader to several octopuses she met at the New England Aqua...

In his third book of poetry, The Tradition , Jericho Brown covers much ground: he grapples with myth, media, racism, his own mortality, and still manages to push past established forms of poetry. It’s impressive in scope, but the breadth can leave the reader forgetting the ground covered because there was too much of it. Brown conveys a disdain for the world around him that embraces and encourages racism and violence, but also exudes a confidence about his own abilities to navigate the terrain. This is a book from a grown, tired man, and is filled with the heartbreak and the fortitude he’s earned. He introduces, too, the “Duplex” form in his poetry, described by Jeannine Hall Gailey in her Barrelhouse review of The Tradition as “a sonnet-like series of couplets that include repetition.” The repetition accomplishes a layering of experiences and voices, making his experiences feel that much more echoed in the lives of others, as though he is not alone. These stories are from a...

Scott Selby and Greg Campbell created a quietly cinematic depiction of the largest jewel heist in history in Flawless . In 2003, the Diamond Center in Antwerp , Belgium , was robbed of an estimated $500 million in jewels that still has not been recovered. Selby and Campbell do compact work here, packing the relatively short narrative with a creative take on how the “ School of Turin ,” a band of skilled thieves, came together to pull off the robbery. They focus on Leonardo Notabartolo, the inside man for the school, who rented office space in the Diamond Center, posed as a businessman, while he cased the area and reported back to his colleagues. By focusing on Notabartolo, the authors provide a lens for the reader to walk through the entirety of the scheme. The particulars of how he figured out the alarms, guards, and cameras are so detailed, it’s like watching Notabartolo while he works. Thanks to Strider Teague for recommending Flawless . I expect we’ll see a movi...

Juan Vidal writes of his burgeoning rap career in Rap Dad , his ambitions shifting with the birth of his children. The now music journalist explores his early success in the music industry and his even earlier disappointment in his own father for his infidelity and drug addiction. Vidal does an interesting job of showing the world of Hip Hop in Miami in the eighties and nineties, educating his reader about the intersections of music, graffiti, and skateboarding. All of these are thrown into a different context once Vidal has his own children, and Hip Hop pioneers like Nas, Jay-Z, and Will Smith are given credit for their influence in his own child-rearing. Without a strong role model for fatherhood in his real life, the author points to these Hip Hop giants as guide posts for his own role as dad. While the anecdotes Vidal shares can feel repetitive at times, he’s giving voice to a subculture of men who were raised by Hip Hop, then used its lessons in parenting their own kid...

Adam Giannelli has always been a fascinating writer to this reader. The author was one of my closest friends upon graduating from Oberlin in 2001, and our friendship reached its peak during our shared years living in Virginia getting our MFA's. It is a true pleasure watching him continue to shine as a poet, and I am totally bias in this review. Giannelli’s particular brand of friendship and communication is not always as verbally progressive as his poetry. It seems he saves some of his best lines for the page, evidenced in Tremulous Hinge . Gianelli starts off strong here, with a near mic drop of a poem, as “Stutter” addressed the author’s life long speech impediment, his verbal work-arounds to some more difficult words (“Since I couldn’t say Cleveland , I said Ohio ”) and his insecurity about his stutter. Kudos to Giannelli for embracing his stutter. I heard him read this in Boston several years ago, and he wisely read the poem first, so that all other stutters th...

At age 50, Judah Leblang experimented with a series of assistive devices to find a hearing aid best suited to his hearing loss. The experience kicked him into an exploration of his Uncle Jerry’s life as a deaf man growing up in Ohio in the 30’s and 40’s. The two men shared both a physical disability and a place as the outsider: Jerry as the deaf athlete and disabled student at a high school attended by predominantly hearing students, Leblang as a gay man struggling with his sexuality, born some 20 years after his uncle. Echoes of Jerry is an even-paced narrative of Leblang’s early life in Ohio , his grappling with his sexuality in his twenties and thirties, his limited but impactful interactions with his uncle, his own experiences within the deaf community as a teacher, and his eventual work as a writer in Boston . While Leblang’s story is fleshed out here, Jerry’s is not as much, used instead as a spring board for Leblang to tell his own tale. This reader was eager t...

The idea that what we learn in our childhoods, we carry into our adulthoods is not new, but Mindy Pollack-Fusi manages to infuse this truism with her own humor in her debut novel, The Narcissist’s Daughter . Jody Horowitz, the 31-year old main character is living a stable life with her husband and daughter outside of Boston when the book opens. Pollack-Fusi wisely sets her novel off with a bang when Jody discovers her husband in bed with another woman. From here, the stability of Jody’s life gives way. Through the course of this enjoyable page turner, Jody reveals the cracks in her marriage were there for a while, but the affair was the final impetus for it and Jody’s life to break. Raised by a controlling, disapproving mother, Jody needs to overcome her mother’s expectations and nasty demeanor. The reader sees Jody struggle to cast off the weight of what her mother expects and instead choose to be the person she and her own daughter can applaud. While Jody’s mother, th...

Some books are enjoyable more for the tone than for the actual story: Steve Earle accomplishes this in his I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. The premise of the book itself is a bit less endearing. The novel’s main character Doc Ebersole is a hack medic the reader is to believe may have given Hank Williams a dose of morphine for back problems that killed the legendary musician in 1953. Doc is tracked through his own intense drug addiction by Williams’ specter. Doc’s professional life involves providing illegal abortions to Mexican sex workers, as a means of making the money to feed his addiction. The world Doc inhabits is dark, yet he handles his work with care and concern. Earle wisely introduces an assistant, Graciela, who is at first one of Doc’s clients. She provides healing to Doc and his clients that is other-worldy and magical, and gives Doc something to believe in beyond his drugs. Earle’s history as a songwriter did him many favors here. The pages drip with...

You have to hand it to Jodi Picoult in House Rules : she writes enough mystery around her characters to leave readers scratching their heads, wondering if they ought to sympathize with and stay with the characters through the entire book, or jump ship early because it seems so obvious where the book is headed. In House Rules, Jacob is an 18-year old with Asperger syndrome, raised by and living with his single mother Emma, carrying on a typical love/hate relationship with his 15-year old brother Theo. Obsession with the TV show CrimeBusters and crime scenes gets him into trouble when his social skills tutor and crush Jess ends up dead, and he steps in to lay out her corpse perfectly for the police to discover. Arrested for Jess’s murder, Jacob struggles to explain his involvement in Jess’s death to his family, the police, and the courts. A great deal of the novel is spent on Jacob’s thoughts, then showing him fail to clearly verbalize those thoughts during his court case. ...

Donna Tartt ’s 2014 bestselling behemoth (771 pages) The Goldfinch tracks the maturation of its main character Theo from age 13, when he’s visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother. During their visit, a terrorist bomb detonates, killing her, and setting the path for the next dozen or so years of his life and the book. At the museum, post-bomb, Theo encounters an older gentleman named “Welty” who dies in the attack, but first gives Theo a ring to return to his business partner “Hobie.” Theo also believes the man tells him to take a painting titled The Goldfinch , a 1654 work by Carel Fabritius, which he does. The painting acts as a last physical tether between Theo and his mom, which helps explain his dedication to it. During the sprawling narrative that ensues, Theo, now a partial orphan because his father is a deadbeat, moves in with his school friend Andy Barbour. He befriends Hobie, and lives out a new reality without his mom that might just be okay, unt...

Cities on wheels, devouring other cities: sounds like a kid’s book. And Philip Reeve ’s Mortal Engines is suited for young adults, but it also does well for adult readers who can suspend their disbelief of the wheeled cities long enough to enjoy the connections between the characters. In a future Europe, cities like London have grown wheels and hunt around for other cities to devour to sustain themselves. Pitted against these cities and the people who operate them is the anti-traction league, which resists traveling and instead still live stationary lives. Enter the novels main characters, Tom, an historian’s apprentice who works on the wheeled city of London , and worships the elder historian Valentine. Valentine appears at first to be above board, but is hotly pursued by Hester, who wants him dead. The whys of her vengeance are slowly revealed to the reader; by the time Hester’s reasons are revealed, Reeve has already given the reader investment in all these characters. ...

Kids are resilient. That’s evident in Jeannette Walls ’ The Glass Castle , where from the beginning when the author is boiling her own hot dogs at age three and is horribly burned, a series of nightmares begins that made up the author’s and her siblings’ lives. Enter their parents: Rex and Rose Mary. Rex escaped his own troubled childhood in West Virginia to become an alcoholic, an often hired/often fired mining engineer and electrician, an affectionate yet manipulative father, and philandering husband. Rose Mary, an artist whose parenting style is extremely hands off, is neglectful or her children and enables her husband’s bad behavior. The Glass Castle catalogs the children’s survival, taking them from one side of the United States to the other as the family avoids debt and homelessness by constantly moving. From San Francisco to West Virginia , we see them scrounge in dumpsters for food, outdo their peers at the latest school because their homeschooling apparently ...

A good coming-of-age story lets us feel the growing pains of a character from beginning to end. Tara Westover ’s depiction of herself in Educated shows a metamorphosis rife with conflict, so that by book’s end, we know she’s grown, but we wonder, along with her, if the agony was worth it. Westover, in her mid-thirties when Educated debuted in 2018, grew up the youngest of seven in a survivalist family in Idaho , where her education consisted mainly of aiding her mother’s growing herbal remedies and midwifery practice. Her father ran a junkyard, scrapped metal, and built barns and sheds for a living. Through her father, Westover learned to operate heavy machinery, and to suck it up when the machines got the best of her: the on-the-job injuries she experiences under her father’s supervision are treated with mother’s home remedies, not western medicine. As Westover enters her teens, she endures the near obsessive gaze of her brother Shawn, who deems her a whore for tending to h...

It’s hard not to get lost in Linda Sue Park ’s A Long Walk to Water , as the main character Salva Dut faces seemingly endless trials on his long walk to water. Set primarily in southern Sudan starting in 1985, the book recounts Salva’s journey from the point when the Second Sudanese Civil War , begun in 1983, reaches him at school. Amidst the chaos of gunfire in what had been up to that point a rather peaceful, family-rich life, 11-year old Salva is displaced from his tribe and family. In the trek east to Ethiopia and a refugee camp, Salva encounters kindness, cruelty, and indifference from the people he meets, and the nature he contends with. As wonderful as a gifted bag of peanuts can be in Salva’s story, there is awfulness, too: he witnesses his uncle, whom he happens upon on his journey, murdered by thieves. Always, there is the thirst for hard-to-come-by water. Salva eventually makes it to a refugee camp where he lives six years before being ejected by new soldiers...

What’s clear from the beginning of Karoline Kan ’s Under Red Skies is that her mother is strong, and her influence over Kan is likely going to make the writer into a strong woman, too. Kan is the second born of her family, which meant her parents had to pay a fee under China ’s one child policy when the author was born in 1989. For Kan ’s mother, the fee was never a hindrance: she and her husband wanted Karoline, and they were going to have her. Kan digs further back into her family’s history and tells tale of her grandmother and grandfather, the former getting credit for keeping her family alive during the great famine. Kan ’s strength is also a focus of the book, as we see her overcome the stigma of being raised in a small town, where inhabitants aren’t supposed to want to graduate into Beijing universities, aren’t supposed to succeed as writers. Kan does both, and with a steady determination and a rebelliousness that at first rattles even her own strong-willed mother...

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise asks: how much should a reader trust an author’s interpretation of what happens in his or her characters’ lives? In a mind-bending work, Choi slowly explores the question via oftentimes annoying characters. The book is divided into three section, each one a send up of the last, forcing the reader to ask how much of the previous section was real, how much was a faulty interpretation by the narrator? In the first section, we meet a group of teenagers enrolled in a small, elite performing arts high school in the American south. The teens come across as mature for their ages, gallivanting about town in cars and enjoying sex with different partners. In the next section, we learn that those characters from the first part of the book dwelled within a story written by another character named Sarah, and we then have the truths Sarah told us unpacked and called into question by another character named Karen. What is the truth? By the book’s finale, a third ...

Perry T. Cook in Leslie Connor ’s All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook grew up in a unique setting: the Blue River Co-ed Correctional Facility. His mother Jessica, convicted of vehicular homicide, gave birth to and raised the smart, curious, loyal Perry there. Connor’s novel kicks off with scenes from inside the prison. It quickly changes to show Perry’s life outside the prison when a concerned district attorney, Thomas VanLeer, insists that prison is not the right place for 11-year old Perry to reside. VanLeer moves the boy into his home, giving him a new family in the form of VanLeer’s wife and step daughter Zoey, a friend of Perry’s from school. Throughout the book, Connor does the work of showing the people inside the prison, and the VanLeer family, as complex characters. VanLeer is the villain here, but Connor makes the effort to show why he does what he does. Jessica is a sympathetic character, but is shown with her warts and all. At its heart, the novel shows ...

Eleanor Oliphant is an instantly likable character in this first novel by Gail Honeyman , who brings a sense of “something is wrong with Eleanor” to the pages. The titular heroine is a bit of an isolationist: sure, she has a 9 to 5 job, a relationship with the convenience store clerk who sells her vodka, and weekly phone chats with her mother, but she’s a bit off, a bit guarded in all of these situations. In conversation with the IT guy at work who fixes her computer, we see her narrate how she answers his questions after considering what would be normal behavior in a social situation. Eleanor is outside the norm, she knows it, and she lets us in on how she chooses to act normal, even when sometimes her attempts are misses.  The beauty of Honeyman’s work, aside from the loads of humor she brings to it, is that Eleanor is on a journey. We meet her at 30 years of age, when a stranger’s collapse in the street ropes Eleanor into a further relationship with the IT guy....

If You Love Me: A Mother’s Journey through Her Daughter’s Opioid Addiction , Maureen Cavanagh Working mother and Marblehead , Massachusetts resident Maureen Cavanagh glanced over the article in the local Salem newspaper detailing a local honor student’s arrest for prostitution, heartbroken at the story. Her sadness turned to disbelief when she realized the story was about her own daughter Katie, who struggled with an opioid addiction. In I f You Love Me: A Mother’s Journey through Her Daughter’s Opioid Addiction , Cavanagh tells her story of concerned mother who can’t at frst separate herself from her child’s addiction, to an advocate for her child’s health, who has to separate herself if she is going to survive and have her own life. Cavanagh’s prose at times reads like reportage, barely resembling an artful take on her journey through her daughter’s addiction. She holds nothing back, however, telling the story in the same way you might imagine she would tell a good f...