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The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
Allen's second bewitching offering (after Garden Spells) is a candy jar of magical characters and mystical adventures set in an ordinary North Carolina town. At 27, Josey Cirrini is plain and just this side of plump and trying to make up for her legendary childhood temper tantrums by caring for her aging, widowed mother Margaret. Her closet features neatly stacked junk food packages and romance novels, and her life chugs along. But as the book opens, Della Lee Baker, waitress at the local greasy spoon, shows up in Josey's closet, having propped a ladder against the house and climbed silently in overnight. She's hiding from someone or something, and has no intention of leaving anytime soon. Instead, the very direct Della Lee sends Josey on a series and missions and misadventures that encourage our low self-esteem heroine to step outside her box and away from her snack-filled closet. As in Allen's previous work, there's an element of the supernatural (self-help books that literally follow one around; tears that sprout mysterious tropical flowers), and again it works. Words such as sweet, charming and delightful are weak accolades for such a pleasurable book. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The book of getting even: a novel by Benjamin Taylor
In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid 20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's intergenerational rancor. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
This crisp yowl of a first novel from Miles, who covers books for Men's Journal and cocktails for the New York Times, finds despairing yet effusive litterateur Benjamin Ford midair in midlife crisis. Bennie is en route from New York, where he shares a cramped apartment with his stroke-disabled mother and her caretaker, to L.A., where he will attend his daughter Stella's wedding. He gets stranded at O'Hare when his connecting flight along with all others is unaccountably canceled. In the long, empty hours amid a marooned crowd, Bennie's demand for a refund quickly becomes a scathing yet oddly joyful reflection on his difficult life, and on the Polish novel he is translating. Bennie writes lightly of his dark years of drinking, of his failed marriages, about his mother's descent into suicidal madness and about her marriage to Bennie's father, a survivor of a Nazi labor camp. Bennie's father recited Polish poetry for solace during Bennie's childhood, inadvertently setting Bennie's life course; Bennie's command of language as he describes his fellow strandees and his riotous embrace of his own feelings will have readers rooting for him. By the time flights resume, Miles has masterfully taken Bennie from grim resignation to the dazzling exhilaration of the possible. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Canadian Galloway (Ascension) delivers a tense and haunting novel following four people trying to survive war-torn Sarajevo. After a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting in line to buy bread, an unnamed cellist vows to play at the point of impact for 22 days. Meanwhile, Arrow, a young woman sniper, picks off soldiers; Kenan makes a dangerous trek to get water for his family; and Dragan, who sent his wife and son out of the city at the start of the war, works at a bakery and trades bread in exchange for shelter. Arrow's assigned to protect the cellist, but when she's eventually ordered to commit a different kind of killing, she must decide who she is and why she kills. Dragan believes he can protect himself through isolation, but that changes when he runs into a friend of his wife's attempting to cross a street targeted by snipers. Kenan is repeatedly challenged by his fear and a cantankerous neighbor. All the while, the cellist continues to play. With wonderfully drawn characters and a stripped-down narrative, Galloway brings to life a distant conflict. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Yes, you’re pregnant, but what about me? by Kevin Nealon
Comedian and actor Nealon (best known for his characters on Saturday Night Live and his role on Weeds) makes his print debut with comedic content so potent readers will surely demand future books. Nealon is a first-time father with his second wife, actress Susan Yeagley, and detailing the male point of view on pregnancy, he writes about the events that led to the birth of their son in 2007. The 53-year-old Nealon considers becoming a father while also anticipating death: It wasn't over for me yet, but I felt I was 'circling the drain'. However, at age 34, Susan was still pregnantable, as he puts it. Thus the merry parental dance began. Beneath the jokes, Nealon swims in poignant undercurrents, discussing his relationship with Susan, recalling his childhood and reflecting on life in general. Digressions lead to such jests as: Why do some people get their stomach stapled? What if you wanted to just lose a little weight? Could you paperclip your stomach? Fellow humorists Benchley and Thurber would probably nod in admiration at Nealon's ability to insert a bon mot or clever phrase into almost every paragraph of this very funny navigation from pregnancy to parenthood. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy
Starred Review. The poems in Shaughnessy's acclaimed debut, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), earned her comparisons to Sylvia Plath for their sexual frankness, tight-to-bursting compression and musical invention. Her second collection, winner of the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award, brings a greater emotional bandwidth and stylistic suppleness to the task of unmasking the hoax of boundlessness in life and in love, making and making to replace the dreaming at last. The book's three sections contain nine, 11 and 10 poems, respectively, and that off-kilter triangulation from the terse, not-quite-tongue-in-cheek self-dismissal of the first heading, Anodyne, to the suggestion of galactic exploration and recording in the last, Astrolabe proves the right three-cornered lens for looking into the darkest corners of human relationships, including their embodiment: honeyed, self-twinned, fearless,/ a wineskin emptying/ into a singing stranger. Most are in the second person, who is sometimes the speaker and sometime not; most often, the addressee is a love or lover, who changes, and who is exhorted, berated, courted, rejected, fucked, accepted, lectured, soothed, teased and, always, loved: I am yours. I am still I. In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's scarce infinity, this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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