July 20, 2024
This week’s selection is meant to keep you on the edge of your beach chair, with books to be gobbled up quickly. An undocumented Ecuadorian woman will win your heart; the unearthing of bodily remains disrupts a small Italian community; the disintegration of a seemingly perfect marriage is put under a microscope; a wonderfully strange, gothic story features two sisters in Southern Appalachia; and a biracial young woman stars in a historical horror story set in Victorian England. Brace yourself.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Catalina
By KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO
Published by ONE WORLD
Villavicencio, who grew up in Ecuador, was one of the first undocumented persons to get into Harvard University. Her first-person narrator, the orphan Catalina, was also born in Ecuador and is recounting her senior year at Harvard. Everyone sees her as a little miracle. She has been raised by grandparents in Queens and must carry the burden of their expectations. Her beloved grandfather faces deportation (it is 2010). Catalina references the Western canon and namechecks historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and even J.Lo. This impressive debut graces us with a memorable character bursting with energy whose incredible voice, mordant wit, and tragic circumstances will remain with you.
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The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia
By JULIET GRAMES
Published by KNOPF
Grames, a publisher at Soho Press who grew up in an Italian American family, has penned her second novel set in Italy—a superb literary mystery that takes place in a small Calabrian village during the ’60s. Francesca, a young do-gooder, has arrived to do charity work and create a nursery school. Instead, she becomes embroiled with the discovery of literal and metaphorical skeletons, and gets entangled in the community’s search for missing relatives and long buried secrets. This is a perfect mid-summer read for the suspense, the reliable plot of an altruistic amateur detective, the locations, and a bit of romance. I eagerly await a television adaptation.
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Smothermoss
By ALISA ALERING
Published by TIN HOUSE BOOKS
The mountain that is the main character in Alering’s haunting Gothic fiction is filled with creepy, crawly nature where the threat of violence drapes over the ancient woods. Seventeen-year-old Sheila is responsible and tidy; little sister Angie is a dirty, hot mess who gets bullied at school. Their mother works at the local asylum. When two female hikers are brutally killed, the insulated community is thrown into chaos and the sisters must band together or face sinister consequences. The author, a former librarian, gets the eerie, lugubrious atmosphere of these Appalachian Mountains just right. A place where anything could happen and in this startling novel, it does.
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Midnight Rooms
By DONYAE COLES
Published by AMISTAD
Orabella, the orphan of a white father and Black mother, lives with her debt-ridden uncle in 1840s England. A strange, shy girl (“she was her own curiosity”) who has never had a suitor, she is surprised to see a disheveled man come to her uncle’s parlor clearly looking for a bride. Once she is ensconced in his decaying manor her husband seems kind and reassuring, but darkness lurks in locked rooms, servants hover disturbingly, and her dreams become nightmares. Paranoia blooms as she fears for her sanity, and her health, and the reader is dropped into a true Gothic horror story with the attendant Victorian chills and thrills.
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Liars
By SARAH MANGUSO
Published by HOGARTH PRESS
Manguso follows her popular debut (Very Cold People) with an intensely absorbing story of the dissolution of a marriage. Jane is a writer and John a filmmaker. It was a promising beginning. But as her star rises and John’s ambitions are not fulfilled the union begins to falter. After their child is born, “I had infinite patience with my one-year-old…and almost no patience with my husband.” Things continue to unravel; seven years on John leaves with his mistress. As in Noah Baumbach’s scorching film Marriage Story, Manguso captures the pain and frustration of two opposing creative forces trying to survive the inevitable splintering of their coupling—with authenticity, wit, and even some redemption.
