July 1, 2022
Richard Sharpe returns to the mayhem of the early 19th-century Peninsular War in Cornwell's Sharpe's Command (75,000-copy first printing). Following the LJ-starred Big Girl, Small Town, Gallen's Factory Girls features a young woman in Northern Ireland working a grinding summer job made harder by a sleazy boss. In The World We Make, three-time Hugo Award--winning Jemisin returns to New York City, whose six protective avatars must work with the world's other great cities to waylay a populist mayoral candidate threatening the city's very soul (225,000-copy first printing). Following Kapelke-Dale's well-received debut, The Ballerinas, The Ingenue features a former piano prodigy Saskia Kreis, shocked to learn that her recently deceased mother left the family estate to a man with whom Saskia shares a painful past (200,000-copy first printing). In The Book of Everlasting Things, a debut from Delhi-based oral historian Malhotra, two lovers--perfumer's apprentice Samir, who is Hindu, and calligrapher's apprentice Firdaus, who is Muslim--are violently torn apart during India's Partition in 1947. From Silver Linings Playbook author Quick, We Are the Light limns the relationship between a sorrowing widower and an ostracized teenager. The multi-award-winning Rebecca Roanhorse returns with Tread of Angels, set in a late 1800s Colorado mining town where cardsharp Celeste defends a sister accused of murdering a Virtue, one of the town's ruling class. Having successfully entered the adult arena with A River Enchanted, YA author Ross wraps up her duology with A Fire Endless, set on a magical island whose uneasy balance of human and faerie is threatened by the power-hungry spirit of the North Wind (50,000-copy first printing). In debuter Swanson's Things We Found When the Water Went Down, a 16-year-old struggles to find her mother, a crusading environmentalist blamed for a miner's death who vanished in a blizzard. Of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee heritage, Wurth debuts with White Horse, featuring young, Indigenous Kari James, who inadvertently summons both her mother's ghost and a dangerous, blood-eyed creature when she discovers an old bracelet belonging to her mother (100,000-copy first printing). The pseudonymous Zeldis (Not Our Kind) brings together Beatrice, The Dressmaker of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; her assistant, orphaned teenager Alice; and their newlywed neighbor Catherine, amid shifting relationships and secrets bubbling up from the past (50,000-copy first printing).
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October 1, 2022
A young woman investigates her mother's disappearance and lifelong traumas in this stylistically rangy novel. Lena Bailey, the narrator of Swanson's brash, atmospheric debut, has grown up in a region full of conflict. Beau Caelais, located in an area loosely modeled after northern Minnesota, has been ravaged by decades of mining. Hugo Mitchum, one of those miners, has a history of physical abuse and sexual assault, and he's long detested Lena's hippie-ish mother, Marietta Abernathy, for being a "goddamn witch." So when Hugo turns up dead, Marietta is the lead suspect; her disappearance from police custody only intensifies that sense. But though Swanson's novel includes news stories, police interviews, and other elements of a detective story, it resists easy categorization. Swanson shifts from footnoted just-the-facts police interviews to lyrical prose poems to visual collages; the cast of characters is similarly diverse, encompassing hardheaded miners to the occupants of a bar that's a refuge for "femmes and boi-dykes and faeries and two-spirits and nonbinary bodies." In time, it becomes clear that the tragedy in Beau Caelais runs deeper than Hugo's murder and Marietta's disappearance; a "World Below" is occupied by decades of female victims of abuse and murder. Swanson's approach is impressionistic and heavy on allegory--the body of water key to the story is called Ruin Lake, and before her disappearance, Marietta gathered a "menagerie" of artifacts--silt, weeds, feathers, minerals, leaves, ashes, fur--intended as an offering to heal both the wounded land and its damaged ancestors. Swanson handles this in a witty, sober manner, so the effect is less New Age-y and more earthy and strange, like a Joseph Cornell shadow box. An inventive and beguiling debut.
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October 10, 2022
In Swanson’s impressive experimental debut, a man’s murder leads to a sordid aftermath in a rural mining town. After Hugo Mitchum is found face down by rangers in a near-frozen swamp, his death is ruled a homicide. Mitchum was a nasty, abusive miscreant since adolescence who loathed Marietta Abernathy, which, in addition to the fact that his body is discovered near her home, makes her the prime suspect. After Marietta, known as “the Obsessive Collector of Ephemera,” is taken into custody for questioning, she escapes and vanishes soon after. Then her daughter, Lena, discovers a steamer trunk full of memorabilia from her mother’s frequent travels. The circuitous narrative branches out to include details about Marietta and Lena’s lives, the area’s dark lore, and a bevy of clues imparted through a collage of newspaper headlines, interviews, illustrations, footnotes, memories, and typewritten letters. By the second half, the parts crystallize into a legacy of sexual abuse and a chronicle of revenge. The result is a darkly provocative assemblage ripe with quirky characters and undertones of horror, with allegorical notes grounded in the landscape upon which the citizens live and thrive. This gloomy and atmospheric mystery works on multiple levels.
November 1, 2022
Elements of mystery, supernatural, and dystopian fiction vie for attention in Swanson's intriguing and inventive debut. In the rural mining town of Beau Caelais, Marietta Abernathy is arrested for the murder of Hugo Mitchum, a despicable miner with a history of abuse. Shortly after, Marietta disappears. Her teenage daughter, Lena, launches her own investigation based on police interviews, Marietta's journals, and her own memories--elements that are included for readers, replete with footnotes, in addition to collage art, poems, and newspaper clippings. Within the ephemera, including her mother's overflowing collection of found objects, Lena uncovers truths far beyond Hugo's murder. She finds a town ravaged by the local mining company, leading to a series of environmental ""Collapses,"" and a ""World Below"" populated by abused and murdered women that Marietta seemed to be able to visit. While the mash of genres doesn't always make for suspenseful reading, Swanson's novel explores themes of violence against women, small town prejudice, and corporate disregard in fascinating and unexpected ways that fans of stylish, experimental fiction will appreciate.
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