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All That Happiness Is: Some Words on What Matters

Adam Gopnik. Liveright, $17.99 (64p) ISBN 978-1-324094-85-2

Happiness is found not in “something gained but in something lost—the loss of ourselves in something ‘other,’ ” according to this concise and elegant meditation from New Yorker staff writer Gopnik (The Real Work). In his view, happiness arises from “accomplishment”—an “engulfing activity” that yields fulfillment for its own sake rather than concrete reward, and is more lasting and valuable than the proverbial “trophy pressed into your hands.” (It’s also more elusive, partly because “the better we become at something the less pleasure it supplies inside.”) Recalling how he taught himself at age 12 to play Beatles songs on his guitar, a memory that remains “a touchstone” for “almost every meaningful thing I’ve done in my life,” Gopnik reflects on the particularities of accomplishment (it’s more accessible to amateurs and hobbyists than to professionals, for example) before broadening his scope to call for a pluralistic society that both supports and is supported by those who pursue their passions. While Gopnik’s notion of happiness seems designed specifically for artists, he constructs a convincing case for the pursuit of individual fulfillment as both an end in itself and a precondition for an open society with strong communal bonds. The result is a thought-provoking look at an eternally fascinating topic. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Book That Broke the World

Mark Lawrence. Ace, $29 (384p) ISBN 978-0-593-43794-0

After the shocking ending to The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, Lawrence has a lot to answer for—and he doesn’t disappoint; there’s no trace of sophomore slump in this fast-paced sequel. The kaleidoscopic story of the vast and perilous athenaeum library continues, again jumping between different perspectives and points in time. Celcha and her brother Hellet, a pair of small, silky-furred ganars enslaved by the library, act on the instructions of the angels that Hellet sees. Meanwhile, siblings Evar, Clovis, and Kerrol, now free from the library chamber that trapped them since birth, are pursued by an insectoid race known as the skeer and a large mechanical monster that seems intent on killing Evar. Arpix and the other escaped librarians are now trapped in the wasteland called the Dust but protected from the skeer by a mysterious weapon. Meanwhile ghosts Livira and Malar search for a way to find solid form again. As these different perspectives weave together, the characters come closer to answers about who built the library, what future awaits it, who determines that future—and how the book Livira wrote affects them all. Lawrence makes the intertwining stories fascinating and propulsive, with enough scattered clues and shocking twists to keep the pages flying. This will keep readers up long past their bedtime. Agent: Ian Drury, Sheil Land Assoc. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Think Twice: A Myron Bolitar Novel

Harlan Coben. Grand Central, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-1-5387-5631-7

Bestseller Coben’s anemic 12th thriller featuring basketball-star-turned-sports agent Myron Bolitar (after 2016’s Home) suggests the series may be losing its bounce. Bolitar is stunned when the FBI demands the whereabouts of his former client Greg Downing, who supposedly died three years earlier. The two had a fraught history: after Bolitar slept with Downing’s fiancée on the eve of their wedding, Downing paid another player to rough him up, ending Bolitar’s career on the court. Now, the Bureau suspects Downing of two recent murders, having found his DNA under the fingernails of supermodel Cecelia Callister, who’s been killed along with her son. With the help of his best friend Win Lockwood, Bolitar starts investigating the possibility that Downing faked his own death. In the process, he stumbles on more murders Downing may have committed and reunites with his son, Jeremy, who harbors secrets of his own. While Coben’s decision to mine Bolitar and Downing’s rivalry for drama is initially promising, he squanders the setup with too many plot contrivances. This misses the mark. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron M. Priest Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Life: My Story Through History

Pope Francis. HarperOne, $28.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-338752-2

Pope Francis (A Good Life) provides a plainspoken overview of how some of the most significant events of the 20th and early 21st centuries shaped his life and morals. Among other episodes, he examines how the news from Nazi Germany he heard during his childhood in Argentina awoke him to “the persecution of Jews”; remembers watching the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, a recollection that leads him to call for Christians to build “bridges instead of barriers”; and suggests that the events of September 11 offer a lesson in the importance of decrying “the use of the name of God to justify slaughter.” Elsewhere, Francis covers the creation of the EU, the 2007–2008 Great Recession, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite a tendency to meander (as when his recollection of the 1969 moon landing awkwardly launches into a critique of technology’s ills), readers will be fascinated by the insights into how these historical events influenced a transformative pope who broke with his more conservative predecessors by recognizing and blessing same-sex civil unions and entertaining the possibility that atheists could go to heaven. Catholics will value this chance to see the leader of their church in a fresh light. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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You Get What You Pay For: Essays

Morgan Parker. One World, $28 (224p) ISBN 978-0-525-51144-1

For African Americans, “becoming a person, forming an identity” is a “sham assignment from the start,” according to this graceful and deeply personal essay collection from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet Parker (Magical Negro). Cataloging a lifetime’s worth of mental health struggles, Parker teases out the disadvantage Black Americans are at psychologically (“Before you can ‘find yourself,’ you have to first find the fake self and question how it got put there”). Among other gut-wrenching recollections that center on mental health and racism, she recounts facing pushback for wanting to go to therapy as a teen (“If Blackness was essentially defined by resilience through unimaginable struggle, what indeed did I really have to cry about?”) and an incident where white classmates pointed and laughed at an extension that had fallen out of her hair (“For me, a serious function of racism is embarrassment.... I mean wanting to be erased”). These memories are presented in fluid tandem with Parker’s astute reflections on such pop culture figures as Serena Williams and Bill Cosby, resulting in a brilliant excavation of the profound link between Black identity and Black mental health (“You see yourself as something to be corrected rather than someone to be helped”) that doubles as a harrowing expression of the relentlessly damaging personal impact of racism. This is breathtaking. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Life: A Natural History of an Early Christian Universe

Catherine Michael Chin. Univ. of California, $29.95 (222p) ISBN 978-0-520-40068-9

From ancient peoples’ perspective, the “landscape and weather were simply alive” and “humans lived inside them,” according to this stirring exploration of the cosmology of antiquity. Classicist Chin (Melania) posits that such perceptions of an “ordered and beautiful universe” even transcended creed; drawing on early Christian theologian Origen and his schoolmate, the pagan philosopher Plotinus, Chin shows how their “parallel cosmologies” both articulated “a story of cosmic unity.” Intertwining a “human-sized story” about these two thinkers with an unabashedly poetic attempt to “put the human inside the mind of the larger-than-human universe,” Chin evokes what it meant to believe in the “aliveness” and “unity” of the world. For example, following the thinking of Plotinus, Chin describes plants as “the thought of the natural world,” small beings that transform and are transformed by the humans who grow them, eat them, and, in the case of papyrus, weave them into paper as a home for words—which likewise “enter and change” the human body. Tackling other materials, including stone (buildings are “the rearranged skin of the earth”), Chin constructs an argument that “aliveness” and “unity” inspired early Christian ideas about resurrection (stars resurrect every night, and “heavenly and earthly beings move in like patterns”). Chin’s unique combination of meticulous scholarship and rapturous mysticism offers a vital window onto the history of faith. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life

Kao Kalia Yang. Atria, $28.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-9821-8529-9

“I wanted to claim the legacy of the woman I came from,” Yang (Somewhere in the Unknown World) writes in the introduction to this gripping and compassionate account of her mother’s escape from war-torn Laos. Her mother, Tswb, was born to a Hmong family in Laos in 1961. In 1975, after the end of the Vietnam War, communist forces began hunting down Hmong families because some had been recruited by the CIA to fight alongside American forces during the war. A teenage Tswb and her family first sought safety in Laotian jungles, then in Thai refugee camps. By 1980, Tswb had resettled in Bangkok, where Yang was born. In its second half, the narrative shifts to Minnesota, where Yang and her parents relocated in 1987. Living in a housing project, working in factories, and attending school at night, Tswb felt “rendered invisible” by her inability to provide more than the basic necessities for Yang and her five siblings. When Tswb’s mother died in Laos circa 2020, Tswb returned to reconnect with the land and people she left behind. Yang writes much of the account from Tswb’s perspective, giving tender voice to her struggles with the competing demands of family duty and personal fulfillment. The results are illuminating, uplifting, and difficult to forget. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Bury Your Gays

Chuck Tingle. Nightfire, $26.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-250-87465-8

Tingle (Camp Damascus) cements his place in horror with this gory romp, which doubles as a love letter to every queer kid who wished for TV characters like themselves and a sharply pointed warning about the state of entertainment and the rise of AI. Misha Byrne is a gay screenwriter hoping to make a career helming the queer shows and movies he wanted to see when he was growing up. He knows how to tell a good story, and he’s got the Oscar nod and a successful ongoing show to prove it. So when his studio executives tell him their algorithm says he has to kill off his lesbian lead characters to boost viewership, Misha refuses, despite the threat of cancellation and the undeniable success of the studio’s new AI-driven movie. He’s stressed, but holding firm, until a series of increasingly terrifying encounters with stalkers dressed as horror movie monsters he created for past projects shake his conviction. Someone is trying to scare him to death—and it’s his own stories he now has to survive. Tingle’s vivid, visceral storytelling combines with prescient insight into the corporate dynamics that rule mainstream media. The result is smart, subtle, and a bloody good time. (July)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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A Deadly Walk in Devon: A Walk Through England Mystery

Nicholas George. Kensington Cozies, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4967-4526-2

This winning debut and series launch introduces grieving retired police investigator Rick “Chase” Chasen. Six years after the death of his romantic partner, Doug, Chase heads from San Diego to a small coastal town in Devon, England, for a reunion with his old friend, Billie Mondreau. Concerned about the continuing depths of Chase’s despair, Billie thinks a tour organized by the Wanderers hiking group might provide a necessary distraction. On the trip, disgruntled Wanderer Ronald Gretz—who’s aware of Chase’s police background—approaches him for help. Gretz is confident that someone in Devon is trying to kill him, an assertion potentially backed up by a spate of threatening emails and a few disturbing instances of verbal conflict Chase observes on the tour. When Gretz falls off a cliff to his death one foggy afternoon, Chase teams up with Billie and a local detective to investigate various Wanderers. Chase’s firm sense of justice and relatable romantic wounds make him a remarkably endearing protagonist. Readers will be eager to strap on their walking shoes for the investigator’s next case. Agent: Michelle Hauck, Storm Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Woodworm

Layla Martinez, trans. from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. Two Lines, $21.95 (144p) ISBN 978-1-949641-59-2

Martinez debuts with a sophisticated ghost story about a former nanny suspected of involvement in a child’s disappearance. The unnamed young woman has just been detained because of her suspected connection to the mysterious disappearance of her wealthy employer’s son, Guillermo Jarabo. After her release for lack of evidence, she moves back in with her grandmother, her only surviving relative, in the house she grew up in somewhere near Madrid. Ostracized by the villagers and scrutinized by journalists, the women spend their days confined to their dilapidated house, which has long been haunted by ghosts who exasperate them with constant muttering. The spirits are woven into their family’s legacy: the house was purchased by the grandmother’s physically abusive father, whose wife later killed him at the ghosts’ urging, an act that instilled in her the family’s “woodworm itch” to do rotten things (for her part, the grandmother believes her granddaughter intentionally let Guillermo wander off). As the narrative alternates between the perspectives of the granddaughter and grandmother, Martinez reveals how Guillermo’s disappearance connects to the women’s long struggle against poverty and their family’s contentious relationship with the Jarabos. Martinez breathes new life into the classic haunted house motif through her vivid exploration of generational trauma, violence, misogyny, and class. Readers won’t soon forget this striking tale. (May)

Reviewed on 04/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

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