The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck

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In 1984 a renowned singer and music scholar receives a box of wax cylinders. Lionel knows what they are: the long-lost recordings from a trip he took in the summer of 1919, accompanying his friend and lover David who planned to record folksongs in rural Maine.

I was hooked right away because of my long-ago research into the song-collecting travels of Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp, and Anne and Frank Warner, as well as my more recent interest in the methodology. In Shattuck’s title story, Lionel is the shy novice while David is the persistent charmer who wears down reluctant backwoods singers.

The intensity of emotion mingles with the immersive setting of the woods to create a kind of dream. Yet we know from the beginning of the story that Lionel ends up alone, and that “this cylinder reminded me of what I’d missed—which is, I think, a life that I didn’t know but of which David was a part. The real one. And how ridiculously short it had been.”

Lionel tries to analyse the “bone-deep” emotions roused in him by the sight of the cylinders and the prospect of once again hearing David’s voice. “How to put it? This type of sadness. Not nostalgia. Not grief. Just the obvious and sudden fact that my life looked an inch shorter than it could have been. That the best year really had come when I was twenty.”

In an interview with The Adroit Journal, Shattuck describes exploring the idea that the “relationship between those in the present and past isn’t static — anyone who has discovered a secret about their family’s past knows this, that you can be changed by the past as it becomes illuminated.” How Lionel is changed by these artifacts from the past makes for a powerful experience.

Each of the remaining eleven stories is equally powerful, their waters troubled by the rip tide of history. As I enter my later years, I think often about my past, how it informs my present but also what I may have misunderstood back then. In this collection the mingling of past and present occurs not only within the stories but also between the pairs of stories.

For Shattuck has structured the collection, as he describes in a note at the beginning, using the “hook-and-chain” song or poem format popular in 18th century New England, where we have five pairs of stories, held within the first and last: A BB CC DD EE FF A. The second story in each set might provide some insight or twist to the first. It might be set before the first or long after.

All of these stories summon strong emotions independent of their time periods, universal emotions, refuting L.P. Hartley’s famous opening sentence “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Maybe, but emotions are the same. The primary one a few members of my book club found was regret. Some of the characters didn’t follow their hearts; some did and perhaps were sorry later. Yet there’s also humor in some of the author’s choices and playful stabs at how academics and historians misinterpret the past.

I fell into each of these mysterious stories so profoundly that I could only read one a day. Each story called me to sit with it a while, think about it, try to grasp what it meant to me. It was as though each one left me with a handful of shells, or stones perhaps, that I had to examine, turning them over and over, rubbing one or another to see what it might tell me.

I loved Shattuck’s use of an unusual structure and that he didn’t try to mimic period dialogue. I also liked the variations of point of view—first or third, close or distant—and verb tense—present or past—which keep the stories from falling into a rut. Most of all, though, I loved the surprising tenderness of the stories. He is gentle with his characters while keeping the writing strong and unsentimental. I’ve found that this kind of tenderness is what I love in the work of many authors I enjoy; their characters have good hearts.

The stories are spun together by theme and setting, yet can stand alone. They contain much that speaks to me and perhaps my own obsessions: the song collecting, the New England settings, the tenderness, the interplay of past and present. Yet it’s not just me; my book club was unanimous in its praise. They found the stories as moving and mysterious as I did.

This is my favorite book of the year so far, and that’s saying a lot. What has been your favorite book in 2026?

Goddess of Swizzle, by Shirley Brewer

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The title perfectly describes this new collection of poems from my friend Shirley Brewer who is indeed a goddess and a master mixologist. A graduate of a bartending school in Baltimore, she serves up concoctions that are bold and funny and tender and unexpected. She sings:

Let all the brazen Hallelujahs multiply

like leaves.

She invites us into her memories, summoning the food and drink that nurture us, coaxing us to smile or startle, her past echoing ours. She writes of the night Bobby Kennedy was killed, memorable already as her 21st birthday (and my senior prom night). Into what kind of adulthood were we graduating? “In the hotel chaos, Ethel / offers her husband comfort. / I’m with you, she whispers.” Shirley offers us the comfort of recognition.

Some of the poems revive scenes from her youth in Rochester while other celebrate the half-weird, half-stodgy city of Baltimore. Yet behind the fine, careless toss of her feather boa lies the abiding pain of loss. Her solace is to feed us on these playful poems served with food and drink.

She gives us a sense of those who are gone, such as a beloved dance teacher and a friend with whom she made pies of Concord grapes picked at the Finger Lakes. She memorialises her sister “fighting for one more/one more breath.” She brings to life a favorite fast-food tradition with her late brother on Opening Day and shows us her parents, including their favorite libations. In “Dear Dad” she says:

Because of you, I imagine the world

as a succulent maraschino cherry

ripe with possibilities.

At the same time, her unbounded imagination delights us: Cher and Emily Dickinson chat over blackcurrant tea in a Hampden café? A poet bringing goats into the Baltimore Museum of Art to view the Cezannes and Matisses? An alligator cruising the aisles of Walmart? Why not?

She celebrates childhood trips to Wegman’s, dancing to Chubby Checker, and Baltimore’s squeegee boys. She finds hilarity and abiding affection in a poem about trying on clothes with her mother in department store changing rooms. And how can you resist a poem that begins:

My grandfather talked to his scarecrow

in the fields near Dundee.

He called it Joseph. 

Another section includes ekphrastic poems. My favorite is “Purple Robe, Silver Swan” in which she “pledge[s] allegiance” to a Matisse painting, filling us with its sumptuous colors, before a surprising turn that harkens back to the beginning. She begins a remarkable flight of imagination with “I share a villa with Vincent/in the south of France.”

These poems capture Shirley’s ebullience and compassion, as well as her delight in the sensory world. Full of color, tastes and aromas, she truly gives us “a feast for here and now.” Whether it’s “parakeet blues, a taste of lime” or twists of lemon that come to life in a drink, these poems nourish us. Fun, surprising, warm: we are always in on the joke, every poem an invitation—often studded with spangles.

I have always loved Lucinda Matlock in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters which ends:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you —

It takes life to love Life.

Shirley’s zest for life comes through in each of these poems. A bright light in a dark time, they make me, like her poet-friend, believe in love. As Sue Ellen Thompson says, “This collection is an antidote to the world’s miseries.”

What poems have you read that lift your spirit and tickle your funny bone?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann

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A flock of sheep gather around their shepherd who is lying on the ground with a spade stuck in his body. They’ve never seen anything like this in their meadow near the Irish village of Glennkill. They’re very fond of George and worry about what will happen to them now. Who will read books to them and explain the difficult words? So they decide to find his killer.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this unusual story but found it not only clever but remarkably consistent in the way the ovine protagonists are presented. They know only what a sheep might be expected to know, at least one with a shepherd like George. For example, they think the priest Father Will is named God because of the way he talks about himself.

They can’t interview suspects, since they can’t talk to people directly, so they must watch and listen and make inferences from what they gather. “You shouldn’t believe what you don’t understand. You should understand what you believe.”

Sometimes this can cause confusion, such as when they misinterpret what’s happening, but I found that just another layer of the puzzle. Mostly their opinions of the humans around them are both simple and profound. “Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren’t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.”

I also liked that the pacing is a little slow in the beginning. The story takes its time to settle in and let us get to know the various sheep and humans. I loved how the flock continues to follow George’s routine after his death and their sense of what makes for a good life.

The plot itself is satisfyingly twisty, but the real joy is in the characters. We joke about sheep being followers, but each of these remarkable animals has a strongly individual personality. My favorites include Miss Maple, who is said to be the smartest sheep in Glennkill, and Mopple the Whale, who provides comic relief and surprising support; his hunger is as reliable as his memory. And the ram Othello, who knows the most about the outside world because he was once confined in the Dublin Zoo; he knows what it is to be alone.

Reading and books are a slight thread through the book. After all, much that the sheep have learned about the world and about humans comes from the books that George has read to them. “Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.”

A movie based on the book is due to come out in May 2026, but I recommend reading the book first to experience the wit and charm of the story told entirely through the sheep’s point of view.

What is the most unusual mystery you’ve read?

Until It’s Over, by Dorothy Van Soest

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When retired social worker Sylvia Jensen refuses to be silenced by a politician with dark secrets, her investigation takes her deep into the past, to the secret springs of guilt, regret, fear and trauma. The story opens with a protest in the state capitol rotunda against a mining company’s plan to open a uranium mine on Indian land.

Readers of Van Soest’s earlier three novels featuring Sylvia know her courage and willingness to fight for her clients’ rights and well-being, as well as for the betterment of all. Now in her eighties, Sylvia attends the protest with her young journalist friend J.B. to support Peter Minter, the frail Ojibwe elder who had been arrested at the mining company’s office.

Peter immediately turns the microphone over to the leading candidate for the Senate, Anthony Jordane, a White man who smoothly promises to protect Indian rights. Then Sylvia, who’s been growing increasingly agitated, lunges toward Jordane screaming that he is a liar before collapsing to the ground unconscious.

This is J.B.’s story as much as it is Sylvia’s. A victim of the U.S.’s unjust and inhumane policies towards the Native Americans whose land they stole, J.B. was forcibly removed from his family as a baby and given to a middle-class White family. Then at age seven he was again forcibly removed from the only family he remembered and returned to his birth family. Eventually he ran away and took refuge with his foster grandparents.

Now he is an investigative journalist with the New York Times who has worked with Sylvia before on some of her cases and also knew her as a social worker who actually cared about what was best for him. However, his unresolved issues about his past, his ethnicity, and his identity make it hard for him to decide the right course of action while Sylvia is sidelined in the hospital.

Per his training, he must first investigate the truth of Sylvia’s claims about Jordane, which means going to the small rural town where she and Jordane grew up and attended high school together. There he must pry open the lid of silence the townspeople have slammed down over the events of that fateful year, the one that made Sylvia leave town swearing never to return.

What I admired most in the story is the subtle way Van Soest weaves the theme of silence versus speaking truth to power through the actions each of the major and minor characters. Sylvia and J.B’s stories were especially moving as the main characters, but I also found myself caring deeply about the minor characters.

This exciting tale, full of compassion and psychological insight, gives voice to the victims of injustice. It speaks to today’s headlines and reminded me of The Great Gatsby where Fitzgerald characterizes the Buchanans as “careless people.” That is of course what we’re seeing today, so I’m grateful to Van Soest for demonstrating how we all, including writers and artists, can resist injustice.

What stories of resistance have inspired you?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Woman with the Cure, by Lynn Cullen

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Meet Dr. Dorothy Horstmann who worked tirelessly and in the face of persistent gender discrimination to stop the polio pandemic. Now mostly forgotten, polio epidemics between 1948 and 1955 paralyzed or killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, around the world. President Franklin Roosevelt is the patient with whom most people are familiar.

 

Cullen brings this time period to life with searing portraits of wards filled with children in iron lungs and scientists competing against each other to be the first to find a cure. Dorothy doesn’t care about fame; fighting polio is her only concern. She freely shares what she learns with the two leading competitors—Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin—as well as with others working to end the scourge.

 

I love that biographers and historical fiction writers are bringing to light women whose essential contributions have been downplayed and forgotten while only the “great men” are credited and remembered. It’s worth noting that polio research was one of the first uses of HeLa cells which I first learned about in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. How much we owe to Ms. Lacks! Check out the book if you’re ever looking for an example of how one person can—even unwittingly—change the world.

 

Rejected for a residency because of her gender, Dorothy applies again as D. M. Horstmann and is accepted. The first to suspect that polio travels from the gut to the blood, she is refused support needed to investigate and conduct trials. She finally gets funding years later after a male scientist proposes the same thing; meanwhile thousands of children continued to be paralyzed or died each year. Nominated for a Nobel Prize for her work, she is passed over for two men.

 

With no time for bitterness, Dorothy pushes forward. The first woman to become a full professor at the Yale School of Medicine, she travels around the world to participate in polio conferences and to study polio outbreaks, thus contributing valuable data. She is also instrumental in the Russian study that validated Albert Sabin’s successful polio vaccine, enabling it to be approved.

 

Cullen takes us behind the scenes as scientists race the clock and each other. I felt Dorothy’s despair at setbacks and her thrills at successes. The delays caused by infighting I found frustrating, thinking of the children around the world left to suffer while male scientists kept their secrets. One of the holdups was danger of human trials with children.

 

We learn that the first round of Salk’s initial vaccine (which was greeted with cheers of relief) left 164 people paralyzed and 10 dead, due to one of the suppliers cutting corners, so that their vaccines actually gave people polio. The resulting distrust of vaccines lingers to this day.

 

I’m old enough to remember those awful years, with terrified parents keeping children apart and swimming pools closed. Some of the children in my school stumped around in their leg braces, while other children never got to attend because schools couldn’t accommodate wheelchairs.

 

I vividly remember the day at school when we lined up to get our first sugar cube with the vaccine and my mother crying. Since then I’ve been a confirmed advocate of vaccinations and nothing that drug-addled creep currently in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—who has made millions of dollars off of anti-vax activities—can say will convince me otherwise.

 

For me, the most moving scene in the book occurs in Detroit, Michigan in 1953 when Dorothy tours the Henry Ford Hospital’s polio unit with its rows of “groaning and wheezing iron lungs out from which heads stuck.” Dorothy herself had tried out one of them early on so that she’d better understand her patients and had immediately panicked.

 

On the tour, Dorothy is distracted by a little girl in a wheelchair. “With her physician’s eye, she noted that the muscles of both the child’s legs had atrophied from the hips down and were thus likely to remain permanently paralyzed.” The child is playing a board game with a grown woman in an iron lung, Mrs. Konkle, who cheerfully announces that all the children beat her at the game, even her own children when they come to visit.

 

The game is Candy Land which we played incessantly when I was little. I never knew that it was invented by a schoolteacher in California while she was in the hospital with polio. Mrs. Konkle had her husband buy it and spent her days cheering up the children in the ward with her by letting them win. Such courage!

 

Occasionally the ins and outs of such a complex, multifaceted effort became a bit tedious, and perhaps some of the side stories could have been eliminated, but it is worth pushing through to get the full story of the dedication and sacrifice, not only Dorothy’s but that of others as well, which finally brought about a cure. Of course, Dorothy—the daughter of immigrants by the way—didn’t stop there but went on to work on the rubella vaccine still used today to protect children.

 

Did you ever play Candy Land? Were you aware of its history?

Bloomsbury Girls, by Natalie Jenner

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In 1950s London, Bloomsbury Books is a relic of an earlier age. Offering new and rare books, the store has resisted change for a hundred years, and its stodgy general manager, Herbert Dutton, with his 51 unbreakable rules is determined to keep it that way. However, the three women who work there have other ideas.

Vivien staffs the Fiction department and loathes her one-time lover Alec who heads the department. She wants to introduce more female authors while Alec refuses all but the usual classics like Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ambitious and clever, Vivien provides much of the humor in the book. I especially love the way she comes up with witty and daring names for the people and places in the bookshop, like the Tyrant and the Via Dolorosa.

As Mr. Dutton’s secretary, Grace is the unacknowledged angel of the house. She helps Mr. Dutton manage his workload and tries to keep things on an even keel. She’s an anomaly for the time: a wife and mother who decided to take a job to avoid her abusive, unemployed husband. She cannot leave him because she doesn’t make enough to support herself and the children and fears she’d lose custody of them.  

Despite a brilliant career in Cambridge, a member of the first class of women awarded degrees by the university, Evie’s academic plans are crushed when she is passed over for a less accomplished man who takes credit for her work. At the bookstore she is in charge of cataloging the jumbled collection of rare books on the top floor, but she has an ulterior motive for working at Bloomsbury Books.

All tea-making is done by the three women, in obedience to Rule No. 17: ‘Tea shall be served promptly four times a day.’ Each of the four departments is run by a man, and they, of course, cannot be expected to make their own tea. The exception is Ash, head of the Science Department, who makes his own chai. As an immigrant from India, Ash’s presence brings portents of change and adds another dimension of discrimination.

I selected this story when looking for a light but engaging audiobook for a trip. Not only does it check those boxes, but it also features a few of my favorite things: a bookstore, London, one of my favorite actors as narrator—Juliet Stevenson—and the post-WWII time period. It also offers something I look for and rarely find: people, especially women, functioning in the workplace. Yes, raising children and running a household is work, and there are many stories about that, but little is written about the rewards and difficulties of working in an office (literal or figurative).

Jenner’s story abounds with the kind of rivalries and shifting alliances, the kindnesses and restrictions recognisable to anyone who has worked in an office. They keep the plot roiling and force the characters to show what they are made of. Other characters come and go, including real people of the time, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Daphne du Maurier, and Samuel Beckett.

Of course I hate the use of “girls” in the title applied to women, but it is true to the time period. I was a child then, but I see my parents in these characters. Many of those who survived the worldwide depression and WWII treasured security and stability, like Mr. Dutton and his 51 rules. And after the war many women like my mother had to give up jobs they found rewarding and confine their ambitions to home and family. Thus, I found Grace’s journey and her impulsive decision to work at the bookstore particularly touching.

If you’re looking for a cosy read with a bit of a bite, check this one out. You don’t need to have read Jenner’s previous book The Jane Austen Society which includes some of these characters. In writing this book, she was inspired by rereading 84, Charing Cross Road. She describes Bloomsbury Girls as “Mad Men meets You’ve Got Mail” which is pretty accurate. Of note, Jenner once owned an independent bookshop in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives now.

Can you recommend a story set in a bookshop?

The Redemption of Galen Pike, by Carys Davies

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After enjoying her novel Clear, I picked up Davies’s second short story collection. Each of the 17 stories here, most of them very short indeed, is a gem. 

We writers are told to write what we know. The stories here range through time and space: a woman isolated in the outback reluctantly entertaining her rough neighbor, an alderman in a small English town hosting a “bored and miserable and alone” Queen Victoria, a Caribbean immigrant working as a nursemaid in New York.

It may seem risky for a woman from Wales to write stories set in such wildly varied locales—others include Siberia, Africa and Oklahoma—but she pulls it off. Davies brings such a deep knowledge of people and emotions that our shared humanity shines through each story, however distant the place or unusual the plot.

Everything about her made Lenny think of a string pulled tight and about to be plucked, a figure balanced on the crumbling lip of a cliff and ready to jump; a brief electric calm before a storm.

Many of the stories convey a vulnerability or loneliness and consequent attempts to connect, all without naming those emotions but instead building them organically. Evangelina, whose husband disappeared more than a year earlier, is:

. . . the only person who didn’t believe that the emptiness out in the bay, the mist, and the water creeping soundlessly back and forth beneath the moon, in and out over the sands, were the silence of a man who was doing his best to disappear.

Sometimes I shy away from short stories because it can take me a little while to get into a book, and that seems like a lot of effort to go through for something that will soon be over. Not a problem here! I was instantly transported into each story and satisfied when it ended no matter how many or few pages later.

Davies often starts a story with some statement that gives us a person and at the same time raises a question (or three). Here are a few examples:

“His name was Henry Fowler and she hated it when he came.”

“Standing at her shoulder, no longer caring much about his future, Arthur Pruitt began to speak.”

“From the moment I arrived, they loved me.”

 

These deceptively simple sentences unsettle us because they assume that we know what’s going on; there are no long explanations, no backstory. And they hook us because we want to know more.

Once you’re in the story, what makes it so stunning is the deft way she uses the turn—what Steven James calls the pivot and poets call the volta. In a moment the story changes, and you see everything that came before differently. And that change is both unexpected and inevitable; looking back you can see the little details she has planted along the way, and the assumptions that led you astray.

Sometimes a turn comes  through a change in point of view. Sometimes it’s a reveal of some new information, or an event that calls up a memory shedding new light on what’s happening. It’s less a plot twist than an addition of something that makes everything slide into place—and not the place you expected.

Sadly, the front cover is the ugliest one I’ve ever seen. The back cover is better and says the stories are ”written with prickly wit and punch.” True, and the punch comes from the turn. Some stories have cascading turns where your understanding of what’s happening flips not once, but two, three or more times. Brilliant!

Davies’s use of long sentences, sometimes without commas or other punctuation, captures the swiftness of thought. 

I kept looking at Annie. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too—that we could both of us let go of his hands and feet and leave him there till the tide turned and let him ride back out on it like a Viking and be dragged down by the current; the sea would take him and Bella would never know.

Short stories are notoriously difficult to write. The author has very little real estate in which to place the reader in time and space, introduce characters, and play out a plot. I’m so impressed by the variety and dexterity of Davies’s stories. I’ll be studying them for a long time.

What’s your favorite short story?

North Woods, by Daniel Mason

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Daniel Mason’s fifth novel is a shimmering tale of a patch of New England woods and those who pass through it over four centuries. We feel the flow of history as we navigate what is essentially a set of twelve stories keyed to the seasons. They are linked and validated by documents, such as song lyrics, pictures, and almanacs.

Mason brings each story to life with sensitive comprehension of both the people and their place. We begin with a pair of young lovers running away from their Puritan colony.

They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, threading deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs . . . Gone was England, gone the Colony.

What fascinates me is the way Mason writes each section using style, language and social constructs appropriate to its time period. For example, there’s a former British soldier planting an apple orchard during the time of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, and a spiritualist during the time of the Third Great Awakening. There are murder ballads in the 19th century and psychiatric case notes during the early years of using lobotomies to solve neurological disfunction. What a challenge to set yourself as a writer!

The descriptions of the natural world are stunning as well. Mason has done his research and writes beautifully of the woods and the creatures—and insects—within it. One of his sources, whose wisdom I see throughout the book, is Tom Wessels, whose fabulous book Reading the Forested Landscape was given to me by my son.

I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!

 As in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation, which is centered on a plot of land in Brandenburg and the houses built there, we see a yellow house built, damaged, added to, redecorated, and reconstructed while different inhabitants move through it. As Clara MacGauffin wrote in “The Unhomely House,” there is a peculiar tension when it is the home that is unsafe. “The disturbance is not simply fear. It is closer to a conflict in perception where what should reassure instead unsettles.”

My book club jumped at the chance to read this book; we’re fans of Daniel Mason’s novels such as A Winter Soldier and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth. However, some thought this book depressing—in the course of four hundred years, every story ends; everyone dies—while others found a lot of it hilarious. There are ghosts here; former inhabitants who sometimes make themselves known, reminding me of Gabrielle Mullarkey’s novel The Ones Who Never Left which she wrote because she wondered if the people who used to live in our houses ever truly leave, an unsettling thought indeed.

Amused by the writerly games and deeply appreciative of the landscape and its history, I did get to a point when I thought the book might be a bit too much. I was overwhelmed by grief at the loss of the birds and the forests, the elm trees and chestnuts.

Then I was reminded of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower thanks to Mason’s story of a post-doctoral fellow studying spring ephemerals, those lovely flowers I’ve tracked in that sliver of time between the coming of the spring sunlight and the canopy blocking it out. “Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past . . . and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

Have you read a book that has comforted you during this dark time in our history and/or has you thinking about what we leave behind during our brief passage on this earth?

 

We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker

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Overwhelmed as we are just now by atrocities and deaths, this novel invites us to take a moment to look at a single death and how it still affects a small town thirty years later. Walk, short for his surname Walker, is the chief of the two-person police force in Cape Haven, California. He’s a cautious, introspective man, still haunted by having testified against his best friend Vincent all those years ago. Now that Vincent is being released from prison, Walk nurtures a dream of restoring their idyllic past.

The other narrator is thirteen-year-old Duchess Day Radley, a self-proclaimed “outlaw” and fierce protector of her little brother Robin and her mother Star, who happens to be Sissy’s older sister. Duchess knows there are plenty of humiliating rumors about her family circulating in the small town, not just about the crime, but also about Star’s addiction and her job waiting tables and singing at a dive bar. Star usually has to bring the children with her and leave them in a booth where Duchess keeps an eye on the men who get loud and handsy after a few drinks and on the bar’s huge and dangerous owner Dickie Darke who might be Star’s protector or her abuser.

A sense of precarity underlies everything in Cape Haven. Houses are falling into the sea. People get beaten or killed. One misunderstanding and everything changes. Even the cadence of the sentences is unsettling at first. The characters struggle keep to keep their footing in an uncertain world. Because Star is a good friend from the old days, Walk watches out for her and the children, but Duchess doesn’t trust him. She doesn’t trust anyone but herself.

Whitaker’s portrait of Duchess is brilliant. She’s not sassy or precocious. She’s angry and smart and fierce and loyal. I knew many thirteen-year-olds when I was teaching in Baltimore’s public schools, and I recognise Duchess. She’s the real thing. So is Walk: someone who is always looking back at the past, someone who wants to do the right thing but isn’t always sure what that is.

While categorised as a thriller, this novel is more a quiet study of grief and danger and pain and tenderness. It unfolds the way real life does, tumultuous at times certainly, but not always. It asks how to go on after the worst happens, how to live with grief, and how to measure what we owe each other.

This book surprised me. Everything about it is so much better than I expected. I kept thinking it couldn’t get better and then it did. Whitaker manages to summon strong emotions without overwriting. He deploys plot pivots that surprised me in the best of ways: by seeming perfect in retrospect. Same with the characters. There is a moral arc here, but not the one I expected. There are no easy answers for these damaged people, for us, or for our damaged world.

 

Can you recommend a novel that surprised you?

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon

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The blizzards that have been pummeling New England recently might hold us up for a while until the plows come through. They might send us scrambling for generators and firewood while waiting for the power to be restored, or putting on snowshoes to go out and assess the damage from fallen trees.

But what if we were in Maine in 1789 when the Kennebec River freezes and stalls activity in our small community? What if the river freezes early and traps a man’s body? Midwife Martha Ballard learns that two men fell through the ice that dark night: Sam Dawin who escaped and Joshua Burgess who didn’t. 

Called to examine the body Martha determines that Burgess was beaten and hanged before being thrown into the river. She’s interrupted by Dr. Page, a recent Harvard graduate and newcomer to town, who calls her an amateur and declares the death an accidental drowning. She later learns that her son Cyrus fought with Burgess shortly before the man’s death. Burgess and Judge North have been accused of raping a local woman, one of many secrets swirling in the village.

We follow Martha’s investigation through her activities as well as through the journal she keeps to record her work as a midwife and community events. Her story is “inspired” by the real Martha Ballard who lived in Hallowell, Maine, delivered over 800 babies, and left a diary covering 30 years of her life. While the author draws on the diary, a nonfiction biography of Ballard, and court transcripts, this story is firmly categorised as historical fiction.

I liked the use of the journal. Even when fictionalised, documents add veracity to a story. Although they sometimes repeated events already dramatised, these sections brought home the physical labor of using ink and quill. I also liked the use of a flashback at the end of each section to fill in information about Martha and her beloved husband Ephraim. These brief forays into the past come just when the information is needed.

The overriding image of the river is powerful; everyone depends on it and is controlled by it. The patriarchal limits on women are powerful as well. Martha’s work makes her an anomaly at a time when women had almost no power and rarely worked in a profession. A woman could not testify in court without her husband accompanying her. Midwives were being supplanted by male doctors who often lacked rudimentary knowledge of sanitation and dismissed women with complaints as lazy or crazy.

Being already well aware of these conditions for women in the 18th century, I found their frequent and unsubtle deployment made the story drag, as did the pace of events now and then. At the same time, I recognise that the slower pace is appropriate to life at the time, when it might take days or weeks to travel between towns, and that there are many readers who might not know about the limitations women suffered then. Similarly, the bullies and corrupt locals seemed exaggerated until I looked around at what is going on here today.

Without giving the ending away, I will say that I appreciated the story’s unusual path to resolution. I also appreciated how the Martha of this story adapts her strategies as needed during the investigation, sometimes backing down, sometimes attacking, sometimes negotiating.

The story also made me think about the body. Not just the dead man, the necessary start to a murder mystery, but also how we inhabit our bodies, whether it’s pushing a quill pen across rough paper or delivering a baby into the world, making love with a husband of 35 years or trying to move quickly through deep snow, riding a horse or dealing with the effects of rape.

Things have changed in the centuries since this story takes place, but not human nature, its insecurity and greedy grasp for power on the one hand and its generous care for everyone in the community on the other. And no matter how much we may think we’ve controlled the natural world since then, it only takes a blizzard to remind us how wrong we are.

What is frozen in your life? What will it take to unfreeze it?