What to Read this Month: October

Beauty in the Blood by Charlotte Carter. Sarah Toomey is a successful young black lawyer, lovely but straitlaced- and afraid that she is losing her mind. Since the death of her mother, a force she can neither understand nor control is manipulating her memory and driving her to unexplained acts of violence and destruction. At the same time, Sarah is swept up in a highly charged relationship with a work colleague that portends a danger of its own. As she moves through her privileged life in New York, Sarah comes to learn how her past-her haunted history-is intertwined with America’s. Yvonne Howard was born into the working class. Now, after years as a prison guard, she has reinvented herself. Her passion for cooking has landed her a position at a trendy soul food restaurant, and she is looking forward to a glamorous career. Then an ex-inmate named Bitty appears, demanding Yvonne’s help investigating her brother’s shocking death. Before long, Bitty too is dead, and Yvonne is pulled back into a world of ugly violence. Smart but unschooled, Yvonne finds herself in the unlikely role of detective- it is she who must unravel the dark and blood-soaked history that not only doomed Bitty and her brother, but also determined beautiful Sarah Toomey’s fate. If you enjoy this book, you might also be interested in Charlotte Carter’s Nanette Hayes series. We have several books in this series, including Drumsticks, Rhode Island Red, and Coq au Vin.

Love Forms by Claire Adam. For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something is missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption. More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps—from Trinidad to Venezuela and then to London—and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since. Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself—a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home. This novel was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize. To find out more check out this feature about the author from The Times.

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel. A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman’s quest for house and home–from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again. The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners–the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie–parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed–has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems. And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home. You may be interested in this Texas Monthly review or this review in the NYT.

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley. When she first meets Adam, Coralie is new to London and feeling adrift. But Adam is clever, witty, and (he insists) a quarter inch taller than the average male. His charming four-year-old daughter only adds to his appeal. But ten years on, something important is missing from the life Coralie and Adam (though let’s face it, mostly Coralie) have built. Or maybe, having gained everything she dreamed of, Coralie has lost something else she once had: herself. Set against an eventful decade, Consider Yourself Kissed puts the subjects of love and family on a grand stage, showing how the intimate dramas in our homes inescapably compete for energy and attention with the shared public dramas of our times. It’s a read that effortlessly balances sweetness with bite, the public with the personal, and humor with heart. Check out the NPR review or the NYT review.

Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson. From the celebrated author of Blankets and Habibi comes a new graphic memoir exploring the class divide, childhood labor, family, and our globalized world–all centered on Wisconsin’s ginseng farming industry. Ginseng Roots follows Craig and his siblings, who spent the summers of their youth weeding and harvesting rows of coveted American ginseng on rural Wisconsin farms for one dollar an hour. In his trademark breathtaking pen-and-ink work, Craig interweaves this lost youth with the 300-year-old history of the global ginseng trade and the many lives it has tied together–from ginseng hunters in ancient China, to industrial farmers and migrant harvesters in the American Midwest, to his own family still grappling with the aftershocks of the bitter past. Stretching from Marathon, Wisconsin, to Northeast China, Ginseng Roots charts the rise of industrial agriculture, the decline of American labor, and the search for a sense of home in a rapidly changing world. Potential reviews of interest might include one in the Asian Review of Books and this one in The Comics Journal.